Iris’s whisper came out of the darkness. “All right.”
“Then go straight back in. Catch up with him again before they throw him out.”
Iris moved back to me. Slipping her arm around me, she reached up and kissed me on the mouth. I wished she hadn’t kissed me. It reminded me of all the things I was missing.
“Don’t worry, darling.” The scent of the gardenia was bitterly sweet in my nostrils. “By the time you get back from Lina, I’ll have that Beard twisted around my little finger.”
She moved away and under the dim green lantern back into the Green Kimono. Seeing her go like that was the thing I hated most about that whole hateful evening.
Hatch was talking to Dagget. “O.K., Bill. You hang around out here. Tail ’em. But easy now. The old guy’s smart. If he finds out he’s being tailed, anything may happen.”
“O.K.” Bill Dagget strolled away deeper into the shadows. For all his oxlike bulk he moved lightly as a doe.
Hatch took hold of my arm and started leading me down the dark alley towards the street.
“Got a gun?”
I shook my head.
“Too bad. But if you ain’t, you ain’t. Now you’ll never get a taxi, so you’ll have to take the trolley. But step on it. Get out to Wawona as fast as you can and when you get there—handle this Lina.” He stopped in the alley. “You got to understand that. You got to go just as easy with her as with the old guy. Now maybe she’s been warned the way Eulalia was. If so—good. Only that means you’ll have a heck of a time getting her to listen to you. You got Eulalia’s letter, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Fine. Show Lina that. It should make her see you’re O.K. But, as I said, handle her. Don’t get her scared and above all, don’t tell her Eulalia’s dead or she’ll probably go screaming to the cops. Remember, she knows as much as Eulalia did. If she’s handled right, she can clear you just as easy as the Beard can. So this is what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to somehow persuade her to come back to the hotel with you. Then we’ll have Lina and the Beard. That’s when we can go to the cops. And, if I know anything, once we got the two of them, we’ll have your reputation just as sweet as a baby’s by morning.”
His optimism was as encouraging as his efficiency. He gave me detailed instructions as to the layout of Wawona Avenue and the right trolley to take. Then, as we emerged from the black alley into the subdued street lighting of Columbus Avenue, he concluded: “Just one thing more. You got that civilian suit back at the hotel. You have to pass that way, anyhow. What you’d better do is change into that civilian suit right away and duck that uniform.”
“Civilian suit!” I echoed. “You’re crazy if you think I’m going to wander around San Francisco in civilian clothes. If I was caught out of uniform, I’d get into all kinds of trouble.”
“So you’d get into trouble.” Hatch looked patient. “And what you think you’re in now? Figure this straight, guy. We’re hoping the cops won’t discover Eulalia till tomorrow. O.K. But maybe they will, see? And if they do, they’ll be screaming all over town for a naval lieutenant. We can’t risk having you picked up before you get to Lina. What’s naval regulations stacked up against Lina’s life? Phooey.”
As usual, Hatch was on the beam.
“O.K.,” I said. “You’re the boss.”
Hatch grinned. “That’s the boy. Then you’re all set. Know your way back to the St. Anton?”
I nodded.
“Fine.” Hatch paused. “As for me, I got a little job of my own. I know the cops in this town. I’m going down to headquarters an’ do a little tactful snooping. If they have found Eulalia, I’ll know soon enough. And if they have, somehow I’ll stall ’em until you’ve had time to get Lina. If all’s quiet when I get there, then there’s a good chance we’re safe till morning. In that case, I’ll be back at the hotel, waiting for you.”
He stood on the dowdy street corner, watching me from shrewd black eyes as if he were mentally weighing my assets against my liabilities for such a responsible job.
“Remember,” he said. “Handle her. None of that ranting around you go in for. Kid gloves.”
“Yes,” I said meekly.
“O.K.” He turned away and hurried back into the alley where, presumably, he was going to make sure that Iris and Dagget were fulfilling their allotted tasks.
Quite a little Napoleon, Hatch.
I stared after him. Then I turned into Stockton with its rowdy sailors, its silent Chinese, and its lighted, junky curio stores.
I was on my own now.
CHAPTER VIII
It took me less than ten minutes to get back to the St. Anton. Once out of the spell of Hatch’s dour optimism, a sense of urgency was riding me like a band of Furies. It was all right for Hatch to talk glibly about bringing Lina back to the hotel. Time was the crucial factor. Already at least three hours had elapsed since Eulalia’s murder. Already the menace of the roses and crocuses had been given three precious hours in which to shift its attack to Lina. At any minute, some shadowy figure with murder in his heart might be ringing the doorbell of that impossibly named Lina Oliver Wendell Holmes Brown at 3862 Wawona Avenue.
I was scared of the trolley. After midnight trolleys are infrequent. They are always maddeningly slow, and Wawona Avenue, huddled close to the Pacific on the fringes of the Fleishhacker Zoo, was maddeningly remote.
A dim fear that the police might have found Eulalia’s body and be waiting for me proved groundless. No one paid me any attention as I hurried through the lobby, which was settling now into a post-midnight somnolence. An incurious elevator man took me to the sixth floor. Back in Room 624 I tore off my uniform and scrambled into the white shirt and the brown suit. With a twinge of revulsion, I realized I was putting on a murderer’s clothes. But my anxiety to get to Lina kept me from worrying about a little thing like that. In a matter of minutes, I had sloughed off my naval identity for an inconspicuous civilian seediness. I glanced at my unfamiliar reflection, framed by the cupids’ behinds, and slipped out of the room, locking it after me.
Afraid that the elevator man would notice my startling transformation, I took the stairs down—six flights of them at the double. Iris might well get back to the hotel with the Beard ahead of me. Making myself as unobtrusive as possible, I edged over to the desk and slipped the room key into the key slit. Then I ducked out of the hotel through the side door on to Geary.
I had to walk to Market to reach the trolley. I hesitated under the lighted awning of the St. Anton, glancing up and down the unending stream of sailors. I had taken my first step towards Market when a voice behind me startled me by calling: “Hey, Peter. Peter Duluth.”
A panicky impulse to escape gripped me. But it was too late. I felt a hand on my arm and once again the voice came.
“Peter, fancy meeting you of all people.”
I turned. Standing by the open door of a parked car was a dapper little man in a tuxedo with a pinkish moustache and pale, watery eyes. With an effort, I managed to recognize him as a small-time actor who had worked with me in a couple of plays back East. Grey. Archie, Cyril, Cecil. That was it. Cecil Grey. A nasty, slippery little number. They say that sooner or later you meet everyone you’ve ever known in San Francisco. This was one hell of a time to have it happen to me.
While I fidgeted, Grey’s eyes, avid with curiosity, slid up and down the civilian suit. “Well, well. I read in the papers you were being one of our brave boys in the Pacific.” He giggled. “What’s the score? Did the navy get tired of you?”
I didn’t know what to say, but, luckily, he said it for me. An expression of understanding passing over his face, he breathed: “So that’s it. Intelligence, eh?”
I looked at the parked car behind him. I saw that Cecil Grey might turn out to be a blessing in disguise.
“That your car?” I asked.
He said: “Why, sure. I’m up from Hollywood for the week-end.” He tittered. “Gas isn’t a problem if you have the right c
ontacts.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ve got to get somewhere. And I’ve got to get in a hurry.” I gave him a meaning look. “I can’t say anything. But it’s important Understand?”
Cecil Grey’s puffy mouth spread in a fascinated smirk. “Why, sure. Sure. Get right in.” He winked. “Secret work, eh? Wait till they hear about Grey, the espionage agent, back in Hollywood.”
“You won’t tell anyone,” I said, making it tough out of the corner of my mouth. “Get it?”
He looked even more fascinated. “O.K. Sure. Anything you say.”
He got into the car. I piled in after him, shutting the door.
“Where to?” he said.
“You know San Francisco?”
“Why, sure. I was raised here.”
I had enough sense not to give him the actual address. “Dump me at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Sloat. And make it snappy.”
“Sunset and Sloat it is.” Cecil Grey nosed the car out into the traffic. He tittered again. “That’s the zoo. So that’s the idea, eh? One of the giraffes is a Jap agent.”
He laughed at that. He thought it was terribly amusing. He was still laughing as he swung into Market and along it to MacAllister, headed for the Golden Gate Park. He could laugh himself blue in the face for all I cared. I had my transportation. Priceless minutes were being saved in my obstacle race towards Lina Oliver Wendell Holmes Brown.
Once you’re out of the main arteries, San Francisco can be a lonely place. There was hardly a person on the street as we raced past the old houses of MacAllister and reached the shadowy purlieus of Golden Gate Park. The actor in Cecil Grey was responding to the drama of the situation. As he hurtled the car past the park and swung it into the broad lanes of Sunset Boulevard, his face had assumed the grim, tight-lipped expression of a B-feature movie hero. In almost no time, it seemed, he jerked the car to a halt at the end of the boulevard.
“Thanks,” I said and jumped out.
For a moment he sat behind the wheel, watching me as if plucking up his courage to ask me whether I needed a grim, tight-lipped assistant in my secret undertakings. Luckily, he didn’t have the nerve. With a little sigh, he swerved the car around and roared away up the boulevard into the night.
I had left myself quite a few blocks to walk. I rather wished I hadn’t been so cagey with Grey, but I didn’t trust him. Even now, although he had brought me to my destination far more quickly than the trolley, I realized that Cecil Grey was yet another menace I had built up for the future. The moment Eulalia’s body was discovered and the newspapers flaunted my name, he would be the first to go to the police and let them know that I was wandering around San Francisco in guilty civilian disguise. Each step I had taken since we left Eulalia’s apartment house had led me that much deeper into a morass. Everything was gambled now on Lina and the Beard.
I headed down Sloat towards the sea. I had never been in this district by night. It was desolate beyond words. A few houses straggled on my right. On my left, the bleak edge of the Lake Merced park stretched away into the darkness. As I hurried on, the street curved into the park itself and there was nothing but the darkness and the gaunt skeletons of trees. From the great zoo ahead of me, the lonely yowling of wild beasts rose every now and then, intensifying the silence. I quickened my pace until I was out of the park again and had turned right into Wawona Avenue itself.
I was in a section of small, Spanish-style villas. The newness of the houses and the damp night air, drifting in from the ocean, made for an atmosphere of raw gloom. I located number 3862. It was on a corner, across the street from a dark drugstore which was closed for the night. Larger than the other houses and obviously older, number 3862 was built of red brick. An iron railing fenced in an old-fashioned basement and a Sight of stone steps led up to a dingy front door. It looked like a broken-down, once solitary private residence caught up to by a new building project and converted into apartments.
I went up the steps. There was a double front door: a glass one outside which led into a small, drably lit porch, and a wooden one beyond the porch, leading into the house proper. I moved into the porch, where a series of buzzers marked with names showed that the place was an apartment house. I scanned the names on the buzzers. There was no Oliver Wendell Holmes Brown.
For one bleak moment I envisaged my whole expedition as a gigantic hoax played on us by the drunken Beard. Lina Oliver Wendell Holmes Brown was only a figment of his crafty champagne dreams and 3862 Wawona Avenue was an address attached at random.
Then I remembered the basement. I ran down the steps to the street and, tugging open a little iron door in the railings, descended the twisting stairway to the basement door. No light was visible in this subterranean apartment. Beside the door, a tall window, protected against burglars with iron bars, exhibited a pair of white curtains.
A card was pinned to the door. I had to strike a match to read it. As the spurt of light flickered, I felt a surge of relief.
On the card was written: Sgt. and Mrs. O. W. H. Brown.
I pressed the metal buzzer. It’s shrill whine, echoing beyond the door, brought sudden jittery recollections of Eulalia Crawford’s buzzer. The whining faded. I rang again. I thought I could hear faint, scuffling footsteps. Then I was sure of it. They came pattering towards me. Then they stopped and a light went on in the room behind the window.
The footsteps came to the door and then stopped again. For a long, strange moment nothing happened. Then, instead of the door opening, a woman’s voice, high and frightened and with a foreign accent, called from inside: “Who ees it, pliz?”
I said: “Is that Mrs. Brown? Mrs. Lina Brown?”
“Yes, yes. Who ees it, pliz?”
Those two little “yesses” sent a shiver of excitement through me. So much for the darkest of my forebodings. Lina Oliver Wendell Holmes Brown was at least alive.
Putting my mouth close to the door, I said: “I’m Lieutenant Duluth. Please let me in. It’s very important. I’ve come from Eulalia Crawford.”
“Oh, yes, yes.” The voice had lost some of its quavering uncertainty. “One moment, pliz.”
There was a rattle of metal as if she had slid a chain into place. Then the door opened about six inches and a face peered around its edge. There was no light in the hall except for a faint radiance coming from the room beyond. I could distinguish no features in that small, white face.
For a moment, Mrs. Lina Brown stared at me. Then her head bobbed back behind the shelter of the door.
“You are not Lieutenant Duluth.” The words tumbled out breathlessly. “Lieutenant Duluth, he ees a sailor. He wear a uniform like a sailor.”
I had overlooked the fact that the civilian suit might alarm her. The door wavered while she was making up her mind whether or not to slam it in my face.
Quickly I said: “I am Lieutenant Duluth, Eulalia’s cousin’s husband. It’s just that my uniform has been stolen. Here, I can show you my identifications.”
Grudgingly, the face appeared around the edge of the door. I took my dog tags out of my pocket and held them to her. She grabbed them from me with a small hand like a bird’s claw and slammed the door. I heard her pattering inside, presumably taking the dog tags to the light. In a few moments, she was back. This time the chain clattered off the door and she opened it wide.
“O.K. I read the leetle tags. I see there Lieutenant Duluth.”
I stepped into the hall. She scurried round me and shut the door, slipping the chain in place. I had known from her voice that she was afraid, but now, alone with her in that cramped dark hall, I could sense the fear in her almost as if it were some invisible third person hovering at our side.
“Come.” She squeezed past me towards an open door which led to the lighted room. “Come, Lieutenant Duluth.”
I followed past a shadowy table on which vague white flowers gleamed in a vase. A few steps took me after her into the room. It was a small parlor full of threadbare furniture arranged with a rather pathet
ic neatness.
For the first time I could see Lina Oliver Wendell Holmes Brown. She was somewhere in her thirties—a tiny Italian thing with big black eyes and a fading prettiness. She must have been asleep or at least in bed when I rang, for she wore a little pink satin wrap over a little pink nightgown.
We stared at each other. The dread in her eyes was so marked that I was afraid to say anything, afraid that the wrong phrases or the wrong intonation might send her skittering away like a flushed phoebe bird. Hatch was right. I would have to handle this terrified little woman with infinite caution and gentleness if I was to persuade her to accompany me to the St. Anton.
“So!” The word came from her in a thin peep. “Eulalia Crawford send you, Lieutenant Duluth?”
“Yes,” I said warily. “I’m her cousin’s husband. She sent me to warn you.”
“Yes, yes.” The black eyes never left my face. I felt she was already beginning to wish she hadn’t let me in.
“She wants you to know—” I paused. “She wants you to know that the red rose and the white rose are out.”
Her hands gripped each other convulsively. The fear in her seemed to be an actual physical pain like a cancer.
“Yes, yes. I know. I keep myself here all the time shut up. The cat warn me.”
The cat! The white rose, the red rose, the elephant, the crocus—and now the cat. That’s what I liked about this case. It had so much natural history in it.
I wondered whether the cat was her name for the Beard. He was the obvious one to have warned her. And yet, what was catlike about him?
She was still staring. She wasn’t going to help the conversation along.
I said on a hazard: “Have you seen the cat recently?”
Lina shook her head.
“But he told you about the roses?”
“I already say.” The eyes flickered. “Why you ask these questions? What ees it that Eulalia want?”
“She thinks you’d both be safer if you kept together. She’s sent me to take you to her,” I lied. “She’s at the St. Anton. Here.” I felt in my breast pocket and brought out Eulalia’s letter. I handed it to her. “She wrote this.”
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