Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 172 - Let's Kill Ames

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LET'S KILL AMES
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page formatted 2004 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
Originally published in Doc Savage Magazine October 1947
Chapter I
I'LL never forget the man with the dirty face.
The least they could do, you'd think, was send a clean man. One with enough pride to wipe off his chin,
anyway. It was his chin that got me. There was a piece of his breakfast on it, a bit of something that was
probably oatmeal, and there is nothing quite like a two-hour-old chunk of oatmeal for chin decoration.
He wore a tan suit of which the coat was a slightly different tan than the pants, and both halves fit him
about equally poorly. As if, a couple of days ago, someone had peeled a banana and hung the peel on
him. He was not a big man, and he did not look as if he had been constructed for any useful purpose.
The only large thing about him was his mouth, wide-spreading, round-lipped, separating his flattish head
in two parts like a clamshell.
He looked as determined as he could, which still left him looking like something you'd prefer to rake
away with a stick.
He said, “Miss Ames?”
“Yes.”
“Miss Travice Ames?” he said.
“Yes.”
He unfolded a paper that was, considering that he had been carrying it, remarkably clean. “You wants
look at this, baby?” he mumbled.
I saw what the paper was, and said, “No, thanks.”
I knew who and what he was. But they still could have sent a clean man.
“You don't wants read it, huh?” he said. “I guess you know what it is, don't you? I guess you been
expecting this, haven't you?”
I moved around to the windward side of him. His breath smelled like a can of fish that had been open too
long, or maybe it was just him.
“Let's skip the personal touch,” I said.
“You want,” he asked, “to do anything about it? In cases like this, if—”
“Never mind.”
“Are you sure—”
“I'm sure,” I said. “I was never surer of anything. What do they pay you for? To give me an argument?”
He nodded. “I thought probably you wouldn't,” he said. “When they're as good-looking as you are, they
don't usually give a damn. You take a homely one, they don't get things as easy, and they got a different
attitude. They value things more.”
“What is this?”
“What is what? Whatcha mean?”
I said, “Skip it,” in a tired voice. And he looked at my car, at my beautiful car. It was a roadster, a
convertible, one of those convertible station wagons. It was not two months old and there was not a
flashier job in town, not in the whole city. Only it wasn't my car any longer. I was beginning to see that.
And he said, “You got anything personal in the iron? Anything you want to get out?”
Calling a car like that an iron was a sin.
“No,” I said.
So he got in my car. He drove it away. He was from the finance company. But at least it seemed they
could have sent a clean man.
That was the first of two bad things that happened. The second bad thing wasn't long following—my
hotel suite door had a trick gadget in the lock. The hotel had put it there. It was one of those gimmicks
they put in the lock of a guest's room when the guest hasn't paid. A French key.
I remembered that the elevator boy'd had a funny look on his face as I rode up.
And I was a little surprised at the Afton House. The hotel was, although Afton House wasn't a fancy
name, one of those luxury places. I was paying—or wasn't paying—forty-six dollars a day for
parlor-bedroom-bath suite. The minimum single rate was, I understood, fourteen dollars. And these had
been the Afton House rates back during the depression and the pre-war days, which gives an idea. So I
was surprised that they would be so hoc genus homme as to put a French key in a guest's lock. It was
not only old-fashioned, but it was worthy of a three-fifty-a-day hotel.
So I was locked out.
THE desk clerk was named Gilrox. He was a slick article, just long enough from New York that he liked
to show it. His cheeks were pink, and his hair looked slick enough to have a coating of airplane dope on
it. But his hands were thin and colorless, as if he washed them with Drano.
He expected me to walk up to the desk and give him hell. He got all set for it. He gave the gardenia in his
lapel a sniff. He looked as if he was going to have fun.
I fooled him and went to the main desk. There was a windowed hotel envelope. I didn't open that. There
were four telephone message envelopes. I opened those, and they all said the same thing in slightly
different ways. They said: Nat Pulaski had called. He had called at 2:00, at 3:10, at 3:45, and at 4:20.
One said, Planning on dinner date tonight. Love. Another one said: Date tonight. Urgent. Love.
And still another said: Call at five. Important.
None of the notes smelled of a chemical laboratory, but they should have; and my imagination easily
added a faint odor of chemical reagent to them. They sounded like Pulaski. Everything was urgent with
Pulaski. The sap.
The clerk, Mr. Gilrox, had stopped sniffing his gardenia. He was standing with his fingertips resting on the
desk, like a student typist waiting for the speed test to begin.
“What about this?” I asked him.
“Yes, what about it?” said Mr. Gilrox. “Yes, indeed. What about four hundred and eighty-six dollars?”
“Is that what I owe?”
He nodded. “Add a matter of forty-one cents, and we have the exact total.”
“And you want it?”
“We feel we would be happier with it,” Mr. Gilrox said.
“I should like some of my baggage.”
“No doubt.”
“You mean,” I asked, “that I'm being locked out with the clothes I stand in?”
“They're very lovely clothes, Miss Ames,” he said. “I've frequently remarked on that to myself. What fine
and expensive clothes Miss Ames has, I've said to myself. And just a while ago I said it again: Miss
Ames is wonderfully dressed this evening, isn't she?” He was as polite as if he was petting a kitten, and
he was enjoying himself.
“Legally,” I said, “I suppose you know what you are doing?”
“Hotels usually do. You see, this isn't entirely an unusual situation.” He smirked and added, “I don't
imagine it's unusual with you, either, Miss Ames.”
“What do you mean by that nasty crack?”
Mr. Gilrox was all ready for me. He slipped an envelope from under the desk, and he slapped it down
before me as if it was a plate of caviar. He said, “Item one: The Beach Colonial hotel in Miami, Florida, a
notation to the effect that you are not to be permitted to register in the future. Also a rather puzzling
addition that it was necessary to replace the management of the hotel upon your departure. I take it
somebody there underestimated you. . . .” There was curiosity back of his large smug eyes. He waited
hopefully for an explanation.
“What a big curiosity you have, Grandma Gilrox,” I said.
He scowled. “Item two: The Atlanta, Georgia, police department states you are hereafter unwelcome in
Atlanta, Georgia. No details. I gather somebody there also underestimated you.”
“You find this interesting?”
“That I do,” he agreed. “That I do indeed. So did Mr. Coyle, the manager here.”
“And you and Mr. Coyle decided?”
“That if you have four hundred eighty-six dollars and forty-one cents, you may pay it to us, and we will
see that a porter delivers your bags to the street with our best service.”
“I don't have four hundred and eighty-six dollars and those cents.”
“How much have you?”
“Not that much.”
“Have you enough to interest us in a compromise?” he inquired.
“I doubt it.”
“That's very sad,” he said. “I regret it greatly.”
“I can see you do regret,” I said. “But if I paid up, you would still throw me out. Am I right?”
“Exactly.”
“Why?”
“We feel that you're a—” He let it hang. He chopped it off as if he had unexpectedly come up against it,
and it had thorns on it. He stood there and remembered what he could about the slander laws. He said,
“Let's put it this way: We feel that you've been underestimated in the past. We wouldn't like to
underestimate you, Miss Ames.”
“You're not calling me a tramp, by any chance?”
“Oh, no indeed,” he said. He meant that.
“Or an adventuress?” I added.
With his look, he said yes, that was it exactly. With his voice, a voice that sounded as if it wrapped things
in velvet each time it spoke, he said, “Don't quote me on that. I didn't say it.”
“Anyway,” I said, “I believe we understand each other.”
He said he hoped we did. And then he asked, “What are you going to do?”
He listened to me tell him how much of his business it was, but if his ears burned the glow didn't show. It
might be possible to insult him, but a hotel guest couldn't do it. Too many had tried. He smiled and
adjusted the flower in his lapel and probably enjoyed it.
I went over and sat in a chair in the lobby. I wanted to think about it. It needed thinking about, because I
had in the whole world something like five dollars in cash.
That was how I happened to decide to let Nat Pulaski buy me a dinner after all. Pulaski was a sucker
and for two days I had been giving him the boot, but getting locked out of my hotel, having my car taken
back, put a different light on it. Hello, sucker.
Chapter II
PULASKI arrived with more than one thing wrong with him. He came in acting as if there was a
rattlesnake in his clothing somewhere and he couldn't find it.
I detest short men, and Pulaski was a short one. He had moist full lips, but otherwise his face wasn't bad,
although now it was redder than it usually was.
He had a go-around with the revolving door when he came in. He was a little too slow on his feet, and
the door batted his rather ample rear, causing him to stumble, and then he got his topcoat caught in one
of the leaves, and stood jerking foolishly at it. The coat came loose and he stumbled back on legs that
bent at the knees at the wrong times.
Oh, fine! I thought contemptuously. Pulaski has to be tight. Pulaski sober was no bargain.
When he spied me, his round face got the expression that the riders to the hounds get when they sight the
fox. I thought he was going to shout, “Tally-ho!” But he just cried, “Oh, ho! Oh, ho!” And then he came
over carefully enough to be walking on golf balls, and wanted to know, “What have I done? Why do you
do these things to me?”
“What things?”
“These cruelties,” he cried. “These diabolical moods of yours! These refined mistreatments you inflict on
poor old Pulaski! A pox on you, woman!”
He was usually that way, but not always as bad. There was evidently a little of thwarted ham actor in the
fellow.
He rocked back on his heels, then forward again, stopping the tilting each time just before he upset. He
continued his complaint.
“Two days!” he shouted. “Two days, fair lady, and you have ignored my humble supplications.
Ignored—hell! I haven't even been able to get you on the telephone.” He paused dramatically, registered
what he evidently thought was stricken grief, and then forgave me. “But your loveliness overwhelms me.
Such beauty wipes all rancor from my mind. I am reduced to a carpet, a slightly rum-soaked carpet, and
you may walk upon me if you wish.” He hiccoughed. “Walk on me if you wish,” he repeated, and it
appeared for a minute that he was going to lie down so that I could.
That was Pulaski. Ham actor, amateur wolf, and—this evening for a change—rum pot. He did not
customarily drink, and he was showing it.
There was something on his mind that was driving him to drink.
I was sure of it before we were halfway through dinner.
He asked where we should dine, and I paid him off by naming the most expensive place in town.
“Hmm!” he said. “I kiss twenty bucks goodbye.”
He would be lucky to get out with a check under thirty dollars. I ordered oysters Rockefeller, the sole
marguery, a green salad, planked steak, crêpes Suzette, and café diablo. I ordered a daiquiri first, a
white wine for the fish, then champagne. He stuck to bourbon and a steak, and did not eat enough of his
steak to give the bourbon a fight.
I saw that the waiter kept the bourbon coming. My idea was to get Pulaski mellow, then touch him for
my hotel bill. Probably he would have to be pretty mellow to stand still for a touch like that.
Pulaski was a chemist employed, he claimed, by himself. I did not know that there were self-employed
chemists, and I still was not sure of it, but that is what Pulaski had said he was. He had a laboratory at
130 Washington Street—he said—and he lived at 720 Ironwood Drive, in an apartment. He said. I was
pretty sure about the last, because I had telephoned him there a couple of times.
He was nothing much. A fellow I had met in Palm Beach, Florida, had been with this Pulaski in the army.
The other fellow had been a sergeant and Pulaski had been a second lieutenant, and the man in Palm
Beach had spent a lot of time saying what he would like to do to Pulaski, and what he would do to
Pulaski if he ever got to this city and had a chance to look him up. He had several things in mind for
Pulaski, including a stroll over Pulaski's face. The sort of a man who had made that kind of a second
lieutenant in the army sounded like an easy mark and I had given Pulaski a ring when I got to town.
But I hadn't come to town to find Pulaski. I had come concerning a business opening with a very sharp
and clever woman named Carolyn Lane, who was calling herself Lady Seabrook, and who had thought
up something nice and lucrative in cosmetics. She had an angel for it, but it was supposed to be turning
out so well that she was going to work the racket and not the angel. Just supposed to be. The D.A. told
the Grand jury about her the day I got there. They even put the angel in jail with her.
This town was a desert. Nothing had turned up, I was broke, and I didn't like Pulaski, but he was running
after me. That was all right. Pulaski was the kind you would enjoy trimming. He wouldn't sit on your
conscience.
I ordered Pulaski another bourbon.
Pulaski continued bragging to me. He liked to boast to me, I think, because I spoke his language. When
he talked about fluxing and reducing reagents, saponification numbers, Elliot apparatus and molecular
weights—why do the simpleminded ones always talk about their business with big words?—I could
understand what he was talking about.
In college, I specialized in chemistry. Afterward, I worked at it for a couple of years. I worked for the
American Union Chemical Foundation until one of their dopey chemists perfected an improved
production method for penicillin and was going to just hand it over to our employers. I had just about
persuaded him to take the idea and go into business for ourselves when they fired me. They had a lawyer
with bright ideas, too, but all they made stick was firing me.
Anyway, that was why Pulaski liked to brag to me. It wasn't why he liked me; it was just why he would
brag to me. But there was something eating him tonight.
I had merely thought I would stick him for an expensive dinner, and maybe for the hotel bill, although I
doubted he even had that kind of money, but now I was beginning to wonder what was eating him.
Whatever it was, it was taking big bites out of his courage.
Pulaski was scared. It finally dawned on me. Pulaski was so frightened of something that he couldn't
keep his mouth still. He wore it like a garment. It oozed out of his pores. They say animals can smell fear
in a person, and Pulaski would certainly have been a bouquet tonight.
“What,” I asked him, “is bothering you?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Bothering me? Nothing at all, baby. I'm just made breathless by you, is all.”
Men seem to be like that. Ask them a question, and they back away, and they either want to be begged
and are being coy, or they downright don't intend to tell you and will pretend that it's preposterous to
think anything is nipping on them. Pulaski belonged to the latter bracket. He didn't intend to tell me
anything, and was made more frightened than he had been by the fact that I had spotted something amiss.
Men are suckers. I haven't met one who isn't. They can be played like a violin if you have the right kind
of a bow and know how to use it. I had discovered this several years ago, when I was about fourteen.
Pulaski was an easy fiddle to play, and that was what he was, just a fiddle. The music that came out of
him probably wouldn't have much quality.
AN hour and fifteen minutes later, I had him giving out information. We were in a night-club now, the
fanciest one the city had—there is something about extremely fleshy surroundings that makes some men
want to boast. That, I had decided, was the way to get Pulaski's information out of him. Get him to take
enough liquor to weaken his fences, then goad him.
I led him into making a pass or two, then gave his amour a cold reception. He complained about this.
“Listen,” I said. “I'm not saying I couldn't fall for you, Pulaski. You're not bad looking. But it just happens
that I have certain ideas about small-timers, and I'm not going to get all involved with some fellow who
uses nickels when he should be using dollars.”
He flushed. “You're mercenary.”
“You think so? I call it practical.”
He said angrily, “You think I'm a small-timer, huh?”
“I didn't say so.”
He batted his eyes, rubbed his hand over his face as if to remove the rum film from his eyes, and
complained, “You're cold-blooded.”
“Pulaski,” I said, “you'd be surprised. I'm not as cold as you'd think. But the kind of a man that arouses
me must be a man. I don't mean he has to roll in money, but that would go with it. My kind of a man has
to be one who does things—big and clever things in a big and clever way. . . . You're nice-looking,
Pulaski. But you're not extraordinary. There's nothing exciting nor adventurous about you. If there was,
well . . .” I let him get what he could out of some eyelash-fluttering.
This was pretty broad stuff, but the alcohol had him foggy enough that the only thing that would make an
impression on him was a club. It worked, too. He got a little purple, and hit the table a lick.
He said, “Listen, baby, you're underestimating old Pulaski.”
“Words,” I said, “don't make it so.”
“You're just a dollar-chasing wench.”
I looked at him and said, “Penny-chasing.”
“Huh?”
“I'm sitting here with you, aren't I?”
He blew up. “Listen, you! Don't call me cheap! I'm going to grab off twenty thousand bucks in the next
two weeks. What do you think of that?”
I thought he was a liar. And pretty soon I didn't. There was the way he had said he would have twenty
thousand dollars in two weeks, the way he tied the words up in fear like red ribbons, that made it
convincing. And puzzling. Pulaski's type didn't get twenty-thousand-dollar fees. Not honestly. And if it
was honest, if he had stumbled on some chemical formula or process, he wouldn't be this scared.
So I told him not to be ridiculous, that I was in no mood for bragging, and to finish his drink and take me
home. That made him madder, and the angrier he got, the more determined he was to prove his
importance.
It took another hour to get the story out of him.
It raised my hair.
THERE were three men named J. X. Smith, Sonny Conover and James L. Like. There was another
man—unnamed—who hated the three. This other man—if it was a man; it may not have been; Pulaski
called the individual “person” throughout—had hired Pulaski to furnish an unusual poison. The poison
was unusual. It would lay in the body tissue several months before it killed the victims. In the meantime, it
could be neutralized and rendered harmless by a treatment which only Pulaski knew about. Pulaski, of
course, had sold the treatment to the “person" along with the poison.
“This person I'm talking about,” said Pulaski, “is going to administer the poison to the three, then demand
plenty of dough for treating them. And they'll pay, too. That's the only way they can save their necks.” He
made a fist and added, “For furnishing the stuff, I get paid twenty grand.” He hit the table again, and
demanded, “Now, what do you think of that?”
“You're drunk,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Or crazy as a gooney bird.”
He batted his eyes at me in an owlish rage. He did that for a long time, nearly a minute, and then he said
in a loose-mouthed foolish way, “Sure. . . . Sure, Ames, I was just talking.”
I knew what had happened. It had finally come into his rum-sodden head that he had talked too much.
He was closing his mouth, and moreover, trying to take back what he had told me.
“You're just bragging,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Sure. . . . I just made up that stuff.”
“You should fix up your stories when you're sober,” I told him. “When you're tight, you think of some
pretty zany ones.”
“I guess you're right.”
It had dawned on me by now that Pulaski's tale of three men being hated by a fourth person who was
going to give them a freak poison and demand extortion money for saving them was true. If it had been a
lie, Pulaski wouldn't have admitted it.
I said, “If there was such a poison, there would be no way of convincing the three they had been doped
with it and would die if they weren't treated. It's ridiculous.”
“The hell it is!” he said.
“Oh, don't be dumb, Pulaski. I'm getting tired of such stupidity.”
The urge to brag got the best of him again, and he said boastfully, “Suppose the stuff could be detected
by a Geiger counter or an electroscope?”
I think I just stared at him for a while. I was floored. He had something. It was practical—except that, as
far as I knew, there was no cure for poisoning by any one of the several compounds that could be used,
once they were present in the body in fatal amounts.
“There's no cure for anything of that sort,” I said.
He snorted. “Oh, if it was insoluble in a salt, and there was a treatment that would cause the body to
eject the salt from its tissue, it could be done.”
“Ridiculous.”
It wasn't, though. I was chemist enough to know that it wasn't.
He rubbed his face with his hand again, and got a fresh hold on his caution. “Sure. . . . It was just
something I said to impress you.”
He wouldn't drink any more. And, as he grew sober, his fear crawled on him with colder feet. He
wouldn't talk about it any more, and I was careful not to pry too obviously. I pried in subtle ways, but got
nothing more. I would have liked to know who was paying him twenty thousand dollars, but I didn't find
out. Maybe it wasn't twenty thousand; perhaps he had lied about that. But I believed someone was
paying him something, and that there really was a scheme.
Pulaski was feeling rather thwarted. He had tried to make himself out quite a big-timer, and it had
flopped on him, and he was embarrassed. He still had that urge to be big in my eyes. It was, if anything,
stronger. He needed to redeem himself, he felt.
I used the way he was feeling to take him for five hundred.
I said casually, “I'm in an embarrassing position. Mr. Clark, the manager of my plant in Tulsa, was
supposed to wire me some money. But Mr. Clark is in Mexico, and won't be back for a week, and it's
going to leave me awfully short.”
I complained about that for a while, making a picture of the little girl in distress, and presently Pulaski had
his hand in his pocket, and was asking, “How much do you need?”
“Oh, a measly five hundred would tide me over,” I said.
The dope handed it over. He did it with a great air of what's-a-stinking-five-hundred-bucks, but his eyes
stuck out a little.
Parting with the five hundred must have made him a little sick, also, because I had no trouble getting rid
of him in the taxi outside my hotel. He didn't even come upstairs with me.
He just sat there and watched me walk away from the taxi with his five hundred and the story of
poisoning-for-profit that he'd told me.
Chapter III
THE pink-cheeked slick Mr. Gilrox was still on duty at the hotel desk. Whether he was working
overtime, or hanging around to make it his business to see that I didn't get back into my suite, I didn't
know. If it was the latter, the insulting I had given him earlier had had more effect than apparent at the
time. At any rate, he got an I-expected-this look when he saw me.
“What, no evening dress, Miss Ames?” he inquired nastily.
“Mr. Gilrox,” I said. “You can file that smirk under the heading: To be enjoyed in private. Or you can get
it slapped off your silly face.”
“Indeed?” he said. “I'd love to see you try that.”
“You would call a cop?”
“Exactly.”
“I've come for my luggage,” I said. “And I can guess exactly what you will say to that.”
He nodded. “You did guess it, tutz.”
“Don't call me tutz.”
“Very well, Miss Ames.”
I got out Pulaski's five hundred, counted two hundred dollars off it and laid that on the desk under his
nose.
“My, my,” he said. He had watched me count it. “What do you think that will buy you?”
“My luggage.”
“Oh, no. The amount you owe, Miss Ames, is not two hundred bucks. It is four hundred and eighty-six
dollars.”
“You refuse to give me my luggage upon my offer to pay two hundred?”
He felt pretty highly of himself. “That gentle silence you heard,” he said, “was our best refusal.”
I said, “Sonny, do you have a copy of the state statues handy?”
“The what?”
“The statutes. The laws of this fine state. They are printed in three volumes for the year of 1947.”
摘要：

LET'SKILLAMESADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispageformatted2004BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI?ChapterII?ChapterIII?ChapterIV?ChapterV?ChapterVI?ChapterVII?ChapterVIII?ChapterIX?ChapterX?ChapterXI?ChapterXII?ChapterXIIIOriginallypublishedinDocSavageMagazineOctober1947ChapterI...

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