you care to come to Washington.”
Lanagan was nettled. Here were keen, quick-witted, level-headed men
poking quiet fun at his spectacular display. Because they were of
the quick intuitions of the exceptional mind, they fathomed his mind
and knew that he would not shoot. Lanagan felt rather boyish for a
fleeting second; got himself in perspective, as it were, and grinned
at the grotesqueness of the situation. Then that seven-column scare
head in the _Enquirer_--the exclusive that was to hum around the world,
focussed before him.
“Open that door!”
Koshloff arose then. There is something singularly compelling about
a blue-nosed revolver six inches from your temple, regardless of any
psychological conviction you may have that the man is not going to
use it. But whether Lanagan would have carried the situation through
successfully cannot be answered. For at that moment there came a
tapping on the panel. Koshloff stopped at a signal from Lanagan. The
tapping came again. The Secretary spoke:
“The situation is becoming strained, however diverting it may be to all
of us. For my part, here are three men, all presumably of minds trained
to meet sudden exigencies, and yet no one of us can solve this one.
But other matters seem to be pressing.” The tapping was becoming more
insistent. “Let us call a truce, Mr. Lanagan, of precisely ten minutes.
At the end of that time I give you my word we will return matters to
just their present condition. It is agreeable?”
“Absolutely,” said Lanagan, pocketing his revolver.
Koshloff sprang across the room and tapped. He was answered to
his satisfaction, for the panel slid open, and after a whispered
consultation with one of the secret service men, Koshloff stood from
before the panel and--
I, Norton, my hands neatly manacled behind me, was ushered into the
room.
Never will I forget the look on Lanagan’s face. For at least three
seconds, he was jolted out of his traditional immobility. His look was
mingled alarm, surprise and amusement.
“Poor Norrie!” half-banteringly, half-serious. “Poor old blunderbuss.
I have certainly got him in a fine mess, him and his sick wife at home.”
I was so glad to see that nothing had happened to him, that I paid
little attention to the other two for the moment. I was telling him
how I waited until 12:15 and had just determined on telephoning
headquarters for Brady and Wilson when, standing as I supposed well
concealed, I was suddenly pinioned by two figures that seemed to start
up from the earth, handcuffed and hustled across the street into the
room where we now were.
“I must compliment you on your organisation,” said Lanagan ironically,
bowing toward Koshloff. Around that gentleman’s bearded lips played the
faintest trace of a mocking smile. I could fancy how that smile ground
into the proud soul of Lanagan.
The Secretary was growing impatient.
“The ten minutes, Mr. Lanagan?” he queried.
Lanagan turned and looked at me a long time. “You should have obeyed
orders,” he said finally. “I told you to give me until twelve; not
twelve-fifteen.”
It was the first time in his life Lanagan had ever criticised me, and
it cut to the quick. I knew then how bitter his disappointment was.
“What is your ‘proposition?’” he said, turning abruptly to the
Secretary, whom I had at once recognised as well as Koshloff.
“I haven’t any ‘proposition,’ Mr. Lanagan. It is simply that neither
the Russian government nor our government can afford to let the world
power know that the Secretary of State journeyed, incognito, across the
American continent, to reach a diplomatic agreement with Russia. Don’t
you realise what the publication of that unprecedented thing would
mean?”
“My only proposition is a declaration. You hear most important
information. It would undoubtedly make a splendid news sensation
to-morrow morning. But you cannot possibly see the great dangers you
would involve your country in. You might as well sit on a barrel of
giant powder, and drop your cigar and expect to save so much as a
collar button, as to print that story now and avoid war.
“My being here was absolutely a matter imperative for certain
sufficient reasons. It was necessary that I present myself to Mr.
Koshloff in person. That is all.
“I know newspaper men. Among the Washington correspondents I number
many warm friends. I will take the judgment upon myself of placing
you both upon your honour. If I permit you to go free from here, your
lips are inviolately sealed for all time, upon the contents of that
telegram. So far as I am concerned, that cannot be used until such time
as this trouble has been adjusted; or, let me say, until the present
administration is out of power at Washington.”
Into the stillness that followed I could distinctly hear Lanagan’s
teeth grind together. Those remarkable eyes of his seemed fairly to
emit a stream of fire, they blazed so fiercely upon Koshloff and the
Secretary. He threw a sweeping glance around the room. It was a look
for all the world like you see in the eyes of a caged tiger when he
is aroused. For my part, there was a quick drop some place under my
diaphragm. I was thinking of my sick wife, and the consequences to her
of being held a State’s prisoner.
His hand went to his pocket and he half drew his revolver; but it was
rather a subconscious act, I think, than any deliberate design to
use it. For Government, after all, is a potent thing. We fight for
it and die for it. It has a splendid and natural influence not to
be lightly tossed from us. And here sat one of Government’s highest
representatives. Lanagan’s hand dropped to his side.
“That is better,” said the Secretary. “For really, Mr. Lanagan, you
cannot move from this room until we say the word. You are as helpless
as though you were shackled. It is late and we have important work to
do. Your answer?”
It was almost pitiable to see Lanagan then. He of a score of brilliant
newspaper victories, the genius of his craft, who found no situation
too difficult to solve, that striking figure in the newspaper life of
the West who knew no duty save to his paper, who embodied the best and
the highest ideals that tradition gives to the gentlemen of the Fourth
Estate, was beaten.
The glow had left his eyes and his voice was dispirited, as he said:
“You have my word, Mr. Secretary, but on one condition: that Carlos’
life be spared, and that you start him back with your answer. It was no
fault of his. There is only one man in town who could have got that pin
from him, and I can hardly blame Carlos for losing it, once Kid Monahan
wanted it.”
“That condition must be granted, Mr. Koshloff,” said the Secretary.
Koshloff hesitated. “The wearer of the pin understands the penalty,” he
began, curtly. “I know. But in this case I personally request it.” “It
is granted,” said Koshloff, definitely.
Lanagan was morose and savage. The Secretary proffered cigars, which
Lanagan impatiently refused.
“There is one thing that I would like, however,” he said with but faint
show of graciousness, “and that is this pin. It will not be worn. I
would like it as a memento; as something tangible to exhibit some day
when I may tell this story, as proof, in support of, possibly, one of
the most unusual experiences of myself or any other newspaper man.”
“There are but two in existence,” said Koshloff soberly. “This one
belongs to our Ambassador at Washington. It was sent to me for use in
receiving the imperial message. The other--is in the possession of the
Czar, and will be worn by the receiving courier at St. Petersburg. The
penalty attaching to the loss of the pin, either to myself or my agents
are--well, they are somewhat stringent and, with the single exception
of Carlos, have always been enforced.”
Lanagan snapped the patent clasp and handed the pin to Koshloff.
“You see, if I lost it,” with the slightest inflection on the pronoun,
“there would be no Czar of this ‘particular bailiwick’ to pardon me as
you pardoned Carlos, Mr. Koshloff.”
We walked the long distance back to town and dropped in at ----.
Lanagan had not addressed a word to me. I knew better than to attempt
to draw him into conversation. I could feel that he was working
the thing over and over again in his mind. He suddenly burst forth
passionately:
“I could have beaten them! I could have beaten them! And they didn’t
convince me at that, that the story should not have been printed!
There’s too much of this one-man-for-the-nation stuff in our
government, anyhow.”
It was months before Lanagan told me that it was because of my wife’s
feeble health that he feared to take the risk of having us both bottled
up for a month, by manoeuvring further for freedom; and had added:
“Merely another argument to prove that your true reporter should not
marry.”
And as if to justify the truth of Lanagan’s assertion to me that the
story should have been printed, within three days the Japanese fleet,
scorpion-like, had struck and crippled that unsuspecting and unready
Russian flotilla.
“Yah!” Lanagan had cried to me in furious disgust, as he ripped the
front page of the _Enquirer_ with its seven-column war head to tatters,
“Statesmen! Diplomats! Give me one live reporter, and I’ll teach the
whole gang of them the right way! Do you suppose for one single,
solitary, coruscating second, that if those Japs knew the Secretary was
hobnobbing with the Russian envoy right here in San Francisco, that the
blow would have been struck? Well, I tell you No! I wouldn’t even have
had to print the message. The story of the meeting was enough.”
Well, the time limit set by the Secretary has long since expired, so
here is the suppressed story of the Ambassador’s Stick-Pin, the finest,
biggest, cleanest in its elements of any of his whole career, as
Lanagan mourned to me more than once.
VI
WHATSOEVER A MAN SOWETH
VI
WHATSOEVER A MAN SOWETH
Sampson, city editor of the San Francisco _Enquirer_, sat scowling over
the _Times_ and the _Herald_. Stripped blackly across the front pages
of those rival morning papers was the unaccustomed seven-column head:
SUSPECT JAILED FOR MONTEAGLE MURDER!
“_Norton!_”
It was Sampson’s voice. When Sampson shot that curt call in his ugly
voice through the swinging doors of his office I felt as though the
warden was calling me from the condemned cell for the drop. Only the
able-bodied newspaper man who has been trimmed hard by the men of the
opposition papers can understand the sensation. It belongs in its
exquisite misery solely to such as speak the language of the tribe. For
the head in the _Enquirer_--my story--had been only a three-column:
POLICE ARE BAFFLED IN MONTEAGLE MYSTERY!
Sampson contemplated me coldly and long; he fairly brooded over me.
But there was no outburst, and that, after all, hurt worse than if he
had put me on the irons for a broiling.
Ralph Monteagle, broker, millionaire, well-known, popular, and engaged
to the equally well-known and popular Helen Dennison, had been found
in his office on the fourth floor of the Sutton Building, stabbed to
death. No weapon was found, the door was locked, the window shut.
Neither money nor valuables were taken. The knife, curiously, had
been sliced once across each cheek, evidently done after death, with
deliberate intent to mar the features. Monteagle had entered his
offices at 9:15 o’clock on Monday evening. The watchman had discovered
the crime at midnight. The system in the Sutton Building permitted an
absolute check on all persons entering the building after 8 o’clock,
when the outer doors were locked. Any person coming in after that
hour was admitted by the watchman, Murray, who until 12 o’clock was
stationed in the lobby. The night elevator man kept a record of each
person entering the building and to which room he went. It was a
building given over to brokers, capitalists, and large law firms, and
several robberies of magnitude had brought about this particular system
of keeping a check on all persons in the building after night.
The elevator man, on going off duty at midnight, turned his book over
to the watchman, who thereupon made the rounds of each of the offices
where there were still tenants or visitors. It was in this manner that
the crime had been discovered after Murray had rapped repeatedly on
Monteagle’s door and had finally admitted himself with his master’s key.
Only three other tenants had been in the building during the evening,
and they were able to clear themselves of all suspicion. The police
turned their attention to the attachés of the building. Suspicion
fell on a janitor, Stromberg, who had the fourth and fifth floors.
Apparently clinching proof of the police suspicions had been afforded
when Stromberg’s jumper, blood stained, was located at his laundry. It
was in the arrest of Stromberg, which had taken place late the night
before, that I had been “scooped” through my zealousness in leaving the
detectives uncovered while I followed a lead that subsequently proved
entirely wrong.
Stromberg claimed to have cut his hand with a scraper while cleaning
the mosaic tiling, and had a deep gash on the ball of his thumb. The
police theory was that he had gashed himself purposely, and in answer
to his defence that it would have been an insane thing for him to have
sent his jumper to the laundry if he had committed the crime, held to
the theory that he had taken precisely that method, in combination
with the self-imposed gash on his hand, to divert suspicion by seeming
frankness.
With the commendable faculty of the American police in usually working
to fasten the crime upon whomsoever they may happen to have in custody,
the officers were devoting their energies to “cinching” their case on
Stromberg.
When Sampson had completed his disquieting survey of me, he finally
said:
“I am giving this story to Ransom and Dickson to handle to-day.” I
could see that he had it all figured out in his cold-blooded way; that
nothing else was to be expected of me than to be scooped, and that
any remarks would be superfluous. But it ground me. “What I want you
to do,” he continued nastily, “is to find Lanagan. Possibly you can
succeed in that at least. I wouldn’t be sorry at that if some more of
you fellows drank the brand of liquor Lanagan drinks once in a while.
I might get a story out of the bunch of you occasionally. Instead, the
_Times_ and the _Herald_ give it to us on the features of this story
three days running--_three days_. It’s the worst beating I’ve had in
a year. You find Lanagan and tell him I want him to jump into the
story independent of Ransom and Dickson. I would like to get the tail
feathers out of this thing, anyhow.”
Ransom and Dickson had no relish for the story, three days old.
“Might as well try to galvanise a corpse,” grumbled Ransom. I turned
over to them what matters I had that might bear watching, and was about
to leave the office when the ’phone rang for me. Very fortunately,
it was Lanagan; and I couldn’t forbear a sort of gulp, because I felt
instinctively that he had wakened up somewhere out of his ten days’
lapse, with the knowledge that I was handling the Monteagle story and
was getting badly beaten on it. I was right in that, too.
“Thought I would catch you before you left,” he said. His voice was
throaty, and I judged that he had been seeing some hard days and
nights. “Suppose that pickled jellyfish of a Sampson has been lacing
you? You should be laced. Met Brady a few minutes ago and he said you
were handling--or mishandling--the story. You ought to get a month’s
lay-off for letting that crowd of two-by-four dubs, on the _Times_ at
least, get the best of you. Come on down. I want to talk things over.”
He was at Billy Connors’ “Buckets of Blood,” that famed barroom
rendezvous by the Hall of Justice, where the thieves’ clans were wont
to forgather. There was nothing of particular coincidence in his
ringing me up just when he did; it was shortly after 1 o’clock, the
hour when the local staff reported on, and he would be sure of finding
me in.
He sat at the rear alcove table with “King” Monahan. “You know my
friend the King, of course?” was his greeting. Monahan, one-time
designated King of the Pick-pockets, after serving two terms, had
retired from the active practice of that profession to establish
himself, it was generally believed, not only as a “fence,” handling
exclusively the precious stones, but also as a sort of local organiser,
to whom any outside gang must report on or before beginning operations
in San Francisco. There is system in crime these days as in all things
else.
“Kind of stuck it in and broke it off, didn’t they?” he continued.
“I’ve stood one panning from Sampson; I don’t want another from you,” I
retorted savagely.
“Norrie,” he said, “you overlooked a very vital point. The King and I
have been talking it over,”--he had the three morning papers spread
out before him--“and we have concluded that there was a woman in the
case. And when two eminent criminologists, like Kid Monahan and Jack
Lanagan, agree that there is a woman in a case, it at least is worthy
of consideration.”
“A moll, sure,” vouchsafed Monahan in his diffident way. He had a
manner as timorous as a girl, which possibly accounted for the success
that he enjoyed while practising his profession. He was not one, on the
crowded platform of a trolley car, who would be immediately suspected
when some proletarian raised a cry of sneak thief and sought in vain
for a stick pin, watch, or wallet.
“Stromberg may or may not be guilty,” said Lanagan, “but I don’t think
much of the case the police have made against him. It, at least,
doesn’t bar us from another line of speculation.
“Tell me, for instance, why in the name of the Seven Suns, didn’t some
of you sleuths go off on the theory that whoever committed that crime
got into the office earlier in the evening and remained concealed in
the closet until Monteagle came in? It would have been the easiest
thing in the world to have decoyed Monteagle to his office even if it
wasn’t known that he was working nights to make up for the lunches and
bachelor dinners and afternoon teas that he’s been going to on account
of his coming marriage.
“And as for whoever committed the murder getting out, you have been on
the scene of too many murders not to know the hysteria that comes over
a bunch of yaps like that. It’s a safe bet they all ran for a regular
policeman, and that whoever was in that room--provided he was still
there, or she--when the crime was discovered could have walked out of
that building with a fair way as wide as Market Street.”
“Murray ran for a policeman,” I admitted, “and some of the janitors
with him.”
“That’s what special cops usually do,” was Lanagan’s comment. “And
it’s a safe bet that those square-head janitors all ran with him.
They didn’t stay around those corridors alone after that crime was
discovered until a regular copper came along. I’ve seen the thing
happen and so has every police reporter in the business.”
Lanagan paused, pushed back a half-drained suisses and called for a
sweet soda--his curious habit when breaking off a “lapse.”
“Whoever killed Monteagle,” he continued, “was in that room when he
entered--always assuming, of course, that it was not Stromberg.
“Now I have something additional, through the King and his invaluable
sources of information on men and affairs. It is this: Monteagle is
known to certain portions of the night life. He was a two-faced society
blatherskite, with a broad streak of primal vulgarity, who drank tea in
swagger drawing-rooms with his fiancée and her friends in the afternoon
and champagne with an entirely different social set after midnight. You
know the kind. Was rather keen about women in an underhanded, quiet
way. It is not difficult for a man of his means to do a lot of things
behind the unassailable French restaurant walls and get by with it.
“You recall the knife was drawn neatly across both cheeks. I see you
indulged in a theory that he possibly was the victim of some blackmail
brotherhood. You even hinted at the Mafia. I am surprised at you. You
ought to let that exaggerated institution rest for a while. I have
a little theory of my own on that knifing business, which, I think,
we will now work upon. ’Phone Sampson when you get a chance that it
pleases Lanagan to go to work for his sweat-shop wages again.”
We parted company with Monahan after he had promised Lanagan to
drift through his particular world--or that portion of it which was
then up--and endeavour to learn something of the identity of any of
Monteagle’s affiliations under the rose.
We headed for the Sutton Building, and in the lobby found Murray, just
coming on duty.
“Do you think anyone could have gotten out of that room in the
excitement after you found the body?” asked Lanagan.
“No, sir,” said Murray, with aged preciseness. “I locked the door on
the outside when I went for an officer, and it could not have been
opened, because in my hurry I left my master’s key turned in the lock
when I went for a policeman.”
So much for Lanagan’s very plausible theory of the “get-away.” He came
up from it as suave as ever and asked:
“Could anyone have been in that room before Monteagle came in, do you
suppose?”
“No, sir,” said Murray, with the didacticism of the aged again. “No,
sir. There was nobody in that room. I know because the elevator boy,
Denny, heard the telephone bell ringing for eight or ten times, and
finally let himself in and answered it, but the party hung up. Mr.
Monteagle was very free and easy with us men, which accounts for Denny
taking the liberty. There was nobody in that room when Denny was in
there, and that was well after eight o’clock, after I came on duty. It
all gets me, sir, how that knife sticker got into that room or how he
got out after he got there. I don’t like to think Ole Stromberg had
a hand in it, but it looks a leetle black for Ole, according to the
papers. I know my skirts are clear.”
We went on up to the room. The Public Administrator, with Monteagle’s
lawyer and his stenographer, was there. The lawyer was inclined to get
forward, but the Administrator was a good programer for a newspaper
man and smoothed matters over. Lanagan was studying the stenographer:
intelligent of feature, stylishly but plainly dressed, and bearing
about her eyes and mouth very plain indications of the nervous tension
under which she must have laboured during the last three days. She was
one of that type of well-poised secretary-stenographers found in most
large offices.
Lanagan made an opportunity of asking her:
“Did Mr. Monteagle have any enemies that you know of? Persons who have
threatened him personally, by letter or over the ’phone?”
“None that I know of,” she replied quietly.
“Do you think,” asked Lanagan quickly, eying the girl narrowly with
those singularly penetrating eyes of his, “do you think it could have
been possible that a person might have been concealed in that closet
when you locked the office door for the night?”
“Oh, no, no,” she answered quickly, but her eyes involuntarily swept
first to the closet and then to Lanagan’s face as though in secret,
anxious questioning. “Why, it makes me shiver even to think such a
thing could have happened,” she added, and she unmistakably shivered a
little.
There was more conversation, and Lanagan fell to examining the room. He
first examined the closet. Then he opened the window and scrutinised
the sill for a long time. He got down on his knees and peered beneath
the heat radiator of coiled pipes. He lit a match, the space between
the bottom of the radiator and the floor being so slight that he could
not examine it as closely as he seemed to want to.
“Expect your man to get into the room through that?” asked the Public
Administrator with heavy facetiousness.
“Oh, no,” replied Lanagan smoothly; “it’s just possible he got out of
the room through it, though,” and continued with his minute examination.