“Why is everyone so cruel to me? I am very nervous, as you can see,
gentlemen. I really need something to quiet my nerves. It is the
doctor’s orders, really. Would it be asking too much, now, to ask for
the loan of ten cents? Oh, dear--”
“_Thorne!_” Lanagan, his aspect actually ferocious, leaped before
the half-arisen suppliant. I shrank back myself, his acting was so
consummately done.
“I’ll give you ten cents, you viper! You murdering, crawling, poisonous
viper! I’ll give you the condemned cell at San Quentin and the death
watch and the black cap, and the quick drop, until they crack that
snake’s neck of yours into a dozen pieces! That’s what I’ll give you!”
Chattering, jabbering incoherently, his long, lean, sharp-nailed,
claw-like hands working spasmodically before his face and toward
Lanagan, the fiend huddled back. He glanced from side to side, his head
lolling, as though seeking some avenue of escape by a desperate leap.
Lanagan’s eyes were within a foot of his face. Thorne began to foam at
the mouth. I thought he was going into a fit as I watched, fascinated,
the horrible scene. Bearing down upon the wretch with savagery in his
voice and manner, Lanagan hammered on:
“Give you ten cents! What do you want with ten cents? You’ll never get
another shot of coke as long as you live, Thorne! Never in this world!
You are coming with me now, coming where you will never need coke
again! Coming to your death by hanging for murder! _Not another shot in
all this world will you ever get!_”
With a shriek that was more animal’s than man’s, Thorne suddenly
lunged forward. Quicker than the dart of a snake’s head, those hands,
with their long, lean, writhing fingers, had twisted around Lanagan’s
neck. With a strength that was the strength of temporary insanity, he
flung Lanagan from him and fell with him. Then, like a lean gorilla,
he shook Lanagan’s head from side to side while he screeched fearful
imprecations.
“_You lie! You lie! I’ll get all I want! That’s what he said, and I
killed him, and I’ll kill you, too! Yah! Yeeah!_” He trailed away into
a maniacal scream.
I hurled myself at him, but the fiend, for the moment at least, had the
strength of three men. I finally managed to get in a blow that settled
him.
Lanagan, rubbing his bruised neck ruefully, rose slowly. He was panting
a little but chuckling.
“Score one for mental suggestion on a weak subject,” he laughed. “But
I didn’t figure those scrawny hands had quite that much strength. This
murder is clearer than print. We all but re-enacted the scene.
“Now, my boy, to establish the connection that would bring a man
of Swanson’s position to a rendezvous at the Palace, to arouse the
slumbering demon in this human orang-utang. It’s rather a commentary on
that hoary police doctrine that a dope fiend never commits murder. I
was right.”
Within thirty minutes Chief Leslie and Brady, and Wilson, his
right-hand men, were in the room, and Lanagan swiftly detailed the
circumstances. Thorne had come to and was shaking and shivering as
the drug wore out of his system, leaving him nerve-racked. He did not
attempt to repudiate his utterance, but sullenly admitted the murder.
In view of the words overheard by See Wong, there was but one person
to clear up the mystery. Leslie, Lanagan and I hurried in the chief’s
machine to the Swanson home, nearly midnight as it was. That they had
had Thorne once under examination and had permitted him to go was
a source of bitter chagrin to the chief. Thorne showed none of the
ravages of the habit that men of weaker physique exhibited; the day the
police picked him up he had happened to be comparatively normal, and
consequently he had passed safely through the quiz.
Mrs. Swanson had not yet retired, and, upon learning that the chief was
one of her late callers, summoned us at once to the drawing-room. She
had one of those splendid faces seen occasionally in the aged, where
strength of mind or religious fervour has brought endurance of lifelong
secret pain of body or soul. The calmness of a noble resignation looked
forth in a slight clouding of her clear eyes and expressed itself in
the faint traces of suppression about her mobile lips. The gleaming,
snow-white hair, combed straight back from a forehead of a remarkable
breadth in a woman, invested her like an aureole.
She was a woman probably of sixty years.
“You will appreciate, gentlemen, I trust,” she said in a low voice of
refined modulation, “that I have endured much and am still suffering.”
“It is a very painful errand we are on, Mrs. Swanson, and we will
endeavour to be brief,” said Lanagan in a voice that a Chesterfield
might have envied for courteous inflection and gentleness of
expression, “but nevertheless it is an errand that must be performed.”
He glanced at the chief, who nodded.
“Speaking as a newspaper man,” continued Lanagan, “it is my wish at all
times to spare the feelings of those, particularly women, with whom I
am brought into relation. But the true newspaper man is a seeker after
truth, and he must follow as definite a path as the police follow.”
There was an eloquent pause. She gazed from one to the other during the
interim, as though striving to read their thoughts. It was evident that
the undercurrent that these skilled cross-examiners intended to convey
had carried home.
“Well?” finally. Neither Lanagan nor Leslie spoke. There was another
pause. She said at last: “You have some information to impart to me? Or
some information to seek?”
“We desire to inform you,” said Leslie slowly, and with just a shade
more of hardness in his tone as the detective began to work in him,
“that we have under arrest the confessed murderer of your husband.”
She leaned involuntarily forward in her chair and grasped the arms so
hard that her knuckles showed white through the fair skin of her hands.
“And we desire to inform you,” added Lanagan quickly, “that the name
of your husband’s murderer is Charles Thorne; and we desire to ask you
what the motive was for the murder of your husband by Charles Thorne;
_and why, when you suspected that Charles Thorne was the murderer, you
did not immediately notify the police?_”
Her hands slowly relaxed their grip on the chair arms as she sank back
into its depths. Curiously, in the way the light struck down at her
hair and her face, it seemed that the beautiful halo of white that
had invested her, and the delicate, well-preserved whiteness of her
skin, turned suddenly to dirty grey. If ever the blight of age settled
visibly in fact or in fiction, it settled upon her then.
“You--have--Charles--Thorne--under--arrest?” she said, and her very
tone was grey. She did not deny the truth of the charge; she did not
express satisfaction that the murderer was found; she merely asked
whether they had Charles Thorne under arrest.
“Yes.”
Her eyes closed and her head dropped suddenly back against the chair.
We stepped swiftly forward, but before we could take any measures
to revive her, her eyes had opened again. The lips moved. She was
speaking, but so gaspingly that we bent to hear.
“It is the end of the long night,” she said with many halts; “the end
of the long night. A life’s nightmare is done. God have mercy on me--”
She stopped completely. Then:
“God pity all mothers who bear as I bore--”
Another long pause. She was by strong effort retaining the clarity of
her faculties under some heavy shock. She repeated:
“Who bear as I bore!”
The silence became acutely poignant.
“It must be told,” she breathed finally. “You have asked me why I did
not tell you my suspicions. I will tell you now. Charles Thorne--”
Her next words came so low that had it not been for the pregnant
silence of the great drawing-room they could not have been heard.
“_Is my son._”
I found I had been holding my breath; and I glanced quickly at Lanagan,
to see his breast falling with a deep exhalation.
“My husband did not know,” she continued, colourlessly. “Charles Thorne
does not know I am his mother. I have tried to live a full Christian
life. I have given by tens of thousands to aid the erring. I have
thought to make all atonement....
“And yet the blood of my blood slew the heart of my heart, my dear
husband, one of God’s noble men....”
After that wrenching confession her normal poise began by degrees to
return as the strength of an extraordinary mind began to assert itself.
The story was soon told: of an alliance before her marriage to Swanson,
of the boy, taken by the father, to be sent back to her after fifteen
years. The dissolute father, on his deathbed, sent Charles back to the
mother.
For fifteen years since that day she had steadily stood sponsor for the
boy. To her husband he was but one of the many others of her objects
of charity. It may be said the boy inherited the dissolute traits of
his father. Finally, her own children by Swanson all marrying, that
profound mysterious quality of motherhood prompted her to make one
last effort to redeem the boy under her own eyes, and she adopted the
dangerous course, for her, of bringing him to the house as a chauffeur.
That he was given to drugs she did not know. Thorne had been caught
in a series of petty thefts. Swanson had finally been compelled to
discharge him. He had left the house with maledictions upon Swanson.
Instinctively she had felt he was the author of the crime.
Considering all of these circumstances, and understanding the character
of the fiend and his paternity, it is evident that in his brain,
constantly weakening under drugs, became fixed a sinister purpose to
work out some scheme of revenge on Swanson for driving him from a rich
home and a cozy living, with ample funds and opportunity for a secret
indulgence in his weakness.
As it subsequently appeared, Thorne did not originally plan murder.
Some abortive scheme of blackmail had but half formed in his crazy
brain. He lured Swanson with a cunning letter, full of explicit
directions, to the Palace Hotel by writing that he was seriously ill
there. He begged that Mrs. Swanson be not informed until after Swanson
had seen him. He wanted an opportunity to redeem himself, he wrote;
and Swanson, as warm-hearted as his wife, and not caring evidently to
worry her needlessly about the condition of one of her charges until he
had made an investigation, set out on his errand of humanity, never to
return.
He wore his ulster, obviously so that he would not be recognised going
alone into the Palace Hotel. In the subcellar he had met Thorne. There
was a prolonged talk, and Swanson made the mistake of chiding the
fiend on his habits. Desire coming upon him strongly, Thorne finally
exhibited himself in all his ugly weakness, and the spectacle was too
much for the eyes of Swanson, unaccustomed to such sights. He was
stooping his way out of the little room after sternly refusing Thorne’s
appeal for money, when the long, lean fingers of the half-insane man,
with some congenital strain outcropping perhaps of that vagabond,
dissolute father, found an easy goal in a man already half-suffocated
in the thick air of the place.
Alarmed, when his fit had passed, at what he had done, and fearing to
rob the body, Thorne had quakingly slipped into Swanson’s ulster and
made his way in terror to his own room. First he had journeyed to the
foot of Powell Street, weighted the coat with a rock, and cast it into
the water of the bay. It was subsequently recovered and served as the
single bit of incriminating evidence to substantiate his confession.
His letter to Swanson, in Swanson’s pocket, he had taken with him to
destroy by tearing into fine bits.
Such were the salient features of a most extraordinary crime as
ultimately established.
But to return to Mrs. Swanson’s drawing-room, where Lanagan is speaking:
“Charles Thorne does not know, then, that you are his mother?”
“He does not know.”
“Who does know?”
“No living person save myself and you gentlemen.”
“In that case, then, Mrs. Swanson,” said Lanagan simply, “your secret
will die with us.”
She choked in attempting to speak, and, tears streaming from her eyes,
bade us each adieu. For my part I confess I was blinking like a boy.
The outer doors closed behind us. Then:
“Back to the room for you, chief,” snapped Lanagan laconically. “Throw
Thorne in at 2:15. Charles Thorne, a former chauffeur, murdered Swanson
after attempted blackmail failed. You stand, of course, chief?”
“Stand, Jack?” replied that sterling officer, “it’s in so deep it can
only come out when the last drop leaves my veins.”
“I knew that,” said Lanagan. “Now, Norrie,” sharply, “get together! We
have exactly _fifty-five minutes to press time_!”
IX
THE DOMINANT STRAIN
IX
THE DOMINANT STRAIN
“Sampson,” said Lanagan, “there’s something queer about that Robbins
case. Professional second story men aren’t returning to the scene of
a $10,000 burglary and sending by messenger a written proposition to
return the property for a cash settlement. They know how and where to
negotiate the stuff and they take no chances; particularly not with one
of their number under arrest--assuming the Ward boy is one of them.
And that is another queer angle: seasoned crooks don’t operate with
sixteen-year-old boys.”
“How do you account for the ring found on him?”
“I don’t--yet.”
“What’s your theory?”
“Haven’t any. But ten ‘second-story’ cases in three months in one
district winding up with a $10,000 job is against all form.”
“Dig into it then. Here, see who this is as you go out. May be about
the suspect. Same name.”
He handed Lanagan a visitor’s card. Scrawled across it in a nervous
hand was: “Jennie Ward. Important.”
In the ante-room a girl with a crutch arose to meet him, but he
motioned her back to her seat. She had the pinched face and the wistful
sadness of those condemned to life but half-whole. It was evident
before she spoke a dozen words that she came as so many others come
to the newspaper ante-room: in futile, uncomprehending protest at the
entire system of News.
It was her brother, Jimmy, who was under arrest, and she said he was
innocent. Jimmy told her he found the ring, therefore he did find it,
because Jimmy never told her a lie. She did not see why papers should
print such things, even if he had been arrested, and why they did not
try to prove a boy innocent rather than aid the police in trying to
prove him guilty.
Lanagan listened patiently at first, with an occasional question; and
then he listened with a deepening interest as the girl’s fervour grew.
“It is only the rich whose wrongs you right!” she exclaimed at last
passionately. “What rights have we poor? I cannot afford even a lawyer.
Mamma does washing. She is old and timid, and she was afraid to come to
the papers. I mostly educated myself, sir; I had to. I have learned the
piano at the Sunday school. I have a little class of pupils there. The
teacher helps me get them. I just teach the first lessons, you know.
I make $4.25 a week. Mamma makes about $7 when she is not sick. Jimmy
has been making $8, with a raise to $9.50 coming the first. So you see
we manage to make out, all of us together, and send my three little
brothers to school.
“And now--now--all the people on the street are talking about us
and my little brothers won’t go to school--the others call them
names--everyone saw Jimmy’s picture in your paper to-day--
“Won’t you please help us? We haven’t any men folks to fight for us now
with Jimmy locked up. Please, sir, help us get Jimmy out!
“I went to police headquarters and waited hours and hours to see
Jimmy--and then--and then finally the detectives--they took me and said
I would see Jimmy--but they took me to a room and shut the door--and
they swore at me--
“They said I--better tell everything or go to--jail--why--why they
talked like _I_--knew about the robbery and they were--going--to
arrest--me--”
She fainted; just drooped quietly back into the chair, wearily,
hopelessly, woefully, without so much as a sigh. Lanagan breathed
quickly as he ministered to her.
“Poor little sis!” he said, softly. “Plucky little mother of the
tenements! Taking a full-grown man’s place! But what a handicap!”
Her eyes opened. “Oh,” she fluttered, her thin, sensitive lips
quivering in apology, “I fainted, didn’t I? How queer. I never fainted
before. I cannot afford to give way like that. Sometimes, though! Oh,
sometimes I wish I could! I wanted to in front of the detectives--my
brain whirled and whirled and whirled with fire like pinwheels but I
wouldn’t--I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction!” Her slight hands with
their long fingers clenched; her eyes sparkled. “Harrigan. That is his
name. He was the worst. The brute! oh, if I were a man! I would kill
him for what he said to me!”
“Never mind Harrigan. Leave him to me,” said Lanagan. “You are only
exciting yourself. Go home now and try not to worry. We are going to
look into your brother’s case.”
“Thank you,” she said, with shining eyes. There were at no time any
tears. She had been trained in a life where tears are inadequate.
Lanagan watched her as she hobbled on her one crutch down the hall to
the elevator, her useless limb swinging loosely. She was a pathetic
little figure, with her man’s brain, her grown woman’s pride, and
her little misshapen body; a fourteen year old girl, wearing “long
clothes” in grim earnest. A quick pang shot through him; cripples
always saddened him. They have infinitely so much less than the meanest
wastrel who has health.
“The judgment of a cold-blooded detective against the judgment of a
loyal sister,” mused Lanagan. “Which is it?”
An hour’s study at police headquarters of the reports on all ten of the
burglaries established in Lanagan’s mind one settled conviction: they
were all committed by the same author, and whoever it was--whether an
individual or a gang--had first become reasonably familiar with the
interior arrangements of the houses entered, and with the daily routine
of the households.
In the Robbins case, for instance, from the time the last member of
the household left the bedroom, or second floor, to go down to the
dining-room on the first floor for dinner, until a member of the
household returning upstairs found the evidences of the burglary, only
twenty-five minutes had passed; and yet in that time the thief or
thieves had entered the house and had left it after cleanly ransacking
three bedrooms. An open bathroom window and the drain pipe to the
ground gave mute evidence of the burglar’s route.
In all of the cases only precious stones were taken: nothing
monogrammed was touched, nor watches, silverware, trinkets or
bric-à-brac. But this was of no particular consequence. The average
expert thief prefers the precious stones. Removed from their settings
they are difficult to identify and easy to negotiate.
“Professional work, all of it,” muttered Lanagan, arguing to himself.
“But what about that message?”
The extraordinary boldness that had marked all the crimes culminated
in the Robbins case when a man, with smoked glasses, heavy moustache,
soft hat pulled down and ulster turned up, gave a small boy ten cents
to carry an envelope to the Robbins home, but a block from where the
man stood. Enclosed in the message, which offered to return the jewelry
for $5,000 cash, was a brooch that had been among the articles stolen.
It was sent as proof that the offer was genuine. The message said the
police were not to be notified. If the family desired to negotiate,
they were to send the boy back with the single word, “Yes,” and they
would be communicated with later.
In the excitement of receiving the message under such singular
circumstances a member of the family, forgetting or disregarding the
caution, telephoned the police, holding the boy in the house. The
police misunderstood the call, and a patrol wagon load of reserves
clattered up to the door within ten minutes, under the impression
murder was being done.
Naturally, the man on the corner had ample time to escape. No further
offers to negotiate came to the family. On the second day the police
placed under arrest the Ward boy. He was employed as a helper with the
Phoenix Vacuum Cleaning Company, which had been engaged a few days
before at the Robbins home.
“And at the start he made a bad case, superficially, by his
contradictions,” reflected Lanagan, reviewing the case.
In their investigations the detectives, examining the two men and the
helper, Jimmie Ward, who had operated the cleaning apparatus at the
Robbins house, learned that the boy had been noticed that morning
examining a diamond ring. Asked where he got it, he had replied he
found it on the floor of the washroom at the establishment. No one
claimed the ring. The matter was called to the attention of Cutting,
the proprietor and manager of the company, but he knew of no customer
having reported such a loss.
The detectives--Harrigan and Thomas--took the boy to headquarters for
further questioning, and he had there said he found the ring on the
sidewalk. On that contradiction he was placed under arrest and locked
up in detinue.
Further, the police regarded as damaging the fact that a robbery a
week previous had been committed in the same neighbourhood in a home
where the cleaning apparatus had been engaged, the Ward boy serving as
the helper in that house also. He had worked with a different crew of
men than had been on the Robbins house, and this fact, in the police
theory, eliminated the remaining employees of the company as it was
highly improbable that they were all in a “second story” ring. They
redoubled their efforts to find the supposed connections of Ward on the
theory that he operated with an outside gang.
“‘Jimmy said he found the ring and if he said he found it he did find
it,’” said Lanagan, repeating the sister’s earnest declaration. “Well,
for her sake--I hope he did.”
Hour after hour Lanagan, tirelessly, kept at his rounds, visiting in
turn each of the ten homes in the western addition that had been robbed
during the last three months.
Long before he reached the Robbins home, the last of the ten, he had
formed his startling theory. In nine of the cases he had discovered
that which he set out in search of: a constant condition present in
them all. There was just one question that he wanted to ask at the
Robbins home.
He found the home in a flurry of excitement. Police headquarters had
rung up and asked that a member of the household come at once to
the detective bureau to identify if possible a bracelet that it was
believed had been among the stolen articles and that had been recovered.
Lanagan, arriving just as the senior Robbins was leaving in his
automobile, was invited to accompany him. He did so; but first he had
asked and had had answered the one question he came to ask.
In the office of O’Rourke, night captain of detectives, they found
O’Rourke, Harrigan and Thomas grouped around a woman, huddled down on a
chair. Lanagan caught a low sob, a helpless, forlorn, frightened sob,
that sent a curious sensation of nausea through him. He stepped quickly
forward to gaze down upon the misery-racked form of the cripple, Jennie
Ward.
“I don’t know anything! Oh, I don’t know anything!” she wailed. “I
found it on the door step!”
O’Rourke had turned as they entered. He stepped to his own desk,
holding the bracelet toward Robbins.
“That is my daughter’s bracelet, sir,” Robbins said. “It was my
Christmas present to her.”
Harrigan, listening, nodded in satisfaction.
“I knew it,” he said. “I guess we had better throw the little gutter
snipe in, cap; a little pressure now and she’s bound to squeal.”
“Oh, oh, oh!” Sobs were shuddering from the girl.
“_Squeal!_ You damned clodhopper! Give her a bullet and kill her now if
you are trying to! You don’t throw her in!”
It was Lanagan. He had whirled from the huddled form to send the words
cutting through the air at Harrigan like a whiplash. The girl flung up
a white face in a swift look of wild hope.
“_I don’t know anything, Mr. Lanagan! Don’t let them put me in jail!_”
She threw herself from her chair in an attempt to clasp his arm but her
withered and shrunken limb crumpled under her and she sank to the floor
with a sharp cry of pain. Lanagan leaned and lifted her to the chair.
Harrigan had an ugly look as he measured the distance from himself to
Lanagan.