After telephoning for me to cover Fogarty’s, he had returned to watch
the St. Germain. Fogarty finally came out and Lanagan shadowed him
to the Mills building. He came from there shortly, in company with
Leighton, and Lanagan, still in the grasp of his “dead hand” theory,
and knowing Leighton by sight, and his reputation in the inner circles
for tangling up in estate cases, dropped Fogarty and followed Leighton.
He went directly to the Fairmont. When he went to the desk to call
for Holmes, Lanagan was close at his side. Leighton did not know him
by sight. Learning which room Holmes had, Lanagan was fortunate in
securing an unoccupied room adjoining, and he was in his room ten
minutes after Leighton had entered Holmes’. Being fortunate enough to
get the room merely hastened the climax, because the case was already
clearing in Lanagan’s mind.
His ear to the keyhole of the door connecting the two rooms--many
of the rooms in that hotel are so joined, to permit of them being
thrown into suites--he had heard a fragment of conversation here and
there, and knew that Leighton was bringing a girl for the Englishman’s
examination who was being sought as a missing English heir. Finally
the Englishman, shortly after eight o’clock, had concluded to go with
Leighton to bring her, desirous evidently of satisfying himself that
she was in the Tenderloin, which seemed to be a point in their argument.
With Holmes and Leighton out of their room, Lanagan had set to work to
whittle a hole in the door for better hearing facilities, and then had
sent the message to Sampson that brought me to his room.
To Lanagan’s ranging mind, the thing was as clear as print. He had
traced his connection past Fogarty down to the last figure in the
combination. It was a “long shot,” perhaps, that Leighton had put the
real heir out of the way in order to impose an imposture on the estate
and thus divide probably a full half; but it was on “long shots” that
Lanagan’s extraordinary brain usually won out.
The narratives were ended. Lanagan turned to Leslie:
“I want Peters here, Chief, to give the last note to my story. To
prevent any ‘leak’ from the county jail, I will have Haddon get
Superior Judge Dunlevy to telephone a verbal order of release to the
jail for Peters to be brought to the city to see his council. It’s
rather unusual, but has been done before, and Dunlevy will do it. I
think I’ll get Haddon in for the finals, too. He’s been in the case
pretty deep.”
It was probably an hour later before Haddon dropped into the room. He
had sent a machine for Peters, Dunlevy telephoning the order. A few
moments later Peters, in charge of a deputy sheriff, entered and in
brief and business-like fashion the facts were laid before him. It was
a little too much for him to grasp all at once.
When he finally did, it was the Englishman who brought matters to a
business basis by remarking:
“Leighton certainly seems to have been extremely positive about the
identity of Mrs. Peters. Did you know that she was Gertrude Pendelton?”
“Sir,” said Peters, “I married my wife as I found her, and I asked no
questions. She made me a good wife. She never talked about herself or
her people.”
“Did she have any keepsakes, any old trinkets, any pictures?”
Peters unbuttoned his shirt. “Only this,” he said, producing a locket
attached to a fine gold chain. “She asked me to wear it when she was
taken to bed, and if anything happened, to give it to the babe. The
police missed it in searching me. It’s her father and mother, I think,
although she never said.”
With eager fingers Holmes opened the old-fashioned locket.
“It is Captain and Mrs. Pendelton,” he said, simply. “He looks as he
looked the day before his death.” A silence fell upon the room, as he
snapped the locket and, bowing profoundly, passed it back to Peters. He
then continued:
“My mission here has certainly had a curious termination. I will remain
until the court matters against you are all disposed of. I would
suggest then that you return with me to London, so that you can be on
the ground in the arrangements for transferring the estate to you.”
“There will be no arrangements,” said Peters. “I don’t want the money.”
The Englishman stared incredulously.
“Don’t want it! Don’t want one hundred and fifty thousand pounds, three
quarters of a million dollars? It will escheat to the Crown if you
refuse it.”
“Let it then,” said Peters, stubbornly. “I don’t want it. Why should
I take something my wife didn’t want? There must be something wrong
about it somewhere. Why should I make money by the death of my wife and
child? If she were here to share it--if only my boy were here--”
He broke down for the first time since his arrest, and sobbed, throwing
his arms over his head in a wild burst of grief. Finally he composed
himself.
“I’ll go back to my trade,” he said, simply. “Hard work is the best
thing for me now.”
He turned to Lanagan and their hands met in a long, hard clasp.
“If it can be done, I’ll turn the money over to you, Mr. Lanagan.”
“Thanks, Peters, no. I’ve only done a newspaperman’s work; what the
_Enquirer_ pays me to do. You’re all man; and it’s been a pleasure to
clear you.”
To Leslie, again the master newspaper mind, calculating the minutes
swiftly slipping around after midnight, he snapped:
“It’s in your hands now, Chief. Keep everybody here and stall around
for an hour or so, while Norton and I give the town a story that, if
it doesn’t make a case in court against Fogarty and Bannerman, will at
least chase Fogarty out of town till it blows over and beat Bannerman
out of the nomination for Superior Judge. His name comes before the
convention to-morrow night. We’re off.”
Then to me as we swiftly pelted out of the room:
“Key up to it, Norrie; this is some stem-winder!”
VIII
AT THE END OF THE LONG NIGHT
VIII
AT THE END OF THE LONG NIGHT
“Extra! Extra!” in shrill diminuendo awakened Jack Lanagan from the
very heart of his morning slumber. The morning paper man sleeps late
and nothing short of cataclysm or the cry of an extra is likely to
awaken him. Lanagan was from his bed to the window in a lanky leap
hailing the newsboy.
It was the _Evening Record_ with a “screamer” head and two hundred
words of black-face type. Lanagan swept through it in a comprehensive
flash. With more speed than was his custom he thereupon dressed.
“_Swanson!_” he said. “Gad, what a story!”
He sat on the edge of the bed, more leisurely to roll a brown-paper
cigarette and read the story more carefully. Stripped of flaring
headlines, it was as follows:
“All hope for the safety of Captain Robert Swanson, the retired
millionaire shipping man who disappeared on Wednesday evening, was
dissipated this morning, shortly after 9.30 o’clock, when the body of
the well-known philanthropist was found in a subcellar room in the
notorious Palace Hotel in Chinatown.
“Death was due to strangulation.
“Life had probably been extinct three days, and it is the police theory
that Captain Swanson went directly to the hotel or was lured there on
the evening of his disappearance.
“His watch and valuables were found on his person.
“So far as a hasty examination could discover no one saw him enter the
hotel, which bears an evil reputation and is occupied by the lowest
type of denizen of Chinatown and the Barbary Coast.
“The room where the body was found is one of several that have been dug
out beneath the basement and is used entirely by opium smokers.
“Chief of Police Leslie has ordered all available detectives on the
case and arrests are expected at any moment.”
“Which means,” finally grumbled Lanagan, “that I get no day off
to-morrow to split a quart of Chianti with mine host Pastori.
“Swanson,” he ran quickly back in his mind, “is president of the
Seamen’s Bank; director of the Cosmos Club; director of a dozen
corporations; trustee of his church; sound as a nut at sixty-five;
solidly established in the old conservative families of Nob Hill,
with a family of married children likewise solidly established in the
solidest kind of respectability and a wife who is a silvery-haired
saint if there ever was one.
“Yet he, a man who probably didn’t know such a place as Chinatown’s
Palace Hotel existed until that night, is found dead in the lowest sink
of that hole. The extremes of the social system met in his end and the
place of it.”
The Chinatown Palace Hotel of the days just before the fire gave that
quarter of San Francisco obliteration, the one thing that could cleanse
it, was a sorry second to the pretentious hostelry on Market Street.
A ramshackle structure, illy lit through its crooked corridors and
musty rooms with ancient gas jets, it looked more, in its complete dirt
and dinginess, like an exaggerated rabbit warren. Three stories above
ground and one or two below, cut up into rooms, the largest not more
than eight by ten, the smallest just large enough for a bunk and an
opium layout, it had survived by some miracle the health authorities to
hive in musty murk the off-scourings of a city. Once, when Portsmouth
Square was the civic centre, it had harboured the kings of the early
gold days.
The rooms were larger in those days; the front suites that gave ease to
the idling, new-made Croesus had long since been cut up into five,
six, seven, or eight, as the increasing congestion of the quarter threw
an increasing swarm of vermin to its recesses.
Save for white “dope fiends,” known in the vernacular of the police as
“hops,” “cokes,” or “morphs,” users of opium, cocaine, or morphine, it
was inhabited solely by Chinese, some of them coolie labourers, but the
most of them likewise “fiends.”
Below the basement floor were a dozen rooms not high enough for a man
to stand erect in. The light of day never entered. What light they
received came from one main gas jet in the corridor or the occasional
flash of a policeman’s pocket light as the Chinatown squad made their
rounds. Save for the members of the squad, and at times a jaded police
reporter, idling from the reporters’ room in the near-by Hall of
Justice on a quiet night through the district with the squad sergeant,
it is probable no white man save the “fiends” of the district had ever
before gasped for breath in that foul den--no white man, that is,
before Captain Robert Swanson, who entered there one night never to
emerge. It was three days before one of the denizens of the subcellar,
finally realising that the occupant of the next bunk was not in the
stupor of drug but the stiffness of death, made his way with frantic
hippity-hoppings to the first member of the squad he could find and
reported the matter, not forgetting to whine for his ten cents for so
doing.
Such, in substance, were the facts in the mystery that set the city
and the coast--Swanson was a notable figure in shipping circles--in a
ferment for a week.
For, more than the initial fact of finding the body in Chinatown’s
cesspool, five days had now elapsed with not one single additional
fact of consequence to clear the mystery. Suspects without number
had been jailed. Every ex-convict, “fiend,” vagrant, or questionable
character of the district, white, yellow, or black, male or female, had
been put through the police mill. The opium dens had been emptied of
their wastrels, blinking like bats in the light of day. Swanson’s past
and his present life were run under a high-power lens; his servants’
and his employees’ lives and the lives of his former servants and
former employees; Chief Leslie was a fellow member of the Cosmos Club
with Swanson, and if any additional good to his natural police pride
were necessary to spur him on, that afforded it. Every recourse that
police experience could adapt or devise was applied.
Always there was lacking motive: that mainspring for crime.
That Swanson had by any chance been addicted to the drug habit was
early dismissed. Practically every hour of his methodical life could be
accounted for for months back.
But in so far as his movements were concerned from the moment he left
his doorstep on Wednesday evening until the body was found, he may as
well have left his doorstep invested in an invisible mantle, for no
living person that could be located had seen him alive.
There was one peculiar circumstance. He had worn that night a heavy
ulster overcoat, although the night had not been chilly, and Mrs.
Swanson had remarked on it at parting. The coat was not found with the
body.
It is not exaggeration to say that in physical output Lanagan worked
harder than any three reporters or detectives during the first five
days of the case. He did not take me into his confidence: he seldom
did until the “smash” approached on any story. He smoked eternally
or chewed to pulp his own select brand of rank Manilas, or consumed
innumerable cigarettes. Lanagan never had to bother with the daily
routine of a story; that was all left to me. His work was the big
“feature” stuff. He might not write a line for a week and then he would
saunter into the picture with a news sensation that would upend the
town.
But there seemed to be no “upending” on this case. During the five days
that had elapsed the big portion of the work had fallen to me. Lanagan
had absolutely not turned a trick. On Wednesday evening at midnight, as
I turned in my story for the day, identical as I felt it would be with
the other two morning papers, Lanagan ’phoned me to meet him at the
Hall of Justice.
I drifted down there.
“I just wanted to tell you,” was his greeting, “that I am going to
disappear. Don’t look for me. I will discover myself when the time
comes. I’m going to lose myself up in Chinatown, for the solution of
that story is there, and I’m not coming until I’ve landed something and
choked off the side remarks of the _Times_ and _Herald_ outfit, if I
stay there for the balance of my natural life. The police can hang as
they please to their hoary old dogma that a ‘hop head’ never commits
murder. Just because they’re so positive, I am going to take the other
tack; at least until I have proved their theory to my own satisfaction.
There isn’t a man outside the frequenters of this quarter knew of that
subcellar and that’s the theory I am going to stick with now. Keep
in pretty close touch with the office so I can get you in a hurry if
anything turns up. Good-by.”
In another moment he was walking rapidly up Washington Street to
disappear down Dupont, out of sight for three days.
The story had run eight days and a dearth of fresh angles had thinned
it out a trifle, when, on Saturday evening, along about ten o’clock,
as I hung around the local room hoping against hope for a call from
Lanagan, it came.
“Meet me in front of old St. Mary’s,” he said, shortly, and I thrilled
instantly with that same premonitory tremor that always came over me
when the climax was on. I sped down Kearney Street and in the shadow of
the church steps picked him up.
“Dorrett is watching me,” he said. “He’s been covering me for days.”
Dorrett was the oldest special policeman in Chinatown and generally
held to be a “leak” for the _Herald_ through personal friendship for a
former police reporter, now city editor of that paper. In such fashion
do papers develop their “sources” of news. “I have one clue that may
be the key to the solid brick wall we have been up against. And I am
not going to lose that key to the _Herald_ via Dorrett,” concluded
Lanagan, as he suddenly stepped fully into the glare of the gas street
lamp on the corner just as Dorrett sidled up. I saw that Lanagan had
deliberately exposed himself.
“Really, Dorrett,” he remarked in that sinister tone he could assume
so well on occasion, “some of these days I shall actually trip over
you if you persist in blundering beneath my feet. You might fall quite
hard in that case and hurt yourself. However, just tell Cartwright”
(city editor of the _Herald_) “that I am going to hand him a package of
nitroglycerin right on your own particular little bailiwick, will you?
Please run along now, like a good little special policeman, because we
are going to lose you--thusly.”
He turned on his heel and ran for a California Street car just
lumbering past us up the hill and I followed suit. After a few blocks
he crossed through the car and dropped off on the other side. Scouting
cautiously back toward Chinatown by way of Washington Street, drifting
along with eyes wide for Dorrett, we finally made Ross Alley, where
Lanagan stopped for a fraction of a second at the wicket of the
gambling house at No. 8.
At that time it was a strict rule of the gambling “joints” that a white
man could not enter. Personally, for all of my four years’ dubbing
around on police, I never had been able to enter a Chinese gambling
house when the play was on. Yet the lookout flashed one glance at
Lanagan, grinned yellowly and ingenuously, and the massive solid oak
door before us swung noiselessly open and we passed quickly through. As
it shut behind us I heard a faint click-click, and glanced back. Three
separate two-by-four scantlings, heavily re-enforced with iron, had
dropped back into their sockets. The door was as solid as a concrete
wall against the axes of the Chinatown squad; the theory being that by
the time the squad had the door battered down, the players had departed
through some secret runway.
“Melodrama?” laughed Lanagan at me. “But I had to come by the back
door, as it were. I wouldn’t like to have any stray police or reporters
or Dorrett suspect I was about to interview the man I am. They might
smell a rat, possibly. We are more isolated among these hundred Chinks,
gambling their fool heads off, than we would be in one of Leslie’s dark
cells.”
We passed directly through the long room with its eight high tables,
at each of which ten or a dozen impassive Celestials, with chopsticks,
beans, and teacups, stood engaged in the contraband pastime of fantan.
At a table or two a pie gow game was running, and in a corner dominoes.
The air was so heavy and heated that I felt the perspiration starting
in an instant. The Chinese gambler, if he is winning, sticks in that
thick atmosphere for hours at a time.
At the rear of the room was another door, likewise barred in
triplicate. Here another lookout grinned friendly at Lanagan and
pressed on an innocent-appearing nail head in the wainscoting and the
bars dropped and the door opened to a steep ladder. We went down about
ten feet into a blind areaway between two buildings.
It was as black as your derby hat. But Lanagan, the marvellous, stepped
ahead with assurance and I followed him gropingly. In another moment he
rapped faintly on what I took to be a section of the brick base of the
building, a click sounded, he took me by the arm, pulled me after him,
another click, and the next moment a blaze of electric light discovered
us to be in a small lounging room elaborately appointed in Oriental
furnishings.
“Hullo, Mist’ Lamagum!”
The voice came from a corpulent, twinkling-eyed, richly garbed Chinaman
just arisen from a massive chair of ebony and mother-of-pearl.
“Hello, Fu,” said Lanagan, sinking into another massive chair and
motioning me to do likewise.
“My friend Norton, Fu. Norton, Mr. Fu Wong, otherwise known to me as
Why Because. You will understand ‘why because’ presently.”
“Why? Becaus’? I tell you,” said Fu Wong, chuckling. “Him funny boy,
Mist’ Lamagum. He, whatyoucalem, jolly me. You likem smoke?” He pressed
a button on the arm of his chair and a flowing-garbed Chinese boy
appeared with rich Havanas on a tray, together with individual teacups
and two-piece teapots for three.
“Did you find See Wong?” Lanagan asked abruptly, while I studied Fu,
whom I knew by reputation as one of the Chinese merchant princes. “I am
in a hurry, Fu.”
“I catchem. He say Charley drive aut-o-mob-_eel_. Charley live there
three, fo’ wicks. She cry one time See bringem tea: ‘Oh, Charley!
Charley! Why fo’ you do him? What’s mala you, Charley?’ She stop quick
see See. Why? Becaus’? See, he donno. He say Charley he usem, what you
call ’em? Hop.”
For the first time since this story broke, that singular flashing,
almost like a cat’s eyes, flamed into Lanagan’s dark eyes and they shot
a responsive shiver of high tension interest through me, because I knew
that at last he had struck the trail.
“You have done more for me than I can ever repay,” said Lanagan at
parting. “You are a remarkable man, Fu Wong.”
Fu laughed boyishly.
“Why? Becaus’? You save my sto’ good name? I help you.”
As we went back out the way we came in, Lanagan enlightened me.
“Fu is president of the Suey Sing Tong. There is a Chinaman, Swanson’s
cook, See Wong, whom I have been hammering on for two days. Of all the
household servants, I have a vague suspicion of him. I couldn’t land
him. Finally I looked up his affiliation, found he was a Suey Sing
man, and then I enlisted the services of Fu Wong. See Wong would have
to talk to his tong leader where the police or the reporters couldn’t
drag information out of him with a team of mules. He purely and simply
wouldn’t ‘sabe,’ and that’s all the satisfaction you could get.
“‘Why Because’ is not only proprietor of one of the biggest bazaars
here and a director of the Chinese Bank, but he is also proprietor--I
am telling you Chinatown secrets and not to be repeated--of of the
gambling house we came through and several others. He is one of the
powers of the quarter.
“There was an English tourist robbed in his bazaar once of a couple
of hundred dollars and I was sent up here. Fu laboured under the
impression that the entire sixteen pages of the _Enquirer_ were going
to be turned over to that particular robbery. He felt the disgrace of
the thing keenly, as any high-class Chinaman would, and personally
offered the Englishman back the money. That was a good story. For some
reason Fu, not understanding the American newspaper idea of ‘human
interest,’ elected to think I had written a eulogy of him deliberately.
I could have had half his store at that time, I guess, if I had wanted
it. But I took a cigar and a cup of tea, and ever since that time I
have been taken inside the inner circle up here. The room we were in is
a runway through the basement of the bazaar next door in case of a raid.
“‘Charley’ was a chauffeur named Thorne, employed by Mrs. Swanson
about three months ago for several weeks. He was one of the numerous
wastrels that that woman of unostentatious but magnificent charities
had under her protection. There are scores in and about the city, men
and women, boys and girls, that she had taken from the under side of
life and put on top. I didn’t see him, but some of Leslie’s men did and
found nothing suspicious. Had they known he was a ‘hop,’ however, they
might have thought differently. It establishes a very clear apparent
connection between Swanson and the Palace Hotel and the only definite
clue that has been turned up. We will save a lot of time by getting his
address from Leslie.”
Lanagan was through with Leslie in a few moments.
“He is going home, but will be on tap with Brady and Wilson if we need
him later,” he said. “He got curious when I mentioned Thorne, but
promised to lay off until he heard from me. Thorne lives at Lombard and
Larkin, where, in view of Mrs. Swanson’s undoubted suspicion that he
committed the crime, coupled with See Wong’s charge that he is a ‘hop,’
we will now proceed to call on him.”
We were there in a few moments. It was a squalid lodging house, in
charge of a slatternly beldam. She didn’t know whether Thorne was in or
not. He was kind of loony, lately, she thought.
“Too bad,” said Lanagan, genially. “Has Charley been so that he
couldn’t be out the last week? He wasn’t feeling well last time I saw
him.”
“Ain’t seen much of him this week,” she replied. “I didn’t know about
it, but I am beginnin’ to think he is one of them there fiends. He is
actin’ something awful sometimes lately, what with his skippin’s and
hoppin’s. You can go on up.”
The door was locked, but it was a rickety affair and the lock yielded
to the pressure of our shoulders. A man who might have been any
age from twenty to forty swung himself to a sitting position on a
disordered bed and glared at us with eyes that were wide open but only
half seeing.
“Full of hop; and I might as well jam him on a gamble,” said Lanagan,
in an aside to me as he stepped quickly over and pulled Thorne to his
feet, slapped him across the face, and sat him down in a chair. A
high-pitched, querulous protest was voiced at the treatment, and then
Thorne whimpered:
“Oh, you are so cruel! What have I ever done to be treated so cruelly?”
He began to cry.
“Done? You snivelling viper, put on your shoes and come with me to
jail. You murdered Robert Swanson and you are going to hang for it. Get
up and come along.” Again Lanagan caught him a sharp slap across the
face. This time Thorne did not whimper. A look of cunning came into his
eyes.
“Getting your wits back pretty quick, now, eh?” sneered Lanagan.
Thorne stared. It seemed for a moment his clouded eyes entirely
cleared; and then the film of the drug-sodden brain fell over his eyes
again, and he relapsed to his hunched position. He was shivering and
rocking himself, his angular knees drawn up to his chin, clasped around
with his arms.