Part 11

Leighton was glancing heavily, his lips apart, from the door to the window as though planning an attempt to escape by either means.

“You’ve been shading pretty close on one or two things lately, Leighton,” said the Chief grimly. “But I didn’t think you had it in you to take a chance at the scaffold.”

“What do you mean by that, Chief?” gasped Leighton, with a sickly attempt at composure.

“He means,” thundered Lanagan, “that you are the man back of the murder of the real Gertrude Pendelton’s child, and the indirect killing of Gertrude Pendelton, who was Mrs. Peters! He means that you are the man back of Fogarty, who is the man who secured the conviction, in Bannerman’s court, of Peters. That’s what he means!”

Lanagan wheeled on the Englishman.

“How much money have you already paid Leighton?”

“One thousand pounds for producing this girl. He was to get four thousand more when final proof of identity was accepted by my principals in London.”

Leslie and Lanagan exchanged glances. It was big pickings for Larry Leighton. Twenty-five thousand dollars in all; properly handled by Fogarty, it would go a long way to grease the wheels of justice in the police court.

Leighton arose, shaking like a palsied man, and tottered, rather than walked, to the Chief. He extended his wrists.

“Put on the bracelets, Chief,” he said, in a voice that was but a shadow of his rich voice. “I took my chances, I’ll take my medicine. The girl hasn’t done anything yet you can hold her on. She knows nothing about the other thing. The doctors had given me two years to live--kidneys gone--and I saw a chance for a big clean-up and the German springs. It might have saved me.”

“Big!” interrupted the Englishman, awed, “one hundred and fifty thousand pounds!”

“That’s all, Chief,” resumed Leighton. “I did the trick with the child myself, I wouldn’t trust anybody else. The night was pitch black and there are no houses right near there, you know. I waited till the old lady went out. After I finished the child, I was going to get the mother, but the front gate slammed. It was Peters coming home. I slipped out the back door again. I wanted the husband out of the way, on general principles. I did not know what his wife might have told him and he was better off, in case any publicity attended the restoration of the girl here, where he couldn’t squeak, in case his wife had ever told him her real name and story.

“This girl here, a Tenderloiner, that I picked up because she looks a good bit like Mrs. Peters, seemed to have nerve enough for the deal, and she was to collect the estate and give me half. It was a big gamble. You’re right about the scaffold, Chief. I never took any such chance before, but this was a ‘get-away’ stake for life for me, and I took it.

“I had no direct dealings with Bannerman. There’s nothing on him. I had talks with Fogarty but paid no money. In a general way he gathered I wanted the man across, and I guess he gathered, too, that there would be a big clean-up all around at the end of it. There’s no case on anybody except myself.”

“Nothing on Bannerman or Fogarty that would make a case in court, possibly,” said Lanagan, curtly, “but plenty that the _Enquirer_ can print. You’re loyal to your pals, Leighton.”

It appeared that Leighton, through a newspaper advertisement, got into communication with the London firm of lawyers of which Holmes was the confidential representative. They had a theory that the girl they sought had gone to San Francisco. A runaway at the age of fifteen, Gertrude Pendelton had been estranged from her father. She had taken the downward path, but the father, relenting on his death bed, willed his estate to her, and his executors had for months been endeavouring to locate her.

Leighton immediately began his plotting to foist an impostor upon the executors and their lawyers. It must be remembered that they had accepted him as a reputable lawyer. He had made a secret trip to England and had secured a fairly complete record of the places the Pendeltons had lived in while the daughter was still with them. Originally residents of various parts of the British possessions, the family had settled at Applegate, where the mother died, the father following her some months later. At Applegate there were none who had ever known the daughter. Leighton’s investigations in England failed to reveal anyone who had in fact ever known her, the Pendeltons only coming to England to settle down there a few years before.

To Leighton’s scheming brain, the thing looked perfectly simple.

The murder plot was secondary. It had been his original plan to find the real Gertrude Pendelton and if possible strike some bargain with her. Equipped with a picture of her taken at the age of fifteen, he had finally traced her, to find her respectably married. Consequently, it was hardly likely that he could strike any combination with her that would give him the “haul” that he sought to make. Then, with her alive, there was always danger that she would disclose her identity to her husband. When the child came along, Leighton, keeping close tab on the Peters, concluded that inevitably motherly pride in the redeemed woman would bring about an attempt at a family reconciliation. Then would come to her the knowledge of her father’s death and of her own inheritance.

He determined on one bold stroke: kill mother and child on the gamble that what did happen, would happen: that the husband would be accused.

With the husband safely imprisoned, or possibly executed, his path with the impostor would be unimpeded. He had coached his impostor well on the information gained on his English trip.

So much for Leighton’s story. Lanagan’s story was startlingly simple. 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.