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  Bob Durane looked worried. His head moved about, nervously. Plainly the crowd worried him. His eyes were cold and hard, but shifty. The scar on his cheek glowed lividly. The cheek seemed pale.

  He looked towards the police car.

  Two men sat in a roadster that had been parked at the curb just behind the police car. The top of the roadster was down, but the men had been apparently engrossed in their own affairs, and had attracted but little attention.

  One of the men put on a cap.

  It was the familiar cap of a taxicab operator. Now that the cap was on, it was apparent that his coat was also labeled with the insignia of the cab company.

  Bob Durane moved across the stretch of sidewalk.

  The motor in the roadster was purring steadily.

  The man in the uniform of a taxi driver jumped to the seat of the roadster. He extended a long arm with a rigid, pointing finger. His voice sounded high above the noises of the street.

  “That’s him! That’s the guy that drove the car!”

  People stared. Bob Durane stopped abruptly. Two policemen pushed towards the roadster.

  Ken Corning, seated in the driver’s seat of the roadster, yelled: “Sit down and hang on!”

  The spectators saw, then, that the roadster was one of those cars with a small wheelbase which can be handled swiftly in traffic. They also saw that it had been skilfully parked with the front wheels warped so that the car could make a fast getaway.

  The motor roared into sudden life. The rear wheels spun for half a revolution, and then the car shot out from the curb. One of the officers blew his whistle.

  Bob Durane turned back towards the hotel, then hesitated.

  The police car lurched forward. One of the officers yelled something. Bob Durane was pushed forward. The door of the police machine opened, Bob Durane was shot inside, One of the officers jumped in after him. The door slammed. Another officer caught the running-board of the police car. The siren screamed as the car roared into motion.

  Metal crashed into crumpled wreckage. The crash was slight, but it was followed with a grinding noise. A light roadster, urn painted, with rusty fenders and battered body, had swung in so that the front wheels of the police car had smashed into it.

  Traffic was blocked.

  The car with the cab driver gained the comer and turned with swaying springs.

  The woman who had been driving the roadster climbed out, her face ghastly white, eyes wide. She screamed hysterically.

  A frantic police officer tugged at her car. The driver of the police car threw his gears into reverse.

  “What the hell you trying to do?” he bellowed.

  Helen Vail, her face made pale with white powder, stared at him with feverishly bright eyes.

  “You started the siren!” she said. “That means get over to the curb. I tried to get over and you smashed into me!”

  The officer swore some more. The police car banged forward. More metal rasped and crumpled. The car was free. “All clear!” yelled the officer. The police car roared into motion. A crowd collected about the battered roadster.

  “Oh, dear,” said Helen Vail. “I must telephone!”

  Officers pushed forward. The crowd opened to let Helen Vail slip through. The crowd closed in behind her, around the battered car. Officers started taking charge.

  “Where’s the woman that was driving?” asked one.

  “She went to telephone,” said someone in the crowd.

  The officers waited.

  Helen Vail did not return.

  After a while they moved the roadster. The police car that did the moving threw a tow rope on the machine and dragged it to the police garage.

  Exactly fifty-nine minutes later, newsboys cried through the streets. The Star was running an “extra.” “Read about it!” yelled the newsboys. “State’s star witness identified as driver of the murder car by taxi driver!”

  Ken Corning sat in his office and grinned at Helen Vail.

  “Good work, kid,” he said.

  She sighed.

  “About one more narrow squeak like that and I’ll be in the bug house.”

  “I told you,” he said, “just to sort of get in the way and give me a chance to get to the corner. I didn’t want you to try and stall the thing up for a week.”

  She grinned.

  “That’s just my way of doing things,” she said. “I do ’em up brown. I figured that I could lock a bumper with them and make it take long enough for them to get loose to give you all the time you wanted. Did you have it?”

  “Yes. I never even heard their car from the time I rounded the comer. It was a cinch.”

  “What happened?” she asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “It hasn’t happened yet, unless …”

  He broke off as the telephone rang. He scooped the receiver to his ear. He said: “Hello,” and the receiver started in making metallic squawks.

  Ken Corning listened. As he listened, a grin spread over his face.

  “Okey,” he said, “thanks for the buggy ride… . Hell’s bells, you reporters want to know everything… . Well, son, that’s a little secret. You can state from me that the witness doesn’t want the notoriety, and he’s just a little afraid something might happen to him. When he goes for a ride he wants to be sitting at the wheel. Yeah… . G’bye.”

  He hung up the receiver, turned to Helen Vail.

  “Nixon, of the Star, ” he said. “Just called me to tell me that the case against Dangerfield had blown up. The star witness for the prosecution, Bob Durane, skipped out. They can’t find him anywhere. He gave his bodyguard the slip, and has utterly vanished. The D. A. announces that, under the circumstances, he won’t go farther with the case until additional evidence is uncovered.”

  “What evidence?” she asked.

  “Nixon wants me to produce my mystery witness and insists on an indictment for Durane.”

  She looked at him fixedly.

  “You going to do it?”

  He grinned.

  “Do I look crazy? It ain’t any crime to have a guy stand up in a roadster and yell: ‘That’s him!’ but when he walks in front of a grand jury and takes an oath and says the same thing, it’s likely to be something pretty serious.”

  She said: “Is that why … ?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s why I didn’t dare to let them catch up with us. I said I was going to pull a fast one, and I had to do it fast. It was a close call—but we made it.”

  She said: “Will they ever try Durane for the murder?”

  He grinned at her.

  “Don’t be silly,” he said. “That’s one position the District Attorney could never afford to get trapped in.”

  “Was that fellow really a taxi driver?” she asked him.

  He lit a cigarette.

  “You’re getting worse than the reporters,” he said.

  Close Call, Black Mask, January 1933

  Making the Breaks

  THE DESK WAS PILED HIGH with law books. On a space which had been cleared in one corner was an electric coffee percolator bubbling steadily. An electric clock on a bookcase showed the time as two o’clock in the morning.

  Ken Corning sipped black coffee from a cup which he held in his left hand. His eyes moved steadily down the printed text of a volume of the Atlantic Reporter. From time to time he made notes with a pencil.

  The outer door gave forth rasping noises as a key was inserted into the lock. Then the door swung inward, and Helen Vail, Ken Corning’s secretary, walked across the outer office, stood in the doorway of the inner office, and surveyed the man at the desk with anxious, sympathetic eyes.

  After a moment Ken Corning felt her presence, and looked up, scowling impatiently. The scowl changed to a tired smile. His eyes went swiftly to the windows, then back to the face of the clock.

  “Thought it must be morning,” he said, “and you were coming to work ”

  “No, it’s two o’clock. I was ou
t at a cabaret, and ditched the party.”

  “Why did you do that?” he asked.

  Something in her face showed him that her visit was not at all casual, and that her eyes were anxious.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “What is it?”

  Helen Vail crossed the room to the side of his desk, pushed back a stacked pile of leather-bound law books, and rested one hip against the side of the desk, swinging one foot, the other foot braced on the floor.

  “I don’t know, chief,” she said, “what it is.”

  He looked at her, frowning. She slowly opened her purse and took out two one-hundred-dollar bills, which she placed on the desk in front of him.

  He looked at them curiously.

  “Been robbing a bank?” he asked.

  She shook her head, “They were in my purse,” she told him.

  “So I saw.”

  “But,” she said, “I don’t know how they got there.”

  “Don’t know what?”

  “Don’t know how they got there.”

  “‘What do you mean?”

  “Just what I say. I was down at the cabaret, and a purse snatcher tried to grab my purse. One of the men in the party hit him on the jaw and knocked him down. A special detective ran up and there was quite a commotion. An officer came in, and there was a plainclothesman there in the cabaret. They recognized the purse snatcher as an old hand at the game, and arrested him. They wanted me to look in my purse and see if he’d taken anything. I told them it was impossible because he hadn’t even had the purse in his hands. He’d simply made a grab at it, but I kept hold of the purse.”

  Ken Corning’s eyes were level-lidded with intense thought. His pupils were contracted until they seemed mere black needle points in the midst of a cold background.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “They looked in the purse.”

  “Then what?”

  “Nothing, except these hundred-dollar-bills were in there.”

  “Did you say anything?” he inquired.

  “No. Naturally I didn’t speak up and tell them that I didn’t know where this money came from.”

  “Why?”

  “It was none of their business.”

  “When did you look in your purse last?”

  “You mean before the purse snatcher?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know. I got out my compact some time during the first part of the evening and put my mouth on straight. I don’t know just when it was.”

  “Were the bills there then?” asked Ken Corning.

  “I don’t think so, chief. They might have been there, and I didn’t notice them. But I don’t think so.”

  Ken Corning picked up the bills again and studied them carefully. He pushed back his swivel-chair, got to his feet, and stood for a moment, staring down at the desk, Then he swung about and started to pace the floor restlessly.

  Helen Vail looked at the money, then at him.

  “Is it serious?” she asked. “Does it mean anything?”

  “I think so,” he told her.

  Suddenly he whirled, strode to the desk, picked up the bills, looked at them once more, and then threw them down on the blotter.

  “All right, kid,” he said quietly, “we’re framed.”

  “What do you mean, chief?”

  There was a peremptory pounding on the outer door of the office. Helen Vail reached hastily for the two one-hundred-dollar bills.

  “That’s all right,” said Corning. “Leave them there. Sit where you are.”

  He strode across the office, to the outer door, and jerked it open. Three men stood on the threshold. The tallest of the three pushed his way forward, grinning.

  “Hello, Corning,” he said.

  “Hello, Malone,” Corning replied. “What do you want?”

  “Is your secretary here?” asked Malone.

  Corning nodded. “She just came in,” he said.

  “We want to see her,” said Malone.

  Corning nodded.

  “Come in,” he said. “I want to see you. There’s something funny here.”

  “What’s funny?”

  “A purse snatcher made a grab at her purse down in a cabaret.”

  “We know that,” Malone said.

  “He didn’t take anything out,” said Ken Corning “He put something in.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He put some money in—two one-hundred-dollar bills.” Malone laughed mirthlessly.

  “Show me,” he said.

  Ken Corning led the way to the inner office. Malone nodded curtly to Helen Vail, then walked over to the desk and stood staring down at the two one-hundred-dollar bills.

  “This the stuff?” he asked.

  Ken Corning nodded.

  Malone reached forward and picked up the bills, then looked shrewdly at Helen Vail.

  “Where did you get these?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Once more Malone laughed, that mirthless laugh of his.

  “Look around, boys,” he told them.

  “What the hell do you mean, look around?’’ Ken Corning demanded.

  “Just what I say,” said Frank Malone. “We’re going to search the office.’’

  “Got a warrant?’’ asked Corning ominously.

  “Certainly not. Do we need one?’’

  “You need one,” said Ken Corning.

  Malone turned to grin at the two men who stood back of him.

  “Okey, boys,” he said, “we won’t search. We need a warrant.”

  “Wait a minute,” Corning told him, “I think I’ll change my mind on that.”

  “Too late now,” Malone told him.

  “What kind of deal is this?” Corning demanded.

  “Suppose you tell me,” Malone replied.

  “What are you driving at?”

  “You know what I’m driving at. Those two one-hundred-dollar bills were taken from Samuel Grosbeck.”

  “You’re crazy!” Corning said.

  “No, we’re not crazy. We’ve got the numbers of the bills. You should know that.”

  “I tell you,” said Corning, “the bills were planted in the young lady’s purse.”

  “Sure,” said Malone, soothingly, “you told me that before, Corning.”

  Malone leaned forward, and copied the numbers on the bills into a leather-backed notebook. He took a fountain pen from his pocket and wrote his initials in small letters on the comers of the currency.

  “All right,” he said, “that’s all we can do here. He won’t let us search the office without a warrant.”

  “I said you could search,” Corning replied.

  “We didn’t hear you except the first tune,” said Malone. “You’ve had a chance to ditch any of the stuff now anyway. Come on, boys, let’s go.”

  Ken Corning strode rapidly across the room, and stood between Malone and the door.

  “Malone,” he said, “you can’t get by with this.”

  Malone pushed forward and past Corning.

  “I’m not getting by with anything,” he said. “Because I’m not trying anything. Don’t lose those bills. They’re evidence.”

  The three men walked wordlessly across the outer office, pushed open the door, and went out into the corridor. The door swung shut, and a latch clicked mechanically.

  Helen Vail left her position on the desk, where she had remained during the interview, and crossed to Ken Corning. She put her hand on his arm and stared up at him with wide frightened eyes.

  “What is it, chief?” she asked.

  “A frame-up,” he told her. “A dirty frame-up!”

  “But what?”

  Ken Corning walked back to the desk, sat down in the swivel-chair, stared at the bills, then looked moodily at her.

  “Samuel Grosbeck,” he said, “had something like fifteen hundred dollars on him in one-hundred-dollar bills when he was murdered. He’d received the bills from his bank. They were new bills, and
the bank happens to have the number sequence.”

  “But why should they plant them on me?” asked Helen Vail. “Because you’re working for me, and because I’m defending Fred Parkett.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s simple,” he told her. “Grosbeck and a chap named Stanwood were sitting in a car parked near the curb. A hold-up man who limped, carried a cane, wore an overcoat and a cap, told them to throw up their hands. Stanwood put up his hands. Grosbeck didn’t, or was slow about it, and got the contents of an automatic emptied into his vest. He died right then.

  “The hold-up man went through his clothes and took a wallet; also a brown manila envelope. We don’t know what was in the manila envelope. There was fifteen hundred dollars in cash in the wallet. The hold-up man ran as fast as he could with his game leg, and turned at the corner. Stanwood found Grosbeck was dead, managed to get to a telephone, and notified the police. The police broadcast the call over the shortwave radio to all cars, and Dick Carr, the detective, was the first on the spot. He cruised around and picked up Fred Parkett.

  “Parkett wore an overcoat, a cap, carried a cane, and limped. He’s a crook with a criminal record a yard long. He didn’t have a gun; he didn’t have any money on him, and he claimed he hadn’t been near the car in which Grosbeck was killed. He was picked up within six blocks of the place, however, and Stanwood identified him as being the murderer. Two other fellows, Arthur Longwell and Jim Monteith, positively identified him as the man they saw running within a block of the scene of the murder.

  “I’m defending Parkett. It looks as though he might beat the case if we can break down the identification. The District Attorney knows I’m planning a big fight. He doesn’t know just what kind of fight it is.”

  Helen Vail nodded her head impatiently.

  “Of course,” she said, “I know all about that. But …”

  She broke off, gasped and stared at Ken Corning with eyes that were dark with alarm

  “Do you mean that the District Attorney’s office is going to claim that Parkett paid you a retainer in money that he had taken from the murdered man, and that you gave me a cut out of it?”