10-Story Detective Magazine Cover — page 88: what you’re looking at

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

~ aggre ae Ke oe ee se a Je, a a OF gO a * - = ee “es eg Ge ‘ " <2 a - “=< > ~ 36—————___—_—_—_——__10-STORY DETECTIVE ed him because I knew what he was going to say. “No, I’m not Jimmy Cronin, the gangster actor. Yes, I know I look like him.” I wagged my head up and down and gave the guy a sour smile. “I’m his double. Now, beat it.” It made me sore to have those guys gap- ing at me all the time, and besides I was feeling pretty low that night. The big guy made a grunting noise that could have passed for surprise. He pulled a chair away from the table and sank heavily into it, stuck a huge blaek cigar into his mouth and lit it. All the time he didn’t take his eyes away from my face. “Are you working right now?” he asked. “If I were, I wouldn’t be sitting in this stinking hole talking to you,” I told him. His face became serious—serious and ugly. In the sickly yellow light of the Parrot, it looked like the face of a freshly shaven gorilla. “Listen, brother,” he told me evenly, “take the chip off your shoulder. It’s easy as hell to start something with us, but it ain’t so easy to finish it. I like po- lite guys, see?” DIDN’T say anything. I just kept looking at him. For the life of me, I eouldn’t place his type, and in Hol- lywood when you can’t do that with a person, is wrong. This guy wasn’t pictures. That was plain. He had dough, but he wasn’t any sucker looking for a chance to “angel” some producer. He was too smart-looking for that. Still, he had something on his mind. I waited. After he’d given me a chance to mull over his last words, he spoke again. “I started to ask you, are you working ?” I shook my head negatively. “That’s better,” he said. “Now, I got a job for you. A few days work and lots of do-re-mi.” His tone im- plied that it was a foregone conelu- sion that I would accept whatever he offered. “You wen’t need any duds or CE Rg eg — ss > “<n a <a anything. You can come with me right now out to the place—the— what do you call it, Hammy?’ He looked sideways at one of his stooges. “De location,” Hammy murmured with some show of pride. “Yeah, the loeation. You got any family ?” I shook my head again. ‘‘What are you doing, making a picture?” “Yeah. In a way I’m making a pic- ture. I need a couple of guys with nerve, too. Not any of these pretty- faced guys. I need ’em with stomach. Now, do you—” “Tf you’re making a picture about gangsters, why don’t you get Jimmy Cronin?” I cut in suspiciously. “I hap- pen to know he’s available right now.” The fat man slapped both hands down on the table and half rose to his feet. “I’m not here to waste time,” he snapped. “Make up your mind and no questions.” Well, if I hadn’t known that every legitimate picture company in the business was through with me, things might have been different. If there’d been even a ghost of a chance of my landing a studio job the next day— or any day after that—I'd have told this guy to go to hell because I didn’t like the smell of him even then. But there wasn’t. : Jimmy Cronin had been teld that very day by American Pictures that he was through. His pictures for the last year and a half had flopped mis- erably, and there wasn’t a producer in Hollywood who would touch him. And let me tell you, when a star flops, his double flops ten times as hard. The ex-star might land a few consolation parts from soft-hearted directors, but who the hell has any use for a has- been’s double? I told the fat guy to count me in. He told me he wanted another guy eut of the crewd of bums im the Yel- low Parrot to come along—somebody who knew something about eameras, ete.—who needed dough and didn’t care how he got it. Just then Shorty Eomichoo cS (eo)