“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 go 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 Richter’s mouth.
“I’ll be damned if I will!”
Both of them looked furtively over their shoulders, and they lowered their voices again, but not for long. The woman was apparently trying to persuade him to do something. He kept shaking his head. He put a hand on her arm. She pushed it away, and kept on whispering.
He said aloud, deliberately:
“Go ahead, if you want to be a fool. It’s your neck. I didn’t put the knife in him.”
She jumped away from him, her eyes black blazes in a white face. O’Gar and I moved softly toward them.
“You rat!” she spat at Richter, and spun to face us.
“I killed him!” she cried. “This thing in the chair tried to and—”
Richter swung the hickory stick.
I jumped for it—missed—crashed into the back of his chair. Hickory stick, Richter, chair, and I sprawled together on the floor. The corporal helped me up. He and I picked Richter up and put him on the davenport again.
The woman’s story poured out of her angry mouth:
“His name wasn’t Molloy. It was Lange, Sam Lange. I married him in Providence in 1913 and went to China with him—to Canton, where he had a position with a steamship line. We didn’t stay there long, because he got into some trouble through being mixed up in the revolution that year. After that we drifted around, mostly around Asia.
“We met this thing”—she pointed at the now sullenly quiet Richter—“in Singapore, in 1919, I think—right after the World War was over. His name is Holley, and Scotland Yard can tell you something about him. He had a proposition. He knew of a gem-bed in upper Burma, one of many that were hidden from the British when they took the country. He knew the natives who were working it, knew where they were hiding their gems.
“My husband went in wi
th him, with two other men that were killed. They looted the natives’ cache, and got away with a whole sackful of sapphires, topazes and even a few rubies. The two other men were killed by the natives and my husband was badly wounded.
“We didn’t think he could live. We were hiding in a hut near the Yunnan border. Holley persuaded me to take the gems and run away with them. It looked as if Sam was done for, and if we stayed there long we’d be caught. I can’t say that I was crazy about Sam anyway; he wasn’t the kind you would be, after living with him for a while.
“So Holley and I took it and lit out. We had to use a lot of the stones to buy our way through Yunnan and Kwangsi and Kwangtung, but we made it. We got to San Francisco with enough to buy this house and the movie theater, and we’ve been here since. We’ve been honest since we came here, but I don’t suppose that means anything. We had enough money to keep us comfortable.
“Today Sam showed up. We hadn’t heard of him since we left him on his back in Burma. He said he’d been caught and jailed for three years. Then he’d got away, and had spent the other three hunting for us. He was that kind. He didn’t want me back, but he did want money. He wanted everything we had. Holley lost his nerve. Instead of bargaining with Sam, he lost his head and tried to shoot him.
“Sam took his gun away from him and shot him in the leg. In the scuffle Sam had dropped a knife—a kris, I think. I picked it up, but he grabbed me just as I got it. I don’t know how it happened. All I saw was Sam staggering back, holding his chest with both hands—and the kris shining red in my hand.
“Sam had dropped his gun. Holley got it and was all for shooting Sam, but I wouldn’t let him. It happened in this room. I don’t remember whether I gave Sam the sarong we used for a cover on the table or not. Anyway, he tried to stop the blood with it. He went away then, while I kept Holley from shooting him.
“I knew Sam wouldn’t go to the police, but I didn’t know what he’d do. And I knew he was hurt bad. If he dropped dead somewhere, the chances are he’d be traced here. I watched from a window as he went down the street, and nobody seemed to pay any attention to him, but he looked so conspicuously wounded to me that I thought everybody would be sure to remember him if it got into the papers that he had been found dead somewhere.
“Holley was even more scared than I. We couldn’t run away, because he had a shot leg. So we made up that Siamese story, and I went over to Oakland, and bought the table cover to take the place of the sarong. We had some guns and even a few oriental knives and swords here. I wrapped them up in paper, breaking the swords, and dropped them off the ferry when I went to Oakland.
“When the morning papers came out we read what had happened, and then we went ahead with what we had planned. We burned the suit Holley had worn when he was shot, and his garters—because the pants had a bullet-hole in them, and the bullet had cut one garter. We fixed a hole in his pajama-leg, unbandaged his leg,—I had fixed it as well as I could,—and washed away the clotted blood until it began to bleed again. Then I gave the alarm.”
She raised both hands in a gesture of finality and made a clucking sound with her tongue.
“And there you are,” she said.
“You got anything to say?” I asked Holley, who was staring at his bandaged leg.
“To my lawyer,” he said without looking up.
O’Gar spoke to the corporal.
“The wagon, Flynn.”
Ten minutes later we were in the street, helping Holley and the woman into a police car.
Around the corner on the other side of the street came three brown-skinned men, apparently Malay sailors. The one in the middle seemed to be drunk, and the other two were supporting him. One of them had a package that could have held a bottle under his arm.
O’Gar looked from them to me and laughed.
“We wouldn’t be doing a thing to those babies right now if we had fallen for that yarn, would we?” he whispered.
“Shut up, you, you big heap!” I growled back, nodding at Holley, who was in the car by now. “If that bird sees them he’ll identify ‘em as his Siamese, and God knows what a jury would make of it!”
We made the puzzled driver twist the car six blocks out of his way to be sure we’d miss the brown men. It was worth it, because nothing interfered with the twenty years apiece that Holley and Mrs. Lange drew.
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CURSE IN THE OLD MANNER
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THE MAIN DEATH
The Captain told me Hacken and Begg were handling the job. I caught them leaving the detectives’ assembly room. Begg was a freckled heavyweight, as friendly as a Saint Bernard puppy, but less intelligent. Lanky detective-sergeant Hacken, not so playful, carried the team’s brains behind his worried hatchet face.
“In a hurry?” I inquired.
“Always in a hurry when we’re quitting for the day,” Begg said, his freckles climbing up his face to make room for his grin.
“What do you want?” Hacken asked.
“I want the low-down on the Main doings—if any.”
“You going to work on it?”
“Yes,” I said, “for Main’s boss—Gungen.”
“Then you can tell us something. Why’d he have the twenty thou in cash?”
“Tell you in the morning,” I promised. “I haven’t seen Gungen yet. Got a date with him tonight.”
While we talked we had gone into the assembly room, with its schoolroom arrangement of desks and benches. Half a dozen police detectives were scattered among them, doing reports. We three sat around Hacken’s desk and the lanky detective-sergeant talked:
“Main got home from Los Angeles at eight, Sunday night, with twenty thousand in his wallet. He’d gone down there to sell something for Gungen. You find out why he had that much in cash. He told his wife he had driven up from L.A. with a friend—no name. She went to bed around ten-thirty, leaving him reading. He had the money—two hundred hundred-dollar bills—in a brown wallet.
“So far, so good. He’s in the living-room reading. She’s in the bedroom sleeping. J
ust the two of them in the apartment. A racket wakes her. She jumps out of bed, runs into the living-room. There’s Main wrestling with a couple of men. One’s tall and husky. The other’s little—kind of girlish built. Both have got black handkerchiefs over their mugs and caps pulled down.
“When Mrs. Main shows, the little one breaks away from Main and sticks her up. Puts a gun in Mrs. Main’s face and tells her to behave. Main and the other guy are still scuffing. Main has got his gun in his hand, but the thug has him by the wrist, trying to twist it. He makes it pretty soon—Main drops the rod. The thug flashes his own, holding Main off while he bends down to pick up the one that fell.
“When the man stoops, Main piles on him. He manages to knock the fellow’s gun out of his hand, but by that time the fellow had got the one on the floor—the one Main had dropped. They’re heaped up there for a couple of seconds. Mrs. Main can’t see what’s happening. Then bang! Main’s falling away, his vest burning where the shot had set fire to it, a bullet in his heart, his gun smoking in the masked guy’s fist. Mrs. Main passes out.
“When she comes to there’s nobody in the apartment but herself and her dead husband. His wallet’s gone, and so is his gun. She was unconscious for about half an hour. We know that, because other people heard the shot and could give us the time—even if they didn’t know where it came from.
“The Mains’ apartment is on the sixth floor. It’s an eight-story building. Next door to it, on the comer of Eighteenth Avenue, is a two-story building—grocery downstairs, grocer’s flat upstairs. Behind these buildings runs a narrow back street—an alley. All right.
“Kinney—the patrolman on that beat—was walking down Eighteenth Avenue. He heard the shot. It was clear to him, because the Mains’ apartment is on that side of the building—the side overlooking the grocer’s—but Kinney couldn’t place it right away. He wasted time scouting around up the street. By the time he got down as far as the alley in his hunting, the birds had flown. Kinney found signs of ’em though—they had dropped a gun in the alley—the gun they’d taken from Main and shot him with. But Kinney didn’t see ’em—didn’t see anybody who might have been them.
Crime Stories Page 70