Part 5
It may be well to say here, too, that the secret service men, although working at cross-purposes with the regular police, had been putting the screws to Tosci and Morton had finally gotten enough information to supplement his own investigations, and in a swift swoop five members of the Tosci gang were in the federal cells at the Oakland jail charged with handling counterfeit money.
All in all, the situation was growing highly complex for a routine plodder, and still no Lanagan! I had just about made up my mind to go on a still hunt for him, confident that he must have broken his vows of abstinence, when he called me up. His message was curt:
“Suggest to Sampson to stick personally until he hears from me. Meet me at once at Hyde and Lombard.”
Sampson usually left the office at midnight. Lanagan preferred his dynamic energy on the desk when a big smash was on; and when he asked for Sampson personally I knew he had landed. And Sampson always preferred being at the city desk when Lanagan was swinging home on the bit.
“Fine work!” was all Sampson said; it was not in his cold-blooded cosmos to show disinterested enthusiasm. Possibly it was that characteristic, coupled with twenty years’ seasoning at the wheel, that made him the greatest city editor in the West.
Lanagan’s clothes had that peculiarly hand-dog appearance that the newest suit will get when a man has slept in it once or twice; and Lanagan’s clothes were seldom new, so the appearance was emphasised. He had evidently found no time either to shave or change his collar. Worn lines were about his mouth and eyes such as you see in athletes who have “pulled off” weight in hard training. But his eyes, those dark, mesmeric eyes, were sparkling and the old engaging trick of smiling was there.
“Began to think maybe I _had_ ‘lost my grip,’” he said, with a short laugh. “But I have either turned up one of the finest police stories in my time or I have gone plumb crazy. We will soon know.”
Without more words, he walked quickly several blocks down over the eastern slope of the hill and turned into a narrow tradesman’s alley. I noticed that he was watching keenly before and after us. He slipped through a gate in a high board fence and we were in a yard overgrown with shrubbery and weeds. The house was a corner one and of that familiar type of old family residence, seen in most localities, that has gone to seed on a mortgage. It was vacant. He opened the kitchen door with a skeleton key and we walked upstairs, turning into a large room commanding a view of the street. He kept away from the window, I noticed.
“Draw up the Morris chair,” he said facetiously, as he squatted on his legs. I sat down against the wall and pulled out a cigar but he stopped me.
“Can’t take a chance. Smell of smoke might give the whole thing away. See anything curious about this room?”
I looked at the bareness of it and shook my head.
“Examine it,” he said. “You haven’t even looked it over.”
I knew he was not given to joking, so I got up and went over the room carefully. The door to the hall was swung back against the wall and I closed it.
Hanging on the door knob by the leather wrist thong was a blackjack, a duplicate of the one with which Ratto was slain. Lanagan was laughing quietly.
“What are your sensations at being in a prospective death chamber?” he asked.
Visions of being suddenly pocketed in that vast, out of the way mansion by a ring of Camorrists, assailed me, and I instinctively felt for my revolver.
“Don’t worry,” said the baffling Lanagan. “The trap won’t spring for several hours yet. But after it does spring,” he went on, “and this mess is over, I’m prepared to present the fair Bina with the biggest box of French mixed in town. That is,” quizzically, “if my puritanical Mentor will permit me to? But seriously, Norrie,”--his next words came forth rather hurriedly, and much as a shamed school-boy might make a confession,--“seriously these Italian girls are mature women at sixteen. And though you may not think it, I am only thirty-four.”
When it filtered into me what he was driving at I jumped to my feet and pulled him to his.
“Jack,” I cried delightedly, “you don’t mean--”
“No,” he said, shortly, “I don’t mean anything, now or any other time, Norrie, until I’ve taken a seat on this water wagon that I know I can ride for life.”
My thoughts shot back to that declaration in the reporters’ room that I had pondered often since uttered. It was clear enough now. He was a man’s man, Jack Lanagan; and looking back now even after the years that have passed since then, looking back from the content of my own cosy home, the tears spring and I stop writing. He did not marry Bina.
“That’s about enough of that,” he said. “I wanted you to get the lay of the house by daylight. Let’s get out of here. I’ve got to see Leslie.”
But we were only as far as the head of the stairs leading to the lower floor when a key grated in a lock some place beneath us and Lanagan gripped my arm, his finger to his lips, his eyes glittering like a snake’s. We swung back on tiptoes to a small closet at the end of the hall, pulling the door almost shut after us. Lanagan dropped, his eye to the keyhole. He had drawn his revolver and I drew mine; my heart was beginning to thump like a big bass drum. There came to my ears the sound of footfalls up the creaking stairs. At first it seemed like a dozen men and I concluded for once that one of Lanagan’s traps was going to spring the wrong way.
The footfalls disintegrated as they came nearer and I found there was but one person. Lanagan’s eye might have been stuck fast to that keyhole, for his hat brim did not waver the fraction of an inch as he held his rigid, cramped position for long minute after minute.
Finally the footfalls sounded back down the stairs. Lanagan did not move until, to our taut ear drums, came the sound of the closing rear door.
“Well?” I asked him, wiping the perspiration from my forehead.
All he said was “Fine! Fine! Wait a bit yet, Norrie! That was merely a scout, taking a last look to be sure that blackjack hadn’t been removed by any prospective tenants who might have been here.”
He glanced at his dollar watch. It was six o’clock.
“There’ll be two good hours before darkness,” he said. “We’ll take a chance and leave the house uncovered while I get hold of the chief. Unless you want to stay here?” he asked banteringly. I did not want to stay there, but he had me squarely in the door, as it were, and I had to say I would if he wanted it. I sometimes think many a man is made a hero against his will. Then a great shaft of illumination struck me and I asked:
“Here, Jack; why should they bring that blackjack here? They could bring a dozen with them and nobody be any the wiser.”
But all the satisfaction I got out of that inscrutable, irritating man was: “How bright the understudy is becoming! You’ll be tackling high C yourself next!”
“However,” he went on, “I’m not going to permit you to remain here. Firstly and mainly, because I am confident nothing will happen until after dark, although for a moment I thought my theory had gone wrong, and in the second place, because you might scramble the whole platter on me and get to shooting recklessly.”
We slipped out of the alley after Lanagan had reconnoitred long. He had good reason for not wishing to appear at police headquarters. It was generally known that he was off on some sort of a still hunt. He had been seen occasionally by some of the boys, and it was known, too, that he was not drinking. His appearance at headquarters in conference with Leslie therefore might bring a corps of sharp-eyed newspaper men on our trail.
He got Leslie on the wire, and within thirty minutes was in deep conversation with that astute thief-taker in the rear room at Allenberg’s. There were few sections of the city where Lanagan was not on intimate terms with saloonmen. There are many times when they can be valuable to the police reporter, particularly in the Tenderloin and down town. The two did not take me into their confidence, but once I heard Leslie say, explosively:
“Jack, you’re as daffy as a horned toad.”
I caught only part of Lanagan’s answer. He was talking earnestly.
“I tell you, Chief, my information is correct. I’ve got the only leak in San Francisco into the Camorra and neither you nor the secret service have a man who can tap it. It’s worth a chance, I tell you. We’ll want Brady, Wilson and Maloney. We’ve got to cover every point, take no chances of a murder getting by on us, and smash this thing right on the nose.”
Leslie studied Lanagan long and carefully. He had never been wrong yet.
“Not drinking, Jack?” he asked at last.
“Not a smell in three months,” said Lanagan.
“You’re on,” the chief finally said, decisively.
I grew restive at not being taken “in,” but Lanagan said I was becoming so very bright that a little discipline would do me good; harkening back, I suppose, to that remark about the blackjack. I said no more. They outlined their plan. Maloney was to hide in the yard of the house directly across from the alley gate--in that old-fashioned neighbourhood, tight board fences and hedgerows are common--and Wilson across the street where he could command the window to the room where the blackjack hung. We three, with Brady, were to take our position inside the house. The moment anybody entered the alley gate, or by the front door--Lanagan considered it likely that that approach might be taken under cover of darkness--Maloney was to lift himself to the fence top and strike a match. Wilson, in turn, as though lighting a cigar, would strike a match, and one or the other of us, watching back from the room window of the house, would know that the trap was set. In addition to watching for Maloney’s signal, Wilson’s position enabled him easily to cover the front door. Lanagan, it appeared, had planned the coup hours before and had his coverts already selected.
Their vigil ended on the outside, Maloney and Wilson were then to jump and cover the front and rear doors, respectively, in case of any miscue inside that might permit of an escape. “Miscue” was Lanagan’s word: and I reflected with some apprehension, that any “miscue” with such nervy officers as Leslie and Brady that would permit an escape out of that house would mean that probably all of us would be candidates for morgue slabs.
Dusk found us all drifting one by one to our stations. When I finally entered through the alley door, I could see neither Maloney nor Wilson, and yet I knew they had both gone before me and were in position. I was the last one in and Lanagan was waiting there to lock the kitchen door after me. We trooped silently upstairs, shoes off and in hand.
It was an unreal situation, waiting there as the deeper blackness of night settled down and the night sounds of an empty house assailed us magnified. Brady was standing the watch at the window for the signal. The rest of us were lined up in the broad hall. It was so dark you couldn’t see a man a foot in front of you. Hours it seemed to me must have passed, with no conversation save a scattered whisper or so. We had tried the hall and room floors and the door to the hall closet and they gave out no squeaks.
“Psst!”
Softly, sibilantly, came Brady’s signal. We backed into the closet. Brady in a second was with us. The door was opened six inches with Lanagan and Leslie ready for a spring. I was in some fashion away back in the rear of the closet.
A key grated in the kitchen lock, and it sounded through the vast empty house with a peculiarly sinister harshness. It was a situation certainly unique in crime! The stairs creaked--there was the sound of heavy, laboured breathing. But there was but one set of footfalls! We heard the door open to the room where the ugly blackjack hung, and as it did Leslie swung our door out and, silently as so many black ghosts, we moved to the other door.
Against the window we could see a man’s form dimly outlined. And then--
There was a flash of blinding brilliance, a report that crashed in the empty stillness of the abandoned mansion with the reverberation of a twelve-pound gun, and under the arcs of the swiftly flashing pocket lights of Brady and Leslie, we beheld, stretched almost at our feet as the form toppled backward and stiffened out--
_Waters!_
There was a gushing wound in the temple. Death had been instantaneous. With an eagerness that was more animal than human, Lanagan tore back Waters’ coat, ran his hands swiftly through his every pocket, and finally, with a “_Ha!_” of satisfaction like a snarl, pulled out from an unsealed envelope in an inside pocket a page of writing:
“Daffy, chief: Daffy, as a horned toad? Well, here’s the proof!”
Written in the hand and phraseology of a fairly intelligent man, it was as follows:
“_I killed Ratto. I guess I have been crazy. I went crazy looking for murdered people in vacant houses from telegraph poles. I couldn’t find any more, and then I thought I would kill somebody. I told Ratto on the street that I had seen a man’s body in that house and he went in with me. I had never seen him before. I had left the door open as I ran out to him, but he didn’t suspect anything. I killed him with a blackjack and then found the body in three days, from the telegraph pole. I had picked out the place several days ahead. I got everything ready and came up several times and it was funny no one saw me. I thought Ratto would say get the police but he was nervy all right and jumped right in after me._
”_The room in this house I discovered in the same way. It was even better than the flat where Ratto was killed because the neighbourhood didn’t have so many people. The blackjack is on the door knob. I put it there so as I went into the room first to light a match I could take it off the inside door knob and hit my man as he followed me in._
“_That reporter Lanagan and another man were hanging around this neighbourhood to-day. He has been talking to me kind of suspicious lately and I guess the jig is up. It’s funny the police never suspected me._
”_I guess I have been crazy all right. I would hang anyhow. But I am all right now and I will kill myself in the room. It’s all the return I can make for Ratto. If nobody hears the shot I hope somebody finds me from a telegraph pole. It will give the newspapers lots to write about. That’s what made me crazy. I got too much fame, I guess._
“_William Waters_”
There was a prolonged pause. Then:
“Humph,” growled Leslie savagely. “The ‘fame’ you got isn’t a marker to the fame that reporter Lanagan has heaped on me. For the original ass I’m it. I took that fellow for a loon. Jack, shake.”
Lanagan could not forbear a soft sarcasm. That “daffy as a horned toad” rankled:
“Give your men a little class in Kraft-Ebing, Lombroso, Nordau or some of those specialists and you will get a better understanding of the pulling power of crime,” he said, dryly. “I hadn’t figured quite this kind of a finish,” he went on. “But the minute he blazed that shot into his brain I was sure he had left a confession. If he couldn’t get notoriety in life he would in death.”
Quickly Lanagan told of his suspicions settling on Waters after Bina, his “leak” to the Camorra, had told him that the death of Ratto was as much of a mystery to the Camorrists as it was to the police. With Bresci a Camorra leader, the wise-eyed and wise-eared little Bina heard and saw much that Lanagan in turn was told. On her say-so, he had absolutely dismissed the Camorra. He set himself to watch Waters and for three days and nights scarcely ever let the lineman out of his sight. From safe vantage points he had watched Waters at his grisly work of climbing innumerable telegraph poles. At times he had casually picked him up and talked with him. It was evident that he had also aroused Waters’ suspicions. He noticed him lingering in the neighbourhood of the house where we now were and finally sneak in by the alley door. After he left the house Lanagan had hunted up a locksmith, secured a set of skeleton keys himself, and let himself into the house, not knowing exactly what to expect.
He found the blackjack on the door knob, saw the telegraph pole out of the window and in a flash had realised the entire plan of the crazed lineman.
Lanagan assumed that Waters would not attempt to lure his victim in daylight. He had come back to the house while we were there merely moved by some insane morbidity to visit again the scene selected for the crime; picture possibly the slain man on the floor, himself peering in from the telegraph pole; and then the columns of newspaper space. That the room was commanded by a telegraph pole I had not noticed during the day or even my sluggish wits might have given me a hint of the truth.
“The shot seems to have raised no stir outside, Chief,” said Lanagan, briskly, when the recital was done. “Call in Wilson and Maloney and stick around and give us two hours lee-way before you get the morgue. It’s twelve-thirty.
“_Now, son, you hit the pike with me for the Enquirer!_”
IV
WHOM THE GODS DESTROY
IV
WHOM THE GODS DESTROY
At Riordan’s, much frequented by policemen and reporters, Jack Lanagan sat with Leslie, that greatest chief of his time, discussing one of Dan’s delectable Bismarck herrings and a “steam.” It was not above the very human Leslie to mingle in the free democracy of Dan’s back room, where the gentlemen of the Fourth Estate foregathered to settle in seasoned nonchalance the problems of the world.
Leslie was speaking.
“You haven’t lost out, Jack,” he was saying. “But if that narrow-gauge Sampson elects to fire you--which I know he won’t--I’ll give you work if I’ve got to pay you out of my contingent fund. Get off that suisses diet and report. The _Enquirer_ can’t afford to lose you.”
Lanagan, unshaven for a week, looked otherwise disreputable.
“The _Enquirer_,” he reported judicially, “can afford to lose anybody. It’s a sweat-shop life, reporting; and they fill your place just as easily as Schwartz, down there on Stevenson Street, fills a place at one of his shirt machines. Nothing is as dead as a yesterday’s paper--excepting it has a libel in it; and nothing is so perishable as a reporter’s reputation. The slate is swabbed clean once every twenty-four hours. Your job is precisely that long.”
“Rats. You’re in a beautiful humour. They can’t forget that Iowa Slim exclusive very soon.”
“No; but only because of the fact that I haven’t shown up for work since. They had given me warning before then. I’m through unless they send for me, and they don’t seem to be doing that. As a matter of cold-blooded fact, the _Enquirer_ likes my work but not my weakness. My type don’t get much sympathy these times. I belong to the generation of the tramp printer; the days of a real ethical code in the profession. We old-timers are taking the gad--what few of us there are left--three times over for an even break with these peg-topped trouser boys at ten a week who once wrote a class farce.
“No, chief,” concluded Lanagan dispassionately and deliberately, “I guess I’ve shot my bolt in San Francisco. I’ll ship on a banana boat and flag it on to Panama. Maybe when I get there I will tangle up in some big complication and another Davis will come along to chronicle me with that other Derelict; a grand story, by the way, chief--a newspaper epic. You should read it.”
Leslie ignored the morose mood of the reporter. “Shot nothing,” he said in disgust. “Take a Turkish bath and sweat that grouch out of your system. Here, take this ten. I want you to get back to your paper. You’re too valuable a man to be out of work in this town.”
Lanagan rejected the proffered money, and Leslie was attempting to force it on him--there was a warm bond of friendship between the two men and a mutual admiration for the abilities of each other--when when Brady from the upper office stuck his head through the door. He saluted.
“Captain Cook sent me over to say that it looks now like that Hemingway case was not a suicide after all. There are no powder burns on the face. The revolver must have been put in her hand after she was shot.”
Cook was night captain of detectives. Leslie jumped to his feet and swung Lanagan to his.
“Here! This will put you on your mettle. I didn’t like the looks of that case from the start. I am going out and take hold of it personally. Come along. Maybe you can turn up something that the _Enquirer_ will be glad to hear from you on. Come along, Brady.”
They jumped into the police machine and were whirled out to a fashionable home on Pacific Avenue. It was 9:30 o’clock. Less than an hour before a report had been received of the suicide of the daughter of the house, a débutante whose coming-out party had been an event of the spring before and whose engagement to a broker, Oliver Macondray, had just been announced.
Wilson, accounted one of Leslie’s shrewdest upper office men, was already in the room when Leslie, Lanagan, and Brady arrived. There were there also a shoal of newspaper men and photographers, and the smell of flash powders was heavy on the air. On the first report from police headquarters I had been sent out by Sampson and had already been in the house for half an hour. But I was glad to surrender the story promptly to Lanagan when he entered, although he did not then say that he intended going to work.
It was Wilson, as I recall it, who had raised a doubt of the suicide theory by pointing out the absence of powder burns, although the bullet wound was in the right temple and the revolver clasped tightly in the right hand. A girl with her frail wrist must have pressed the revolver close before firing. It was clear the revolver had been placed in her hand after the shooting. It was an English bulldog of old pattern, one of those “family” pistols found in most homes.
“If you can’t be first on the ground, be last,” was an axiom of the newspaper business that Lanagan often tried to impress upon me. He proceeded to act upon his theory now by rolling and lighting a cigarette to give all in the room ample time to finish their investigation. Finally the room was cleared of all save, Leslie, Lanagan, Brady, Wilson, and myself.
The room had one set of French windows giving out upon a wide porch and a heavily matted lawn. It would be next to impossible to say whether a person had escaped over the lawn by way of the veranda. The bedroom door was open when a maid, attracted by the shot, had overcome her terror and run to the room.
At the time of death the only persons in the house were the mother, daughter, and the maid, Marie. The maid was in a state bordering on collapse after the first siege with the detectives and newspaper men, and Leslie ordered her kept quiet for an hour. The occasional hysterical cries of the mother, prostrated in her own room, could be heard.
Leslie examined the body with minute care. The rest of us had completed our investigations. Then Lanagan took his leisurely turn, drawing up an easy chair. Leslie, Brady, and Wilson had stepped through the window and were examining the porch and the lawn carefully with their pocket lights. Lanagan had taken one of the girl’s hands up in his. He was examining an old-fashioned bracelet critically, very critically, it seemed to me. He flashed a sudden quick glance toward the window; the chief and the detectives were still busy outside.
“Stand at the door, Norrie!” he shot at me electrically.