“Meanwhile she closed up her affairs in England—she had no close relatives to hold her there—and came to San Francisco, to be on hand when her husband was ready to return to her. A year has gone. She still sends him money each month. She still waits for him to come back to her. He has repeatedly refused to see her, and his letters are evasive—filled with accounts of the struggle he is having, making headway against the drug one month, slipping back the next.
“She suspects by now, of course, that he has no intention of ever coming back to her; that he does not intend giving up the drug; that he is simply using her as a source of income. I have urged her to discontinue the monthly allowance for a while. But she will not do that. You see, she blames herself for his present condition. She thinks her foolish flare of jealousy is responsible for his plight, and she is afraid to do anything that might either hurt him or induce him to hurt himself further. Her mind is unchangeably made up in that respect. She wants him back, wants him straightened out; but if he will not come, then she is content to continue the payments for the rest of his life. But she wants to know what she is to expect. She wants to end this devilish uncertainty in which she has been living.
“What we want, then, is for you to find Ashcraft. We want to know whether there is any likelihood of his ever becoming a man again, or whether he is gone beyond redemption. There is your job. Find him, learn whatever you can about him, and then, after we know something, we’ll decide whether it’s wiser to force an interview between them—in hopes that she will be able to influence him—or not.”
“I’ll try it,” I said. “When does Mrs. Ashcraft send him his monthly allowance?”
“On the first of each month.”
‘Today is the twenty-eighth. That’ll give me three days to wind up a job I have on hand. Got a photo of him?”
“Unfortunately, no. In her anger immediately after their row, Mrs. Ashcraft destroyed everything she had that would remind her of him.”
I got up and reached for my hat.
“See you around the second of the month,” I said, as I left the office.
On the afternoon of the first, I went down to the post office and got hold of Lusk, the inspector in charge of the division at the time.
“I’ve got a line on a scratcher from up north,” I told Lusk, “who is supposed to be getting his mail at the window. Will you fix it up so I can get a spot on him?”
Post office inspectors are all tied up with rules and regulations that forbid their giving assistance to private detectives except on certain criminal matters. But a friendly inspector doesn’t have to put you through the third degree. You lie to him—so that he will have an alibi in case there’s a kick-back—and whether he thinks you’re lying or not doesn’t matter.
So presently I was downstairs again, loitering within sight of the A to D window, with the clerk at the window instructed to give me the office when Ashcraft’s mail was called for. There was no mail for him there at the time. Mrs. Ashcraft’s letter would hardly get to the clerks that afternoon, but I was taking no chances. I stayed on the job until the windows closed.
At a few minutes after ten the next morning I got my action. One of the clerks gave me the signal. A small man in a blue suit and a soft gray hat was walking away from the window with an envelope in his hand. A man of perhaps forty years, though he looked older. His face was pasty, his feet dragged, and his clothes needed brushing and pressing.
He came straight to the desk in front of which I stood fiddling with some papers. He took a large envelope from his pocket, and I got just enough of a glimpse of its front to see that it was already stamped and addressed. He kept the addressed side against his body, put the letter he had got from the window in it, and licked the flap backward, so that there was no possible way for anybody to see the front of the envelope. Then he rubbed the flap down carefully and turned toward the mailing slots. I went after him. There was nothing to do but to pull the always reliable stumble.
I overtook him, stepped close and faked a fall on the marble floor, bumping into him, grabbing him as if to regain my balance. It went rotten. In the middle of my stunt my foot really did slip, and we went down on the floor like a pair of wrestlers.
I scrambled up, yanked him to his feet, mumbled an apology and almost had to push him out of the way to beat him to the envelope that lay face down on the floor. I had to turn it over as I handed it to him in order to get the address:
Mr. Edward Bohannon,
Golden Horseshoe Cafe,
Tijuana, Baja California,
Mexico
I had the address, but I had tipped my mitt. There was no way in God’s world for this little man in blue to miss knowing that I had been trying to get that address.
I dusted myself off while he put his envelope through a slot. He didn’t come back past me, but went on down toward the Mission Street exit. I couldn’t let him get away with what he knew. I didn’t want Ashcraft tipped off before I got to him. I would have to try another trick as ancient as the one the slippery floor had bungled for me. I set out after the little man again.
Just as I reached his side he turned his head to see if he was being followed.
“Hello, Micky!” I hailed him. “How’s everything in Chi?”
“You got me wrong.” He spoke out of the side of his gray-lipped mouth, not stopping. “I don’t know nothin’ about Chi.”
His eyes were pale blue, with needlepoint pupils—the eyes of a heroin or morphine user.
“Quit stalling,” I said. “You fell off the rattler only this morning.”
He stopped on the sidewalk and faced me.
“Me? Who do you think I am?”
“You’re Micky Parker. The Dutchman gave us the rap that you were headed here.”
“You’re cuckoo,” he sneered. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about!”
That was nothing—neither did I. I raised my right hand in my overcoat pocket.
“Now I’ll tell one,” I growled.
He flinched away from my bulging pocket.
“Hey, listen, brother!” he begged. “You got me wrong—on the level. My name ain’t Micky Parker, an’ I been here in Frisco for a solid year.”
“You got to show me.”
“I can do it,” he exclaimed, all eagerness. “You come down the drag with me, an’ I’ll show you. My name’s Ryan, an’ I been livin’ aroun’ the comer here on Sixth Street.”
“Ryan?” I asked.
“Yes—John Ryan.”
I chalked that up against him. I don’t suppose there are three old-time yeggs in the country who haven’t used the name at least once; it’s the John Smith of yeggdom.
This particular John Ryan led me around to a house on Sixth Street, where the landlady—a rough-hewn woman of fifty, with bare arms that were haired and muscled like the village smithy’s—assured me that her tenant had to her positive knowledge been in San Francisco for months, and that she remembered seeing him at least once a day for a couple of weeks back. If I had been really suspicious that this Ryan was my mythical Micky Parker from Chicago, I wouldn’t have taken the woman’s word for it, but as it was I pretended to be satisfied.
That seemed to be all right then. Mr. Ryan had been led astray, had been convinced that I had mistaken him for another crook, and that I was not interested in the Ashcraft letter. I would be safe—reasonably safe—in letting the situation go as it stood. But loose ends worry me. This bird was a hop-head, and he had given me a phony-sounding name, so . . .
“What do you do for a living?” I asked him.
“I ain’t been doin’ nothin’ for a coupla months,” he pattered, “but I expec’ to open a lunch room with a fella nex’ week.”
“Let’s go up to your room,” I suggested. “I want to talk to you.”
He wasn’t enthusiastic, but he took me up. He had two rooms and a kitchen on the third floor. They were dirty, foul-smelling rooms.
“Where’s Ashcraft?” I threw at him.
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” he mumbled.
“You’d better figure it out,” I advised him, “or there’s a nice cool cell down at the booby-hatch that will be wrapped around you.”
“You ain’t got nothin’ on me.”
“What of that? How’d you like to do a thirty or a sixty on a vag charge?”
“Vag, hell!” he snarled. “I got five hundred smacks in my kick.”
I grinned at him.
“You know better than that, Ryan. A pocketful of money’ll get you nothing in California. You’ve got no job. You can’t show where your money comes from. You’re made to order for the vag law.”
I had this bird figured as a dope peddler. If he was—or was anything else off color that might come to light when he was vagged—the chances were that he would be willing to sell Ashcraft out to save himself; especially since, so far as I knew, Ashcraft wasn’t on the wrong side of the criminal law.
“If I were you,” I went on while he stared at the floor and thought, “I’d be a nice, obliging fellow and do my talking now. You’re—”
He twisted sidewise in his chair and one of his hands went behind him.
I kicked him out of his chair.
The table slipped under me or I would have stretched him. As it was, that shot that I aimed at his jaw took him on the chest and carried him over backward, with the rocking-chair piled on top of him. I pulled the chair off and took his gun—a cheap nickleplated .32. Then I went back to my seat on the corner of the table.
He had only that one flash of fight in him. He got up sniveling.
“I’ll tell you. I don’t want no trouble. This Ashcraft told me he was jus’ stringin’ his wife along. He give me ten bucks a throw to get his letter ever’ month an’ send it to him in Tijuana. I knowed him here, an’ when he went south six months ago—he’s got a girl down there—I promised I’d do it for him. I knowed it was money—he said it was his ‘alimony’—but I didn’t know there was somethin’ wrong.”
“What sort of a hombre is this Ashcraft? What’s his graft?”
“I don’t know. He could be a con man—he’s got a good front. He’s a Englishman, an’ mostly goes by the name of Ed Bohannon. He hits the hop. I don’t use it myself”—that was a good one—“but you know how it is in a burg like this, a man runs into all kinds of people. I don’t know nothin’ about what he’s up to.”
That was all I could get out of him. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me where Ashcraft had lived in San Francisco or who he had mobbed up with.
Ryan squawked his head off when he found that I was going to vag him.
“You said you’d spring me if I talked,” he wailed.
“I did not. But if I had—when a gent flashes a rod on me I figure it cancels any agreement we might have had. Come on.”
I couldn’t afford to let him run around loose until I got in touch with Ashcraft.
He would have been sending a telegram before I was three blocks away, and my quarry would be on his merry way to points north, east, south and west.
It was a good hunch I played in nabbing Ryan. When he was fingerprinted at the Hall of Justice he turned out to be one Fred Rooney, alias “Jamocha,” a peddler and smuggler who had crushed out of the Federal Prison at Leavenworth, leaving eight years of a tenner still unserved.
“Will you sew him up for a couple of days?” I asked the captain of the city jail. “I’ve got work to do that will go smoother if he can’t get any word out for a while.”
“Sure,” the captain promised. “The federal people won’t take him off our hands for two or three days. I’ll keep him airtight till then.”
From the jail I went up to Vance Richmond’s office and turned my news over to him.
“Ashcraft is getting his mail in Tijuana. He’s living down there under the name of Ed Bohannon, and maybe has a woman there. I’ve just thrown one of his friends—the one who handled the mail and an escaped con—in the cooler.”
The attorney reached for the telephone.
He called a number. “Is Mrs. Ashcraft there? . . . This is Mr. Richmond . . . No, we haven’t exactly found him, but I think we know where he is . . . Yes . . . In about fifteen minutes.”
He put down the telephone and stood up.
“We’ll run up to Mrs. Ashcraft’s house and see her.” Fifteen minutes later we were getting out of Richmond’s car in Jackson Street near Gough. The house was a three-story white stone building, set behind a carefully sodded little lawn with an iron railing around it.
Mrs. Ashcraft received us in a drawing-room on the second floor. A tall woman of less than thirty, slimly beautiful in a gray dress. Clear was the word that best fit her; it described the blue of her eyes, the pink-white of her skin, and the light brown of her hair.
Richmond introduced me to her, and then I told her what I had learned, omitting the part about the woman in Tijuana. Nor did I tell her that the chances were her husband was a crook nowadays.
“Mr. Ashcraft is in Tijuana, I have been told. He
left San Francisco six months ago. His mail is being forwarded to him in care of a cafe there, under the name of Edward Bohannon.”
Her eyes lighted up happily, but she didn’t throw a fit. She wasn’t that sort. She addressed the attorney: “Shall I go down? Or will you?”
Richmond shook his head.
“Neither. You certainly shouldn’t go, and I cannot—not at present.” He turned to me. “You’ll have to go. You can no doubt handle it better than I could. You will know what to do and how to do it. Mrs. Ashcraft doesn’t wish to force herself on him, but neither does she wish to leave anything undone that might help him.” Mrs. Ashcraft held a strong, slender hand out to me. “You will do whatever you think wisest.”
It was partly a question, partly an expression of confidence.
“I will,” I promised.
I liked this Mrs. Ashcraft.
Tijuana hadn’t changed much in the two years I had been away. Still the same six or seven hundred feet of dusty and dingy street running between two almost solid rows of saloons, with dirtier side streets taking care of the dives that couldn’t find room on the main street.
The automobile that had brought me down from San Diego dumped me into the center of the town early in the afternoon, and the day’s business was just getting under way. That is, there were only two or three drunks wandering around among the dogs and loafing Mexicans in the street, although there was already a bustle of potential drunks moving from one saloon to the next.
In the middle of the next block I saw a big gilded horseshoe. I went down the street and into the saloon behind the sign. It was a fair sample of the local joint A bar on your left as you came in, running half the length of the building, with three or four slot machines on one end. Across from the bar, against the right-hand wall, a dance floor that ran from the front wall to a raised platform, where a greasy orchestra was now preparing to go to work. Behind the orchestra was a row of low stalls or booths, with open fronts and a table and two benches apiece.
It was early in the day, and there were only a few buyers present. I caught a bartender’s eye. He was a beefy, red-faced Irishman, with sorrel hair plastered down in two curls that hid what little forehead he had.
“I want to see Ed Bohannon,” I told him confidentially.
He turned blank eyes on me.
“I don’t know no Ed Bohannon.”
Taking out a piece of paper and a pencil I scribbled, Jamocha is copped, and slid the paper over to him.
“If a man who says he’s Ed Bohannon asks for that, will you give it to him?”
“I guess so.”
“Good,” I said. “I’ll hang around a while.”
I walked down the room and sat at a table in one of the stalls. A lanky girl who had done something to her hair that made it purple was camped beside me before I had settled in my seat.
“Buy me a little drink?” she asked.
The face she made
at me was probably meant for a smile. Whatever it was, it beat me. I was afraid she’d do it again, so I surrendered.
“Yes,” I said, and ordered a bottle of beer for myself from the waiter who was already hanging over my shoulder.
The purple-haired woman at my side downed her shot of whiskey, and was opening her mouth to suggest that we have another drink—hustlers down there don’t waste any time at all—when a voice spoke from behind me.
“Cora, Frank wants you.”
Cora scowled, looking over my shoulder.
Then she made that damned face at me again, said “All right, Kewpie. Will you take care of my friend here?” and left me.
Kewpie slid into the seat beside me. She was a little chunky girl of perhaps eighteen—not a day more than that. Just a kid. Her short hair was brown and curly over a round, boyish face with laughing, impudent eyes.
I bought her a drink and got another bottle of beer.
“What’s on your mind?” I asked.
“Hooch.” She grinned at me—a grin that was as boyish as the straight look of her brown eyes. “Gallons Of it.”
“And besides that?”
I knew this switching of girls on me hadn’t been purposeless.
“I hear you’re looking for a friend of mine,” Kewpie said.
“That might be. What friends have you got?”
“Well, there’s Ed Bohannon for one. You know Ed?”
“No—not yet.”
“But you’re looking for him?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s the racket? Maybe I could get word to Ed.”
“Let it go,” I bluffed. “This Ed of yours seem to be as exclusive as all hell. Well, it’s no skin off my face. I’ll buy you another drink and trot along.”
She jumped up.
“Wait a minute. I’ll see if I can get him. What’s your name?”
Crime Stories Page 44