their first meeting since their imprisonment. With a sob, asking no why
or wherefore, Mrs. Watson fell into her husband’s arms and mingled her
tears with his. Her sobs--weary, worn, tired little sobs--echoed softly
under the vaulted ceiling.
“I am pleased to inform you,” Henley said grandly, “that through the
efforts of our brilliant young friend of the _Enquirer_, the murderer
of Miller has been located. You are free.”
Then followed such a scene of hysterical gladness and tearful, joyous
explanations as Henley’s room, that had beheld many strange and unusual
scenes, had never witnessed.
Of course Watson, when arrested, confronted with the hammer and told
that his wife had confessed, had yielded to the third degree and,
unable to accept the full horror of it, yet had swiftly formed his plan
to confess to save the woman he loved, even though she might have done
the deed.
She, on her part, told a similar story, had formed her plan, for it
appeared that when the furor was raised after the murder was discovered
she had found the hammer on her porch with fresh blood stains; knew it
had been in Miller’s cottage, and had washed it hurriedly, not knowing
in her excitement just what to do, her husband even then having been
taken to the scene of the crime by the police.
In face of his confession and her own hammer found stained in such
manner, she had actually believed that he had committed the crime.
The police automobile drove up and the Watsons were escorted to it.
For the twentieth time, her eyes still tear-filled, Mrs. Watson said:
“What can we ever do to thank you, Mr. Lanagan?”
“Forgive me certain brutal conduct,” laughed that individual. “As I
hope the Lord will forgive me,” he added _sotto voce_, “for misjudging
you.”
As the automobile sped away to return a very happy couple to their
home, Lanagan, hat doffed and in hand, bowed profoundly after the
retreating machine, and remarked with veneration to the world at large:
“The tenth woman, gentlemen, the tenth woman.”
Then to Henley: “Inspector, I believe you said something about buying?”
III
THE CONSPIRACY OF ONE
III
THE CONSPIRACY OF ONE
“Kind of caught you fellows off base, Norrie.”
Bradley, star man for the _Herald_, drawled it at me invidiously as I
entered the police reporters’ room at the Hall of Justice. Merriman of
the _Times_ and a half-dozen morning paper men, their copy turned in,
had drifted down to the room to await any late developments. The Ratto
story had been on for three days and the _Herald_ and the _Times_ had
“put over” the arrest of Bernardo Tosci, Camorrist, at the expense of
Lanagan and myself.
“Better shoot a few absinthe drips into Lanagan,” continued Bradley,
“and then maybe you’ll land something. He’s been sober so long he’s
lost his grip.”
Bradley had fared hardly at the expense of Lanagan on more than one
occasion. I was about to fling it back at him when Lanagan’s voice
interrupted me. He had entered the room unfortunately just in time to
hear Bradley’s words.
“Possibly,” he said.
There was an embarrassed pause. Lanagan had a caustic tip to his
tongue and they awaited it now. He studied Bradley without expression,
leaning against the door sill. But, curiously enough, there was no
outburst. It was always difficult to foresay just what form Lanagan’s
humour would take.
“Charley,” he said at last to Bradley, and there shaded into his voice
a subtle colouring of unconscious pathos, “What have I ever done to
you? I have never done you dirt; nor any man in the business dirt. I
have played the game square. Why is it that I am always singled out
like that? Have I ever betrayed my paper or my friends? Have I ever
brought dishonour to the name of the newspaperman? If I have drunk, it
has been out of the public sight.
“I have fought hard, Charley; fought hard to break the habit. It
belongs to a past day in our game. And irrespective of that I may wish
to be remembered around here some day as something other than drunken
Jack Lanagan. I can’t help it if I have a knack of landing stories.
I’ve got to play the game right with my paper, haven’t I? And here in
this reporters’ room of all places I thought for a little lift and a
hand along and you are trying to shove me down.”
His voice hardened in bitterness:
“I’ve played a lone hand all my life, though, Charley; it seems to be
in the cards that I keep it up.”
My eyes blurred because I alone knew how hard he had fought that
battle. Beneath his cynical exterior he had a soul as sensitive to
slights as a girl. Boyishly I made a lunge at Bradley, but Lanagan,
with a swift move, had my arm in that lean, powerful hand of his.
“It don’t go,” he said, softly. “We are full grown men.”
There was an awkward pause. Then Merriman, of few words, said
sententiously:
“It’s your move, Charley.”
And Bradley put out his hand, which Lanagan took.
“Jack,” said the _Herald_ man, “I’m a cad. There isn’t a righter man in
the game than you.”
“Forget it then,” said Lanagan. “I have.”
But as we left the reporters’ room together I noticed that the
whiteness that had come over Lanagan’s face remained there.
“Don’t let it worry you, Jack,” I said anxiously.
“Don’t you bother, laddie. He did me more good than liquor, and I never
felt the dragging for the stuff worse than to-night. I’m going into
this story now for fair, and I’m going in to smash the _Times_ and the
_Herald_ flatter than a matrix.”
The Ratto case was one that occupied considerable public attention
several years ago, interest arising in the first instance through the
peculiar manner in which the crime was disclosed. Ratto, a wealthy
Italian commission merchant, had disappeared, no great commotion being
raised for the first few days. The police made the customary desultory
“search”--the “search” consisting mainly of the name and description
of Ratto being read out at the watches in the various station-houses.
The mystery in the disappearance might have remained unsolved for weeks
had it not been for a lineman, Waters, who, perched on the cross-tree
of a telegraph pole commanding a view of the windows of a room in
the vacant house where Ratto’s dead body lay, made the discovery.
No policeman being in the vicinity, Waters, with residents of the
vicinity, entered the house.
There had followed much newspaper speculation and police deduction. The
Mafia and the Camorra came in for attention, the latter organisation
being one that was at that time--long before the Viterbo trials--just
coming to the attention of the American regular police and the secret
service, as counterfeiting of American currency formed one of the
Camorra accomplishments.
The peculiar interest in the manner in which the Ratto killing
was discovered was this: three months previously a crime had been
discovered under almost identical circumstances by the same lineman,
Waters. In that case Rosendorn, a Jewish tailor, was found after a
several days’ disappearance by Waters, at work on the lines, who
happened to see the body as he glanced through the window of a vacant
house from his elevated perch. Following the discovery of the body by
Waters the case had been speedily cleared up by the police and proved
to be an affair arising from conjugal jealousy.
Waters was a man well advanced in years. The strain of the appearance
at the coroner’s jury and the preliminary hearings in the police
court appeared slightly to unbalance his mind. The spectacle of the
murdered man that he beheld through the windows of the vacant house was
constantly before him. He was a man who had gone through a placid life
and never figured in any scene of shocking violence or of murder.
After the disposal of the Rosendorn case Waters became possessed of a
mania for climbing telegraph poles commanding the windows of vacant
houses. Here and there and everywhere about the city he might be seen
spiking himself up a pole, peering intently, and scuttling down. He
was a familiar figure to all policemen and many citizens. He made
a practice of haunting police headquarters, and, his imagination
beginning evidently to visualise the first scene, once or twice led
futile parties into vacant houses with the declaration that he had
discovered a body. The police reporters humoured him and he came to
know the most of them, particularly Lanagan, who found Waters’ case was
of profound interest. Several stories were written about him and his
self-appointed cross-beam task of discovering murdered people in vacant
houses.
And then--he “made good.” Weeks of poking and prying and shinning up
and down telegraph poles brought their reward and Waters discovered
another crime: that of Ratto. He had been slain with an ordinary
blackjack, which was found by the body.
During the three days of excitement following the discovery of the
commission merchant’s body Waters thrived upon the publicity that he
received. He carried bundles of papers containing accounts of his
“find” and with his picture taken in many ways: climbing up telegraph
poles, peering into a window from a cross-tree--a camera man nearly
lost his life slipping on a cross beam taking this picture, and
as he looked ten years ago, his last “gallery” picture unearthed
“exclusively” by a proud “cub” reporter. He was as tickled as a boy,
and it was confidently predicted around police headquarters that he
would find an end in an insane asylum from pure joy in a month.
But the Ratto case did not clear up quite as easily as had the
Rosendorn case. It will be recalled in San Francisco that a swift
night ride in the police launch to Black Diamond had resulted in the
arrest of Bernardo Tosci, claimed by the police to be the leader of
the Camorra in the west. A police theory of attempted blackmail by
that organisation seemed to have been well bolstered up. The local
ramifications of the Camorra were proved beyond all doubt. Mysterious
persons, suspected of being Camorra agents, who had been seen talking
to Ratto shortly before his disappearance, were being diligently
sought. The fear of the Camorra by the residents of the Latin quarter
seriously hindered the police and newspaper men in their work, even
the native-speaking Italian detail of upper officemen making little
progress against the terror that the shadow of the Camorra threw upon
the quarter. Police and newspaper judgment were slowly settling that
Ratto’s death was due to one of those far-reaching conspiracies of the
Camorra chieftain and his minions.
Such was the situation at midnight when Lanagan and I dropped out of
the reporters’ room. The arrest of Tosci--that we had been “scooped”
on--had been made shortly after midnight the night before. A sullen
“hunch” on Lanagan’s part that the crime was in no way reminiscent of
the methods of the Camorra, as he understood those methods from a mass
of inquiry and first-hand reading, had led us away from the police
headquarters just a few moments before Tosci had been slipped up the
back elevator and placed in detinue. The man regularly assigned to the
night police detail at the Hall of Justice, a new man on the “beat,”
had missed the arrest, working against seasoned men on the _Times_ and
the _Herald_ with their inside sources of prison information. However,
we were supposed to be doing the “heavy” work on the story, so the
burden of the “trimming” fell upon us.
Lanagan was morose. He had nothing more to say as we walked down
Kearney street and turned up Broadway. I thought he was going to
Cæsar’s--the original Cæsar’s with the two tables and the marvellous
cuisine that pioneered the way for the glaring café chantant of
to-day’s slumming parties,--but he walked rapidly past Cæsar’s and on
to turn in at Bresci’s, a short distance up the slope of Telegraph
Hill. It was a dirty little place, one of the corner “wine joints”
sprinkled thickly in out of the way pockets of the congested Latin
quarter. At Bresci’s, in addition to the bar, there was a little eating
place at the rear, separated from the bar by dingy curtains. One room
further back held a piano, where on occasion one might hear his ash
man, or the flower vendor from Third and Market streets, or a waiter
off duty from the downtown cafés, volume forth the Prologue or swing
faultlessly through the Toreador’s song.
“Just got a tip that they are trying to hook mine host Bresci into the
thing as a Camorra leader,” was all that Lanagan said.
We sat at one of the tables while Lanagan pulled the faded curtains
almost together. Madam Bresci, she of the famed sauté mêlé, was
indisposed, so the daughter, Bina, would serve us, if agreeable?
Perfectly so, said Lanagan, rather with a note of satisfaction it
struck me, though when I glanced at his face in some surprise, for he
was a man who was ordinarily unmoved of women, it was expressionless.
Bresci went on to his bar after giving orders at the kitchen, and we
sat there some time in silence; long enough for Lanagan to send the
nicotine of three evil Manilas to his lungs. I saw that his eyes never
left the opening through the curtains. Then his cigar, from his mouth
for the moment, was suspended in air on its travel back and I followed
his sharp glance through the curtain.
Dinoli and Alberta, two plain-clothes men detailed in the Latin
quarter, had entered the saloon. Instantly the babble from the
voices of many volatile Italians ceased. The saloon on the moment
became quiet, save for the rattling of glasses and one click of the
old-fashioned maplewood cash register. The detectives passed the time
with Bresci, casually “sized up” the gathering, missing Lanagan and
myself, and left. Instantly there broke forth a riot of sputtering
Italian. The word “Ratto” we heard and then, obviously at some motion
toward our curtains from Bresci, the babble stopped as suddenly as it
began and within five moments the throng had idled out and the saloon
was still.
“Bresci,” demanded Lanagan suddenly, “what were they saying out there
about Ratto? Were they Camorrists?”
Bresci’s hand went straight over his head.
“_Corpo di Christo! Non! Non!_” he exclaimed, paling. “Oh, never speek
such word here! Non! They say, too bad Ratto he keeled!”
He mopped his brow of its perspiration, suddenly started, and glanced
furtively through the curtains to see whether anyone had come in and
heard the conversation.
“I think you’re a liar, Bresci,” said Lanagan pleasantly. “But as
I can’t talk Italian, I can’t prove it. It’s pretty funny how that
pow-wow shut up the minute those coppers blew through that door. But
you better wipe your streaming brow again and beat it back to the bar.
You’ve got a customer. Who is--” Lanagan whispered to me as Bresci
left, “no other than Lawrence Morton of the secret service, just
assigned here from Seattle.”
Then he continued, “I met him the other day on that counterfeiting
story at the beach. Just a shade curious, I should say, the attention
Bresci is attracting to-night from the big and the little hawkshaws. It
bears out my ‘tip.’”
Morton had a drink or two, complained of being tired, and drifted
casually over to the curtains, opened them, saw us, and was backing
easily away when Lanagan called out from the darkness--he had turned
off the incandescent earlier:
“Come in, Morton. Nothing to get exclusive over,” switching on the
light.
Morton dropped into a chair. If he was perturbed at being “made” he did
not show it. He was generally reputed one of the two or three cleverest
operators in the government service.
“That was good work you did on Iowa Slim, from all I hear,” he
vouchsafed.
“There’s a better coming up,” replied Lanagan, indifferently. “What
brings you to Bresci’s?”
Morton shrugged his shoulders.
“You know the two rules of our department?”
“Guard the president and turn up counterfeiters,” said Lanagan.
“Well, Lanagan, you’ve got the cachet to me from a good friend. The
secret service man loses his job who talks; but I don’t mind taking a
chance with you and telling you in confidence that in this particular
case I’m not guarding the president; being as he is, as you know, in
Washington.”
“Haven’t been sampling any--er--_salami_?” drawled Lanagan.
Morton laughed. “You sure are a clever one at that. No. I haven’t come
across any that suited my palate. I’m particular.”
We had a _café royale_--with Lanagan pouring his thimble-full of cognac
in my glass--and Morton left.
“The Camorra, it develops,” said Lanagan, “have been shipping to this
country from ---- excellent counterfeit American bank notes. They ship
them in _salami_ sausages. Maybe if one has gone astray we will get a
slice of bank note with our _salami_ and _sauté_, for here it comes on
a tray with the fair Bina serving.”
Bina, Bresci’s daughter, was an Italian of absolute beauty; one of
those glowing faces and perfect forms you see in the old Italian
masters.
I noticed in a moment that the comely Bina had much attention to show
Lanagan. We finished our meal and Lanagan led the way to the inner
room, where the piano was located. I had heard him at different times
sputter out “rag,” but when Nevin’s “A Day in Venice” suite came
breathing softly beneath his finger tips from out of that wrangly piano
I could but listen in amazement. Man of mysterious beginnings, he had
dropped into the San Francisco newspaper game over night, been given
his “try-out” by the brotherhood, found to speak the language of the
tribe, and had thereafter been unconditionally accepted. Such a mess as
the Bradley affair only served to emphasise his leadership.
With the last fine chord of the _Buona Notte_ there was a stillness
broken only by the instant and ecstatic handclapping of Bina. If I ever
saw the thing called Love shine forth from the human eyes, it suddenly
illuminated those dusky eyes that moment.
“O Madonna! Madonna!” she cried, softly. “Encore! Encore!”
Lanagan zipped through a lustspeil, to drop back then to the Last
Composition. It was truly remarkable, the manner in which he brought
the encroaching blindness of the great Beethoven sobbing out of the
misery of the minor base.
“Did a lot of that sort of thing when I was younger,” he said,
apologetically. “Before the wanderlust hit me.”
He was through. Bina fluttered about him and Lanagan’s head was close
to hers. She was a full-sexed creature but young; and I balked. I spoke
to Lanagan sharply after a moment or two and we departed. She gave him
a shy little glance as he left.
He laughed. “What a Covenanter you are! A psalm singer gone wrong for
fair!”
“I don’t like it,” I said, stubbornly, but with the best of intentions.
“She’s only a child.” I didn’t yet know all the sides of this man
Lanagan.
He whirled on me: and I got a swift sense of the power that could
flash from those dark eyes, and I felt, with the intimacy of personal
experience, how effective they must be when working upon a guilty mind.
“Let me tell you, Howard,” he bit out, using my given name for the
first time in our friendship, “Norrie” being his ordinary salutation,
“that I’m working on the Ratto story. Get me? What do you take me for,
anyhow? I’ve stood one welt from my own kind to-night and I don’t want
another.”
Lanagan received his second apology of the night; but he didn’t appear
to want it at that. His uncanny faculty of reading men’s minds seemed
to tell him that my remark was in good faith.
“Forget it,” he laughed. “But just for that, Norrie, I’ll keep to
myself for the present the interesting bit of information that Bina
gave me; for Bresci is a Camorra agent after all, and Bina, who is all
eyes and ears, knows precisely the truth about Ratto’s death in so far
as it pertains to the Camorra. I guess that will hold you for a while?
But what a lover of music she is! Let’s call it a day. Don’t look for
me to-morrow. I’m off on a little lay of my own. Keep in general reach
of a telephone so I can get you in a hurry and give that slavedriver of
a Sampson my distinguished compliments and tell him I will show up when
it pleases me to get d---- good and ready.”
I hammered away at the routine of the story the next day--I was
just a plain plodder, ordinarily dependable, but never particularly
brilliant--and neither saw Lanagan nor heard from him. A lively angle
was given to the story when Dinola and Alberti discovered, concealed in
one of Ratto’s game refrigerators, six choice _salami_ sausages that
his death had evidently prevented him disposing of in the proper way,
for neatly rolled in a half-inch wad in the dead centre of each, was a
roll of ten $100 gold bills of U. S. currency.
The secret service men, apprised, raged at the information being
given to the press, claiming that they had been working to round up
the entire gang for months, and that the publication would serve as
warning to the others. But Leslie, more concerned with solving the
Ratto mystery, and hanging it on Tosci than with handling Uncle Sam’s
minor details, and being also a great believer in the assistance
intelligent newspaper publicity could be to the police, gave the facts
out. The facts would appear to link Ratto indubitably with the Camorra
ring engaged in the importation of counterfeit currency and obviously
eliminated the Camorra blackmail theory with respect to his death.
With Ratto now definitely established as a leader of the slippery
Camorra--it was a hard organisation to get definite proof on--the
police were thrown back on a theory of a fight between Camorra leaders,
possibly over some division of the profits or some breach of faith.
The Camorra history shows that it was not--nor is not--slow to take
vengeance even on its own people.
Lanagan was missing the next day again, and I was surprised, in view
of the sensational developments. I was following the police lead and
it all pointed to the Camorra to me. Nor did he appear for work the
third day nor give me word of himself. And on this day the police had
an admission from Tosci that he had visited Ratto on the evening of his
disappearance!
It may be well to say here, too, that the secret service men, although
working at cross-purposes with the regular police, had been putting the
screws to Tosci and Morton had finally gotten enough information to
supplement his own investigations, and in a swift swoop five members of
the Tosci gang were in the federal cells at the Oakland jail charged
with handling counterfeit money.
All in all, the situation was growing highly complex for a routine
plodder, and still no Lanagan! I had just about made up my mind to go
on a still hunt for him, confident that he must have broken his vows
of abstinence, when he called me up. His message was curt:
“Suggest to Sampson to stick personally until he hears from me. Meet me
at once at Hyde and Lombard.”
Sampson usually left the office at midnight. Lanagan preferred his
dynamic energy on the desk when a big smash was on; and when he asked
for Sampson personally I knew he had landed. And Sampson always
preferred being at the city desk when Lanagan was swinging home on the
bit.
“Fine work!” was all Sampson said; it was not in his cold-blooded
cosmos to show disinterested enthusiasm. Possibly it was that
characteristic, coupled with twenty years’ seasoning at the wheel, that
made him the greatest city editor in the West.
Lanagan’s clothes had that peculiarly hand-dog appearance that the
newest suit will get when a man has slept in it once or twice; and
Lanagan’s clothes were seldom new, so the appearance was emphasised. He
had evidently found no time either to shave or change his collar. Worn
lines were about his mouth and eyes such as you see in athletes who
have “pulled off” weight in hard training. But his eyes, those dark,
mesmeric eyes, were sparkling and the old engaging trick of smiling was
there.
“Began to think maybe I _had_ ‘lost my grip,’” he said, with a short
laugh. “But I have either turned up one of the finest police stories
in my time or I have gone plumb crazy. We will soon know.”
Without more words, he walked quickly several blocks down over the
eastern slope of the hill and turned into a narrow tradesman’s alley.
I noticed that he was watching keenly before and after us. He slipped
through a gate in a high board fence and we were in a yard overgrown
with shrubbery and weeds. The house was a corner one and of that
familiar type of old family residence, seen in most localities, that
has gone to seed on a mortgage. It was vacant. He opened the kitchen
door with a skeleton key and we walked upstairs, turning into a large
room commanding a view of the street. He kept away from the window, I
noticed.