RGL e-Book Cover 2019©
RGL e-Book Cover 2019©
The Spider, May 1938, with "The Corpse Factory"
It was an orphaned baby, of a slain mother, who sent Doc Turner out on a vengeance trail—to run down the master of a corpse factory that worked overtime to turn out alarm clocks set for murder!
BENEATH his bushy white mustache, Andrew Turner's lips moved in a thin, weary smile that was half bitter, half self-mocking. A quarter to six—Doc was over an hour early. There had been no sleep for him that night.
In desperation, he had risen with the first rays of the spring sun, clothed his frail old body and come down to the drugstore on Morris Street that was infinitely more home to him than the austere and lonely room that had been the other end of his orbit for far longer than he cared to recall.
The key came out of the pocket in the bony, acid-stained fingers that had so long rolled pills, folded powders, measured meticulous drams. But Doc did not at once insert the key into its lock. Instead, he turned to scan the cobbled thoroughfare that he could remember as an earth-bedded suburban lane... and in his faded and kindly eyes was a shadow of troubled apprehension.
There was no reason, Turner told himself, for the gnawing anxiety that had kept him staring at a blank and oppressive ceiling since midnight. Nothing was wrong—he was a doddering old fool...
But he could not wholly convince himself that this was so.
He was more than merely the druggist on the corner, this stooped and white-haired little man. To the poverty-stricken denizens of this wretched neighborhood he was their tutor in the bewildering ways of the strange land to which they had come with such high hopes—and where they had lost all hope. Time and again, he had fought for them against the human vultures who prey on the helpless poor; in that fighting he had gained a sixth sense that warned him, even before there was any tangible evidence of it, when some new threat hovered over his people.
This sixth sense was now sounding its inner, inscrutable warning, telling him, insistently, that something was wrong in Morris Street... deadly wrong.
The low sun came in under the trestle of the "El," so that, for a little while, the shadow of the stilted, gaunt structure did not yet make dim and brooding the golden light flooding the street. As yet there was no long line of pushcarts along the curb, or shouting, raucous hucksters. No shawled and jabbering housewives yet thronged the sidewalks that were still un-strewn by debris. No juggernauts of trucks scattered shrieking, grimly- faced urchins for whom the gutter was the only playground. Even the decrepit, dreary tenement facades were new-washed by the morning and seemed to hide, behind their desolate facades, a little less of human misery. Even the smells of the slum were almost covered over by the salty tang of the soft, cool breeze sighing up from the river.
Doc Turner could almost hear that breeze rustling the elms that, in the dim long-ago, lined Morris Road. Almost, he could—A small sound—the whisper of a bare foot on sidewalk concrete swung Doc around.
The child stood very still, looking gravely at him out of great, round eyes. She was about five, but so small for her age, that her matted brown hair reached hardly higher than the old man's knees. Unclothed, except for a cheap cotton nightgown, she clutched a lollipop tightly in one smeared fist, and, on her naked little arm and one cheek, the candy had left its red marks.
"Good morning, Janey," Doc Turner said. "Does your mother know you came out so early?"
"Good morning," the little girl answered him. And then, as if puzzled, "Muvver won't wake up."
A muscle twitched in Doc's cheek. Mary Lilling, Janey's mother, never altered her daily routine—up at five-thirty, an hour to attend to her own and Janey's needs, to set the small flat to rights and fix lunch to leave on the kitchen table for the child, on her way to the factory down near the river at six-thirty. Six unvarying days a week it had been like that for almost two years since Dan Lilling had taken the flu and died.
"Didn't the alarm clock go off?" Doc's voice was mildly inquiring, utterly without excitement.
"Yes. It ringed an' ringed, but muvver just kep' on sleepin'." Janey's upper lip quivered a bit and the distress in her eyes deepened. "I shook her an' shook her an' she didn't wake up. Why didn't muvver wake up, mister?"
"Suppose we go and see." Turner covered the space between them in two unhurried steps. "Come on, I'll give you a ride back." He lifted the soft, warm little body in his arms. Her silken cheek brushed the back of his hand as he did so, and some of the red smear came off on it.
The stuff wasn't sticky, as it should be if it came from the lollipop. It felt greasy, and a little granular. Doc looked at the stain on the bare arm that clung across his chest. The red was browning a little at the edges. Only one thing would do that—blood.
A chill prickle ran along Andrew Turner's spine.
"I like you," Janey lisped, smuggling close. "An' muvver likes you, too. She told me so last night. She told me if anything happened to her I should go to you an' you would take care of me. She cried a little after she said that. She didn't know I knew she cried but I saw her in the looking glass. Why did she cry, mister? Why did she think something would happen to her? Why won't she wake up?"
There was no longer any doubt about the answer to that last question.
"Look, honey," Doc said to the child in his arms, "I've got an idea. How would you like to have breakfast with Becky and Izzy Meyer on the first floor in your house? Don't you think that would be fun?"
"Oh—yes!"
THERE was barely enough light in the hall of the tenement into
which Doc carried Janey Lilling for him to make out the fly-specked sign, Tailor, on the paint-less door at which he
rapped. A sudden jabber of shrill voices rose within, and then
the flop-flop of backless slippers was distinct through the thin
wood.
"Ai!" Sarah Meyer exclaimed. She pulled a dingy wrapper closer over the deep pillows of her breasts. "Vot ees?"
"Janey's going to have breakfast with you, Mrs. Meyer," Turner said. "Her mother wants to sleep late this morning and Janey's hungry. She isn't even washed." He pointed with his free hand to the red on the child's arm, and then laid a warning finger across his lips.
The woman's pupils dilated, but her, "Ain't dot nice!" was hearty. "Come Jenny." Sarah took the little girl from him, nodding vigorously.
Two overalled laborers clumped past on the uncarpeted stairs, their lunch pails rattling against the broken rods of the balustrade. A pinpoint gas jet still burned on the second landing, making a grimy yellow dusk there, and the air was thick with the peculiar mustiness of poverty. One of the doors at the rear of the landing was ajar by an inch or two, the door Doc Turner knew to be Mary Lilling's.
DOC did not knock. He entered a threadbare but immaculate
kitchen. There was a coffee pot on the stove. The unpainted table
in the center of the room was covered by a square of gay-colored
linoleum and it was set for breakfast. All this must have been
done last night, to save time, because there was no food on the
table and nothing had been disturbed.
There was another door in the wall opposite Doc. It was open and he could see Janey's little crib through it. He got to that door, went through it, and saw the iron bed on which Janey's mother lay.
The golden morning light came through the single window and lay across the bed, and the light was barred with the shadow of the fire-escape outside. The shadow bars curved over the worn, patched sheets and it seemed to be these which held, so motionless, the thin form over which the sheets were molded.
A hand lay lax atop the sheets. It was a slim hand, its long fingers sensitive, but its skin reddened and the fingertips cruelly calloused. Bobbed hair was startlingly black against the whiteness of the pillow and the paleness of Mary Lilling's face. That face was sunken-cheeked, sharp-featured because the food that should have built up flesh to soften it had gone to little Janey, instead. The eyes were closed as if in peaceful sleep.
But there was nothing peaceful about the red-brown splotch where the woman's corded neck joined a pathetically bony chest—or the wound from whose bluing lips the blood, that had clotted into that splotch, had seeped.
Mary's flesh, still young and firm, almost closed the slit in it—there had been very little external bleeding. But Doc Turner did not need to lift a flaccid wrist and press fingertips on it, to know that Mary Lilling would never wake from her sleep. At first glance he saw that the wound ranged downward into a tired heart and had instantly brought it rest.
The old man's seamed face was expressionless; the bleakness about his eyes gave them a dark, dangerous light.
He released the pulse-less wrist. In dropping, it shifted a fold of the sheet Janey had rumpled in her fruitless efforts to arouse her mother... just enough to expose the corner of a paper that till now had been hidden.
With the end of his gnarled forefinger, Doc moved the sheet a little more. Now he could see what was on the paper. There was no writing, only a penciled design—a circle within which a clenched fist had been crudely drawn.
Someone gasped behind Doc.
The pharmacist whirled.
A young woman was in the doorway, garbed for the street. Her dilated pupils were like lumps of coke in a face shaped from unbaked dough. The back of her right hand was caught to her mouth, and every line of the scrawny, ill-dressed body was taut with terror.
Her staring look was not fixed on Mary Lilling's face but the paper Doc had just uncovered.
"It's them!" a whisper hissed from the woman. "I told her if she shot her mout' off..." She checked, as if aware for the first time of Doc. The pocketbook in her left hand came up as if to fend him away as he approached her.
"Who did it, Rosa?" The old druggist was in front of her, his hand on her arm. "Who killed Mary and left that mark on her?"
Rosa Liscio's hand dropped away from her mouth. Abruptly her eyes were veiled. "I—I don't know what you mean," she mumbled. "How should I know who done it?"
Doc's jaw hardened. So it was going to be that way! Rosa knew something about this but she would not tell him. That was the way these people were. They came from many different countries, but had one trait in common. Centuries of oppression, venal officialdom and spies and traitors, had taught them to keep their own counsel, no matter how threatened or exploited. But sometimes if they were frightened...
"All right," Doc barked. "That means you're mixed up in it. The cops will get it out of you with their clubs, when I tell them how I found you here—"
"No!" Rosa shrilled. "No, you didn't find me here. I come for Mary to go to work like always. The door open and I walk in. You were here first and I—"
A heavy pounding drowned the end of her sentence. "Open up," a hoarse voice demanded. "It's the law!"
"The cops!" Rosa exclaimed, whirling away from Doc and darting across the kitchen. "I'll close the door." By the time the old druggist came up with her, she was twisting the knob of the flat door, flinging it open.
"WHAT'S up here?" A burly, florid-faced policeman shoved in.
He saw Turner, recognized him. "What's up, Doc? Ike Meyer here
comes runnin' up to me babbling something about blood on a little
girl an' things like that, an' I couldn't make no sense out of
him."
"Ai," a little man in undershirt and grey trousers too big for his skinny shanks expostulated. "I told you Chaney's got blood on her, and mine wife Sarah she says, 'Ikey, something's happened to her mother. Go get a cop'."
Rosa had whipped out into the hall and was running down the stairs. Doc watched her go, an inscrutable smile on his thin lips.
"Yeah," the cop said, "I heard that before. But what's happened? That's what I want to know."
"Murder's happened, Flaherty," Turner said quietly. "Mary Lilling's been murdered."
"Huh!" The policeman took a firmer grip on his nightstick. "Trust you to be on the spot when anything breaks. Where is she?"
"In there."
"Ai, ai," Meyer wailed, lifting his clawed, needle-pricked hands above his kinky poll. "Moider!"
Flaherty thudded to the bedroom and into it, Doc close behind him. "She's in the bed," the old man said, pointing. "There was a..." He swallowed the last sentence.
The paper with the circle and fist, of which he had been about to speak, was no longer on the sheet! He had not touched it. Rosa could not have taken it...
The window had been closed—he was sure of that. Now, however, it was open. Doc leaped past the end of the bed, faster than his frail limbs would have seemed able to carry him. He squeezed around the iron head-post, leaned over the sill.
Three flights down, a dark-clothed figure was darting across a garbage-strewn backyard. In the moment Doc glimpsed it, it sprang for the top of a rickety wooden fence, gripped the top, chinned over and dropped out of sight. The pharmacist did not see the man's face. All he saw was the crouched back, and two hands clutching the fence top. The left hand had seemed, somehow, odd in shape. Turning back into the room, Doc realized what was wrong.
The middle finger of that hand had been a mere stump.
Flaherty stared at him. "What are you hopping around like that for?"
Turner shrugged. "I thought I heard someone out on the fire-escape," he answered. "But there isn't anyone there."
There wasn't either—not now. But all the time Doc had been in the room—until Flaherty's knocking on the flat door had taken him from it—a killer had crouched out there, watching him...
"THEY didn't bother me much," Doc Turner said, straightening a
package of sulphur lozenges in the display on his sales counter.
"After all, it was only a factory girl who had been
killed—and even if they tracked down her murderer the item
would be buried on Page Ten in the newspapers." A trace of
bitterness was in his mild voice. "Now if Mrs. Vanastorbilt's pet
poodle had been poisoned I would be in the Tombs, most likely,
held as a material witness."
"What did they get out of Rosa Liscio?" Jack Ransom was chunkily built, power in his barrel chest and thick arms. His rumpled shock of hair was the color of fresh-pulled carrots and his freckles, dusting his broadly sculptured face, matched that hue.
"I didn't tell them what Rosa blurted out." Doc smiled drearily. "When Flaherty asked about her I just said that she'd found the door open and come in. And I didn't tell them about the paper that lay on Mary's breast."
"Yeah." Ransom nodded comprehendingly. "This is another job for us to work out. The less the cops know about it the less they'll mess things up for us." Young as Jack was, he'd been Doc's right hand in most of his battles for the people of Morris Street. The two understood each other perfectly. "Now what gets me is the killer's waiting around for a chance to swipe back that paper. Why did he leave it there, in the first place? And if he changed his mind about it, why didn't he take it while little Janey went out to find you?"
Doc's fingers drummed on the edge of the counter. The light was dim, so that the white-painted, old-fashioned showcases and shelves were almost like wraiths. Doc's big nostrils flared with the old, familiar odor of herbs aromatic in the still air—of chamomile, senna, licorice.
"It was important that someone should see that paper and someone should know why Mary Lilling died," he said slowly. "It was so important that the murderer risked its being traced to him. It wasn't I that he wanted to see it—the circle and clenched-fist symbol meant nothing to me.
"I get it." Jack's voice was filled with growing excitement. "It did mean some thing to Rosa Liscio. He expected Rosa to find her."
"Or someone else who lived in that house," finished Doc. "After Rosa had seen it; he got the break he'd been waiting for—his chance to remove the message. He knew Rosa would deny that it had been there at all—and, if I said anything about it, I'd be disbelieved as a mere senile fool."
"This Liscio gal said something to you about Mary's shooting her mouth off, Doc," Jack reminded. "That sounds screwy. Mary did very little talking to the folks around here. She used to come home just about in time to give Janey her supper and put her to bed—and never went out evenings."
"But she was at the factory all day," Doc said. "She must have done her talking there—the talking that brought death."
"She expected it," Jack put in. "She told little Janey—"
"That she should come to me if anything happened to her. She said that only last night." Doc nodded. "Look here, Jack. There's never much business in the morning. I'm going to close up, go down there and see what I can find out."
"Down where?"
"To the Three Star Clock factory, where Mary, Rosa and dozens of the other women around here work. Something's happening down there, and it won't stop merely with Mary's murder... Not if I read Rosa Liscio's face right."
BENT with his years, shabby in thread-bare topcoat and
battered felt, Doc Turner seemed a shambling, ineffectual figure
as he hurried along the wide, cobbled street now alive with
roaring trucks, shouts of burly overalled men—all the
rumbling, tumultuous traffic of the waterfront.
Here were the olive-green facades of the river wharves, in and out of whose gaping maws poured the commerce of the Seven Seas. The warehouses made a high, long wall, the sidewalk in front of them piled with crates, bales and gargantuan barrels—dangerous with the hand trucks that rushed pell-mell, the vats and kegs being busily trundled.
Doc peered about him as if dazed by the mad turmoil. A shaggy-chested stevedore bumped into him, kept him from falling with a huge hand that engulfed the old druggist's elbow. "Why you don't look where you go?" the gigantic Polack roared. "You get hurt, you don't look out!"
"Pardon me," Doc said timidly. "I—I am a bit confused. I wonder if you could direct me to the Three Star Clock Company?"
The blond giant jerked a banana-like thumb at the brick-fronted building before which the collision had occurred. "If you don't look out, it fall on you. This it here!"
"Indeed?" Andrew Turner's white brows lifted. "So it is. Thank you—thank you." He looked around him now.
A loading-platform of splintered wood ran across the front of the structure. Cases on some sort of conveyor were sliding out of the dark interior. Men chunked sharp steel hooks into the great wooden boxes, heaving them into separate piles on the platform, whence they were loaded upon panting trucks. Directing all this activity was a short, fox-faced man in shirt-sleeves—so wizened it seemed that any one of the laborers might have broken him in half between thumb and forefinger.
"Over there, you lummox!" he squealed at a huge Negro. "Don't you see the marks on that case? Get it through your thick head that's an export case and belongs over there!"
"Yes, suh, boss," the man grinned. "Yes, suh, I seen them two crosses on it. But I thought—"
"Don't think—you haven't got anything to think with! Hey, leave that one alone. Look at the mark on it—that goes down to Jim at the other end."
A pulse throbbed in Doc Turner's wrist. He, too, had looked at the device splashed in black paint on the yellow board of the case over which the shirt-sleeved man was shrieking.
That symbol was a crude representation of a clenched fist within a circle!
Doc wandered over to where steps had been cut into the platform, and mounted them. He dodged a succession of cases tumbling end over end and reached the fuming little man—plucked at his sleeve.
"Pardon me," he ventured. "Could you direct me to the proprietor?"
The man turned a furious gaze on him. "That's me," he spat. "G. C. Sortis. There ain't no jobs open."
"I'm not in search of employment. I—"
"Got all the materials I need for a year," Sortis snapped. "I'm not buying insurance, and I can't read. There are three boats sailing before noon, and the Cannonball Freight for the south is due to leave in two hours. I'm too busy to talk to you about politics or the weather. I'm too busy to talk to the Angel Gabriel about the trump of doom." The man twisted away, yelping at a laborer, "That's only three for the Dollar Princess. Where's the other two?"
Doc interrupted. "I—I am neither an insurance agent nor the Angel Gabriel. But if you can spare a few minutes I would like to talk with you about Mary Lilling."
Sortis whipped back to him. Doc thought he saw a strange flicker in the red-rimmed small orbs but it was quickly veiled. "Lilling?" the fellow squealed. "Who's Mary Lilling?"
"One of your factory hands. She—"
"Go inside and find Hen Gaston," growled Sortis. "Tell him your business with her. If he thinks it's important enough, he'll let you see her."
Doc shook his head. "Mr. Gaston won't let me see Mary—he can't."
"He can't, hey? He's my factory foreman and boss of the girls on the assembly line. Why can't he let you see this Lilling?" Sortis glared.
"Because she's dead—murdered. That's what I want to talk with you about." Doc studied him quietly.
Did the corners of Sortis' mouth tighten? "Murdered? All right, go ahead and talk."
Doc fumbled at the hem of his coat. "I—ah—can't talk to you out here. What I want to tell you..." He waved a vague arm at the men on the platform, and there was a curious, sly insinuation in the way he looked at Sortis.
Sortis had abruptly stiffened. His upper lip lifted, slightly, in a vague snarl. "So that's the way it is?" he said softly. He turned to the murky recesses out of which the cases kept coming in an unending line. "Corbett! Hey, Corbett. Come out here."
A shadow materialized into a tall, cadaverous individual about whose skeleton frame a grey alpaca robe flapped loosely. "Y-yes, Mr. Sortis," this apparition quavered, blinking lashless lids over pink-irised, fearful eyes. "What have I done wrong now?"
"I haven't found out yet," Sortis barked. "Do your checking out here and try to see that these ivory-heads don't send more than a half-dozen Brazil shipments to Japan. I've got some business to attend to inside." He snapped at Doc, "Come on, you."
HE plunged away, into the dim interior of the factory,
striding toward the back without turning. Doc trotted after him,
hard put to it to keep up with his guide—but his eyes took
in everything.
There were more leather-aproned, big-thewed men in the front part of the noisy floor, heaving cases on to the conveyor, marking them, hammering on lids. Farther back, chutes came down out of the ceiling, spilling clocks out onto long tables from which they were immediately snatched by girls who slapped them into cardboard boxes and then the cases standing open beside them.
Going past these tables, Doc Turner saw that the clocks spilling out on each were different—some square, some round, some modernistically irregular, variously colored. On the dials of each, just below the axis of the hands, was printed a symbol in a circle—different for each kind. A star was on one variety, a flag on the next, map-globe on the third. Over the seventh, and last, table—far back at the rear—square timepieces, smaller than the others, were being passed. The symbol on these was A clenched fist within a circle!
Just as Doc spotted this, a big-bellied, fat-jowled man, with a green shade over his eyes, grabbed Sortis by the elbow. "Listen, boss," he said, "you gotta do something about them defectives comin' down from Bench Two. They're runnin' high again."
"What's the matter with 'em?" Sortis squealed. "What makes 'em defective?"
The clock-maker's back was turned for the moment, and Doc took a chance. He reached for one of the small, square clocks, picked it up...
"Don't, mister," the girl, who was packing them, exclaimed, plucking the timepiece from his fingers. "You'll throw me off my count, and that'll be just too bad for—"
"Hey you," Sortis barked. "Come on!" He was striding toward a narrow staircase that climbed on a long slant toward the front of the building. Following, Doc Turner tried to puzzle it all out.
The fright that had flared into that girl's eyes when he picked up the clock might simply be due to the whip-lash drive of her superiors—the tremendous insistence upon speed so evident here. But the discovery he had made, while that clock was in his hands, left him astonished. He had twisted at one of the winding keys, which refused to move. Unless he was greatly mistaken, it was riveted solidly in place!
The stairs went up through the floor and the door at its head. Sortis shoved open the door and let it go, so that Doc had to move quickly to avoid having it slam in his face. The old man passed through another great room filled with a vast, tinny tinkle. Then he followed Sortis along the wall out of which the door had opened.
Three wide tables ran toward him, the full length of this floor, from its street end—and innumerable girls were ranged along either side of these. Down the center of the tables ran three-sided, topless boxes, each filled with glittering, brassy metal parts. Under the deft, never-stopping hands of the girls, timepieces were taking shape. Mere glinting frameworks at the other end grew more complicated and complete, as they shot ceaselessly along till the final worker at this end twirled the winding-key onto the last stem, sticking out of the back of a finished clock—and shoved it into the mouth of a chute slide down to the packers below.
The ends of the assembly line were staggered, Doc saw, to correspond to the tables that ran at right angles to them on the floor below. Six assembly lines were up here, and six chute-mouths. But there were seven tables, seven chute-ends, below.
Turner recalled the way the staircase had angled back—past that seventh table down there—the table onto which the clocks, marked by a clenched fist in a circle, were flowing! It had slanted back from the rear wall of that lower floor, but its upper end was flush with this wall along which he now trotted after the hurrying Sortis. Doc mentally measured the distance between the end of the third, and longest table, and the wall.
Now, at last, he had the answer to the puzzle! The seventh chute was behind this apparently solid wall. The clocks, whose winding keys did not turn, were being assembled in the space behind there!
Doc Turner would have given five years of his life for a single look into that space. He also wanted to discover where Rosa Liscio sat. He had carefully scanned the face of each girl, below and up here, but, had not seen Rosa.
SORTIS now halted. He slid a key into the lock of a door in
the wall that so intrigued the white-haired pharmacist. It came
open, and Doc saw that it was of solid oak—ominously thick.
There was no legitimate reason why an office door should be so
formidable or have such a heavy lock.
Doc's pulses thumped a warning of danger, but he went past Sortis, into the room behind that door. It thudded shut behind him.
"Go ahead," Sortis' peculiar squeal sounded in Doc's ear. "Get it off your chest."
The man prowled past Doc to the cluttered desk that dominated the little room, something wolfish in his movements. He slid into the swivel chair in front of the desk and stared up at Doc, who remained standing because there was no place for him to sit.
"Well," Sortis demanded, impatiently, "what are you stalling for? No one can hear you in here."
"I—ah—I am Andrew Turner." Then Doc stopped.
There was a window in the room, but covered over by a steel shutter so that the only light came from a grimy electric bulb hanging over the desk. In the wall opposite the desk was another door, as heavy looking as the one through which they had just come. Beyond that door must be the cut-off part of the floor—the section where the curious small clocks were being made.
"I have a drug store on Morris Street," Doc spoke again.
"So what?" snarled the other. "Hurry up, will you?"
Doc fumbled at the edge of his coat, appearing very timid and ineffectual. "Mary Lilling was one of my customers," he went on in the mild, hesitant tones he had assumed. "She was a widow—and left a little girl, penniless."
All the furious violence had died out of Sortis' eyes. They were blank now, expressionless. "What has that got to do with me?"
"I am taking up a collection to provide for little Janet," Doc said. "Her mother worked for you."
"So you say," growled Sortis. "I don't remember the name. There are a hundred girls out there. You can't expect me to know the names of all of them."
"You ought to be able to find Mary's on your payrolls—she's been working for you about two years." Doc saw a clock on the desk, one with a flag on its dial. "Why, bless me," he exclaimed, "I didn't know it was so late. I must hurry back."
Ever since the fist-marked clocks and the partitioned-off space had told Doc what he had come to find out, the need for getting away from this place had become imperative. "Suppose you look up your records and send me your contribution. I left an inexperienced clerk in my store and something might come up." He turned, got his hand on the knob by which he had come in, twisted. "Thanks for listening to me." The door would not open. It was locked, and he was trapped!
"What's your hurry?" Sortis asked smoothly. "Wait just a second while I ask Hen Gaston about this Lilling skirt." He thumbed a button on his desk. Almost at once the second door opened and closed, and there was another man in the room.
"Hen," Sortis asked, very softly. "Did we have a gal working for us by the name of Lilling?"
"Who wants to know?" the newcomer demanded hoarsely.
Short, wiry, he wore a long grey alpaca coat like the hairless man who had taken over supervision of the loading-platform. His eyes were black, beady and evil—but it was his hands that interested Doc. His left hand was grotesquely malformed—its middle finger a mere stump!
"This—gentleman." Sortis nodded at Turner. "Maybe you know him, Hen?"
The tip of a pink tongue licked Gaston's thin, cruel lips. "Yeah," he murmured, "I know him, all right. I seen him this morning. He was looking at something he wasn't meant to see."
Doc's back was flat against the door. Cold sweat dewed his wrinkled forehead.
"You saw something but you didn't tell the cops about it," Sortis purred. He resembled a gaunt alley cat, lithely stalking a sparrow. "And you saw the same thing on the clock you picked up downstairs. You didn't come here to collect for Mary Lilling. You came here to collect for yourself, but you didn't have the guts to go through with it. That right?"
"Yes," Doc's breath was coming a little easier. "Precisely." They took him for a blackmailer and were ready to pay him off. That would let him get out of this trap until he could get help...
"You didn't think you could get away with it," the clock manufacturer continued, low-voiced, menacing. "And you were right. You were smart, but not smart enough. You should never have come through that door behind you—because you're never going out of it again!"
A smile edged Doc's mouth. "You're not going to keep me forever." His mild voice was steady. "My friends might come looking for me."
"You didn't tell your clerk you were coming here, or anybody else—not with the reason you had for coming. Your friends will look for you all right, but they won't look here. If you're thinking the gals outside will ask what became of you, don't worry about that. They know better than to ask questions about what goes on here. Isn't that right, Hen?"
"Yeah." Gaston grinned. "Especially after what happened this morning, they do. They know what happened to that Mary because she started asking questions."
Doc still seemed composed. "If I stay here too long, I might start to smell." He smiled bleakly. "You would hardly be cutting me up in pieces little enough to pack into clocks with the picture of a clenched fist on them. For example, the way you pack—narcotics, is it?"
A flick of Gaston's eyelids told him the guess was right. But it had not altogether been a guess. Something was being packed into the clocks. Likewise, the only thing that could be contained in such a small compass, and still pay dividends large enough to justify this elaborate setup, was narcotics. This was probably a distributing point, for the whole country, of forbidden drugs brought from all over the world on the ships docking across the street. How such large quantities were brought past the customs inspectors was the only element of the scheme yet baffling Doc. But he wouldn't find out now.
"Let's quit fooling around, boss," Gaston said. "I don't like leaving the gals inside alone too long. They might be ditching some of the junk."
"Go ahead," Sortis nodded. "Take him!"
Hen leaped at Doc so quickly that even if the old man had contemplated putting up a fight he could not have gotten started. The killer jerked him away from the wall, slid around behind and ripped his coat halfway down from his shoulders, pinning his arms.
"No use yelling," the fellow grunted, twisting the coat tighter. "The crowd at the Yankee Stadium could be yelling in here and nobody outside would hear them."
"All right," his employer said. "Stop the talk and take him down."
Sortis had jumped to the wall beside the desk, was thumbing it. A vertical crack split it, widened, became a door-high opening that had not been there before. Gaston shoved Doc toward that opening, his wiry strength irresistible.
THE dank, oil-laden odor of river water gusted out of the
dimness into which Hen thrust the old druggist. The sliding panel
bumped shut behind them, and the half-light became Stygian
blackness. Doc was being pushed down steps, and from somewhere
came the melancholy hoot of a tugboat whistle.
They went down... down, between brick walls that scraped Doc's shoulders on either side. The stairs turned, turned again. There was a gray half-light below now, into which he descended. The footing leveled off, and he found himself in a small, brick-walled chamber. Three sides of this room were shelved, and the shelves were stacked with square, yellow cans.
A tunnel led out of this curious little room, and into this Doc was shoved. Green slime was on the bricks that lined the tunnel and a constant drip from the bricks overhead. The grey light came from a U-shaped opening about fifty yards ahead. Beyond it was what looked like a forest of black, branchless trees on which green shadow-lights wavered.
"How do you like the set-up, wise guy?" Gaston grunted, behind Doc. "The junk is dropped overboard at night into small boats and they come in under the pier there. It's handy for that, and handy for a getaway, if things get tough upstairs. But the thing it's handiest for is getting rid of guys who get ideas about muscling in on the sweetest racket anybody ever figured out. Nobody ain't going to ask no questions about a drowned stiff floating in the river, without a mark on it."
The lap-lap of the water at the end of the tunnel was like the slaver of many thirsty tongues. Gaston would hold him under that greasy flood till he drowned and then shove him out into the stream. That was what Gaston planned to do. Doc's foot lashed up and backward, its heel driving into a bony shin. Hen squealed with surprised pain, and Turner jerked, getting his coat free from the killer's startled grasp. He jumped forward, slipped. He was tangled in his own coat, that had slipped down his arms, and now couldn't free himself. Gaston was stooping over him, contorted face fiendish in the murk—a long-bladed knife flailing down at the old man's throat.
Turner rolled toward the knifer, swept his feet out from under him. He kicked free from the tangling coat, scrambled erect, and Gaston leaping at him again, dagger glinting...
Doc's hand swept out in a swift arc... Something flew from it, struck Gaston's face. The blade smashed harmlessly into the bricks against which, an instant before, the white-haired pharmacist had been pressed. Now Gaston was screaming, high and shrill, hands tearing at his eyes, at his face down which rivulets of some liquid ran, mixed with splinters of very thin glass. It has all happened very quickly.
Doc leaned against the wall, panting. Gaston staggered, went down to his knees, sprawled limp and motionless on the slimy tunnel floor. Doc Turner smiled briefly.
"I thought," he whispered, "that I might find some use for those ampoules of ether and nitrous oxide when I took them along. The best part of them was that Gaston didn't know the Polak lookout passed them right over. He didn't know they were real weapons when he frisked me."
THE customs guards on Pier 72 thought the little old man, whom
they pulled out of the river, hearing his shouts, was crazy when
he told them his story. But they changed their minds when he
showed them what was in the yellow can he clutched. After that
there was much telephoning, a stealthy converging of cars and
machine-gun mounted motor boats on that waterfront spot so near
Morris Street. Then, there followed a swift, perfectly-engineered
raid on the Three Star Clock Company's factory.
G.C. Sortis, diving rat-like down the tunnel that was to have been a perfect getaway for him, was met by a squad of grim-faced Federal agents. He chose to fight it out with them. When that short fight was over, G.C. Sortis' body could have been used as an anchor for one of the freighters whose crews would no longer bring narcotics for him to pack in little square clocks with the symbol of a clenched fist on their dials.
There is a reward for citizens who help Uncle Sam in his endless fight against the illicit drug traffic—a very generous reward. Doc Turner got his check in due time, and, for a while, was very busy...
Then one fine day the white-haired old pharmacist stood in the doorway of a room on Morris Street. The room was painted white and pink, and on its walls were a gay company of fairies and elves and laughing, golden-haired children out of the fairy books. There was a sweet-faced woman in the room too, dressed all in white, but Doc wasn't looking at her. He was looking down into the face of the little girl in his arms, whose brown eyes were great round O's of excitement.
"Like it, Janey?" Doc asked softly.
The little orphan shook her head, happily.
"Well you're going to live here from now on, Janey," Doc said. "This nice lady is going to take care of you."
A cloud passed over the child's face. "No," Janey answered. "You're goin' to take care of me. My mother said you would take care of me."
Something seemed to stick in Doc Turner's throat. "I've tried to, Janey. I've tried hard to take care of you—and of your mother too."
His eyes were misty.