Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s

by Leslie S. Klinger

  John Quincy wished he was back. He wished he was crossing Boston Common to his office on State Street, there to put out a new issue of bonds. He was not yet a member of the firm—that was an honor accorded only to Winterslips who were bald and a little stooped—but his heart was in his work. He put out a bond issue with loving apprehension, waiting for the verdict as a playwright waits behind the scenes on a first night. Would those First Mortgage Sixes go over big, or would they flop at his feet?

  The hoarse boom of a ferry whistle recalled John Quincy to his present unbelievable location on the map. The boat began to move. He was dimly conscious of a young person of feminine gender who came and sat at his side. Away from the slip and out into the harbor the ferry carried John Quincy, and he suddenly sat up and took notice, for he was never blind to beauty, no matter where he encountered it.

  And he was encountering beauty now. The morning air was keen and dry and bright. Spread out before him was that harbor which is like a tired navigator’s dream come true. They passed Goat Island,23 and he heard the faint echo of a bugle; he saw Tamalpais24 lifting its proud head toward the sparkling sky, he turned, and there was San Francisco scattered blithely over its many hills.

  The ferry plowed on, and John Quincy sat very still. A forest of masts and steam funnels—here was the water front that had supplied the atmosphere for those romantic tales that held him spellbound when he was a boy at school—a quiet young Winterslip whom the gypsy strain had missed. Now he could distinguish a bark from Antwerp, a great liner from the Orient, a five-masted schooner that was reminiscent of those supposedly forgotten stories. Ships from the Treaty Ports,25 ships from cocoanut islands in southern seas. A picture as intriguing and colorful as a back drop in a theater—but far more real.

  Suddenly John Quincy stood up. A puzzled look had come into his calm gray eyes. “I—I don’t understand,” he murmured.

  He was startled by the sound of his own voice. He hadn’t intended to speak aloud. In order not to appear too utterly silly, he looked around for some one to whom he might pretend he had addressed that remark. There was no one about—except the young person who was obviously feminine and therefore not to be informally accosted.

  John Quincy looked down at her. Spanish or something like that, blue-black hair, dark eyes that were alight now with the amusement she was striving to hide, a delicate oval face tanned a deep brown. He looked again at the harbor—beauty all about the boat, and beauty on it. Much better than traveling on trains!

  The girl looked up at John Quincy. She saw a big, broad-shouldered young man with a face as innocent as a child’s. A bit of friendliness, she decided instantly, would not be misunderstood.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said.

  “Oh—I—I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I didn’t mean—I spoke without intending—I said I didn’t understand—”

  “You didn’t understand what?”

  “A most amazing thing has happened,” he continued. He sat down, and waved his hand toward the harbor. “I’ve been here before.”

  She looked perplexed. “Lots of people have,” she admitted.

  “But—you see—I mean—I’ve never been here before.”

  She moved away from him. “Lots of people haven’t.” She admitted that, too.

  John Quincy took a deep breath. What was this discussion he had got into, anyhow? He had a quick impulse to lift his hat gallantly and walk away, letting the whole matter drop. But no, he came of a race that sees things through.

  “I’m from Boston,” he said.

  “Oh,” said the girl. That explained everything.

  “And what I’m trying to make clear—although of course there’s no reason why I should have dragged you into it—”

  “None whatever,” she smiled. “But go on.”

  “Until a few days ago I was never west of New York, never in my whole life, you understand. Been about New England a bit, and abroad a few times, but the West—”

  “I know. It didn’t interest you.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” protested John Quincy with careful politeness. “But there was such a lot of it—exploring it seemed a hopeless undertaking. And then—the family thought I ought to go, you see—so I rode and rode on trains and was—you’ll pardon me—a bit bored. Now—I come into this harbor, I look around me, and I get the oddest feeling. I feel that I’ve been here before.”

  The girl’s face was sympathetic. “Other people have had that experience,” she told him. “Choice souls, they are. You’ve been a long time coming, but you’re home at last.” She held out a slim brown hand. “Welcome to your city,” she said.

  John Quincy solemnly shook hands. “Oh, no,” he corrected gently. “Boston’s my city. I belong there, naturally. But this—this is familiar.” He glanced northward at the low hills sheltering the Valley of the Moon, then back at San Francisco. “Yes, I seem to have known my way about here once. Astonishing, isn’t it?”

  “Perhaps—some of your ancestors—”

  “That’s true. My grandfather came out here when he was a young man. He went home again—but his brothers stayed. It’s the son of one of them I’m going to visit in Honolulu.”

  “Oh—you’re going on to Honolulu?”

  “To-morrow morning. Have you ever been there?”

  “Ye—es.” Her dark eyes were serious. “See—there are the docks—that’s where the East begins. The real East. And Telegraph Hill—” she pointed; no one in Boston ever points, but she was so lovely John Quincy overlooked it—“and Russian Hill and the Fairmont26 on Nob Hill.”

  Panoramic view of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.

  “Life must be full of ups and downs,” he ventured lightly. “Tell me about Honolulu. Sort of a wild place, I imagine?”

  She laughed. “I’ll let you discover for yourself how wild it is,” she told him. “Practically all the leading families came originally from your beloved New England. ‘Puritans with a touch of sun,’ my father calls them. He’s clever, my father,” she added, in an odd childish tone that was wistful and at the same time challenging.

  “I’m sure of it,” said John Quincy heartily. They were approaching the Ferry Building and other passengers crowded about them. “I’d help you with that suitcase of yours, but I’ve got all this truck. If we could find a porter—”

  “Don’t bother,” she answered. “I can manage very well.” She was staring down at John Quincy’s hat box. “I—I suppose there’s a silk hat in there?” she inquired.

  “Naturally,” replied John Quincy.

  She laughed—a rich, deep-throated laugh. John Quincy stiffened slightly. “Oh, forgive me,” she cried. “But—a silk hat in Hawaii!”

  John Quincy stood erect. The girl had laughed at a Winterslip. He filled his lungs with the air sweeping in from the open spaces, the broad open spaces where men are men. A weird reckless feeling came over him. He stooped, picked up the hat box, and tossed it calmly over the rail. It bobbed indignantly away. The crowd closed in, not wishing to miss any further exhibition of madness.

  “That’s that,” said John Quincy quietly.

  “Oh,” gasped the girl, “you shouldn’t have done it!”

  And indeed, he shouldn’t. The box was an expensive one, the gift of his admiring mother at Christmas. And the topper inside, worn in the gloaming along the water side of Beacon Street, had been known to add a touch of distinction even to that distinguished scene.

  “Why not?” asked John Quincy. “The confounded thing’s been a nuisance ever since I left home. And besides—we do look ridiculous at times, don’t we? We easterners? A silk hat in the tropics! I might have been mistaken for a missionary.” He began to gather up his luggage. “Shan’t need a porter any more,” he announced gaily. “I say—it was awfully kind of you—letting me talk to you like that.”

  “It was fun,” she told him. “I hope you’re going to like us out here. We’re so eager to be liked, you know. It’s almost pathetic.”

&
nbsp; “Well,” smiled John Quincy, “I’ve met only one Californian to date. But—”

  “Yes?”

  “So far, so good!”

  “Oh, thank you.” She moved away.

  “Please—just a moment,” called John Quincy. “I hope—I mean, I wish—”

  But the crowd surged between them. He saw her dark eyes smiling at him and then, irrevocably as the hat, she drifted from his sight.

  “I say, it was awfully kind of you,

  letting me talk to you like that.”

  “It was fun,” she told him. “I hope you’re going to like us out here.”

  From The House Without a Key, illustration by William Liepse

  (The Saturday Evening Post, January 24, 1925)

  20.Trains with sleeping cars. Sleeping cars came in different configurations, but for someone with the wealth of the Winterslips, John Quincy would presumably have chosen a car with a private or semi-private drawing room. The trip would have been about a day to a day and a half from Boston to Chicago and another three to three and a half days from Chicago to San Francisco, probably via a luxury train like the Twentieth Century Limited or The Westerner (of the New York Central Railroad line) on the run to Chicago and the Pacific Limited or Continental Limited (of the Union Pacific Railroad Company) on the trip from Chicago to San Francisco. By 1926, the Chicago & Northwestern and Southern Pacific Railroads were advertising new trains that cut the time of the Chicago–San Francisco trip to sixtry-three hours. John Quincy’s “more than six days” either is an exaggeration or he chose some very slow routes.

  21.The Longwood Cricket Club in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, was founded in 1872 and put in a lawn tennis court in 1878. As cricket waned in popularity in the United States, the club’s tennis clientele grew, and the first Davis Cup tournament was held at Longwood in 1900.

  Longwood Cricket Club, Chester Hills, Massachusetts.

  22.The Magnolia Golf Club, in the village of Magnolia, Gloucester, Massachusetts, was a popular summer outing for Boston golfers until it closed in the 1920s.

  23.Originally Yerba Buena Island, in the San Francisco Bay between Oakland and San Francisco, it was renamed Goat Island in 1895, only to have its original name restored in 1931. Home to military strongholds through World War II, it is now a tourist site.

  24.Mount Tamalpais, in Marin County north of San Francisco, though only 2,576 feet in elevation (after the top was graded for radar installations), is visible from San Francisco and the East Bay.

  25.Port cities in China, Japan, and Korea, so-called because they were made accessible to trade by treaties with the European powers.

  26.A famous hotel even in the early 1920s, it was under construction as the 1906 earthquake devastated San Francisco, and the interior was badly damaged; it opened in 1907 and has operated continuously since.

  Fairmont Hotel, fifth story, looking down the corridor. “This view is typical of the upper stories and shows the distorted condition of the partitions and the warped surfaces of the floors, caused by the buckled columns in the lower stories. The man in the rear is standing in a depression, or low point, on the floor. The undulations of the floors can perhaps be best understood by following the intersection of the ceiling and the partition at the right-hand upper corner of the corridor. Only concrete floors and metal lath and plaster partitions would remain in position under such conditions.” The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire: A Brief History of the Disaster, by Abraham Lincoln Artmann Himmelwright (New York: The Roebling Construction Co., 1906), p. 219.

  CHAPTER III

  Midnight on Russian Hill

  A few moments later John Quincy stepped ashore in San Francisco. He had taken not more than three steps across the floor of the Ferry Building27 when a dapper Japanese chauffeur pushed through the crowd and singling out the easterner with what seemed uncanny perspicacity, took complete charge of him.

  Roger Winterslip, the Jap announced, was too busy to meet ferries, but had sent word that the boy was to go up to the house and after establishing himself comfortably there, join his host for lunch downtown. Gratified to feel solid ground once more beneath his feet, John Quincy followed the chauffeur to the street. San Francisco glittered under the morning sun.

  “I always thought this was a foggy town,” John Quincy said.

  The Jap grinned. “Maybe fog do come, maybe it do not. Just now one time maybe it will not. Please.” He held open the car door.

  Through bright streets where life appeared to flow with a pleasant rhythm, they bowled along. Beside the curbs stood the colorful carts of the flower venders, unnecessarily painting the lily of existence. Weary traveler though he was, John Quincy took in with every breath a fresh supply of energy. New ambitions stirred within him; bigger, better bond issues than ever before seemed ridiculously easy of attainment.

  Roger Winterslip had not been among those lured to suburban life down the peninsula; he resided in bachelor solitude on Nob Hill. It was an ancient, battered house viewed from without, but within, John Quincy found, were all known comforts. A bent old Chinaman28 showed him his room and his heart leaped up when he beheld, at last, a veritable bath.

  At one o’clock he sought out the office where his relative carried on, with conspicuous success, his business as an engineer and builder. Roger proved a short florid man in his late fifties.

  “Hello, son,” he cried cordially. “How’s Boston?”

  “Every one is quite well,” said John Quincy. “You’re being extremely kind—”

  “Nonsense. It’s a pleasure to see you. Come along.”

  He took John Quincy to a famous club for lunch. In the grill he pointed out several well-known writers. The boy was not unduly impressed, for Longfellow, Whittier and Lowell were not among them. Nevertheless it was a pleasant place, the service perfect, the food of an excellence rare on the codfish coast.

  “And what,” asked Roger presently, “do you think of San Francisco?”

  “I like it,” John Quincy said simply.

  “No? Do you really mean that?” Roger beamed. “Well, it’s the sort of place that ought to appeal to a New Englander. It’s had a history, brief, but believe me, my boy, one crowded hour of glorious life. It’s sophisticated, knowing, subtle. Contrast it with other cities—for instance, take Los Angeles—”

  He was off on a favorite topic and he talked well.

  “Writers,” he said at last, “are for ever comparing cities to women. San Francisco is the woman you don’t tell the folks at home an awful lot about. Not that she wasn’t perfectly proper—I don’t mean that—but her stockings were just a little thinner and her laugh a little gayer—people might misunderstand. Besides, the memory is too precious to talk about. Hello.”

  A tall, lean, handsome Englishman was crossing the grill on his way out. “Cope! Cope, my dear fellow!” Roger sped after him and dragged him back. “I knew you at once,” he was saying, “though it must be more than forty years since I last saw you.”29

  The Britisher dropped into a chair. He smiled a wry smile. “My dear old chap,” he said. “Not so literal, if you don’t mind.”

  “Rot!” protested Roger. “What do years matter? This is a young cousin of mine, John Quincy Winterslip, of Boston. Ah—er—just what is your title now?”

  “Captain. I’m in the Admiralty.”

  “Really? Captain Arthur Temple Cope, John Quincy.” Roger turned to the Englishman. “You were a midshipman, I believe, when we met in Honolulu. I was talking to Dan about you not a year ago—”

  An expression of intense dislike crossed the captain’s face. “Ah, yes, Dan. Alive and prospering, I presume?”

  “Oh, yes,” answered Roger.

  “Isn’t it damnable,” remarked Cope, “how the wicked thrive?”

  An uncomfortable silence fell. John Quincy was familiar with the frankness of Englishmen, but he was none the less annoyed by this open display of hostility toward his prospective host. After all, Dan’s last name was Winterslip.

&nb
sp; “Ah—er—have a cigarette,” suggested Roger.

  “Thank you—have one of mine,” said Cope, taking out a silver case. “Virginia tobacco, though they are put up in Piccadilly. No? And you, sir—” He held the case before John Quincy, who refused a bit stiffly.

  The captain nonchalantly lighted up. “I beg your pardon—what I said about your cousin,” he began. “But really, you know—”

  “No matter,” said Roger cordially. “Tell me what you’re doing here.”

  “On my way to Hawaii,” explained the captain. “Sailing at three to-day on the Australian boat. A bit of a job for the Admiralty. From Honolulu I drop down to the Fanning Group30—a little flock of islands that belongs to us,” he added with a fine paternal air.

  “A possible coaling station,” smiled Roger.31

  “My dear fellow—the precise nature of my mission is, of course, a secret.” Captain Cope looked suddenly at John Quincy. “By the way, I once knew a very charming girl from Boston. A relative of yours, no doubt.”

  “A—a girl,” repeated John Quincy, puzzled.

  “Minerva Winterslip.”

  “Why,” said John Quincy, amazed, “you mean my Aunt Minerva.”

  The captain smiled. “She was no one’s aunt in those days,” he said. “Nothing auntish about her. But that was in Honolulu in the ’eighties—we’d put in there on the old wooden Reliance—the poor unlucky ship was limping home crippled from Samoa.32 Your aunt was visiting at that port—there were dances at the palace, swimming parties—ah, me, to be young again.”

  “Minerva’s in Honolulu now,” Roger told him.

  “No—really?”

  “Yes. She’s stopping with Dan.”

  “With Dan.” The captain was silent for a moment. “Her husband—”

  “Minerva never married,” Roger explained.

  “Amazing,” said the captain. He blew a ring of smoke toward the paneled ceiling. “The more shame to the men of Boston. My time is hardly my own, but I shall hope to look in on her.” He rose. “This was a bit of luck—meeting you again, old chap. I’m due aboard the boat very shortly—you understand, of course.” He bowed to them both, and departed.