The Last Express Read online

  “Semiannually.” Mechanically she forced her voice to firmness. “I’m still young, Captain Maclain, but I do have some slight idea about business procedure. The report is from a reputable firm of certified public accountants. You’re wrong if you think any manipulation has brought about this present situation.”

  “Very well,” he said amiably. He was certain of her fears about the estate but respected her desire to protect her brother. Adroitly he took another line. “Your assurance leaves me two avenues of investigation—blackmail or intimidation.”

  “Blackmail?” she repeated unsteadily. “With Paul? Impossible.”

  “Unfortunately it’s quite possible. His wealth and his public office leave him doubly open. It’s a profession dependent on pride and money for existence. Your brother has both—and knows many women. However, it’s not as dangerous as the intimidation. There are men in New York ready to use any means to save themselves from the law. Do you know of any recent cases on which your brother was working?”

  “He never spoke of his work to me. I’m afraid I can’t help you there.”

  “I can find out. Do you know any of his women friends ?”

  “A few.” Maclain judged she was embarrassed at the question, but she went bravely on. “Shall I say those on the more respectable side ? He has an address book at home. Perhaps—”

  “That’s for you to decide, of course. A list of the names in that book would be of invaluable help, presuming you wish me to continue.”

  “I do,” she assured him. “My talk with you has already made me feel better. Is $200 sufficient as a retainer ?”

  “Ample.” He rose, smiling. Schnucke stood up beside him and stretched herself, yawning pinkly. “You can mail me a check with the list of names.”

  “I’d prefer to give you the money now. I brought it with me.” She opened her bag, counted ten 20’s onto the desk, then picked them up and placed them in his hand.

  “Thank you.” He gave a slight bow as he folded the bills and put them in his pocket. “I hope I can be of real service.”

  “There’s one more thing,” she remarked hesitantly. “It’s silly, but I feel I should tell you. We have some friends, Howard Hewitt and his wife Gladys. They come to our house quite often to play bridge. She’s much younger than Howard—and extremely beautiful. I’ve felt for some time that Paul was showing her too much attention.…”

  She paused uncertainly, and he asked, “You’ve heard something to confirm that idea?”

  “Several things—and Howard Hewitt is a man of violent temper. He’s with the Department of Gas, Water and Electricity. I know a girl who works there. She’s seen Paul and Gladys together more than once—at the Hi-de-Ho Club in the Village.”

  Duncan Maclain stiffened and placed both hands palm down on the top of the desk. “Did you ever hear your brother mention the name ‘Hoefle,’ Miss Zarinka?”

  “Why, yes. Since you’ve reminded me, I believe that was a case he worked on some time ago. But I don’t know anything about it.”

  “I don’t want to alarm you without cause.” His hands pressed tighter on the desk. “But it’s better you know the truth. If your brother’s mixed up with Benny Hoefle he’s in danger—frightful danger, Miss Zarinka.”

  Her full lips trembled. “What makes you think he’s mixed up with this man?”

  “Anyone who knows Hoefle by sight is mixed up with him,” said Duncan Maclain.

  Chapter Three: LAST GRIM RECORDING

  The Tombs Prison, squatting next to the Criminal Courts building, showed half-a-dozen dim rectangles of yellow light. The Criminal Courts building was dark, a hideous, distorted mass of bricks, futilely trying to rid itself of grime in the soft fall of the drizzling rain.

  Slightly farther north, on the same side of Centre Street, a dim hanging light swung gently in a breeze from the East River. It flickered on the gold lettering of a plate-glass window in the building on the corner, making the words District Attorney’s Office move deceptively. Two floors above, three lighted windows indicated late workers.

  Patrolman Galligan, taking a short refuge from the rain in an all-night lunch across the street, looked up at the windows and stirred more sugar into his coffee. “Them D. A.’s give me a pain,” he confided to the man back of the counter. “We make the pinches, and they work all night to turn ’em loose.”

  “Yeah.” The counterman wiped his hands on a dirty towel and squinted through window and drizzle. “Homicide Bureau working, ain’t it? Dey got a boid wot cu’d double for John Barrymore. ’Jever see ’im? Begins wid a Z—his name I mean. He give me a dime tip once—fer a doughnut and coffee.”

  “Zarinka.” Galligan blew in his spoon. “He’s trying to pin the Delancey killing on Benny Hoefle.”

  “So’s me old Aunt Hattie.” The counterman twisted in a new station on the radio and turned it up to blaring pitch. “Last night I forgot and missed me program,” he yelled. “I’m getting the right station early tonight.”

  Patrolman Galligan tossed a nickel on the counter. “And I’m getting t’hell out. I’ve got a couple of kids I can listen to when I crave a row like that.”

  He started slowly up Centre Street, pausing to try the doors of darkened machinery supply shops which lined the way. A short distance below Walker Street a solitary sedan was parked. As Galligan watched idly, a man crossed Centre Street and got in the car. The set of his shoulders, hunched against the rain, and the free swing of his arms were vaguely familiar, but Galligan could not see his face.

  After a few moments, when the car did not start, the patrolman sauntered on by. The occupant of the car was in the front seat, half sideways, his back toward the sidewalk. He was engrossed in a paper held open under the dash light. Galligan hesitated, on the verge of speaking, but the windows of the sedan were closed, and there was nothing suspicious about the man’s conduct. Furthermore, the car was familiar. He had seen it parked on his beat many times, and the license number was low—9Y-97.

  Galligan was no rookie. He knew that patrolmen who started a career of questioning every occupant of a parked car would find most of the occupants were indignant taxpayers entitled to protection instead of interference. Such a career of derring-do invariably ended on the carpet before a deputy commissioner. He shrugged massive shoulders under his slicker and walked on toward Canal Street, trying more doors.

  Upstairs in the district attorney’s office Miss Amelia Burberry covered her typewriter and clanged the doors of an ancient safe, dismissing it for the night with a twirl of the knob. She was past 40 and looked older, for her hair was gray and her face hard from the weathering of many political blizzards. She stopped in the outer room, a large expanse of linoleum-covered floor furnished with four oak desks, separated from the corridor by a brass railing.

  “You going to work all night?”

  Paul Zarinka looked up from a blue-backed brief and pushed an impeding pile of lawbooks to one side. Miss Burberry, who had seen many faces in varying degrees of trouble and grief, thought for a moment he was startled at her question. She dismissed the idea. Much work in the Homicide Bureau of the D. A.’s office tended to breed peculiar expressions, easily subject to misinterpretation.

  “I’m checking out shortly,” he said. “Good night.” His smoldering brown eyes returned to the brief.

  Miss Burberry was inclined to linger. She lived in Long Island City, and occasionally Paul Zarinka drove her home on his way to Forest Hills. “You’ve been putting in a lot of overtime.”

  “I’ll put in a lot more before I get where I’m going.”

  “It doesn’t pay.”

  “Nothing pays—unless you make it. Good night.” His clipped words stultified any further conversation.

  The creeping elevator which served the building had ceased many hours before. He listened as Miss Burberry’s adequate feet traversed the length of the corridor and started down the worn stairs. When the sound of them died away he left his desk and went to a window overlooking Centre S
treet. For five minutes he looked down at the supply shops over the way, chewing on his thumb with quick nervous bites.

  An umbrella-shielded pedestrian, recognizable as Miss Burberry, hurried toward the nearest subway station. Paul Zarinka straightened up and turned slowly around. In the darkened surface of the windowpane he had seen a raincoated form come through the gate in the brass railing behind him. It was a sweet-faced boy who looked to be in his early teens, except for his eyes. They approached perfect roundness so closely as to be bizarre and were partly covered with a film. Due to their abnormal construction his face constantly reflected an earnest surprise—a startling surprise, the amazement of a dying fish at finding itself removed from the water.

  Paul Zarinka sat down without speaking, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief to cover an involuntary twitching of one corner. The boy perched himself on a desk edge in the shadow, crossed well-shod small feet, and lighted a cigarette by flicking a match with his thumbnail. He inhaled deeply, showed exquisite teeth without grinning, and let the smoke trickle out from between them.

  “The great mouthpiece,” he said, still holding his teeth together. “How are you, toots?”

  “What do you want, Madonna?” Zarinka’s forehead glistened in the light of the desk lamp. “It’s crazy to come up here.”

  “A nuthouse, hunh ? I heard something was missing from the files and that nobody could find you this afternoon. I thought I’d drop around and see if you’d heard about it.”

  The blood rushed to Paul Zarinka’s dark face and drained away. He smoothed his black mustache with one finger wrapped in the handkerchief. “Maybe you haven’t heard that the governor has started an investigation. Do you think I’m a fool?”

  “I’m trying to find out, toots. We’re afraid the great mouthpiece may have lost our little nest egg. Three hundred grand!”

  “Well, you’d better go back where you came from, Madonna. I’m not putting out. You may be afraid—and your boss may be afraid—but he’s not my boss, and I don’t scare easy. Don’t forget that half that nest egg is mine—and I’m the only one who knows where it is. It’s staying there until things quiet down.”

  The boy stood up, took a small mirror from his pocket, and sleeked back his glossy blond hair with a pocket comb. “Ooh! Such a nasty tough mans!” He cocked his head to one side, registering a mixture of surprise and sadness.

  “Get out of here!” Zarinka ordered furiously. “Or I’ll knock your sissified head off!”

  “Go ahead.” Madonna’s eyes grew even more round and fishy. “The sign outside says ‘Homicide Bureau.’ I’d just as soon fog you here as any place.” He vaulted the brass railing and went down the corridor, singing “‘I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal, you!’”

  Paul walked to the railing and watched him out of sight down the stairs. Then he gathered the papers from his desk, shoved them into a folder, and placed it in the steel files, locking the drawer behind him. From a clothes tree in the corner he took his belted raincoat, slipped into it, and felt for the weight of the Smith and Wesson in the pocket.

  Felt hat in hand, he switched off the desk light, then turned it on again, and dialed a number on the phone. “Tell the lady at table number four her escort will be there in twenty minutes,” he ordered the foreign voice at the other end.

  He went down the stairs holding the cocked Smith and Wesson in his right hand, and breathed more freely when he reached the street. With one hand on the door handle of his car he drew a sharp whistling breath at sight of the man inside, walked around to the other side by the wheel, and climbed in.

  “I forgot you had a key to the car,” he said as he pressed the starter.

  “That’s rather careless, isn’t it?”

  “There are more important things than that. Madonna wanted to know where I was this afternoon. He just left the office. It was careless of me not to shoot him. You didn’t see him by any chance?”

  “I wouldn’t know him if I did.”

  “That’s funny.” Paul stopped for a traffic light. “I had an idea you knew him. Was there something on your mind?”

  “Nothing much. I saw your car and thought you might drive me home. There’s a new investigation due from Albany.”

  The light changed to green, but Paul kept the car out of gear. “I’m sorry, I have a date in the Village. I can drop you any place on the way.”

  “Never mind. Canal Street will do. I can take the B. M. T. there. I’ll take a run over to Brooklyn instead. I turned down a poker game, but I might as well go. You say you’ve heard about the investigation ?”

  “Yes,” Paul said shortly. “I’ve heard about it—and I’m not worried. I have no tin boxes to conceal.” He started the car and was silent for the short distance to Canal Street. “Good night,” he said, as his companion alighted. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “I hope so,” the man declared, and started across Canal Street against the red light.

  Centre Street was almost deserted, and the traffic on Canal Street was light. When the hand grenade burst in Paul Zarinka’s sedan he was the only one killed. You could hardly count the two white mice he was carrying in a cage in the back of his car.

  With nine pieces of jagged metal in him, Paul lived long enough to speak. Patrolman Galligan reached him first and marked down his words in a notebook.

  The copy made for Duncan Maclain was recorded on an Ediphone record: “Sea Beach Subway—the last express!”

  Chapter Four: THE DEAD MICE

  The machinery of the New York Police Department may be ponderous, but it moves with alacrity and deadly efficiency when once under way. It is extremely doubtful if the startled Patrolman Galligan remembered the proper police procedure when Paul Zarinka’s automobile blew up within a few blocks of headquarters on his peaceful beat.

  There was little necessity for him to live up to regulations and notify headquarters who in turn would notify the chief of police, the commander of the detective bureau, the medical examiner, the district attorney, the Homicide Squad specialists, the Technical Police Laboratory and the staff photographers and stenographers, and, since it was a homicide caused by explosion, the Bomb Squad, for within five minutes after the deafening detonation Centre and Canal streets were swarming with efficient men.

  Sergeant Aloysius Archer of the Homicide Squad found the two dead white mice in their tiny battered wire birdcage not 15 feet from where the car had waited for the light. They were resting in the doorway of a store with a shattered window, deposited there intact by some strange freak of the explosion.

  He picked them up, regarded them curiously for a moment, and pushed his way roughly through the milling crowd to a place where he could get a better look under the street light at the corner. He found Inspector Larry Davis in a circle of uniformed men holding back the crowd. The inspector was bent over, interestedly watching a man sketch the design of a set of tire tracks still visible on the wet street.

  The man wrote down the figures “B three-thirds” under the design and said, “A car must have passed him all right, Inspector, but I’m afraid it won’t do us much good. These are Michelin taxi tires all the way around.”

  “We can check, anyhow,” Inspector Davis said curtly and turned to Sergeant Archer. “What have you got there ?”

  “Mice.”

  The sergeant held out the cage. The inspector’s thick eyebrows met. “Where were they?”

  The sergeant pointed. “In that doorway over there.”

  “What is it, a pet shop?” the inspector asked.

  Archer grinned. “A machinery supply store. I think these were blown there. What knocked him off—dynamite?”

  The inspector shook his head and held out a big hand. In his palm lay an octagonal piece of metal.

  “Something new. A Mills hand grenade.”

  The sergeant was about to speak but stopped. The crowd had parted to admit a Cadillac coupé. It pulled up to the curb, and a patrolman sprang to open the door.

  �
�The D. A.,” Davis muttered under his breath. “Will he be burned up!”

  District Attorney Claude Dearborn was a man with powerful friends, and equally powerful enemies, a fact which he never allowed himself to forget. Even in the press of official business he was seldom deserted by his sense of caution.

  Springer, the blunt, bullet-faced man at the wheel of the Cadillac, was his constant companion. The sight of Springer’s heavy blue-serged figure occupying a chair discreetly outside of ballrooms and dining-rooms was a sure sign of District Attorney Dearborn’s presence in person at the functions under way. Springer could sit hours on end without an apparent movement, declining hostesses’ proffers of refreshments with a wordless shake of his head, his face as expressionless as the butt end of a cartridge, watching each passer by with lackadaisical eyes which missed nothing.

  A slightly exaggerated rumor had it that he knew every man and woman with a police record in the United States and that he could hit a quarter tossed in the air with the snub-barreled .38 which slanted his coat slightly to the side as he walked.

  In curious contrast was the immaculate, gray-coated form of the D.A. as he stepped from the coupé, hitched his expensive hat forward to shield his eyes from the rain, and encompassed the assembled crowd of police and onlookers with normally pleasant gray eyes suddenly gone hard.

  Springer got out from under the wheel and wordlessly stood beside him. Together they moved forward toward Inspector Davis and the mangled remains of Paul Zarinka’s car. The D. A. stood for a moment looking down at the wreckage, then took a white handkerchief from his pocket and made an attempt to clear his platinum-rimmed spectacles of water which obscured his view. There were T-shaped lines at the ends of his mouth when he said, “This is getting pretty close to home. I suppose they’ll bomb headquarters next. Are you sure it’s Zarinka?”

  “I’m sure it’s what is left of him. You can take a look if you want to.” The inspector was unimpressed by Claude Dearborn’s biting tones. “You’ll find the res gesta over there.” He nodded toward a rubber blanketed heap near the curb.