Too Fair to Die by Cleve Adam F

Author:Cleve, Adam F. [Cleve, Adam F.]
Format: epub
Tags: Crime, Pulp
Publisher: Fiction House
Published: 1951-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

6

IN AN OPEN-FRONT bar on Zephyr Street McBride let himself be rooked out of a stack of silver dollars by a black. jack dealer who could throw tops, bottoms, seconds or even thirds with equal facility. He could do this while talking about the weather, copper, politics and who won the fifth at Santa Anita yesterday.

“They tell me Donaldson is quite a gambler,” McBride said, shoving two face cards under his dollar. He figured the dealer would have to work for this one, since he had a deuce showing.

“Who did?” The man gave himself three more cards, making a total of five, but the answer came out just the same, exactly twenty-one. “He’s a gambler the way a one-shot author hits a run-away best seller. I’ve never heard of him winning or losing more than seventeen bucks in a game since.”

“Since when?”

“Couple or three years back he took a hundred grand out of Vegas. You must have read about it in the papers. From then on he became a success story, but not in any games I’ve dealt or heard about.” Just for the hell of it the nimble fingers gave McBride a blackjack and paid him a dollar and a half. “How’s for a drink?”

“I might have known,” McBride said sadly, They went over to the bar and had a couple. The second one they matched for, but McBride couldn’t win at this either. “No wonder Donaldson fights shy of the local talent. When he’s elected you’re going to have to reform.”

“If he’s elected.”

McBride tossed off the last of his drink. “You don’t think he will be?”

“I wouldn’t make book on it.”

“Hell, there’s nothing in that. You wouldn’t bet the sun would come up unless you were dealing.”

“Maybe you’re right, friend”

They parted on excellent terms, and McBride went out and around the corner into Copper Street, heading for Lou Patrick’s office. Midway of the second block he heard the screech of tortured rubber and someone yelled at him. It was Dutch. He jockeyed his cab in between two parked cars, only slightly crumpling the fender of one, McBride saw that he had the makings of a fine black eye. “What’s the matter—some fellow motorist give you an argument?”

“You and your detecting,” Dutch said. “You want to know who gave me this shiner? Mazaryk, that’s who.”

“What happened?”

Dutch’s story, sifted of obscenities, was quite simple. He’d had a flat tire, see? So he’d gone back to the company garage to have it fixed, see? So while he was there and waiting around he’d noticed Mazaryk’s cab in its stall and thought he’d have a look at it, the trip sheet and one thing and another. But he hadn’t found anything suspicious, or even interesting, until he was getting out, when he observed that the front seat cushion didn’t fit down very good. “It kind of wobbled, see?”

McBride said he had a perfect mental picture of the cab’s front seat. “Get on with it. You’re not writing an epic.”

“What do you think it was?”

McBride sighed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.