The Fly in Their
Ointment
The Persistent Antics of an Insect are 
a Coded Message of Grim Death!

CHARLES GREEN
Author of
“The White Killer,” “Federal Bullets,” etc.

	JEFF BARNABY, the elephantine head of the Barnaby Detective Agency, was taking a Turkish bath right in the privacy of his own apartment. Sweating in a leather chair in front of an open window, he tried to kid himself that there was a breeze coming in from the shaftlike courtyard. The most naive of men—which Barnaby was not— would have found it an illusion difficult to accept.
His blubbery body, clad only in atrocious lavender-striped shorts, was not an esthetic sight before the window. But Barnaby reasoned, logically enough, that no one could possibly have esthetic thoughts in that heat. Besides, the only human he could see in any of the windows opening into the courtyard was a bald-headed man who was fast asleep.
Barnaby’s window was the second from the left in the southern wall of the courtyard; the other’s window had the corresponding position in the eastern wall. Less than fifteen feet separated them.
The man apparently was slumped low in his chair. Barnaby could see only his bald head, resting against the back of the chair, and his, pale, bony face. For some twenty minutes now, he had been glaring at that bald head. For it seemed to have united with the superintendent of the apartment house in deliberately mocking him..
Barnaby had considered it an astute bit of foresight when he had paused, before going up to his apartment, to buy a half-dozen lemons. Nothing like a pitcher of home-made lemonade to help one battle the heat. He had undressed, squeezed out the lemons—and only then discovered the superintendent of the building had picked that day for the monthly defrosting of the refrigerators. No ice cubes, no cold lemonade.

	ALL right, by God, he’d sleep through this heat! For two hours he had made a stubborn but
miserably unsuccessful attempt to doze off. And when he had finally decided that no human being
could possibly faIl asleep in that stifling heat, he saw the man in the next apartment, peacefully
asleep near his window!
It was humiliating. Did the guy have to sleep there? Didn’t he own a bed? Only the temporizing heat had checked Barnaby from working himself into quite a passion over it.
He leaned forward suddenly, un-plastering his back from the leather of the chair. A particularly large and offensive looking fly was now buzzing about the man’s bald head. Barnaby watched it with a certain amount of sadistic pleasure. From personal experience, he had utter faith in the merciless persistance of that specie of a pest.
The fly circled a half dozen times
close to the man’s head, then landed just above the left eyebrow. Now there should be that twitching of facial muscles, heralding the inevitable profane awakening. Barnaby grinned wickedly.
But the bald-headed man seemed to have callous sensibilities. The long, bony face did not twitch. There wasn’t even that pathetically futile brush of the hand. As the fly rested quietly, obviously testing its victim, the man slept on.
A hard-boiled customer, apparently. Barnaby applauded the fly’s next move of attack. Distinctly, he saw it begin crawling on the man’s face. Down the forehead to the eyebrow it moved, paused defiantly, then crept on. Crept boldly across the man’s closed eye
Barnaby leaned forward in the chair. By God, it must work now. Yet—the man slept on. It defied logic and reason. It should certainly discourage and break the spirit of any self-respecting fly.
That particular fly was game, however. It crawled on grimly. Right down the bridge of the nose, descended the precipice to the upper lip, traversed it to the corner of the mouth. And still the bald-headed man slept on!
There was amazed incredulity on Barnaby’s round, perspiring face. Was it possible that anyone could sleep on as soundly as that? And as he deliberated over the phenomenon, his phone rang. Barnaby sighed. In that hellish heat, it was an effort to heave his bulk up out of the chair. He waddled out into the hallway, and lifted the receiver.
“Hello ?“
“Is this Oscar’s Delicatessen ?“ a man’s voice wanted to know.
Barnaby took a deep breath. “No.” he said patientIy, “this isn’t Oscar’s Delicatessen.”
“Sorry,” the man apologized. “I must have the wrong number.”
Mopping his moist, red face, Barnaby returned to the window. He glanced across—and then stared incredulously. The man who had been so amazingly sound asleep less than thirty seconds ago had vanished!
“What the hell!“ he gasped. “When the guy awakened, he sure moved fast.”
He sat down again, but he was restless, uncomfortable. And not from the humidity now. Something decidedly queer about the man’s abrupt disappearance. Had the fly finally awakened him? Perhaps the guy saw that he was late for an appointment, and had bolted out of the room? Yet— Barnaby squirmed. The fat detective didn’t like puzzles which he couldn’t solve to his complete satisfaction. Darn it, how could that bald-headed man have gone on sleeping when the fly had crawled across his eye, down his nose, to his lip? Drunk, was he? Exhausted to the point of stupor?
Yet he couldn’t — no, he couldn’t have controlled the involuntary twitching of his facial muscles when the sticky little legs of that fly— “He was dead !“ Barnaby said aloud. “That’s it I The guy was dead!”

 	FOR the second time, he heaved his big hulk out of the chair. Sure! Maybe the heat killed the guy. Scores of such cases all over New York. He’d died in that chair. It had supported him in a sitting position a while, then rigor mortis setting in had shifted his weight and he’d plopped over. He was undoubtedly lying below the window now.
Sweating more profusely than ever, Barnaby slipped incredibly wide trousers over his fat hams, put on a shirt, wedged his feet into bedroom slippers. Ten seconds later, he was ringing the bell of the bald-headed man’s apartment. No answering footsteps came to the door. And Barnaby hadn’t expected any.
He extracted a ring of skeleton keys from his pocket, tried the lock. The third key did the trick. Pushing the door open, he listened a moment, then proceeded unhurriedly down the long, dark hallway.
Since the layout of that apartment was exactly as his own, Barnaby
did not bother investigating the two doors on the right. The first, he knew, was only a linen closet. The second led into the bathroom. The entrance to the room he wanted was at the. very end of the corridor.
He had just passed the partly open bathroom door, when he stopped jerkily. With sure-footed-ness amazing for his bulk, he spun around and lunged forward. But the man who had glided ghostlike out of the bathroom already had two strikes on Barnaby. For there was a blackjack in his right hand—and the upraised hand was slashing downward viciously.
Had the lead-weighted weapon come down solidly on its intended mark, it would have certainly crushed Barnaby’s skull. But his forward lunge carried him within a hair’s breadth of evading altogether that deadly arc. The blackjack merely brushed the side of his head and glanced off his weli padded shoulder.
And before the man could slash out again, Barnaby’s thick arms enfolded him in a bearlike hug. He jammed him against the wall.
“And now, you rat,” he panted, “we’ll see just who—”
Someone else now suddenly threw himself on Barnaby’s back. A mus-cular arm encircled his throat, yanked his head back, back, until his bulging eyes stared up at the ceiling. The arm was tightening mercilessly, shutting off his windpipe.
Like a buffalo with a grey wolf hanging onto its throat. Barnaby pivoted his huge body. The man’s feet left the floor, swinging around like the tail of a kite, but the arm about the detective’s throat never relaxed its vicious stranglehold.
A red glare now danced in front of Barnaby’s eyes. A pounding like that of heavy surf roared in ins ears. He knew he had one chance left. If he threw himself backward against the wall so that the strangler’s body cushioned the impact— And even as he tensed hiznself
for the effort, red-hot steel claws suddenly seemed to be ripping at his vitals. The first man had rammed a knee into Barnaby’s groin!
What happened next Barnaby had no clear idea. He felt his legs buckling from under him. Felt himself crashing to the floor. At least once he remembered the whiplike swish of air displaced by the slash of the blackjack narrowly missing his head. Then the merciful blackness of unconsciousness swept over him.
Barnaby had a wild nightmare. He was on a raft, clinging to it for dear life, while it was heaved and tossed by angry waves. Every once in the while, those waves would wash over the raft, half drowning him. It seemed to have been going on for eternities.

	AND then quite suddenly he real-ized he was lying with his eyes open, and the heaving thing beneath him was only a carpeted floor. A kneeling man, whose face was a vague blur, was trying both to smother and drown him with a dripping towel.
“Hey !“ he said weakly.
“Get the harpoons ready, boys,” an unpleasantly familiar voice now grated in his ears. “The whale has come up to the surface.”
Barnaby blinked, winced at the devilish steel foundry that seemed to be roaring full blast inside his skull, and sat up. As if he were peering through a pair of binoculars, terribly out of focus before and slowly being adjusted now, the vague forms around him slowly assumed discernible shapes. White blobs became faces.
There were four men in the room. Two were uniformed patrolmen. The third was the owner of that familiarly unpleasant voice — a redheaded, bulldog-jawed man whom Barnaby knew as a certain Detective Smiley, attached to Headquarters. The fourth was a tail, lanky, beak-nosed guy who met Barnaby’s eyes with cold and undisguised hostility.
“May I ask,” the lanky man demanded shrilly, “just what you are doing in my apartment ?“
Barnaby’s head was clearing rapidly now. A cautious examination disclosed an egg-like lump over his left ear and what seemed to be a sweet little gash above his right eyebrow. Otherwise, he was all right.
“Now let’s get organized here,” he told the man. “You say this is your apartment ?“
“Certainly. I’m Thomas J. Porter. Will you tell me that this isn’t my apartment ?“
“Now wait a minute,” said Barnaby. “Conceding that this is your apartment, what about the bald-headed guy ?“
Smiley, who always resented being left out of anything, said truculently, “What bald-headed guy you talkin’ about ?“
Barnaby glanced around quickly. “Why, this is the room. There’s the chair near the window there where the guy had been sitting. Say, didn’t you guys find — find a body here?”
The quartet stared at him.
“The only body we found here,” Smiley said unpleasantly, “was your fat carcass lyin’ in the hallway. Mr. Porter discovered it when he entered ten minutes ago. He phoned the local precinct. They flashed a radio car I happened to be gettin’ a lift in.”
“But the body of the bald-headed guy,” Barnaby interrupted wildly, lurching to his feet, “what became of it?”
“ “Maybe,” said Thomas J. Porter, you’re referring to my brother Ernest. He’s bald. But his body ought to be aboard the four o’clock Flyer to Chicago. And he isn’t a body. I mean, not so far as I know. Just what are you talking about ?“
“ “Exactly,” supplemented Smiley, what I’d like to know.”
“What time is it now?” Barnaby snapped.
A bit startled, the lanky man glanced at his wrist watch. “Three minutes after four,” he replied.
“Well,” said Barnaby, “just about a half-hour ago I was sitting at my window. It’s right around the angle in the wall there. A bald-headed man sat in that chair. I thought he was asleep. I kept watching him.”
“Why ?“ Smiley asked suspiciously, “No particular reason. And stop interrupting me, will you? I was watching him, I said, and then I saw a fly land on his face. It crawled down the guy’s face, but his muscles didn’t twitch, and he didn’t try to brush it away. I thought it was peculiar. I left the window to answer a phone call. When I came back, the guy wasn’t in the chair any more. I figured he was dead.”
“Because,” Smiley said, “he left his chair?”
“Because of the fly crawling—”
Barnaby paused. He saw that pursuance of the explanation would lead to many irritable minutes with Smiley.
“Let’s put it this way,” he said. “I believed something happened to the bald-headed guy who had been sitting in that chair. So I got dressed and buzzed the bell of this apartment. There was no answer, so I got in with a skeleton key. I walked down the hallway there, and then a couple of guys jumped me—knocked me cold.”
“If that,” sneered Smiley, “isn’t the fishiest story I ever heard— You saw the guys who knocked you out?”
“Not enough to identify them. They kept me pretty busy, and it was dark in the hallway.” Barnaby turned to Porter. “Was your brother supposed to have been here at about
3:30 ?“
“Until 3:30 — yes,” Porter replied promptly. “Waiting for me. He wanted me to make the Chicago trip for him, if I could get away in time from my client. We’d agreed, however, that he was to go if I didn’t show up by 3:80.”
“Couldn’t you have phoned him, saving yourself a trip here ?“
“Foh, I was coming home anyway. Besides, he had his jewel case here. I couldn’t have left without it.”
“Jewel case?“ Barnaby repeated sharply.
“Yes. Ernest and I represent Har-mond & Levy, wholesale jewelers. A
Chicago firm had wired that they were in the market for a certain type of precious stones. Ernest picked out what he thought they might use and—”
“What,” B a r n a b y interrupted tersely, “was the value of the stones in that jewel case ?“
“Why, I’d say approximately a hundred thousand dollars. There were three sets of black pearls alone worth over twenty thousand dollars.”

	BARNABY now looked like an irri. table hippopotamus that had just received another thrust from a pitchfork.
“Why didn’t you say that before ?“ he almost shouted. “A hundred grand in precious stones. Your brother supposed to have left for Chicago. Hell, of course, they’d try to conceal the body !“
“Body !“ Smiley roared back. “How do you know there was a body? You fat clown, what gag are you tryin’ to put over here ?“
“If it wasn’t so damn hot,” Barnaby growled, “I’d grab the phone in the hallway and trace the call I got in my apartment about a half-hour ago. I believe it was a wrong number gag just to get me away from the window. The guy could have got my number from the name plate on my door. Go ahead, palooka, if you want to steal some of the homicide boys’ thunder !“
Smiley went to the hallway, while Barnaby began prowling about the apartment. The chair in which the bald-headed man had been sitting was made of leather. Blood couldn’t have soaked through. It could have been, and probably was wiped off. Then those two mugs dragged the body off somewhere. Barnaby would have staked his life on that.
Murder had stalked in that room ! But where was the body? Where could it be?
It wasn’t in the apartment, as Barnaby assertained during the next few minutes. Pausing in the kitchen finally, he swung open the door of the huge electrical refrigerator, with which all the apartments were equipped. If the shelves were removed, its interior was large enough to hold a man’s body.
The frigidaire, dripping water from the defrosting, was empty. It exhausted the last possible place where a body might have been concealed. And Barnaby just couldn’t conceive anyone having the nerve of lugging the body outside the apartment at four o’clock in the afternoon. People were always popping in and out of their apartments. It was a move the killers wouldn’t have dared to make.
Then he cursed under his breath as he noticed the dumbwaiter door on his right. Of course ! That was the only safe way that they could have moved the body to another apartment. He was sliding aside the bolts securing the dumbwaiter opening w h e n Smiley entered the kitchen.
“That’s funny, Barnaby,” the Headquarters man announced. “Why, that call came right from this apartment!“
Barnaby nodded grimly. “I thought so. And take a squint at that !“ He had opened the dumbwaiter door, and was now pointing to an ugly reddish stain on the cowling behind it. Blood ! The first definite bit of evidence, aside from the bruises on Barnaby’s face, of the deviltry which took place in the apartment.

	THREE apartments at each floor level were serviced by that particular shaft. The building itself was twelve stories high, which meant that the body might have been moved, into any one of thirty-five apartments I Even on a cool day, it was a discouraging thought.
“Looks like something’s screwy, Barnaby,” Smiley said. “I’d better phone Headquarters, because it’s a cinch I haven’t the authority to start barging from one apartment into another looking for a corpse. Both the tenants and the management will raise hell.”
Barnaby shook his head. “Every wasted minute gives those guys a chance to make their getaway, I got me an idea. An idea that’s wild as hell, but—well, there’s no harm trying it. Wait here for me !“
Shuffling out into the corridor, Barnaby rang for the service elevator and descended to the basement. The white-haired old German superintendent of the building was mixing paints near the elevator. He stared incredulously at Barnaby’s battered face.
“What—”
“Never mind that now, Muller,” Barnaby interrupted. “Listen ! How do you cut off the current to the electrical refrigerators in this building when you want them defrosted ?“
“Why, there’s a special fuse, Mr. Barnaby, on every meter. I loosen it. Otherwise, people wouldn’t defrost the boxes.”
“Right. But if someone wanted his refrigerator turned on, he could run the cord to another outlet, couldn’t he ?“
“Sure. But it’s a pretty tough job, Mr. Barnaby. You gotta move the heavy box out of its niche, take down a special plate there. An awful lot of trouble.”
“But it can be done, eh ?“ Barnaby insisted.
“Oh, sure.”
“Okay. Now here’s what I want, Muller. You know the wing of the building my apartment is in. Thirty-six apartments use the one dumbwaiter shaft there. I’ve got an idea that the refrigerator is turned on in one of them. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon now. People aren’t using their lights. So if the box is turned on, we could tell from the moving wheel on the electric meter, couldn’t we?”
“Yeah. If the current is being used. But it might be a radio playing or an electric fan turned on. You wouldn’t be able to tell which.”
Barnaby cursed softly. “Yea, you’re right.”
“Of course,” Muller went on, “most people in them one-room apartments work during the day. Wouldn’t be getting back until five o’clock or so. Is it important, Mr. Barnaby?“
“Murder investigation,” Barnaby replied grimly. “Let’s take a look anyway, eh?“
Getting a flashlight, Muller led him to a long row of meters.
“All those on the left are from your wing of the building, Mr. Barnaby. There’s your meter — the fourth one.”
Barnaby took the flashlight from him and examined the meters. Of the first dozen or so, the little wheel which denoted current being used was still. Then he came to one which revolved slowly. “5F” was painted on the meter.
“Who occupies this apartment, Muller ?“ Barnaby asked.
“Two girls. They’re. s c h o o 1 teachers, I think.”
Again there was a gap of maybe a. dozen meters before the next moving wheel.
“And this one, Muller? It’s marked “7E.”
“Why, let’s see !“ The old German scratched his head. “Oh, sure! Mr. Gant lives in 7E. He gave me a tip on a horse once.”
Barnaby’s heart began pounding madly. “Charlie Gant?” he shouted, whirling to the old man. “The guy who was mixed up in that crooked track scandal?“
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“Come with me,” Barnaby snapped. “We’re paying Mr. Gant a social call.”
If anyone was capable of some devilishly executed murder, it was Charlie Gant, gambler, crook, gunman. Barnaby had no idea that both of them lived at the same address.
“Drop me off at my floor for a few seconds,” Barnaby told the elevator operator. “I’ll be right back.” He entered his own apartment.
Muller looked frightened when he saw Barnaby return. There was now a heavy .45 automatic in the fat detective’s fist. “What’re you going to do, Mr. Barnaby ?“ he gasped.
“I want to enter his apartment through the servce exit off the kitchen,” Barnaby said tersely.
“You’ve a pass key to it, haven’t you ?“
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Now this might be a false alarm. If it isn’t, though—and you’ll know that quickly enough—scram down to Mr. Porter’s apartment and fetch the police officers you’ll find there.”
The service elevator stopped again, at the seventh floor now. Thirty seconds later, Barnaby stood before the tradesmen’s entrance to Apartment 7E. Muller’s hands trembled as he inserted a pass key into the lock. And even before he opened the door, they heard the peculiar hum and clatter of an electric refrigerator’s motor.
“Just open the door an inch or so,” Barnaby whispered, “then step aside—fast !“
The old man obeyed. Slowly, slowly, his .45 hip high, Barnaby pushed the door inward. The whitetiled kitchen was empty, but, above the clattering of the refrigerator, he heard voices from the next room.
His eyes hardened when he saw the refrigerator’s metal shelf slides piled on top of it. It prepared him for what he saw five seconds later— when he stepped into the kitchen, edged left to the huge white box and jerked open the door.
Legs twisted under him, his bald head between his thighs, the body of Ernest Porter wedged into the interior of that refrigerator was a grotesquely horrible spectacle.

	IT was Muller who spoiled what might have been an easy capture. The old man’s nerves cracked at the sight of that twisted body in the refrigerator. He shrieked something unintelligible, then raced madly back to the elevator.
A hoarse, loud shriek, it instantly silenced the conversation in the next room. Barnaby’s stubby fingers tightened on the butt of the .45. Gunplay in the next second or two ! That fool Muller has spilled the beans !
And Barnaby was right. A maii abruptly plunged across the thresh.old of the communicating door. Charlie Gant — tall, gaunt, hooknosed. Looking like the human vulture that he was, he brandished a long-barreled German Luger.
Gant saw Barnaby. Saw the open door of the refrigerator. And swift hell broke loose !
The Luger supplied the initial move. Crack! Flame belched from that long barrel, There was a mad splintering of glass as the slug smashed the kitchen window. A woman screamed outside somewhere.
Then the much heavier booming sound of the .45 contributed to the bedlam. Plaster crumpled to the left of Gant as a bullet smashed a huge chunk out of the wall. A pic-ture went crashing to the floor. Again Barnaby jerked the trigger, and still again, the roaring of the 45 drowning the cough of the Luger.
Even in that split-instant, Barnaby found himself marveling that he hadn’t been hit yet. Like angry hornets, the bullets whined past him. He heard the thud and slap as they buried themselves into the kitchen wall.

	GANT was on one knee, a rent appearing as if by magic in his neatly creased trouser leg. A .45 slug had found his left thigh. His swarthy face was distorted with pain, fear and hatred. Barnaby’s next shot sent Gant hurling back against the wall. The terrific impact of the .45 bullet was like a spear head driven by a galloping lanceman.
The gambler dropped the Luger. Though mortally wounded, he now made a groping attempt to recover
it. Barnaby saw his hands close on the brown butt, then Gant slumped forward. He lay still now, a slowly widening pool of crimson forming on the linoleum beneath him.
And then another man suddenly darted into the kitchen. A small, spectacled man, whose white face twitched with mad terror. He made a grab for the Luger, dived for it, ignoring Barnaby’s sharp warning.
Anyone considering Barnaby’s
ponderous bulk would have never believed that he could move as fast as he did. So is the speed of a charging elephant deceptive. The man was rolling over on the floor, bringing up the Luger, when Barnaby pounced on top of him. His huge bulk enfolded the man like a collapsed tent, collapsed by a landslide.
“I’ll take that gun,” Barnaby panted. And he did.
When Smiley, the two patrolmen, Henry Porter and Muller burst into the apartment, they heard an anguished voice:
“For God’s sake, you’ll crush me !“ And Barnaby replied cheerfully, rolling off the other’s body:
“No, I intend to save you for the electric chair.”
“Say,” Henry Porter burst out abruptly, “I know that man. He’s Ralston, the accountant for our firm. He usually drove Ernest home. I —”His voice broke off, then rose to a sudden shriek: “Oh, my God !“ And he crumpled in a dead faint.
He had just seen the body stuffed into the huge refrigerator.
“Take him in the other room,” Barnaby told the two patrolmen.
He climbed ponderously to his feet, and, with Snifley’s help, extracted the body from inside the refrigerator. A brief examination revealed that Ernest Porter had been stabbed through the heart.
Barnaby tried the impossible —wiping a sweating face with an equally sweaty forearm
“You savvy now what happened, Smiley?“
“Some,” the Headquarters man admitted cautiously. “They bumped him off for the jewels.”
“Brilliant,” B a r n a b y grinned. “Yeah, they did. Not only did they want the stones, but they also wanted a couple days to dispose of them while no one had any suspicion yet of the murder and robbery. Unloading hot-stones is both unprofitable and risky—they tried to get around that.”
“By hauling the corpse up the dumbwaiter to Gant’s apartment?“
	“Exactly. Why, it was a set-up.Ralston, being an accountant of the firm, knew Ernest Porter was supposed to have left for Chicago. Knew his brother would believe that—if he didn’t find him in the apartment. So Ralston came home with Porter, and either he or Gant drove a knife in Porter’s heart as he sat in that chair by the window.
“Then, when they’re all set to lug the body away, I come to my window, diagonally across the courtyard and only fifteen feet away. They dodged out of sight before I could notice them, and then they must have got the jitters waiting for me to go away. Especially, when they knew that Henry Porter was due to show up there soon.”
“‘That wrong number gag wasn’t a bad stunt to get you away from the window,” said Smiley. 	“And they knocked you cold when you entered the apartment. I get that part of it-but how did you trace the body to this apartment?“
“Well,” said Barnaby, “I knew that they’d have to sneak the body out, sooner or later. In this hellish heat, it would decompose pretty quickly, would smell to high heaven In but a few hours. The logical
place to preserve it, until they had a chance to sneak it out, would be in one of these immense ref rigerators.
“Now the things are defrosted today. It’s done once a month, the current cut off from noon until midnight. You can get the box working by going to a lot of trouble by pulling it out of that niche and rigging up a wire to another outlet. Like, you see, they did here. But when you start using current, it shows on the electric meter in the basement. I went down to find out who, at four o’clock in the afternoon, would be using electricity, And the moment I heard Gant’s name—well, you know the reputation that rat has.”
“Had!” Smiley corrected grimly, glancing at the gambler’s body. “He’s deader ‘n’ prohibition. Cripes, they would have pulled it off, too, if—”
“There hadn’t been a fly in their ointment,” Barnaby concluded. “And don’t ask me to explain that. I hear one of the cops yelling that he found the jewel case. But am I interested? No! I’ve got a date with the fat man’s best friend in this weather— a nice cold shower!“