Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 149 - King Joe Cay

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KING JOE CAY
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2003 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I
? Chapter II
? Chapter III
? Chapter IV
? Chapter V
? Chapter VI
? Chapter VII
? Chapter VIII
? Chapter IX
? Chapter X
? Chapter XI
? Chapter XII
? Chapter XIII
? Chapter XIV
Scanned and Proofed
by Tom Stephens
Chapter I
HE stole the young lady's purse when the train was about sixty miles out of Chicago.
He began by going into the day coach and standing in the aisle beside the girl's seat. A dozen other
passengers were already standing in the crowded coach, so he looked innocent enough.
A man named Brigham Pope was helping him.
Brigham Pope came into the coach.
He saw with displeased astonishment that Brigham Pope was carrying a baby, a small baby.
He hurried forward. While passing Brigham Pope, he whispered, “Talk to you. Vestibule.” He went on
to the place between the cars, out of sight of the passengers, and waited there. Shortly Brigham Pope
joined him.
Brigham Pope was short, blond, rosy-cheeked, athletic. He had a feeling about Brigham Pope, a feeling
that if he ever learned the truth about the man, it would turn out that the fellow had once been an actor,
probably a low comic. Brigham Pope wore a checkered sport coat. Two minutes after they'd originally
met, Brigham Pope had told a dirty joke.
He asked Brigham Pope, “Where did you get the baby?”
“Belongs to a woman a couple of cars back.”
“You fool!” he said bitterly. “You complete, utter fool!”
“Now wait a minute!” Brigham Pope was indignant. “I know what I'm doing.”
“It sure looks like it! You know what the rap for kidnapping is? They electrocute you.”
“Keep your shirt on, bub. Woman I borrowed him off of is tired. She's been traveling two days. Brat
was squalling his head off. When I offered to carry him around and keep him quiet, she jumped at the
chance.”
He examined the baby briefly. “It's a her, not a him.”
“The hell you say!” Brigham Pope grinned. “Well, that's okay. Quiet down. It's okay.”
“It's not okay!” he said violently. “If we get caught at this, they'll throw everything at us. Robbery.
Kidnapping too. I know how these district attorneys work it.”
Brigham Pope joggled the baby comfortably. “Tom Ittle said to use a baby. Don't eat on me. Go tell
Tom Ittle about it.”
He thought about it a moment. He was dissatisfied, but he decided it might not be wise to do any more
squawking about it.
“Okay.” He shrugged.
“You look the girl over?” Brigham Pope demanded.
“Yes.”
“She the one?”
“Yes.”
“Is the seat facing her empty?”
“No. There's a sailor in it.”
“I'll take care of the sailor,” Brigham Pope said. “What about her purse. Has she got it?”
“She has her purse, yes.”
“Where is it?”
“On her lap.”
Brigham Pope was pleased. “She's left handed. She'll stick it down beside her, on the left side.”
“Let's hope so.” He straightened his coat. “All right, let's start it all over again.” He went back into the
coach and took up his stand beside the girl's seat. Her purse, he noted, was still on her lap.
BRIGHAM POPE came in and stood in the aisle beside the sailor who occupied the seat facing the girl
who had the purse they wanted.
Brigham Pope started a business of shaming the sailor into giving up his seat to tired father and infant.
The sailor wasn't very coöperative. For this he couldn't be blamed. The girl was nice scenery.
She was a trim, bright girl, not too long and not too short. Hair about the color of good walnut, eyes
about the color of a good lively lion. She was reading a book.
He was astonished when he saw what she was reading.
The name of the book she was reading was Studien über Hysterie, by Breuer and Freud. He thought:
we had better watch out; the girl has brains. She didn't look like a girl who would be reading a book of
psychiatry on a train, a book that was, moreover, a first edition in the original. Good God, that's heavy
even for me, he thought.
He felt that the book alone should be enough to discourage the sailor, but it wasn't.
Brigham Pope began pinching the baby to make it squall. The baby coöperated. It squalled bloody
murder.
The sailor stood up.
“You better sit here with the baby, sir,” he said.
“Thanks. Say, thanks, sailor!”
The girl paid no attention. Brigham Pope took the seat facing the girl, squirmed, settling himself; he
removed the blanket from the baby.
So far, so good.
He was getting a strange feeling about the girl, a hunch. A vague impression. A feeling of a
double-something about her, a Jekyll-Hyde intimation. It wasn't just her neatness. It wasn't just the book.
He didn't know exactly what it was. One thing he had learned long ago: he couldn't tell anything about
women.
Brigham Pope leaned back, sighed, closed his eyes. Tired father. He let his hands drop away from the
baby. The baby tottered. It swayed on Brigham Pope's knee. It started to fall.
That did it.
The girl dropped her book, snatched at the baby, caught it. From there on out, you would think she'd
saved the baby's life.
“Oh!” she cried. “You poor darling!”
“What happened?” gasped Brigham Pope. He was an actor.
“The baby was falling!”
“Gosh!”
“I caught him just as he went over.”
“Gosh, thanks.”
“You weren't holding him right, you dope! The sweet little thing might have been badly hurt!”
It had worked fine.
He had her purse now.
THERE was the fat man across the aisle, though. He might have seen what had happened. It was hard to
tell. The fat man—he was a big fat man, quite different-looking from most fat men, who look short or
round, or at least chunky—closed his eyes again. If he'd seen, he wasn't going to do anything about it.
The swap had been simply managed. It was a swap. The girl's purse was long, black. He had another
purse just like it. They had managed to buy this purse in Chicago before the train left. The girl had simply
put her purse down, on her left side as Brigham Pope had said she would, and he had taken it and made
a substitution. He had put the purse they had bought in its place.
He didn't leave right away.
He wondered if the long, fat man had really seen. If so, why the hell was he keeping quiet? Maybe he
was waiting for the conductor to come by. Or the Military Police.
The girl was telling Brigham Pope the way he was taking care of the baby was a crime. “You weren't
even holding on to him!”
“I dozed off, I guess.”
“You idiot! He could have had a bad fall!” She was a girl who said what she thought. She added, “You
have to watch them every minute, particularly when they're that age!”
“Yeah. This'n jumps around like a flea, never still a minute.”
“How old is she?”
“Eleven months.”
“Eleven! She looks older, the little dear.”
“She's big for her age.”
The girl was looking at the baby the way women look at babies. She chucked its chin. The baby hadn't
bawled, although she'd been a little scared. The baby relaxed and smiled. It had a nice smile. It was a
cute baby.
He left them.
He walked along the aisle toward the pullmans. He tried not to let it be apparent that he was holding the
girl's purse under his coat.
He went into the men's washroom in the next car. No one else was there. He opened the girl's purse
quickly, looked in it, took out everything that looked to him like what they might be seeking. This stuff he
held in his fist, looking around for a place to hide it.
The waste-paper basket was over half full of crushed paper towels. He shoved the stuff he had taken out
of the purse down in the towels, left it there.
He went back and stood between the cars, waiting, standing on widespread feet to counteract the
swaying. There was roaring under him and cold wind blew in through the joints between the cars. He
noticed that the glass in the door was streaked with dirty water, and saw with surprise that now it was
raining outside.
Brigham Pope joined him, asked, “You get it?”
He lifted his coat slightly, so that Brigham Pope could see the purse.
“Okay,” Brigham Pope said. “Don't start looking at it. Don't let anybody see you got it.”
“Where's the baby?”
“The girl is holding him.”
“How come?”
“I told her I hadda get a drink.”
“Oh.”
“I'm going back and ask her to hold him a while longer,” Brigham Pope said. “That way, we can come
back later and get the baby, and switch the purses back again, so she'll have hers back.”
“Whose idea was that?”
“Tom Ittle's.”
“Oh.”
“You wait. I'll tell her, be back. We'll go see Tom Ittle.” Brigham Pope went away.
The train, traveling across the Illinois farmland, began attacking a slight grade. There were three baggage
and mail cars nearest the locomotive, then four pullmans of which this was the last one, then the day
coaches.
On the prairie flatland there had been through the whole train a loose, wild sensation of speed, but this
was gone as the train threw itself at the grade. The driving pulse of the locomotive flowed back through
the couplings, carrying through the cars a throbbing strength, a feeling of determined life.
He moved a little, stood where he could see into the day coach. He wanted to see that nothing had gone
amiss with Brigham Pope.
He was curious about the long fat man, too. He had a feeling that the long flabby fellow had seen the
purse deal.
But peace was in the coach. In the day coach there was already an atmosphere of settled resistance to
the fatigue of traveling. It was tangible on the faces and in the manner of the passengers. Some seat
occupants were sleeping, or wooing sleep by feigning it. Tobacco smoke, bluish and tenuous, appearing
above seats here and there, was taken up and whisked away and dissolved by moving air from the
conditioning system. Forward, four soldiers were playing twenty-one on a suitcase. The conductor had
been through, punching the tickets, consulting, low-voiced, with a coach porter who followed at his
heels—the porter scribbling mysterious numerals on little tabs, then shoving the tabs into the clips over
the windows. They had gone on, and merely by going they had taken with them a nebulous feeling of
suspense, a possibility for mild excitement. Now there was nothing left to do but ride. And so they rode
resignedly, complacently, and the only excitement that was left was in the minds of those with
imaginations agile enough to be titilated by what the future might hold.
He saw Brigham Pope coming toward him along the aisle.
He turned and walked toward the front of the train.
Chapter II
BRIGHAM POPE overtook him when he was pushing and pulling at doors between the pullmans.
Brigham Pope was pleased. “You're okay, Clark,” Brigham Pope said. “Nice, the way you got her
purse. I didn't even see you do it myself.”
“Think anybody saw it?”
“No.”
He was tempted to mention that he thought the long, fat man had seen, but he decided not to. He didn't
know enough about this thing yet.
Brigham Pope said, “I'm going to see that Tom Ittle knows what a fine job you did, Clark.”
“Thank you.” He put gratitude in his voice.
At Compartment 2, Car 3, they stopped. Or rather, Brigham Pope stopped, and grinned ingratiatingly.
“Look,” he said. “Any good we can do each other, it won't hurt. What I mean, build each other up a
little, see.”
He nodded. “Okay,” he said.
“You build me, I build you,” Brigham Pope said. “A little advertising hooey never hurts.”
“Okay.”
They went in to talk to the incredibly stout man whose name was Tom Ittle.
Tom Ittle did not look up. He wore a pin-striped dark blue suit of soft-finished cloth, and he was doing a
crossword puzzle. The crossword puzzle he was doing was not in a newspaper, but in a book of them;
he had the book on his knee; his mouth was making shapes for different words as he stared at the puzzle.
Tom Ittle asked, “What would be a five-letter word for cold, beginning with G?”
“Would it be gelid?”
Tom Ittle wrote in the word. “Could be,” he said.
Ittle had thick lips. He was a man who did not make a bad looking fat man, but who would have made a
hideous, vulture-like thin man. This was because Tom Ittle's features were all large—big nose, big eyes,
big ears, besides the large mouth with the pink bicycle tire lips. On a skinny man the big features would
have been repulsive; on him they were not bad.
Ittle's body was the shape of a football and the size of a small barrel and his suit had pre-war cuff's on the
trouser legs. His old-fashioned black button shoes were polished like mirrors.
There was something about him that was unnerving. Like looking at the cobra in the zoo reptile house
and noticing they had a glass panel between you and the cobra so it couldn't spit its poison on you and
kill or blind you.
“Gelid,” Tom Ittle said. “That seems correct. You are pretty good, Clark. You are a smart fellow.”
“Thank you.”
“Were you smart enough to do what I told you to do?”
He gave Tom Ittle the girl's handbag. Then he waited, wondering what Tom Ittle would do when he
looked in the bag and found what they wanted wasn't there.
Or maybe what they wanted would be in the bag. He didn't know. He was not exactly sure what they
were after. He wished he dared ask questions about it, find out what it was, but he was cautious about
doing that because he wasn't sure whether he was supposed to know.
Tom Ittle was a dangerous man, he knew that.
“LET'S see what we got,” Tom Ittle said, and opened the purse. He took things out of the purse and
handed them to Brigham Pope, who passed them on.
The girl's name, according to what her ration books said, was Trudy Stevens, of a West Fifty-fifth Street
address, New York City. Unmarried. She had a cigarette case, so expensive it must be a gift. No
woman would buy such an expensive thing for herself. Engraved on this case was Patrick to Trudy,
Yuletide 1944.
There was a love-letter. A letter from a Captain Patrick O'Sien to Miss Trudy Stevens. Tom Ittle read
this, and chuckled as he read.
“I could write a better love letter than this to that babe,” Tom Ittle said.
“You ever see an Irishman who could write a love letter? They do it with talking. At talking, they got the
world beat.”
Ittle looked up. “That's right, Clark.” He passed over the love letter. “Want to read it, Clark?”
He did want to read it. He thought, after he had read a while, that an Irishman should be ashamed of such
a letter. It opened with some mush, rambled around to the matter of a new Leica camera the writer had
taken from a German officer, closed with some more mush.
He realized he was scowling. He thought: Good God, am I jealous of this guy, this Irishman! He hoped
not. But the letter had made him angry, and that was a bad sign.
Resolutely, he concentrated on his main interest, which was deciding whether or not the letter was a code
message. If it was, it was a slick job.
He asked, “You got an infra-red lamp?”
Tom Ittle grinned. “You are smart.”
He opened a suitcase. He had the infra-red outfit in that, and an X-ray, one of the tiny portable ones,
too.
He took the letter and went over it again, and when he finished it was pretty certain it was not enciphered
with secret ink of any generally known sort.
“Now,” Tom Ittle said, “I'll go over the rest of the stuff just for luck.”
He didn't find anything.
Ittle put everything back in the purse.
“We didn't do so good,” he said.
THE train was running loosely again, somewhat more slowly. It passed through a hamlet. Switches
clicked past under the wheels, a crossing whipped past, an automatic signal swinging its arm with the red
disc for a hand; two automobiles and a truck were waiting at the crossing. And then the feeling of
strength flowed through the train again as it picked up speed.
He was watching Tom Ittle. He couldn't tell whether the fat man was suspicious or not. What they
wanted wasn't in the purse, that was sure. They had drawn a blank. He hoped that he hadn't drawn a
blank. He hoped that what they were after was among the stuff he had thrust down in the washroom
wastebasket, down among the used paper towels.
He hoped. Tom Ittle wouldn't notice that he was taking care to stand with his back to one of the
compartment walls. So that Brigham Pope was not behind him.
Tom Ittle picked up the crossword puzzle. He gazed at it, wrote in a word, pursed his Brobdignagian
lips. He lifted his eyes from the puzzle, sat looking at nothing in a fixed sort of a way. His eyes were large,
brown, calf-like.
“Clark,” Tom Ittle said.
“Yes?”
“She knows us.”
“Not me, she doesn't.”
“That's what I mean,” Tom Ittle said. “She knows me and she knows Brigham Pope here, but she does
not know you.”
“I thought you said she didn't know she was being followed.”
“I'm not making myself exactly clear,” Tom Ittle explained. “We've been following her. She may have
noticed us. She wouldn't have noticed you. In other words, you stand the best chance.”
“Best chance for what?”
“Pick her up.”
“Eh?”
“Get acquainted with her, start following her around, make love to her,” Tom Ittle grinned. “That
shouldn't be tough.”
“It'll be tough for me.”
Tom Ittle laughed. “You're kidding.”
“Okay. I'm kidding then.”
“You'll do it?”
“If you say so.”
“Good.”
He supposed this was all of it. He had the girl's purse now, and the stuff back in it. He put the purse
under his coat, shoved it down inside his belt, and laid his hand on the door.
“Wait,” Ittle said.
The fat man's face had become cold, ugly, full of ferocity and hate. He was silent, as if turning violence
over and over in his mind.
Finally Tom Ittle said, “Did you ever hear of a man named Doc Savage?”
He didn't answer immediately. He wet his lips, took his hand off the door, turned and put his back to the
door. He had one thought: How could they kill him here? Now. There were lots of ways they could try it.
But he didn't believe they could make any of the ways work. There was just the three of them in the
compartment, and space was close. He believed he could keep them from killing him.
He asked: “What about Savage?”
Tom Ittle slapped his hand down on the book of crossword puzzles. It made a report. It startled them all,
even startled Tom Ittle.
“So you've heard of him!” Ittle said.
“Is that so unusual?”
He was pleased with the cold placidity in his voice.
“I guess it ain't unusual.” Tom Ittle made a conscious effort to speak properly, but it did not come
naturally to him, nor did he do a very good job. “No, I guess it ain't unusual.” Ittle eyed him intently.
“Don't it scare you?”
“Should it scare me?”
“What would you say,” asked Tom Ittle, “if I told you we think Doc Savage may be sticking his nose into
this?”
“Is he?”
“We think so.” Tom Ittle nodded slowly. He turned the puzzle book in his hands. He asked, “What are
you going to do about it, Clark?”
“Do?”
“Yeah.”
“I'm going to be about ten times as careful as a man walking on eggs,” he said.
“You going to quit?”
He pretended to consider this, to give it deep thought. Having done that, he shook his head. “Not right
now,” he said. “I'm not scared.”
Tom Ittle was pleased. “Neither am I, I don't mind telling you.” Ittle grinned at him. “I don't mind telling
you I think you're a sensible man, Clark. A mighty sensible man. In my book, that means a lot.”
“I'm no God Almighty,” he said.
Nodding, Tom Ittle said, “Most of us stop being that when we get to be about twenty-five years old.” He
chuckled, added, “I hope you can do all right with this babe, though.”
“I'll try.”
“You do that.” Ittle opened the puzzle book. He took a pencil out of a vest pocket where there were at
least ten other pencils. “You do that, and you tell us what you learn about her.”
“Okay.”
Tom Ittle suddenly laughed. “It would be nice if you could interest her in you becoming her protector.”
“That might be an idea.”
Brigham Pope became excited. “Say, that is an idea! Maybe we could fix a little attack on her, and Clark
here could rescue her from us. That ought to put him in solid with her.”
Tom Ittle looked up. “What do you think of that idea, Clark?”
“Corny.”
Ittle wasn't displeased. “It is, at that. But we might dress it up for her.”
“Maybe. The old gags are usually dependable.”
“Yes, that's true.”
Tom Ittle began working on the crossword puzzle. He didn't look up. There was an air of indescribable
evil, quite tangible evil, about him as he sat there.
He left Tom Ittle and Brigham Pope.
He did not immediately go back to the day coach. Between two of the pullmans, someone had left open
the upper half of an outside door. He leaned on the door and watched the farmlands slide past. To his
astonishment, he saw that the train was running through gay sunlight. They were out of the rain.
He felt—mentally—as if he had come out in the sunlight himself. Relieved.
He wondered if they knew that he was Doc Savage.
Chapter III
摘要：

KINGJOECAYADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2003BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI?ChapterII?ChapterIII?ChapterIV?ChapterV?ChapterVI?ChapterVII?ChapterVIII?ChapterIX?ChapterX?ChapterXI?ChapterXII?ChapterXIII?ChapterXIVScannedandProofedbyTomStephens ChapterIHEstoleth...

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