The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits Read online

  “How was his mood?”

  “His mood?”

  “Was he happy when he left you?”

  “Oh, dear!” she said, her winsome young features creasing in concern again. “I’m afraid he wasn’t. He wanted to come in with me. He offered to take off his shoes and tiptoe upstairs, but I wouldn’t risk upsetting the landlady. I pushed him away and shut the door in his face. Do you think that’s why he killed himself?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Father Montgomery. “I don’t believe he killed himself at all.”

  “You mean my conscience is clear?”

  “I have no way of telling what’s on your conscience, my dear, but I’m sure you did the right thing at the end of the evening.”

  Inspector Carew was far from happy at being dragged back to 7, Albert Street by a priest he’d never met, but the mention of murder couldn’t be ignored.

  “The wife lied to us both,” Father Montgomery said as they were being driven to Teddington. “She insisted that the shooting was at midnight, but I have a female witness who says Patrick Flanagan was with her in Richmond until four in the morning.”

  “So what?” said the inspector. “Emily Flanagan has her pride. She won’t want to admit that her wayward husband preferred to spend the night with some other filly.”

  “She wasn’t exactly grieving.”

  “True. I noted her demeanour. Maybe she’s not sorry he’s dead. It doesn’t make her a murderess.”

  “There’s money behind this,” the priest said. “A man who can splash out on champagne and oysters at the Star and Garter is doing too well for a jobbing actor with a wife and father-in-law to support.”

  “We checked the bank account,” the inspector said, pleased to demonstrate how thorough he’d been. “They have a modest income, but two days before his death he withdrew most of what they had, about sixty pounds. And so would I, if I was planning to do myself in. I’d have a binge and a night out with a girl before I pulled the trigger. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t go out with girls and I wouldn’t pull the trigger,” said Father Montgomery. “Neither is permitted.”

  They drew up at the Flanagans’ house in Teddington. Emily Flanagan opened the door, saw them together, and said, “Holy Moses!”

  In the kitchen, the brandy bottle was empty. Old Mr Russell was asleep in a rocking chair in front of the stove.

  “No need to disturb him,” Inspector Carew said. “This concerns you, ma’am. An apparent discrepancy in what you told me. You said the fatal shot was fired at midnight.”

  “Or thereabouts,” said Mrs Flanagan.

  “Our latest information places your husband on a river steamer in Richmond at midnight.”

  “The heel! What was he doing there?”

  “Dancing with an actress until nearly four in the morning.”

  “I’m not surprised,” she said, failing to appreciate what an admission this was. “Which baggage was it this time?”

  “Do you admit you lied to me?”

  “How could I have known what he was doing in Richmond?”

  “The time. You lied about the time.”

  “‘Thereabouts’ is what I said. What difference does an hour or two make to you? I guessed he was entertaining some little trollop on the last night of his life, but the world doesn’t need to know, does it? Allow me some dignity when I walk behind his coffin, Inspector.”

  “Did you know he emptied his bank account and treated his actor friends to oysters and champagne?”

  “Did he, the rotter?”

  “You don’t seem overly concerned.”

  “He left no will. As his nearest and dearest I’ll inherit everything he ever owned, including this house.”

  “Not if you’re hanged for murder, madam.”

  “What?” For the first time in all this sorry business, she looked alarmed.

  Father Montgomery raised his hands to urge restraint on both sides. “Before we go any further, Inspector, why don’t I show you what I discovered in the den?”

  Emily Flanagan, muttering mild expletives, followed them into the room where the body had been discovered. The priest pointed out the bullet hole in the books and remarked that it was unlikely that the victim had held a gun to his head and missed. “I suggest that someone else was holding the gun, someone who waited through the small hours of the night for him to come in and then pointed it at him and brought him in here and sat him at his own desk, where it would look as if he chose to die. I suggest there was a struggle and he deflected the first shot, but the second was fired with the gun to his head.”

  “A crime of passion, then,” said the inspector.

  “No. Let me show you something else.” He rolled back the carpet and revealed the copy of John Bull. “You can pick it up,” he told the inspector. “Take note of the number seven scribbled on the top right corner. The magazine was delivered to this house as usual. It was Mr Russell’s copy, but Patrick Flanagan grabbed it the day it was pushed through the letterbox and hid it here. Now turn to page thirty-eight, headed Bullets, and look at this week’s thousand pound winner.”

  The inspector read aloud, “Mr PF, of Teddington, Middlesex. That’s Patrick Flanagan. No wonder he was out celebrating.”

  “But Patrick didn’t do the Bullets!” said Mrs Flanagan in awe.

  “Right, it was your father who provided the winning entry. Being unable to walk more than a few steps, he relied on Patrick to post it for him. Patrick ripped open the envelope and entered the competition under his own name. I dare say he’d played the trick before, because the old man was known to have a flair for Bullets.”

  “They’re second nature to him,” said Mrs Flanagan.

  “Patrick delayed paying in the cheque. I’m sure we’ll find it in here somewhere. He hid the magazine under the carpet so that your father shouldn’t find out, but the old chap managed to get hold of a copy.”

  “He sent me out to buy it.”

  “And when he saw the competition page, he was outraged. The main object of his life was to win that competition. He’d been robbed of his moment of glory by a shabby trick from his son-in-law. So last night he went to the study and collected the gun and lay in wait. The rest you know.”

  The inspector let out a breath so deep and so long it seemed to empty his lungs. “You’re clever, Father.”

  “A man’s soul was at stake, Inspector.”

  “Not a good man.”

  “It’s not for us to judge.”

  Mrs Flanagan said, “What was the winning entry?”

  “Well, the phrase was ‘A Policeman’s Lot’.”

  “‘A Lawfully Big Adventure’,” said the murderer with pride, entering the room.

  He Couldn’t Fly

  MICHAEL KURLAND

  Michael Kurland has written science fiction (Ten Years to Doomsday, 1964), fantasy (Ten Little Wizards, 1988 – which is also a mystery novel featuring Lord Darcy, created by Randall Garrett), mysteries (The Infernal Device, 1979, featuring Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis Moriarty) and a wide range of reference books, such as How to Solve a Murder (1995) and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Unsolved Mysteries (2000). He has also written two novels featuring newspaper columnist Alexander Brass, Too Soon Dead (1997) and The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (1998). Both those books are set in the 1930s, but in the following story we follow Brass back to an unsavoury episode in 1926.

  Late last Tuesday night Brass and I ran into Theodore Finter, better known as the Two Step Kid, upstairs at the Hotsy Totsy Klub on Forty Seventh Street, off Sixth Avenue. In the circles which Brass and I frequent the Kid is a well-known character, but it happens that I’ve never had the opportunity to speak to him before, although Mr Brass first made his acquaintance many years ago. The Kid is a short, thin, wiry man with an unlined face, even now when he must be well into his forties. His avocation is dancing. His vocation, it is said by those who should know, is murder.

  When the set was over, Fletcher Henderson and his boys r
etired to the green room, the bathroom, or the bar, and the blonde that the Kid had been two-stepping with went off to powder her nose. The Kid stepped over to our table to have a few words with Brass. They got to talking about the Good Old Days, which, as Mr Brass has told me many times, is anything that happened more than ten years before whenever you’re talking. Eventually the conversation got around to the last days of Sammy the Toad Mittwick, and this was a story which I had not heard before. It’s quite a tale and deserves retelling, so I went abroad into the world which is New York City and did some checking and some listening, and I wrote it all down here for you.

  This happened back in March of 1926, ten years ago now, and five years before I went to work for Mr Alexander Brass, famed columnist for the New York World, so I’m telling it based on talks with those who should know, including Brass himself, although he hasn’t been as forthcoming as he might. You will see why. My name is Morgan DeWitt, and I am Mr Brass’s amanuensis, leg man, bottle washer, errand-runner, and general all-around sycophant; but that’s all you’ll hear about me because, as I said, all this happened well before I arrived at the World building and talked Brass into hiring me. I’m going to tell it like I was there when it happened, looking over Brass’s shoulder, ’cause that’s the best way to tell a story. But, since I wasn’t, some of the dialogue is what I figure they must have said, things being the way they were. Anyway, here’s the story.

  It started when Jimmy Eisen, from his hospital bed in Brooklyn General, asked to see Brass. They called Jimmy the Canarsie Crusher when he was in the ring. He was a big man, big and powerful. But he was no Dempsey – he was slow. His left jab could do more damage than a 10-pound sledge, and if he ever landed a right, well, you were down for the count and then some. But if you couldn’t dodge or block his jab you shouldn’t be on that side of the ropes; and as for the right; you’d have to stay awful still for an awful long time for it to reach you. But he could take a lot of punishment while he waited to land that one punch that would put you on the canvas.

  The trouble was that, after eight years in the ring, he had taken a lot of punishment. It didn’t show in his face much, although his ears were maybe a little flatter than God had made them, but you could see it in his eyes.

  His kidneys didn’t work too well anymore either. He peed blood. And when he talked there were pauses between his words that God never intended; and sometimes his sentences didn’t end up where he thought they would. But by God he could still take it.

  Whoever had worked him over the night before had meant business: two ribs cracked, an arm broken maybe – the docs were still trying to figure out whether there was or wasn’t a chip out of the bone, the ulna I guess it’s called, by the elbow – and one side of his face really messed up. But he still managed a grin when Brass walked into the hospital room. At least Brass decided it was a grin, it was hard to tell for sure what with his face all bandaged up.

  “Glad you could get over here, scribbler,” he said out of one side of his mouth. “I think maybe I got some info for you.”

  “Who worked you over, Crusher?” Brass asked, coming over to the side of the bed. “I brought you a bag of oranges. Do you think you can eat them, or should I have someone squeeze them for you?”

  “Oranges,” said the crusher. “Oranges in March, who wudda thought?”

  “Florida,” Brass explained.

  “Yeah,” agreed Eisen. “That too.”

  “I’ll leave them here on the table,” Brass told him. “Who did this to you?”

  “It was a private dispute,” Eisen said. “It took four of them with brass knuckles to knock me off my pins, and they was not without a few bumps and bruises themselves before it was over.”

  “I’m sure,” said Brass. “If you don’t want to say any more than that, then you don’t. What do you have for me?”

  Eisen stared up at Brass with his one uncovered eye. “You remember Lumps Madigan?”

  Brass nodded. “Middleweight,” he said. “Canvasback. Not but that he didn’t try.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s hiding out from the mob boys, and he wants to talk to someone, like maybe buy some insurance.”

  “What happened, did he make a mistake and forget to fall down in the fourth?”

  “Nah, he’s quit the ring. He was working for Dutch Schultz as an enforcer, ’cause he’s pretty good at hitting those as don’t hit back. Not that he’s a coward or nothing, but he’s got a glass jaw.”

  “So what’s his problem?”

  “Seems like somebody told the Dutchman that Madigan and a couple of other lowlifes are preparing to talk turkey to the McWheeter Commission. The Dutchman isn’t sure he believes this, but discretion being the better part of valor, he’s decided to have them all offed.”

  Brass’s eyes widened (or so I would suppose. I wasn’t there but Brass’s eyes always widen when he’s told something of interest. Okay, okay; I’ll butt out now). “What sort of insurance does Lumps think I can buy him, except maybe a bus ticket to California?”

  “You’ll have to ask him,” said the Crusher, “which is the idea what I been telling you – that you should go ask him.”

  “Why didn’t he just call me?”

  “’Cause he don’t have no telephone where he is at, and he don’t want to go outside of where he is at.”

  “Well then, why didn’t you just call me?”

  “I did,” the Crusher pointed out. “But I didn’t want to tell you nothing on the phone, ’cause how could I be sure it was you?”

  “Makes sense,” Brass agreed. Then his eyes narrowed (trust me on this). “Say, did the Dutchman’s boys do this to you?”

  “You might say that,” the Crusher agreed.

  “You must owe Madigan a lot, if you’d take a beating like this for him,” Brass said.

  Eisen shook his head, then groaned and stopped trying to shake his head. “Nope,” he said. “I don’t care one way or the other, ’cept I hate to see a guy get a raw deal.”

  “But you didn’t give him up.”

  “It’s like this,” the Crusher said. “You let one gang of hoods beat something out of you, and pretty soon they’ll all be trying it. It’s the percentages.”

  “Right,” Brass agreed. “The percentages.”

  “So you’ll go talk to him?”

  “Give me the address.”

  “One-Twelve East Eighty-Eighth, off Lexington in Manhattan. The name over the doorbell is Benchman. Ring twice, then wait maybe half a minute and ring three times, and he’ll buzz you in. Don’t let yourself be followed.”

  “Say,” Brass said, “what do you take me for, an amateur?”

  The Crusher croaked out a sort of laugh, which might have been an answer, and Brass got up to leave, saying he’d be back to see how the Crusher was doing.

  “I’ll be here for the next little while,” the Crusher assured him.

  Brass pulled his Auburn 8 Speedster over to the side lane on the Brooklyn Bridge and got out to inspect a front tire. The drivers behind him honked and beeped and swore colorful oaths, but none of them stopped or tried to stay behind him. He crossed Canal Street over to the West Side and went up Broadway to 86th Street, where he crossed through the park back to the East Side, stopping briefly in the park to admire the trees. By now he was sure that no one had managed to follow him, even if they had tried.

  One-Twelve East Eighty-Eighth was a brownstone tenement like all the other brownstone tenements on the block. Brass parked the Auburn in front of the house and scanned the sky for signs of rain. The overcast was increasing, but the rain would probably hold off for a while longer, so he trotted up the steps to the front door without bothering to put up the car’s canvas top.

  He found the button for 2B. Benchman, gave the secret signal, and was buzzed in. The building was old, but respectable. The stairs complained under the threadbare carpet runner, but the railings were polished to a shine.

  The door to apartment 2B was cracked open a hair when he reached the land
ing, and Brass could see an eye peering through.

  “Why don’t you look through the peep hole?” Brass asked the eye. “It’s not quite as obvious.”

  The door pulled open. “’Cause you can’t see nothing through the peep hole, that’s why,” said Madigan, who stood in the doorway in a gray bathrobe, and oversized black slippers, looking like a giant pouter pigeon. “The mirror or whatever is busted, and all you can see is a little strip of floor right in front of the door. If I could get everyone to write their names on their shoes, then I could use the peephole. You’re Brass, right? The newsy?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Yeah,” Madigan said, squinting at him. “I recognize you from around. Come on in.” he stepped aside, and Brass entered the apartment.

  The living room was decorated in early French brothel. The wallpaper was some kind of flocked red flower pattern, with an occasional yellow butterfly; the furniture was some dark wood with overstuffed cushions on the chairs and couch; the drapes were red and cream, with heavy red tassels; and the pictures on the walls were Victorian studies of sparsely-draped maidens in heavy gold frames. The only thing missing was an upright piano being played by a short, stout Negro in a red and white suit.

  In place of the piano was an oversized Stromberg-Carlson radio with a built in record player on top. At the moment a record was spinning out the sound of a Dixieland jazz band playing something that sounded like “Oh, What a Girl!” but probably wasn’t. Lumps went over and turned the music down. “Glad you came, Mr Brass,” he said. “I got what you might call a problem.”

  “So the Crusher told me,” Brass said.

  “I been working for the Dutchman,” Lumps said, “doing a little collecting, and a little persuading, and a little of this and that.”

  Brass nodded.