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LANAGAN
[Illustration: “TWO MORE SHOTS TORE THROUGH AND SPRAYED US WITH
SPLINTERS”]
LANAGAN
_AMATEUR DETECTIVE_
BY
EDWARD H. HURLBUT
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
FREDERIC DORR STEELE_
New York
STURGIS & WALTON
COMPANY
1913
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1913
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I WHITHER THOU GOEST 3
II THE PATHS OF JUDGMENT 31
III THE CONSPIRACY OF ONE 63
IV WHOM THE GODS DESTROY 93
V THE AMBASSADOR’S STICK-PIN 121
VI WHATSOEVER A MAN SOWETH 151
VII THE PENDELTON LEGACY 181
VIII AT THE END OF THE LONG NIGHT 209
IX THE DOMINANT STRAIN 235
X OUT OF THE DEPTHS 263
ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM DRAWINGS BY
FREDERICK DORR STEELE
“Two more shots tore through, and sprayed
us with splinters” _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
“Then Lanagan took his leisurely turn, drawing up an
easy chair” 96
“He lit a match” 260
“On the floor they placed the figure they bore, a stalwart
figure of a man” 280
LANAGAN
_AMATEUR DETECTIVE_
I
WHITHER THOU GOEST
I
WHITHER THOU GOEST
Jack Lanagan of the San Francisco _Enquirer_ was conceded to have
“arrived” as the premier police reporter of San Francisco. This honour
was his not solely through a series of brilliant newspaper feats in his
especial field, but as well by reason of an entente that permitted him
to call half the patrolmen on the force by their given names; enjoy the
confidences of detective sergeants, a close-mouthed brotherhood; dine
tête-à-tête in private at French restaurants with well-groomed police
captains on canvasback or quail out of season, and sit nonchalantly on
a corner of the chief’s desk and absent-mindedly smoke up the chief’s
two-bit cigars.
It was an intimacy that carried much of the lore of the force with it:
that vital knowledge not of books. Bill Dougherty on the “pawnbroker
detail” knew scarcely more “fences” than did Lanagan; Charley Hartley,
who handled the bunco detail, found himself nettled now and then when
Lanagan would pick him up casually at the ferry building and point out
some “worker” among the incoming rustics whom Hartley had not “made,”
and debonair Harry O’Brien, who spent his time among the banks, was
more than once rudely jarred when Lanagan would slip over on the front
page of the _Enquirer_ a defalcation that had been engaging O’Brien’s
attention for a week.
So it went with Lanagan; from the “bell hops” of big hotels, the bar
boys of clubs, down to the coldest-blooded unpenned felon of the
Barbary Coast who sold impossible whiskey with one hand and wielded a
blackjack with the other, the police sources were his.
Consequently Lanagan, having “arrived,” may be accorded a few more
liberties than the average reporter and permitted to spend a little
more time than they in poker in the back room at Fogarty’s, hard
by the Hall of Justice. Here, when times were dull, he could drift
occasionally to fraternise with a “shyster,” those buzzards of the
police courts and the city prisons who served Fogarty; or with one of
the police court prosecuting attorneys affiliated with the Fogarty
political machine, for Fogarty was popularly credited with having at
least two and possibly three of the police judges in his vest pocket.
Or he could rattle the dice with a police judge himself and get the
“inside” on a closed-door hearing or the latest complaint on the secret
file; and he could keep in touch with the “plain-clothes” men who
dropped in to pass the time of day with Fogarty; or with the patrolmen
coming on and off watch, who reported to Fogarty as regularly as they
donned and doffed their belts and helmets things they thought Fogarty
should know.
In this fashion does the police reporter best serve his paper; for
it is by such unholy contact that he keeps in touch with the circles
within circles of the police department of a great city. Some he
handles by fear, some he wins by favour, some he wheedles. In the end,
if he be a brother post-graduate, the grist of the headquarters’ mill
is his.
Of the shysters there is Horace Lathrop, for instance, who boasts a
Harvard degree when he is drunk--never when he is sober.
Horace is sitting with Lanagan at Fogarty’s rear room table, while
Lanagan sips moodily at his drink.
Larry the Rat, runner for the shysters, pasty of face, flat of forehead
as of chin, with an upper lip whose malformation suggests unpleasantly
the rodent whose name he bears, shuffles in and bespeaks Lathrop at
length. That worthy straightens up, glances at Lanagan, and then
remarks:
“Casey has just brought in a moll,” and arises, with elaborate
unconcern, to leave the room.
“Well,” drawled Lanagan, “what else?”
“Nothing. That’s all I know. Going to try to get the case now, whatever
it is.”
“Is that all you told him, Larry?” asked Lanagan. The Rat mumbled
unintelligibly and shuffled away.
“The Rat’s answered after his breed,” said Lanagan. “He says no, it is
not. Now, Horace--pardon me, Barrister Lathrop--kick through. You know
I’ve got to deliver a story to my paper to-day. Come on.”
Lanagan never wasted words with Lathrop. There were a few trivialities
that he “had” on that individual. But Lathrop balked.
“Look here, Lanagan, all I got’s her name and address. It isn’t square.
She may have a roll as long as your arm. You print this story, the
newspaper men go at her for interviews, tip her off about me, she gets
a regular lawyer, and where do I come off? You fellows are always
crabbing our game. I gave you that shoplifter story a week ago and you
played it for a column. You know you did, Jack; now you know you did.”
Lathrop had been whining. Now he stiffened.
“I ain’t going to,” defiantly; “I’m tired o’ being bullied by you. Aw,
say now, Jack, it’s a big case. And I got a wife and kids to look out
for”--which was a fact--“and here you come taking the bread and butter
out of their mouths. It ain’t square, Jack; you know it ain’t.”
All morals to all men, reflected Lanagan, and laughed lazily, pulling a
copy of the _Enquirer_ across the table.
“See her, Horace? Right on this page--page one, column two, right here,
with your name in big black-face letters--a little story of about
one-third of a column on that $750 touch-off on that Oroville deacon,
who went astray for the first time of his life and was pinched as a
drunk--to be fleeced by you and your precious band. There isn’t any
way of getting his money back, or proving a case against you or the two
cops who cut the roll with you and Fogarty. I didn’t print the story,
but I’ve got the facts pretty straight; and it goes right here--right
in this nice, conspicuous place for the grand jury to see and for that
wife and those ‘kids’ to see also, who, singular as it may sound,
actually don’t know what particular brand of a ‘lawyer’ you are. Get
all that?”
Lathrop “got” it.
Lanagan was then told that the detinue cells held a young woman of
remarkable beauty, Miss Grace Turner, taken from a family rooming house
on O’Farrell Street. Also that through Lathrop word of her arrest was
to be taken to her brother there. Lathrop--or Larry the Rat, both
being cogs in the same machine--had come by the information by the
underground wire that runs from every city prison to the bail-bond
operators and their shysters without.
Fogarty was the bail-bond chief, and possibly one of the plain-clothes
men who just now rested his elbow upon the bar may have passed that
name and address to Larry the Rat.
The “detinue” cases are those on the secret book at headquarters, that
stable police violation of Magna Charta; the detinue cases, therefore,
become the focus of the police reporter’s activity.
“And incidentally, Horace, you stay away from 1153A O’Farrell Street
until I get through,” was Lanagan’s final command.
“But what about Fogarty?” whined the shyster. “He must know by this
time I got the case. You know what he could do to me if he wanted to,
Jack.”
“Yes, and I know what I could do to him if I wanted to, and he knows
it, too,” snapped Lanagan. “Leave him to me.”
“I’m a friend of Miss Turner’s,” he said as the landlady opened the
door at 1153A O’Farrell. “I wish to speak with her brother.”
“He’ll be glad to see you. He has been worrying. You ain’t another one
of them detectives? I didn’t tell him, though. He was asleep and the
doctor said he shouldn’t be worried just now. It might be fatal. What
did they do with the poor, dear girl?”
“Merely holding her for a few hours. What was the trouble?”
“Giving a bad check to the druggist for medicine. She did the same
thing at the grocer’s. It’s a dirty trick, I say, to arrest the poor
thing. Why, the grocer’s bill was only a few dollars. They don’t eat
enough to keep my canary. The man eats mostly almonds. Something wrong
with his stomach, and that seems to be all he can eat. Funny, ain’t it?”
The garrulous woman led Lanagan to a doorway in the rear. He knocked
and, in response to a feeble voice, entered.
Propped up with two pillows was a young man whose wasted features were
bright with a hectic flush; whose arms, hanging loosely from his gown,
were shrunk to the bone and sinews. The eyes were grey, steady, and
assured; so much so that Lanagan half halted on the threshold as he
felt the response in his own sensitive brain to the personality that
flashed to him through those eyes. A man of mental power, thought
Lanagan; of swift decision and of iron will.
The voice was little more than a gasp, but each word by effort was
clearly uttered.
“You’re an upper office man?”
“No. I am a newspaper man. Why did you ask that?”
“Because they were here and took my sister for overdrawing what little
funds we had in bank.”
There was concentrated fury in his weak voice.
“Still I am curious to know how you knew they were plain-clothes men
that took her?”
“How? A newspaper man ask how? Because they walk like a ton of pig
lead. And didn’t that cursed grocer threaten to have her arrested for
a paltry four or five dollars? I heard her scream when they took her.
This”--more quietly, with a slight shrug and comprehensive gesture
to indicate his wasted form and flushed cheeks--“this particular
complaint serves to strengthen our outer faculties for a while at
least, even if it is at the expense of our inner ones.”
“I take it your sister is bringing you from the interior to the South?”
“Yes. We came from South Dakota. We were robbed of our tickets on our
first night here. She has been trying to get something to do to save
enough money to get as far as Los Angeles. It came on me suddenly,
alcohol helping. Sis stuck when they turned me out. On general
principles, I don’t blame father. I gambled a mortgage on to the old
ranch and twenty years on to his head. Anyhow, here we are, Sis and
me. That’s what you fellows on the papers call a human-interest story,
isn’t it?”
There was something about the measured and sinister tone that told of
the bitterness of a baffled strong man, in the face of a situation
that he was powerless to avoid. Lanagan wondered what that man would
have done--or tried to do--to him if he were in full possession of his
strength. He judged from those level grey eyes that the session would
not be uninteresting.
“Yes, it might be a human-interest story,” said Lanagan, “and then
again--it might be better than a human-interest story.”
He was looking at the tip of his cigar, flicking the ashes from it as
he said it; but he caught the swift, suddenly veiled flash that the
keen eyes shot to his face. To all appearances, though, Lanagan did not
see that glance. He had not liked the ready talk about upper office
men; and he would take oath that in the wasted features, round the
ears and the neck, were the tell-tale traces of that prison pallor that
requires many a long day to wear away.
“For instance,” Lanagan continued, still flicking at his cigar tip, “if
you were being kept under cover here?”
It was only a swift, partial intake of breath, but Lanagan caught it,
and then the man spoke so easily and smoothly that the newspaper man
believed himself deceived.
“Well, I am. That’s a bet. But just until Sis can get me away; that’s
also a bet.”
Then there followed details, the man on the pillows supplying with
facility a pedigree that went back to the _Mayflower_. Lanagan had
been fishing; yet as he left the room he was uneasy and far from being
satisfied. As the story stood it was a neat little “human-interest”
story--as Harry Turner had said--and worth a column and a half. He had
comforted Turner to the extent of informing him that the shysters had
his sister’s case and would probably have her out before night. He
drifted moodily back to police headquarters. There Lathrop met him.
“Nothing stirring,” he said, disgustedly. “They’ve turned her loose.
Grocer wouldn’t prosecute. She’s got a sick brother. Don’t think she
was a live one, anyway.”
Lanagan ground one palm into the other. Three-quarters of the story was
gone with the woman free and his “hunch” was afloat without an anchor.
He drifted into Chief Leslie’s office and helped himself to a cigar.
“Chief, what did you have on that Turner girl?”
Leslie was past being surprised at anything Lanagan knew. He stopped
studying a police circular long enough to look up. “Couple of little
checks, but the complaining witness withdrew. I wouldn’t write her up
if I were you. She’s one case entitled to sympathy. I talked to her.
Thoroughbred, that girl; consumptive brother; taking him South. So I
turned her loose.”
Leslie fell to studying his circular again and Lanagan drew up a chair
to look over the circular also, a little privilege he alone enjoyed of
the newspaper men at headquarters. Then he whistled softly; Lanagan was
past being surprised at anything--almost. That whistle was about his
most demonstrative exhibition.
The circular was from Denver and offered $5,000 reward for information
leading to the “arrest and conviction” of Harry Short, wanted for
highway robbery and murder. The details of a Denver crime that a brief
time before had shocked the country were given and the customary police
description, with the front and profile pictures from the rogues’
gallery.
“Would probably be found with a woman,” the circular read, “posing as
his wife or sister.” There followed a description of the woman, Cecile
Andrews, and her history. She was the daughter of a country minister
who became enamored of Short when he did odd jobs about her father’s
place. She had refused to give him up when he was charged with triple
murder. In some way, it was believed, she had managed to join him in
hiding, for she had disappeared as completely as he.
Leslie finally became annoyed at Flanagan’s prolonged whistle.
“Good heavens, Jack,” he said irascibly, “I’m trying to get these
descriptions in my head. Take that whistle outside.”
“All right; but say, chief--” The tone was tense, drawn taut like a
fiddle string. Leslie wheeled. Lanagan’s eyes were lighting up with
that curious brightness that flamed there when the strange brain of
the man was at work, when there was action promised, when the tortuous
mazes of some enigma were unfolding to that inner sight.
“Say, chief,” he went on, “I wonder if I could make a trip, say to
Paris, on about one-half of that reward? I’ve always had a curiosity to
study that Paris police system. I don’t approve of newspaper men taking
blood money. It isn’t in our game. But it might be proper to take about
one-half of that money in a case like this for a trip like that. What
do you think?”
Leslie’s eyes were searching Lanagan’s. He knew of old that Lanagan was
not a quibbler and that he never wasted words.
“You’ve got something, Jack. What is it?”
“Him,” said Lanagan inelegantly, tapping the face upon the circular.
Leslie jumped straight up out of his chair. The police reporter lit a
fresh cigar from Leslie’s top desk drawer, where the good ones were.
“It’s this way, chief; but the story’s mine, mine absolutely.”
“You’ve brought me the tip, the story’s yours. That’s the way I play
the game,” said Leslie.
“This woman was the girl you arrested. Her brother’s out in a rooming
house on O’Farrell Street, laid up with consumption--galloping, too, it
appears to me.”
Leslie was an explosive man, and after a swift glance through the
circular description of the woman again, he expressed himself volubly
and with unction. It never occurred to him to question the accuracy of
Lanagan’s statements. He would have taken the newspaper man’s word over
that of one of his own men.
Lanagan telephoned to Sampson, city editor of the _Enquirer_, and
before that cold-blooded individual could get in a word, Lanagan had
said enough to indicate to Sampson that something choice was on the
irons. Lanagan had asked for me, and I was detailed to report to him in
thirty minutes at Van Ness Avenue and Eddy.
It was just thirty minutes later that the chief, Lanagan, Brady,
Wilson, and Maloney--three of Leslie’s steadiest thief takers--and
myself were dropping singly into 1153A O’Farrell Street, Lanagan
having preceded us to reassure the landlady. Maloney went on through
to take the alleyway, the room having a window over the alley. Softly
and swiftly we massed before the door. Lanagan took the door, rapping.
There was no answer. The chief signaled for a rush.
Leslie never carried but one gun, and this he now rested in the hollow
of his left arm. He towered above and behind us as we noiselessly
wedged against the old-fashioned, flimsy door. My heart was beating
like a trip hammer. I never seem to be able to get over that thumping
just before the opening engagement when I am elected to make a target
of myself. I confess freely that I always went into those thrillers
with Lanagan in the full expectation of getting my own name and picture
in the papers, and the complimentary designation usually accorded a man
of my profession by the paper he serves when mishap befalls him: “A
reporter who was killed.”
The chief breathed a soft command, the wedge crashed, the bolts burst,
and we were in--an empty room.
There was an awkward pause, it seemed to me for an hour; it may have
been but a minute, while Leslie slipped back into his holster that ugly
gun of his. Lanagan was turning slowly, examining every corner of the
room. His eyes were living, snapping fire.
“I guess, chief,” he drawled, “I won’t make the reservations to-day for
that little trip of mine.”
The bed was unmade, but the room showed no traces of recent occupation
save several empty medicine bottles from which the labels had been
washed, and on a closet shelf a paper sack half full of almonds. There
were almond shells on the floor. For the rest the room held but the
ordinary appurtenances of a room of its kind; washstand, bowl, towels
and rack, and cheap dresser.
The landlady was summoned. She was more surprised than Lanagan or the
chief. She had not seen the girl return; had not seen the pair depart;
had believed that the man was too sick to leave his bed.
Galvanic Leslie, within an hour, had men at the ferry building, at the
Third and Townsend Street Depot, covering every boathouse that had
launches or tugs for hire; the suburban electric lines were covered and
the country roads leading south. The great mantrap that so easily can
be thrown around the peninsula of San Francisco, the trap that time
and again has caught the thieves of the world when they have fled for
haven to the Western Coast metropolis, was set. And yet so quietly was
the work done, so implicitly had Leslie impressed upon every district
captain, every detective, every patrolman concerned with the story, the
necessity for absolute secrecy that not one of the other great papers
of San Francisco knew that the jaws of that trap were gaping hungrily.
Probably there was no reporter save Lanagan who could have broken into
that story once Leslie had commanded his men to secrecy. They knew what
disloyalty to that disciplinarian meant too well to trifle with him.
Within the city proper, plain-clothes men by shoals flooded every hotel
and lodging house that might by any possibility harbour the pair. The
hospitals were watched; half a dozen doctors known to Leslie worked
among their professional brothers, but no one was attending such a man
as Turner.
And the wonder grew to Lanagan that the story, scattered now well over
the city, was even yet escaping the innumerable sources of news of
the _Times_ and the braggart _Herald_, to say nothing of the evening
papers, the _Record_ and the _Tribune_. In such fashion, though, by
grace of newspaper luck, are the greatest successes scored after they
have knocked around under the very feet of half the newspaper men of a
city.
Of that army of plain-clothes men none worked harder than Lanagan. For
days I did not see him. Sometimes I would locate him in the foulest
sinks of the Barbary Coast or Chinatown. Here, with products brewed in
some witch’s caldron, he would be in fraternity, trying ceaselessly to
tap that underground wire by which the convict bayed in a great city
sends word to his kind. But always he failed. “Kid” Monahan laboured
in vain; “Red” Murphy, credited with knowing more thieves than all
the coast saloon men put together, could secure no trace; Turner, or
Short, had found no refuge in the hutches of the drug or the opium
fiends. Lanagan met men who should have been in San Quentin; one night
he crossed “Slivers” Martin, who had broken from a deputy sheriff and
escaped a ten-year sentence.
Slivers was waiting until he could get out of the city. Yet even
Slivers knew nothing of such a one as Turner. Finally Lanagan turned
his attention to the residence sections.
At times he would drag me with him. For hours he would ramble up one
street and down another, always trying the fruit stands, the grocery
stores, the delicatessen stores, and always he asked one question: Did
a blond young woman, with dark blue eyes, blue tailored suit, quick,
nervous walk, come in and buy nuts, particularly almonds? A dozen
times the answer was yes. And when the customer was not known to the
proprietor, Lanagan would take up his watch, tireless, indefatigable,
and wait until that person appeared or passed on the street. Always he
met with failure.
Lanagan, always gaunt, became cadaverous. For four days I lost him. I
worried and spent my nights trying to locate him, but his old haunts
knew him not. One day there came a call for me.
“You, Norrie?” It was Lanagan’s voice; it sounded thin and tired.
“I’ve landed. Come to Eddy and Van Ness. Got your gun?”
A quick shiver went over me. The climax had come. I borrowed Sampson’s
gun, having left mine home.
“Heard from Lanagan, have you?” asked that austere individual. I
nodded. “Has he landed? Yes? Good luck,” said Sampson, his eyes
sparkling. He knew that Lanagan’s pride, after the first fiasco,
prevented his ringing up until the story was clinched.
“Give Lanagan my regards. Let us hear from you. It is not necessary to
tell either you or Lanagan to do your best for speed.”
Sampson, reckoned the coldest-blooded city editor in the West, was yet
the most responsive to a story. He was a driver, but he knew how to
humour men. I disliked him personally, and would avoid him out of the
office, but in harness would have worked both legs to the ankle for
him. Most of the men on his staff had that fanatical loyalty for him
as a city editor; yet outside they seldom spoke of him save to damn.
Curious breed, reporters.
To his credit as a city editor, in all of those two weeks he had not
complained. He spoke about Lanagan to me only twice. He knew I was
worried, and knew, I think, that I had spent many a night searching for
him, finally to appear for work without sleep. But he knew that Lanagan
was out for the paper first, last, and all the time; knew that that
bloodhound quality of sticking to the trail would never let him quit
till he had proved that there was no way of landing the story.
Lanagan’s appearance shocked me. He had not shaved for a week. Rings
were under his eyes, red-lidded for want of sleep. His pale cheeks held
an unhealthy flush and he coughed once or twice in a fashion I did not
like, but that old magnetic smile was there.
“Scared as a rabbit, I’ll bet, and wishing you’d insured your life
first,” he laughed, pulling me into a doorway. Then, more seriously,
“Norrie, I’m just a wandering hulk, a derelict; whatever you will. My
passing would be nothing to a soul on earth.”
I had never heard Lanagan speak in that way.
“No soul on earth,” he repeated.
Then he swept me with those luminous eyes of his, and they were as
clear and as unclouded as my own. I knew that I had caught a swift
glimpse as the shutter opened upon the vista of his past; that secret
past that now I understood.
For a moment I was conscious of nothing save that this man whom I loved
like a brother was in pain and I could do nothing for him. With his
swift perceptions, Lanagan had caught my mood and our hands met; that
lean, sinewy hand was as firm as steel. Then, with his facile art, he
had thrown aside his humour of introspection and spoke briskly.
“Norrie, I don’t want to tangle you with this against your will. This
man, I believe, is the hardest game this city has held in my time or
yours. He will die with his stockings on. It looks like gun play.”
Frankly, I was for quitting, inwardly. Outwardly, because of that
mesmeric way of his, that teasing, superior tone, I was all for the
climax. Besides, I did not want to leave him to himself in that humour
to go into a mess; I knew his reckless ways too well.
We walked rapidly up Eddy Street and turned on Franklin until near the
corner of O’Farrell, where, entering a flat, Lanagan led the way to the
top story. Here we entered an unfinished alcove room in the rear with
a dormer window covered by a heavy curtain of burlap. The slightest
possible rent had been made in the curtain. Lanagan told me to look.
Opposite was a dormer window corresponding to our own, the next house
being one of similar design. The alley between was possibly ten feet.
Our window was the only one that could command the other.
In the opposite house the curtain was of ordinary heavy lace. After
peering intently for a time, I could distinguish through it a woman’s
figure and a bed, upon which a form could be discerned.
“There you are, Norrie. That man shows his caliber by moving round the
corner from his former home while the police look for him elsewhere.
He knows by now the police descriptions are here; that I must have
recognised him, and that the hunt is on. My almond trail landed when I
came back to this territory just on the final chance that the man was
big enough to figure out that his surest safety lay right here. She has
been out but a few times, buying those eternal almonds. Malted milk has
been added to his diet, too. I picked her up, trailed her, and the rest
was easy.
“The man’s stomach is gone. Incidentally, they owe a week’s rent there,
and she is living mostly on almonds now, too; so I guess the exchequer
is pretty low. I didn’t suppose there were any more women left in
the world like that. This girl, born of good family, daughter of a
minister, takes up with that triple-stained murderer and sticks. She
surely took that honour and obey in epic earnest--if she married him;
if not, why, the more credit to her for sticking.
“It isn’t for us to judge, Norrie. Keep your eye glued to that hole
while I go into the next room--I’ve rented this attic, by the way--and
grind out copy.”
It was four o’clock then; at nine Lanagan ceased writing. He had made
in longhand 6,000 words of as clean-cut, brilliant a narrative story of
its kind as, under similar pressure, has ever appeared in print. As in
all of Lanagan’s stories, it was “the police” who had learned this and
that. Lanagan has made several detective sergeants in his time.
“Leslie will meet us here at one o’clock. We must keep the smash until
two, fire the story at Sampson by telephone to lead off my stuff with;
hold them in the room until three, and we beat the town again.”
He hurried out to return in half an hour. He had telephoned to Sampson
that the story would break about two o’clock and to hold the paper
until he had heard from us; then he had sent his copy down by messenger
boy and loaded up on a bundle of the choicest of the rank brand of
Manilas he chose at times to affect. I noticed as he lit a match that
his hands shook. I wanted him to lie down until one, but his only
answer was to fix me with those eyes of his, glowing like a cat’s in
the darkness (we were smoking with the lighted ends of our cigars held
inside our hats, so careful was Lanagan lest any trace be given to the
opposite room), and he laughed that curious laugh of his.
“When this is over, Norrie,” he said, “I’ll sleep for a week. Half that
$5,000 is mine; you and Leslie and the others can divide the rest.”
Really, I saw Lanagan in my mind’s eye already snooping and prying
around those Paris byways; it sounded too assured as he said it. I
wondered whether I cared for blood money; figured that I would accept
it, and began pleasantly in the gloom to spend my “bit” with much
contentment. I concluded I would accompany Lanagan on that Paris trip.
One o’clock came, and with it Leslie, Brady, Wilson, and Maloney. Brady
was put at the aperture. A faint light in the opposite room brought the
two figures out into bold relief. The rest of us moved to the outer
room, where the plain-clothes men slipped their revolvers to their side
coat pockets. I wished lonesomely that I had brought two and that I
might feel braver, although I had as much chance of shooting a revolver
with my left hand without disaster as of sailing an aeroplane with
either. At that I believe I would have felt more in the picture with
two.
The plan was to pull a fire alarm, and as soon as the engines clattered
into the street, scatter to the top story, rap on the door as if to
warn the occupants, take them off their guard when the door was opened,
and the thing was done. That programme was carried out. When the
apparatus swung up from O’Farrell, filling the still night air with
those strident bells of terror and alarm, we sped to the top floor and
made the corridor.
“_Fire! Fire!_”
It was Brady’s hoarse voice; and even I thrilled, it was done so
realistically. I, as the one most likely unknown to the pair, had been
selected to take their door. I rapped loudly and shouted the alarm.
Brady was on one side of me, Lanagan on the other. Wilson, Maloney, and
the chief on either side again in the dark hall, flattened to the wall,
guns drawn ready for the rush. The door opened six inches a startled,
wan face with lustrous blue eyes, shining vividly above deep circles of
black, looked into mine through the aperture. Possibly something in my
face, possibly native suspicion and fear, induced her to essay to slam
the door. I pushed my shoulder to the door and shoved, Brady at one
shoulder, Lanagan at the other. She gave back with one more wide-eyed
look that went over my shoulder and caught the grey-bearded chief,
known to her, huddled back for fear of that very thing.
There came one shrill scream: “Harry! The police!” and she had turned
and fled and we pushed in vain--the door was chained! One united crash
again, the fastenings gave just as the slight figure, quicker than a
swallow, had darted within the inner room and slammed the door shut in
our faces. A bolt shot to place as a bullet from within tore through
the panelling and clipped the rim of Brady’s hat, and that towering
figure bore back out of range and swung us in a mass with him. Two more
shots tore through and sprayed us with splinters. We flattened against
the wall.
“The jig is up, Short; you may as well come out.”
It was Leslie, calm as if he were delivering orders to his chauffeur.
A shot rewarded him, impinging perilously close to his shoulder. The
man within was dying with the convict’s last desperate ambition to take
a policeman with him. We dropped flat. There was a pause, while Brady
and Leslie counselled in whispers whether to risk a rush. The silence
became acute, punctuated now and then by whisperings from the inner
room.
It sounded as if she were pleading with him; his note of finality
could not be mistaken, although the words were not heard. Another
silence, and then to our straining ears, rising clearly above the din
and clamour of doors below stairs opening and shutting, of shoutings
and excited cries, came a trembling voice floating through the jagged
holes of the inner door--trembling with the strength or the ardour of a
determination rather than any dread or fear:
“Then, Harry, take me, too! Take me, too!”
“_No, Cecile, no!_”
There was silence again from within; and again that voice, now touched
with pleading still more earnest:
“It is only right, Harry dear; all that the world held I sacrificed for
you. If you don’t take me, I will follow you!”
Prolonged to acuteness became the silence again; the man’s voice,
hoarse, gasping, finally came:
“Pray, Cecile.”
And again that voice, trembling, yet clear as the beautiful sweeping
chords of a harp, came floating with the acrid revolver smoke through
the jagged, ugly rents in the panelling, and seemed to flood the room
with something almost like a visible radiance:
“_Our Father, who art in heaven!_”
I saw Maloney, his blue-nosed revolver in hand, half risen, make the
sign of the adoration, touching his forehead and his chest with that
grim muzzle. Leslie stood slowly upright, his massive head sunk into
his breast. Lanagan breathed hard and deep. It was awesome; we were
held in the spell of that strange and extraordinary occurrence. On that
beautiful voice went to the end:
“_And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil. Amen._”
“_Amen!_” echoed the murderer’s choking voice.
“The door! To save her!”
It was Leslie’s electric whisper, and at his signal we crashed with
our united strength. With the crashing came two shots, and I caught
Lanagan’s harsh curse at my ear and his swift mutter: “Too late!” The
door gave.
She knelt with her head fallen upon her clasped hands, just as she had
knelt in that final prayer, beside the bed. He was lying back upon the
pillow.
There was no dry eye there. Veteran thief-takers, men who had stood
with their backs to the wall and death baying them a score of times;
men who would risk the billy or knife or gun as blithely as they would
go to their morning meal; to whom suffering and violence and death were
daily allotments, bowed themselves before the melancholy end of that
misguided girl.
Yet possibly, for her, it was better so.
It was Lanagan’s voice that brought me back. Lanagan, answering the
newspaper call, with the dominant newspaper demand still strong upon
him and over him; Lanagan, quick with instinctive thought for the
high-strung, chafing Sampson down at the _Enquirer_ office and the
press waiting for the release gong; Lanagan, the genius of his craft,
asserting once again his incomparable newspaper superiority to me,
still dreaming the precious seconds away at the pathetic fate of that
poor piece of clay kneeling there; Lanagan, crisply as a colonel in the
field, snapped:
“_Scatter, Norrie, for a ’phone!_”
II
THE PATHS OF JUDGMENT
II
THE PATHS OF JUDGMENT
Jack Lanagan had a Sunday off, the first in weeks. A man of whim and
caprice in his leisure moments, he had made no plans. This Sunday
morning, after idly reading the morning papers, rolling and consuming
innumerable brown paper cigarettes meanwhile, he finally sallied forth
in his ill-fitting clothes toward the Palace grill and breakfast. And
this being luxuriously ended, he was laved and shaved to his heart’s
content. Then, perfumed like a boulevardier, he issued forth into
Market Street to join that morning throng drifting down toward the
ferry building for the institutional Sunday outing across the bay. He
permitted himself to drift with the current, perfectly and vastly at
ease with all the world. He had switched from cigarettes to an evil
Manila, poisoning the air cheerfully for yards around him. Lanagan
rather enjoyed the exclusiveness given him by his noisome cigars.
Rourke, Fleming, and little Johnny O’Grady of the _Herald_, with a
camera man, whirled out of Market Street in an automobile, and Lanagan
jerked alertly round to watch them out of sight, speculating as to
what the story might be. He had half determined to drift over to the
office, when Truck One swung into Market Street from O’Farrell. Other
fire apparatus was swinging into and out of Market Street, clanging
stridently, and Lanagan turned again to the ferry. Fires interested him
but little. Always the chance, he remarked once to me fastidiously, of
some chump of a fireman squirting water all over you, which spoiled
your clothes. I never knew whether Lanagan was having a quiet joke
in that or not. His entire wardrobe would have been scorned by a rag
picker.
He had been puffing his oakum industriously, and now was attracted by
the spectacle of a man beside him nearly doubled over with a fit of
coughing. He was shaking and beating at his breast with large, bony
hands, and Lanagan noted professionally the rheumatic knuckles and the
nails like claws, yellow and dirty. His breath came in sharp whistles,
short and staccato, and he was taking possibly a third of a normal
respiration at a time.
A particularly violent paroxysm, followed by all evidences of entire
suspension of breath, brought Lanagan to the man’s side with a leap. He
swung the huddled form against a hydrant.
“Here you!” he called, to a passer-by, “call Douglas 20 and tell them
to shoot the harbour ambulance up here.” To himself he said: “This man
is sick. He needs attention and needs it quick.”
But at the words the hunched, choking figure straightened
spasmodically, flashing a look upon Lanagan that Lanagan, used to
malevolence in all its forms expressed upon features the most evil, had
not seen quite equalled. Accustomed to the ill-featured and repulsive
as they strain through the bars at the city prison, yet even Lanagan
started back momentarily in revulsion.
“I have seen misers,” thought Lanagan, “but this is the real miser of
all fact and all fiction. I would know him in a million. Fellow I used
to see in my dreams when I was a youngster. Pneumonia sure. About six
hours for him and then six feet.”
Thus lightly diagnosing and disposing of the man and his case, Lanagan
motioned the citizen, who had meantime stopped, to go on with the call.
But the strange, gnomelike figure, flashing another look, a singular
blend of loathing, hate, fear, and timidity, upon the newspaper man,
started to hobble away. Lanagan dropped his hand on the man’s shoulder
to restrain him. But the harsh features turned a look so glowering
and repellent upon him that he withdrew the restraining hand. The
coughing had ceased. The little old man was still breathing sibilantly
and swiftly, rather like a panting dog or cat, which he suggested,
but by extraordinary effort of will had fought away the more violent
exhibition of his seizure. He commenced to shuffle down the street,
with one furtive, fearful, backward look that went on past Lanagan and
up Market Street.
“You need a hospital, man,” said Lanagan curtly, “and I’m going to
take you there. Wait.” He placed his hand again on the man’s shoulder.
But the manikin-like creature flung the hand viciously from him and
again flashed that strange look of blended hate, fear, and timidity
upon the newspaper man.
“Let be!” he grated. “Let be!”
A car clanged to the safety station. The grotesque figure, still
half-hunched over at the paroxysm from Lanagan’s Manila, started for it
and Lanagan made no further effort at detention. He climbed laboriously
to the platform, and Lanagan shrugged his shoulders.
“I certainly am not going to dry-nurse you, old man, but I ought to at
that. If I ever saw a man marked for death, you’re that man.”
Despite a long afternoon idled away beneath mine host Pastori’s shade
trees and the somnolent influence of cobwebbed Chianti, Lanagan found
his miser’s features constantly before him.
“He’s my miser, too,” he mused, in the vernacular of childhood. “I
shouldn’t have let him escape me after finding him.”
Returning late, Lanagan for once in his life went to his room without
his inevitable last call at police headquarters. Consequently he
was several hours late in the morning on the news of a very fine
police story when he awakened to find his miser--Thaddeus Miller of
Oakland--pictured on the front pages of all the morning papers. There
was no mistaking that face. It was his miser. He had been murdered
in his cabin, a clumsy attempt having been made to fire the cabin to
destroy the crime and its evidence.
A young clerk, a neighbour to the miser, was under arrest. It appeared
that the clerk, James Watson, was found named in the will as sole
legatee to an estate valued at close to a quarter of a million dollars.
Upon the Watson porch had been found a hammer, freshly washed, the
handle not yet dry. But clinging to the claws, unobserved by whoever
had washed the blood from the hammer, were two strands of white hair
that brought the hammer home to the crime in the cabin. Watson, the
stories related, had only known Miller for a few months. He had been
seen leaving the cottage shortly before eight o’clock. The fire was
discovered smouldering at nine-thirty o’clock, extinguished, and Miller
found with his skull crushed, lying on a kerosene-soaked bunk, to
which, fortunately, the clumsily started fire had not yet communicated.
Watson had made a bad case out for himself initially by denying that
he had seen Miller at all that day or knowing that he was named in
the will. When confronted by neighbours who had seen him leaving the
cottage and one neighbour who had heard his wife speak of the will, he
took refuge in protestations that he had denied everything through fear
and terror. He then admitted owning the hammer, but professed himself
at a loss to account for the fact of its having been freshly washed
and of the strands of gray hair.
Raving his innocence, he had come to the verge of physical collapse. He
repeated constantly the name of his wife and begged the police to bring
her to him. But he was being held in strict “detinue,” the papers said,
until the third degree was given him. At the time of going to press
confession was expected momentarily.
Mrs. Watson, after a police examination, had been permitted to return
to her home. Her story was that both she and her husband had befriended
Miller on different occasions, out of pity for his forlorn and
miserable condition. She admitted that on one occasion he had jocularly
remarked that he would not forget her husband in his will, but had
attached no importance to his remark. She had never heard him speak of
any person that he feared. She admitted that her husband had visited
Watson at his cabin in the evening, but that the circumstance was not
unusual. He had remained but a moment, Miller being in an unusually
morose mood--had been so, in fact, for three or four days. She was at a
loss to account for the condition of the hammer.
“And yet,” growled Lanagan, “I’m eternally doomed if I think either
of them did it. That fellow gave me a look that spelled fear; abject,
abnormal fear; it was the concentration of the fear of a lifetime of a
hare who runs with the dogs always at his heels. And it was not fear of
the Watsons either.”
Lanagan, stopping at the office only long enough to receive
instructions, made the narrow-gauge ferry by bowling over an
obstreperous ticket-taker who tried to shut the gate in his face.
Not that there was any particular need for such spectacular haste;
it was merely Lanagan’s way; Lanagan “showing off,” as some of his
professional brothers would invidiously have it. But I, who knew him
better than any news writer in the business, say not. Lanagan was a
genuine eccentric. And in this particular case he was fighting for
time. Bitter experience had taught him the value of minutes. Indeed,
a cardinal rule of his business that Lanagan sought to drive into my
slower newspaper intelligence was to get on the ground first.
Lanagan knew of old that every city editor in town would be accepting
the very plausible police version, and would be awaiting the expected
confession from Watson. Watson might confess, but, Lanagan had a sullen
“hunch” that he wouldn’t.
Lanagan moved most of the time by “hunches,” as many successful
newspaper men--to say nothing of detectives--do. Hunches and luck may
be called by such fancy brands as inductive or deductive, intensive
or extensive analytical capacity; but in the long run most crimes are
solved on luck, hunches, and through the invaluable aid of police
“stool pigeons,” more politely known as “sources.” An intuitive
judgment of men is about as good an asset as a reporter or detective
can have, coupled with a faculty for quick decision and personal
bravery.
More than any one thing, it was possibly this faculty for swift
intuitive analysis that carried Lanagan to his high degree of success.
However, man and man’s judgments are fallible; it was so ordered in the
original scheme of things, for very obvious reasons.
Lanagan went directly to the Watson cottage. The brilliant American
police system had permitted some scores of curious and morbid persons
to trample over every inch of ground within a hundred yards of the
Miller hut. Privileged friends of the patrolman on guard there, after
the traditional American custom also, had been permitted to slip inside
and paw over the belongings and stare to their hearts’ content. Lanagan
knew of old what the situation there would be. That could wait. He
was more concerned with having the first meeting of the day with Mrs.
Watson.
It was a modest little “bungalow style” of home that he approached,
much like that of any one of thousands of small-salaried men in the
transbay suburban sections. An air of good taste, neatness, and care in
the trim little lawn, the cleanliness of the walks, stairs and porch,
and the precision with which all of the shades were drawn against the
morning sun, marked it possibly a bit more individual than many of its
kind. Mrs. Watson herself opened the door to his ring. She bore the
outward evidence of grief. Her eyes were red and swollen, her cheeks
hectic, her hair disheveled. She was blond, with large blue eyes, set
possibly a line too closely together, chiseled nose, delicate, shapely
ears, saving the lobe was not quite as free as an exact taste would
require, and a well-moulded chin.
“I am Mr. Lanagan of the _Enquirer_,” he said, adding some words of
apology. He had a way with women--and with men as well--when he so
desired, that was singularly ingratiating; a soft trick of speech, an
ingenuousness of manner, a certain dignity that seemed to lift him from
the mean atmosphere of his ill-fitting clothes and marked him with
personality.
“You may come in,” said Mrs. Watson.
As he followed her to the parlour and she lifted the shades, he noticed
that she was of good figure, rather lithe in her movements, laced
well in for a housewife unappareled for the street, not more than
three-and-twenty, and that she walked with that scarcely perceptible
lift of the shoulders and swing of the hips that denotes a woman not
entirely unconscious, even in the stress of melancholy circumstances,
of the gaze of a man; a suggestion of affectation, the unmistakable
mark of a woman inclined by temperament to be naturally frivolous; or
even, upon occasion, reckless. He noticed, too, that she wore French
heels.
“Curious type certainly,” commented Lanagan mentally. “Sort of a
domesticated coryphée; with the homing instinct implanted where the
wanderlust was planted in her sisters. One who has settled into
marriage where her like settle, with as little concern, into the round
circle of the night lights. Everything different except that generic
vanity. Rather an odd mating for a clerk, and a plodder at that, to
judge from his picture,” thought Lanagan.
Lanagan sat with his back to the window, putting Mrs. Watson in the
full light.
“Is there anything you can say, Mrs. Watson, that could throw any
light upon this affair? Any enemies that Miller ever spoke about? Any
visitors that he has had of late? Any letters or other messages that he
received? Any threats?”
She threw both hands forth with a despairing gesture.
“Nothing, nothing!” she moaned, as tears came. “It is terrible,
terrible! He is innocent, innocent I say! I know he is innocent! I know
it!”