Black Cat Thrillogy #2

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  INTRODUCTION, by John Gregory Betancourt

  EASY MARK

  LIFE SENTENCE

  REWARD FOR GENIUS

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Black Cat Thrillogy #2: 3 Classic Mysteries by Talmage Powell is copyright © 2017 by Wildside Press LLC. All rights reserved.

  * * * *

  “Introduction,” by John Gregory Betancourt, is original to this volume and copyright © 2017 by Wildside Press LLC.

  “Easy Mark” was originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May 1971. Copyright © 1971 by Talmage Powell. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the copyright holder.

  “Life Sentence” was originally published in Manhunt, April 1960. Copyright © 1960 by Talmage Powell. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the copyright holder.

  “Reward For Genius” was originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Nov. 1965. Copyright © 1965 by Talmage Powell. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the copyright holder.

  INTRODUCTION, by John Gregory Betancourt

  Welcome to the second volume of The Black Cat Mystery Community’s “Thrillogy” series, celebrating classic mystery short stories. This time we focus on the work of Talmage Powell (1920-2000). Included are:

  “Easy Mark”

  An older man stops at a seedy bar, but gets more than he bargained for when he meets a pair of muggers…or does he?

  “Life Sentence”

  Time in prison isn’t the worst thing that ever happened to Hervie Taylor. Not by a long shot!

  “Reward For Genius”

  When a painter is commissioned to repaint a rotted portrait, he discovers a secret worthy of blackmail.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  At the beginning of his career, Powell published, under his name and many pseudonyms, more than 200 stories in top crime and mystery pulp magaziness like Dime Mystery and Black Mask Mystery Magazine. After the collapse of the pulps, he continued penning new tales for their digest-sized replacement, writing more than 300+ tales for magazines such as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Manhunt, and many more.

  He wrote his first novel, The Smasher, in 1959. Other notable works include the novel The Killer is Mine, a number of Ellery Queen novels he ghost-wrote, novelizations of the TV series Mission: Impossible and scenarios for the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

  * * * *

  We invite your feedback in the forums of The Black Cat Mystery Community at bcmystery.com or by email at wildsidepress@yahoo.com. If there are other classic authors you’d like to see included in the Thrillogy series, let us know!

  EASY MARK

  Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May 1971.

  The two youths at the front corner table marked me from the moment I strolled into the psychedelic, nether-world decor of the Moons of Jupiter.

  I was surely a sudden out-of-kilter detail on the scene. My appearance stamped me as the most reprehensible of straights: businessman, establishment man; specter from the far side of the generation gap. Fortyish, brushed with gray at the temples, lean, conditioned from regular workouts, I was smoothly barbered, tailored in a five hundred dollar suit of English cut, with coordinated shirt and necktie.

  A cool young hostess, blonde and topless, decided I was for real. She smiled a greeting to take me in tow and threaded a way through a dimly lighted, pot-smoke-hazed broken field of tables and hovering, pale faces. In passing, I drew a few glances, ranging from the sullen to the amused. Empty, bored young eyes lifted, noted the stranger, and dropped again to contemplation of existence and a world they had rejected. I was of no more real interest than the movement of a shadow—except to the pair at the corner table. They studied every detail about me as I was seated and ordering a drink.

  On the bandstand a four-piece rock group, as hairy as dusty and moth-eaten young gorillas, suddenly assailed the senses with electronic sound. The lighting came and went like a Gehenna fire, swirling faces from corpse-green to paranoid purple to jaundice yellow, cycling and recycling until the brain swam and burst from the brew of shattering sound and color.

  Throughout the hard-rock number I had the impression that I was being discussed by the pair at the corner table. Their faces in the ghoulish glows turned toward me, turned away, drew close over the table as words blanketed by the music were exchanged.

  The music shimmered to a long-drawn wail against a mad rhythmic background and slipped eerily to silence. The lighting settled to a twilight. There was a shifting of bodies and a ripple of applause.

  I lifted my drink, covertly watching the pair rise from the corner table. I sensed a decision, and my palms became a little damp as they came toward me.

  Their shadows streamed across my table. Suddenly they stopped.

  “Hi, pops.”

  The taller, huskier one had spoken. I looked up. He was a strapping youth with a heavy-boned face lurking behind a heavy growth of thick black beard and wiry tresses that fell to his thick neck. He wore nondescript poplin slacks, dirty and wrinkled, and a leather vest that partially covered his massive, hairy chest. His swarthy, bare arms were corded and muscled like a weight lifter’s.

  The companion beside him was as tall, but much thinner, a fine-boned fellow. Tangled, unwashed locks of yellow and a sparse beard graced a narrow, almost delicate face and high-domed head. The smoldering eyes of a decadent poet peered from the shadows of large sockets. The thin-lipped mouth was faintly quirked, as if sardonic amusement was a habitual reaction.

  “We sensed a loneliness,” the poet said, “and would offer a friendly ear if you’d care to rap. Peace.” He had a thin, nasal voice. His jerky delivery and the embers in his eyes were clues to a good high on drugs. Clad in a rumpled tie-dyed gaucho shirt that hung loose about greasy ducks, he slipped with unreal movements into a chair across the table.

  “I’m Cleef,” he said, “and my boon companion is known as Willis.”

  Willis wiped a palm across his leather vest and extended his hand. “Into the pudding, man.”

  I saw no alternative at the moment but to shake his hand. His grip was modestly powerful. He pumped my hand once, then eased into the chair at my left

  “Pudding?” I inquired.

  “As your group would put it,” Cleef-the-poet said, “welcome to the club.”

  “I see. Well, thanks. Buy you fellows a drink?”

  Willis’ heavy mouth curled gently. “You’re out of sight, pops. We don’t ruin the belly with booze. But you might blow the price of a joint.”

  He lifted a muscle-lumped arm and signaled a waitress who was moving from a nearby table. She served them joints from an innocent-looking package bearing the brand name of a well-known cigarette. As Willis and Cleef fired the reefers, I ordered a second double Scotch. I figured I needed it.

  Cleef drew deeply, half closing his eyes and holding the smoke until his lungs burned for air. Willis was a more conservative pothead, less greedy, less desperate for a turn-on. He puffed, inhaled, exhaled.

  “What brings you to a place like this, pops?” Willis asked conversationally.

  My gaze roamed the unreality of the room, returned to Willis’ dark face. My shoulders made a vague movement “I’m really not sure,” I said.

  “Hung-up man, ice cream man,” the poet suggested.

  “Ice cream?” I asked.

  “Now and then user of drugs,” Willis explained. “Ice cream habit.”

  I nodded, grinned slight
ly. “Thanks for the translation, but I haven’t an ice cream habit. Just an occasional Scotch does it for me. “

  “Translate, extrapolate,” Cleef rhymed. “Rap across the gap.”

  Willis reached and patted the back of my hand. “We’ll try to talk your lingo, pops.”

  “Thanks. It would be less awkward.”

  The waitress came with my drink. Willis elaborately mused on her thin face and slender topless figure. The gesture on his part was almost pathetically obvious, a cover-up for his quick assessment of the thick wallet from which I paid the tab.

  I lifted the Scotch. “Cheers.” I rolled the first drops under my tongue for the taste. The liquor dispelled a little of the clammy chill inside me.

  I set the glass down and studied it a moment. “I guess it was because of Camilla,” I said finally.

  “Come again?” Willis said.

  “The reason I came in here,” I said. “Dear Camilla…about the same age as some of the young women in here…early twenties…very beautiful.”

  Willis chuckled, eyes brightening. “Well, what do you know! The old boy has got himself a chick!”

  “Straight man buys anything his little heart desires,” Cleef said lazily.

  I couldn’t help the angry look I shot across the table. “It wasn’t that way at all!”

  “Easy, pops,” Willis suggested mildly.

  I lifted the glass and threw the remainder of the drink down my throat “Well, it wasn’t!”

  “So okay.”

  “I want you to understand.”

  “Sure, pops. Don’t blow your mind.”

  I took out a spotless Irish linen handkerchief and brushed the cold needles from my forehead. “Blow my mind… Sonny, that’s just what I did, with Camilla. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t live without her. Went crazy if she glanced at another man. Never wanted her out of my sight…”

  “Zap!” mumbled the poet “What a king-sized hang-up.”

  My vision cleared slightly. “At last you have voiced a truth. I became a different man, totally different, a stranger to myself.”

  “How’d you meet such a chick?” Willis asked with genuine interest

  I drew a breath. “In a place much like this. I—my wife had died I was, you might say, in loose-ends bachelorhood One evening I was entertaining a business client and his wife.”

  “How deadly dull,” decided Cleef.

  “She, the client’s wife, had heard of a place similar to this one,” I said, as if the poet hadn’t interrupted “She wanted to see the sights. She insisted we go, as a lark.”

  “But you, not the fellowship, were the bugs under the microscope,” Cleef intoned sagely.

  “Shut up.” Willis glowered a look at his companion. “Let the man talk. Go on, pops.”

  “Go on?” I sagged morosely. “Where is there to go, after Camilla? With Camilla you have been all the way.”

  Willis’ eyes glinted with a grain of fresh respect. “Tough, pops.”

  “Lovely while it lasted,” I amended. “I met her that night, on the lark. We grooved, as I believe you would put it.” I broke off, numbly, trying to relate the experience in my own mind to the “straight” sitting at the table with Cleef and Willis. “Then she turned me off. It was nightmare. I pleaded. She reviled. I begged—and Camilla laughed…”

  “And she split the scene?” Willis finished.

  “Yes,” I said, squeezing my eyes tight and seeing her face against the darkness; lovely face, mask-like face; face that could become cruel, unendurably cruel. “Yes, she split the scene.” I wrapped it up in a whisper.

  Willis scratched his beard and gave his head a short shake. “Who’d have believed it?” He lifted his eyes and looked about the Moons of Jupiter. “So it was the thought of Camilla that brought you in tonight?”

  “You might say that,” I agreed. I washed the final drop of Scotch from the glass against my lips. “You see, after Camilla, my home town was unbearable. I left I’ve wandered, for a long way. It hasn’t been easy.”

  “Looking for another Camilla,” the poet said. “I should write about you, man, if it all wasn’t so corny.” Cleef half stood, drugged eyes flicking about the room. “Is she here tonight? Another Camilla? Do you see another Camilla, man?”

  “There will never be another Camilla, sonny,” I said. “Once is enough.”

  “So now you wander some more, pops?” Willis asked.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Why don’t we wander together, pops? Have a ball? Cleef and I have rapped about blowing this town. We’d like to see California, New Orleans, Miami when the chill winds blow. ”

  “Dust to salve the itch in our feet,” the poet supplied.

  “That’s right, pops,” Willis nodded. “We yearn to roam. You got a car and dough.”

  “Sorry,” I said, suddenly very sober, “but I don’t think…”

  “Man,” Willis said, “you just think about Camilla.” His heavy face had changed, hardened. He lifted his right hand almost to tabletop level. I saw the glint of dusky light on six inches of gleaming switchblade. I sat very still. This was the decision the pair had made when I’d strolled in and they’d pegged me for an easy mark.

  “Let’s go, pops,” Willis said.

  “All right,” I swallowed drily. “I won’t resist. You won’t have to hurt me.

  “That’s good, pops. We don’t want to hurt you. We’re not stupid. Just the dough and the car, that’s all.”

  We rose from the table and walked out of the Dantean room and onto a parking lot, Willis close behind me with the tip of the knife against my back.

  “It’s the sporty little car right over there,” I said. “Please…careful with the knife.” I eased the wallet from my pocket, stripped it of cash, several hundred dollars, and handed the money to Willis.

  His big hand closed over the bread. “Thanks, pops. And look, you ought to be more careful, wandering into places like the Moons of Jupiter. ”

  “Seeking adventure, you found it,” the poet surmised.

  I handed the car keys to Willis. “That’s it. You have got it. You’ve stripped me clean.”

  “So long, pops.”

  I saw the flash of his big fist. Conditioned as I was, even after Camilla, I could have handled him—both of them, Cleef posing no problem in a rough-and-tumble.

  I took the punch on the chin, rolling with it just enough to keep from being knocked blotto. My knees crumpled. I fell on the darkly shadowed asphalt, stunned but not unconscious.

  I heard Willis say: “That’ll hold him while we split the scene.”

  I heard the poet intone: “Hail the open road!”

  I heard the rush of their feet, the starting of the car, the sigh of engine as the car took them from the parking lot.

  I got up and dusted myself off in time to see the taillights vanish around a distant street corner.

  Good-bye Camilla’s car… Bought with my money, but she’d done the shopping, chosen the model. Not even a fingerprint to connect the car to me; I’d wiped them away before entering the Moons of Jupiter.

  I strolled to the street in order to find a taxicab several blocks from the scene.

  Good-bye, Camilla…

  I still had the smallest catch in my throat. I hadn’t really meant to kill her when I struck her in that final moment of insane rage.

  Farewell, Camilla… It was hard to cover my tracks and get rid of you, the evidence. I wonder when they will find you in the trunk of the car? California? New Orleans? At some service station in Alabama when the attendant moves from gas pump to the rear of the car and catches the first whiff of the ripening smell?

  As for you, easy marks, you know not from where I came, or where I go, or even my name.

  So enjoy the ride…

  LIFE SENTENCE

 
Originally appeared in Manhunt, April 1960.

  In my official capacity I’ve escorted many men to state prison, each handcuffed to me during the train ride. Several of them have been murderers. This one was in that macabre category, and the thing that interested me was that I couldn’t imagine him killing anybody.

  As a matter of fact, his was the goriest murder of all. He had taken a heavy meat knife and chopped his wife so thoroughly that she was buried like a mass of hamburger.

  His name was Hervie Taylor. He looked as if he should be on his way to keep books in an electric appliance store. This was precisely the job he’d had. If you’d noticed him at all against that background you’d have felt instinctively that he would never go far. He was an excellent bookkeeper. This, coupled with his natural colorless attributes, kept him in his dim corner writing his careful rows of figures while the world went its laughing, crying, loving, brawling, lustrous way.

  He was a considerate little man, doing his best to keep from being an inconvenient appendage attached to me by steel. Some of them can’t help worrying their hand against the handcuff. Others want water. A few try to bury our hands in the seat to hide the cuff. Last one I took up before Hervie Taylor had to go to the bathroom every five miles or so.

  Hervie sat beside me watching the scenery stream past, beautiful farming country of low. Rolling hills and green meadows, white houses and red barns. In this, he was different from the others. There are several stock reactions. Hatred for the beauty of the countryside. Bitterness. Nostalgia. Inner torture, if the man being taken away had a masochistic streak. Even hope, in a few.

  Hervie Taylor simply sat and looked at the scenery.

  He was a man of fifty, small-boned and not given to excess flesh. He had brown hair that he wore neatly parted. The hair had faded a little, but there was no gray in it. His eyes were dark brown, keen and intelligent. You’d never guess his age—or his crime—simply by looking at him. There was still the suggestion of boyishness in his face. A lively eagerness in his eyes that the monotony and cares of the years had not altogether extinguished.