Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 105, No. 5, October 10, 1936

I

Warren Louw and his comely young wife were driving slowly through the moonlit night. The film they had just witnessed — a tender, little comedy of love and marriage — had left them with a sense of mellow contentment. Mrs. Louw, sighing happily, snuggled close to her husband’s side as he gripped the wheel, intent on the glistening, coiling ribbon of road that wound through Twin Peaks and on to Kenwood Way. Surely violence and sudden tragedy were utterly foreign, unthinkable, in this soft, eucalyptus-scented night.

San Francisco lay below them, a tapestry of winking lights. Around the bend slumbered the newly-developed suburb, bristling with sleek, modernist bungalows. Here the Louws had made their home.

As Warren Louw sighted his drive-way he pressed down the accelerator in joyful anticipation of being home again. In the next instant the ear swerved crazily, skinned a tree on the left side of the road. The headlights, stabbing through the night, had picked out an inert mass lying directly in the path of the speeding car and to avoid striking it Louw had been forced to twist his wheel sharply. Mrs. Louw screamed.

He laughed nervously. “Sorry, dear. For a minute I thought it was a woman.”

“Heavens, what a start you gave me!”

“Stupid of me, darling. Probably just some sold rags or newspapers or something.” He shifted and backed on to the road.

As he was gathering momentum Mrs. Louw clutched his arm.

“Warren, wait! I saw it lying there, too. I’ve got the strangest feeling that it wasn’t any bundle of rags or newspapers or anything else, but a—”

“Why, gosh, darling, if you think that we’ll go back and look.”

They sat stiffly apart now, nervous and apprehensive. Louw let the car slide backwards, while his wife craned her neck out the window, straining her eyes towards the spot where they had seen that still, disordered mass.

“It’s here!” she cried.

They jumped out and hurried to the spot. Staring down, their hands groped instinctively for each other.

“Oh,” was all Mrs. Louw could say. “Oh!”

“Poor old thing,” Louw murmured.

They were looking at the body of an old woman. The moon had slid from behind a cloud and splashed a wide beam on the hatless, white head. She wore a red sweater and a pink house-dress. She was trail and slight, and the parchment white old face, blank in death, held gentility and breeding.

“She’s... she’s been ran over,” gasped Mrs. Louw.

Louw braced her with his arms. “Don’t look, dear. Go back to the car.”

But neither of them could avert their eyes from that limp, crushed body. The wheels of a heavy car had rolled across the abdomen. The woman’s cheekbone — she lay on her hack — was bruised.

“I’d like to get the guy who did this,” Louw muttered between clenched teeth. “Another one of those hit and run skunks.”

“We’d better telephone the hospital,” said Mrs. Louw.

“Yeah, and the police. I’m not going to touch her. There may be some clue, some way of tracing whoever bit her.”

A few minutes later Louw was barking excitedly into a telephone: “Park Emergency Hospital? Listen, this is Mr. Warren Louw, at 129 Kenwood Way. There’s an old woman lying about a hundred yards down the road. She’s been hit by a car. Yeah, dead. Better send somebody quick.”

Presently the shrill whine of an ambulance siren sounded along the road. The Louws heard the ambulance grind to a stop and ran out to direct it. “This way,” Louw shouted.

Dr. James Clary knelt by the old woman’s head. “Sure,” he muttered, “it’s a hit-and-run case. Looks like she was taking a little stroll, wandered out in the middle of the road and a car, sweeping around the bend, ran clean over her. Hasn’t been dead very long. Body still warm.” It was then shortly after ten.

Mrs. Louw shuddered. “Do you think they’ll ever find the driver?”

“Dunno, lady. He’s probably three counties away by now. That’s a job for the police.”

“I wonder who she was.”

“Well, this might help.” He indicated a diamond ring on the right hand, and, removing it, read aloud the inscription, “ ‘From Joe to Jessie.’ Yes, that’s certainly something.”

“You know,” put in Louw, who had been studying the dead woman’s face fixedly, “I think she lived near us. Seems to me I’ve seen her walking in the evenings.”

“So? Well, the police will be glad to know about it. All we can do now—” He nodded to one of the white-coated internes, standing at his elbow.

The latter said: “To the morgue.”

II

Captain of detectives, Charles Dullea, sharp-nosed and square-jawed, one of the slickest, coolest hounds of the law in the history of the San Francisco Police Department, was fiddling with a dictaphone record when Deputy Coroner Jane Walsh entered his office.

“Oh, Captain,” she hailed him, “another hit-and-run case down at the morgue.”

“Yes,” he said, without looking up from the black disk, “it’s getting to be a habit. Who is it this time?”

“That’s just it. No identity. Doc Clary picked her up out Kenwood Way. She’s an old lady, looks as though she had background and refinement. A car ran smack over her middle.”

Dullea let the disk roll from his thick, knotted fingers. He stared wide-eyed at the lady coroner. “Did you say Kenwood Way?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Why not! Why not, indeed! It’s... it’s fantastic! It just couldn’t happen, that’s all!”

He made strange, rumbling noises in his throat. Deputy Walsh eyed him questioningly, but he had recovered. He was once more impassive, cool. “Come on,” he said, “I want to see this woman.”

But by the time they reached the city morgue the mystery of the dead woman’s identity had been solved. A city boiler inspector, John J. Kane, having recognized her photograph in a late edition of the newspapers, had come forward.

“I know who she was,” he told the morgue officials. “Her name was Mrs. Jessie Scott Hughes.”

He repeated this information to Dullea when that troubled sleuth emerged from an examination of the body.

“What do you know about her?” Dullea asked.

“Well, not an awful lot. I just knew her in a casual sort of way. She’s a widow, lives alone in a little house not far from where they found her body, three doors down from the people who found her, as a matter of fact — the Warren Louws. She had plenty of dough.”

“That tallies with the ring I saw on her finger — ‘From Joe to Jessie.’ I suppose ‘Joe’ was her husband.”

“I suppose so.”

“I can set your mind at ease on that point, gentlemen. He was!” This came from a tall, elegantly dressed man who had suddenly appeared in the corridor. His voice was musical and beautifully modulated.

Dullea wheeled around. “Frank Egan!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, didn’t you know? She... she was an old friend.” He turned away, moved.

“That’s right,” Kane piped. “Mrs. Hughes was a client of Mr. Egan here.”

“Is that true, Egan?”

“Precisely true. She was not only a client, she was a dear, dear, friend. I’ve known Jessie since — let me, see — since the ’quake of 1906. I was driving a Wells Fargo Express wagon then. You remember how the whole city was fleeing madly from their homes. I saw this girl standing bewildered in, the street with a small lad. I picked them up and drove them to the girl’s sister.

“Ever since I’ve been in private law practice I’ve Handled her legal and financial affairs. I... I think she would have wanted me to take charge of the funeral arrangements.”

“Why, certainly, Egan, certainly, no objections there.”

“And now, Captain, if you’ll excuse me — this thing has shaken me horribly. If there’s anything, anything I can do to find the man who struck Jessie down please let me know.”

“I’ll do that, Egan.” Dullea watched the man’s broad back disappear down the corridor.

The presence of Frank J. Egan at the morgue had given the affair an atmosphere of prime importance and authority. The sympathetic-faced, keen-eyed man was one of the most beloved characters in San. Francisco public life. By, unswerving honesty and hard work he had risen from a policeman’s beat to become a brilliant attorney and now, public defender.

It was Egan’s function in life to succor the poor, the helpless, the misunderstood, There was no man, woman or child in the state too humble or too obscure to obtain Frank Egan’s services. He had saved countless victims of circumstance from unjust prison sentences, and to others, convicts on parole, he had given, fresh starts in life. His own chauffeur had served a prison term for burglary.

Back in his office Dullea summoned one of his crack detectives. “I want you to go with me to the home of the late Mrs. Jessie Hughes,” he told him.

“What’s up, Chief?”

“Oh, nothing much. Just that Mrs. Hughes was not an ordinary hit-and-run victim. In fact, she was murdered!”

The home of Mrs. Hughes was a pleasant, little white plaster house with a red roof. Dullea tried the front door. It was bolted. So was the back door and, all the windows. The garage, which was attached to the house, was likewise locked.

“Looks like you were right, Chief,” the detective said, “the old lady must have been scared of something or why should she have kept everything tighter than a clam? Shall I bust it open?”

Dullea nodded. A few minutes later they stood in a wide-beamed, cool living-room. All around them were cages filled with yellow canaries. The singing and rustling of tiny wings created a strange atmosphere. The two men pressed forward into the kitchen. On a white enamel table they, saw a cluster of vegetables peeled, washed and ready to be cooked. Next to them stood a sauce-pan half-filled with water.

“Guess she was interrupted just as she was preparing supper,” the detective ventured.

They continued to wander about the house. Presently they came to a small, white door which obviously led to the attached garage. Like all the other doors in the house it was locked and bolted on the inside. With a bunch of keys they found in a red purse they opened it and descended into the garage. The garage door, they found, was equipped with an automatic lock which locked when the door was slammed shut.

One of the keys from the red purse fitted this door. This would have been the only way of entering the house, but since the keys were found in the house and not on Mrs. Hughes’s body it appeared that she had been taken out forcibly. What was more surprising, there was no car in the garage.

“What’s the answer to that?” Dullea mused aloud. “A garage and no car.”

“You heard what the lady next door said. Mrs. Hughes never did own a car. It just happened that the house she bought had a garage attached.”

“Sure. Then I wonder what these tire-marks mean.” He indicated a number of distinct patterns on the cement floor.

The detective consulted a small, black notebook. “That would be the blue Lincoln sedan driven by two men which the neighbors saw leave this house around 9:30 the night of Mrs. Hughes’s death. I’m telling you. Chief—”

But Dullea was no longer listening. He was on one knee, passing his hand over a circular rubbed stain on the floor. Bending closer he picked up something between his fingers.

“What is it, Chief?”

“Look.” He held up a number of white hairs. The roots were bloody.

“That’s it! The old lady was done in just like you said.”

“Yes, and I think I know how. Those two men drove the Lincoln sedan into this garage and Mrs. Hughes came around to meet them from the front. They knocked her down, threw her in the car, dumped the body on the road and then ran over it to make it look like a hit-and-run case. You remember she was wearing a sweater over an ordinary house-dress. My guess is that they slipped the sweater over her to make it seem as though she had been taking a walk when she was struck. Furthermore, I’ll bet that bruise on her jaw was from a man’s fist and this cleaned spot here was blood!”

“It fits, Chief. What’s the next move?”

“To find that blue sedan.”

III

The body of Mrs. Jessie Hughes had been found on the evening of April 29, 1932. On the following Monday a blue Lincoln sedan, belonging to Lieutenant Oscar Postel, of the city fire department, was discovered in a public garage. The tire-tread matched those on the floor of Mrs. Hughes’s garage.

The report of this discovery was brought to Dullea by one of the scores of detectives now working on the case.

“The garage man admitted that Postel’s car had been borrowed on the night of the murder,” he said, “and returned a few hours later. It was borrowed by a guy called Verne Doran.”

“Verne Doran!” Dullea braced himself on the arms of his chair. “Do you know who Verne Doran is?”

“No, I don’t know.”

“Wait.” He thumbed through some files on his desk. “Here it is: Verne Doran, paroled convict, up for burglary with weapons. Previously tried and acquitted of murder. Known to be an associate of Albert Tinnin, also an ex-convict, once suspected of murder. Here are pictures of them both.”

Dullea tapped angrily on a pair of rogues’ gallery portraits. Tinnin had a long, ape-like face and close-set eyes. Doran had high cheek bones and wore a pencil-thin mustache.

“I want you to nab those guys so quick they won’t know what struck ’em. I don’t mind telling you that Doran is Frank Egan’s chauffeur and Tinnin is one of the crooks Egan has tried to help go straight!”

The detective whistled shortly and dashed from the room.

But it wasn’t as easy as all that. The city was scoured, but neither Doran nor Tinning could be found. When the newspapers broke the story that a pair of ex-convicts, protegés of the public champion, Frank Egan, were toeing sought in connection with the death of Mrs. Hughes, the citizenry preferred to put a creditable interpretation on Egan’s position. His whole official work had consisted in protecting the legal rights of accused men who were without funds, in helping deserving prisoners to find jobs so that they could leave the prison walls with a prospect of making good. Tinnin’s parole had been recent. It had been granted at Egan’s request. What was suspicious about that?

On the evening of May 4, an amazing thing occurred. Dullea, eating a sandwich in headquarters, was called to the telephone. He recognized the voice at once. It was Egan.

“Listen,” he whispered hoarsely — the man was clearly frightened — “they’ve got me. Two men have got me here. They think I’m phoning home. I’m in a booth at the Ferry Building and they’re outside with guns—”

“Egan, who’s got you? Who are they?” No answer. “Egan!” He jiggled the hook. The line was dead.

Dullea spun around and beckoned to an officer. “The Ferry Building. Hurry!”

They climbed into a police car and sped to the downtown sector.

The Ferry Building loomed white and ominous in the moonless night. The car jerked to a halt and Dullea tumbled out. There was only one set of telephone-booths in the building, on the main floor. No one in sight but a sleepy elevator boy.

Dullea shook him. “Has any one used those ’phones in the last few minutes?”

“No, sir. I ain’t seen any one.”

“That’s what I thought.”

He returned to the car. “Go to Egan’s house.”

Dullea was received by Mrs. Egan, a charming, regal-looking woman. She was pale and worried.

“Mrs. Egan,” Dullea began, dispensing with formalities, “it is essential that we locate your husband at once. Do you know what has become of him?”

“Oh, I wish I did. He drove away from this house last night. He... he’s been acting rather strangely lately, almost as though he were afraid of something. Then a few hours ago I got a call from some man I don’t know. He said: ‘We’ve just taken Frank for a ride.’ And hung up. I’m terrified, Captain Dullea, terrified. They’ll do the same thing to him they did to poor Mrs. Hughes.”

“Why do you say that, Mrs. Egan?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“I don’t think you have to worry. I think your husband is alive.”

“I hope so.”

“Is that all you wish to tell me, Mrs. Egan?”

“That is all I know, Captain.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Egan. Good night.”

With Egan, Tinnin and Doran all missing, Dullea was not prepared for the surprise which awaited him back at headquarters. Verne Doran had been traced to a downtown speakeasy and arrested. A lieutenant greeted Dullea with the news.

“Chief,” he cried, “we’ve got Doran and, boy, has he got a story to tell!”

“Been using pressure?”

“A little.”

“He’s told you that the real murderer of Jessie Hughes is Frank Egan.”

“Judas, Chief, how did you know that?”

“I’ve known it for a long time.”

Verne Doran squatted before Dullea’s desk, his stiff hair matted with sweat, his face pasty and drawn. Around him the detectives formed a semi-circle, grim and silent, piercing him with their, eyes. He was talking in a dull monotone.

“Egan had told us that he had been our friend and that it was a case of his life or Mrs. Hughes’s. He told me that I owed him plenty, that he had got me out of jail and kept me out of it and that if I didn’t do as he asked it would be easy for me to go back again.

“He said he was hard pressed for money and that he could get money if Mrs. Hughes died.

“He ’phoned to Mrs. Hughes and told her he was coming out with friends in a short time and that she was to have the garage door open as she had in the past. He told us that Tinnin was to knock her unconscious by striking her in the stomach and that my job was to run over her body. It was agreed that we were to make it look like a hit-run accident.

“We went over to her house and drove in the garage. We were in there for about an hour, talking to Mrs. Hughes. Finally, when she got restless, Tinnin gave me the sign and said for me to back in the car. As I got in he struck her in the stomach with his fist, then in the eye and a second time in the stomach. She fell without a sound.

“He dragged her under the right front wheel. Tinnin stood nearby and gave instructions to go forward and back, forward and back. I obeyed. We then drove around the neighborhood looking for a place to leave her and every time we’d stop either a car or a pedestrian would pass. Finally, we found a dark spot and Tinnin dumped the body out.

We turned out the lights, drove furiously for a few blocks, then put the car away.

“Egan called me Monday and told me to get away, that the police were on the trail. The one big slip we made was about the house key. Egan forgot to tell us that she should have a key on her so it would look as if she had gone out walking.”

But Doran was wrong. There had been many slips. Egan had a secretary, a Miss Marion Lambert. This girl now offered the information that Egan had been in trouble about personal finances and clients’ money and that Mrs. Hughes herself had stormed into his office a few days before her death, demanding a showdown. Furthermore, Egan was not at the prizefights, as he had let various officials understand, but was seen pacing up and down before Mrs. Hughes’s house at 9:30 on the evening of April 29! Incidentally, Egan was named sole heir in Mrs. Hughes’s will.

Further inquiries into Egan’s personal finances revealed that he had been gambling with the moneys of various clients and was in debt to the tune of. $19,000. He was also about to lose his home, which was heavily mortgaged.

Dullea was not the sort of detective to send his case before a grand jury without substantiation of every detail. In this complex task he was brilliantly assisted by Police Chemist Frank Latulipe. The tire-tracks in Mrs. Hughes’s garage were carefully photographed and impressions were taken in plaster. They showed the right tire was smoother than the left and that its thread left peculiar marks from the vacuum cups — marks like tiny horseshoes. They were unlucky for Egan, those horse-shoes. Similar impressions were taken from Mrs. Hughes’s clothes.

The most damning clues were the eight white hairs found by Dullea. Other hairs were found caught in the fender of the suspected death-car and under a microscope these hairs matched exactly with those found in the garage and with the hair of Mrs. Hughes!

It was the icy presentation of these facts which brought Verne. Doran to a complete confession. Albert Tinnin, too, was found and grilled by Dullea for 108 hours in a room at the Hotel Whitcomb.

But Frank Egan was still missing.

IV

It was a tribute to the role which Egan had been, acting for twelve years that half the population of San. Francisco refused to believe in his guilt. To them it appeared incredible that this kindly, humanitarian worker, who had done so much for the down-trodden and the defenseless, should be capable of so monstrous a hypocrisy. As for the cold-blooded murder of a feeble, old woman, their imagination balked at it.

The controversy assumed a political color. It centered about the whole public defender system and the antagonism which naturally exists between the police-seeking a conviction and officials on the defense side.

The parole system, too, was violently attacked.

Dullea had called forth a storm upon his head when he denounced Frank Egan as a murderer.

On June 7, more than a month after the death of Mrs. Hughes, Egan was still missing, Mayor Angelo Rossi, flustered, under the stinging charges flung against the police department, lashed. Dullea verbally for not finding him. He warned him to do so immediately or risk his job.

At that moment Dullea’s men were hot oh Egan’s trail and by nightfall had traced him to a private sanitarium operated by a Mrs. Bronescoe. He had been brought there by his lawyer, Vincent. Hallinan, pale and haggard and starving. Mrs. Bronescoe told the police that his mind was affected. He had suffered horribly from malnutrition and exposure.

“Very well,” said Dullea, “we’ll give him time to recover.”

It was the one serious mistake Duller made throughout the case. The moment the guard’s vigilance relaxed Egan skipped again. This time he was trailed to Emerald Lake Hallman admitted that he had gone to his cottage there, but when the police arrived Egan was gone. Ten officers searched the district all night.

Meanwhile a county grand jury had seen things Dullea’s way. They returned murder indictments against Egan, Tinnin and Doran, conceding that the Public Defender had been the master mind of the unholy trio.

Hallinan pleaded ineffectually with the District Attorney that Doran alone had committed the crime for a wretched fifty dollars!

On June 9 Egan surprised everybody by calmly giving himself up. He was a broken man. There was no more fight in him. He went to trial a few weeks later.

The trial lasted one month. It was the rawest melodrama from opening to finish. Marion Lambert, Egan’s secretary who testified against him, was threatened with gang vengeance and had to be protected.

Egan’s attorney went so far in defying Judge Dunne’s rulings that the court did what it has so often threatened to do and so seldom has actually done — sent him to jail for contempt.

He actually stayed there for twenty-four hours.

The trial concerned itself largely with the personality of Frank Egan. If ever a human being was equipped by natural aptitude plus training to plan and execute the perfect crime it was San Francisco’s Public Defender. He had been a policeman in constant contact with the underworld’s petty thugs and thieves, next an ace detective, familiar with the innermost workings of the criminal mind, and lastly an attorney, agile in adapting the twists and turns of a complex legal system to his own uses.

Yet when it came to organizing a crime, he failed just as thousands have failed before him and failed, as the most muddle-headed brigand has failed — through some idiotic oversight. The police call them “banana peels.”

The murder-plot, however, was not without elements of cleverness. Determined to fulfill the prime function of the perfect crime, Egan had planned that the death of Mrs. Hughes should not appear to be a crime at all, but an accident. He had counted more on this than on the concealment of clues. And it was his undoing.

Egan knew the frequency of hit-run deaths and how rarely they were solved. He had little to fear from the police’s ordinarily haphazard check-up. He was, then, utterly caught off guard when Dullea immediately characterized the tragedy as murder. Fifty per cent of the success of his plan had depended on concealing this fact.

After that the numerous errors he had made stood out like sore thumbs. He should never have employed as accomplices two men who were known to be convicts and also known to have been associated with him. He should have known that one or both of them would talk. His failure to warn them to plant a key on Mrs. Hughes’ body, his anxiety to account for himself on the night of the crime, his obviously spurious attempt to convince Dullea that he had been kidnaped and his subsequent escape from the sanitarium, above all, his failure to conceal the state of his finances and his quarrel with Mrs. Hughes — these spelled but one thing to the mind of a trained detective like Charles Dullea: guilt!

Despite the unbreakable net of evidence against the murderous trio the jury deliberated for seventy-two hours before reaching a verdict. In fact, such was the power of the legend which Egan had spun around his own falsely-haloed head for twelve years, that jurors Bradley Webb and Mrs. Annie J. Riley, held out for unconditional acquittal. Under the strain of the long hours Mrs. Riley had become quite hysterical.

But in the end the seven men and five women filed back into the court and delivered their verdict. All three defendants were found guilty of murder without any extenuating circumstances. They were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Egan, a shattered, half-crazed man, is still in San Quentin.

Long after the murder of Jessie Hughes was a closed issue the general public was still ignorant of the most fantastic feature of this completely fantastic case. And this was how Captain Charles Dullea had known almost at once that Mrs. Hughes had been murdered. It was not intuition. Detectives disclaim this quality in serious work. It was not one of those lightning-flashes of deduction such as adorn the pages of mystery novels. It was something far more conclusive than either. Dullea had heard Egan plan the crime months before its actual accomplishment!

It happened in this way: Dullea had planted a dictaphone in the office of a physician who was under suspicion in connection with another case. Egan and his henchmen were acquainted with this doctor and it was in his office that they discussed in all its details the projected murder of Mrs. Hughes, while the police listened in! Every detail was overheard: the method, the car that would be used, the place — everything.

But the police did nothing about it because they thought the thing was too fantastic to be anything more than an elaborate joke. Furthermore there was nothing they could do about it until the potential killers in some way showed their hand. They did take the elementary precaution of providing Mrs. Hughes with unseen bodyguards. After awhile, convinced they were misled, they withdrew them. Soon after Mrs. Hughes was murdered.

Little wonder Dullea had blanched when reports of the supposed hit-run case reached him and little wonder, too, that he kept silent about this until he had solved the case on the external facts alone.

Of all the perfect crimes ever planned this one, discussed within full hearing of the police, was the strangest. It made master-mind Frank Egan appear a trifle foolish.