Part 2
To his credit as a city editor, in all of those two weeks he had not complained. He spoke about Lanagan to me only twice. He knew I was worried, and knew, I think, that I had spent many a night searching for him, finally to appear for work without sleep. But he knew that Lanagan was out for the paper first, last, and all the time; knew that that bloodhound quality of sticking to the trail would never let him quit till he had proved that there was no way of landing the story.
Lanagan’s appearance shocked me. He had not shaved for a week. Rings were under his eyes, red-lidded for want of sleep. His pale cheeks held an unhealthy flush and he coughed once or twice in a fashion I did not like, but that old magnetic smile was there.
“Scared as a rabbit, I’ll bet, and wishing you’d insured your life first,” he laughed, pulling me into a doorway. Then, more seriously, “Norrie, I’m just a wandering hulk, a derelict; whatever you will. My passing would be nothing to a soul on earth.”
I had never heard Lanagan speak in that way.
“No soul on earth,” he repeated.
Then he swept me with those luminous eyes of his, and they were as clear and as unclouded as my own. I knew that I had caught a swift glimpse as the shutter opened upon the vista of his past; that secret past that now I understood.
For a moment I was conscious of nothing save that this man whom I loved like a brother was in pain and I could do nothing for him. With his swift perceptions, Lanagan had caught my mood and our hands met; that lean, sinewy hand was as firm as steel. Then, with his facile art, he had thrown aside his humour of introspection and spoke briskly.
“Norrie, I don’t want to tangle you with this against your will. This man, I believe, is the hardest game this city has held in my time or yours. He will die with his stockings on. It looks like gun play.”
Frankly, I was for quitting, inwardly. Outwardly, because of that mesmeric way of his, that teasing, superior tone, I was all for the climax. Besides, I did not want to leave him to himself in that humour to go into a mess; I knew his reckless ways too well.
We walked rapidly up Eddy Street and turned on Franklin until near the corner of O’Farrell, where, entering a flat, Lanagan led the way to the top story. Here we entered an unfinished alcove room in the rear with a dormer window covered by a heavy curtain of burlap. The slightest possible rent had been made in the curtain. Lanagan told me to look. Opposite was a dormer window corresponding to our own, the next house being one of similar design. The alley between was possibly ten feet. Our window was the only one that could command the other.
In the opposite house the curtain was of ordinary heavy lace. After peering intently for a time, I could distinguish through it a woman’s figure and a bed, upon which a form could be discerned.
“There you are, Norrie. That man shows his caliber by moving round the corner from his former home while the police look for him elsewhere. He knows by now the police descriptions are here; that I must have recognised him, and that the hunt is on. My almond trail landed when I came back to this territory just on the final chance that the man was big enough to figure out that his surest safety lay right here. She has been out but a few times, buying those eternal almonds. Malted milk has been added to his diet, too. I picked her up, trailed her, and the rest was easy.
“The man’s stomach is gone. Incidentally, they owe a week’s rent there, and she is living mostly on almonds now, too; so I guess the exchequer is pretty low. I didn’t suppose there were any more women left in the world like that. This girl, born of good family, daughter of a minister, takes up with that triple-stained murderer and sticks. She surely took that honour and obey in epic earnest--if she married him; if not, why, the more credit to her for sticking.
“It isn’t for us to judge, Norrie. Keep your eye glued to that hole while I go into the next room--I’ve rented this attic, by the way--and grind out copy.”
It was four o’clock then; at nine Lanagan ceased writing. He had made in longhand 6,000 words of as clean-cut, brilliant a narrative story of its kind as, under similar pressure, has ever appeared in print. As in all of Lanagan’s stories, it was “the police” who had learned this and that. Lanagan has made several detective sergeants in his time.
“Leslie will meet us here at one o’clock. We must keep the smash until two, fire the story at Sampson by telephone to lead off my stuff with; hold them in the room until three, and we beat the town again.”
He hurried out to return in half an hour. He had telephoned to Sampson that the story would break about two o’clock and to hold the paper until he had heard from us; then he had sent his copy down by messenger boy and loaded up on a bundle of the choicest of the rank brand of Manilas he chose at times to affect. I noticed as he lit a match that his hands shook. I wanted him to lie down until one, but his only answer was to fix me with those eyes of his, glowing like a cat’s in the darkness (we were smoking with the lighted ends of our cigars held inside our hats, so careful was Lanagan lest any trace be given to the opposite room), and he laughed that curious laugh of his.
“When this is over, Norrie,” he said, “I’ll sleep for a week. Half that $5,000 is mine; you and Leslie and the others can divide the rest.”
Really, I saw Lanagan in my mind’s eye already snooping and prying around those Paris byways; it sounded too assured as he said it. I wondered whether I cared for blood money; figured that I would accept it, and began pleasantly in the gloom to spend my “bit” with much contentment. I concluded I would accompany Lanagan on that Paris trip.
One o’clock came, and with it Leslie, Brady, Wilson, and Maloney. Brady was put at the aperture. A faint light in the opposite room brought the two figures out into bold relief. The rest of us moved to the outer room, where the plain-clothes men slipped their revolvers to their side coat pockets. I wished lonesomely that I had brought two and that I might feel braver, although I had as much chance of shooting a revolver with my left hand without disaster as of sailing an aeroplane with either. At that I believe I would have felt more in the picture with two.
The plan was to pull a fire alarm, and as soon as the engines clattered into the street, scatter to the top story, rap on the door as if to warn the occupants, take them off their guard when the door was opened, and the thing was done. That programme was carried out. When the apparatus swung up from O’Farrell, filling the still night air with those strident bells of terror and alarm, we sped to the top floor and made the corridor.
“_Fire! Fire!_”
It was Brady’s hoarse voice; and even I thrilled, it was done so realistically. I, as the one most likely unknown to the pair, had been selected to take their door. I rapped loudly and shouted the alarm. Brady was on one side of me, Lanagan on the other. Wilson, Maloney, and the chief on either side again in the dark hall, flattened to the wall, guns drawn ready for the rush. The door opened six inches a startled, wan face with lustrous blue eyes, shining vividly above deep circles of black, looked into mine through the aperture. Possibly something in my face, possibly native suspicion and fear, induced her to essay to slam the door. I pushed my shoulder to the door and shoved, Brady at one shoulder, Lanagan at the other. She gave back with one more wide-eyed look that went over my shoulder and caught the grey-bearded chief, known to her, huddled back for fear of that very thing.
There came one shrill scream: “Harry! The police!” and she had turned and fled and we pushed in vain--the door was chained! One united crash again, the fastenings gave just as the slight figure, quicker than a swallow, had darted within the inner room and slammed the door shut in our faces. A bolt shot to place as a bullet from within tore through the panelling and clipped the rim of Brady’s hat, and that towering figure bore back out of range and swung us in a mass with him. Two more shots tore through and sprayed us with splinters. We flattened against the wall.
“The jig is up, Short; you may as well come out.”
It was Leslie, calm as if he were delivering orders to his chauffeur. A shot rewarded him, impinging perilously close to his shoulder. The man within was dying with the convict’s last desperate ambition to take a policeman with him. We dropped flat. There was a pause, while Brady and Leslie counselled in whispers whether to risk a rush. The silence became acute, punctuated now and then by whisperings from the inner room.
It sounded as if she were pleading with him; his note of finality could not be mistaken, although the words were not heard. Another silence, and then to our straining ears, rising clearly above the din and clamour of doors below stairs opening and shutting, of shoutings and excited cries, came a trembling voice floating through the jagged holes of the inner door--trembling with the strength or the ardour of a determination rather than any dread or fear:
“Then, Harry, take me, too! Take me, too!”
“_No, Cecile, no!_”
There was silence again from within; and again that voice, now touched with pleading still more earnest:
“It is only right, Harry dear; all that the world held I sacrificed for you. If you don’t take me, I will follow you!”
Prolonged to acuteness became the silence again; the man’s voice, hoarse, gasping, finally came:
“Pray, Cecile.”
And again that voice, trembling, yet clear as the beautiful sweeping chords of a harp, came floating with the acrid revolver smoke through the jagged, ugly rents in the panelling, and seemed to flood the room with something almost like a visible radiance:
“_Our Father, who art in heaven!_”
I saw Maloney, his blue-nosed revolver in hand, half risen, make the sign of the adoration, touching his forehead and his chest with that grim muzzle. Leslie stood slowly upright, his massive head sunk into his breast. Lanagan breathed hard and deep. It was awesome; we were held in the spell of that strange and extraordinary occurrence. On that beautiful voice went to the end:
“_And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil. Amen._”
“_Amen!_” echoed the murderer’s choking voice.
“The door! To save her!”
It was Leslie’s electric whisper, and at his signal we crashed with our united strength. With the crashing came two shots, and I caught Lanagan’s harsh curse at my ear and his swift mutter: “Too late!” The door gave.
She knelt with her head fallen upon her clasped hands, just as she had knelt in that final prayer, beside the bed. He was lying back upon the pillow.
There was no dry eye there. Veteran thief-takers, men who had stood with their backs to the wall and death baying them a score of times; men who would risk the billy or knife or gun as blithely as they would go to their morning meal; to whom suffering and violence and death were daily allotments, bowed themselves before the melancholy end of that misguided girl.
Yet possibly, for her, it was better so.
It was Lanagan’s voice that brought me back. Lanagan, answering the newspaper call, with the dominant newspaper demand still strong upon him and over him; Lanagan, quick with instinctive thought for the high-strung, chafing Sampson down at the _Enquirer_ office and the press waiting for the release gong; Lanagan, the genius of his craft, asserting once again his incomparable newspaper superiority to me, still dreaming the precious seconds away at the pathetic fate of that poor piece of clay kneeling there; Lanagan, crisply as a colonel in the field, snapped:
“_Scatter, Norrie, for a ’phone!_”
II
THE PATHS OF JUDGMENT
II
THE PATHS OF JUDGMENT
Jack Lanagan had a Sunday off, the first in weeks. A man of whim and caprice in his leisure moments, he had made no plans. This Sunday morning, after idly reading the morning papers, rolling and consuming innumerable brown paper cigarettes meanwhile, he finally sallied forth in his ill-fitting clothes toward the Palace grill and breakfast. And this being luxuriously ended, he was laved and shaved to his heart’s content. Then, perfumed like a boulevardier, he issued forth into Market Street to join that morning throng drifting down toward the ferry building for the institutional Sunday outing across the bay. He permitted himself to drift with the current, perfectly and vastly at ease with all the world. He had switched from cigarettes to an evil Manila, poisoning the air cheerfully for yards around him. Lanagan rather enjoyed the exclusiveness given him by his noisome cigars.
Rourke, Fleming, and little Johnny O’Grady of the _Herald_, with a camera man, whirled out of Market Street in an automobile, and Lanagan jerked alertly round to watch them out of sight, speculating as to what the story might be. He had half determined to drift over to the office, when Truck One swung into Market Street from O’Farrell. Other fire apparatus was swinging into and out of Market Street, clanging stridently, and Lanagan turned again to the ferry. Fires interested him but little. Always the chance, he remarked once to me fastidiously, of some chump of a fireman squirting water all over you, which spoiled your clothes. I never knew whether Lanagan was having a quiet joke in that or not. His entire wardrobe would have been scorned by a rag picker.
He had been puffing his oakum industriously, and now was attracted by the spectacle of a man beside him nearly doubled over with a fit of coughing. He was shaking and beating at his breast with large, bony hands, and Lanagan noted professionally the rheumatic knuckles and the nails like claws, yellow and dirty. His breath came in sharp whistles, short and staccato, and he was taking possibly a third of a normal respiration at a time.
A particularly violent paroxysm, followed by all evidences of entire suspension of breath, brought Lanagan to the man’s side with a leap. He swung the huddled form against a hydrant.
“Here you!” he called, to a passer-by, “call Douglas 20 and tell them to shoot the harbour ambulance up here.” To himself he said: “This man is sick. He needs attention and needs it quick.”
But at the words the hunched, choking figure straightened spasmodically, flashing a look upon Lanagan that Lanagan, used to malevolence in all its forms expressed upon features the most evil, had not seen quite equalled. Accustomed to the ill-featured and repulsive as they strain through the bars at the city prison, yet even Lanagan started back momentarily in revulsion.
“I have seen misers,” thought Lanagan, “but this is the real miser of all fact and all fiction. I would know him in a million. Fellow I used to see in my dreams when I was a youngster. Pneumonia sure. About six hours for him and then six feet.”
Thus lightly diagnosing and disposing of the man and his case, Lanagan motioned the citizen, who had meantime stopped, to go on with the call. But the strange, gnomelike figure, flashing another look, a singular blend of loathing, hate, fear, and timidity, upon the newspaper man, started to hobble away. Lanagan dropped his hand on the man’s shoulder to restrain him. But the harsh features turned a look so glowering and repellent upon him that he withdrew the restraining hand. The coughing had ceased. The little old man was still breathing sibilantly and swiftly, rather like a panting dog or cat, which he suggested, but by extraordinary effort of will had fought away the more violent exhibition of his seizure. He commenced to shuffle down the street, with one furtive, fearful, backward look that went on past Lanagan and up Market Street.
“You need a hospital, man,” said Lanagan curtly, “and I’m going to take you there. Wait.” He placed his hand again on the man’s shoulder. But the manikin-like creature flung the hand viciously from him and again flashed that strange look of blended hate, fear, and timidity upon the newspaper man.
“Let be!” he grated. “Let be!”
A car clanged to the safety station. The grotesque figure, still half-hunched over at the paroxysm from Lanagan’s Manila, started for it and Lanagan made no further effort at detention. He climbed laboriously to the platform, and Lanagan shrugged his shoulders.
“I certainly am not going to dry-nurse you, old man, but I ought to at that. If I ever saw a man marked for death, you’re that man.”
Despite a long afternoon idled away beneath mine host Pastori’s shade trees and the somnolent influence of cobwebbed Chianti, Lanagan found his miser’s features constantly before him.
“He’s my miser, too,” he mused, in the vernacular of childhood. “I shouldn’t have let him escape me after finding him.”
Returning late, Lanagan for once in his life went to his room without his inevitable last call at police headquarters. Consequently he was several hours late in the morning on the news of a very fine police story when he awakened to find his miser--Thaddeus Miller of Oakland--pictured on the front pages of all the morning papers. There was no mistaking that face. It was his miser. He had been murdered in his cabin, a clumsy attempt having been made to fire the cabin to destroy the crime and its evidence.
A young clerk, a neighbour to the miser, was under arrest. It appeared that the clerk, James Watson, was found named in the will as sole legatee to an estate valued at close to a quarter of a million dollars. Upon the Watson porch had been found a hammer, freshly washed, the handle not yet dry. But clinging to the claws, unobserved by whoever had washed the blood from the hammer, were two strands of white hair that brought the hammer home to the crime in the cabin. Watson, the stories related, had only known Miller for a few months. He had been seen leaving the cottage shortly before eight o’clock. The fire was discovered smouldering at nine-thirty o’clock, extinguished, and Miller found with his skull crushed, lying on a kerosene-soaked bunk, to which, fortunately, the clumsily started fire had not yet communicated.
Watson had made a bad case out for himself initially by denying that he had seen Miller at all that day or knowing that he was named in the will. When confronted by neighbours who had seen him leaving the cottage and one neighbour who had heard his wife speak of the will, he took refuge in protestations that he had denied everything through fear and terror. He then admitted owning the hammer, but professed himself at a loss to account for the fact of its having been freshly washed and of the strands of gray hair.
Raving his innocence, he had come to the verge of physical collapse. He repeated constantly the name of his wife and begged the police to bring her to him. But he was being held in strict “detinue,” the papers said, until the third degree was given him. At the time of going to press confession was expected momentarily.
Mrs. Watson, after a police examination, had been permitted to return to her home. Her story was that both she and her husband had befriended Miller on different occasions, out of pity for his forlorn and miserable condition. She admitted that on one occasion he had jocularly remarked that he would not forget her husband in his will, but had attached no importance to his remark. She had never heard him speak of any person that he feared. She admitted that her husband had visited Watson at his cabin in the evening, but that the circumstance was not unusual. He had remained but a moment, Miller being in an unusually morose mood--had been so, in fact, for three or four days. She was at a loss to account for the condition of the hammer.
“And yet,” growled Lanagan, “I’m eternally doomed if I think either of them did it. That fellow gave me a look that spelled fear; abject, abnormal fear; it was the concentration of the fear of a lifetime of a hare who runs with the dogs always at his heels. And it was not fear of the Watsons either.”
Lanagan, stopping at the office only long enough to receive instructions, made the narrow-gauge ferry by bowling over an obstreperous ticket-taker who tried to shut the gate in his face. Not that there was any particular need for such spectacular haste; it was merely Lanagan’s way; Lanagan “showing off,” as some of his professional brothers would invidiously have it. But I, who knew him better than any news writer in the business, say not. Lanagan was a genuine eccentric. And in this particular case he was fighting for time. Bitter experience had taught him the value of minutes. Indeed, a cardinal rule of his business that Lanagan sought to drive into my slower newspaper intelligence was to get on the ground first.
Lanagan knew of old that every city editor in town would be accepting the very plausible police version, and would be awaiting the expected confession from Watson. Watson might confess, but, Lanagan had a sullen “hunch” that he wouldn’t.
Lanagan moved most of the time by “hunches,” as many successful newspaper men--to say nothing of detectives--do. Hunches and luck may be called by such fancy brands as inductive or deductive, intensive or extensive analytical capacity; but in the long run most crimes are solved on luck, hunches, and through the invaluable aid of police “stool pigeons,” more politely known as “sources.” An intuitive judgment of men is about as good an asset as a reporter or detective can have, coupled with a faculty for quick decision and personal bravery.
More than any one thing, it was possibly this faculty for swift intuitive analysis that carried Lanagan to his high degree of success. However, man and man’s judgments are fallible; it was so ordered in the original scheme of things, for very obvious reasons.
Lanagan went directly to the Watson cottage. The brilliant American police system had permitted some scores of curious and morbid persons to trample over every inch of ground within a hundred yards of the Miller hut. Privileged friends of the patrolman on guard there, after the traditional American custom also, had been permitted to slip inside and paw over the belongings and stare to their hearts’ content. Lanagan knew of old what the situation there would be. That could wait. He was more concerned with having the first meeting of the day with Mrs. Watson.
It was a modest little “bungalow style” of home that he approached, much like that of any one of thousands of small-salaried men in the transbay suburban sections. An air of good taste, neatness, and care in the trim little lawn, the cleanliness of the walks, stairs and porch, and the precision with which all of the shades were drawn against the morning sun, marked it possibly a bit more individual than many of its kind. Mrs. Watson herself opened the door to his ring. She bore the outward evidence of grief. Her eyes were red and swollen, her cheeks hectic, her hair disheveled. She was blond, with large blue eyes, set possibly a line too closely together, chiseled nose, delicate, shapely ears, saving the lobe was not quite as free as an exact taste would require, and a well-moulded chin.
“I am Mr. Lanagan of the _Enquirer_,” he said, adding some words of apology. He had a way with women--and with men as well--when he so desired, that was singularly ingratiating; a soft trick of speech, an ingenuousness of manner, a certain dignity that seemed to lift him from the mean atmosphere of his ill-fitting clothes and marked him with personality.
“You may come in,” said Mrs. Watson.