Innocent Bystander Read online

  Innocent Bystander

  Craig Rice

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  CONTENTS

  I. Alibis While You Wait

  II. Missing Witness

  III. A Hell of a Way to Make a Living

  IV. Midway Grapevine

  V. A Matter of Survival

  VI. Pick-Up on the Pier

  VII. Hide-Out

  VIII. “A Mouth Like a Bruised Rose.”

  IX. Perfume for the Dead

  X. More Man Than Cop

  XI. Flight

  XII. Three Men in Search of a Key

  XIII. “What Does She Know?”

  XIV. The Smell of Money

  XV. Ripe for the Plucking

  XVI. Bedtime Story

  XVII. Cornered

  XVIII. Until Proven Guilty

  XIX. A Girl Remembers

  XX. A Man With a Load of Fear

  XXI. Death in a Barrel

  XXII. Dragnet

  XXIII. Shark Food

  XXIV. Desperate Dive

  XXV. Love on the Bottom

  XXVI. Empty Rescue

  XXVII. Nightmare in the Fun House

  Chapter One

  ALIBIS WHILE YOU WAIT

  The Pier is still there, of course. So are its people. They will always be there.

  Oh, sure, this pier will be torn down some day, but another one will be built in its place. Yes, Ferris wheel and all.

  The people? Well, some of them are dead now. Murdered, in case anyone should ask you. And some of them have just moved on. Atlantic City, Coney Island, Long Beach, Riverside Park, and small-town carnivals. But there will always be others to take their places.

  Yes, even the places of the ones who were murdered.

  You’ve seen the Pier. You’ve been there. Remember? The street leading up to it is bordered with hot-dog stands, popcorn parlors, all-night restaurants, delicatessens, and fortune tellers. There’s a world-famous ballroom and a couple of movie theaters. There’s the biggest bowling-alley in the world.

  The street itself is littered with old newspapers, empty peanut shells, odds and ends of cigarette packages, and just plain trash.

  But the Pier—once you’ve turned the corner leading into it—is a child’s dream of paradise. Lights. Music. Rides. Concessions where, for a ninety-cent investment, you can win a ten-cent plaster doll and go home happy.

  You can have your weight guessed; be told the state you were born in; see a bandit-car riddled with bullets; ride the roller coaster; eat hot dogs, French fries, taffy apples, and soft ice-cream cones; drink root beer, soda pop, and orange juice.

  You can go through the Fun House; drive six nails for a dime; play skee-ball, twelve shots for a nickel; and go down in the Diving-Bell, thirty feet under the surface of the ocean, to be scared by a man-eating shark who leers at you through the porthole.

  You can pick up a date, get into a fight, or both.

  Or, you can ride the big Ferris wheel.

  You see it the minute you turn onto the Pier, dominating the whole scene. A double wheel, blazing with lights that turn into great, fiery serpents when the wheel really starts moving fast.

  Sounds go along with it. The voices of the crowd. The noise of machinery turning. The music from the Wurlitzer organ on the Merry-Go-Round. The siren from the Crime Does Not Pay concession.

  On this particular night everything was just as usual. Like any other jam-packed Saturday night. The lights, the sounds, the smells. The bored voices of the barkers.

  Just as usual except for one detail, not yet known to the general public.

  One of the passengers on the big Ferris wheel was dead. Murdered.

  Amby, the artist, was doing one of his fifty-cent crayon portraits, just across the walk from the big wheel. He was sketching the face of a brown-haired girl who was perched on his high stool.

  Amby was a little drunk. Amby was always a little drunk, never much more nor much less. He never became belligerent, amorous, tearful, sentimental, or stupefied. On the other hand, he never became sober.

  He lived permanently in a vague and rather pleasant daze. When he woke in the morning in the huddle of dirty blankets back of his canvas booth, he automatically felt for the bottle he had tucked within easy reaching distance the night before. When he settled down to sleep at night, he took one last swig and sighed his way into mildly drunken and happy dreams.

  He was known only as Amby. Many years before he had had a longer and more dignified name, but he had forgotten it long since. He wasn’t quite sure who he was or where he’d come from or how he’d landed as a sketch artist on the Pier, and he didn’t particularly care.

  Sketching, he was hardly aware of his surroundings. The flashing lights from the big wheel didn’t divert his attention from the girl sitting on the high stool in front of him. He reached for a brown crayon. A blue crayon. A pink crayon.

  The laughter from the Fun House, the rumble of the roller coaster and screams from its passengers didn’t bother him as he worked, because he didn’t hear them. He was doing a little mental arithmetic as he worked. Fifty cents. A dollar. Dollar-fifty. Two dollars. Two and a half. This would make three. Minus fifty cents for food tomorrow. Amby decided that as soon as he’d finished the picture of the brown-haired girl, he’d quit for the night and buy a bottle of gin.

  He finished it just as the wheel was slowing down. Amby wasn’t much of an artist, but the picture was a fair likeness. At least, the girl seemed satisfied with it. She gave him his fifty cents, took the picture, and rolled it up. Just as the wheel stopped, she disappeared into the crowd.

  Amby, closing up for the night, ignored the crowd that always gathers to watch an artist at work. He couldn’t hear the comments, and he couldn’t have answered them if he’d wanted to.

  Amby was deaf and dumb.

  From the very top of the wheel it’s possible to see for miles around. There is the ocean. There is the beach with its long strings of lights, and the city beyond. And, looking down, there are the crowds milling around on the Pier.

  The young man in one of the cabs of the big wheel wasn’t looking at light, ocean, or crowds. He was far too busy searching the motionless man next to him. It was a quick but careful search, one that had to be carried on when that particular cab was at the top of the wheel.

  He found nothing. That puzzled him. He sniffed. Funny, he told himself. Never would have expected this guy to be a sucker for perfume.

  The wheel began its downward movement.

  The searcher was a man of average height, and slender. He had a thin, dark, saturnine face showing under a snap-brim hat. He wore a belted camel’s-hair topcoat over his well-tailored pin-stripe suit.

  The wheel went on turning. One by one the cabs came down and customers climbed out, breathless and giggling, or stayed on for another ride. The bored attendant took up their tickets or helped them out onto firm ground again.

  The cab in which the young man had been riding came down to the loading-platform. He hopped out, grinned at the attendant, slipped him a ticket, and said, “My friend wants to go around again, Joe.”

  The wheel moved on.

  Out in the crowd someone said, “That guy must be a sucker for rides. This makes the third time he’s been around.”

  Instead of heading into the Pier itself, the young man turned a corner behind the wheel. It led him into a rear entrance of the Penny Arcade. He spent a few minutes there, just another customer. At the far end of the arcade, just beyond the Gorilla’s Bride, he had to go out onto the main walk again. He moved quickly, keeping his head ducked low.

  He turned in at a door under a sign that read: Maritza. Palmistry. Horoscopes. Numerology.

  There was no one in the tiny waiting-room, hung with gaudy S
panish shawls, decorated with bead-fringed lamps, and heavy with the smell of cheap incense. He pushed on into the room beyond.

  “Hey, Mamie!”

  The woman looked up hastily from the chair where she had been knitting and reading a comic book and began to feel around for her shoes.

  She was enormously fat, and she wore what her customers trustingly believed to be a gypsy costume. Her broad brown face was elaborately made up; her glittering eyes were ringed with mascara.

  “You ought to be out in front, snagging the jaspers,” the young man said, grinning at her.

  “My feet hurt,” she complained.

  Suddenly she realized who he was. The comic book slid to the floor. “When did you get out?”

  “Never mind. Mamie, I’ve got to have an alibi.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Trouble.”

  She sighed, pulled her enormous bulk out of the easy chair, and said, “For what time, and where?”

  He told her.

  A few minutes later Mamie had filled the waiting-room with “prospective customers” who had been waiting outside for hours, who had seen the young man go into the waiting-room and into the inner room, and who had seen him leave.

  Meantime, in that inner room, he said, “Mamie, I’m in a jam.”

  Mamie said, “Whatever it is, you’ve gotten out of worse ones. What’s it this time?”

  “It’s like this, Mamie,” he began. “You know—Jerry McGurn—”

  The front door screeched open and slammed shut. Mamie put a finger to her lips, waddled into the waiting-room, and told a prospective customer to wait.

  Back again, she said very quietly, “You’d better move on.”

  He shook his head. “Five minutes, Mamie.”

  She pulled her painted old lips back in a smile. “All right, Tony-boy, I’ll do your horoscope for you while you wait. Or read your palm. Or—”

  “Never mind the build-up,” he said.

  She bent over his palm and laughed. “I see an alibi.” Then suddenly: “And I see a murder.”

  He jerked his hand away from hers, roughly.

  Just about that time the first sirens screamed.

  Chapter Two

  MISSING WITNESS

  The best barker in the business couldn’t have drawn a crowd like the one that had gathered around the Ferris wheel.

  Fun and fear go hand-in-hand in the amusement parks. Because it’s fun to be frightened. Scare yourself into fits on the Sky Ride—perhaps this will be the one time when a car jumps the tracks and skids into the ocean. Or this will be the time the boat, coming down the chutes, will capsize when it hits the water. Or maybe this time the Diving-Bell won’t come up again.

  This time something had happened. A man had been found dead on the Ferris wheel, and the police were there to ask questions. The crowd was there to watch.

  The big, brilliantly lighted wheel was ominously still. A few terrified passengers in its cabs stared at the scene below, wondering what had happened, wondering how long it would be before they would get to the solid ground again.

  Music still came gaily from near-by concessions, but the crowd wasn’t paying any attention. This was a show that didn’t charge admission.

  Two hastily summoned squad-car cops had the situation temporarily in hand. One of them motioned the crowd to move back. That, on the Pier, was something new. Usually the crowd was urged to step up a little closer.

  The other cop finished his brief examination of the body and said, “Can’t do a thing until Smith gets here.”

  Another siren sounded in the distance. The cop said in a relieved voice, “That must be Homicide now.”

  The crowd shivered delightedly at the word. This wasn’t merely death. This was murder.

  A car screamed to a stop in front of the wheel, and Art Smith, head of Homicide, stepped out. He was a big, awkward, shambling man, whose wrinkled suits always fitted him badly. His face usually wore a deceptively mild and pleasant expression; his blue eyes were just as deceptively pleasant. But there were a number of lawbreakers and a few members of the force who knew otherwise. Subordinates sometimes said of him that routine was his religion, and the Manual of Police Procedure his Bible. They weren’t far wrong.

  Neither the crowd nor the police paid any attention to the slender, dark-haired young man with the snap-brim hat who was slowly moving toward the front of the crowd, watching everything that went on.

  Art Smith’s first words, after confirming the fact that the man was dead and expressing his pleasure that the body hadn’t been moved or tampered with were, “Where’s the witnesses?”

  There were no witnesses.

  Art Smith looked over the scene. The big wheel, motionless now, but with its colored lights still blazing. The bandit-car concession across the Pier. Amby’s little canvas booth, the walk where the Saturday night crowd had been passing back and forth.

  “Hell,” Smith said. “There’s got to be witnesses. Find ’em.”

  When Smith gave an order, people moved. Fast.

  He glanced out over the crowd and wished they would go away. He still didn’t like to be the center of attention. And there was the look on their faces. Avid, curious, excited. He wanted to tell them to go home.

  But one of them might be a witness.

  The medical examiner arrived, and police procedure went into its smooth, rehearsed action. At last the medical examiner announced what everybody knew already, that the man had been stabbed fatally in the back with an ordinary kitchen knife which had been left in the wound.

  The body was photographed, removed from the cab, and searched. The fingerprint man went to work on the cab.

  The murdered man had been tall, heavy, muscular. His face had been both handsome and brutal. His hair and eyes had been so dark a brown as to be almost black. A dark shadow still showed under the powder on his closely shaven face. Some of the powder had evidently sifted down to his lapel. A white smear of it showed.

  There wasn’t a scrap of identification on him. The pockets of his coat were empty, save for a few crumbs of tobacco in one of them. In his left pants pocket was a dollar and a quarter in silver. In his right pants pocket was a slightly crumpled handkerchief. That was all.

  “Never mind,” Art Smith said wearily, “I know him. It’s McGurn, the gambling boss.”

  The crowd was really thrilled now. This was big-time stuff. Everybody had heard of McGurn.

  Just about then Art Smith’s assistant, a husky, hard-faced young man with cold blue eyes, moved up and said, “What was he doing at a place like this?”

  “Getting himself stabbed,” Art Smith said peevishly. He looked as though he wished O’Mara would do the same thing.

  The murdered man was stowed in the police ambulance and driven off to the morgue. The fingerprint man finished his work and went away, gloomily predicting that there wouldn’t be a thing of value. Then the wheel began to turn again, until the last frightened passenger was down on the ground. It was roped off, and a bored policeman placed in charge of it.

  The show seemed to be over, but the crowd stayed, hoping for some kind of an encore.

  No one noticed Tony, and no one noticed the two men at the very edge of the crowd who were watching Tony Webb.

  One of the two men was tall and heavily built. The other one was short and wiry. Yet they looked curiously alike. Perhaps it was the look on their faces, hard, alert, and wary. They were keeping track of everything that went on, but it was on Tony that their eyes were fixed.

  Art Smith silently cursed a policeman’s life. There were still no witnesses, and no one seemed to remember a thing.

  He went to work on the operator of the wheel, Joe Wecheler, a dour, perpetually bored man who’d spent most of his fifty-nine years in carnivals and amusement parks.

  “You own this contraption?”

  “No.”

  “Who does?”

  “Barney.”

  “Barney who?”

  “Barney Levine.”


  “What happened here tonight?”

  “How the hell do I know?”

  “Who got into the cab with that guy?”

  “How the hell do I know?”

  Art Smith drew a long breath and kept his temper. Inspire confidence when questioning witnesses, the Manual of Police Procedure said.

  “Take it easy,” he said mildly. “I just want to know about the other passengers on the wheel.”

  Joe remembered something from his own manual of procedure: Never argue with a cop. He forced a smile to his thin face and explained the way the wheel worked. After every ride the wheel made twenty-four stops. Passengers got off or handed over a ticket and stayed on for another ride. New passengers got on. All but three of the cabs had been unloaded when the body had been found.

  “But who was in the cab with McGurn?” Art Smith asked.

  Joe held his breath for a minute. Out in the front of the crowd he saw Tony Webb. He said, “Look, copper. This wheel runs seven minutes. Three minutes it takes to unload and load. That makes it six rides an hour. Forty-eight people to a ride, if she’s full up. How am I going to remember everybody who gets on and gets off?” He added, “Especially when some people take one ride, some take two or three, some stay on for an hour.”

  “How long had the murdered man been on?” Art Smith asked patiently.

  “I don’t know, pal.”

  “Ever see him before?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Art Smith resisted an impulse to smash his fist into Joe’s face. Just in time he remembered another sentence from the Manual. It is best, when possible, to examine a hostile witness in the office of a police station. He turned to one of the cops and said, “Take this guy down to the station and hold him for questioning.”

  Joe Wecheler complained loudly all the way to the police car. Its door slammed and there was a silence, as far as he was concerned.

  Tony Webb crossed his fingers. Luck had been with him thus far.

  The show seemed to be over, and the crowd began drifting away. The passengers from the big wheel had given their names and addresses, had them verified, and been told to go home. Routine procedure had been carried out. The wheel itself was closed to the public, despite the violent, telephoned protests of an indignant Barney Levine.