Chapter Twenty-Three

There was a startled yell.

My strongest desire was to draw my gun and get into position to defend myself. I ducked my hand inside my jacket and got my fingers around the butt, and that was all. I was lying on my holster.

It was all right, though. Crawfie was alone in the room. He was standing a little back from the window, beside a camera that sat on a solid tripod and sported one of the biggest telescopic lenses I ever saw.

Crawfie was what had yelled when the door broke. He’d been settled in here for weeks from the look of the junk accumulated around the bare room, and probably he’d felt perfectly safe and secure from discovery. The room was large and square, and held all the equipment a photographer would want to do delicate work. In one corner I saw an enlarger—he’d need that for making his fake prints—and rough tables along the walls held his papers and trays of solution. There was a cot against the other wall, and a small electric hot plate sitting on a chair.

Crawfie was goggling at me. He’d been completely surprised; had been concentrating so hard on his work that he hadn’t seen us move around down on the sidewalk, hadn’t heard us come up to his door. Now I rolled off my gun and pulled it out. “Okay, no smart tricks,” I directed.

I got slowly up onto my foot and my cast and limped over to him. He gazed petrified at the gun. He quaked. I thought his big horn-rimmed glasses would shake right off his fat nose.

“MacArnold, we’ve caught it,” I called. “Go get Jimmy.”

I gestured with the gun. Crawfie jumped as if the gun was a red-hot rod prodding him.

“Go sit on your bed, slug. Don’t try to run.”

He shook his head violently. He trotted to the cot and flopped down on it. Mac and Montgomery came in.

“It’s all over but the shooting,” I said. “Maybe there won’t even be any shooting now. Mac, go get to a telephone and have Framboise come up here. I told him to stay at headquarters until I got in touch with him.”

I went to the camera and squinted through its view-finder. The lens was trained directly on the front door of the St. Stephen Club. As I looked, a man came out the door. He was framed in the viewfinder, in the instant of putting on his hat before he stepped down to the street, neatly as a screen close-up frames the star’s gorgeous puss.

“This is it,” I said again. “Okay, Crawfie. Any time you want to talk—”

“How did you know this was the place to look?” Jimmy asked.

“Simple enough. MacFaden gave me the names of a few others who’d been blackmailed. All I had to figure out was where they’d all meet, besides in the gambling apartment. Who’s Who told me they were all members of the St. Stephen.”

“Nice deducing.”

“It wasn’t that hard. This was the only club they all had in common. Once we’d tumbled to the fact that the photos were fakes, it followed through easily.”

Montgomery was poking around the photographic, as opposed to the living, side of the room. “He’s got a really complete shop set up here. Oh—oh. Look.”

He held up a sheaf of enlargements. There were about a dozen. They were all enlarged prints of a single shot—a shot of the doorway of apartment sixteen.

“Okay, Crawfie. We know what you’ve been doing,” I said. “We know why too. All we want to know is who is in it with you.”

Crawfie found his tongue. “I—I was working with Irish Joe and his bodyguard,” he said. “The two who were with me last night, out on Decarie.”

“Yeah, sure.” I went close to him and looked down. I swung my gun loosely, meaningfully in my hand. “You heard from them since last night? No. I’ll tell you why—I killed them. But here you are, back in business this morning. Who told you to carry on with the job, Crawfie?”

“I—”

“Who else is in it? Come on.”

He began to sob. “Nobody. Nobody, honest, Russell. I’m working for myself now. I wanted to get a few more shots to collect getaway money, and—”

“So you’re the only one left, are you? You’re the one who will take the rap for the Chesterley killing then. And the Wales shooting. And Priscilla Dover’s death.”

I tapped him on the cheek with the side of the gun, not enough to knock him over but enough to make an angry red mark. “Why did Priscilla have to die, Crawfie? How did she tumble?”

“She—”

He hesitated. That was a big mistake for him to make. I put the gun away and clipped him twice, once each way with my open hand. His teeth cut his lips. “Come on,” I said. “Only God could save you now, and I doubt if he’s interested in you. Sing.”

He controlled his sobbing enough to talk. The tears dried in streaks on his pudgy, pasty face. “I had to have paper and supplies here. I phoned up my supplier and gave him a change of address. Priscilla was smart. She figured that out and checked with him. Then she came here one morning.”

“And you let her in?”

“There’s a bathroom down the hall. I’d gone in there and left this door unlocked for a minute. When I came back, she was in the room. She tried to pretend she hadn’t tumbled to anything—just bawled me out for skipping without paying her, and asked for her salary. I stalled. When she left, I found one of the shots was missing.”

“So you followed her to her home and shot her.”

“No, no.” He started to cry again.

“Come on, you tub of lard, before I begin kicking you with this plaster cast. Who shot her?”

He looked wildly around the room. His eyes picked up Montgomery, lounging against a table near the other wall. He looked at me. He saw I’d put my gun away.

Before I could realize what was happening, his hand darted under the pillow on the cot and came out with a small, short-snouted revolver.

“Hands up!” he screamed, just like the bad man in a Wild West movie.

The last thing I’d expected was that Crawfie would have a gun. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I expected him to pull the trigger, when the cylinder of the gun would snap apart and reveal a flame for lighting cigarettes.

But no, it was a real gun.

I put my hands up. If the unbelievable could happen—if Crawfie had a gun—he might be desperate enough to use it.

“Don’t argue with him,” I said quietly to Montgomery. “He can’t get away. MacArnold would stop him downstairs, and Framboise is probably down there now anyway.”

Crawfie hauled his fat, sloppy body off the cot. “Back up!” he ordered me, and I shuffled away from him.

He waddled sideways to the door. He kept the gun moving from me to Montgomery, and his eyes carefully on us.

Montgomery yelled, “Okay, MacArnold. Now!”

Crawfie was an amateur, of course. He didn’t shoot us first, then turn to see what was behind him. He just turned.

Montgomery dived for his legs and brought him crashing down. Then for a minute they were swarming all over each other. Crawfie was panting and screaming curses and lashing at Montgomery with the gun; Jimmy stopped one or two hard lashes, and then got it in both hands.

They were a mass of heaving flesh and cloth on the floor, the gun buried somewhere in the mass. Montgomery heaved hard, got one knee loose and drove it into Crawfie’s soft and flabby stomach.

With reflex action, as his wind burst out of his body, Crawfie’s finger tightened on the trigger. There was a roar. And with the roar, both of them collapsed.