“You bum,” said Harrigan, with deadly levelness. “You drunken bum.”
Lanagan’s leap was catlike. It took all the mighty O’Rourke’s strength
to tear his fingers free. Lanagan was not a Queensbury fighter when
tackling two hundred pounds of policeman. O’Rourke had Harrigan by the
arms. Thomas had Lanagan. For a second or two there was not a sound but
the panting of grappling men. Then discipline told. Harrigan’s arms
relaxed.
“You are relieved from duty, Officer Harrigan,” said O’Rourke. “Until I
lay the matter of your insubordination before the Chief.”
The detective turned on his heel and walked from the room, stopping at
the door. “I’ll get you, Lanagan,” he said. Lanagan ignored him.
“Now, Jack,” said O’Rourke, grimly, as Thomas freed the reporter. “Why
won’t we throw this girl in?”
“Because,” said Lanagan, still breathing heavily, “she is innocent.”
“How do you know?”
“I know. That is enough. If you won’t take my word ring up the Chief
and he will.”
O’Rourke knew the close friendship between Lanagan and Chief Leslie and
the confidence the chief had in his judgment. He gazed doubtfully at
the girl and then at Robbins. Secretly, he respected Lanagan also and
he was impressed by Lanagan’s assurance.
“We aren’t justified in holding the girl,” he said to Robbins. Then to
Lanagan: “All right. You win.”
But as Lanagan left the room with the girl to send her home in the
police automobile, O’Rourke had an afterthought. He turned to Thomas.
“We might just as well cover up. Watch the house to-night. There’s
something queer about this whole business that I don’t get yet.”
“Whatever happens keep calm until I see you again,” was Lanagan’s last
counsel to the girl. Through the scene in O’Rourke’s office she had
kept crouched down in her chair, watching with wide eyes; save for
one quickly shrilled: “_Give it to him!_” as Lanagan’s sinewy fingers
twined around Harrigan’s throat.
“It was terrible of me to say that, wasn’t it?” she asked. “But I
couldn’t help it! He is a bad man! I feel it!”
“He’s what we call a ‘wrong’ detective,” said Lanagan, drily. “Don’t
think about him any more.”
“Let me have Norton,” he said, some moments later to Sampson, and to me
he said:
“I want you to cover 211 Clementina Street. Don’t bother anybody. Just
see who goes in or out or hangs around there. I’ll pick you up later
down there. Wait for me no matter what happens.”
He jumped into a taxicab at the curbing and whirled away out Market
Street. I hastened to my station, in that gloomy, narrow street of
rookeries. Almost opposite 211 was a deep doorway. I flattened back in
the shadows, trusting to luck that the occupants were all in bed and
that no one would walk up on me. I was not bothered. An hour passed and
another. I heard someone come out of a house a few doors above me and
saunter down the street toward me. I huddled back. The figure passed
within six feet of me. By the dim rays of the gas lamp on the corner,
throwing its feeble area of light a dozen yards, I recognised Detective
Thomas.
He slipped into the side door of the corner saloon. “Off his job,
whatever it is,” I said to myself. “Something should happen now. It
usually does in such cases.”
It did. Noiselessly on the opposite sidewalk passed a figure in a heavy
black overcoat with a high collar turned up around the ears and a soft
hat pulled down. In front of 211 the figure stopped for a fraction of a
second, it may have been to look for something that had been dropped;
but it appeared to me to fumble an instant by the steps. The figure
then passed rapidly on.
Thomas, a fresh cigar between his teeth, sauntered back to his post.
The figure that had stopped at 211 had disappeared around the corner at
Seventh Street. Thomas had certainly missed the episode entirely.
There was a long interval. The door at 211 opened, slowly. A girl came
out, finally; a girl with a crutch. She came down the three steps,
looked up and down and across the street, and suddenly dropped down and
I could see that she was rummaging in the space under the stairs.
Stepping easily, I saw Thomas, his cigar still puffing leisurely, cross
the street. He was almost beside the girl before she saw him. There
came a faint cry of alarm, quickly smothered, as she straightened
up, her back to the house. I walked quickly to them in time to hear
Thomas’s voice:
“Well, miss, find any presents? Little late for Santa Claus, isn’t it?
But let’s see. Let’s just see what you were looking for under those
stairs.”
He dropped to his knees, threw his pocket flash about, and arose, a
small package wrapped in a newspaper in his hand. The girl was staring
with startled, wide eyes. She was breathing quickly, her thin bosom
rising and falling. Thomas wheeled on me, was about to snap at me,
thought better of it, and remarked:
“Oh, well, you’re dropped to me. I might as well let you in.”
He tore off the paper wrapping from the package and in the flash of his
pocket light I saw the glitter of a pair of diamond ear drops.
“Do you make them?” he asked, triumphantly. I nodded. The jewels
unquestionably answered the description of those stolen from the
Robbins home. It came to me like a physical blow, the shock that such
a frail, broken bit of humanity as the little back alley waif before me
was entangled in a thieves’ gang. I knew she was the suspect’s sister.
She still held her defiant place against the house.
“I guess this time, young lady, you will go in,” said Thomas, tersely.
“Do you want anything from the house? Got any thing to say? You are
going to jail.”
She began to tremble violently, but her lips were still compressed.
“No,” she managed to say at last. “No! I was watching! I know now! I
know! But I will not talk to you! Please don’t waken my mamma or my
little brothers--let us go--now--if I must.” She started to hobble away
in feverish haste, shaken with sobs that she would not permit to escape
her lips. Seldom have I been affected with such a sense of sadness
as came over me then: all of the tragedy that would have been in the
situation with even a whole girl under such circumstances was doubled
by her condition.
“Got her dead to rights that time,” chuckled Thomas to me. “She’ll
spill now sure. The rest of the stuff must be cached around here
somewhere.”
“You think there is no question about the Ward boy?” I asked.
“Not the slightest. And she is in and is covering up. They’re all
crooked, these back alley rats. There’s more in the gang, of course.
That stuff was put there, I suppose, to-night, for her to ‘shove.’
Probably she peddles it. You never can tell how these gangs operate.”
I glanced again at the pitiable little misshapen thing dragged away
from her home to a cell and an iron bed at the city prison and I
couldn’t trust myself to reply to Thomas.
By a curious change that is gradually making me less valuable as
a newspaper man the older I become in the business, I find myself
unconsciously taking sides against my paper with fellow beings whose
frailties or sorrows make them grist for the newspaper mill. I felt
so toward this poor girl now, a victim of congenital influence in
all likelihood; obviously a product of the malnutrition of the under
classes.
Thomas took his prisoner away in a taxi and I hurried to a telephone
and gave the story to Sampson in that fashion. I then hastened back to
Clementina Street, where to my great relief, I was picked up by Lanagan
within a few moments.
I related everything to him. When I had finished his eyes shone more
brightly than the gas jet over our heads. Never had I beheld him so
far from the composure for which he was noted. For a minute or two
he anathematised O’Rourke by all the carded oaths and a few that he
invented.
“Back, back in jail, is she! So, O’Rourke couldn’t take my word! We’ll
see, oh, we’ll see! Wait.”
He ran up the steps to 211. After a long period, the door opened. It
was the mother. Briefly Lanagan explained what had happened. The poor
old toothless soul was about past being shocked further. But quickly
Lanagan, in that compelling way of his, calmed her fears. He promised
that she would have her son and daughter back--before daylight.
_Before daylight!_ It fairly took my breath away.
“What is it, Jack? Give me a line,” I demanded in excitement. “Heavens,
man, it’s quarter to two! How are you going to get a story in the paper
to-night now? You’ll only break it for all the papers.”
Lanagan stopped short in his rapid walk and laid his hand on my
shoulders.
“I’ve been in this game fifteen years, Norrie,” he said, with a
solemnity new in him. “Let me tell you something, and I say it who have
the right: there comes a time just once every so often when a newspaper
man puts humanity above his paper. Remember that. You are betraying no
trust with your paper when you do; you are betraying your trust with
yourself, with your fellow man, and with your conscience when you do
not. This is one of them.”
That was all. But many times in the years that have whirled by since
then and since that strange, marvellous man passed out of the newspaper
life of the west, have those words come back out of the dark of a back
alley, to guide me.
He was not working for an “exclusive” now; he was working to free a
mite of a cripple girl and her stunned and misused brother from the
inner tier of cells at the city prison.
He said no more. At Market Street he flung open a taxicab door and we
jumped in. He called an address to the driver. It was Chief Leslie’s
home. We were there within fifteen minutes. Lanagan held his finger on
the button until the door swung open and the Chief himself appeared,
wrapped in a lounging robe, his hair tousled, his beard rumpled, but
his grey eyes wide and alert. Lanagan brushed in and I after him. He
sat the Chief down on a settee and for ten minutes he hammered away. At
last Leslie’s fist banged the settee arm.
“By the Lord Harry, you’re right! And I want to flash that bird again!
It all comes back to me now; I couldn’t make out the other day where
I had seen him before. Little stouter, but same man or I’ll cut my
throat!”
He took the stairs to the next floor three at a time. Within five
minutes he was back, fully dressed.
“Got your machine out here yet?”
“Yes,” said Lanagan. “But don’t forget the Wards.”
Leslie stepped to the telephone stand and to his private line to
headquarters.
“Prison,” he said, shortly. “Prison? Give me the matron. Mrs. Conness?
Take that Ward girl into your room and give her the best you have
until I get down. Give me Andrews. Sergeant Andrews? Take that Ward
boy to the matron’s room and give him the best you have until I get
down there.” He hung up the receiver. “Come on. We’ll pick up Brady. He
lives just around the corner. We better get Maloney, too; he’s not far
away. If this is the bird I think it is, we’ll take no chances. Known
as the ‘Swallow.’ Two timer, Moyomemsing prison. Porch climber. Came
out here about fifteen years ago and reported on, saying he wanted a
chance to make good. We kept track of him for a couple of years. He was
clerking and doing the right thing. Then we lost him.”
“I didn’t identify him that closely,” said Lanagan. “But he’s the man
who did this trick and the other nine.”
Within twenty-five minutes Brady and Maloney were crowded into the
machine with us. Lanagan gave a direction. At Pacific Avenue and
Octavia Street we stopped, in the heart of the fashionable western
addition. With Lanagan and Leslie in the lead, Brady and I next and
Maloney bringing up the rear, we straggled along for several blocks.
At Washington and Buchanan Streets the Chief and Lanagan had stepped
back and signalled us. We closed up. From the middle of the block on
Washington Street came the sound of a taxicab starting. Leslie looked
around the corner as the machine came towards us, and stepped to the
street, flashing his shield. The machine stopped. The door opened. A
head appeared. A familiar voice came.
“Hello, Chief! What’s up?”
Detective Harrigan stepped out.
“You’re up,” said Leslie, with a bitter oath. “You are under arrest.
Brady, search the prisoner.”
Quick as a knife blade springs back Harrigan’s hand went to his
hip; but as quick as he was, Leslie was quicker. There was a click,
click and Harrigan stood before his superior officer and his brother
detectives, manacled. With practised fingers Brady was running through
his clothes. He passed over Harrigan’s revolver, handcuffs and billy.
He brought forth a leather wallet. Leslie tore it open. It held an
assortment of jewelry, jumbled together.
“So!” he said, his voice shaking with rage, “you knew it was the
Swallow, did you? And you have been shaking him down for half the loot?
Well, Officer Harrigan, you and the Swallow will be splitting cobble
stones inside of a month. You dirty, rotten, gutter scut! You were
framing to send two little kids to prison, were you? I wish I had let
you pull that gun! We’d have saved the county the expense of a trial!”
He tore Harrigan’s coat back and ripped his star from his breast. He
ground it under his heel until the number it held was obliterated, and
then he hurled it spinning into the air and over the corner house. It
landed faintly on a distant roof.
Harrigan noticed Lanagan for the first time and sprang for him, raising
his manacled hands. But Leslie stopped him with a drive to the jaw that
sent him staggering back against the machine.
“Take him in, Maloney,” ordered the Chief. “I’ve seen enough of him.
We’ll get along without you now.”
Harrigan said not a word. He stumbled into the machine, Maloney
following. It drove away.
“Jack Lanagan,” said Leslie, “I wish you were on my staff. You could
have O’Rourke’s job to-night.”
“Thanks, Chief, I’ll be satisfied if you send O’Rourke to the fog
belt,” replied Lanagan, sardonically. “Put a man like Royan in his
place and you’ll have the kind of head the bureau needs.”
“Royan goes,” said the Chief. “You’re entitled to something on this
night’s work.”
“We’ve got to hurry. Our man may have noticed that taxi incident.”
“I don’t think so. Harrigan came out of the house.” We walked up the
street. “Take the rear, Brady,” said Leslie, and the detective stepped
quietly down the cement path at the side of a fairly pretentious home.
Leslie, Lanagan and I tiptoed up the front steps. We stood to one side,
while Lanagan took the door. He rang twice. Footsteps came. It was
evident Harrigan’s host had not yet retired.
“That you, Harrigan?” the voice came from inside before the door
opened. Lanagan mumbled a yes. The door swung back and Donald Cutting,
Esq., proprietor and general manager of the Phoenix Vacuum Cleaning
Company stood staring at Lanagan from the brilliantly lighted hallway.
For an instant he was speechless. Then he shouted:
“Well, what the devil do _you_ want around here at this hour of the
morning? What gets into you reporters, anyhow? Has a citizen got any
rights in his own home at all?”
“There aren’t many that you have.” It was Leslie. He had swung to the
door directly before Cutting.
His revolver was at Cutting’s waist.
“Just keep your hands a little higher, Cutting: you’re pretty nifty
with those digits of yours. Now back in there, so we can all sit down
and talk.”
Cutting stood an instant as though frozen, and then mechanically
stepped back. We all walked in. The door was closed.
“‘Swallow,’” said the Chief, “you’re through. We’ve got Harrigan with
the goods. Where’s the rest of the loot? I mean outside the Robbins
stuff. We’ve got that located.”
Cutting’s head dropped to his hands. He sat in silence, bowed.
“Donald, what is it? Is there any trouble?” A woman’s voice came over
the balustrade. He straightened up, as though an electric current had
shot through him.
“Nothing, Molly,” he said. “Just some old friends dropped in on me. I
will be at liberty soon.”
“Your wife?” asked Leslie. “My wife,” replied Cutting.
In another moment she was sweeping from the broad stairway in a silken
kimono, her hair flowing loosely, and stood before us.
Cutting looked directly at her, and in her eyes there was a light of
questioning. “I must leave you, Molly,” he said. Still looking at him
in that singular way, she asked: “For how long?”
“It is not in my power to say. These men are police officers. They knew
me from the east. They want me to go down to the jail with them.”
“Will you be there long?”
“If I could help myself, I would not go at all.”
“Oh,” she said, with a nervous laugh. “I understand. Something possibly
about that poor boy in your employ and that robbery.”
Lanagan’s black eyes were studying the woman intently; Leslie was
watching Cutting. Both, I could see, were puzzled. Even I, with
my duller perceptions, was sensible that there was some subtle
undercurrent in this conversation; something cryptic that I could not
solve.
“You will need your hat,” she said, and turned to the hat rack in the
rear of the hall.
“It’s all right, Chief,” said Cutting, in an aside, arising, “you’ve
got me. Please don’t make any scene before her.”
She returned with the hat. He fumbled with it.
“Kiss me,” he said. She did so; left his arms, but came back to them, a
gush of tears starting as she clung to him in a passionate embrace.
“Go,” he said, faintly, his voice breaking. She turned and stumbled for
the stairs. A quick look flashed from Lanagan to the Chief.
“One minute, madam,” said Leslie, sternly. “You had better come along,
too.”
“_No!_” cried Cutting. “Never, Chief, as you are a man! Never in a
million years! She has never known of my work out here; she knew me
before Moyomemsing; she stuck by me during it all; she married me and
we came out here. She knows nothing; nothing. She may have suspected,
but she knew nothing. The old call claimed me, going through those
houses making estimates on cleaning; why, it’s a disease, that’s all,
Chief! I got pressed for money. I undertook too much in my business. I
couldn’t handle it. I had notes to meet. I just fell naturally back to
the old easy way. That’s all. Just went back to it because that’s the
way I was born, I suppose; crooked.”
“Humph. Where did you send the stuff?”
“East. Except the Robbins. Needed money bad, didn’t want to take a
chance handling it here, so I tried the message. What Harrigan didn’t
get is down at the office in the safe.”
“We suspected that,” said Leslie. “How long has Harrigan been cutting
with you?”
“Oh, well, don’t ask me that. Some time. He’s a wolf. I am a crook,
but he’s got me lashed to the mast. The kid stuff was none of mine. I
did lose one ring at the office. The boy found it. He got scared and
contradicted himself. Harrigan framed the other thing about the house.”
“I guess it’s pretty nearly an even break,” said Leslie. He stepped
forward to put on the wrist nippers. As he did so Cutting raised his
hat to his head; his hand, coming down, stopped for a fraction of a
second at his lips.
“Better this,” he said, rapidly, backing away, “I couldn’t go back. I’m
a pretty old man, you know.”
As though he had been shot through the heart he dropped in a heap.
Lanagan leaped for him. The Chief bent over him. They arose together.
Lanagan picked up the hat and turned back the sweat band. Inside was
a little envelope, pasted to the felt. It was half filled with white
powder.
“Cyanide,” said Lanagan.
* * * * *
Such was the passing of the Swallow.
Lanagan, in his search for similar conditions in the ten burglaries
found but one: that Cutting had personally visited each house to make
the estimates of cost. That fact, coupled with the ring found at his
establishment, convinced Lanagan that he and he alone was the man.
Cutting worked four machines, each with its separate crew, and no
other employee had worked in more than three out of the ten houses.
Anxious to keep track of Cutting after his theory began to impress
him, he had learned that he was at the theatre. He had picked him up
after the show, trailed him to a café, followed him in a taxicab as he
took his wife home, and kept at his tail lights when he returned after
one o’clock to discharge the machine and walk to a saloon well south
of Market Street where he had met Harrigan. That was Lanagan’s first
definite information that Harrigan and Cutting were involved.
Cutting and Harrigan had separated, Lanagan following Cutting to his
establishment. He remained there some time, busied about his safe, and
had then apparently gone directly home.
It was then that Lanagan picked me up.
Harrigan, of course, was the man who had passed through the alley. He
then had gone on out to Cutting’s house, for a final distribution of
the spoils, Cutting having evidently taken Harrigan’s share from the
safe.
* * * * *
Late that same afternoon Lanagan sat in Leslie’s office with Robbins,
who had just received his jewelry. Robbins drew out his check book.
“If you will permit me?” he said, to Lanagan. He had filled in “$250.”
“How do you spell your name?”
Lanagan laughed. “Make it out to the Adams Piano Company,” he said.
Robbins looked politely inquisitive, but asked no questions. He wrote
in the name. But Leslie was not so polite.
“What in the name of Sam Hill are you going to do with a piano?”
“Nothing, myself. I wouldn’t take it any more than I would take the
money. You know that. But there is a girl I know who can use that piano
and use it to very good advantage. And what’s more, she’s entitled to
it.”
He picked up the check and carefully folded it, placing it in his
pocket.
“I’m going over now and pick out the best piano the money will buy,” he
said, “and I’m going to send it, with the compliments of Mr. Robbins,
Chief Leslie and Jack Lanagan to a little home at 211 Clementina
Street, Miss Ward is the name.”
[Illustration: “He lit a match.”]
X
OUT OF THE DEPTHS
X
OUT OF THE DEPTHS
The Stockslager case will be recalled immediately upon the Pacific
Coast as a crime of some years ago marked by the peculiar atrocity of
the circumstances. Aged Mrs. Stockslager, living in a small cottage at
the extreme northern end of Thirty-third Avenue--in those days a region
sparsely settled and visited chiefly by picknickers bound for Baker’s
Beach--was found one Sunday morning literally hacked to pieces.
From the location of portions of the dismembered body it was apparent
that the author had planned to carry the evidences of the crime away
and sink them in the waters of the ocean, which tumbled and rolled on
the rocks at the base of the steep cliff that marked the extremity of
Thirty-third Avenue. A potato sack, with the torso, was found near the
rear door to the cottage, indicating that whoever had committed the
deed had probably been interrupted while carrying the remains to the
bay; and had then fled.
A kitchen butcher knife was the weapon used. Robbery was evidently the
motive, for the hut had been ransacked thoroughly, such poor and mean
trinkets as the recluse was known to possess having been taken.
Mrs. Stockslager did a small business in sandwiches, pop corn and soda
water with the picknickers. The rumours of a miser’s hoard that usually
attached to such as she had long been current. But whether the slayer
or slayers realised a profit in money could not be determined as there
was no one who could be found sufficiently familiar with her life to
say whether she did or did not have a store of money on the premises.
Such were the general facts which Sampson, city editor of the
_Enquirer_, skeletonised tersely to Lanagan as that police reporter of
superior talents reported for duty after a lapse of more than ordinary
duration.
“Hop to it, Jack,” added Sampson. “You’ve had your salary for two
weeks. Show your appreciation.”
Those were the days before automobiles might be
requisitioned--occasionally--for big assignments, and Lanagan, taking
the steam line that in those days twisted around the ocean shore,
was considerably later than the coroner’s deputies, who had already
discharged their functions and now were engaged in making an impromptu
meal upon the old woman’s supply of sandwiches, the only loot available.