station, were also on the scene. The “upper office” at headquarters
is recruited--where it is not recruited by politics or favouritism--by
these active young officers on special duty at the outside stations,
and Lanagan knew that this particular brace of plain-clothes men were
hardworking and ambitious and without the “strings” that many times
bring the ablest of upper office men a trifle too considerately into
touch with the outlaw clans.
“What do you make of it, Phillips?” asked Lanagan, as the officer
placed his note-book in his pocket.
“Wouldn’t call it a suicide, exactly,” replied Phillips, offishly.
Lanagan laughed. “No?” he drawled. “I wouldn’t put it past you to call
it natural causes, though.”
Phillips flushed to the base of his thick neck but held himself from
answering. He knew Lanagan by reputation and did not care to match
wits with him. Lanagan worked with most of the “upper office” men on
intimate terms, but found it occasionally necessary to put a “crimp” in
the arrogance, or ignorance, of the outside station officers, who do
not come into contact with newspaper men as frequently as the down town
men and at times elect to affect the same impartiality with which they
treat ordinary persons. Such Lanagan took pride in bringing to a proper
appreciation of the honourable place occupied by the brothers of the
Tribe.
Lanagan ignored the two detectives and gave his attention to the
coroner’s deputies, the cottage and outskirts, and the contents of
the wicker basket. Before the next train arrived, bringing a dozen
reporters and camera men from the other papers, and myself, Lanagan
had finished his investigations. I found him seated on a salt grass
hummock, smoking and gazing absently up and down the ragged, rocky
shore line. The surf was tumbling heavily although a few hundred yards
out the sea was an undulating swell of greenish beauty.
“Some fine day,” was his greeting. “Let’s take a stroll down.”
We made our way down the cliff to the rocks at the water’s edge.
“Imagination is oftentimes a great thing in solving crime,” he
remarked, as he poised himself perilously on a slippery rock and relit
his cigar. “That and the ‘take a chance’ instinct. Call it a hunch,
bull-luck, accident, or as one great French detective said, ‘le grand
hasard.’ Beautiful picture, is it not?”
He pointed toward the Heads, where a Pacific Mail steamship was just
putting her pilot down the side. She made a fine picture in truth, with
her clean, lithe lines and her smoke blowing back like the wind-blown
tresses of a girl.
We strolled along the intermittent stretches of sandy beach or
clambered over the rocks and it finally struck me that Lanagan’s ferret
eyes were not at all absent-minded or entirely busied with the natural
beauties of the scene, but that he was examining closely every square
inch of the ground we travelled; and the waters as we passed.
“Phillips is rather cagey,” he remarked. “He’ll have to be taught his
place. He’s a good officer, though; and Leslie has his eye on him.
We must look out for that chap. He not only has good legs, a prime
requisite of a detective or a reporter, but he has a head that really
works once in a while.”
He sat down finally under the shelter of a great rock and motioned me
to do likewise. Then he pulled from his pocket, carefully tucked away,
a V-shaped piece of paper written over with Chinese characters. The
corner that made the apex of the V was crinkled.
“What do you make of it?”
“It’s a piece of a Chinese newspaper,” I replied.
“Really! You would do credit to Phillips. _Examine_ it this time.”
I tried again, but could make nothing of it.
“Look.”
He uncrumpled the slight crinkling at the apex and a tiny bit of red
paper was exposed. I was ashamed of my own lack of observation; but
just as puzzled as before and said so.
“I should say,” said Lanagan, “that this paper with the Chinese
characters was a piece of wrapping paper; that someone tore it from a
package with his finger nails and that a portion of the red wrapper of
the package itself, came off in his finger nails. See?” He crumpled it
up and sure enough it fitted neatly into the space under his finger
nail.
“Well?” I asked, vaguely. Then I had an inspiration. The Chinese burial
ground was only an eighth of a mile away. Lanagan obviously had some
theory connecting Chinese with the crime, the bit of paper evidently
having dropped from a Chinaman’s blouse. I told him so. He laughed
immoderately but indulgently and carefully put the bit of paper away in
his pocket.
“You’re a stem-winder when it comes to writing fancy leads for my
police stories,” he said, still chuckling, “but I guess I’ll have
to give up for keeps trying to make a detective out of you. I have
shown you in perspective as it were, during the past twenty minutes,
the solution of this entire crime--if my theory is not altogether
wrong--and you can’t see it. Let’s get busy. Your legs can at least be
of service to me.
“I want you to stick around here for a couple of hours. Tackle
everybody in sight for a knowledge of Mrs. Stockslager; how long
she has been out here, her past, who her family are if any, who her
visitors have been; if she had any particular idiosyncrasies or
hobbies. Take in all the houses within a radius of a mile--there are
only four or five--and try to get some kind of a line on her. Don’t
overlook the small boy. In out-of-the-way regions like this he is
the pioneer of civilisation and you may tumble on to more through
some roving urchin than all the grown-ups in the county. I will leave
instructions at the office where to meet me later. I anticipate lively
entertainment ahead.”
When we got back to the cottage the coroner’s deputies had gone, as
had Phillips and Castle. Camera men were taking the house from many
angles; artists were busy sketching the interior--that was the heyday
of “yellow journalism”--marking the “spot” with the old familiar cross.
Reporters were still cluttering around. A crowd of morbid persons,
attracted out of the very sky like vultures, were already gathered.
“Suppose you’ve got it all cleared?” remarked Bradley of the _Times_
to Lanagan. He was Lanagan’s nearest approach to a rival as a police
reporter.
“Clear as print can make it,” replied Lanagan as he turned for the
train.
He ran for the car, leaving Bradley secretly uneasy. He had a wholesome
regard for Lanagan and knew that he was of few words and not given to
wasting them. I slipped the rest of the newspaper men and tramped the
sandhills “covering” all the houses, “buzzing” an occasional small boy.
The best I could get for two hours’ hard work--and the first “tip” came
from an unwashed, sling-shooting young American--was a vague story that
no one could substantiate, that Mrs. Stockslager had a worthless son
who infrequently visited her for money. I hugged this information close
until I could see Lanagan. It so happened he ordered me to keep it
quiet for that day, giving no reasons.
I was chagrined the next morning to awaken and find that Bradley had
the same piece of information and had “flashed” it on the front page
for an exclusive double-leaded feature to his story.
The search then turned to the son. He could be traced to within six or
seven months of the murder. I had to lumber along as best I could in
handling the story without Lanagan’s assistance. The stories in all of
the papers became monotonously uniform. On the third day the interest
was thinning. There had not been a single new fact discovered; nor, so
far as the _Enquirer_ was concerned, had there been a word from Lanagan.
“He must have something,” Sampson said to me irritably on the third
day. “But take a flier through his hangouts on the chance that he might
have gone off again.”
I shook my head. “That isn’t Lanagan with a story on,” I said. “He does
his drinking when the story is turned in.” Nevertheless I took a quick
skirmish to Connor’s, Fogarty’s and “Red” Murphy’s; looked up “Kid”
Monahan and some of Lanagan’s intimates in the upper office. I could
find no trace of him.
Toward evening I dropped back to the _Enquirer_ after a final round-up
of the ends of the story at police headquarters, and there Lanagan
sat with his heels on Sampson’s desk, with that pulseless individual
shooting questions at him with the speed and precision of an automatic
revolver.
“I’ve given you all I am free to give just now,” said Lanagan, shutting
down on the questioning. “You’ve got a good enough scoop to hold the
story for to-morrow. Let me handle the rest in my own way, will you?”
He was nettled. “Don’t be so didactic. Do you think I’ve been spending
the last three days with a dry nurse?” He was the only man on the
_Enquirer_ who could take that tone with Sampson and hold his job.
“No. I know you’ve been on your toes hard, Jack, and I appreciate it.
Only the news-call gets the best of me and this story has us all on
edge,” replied Sampson.
“You’re not to go near the prison,” continued Lanagan. “I need
Norton to-night. Let Martin write the story from here. Stockslager
is absolutely out of it. He has been a trusty at the city prison for
about six months, which clears him up. Name he goes under is ‘Swede’
Stockley. The police have known it all along but they have kept it dark
for certain reasons which I am not at liberty now to state.
“Lend me that nice, new mackintosh of yours, Sampson. It’s raining like
blazes and the enthusiastic Mr. Norton and myself will have a hard
stand to-night. Take your raincoat, Norton. We are going out looking
for ghosts around the Stockslager cottage. There’s a real ghost of the
old lady out there and I’ve wanted for a long time to have a run-in
with a genuine spook. She was seen on the cliff last night as the train
stopped. McCluskey, the conductor, thought he heard a sort of moaning.
He’s a pretty nervy chap and the moans, coming it seemed from the hut,
didn’t scare him much. He walked over that way and silhouetted at the
edge of the cliff he swears he saw the old lady herself. It was too
much even for McCluskey and he ran back to the train.
“He and the engineer, Roberts, went back with a couple of crowbars
although he didn’t say what good crowbars would do in tackling
a bonafide ghost. They just got one glimpse of the thing and it
disappeared and they both swear it couldn’t have had time to get any
place before they reached the scene. It was a fairly clear night,
during a break in the storm, and they wasted five minutes and then went
back to their train.
“I was out there to-day and McCluskey told me the yarn. They’ve kept
it quiet around the car barn for fear of being ridiculed. I have them
pledged to secrecy. Don’t use that angle of the story to-morrow,
though, as I want to do some ghost hunting before the whole town hears
about it and flocks out there.
“Come on, Norrie. Got your gun?”
That ghost talk gave me all sorts of forebodings. With a black night
ahead and a driving rain, ghost hunting on the scene of the murder, in
an environment sufficiently forbidding on a wintry night in any event,
failed to stir me to any particular height of enthusiasm.
“Fire ahead,” said Sampson, with one of his mirthless grins. But he was
sitting comfortably in a steam-heated office.
It was nine o’clock when we boarded the steam cars at the old Central
Avenue terminal. McCluskey was a solid-jawed, sensible, self-reliant
looking chap. It puzzled me. A sober, steady man like that must have
seen something very convincing before sponsoring talk of ghosts.
“Ghost hunting?” he asked.
“Yes,” replied Lanagan. “Good feature story, this ghost stuff. Keep it
quiet for a day or two longer, will you?”
“Sure. I’ll be on the watch for the _Enquirer_ to see about it. Looked
for it to-night, but didn’t see it.”
He slowed down for us about an eighth of a mile from the Thirty-third
Avenue stop and we dropped off into a bitter rain.
That rain would have quenched the tail fires of hell.
We struggled on, heads down. There was no use in trying to talk and I
knew Lanagan would take his own time about giving me any information.
We suddenly pulled stiffly up against two bulky, raincoated figures. A
dark lantern flashed, first in my face, then in Lanagan’s.
“Well, well!” It was Lanagan’s ready voice, pitched a trifle high on
account of the beating rain. “If it isn’t Messrs. Phillips and Castle!
Walking to reduce weight, I presume?”
“What are you fellows doing out here?” asked Phillips, gruffly.
“Well, Phillips, seeing that it’s you, I’ll tell you: It’s none of
your business. Maybe we’re going to swim to the Farallones. Do you
understand me perfectly?”
“Isn’t it? We’ll see. And I don’t know whether we want you snuffing
around here or not,” replied Phillips. He was a choleric man, was
Phillips, with a neck too thick even for a policeman. I thought for a
moment Lanagan would have us both ordered back, but he only laughed, in
that mocking, Machiavelian laugh of his that could rasp like a file on
a sore tooth.
“Dear me,” he said, “your mood fits the weather, Phillips; very
disagreeable. I am not concerned with your wants. I’m going to snuff
to my heart’s content. Now please step off the right of way and permit
us to pass. We are both citizens of this great and glorious city that
overpays you most disgracefully in proportion to your attainments; and
as such citizens our powers and privileges on the county domain are
precisely as full and complete as yours. Phillips, you’ll never do. No
policeman ever succeeds who begins by antagonising newspaper men. I’m
telling you, you won’t do. Step aside, please. We want to go on and we
don’t purpose to walk around you to do it.”
For a moment things looked ugly, with Phillips standing fast. Castle
took him by the arm.
“Come on, Tom, you’re wrong,” he said, and the two officers stepped to
one side and we passed on, with Lanagan chuckling aloud.
“Ghost hunting is becoming a regular fad,” he said finally. “And I
shouldn’t be surprised to find a few more hunters scattered around. We
will let Phillips and Castle pass.”
We stepped quickly to one side and sank down behind a hillock of very
wet and very cold sand. Lanagan was correct. The two detectives had
turned and followed us. They went on ahead, having missed us.
It was shivery. Here were four men, two trailing two others who assumed
they were the trailers; and all bound for a murder house on a black
night to hunt ghosts: for it was safe to assume that in some fashion
Phillips and Castle had heard the ghost episode. Did we but know it at
the time, we were in turn being trailed by two keen eyed, storm-coated
men, each of whom kept a ready hand in his overcoat pocket.
For, as Phillips and Castle disappeared on ahead and we were just
stepping back to the railroad tracks from our place of concealment,
Lanagan suddenly bore back and dropped. I followed suit.
“More ghost hunters,” he whispered in my ear, pointing. Two blurred,
indistinct figures passed along the right of way. It was awesome. But
Lanagan gave me no time for questions. Stooping low, threshing softly
through the dripping salt grass, in and out among the sand dunes, we
worked our way gradually toward the cliffs along the ocean. The coat
fairly well protected my body, but my shoes were soaked and I was
drenched with the cold, numbing rain to my knees.
In a position I should judge about twenty yards from the point where
the path from the Stockslager path led over the cliff to the rocks
below, we crouched against a hummock. The ocean roared beneath us
and the white froth of the breakers, tumbling on the rocks, could be
faintly seen. Each time it would flash into the corner of my eye, I
thought it was ghost time. I don’t believe in ghosts, of course; but,
under such circumstances, one can’t help wondering a little bit. From
behind us, as we lay there, once, twice, thrice, four times we heard
the toot, toot of the train; and I knew that we had lain there for two
mortal hours, because the train made hourly round trips.
I thought of Sampson and his snug office and his snug salary; and I
compared myself, taking the chances of anything from a pistol ball
to pneumonia for my thirty dollars a week. I concluded to quit the
business at the end of this scrape. But I always determined to do
that under such circumstances. So does every newspaper man; and they
always show up for work the next day. Were we not at least potential
paranoiacs we wouldn’t be newspaper men. Certainly otherwise we
wouldn’t do the things we do for the pay we get. Regarding newspaper
photographers, there is no question. They are all crazy; except one.
We had drunk the last drop from the healthy flask apiece we had brought
and I was settling back in soggy misery for more suffering, my eyes so
blurred with watching and staring that I could see slinking forms in
fancy every place I turned, when Lanagan’s lean hand clutched my leg.
He had taken a position lower and nearer the path than I and could
get a dim perspective of the edge of the cliff just where the path
descended.
I peered ahead. Faintly I could see a single figure, outlined in
blurred relief and then it disappeared, apparently into thin air.
Whether it was man or woman I could not have told. That it disappeared
before my eyes I knew.
It gave one a creepy feeling. I was about to speak to Lanagan but his
warning pressure was still on my calf. Probably thirty minutes passed,
or it may have been only three. Another figure came into view; and then
another, and disappeared.
Then I realised that the first figure had simply slipped down the path
and out of sight. I wondered if something of the sort hadn’t happened
when McCluskey was ghost hunting.
Still Lanagan held that vice-like clutch on me. Another prolonged
interval. Two more figures bulked into view and disappeared. Many more
minutes passed and Lanagan said no word. The wind during the hours
had died away, but the rain continued, pelting now straight down.
Lanagan’s hand finally loosened itself from my leg. He pointed over the
ocean toward the intermittent flashes of the lighthouse at Land’s End.
Between the Land’s End and Fort Point lights could be seen--the lights
of a vessel.
“She’s a day overdue on account of the storm,” Lanagan shot up at
me. “She’s heading through the Golden Gate now. We’ll have some fun
shortly, I reckon.”
He straightened up and stretched himself and I did likewise, threshing
my arms to start the blood into circulation. I was cold, cramped and
grouchy.
“Jack,” I said impatiently, “cut out this mystery stuff and give me the
facts. You’ve got me neck and neck with pneumonia now. Kick through
with this story, whatever it is, or I’m going to tear down that cliff
after those fellows and start something if only to keep warm.”
Of course he only laughed. The man must have been made of chilled steel.
“Easy, Norrie. Think of the ten cents’ carfare you can charge up on
this assignment. That ought to be some compensation, that and the
glory of the thing, even if you do get sciatica or lumbago or some
other old woman’s complaint. Norrie, sometimes you make me weary.
Here I’m staging one of the finest climaxes you have ever participated
in. I have adopted a true Shakespearean method of suiting the natural
surroundings to the action. It’s rather an epic situation, in my
opinion.
“Now that liner--it was the Mail boat _Hongkong_--has finally passed
inside the gate. Any minute something may happen, and I pick you out of
the entire staff to be here when it does happen; here in an elemental
atmosphere where human lives may be snuffed out as we snuffed out the
contents of those flasks, and still you’re not satisfied. It’s a big,
vital, gripping situation. Where’s your imagination?”
“Oh, hell. You’re drunk. Let’s chase down after those men. Let’s do
something to start things, whatever they may be. I’m cold.”
Lanagan was genuinely put out with me. Later I knew why. He had been
hanging around those bleak cliffs for two nights and skulking in the
sand dunes for two days watching the Stockslager hut. No wonder I was a
“quitter” by comparison. He whirled on me and I saw his eyes flashing
with that curious light that I had seen in them on rare occasions when
he was thoroughly aroused.
“You either quit whining or beat it back to town.”
If he had struck me in the face it couldn’t have affected me
differently, such was the magnetism of that remarkable man.
“I beg your pardon, Jack. I didn’t mean to rough you,” I said, and he
was his natural self in a moment, too.
“All right. Forget it. Let’s take a peek over the cliff.” We crawled to
the edge of the path. Lanagan was ahead. He was on his feet with a leap
the instant he struck the ledge, and I up beside him.
“_Ha!_” he shouted. “_They’re at it! Now we’ll see! Now we’ll see! Le
grand hasard!_”
Far down below I saw a half a dozen flares in the darkness; smattered,
smeared flares of yellowish light and then all was blackness again.
There came no report from weapons, the roaring of the surf drowning
that. More by instinct than anything else to be on the scene of action,
I made a quick step toward the path. Lanagan’s hand was on my arm.
“Wait,” he said, curtly. “This is no funeral of ours. Wait.”
He knelt down, arching his hands around his eyes and peering long and
intently.
“Revenue officers,” he said. “We can’t monkey with them. Haven’t got
them on my staff like Leslie and his men. They’ll be up.”
Revenue officers! A light began to dawn upon me.
The toot, toot of the engine came.
“Beat it, Norrie! Hold that train,” ordered Lanagan. “There may be
some wounded here to rush to town. Quick!”
[Illustration: “On the floor they placed the figure they bore, a
stalwart figure of a man.”]
I was already off on the run past the Stockslager hut to the little
platform where the train stopped. It was some distance away around the
curve. As I stood there, with the rain pattering a monotonous tattoo on
the planking, there came a sudden groan, a drawn-out, rasping groan,
and I whirled toward the house; my body one quiver of gooseflesh.
It came again, from up toward the roof; and as it came there was a
breathing of light wind across my face. I laughed aloud; but nervously.
Another light puff of wind, another long-drawn groan--loose shingles,
or a loose piece of clapboarding, giving, evidently, just the slightest
against a nail. The other end of the ghost mystery was cleared.
The train pulled in. I told McCluskey there had been a shooting, and to
hold the train.
“Can’t back her in. We’ll run out to the first switch!” he cried, as he
jumped into the cab with the engineer.
I ran back to find four men bearing a form between them. Lanagan was
alongside the leader of the four, talking swiftly. They kicked in the
door of the hut and made a light. On the floor, littered just as it had
been littered the Sunday morning of the murder discovery, they placed
the figure they bore, a stalwart figure of a man. A leg and an arm,
I could see, were useless. They felt of his arm and leg and he never
winced, staring straight at the ceiling. They ripped away his oilskin
coat, his over-shirt and undershirt. He had a bullet just over the
heart, a deep wound and one that bled inwardly, for no blood oozed out.
Two of the four men had deposited on the floor bulky bundles wrapped in
rubber, around which double pairs of life preservers were strapped.
He who seemed to be the leader of the four (“Marshall, chief revenue
inspector,” Lanagan whispered to me), took the man’s pulse after the
examination was ended. No one had spoken. In the faces of all, as far
as I could detect in the murky light of the smoky chimney of an oil
lamp, was a set, grim look; not the look that officers usually wear
when there has been a killing or a successful capture in a crime.
Marshall straightened up. He said, solemnly:
“Billy, I think you are going. What have you got to say? Any message?”
“No, Jim,” said the man on the floor, weakly. “You got me right. I
went into the thing with my eyes open. Only don’t ask me to squeal on
the others. I got what I deserved, I guess. I’ve brought shame to the
service and I’m ready to pass. Thank God, thank God,” he burst out with
sudden choking, “the wife is not here--passed out last year, you know;
and there never were any kiddies. No one to suffer but you boys that
I’ve disgraced.”
A tear rolled from his eyes to the floor.
“Can I say a word to him, Marshall?” It was Lanagan who spoke. The
other men had bowed their heads. On one or two faces I could see a
tear, for all the wetness that the rain had left there.
“Enright,” said Lanagan, kneeling down beside the stricken man,
“you know you are passing. Make a clean breast. _Who killed Mrs.
Stockslager?_”