determination, straightened up, dried her eyes, and composed herself.
Lanagan had been watching her with eyes that seemed to narrow and
lessen to little black beads. His ears, gifted with abnormal power for
receiving and disintegrating into each component shade of meaning or
emotion the tones of the human voice, drank in every word that she
uttered, marked each sob that shook her form.
“You do not believe your husband guilty, do you?”
Her lips parted in an exclamation of protest, and Lanagan for the first
time caught the upper lip; a lip as thin as a paper cutter, that drew
tautly and white across the perfect teeth. It suggested a knife to
Lanagan.
“She holds true to the type,” he commented to himself grimly. “A
curious type, surely, for a prosaic clerk!”
Lanagan’s brain was churning. His beady eyes gleamed as though touched
with phosphorescence. Under the concentration of his gaze, the woman
unconsciously shrank. Rising from his chair with a movement almost
tigerish, he strode before her, upturned her face so that her eyes
looked straight up into his, and then, his voice terrific in its
tension, and yet scarcely louder than a whisper, said:
“Did _you_ wheedle Thaddeus Miller into making a will in your favour
and then murder him?”
So quickly that her act seemed rather involuntary than by any conscious
impulse, she leaped to her feet, her breast rising and falling
tumultuously. She struggled inarticulately for speech, raised her hand
as though to strike him in the face, and collapsed in a swoon at his
feet.
Lanagan gazed coldly down upon her without qualm. He was impersonal
now; the incarnation of newspaper truth. He only regretted that she
had balked him by swooning. Swiftly he straightened her out, loosed her
collar, and was busily engaged chafing her hands when heavy footfalls
sounded from the porch, and the bell rang loudly.
“By the brogans and the ring, our friends of the upper office,”
commented Lanagan cynically as he opened the door. Quinlan and Pryor
from the Oakland department entered, viewing Lanagan suspiciously as
they beheld the still form upon the floor.
“She’s in better shape for the hospital than your third degree in the
detinue cells,” remarked Lanagan, vouchsafing no explanations. “Went
out just this minute as I was interviewing her.”
Quinlan and Pryor settled themselves heavily, lit fresh cigars, made
laboured notes of the circumstances, and, when Lanagan finally restored
the woman, gave her some breathing space and then informed her that
she was to be taken to see her husband. To Lanagan she directed no
look--addressed no word. She moved as one in a trance.
The detectives and their prisoner departed and Lanagan turned for the
Miller cottage.
“That was a pure soul’s denial or it was a guilty soul’s defiance,”
thought Lanagan. “But which?”
Long he turned that over.
“Frankly, on type I mistrust her; but what about that look in Miller’s
eyes?”
Lanagan seldom went back on a “hunch.” At first flash he had declared
the Watsons innocent. He was not yet ready to abandon that; and yet the
circumstances were certainly trending toward them.
“But,” he concluded, “there’s a nigger in this woodpile somewhere that
I haven’t located.”
The cottage had nothing to offer. Police, curio hunters, and shoals
of newspaper men had combed it Lanagan hurried to the Oakland police
headquarters and cocked his feet on Inspector Henley’s desk while that
astute individual detailed to him the various steps taken by the police
in fixing the crime on Watson. Lanagan was nettled. It sounded highly
convincing.
“You’re sure of Watson?” he finally asked, quizzically, helping himself
to a fist-full of Henley’s cigars.
“Clearest case I have ever handled,” said Henley, moving the cigar box
out of reach. “Every link is complete. Further: the woman is in on it
and we’ll have her within twenty-four hours. We’ll get the case before
Baxter and they’ll swing inside of three months.”
“Well,” drawled Lanagan, “you’re wrong again, Henley.”
The inspector flushed. He had a lively recollection of how Lanagan had
“trimmed” him on the Stockslager murder and he didn’t take kindly to
the “again.”
“We’ve got the motive, the property; and the means, the hammer. What
more do you want?”
“Well, to complete the alliteration, I suppose you want the murderer,”
said Lanagan with a faint laugh. “And you haven’t got him. Pretty good
smokes. Just slip back that box. I don’t get over your way very often.
You act as though you had paid for those cigars yourself. Can I see
Watson?”
“No,” said Henley, surlily. He never cared to argue the little matters
such as Lanagan was fond of nagging him with; some way he had a feeling
that Lanagan always knew just a trifle more than he told. He passed
back the box. “But it’s an even break. Nobody’s seen him. Here’s his
picture.”
Lanagan studied the front and profile of a young man of twenty-six, a
face of surprising frankness and honesty. Every line held to Lanagan’s
critical eye the lie to the number striped across his breast; another
feature of our brilliant American police system that puts the rogue’s
gallery blazon on a man before he is tried.
As Lanagan passed out, his eye fell on the bulletin board in the
detectives’ room. The last discharge slip from San Quentin was pasted
upon it, the slip by which all police stations are supposed to keep in
touch with prisoners discharged during the past month. But through long
familiarity few of the detectives stop to read carefully. More from
habit than anything else, Lanagan read those sheets as a preacher reads
the book--he scanned it.
The fifth name on the list caught his eye: Ephraim Miller, alias Thad
Miller, alias Thornton Miles, alias Iowa Slim; assault to murder;
twenty-five years. The slip was dated the first--five days back. There
was little chance of its being read now. Swift as a lightning flash
Lanagan had formed his theory. His mind leaped back to the meeting
with Miller in front of the Palace. Ephraim and Thaddeus; they were
old-fashioned names. Then there was the “Thad.”
Miller had been from San Quentin but four days: Miser Miller’s fear
had been on him but a few days. Possibly this was a wayward son, some
unrecognised offspring, some family skeleton recrudescent; perhaps it
was this convict who had brought that fear into the eyes of Thaddeus
Miller!
It was a long, fine chance; but the most brilliant of newspaper
successes are scored on long, fine chances. Lanagan determined to take
it. He “rapped” to the hunch, as he used to style it; under the impulse
of his new idea he was a human dynamo.
He was back in San Francisco within an hour, and headed straight for
Billy Connors’ Buckets of Blood, that famed rendezvous within a stone’s
throw of the Hall of Justice, where the leaders of the thieves’ clans
foregathered. There he waited an hour until “Kid” Monahan, popularly
designated as King of the Pick-pockets, came in. The Kid was now a
fence. He had retired from the active practice of his profession after
doing time twice. “Ain’t there with the touch any more,” he remarked
sadly to Lanagan one day. He was, moreover, credited with being the man
for an outsider to “see” who wanted to operate locally.
“Kid,” said Lanagan, “I want you to find me Ephraim Miller, alias Thad
Mills, alias Thornton Miles, alias Iowa Slim. Just out of San Quentin
where he did twenty-five years for assault to murder.”
“We don’t keep no line on these old ones,” retorted the “King”
professionally. “But if he’s goin’ to report here he reports to me.
It’s pretty hard on us native sons with that reform bunch on the Police
Commission and the sky pilots stuffing you guys on the papers full of
knocks. There ain’t no touch-off work bein’ done around here by any
travellers that we can help. When do you want him?”
“Meet me here to-night at ten. I must have him located by then.”
Lanagan had befriended the “King” once, and he held that illustrious
gentleman’s absolute loyalty. He knew the “King” would have a dozen men
out in as many minutes.
Lanagan headed back for Oakland to round up the loose ends of the
story. He found police headquarters jammed with newspaper men and the
smell of many flash powders heavy on the air.
“All right, Mr. Lanagan of the _Enquirer_,” quoth Henley. “You can talk
to Watson now.” His tone was triumph.
Watson had confessed. He was sitting in a chair in the Inspector’s
room, a huddled figure of misery. The mantle of age seemed to have
settled on him overnight.
Lanagan was a hard loser. He stepped over to the huddled man.
“Do you mean to tell me, Watson,” he said so low that no one but Watson
heard him; “do you mean to tell me that you are not lying, putting your
neck in the noose--to save your wife?”
“No! No!” the denial was a shriek. “I killed him! I killed him for his
money, I tell you!” He fell back, shivering.
Lanagan drove in on him. “You lie, I tell you,” he hissed. “You lie!
You fool! It’s bound to come out! Tell the truth!”
“No, no,” moaned Watson. “I did it alone. God! I can feel his skull
crunching yet!”
“You’ve got more imagination than I credited you with,” sneered Lanagan
savagely. “That last was a good touch.”
There was a hustle as Quinlan and Pryor came through the prison gates
from the detinue cells surrounded by an eager coterie of newspaper men.
“We’ve got her, Inspector!” cried Quinlan with unprofessional feeling.
“She’s ‘spilled.’ Killed him herself, and says her husband is lying if
he says he did it. They’re both in it. We will have the whole thing
now.”
The woman was then brought out after her official statement had been
taken. Nothing that the newspaper men could do could shake her story.
In substance she said that she had worked on the old man for months to
have the will made out in her husband’s favour. Knowing her husband was
above such a deed, she planned and executed it alone. She had not had
an opportunity to wash the hammer after she returned home, and only did
so when the furor commenced. That was why it was still damp and why she
had overlooked the two strands of incriminating gray hair.
The newspaper camera men snapped and exploded flashes; the
inquisitorial circle broke up, and Watson having been removed, the room
was cleared of all save Henley, Mrs. Watson, and Lanagan.
“Through?” asked Henley sarcastically.
“No,” snapped Lanagan. “You say you killed this man. I say, Mrs.
Watson, you’re a liar. You no more killed that man than I did. You are
lying to save your husband!”
His voice had risen; his aspect was fairly ferocious; his sallow face
flushed to an unwholesome grey-blue; his eyes glowing again with that
catlike phosphorescence that she had seen and quailed at once before.
But again he was doomed to disappointment at a breakdown, for again
under the shock she collapsed after half rising to her feet with
evident purpose to give him the lie as violently as he gave it to her.
Women, Lanagan reflected, are like electric wires. They are drawn to
carry just so much voltage. A little overplus and they burn out. Each
time he had bullied the woman just as her nerves were at the breaking
point.
The matron bustled in with a side compliment on Lanagan for his
brutality, and lifted the limp form. Lanagan, bitterly chagrined at
the events of the day, turned on his heel to return to San Francisco.
On the ferry he broke a vow of six months and fell back on absinthe.
He reached the office at seven o’clock, wrote steadily for two hours a
story identical as he knew it would be with all the morning papers, and
then went out.
The word was passed swiftly that Lanagan was drinking again, and I
was released for the night to round him up and get him home--my usual
assignment under the circumstances.
On the chance that some of the choice spirits that foregather at
Connors’ dive might have crossed his path, I dropped in there, and,
to my unbounded relief, saw Lanagan himself at a table in deep
conversation with “Kid” Monahan. I went over to his table, the
“King” slipping out the side door. I had not Lanagan’s penchant for
camaraderie with that breed, and took little pains not to let him know
it.
The old wild, reckless light shone from Lanagan’s eyes, and I knew
there was no measuring his stride that night, making pace or keeping it.
He laughed aloud. “Art there, old truepenny?” and slapped my shoulder.
He was in high feather with himself, that was clear. “Come. Have you
got your gun?” I nodded.
“That’s fine. Now for the grand ‘feenale,’ as Cæsar says about his
_ponce à la toscana_. And success to all hunches!” There was something
besides absinthe burning back in those eyes.
Questions were useless, so I trailed along. At Macnamara’s corner we
picked up Brady and Wilson, two of Chief Leslie’s trustiest men.
“Did the chief instruct you?” asked Lanagan.
“He said to report to you and keep our heads shut or tend daisies,”
replied Brady, the senior of the pair, and a cool and heady
thief-taker; also the champion pistol shot of the department.
“My man is Iowa Slim, wanted for murder. Is heavily armed and
desperate. He’s in the Tokio--Jap lodging house at Dupont and Clay. It
looks like break the door and rush. Wilson, Norton, and I will take
the door, and you, Brady, stand free of the rush and be ready to drop
him if he shows fight. That is, Norton will--” turning to me in his
quizzical, bantering way, “--if he relishes the job!”
I didn’t relish the job. But, as usual, when he spoke to me in that
superior, teasing way I blundered in valiantly where my native caution
would have feared to tread. I am free to admit that I am of that
branch of the profession that believes a reporter full of lead in peace
or war is of very little use on earth, and certainly not elsewhere, to
the paper that employs him.
In the shadows the detectives nonchalantly slipped their revolvers
into their side coat pockets. Neither was cumbered by an overcoat;
double-line your sack coat, the old-timers will tell you, but keep away
from excess encumbrances where possible. One gallant officer in my
time lost his life because he was two seconds delayed unbuttoning an
overcoat for his gun.
Fifteen minutes later we assembled, one by one, at convenient corners
to the Tokio, a foul-smelling, ramshackle affair. One by one we drifted
in, slipped off our shoes and tiptoed up the stairs, Lanagan in the
lead, Norton bringing up the rear.
Lanagan paused before a corner door. He and Wilson braced against it.
My bulk backed Wilson. Brady towered above us, standing free to have a
clear sweep with both guns. He turned the light on full, taking every
chance of making targets of us all for the one chance of getting a drop
on Slim without bloodshed.
From an adjacent room a clock ticked loudly; somebody rolled over in
bed, and the sounds came so clearly that it seemed my heart must have
beat as loudly as a trip hammer. Yet it was not exactly fear, as I
recall it; it was a sort of nervous tension to have it over with if it
had to come.
“Slim! Slim!” It was a soft, sibilant whisper, and I could scarcely
believe my ears. It was Lanagan at the keyhole. Then he rapped four
times in quick, soft staccato, and then four times more. It was some
code he had learned, possibly from Monahan.
There was a prolonged pause, and the sound of someone from within
turning in bed, and another long pause. The strain on me was terrific.
From the corner of my eye I caught the black muzzle of Brady’s
left-hand gun. It was as steady as though held in a vise, and I had
time to marvel.
“Slim! Slim! They’re after me! It’s Larry Bowman’s pal, Shorty!”
Another nerve-racking pause, and then at the very keyhole came through
a soft, throaty whisper:
“Who?”
“Shorty Davis. Larry said you’d take me in. Quick, Slim, they’re after
me!”
A key grated, the knob turned.
“Now!” hissed Lanagan, and with one mighty lurch we burst pell-mell
into the room. I caught a flashing look at a slender, flannel-shirted
figure with a week’s growth of beard as Slim whirled a foot ahead
of us and with one leap cleared the room and swung with a murderous
long-barrelled Colt in his hand.
His leap was quicker than the spring of a cat. He shot from the hip,
but Brady, posted to do just the trick he did, spoiled the shot. Slim’s
bullet ripped a two-inch hole through the floor as he crumpled down in
a heap.
We stretched him upon the bed. He had got it in the lungs. Wilson
started for the doctor.
“Remember,” said Lanagan, “the chief’s orders. You are not to talk. If
it gets out, tell all reporters it’s a detinue case. I’ll answer for
the rest.”
A few gnomelike, corpselike, yellow faces peered from doors, but
a flash from Brady’s star sent them scurrying back. The shot was
apparently not heard in the street, for no one came.
Lanagan turned to Slim, who was choking.
“You know what you were wanted for, Slim?” he asked in as cool a voice
as a surgeon might ask for your pulse.
“That Oakland job, I suppose,” he gasped. “Well, boys, you did me a
good turn croaking me. I never wanted to go back to that hell hole
again. I did what I came out to do, what I’ve waited twenty-five
years to do, and I’m ready to take my judgment. He sent me up there
twenty-five years ago, and he murdered my father as surely as there is
a God, who will some day dope it all out right according to a different
scheme than they do here.”
Gasping, with many halts, he told his story. The surgeon came, shook
his head, and devoted himself to keeping life until the story was taken
down.
His father, a wealthy Iowan, had come to Thaddeus Miller’s ranch thirty
years ago, bringing with him his entire fortune for investment. The
son Ephraim remained at school back home. At Miller’s ranch the boy’s
father had been found in the well one day, drowned. A whiskey bottle
floated on the water beside him. His entire estate had been willed to
Thaddeus Miller. In a sparsely settled community Thaddeus Miller’s
story had been accepted--that the brother, in drink, had stumbled into
the well. The son had journeyed across the continent to find himself
disinherited. He had always been told he was to be his father’s heir.
His father in Iowa had been a strict abstainer. So far as the son knew,
he had never touched liquor. But his charge, that Thaddeus had in some
fashion gotten his father intoxicated, forced him to sign a will, and
then pitched him into the well with the bottle, while it created some
natural excitement, could never be proved, and in the course of time
became forgotten. In spite of a contest, the will stood.
Ephraim took to drink and fell in with evil companions. For petty
offences he was sentenced and earned his name of Iowa Slim. One night
in liquor, fired with his wrongs, he determined to ransack Miller’s
house. He knew the old man kept a large amount of money concealed
there. It was his, he believed, and he determined to have it. Miller
had caught him. In the scuffle he beat his uncle and left him for dead,
and in the stovepipe he had found a bag of gold. But as he was leaving
the grounds, neighbours, driving along on the lonely country road, who
had heard the first screams of the old man, surrounded him. The uncle
prosecuted him with all the wealth and influence at his command, and
the son, at the age of eighteen years, was sentenced to San Quentin for
twenty-five years for assault to murder.
As sentence was pronounced he had turned on his uncle and warned him
that the day he was freed from prison he would come back and kill
him. From time to time he had managed to send threats by discharged
convicts, who carried the word with the unfailing obligation of the
convict brotherhood. He had driven the old man from place to place.
He had lost track of him for an entire year, and was planning how best
to locate him again when he unexpectedly met him face to face on the
streets of San Francisco, followed him to his home, waited until the
neighbourhood was quiet, and then had stolen in, wakened the old man
from sleep, and asked about his father’s property.
Under the fear of death Miller had made a promise of restitution,
but in an unguarded moment he said he “would make a new will.” Slim
demanded what he meant by a new will, and the uncle had confessed the
will to the Watsons merely to cheat the nephew in case he had come back
and fulfilled his courtroom threat. The uncle had kept count and knew
to a day when Slim was to be released. Enraged beyond endurance at
that, Slim had seized up the hammer and crushed the old man’s head.
“But as I live,” he breathed hoarsely, “the man was as good as dead
before I hit him.”
“Yes,” Lanagan interrupted, “I know that, Slim.”
Slim looked at Lanagan with dull curiosity, but was too far gone to ask
explanations, and he continued with his story, telling of sprinkling
kerosene and touching it with a match. He then had gone to the Watson
cottage, carrying the hammer, intending if the couple were not in to
locate and destroy the will; and if they were to do double murder if
necessary to get it. Miller had said they had it, an untruth, told
evidently in the childish hope that Slim might leave him and search
for it. While still waiting for an opportunity of entering the house,
the smouldering fire had been discovered at the Miller cottage, and he
had fled, the thought coming to him to leave the hammer on the Watson
porch, not knowing the hammer belonged to them and had been borrowed by
Miller. The arrest of the two for murder might pave the way for him to
have his property restored as the next of kin to Miller.
He signed the confession laboriously, and the story was done.
“It’s all right, cull,” he said to Brady, dropping back to the
vernacular. “You did me a good trick not sending me back. There ain’t
no hard feelings on my part.”
He raised himself by a sudden effort, his eyes peering far, far away
and beyond the sordid scene of his dissolution.
“I squared--all--accounts--dad--I squ’--”
He dropped back on the pillow. The surgeon bent his head to Slim’s
breast, then slowly straightened up and drew the sheet over his face.
“Poor lad!” said Lanagan softly. “They will judge you differently
there!”
Then again the newspaper mind curtly:
“Brady, you and Wilson stay here until I come back. Nobody gets in.
Nobody, understand? Doc, we’ll have to impound you, too, until three.
Understand, Brady?” Brady nodded.
“Now, Norrie,” snapped Lanagan incisively, “beat it, boy, beat it!”
For two hours Lanagan and I fed paper into our typewriters, with
Sampson himself whisking the sheets away as they came from the platens.
The M. E. even came in once or twice and tried to preserve his dignity
while he scanned the copy hot from the typewriter.
The thrill of Lanagan’s great exclusive was throughout the entire
plant. Not a half-dozen people in the office knew just what the story
was, but each knew by the subtle instinct of communication that the big
scoop of the year was shooting down the pneumatic to the composing room.
Not until we had the first papers, sticky and inky and fragrant, in our
eager fingers, did we stir from our desks. Then followed the usual
jubilation as the scouts ran in with the _Times_ and the _Herald_ with
the “Watsons Confess” scareheads.
Ah, that is life, that exaltation of the “exclusive”!
We wandered leisurely down to the Tokio. The story was wide open now.
We were through. The morgue notified, Brady and Wilson stayed to attend
to the routine, and Lanagan announced that he was going to Oakland.
We caught the paper boat, riding luxuriously on heaps of _Enquirers_.
Thus it happened that we were at police headquarters there with the
copies of our own paper before the route carriers had made their
deliveries. Lanagan stepped to the ’phone and rang up Henley.
“Feel like buying a drink?” asked Lanagan.
Over the wire came back some hearty and measured compliments. “You’re
sure in an amiable humour. Well, come down. You’ve got two prisoners
to free. If conditions at your jail weren’t so rotten I wouldn’t say
anything till morning. But I need a drink, which is on you, and the
Watsons need a breath of fresh air.” In fifteen minutes Henley was with
us.
He was a gallant officer, that Henley. When he had finished he wrung
Lanagan’s hand until I thought he never would let go.
“Bring in the Watsons,” he ordered.