Dead Men's Letters by Erle Stanley Gardner

Author:Erle Stanley Gardner [Gardner, Erle Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0881845795
Publisher: Carroll & Graf
Published: 1989-12-31T21:00:00+00:00

This way out

He slipped into my little apartment with a quick glance over his shoulder and a finger to his lips. I frowned at him. A crook he was, and I don’t care to have crooks pay me social calls. I have made my reputation in crookdom as being a lone wolf, one who has no friends.

“Ed,” he whispered, “I’ve come as a friend. You did me a good turn once, and I haven’t forgotten it. The woman with the mole on her left hand—watch out for her. They’re after you, Ed Jenkins. The police want you. The crooks want you. You haven’t a gang to back you up… . Beware of the woman with the mole on her left hand.”

That much of a warning he gave me, and then he was gone. It was as well. I pay but little attention to warnings. Also he left the jail smell in the apartment, that sickening, cloying odor of jail disinfectant. He had been in for vagrancy, this crook who was known as the Weasel. When the police couldn’t frame anything better on him they’d throw him in on a vagrancy charge and bully him just enough to let him remember that he was nothing but a crook, and a weak crook at that. The stronger ones they left alone until they really had something on them. Little crooks like the Weasel were beaten up, knocked around from pillar to post.

I opened the windows to let the apartment air out.

As I flung open the window and stuck my head out into the balmy air of the summer night there came the bark of a pistol, another and another. Then silence.

The shots had come from around the comer, perhaps a block away. There was the whining shriek of tires as a car skidded around the comer, gathered momentum, and shot away into the night. A woman screamed, a man called out some hoarse question. There was the sound of running feet on the pavement, and isolated masses of animated curiosity sprinted toward the scene of the shooting.

I withdrew my head. Somehow, I had an uncomfortable feeling that the shooting concerned me. There was nothing to go on— nothing but that intangible feeling.

I waited for an hour, sitting there in the dark, giving the police a chance to make their investigations and get away from there, allowing the curiosity seekers a chance to get their fill and disperse. Then I put on hat and topcoat and went out.

At the cigar store on the comer I got the news. The Weasel it had been. Shot from a machine, one of those death cars which figure so prominently in bandit gang wars. He had been killed almost instantly.

I bit the end from a cigar, stepped to the flame which burned steadily and brightly, and thought of the life that had been snuffed out. Was it because of the warning? Was he suspected? Had he been followed to my apartment and killed as he left? Probably—I would never know for sure.

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