Tisano had been arrested at one o’clock. At a little after two o’clock, a white man who gave his name as Henry Somerton had appeared and had tried to bail the Negro out. The desk sergeant had told Somerton that nothing could be done till morning, and that, anyway, it would be better to let Tisano sleep off his jag before removing him. Somerton had readily agreed to that, had remained talking to the desk sergeant for more than half an hour, and had left at about three. At ten o’clock that morning he had reappeared to pay the black man’s fine. They had gone away together.
The San Pedro police said that Sherry’s photograph—without the mustache—and description were Henry Somerton’s.
Henry Somerton’s signature on the register of the hotel to which he had gone between his two visits to the police matched the handwriting in Sherry’s note to the bungalow’s owner.
It was pretty clear that Sherry and Marcus had been in San Pedro—a nine-hour train ride from Farewell—at the time that Kavalov was murdered.
Pretty clear isn’t quite clear enough in a murder job: I carried the San Pedro desk sergeant north with me for a look at the two men.
“Them’s them, all righty,” he said.
8
The district attorney ate up the rest of his thumb nails.
The sheriff had the bewildered look of a child who had held a balloon in his hand, had heard a pop, and couldn’t understand where the balloon had gone.
I pretended I was perfectly satisfied.
“Now we’re back where we started,” the district attorney wailed disagreeably, as if it was everybody’s fault but his, “and with all those weeks wasted.”
The sheriff didn’t look at the district attorney, and didn’t say anything.
I said:
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. We’ve made some progress.”
“What?”
“We know that Sherry and the servant have alibis.”
The district attorney seemed to think I was trying to kid him. I didn’t pay any attention to the faces he made at me, and asked:
“What are you going to do with them?”
“What can I do with them but turn them loose? This shoots the case to hell.”
“It doesn’t cost the county much to feed them,” I suggested. “Why not hang on to them as long as you can, while we think it over? Something new may turn up, and you can always drop the case if nothing does. You don’t think they’re innocent, do you?”
He gave me a look that was heavy and sour with pity for my stupidity.
“They’re guilty as hell, but what good’s that to me if I can’t get a conviction? And what’s the good of saying I’ll hold them? Damn it, man, you know as well as I do that all they’ve got to do now is ask for their release and any judge will hand it to them.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’ll bet you the best hat in San Francisco that they don’t ask for it.”
“What do you mean?”
“They want to stand trial,” I said, “or they’d have sprung that alibi before we dug it up. I’ve an idea that they tipped off the Spokane police themselves. And I’ll bet you that hat that you get no habeas corpus motions out of Schaeffer.”
The district attorney peered suspiciously into my eyes.
“Do you know something that you’re holding back?” he demanded.
“No, but you’ll see I’m right.”
I was right. Schaeffer went around smiling to himself and making no attempt to get his clients out of the county prison.
Three days later something new turned up.
A man named Archibald Weeks, who had a small chicken farm some ten miles south of the Kavalov place, came to see the district attorney. Weeks said he had seen Sherry on his—Weeks’s—place early on the morning of the murder.
Weeks had been leaving for Iowa that morning to visit his parents. He had got up early to see that everything was in order before driving twenty miles to catch an early morning train.
At somewhere between half-past five and six o’clock he had gone to the shed where he kept his car, to see if it held enough gasoline for the trip.
A man ran out of the shed, vaulted the fence, and dashed away down the road. Weeks chased him for a short distance, but the other was too speedy for him. The man was too well-dressed for a hobo: Weeks supposed he had been trying to steal the car.
Since Weeks’s trip east was a necessary one, and during his absence his wife would have only their two sons—one seventeen, one fifteen—there with her, he had thought it wisest not to frighten her by saying anything about the man he had surprised in the shed.
He had returned from Iowa the day before his appearance in the district attorney’s office, and after hearing the details of the Kavalov murder, and seeing Sherry’s picture in the papers, had recognized him as the man he had chased.
We showed him Sherry in person. He said Sherry was the man. Sherry said nothing.
With Weeks’s evidence to refute the San Pedro police’s, the district attorney let the case against Sherry come to trial. Marcus was held as a material witness, but there was nothing to weaken his San Pedro alibi, so he was not tried.
Weeks told his story straight and simply on the witness stand, and then, under cross-examination, blew up with a loud bang. He went to pieces completely.
He wasn’t, he admitted in answer to Schaeffer’s questions, quite as sure that Sherry was the man as he had been before. The man had certainly, the little he had seen of him, looked something like Sherry, but perhaps he had been a little hasty in saying positively that it was Sherry. He wasn’t, now that he had had time to think it over, really sure that he had actually got a good look at the man’s face in the dim morning light. Finally, all that Weeks would swear to was that he had seen a man who had seemed to look a little bit like Sherry.
It was funny as hell.
The district attorney, having no nails left, nibbled his fingerbones.
The jury said, “Not guilty.”
Sherry was freed, forever in the clear as far as the Kavalov murder was concerned, no matter what might come to light later.
Marcus was released.
The district attorney wouldn’t say good-by to me when I left for San Francisco.
9
Four days after Sherry’s acquittal, Mrs. Ringgo was shown into my office.
She was in black. Her pretty, unintelligent, Oriental face was not placid.
“Please, you won’t tell Dolph I have come here?” were the first words she spoke.
“Of course not, if you say not,” I promised.
She sat down and looked big-eyed at me.
“He’s so reckless,” she said.
I nodded sympathetically, wondering what she was up to.
“And I’m afraid,” she added, twisting her gloves. Her chin trembled. Her lips formed words jerkily: “They’ve come back to the bungalow.”
“Yeah?” I sat up straight. I knew who they were.
“They can’t,” she cried, “have come back for any reason except that they mean to murder Dolph as they did Father. And he won’t listen to me. He’s so sure of himself. He laughs and calls me a foolish child, and tells me he can take care of himself. But he can’t. Not, at least, with a broken arm. And they’ll kill him as they killed Father. I know it. I know it.”
“Sherry hates your husband as much as he hated your father?”
“Yes. That’s it. He does. Dolph was working for Father, but Dolph’s part in the—the business that led up to Hugh’s trouble was more—more active than father’s. Will you—will you keep them from killing Dolph? Will you?”
“Surely.”
“And you mustn’t let Dolph know,” she insisted, “and if he does find out you’re watching them, you mustn’t tell him I got you to. He’d be angry with me. I asked him to send for you, but he—” She broke off, looking embarrassed: I supposed her husband had mentioned my lack of success in keeping Kavalov alive. “But he wouldn’t.”
“How long have they been back?”
“Since
the day before yesterday.”
“I’ll be down tomorrow,” I promised. “If you’ll take my advice you’ll tell your husband that you’ve employed me, but I won’t tell him if you don’t.”
“And you won’t let him harm Dolph?”
I promised to do my best, took some money away from her, gave her a receipt, and bowed her out.
Shortly after dark that evening I reached Farewell.
10
The bungalow’s windows were lighted when I passed it on my way uphill. I was tempted to get out of my coupe and do some snooping, but was afraid that I couldn’t out-Indian Marcus on his own grounds.
When I turned into the dirt road leading to the vacant house I had spotted on my first trip to Farewell, I switched off the coupe’s lights and crept along by the light of a very white moon overhead.
Close to the vacant house I got the coupe off the path.
Then I went up on the rickety porch, located the bungalow, and began to adjust my field glasses to it.
I had them partly adjusted when the bungalow’s front door opened, letting out a slice of yellow light and two people.
One of the people was a woman.
Another least turn of the set-screw and her face came clear in my eyes—Mrs. Ringgo.
She raised her coat collar around her face and hurried away down the cobbled walk. Sherry stood on the veranda looking after her.
When she reached the road she began running uphill, towards her house.
Sherry went indoors and shut the door.
Two hours and a half later a man turned into the cobbled walk from the road. He walked swiftly to the bungalow, with a cautious sort of swiftness, and he looked from side to side as he walked.
I suppose he knocked on the door.
The door opened, throwing a yellow glow on his face, Dolph Ringgo’s face.
He went indoors. The door shut.
I put away the field glasses, left the porch, and set out for the bungalow. I wasn’t sure that I could find another good spot for the coupe, so I left it where it was and walked.
I was afraid to take a chance on the cobbled walk.
Twenty feet above it, I left the road and moved as silently as I could over sod and among trees, bushes and flowers. I knew the sort of folks I was playing with: I carried my gun in my hand.
All of the bungalow’s windows on my side showed lights, but all the windows were closed and their blinds drawn. I didn’t like the way the light that came through the blinds helped the moon illuminate the surrounding ground. That had been swell when I was up on the ridge getting cock-eyed squinting through glasses. It was sour now that I was trying to get close enough to do some profitable listening.
I stopped in the closest dark spot I could find—fifteen feet from the building—to think the situation over.
Crouching there, I heard something.
It wasn’t in the right place. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. It was the sound of somebody coming down the walk towards the house.
I wasn’t sure that I couldn’t be seen from the path. I turned my head to make sure. And by turning my head I gave myself away.
Mrs. Ringgo jumped, stopped dead still in the path, and then cried:
“Is Dolph in there? Is he? Is he?”
I was trying to tell her that he was by nodding, but she made so much noise with her Is he’s that I had to say “Yeah” out loud to make her hear.
I don’t know whether the noise we made hurried things up indoors or not, but guns had started going off inside the bungalow.
You don’t stop to count shots in circumstances like those, and anyway these were too blurred together for accurate scorekeeping, but my impression was that at least fifty of them had been fired by the time I was bruising my shoulder on the front door.
Luckily, it was a California door. It went in the second time I hit it.
Inside was a reception hall opening through a wide arched doorway into a living-room. The air was hazy and the stink of burnt powder was sharp.
Sherry was on the polished floor by the arch, wriggling sidewise on one elbow and one knee, trying to reach a Luger that lay on an amber rug some four feet away.
At the other end of the room, Ringgo was upright on his knees, steadily working the trigger of a black revolver in his good hand. The pistol was empty. It went snap, snap, snap, snap foolishly, but he kept on working the trigger. His broken arm was still in the splints, but had fallen out of the sling and was hanging down. His face was puffy and florid with blood. His eyes were wide and dull. The white bone handle of a knife stuck out of his back, just over one hip, its blade all the way in. He was clicking the empty pistol at Marcus.
The black boy was on his feet, feet far apart under bent knees. His left hand was spread wide over his chest, and the black fingers were shiny with blood. In his right hand he held a white bone-handled knife—its blade a foot long—held it, knife-fighter fashion, as you’d hold a sword. He was moving toward Ringgo, not directly, but from side to side, obliquely, closing in with shuffling steps, crouching, his hand turning the knife restlessly, but holding the point always towards Ringgo.
He didn’t see us. He didn’t hear us. All of his world just then was the man on his knees, the man in whose back a knife—brother of the one in the black hand—was wedged.
Ringgo didn’t see us. I don’t suppose he even saw Marcus. He knelt there and persistently worked the trigger of his empty gun.
I jumped over Sherry and swung the barrel of my gun at the base of Marcus’s skull. It hit. Marcus dropped.
Ringgo stopped working the gun and looked surprised at me.
“That’s the idea; you’ve got to put bullets in them or they’re no good,” I told him, pulled the knife out of Marcus’s hand and went back to pick up the Luger that Sherry had stopped trying to get.
Sherry was lying on his back now. His eyes were closed.
He looked dead, and he had enough bullet holes in him to make death a good guess.
Hoping he wasn’t dead, I knelt beside him—going around him so I could kneel facing Ringgo—and lifted his head up a little from the floor.
“Sherry,” I said sharply. “Sherry.”
He didn’t move. His eyelids didn’t even twitch.
I raised the fingers of the hand that was holding up his head, making his head move just a trifle.
“Did Ringgo kill Kavalov?” I asked the dead or dying man.
Even if I hadn’t known Ringgo was looking at me I could have felt his eyes on me.
“Did he, Sherry?” I barked into the still face.
The dead or dying man didn’t move.
I cautiously moved my fingers again so that his dead or dying head nodded, twice.
Then I made his head jerk back, and let it gently down on the floor again.
“Well,” I said, standing up and facing Ringgo, “I’ve got you at last.”
11
I’ve never been able to decide whether I would actually have gone on the witness stand and sworn that Sherry was alive when he nodded, and nodded voluntarily, if it had been necessary for me to do so to convict Ringgo.
I don’t like perjury, but I knew Ringgo was guilty, and there I had him.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to decide.
Ringgo believed Sherry had nodded, and then, when Marcus gave the show away, there was nothing much for Ringgo to do but try his luck with a plea of guilty.
We didn’t have much trouble getting the story out of Marcus. Ringgo had killed his beloved capitaine. The boy was easily persuaded that the law would give him his best revenge.
After Marcus had talked, Ringgo was willing to talk.
He stayed in the hospital until the day before his trial opened. The knife Marcus had planted in his back had permanently paralyzed one of his legs, though aside from that he recovered from the stabbing.
Marcus had three of Ringgo’s bullets in him. The doctors fished two of them out, but were afraid to touch the third. It didn’t seem to worry him. B
y the time he was shipped north to begin an indeterminate sentence in San Quentin for his part in the Kavalov murder he was apparently as sound as ever.
Ringgo was never completely convinced that I had suspected him before the last minute when I had come charging into the bungalow.
“Of course I had, right along,” I defended my skill as a sleuth. That was while he was still in the hospital. “I didn’t believe Sherry was cracked. He was one hard, sane-looking scoundrel. And I didn’t believe he was the sort of man who’d be worried much over any disgrace that came his way. I was willing enough to believe that he was out for Kavalov’s scalp, but only if there was some profit in it. That’s why I went to sleep and let the old man’s throat get cut. I figured Sherry was scaring him up—nothing more—to get him in shape for a big five- or money shakedown. Well, when I found out I had been wrong there I began to look around.
“So far as I knew, your wife was Kavalov’s heir. From what I had seen, I imagined your wife was enough in love with you to be completely in your hands. All right, you, as the husband of his heir, seemed the one to profit most directly by Kavalov’s death. You were the one who’d have control of his fortune when he died. Sherry could only profit by the murder if he was working with you.”
“But didn’t his breaking my arm puzzle you?”
“Sure. I could understand a phony injury, but that seemed carrying it a little too far. But you made a mistake there that helped me. You were too careful to imitate a left-hand cut on Kavalov’s throat; did it by standing by his head, facing his body when you cut him, instead of by his body, facing his head, and the curve of the slash gave you away. Throwing the knife out the window wasn’t so good, either. How’d he happen to break your arm? An accident?”
“You can call it that. We had that supposed fight arranged to fit in with the rest of the play, and I thought it would be fun to really sock him. So I did. And he was tougher than I thought, tough enough to even up by snapping my arm. I suppose that’s why he killed Mickey too. That wasn’t on the schedule. On the level, did you suspect us of being in cahoots?”
I nodded.
Crime Stories Page 81