Part 4

“Now, Norrie,” snapped Lanagan incisively, “beat it, boy, beat it!”

For two hours Lanagan and I fed paper into our typewriters, with Sampson himself whisking the sheets away as they came from the platens. The M. E. even came in once or twice and tried to preserve his dignity while he scanned the copy hot from the typewriter.

The thrill of Lanagan’s great exclusive was throughout the entire plant. Not a half-dozen people in the office knew just what the story was, but each knew by the subtle instinct of communication that the big scoop of the year was shooting down the pneumatic to the composing room.

Not until we had the first papers, sticky and inky and fragrant, in our eager fingers, did we stir from our desks. Then followed the usual jubilation as the scouts ran in with the _Times_ and the _Herald_ with the “Watsons Confess” scareheads.

Ah, that is life, that exaltation of the “exclusive”!

We wandered leisurely down to the Tokio. The story was wide open now. We were through. The morgue notified, Brady and Wilson stayed to attend to the routine, and Lanagan announced that he was going to Oakland.

We caught the paper boat, riding luxuriously on heaps of _Enquirers_. Thus it happened that we were at police headquarters there with the copies of our own paper before the route carriers had made their deliveries. Lanagan stepped to the ’phone and rang up Henley.

“Feel like buying a drink?” asked Lanagan.

Over the wire came back some hearty and measured compliments. “You’re sure in an amiable humour. Well, come down. You’ve got two prisoners to free. If conditions at your jail weren’t so rotten I wouldn’t say anything till morning. But I need a drink, which is on you, and the Watsons need a breath of fresh air.” In fifteen minutes Henley was with us.

He was a gallant officer, that Henley. When he had finished he wrung Lanagan’s hand until I thought he never would let go.

“Bring in the Watsons,” he ordered.

In a moment they came in, a weary, worn, misery-marked couple. It was their first meeting since their imprisonment. With a sob, asking no why or wherefore, Mrs. Watson fell into her husband’s arms and mingled her tears with his. Her sobs--weary, worn, tired little sobs--echoed softly under the vaulted ceiling.

“I am pleased to inform you,” Henley said grandly, “that through the efforts of our brilliant young friend of the _Enquirer_, the murderer of Miller has been located. You are free.”

Then followed such a scene of hysterical gladness and tearful, joyous explanations as Henley’s room, that had beheld many strange and unusual scenes, had never witnessed.

Of course Watson, when arrested, confronted with the hammer and told that his wife had confessed, had yielded to the third degree and, unable to accept the full horror of it, yet had swiftly formed his plan to confess to save the woman he loved, even though she might have done the deed.

She, on her part, told a similar story, had formed her plan, for it appeared that when the furor was raised after the murder was discovered she had found the hammer on her porch with fresh blood stains; knew it had been in Miller’s cottage, and had washed it hurriedly, not knowing in her excitement just what to do, her husband even then having been taken to the scene of the crime by the police.

In face of his confession and her own hammer found stained in such manner, she had actually believed that he had committed the crime.

The police automobile drove up and the Watsons were escorted to it.

For the twentieth time, her eyes still tear-filled, Mrs. Watson said: “What can we ever do to thank you, Mr. Lanagan?”

“Forgive me certain brutal conduct,” laughed that individual. “As I hope the Lord will forgive me,” he added _sotto voce_, “for misjudging you.”

As the automobile sped away to return a very happy couple to their home, Lanagan, hat doffed and in hand, bowed profoundly after the retreating machine, and remarked with veneration to the world at large:

“The tenth woman, gentlemen, the tenth woman.”

Then to Henley: “Inspector, I believe you said something about buying?”

III

THE CONSPIRACY OF ONE

III

THE CONSPIRACY OF ONE

“Kind of caught you fellows off base, Norrie.”

Bradley, star man for the _Herald_, drawled it at me invidiously as I entered the police reporters’ room at the Hall of Justice. Merriman of the _Times_ and a half-dozen morning paper men, their copy turned in, had drifted down to the room to await any late developments. The Ratto story had been on for three days and the _Herald_ and the _Times_ had “put over” the arrest of Bernardo Tosci, Camorrist, at the expense of Lanagan and myself.

“Better shoot a few absinthe drips into Lanagan,” continued Bradley, “and then maybe you’ll land something. He’s been sober so long he’s lost his grip.”

Bradley had fared hardly at the expense of Lanagan on more than one occasion. I was about to fling it back at him when Lanagan’s voice interrupted me. He had entered the room unfortunately just in time to hear Bradley’s words.

“Possibly,” he said.

There was an embarrassed pause. Lanagan had a caustic tip to his tongue and they awaited it now. He studied Bradley without expression, leaning against the door sill. But, curiously enough, there was no outburst. It was always difficult to foresay just what form Lanagan’s humour would take.

“Charley,” he said at last to Bradley, and there shaded into his voice a subtle colouring of unconscious pathos, “What have I ever done to you? I have never done you dirt; nor any man in the business dirt. I have played the game square. Why is it that I am always singled out like that? Have I ever betrayed my paper or my friends? Have I ever brought dishonour to the name of the newspaperman? If I have drunk, it has been out of the public sight.

“I have fought hard, Charley; fought hard to break the habit. It belongs to a past day in our game. And irrespective of that I may wish to be remembered around here some day as something other than drunken Jack Lanagan. I can’t help it if I have a knack of landing stories. I’ve got to play the game right with my paper, haven’t I? And here in this reporters’ room of all places I thought for a little lift and a hand along and you are trying to shove me down.”

His voice hardened in bitterness:

“I’ve played a lone hand all my life, though, Charley; it seems to be in the cards that I keep it up.”

My eyes blurred because I alone knew how hard he had fought that battle. Beneath his cynical exterior he had a soul as sensitive to slights as a girl. Boyishly I made a lunge at Bradley, but Lanagan, with a swift move, had my arm in that lean, powerful hand of his.

“It don’t go,” he said, softly. “We are full grown men.”

There was an awkward pause. Then Merriman, of few words, said sententiously:

“It’s your move, Charley.”

And Bradley put out his hand, which Lanagan took.

“Jack,” said the _Herald_ man, “I’m a cad. There isn’t a righter man in the game than you.”

“Forget it then,” said Lanagan. “I have.”

But as we left the reporters’ room together I noticed that the whiteness that had come over Lanagan’s face remained there.

“Don’t let it worry you, Jack,” I said anxiously.

“Don’t you bother, laddie. He did me more good than liquor, and I never felt the dragging for the stuff worse than to-night. I’m going into this story now for fair, and I’m going in to smash the _Times_ and the _Herald_ flatter than a matrix.”

The Ratto case was one that occupied considerable public attention several years ago, interest arising in the first instance through the peculiar manner in which the crime was disclosed. Ratto, a wealthy Italian commission merchant, had disappeared, no great commotion being raised for the first few days. The police made the customary desultory “search”--the “search” consisting mainly of the name and description of Ratto being read out at the watches in the various station-houses. The mystery in the disappearance might have remained unsolved for weeks had it not been for a lineman, Waters, who, perched on the cross-tree of a telegraph pole commanding a view of the windows of a room in the vacant house where Ratto’s dead body lay, made the discovery. No policeman being in the vicinity, Waters, with residents of the vicinity, entered the house.

There had followed much newspaper speculation and police deduction. The Mafia and the Camorra came in for attention, the latter organisation being one that was at that time--long before the Viterbo trials--just coming to the attention of the American regular police and the secret service, as counterfeiting of American currency formed one of the Camorra accomplishments.

The peculiar interest in the manner in which the Ratto killing was discovered was this: three months previously a crime had been discovered under almost identical circumstances by the same lineman, Waters. In that case Rosendorn, a Jewish tailor, was found after a several days’ disappearance by Waters, at work on the lines, who happened to see the body as he glanced through the window of a vacant house from his elevated perch. Following the discovery of the body by Waters the case had been speedily cleared up by the police and proved to be an affair arising from conjugal jealousy.

Waters was a man well advanced in years. The strain of the appearance at the coroner’s jury and the preliminary hearings in the police court appeared slightly to unbalance his mind. The spectacle of the murdered man that he beheld through the windows of the vacant house was constantly before him. He was a man who had gone through a placid life and never figured in any scene of shocking violence or of murder.

After the disposal of the Rosendorn case Waters became possessed of a mania for climbing telegraph poles commanding the windows of vacant houses. Here and there and everywhere about the city he might be seen spiking himself up a pole, peering intently, and scuttling down. He was a familiar figure to all policemen and many citizens. He made a practice of haunting police headquarters, and, his imagination beginning evidently to visualise the first scene, once or twice led futile parties into vacant houses with the declaration that he had discovered a body. The police reporters humoured him and he came to know the most of them, particularly Lanagan, who found Waters’ case was of profound interest. Several stories were written about him and his self-appointed cross-beam task of discovering murdered people in vacant houses.

And then--he “made good.” Weeks of poking and prying and shinning up and down telegraph poles brought their reward and Waters discovered another crime: that of Ratto. He had been slain with an ordinary blackjack, which was found by the body.

During the three days of excitement following the discovery of the commission merchant’s body Waters thrived upon the publicity that he received. He carried bundles of papers containing accounts of his “find” and with his picture taken in many ways: climbing up telegraph poles, peering into a window from a cross-tree--a camera man nearly lost his life slipping on a cross beam taking this picture, and as he looked ten years ago, his last “gallery” picture unearthed “exclusively” by a proud “cub” reporter. He was as tickled as a boy, and it was confidently predicted around police headquarters that he would find an end in an insane asylum from pure joy in a month.

But the Ratto case did not clear up quite as easily as had the Rosendorn case. It will be recalled in San Francisco that a swift night ride in the police launch to Black Diamond had resulted in the arrest of Bernardo Tosci, claimed by the police to be the leader of the Camorra in the west. A police theory of attempted blackmail by that organisation seemed to have been well bolstered up. The local ramifications of the Camorra were proved beyond all doubt. Mysterious persons, suspected of being Camorra agents, who had been seen talking to Ratto shortly before his disappearance, were being diligently sought. The fear of the Camorra by the residents of the Latin quarter seriously hindered the police and newspaper men in their work, even the native-speaking Italian detail of upper officemen making little progress against the terror that the shadow of the Camorra threw upon the quarter. Police and newspaper judgment were slowly settling that Ratto’s death was due to one of those far-reaching conspiracies of the Camorra chieftain and his minions.

Such was the situation at midnight when Lanagan and I dropped out of the reporters’ room. The arrest of Tosci--that we had been “scooped” on--had been made shortly after midnight the night before. A sullen “hunch” on Lanagan’s part that the crime was in no way reminiscent of the methods of the Camorra, as he understood those methods from a mass of inquiry and first-hand reading, had led us away from the police headquarters just a few moments before Tosci had been slipped up the back elevator and placed in detinue. The man regularly assigned to the night police detail at the Hall of Justice, a new man on the “beat,” had missed the arrest, working against seasoned men on the _Times_ and the _Herald_ with their inside sources of prison information. However, we were supposed to be doing the “heavy” work on the story, so the burden of the “trimming” fell upon us.

Lanagan was morose. He had nothing more to say as we walked down Kearney street and turned up Broadway. I thought he was going to Cæsar’s--the original Cæsar’s with the two tables and the marvellous cuisine that pioneered the way for the glaring café chantant of to-day’s slumming parties,--but he walked rapidly past Cæsar’s and on to turn in at Bresci’s, a short distance up the slope of Telegraph Hill. It was a dirty little place, one of the corner “wine joints” sprinkled thickly in out of the way pockets of the congested Latin quarter. At Bresci’s, in addition to the bar, there was a little eating place at the rear, separated from the bar by dingy curtains. One room further back held a piano, where on occasion one might hear his ash man, or the flower vendor from Third and Market streets, or a waiter off duty from the downtown cafés, volume forth the Prologue or swing faultlessly through the Toreador’s song.

“Just got a tip that they are trying to hook mine host Bresci into the thing as a Camorra leader,” was all that Lanagan said.

We sat at one of the tables while Lanagan pulled the faded curtains almost together. Madam Bresci, she of the famed sauté mêlé, was indisposed, so the daughter, Bina, would serve us, if agreeable? Perfectly so, said Lanagan, rather with a note of satisfaction it struck me, though when I glanced at his face in some surprise, for he was a man who was ordinarily unmoved of women, it was expressionless.

Bresci went on to his bar after giving orders at the kitchen, and we sat there some time in silence; long enough for Lanagan to send the nicotine of three evil Manilas to his lungs. I saw that his eyes never left the opening through the curtains. Then his cigar, from his mouth for the moment, was suspended in air on its travel back and I followed his sharp glance through the curtain.

Dinoli and Alberta, two plain-clothes men detailed in the Latin quarter, had entered the saloon. Instantly the babble from the voices of many volatile Italians ceased. The saloon on the moment became quiet, save for the rattling of glasses and one click of the old-fashioned maplewood cash register. The detectives passed the time with Bresci, casually “sized up” the gathering, missing Lanagan and myself, and left. Instantly there broke forth a riot of sputtering Italian. The word “Ratto” we heard and then, obviously at some motion toward our curtains from Bresci, the babble stopped as suddenly as it began and within five moments the throng had idled out and the saloon was still.

“Bresci,” demanded Lanagan suddenly, “what were they saying out there about Ratto? Were they Camorrists?”

Bresci’s hand went straight over his head.

“_Corpo di Christo! Non! Non!_” he exclaimed, paling. “Oh, never speek such word here! Non! They say, too bad Ratto he keeled!”

He mopped his brow of its perspiration, suddenly started, and glanced furtively through the curtains to see whether anyone had come in and heard the conversation.

“I think you’re a liar, Bresci,” said Lanagan pleasantly. “But as I can’t talk Italian, I can’t prove it. It’s pretty funny how that pow-wow shut up the minute those coppers blew through that door. But you better wipe your streaming brow again and beat it back to the bar. You’ve got a customer. Who is--” Lanagan whispered to me as Bresci left, “no other than Lawrence Morton of the secret service, just assigned here from Seattle.”

Then he continued, “I met him the other day on that counterfeiting story at the beach. Just a shade curious, I should say, the attention Bresci is attracting to-night from the big and the little hawkshaws. It bears out my ‘tip.’”

Morton had a drink or two, complained of being tired, and drifted casually over to the curtains, opened them, saw us, and was backing easily away when Lanagan called out from the darkness--he had turned off the incandescent earlier:

“Come in, Morton. Nothing to get exclusive over,” switching on the light.

Morton dropped into a chair. If he was perturbed at being “made” he did not show it. He was generally reputed one of the two or three cleverest operators in the government service.

“That was good work you did on Iowa Slim, from all I hear,” he vouchsafed.

“There’s a better coming up,” replied Lanagan, indifferently. “What brings you to Bresci’s?”

Morton shrugged his shoulders.

“You know the two rules of our department?”

“Guard the president and turn up counterfeiters,” said Lanagan.

“Well, Lanagan, you’ve got the cachet to me from a good friend. The secret service man loses his job who talks; but I don’t mind taking a chance with you and telling you in confidence that in this particular case I’m not guarding the president; being as he is, as you know, in Washington.”

“Haven’t been sampling any--er--_salami_?” drawled Lanagan.

Morton laughed. “You sure are a clever one at that. No. I haven’t come across any that suited my palate. I’m particular.”

We had a _café royale_--with Lanagan pouring his thimble-full of cognac in my glass--and Morton left.

“The Camorra, it develops,” said Lanagan, “have been shipping to this country from ---- excellent counterfeit American bank notes. They ship them in _salami_ sausages. Maybe if one has gone astray we will get a slice of bank note with our _salami_ and _sauté_, for here it comes on a tray with the fair Bina serving.”

Bina, Bresci’s daughter, was an Italian of absolute beauty; one of those glowing faces and perfect forms you see in the old Italian masters.

I noticed in a moment that the comely Bina had much attention to show Lanagan. We finished our meal and Lanagan led the way to the inner room, where the piano was located. I had heard him at different times sputter out “rag,” but when Nevin’s “A Day in Venice” suite came breathing softly beneath his finger tips from out of that wrangly piano I could but listen in amazement. Man of mysterious beginnings, he had dropped into the San Francisco newspaper game over night, been given his “try-out” by the brotherhood, found to speak the language of the tribe, and had thereafter been unconditionally accepted. Such a mess as the Bradley affair only served to emphasise his leadership.

With the last fine chord of the _Buona Notte_ there was a stillness broken only by the instant and ecstatic handclapping of Bina. If I ever saw the thing called Love shine forth from the human eyes, it suddenly illuminated those dusky eyes that moment.

“O Madonna! Madonna!” she cried, softly. “Encore! Encore!”

Lanagan zipped through a lustspeil, to drop back then to the Last Composition. It was truly remarkable, the manner in which he brought the encroaching blindness of the great Beethoven sobbing out of the misery of the minor base.

“Did a lot of that sort of thing when I was younger,” he said, apologetically. “Before the wanderlust hit me.”

He was through. Bina fluttered about him and Lanagan’s head was close to hers. She was a full-sexed creature but young; and I balked. I spoke to Lanagan sharply after a moment or two and we departed. She gave him a shy little glance as he left.

He laughed. “What a Covenanter you are! A psalm singer gone wrong for fair!”

“I don’t like it,” I said, stubbornly, but with the best of intentions. “She’s only a child.” I didn’t yet know all the sides of this man Lanagan.

He whirled on me: and I got a swift sense of the power that could flash from those dark eyes, and I felt, with the intimacy of personal experience, how effective they must be when working upon a guilty mind.

“Let me tell you, Howard,” he bit out, using my given name for the first time in our friendship, “Norrie” being his ordinary salutation, “that I’m working on the Ratto story. Get me? What do you take me for, anyhow? I’ve stood one welt from my own kind to-night and I don’t want another.”

Lanagan received his second apology of the night; but he didn’t appear to want it at that. His uncanny faculty of reading men’s minds seemed to tell him that my remark was in good faith.

“Forget it,” he laughed. “But just for that, Norrie, I’ll keep to myself for the present the interesting bit of information that Bina gave me; for Bresci is a Camorra agent after all, and Bina, who is all eyes and ears, knows precisely the truth about Ratto’s death in so far as it pertains to the Camorra. I guess that will hold you for a while? But what a lover of music she is! Let’s call it a day. Don’t look for me to-morrow. I’m off on a little lay of my own. Keep in general reach of a telephone so I can get you in a hurry and give that slavedriver of a Sampson my distinguished compliments and tell him I will show up when it pleases me to get d---- good and ready.”

I hammered away at the routine of the story the next day--I was just a plain plodder, ordinarily dependable, but never particularly brilliant--and neither saw Lanagan nor heard from him. A lively angle was given to the story when Dinola and Alberti discovered, concealed in one of Ratto’s game refrigerators, six choice _salami_ sausages that his death had evidently prevented him disposing of in the proper way, for neatly rolled in a half-inch wad in the dead centre of each, was a roll of ten $100 gold bills of U. S. currency.

The secret service men, apprised, raged at the information being given to the press, claiming that they had been working to round up the entire gang for months, and that the publication would serve as warning to the others. But Leslie, more concerned with solving the Ratto mystery, and hanging it on Tosci than with handling Uncle Sam’s minor details, and being also a great believer in the assistance intelligent newspaper publicity could be to the police, gave the facts out. The facts would appear to link Ratto indubitably with the Camorra ring engaged in the importation of counterfeit currency and obviously eliminated the Camorra blackmail theory with respect to his death.

With Ratto now definitely established as a leader of the slippery Camorra--it was a hard organisation to get definite proof on--the police were thrown back on a theory of a fight between Camorra leaders, possibly over some division of the profits or some breach of faith. The Camorra history shows that it was not--nor is not--slow to take vengeance even on its own people.

Lanagan was missing the next day again, and I was surprised, in view of the sensational developments. I was following the police lead and it all pointed to the Camorra to me. Nor did he appear for work the third day nor give me word of himself. And on this day the police had an admission from Tosci that he had visited Ratto on the evening of his disappearance!