Black Mask July 1951 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime, Pulp, Mystery
Publisher: Black Mask Magazine
Published: 1951-07-11T05:00:00+00:00

HE DIDN’T say anything. He was white as a ghost and his fingers were plucking at his coat pocket nervously. “Your uncle telephoned me. Or let’s say that you telephoned me and your uncle spoke with me. He spoke with me via an old recording, a dictated cylinder which you still own. I don’t knew about the message; it could have applied to almost anyone who’d wanted to see him.”

“This,” he said thickly, “is all utterly fantastic.”

“This morning,” I said, “I found your friend in the morgue. The guy who came back on the boat with you, posing as your uncle. The same guy you paid five grand to go aboard with you and pose as your uncle. Always, he kept in the background, but you got around and had a swell time. We got a foto of him being loaded in the ambulance yesterday. He’s in the morgue today, dead of the gunshot wound you neatly put in his head.”

Henry Jorgansen’s mouth was too dry for words.

“It’s all simple enough. You killed the old boy two months ago. He was going to cut you off, or else you got tired of waiting, but I think maybe your parties were too much for him and he threatened to cut you off without a cent. So you forged power of attorney and killed him. You didn’t want him found, for that meant murder and you had the only real motive. So you kept him alive, technically, and enjoyed his estate through the forged power of attorney. Damn clever, boy. But you should have nailed down the lid.” I shook my head. “You should have—”

His hand was in his pocket and he pulled out a Smith & Wesson .38 and tried to gun me, but I was out of the chair and at him in no time.

I threw my left hand down on his right so that the gun pointed at the floor when it went off, and then I crossed a right to his jaw which made my knuckles crack and tore the skin off them. Man, that was a punch. It hurt my hand. I knocked him clean off the arm of the chair where he had been sitting and he fell on the floor.

But he still had the gun and he fired twice at me and missed, and spoiled a swell oil painting on the wall behind me.

I jumped his gun and kicked it out of his hand with a lucky boot; and as he scrambled to his feet, I clipped him again, from the floor up, and I thought for a second that I’d broken his neck, it snapped so hard. I drove him clean out into the hall and he would have fallen and passed out cold except that he fell into a man’s arms.

“Darn you, Poppa,” I said in admiration, “I don’t see how you do it. A nick-in-timer if there ever was one. But I didn’t need you this time.”

“You sure did. I could tell by the gleam in your eyes at the morgue that something was on the make and I was right.

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