Mourning Glory (Book #656) Read online

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  It started with the name ‘Emanuel Kadaver’ and a New York address … both of which were written on one side of a five-hundred dollar bill. Intrigued, Larry Kent went along discover just what his mysterious benefactor wanted. Next thing he knew he was stranded fifteen hundred miles from home with two whole days missing from his memory.

  Who had dumped him on a lonely, humid island in the middle of the Louisiana swamplands? Aside from Kadaver, there were only two other suspects—a tawny-haired swamp girl named Becky, who longed to become a woman, and the mysterious Miss Baines, whose gloomy, run-down mansion was patrolled by dogs who had been trained not just to defend, but to kill.

  Only one thing was for sure—if Larry didn’t clear himself of the neatest frame-up he’d ever encountered, he had an appointment with the electric chair …

  LARRY KENT 656: MOURNING GLORY

  By Don Haring

  First Published by The Cleveland Publishing Pty Ltd

  Copyright © Piccadilly Publishing

  First Digital Edition: April 2019

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: David Whitehead

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with The Cleveland Publishing Pty Ltd.

  Chapter 1 … rogue’s gallery …

  It was a brownstone walk-up on East 73rd Street. I checked the mailboxes in the vestibule. Under Number 4 was a white card on which was typed: EMANUEL KADAVER. He was my man.

  I climbed three flights of stairs, twisted a brass bell-ringer beneath a small glass peep-hole. A moment later the glass magnified a brown eye. The eye rolled down and up, then disappeared. A bolt rasped and the door opened.

  He was at least four inches taller than my six feet. His long face was thin and bony almost to the point of emaciation. His large eyes were deep-set, yet they seemed to glow, as though a light burned behind them.

  “Emanuel Kadaver?” I asked.

  “Yes. And you, of course, are Mr. Larry Kent.” He had a soft, resonant voice. “Come in, please.”

  As I walked past the half-open door, what had been the subtle suggestion of incense became heavier, sharper. It was in a dimly-lit room. In the light from the hallway I saw what appeared to be a group of standing figures. A trap? I didn’t want to look foolish if it wasn’t. But I wanted some kind of protection if it was. So I gave a shake of my right arm and the wrist derringer slid into my hand.

  At that moment there was a loud click and the room was flooded with light. The shadowy figures took full shape. Four men. One held a machine-gun cradled in his arms, another a baseball bat, the third a cleaver. The fourth had his arms at his sides; his shiny face was smiling.

  Kadaver chuckled. “I’m sorry if my friends startled you, Mr. Kent. I should have warned you about them.” He walked between me and the four “men”, smiled. “They are realistic at first glance, aren’t they?”

  They were wax figures! I closed my hand around the wrist gun, put the hand in my pocket and let go of the gun.

  “They sure are,” I said.

  “Until six years ago they were part of the Carlotta Wax Museum in Philadelphia. Then Rudolph Carlotta died and all his possessions had to be sold at auction to pay his creditors. I bought these four gentlemen. This …” He indicated the figure with the machine-gun ... is the famous—or should I say infamous?—Dutch Kramer. During the wild days of prohibition he killed forty-two men with his Thompson submachine gun. He also killed some innocent bystanders, including two women and a child. It was this last that led to his downfall. Fifty-six law enforcement officers trapped him in a farmhouse. They put more than a hundred bullets in him—but he took six of them with him and wounded ten more.”

  “One of our great folk heroes,” I said.

  “A mass murderer par excellence.” Kadaver moved to the next figure. The corners of his eyes crinkled as he took in the stocky body, the baseball bat with a smear of gleaming red near the end. “Ah, but here is a gentleman who made Kramer seem an amateur. Not many men were given the honor of being dispatched by him personally; this was usually done by paid executioners. However, on occasion he was quite happy to oblige ...”

  “Capone,” I said.

  “Yes.” Smiling, Kadaver traced a scar down the cheek of the wax face. “Al Capone. Scarface. No one will ever know exactly how many men he condemned to death, nor how many he killed personally. But we do know about the big dinner at which he honored two of his lieutenants.”

  “I read all about it,” I told him. But Kadaver went on as though I hadn’t spoken:

  “The two men must have thought it was the height of irony, particularly when Alphonzo Capone got to his feet and made a speech in which he referred to their contributions to his organization in glowing terms. You see, they had decided to turn him in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They would be government witnesses in a trial that would send Capone to the electric chair.”

  “But Capone knew about it,” I said.

  “Ah, yes. Capone had paid informers everywhere. But he couldn’t just have the two men killed. The important men in his organization had to be shown what would happen to any and all informers. So he told the two men to come forward to be suitably rewarded. They did. On the table in front of Capone were two beautifully wrapped packages.

  “‘In these packages,’ Capone announced, ‘are two of the most expensive watches in the world. They’re yours—a token of the organization’s appreciation for all you’ve done.’

  “The two men accepted the packages and everyone applauded, including Capone. But Capone wasn’t finished. He held up his hands for quiet and then he said, ‘There’s just one more little thing. I understand you boys have been to the F.B.I. Well, I can’t give you a watch for that …’

  “And he reached under the table and brought up a baseball bat and bashed both their skulls in.”

  I said, “The way I read it, he kept hitting them until most of the guests at that banquet were very, very sick.’”

  Kadaver nodded. “He was making a point. Now, this fellow …” He moved to the third figure, the replica of a bald man with a beaming red face in which blue eyes danced merrily. There was a white apron, red-stained, around the figure’s middle. “This is Harvey Schlitzmann.”

  There was a gleaming meat cleaver in the wax figure’s right hand. Along the blade edge was the same kind of red paint that shone at the end of Capone’s baseball bat.

  “Harvey Schlitzmann was a butcher.” Kadaver smiled and, for a moment, a trick of the light made his face look like a grinning skull. “Yes, he was a butcher—in more ways than one. He was born in a small town, Carterville, in Ohio. Poor Harvey ...”

  Kadaver looked into the red face of the wax figure, shook his head in sympathy. “He didn’t have a very nice childhood. A glandular condition made him a fat freak. Children can be very, very cruel; I’m afraid they made Harvey’s life a nightmare.

  “Then, when he was thirteen, his parents died and he went to live with an aunt in California. Doctors treated his glandular condition and gradually he lost weight. He never became slim, but at least people didn’t stop and stare at him in the street.

  “After he graduated from high school, he went to a meat cutting school and then h
e was apprenticed to a butcher. He never went out with women, probably because he couldn’t forget how the girls in Carterville had laughed at him in school. Finally his aunt died, leaving him a little money. Soon after this, he returned to Carterville and opened a butcher shop.

  “A few years passed. Harvey’s shop did a reasonably good trade, steady but not spectacular—until he came out with a home-made sausage so delicious that people came from twenty or thirty miles away just to buy a few pounds.”

  Kadaver looked at me. “You guessed it, of course. Harvey was getting revenge for all those childhood incidents by killing his ex-tormenters one by one and grinding them up for sausage. He managed to do in twenty-four of them before a tip sent detectives to his deep-freeze room, where they found two human legs.”

  I said, “I guarantee the Carterville butchers didn’t sell much sausage for a long time after that.”

  “I didn’t look into that aspect of the case,” Kadaver returned, dead-pan. Then he gave a sigh of admiration. “Quite a man, Harvey Schlitzmann.”

  “Sure. A real swinger.”

  Kadaver walked to the fourth wax figure. “And here we have the gentleman who earned a place amongst the mass killers of all time. Not even Nero could match his amazing record. His name, Felix Vishinski.”

  “The whispering assassin,” I said.

  Kadaver’s thick eyebrows lifted. “Ah? You know about him, I see.”

  “Vishinski was one of Stalin’s ace hatchet men.”

  “He most certainly was!” Kadaver’s face was the pure reflection of admiration. “There was a train to Moscow that was never less than thirty minutes late, always because of incidents at a station only forty miles away. Vishinski went to the station when some of the Kremlin bosses complained about the service. He had every employee at the station line up in the waiting room, including the stationmaster and his assistant. He then took a pistol from his coat and put two bullets through the stationmaster’s head. Turning to the dead man’s white-faced assistant, he said, ‘You are now the stationmaster, and from this day on the train to Moscow will be on time.’ And it was.”

  “He was a real charmer,” I said.

  “An expert. Of course, the stationmaster incident was only a minor episode in Vishinski’s career. However, I think he enjoyed it because he took an active part. Most of the liquidations for which he was responsible were at long range. That was during the early days of agrarian reform in Russia.”

  “I know the story,” I said.

  Kadaver flicked a bit of lint from the sleeve of Vishinski’s coat. “A liquidator of the highest order.”

  “There was a more recent character who made him look like a piker,” I said. “Herr Schicklegruber.”

  “Ah, yes. Adolf Hitler.” Kadaver made sharp little sounds of disappointment with his tongue. “Unfortunately, the Carlotta Wax Museum was unable to keep Hitler’s figure for more than a few months. They had him built four times, but there was always someone who’d mutilate him.”

  “Dirty vandals,” I said.

  Kadaver blinked his eyes at me for a moment, then he chuckled. “You don’t seem very impressed by my friends.”

  “Don’t be silly. They make a beautiful quartet. You ought to put their arms around each other and play a recording of ‘Down by the Old Mill Stream’.”

  Kadaver kept the chuckle going. “An amusing idea.”

  “All this is very interesting, Mr. Kadaver, but—”

  “You want to get down to business.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Fine. But not here.” He turned toward the four figures. “If you’ll excuse us, gentlemen ...”

  Light and shadow were still playing tricks with my eyes. I could have sworn that Capone and Vishinski gave slight nods.

  “This way, Mr. Kent ...”

  I followed Kadaver into another room. One of the walls was lined with books. Another wall contained a huge fireplace. Two were curtained off. A small fuel lamp burned on a low table. Kadaver flicked a switch near the door and indirect light flooded down from slots in the ceiling. He flicked another switch and, with a gentle hiss and whisper of cloth, the curtains covering the two walls slid apart.

  “What do you think?” Kadaver asked with pride.

  Set in glass-covered cases or hanging from pegs on the two walls were hundreds of weapons. Knives and daggers, plain and disguised; pistols, from a few inches long to one with a barrel that measured at least two feet; swords; bolos; spears; blowguns; sling-shots; rifles; sub-machine guns; silken nooses—anything and everything that could kill a man.

  I said, “You have some interesting hobbies.”

  “It all ties in with my work, Mr. Kent.”

  “Are you a collector?”

  “I collect, as you can see, but that’s not how I make my living. All my adult life I’ve been a hunter. I began in South Africa. In those, days, it was mainly for pleasure that I hunted. My father left me a tidy sum of money, you see, and I detested the idea of going into business.”

  “Where did you live?”‘

  “We have no real home. My father’s business took him all over the world. That was how I developed my wanderlust, I suppose. Even Africa palled on me, when there was no longer any new dangerous game to hunt. I went to India, where I killed several tigers that had taken hundreds of people.” Kadaver hesitated. “To be truthful. Mr. Kent, I wasn’t overly concerned about the fact that the tigers had killed so many people. It was the hunt itself that fascinated me. The man-eating tiger knows the ways of humans. He’s clever. He? In two of the three cases, they were female tigers. They presented quite a challenge. When the last of them was dead, I thought I’d die—of boredom.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “However ...”

  “Yes. Of course. You want to know why I asked you to come here.”

  “And why you did it so dramatically. It’s not every prospective client who prints his name and address in white ink on a 500 dollar bill.”

  Kadaver’s thin lips became two dark lines across his face as he smiled. “I wanted to be sure I caught your attention.” He waved a hand. “More about that in a moment. Right now ...”

  He turned his back to me. “I want to show you something.”

  He whirled around. In his right hand was one of the weapons that had been on the wall. It was pointed at a spot a few inches above my navel.

  Chapter 2 … the dangerous game …

  The gun looked like an automatic, but the hole in the muzzle was too small for any bullet I’d ever seen.

  “Well,” I said.

  “Please don’t make any quick little moves, Mr. Kent.”

  “While you’re covering me with a gun? Not likely. I assume that is a gun?”

  “A little something the Czechs came up with. Most effective, I assure you—so don’t reach for that little gun you slipped into your pocket in the other room.”

  “You’ve got good eyes.”

  “A hunter’s eyes. Now ... to get back to my story ... Life became empty after I left India. I’d done it all—there was nothing worth hunting that I hadn’t already killed. At any rate, once you’ve matched wits with a man-eating tiger, you’re spoiled for ordinary game.

  “Then someone put me onto sharks, and I had a few weeks of good sport along the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Ah, but sharks, I’m afraid, don’t nearly live up to their reputation as killers. Most keep their distance.”

  “A sad, sad story,” I said, “but it doesn’t begin to explain why you’re pointing that gun at me.”

  “I’m working up to it, Mr. Kent.” He paused, seemed a trifle disappointed. “From what I’ve heard and read about your talents, it shouldn’t be necessary for me to tell you how I managed to find excitement in this rather boring world of ours.”

  “Well, I have a pretty good idea—but I don’t want to be rude and kill your story. Please go on, Mr. Kadaver.”

  “I think you do know.” He laughed suddenly. “Yes, of course you know. You’re pl
aying for time, aren’t you? You think that, sooner or later, I’ll make a mistake. Well, I don’t mind playing your game. As a matter of fact, it adds spice to the proceedings.”

  “Is it all right if I smoke?”

  He waved the funny-looking gun. “I don’t want you to reach into your pocket. There are some cigarettes in that box on the table.”

  “What brand?”

  “You’ll find some Camels.”

  I showed I was impressed by raising my eyebrows. “What else do you know about me, Mr. Kadaver?”

  “Many, many things. Keep your hands clear of your body as you walk to the table, please.”

  I did as ordered, went to the table, opened a black ebony box that held Camels and cigarettes with a white filter tip. I selected a Camel, set it alight with flame from a table Ronson. The lighter was about the size of a baseball. It was heavy enough to smash in a man’s skull ...

  “I’d put that down gently if I were you,” Kadaver said quietly.

  I nodded. “I’ve already made up my mind to do just that.” I set the lighter down, dragged hard on the cigarette, let smoke out slowly. “All right, Mr. Kadaver, I’ll give a demonstration of my powers of deduction. You ran out of wild game to hunt, so finally you decided to go after the most dangerous of all game. Man.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s not a bad idea. Without much trouble at all I could make out a list of fifty men who deserve being hunted down. But why me?”

  Kadaver executed a smile that sent a little shiver racing up my spine. “Why not you, Mr. Kent?”

  “Well, it’s only reasonable to expect that you’d look for some kind of reason before declaring open season on a man—”

  “Now you’re assuming that I observe certain moral laws.”

  “Well, you don’t look the type who’d shoot a man down in cold blood. You’d have to have some kind of a reason. You can’t chop off a man’s head and mount it on your wall. How many men have you killed, by the way?”

  “A good few.”