The woman was bent far forward . . .
Now that’s how you start a story!
It regresses to the mean quickly as she is only leaning over the steering wheel with squinty eyes looking at the road ahead and checking the mirrors for the car following her. Her eyes get the opposite of squinty as they begin firing on her. One shot blows out a tire, and a parting shot thuds into the back of the seat beside the woman.
The brave drive-by missers speed away, leaving the woman fortuitously stranded by a gas station. She gives the mechanic her card and cabs her way back to Manhattan. They see from her card that she is Mrs. Dale Hanan [1] of the Park Avenue Dale Hanans. The mechanic recognizes her his the name. “She’s Hanan’s wife — the millionaire. Made his dough in oil” which is why his bread is so yummy. His partner says, “That’s swell. We can soak him plenty.”
Her cab stops at 63rd and Park Avenue. Hey, there’s the Regency — I’ve stayed there! She calls her husband and tells him what happened. An hour later, he is paying a visit to Mr. Druse. Hanan tells Druse that Jeffrey Crandall just tried to kill his wife. Hanan says his ex-wife Catherine has gone through about $115k of her inheritance gambling. She has further run up a debt of $68k.
Hanan says his wife still has a set of rubies named “Pigeon Blood” by the worst marketing department on earth. The plan was for Crandall to steal the rubies, Catherine to collect the insurance to pay him back, and Crandall to give her back the rubies. Which sounds great, although, I’m not sure why Crandall needed to be involved at all. Anyhoo, Crandall gave her back some phonies, doubling his take. She threatened to rat him out to the insurance company even if she had to go to jail. That’s when his boyz started shooting at her. Druse agrees to help out for the low, low sum of $35k. What the hell, that’s $650k in 2018 dollars!
Druse goes to her place and finds her drunk, with a dead man in her apartment. The dude tried to sneak up the fire escape so she brained him with a niblick. They leave the apartment. Druse asks how long she and Hanan have been divorced. Like every woman I talk to, she takes about 3 seconds to tell him she is married.
They go to Druse’s luxurious penthouse apartment. It is as fabulous as you would expect from a guy who takes $650k cases. It lacks an infinity pool, but has an infinity carpet — the living room is open to the dark city skyline outside, without even a railing.
Druse leaves Catherine and uses a phone downstairs to call Hanan. He tells Hanan his wife Catherine is dead — what a scamp! Then he goes to see Crandall and gives him the same story. Crandall turns out to be pretty honest as gangsters go. The rubies had already been switched out when he stole them.
Druse regroups with the Hanans back at his crib. Druse lays out the whole story and someone inevitably goes over the edge of that open-air living room. The story is pretty standard, but the image of that death is staying with me. That would be worth the price of admission in a movie.
And by “price of admission” I mean a month’s Netflix fee because God knows they haven’t earned their $7.99 in months.
Other Stuff:
- [1] I refuse to watch The Handmaid’s Tale because of the producers’ hysteria that it could become reality any day. On the other hand, the old convention of sticking Mrs. In front of the husband’s full name is about as close to Offred as you can get.
- Druse has a Filipino boy working for him at his pad. We know this because the phrase “Filipino boy” appears 13 times in 3 pages.
- Paul Cain was last heard from in One, Two, Three in this same collection. So either he is a great writer, or he has a lot of stuff in the public domain.
- First published in the November 1933 issue of Black Mask.
- Also that month: Duck Soup released.