How long his eyes had swept up and down that block he did not know. The apartment houses, the Paramount Gleaners, Shoenfeld Realty, more apartment houses, the waste of the alley, the Pasadena Trust Bank on the corner. Then, back up the block again, in reverse: the bank, the alley, the apartments, the real estate office, the cleaners, more apartments. To DuVol it was like watching a dull motion picture over and over again to keep out of the rain.
But something here was trying desperately to impress itself upon his mind. Each time his eyes swept the opposite side of Colorado Boulevard, an aspect tugged at his brain, a key dangled before the locked door to his quandry. Ah, the bank! Something to do with the bank. On Thursday.
DuVol strained his mind to its conniving limits. What happened there nearly every Thursday evening without fail? At eight p.m. No, a bit later, nearer to eight-fifteen. What? Yes! The night deposit chute!
Every Thursday evening — sometimes a man, sometimes a woman — would appear from around the corner on. Los Robles Street, stroll unhurriedly down the length of the block to the bank, take a bank-deposit bag from a plain brown grocery bag, drop it into the night deposit chute and then return to the store or firm from which he or she had come.
There was his messenger out of Mr. Stortini’s debt and off his list of people to be dispatched quickly and quietly into non-status. There must be at least the $800 he needed in that deposit bag. Not even a pistol would be needed, just two fingers thrust into the small of a back or the back of a head. Business people were always instructed never to resist robbery. Yes, it would do nicely.
The key was timing of course. If the figure of the messenger should unexpectedly appear around the corner from Los Robles Street with DuVol still housed in his apartment, he could never reach the street in time to prevent those receipts from slipping down the mouth of the deposit chute. Likewise he knew he could not be found loitering near the bank. One look at him there as the messenger came around the corner spelled instantaneous defeat.
If he kept up a surveillance from the entry way of his apartment building, could he move across the street to intercept the messenger before his attention was attracted? No way. The bank did have a recessed doorway adjacent to the deposit chute. But it would take only a single passing patrol car to uncover his intentions. The doorway it would have to be. DuVol looked at his watch. The time had moved to 7:18. He had to allow for an early or late arrival by the messenger. That meant he had to be stationed in that doorway no later than eight o’clock, perhaps even a bit sooner.
For fifteen minutes he would be standing there in a static state. This was it, then — his life crystalized to a few minutes of the kind of crime he abhorred.
The young man standing before the night-deposit chute of the Pasadena Trust Bank went rigid when he felt the pistol barrel jab into his lower spine. The man took the grocery bag out of his arms and told Ori to lie down on the pavement of the entry way. There was a second man watching him from a parked automobile with another pistol; if Joe Ori moved so much as a muscle in the next five minutes, he would be shot and killed.
There wasn’t much Joe Ori could do but comply with the instructions. He crooked his left arm so that one eye could view the dial of his wristwatch, as he heard the man who had taken his grocery bag run off.
That was just the thing about those damn meetings, Ori reflected as he lay waiting for the five minutes to pass. They extolled the beauty of revolution, they paid fiery homage to the great revolutionaries of the past, they filled your arms with those damn pamphlets and they they shoved you out onto the street with the vague instructions to hit the establishment where the establishment was most vulnerable.
So you spent the day wandering around with the damn thing tucked under your arm, looking for the establishment’s vulnerability so you could make your statement, create a symbol. And then, when you found it, some punk with a pistol and a two-bit plan heisted the damn one-minute time-activated bomb right out your hands...
The Counterfeit Frame
by T. A. Meeks
Ex-cop Pete Merrick took up true crime writing to, make a living. Then he discovered his new way of life had suddenly turned into a way of death...
Pete Merrick was standing at his fourth floor walk-up window staring morosely down toward the darkening street when the telephone brred into action. His leg muscles were knotted from a four-hour stint at the type-writer and he stamped the floor to relieve them as he moved toward the instrument.
“Yeah? Merrick here.”
“This the Pete Merrick that’s writing the stories?” a fuzzy voice inquired.
“Yes, it is. Take your handkerchief off the mouthpiece and let’s talk,” Merrick replied.
“You don’t need to know who I am,” the muffled words continued, “but I’ve got a message for you.”
“Lay it on me, then,” Merrick cut in impatiently.
“The big man has just put out a contract on you, so take care.” The line clicked dead and Merrick found himself holding the silent receiver at arm’s length, staring at it with an unconscious sort of fascination. Then he moved automatically to the battered old coffee pot oh the hot plate in the cubicle kitchen and began manufacturing a fresh supply of black liquid.
After a while sitting at his desk, a hand curled around a fresh mug of inky coffee, he studied the closing paragraphs of his story. He had done everything except name names in his three previous articles. It figured that Big Augie would take steps to silence him soon, and now it had come.
After his wife’s sudden death two years before and his resignation from the force, his friends at Headquarters, especially Sam Tolliver, had done everything possible to help Merrick pull out of his soul-searing depression. When Pete bought an old second hand typewriter and tried to write mystery stories with a policed background, Sam Tolliver had encouraged him to try and try again. When Pete’s money was almost exhausted, Sam had steered him into a part-time job at the police car pool yard.
Then the first break had come. Pete was approached by a local publisher who wanted a professional exposé dredged up out of the sordid sewage of the city underworld. There was no problem about an investigator’s license or, the permit to carry his old service .357 Magnum.
Now, with the last page of the final article in his typewriter, Pete Merrick had been put on notice of death. There was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. So to hell with it, he thought, flopping down on the old couch without undressing.
The following day, Merrick had an appointment with his publisher at ten. Awakening late, he made a dash for his shaving kit. A half hour later, jockeying his old sedan through the slushy streets, Pete found himself almost unconsciously screening through the swirling throng of pedestrians for a face, any face that might belong to a hit man, a hit man he had probably never seen before.
He eased the car to a halt at a traffic light, scanning the crowd along the curb. Suddenly, through a momentary break in the crush, he saw two faces, split-second glimpses, two men side by side, standing in a dingy little hole-in-the-wall shop doorway.
As a blaring horn prodded him forward, Pete catalogued one of the faces he had just seen as Johnny Conway, a technician who worked in the police lab. The man had been hired shortly before Pete resigned and the two were barely nodding acquaintances. The figure standing beside Conway in the doorway, however, was more puzzling. There was something vaguely familiar about the stooped shoulders, the shock of white hair, yet Merrick could not place him. But the doorway fronted a little cubbyhole gun shop. A small, weathered sign clutched against the brickwork by rusty nails proclaimed this fact.