“His name is Rounds. He registered here yesterday from New York. His stuff is new, and there’s nothing on any of it to tell us anything except that he didn’t want to leave a trail. No letters, no memoranda, nothing. No blood, no signs of a row, in the room.”
O’Gar turned to Pederson.
“Any brown men been around the hotel? Hindus or the like?”
“Not that I saw,” the house copper said. “I’ll find out for you.”
“Then the red silk was a sarong?” I asked.
“And an expensive one,” the detective sergeant said. “I saw a lot of ’em the four years I was soldiering on the islands, but I never saw as good a one as that.”
“Who wears them?”
“Men and women in the Philippines, Borneo, Java, Sumatra, Malay Peninsula, parts of India.”
“Is it your idea that whoever did the carving advertised himself by running around in the streets in a red petticoat?”
“Don’t try to be funny!” he growled at me. “They’re often enough twisted or folded up into sashes or girdles. And how do I know he was knifed in the street? For that matter, how do I know he wasn’t cut down in your joint?”
“We always bury our victims without saying anything about ’em. Let’s go down and give Pete a hand in the search for your brown men.”
That angle was empty. Any brown men who had snooped around the hotel had been too good at it to be caught.
I telephoned the Old Man, telling him what I had learned—which didn’t cost me much breath—and O’Gar and I spent the rest of the evening sharp-shooting around without ever getting on the target once. We questioned taxicab drivers, questioned the three Roundses listed in the telephone book, and our ignorance was as complete when we were through as when we started.
The morning papers, on the streets at a little after eight o’clock that evening, had the story as we knew it.
At eleven o’clock O’Gar and I called it a night, separating in the direction of our respective beds.
We didn’t stay apart long.
II
I opened my eyes sitting on the side of my bed in the dim light of a moon that was just coming up, with the ringing telephone in my hand.
O’Gar’s voice: “1856 Broadway! On the hump!”
“1856 Broadway,” I repeated, and he hung up.
I finished waking up while I phoned for a taxicab, and then wrestled my clothes on. My watch told me it was 12:55 A.M. as I went downstairs. I hadn’t been fifteen minutes in bed.
1856 Broadway was a three-story house set behind a pocket-size lawn in a row of like houses behind like lawns. The others were dark. 1856 shed light from every window, and from the open front door. A policeman stood in the vestibule.
“Hello, Mac! O’Gar here?”
“Just went in.”
I walked into a brown and buff reception hall, and saw the detective sergeant going up the wide stairs.
“What’s up?” I asked as I joined him.
“Don’t know.”
On the second floor we turned to the left, going into a library or sitting room that stretched across the front of the house.
A man in pajamas and bathrobe sat on a davenport there, with one bared leg stretched out on a chair in front of him. I recognized him when he nodded to me: Austin Richter, owner of a Market Street moving picture theater. He was a round-faced man of forty-five or so, partly bald, for whom the Agency had done some work a year or so before in connection with a ticket-seller who had departed without turning in the day’s receipts.
In front of Richter a thin white-haired man with doctor written all over him stood looking at Richter’s leg, which was wrapped in a bandage just below the knee. Beside the doctor, a tall woman in a fur-trimmed dressing-gown stood, a roll of gauze and a pair of scissors in her hands. A husky police corporal was writing in a notebook at a long narrow table, a thick hickory walking stick laying on the bright blue table cover at his elbow.
All of them looked around at us as we came into the room. The corporal got up and came over to us.
“I knew you were handling the Rounds job, sergeant, so I thought I’d best get word to you as soon as I heard they was brown men mixed up in this.”
“Good work, Flynn,” O’Gar said. “What happened here?”
“Burglary, or maybe only attempted burglary. They was four of them—crashed the kitchen door.”
Richter was sitting up very straight, and his blue eyes were suddenly excited, as were the brown eyes of the woman.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but is there—you mentioned brown men in connection with another affair—is there another?”
O’Gar looked at me.
“You haven’t seen the morning papers?” I asked the theatre owner.
“No.”
“Well, a man came into the Continental office late this afternoon, with a stab in his chest, and died there. Pressed against the wound, as if to stop the bleeding, was a sarong, which is where we got the brown men idea.”
“His name?”
“Rounds, H. R. Rounds.”
The name brought no recognition into Richter’s eyes.
“A tall man, thin, with dark skin?” he asked. “In a grey suit?”
“All of that.”
Richter twisted around to look at the woman.
“Molloy!” he exclaimed.
“Molloy!” she exclaimed.
“So you know him?”
Their faces came back toward me.
“Yes. He was here this afternoon. He left—”
Richter stopped, to turn to the woman again, questioningly.
“Yes, Austin,” she said, putting gauze and scissors on the table, and sitting down beside him on the davenport. “Tell them.”
He patted her hand and looked up at me again with the expression of a man who has seen a nice spot on which to lay down a heavy load.
“Sit down. It isn’t a long story, but sit down.”
We found ourselves chairs.
“Molloy—Sam Molloy—that is his name, or the name I have always known him by. He came here this afternoon. He’d either called up the theater or gone there, and they had told him I was home. I hadn’t seen him for three years. We could see—both my wife and I—that there was something the matter with him when he came in.
“When I asked him, he said he’d been stabbed, by a Siamese, on his way here. He didn’t seem to think the wound amounted to much, or pretended he didn’t. He wouldn’t let us fix it for him, or look at it. He said he’d go to a doctor after he left, after he’d got rid of the thing. That was what he had come to me for. He wanted me to hide it, to take care of it until he came for it again.
“He didn’t talk much. He was in a hurry, and suffering. I didn’t ask him any questions. I couldn’t refuse him anything. I couldn’t question him even though he as good as told us that it was illegal as well as dangerous. He saved our lives once—more than my wife’s life—down in Mexico, where we first knew him. That was in 1916. We were caught down there during the Villa troubles. Molloy was running guns over the border, and he had enough influence with the bandits to have us released when it looked as if we were done for.
“So this time, when he wanted me to do something for him, I couldn’t ask him about it. I said, ‘Yes,’ and he gave me the package. It wasn’t a large package: about the size of—well—a loaf of bread, perhaps, but quite heavy for its size. It was wrapped in brown paper. We unwrapped it after he had gone, that is, we took the paper off. But the inner wrapping was of canvas, tied with silk cord, and sealed, so we didn’t open that. We put it upstairs in the pack room, under a pile of old magazines.
“Then, at about a quarter to twelve tonight—I had only been in bed a few minutes, and hadn’t gone to sleep yet—I heard a noise in here. I don’t own a gun, and there’s nothing you coul
d properly call a weapon in the house, but that walking stick”—indicating the hickory stick on the table—“was in a closet in our bedroom. So I got that and came in here to see what the noise was.
“Right outside the bedroom door I ran into a man. I could see him better than he could see me, because this door was open and he showed against the window. He was between me and it, and the moonlight showed him fairly clear. I hit him with the stick, but didn’t knock him down. He turned and ran in here. Foolishly, not thinking that he might not be alone, I ran after him. Another man shot me in the leg just as I came through the door.
“I fell, of course. While I was getting up, two of them came in with my wife between them. There were four of them. They were medium-sized men, brown-skinned, but not so dark. I took it for granted that they were Siamese, because Molloy had spoken of Siamese. They turned on the lights here, and one of them, who seemed to be the leader, asked me:
“‘Where is it?’
“His accent was pretty bad, but you could understand his words good enough. Of course I knew they were after what Molloy had left, but I pretended I didn’t. They told me, or rather the leader did, that he knew it had been left here, but they called Molloy by another name—Dawson. I said I didn’t know any Dawson, and nothing had been left here, and I tried to get them to tell me what they expected to find. They wouldn’t, though—they just called it ‘it.’
“They talked among themselves, but of course I couldn’t make out a word of what they were saying, and then three of them went out, leaving one here to guard us. He had a Luger pistol. We could hear the others moving around the house. The search must have lasted an hour. Then the one I took for the leader came in, and said something to our guard. Both of them looked quite elated.
“‘It is not wise if you will leave this room for many minutes,’ the leader said to me, and they left us—both of them—closing the door behind them.
“I knew they were going, but I couldn’t walk on this leg. From what the doctor says, I’ll be lucky if I walk on it inside of a couple of months. I didn’t want my wife to go out, and perhaps run into one of them before they’d got away, but she insisted on going. She found they’d gone, and she phoned the police, and then ran up to the pack room and found Molloy’s package was gone.”
“And this Molloy didn’t give you any hint at all as to what was in the package?” O’Gar asked when Richter had finished.
“Not a word, except that it was something the Siamese were after.”
“Did he know the Siamese who stabbed him?” I asked.
“I think so,” Richter said slowly, “though I am not sure he said he did.”
“Do you remember his words?”
“Not exactly, I’m afraid.”
“I think I remember them,” Mrs. Richter said. “My husband, Mr. Richter, asked him, ‘What’s the matter, Molloy? Are you hurt, or sick?’
“Molloy gave a little laugh, putting a hand on his chest, and said, ‘Nothing much. I run into a Siamese who was looking for me on my way here, and got careless and let him scratch me. But I kept my little bundle!’ And he laughed again, and patted the package.”
“Did he say anything else about the Siamese?”
“Not directly,” she replied, “though he did tell us to watch out for any Asiatics we saw around the neighborhood. He said he wouldn’t leave the package if he thought it would make trouble for us, but that there was always a chance that something would go wrong, and we’d better be careful. And he told my husband”—nodding at Richter—“that the Siamese had been dogging him for months, but now that he had a safe place for the package he was going to ‘take them for a walk and forget to bring them back.’ That was the way he put it.”
“How much do you know about Molloy?”
“Not a great deal, I’m afraid,” Richter took up the answering again. “He liked to talk about the places he had been and the things he had seen, but you couldn’t get a word out of him about his own affairs. We met him first in Mexico, as I have told you, in 1916. After he saved us down there and got us away, we didn’t see him again for nearly four years. He rang the bell one night, and came in for an hour or two. He was on his way to China, he said, and had a lot of business to attend to before he left the next day.
“Some months later I had a letter from him, from the Queen’s Hotel in Kandy, asking me to send him a list of the importers and exporters in San Francisco. He wrote me a letter thanking me for the list, and I didn’t hear from him again until he came to San Francisco for a week, about a year later. That was in 1921, I think.
“He was here for another week about a year after that, telling us that he had been in Brazil, but, as usual, not saying what he had been doing there. Some months later I had a letter from him, from Chicago, saying he would be here the following week. However, he didn’t come. Instead, some time later, he wrote from Vladivostok, saying he hadn’t been able to make it. Today was the first we’d heard of him since then.”
“Where’s his home? His people?”
“He always says he has neither. I’ve an idea he was born in England, though I don’t know that he ever said so, or what made me think so.”
“Got any more questions?” I asked O’Gar.
“No. Let’s give the place the eye, and see if the Siamese left any leads behind ’em.”
The eye we gave the house was thorough. We didn’t split the territory between us, but went over everything together—everything from roof to cellar—every nook, drawer, corner.
The cellar did most for us: it was there, in the cold furnace, that we found the handful of black buttons and the fire-darkened garter clasps. But the upper floors hadn’t been altogether worthless: in one room we had found the crumpled sales slip of an Oakland store, marked 1 table cover; and in another room we had found no garters.
“Of course it’s none of my business,” I told Richter when O’Gar and I joined the others again, “but I think maybe if you plead self-defense you might get away with it.”
He tried to jump up from the davenport, but his shot leg failed him.
The woman got up slowly.
“And maybe that would leave an out for you,” O’Gar told her. “Why don’t you try to persuade him?”
“Or maybe it would be better if you plead the self-defense,” I suggested to her. “You could say that Richter ran to your help when your husband grabbed you, that your husband shot him and was turning his gun on you when you stabbed him. That would sound smooth enough.”
“My husband?”
“Uh-huh, Mrs. Rounds-Molloy-Dawson. Your late husband, anyway.”
Richter got his mouth far enough closed to get words out of it.
“What is the meaning of this damned nonsense?” he demanded.
“Them’s harsh words to come from a fellow like you,” O’Gar growled at him. “If this is nonsense, what do you make of that yarn you told us about creeping Siamese and mysterious bundles, and God knows what all?”
“Don’t be too hard on him,” I told O’Gar. “Being around movies all the time has poisoned his idea of what sounds plausible. If it hadn’t, he’d have known better than to see a Siamese in the moonlight at 11:45, when the moon was just coming up at somewhere around 12:45, when you phoned me.”
Richter stood up on his one good leg.
The husky police corporal stepped close to him.
“Hadn’t I better frisk him, sergeant?”
O’Gar shook his bullet head.
“Waste of time. He’s got nothing on him. They cleaned the place of weapons. The chances are the lady dropped them in the bay when she rode over to Oakland to get a table cover to take the place of the sarong her husband carried away with him.”
That shook the pair of them. Richter pretended he hadn’t gulped, and the woman had a fight of it before she could make her eyes stay still on mine.
O’Gar
struck while the iron was hot by bringing the buttons and garters clasps we had salvaged out of his pocket, and letting them trickle from one hand to another. That used up the last bit of the facts we had.
I threw a lie at them.
“Never me to knock the press, but you don’t want to put too much confidence in what the papers say. For instance, a fellow might say a few pregnant words before he died, and the papers might say he didn’t. A thing like that would confuse things.”
The woman reared up her head and looked at O’Gar.
“May I speak to Austin alone?” she asked. “I don’t mean out of your sight.”
The detective sergeant scratched his head and looked at me. This letting your victims go into conference is always a ticklish business: they may decide to come clean, and then again, they may frame up a new out. On the other hand, if you don’t let them, the chances are they get stubborn on you, and you can’t get anything out of them. One way was as risky as another. I grinned at O’Gar and refused to make a suggestion. He could decide for himself, and, if he was wrong, I’d have him to dump the blame on. He scowled at me, and then nodded to the woman.
“You can over into that corner and whisper together for a couple of minutes,” he said, “but no foolishness.”
She gave Richter the hickory stick, took his other arm, helped him hobble to a far corner, pulled a chair over there for him. He sat with his back to us. She stood behind him, leaning over his shoulder, so that both their faces were hidden from us.
O’Gar came closer to me.
“What do you think?” he muttered.
“I think they’ll come through.”
“That shot of yours about being Molloy’s wife hit center. I missed that one. How’d you make it?”
“When she was telling us what Molloy had said about the Siamese she took pains both times she said ‘my husband’ to show that she meant Richter.”
“So? Well—”
The whispering in the far corner had been getting louder, so that the s’s had become sharp hisses. Now a clear emphatic sentence came from Rihter’s mouth.
“I’ll be damned if I will!”
Creeping Siamese and Other Stories Page 3