The front door slammed open, and Gooseneck Flinn came into the room.
His clothes were white with dust. His face was thrust forward to the full length of his long, yellow neck.
His shoe-button eyes focused on me. His hands turned over. That’s all you could see. They simply turned over—and there was a heavy revolver in each.
“Your paws on the table, Ed,” he snarled.
Ed’s gun—if that is what he had in his pocket—was blocked from a shot at the man in the doorway by a comer of the table. He took his hand out of his pocket, empty, and laid both palms down on the table-top.
“Stay where y’r at!” Gooseneck barked at the girl.
Gooseneck glared at me for nearly a minute.
When he spoke it was to Ed and Kewpie.
“So this is what y’ wired me to come back for, huh? A trap! Me the goat for yur! I’ll be y’r goat! I’m goin’ to speak my piece, an’ then I’m goin’ out o’ here if I have to smoke my way through the whole damn’ Mex army! I killed yur wife all right—an’ her help, too. Killed ’em for the thousand bucks—”
The girl took a step toward him, screaming:
“Shut up, damn you!”
“Shut up, yourself!” Gooseneck roared back at her, and his thumb raised the hammer of the gun that threatened her. “I’m doin’ the talkin’. I killed her for—”
Kewpie bent forward. Her left hand went under the hem of her skirt. The hand came up—empty. The flash from Gooseneck’s gun lit on a flying steel blade.
The girl spun back across the room—hammered back by the bullets that tore through her chest. Her back hit the wall. She pitched forward to the floor.
Gooseneck stopped shooting and tried to speak. The brown haft of the girl’s knife stuck out of his yellow throat. He couldn’t get his words past the blade. He dropped one gun and tried to take hold of the protruding haft. Halfway up to it his hand came, and dropped. He went down slowly—to his knees—hands and knees—rolled over on his side—and lay still.
I jumped for the Englishman. The revolver Gooseneck had dropped turned under my foot, spilling me sidewise. My hand brushed the Englishman’s coat, but he twisted away from me, and got his guns out.
His eyes were hard and cold and his mouth was shut until you could hardly see the slit of it. He backed slowly across the floor, while I lay still where I had tumbled. He didn’t make a speech. A moment of hesitation in the doorway. The door jerked open and shut. He was gone.
I scooped up the gun that had thrown me, sprang to Gooseneck’s side, tore the other gun out of his dead hand, and plunged into the street. The maroon roadster was trailing a cloud of dust into the desert behind it. Thirty feet from me stood a dirt-caked black touring car. That would be the one in which Gooseneck had driven back from Mexicali.
I jumped for it, climbed in, brought it to life, and pointed it at the dust-cloud ahead.
The car under me, I discovered, was surprisingly well engined for its battered looks—its motor was so good that I knew it was a border-runner’s car. I nursed it along, not pushing it. For half an hour or more the dust-cloud ahead and I held our respective positions, and then I found that I was gaining.
The going was roughening. Any road that we might originally have been using had petered out. I opened up a little, though the jars it cost me were vicious.
I missed a boulder that would have smashed me up—missed it by a hair—and looked ahead again to see that the maroon roadster was no longer stirring up the grit. It had stopped.
The roadster was empty. I kept on.
From behind the roadster a pistol snapped at me, three times. It would have taken good shooting to plug me at that instant. I was bouncing around in my seat like a pellet of quicksilver in a nervous man’s palm.
He fired again from the shelter of his car, and then dashed for a narrow arroyo—a sharp-edged, ten-foot crack in the earth—off to the left. On the brink, he wheeled to snap another cap at me—and jumped down out of sight.
I twisted the wheel in my hands, jammed on the brakes and slid the black touring car to the spot where I had seen him last. The edge of the arroyo was crumbling under my front wheels. I released the brake. Tumbled out.
The car plunged down into the gully after him.
Sprawled on my belly, one of Gooseneck’s guns in each hand, I wormed my head over the edge. On all fours, the Englishman was scrambling out of the way of the car. The car was mangled, but still sputtering. One of the man’s fists was bunched around a gun—mine.
“Drop it and stand up, Ed!” I yelled.
Snake-quick, he flung himself around in a sitting position on the arroyo bottom, swung his gun up—and I smashed his forearm with my second shot.
He was holding the wounded arm with his left hand when I slid down beside him, picked up the gun he had dropped, and frisked him to see if he had any more. Then twisting a handkerchief into a tourniquet of a sort, I knotted it around his wounded arm.
“Let’s go upstairs and talk,” I suggested, and helped him up the steep side of the gully.
We climbed into his roadster.
“Go ahead, talk your head off,” he invited, “but don’t expect me to add much to the conversation. You’ve got nothing on me. You saw Kewpie bump Gooseneck off to keep him from peaching on her.”
“So that’s your play?” I inquired. “The girl hired Gooseneck to kill your wife—out of jealousy—when she learned that you were planning to shake her and return to your own world?”
“Exactly.”
“Not bad, Ed, but there’s one rough spot in it. You are not Ashcraft!”
He jumped, and then laughed.
“Now your enthusiasm is getting the better of your judgment,” he kidded me. “Could I have deceived another man’s wife? Don’t you think her lawyer, Richmond, made me prove my identity?”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Ed, I think I’m a smarter baby than either of them. Suppose you had a lot of stuff that belonged to Ashcraft—papers, letters, things in his handwriting? If you were even a fair hand with a pen, you could have fooled his wife. As for the lawyer—his making you identify yourself was only a matter of form. It never occurred to him you weren’t Ashcraft.
“At first your game was to bleed Mrs. Ashcraft for an allowance—to take the cure. But after she closed out her affairs in England and came here, you decided to wipe her out and take everything. You knew she was an orphan and had no close relatives to come butting in. You knew it wasn’t likely that there were many people in America who could say you were not Ashcraft.”
“Where do you think Ashcraft would be while I was spending his money?”
“Dead,” I said.
That got to him, though he didn’t get excited. But his eyes became thoughtful behind his smile.
“You may be right, of course,” he drawled. “But even at that, I don’t see just how you expect to hang me. Can you prove that Kewpie didn’t think I was Ashcraft? Can you prove that she knew why Mrs. Ashcraft was sending me money? Can you prove that she knew anything about my game? I rather think not.”
“You may get away with it,” I admitted. “Juries are funny, and I don’t mind telling you that I’d be happier if I knew a few things about those murders that I don’t know. Do you mind telling me about the ins and outs of your switch with Ashcraft?”
He puckered his lips and then shrugged. “I’ll tell you. It won’t matter greatly. I’m due to go over for this impersonation, so a confession to a little additional larceny won’t matter.
“The hotel-sneak used to be my lay,” the Englishman said after a pause. “I came to the States after England and the Continent got uncomfortable. Then, one night in a Seattle hotel, I worked the tarrel and put myself into a room on the fourth floor. I had hardly closed the door behind me before another key was rattling in it. The room was night-dark. I risked a flash from my light, picked out a closet door, and got behind it.
“The clothes closet was empty; rather a stroke of luck, since there was nothi
ng in it for the room’s occupant to come for. He—it was a man—had switched on the lights by then.
“He began pacing the floor. He paced it for three solid hours—up and down, up and down, up and down—while I stood behind the closet door with my gun in my hand, in case he should pull it open. For three solid hours he paced that damned floor. Then he sat down and I heard a pen scratching on paper. Ten minutes of that and he was back at his pacing; but he kept it up for only a few minutes this time. I heard the latches of a valise click. And a shot!
“I bounded out of my retreat. He was stretched on the floor, with a hole in the side of his head. A bad break for me, and no mistake! I could hear excited voices in the corridor. I stepped over the dead chap, found the letter he had been writing on the writing-desk. It was addressed to Mrs. Norman Ashcraft at a Wine Street number in Bristol, England. I tore it open. He had written that he was going to kill himself, and it was signed Norman. I felt better. A murder couldn’t be made out of it.
“Nevertheless, I was here in this room with a flashlight, skeleton keys, and a gun—to say nothing of a handful of jewelry that I had picked up on the next floor. Somebody was knocking on the door.
“Get the police!” I called through the door, playing for time.
“Then I turned to the man who had let me in for all this. I would have pegged him for a fellow Britisher even if I hadn’t seen the address on his letter. There are thousands of us on the same order—blond, fairly tall, well set up. I took the only chance there was. His hat and topcoat were on a chair where he had tossed them. I put them on and dropped my hat beside him. Kneeling, I emptied his pockets, and my own, gave him all my stuff, pouched all of his. Then I traded guns with him and opened the door.
“What I had in mind was that the first arrivals might not know him by sight, or not well enough to recognize him immediately. That would give me several seconds to arrange my disappearance in. But when I opened the door I found that my idea wouldn’t work out as I had planned. The house detective was there, and a policeman, and I knew I was licked. But I played my hand out. I told them I had come up to my room and found this chap on the floor going through my belongings. I had seized him, and in the struggle had shot him.
“Minutes went by like hours, and nobody denounced me. People were calling me Mr. Ashcraft. My impersonation was succeeding. It had me gasping then, but after I learned more about Ashcraft it wasn’t so surprising. He had arrived at the hotel only that afternoon, and no one had seen him except in his hat and coat—the hat and coat I was wearing. We were of the same size and type—typical blond Englishmen.
“Then I got another surprise. When the detective examined the dead man’s clothes he found that the maker’s labels had been ripped out. When I got a look at his diary, later, I found the explanation of that. He had been tossing mental coins with himself, alternating between a determination to kill himself, and another to change his name and make a new place for himself in the world. It was while he was considering the second plan that he had removed the markers from all of his clothing. But I didn’t know that while I stood there among those people. All I knew was that miracles were happening.
“I had to talk small just then, but after I went through the dead man’s stuff I knew him inside and outside, backward and forward. He had nearly a bushel of papers, and a diary that had everything he had ever done or thought in it. I put in the first night studying those things—memorizing them—and practicing his signature.
Among the other things I had taken from his pockets were fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks, and I wanted to cash them in the morning.
“I stayed in Seattle for three days—as Norman Ashcraft. I had tumbled on to something rich and I wasn’t going to throw it away. The letter to his wife should keep me from being charged with murder if anything slipped, and I knew I was safer seeing the thing through than running. When the excitement had quieted down I packed up and came down to San Francisco, resuming my own name—Edward Bohannon. But I held onto all of Ashcraft’s property, because I had learned from it that his wife had money, and I knew I could get some of it if I played my cards right. She saved me the trouble. I ran across one of her advertisements in the Examiner, answered it, and—here we are.”
“But you didn’t have Mrs. Ashcraft killed?”
He shook his head.
I took a package of cigarettes out of my pocket and put two of them on the seat between us.
“Suppose we play a game. This is just for my own satisfaction. It won’t tie anybody to anything—won’t prove anything. If you did a certain thing, pick up the cigarette that is nearer me. If you didn’t, pick up the one nearer you. Will you play?”
“No, I won’t,” he said emphatically. “I don’t like your game. But I do want a cigarette.”
He reached out his uninjured arm and picked up the cigarette nearer me.
“Thanks, Ed,” I said. “Now I hate to tell you this, but I’m going to swing you.”
“You’re balmy, my son.”
“You’re thinking of the San Francisco job, Ed,” I explained. “I’m talking about Seattle. You, a hotel sneak-thief, were discovered in a room with a man who had just died with a bullet in his head. What do you think a jury will make out of that, Ed?”
He laughed at me. And then something went wrong with the laugh. It faded into a sickly grin.
“Of course you did,” I said. “When you started to work out your plan to inherit all of Mrs. Ashcraft’s wealth by having her killed, the first thing you did was to destroy that suicide letter of her husband’s. No matter how carefully you guarded it, there was always a chance that somebody would stumble onto it and knock your game on the head. It had served its purpose—you wouldn’t need it. It would be foolish to chance it turning up.
“I can’t put you up for the murders you engineered in San Francisco; but I can sock you with the one you didn’t do in Seattle—so justice won’t be cheated. You’re going to Seattle, Ed, to hang for Ashcraft’s suicide.” And he did.
WHO KILLED BOB TEAL?
“Teal was killed last night.”
The Old Man—the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco manager—spoke without looking at me. His voice was as mild as his smile, and gave no indication of the turmoil that was seething in his mind.
If I kept quiet, waiting for the Old Man to go on, it wasn’t because the news didn’t mean anything to me. I had been fond of Bob Teal—we all had. He had come to the Agency fresh from college two years before; and if ever a man had the makings of a crack detective in him, this slender, broad-shouldered lad had. Two years is little enough time in which to pick up the first principles of sleuthing, but Bob Teal, with his quick eye, cool nerve, balanced head, and whole-hearted interest in the work, was already well along the way to expertness. I had an almost fatherly interest in him, since I had given him most of his early training.
The Old Man didn’t look at me as he went on. He was talking to the open window at his elbow.
“He was shot with a thirty-two, twice, through the heart. He was shot behind a row of signboards on the vacant lot on the northwest corner of Hyde and Eddy Streets, at about ten last night. His body was found by a patrolman a little after eleven. The gun was found about fifteen feet away. I have seen him and I have gone over the ground myself. The rain last night wiped out any leads the ground may have held, but from the condition of Teal’s clothing and the position in which he was found, I would say that there was no struggle, and that he was shot where he was found, and not carried there afterward. He was lying behind the signboards, about thirty feet from the sidewalk, and his hands were empty. The gun was held close enough to him to singe the breast of his coat. Apparently no one either saw or heard the shooting. The rain and wind would have kept pedestrians off the street, and would have deadened the reports of a thirty-two, which are not especially loud, anyway.”
The Old Man’s pencil began to tap the desk, its gentle clicking setting my nerves on edge. Prese
ntly it stopped, and the Old Man went on:
“Teal was shadowing a Herbert Whitacre—had been shadowing him for three days. Whitacre is one of the partners in the firm Ogburn and Whitacre, farm-development engineers. They have options on a large area of land in several of the new irrigation districts. Ogburn handles the sales end, while Whitacre looks after the rest of the business, including the bookkeeping.
“Last week Ogburn discovered that his partner had been making false entries. The books show certain payments made on the land, and Ogburn learned that these payments had not been made. He estimates that the amount of Whitacre’s thefts may be anywhere from one hundred fifty to two hundred fifty thousand dollars. He came in to see me three days ago and told me all this, and wanted to have Whitacre shadowed in an endeavour to learn what he has done with the stolen money. Their firm is still a partnership, and a partner cannot be prosecuted for stealing from the partnership, of course. Thus, Ogburn could not have his partner arrested, but he hoped to find the money, and then recover it through civil action. Also he was afraid that Whitacre might disappear.
“I sent Teal out to shadow Whitacre, who supposedly didn’t know that his partner suspected him. Now I am sending you out to find Whitacre. I’m determined to find him and convict him if I have to let all regular business go and put every man I have on this job for a year. You can get Teal’s reports from the clerks. Keep in touch with me.”
All that, from the Old Man, was more than an ordinary man’s oath written in blood.
In the clerical office I got the two reports Bob had turned in. There was none for the last day, of course, as he would not have written that until after he had quit work for the night. The first of these two reports had already been copied and a copy sent to Ogburn; a typist was working on the other now.
In his reports Bob had described Whitacre as a man of about thirty-seven, with brown hair and eyes, a nervous manner, a smooth-shaven, medium-complexioned face, and rather small feet. He was about five feet eight inches tall, weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds, and dressed fashionably, though quietly. He lived with his wife in an apartment on Gough Street. They had no children. Ogburn had given Bob a description of Mrs. Whitacre: a short, plump, blond woman of something less than thirty.
Crime Stories Page 47