Thrilling Detective Magazine October 1947 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Pulp
Publisher: Thrilling Detective Magazine
Published: 1947-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

This Will Kill You

By C. S. Montayne

A COMPLETE JOHNNY CASTLE NOVELET

When a New York reporter finds a body in a Broadway siren’s boudoir, he plays a strange game of hide-and-seek with both cops and robbers!

While Gilda held the gun on Lovie, Esthay got me by the throat, and the air went out of my lungs

1. Date With the Girl Friend

It was one of those rainy autumn nights when you seemed to be looking at the blurred lights of Broadway through an even half dozen Scotches and sodas. Getting a taxi was as easy as trying to get gracious language from a harried head waiter.

I snapped up the collar on my leakproof slicker and headed for Dufrey’s on leather. That inhospitable lift-and-drain tuckaway was half down 45th Street, a pebble’s toss from the Imperial Theater. Why Libby Hart, the principal character in my dreams, had designated that as a meet-me-there-at-nine rendezvous was a bigger question than the Middle East.

But Mrs. Hart’s only girl child had laid it on the line and didn’t like arguments. So, when I checked out of the Orbit, that high class newspaper for which I concocted various sporting page pieces, there was nothing to do but duck the drops and keep the date.

Dufrey’s, dressed up to represent an Old World Sicilian grotto, was no place for a lady like Libby to be waiting for anybody.

Its customers were the flower of the underworld, a mob of not so nice smelling tiger lilies. I had reason to know that Brian Esthay, one of the town’s toughest muscle men, owned the major slice of Dufrey’s and made it his headquarters.

In the few times I’d been there the faces of the patrons had haunted my nightmares. I walked faster, trying to beat the gal friend to its doorstep.

But there wasn’t any need to hurry. Libby was a charter member of the Ladies Never On Time Association. When I went past the circular bar in the front room there was no sign of her. Nor in the Florentine Room in the rear. Or in the foyer, or emerging from the powder room.

I took a short beer to a table and sat down. Over to the left Brian Esthay was dining a couple of pals. Esthay, a big, benevolent mug with a face like a friendly St. Bernard, was laughing heartily at one of his own gags.

Esthay was always laughing. Around the Main Stem he had a reputation for his constant good humor, wisecracks and witticisms, charity and unfailing memory for friends, near and far.

One of the “far” ones, I recalled, happened to be Dolf Callise, a deadpanned young gentleman who had acquired the unhappy habit of borrowing jewelry from wealthy people and forgetting to return it.

In fact, Callise seldom asked for the loans. He simply dropped in when the folks were out and helped himself.

He had done that in the case of a Mrs. Randall Westcott. That wealthy dowager maintained a fourteen-room Park Avenue dude ranch. Mrs. W, through Callise’s visit, found herself minus a collection of jeweled trinkets insured for a mere sixty grand.

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