Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 2, September 24, 1927

One of these, for long known to the neighborhood as a professional down and outer, sauntered into this particular saloon on a morning about ten days after the Coraopolis crime, ordered a double whisky with an air of jauntiness and confidence unknown to the bartender, from whom he had so often begged a drink with humble words and watery eyes. And when the bartender said:

“Hey, Jimmy, who made you a millionaire overnight?” Jimmy replied:

“That’s just what’s happened, old kid.”

He tendered a one hundred dollar bill across the bar in payment.

“G’wan,” said the bartender, “pull back with that stage money and let me have some real change.”

“That bill’s as real as the nose on your face,” said Jimmy Kramer.

The man behind the bar took a closer look at it and was convinced.

“Where in God’s name did you get one hundred bucks all at once?” he demanded.

Jimmy Kramer winked.

“I’ll bet you’d give a lot to know,” he said. “But treat me nice now, because there’s more where that one came from. Give me another double hooker, and throw me a quart bottle of the best into a paper wrapper. I’m giving a little party to some friends this afternoon.”

When Jimmy had departed with his bottle and his pockets stuffed with the bills he got in change for the hundred, the bartender pondered. Jimmy Kramer he had known as a shiftless, jobless “bar fly” for nearly ten years.

No Arrests Yet!

Of course, somebody might have left him some money. But if so, Jimmy Kramer was the sort that would have been around with his chest out, bragging about it, because he was always boasting of having wealthy relatives.

It. came to the saloon man’s mind that he hadn’t seen Jimmy around for some days. A week — no, more than that — ten days. He wandered where Jimmy, the saloon’s “regular,” had been for ten days. But his conjectures ended only in perplexity.

There being no other customers at the time, he picked up his morning newspaper, not yet perused. It was the Dispatch. And in large type this headline stared him in the face:

TENTH DAY SINCE CORAOPOLIS OUTRAGE AND NO ARRESTS YET!

Tenth day!

Could it be possible that Jimmy Kramer, the worthless rummy, was in that cowardly crime? Jimmy Kramer — with one hundred dollars to spend!

Well, if Jimmy Kramer was one of the gang who burned that plucky old woman, who was dying from the deal she got, he ought to be turned in. The bartender knew crooks who, with an easy conscience, he would protect. But not that kind of a crook.

Some Easy Money

So he spoke to the precinct detective. And the detective watched Jimmy all day as Jimmy got gloriously drunk with a group of sordid guzzlers like himself. The detective waited until four o’clock in the morning, when he knocked on the door of Jimmy’s squalid furnished room, and when Jimmy opened it and stood quaking and trembling from his debauch, the detective seized him.

He gave him no opportunity to bring back his nerves through a deep drink from the bottle beside his bed. He wouldn’t let poor, whining Jimmy touch the bottle, but made him hustle into his clothing and called a patrol wagon and took him to headquarters.

And there huge-bodied, hard-jawed, steel-eyed O’Mara took Jimmy in hand and demanded an account of where he had come into possession of so much money.

And Jimmy, who hadn’t earned more than a half dollar or a dollar at anything in more than fifteen years, was totally unable to pull his scattered wits together to formulate any sort of a reasonable lie. Within half an hour O’Mara had made an abject pulp of him, and a complete confession was forthcoming.

He said that he and three other men like himself, social discards who yet had never been apprehended for serious crimes, were approached by a young woman named May Lang, with whom all had a sporadic acquaintance.

May Lang, he said, when she was flush with money, liked to appear in the back rooms of the resorts Kramer and his kind frequented and play the “good fellow.” She would stand them all three, four, sometimes five rounds of drinks.

Once or twice on these expeditions she had been accompanied by a young fellow to whom they were finally introduced by her under the name of Morris. On this last meeting May told the four men that her friend had a big scheme for picking up some easy money, and lots of it. Then she had let Morris do the rest of the talking.

“He told us about this old fellow that lived way off from anybody else and kept a potful of money in his house all the time,” Kramer went on to say.

“There was only this old geezer and his old wife living in this lonesome house, without even a dog to protect them. All we’d have to do was to put on masks, and if the old boy saw five men come in on him at once, why there’d be nothing to it. He’d give up all the money he had in the house in a hurry.