BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY GORDON LANDSBOROUGH

      Call in the Feds!

      F.B.I. Showdown

      The Grab

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 1951 by Gordon Landsborough

      Copyright © 2012 by the Estate of

       Gordon Landsborough

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      DEDICATION

      For Dian and Phil

      CHAPTER ONE

      WITNESS TO MURDER

      You can take your pick where you begin. Either in the prison farm at Halifax, North Carolina, with Egghead Schiller and Johnny Delcros and friends working around the State gas chamber (they don’t electrocute murderers in the Old North State; they stick them in a room containing one easy chair and an unnecessary table, and release gas in on the sedative-filled candidate for Heaven, Hell, or wherever killers go).

      Or we could start with little Hymie Kolfinkle, who took a picture of a man frying in oil.

      Maybe we’ll start with Hymie.

      It’s funny about men like Hymie, the newsreel cameraman. A man entirely undistinguished, and yet this fat little man triggered off a series of happenings that mushroomed to the size of the Bikini explosion, and had nearly as great a repercussion on the American continent.

      He didn’t come much more than shoulder high on most men, little Hymie, and he had a big wife. In the first years after marriage she used to make life hell by threatening to go back to mom; and in these last many years she just wouldn’t go back. He was a very depressed man.

      That late May afternoon he was sitting high up on the Crombie Range, where the leaves on the trees still retained their green freshness, and the grass in the ditches was tall and succulent, unlike on the plains below, already going sear and yellow under this near-tropical sun.

      He was looking into the descending sun through the orange visor on his stationary car, and he was wishing he had the guts to put an end to his life. He used to like to think of such a thing; in fact, it was nearly the only thought that made him cheerful.

      He liked to picture the shock it would give his wife when she saw him brought home and realised to what a state her nagging had reduced him. Yeah, and the neighbours would talk together indignantly and would maybe not speak to her for weeks, and that would surely burn her up.

      After a while Hymie sighed and started the car. Sitting there did no good except make him late for reaching the town where he was to spend the night.

      Hymie was Number Nine on the list of cameramen with the company. They had nine operators.... He got the little jobs, like the coverage of a newly appointed small-town mayor, or pictures of some new-born lambs to go with the Easter pictures, or one-and-a-half minutes of a woman speaker from Boston addressing the local Women’s Guild. That sort of job particularly depressed him. Always those women speakers from Boston reminded him of the wife he was trying to run away from.

      The other eight cameramen got sent on the choice assignments, to Florida in the winter season to show jaded northerners how the other half lived, to Sun Valley and other mountain resorts, and to all the big, exciting disasters, natural and manmade, that daily assault the American headlines.

      “Me,” he thought, turning slowly down from the blessed coolness, “me, I get the dirt.” And he felt very low and unhappy at the thought of it.

      And yet little Hymie Kolfinkle got the biggest scoop of any cameraman, though he didn’t realise it himself at the time.

      He was about eight miles from that lusty, growing town of Warren Bridge when he ran into a fast-moving convoy of cars. He had come down the last of the gradients from the Crombie Range, and was about to pull into the main road to Warren Bridge when a big, expensive car, fronted by a chromium grin that screamed of dough in the owner’s bank, flashed along towards him, braked hard, and then turned towards the Crombie Hills. Following close behind came somewhere around twenty or thirty other cars, nearly all big and expensive-looking.

      Hymie noticed that all were filled to the last seat and the occupants all seemed to be men. And clearly, the way they played follow-my-leader, they were all together in this expedition.

      They were cutting the corner so fine, after the first few cars, that Hymie had to sit and wait, without being able to pull on to the main road. He felt so depressed he couldn’t feel worse at being held up by the arrogant cornering of the convoy, and he just sat there and watched apathetically....

      All the same, he received a curious impression from the occupants of the cars, though he never heard a sound from any of the people in them.

      He had a feeling of intense if suppressed excitement. Of emotion at fever-heat.

      It was a similar sort of feeling you got at election time, and again when men left their wives and got together for some convention in a city where no one knew them.

      Hymie tried to think of some convention that might be on at the moment around this part of North Carolina, but failed. He didn’t know this part of the country very well. He wondered what they were up to, and thought that maybe they were going to some place where there would be food and drink and someone to talk to. Hymie liked food and drink, but when he was depressed, as now, he liked even better to have someone to listen to his confidences about his wife.

      It was on the impulse of the moment, then, that when the last car swooshed round the corner on tyres that skidded a little in the crunching gravel thrown up at the side of the road, Hymie suddenly pulled the wheel completely round and tailed on at the rear.

      The sun was going down, but it was still hot and there was plenty of light. The party didn’t go far. There was a wooded draw that came out on to the Crombie Hill Road just where the cultivated fields ended. It was a very lonely, desolate place. As they turned up the rutty dirt road that wound between the sparse, stunted oaks, Hymie thought it was a queer place for a lot of men to go for enjoyment. Then he thought maybe they were going pigeon-shooting and would then have a barbecue in the cool of the evening, and that seemed reasonable except for the fact that soon there wouldn’t be light enough to see any pigeons.

      Before he had time to think of another solution to the minor mystery, he realized that they were stopping. He also realised that they were in an open space that was like a cup amongst the little, tree-covered hillocks all around, and they were out of sight of the main Crombie Range road.

      Some of the cars just stopped anywhere, but most of them pulled into a rough circle around a solitary oak that was rather to one side of the cup-like glade. Then everybody got out, and Hymie, for all his depression, was out as soon as anyone.

      He went straight across to a group who were doing something to the baggage compartment at the rear of a big sedan. Hymie heard bottles clink together and said, “Hell, but I got a thirst that makes blotting paper look like—” He couldn’t think what to make blotting paper look like, and anyway no one was listening that long.

      Some bottles of cold beer were being handed round and Hymie got his hand there before anyone and was first to start drinking. For a depressed man he wasn’t slow, little middle-aged Hymie.

      They were all drinking when a big man came over. He had the fleshy body and ponderous limbs of a Hermann Goering, and he wore plenty of jewellery and a suit that was loud in an expensive way. He seemed to be a leader of this party, for everyone listened as he gave orders.

      He growled, “What’n hell, you should be watching the road, not drinking so soon. Keep a look out down the track, so that we’re not surprised by any damned busy-bodies.”

      One of the men—they all looked pretty prosperous, Hymie noticed, looked like well-to-do businessmen out on a spree—detached himself for a