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

“Now you’ve done it, Ben! Now you’ve tightened the noose about my neck! When it gets out that my chief investigator was with Sutton on the night a warrant was issued for bribing me, not even my own wife will believe I’m innocent!”

I didn’t feel so bright then, for I hadn’t thought of that.

Chapter Two

Dead to the World

After Keever had finally cooled off, I said: “Maybe it’s not so bad that I should have been with Sutton this evening. Maybe that’ll give me a lead on finding him before the D.A.’s boys do. You’re sure they haven’t nailed him already?”

“Yes, but it’s only a matter of time until they do. Even if Sutton isn’t conspiring to ruin me, I’ve got to find him first.”

“Why is finding him so important, boss?”

Keever looked pained. “Even you should be able to figure that out, Ben. What’s Sutton’s main racket?”

“The black market, of course.”

“All right. The odds are a thousand-to-one that the cheek Price gave him made payable to cash was to pay off a black market operator. So what can Sutton say when the D.A.’s boys ask him who really cashed that check?”

“I see your point.” I was beginning to think I hadn’t sobered up much, missing one like that one. A black market pinch is a federal rap. Bribery of a state official is only a state rap. It was a lead-pipe cinch that if Sutton had to take a choice between the two he’d clam up about the black market deal. So It was plain that Keever’s only chance to make him talk was to grab him first.

“That’s your job, finding him,” Keever told me. “If it ever gets out that you, my chief investigator, were at a drunken brawl with him the same night the D.A.’s office was after him for bribing me, I’m through. And so are you.”

It looked that way, for a fact. I got up. “Give me Shellie,” I said. “He’s waiting around outside. As for Durbin, why don’t you send him to bed?”

Keever sneered. “At least Durbin doesn’t carouse around with black market crooks!”

I couldn’t say a word. I went out, motioned to Shelton that he was to come along, which he did with alacrity. Durbin eyed us suspiciously as we left.

“We’ll take a cab to the south side,” I told Shelton. “I left my car at a honky-tonk down there — I hope.”

Shelton was full of questions. “Do you think Mr. Keever’s really in as serious a jam as he thinks he is?”

“Worse. There’s nothing more dangerous than being an honest politician, and Keever’s just that. All the rest of the politicians resent his honesty, and even if they weren’t his political enemies, they’d try to grease the skids under him just on general principles.”

Shelton looked away, and I guessed it was because my breath, not my answer, reeked. I didn’t particularly like the idea of the kid seeing me with a flushed face and bloodshot eyes, especially as he had been the indirect cause of it all. But I was coming around pretty fast by the time we got to the honky-tonk, and it helped my morale quite a bit to find my car there.

I realized, though, that I wasn’t as sober as I thought I was after we’d gone ten blocks and Shelton wanted to know when I was going to shift out of second gear.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“To a party. Sutton took me there tonight in his Cadillac, and then he came up missing. It could be that he got wind of the D.A.’s warrant for him and lit out. Maybe somebody there will have an idea about that or even tell us where he went.”

It took only about fifteen minutes to get to the corner of Elmhurst and Arlington Road. I came in on Arlington, which skirts that end of town, because it was the quickest way from the south side. Elmhurst led straight downtown. I noticed there weren’t any cars parked around the apartment house, though an apartment on the fourth floor was all lighted up. I guessed that this was 4B.

The card in the mail box said the apartment belonged to a guy named George Cranston, and the name didn’t mean a thing. The foyer was deserted, and we used the automatic elevator, which was on the main floor. When we reached 4B I wondered if somebody had wrecked the phonograph, for it wasn’t playing.

I tried the door, and it opened. I entered, and Shelton followed. There wasn’t a soul in the living room, where the phonograph was. There wasn’t even a sound in the house. I went on into the dining room, through it and into the kitchen without finding a sign of life. One thing I thought was odd.

The gang had taken the trouble to wash every glass in the place and stack them up in neat rows. There wasn’t a bottle, even an empty one in sight. I looked in the trash basket beside the electric range, and there wasn’t a bottle in it, either. I thought it was really remarkable for a gang of drunks as knocked-out as that bunch had been to be so neat and tidy and even carry away the little dead soldiers.

“Where is everybody?” asked Shelton.