Crime Gets A Head

When I broke in, the Droyster dame was saying something about a calling card and a Great Dane dog. “Just a minute. The boss has just blown in.”

I handed him the phone and stepped back to watch him. He began asking Alicia Droyster a lot of questions. His eyes got warm-looking, and I could see his hand tightening on the phone. Well, I have been with him long enough to know the signs. I wondered what in hell it would be this time.

Smith can get into more messes in five minutes than you or I could in ten years. He began to smile, making my stomach nearly flip over. I wished he would tell the Droyster dame goodbye and hang up. But I knew from the way he was grinning that he wouldn’t do that. Smith is a private shamus because he wants to be. And that kind of guy always hunts trouble.

I moved around the desk and sat down. I was already betting myself three to one that Smith would find what he was hunting—if Alicia Droyster hired him.

Two days ago, Mark Droyster, Alicia’s loving hubby, had gone home late in the afternoon, gone in his bedroom, and rigged up a contraption with coat hangers and a sawed-off shotgun. I thought it was a very messy way for a guy to kill himself. When they found Droyster, there wasn’t anything left of his head.

The bulls had marked it up as suicide without thinking about it much, and Droyster had been put six feet under late yesterday. It had been a very private funeral. The preacher, Alicia Droyster, a sawbones named Lawrence Jordan, and pallbearers were all the people the Droyster dame would let enter the cemetery.

As usual, the boys on the news sheets made a big splash with it. This Mark Droyster had been as tough as a bulldog. He’d started as a kid selling papers and muscled his way up in a rough and ready style until he was a big shot. But when he cashed in his chips, the newshounds hinted that he was busted. It was odds around town that losing his dough had put him in such a funk that he killed himself.