A DEAD CLUE, by David Nowinson

Originally published in Ten Detective Aces, September 1933.

There was a timid knock upon the door. People who came to visit Nails Sperry didn’t usually knock. They walked right in and, if they weren’t welcome, they were carried out.

Again a timid knock. Nails Sperry looked down the length of his cigar and grinned. There was only one man who would knock. “Come in,” Nails yelled.

Young Roland Curtis slid hesitantly into the unprepossessing place. The room reeked with the merged fumes of cheap tobacco and cheaper liquor. The one electric light, placed near the door so Nails might see his visitors before they saw him, was covered with dust, casted a wan yellow light as if it, too, felt sick in that foul atmosphere.

These things young Curtis sensed before he saw the man who had sent for him. Nails Sperry sat on the bed looking as hard as his name. He wore a pearl stickpin in his tie. Curtis noticed that.

“Sit down and take a load off your dogs,” Nails ordered.

Curtis sat down upon the one chair in the room.

The racketeer stared contemptuously at his guest for a moment. This tall young fellow with the blond hair and the sensitive mouth he had long ago set down as “one of them pretty boys without guts.”

“Have a shot of shellac,” he invited, dragging a bottle and two glasses from beneath the bed.

He filled the glasses and gave one to Curtis. Curtis sniffed at it and shuddered. In the old days, when his father was alive, there had been bourbon and champagne on the table.

He passed the glass back to Sperry. “Thank you. Don’t think I’d better. Too early in the day for me.”

Nails spat upon the floor and drank both glasses down. “Never too early for me,” he said.

“I don’t know why you sent for me,” ventured Curtis nervously, “but if it’s money, I haven’t a cent. You promised me the last time that you wouldn’t ask for any more.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said Nails. “I’m not asking yet, see? So don’t get wise or tomorrow the rags’ll be yelling it all over town how your old man chiseled money from the bank before he bumped himself off.”

Young Curtis clenched his fists and said nothing. Too late he had discovered how a little knowledge may be a very dangerous thing in the hands of a man like Sperry.

“You still got the pearl necklace, ain’t you?” shot out Nails suddenly.

“Yes, but I’m not permitted to dispose of it—as I told you. The will—”

“Yeah, you sobbed out all that hooey before. Well, I don’t want you to give me the pearls, see? I just want the use of ’em for a while.”

“But why—”

A crafty look came over the racketeer’s face.

“Pearls come from oysters, don’t they? Oysters are dumb, see? I’m going to send them pearls back to the oysters.”

“What do you mean?”

“The rocks are insured, ain’t they?”

‘Why, yes.”

“How much?”

“Fifty thousand dollars. The Runtham Company.”

Nails Sperry licked his thin lips. “Fifty grand! Sweet, sweet. Fifty grand from the oysters.” His voice changed, took on a menacing note. “Now here’s what I want you to do, see? Telephone your jeweler you’re sending the pearls through the mail—registered letter, see?—to get the clasp fixed. Then you appoint me your agent to collect and handle all your insurance, see? That’s all. I do the rest.”

“But the pearls?” protested Curtis weakly.

“You scram home and get ’em for me. I’ll give ’em back in three days. Might even give you a cut on my take.”

“But how—”

“That’s something you wouldn’t get hep to,” said Nails. “Ever see Mickey Mouse?”

“Of course. Why?”

“Good guy to watch,” said Sperry in a tone of dismissal. “Now scram and cart the rocks right up.”

* * * *

When Roland Curtis returned, Nails Sperry ran his hands covetously over the gleaming pearl necklace. Then he handed Curtis a thick brown envelope.

“What’s in it?” Curtis inquired.

“That’s your pearls, see?” Nails leered. “You’ll have that letter registered and you’ll send it to your jeweler. Don’t try to open it because I know how I fixed it up and you’ll screw the works if you fool around, see? Just phone the jeweler and send it right out. In three days you get your pearls and I get my fifty grand, see?”

Roland Curtis didn’t see, but he said nothing.

“It’s fool-proof, this scheme,” boasted Sperry. “It took some work in the old noodle. Now do what I told you.”

The blond young man left the room for the second time that morning…

* * * *

Curtis wanted to open that envelope. A nameless fear stopped him. He wasn’t afraid for himself. For Nails to expose what he had threatened, however, besmirching his dead father’s name, seemed to Curtis the rankest kind of sacrilege.

The envelope, he thought, was rather thin to hold anything almost as valuable as the necklace. There was something soft inside, as if rolled in cotton. He wondered.

At home, Curtis phoned his jeweler as Nails had instructed. He did something Nails had not instructed, too. He placed the envelope under a large unabridged dictionary to fasten it so that an address might be written more easily. And he signed not his own, but Sperry’s name and address before having the letter registered and mailed.

* * * *

There were three in the delegation that visited Nails Sperry’s room next day. Young Roland Curtis led the way. Admitted, he entered, followed by the other two.

Sperry’s face darkened as he saw them. “What’s the big idea?” he snarled. “Who are those guys?”

“Sorry,” said Curtis apologetically. “Awfully rude of me. This is Postal Inspector Danney and this is Federal Agent Smith.”

The men bowed. Nails Sperry scowled. He didn’t appreciate good manners.

“Well, what do they want here?”

“It’s about that letter you sent, Mr. Sperry,” said Federal Agent Smith who was a mild little man with sandy hair.

“Me? You’re screwy! I didn’t send no letter,” snarled the racketeer.

“It had your name and address on it,” said the mild-mannered Smith. “And besides, what about San Francisco?”

“Well, what about it?”

“In 1929,” said Smith reminiscently, “a similar situation occurred in Frisco—with a diamond ring. An insurance company there paid you four thousand dollars because the letter in which you’d mailed the ring for repairing, arrived with a hole in the envelope, explaining the ring’s absence. Very neat. There was no substantial evidence at the time, Mr. Nails Sperry, but we’ve kept you in mind.”

The racketeer edged towards the bureau.

“Keep away from there,” ordered Smith. A gun flashed in his hand. “You want to give me a chance to finish my story. Inspector Danney will take care of your gun.”

Inspector Danney opened the bureau drawer and obliged.

“This letter that should have contained the pearl necklace,” continued Smith, “arrived this morning at the Townsend Jewelers. Oddly enough, it contained a dead mouse.”

“Dead!” cried Nails hoarsely.

“Yes, it had smothered somehow. Strange, wasn’t it? Normally a live mouse gnaws its way out of a letter in a hurry.”

“Mickey Mouse would have done a better job,” contributed Curtis.

The racketeer wheeled upon him. “Smart, ain’t you? Maybe you won’t be so smart when I get done talking about what your old man—”

“Where you’re going,” interrupted the Federal agent softly, “you won’t have a chance to talk for a long time. Uncle Sam will see to that. And people don’t trust convicts these days.”

Inspector Danney, who had been rummaging about the bureau, handed Curtis a string of pearls now.

“Thanks,” said Curtis as they led their prisoner away. “You know, they say that pearls come from oysters.”

“That’s right,” agreed Federal Agent Smith. “But oysters are pretty dumb.”