The Ghost Strikes Back by Chance George

Author:Chance, George [Chance, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Pulp
Publisher: The Ghost Super-Detective Magazine
Published: 1940-04-03T05:00:00+00:00

JOE and I drove over to within a block of the building where McTeeg lived, and then got out and walked.

I asked Joe if he felt up to doing a bit of burglarizing. He said he guessed he might as well feel like it. So we got out and walked to the apartment building where McTeeg lived.

McTeeg was on the second floor front. From the street we could see a light burning in the front window. Joe ran across the street to the drugstore and telephoned McTeeg’s apartment. I waited for him outside. He returned a moment later to announce that a man had answered the phone and said that McTeeg wasn’t in.

“It wasn’t McTeeg who said that, was it?” I asked.

“No. I’d know the guy’s voice any time. He squeaks like a juvenile’s understudy his first night on stage.”

I remembered that thin voice of Augie McTeeg’s pretty well myself.

As we went up the steps I gave Joe my plans. Whoever answered the door was to get Joe’s sap back of the ear. Then we would go on and go through the place with a comb, try and find the negative of the picture, and then get out as soon as possible.

I knocked at McTeeg’s door. A voice on the other side asked who it was.

The vocal cords in my throat tightened. So close an imitation of McTeeg’s squeaky voice came from my mouth that Joe Harper gave me a startled look.

“It’s Augie,” I said. “Open the door.”

A key turned in the lock. The door opened. Joe and I jumped the man, had him before he could make a move. Joe’s sap went up and came down again and the man melted to the floor, face up. I closed the door of the apartment.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Joe said.

I turned around, looked at the man on the floor.

Maybe if he hadn’t been stretched out on the floor just as he had appeared in the picture, we wouldn’t have recognized him so readily.

You see, this man Joe had knocked out was the man in the photo—the one who looked as though he had been killed by Mrs. Kalaban’s car. He was undoubtedly a professional dummy-chucker who made his living by having accidents and then filing suit for damages.

This time he had simply flopped in front of Irene Kalaban’s car. Oscar had been planted where he could snap the photo easily. It was all a put-up job, as I had half expected. And so long as the man Irene thought was dead wasn’t dead, McTeeg really didn’t have anything he could blackmail her with.

Joe had the same idea that I did about the blackmail stunt. “There’s no percentage in us sticking around here now, is there?” he asked.

“We’d better take a look around while we’re here,” I said.

It was in an unprotected drawer of a dressing table in McTeeg’s luxurious living room, that we came across the negative of the shake-down photo. Joe and I were about to leave the bedroom with our prize when I heard McTeeg’s shrill voice talking to someone.

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