A Woman’s Job. Talmage Powell

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       COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

       A WOMAN’S JOB

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 1950, 1978 by Talmage Powell.

      Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

      Originally published in Detective Tales, April 1950.

      Published by Wildside Press LLC.

      wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

A WOMAN’S JOB

      He looked like any other dead man—loose, disjointed, strange, a pasty sponginess to his flesh. Eyes staring and mouth agape. Looking at them like that it’s always hard to think of them once alive, thinking, feeling.

      He lay dead there in the alley, and the alley was a black hole in the night. From the vacant, junk-cluttered lot half a block away I could hear the shrill cries of slum kids playing kick-the-can, unmindful of what one of their number had found when he’d picked the alley as a place to hide.

      All around the dead man, life went on. The blare of juke boxes in the gin mills. The cries of the burlesque barker at the joint across the street. The tight, thin laughter of a woman in a hotel room somewhere overhead.

      The kid was bouncing from one foot to the other. “Gee, he looks terrible, don’t he?”

      At the mouth of the alley, Grant, sweating in his uniform, was keeping a crowd from forming around the dead man.

      “Gee,” the kid said, “wait’ll I tell Eggie about this. I guess Eggie never found no dead man!”

      Danaird and Henssen moved like shadows in the alley, speaking in low tones. Doc Prator flashed his light on the dead man’s face, grunted softly. The bartender from the Cozy Club wiped his face with his apron, his jowls shaking.

      All of us stood in a tight group, watching Doc Prator look over the dead man.

      The bartender from the Cozy Club said, “The kid swaggers in the back door of the joint. He says there’s a guy croaked out in the alley. I start to chase him, but decide I better look. I find this guy, dive for the telephone, yell copper.”

      “Policeman,” Danaird corrected.

      “I yell policeman,” the barkeep said.

      “He hasn’t been dead over an hour,” Doc Prator said, “an hour and half at the most.” He wiped his face, took off his hat and wiped the sweatband. “He expired from a head wound that drove slivers of bone into the frontal lobe. Looks like a sap did it. The bruises on his knuckles indicate he put up a scrap. I don’t think a p. m. will help us much, but we can always try. Who is he, anyway?”

      “Name of Danny Pryor,” Henssen said. “He worked for the Little Fellow.”

      “For Kurt Loeffler? He ran numbers for Loeffler, eh?”

      “Among other things. He was just a small-time yegg.”

      No, Danny Pryor was more than that. But I didn’t say anything. It wouldn’t have sounded right there in the alley. Pryor had been a lot of things—slum kid, drugstore cowboy, tough guy, finally a man. A woman’s love had wrought the last change in him.

      All those things Danny Pryor had been; but mostly, he had been a husband.

      As I rode back to precinct headquarters in the cruiser with Henssen, I thought about her sitting in their grubby apartment, waiting for Danny to come home. “Somebody will have to tell her,” I said.

      “His wife?” Henssen said. “Not me. I don’t like jobs like that. You do it, Delaney. You know her, don’t you?”

      “Yeah,” I said quietly, “I know her.”

      “What do you make of his killing? Like a lot of them, right? Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything. He could have been waltzed into the alley from any point in the city. If there was anybody in this town big enough to buck the Little Fellow, I might think it was a gang killing.”

      We rode a while in silence. I said, “Loeffler will have an alibi, an air-tight, leak-proof, bought-and-paid-for alibi.”

      Henssen shot me a look. “You think the Little Fellow had that job done back there in the alley?”

      “I know he did.”

      “Why? Why would he knock off one of his own boys, Delaney?”

      “Pryor wasn’t his boy any more. Pryor was bringing me some books.”

      “Books?”

      “Books.”

      * * * *

      The little fellow and his lawyer reached my office fifteen minutes after my phone call to him to come over. The Little Fellow was a massive mountain of fat, with a round face and eyes that always laughed coldly at the world. The lawyer was a smooth, slick example of custom tailoring, smelling like a barber shop. His name was Peaseley; he had cold, greedy eyes and thin, nervous hands.

      “I will talk for Little Fellow,” Peaseley said. “What’s on your mind? We want to get back to our poker game.”

      “I suppose you’ve been playing poker all evening, Loeffler?”

      “He has,” Peaseley said. “With me and three other gentlemen. What is it? If this is just a whim of yours, Delaney—”

      “Danny Pryor is dead, murdered.”

      “That’s too bad,” Peaseley said.

      “I don’t suppose you know anything about it, Loeffler?”

      “He doesn’t.”

      “Let him talk!”

      “Why should I talk?” the Little Fellow said. “I pay the shyster twenty grand a year to talk, don’t I, shyster?”

      Peaseley’s face tightened, but he took it.

      “Talk to him, shyster,” the Little Fellow said.

      “Let the flatfoot talk,” Peaseley said angrily. “We don’t need to talk. The burden of proof is on him. Let him talk big and fast, and book you—or he’ll have to hold the door for us!”

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