legs. I sat down against the wall and pulled out a cigar but he stopped
me.
“Can’t take a chance. Smell of smoke might give the whole thing away.
See anything curious about this room?”
I looked at the bareness of it and shook my head.
“Examine it,” he said. “You haven’t even looked it over.”
I knew he was not given to joking, so I got up and went over the room
carefully. The door to the hall was swung back against the wall and I
closed it.
Hanging on the door knob by the leather wrist thong was a blackjack, a
duplicate of the one with which Ratto was slain. Lanagan was laughing
quietly.
“What are your sensations at being in a prospective death chamber?” he
asked.
Visions of being suddenly pocketed in that vast, out of the way mansion
by a ring of Camorrists, assailed me, and I instinctively felt for my
revolver.
“Don’t worry,” said the baffling Lanagan. “The trap won’t spring for
several hours yet. But after it does spring,” he went on, “and this
mess is over, I’m prepared to present the fair Bina with the biggest
box of French mixed in town. That is,” quizzically, “if my puritanical
Mentor will permit me to? But seriously, Norrie,”--his next words came
forth rather hurriedly, and much as a shamed school-boy might make
a confession,--“seriously these Italian girls are mature women at
sixteen. And though you may not think it, I am only thirty-four.”
When it filtered into me what he was driving at I jumped to my feet and
pulled him to his.
“Jack,” I cried delightedly, “you don’t mean--”
“No,” he said, shortly, “I don’t mean anything, now or any other time,
Norrie, until I’ve taken a seat on this water wagon that I know I can
ride for life.”
My thoughts shot back to that declaration in the reporters’ room that
I had pondered often since uttered. It was clear enough now. He was a
man’s man, Jack Lanagan; and looking back now even after the years that
have passed since then, looking back from the content of my own cosy
home, the tears spring and I stop writing. He did not marry Bina.
“That’s about enough of that,” he said. “I wanted you to get the lay of
the house by daylight. Let’s get out of here. I’ve got to see Leslie.”
But we were only as far as the head of the stairs leading to the lower
floor when a key grated in a lock some place beneath us and Lanagan
gripped my arm, his finger to his lips, his eyes glittering like a
snake’s. We swung back on tiptoes to a small closet at the end of the
hall, pulling the door almost shut after us. Lanagan dropped, his eye
to the keyhole. He had drawn his revolver and I drew mine; my heart
was beginning to thump like a big bass drum. There came to my ears the
sound of footfalls up the creaking stairs. At first it seemed like a
dozen men and I concluded for once that one of Lanagan’s traps was
going to spring the wrong way.
The footfalls disintegrated as they came nearer and I found there
was but one person. Lanagan’s eye might have been stuck fast to that
keyhole, for his hat brim did not waver the fraction of an inch as he
held his rigid, cramped position for long minute after minute.
Finally the footfalls sounded back down the stairs. Lanagan did not
move until, to our taut ear drums, came the sound of the closing rear
door.
“Well?” I asked him, wiping the perspiration from my forehead.
All he said was “Fine! Fine! Wait a bit yet, Norrie! That was merely a
scout, taking a last look to be sure that blackjack hadn’t been removed
by any prospective tenants who might have been here.”
He glanced at his dollar watch. It was six o’clock.
“There’ll be two good hours before darkness,” he said. “We’ll take a
chance and leave the house uncovered while I get hold of the chief.
Unless you want to stay here?” he asked banteringly. I did not want to
stay there, but he had me squarely in the door, as it were, and I had
to say I would if he wanted it. I sometimes think many a man is made a
hero against his will. Then a great shaft of illumination struck me and
I asked:
“Here, Jack; why should they bring that blackjack here? They could
bring a dozen with them and nobody be any the wiser.”
But all the satisfaction I got out of that inscrutable, irritating man
was: “How bright the understudy is becoming! You’ll be tackling high C
yourself next!”
“However,” he went on, “I’m not going to permit you to remain here.
Firstly and mainly, because I am confident nothing will happen until
after dark, although for a moment I thought my theory had gone wrong,
and in the second place, because you might scramble the whole platter
on me and get to shooting recklessly.”
We slipped out of the alley after Lanagan had reconnoitred long. He had
good reason for not wishing to appear at police headquarters. It was
generally known that he was off on some sort of a still hunt. He had
been seen occasionally by some of the boys, and it was known, too, that
he was not drinking. His appearance at headquarters in conference with
Leslie therefore might bring a corps of sharp-eyed newspaper men on our
trail.
He got Leslie on the wire, and within thirty minutes was in deep
conversation with that astute thief-taker in the rear room at
Allenberg’s. There were few sections of the city where Lanagan was not
on intimate terms with saloonmen. There are many times when they can
be valuable to the police reporter, particularly in the Tenderloin and
down town. The two did not take me into their confidence, but once I
heard Leslie say, explosively:
“Jack, you’re as daffy as a horned toad.”
I caught only part of Lanagan’s answer. He was talking earnestly.
“I tell you, Chief, my information is correct. I’ve got the only leak
in San Francisco into the Camorra and neither you nor the secret
service have a man who can tap it. It’s worth a chance, I tell you.
We’ll want Brady, Wilson and Maloney. We’ve got to cover every point,
take no chances of a murder getting by on us, and smash this thing
right on the nose.”
Leslie studied Lanagan long and carefully. He had never been wrong yet.
“Not drinking, Jack?” he asked at last.
“Not a smell in three months,” said Lanagan.
“You’re on,” the chief finally said, decisively.
I grew restive at not being taken “in,” but Lanagan said I was becoming
so very bright that a little discipline would do me good; harkening
back, I suppose, to that remark about the blackjack. I said no more.
They outlined their plan. Maloney was to hide in the yard of the
house directly across from the alley gate--in that old-fashioned
neighbourhood, tight board fences and hedgerows are common--and Wilson
across the street where he could command the window to the room where
the blackjack hung. We three, with Brady, were to take our position
inside the house. The moment anybody entered the alley gate, or by the
front door--Lanagan considered it likely that that approach might be
taken under cover of darkness--Maloney was to lift himself to the fence
top and strike a match. Wilson, in turn, as though lighting a cigar,
would strike a match, and one or the other of us, watching back from
the room window of the house, would know that the trap was set. In
addition to watching for Maloney’s signal, Wilson’s position enabled
him easily to cover the front door. Lanagan, it appeared, had planned
the coup hours before and had his coverts already selected.
Their vigil ended on the outside, Maloney and Wilson were then to jump
and cover the front and rear doors, respectively, in case of any miscue
inside that might permit of an escape. “Miscue” was Lanagan’s word: and
I reflected with some apprehension, that any “miscue” with such nervy
officers as Leslie and Brady that would permit an escape out of that
house would mean that probably all of us would be candidates for morgue
slabs.
Dusk found us all drifting one by one to our stations. When I finally
entered through the alley door, I could see neither Maloney nor Wilson,
and yet I knew they had both gone before me and were in position. I was
the last one in and Lanagan was waiting there to lock the kitchen door
after me. We trooped silently upstairs, shoes off and in hand.
It was an unreal situation, waiting there as the deeper blackness of
night settled down and the night sounds of an empty house assailed us
magnified. Brady was standing the watch at the window for the signal.
The rest of us were lined up in the broad hall. It was so dark you
couldn’t see a man a foot in front of you. Hours it seemed to me must
have passed, with no conversation save a scattered whisper or so. We
had tried the hall and room floors and the door to the hall closet and
they gave out no squeaks.
“Psst!”
Softly, sibilantly, came Brady’s signal. We backed into the closet.
Brady in a second was with us. The door was opened six inches with
Lanagan and Leslie ready for a spring. I was in some fashion away back
in the rear of the closet.
A key grated in the kitchen lock, and it sounded through the vast
empty house with a peculiarly sinister harshness. It was a situation
certainly unique in crime! The stairs creaked--there was the sound of
heavy, laboured breathing. But there was but one set of footfalls! We
heard the door open to the room where the ugly blackjack hung, and as
it did Leslie swung our door out and, silently as so many black ghosts,
we moved to the other door.
Against the window we could see a man’s form dimly outlined. And then--
There was a flash of blinding brilliance, a report that crashed in the
empty stillness of the abandoned mansion with the reverberation of a
twelve-pound gun, and under the arcs of the swiftly flashing pocket
lights of Brady and Leslie, we beheld, stretched almost at our feet as
the form toppled backward and stiffened out--
_Waters!_
There was a gushing wound in the temple. Death had been instantaneous.
With an eagerness that was more animal than human, Lanagan tore back
Waters’ coat, ran his hands swiftly through his every pocket, and
finally, with a “_Ha!_” of satisfaction like a snarl, pulled out from
an unsealed envelope in an inside pocket a page of writing:
“Daffy, chief: Daffy, as a horned toad? Well, here’s the proof!”
Written in the hand and phraseology of a fairly intelligent man, it was
as follows:
“_I killed Ratto. I guess I have been crazy. I went crazy looking for
murdered people in vacant houses from telegraph poles. I couldn’t find
any more, and then I thought I would kill somebody. I told Ratto on the
street that I had seen a man’s body in that house and he went in with
me. I had never seen him before. I had left the door open as I ran out
to him, but he didn’t suspect anything. I killed him with a blackjack
and then found the body in three days, from the telegraph pole. I had
picked out the place several days ahead. I got everything ready and
came up several times and it was funny no one saw me. I thought Ratto
would say get the police but he was nervy all right and jumped right in
after me._
”_The room in this house I discovered in the same way. It was even
better than the flat where Ratto was killed because the neighbourhood
didn’t have so many people. The blackjack is on the door knob. I put it
there so as I went into the room first to light a match I could take it
off the inside door knob and hit my man as he followed me in._
“_That reporter Lanagan and another man were hanging around this
neighbourhood to-day. He has been talking to me kind of suspicious
lately and I guess the jig is up. It’s funny the police never suspected
me._
”_I guess I have been crazy all right. I would hang anyhow. But I am
all right now and I will kill myself in the room. It’s all the return I
can make for Ratto. If nobody hears the shot I hope somebody finds me
from a telegraph pole. It will give the newspapers lots to write about.
That’s what made me crazy. I got too much fame, I guess._
“_William Waters_”
There was a prolonged pause. Then:
“Humph,” growled Leslie savagely. “The ‘fame’ you got isn’t a marker to
the fame that reporter Lanagan has heaped on me. For the original ass
I’m it. I took that fellow for a loon. Jack, shake.”
Lanagan could not forbear a soft sarcasm. That “daffy as a horned toad”
rankled:
“Give your men a little class in Kraft-Ebing, Lombroso, Nordau or some
of those specialists and you will get a better understanding of the
pulling power of crime,” he said, dryly. “I hadn’t figured quite this
kind of a finish,” he went on. “But the minute he blazed that shot
into his brain I was sure he had left a confession. If he couldn’t get
notoriety in life he would in death.”
Quickly Lanagan told of his suspicions settling on Waters after Bina,
his “leak” to the Camorra, had told him that the death of Ratto was
as much of a mystery to the Camorrists as it was to the police. With
Bresci a Camorra leader, the wise-eyed and wise-eared little Bina
heard and saw much that Lanagan in turn was told. On her say-so, he
had absolutely dismissed the Camorra. He set himself to watch Waters
and for three days and nights scarcely ever let the lineman out of
his sight. From safe vantage points he had watched Waters at his
grisly work of climbing innumerable telegraph poles. At times he had
casually picked him up and talked with him. It was evident that he
had also aroused Waters’ suspicions. He noticed him lingering in the
neighbourhood of the house where we now were and finally sneak in
by the alley door. After he left the house Lanagan had hunted up a
locksmith, secured a set of skeleton keys himself, and let himself into
the house, not knowing exactly what to expect.
He found the blackjack on the door knob, saw the telegraph pole out of
the window and in a flash had realised the entire plan of the crazed
lineman.
Lanagan assumed that Waters would not attempt to lure his victim in
daylight. He had come back to the house while we were there merely
moved by some insane morbidity to visit again the scene selected for
the crime; picture possibly the slain man on the floor, himself peering
in from the telegraph pole; and then the columns of newspaper space.
That the room was commanded by a telegraph pole I had not noticed
during the day or even my sluggish wits might have given me a hint of
the truth.
“The shot seems to have raised no stir outside, Chief,” said Lanagan,
briskly, when the recital was done. “Call in Wilson and Maloney and
stick around and give us two hours lee-way before you get the morgue.
It’s twelve-thirty.
“_Now, son, you hit the pike with me for the Enquirer!_”
IV
WHOM THE GODS DESTROY
IV
WHOM THE GODS DESTROY
At Riordan’s, much frequented by policemen and reporters, Jack Lanagan
sat with Leslie, that greatest chief of his time, discussing one of
Dan’s delectable Bismarck herrings and a “steam.” It was not above the
very human Leslie to mingle in the free democracy of Dan’s back room,
where the gentlemen of the Fourth Estate foregathered to settle in
seasoned nonchalance the problems of the world.
Leslie was speaking.
“You haven’t lost out, Jack,” he was saying. “But if that narrow-gauge
Sampson elects to fire you--which I know he won’t--I’ll give you work
if I’ve got to pay you out of my contingent fund. Get off that suisses
diet and report. The _Enquirer_ can’t afford to lose you.”
Lanagan, unshaven for a week, looked otherwise disreputable.
“The _Enquirer_,” he reported judicially, “can afford to lose anybody.
It’s a sweat-shop life, reporting; and they fill your place just as
easily as Schwartz, down there on Stevenson Street, fills a place
at one of his shirt machines. Nothing is as dead as a yesterday’s
paper--excepting it has a libel in it; and nothing is so perishable
as a reporter’s reputation. The slate is swabbed clean once every
twenty-four hours. Your job is precisely that long.”
“Rats. You’re in a beautiful humour. They can’t forget that Iowa Slim
exclusive very soon.”
“No; but only because of the fact that I haven’t shown up for work
since. They had given me warning before then. I’m through unless they
send for me, and they don’t seem to be doing that. As a matter of
cold-blooded fact, the _Enquirer_ likes my work but not my weakness. My
type don’t get much sympathy these times. I belong to the generation of
the tramp printer; the days of a real ethical code in the profession.
We old-timers are taking the gad--what few of us there are left--three
times over for an even break with these peg-topped trouser boys at ten
a week who once wrote a class farce.
“No, chief,” concluded Lanagan dispassionately and deliberately, “I
guess I’ve shot my bolt in San Francisco. I’ll ship on a banana boat
and flag it on to Panama. Maybe when I get there I will tangle up in
some big complication and another Davis will come along to chronicle me
with that other Derelict; a grand story, by the way, chief--a newspaper
epic. You should read it.”
Leslie ignored the morose mood of the reporter. “Shot nothing,” he said
in disgust. “Take a Turkish bath and sweat that grouch out of your
system. Here, take this ten. I want you to get back to your paper.
You’re too valuable a man to be out of work in this town.”
Lanagan rejected the proffered money, and Leslie was attempting to
force it on him--there was a warm bond of friendship between the two
men and a mutual admiration for the abilities of each other--when when
Brady from the upper office stuck his head through the door. He saluted.
“Captain Cook sent me over to say that it looks now like that Hemingway
case was not a suicide after all. There are no powder burns on the
face. The revolver must have been put in her hand after she was shot.”
Cook was night captain of detectives. Leslie jumped to his feet and
swung Lanagan to his.
“Here! This will put you on your mettle. I didn’t like the looks
of that case from the start. I am going out and take hold of it
personally. Come along. Maybe you can turn up something that the
_Enquirer_ will be glad to hear from you on. Come along, Brady.”
They jumped into the police machine and were whirled out to a
fashionable home on Pacific Avenue. It was 9:30 o’clock. Less than an
hour before a report had been received of the suicide of the daughter
of the house, a débutante whose coming-out party had been an event of
the spring before and whose engagement to a broker, Oliver Macondray,
had just been announced.
Wilson, accounted one of Leslie’s shrewdest upper office men, was
already in the room when Leslie, Lanagan, and Brady arrived. There
were there also a shoal of newspaper men and photographers, and the
smell of flash powders was heavy on the air. On the first report from
police headquarters I had been sent out by Sampson and had already been
in the house for half an hour. But I was glad to surrender the story
promptly to Lanagan when he entered, although he did not then say that
he intended going to work.
It was Wilson, as I recall it, who had raised a doubt of the suicide
theory by pointing out the absence of powder burns, although the bullet
wound was in the right temple and the revolver clasped tightly in the
right hand. A girl with her frail wrist must have pressed the revolver
close before firing. It was clear the revolver had been placed in her
hand after the shooting. It was an English bulldog of old pattern, one
of those “family” pistols found in most homes.
[Illustration: “Then Lanagan took his leisurely turn, drawing up an
easy chair.”]
“If you can’t be first on the ground, be last,” was an axiom of the
newspaper business that Lanagan often tried to impress upon me.
He proceeded to act upon his theory now by rolling and lighting
a cigarette to give all in the room ample time to finish their
investigation. Finally the room was cleared of all save, Leslie,
Lanagan, Brady, Wilson, and myself.
The room had one set of French windows giving out upon a wide porch and
a heavily matted lawn. It would be next to impossible to say whether
a person had escaped over the lawn by way of the veranda. The bedroom
door was open when a maid, attracted by the shot, had overcome her
terror and run to the room.
At the time of death the only persons in the house were the mother,
daughter, and the maid, Marie. The maid was in a state bordering on
collapse after the first siege with the detectives and newspaper
men, and Leslie ordered her kept quiet for an hour. The occasional
hysterical cries of the mother, prostrated in her own room, could be
heard.
Leslie examined the body with minute care. The rest of us had completed
our investigations. Then Lanagan took his leisurely turn, drawing up an
easy chair. Leslie, Brady, and Wilson had stepped through the window
and were examining the porch and the lawn carefully with their pocket
lights. Lanagan had taken one of the girl’s hands up in his. He was
examining an old-fashioned bracelet critically, very critically, it
seemed to me. He flashed a sudden quick glance toward the window; the
chief and the detectives were still busy outside.
“Stand at the door, Norrie!” he shot at me electrically.
I sprang to put my back to it, to give him a moment’s delay in case any
of the other newspaper men should drift back to the room. I had not
the slightest idea what he was after, but I caught a glitter of fierce
interest in his eyes, and I knew him better than to disobey. I did not
see what he did then, save that he quickly placed something within his
pocketbook, something that didn’t have much substance, for he had to
rub his thumb and forefinger to drop it into a piece of paper. Some of
the newspaper men trooped back into the room; Leslie entered again,
frowning in perplexity.
“Singular, Jack,” he said. “What’s your idea?”
“I think,” drawled Lanagan, “I’ll save my ideas for the _Enquirer_,
Chief. I’ve concluded to go back to work.”
Leslie stared. “You’ve got something,” he finally said testily. “What
is it?”
“Something that may save me being driven from town like a beaten dog,
Chief, that’s all. You didn’t want that, you said.”
“Confound you anyhow. You’re too infernally clever. Go in and win,”
said the grizzled chief, but his tone was nettled and there was a
natural trace, possibly, of professional jealousy that he could not
conceal. It had never before happened that he and Lanagan had started
off on an absolutely even break where it was a straight open-and-shut
proposition of the best detective winning; and he felt that Lanagan
had found a clue in that room that he had overlooked. He was a hard
loser. He went over the room again; he examined the body; he used his
magnifying glass and he scanned the walls, the carpet, the clothing,
inch by inch.
He was still reluctant to give up when the coroner’s deputies finally
arrived to discharge their melancholy functions. The mother was still
in hysteria. The maid had calmed somewhat, and Leslie went to examine
her with Wilson and Brady. Lanagan had drifted out and was sitting on
the moonlit porch, to which the electroliers gave added brightness.
“When all those blunderbusses get through with their heavy work,
Norrie, we’ll have a run in with the maid,” said he. “I seem to be
the last man on the job. Meantime find out for me how many red-haired
people there are about this house or among the immediate circle of
the girl’s friends. It is a matter of some importance, because--”
he carefully opened the pocketbook, extracted the folded piece of
note paper, and, first assuring himself that no one was about,
pointed--“because here are two broken, half-inch bits of red hair that
I take it are going to play an important part in this case. Remember
the Deveraux case? These were wedged back of the cameo on her bracelet,
and they got there in her last struggle with whoever shot her. For the
time being at least, then, we will eliminate all but red-haired people.”
“Maybe it’s a dog’s hair,” I suggested hopefully.
Lanagan was on the point of retorting with his finished sarcasm when
the Hemingway limousine, evidently bringing other members of the family
or relations summoned by word of the mournful occurrence, rolled up
to the brilliantly lighted porte-cochère. Lanagan’s eye had travelled
swiftly and fixed upon some object of interest. I followed his intense
gaze.
The chauffeur’s hair was as flaming as a firebrand.