The Complete Cases of the Marquis of Broadway, Volume 1 by John Lawrence

Author:John Lawrence [Lawrence, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: detective
Publisher: Altus Press
Published: 2014-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

A Girl Can Go Berserk

IT WAS nearly four o’clock when they finally located the gambler, and by then two other facts were growing in seriousness. First—the missing playboy seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth with his shot wife. Second—the old man, Cotton Manson, had not been seen or heard from since he’d left the Ritz-Plaza minutes after the shooting on Broadway.

They eventually located Titanic through Stewart, the crap-game lookout on Broadway and Forty-second. He lipped the information: “No game tonight, but I think Titanic is playing stud up on Seventy-second. He sent me a message he wasn’t going to play in your district for a while.”

“When did this stud game start?”

“Around ten—maybe a shade after.”

“I saw Titanic just before ten. You mean around eleven—or a shade after.”

“No. He went right from the restaurant where he saw you to this hotel where he is now.”

“Who’s he playing with?”

The youth mentioned two names—prominent operators of the Chicago policy racket.

“That’s a great alibi, if ever I heard one,” the Marquis growled.

THE Alamo was an old, dark-fronted hotel of the type known as “Commercial.” The night clerk, a mouse-colored man with eight mouse-colored hairs which criss-crossed back and forth across his square bald head, looked at them with uneasy eyes as they came in. He brightened, however, when they inquired for Titanic Johnson.

“He just went,” he explained. “Just a minute ago.”

“I bet he did,” Johnny Berthold growled.

The manager hurried around the desk. “Really—he did! He ought to be—” He pushed through the revolving door and they followed him. The first faint luminosity that warned of dawn’s coming, gave the street a vague grayness. The manager pointed, whispered: “There—there he is—just climbing into his car.”

The gambler’s plump figure was recognizable under a street light, a block and a quarter away as he entered a big sedan. Johnny started off. “I’ll get him!”

“Wait,” the Marquis checked him. “Never mind.”

He led the way to Berthold’s car, threw a “Thanks” over his shoulder at the clerk.

“Catch him,” he told the shaggy blond detective, “but there’s no point in cutting baldy back there in on it.”

“Oh—I get it.”

Ahead, they saw the sedan swing out, head straight across for Fifth Avenue. Berthold sent the coupe at a moderate pace in the gambler’s wake.

It was not till they had both turned south on Fifth that the big sedan started to do convolutions. Berthold stared with wrinkled forehead. “Say—what the hell? He didn’t see me.” He cursed, accelerated quickly, as the gambler swung out of sight. “I’ll jam that monkey up against a lamp po—”

“Relax,” the Marquis said. “Maybe he’s going somewhere. He seems anxious to make sure he isn’t followed. Keep on his tail.”

Titanic started circling blocks, doubling back, swinging around corners unexpectedly. Berthold growled, held him in sight with the ease of long practise. The sedan curveted across town and back, up and down. It was not till it straightened out, in the Twenties, on Lexington, that it was apparent the gambler had been slowly working southward.

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