The Second Pulp Crime MEGAPACK® by Mack Reynolds & Fletcher Flora & Will F. Jenkins & Rufus King & Talmage Powell

Author:Mack Reynolds & Fletcher Flora & Will F. Jenkins & Rufus King & Talmage Powell [Reynolds, Mack]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: mystery, detective, murder, noir, crime
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2016-07-17T16:00:00+00:00

A DEAD CLUE, by David Nowinson

Originally published in Ten Detective Aces, September 1933.

There was a timid knock upon the door. People who came to visit Nails Sperry didn’t usually knock. They walked right in and, if they weren’t welcome, they were carried out.

Again a timid knock. Nails Sperry looked down the length of his cigar and grinned. There was only one man who would knock. “Come in,” Nails yelled.

Young Roland Curtis slid hesitantly into the unprepossessing place. The room reeked with the merged fumes of cheap tobacco and cheaper liquor. The one electric light, placed near the door so Nails might see his visitors before they saw him, was covered with dust, casted a wan yellow light as if it, too, felt sick in that foul atmosphere.

These things young Curtis sensed before he saw the man who had sent for him. Nails Sperry sat on the bed looking as hard as his name. He wore a pearl stickpin in his tie. Curtis noticed that.

“Sit down and take a load off your dogs,” Nails ordered.

Curtis sat down upon the one chair in the room.

The racketeer stared contemptuously at his guest for a moment. This tall young fellow with the blond hair and the sensitive mouth he had long ago set down as “one of them pretty boys without guts.”

“Have a shot of shellac,” he invited, dragging a bottle and two glasses from beneath the bed.

He filled the glasses and gave one to Curtis. Curtis sniffed at it and shuddered. In the old days, when his father was alive, there had been bourbon and champagne on the table.

He passed the glass back to Sperry. “Thank you. Don’t think I’d better. Too early in the day for me.”

Nails spat upon the floor and drank both glasses down. “Never too early for me,” he said.

“I don’t know why you sent for me,” ventured Curtis nervously, “but if it’s money, I haven’t a cent. You promised me the last time that you wouldn’t ask for any more.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said Nails. “I’m not asking yet, see? So don’t get wise or tomorrow the rags’ll be yelling it all over town how your old man chiseled money from the bank before he bumped himself off.”

Young Curtis clenched his fists and said nothing. Too late he had discovered how a little knowledge may be a very dangerous thing in the hands of a man like Sperry.

“You still got the pearl necklace, ain’t you?” shot out Nails suddenly.

“Yes, but I’m not permitted to dispose of it—as I told you. The will—”

“Yeah, you sobbed out all that hooey before. Well, I don’t want you to give me the pearls, see? I just want the use of ’em for a while.”

“But why—”

A crafty look came over the racketeer’s face.

“Pearls come from oysters, don’t they? Oysters are dumb, see? I’m going to send them pearls back to the oysters.”

“What do you mean?”

“The rocks are insured, ain’t they?”

“Why, yes.”

“How much?”

“Fifty thousand dollars. The Runtham Company.”

Nails Sperry licked his thin lips.

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