Toward the Golden Age

by Ashley, Mike;

  “He’ll be glad to see you. He has been worrying. You ain’t another one of them detectives? I didn’t tell him, though. He was asleep and the doctor said he shouldn’t be worried just now. It might be fatal. What did they do with the poor, dear girl?”

  “Merely holding her for a few hours. What was the trouble?”

  “Giving a bad check to the druggist for medicine. She did the same thing at the grocer’s. It’s a dirty trick, I say, to arrest the poor thing. Why, the grocer’s bill was only a few dollars. They don’t eat enough to keep my canary. The man eats mostly almonds. Something wrong with his stomach, and that seems to be all he can eat. Funny, ain’t it?”

  The garrulous woman led Lanagan to a doorway in the rear. He knocked and, in response to a feeble voice, entered.

  Propped up with two pillows was a young man whose wasted features were bright with a hectic flush; whose arms, hanging loosely from his gown, were shrunk to the bone and sinews. The eyes were grey, steady, and assured; so much so that Lanagan half halted on the threshold as he felt the response in his own sensitive brain to the personality that flashed to him through those eyes. A man of mental power, thought Lanagan; of swift decision and of iron will.

  The voice was little more than a gasp, but each word by effort was clearly uttered.

  “You’re an upper office man?”

  “No. I am a newspaper man. Why did you ask that?”

  “Because they were here and took my sister for overdrawing what little funds we had in the bank.”

  There was concentrated fury in his weak voice.

  “Still I am curious to know how you knew they were plainclothes men that took her?”

  “How? A newspaper man asks how? Because they walk like a ton of pig lead. And didn’t that cursed grocer threaten to have her arrested for a paltry four or five dollars? I heard her scream when they took her. This”—more quietly, with a slight shrug and comprehensive gesture to indicate his wasted form and flushed cheeks—“this particular complaint serves to strengthen our outer faculties for a while at least, even if it is at the expense of our inner ones.”

  “I take it your sister is bringing you from the interior to the South?”

  “Yes. We came from South Dakota. We were robbed of our tickets on our first night here. She has been trying to get something to do to save enough money to get as far as Los Angeles. It came on me suddenly, alcohol helping. Sis stuck when they turned me out. On general principles, I don’t blame father. I gambled a mortgage on to the old ranch and twenty years on to his head. Anyhow, here we are, Sis and me. That’s what you fellows on the papers call a human-interest story, isn’t it?”

  There was something about the measured and sinister tone that told of the bitterness of a baffled strong man, in the face of a situation that he was powerless to avoid. Lanagan wondered what that man would have done or tried to do to him if he were in full possession of his strength. He judged from those level grey eyes that the session would not be uninteresting.

  “Yes, it might be a human-interest story,” said Lanagan, “and then again it might be better than a human-interest story.”

  He was looking at the tip of his cigar, flicking the ashes from it as he said it; but he caught the swift, suddenly veiled flash that the keen eyes shot to his face. To all appearances, though, Lanagan did not see that glance. He had not liked the ready talk about upper office men; and he would take oath that in the wasted features, round the ears and the neck, were the tell-tale traces of that prison pallor that requires many a long day to wear away.

  “For instance,” Lanagan continued, still flicking at his cigar tip, “if you were being kept under cover here?”

  It was only a swift, partial intake of breath, but Lanagan caught it, and then the man spoke so easily and smoothly that the newspaper man believed himself deceived.

  “Well, I am. That’s a bet. But just until Sis can get me away; that’s also a bet.”

  Then there followed details, the man on the pillows supplying with facility a pedigree that went back to the Mayflower. Lanagan had been fishing; yet as he left the room he was uneasy and far from being satisfied. As the story stood it was a neat little “human-interest” story as Harry Turner had said and worth a column and a half. He had comforted Turner to the extent of informing him that the shysters had his sister’s case and would probably have her out before night. He drifted moodily back to police headquarters. There Lathrop met him.

  “Nothing stirring,” he said, disgustedly.

  “They’ve turned her loose. Grocer wouldn’t prosecute. She’s got a sick brother. Don’t think she was a live one, anyway.”

  Lanagan ground one palm into the other. Three-quarters of the story was gone with the woman free and his “hunch” was afloat without an anchor. He drifted into Chief Leslie’s office and helped himself to a cigar.

  “Chief, what did you have on that Turner girl?”

  Leslie was past being surprised at anything Lanagan knew. He stopped studying a police circular long enough to look up. “Couple of little checks, but the complaining witness withdrew. I wouldn’t write her up if I were you. She’s one case entitled to sympathy. I talked to her. Thoroughbred, that girl; consumptive brother; taking him South. So I turned her loose.”

  Leslie fell to studying his circular again and Lanagan drew up a chair to look over the circular also, a little privilege he alone enjoyed of the newspaper men at headquarters. Then he whistled softly; Lanagan was past being surprised at anything almost. That whistle was about his most demonstrative exhibition.

  The circular was from Denver and offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the “arrest and conviction” of Harry Short, wanted for highway robbery and murder. The details of a Denver crime that a brief time before had shocked the country were given and the customary police description, with the front and profile pictures from the rogues gallery.

  “Would probably be found with a woman,” the circular read, “posing as his wife or sister.” There followed a description of the woman, Cecile Andrews, and her history. She was the daughter of a country minister who became enamored of Short when he did odd jobs about her father’s place. She had refused to give him up when he was charged with triple murder. In some way, it was believed, she had managed to join him in hiding, for she had disappeared as completely as he.

  Leslie finally became annoyed at Lanagan’s prolonged whistle.

  “Good heavens, Jack,” he said irascibly, “I’m trying to get these descriptions in my head. Take that whistle outside.”

  “All right; but say, chief—” The tone was tense, drawn taut like a fiddle string. Leslie wheeled. Lanagan’s eyes were lighting up with that curious brightness that flamed there when the strange brain of the man was at work, when there was action promised, when the tortuous mazes of some enigma were unfolding to that inner sight. “Say, chief,” he went on, “I wonder if I could make a trip, say to Paris, on about one-half of that reward? I’ve always had a curiosity to study that Paris police system. I don’t approve of newspaper men taking blood money. It isn’t in our game. But it might be proper to take about one-half of that money in a case like this for a trip like that. What do you think?”

  Leslie’s eyes were searching Lanagan’s. He knew of old that Lanagan was not a quibbler and that he never wasted words.

  “You’ve got something, Jack. What is it?”

  “Him,” said Lanagan inelegantly, tapping the face upon the circular.

  Leslie jumped straight up out of his chair. The police reporter lit a fresh cigar from Leslie’s top desk drawer, where the good ones were.

  “It’s this way, chief; but the story’s mine, mine absolutely.”

  “You’ve brought me the tip, the story’s yours. That’s the way I play the game,” said Leslie.

  “This woman was the girl you arrested. Her brother’s out in a rooming house on O’Farrell Street, laid up with consumption galloping, too, it appears to me.”

  Leslie was an explosive ma
n, and after a swift glance through the circular description of the woman again, he expressed himself volubly and with unction. It never occurred to him to question the accuracy of Lanagan’s statements. He would have taken the newspaperman’s word over that of one of his own men.

  Lanagan telephoned to Sampson, city editor of the Enquirer, and before that cold-blooded individual could get in a word, Lanagan had said enough to indicate to Sampson that something choice was on the irons. Lanagan had asked for me, and I was detailed to report to him in thirty minutes at Van Ness Avenue and Eddy.

  It was just thirty minutes later that the chief, Lanagan, Brady, Wilson, and Maloney—three of Leslie’s steadiest thief takers, and myself, were dropping singly into 1153A O’Farrell Street, Lanagan having preceded us to reassure the landlady. Maloney went on through to take the alleyway, the room having a window over the alley. Softly and swiftly we massed before the door. Lanagan took the door, rapping. There was no answer. The chief signaled for a rush.

  Leslie never carried but one gun, and this he now rested in the hollow of his left arm. He towered above and behind us as we noiselessly wedged against the old-fashioned, flimsy door. My heart was beating like a trip hammer. I never seem to be able to get over that thumping just before the opening engagement when I am elected to make a target of myself. I confess freely that I always went into those thrillers with Lanagan in the full expectation of getting my own name and picture in the papers, and the complimentary designation usually accorded a man of my profession by the paper he serves when mishap befalls him: “A reporter who was killed.”

  The chief breathed a soft command, the wedge crashed, the bolts burst, and we were in an empty room.

  There was an awkward pause, it seemed to me for an hour; it may have been but a minute, while Leslie slipped back into his holster that ugly gun of his. Lanagan was turning slowly, examining every corner of the room. His eyes were living, snapping fire.

  “I guess, chief,” he drawled, “I won’t make the reservations today for that little trip of mine.”

  The bed was unmade, but the room showed no traces of recent occupation save several empty medicine bottles from which the labels had been washed, and on a closet shelf a paper sack half full of almonds. There were almond shells on the floor. For the rest the room held but the ordinary appurtenances of a room of its kind; washstand, bowl, towels and rack, and cheap dresser.

  The landlady was summoned. She was more surprised than Lanagan or the chief. She had not seen the girl return; had not seen the pair depart; had believed that the man was too sick to leave his bed.

  Galvanic Leslie, within an hour, had men at the ferry building, at the Third and Townsend Street Depot, covering every boathouse that had launches or tugs for hire; the suburban electric lines were covered and the country roads leading south. The great mantrap that so easily can be thrown around the peninsula of San Francisco, the trap that time and again has caught the thieves of the world when they have fled for haven to the Western Coast metropolis, was set. And yet so quietly was the work done, so implicitly had Leslie impressed upon every district captain, every detective, every patrolman concerned with the story, the necessity for absolute secrecy that not one of the other great papers of San Francisco knew that the jaws of that trap were gaping hungrily. Probably there was no reporter save Lanagan who could have broken into that story once Leslie had commanded his men to secrecy. They knew what disloyalty to that disciplinarian meant too well to trifle with him.

  Within the city proper, plain-clothes men by shoals flooded every hotel and lodging house that might by any possibility harbour the pair. The hospitals were watched; half a dozen doctors known to Leslie worked among their professional brothers, but no one was attending such a man as Turner.

  And the wonder grew to Lanagan that the story, scattered now well over the city, was even yet escaping the innumerable sources of news of the Times and the braggart Herald, to say nothing of the evening papers, the Record and the Tribune. In such fashion, though, by grace of newspaper luck, are the greatest successes scored after they have knocked around under the very feet of half the newspaper men of a city.

  Of that army of plain-clothes men none worked harder than Lanagan. For days I did not see him. Sometimes I would locate him in the foulest sinks of the Barbary Coast or Chinatown. Here, with products brewed in some witch’s caldron, he would be in fraternity, trying ceaselessly to tap that underground wire by which the convict bayed in a great city sends word to his kind. But always he failed. “Kid” Monahan laboured in vain; “Red” Murphy, credited with knowing more thieves than all the coast saloon men put together, could secure no trace; Turner, or Short, had found no refuge in the hutches of the drug or the opium fiends. Lanagan met men who should have been in San Quentin; one night he crossed “Slivers” Martin, who had broken from a deputy sheriff and escaped a ten-year sentence.

  Slivers was waiting until he could get out of the city. Yet even Slivers knew nothing of such a one as Turner. Finally Lanagan turned his attention to the residence sections.

  At times he would drag me with him. For hours he would ramble up one street and down another, always trying the fruit stands, the grocery stores, the delicatessen stores, and always he asked one question: Did a blond young woman, with dark blue eyes, blue tailored suit, quick, nervous walk, come in and buy nuts, particularly almonds? A dozen times the answer was yes. And when the customer was not known to the proprietor, Lanagan would take up his watch, tireless, indefatigable, and wait until that person appeared or passed on the street. Always he met with failure.

  Lanagan, always gaunt, became cadaverous. For four days I lost him. I worried and spent my nights trying to locate him, but his old haunts knew him not. One day there came a call for me.

  “You, Norrie?” It was Lanagan’s voice; it sounded thin and tired. “I’ve landed. Come to Eddy and Van Ness. Got your gun?”

  A quick shiver went over me. The climax had come. I borrowed Sampson’s gun, having left mine home.

  “Heard from Lanagan, have you?” asked that austere individual. I nodded. “Has he landed? Yes? Good luck,” said Sampson, his eyes sparkling. He knew that Lanagan’s pride, after the first fiasco, prevented his ringing up until the story was clinched.

  “Give Lanagan my regards. Let us hear from you. It is not necessary to tell either you or Lanagan to do your best for speed.”

  Sampson, reckoned the coldest-blooded city editor in the West, was yet the most responsive to a story. He was a driver, but he knew how to humour men. I disliked him personally, and would avoid him out of the office, but in harness would have worked both legs to the ankle for him. Most of the men on his staff had that fanatical loyalty for him as a city editor; yet outside they seldom spoke of him save to damn. Curious breed, reporters.

  To his credit as a city editor, in all of those two weeks he had not complained. He spoke about Lanagan to me only twice. He knew I was worried, and knew, I think, that I had spent many a night searching for him, finally to appear for work without sleep. But he knew that Lanagan was out for the paper first, last, and all the time; knew that that bloodhound quality of sticking to the trail would never let him quit till he had proved that there was no way of landing the story.

  Lanagan’s appearance shocked me. He had not shaved for a week. Rings were under his eyes, red-lidded for want of sleep. His pale cheeks held an unhealthy flush and he coughed once or twice in a fashion I did not like, but that old magnetic smile was there.

  “Scared as a rabbit, I’ll bet, and wishing you’d insured your life first,” he laughed, pulling me into a doorway. Then, more seriously, “Norrie, I’m just a wandering hulk, a derelict; whatever you will. My passing would be nothing to a soul on earth.”

  I had never heard Lanagan speak in that way.

  “No soul on earth,” he repeated.

  Then he swept me with those luminous eyes of his, and they were as clear and as unclouded as my own. I knew that I had caught a swift glimpse as the shutter opened up
on the vista of his past; that secret past that now I understood.

  For a moment I was conscious of nothing save that this man whom I loved like a brother was in pain and I could do nothing for him. With his swift perceptions, Lanagan had caught my mood and our hands met; that lean, sinewy hand was as firm as steel. Then, with his facile art, he had thrown aside his humour of introspection and spoke briskly.

  “Norrie, I don’t want to tangle you with this against your will. This man, I believe, is the hardest game this city has held in my time or yours. He will die with his stockings on. It looks like gun play.”

  Frankly, I was for quitting, inwardly. Outwardly, because of that mesmeric way of his, that teasing, superior tone, I was all for the climax. Besides, I did not want to leave him to himself in that humour to go into a mess; I knew his reckless ways too well.

  We walked rapidly up Eddy Street and turned on Franklin until near the corner of O’Farrell, where, entering a flat, Lanagan led the way to the top story. Here we entered an unfinished alcove room in the rear with a dormer window covered by a heavy curtain of burlap. The slightest possible rent had been made in the curtain. Lanagan told me to look. Opposite was a dormer window corresponding to our own, the next house being one of similar design. The alley between was possibly ten feet. Our window was the only one that could command the other.

  In the opposite house the curtain was of ordinary heavy lace. After peering intently for a time, I could distinguish through it a woman’s figure and a bed, upon which a form could be discerned.

  “There you are, Norrie. That man shows his caliber by moving round the corner from his former home while the police look for him elsewhere. He knows by now the police descriptions are here; that I must have recognised him, and that the hunt is on. My almond trail landed when I came back to this territory just on the final chance that the man was big enough to figure out that his surest safety lay right here. She has been out but a few times, buying those eternal almonds. Malted milk has been added to his diet, too. I picked her up, trailed her, and the rest was easy.