Dime Detective Magazine October 1950 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Pulp
Publisher: Dime Detective Magazine
Published: 1950-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

“Don’t be jittery,” she began scornfully.

He’d raised his voice suddenly, before she knew what to expect. It went booming down the desolate hallway. “Corrigan! C’mere a minute!”

A blue-suited figure had joined his in the opening before she knew what was happening. He pointed toward her.

“Arrest this woman for murder! Hold her here in this room until I get back! I’m making you personally responsible for her!”

A bleat of smothered fury ripped from her. “Why, you dirty, double-crossing—The guy isn’t even dead yet.”

“I’m not arresting you for the murder of Frank Willis. I’m arresting you for the murder of his wife, Annie Willis, over a month and a half ago at the New Rotterdam Theater !”

The greater part of it came winging back from the far end of the hallway, along which he was moving fast on his way to try to save a man’s life…

They came trooping down single file, fast, into the gloom. White poker chips of light glanced off the damp, cemented brick walls from their torches, The janitor was in the lead. He poked at a switch by his sense of memory alone, and a feeble parody of electricity illuminated part of the ceiling and the floor immediately under it, nothing else.

“I ain’t seen him since yesterday at noon,” he told them in a frightened voice. “I seen him going out then. That was the last I seen of him. Here it is over here, gents. This door.”

They fanned out around it in a half-circle. All the separate poker chips of torchlight came to a head, focused on one big door, which was fireproof ; nail-studded iron, rusty but stout. But it was fastened simply by a padlock clasping two thick staples.

“I remember now, my wife said something about his asking her for the key to here, earlier in the evening while I was out,” the janitor said. “So he was still all right then.”

“Yes, he was still all right then,” Benson agreed shortly. “Get that thing. Hurry up!” A crowbar was inserted behind the padlock chain; two of the men with him got on one end of it and started to pry. Something snapped. The unopened lock bounced up, and they swung the storage space door out with a grating sound.

The torch beams converged inside and lit it up. It was small and cramped. The air was already musty and unfit to breathe—even the unconfined air at large between its four sides—and it was lifeless. All the discarded paraphernalia of forgotten tenants over the years choked it.

Cartons, empty packing cases, a dismantled iron bed frame, even a kid’s sled with one runner missing. But there was a clear space left between the entrance and the one large trunk that loomed up in it, like a towering headstone on a tomb.

It stood there silent, inscrutable. On the floor before it lay, in eloquent meaning, a single large lump of coal brought from the outside part of the basement and discarded after it had served its purpose. Two smaller fragments had chipped off it, lay close by.

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