RGL e-Book Cover 2019©
RGL e-Book Cover 2019©
The Spider, November 1937, with "Doc Turner and the Crimson Coffin"
Into Doc Turner's little settlement drove that terrible hearse with its death-trap for the poor—a flaming crimson coffin. Only the little druggist could beat this ruthless racket—by making a corpse rise, of its own volition, from the grave!
MORRIS STREET, roofed by the serried black ties of the
"El," walled by dingy tenement fronts, floored by debris-strewn
cobbles, was a long tunnel of drabness. Even the scarlet of
radishes and tomatoes heaped on the pushcarts that lined its
curbs, the emerald of lettuce and cabbage-heads, the brown-spotted yellow of bananas, served only to high-light the dim and
brooding street.
A grey and feeble figure, Andrew Turner stood in the doorway of his drugstore and watched from beneath bushy white brows the shifting panorama of the slum.
Deepening dusk, elsewhere melancholy enough, seemed here a slow settling of doom. The old druggist felt in his bones the vague unease, an evasive sense that something was deadly wrong. The seams of age etched his face more deeply, so that its kindliness was bleakly masked.
There beat about Doc the brawling tumult to which he had become accustomed through long years—the harsh shouts of the hucksters, the pounding rush of traffic, the shrill screams of half-clad, grimy youngsters at play in the hazardous gutter, the polyglot chatter of their alien elders for whom a golden promise had faded into the reality of poverty and unremitting toil. To the nostrils of his great, bony nose came the compound odor of garbage and sweat of unwashed bodies, and breath odorous with exotic foods. Everything was as it always was, yet deep in Doc Turner's bleared, blue eyes crawled a secret anxiety, and they were keenly watchful.
He was the only friend of those who were bewildered strangers in a strange land. He was their adviser, their interpreter of customs they did not understand. And he was more.
Among those who live without the law there are those who batten only upon the very poor because they are ignorant and helpless. Human rodents are these, without courage but shrewd and ruthless and, if cornered, more vicious than their braver fellows. Against them, Andrew Turner protected his people. Against them, he waged an unremitting war and, as to every hunter, whether of beasts or of men, there had come to him an inexplicable instinct for their evil presence, an awareness of their depredations depending upon no concrete evidence but as sure as if he watched them at their nefarious work.
This instinct was warning him now. Something was wrong on Morris Street. There was work for him to do.
But what?
NO use, he knew, to ask of this bearded Hebrew, that
swarthy son of Sicily, why their glances shot with covert
fearfulness through the shambling sidewalk throng—why,
beneath their dark skins' stolidity, there was a faint pallor of
apprehension, a quiver of dread. Much as they respected him, much
as they loved him, they would not reply. Schooled to silence by
generations of persecutions and banditry, they would look at him
blandly, a veil dropping over their eyes, shrug expressive
shoulders and turn away.
He must wait till something happened... Unaccustomed sounds interrupted the aged pharmacist's thoughts; the clop-clop of hoofs on the cobbles, the jingle and slap of harness and rumble of iron-tired wheels.
Even before Doc turned, he knew that for which he was waiting had come. A hush had traveled toward him with the sound of the horses, heads turning out there along the street, a sigh that ran along beneath the "El" like a wind through elms that had not been here for two decades. Then he saw the horses and what they drew, and a pulse thudded in his temples.
There were two of them, deep-chested, great-thewed draft animals sleekly black, squat but so huge-bodied as to seem monstrous.
They plodded slowly toward him between the gaunt pillars of the "El" and about their deliberate progress there was a grim, relentless quality inevitable as the coming of night.
They drew a sideless truck painted a lustrous black to match their hides. Blotched against a wavering luminescence, its driver was a hunched black bulk without form or face, erect and swaying with the swaying of the truck.
This strange equipage came opposite Doc Turner. He saw now that the light moving with it came from smoking flames that topped four tall, arm-thick candles set at the corners of the vehicle's flat bed. And he saw the truck's unbelievable load.
It was merely a coffin, but it was crimson as spurting arterial blood, crimson as the petals of an opium-bearing poppy struck through by the sun.
Because the illumination by which it was startlingly visible was unsteady, the casket's blasphemous color throbbed with constant change, so that its substance seemed in some macabre manner alive. What that substance was the old druggist could not at once make out, but it was not quite opaque, and within it was discernible the vague shadow of a corpse.
On the sidewalk no one made a sound after that first sigh, and no one stirred. The only noise in the hush was the clop-clop of those horses' hoofs and the slap-jingle of their harness. The only movement in the trailing dusk was the movement of the truck.
AND then abruptly there was new sound and new movement. An
overalled young Slav, thick-necked, thick-limbed, thrust between
two carts into the gutter. His face was pallid with wrath, his
fisted arm rising above his head. From five yards away his voice,
guttural but shrill-edged, shouted at the truck.
"Damn you!" it shocked the silence. "Damn you! You no scare me wid your tricks! You no get..."
He pitched forward, thudded on the cobbles, twitched and was very still.
For an instant more, the crowd on the sidewalk was immovable, not yet comprehending what had occurred. The grotesque hearse turned the corner into Hogbund Lane, plodding measuredly.
Doc sprang into motion toward that corner, was blocked by rigid bodies. Between heads and shoulders, he saw the gaping face and blue uniform of a policeman.
"Stop that truck, Casey!" he yelled. "Hold it!"
The patrolman swung to obey. Street lamps flared on, obliterating the dusk with garishness, and a woman screamed. That shrillness was like a knife edge. It released a welling, chaotic tumult of shouts, and Morris Street was abruptly a blundering, milling mass.
The little pharmacist thrust between a whimpering Swede and a shawled Polish woman from whose hand a market bag had spilled. He got through the jostle, over the curb, and went to his knees in the gutter alongside the man who had dropped there in the middle of that defiant shout.
The powerful frame was limp and its head lolled laxly sidewise on the smeared stone. Glazed eyes stared at Doc—sightless eyes. He knew that they would never see again, yet he reached for the flaccid wrist, his acid-stained, gnarled fingers finding the place where a pulse should be.
There was, of course, none there.
But there was no visible wound—no injury of any kind to explain that sudden death. Under the corner of the man's jaw there showed simply a little patch of reddened skin where the rough collar of his tieless shirt might have rubbed.
"Ivan!" a feminine voice wailed over Doc's head. "Ivan!"
The woman dropped beside Doc, her flaxen hair disordered, her high-cheek-boned, broadly sculptured face distorted almost beyond human semblance. "I know you get mad too quick sometime..." A sob choked her, visibly wrenching her larynx. Her toil-roughened hands clawed the lifeless head to her lap, and she rocked above it, moaning.
"Steady, Mariovna," Doc said gently. "You have your two little ones."
Realizing the futility of proffered comfort at the moment, he pushed erect, shoving through the knot now closing a tight circle on the tragedy. He reached the sidewalk and corner.
THE policeman at whom he had shouted was coming toward
him... and the black truck with its burden was nowhere in sight.
"Casey!" Turner exclaimed, grasping the cop's sleeve. "Where is
it? You let it get away!"
"Sure, Doc, and how was I goin' to hold him? He had a permit for displayin' an advertising float in the precinct and he didn't violate no ord'nance. If he had any pull at all it would of been my badge if I made him stop."
"Violate an ordinance!" the druggist exclaimed. "Would any pull take your badge away for arresting a murderer? Didn't you see Ivan Petroff drop dead as he shouted at him?"
"Sure Doc," Casey returned. "Sure I seen the hunkie drop. But he wasn't within fifteen feet of the truck, and the guy on it didn't make no move. Petroff just got excited and his heart conked. Many times them big bums is like that—look like bulls but all rotten inside. The guy in black didn't have nothing to do with it. If he's a killer, I snatched Judge Crater."
The pharmacist's lips pressed thinly together beneath his nicotine-browned mustache. The damage was done and discussion with this bovine representative of the law was utterly futile.
"You're right," he said, his tone colorless. "The man on the truck could have had nothing to do with it. Which way did he go?"
"Down there," Casey's ham-like paw gestured to the slope of Hogbund Lane, a tenement-sided gut sloping toward the river. "He whipped up his horses after he showed me his permit and he turned north again on Pleasant Avenue."
"Who is he? What did he look like?" the Doc snapped.
The officer shrugged. "I dunno. He didn't take his mask off. He didn't even say nothing but just shoved his paper at me, holding it in a black glove."
"There must have been a name on the permit."
"Sure. The Sun Trucking Company. They kind of make a specialty of these here floats, and the permits are always made out to them. Say listen, Doc, I can't stand palavering here with you no longer. I got to take care of that stiff."
"Yes," Turner sighed. "Yes. You have to take care of Ivan. You have to have the carrion taken away because it's blocking traffic."
Casey didn't hear him, probably would not have understood had he heard. Casey was going to the police phone box fastened to the sidewall of Doc Turner's drugstore. Time enough to take a look at the stiff after he called in his report.
If he had troubled to go right to the dead man he would have seen something that was holding the watching crowd numb in a sickened sort of awe. The red spot on Petroff's neck was spreading. It was the breadth of one's hand now, and it was crimson as the petals of a poppy through which the sun struck.
Before the medical examiner ordered the body taken to the morgue for an autopsy that scarlet had spread till the whole cadaver was the color of spurting, arterial blood.
FOUR hours later, Morris Street was just as it had
been—or almost so. There was a note in the raucous cries of
the peddlers that had not been there before. There were no
yelling children playing in the gutter, and miraculously escaping
destruction under the Juggernaut wheels of traffic. And, though
the street lamps, store windows and the globes suspended over the
pushcarts made the night garish, a dark river of some secret fear
ran under the black roof of the "El."
Within Andrew Turner's ancient drugstore, a barrel-chested squat young man with hair exactly the color of a fresh-pulled carrot shrugged burly shoulders. The smile on his blunt-jawed face was rueful.
"The fellow at the Sun Company don't know who it was hired the truck from him," he said. "Whoever it was paid cash for it, and left a deposit. He didn't even come back with it but got off somewhere around the corner and let the horses go to the stable alone. The coffin wasn't on it any more."
Jack Ransom was a mechanic working in a garage around the corner from the pharmacy. He was Turner's right hand in his forays against the crooks who prey on the helpless poor, his fists the old man's bludgeon.
"I didn't think we'd find out anything that way." Doc probed the edge of a dingy-white showcase with a gnarled thumb. "But we had to try."
"You were calling the medical examiner's office when I came in. What did the autopsy show?"
"Death by apoplexy. Petroff's blood was charged with a tremendous amount of suprarenal, the ductless gland excretion that pours into it with anger. So much that it kept on contracting the capillaries even after he was dead, the blood in them bursting them. That's why he turned red."
Ransom winced at the picture evoked by the old man's words. "That settles it, then," he said. "You don't want to find the driver of that truck any more. Petroff died by natural causes."
Doc's eyes narrowed. "No," he said softly. "It doesn't settle anything. Petroff was murdered..."
"Good Lord, Doc!"
"And there will be others murdered around here, son, if they defy whatever it is of which that crimson coffin is the symbol. The police are through, Jack. That means it's once more up to us. We've got to stop it."
"To stop what? What's going on?"
"I don't know," the old man whispered. "I don't know. But it's something big. That show wasn't put on to goad one almost penniless laborer to his death. It was deliberately devised to strike terror into the people around here, to batter down their resistance to—" He broke off.
"To what?"
"I don't know, but—"
He broke off again. This time, however, it was because the drugstore door was opening.
THE wizened man who came in was cloaked in a dirty linen
smock, and his crescent beard of black crinkled hair, his
mustached thick lips, the humped promontory of his nose, left no
question as to his race. He had a crumpled paper in one hand.
"Hello, Izzy," Ransom greeted him. "How's the schochet business? Slicing a lot of chickens' necks?"
Izzy's thin shoulders lifted to the level of his fanlike ears. "Ach," he whined. "Ees no beezness at all hardly. Dey ain't got eet no money to buy cheeckens around here no more. Dey got money hardly to buy zup meat."
"Huh. I thought you told me last week everything was on the up and up since the depression was over."
"Dot vas lest week. Dees week—nodeengs. I kent understand eet." He turned to the druggist. "Dukter Toiner, mebbe you vill be so kindly to read me dees paper. A man geeve eet to me joost now und he said I moost be sure to read eet eef I know vot's goot fahr me."
The Doc took the sheet and read—
You cannot escape death. It may be tonight, it may not be for a long time. But when death comes to you, as come it must, you want to be prepared. You can be certain of a beautiful grave without having to pay out a lot of money now. A dollar a week is all we ask. As your friend, we advise you to come to 6197 Pleasant Avenue and make arrangements to start. Don't delay. Act now or—
"The corner of this paper is pasted over what follows the 'or'," Doc explained his break, picking at the glued flap.
"Ach," Izzy shrugged. "Ah plot in der Rodeph Sholem cemetery I got already yet. Vot do I need..." He stopped talking, and abruptly a grey film blurred the swarthiness of his visage. "Ai!" he wailed, his pupils dilating. "Aiaiai..."
"Jack!" Doc Turner blurted. "Look here. Look at this."
There were no more printed words under the flap. There was only a blotch, slant-sided, the corners at one end cut off. A coffin—a scarlet coffin!
"Aiaiai," Izzy wailed. "Vot ees dot attress? Vot ees eet? I moost go..."
"Wait!" Doc's command was neither loud nor harsh, but some quality of command in it stifled the schochet's outcry. "Wait! I'll take care of this."
"Baht..."
"But nothing. You can't pay out a dollar a week the rest of your life. None of the people on Morris Street can. It's not only chicken they won't be able to buy, it's the soup meat you mentioned."
"Baht eef we don't pay eet ve veel die like Petroff, ve veel die de red deat'."
"No. You will not die. None of you will die. Leave this to me. You know you can trust me."
"Thees ees deeferent."
"It is the same. Leave this to me, Izzy. Give me till tomorrow morning. Then, if I have not stopped this thing you can go ahead. Tell the others who got this circular the same."
"I dun't know no odders who got eet. Dere vas only me."
Turner did not seem to be surprised by this statement, although the live poultry market where the man worked was the center of slum gossip and if there had been more of the circulars he surely would have heard it.
"All right," the old druggist said. "Go home, stay there, and forget about this."
Izzy shambled out. "That's the stunt, is it?" Ransom growled. "The meanest racket of all, milking these poor guys for a grave in some lousy lot out in the sticks or maybe none at all. Buy a grave or else! Let's get the cops."
"No," Turner responded. "The police won't believe it. They have their verdict on Ivan's death and they'll say the truck was just a clever publicity stunt. It's still our job, Jack. It's still up to us."
"Let's get going then. It's ten o'clock now. And you told Izzy you'd settle this by morning."
A smile licked Doc Turner's lips, but there was no humor in his eyes. Only a bleak resolve.
"Make haste slowly, son," he said. "There are some things we have to do, first. For instance, you have to go up the block to Lapidus' Novelty Store and get me some stage hair, black and kinky, and some spirit gum. That's for a beard like Izzy's. My nose is enough like his to pass muster, and I have some black hair dye for my eyebrows and mustache that will wash out easily. If I ever get a chance to wash it out."
THERE are degrees even in poverty and degradation. If
Morris Street was a drab tunnel, Pleasant Avenue was a fetid,
open sewer. The sparse street lamps here waged a futile struggle
against a mucid darkness, and the cold-water flat-houses seemed
on the point of collapse. On the broken flagged sidewalks dough-faced humans shambled furtively about their shady business or
loitered on railingless stoops or flaking curbs.
The Doc finally found Number 6197, hesitated, almost visibly took himself by the back of his greasy collar and forced himself up the worn steps of its stoop.
In the black maw of the vestibule a blacker figure materialized from the shadows. "Who yuh lookin' for?" a palpably disguised voice demanded.
"I dun' know," the visitor whined. "De paper said come here und here I em."
"What paper?"
"De paper wit' de red coffin on eet. Maybe dees is not de place?"
"Yeah. It's the place. Go on in."
Doc fumbled past the sentry. His groping hands found a door that swung open. He hesitated a moment, went through into sightless dark.
Unseen fingers closed on his elbow and he was conscious of a bulky presence beside him. The hand on his elbow shoved him silently forward. His own shoes made a sliding noise on bare wood beneath them but the feet of the other sounded only in a barely audible pad, as though it were some gigantic cat that guided him by an inexorable pressure.
He was turned at right angles, halted. From just ahead of him there came a muffled rap, and then, though the Stygian murk lessened not at all, he was aware that space had opened ahead of him. He was pushed into it, brought to a halt once more. Hinges whispered behind him and his straining ears caught the slither of a door into its frame.
"Vell," he said. "Vot ees dees?"
"Silence!" a hollowed voice intoned. Abruptly, there was light, four yellow pinpoints of light enclosing Doc in their square. They grew, became flames at the tops of arm-thick tall candles, and a room rose out of the darkness.
It was bare-walled, bare-floored. Its two windows, straight ahead of Turner, were covered with black cloth tacked closely to their frames. Between them, between two of the candles, was the shapeless black figure of the horse-truck's driver. And on the floor right before the daring druggist was the crimson coffin the truck had carried.
HE could look down into the coffin because its cover was
removed. He could see its interior, lined with red satin, and he
could see the corpse whose presence had been before only shadowed
through the casket's sides of translucent, scarlet glass. It was
the clothed corpse of a man, and its skin was crimson as the
puffed satin on which it lay.
"Why have you come here?" The hollow voice spoke again, and now it came from the monstrous, black-robed form.
"Fahr vy you esk? Deedn't de paper say I should come here?"
"The paper. Ah. Is this one of those we have summoned here?"
"Aye, Master Death." It was a voice from behind Doc that responded. "He is one of those." Doc threw a swift glance behind him, saw two men standing close to him. "He is on your list." They were not robed, but they wore black suits with collars turned up about their necks, black gloves and black masks through whose eye-slits was visible only a glitter.
"Are you ready to enter into an agreement for the purchase of a grave?" demanded Master Death.
"Vell," Doc shrugged in a perfect imitation of Izzy's gesture. "I dun't know. Mybe I dun't understand right vat you mean by vat you say on de paper, und de pickshoor of a red coffin. Suppose I dun't buy from you a grave?"
"Then you will need one sooner than you think, Isadore Rifkin. Ivan Petroff thought that he did not need to deal with me and you saw what happened to him."
"De police doctor said eet vas—apoplexy. Dod deedn't have noddeng to do mit you."
"Petroff did not die of apoplexy, fool. He died because he defied me, and it was I who struck him down. Do you believe that or must I prove it to you?"
"Vy should I believe eet. I..."
"Hell, chief," the man behind Doc exclaimed. "What's the idea of kidding around like this? We had rehearsals enough. Let this guy know we're on to him and get through with it."
"Vot you mean?" Doc exclaimed, starting to twist around. He never completed the movement. Steel-like hands black-gloved, grasped his shoulders and held him immovable. The second man reached out, ripped the false beard from his chin!
MASTER Death laughed, triumphantly and without humor.
"They told us you were clever, Mister Andrew Turner," he said.
"But you certainly did not show that tonight. There was only one
circular sent out and that was intended to bring you here. It did
just that."
Turner seemed undisturbed. "Yes," he said. "It brought me here. But why did you bait this trap for me?"
"Because we heard all about you when we were looking the ground over before we started. It sounded like you were too good to be true, so we decided to let you ride but to keep an eye on you. When you sent your boy friend out to trace the truck, that was a warning that you were going to try to interfere with us and so... Well, here you are."
Doc sighed. "Here I am. What are you going to do with me?"
"Wouldn't you like to know?" the leader of the trio sneered.
"Yes. Not that it matters much. I am an old man and I'm living on borrowed time. But there is something that I'm really curious about."
"That is...?" Long experience with criminals had taught Turner that they shared one common failing, an overpowering inquisitiveness and an overweening propensity to boast of their cleverness. He was playing for time, and he took advantage of his knowledge now.
"I know why Petroff died," he said. "You shot a tremendous dose of adrenaline into his blood, of course, that the medical examiner's pathologist found and decided was suprarenal—another name for the same compound—from the man's own gland. What puzzles me, however, is how you managed to do that. You were at least five yards away from him when he dropped."
Master Death chuckled. "That was simple. I had a sharp sliver of crystallized adrenaline in a blowpipe. He was near enough for it to penetrate his jugular when I expelled it. It could not be heard nor seen, and he died almost at once so he could say nothing of the sting he felt."
"Ingenious," Doc exclaimed. "Almighty ingenious. Too bad you are devoting that ingenuity to despoiling mankind instead of helping it."
"That is a slave morality to which I do not subscribe. I..."
"Hey, boss," the first interrupter growled again. "This yammering going to keep up all night? We got to take another trip around before the pushcarts is all off Morris Street. How about it?"
"All right, Luke. I'll get it over with... Turner, you're going to get a chance to gain first-hand knowledge of how it feels to die of an overdose of adrenaline." Master Death snapped, "Because..." There was movement in his black robes, and suddenly a thin rod projected from them, near their top, "Because you're going to die the way Petroff died."
"No!" Doc screamed. "No!" He tore free from the hands that held him, clapped a hand to his neck as though to shield it from the blowpipe missile.
Whiff the slender rod said, and Doc pitched forward over the scarlet coffin. He dangled there, motionless.
Master Death laughed again. "That's that," he grunted. "He was too smart for his own good... but just smart enough for ours. We'll have a real corpse now to show any Doubting Thomas's, instead of that wax dummy. Luke, you help me get it out of there and put Turner in. Dan, tell Steve to come in so the three of us can carry the casket out to that new wagon you have waiting in the back alley."
Dan went out. Between them the two others heaved Andrew Turner's still warm body from the coffin, lifted the stiff wax figure from the scarlet satin, replaced it with the corpse of the old druggist.
"It's going to give me a big kick," Luke chuckled as he slid the scarlet casket lid in place, "watching you drive along Morris Street with the stiff of this guy they're all crazy about."
"It will be a rather good joke," the other replied. There was a note of uneasiness in his tone. "Wonder what's keeping Dan and Steve."
"Probably sneaking a smoke before coming back," Luke proffered.
"Better go and see. I want to get started."
Master Death was alone in the candlelit room. He fished in the Stygian swirl of his macabre robes. His black-gloved hands came out with six wing-nutted silver screws. He bent to fit the first in the hole in the lid where it belonged—and froze!
The lid was lifting, slowly, apparently of its own volition! It rose higher and higher... jumped upward and fell off.
Doc Turner heaved upright out of the casket—the corpse of Doc Turner scarlet as blood save for black dyed mustache and eyebrows! His scarlet hand jerked out, jabbed an accusing finger straight into the staring face of the man who had killed him!
"He whose name you stole calls for you," he rasped. "Come!"
THE black-robed man staggered backward, caught himself. "Damn!" he grated, "for a minute you had me." There was a gun in his gloved hand, a nickeled automatic on which the flickering candlelight gleamed. "Missed you, did I? But I'll make sure of you this..."
A sledgehammer fist pounded the weapon from his grip, and he was held helpless in throttling, whipcord arms—in the inexorable arms of a carrot-headed youth who grinned happily the while he said, "Gosh, Doc, you look like a Comanche on the warpath. How did you get that way?"
"Red ink, Jack," Andrew Turner answered. "And I hope it's washable. Got enough rope left to tie him up?"
"Yeah. In the left pocket of my coat."
While the pharmacist fished out the thongs and busied himself lashing wrists and ankles of Master Death, he asked, "Did you get it all?"
"Sure Doc. I conked the lookout right after he passed you, and I listened to every word that was said in here. We certainly got enough on these birds to send them to the electric chair like they was on a greased slide. Then when Dan started out I stunned him before he knew what hit him, and the same for that bloke Luke. But what was the idea of jumping out of the box before I had a chance to get in?"
"I didn't quite fancy the idea of being screwed in there. Air was getting short, and I didn't know how long you'd be. Well, we can go back and tell Izzy he needn't worry any longer."
Jack stepped back from the trussed-up Master Death. "What I don't get is how you kept that dose of adren—adrenal—whatever it is that he shot into you from hurting you."
"That was simple. At the instant he blew the blowpipe I jabbed myself with a hypodermic injection of nitroglycerine, which has exactly the opposite effect to the adrenaline. Either was a fatal dose, but the two neutralized one another and left my blood vessels normal. You see, Master Death," Andrew Turner allowed himself a moment of gloating, "my eyes were not too old to see that the circular you had handed to Izzy, knowing he would bring it to me to read, was not actually printed but drawn with india-ink in a remarkably perfect imitation of printing. That warned me it was bait for a trap, and I came prepared. I was never in any real danger."
"No," Jack Ransom said dryly. "You was never in any danger. Not much!"