10-Story Detective Magazine Cover — page 64: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

OP pa lh: ae 3 2 : + As O’Brien. ---- *“T feel like hell, the saneais said. “Tt’s my own damned fault. I’d give my right arm—” Phillips said musingly: “He’d have gone out soon anyway. That’s the way he’d probably look at it, captain. Tell _ you about it later, when I get the guy who did the job.” “Queer about the finger marks on the kid’s coliar,”’ commented Captain O’Brien Jim Phillips was as certain as he was sure he was standing there that those finger marks held the clue to ‘Timmy’s murderer. He yearned for action. “Yeah,” he said cautiously. “Like “Timmy had put ’em there to tell us - gomethin’.” The captain snorted. “Too thin— _eould have been accidental durin’ the death throes.’ “But they look too deliberately ” Phillips re- =e “Wait a minute,” Phillips stopped the eaptain. “Don’t let ’em go yet. By hell, I’m going to make an arrest if it’s the last thing I do. .. . Captain, _ have that River Street gang line up. I wanta look ’em over.” Captain O’Brien looked at the _ rookie plainclothes Iman in amaze- = “You'll have to give me Swood reagon, = «] can’t do that now, captain. I - don’t know enough. But you'll just _ have to let me go through with this _—for Timmy’s sake.” ‘Nothin’ doin’!’ the Soptain See Phillips caught hold of his superior = officer in a tight grip. “Captain, you ‘were just admittin’ that it was your os fault the kid got killed. Feel pretty es badly about that, don’t you?” The captain nodded slowly. Wel ge Faliee, ne rs = ¢sroRY DETECTIVE— boat you'll let me have my way in “thin you'll get a chance to feel better about it. Otherwise, you never will. You were about to kick me back on a beat, anyway—” Captain O’Brien hesitated, finally nodded and said: “Okay, Phillips. I’m afraid you’ve got me—but it’s against my will.” | Jim Phillips knew he was up against a hell of a blank wall, but he had to try anything. He had to go on desperately hoping he’d get the an- swer—for Timmy’s sake. But things were black. The murder gun: prob- - ably heaved unretrievably into the river from one of a score of windows of the Arcadia; the note the refresh- ment-stand girl had found on her counter to tell Timmy of a phone call —thrown in a trash receptacle long since emptied. And as for paraffin tests of the hands of the River Street gang, to determine if one of them had recently fired a gun—a newly invented steel gauntlet could easily have been used to obviate any reliability of such a test. RIVER STREET gang lined up at Captain O’Brien’s barking command. Like a firing squad the half dozen men stood before the phone booth in which the pitiful lit- tke murder victim lay. Two morgue boys bent over to lift up Timmy and put him in a wicker basket. “Hold it!’ Phillips snapped. “Wait a few minutes before you move him.” Then he turned his attention to the River Street gang lined up before him. Sneering, confident and ugly, they faced him. Dugan, believed to be the gang’s official executioner, was the most arrogant of the lot. Phillips cross-examined several of them, des- perate, stalling for time—trying to realize what Timmy’s finger marks were intended to mean. He was hop- ing that something, he knew not what, would come to him so that he could grab the murderer. He knew he was belng.s foal But he had to try =