Black Mask (Vol. 29, No. 3 — January 1947)

Carl said: “What difference does it make to you, shamus? What difference is anything going to make to you, where you’re going?”

There was a sharp intake of breath from Miss Townsbury.

I said: “The man in the doorway will take care of me.”

Carl’s laugh was low. “That’s a pretty dusty gag, Jones. That’s a little old for me.”

From the doorway, Devine said: “You’d better put that toy away, big boy. This thing in my hand is a man’s

gun.”

Carl never even turned before he dropped the gun to the carpet. It would be a long time, I knew, before Devine would let me forget this.

The department built up a case, all right. Some of Miss Townsbury’s patients talked, and after that, some of her former patients. Some of the organization’s small fry talked enough to sew all of them up — Every and Carl and the old girl and her staff. Judy wasn’t in on any of it. Carl’s gun had killed Lundgren and Carlton, but not Flame.

They found Flame the next day. In a shallow and poorly concealed grave in the woods. No coffin. In the cold, wet ground, with a knitting needle through her left eye, embedded in her brain...

I Remember Murder

by Julius Long

What a lovely party! Everybody high as a kite, nobody knew anyone else and a riotous time was had by all. All, that is, except the blonde they left behind them. She was very shapely and very young — and she wouldn’t be getting any older. Not with that bullet-hole through her pretty head!

Chapter One

Wine, Women and Worse

Everybody at the party was drunker than I was, and I was afraid to stand up from fear I’d fall down. I just sat there staring into space, trying to figure out whose apartment Phil Sutton had brought me to and where it was.

My watch was still running, and I knew it had been two hours since Sutton had come upon me in a south-side honky-tonk and insisted that I go with him to a “swell party.” If I hadn’t been three sheets to the wind I’d never have walked out of any public place with Phil Sutton.

There were plenty of people willing to associate with him since he’d organized the Acme Auto Insurance Company, but not me. I’m funny about respecting people just because they have money and even funnier about the way they got it. I knew how Sutton had got his.

A couple of weeks before Pearl Harbor he had gone into bankruptcy and stuck his creditors for a hundred thousand dollars. By the time the Nips took Bataan he was riding around in a black Cadillac with white side-wall tires, and a year later he was so rich that when he bought a new fur coat for his secretary he even bought one for his wife.

If you wanted a case of Scotch, Sutton wouldn’t sell it to you, but if you wanted a truck-load of it and were willing to pay a hundred thirty-five a case, he would. He wouldn’t sell you a set of tires, either, but if you had a place for a gross, he was your man. There is a popular notion that the federal boys always get their man, too, but when they finally put the pinch on Sutton he walked out none the worse for it except what it had cost for lawyers.

After that he was a bigger shot than ever, and you never saw him without a whole gang of stooges. They weren’t always poolroom punks — sometimes it was amazing to see who traveled around with him.

Of course this was in a large part due to the fact that Sutton provided plenty of free liquor and girls.

That was why I was here tonight at this apartment. Sutton had cracked about a swell girl I’d like to meet, and though I knew what his idea of a swell girl was, at the moment, the idea suited me fine.

I felt that I had a right to pitch a wild party, and I wanted more than anything else to convince myself that I didn’t care about Kay. I mean Kay Kennedy, the beautiful creature who is private secretary to my boss, the Hon. Burton H. Keever, attorney general of our fair state.

She’d given me plenty of trouble before, giving dates to a heel named Curtis T. Durbin. This Durbin is a reformed college professor trying to go straight on his salary as “State Criminologist” in the office of the attorney general. Keever imported him from a cow-patch college, thinking a Ph. D in the joint would give it class. It took Keever only a few months to get his belly full of Durbin, but by that time the drip had put himself in so solid with the ladies’ reform leagues that Keever was afraid to pitch him out.

I could never understand Kay’s interest in the guy, and I didn’t try very hard, for I never considered him serious competition. Then Shellie had come along.