Fangs of Murder: Phantom Detective Saga. Robert Wallace
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with the enthusiasm of a true turf-lover, "Come on, Hot Foot! Come on home—come on, Hot Foot!"
As the horses went into the finish stretch, an usher leaned over the box and slipped a note to Dutch Kaltz.
Annoyed, Kaltz opened it hastily. The cigar dropped from his suddenly gaping mouth. His eyes bulged at the bold, scrawled words:
Your mob's run out to Monk Gorman. Someone's backing him with dough. Better take this tip from a pal and get busy.
Kaltz's rubicund face looked like a bloated moon. With a snarled oath, he leaped to his feet. Without a word of explanation to his companion, he began moving his shoulder-padded frame toward the exit of the box.
Simultaneously the crowd in the grandstand went wild with cheers. The human din drowned out all other sound. The blonde swept from her chair, yelling joyously as she turned.
"Hot Foot's in, Dutch!" she cried. "Oh Sugar, I can just see myself in that—"
She broke off as she saw Dutch Kaltz's vacated chair. Her eyes flashed with sudden anger across the box, to the exit gate. Then she screamed shrilly, wildly.
The rubicund figure of Dutch Kaltz lay slumped on the floor just beneath the exit. Blood lay in a pool around it. There was a blood-fringed hole in the front of Kaltz's sport coat where the single high-calibred slug had entered, and done its ghastly work. Dutch Kaltz had seen—and run—his last race.
* * *
Indian summer had come to New York City. The night was close and warm. The sky, dull and starless, reflected the bright lights of Manhattan in a vague, ruddy glow.
On a desolate, deserted side street on the lower west side stood a big brick garage which looked as if it had not done business for some time. Its slide-doors were closed, the glass panes covered up so that only dull chinks of light showed through.
But inside, there was sinister life. A crowd of men stood, smoking cigarettes, in various attitudes of attention. The light from naked electric bulbs starkly revealed their hard, coarse-featured faces, their shifty, ever-alert eyes.
"Okay, boys—the whole job's been done! An' without a hitch!"
The harsh voice rasped out in the confines of the garage, the voice of a burly, swart-faced man in a sport-belted slicker. Monk Gorman stood facing the crowd, his hand nestled smugly in a pocket which showed the protecting bulge of an automatic.
"You ain't workin', any of you, for your old bosses—because they just ain't going to be around any more!" he went on triumphantly. "All four of them are washed up, see. Kaltz! Ricco! Flowers Gorsh! And Big Boy Rinaldi!"
There was a grim but awed silence. Thugs who, until this night, had worked for one of those four big king-pins of New York City's underworld, looked impressed rather than regretful. In the unfeeling underworld there was little personal sentiment, especially when money flowed freely.
A broken-nosed man spoke then, with a self-important laugh. "Boy, did I finish Dutch in style! Nobody even heard that silenced gat when I clipped him from the aisle soon as he blew up over that note."
A pallid-faced, long-jawed thug put in, "Hell, Gus, you shoulda seen me sideswipe Ricco over that cliff—"
"Cut it, you mugs!" the big man in the slicker snapped out angrily. Again he addressed the hard-faced gathering.
"Them four babies all got just what was comin' to 'em, see? An' the same goes for anyone else who thinks he's big shot now! Why? Because you're workin' for a guy, bigger than any of these punks ever were! A right guy who won't keep you warmin' park benches while he goes off on vacations! They'll be dough, an' plenty of it! They'll be dough enough to buy the whole damn town! From now on we all got one boss—and we're doin' whatever he tells us, see?"
Eager eyes were fixed on the speaker.
Eager voices rose from the vast interior of the garage.
"Where's th' Big Shot, Monk?"
"Let's meet 'im! Th' dough you jes' passed out from him is like old times!"
"Is he comin' here, Monk?"
"Whadda we do next?"
Monk Gorman again held up his hand for silence.
"I've already told you guys that th' big shot's been—well, he's been sending me orders from where he's been hiding out. Yeah, he's coming to take personal charge tonight—about eleven, when the Charlemagne docks. But he ain't coming to this dump."
He paused and indicated the five bullet-riddled bodies which lay in a huddled heap in one corner.
"We've jes' finished our first job for him when we cleaned out Rinaldi's garage here, but we gotta scram. We got one more job to do, and then, if we do it right, we meet th' new Big Shot in person."
Chapter II.
Murder by Appointment
Eleven p.m. the clock over the passenger gateway showed the time.
The huge, newly constructed pier on the Hudson River was jammed with people meeting the late docking S.S. Charlemagne which was nine hours ahead of its schedule. Private cars and taxis pulled up in turn outside the vast concrete and steel structure which was three city blocks in length.
In a rather small but handsomely finished office room of the big pier building which towered above cobblestoned Twelfth Avenue and the newly-built express highway which flowed north along the western edge of Manhattan, Inspector Thomas Gregg, chief of the Bureau of Detectives, spoke to seven elderly men.
"Without disrespect to you, gentlemen," he said gruffly, "I must say this sounds juvenile and screwy to me. The idea of a super-criminal staging a come-back after twenty years is ridiculous on the face of it. And there were no super-criminals twenty years ago. Why, I had one devil of a time even getting reports from the mid-west on this—er—Albert Millett. And look at the picture I got from Arizona—a smooth-faced kid with buck teeth. It's so faded you can scarcely decipher it."
"Inspector Gregg, you are making a grave mistake in taking this matter so lightly," said Carl Fenwick, the theatrical producer, in a solemn voice. "We were all young then, some younger than others, and photography was bad. You didn't know Al Millett. We did."
A sort of psychic shiver seemed to ripple around the group of seven at his words. Even Inspector Gregg felt it, and the hackles wanted to rise on his thick, red neck. This made the chief detective mad. He fairly scowled around the group which half-encircled him.
Seven elderly, influential, wealthy, distinguished men. He told them off mentally. Now that he thought of it, this was the first time Gregg had ever been in close contact with any of these prominent men—the very first time he had even heard of them appearing publicly together.
Clyde Dickson, gaunt-faced, with dark and brooding eyes, an unusually thick shock of grey hair on his oddly pointed head, was huddled deep in a leather armchair. He was the owner of the highly successful Palladium Club—one of New York's most luxurious night spots.
Stocky, broad of beam, heavy-jowled, but visibly short of legs despite their massiveness, Bernard J. Andrews leaned on a beautifully carved cane as rugged as himself as he stood there. Andrews was the president of a nationally known radio station.
Paul Corbin, owner and operator of a small chain of exclusive night clubs and cocktail bars, stood next. Corbin was small, slender, with an effeminate sort of face out of which looked large, tragic eyes which, in themselves, were beautiful. He wore loosely tailored tweeds which almost looked too bulky, too mannish for him.
John Gifford, massive-chested and craggy of features, with arms that were a trifle abnormal in length, sat beside Dickson and spoke to him in deep whispers. Gifford was a well-known operator of a huge amusement park at Coney Island and the designer of the breath-taking