The Continental Op (Novelettes and short stories)

Originally appeared in The Black Mask, June 1924

I

A bell jangled me into wakefulness. I rolled to the edge of my bed and reached for the telephone. The neat voice of the Old Man — the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco manager — came to my ears:

“Sorry to disturb you, but you’ll have to go up to the Glenton Apartments on Leavenworth Street. A man named Burke Pangburn, who lives there, phoned me a few minutes ago asking to have someone sent up to see him at once. He seemed rather excited. Will you take care of it? See what he wants.”

I said I would and, yawning, stretching and cursing Pangburn — whoever he was — got my fat body out of pajamas and into street clothes.

The man who had disturbed my Sunday morning sleep — I found when I reached the Glenton — was a slim, white-faced person of about twenty-five, with big brown eyes that were red-rimmed just now from either sleeplessness or crying, or both. His long brown hair was rumpled when he opened the door to admit me; and he wore a mauve dressing-robe spotted with big jade parrots over wine-colored silk pajamas.

The room into which he led me resembled an auctioneer’s establishment just before the sale — or maybe one of these alley tea-rooms. Fat blue vases, crooked red vases, lanky yellow vases, vases of various shapes and colors; marble statuettes, ebony statuettes, statuettes of any material; lanterns, lamps and candlesticks; draperies, hangings and rugs of all sorts; odds and ends of furniture that were all somehow queerly designed; peculiar pictures hung here and there in unexpected places. A hard room to feel comfortable in.

“My fiancée,” he began immediately in a high-pitched voice that was within a notch of hysteria, “has disappeared! Something has happened to her! Foul play of some horrible sort! I want you to find her — to save her from this terrible thing that...”

I followed him this far and then gave it up. A jumble of words came out of his mouth — “spirited away... mysterious something... lured into a trap” — but they were too disconnected for me to make anything out of them. So I stopped trying to understand him, and waited for him to babble himself empty of words.

I have heard ordinarily reasonable men, under stress of excitement, run on even more crazily than this wild-eyed youth; but his dress — the parroted robe and gay pajamas — and his surroundings — this deliriously furnished room — gave him too theatrical a setting; made his words sound utterly unreal.

He himself, when normal, should have been a rather nice-looking lad: his features were well spaced and, though his mouth and chin were a little uncertain, his broad forehead was good. But standing there listening to the occasional melodramatic phrase that I could pick out of the jumbled noises he was throwing at me, I thought that instead of parrots on his robe he should have had cuckoos.

Presently he ran out of language and was holding his long, thin hands out to me in an appealing gesture, saying,

“Will you?” over and over. “Will you? Will you?”

I nodded soothingly, and noticed that tears were on his thin cheeks.

“Suppose we begin at the beginning,” I suggested, sitting down carefully on a carved bench affair that didn’t look any too strong.

“Yes! Yes!” He was standing legs apart in front of me, running his fingers through his hair. “The beginning. I had a letter from her every day until—”

“That’s not the beginning,” I objected. “Who is she? What is she?”

“She’s Jeanne Delano!” he exclaimed in surprise at my ignorance. “And she is my fiancée. And now she is gone, and I know that—”

The phrases “victim of foul play,” “into a trap” and so on began to flow hysterically out again.

Finally I got him quieted down and, sandwiched in between occasional emotional outbursts, got a story out of him that amounted to this:

This Burke Pangburn was a poet. About two months before, he had received a note from a Jeanne Delano — forwarded from his publishers — praising his latest book of rhymes. Jeanne Delano happened to live in San Francisco, too, though she hadn’t known that he did. He had answered her note, and had received another. After a little of this they met. If she really was as beautiful as he claimed, then he wasn’t to be blamed for falling in love with her. But whether or not she was really beautiful, he thought she was, and he had fallen hard.

This Delano girl had been living in San Francisco for only a little while, and when the poet met her she was living alone in an Ashbury Avenue apartment. He did not know where she came from or anything about her former life. He suspected — from certain indefinite suggestions and peculiarities of conduct which he couldn’t put in words — that there was a cloud of some sort hanging over the girl; that neither her past nor her present were free from difficulties. But he hadn’t the least idea what those difficulties might be. He hadn’t cared. He knew absolutely nothing about her, except that she was beautiful, and he loved her, and she had promised to marry him.

Then, on the third of the month — exactly twenty-one days before this Sunday morning — the girl had suddenly left San Francisco. He had received a note from her, by messenger.

This note, which he showed me after I had insisted point blank on seeing it, read:

Nine days later he had received another letter from her, from Baltimore, Maryland. This one, which I had a still harder time getting a look at, read:

For nine days he had had a letter from her each day — with two on Monday to make up for the none on Sunday — and then her letters had stopped. And the daily letters he had sent to the address she gave — 215 N. Stricker Street — had begun to come back to him, marked “Not known.”

He had sent a telegram, and the telegraph company had informed him that its Baltimore office had been unable to find a Jeanne Delano at the North Stricker Street address.

For three days he had waited, expecting hourly to hear from the girl, and no word had come. Then he had bought a ticket for Baltimore.

“But,” he wound up, “I was afraid to go. I know she’s in some sort of trouble — I can feel that — but I’m a silly poet. I can’t deal with mysteries. Either I would find nothing at all or, if by luck I did stumble on the right track, the probabilities are that I would only muddle things; add fresh complications, perhaps endanger her life still further. I can’t go blundering at it in that fashion, without knowing whether I am helping or harming her. It’s a task for an expert in that sort of thing. So I thought of your agency. You’ll be careful, won’t you? It may be — I don’t know — that she won’t want assistance. It may be that you can help her without her knowing anything about it. You are accustomed to that sort of thing; you can do it, can’t you?”

II

I turned the job over and over in my mind before answering him. The two great bugaboos of a reputable detective agency are the persons who bring in a crooked plan or a piece of divorce work all dressed up in the garb of a legitimate operation, and the irresponsible person who is laboring under wild and fanciful delusions — who wants a dream run out.

This poet — sitting opposite me now twining his long, white fingers nervously together — was, I thought, sincere; but I wasn’t so sure of his sanity.

“Mr. Pangburn,” I said after a while, “I’d like to handle this thing for you, but I’m not sure that I can. The Continental is rather strict, and, while I believe this thing is on the level, still I am only a hired man and have to go by the rules. Now if you could give us the endorsement of some firm or person of standing — a reputable lawyer, for instance, or any legally responsible party — we’d be glad to go ahead with the work. Otherwise, I am afraid—”

“But I know she’s in danger!” he broke out. “I know that— And I can’t be advertising her plight — airing her affairs — to everyone.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t touch it unless you can give me some such endorsement.” I stood up. “But you can find plenty of detective agencies that aren’t so particular.”

His mouth worked like a small boy’s, and he caught his lower lip between his teeth. For a moment I thought he was going to burst into tears. But instead he said slowly:

“I dare say you are right. Suppose I refer you to my brother-in-law, Roy Axford. Will his word be sufficient?”

“Yes.”

Roy Axford — R. F. Axford — was a mining man who had a finger in at least half of the big business enterprises of the Pacific Coast; and his word on anything was commonly considered good enough for anybody.

“If you can get in touch with him now,” I said, “and arrange for me to see him today, I can get started without much delay.”

Pangburn crossed the room and dug a telephone out from among a heap of his ornaments. Within a minute or two he was talking to someone whom he called “Rita.”

“Is Roy home?... Will he be home this afternoon?... No, you can give him a message for me, though... Tell him I’m sending a gentleman up to see him this afternoon on a personal matter — personal with me — and that I’ll be very grateful if he’ll do what I want... Yes... You’ll find out, Rita... It isn’t a thing to talk about over the phone... Yes, thanks!”

He pushed the telephone back into its hiding place and turned to me.

“He’ll be at home until two o’clock. Tell him what I told you and if he seems doubtful, have him call me up. You’ll have to tell him the whole thing; he doesn’t know anything at all about Miss Delano.”

“All right. Before I go, I want a description of her.”

“She’s beautiful!” he exclaimed. “The most beautiful woman in the world!”

That would look nice on a reward circular.

“That isn’t exactly what I want,” I told him. “How old is she?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Height?”

“About five feet eight inches, or possibly nine.”

“Slender, medium or plump?”

“She’s inclined toward slenderness, but she—”

There was a note of enthusiasm in his voice that made me fear he was about to make a speech, so I cut him off with another question.

“What color hair?”

“Brown — so dark that it’s almost black — and it’s soft and thick and—”

“Yes, yes. Long or bobbed?”

“Long and thick and—”

“What color eyes?”

“You’ve seen shadows on polished silver when—”

I wrote down grey eyes and hurried on with the interrogation.

“Complexion?”

“Perfect!”

“Uh-huh. But is it light, or dark, or florid, or sallow, or what?”

“Fair.”

“Face oval, or square, or long and thin, or what shape?”

“Oval.”

“What shaped nose? Large, small, turned-up—”

“Small and regular!” There was a touch of indignation in his voice.

“How did she dress? Fashionably? And did she favor bright or quiet colors?”

“Beaut—” And then as I opened my mouth to head him off he came down to earth with:

“Very quietly — usually dark blues and browns.”

“What jewelry did she wear?”

“I’ve never seen her wear any.”

“Any scars, or moles?” The horrified look on his white face urged me on to give him a full shot. “Or warts, or deformities that you know?”

He was speechless, but he managed to shake his head.

“Have you a photograph of her?”

“Yes, I’ll show you.”

He bounded to his feet, wound his way through the room’s excessive furnishings and out through a curtained doorway. Immediately he was back with a large photograph in a carved ivory frame. It was one of these artistic photographs — a thing of shadows and hazy outlines — not much good for identification purposes. She was beautiful — right enough — but that meant nothing; that’s the purpose of an artistic photograph.

“This the only one you have?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll have to borrow it, but I’ll get it back to you as soon as I have my copies made.”

“No! No!” he protested against having his ladylove’s face given to a lot of gumshoes. “That would be terrible!”

I finally got it, but it cost me more words than I like to waste on an incidental.

“I want to borrow a couple of her letters, or something in her writing, too,” I said.

“For what?”

“To have photostatic copies made. Handwriting specimens come in handy — give you something to go over hotel registers with. Then, even if going under fictitious names, people now and then write notes and make memorandums.”

We had another battle, out of which I came with three envelopes and two meaningless sheets of paper, all bearing the girl’s angular writing.

“She have much money?” I asked, when the disputed photograph and handwriting specimens were safely tucked away in my pocket.

“I don’t know. It’s not the sort of thing that one would pry into. She wasn’t poor; that is, she didn’t have to practice any petty economies; but I haven’t the faintest idea either as to the amount of her income or its source. She had an account at the Golden Gate Trust Company, but naturally I don’t know anything about its size.”

“Many friends here?”

“That’s another thing I don’t know. I think she knew a few people here, but I don’t know who they were. You see, when we were together we never talked about anything but ourselves. You know what I mean: there was nothing we were interested in but each other. We were simply—”

“Can’t you even make a guess at where she came from, who she was?”

“No. Those things didn’t matter to me. She was Jeanne Delano, and that was enough for me.”

“Did you and she ever have any financial interests in common? I mean, was there ever any transaction in money or other valuables in which both of you were interested?”

What I meant, of course, was had she got into him for a loan, or had she sold him something, or got money out of him in any other way.

He jumped to his feet, and his face went fog-grey. Then he sat down again — slumped down — and blushed scarlet.

“Pardon me,” he said thickly. “You didn’t know her, and of course you must look at the thing from all angles. No, there was nothing like that. I’m afraid you are going to waste time if you are going to work on the theory that she was an adventuress. There was nothing like that! She was a girl with something terrible hanging over her; something that called her to Baltimore suddenly; something that has taken her away from me. Money? What could money have to do with it? I love her!”

III

R. F. Axford received me in an office-like room in his Russian Hill residence: a big blond man, whose forty-eight or — nine years had not blurred the outlines of an athlete’s body. A big, full-blooded man with the manner of one whose self-confidence is complete and not altogether unjustified.

“What’s our Burke been up to now?” he asked amusedly when I told him who I was. His voice was a pleasant vibrant bass.

I didn’t give him all the details.

“He was engaged to marry a Jeanne Delano, who went East about three weeks ago and then suddenly disappeared. He knows very little about her; thinks something has happened to her; and wants her found.”

“Again?” His shrewd blue eyes twinkled. “And to a Jeanne this time! She’s the fifth within a year, to my knowledge, and no doubt I missed one or two who were current while I was in Hawaii. But where do I come in?”

“I asked him for responsible endorsement. I think he’s all right, but he isn’t, in the strictest sense, a responsible person. He referred me to you.”

“You’re right about his not being, in the strictest sense, a responsible person.” The big man screwed up his eyes and mouth in thought for a moment. Then: “Do you think that something has really happened to the girl? Or is Burke imagining things?”

“I don’t know. I thought it was a dream at first. But in a couple of her letters there are hints that something was wrong.”

“You might go ahead and find her then,” Axford said. “I don’t suppose any harm will come from letting him have his Jeanne back. It will at least give him something to think about for a while.”

“I have your word for it then, Mr. Axford, that there will be no scandal or anything of the sort connected with the affair?”

“Assuredly! Burke is all right, you know. It’s simply that he is spoiled. He has been in rather delicate health all his life; and then he has an income that suffices to keep him modestly, with a little over to bring out books of verse and buy doo-daws for his rooms. He takes himself a little too solemnly — is too much the poet — but he’s sound at bottom.”

“I’ll go ahead with it, then,” I said, getting up. “By the way, the girl has an account at the Golden Gate Trust Company, and I’d like to find out as much about it as possible, especially where her money came from. Clement, the cashier, is a model of caution when it comes to giving out information about depositors. If you could put in a word for me it would make my way smoother.”

“Be glad to.”

He wrote a couple of lines across the back of a card and gave it to me; and, promising to call on him if I needed further assistance, I left.

IV

I telephoned Pangburn that his brother-in-law had given the job his approval. I sent a wire to the agency’s Baltimore branch, giving what information I had. Then I went up to Ashbury Avenue, to the apartment house in which the girl had lived.

The manager — an immense Mrs. Clute in rustling black — knew little, if any, more about the girl than Pangburn. The girl had lived there for two and a half months; she had had occasional callers, but Pangburn was the only one that the manager could describe to me. The girl had given up the apartment on the third of the month, saying that she had been called East, and she had asked the manager to hold her mail until she sent her new address. Ten days later Mrs. Clute had received a card from the girl instructing her to forward her mail to 215 N. Stricker Street, Baltimore, Maryland. There had been no mail to forward.

The single thing of importance that I learned at the apartment house was that the girl’s two trunks had been taken away by a green transfer truck. Green was the color used by one of the city’s largest transfer companies.

I went then to the office of this transfer company, and found a friendly clerk on duty. (A detective, if he is wise, takes pains to make and keep as many friends as possible among transfer company, express company and railroad employees.) I left the office with a memorandum of the transfer company’s check numbers and the Ferry baggage-room to which the two trunks had been taken.

At the Ferry Building, with this information, it didn’t take me many minutes to learn that the trunks had been checked to Baltimore. I sent another wire to the Baltimore branch, giving the railroad check numbers.

Sunday was well into night by this time, so I knocked off and went home.

V

Half an hour before the Golden Gate Trust Company opened for business the next morning I was inside, talking to Clement, the cashier. All the traditional caution and conservatism of bankers rolled together wouldn’t be one-two-three to the amount usually displayed by this plump, white-haired old man. But one look at Axford’s card, with “Please give the bearer all possible assistance” inked across the back of it, made Clement even eager to help me.

“You have, or have had, an account here in the name of Jeanne Delano,” I said. “I’d like to know as much as possible about it: to whom she drew checks, and to what amounts; but especially all you can tell me about where her money came from.”

He stabbed one of the pearl buttons on his desk with a pink finger, and a lad with polished yellow hair oozed silently into the room. The cashier scribbled with a pencil on a piece of paper and gave it to the noiseless youth, who disappeared. Presently he was back, laying a handful of papers on the cashier’s desk.

Clement looked through the papers and then up at me.

“Miss Delano was introduced here by Mr. Burke Pangburn on the sixth of last month, and opened an account with eight hundred and fifty dollars in cash. She made the following deposits after that: four hundred dollars on the tenth; two hundred and fifty on the twenty-first; three hundred on the twenty-sixth; two hundred on the thirtieth; and twenty thousand dollars on the second of this month. All of these deposits except the last were made with cash. The last one was a check — which I have here.”

He handed it to me: a Golden Gate Trust Company check.

It was dated the second of the month.

“Burke Pangburn!” I exclaimed, a little stupidly. “Was it usual for him to draw checks to that amount?”

“I think not. But we shall see.”

He stabbed the pearl button again, ran his pencil across another slip of paper, and the youth with the polished yellow hair made a noiseless entrance, exit, entrance, and exit.

The cashier looked through the fresh batch of papers that had been brought to him.

“On the first of the month, Mr. Pangburn deposited twenty thousand dollars — a check against Mr. Axford’s account here.”

“Now how about Miss Delano’s withdrawals?” I asked.

He picked up the papers that had to do with her account again.

“Her statement and canceled checks for last month haven’t been delivered to her yet. Everything is here. A check for eighty-five dollars to the order of H. K. Clute on the fifteenth of last month; one ‘to cash’ for three hundred dollars on the twentieth, and another of the same kind for one hundred dollars on the twenty-fifth. Both of these checks were apparently cashed here by her. On the third of this month she closed out her account, with a check to her own order for twenty-one thousand, five hundred and fifteen dollars.”

“And that check?”

“Was cashed here by her.”

I lighted a cigarette, and let these figures drift around in my head. None of them — except those that were fixed to Pangburn’s and Axford’s signatures — seemed to be of any value to me. The Clute check — the only one the girl had drawn in anyone else’s favor — had almost certainly been for rent.

“This is the way of it,” I summed up aloud. “On the first of the month, Pangburn deposited Axford’s check for twenty thousand dollars. The next day he gave a check to that amount to Miss Delano, which she deposited. On the following day she closed her account, taking between twenty-one and twenty-two thousand dollars in currency.”

“Exactly,” the cashier said.

VI

Before going up to the Glenton Apartments to find out why Pangburn hadn’t come clean with me about the twenty thousand dollars, I dropped in at the agency, to see if any word had come from Baltimore. One of the clerks had just finished decoding a telegram.

It read:

The Old Man came in from luncheon as I was leaving. I went back into his office with him for a couple of minutes.

“Did you see Pangburn?” he asked.

“Yes. I’m working on his job now — but I think it’s a bust.”

“What is it?”

“Pangburn is R. F. Axford’s brother-in-law. He met a girl a couple of months ago, and fell for her. She sizes up as a worker. He doesn’t know anything about her. The first of the month he got twenty thousand dollars from his brother-in-law and passed it over to the girl. She blew, telling him she had been called to Baltimore, and giving him a phoney address that turns out to be an orphan asylum. She sent her trunks to Baltimore, and sent him some letters from there — but a friend could have taken care of the baggage and could have remailed her letters for her. Of course, she would have needed a ticket to check the trunks on, but in a twenty-thousand-dollar game that would be a small expense. Pangburn held out on me; he didn’t tell me a word about the money. Ashamed of being easy pickings, I reckon. I’m going to the bat with him on it now.”

The Old Man smiled his mild smile that might mean anything, and I left.

VII

Ten minutes of ringing Pangburn’s bell brought no answer. The elevator boy told me he thought Pangburn hadn’t been in all night. I put a note in his box and went down to the railroad company’s offices, where I arranged to be notified if an unused Baltimore-San Francisco ticket was turned in for redemption.

That done, I went up to the Chronicle office and searched the files for weather conditions during the past month, making a memorandum of four dates upon which it had rained steadily day and night. I carried my memorandum to the offices of the three largest taxicab companies.

That was a trick that had worked well for me before. The girl’s apartment was some distance from the street car line, and I was counting upon her having gone out — or having had a caller — on one of those rainy dates. In either case, it was very likely that she — or her caller — had left in a taxi in preference to walking through the rain to the car line. The taxicab companies’ daily records would show any calls from her address, and the fares’ destinations.

The ideal trick, of course, would have been to have the records searched for the full extent of the girl’s occupancy of the apartment; but no taxicab company would stand for having that amount of work thrust upon them, unless it was a matter of life and death. It was difficult enough for me to persuade them to turn clerks loose on the four days I had selected.

I called up Pangburn again after I left the last taxicab office, but he was not at home. I called up Axford’s residence, thinking that the poet might have spent the night there, but was told that he had not.

Late that afternoon I got my copies of the girl’s photograph and handwriting, and put one of each in the mail for Baltimore. Then I went around to the three taxicab companies’ offices and got my reports. Two of them had nothing for me. The third’s records showed two calls from the girl’s apartment.

On one rainy afternoon a taxi had been called, and one passenger had been taken to the Glenton Apartments. That passenger, obviously, was either the girl or Pangburn. At half-past twelve one night another call had come in, and this passenger had been taken to the Marquis Hotel.

The driver who had answered this second call remembered it indistinctly when I questioned him, but he thought that his fare had been a man. I let the matter rest there for the time; the Marquis isn’t a large hotel as San Francisco hotels go, but it is too large to make canvassing its guests for the one I wanted practicable.

I spent the evening trying to reach Pangburn, with no success. At eleven o’clock I called up Axford, and asked him if he had any idea where I might find his brother-in-law.

“Haven’t seen him for several days,” the millionaire said. “He was supposed to come up for dinner last night, but didn’t. My wife tried to reach him by phone a couple times today, but couldn’t.”

VIII

The next morning I called Pangburn’s apartment before I got out of bed, and got no answer. Then I telephoned Axford and made an appointment for ten o’clock at his office.

“I don’t know what he’s up to now,” Axford said good-naturedly when I told him that Pangburn had apparently been away from his apartment since Sunday, “and I suppose there’s small chance of guessing. Our Burke is nothing if not erratic. How are you progressing with your search for the damsel in distress?”

“Far enough to convince me that she isn’t in a whole lot of distress. She got twenty thousand dollars from your brother-in-law the day before she vanished.”

“Twenty thousand dollars from Burke? She must be a wonderful girl! But wherever did he get that much money?”

“From you.”

Axford’s muscular body straightened in his chair.

“From me?”

“Yes — your check.”

“He did not.”

There was nothing argumentative in his voice; it simply stated a fact.

“You didn’t give him a check for twenty thousand dollars on the first of the month?”

“No.”

“Then,” I suggested, “perhaps we’d better take a run over to the Golden Gate Trust Company.”

Ten minutes later we were in Clement’s office.

“I’d like to see my cancelled checks,” Axford told the cashier.

The youth with the polished yellow hair brought them in presently — a thick wad of them — and Axford ran rapidly through them until he found the one he wanted. He studied that one for a long while, and when he looked up at me he shook his head slowly but with finality.

“I’ve never seen it before.”

Clement mopped his head with a white handkerchief, and tried to pretend that he wasn’t burning up with curiosity and fears that his bank had been gypped.

The millionaire turned the check over and looked at the endorsement.

“Deposited by Burke,” he said in the voice of one who talks while he thinks of something entirely different, “on the first.”

“Could we talk to the teller who took in the twenty-thousand-dollar check that Miss Delano deposited?” I asked Clement.

He pressed one of his desk’s pearl buttons with a fumbling pink finger, and in a minute or two a little sallow man with a hairless head came in.

“Do you remember taking a check for twenty thousand from Miss Jeanne Delano a few weeks ago?” I asked him.

“Yes, sir! Yes, sir! Perfectly.”

“Just what do you remember about it?”

“Well, sir, Miss Delano came to my window with Mr. Burke Pangburn. It was his check. I thought it was a large check for him to be drawing, but the bookkeepers said he had enough money in his account to cover it. They stood there — Miss Delano and Mr. Pangburn — talking and laughing while I entered the deposit in her book, and then they left, and that was all.”

“This check,” Axford said slowly, after the teller had gone back to his cage, “is a forgery. But I shall make it good, of course. That ends the matter, Mr. Clement, and there must be no more to-do about it.”

“Certainly, Mr. Axford. Certainly.”

Clement was all enormously relieved smiles and head-noddings, with this twenty-thousand-dollar load lifted from his bank’s shoulders.

Axford and I left the bank then and got into his coupé, in which we had come from his office. But he did not immediately start the engine. He sat for a while staring at the traffic of Montgomery Street with unseeing eyes.

“I want you to find Burke,” he said presently, and there was no emotion of any sort in his bass voice. “I want you to find him without risking the least whisper of scandal. If my wife knew of all this— She mustn’t know. She thinks her brother is a choice morsel. I want you to find him for me. The girl doesn’t matter any more, but I suppose that where you find one you will find the other. I’m not interested in the money, and I don’t want you to make any special attempt to recover that; it could hardly be done, I’m afraid, without publicity. I want you to find Burke before he does something else.”

“If you want to avoid the wrong kind of publicity,” I said, “your best bet is to spread the right kind first. Let’s advertise him as missing, fill the papers up with his pictures and so forth. They’ll play him up strong. He’s your brother-in-law and he’s a poet. We can say that he has been ill — you told me that he had been in delicate health all his life — and that we fear he has dropped dead somewhere or is suffering under some mental derangement. There will be no necessity of mentioning the girl or the money, and our explanation may keep people — especially your wife — from guessing the truth when the fact that he is missing leaks out. It’s bound to leak out somehow.”

He didn’t like my idea at first, but I finally won him over.

We went up to Pangburn’s apartment then, easily securing admittance on Axford’s explanation that we had an engagement with him and would wait there for him. I went through the rooms inch by inch, prying into each hole and hollow and crack; reading everything that was written anywhere, even down to his manuscripts; and I found nothing that threw any light on his disappearance.

I helped myself to his photographs — pocketing five of the dozen or more that were there. Axford did not think that any of the poet’s bags or trunks were missing from the pack-room. I did not find his Golden Gate Trust Company deposit book.

I spent the rest of the day loading the newspapers up with what we wished them to have; and they gave my ex-client one grand spread: first-page stuff with photographs and all possible trimmings. Anyone in San Francisco who didn’t know that Burke Pangburn — brother-in-law of R. F. Axford and author of Sandpatches and Other Verse — was missing, either couldn’t read or wouldn’t.

IX

This advertising brought results. By the following morning, reports were rolling in from all directions, from dozens of people who had seen the missing poet in dozens of places. A few of these reports looked promising — or at least possible — but the majority were ridiculous on their faces.

I came back to the agency from running out one that had — until run out — looked good, to find a note on my desk asking me to call up Axford.

“Can you come down, to my office now?” he asked when I got him on the wire.

There was a lad of twenty-one or — two with Axford when I was ushered into his office: a narrow-chested, dandified lad of the sporting clerk type.

“This is Mr. Fall, one of my employees,” Axford told me. “He says he saw Burke Sunday night.”

“Where?” I asked Fall.

“Going into a roadhouse near Halfmoon Bay.”

“Sure it was him?”

“Absolutely! I’ve seen him come in here to Mr. Axford’s office to know him. It was him all right.”

“How’d you come to see him?”

“I was coming up from further down the shore with some friends, and we stopped in at the roadhouse to get something to eat. As we were leaving, a car drove up and Mr. Pangburn and a girl or woman — I didn’t notice her particularly — got out and went inside. I didn’t think anything of it until I saw in the paper last night that he hadn’t been seen since Sunday. So then I thought to myself that—”

“What roadhouse was this?” I cut in, not being interested in his mental processes.

“The White Shack.”

“About what time?”

“Somewhere between eleven-thirty and midnight, I guess.”

“He see you?”

“No. I was already in our car when he drove up. I don’t think he’d know me anyway.”

“What did the woman look like?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see her face, and I can’t remember how she was dressed or even if she was short or tall.”

That was all Fall could tell me.

We shooed him out of the office, and I used Axford’s telephone to call up “Wop” Healey’s dive in North Beach and leave word that when “Porky” Grout came in he was to call up “Jack.” That was a standing arrangement by which I got word to Porky whenever I wanted to see him, without giving anybody a chance to tumble to the connection between us.

“Know the White Shack?” I asked Axford, when I was through phoning.

“I know where it is, but I don’t know anything about it.”

“Well, it’s a tough hole. Run by ‘Tin-Star’ Joplin, an ex-yegg who invested his winnings in the place when Prohibition made the roadhouse game good. He makes more money now than he ever heard of in his piking safe-ripping days. Retailing liquor is a sideline with him; his real profit comes from acting as a relay station for the booze that comes through Halfmoon Bay for points beyond; and the dope is that half the booze put ashore by the Pacific rum fleet is put ashore in Halfmoon Bay.

“The White Shack is a tough hole, and it’s no place for your brother-in-law to be hanging around. I can’t go down there myself without stirring things up; Joplin and I are old friends. But I’ve got a man I can put in there for a few nights. Pangburn may be a regular visitor, or he may even be staying there. He wouldn’t be the first one Joplin had ever let hide-out there. I’ll put this man of mine in the place for a week, anyway, and see what he can find.”

“It’s all in your hands,” Axford said. “Find Burke without scandal — that’s all I ask.”

X

From Axford’s office I went straight to my rooms, left the outer door unlocked, and sat down to wait for Porky Grout. I had waited an hour and a half when he pushed the door open and came in.

“’Lo! How’s tricks?”

He swaggered to a chair, leaned back in it, put his feet on the table and reached for a pack of cigarettes that lay there.

That was Porky Grout. A pasty-faced man in his thirties, neither large nor small, always dressed flashily — even if sometimes dirtily — and trying to hide an enormous cowardice behind a swaggering carriage, a blustering habit of speech, and an exaggerated pretense of self-assurance.

But I had known him for three years; so now I crossed the room and pushed his feet roughly off the table, almost sending him over backward.

“What’s the idea?” He came to his feet, crouching and snarling. “Where do you get that stuff? Do you want a smack in the—”

I took a step toward him. He sprang away, across the room.

“Aw, I didn’t mean nothin’. I was only kiddin’!”

“Shut up and sit down,” I advised him.

I had known this Porky Grout for three years, and had been using him for nearly that long, and I didn’t know a single thing that could be said in his favor. He was a coward. He was a liar. He was a thief, and a hophead. He was a traitor to his kind and, if not watched, to his employers. A nice bird to deal with! But detecting is a hard business, and you use whatever tools come to hand. This Porky was an effective tool if handled right, which meant keeping your hand on his throat all the time and checking up every piece of information he brought in.

His cowardice was — for my purpose — his greatest asset. It was notorious throughout the criminal Coast; and though nobody — crook or not — could possibly think him a man to be trusted, nevertheless he was not actually distrusted. Most of his fellows thought him too much the coward to be dangerous; they thought he would be afraid to betray them; afraid of the summary vengeance that crookdom visits upon the squealer. But they didn’t take into account Porky’s gift for convincing himself that he was a lion-hearted fellow, when no danger was near. So he went freely where he desired and where I sent him, and brought me otherwise unobtainable bits of information upon matters in which I was interested.

For nearly three years I had used him with considerable success, paying him well, and keeping him under my heel. Informant was the polite word that designated him in my reports; the underworld has even less lovely names than the common stool-pigeon to denote his kind.

“I have a job for you,” I told him, now that he was seated again, with his feet on the floor.

His loose mouth twitched up at the left corner, pushing that eye into a knowing squint.

“I thought so.”

He always says something like that.

“I want you to go down to Halfmoon Bay and stick around Tin-Star Joplin’s joint for a few nights. Here are two photos” — sliding one of Pangburn and one of the girl across the table. “Their names and descriptions are written on the backs. I want to know if either of them shows up down there, what they’re doing, and where they’re hanging out. It may be that Tin-Star is covering them up.”

Porky was looking knowingly from one picture to the other.

“I think I know this guy,” he said out of the corner of his mouth that twitches.

That’s another thing about Porky. You can’t mention a name or give a description that won’t bring that same remark, even though you make them up.

“Here’s some money.” I slid some bills across the table. “If you’re down there more than a couple of nights, I’ll get some more to you. Keep in touch with me, either over this phone or the under-cover one at the office. And — remember this — lay off the stuff! If I come down there and find you all snowed up, I promise that I’ll tip Joplin off to you.”

He had finished counting the money by now — there wasn’t a whole lot to count — and he threw it contemptuously back on the table.

“Save that for newspapers,” he sneered. “How am I goin’ to get anywheres if I can’t spend no money in the joint?”

“That’s plenty for a couple of days’ expenses; you’ll probably knock back half of it. If you stay longer than a couple of days, I’ll get more to you. And you get your pay when the job is done, and not before.”

He shook his head and got up.

“I’m tired of pikin’ along with you. You can turn your own jobs. I’m through!”

“If you don’t get down to Halfmoon Bay tonight, you are through,” I assured him, letting him get out of the threat whatever he liked.

After a little while, of course, he took the money and left. The dispute over expense money was simply a preliminary that went with every job I sent him out on.

XI

After Porky had cleared out, I leaned back in my chair and burned half a dozen Fatimas over the job. The girl had gone first with the twenty thousand dollars, and then the poet had gone; and both had gone, whether permanently or not, to the White Shack. On its face, the job was an obvious affair. The girl had given Pangburn the work to the extent of having him forge a check against his brother-in-law’s account; and then, after various moves whose value I couldn’t determine at the time, they had gone into hiding together.

There were two loose ends to be taken care of. One of them — the finding of the confederate who had mailed the letters to Pangburn and who had taken care of the girl’s baggage — was in the Baltimore branch’s hands. The other was: Who had ridden in the taxicab that I had traced from the girl’s apartment to the Marquis Hotel?

That might not have any bearing upon the job, or it might. Suppose I could find a connection between the Marquis Hotel and the White Shack. That would make a completed chain of some sort. I searched the back of the telephone directory and found the roadhouse number. Then I went up to the Marquis Hotel.

The girl on duty at the hotel switchboard, when I got there, was one with whom I had done business before.

“Who’s been calling Halfmoon Bay numbers?” I asked her.

“My God!” She leaned back in her chair and ran a pink hand gently over the front of her rigidly waved red hair. “I got enough to do without remembering every call that goes through. This ain’t a boarding-house. We have more’n one call a week.”

“You don’t have many Halfmoon Bay calls,” I insisted, leaning an elbow on the counter and letting a folded five-spot peep out between the fingers of one hand. “You ought to remember any you’ve had lately.”

“I’ll see,” she sighed, as if willing to do her best on a hopeless task.

She ran through her tickets.

“Here’s one — from room 522, a couple weeks ago.”

“What number was called?”

“Halfmoon Bay 51.”

That was the roadhouse number. I passed over the five-spot.

“Is 522 a permanent guest?”

“Yes. Mr. Kilcourse. He’s been here three or four months.”

“What is he?”

“I don’t know. A perfect gentleman, if you ask me.”

“That’s nice. What does he look like?”

“Tall and elegant.”

“Be yourself,” I pleaded. “What does he look like?”

“He’s a young man, but his hair is turning gray. He’s dark and handsome. Looks like a movie actor.”

“Bull Montana?” I asked, as I moved off toward the desk.

The key to 522 was in its place in the rack. I sat down where I could keep an eye on it. Perhaps an hour later a clerk took it out and gave it to a man who did look somewhat like an actor. He was a man of thirty or so, with dark skin, and dark hair that showed grey around the ears. He stood a good six feet of fashionably dressed slenderness.

Carrying the key, he disappeared into an elevator.

I called up the agency then and asked the Old Man to send Dick Foley over. Ten minutes later Dick arrived. He’s a little shrimp of a Canadian — there isn’t a hundred and ten pounds of him — who is the smoothest shadow I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen most of them.

“I have a bird in here I want tailed,” I told Dick. “His name is Kilcourse and he’s in room 522. Stick around outside, and I’ll give you the spot on him.”

I went back to the lobby and waited some more.

At eight o’clock Kilcourse came down and left the hotel. I went after him for half a block — far enough to turn him over to Dick — and then went home, so that I would be within reach of a telephone if Porky Grout tried to get in touch with me. No call came from him that night.

XII

When I arrived at the agency the next morning, Dick was waiting for me.

“What luck?” I asked.

“Damndest!” The little Canadian talks like a telegram when his peace of mind is disturbed, and just now he was decidedly peevish. “Took me two blocks. Shook me. Only taxi in sight.”

“Think he made you?”

“No. Wise head. Playing safe.”

“Try him again, then. Better have a car handy, in case he tries the same trick again.”

My telephone jingled as Dick was going out. It was Porky Grout, talking over the agency’s unlisted line.

“Turn up anything?” I asked.

“Plenty,” he bragged.

“Good! Are you in town?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll meet you in my rooms in twenty minutes,” I said.

The pasty-faced informant was fairly bloated with pride in himself when he came through the door I had left unlocked for him. His swagger was almost a cake-walk; and the side of his mouth that twitches was twisted into a knowing leer that would have fit a Solomon.

“I knocked it over for you, kid,” he boasted. “Nothin’ to it — for me! I went down there and talked to ever’body that knowed anything, seen ever’thing there was to see, and put the X-ray on the whole dump. I made a—”

“Uh-huh,” I interrupted. “Congratulations and so forth. But just what did you turn up?”

“Now le’me tell you.” He raised a dirty hand in a traffic-cop sort of gesture, and blew a stream of cigarette smoke at the ceiling. “Don’t crowd me. I’ll give you all the dope.”

“Sure,” I said. “I know. You’re great, and I’m lucky to have you to knock off my jobs for me, and all that! But is Pangburn down there?”

“I’m gettin’ around to that. I went down there and—”

“Did you see Pangburn?”

“As I was sayin’, I went down there and—”

“Porky,” I said, “I don’t give a damn what you did! Did you see Pangburn?”

“Yes. I seen him.”

“Fine! Now what did you see?”

“He’s camping down there with Tin-Star. Him and the broad that you give me a picture of are both there. She’s been there a month. I didn’t see her, but one of the waiters told me about her. I seen Pangburn myself. They don’t show themselves much — stick back in Tin-Star’s part of the joint — where he lives — most of the time. Pangburn’s been there since Sunday. I went down there and—”

“Learn who the girl is? Or anything about what they’re up to?”

“No. I went down there and—”

“All right! Went down there again tonight. Call me up as soon as you know positively Pangburn is there — that he hasn’t gone out. Don’t make any mistakes. I don’t want to come down there and scare them up on a false alarm. Use the agency’s under-cover line, and just tell whoever answers that you won’t be in town until late. That’ll mean that Pangburn is there; and it’ll let you call up from Joplin’s without giving the play away.”

“I got to have more dough,” he said, as he got up. “It costs—”

“I’ll file your application,” I promised. “Now beat it, and let me hear from you tonight, the minute you’re sure Pangburn is there.”

Then I went up to Axford’s office.

“I think I have a line on him,” I told the millionaire. “I hope to have him where you can talk to him tonight. My man says he was at the White Shack last night, and is probably living there. If he’s there tonight, I’ll take you down, if you want.”

“Why can’t we go now?”

“No. The place is too dead in the daytime for my man to hang around without making himself conspicuous, and I don’t want to take any chances on either you or me showing ourselves there until we’re sure we’re coming face to face with Pangburn.”

“What do you want me to do then?”

“Have a fast car ready tonight, and be ready to start as soon as I get word to you.”

“Righto. I’ll be at home after five-thirty. Phone me as soon as you’re ready to go, and I’ll pick you up.”

XIII

At nine-thirty that evening I was sitting beside Axford on the front seat of a powerfully engined foreign car, and we were roaring down a road that led to Halfmoon Bay. Porky’s telephone call had come.

Neither of us talked much during that ride, and the imported monster under us made it a rather short ride. Axford sat comfortable and relaxed at the wheel, but I noticed for the first time that he had a rather heavy jaw.

The White Shack is a large building, square-built, of imitation stone. It is set away back from the road, and is approached by two curving driveways, which, together, make a semi-circle whose diameter is the public road. The center of this semi-circle is occupied by sheds under which Joplin’s patrons stow their cars, and here and there around the sheds are flower-beds and clumps of shrubbery.

We were still going at a fair clip when we turned into one end of this semi-circular driveway, and—

Axford slammed on his brakes, and the big machine threw us into the wind-shield as it jolted into an abrupt stop — barely in time to avoid smashing into a cluster of people who had suddenly loomed up before us.

In the glow from our headlights faces stood sharply out; white, horrified faces, furtive faces, faces that were callously curious. Below the faces, white arms and shoulders showed, and bright gowns and jewelry, against the duller background of masculine clothing.

This was the first impression I got, and then, by the time I had removed my face from the windshield, I realized that this cluster of people had a core, a thing about which it centered. I stood up, trying to look over the crowd’s heads, but I could see nothing.

Jumping down to the driveway, I pushed through the crowd.

Face down on the white gravel a man sprawled — a thin man in dark clothes — and just above his collar, where the head and neck join, was a hole. I knelt to peer into his face.

Then I pushed through the crowd again, back to where Axford was just getting out of the car, the engine of which was still running.

“Pangburn is dead — shot!”

XIV

Methodically, Axford took off his gloves, folded them and put them in a pocket. Then he nodded his understanding of what I had told him, and walked toward where the crowd stood around the dead poet. I looked after him until he had vanished in the throng. Then I went winding through the outskirts of the crowd, hunting for Porky Grout.

I found him standing on the porch, leaning against a pillar. I passed where he could see me, and went on around to the side of the roadhouse that afforded most shadow.

In the shadows Porky joined me. The night wasn’t cool, but his teeth were chattering.

“Who got him?” I demanded.

“I don’t know,” he whined, and that was the first thing of which I had ever known him to confess complete ignorance. “I was inside, keepin’ an eye on the others.”

“What others?”

“Tin-Star, and some guy I never seen before, and the broad. I didn’t think the kid was going out. He didn’t have no hat.”

“What do you know about it?”

“A little while after I phoned you, the girl and Pangburn came out from Joplin’s part of the joint and sat down at a table around on the other side of the porch, where it’s fairly dark. They eat for a while and then this other guy comes over and sits down with ’em. I don’t know his name, but I think I’ve saw him around town. He’s a tall guy, all rung up in fancy rags.”

That would be Kilcourse.

“They talk for a while and then Joplin joins ’em. They sit around the table laughin’ and talkin’ for maybe a quarter of a hour. Then Pangburn gets up and goes indoors. I got a table that I can watch ’em from, and the place is crowded, and I’m afraid I’ll lose my table if I leave it, so I don’t follow the kid. He ain’t got no hat; I figure he ain’t goin’ nowhere. But he must of gone through the house and out front, because pretty soon there’s a noise that I thought was a auto backfire, and then the sound of a car gettin’ away quick. And then some guy squawks that there’s a dead man outside. Ever’body runs out here, and it’s Pangburn.”

“You dead sure that Joplin, Kilcourse and the girl were all at the table when Pangburn was killed?”

“Absolutely,” Porky said, “if this dark guy’s name is Kilcourse.”

“Where are they now?”

“Back in Joplin’s hang-out. They went up there as soon as they seen Pangburn had been croaked.”

I had no illusions about Porky. I knew he was capable of selling me out and furnishing the poet’s murderer with an alibi. But there was this about it: if Joplin, Kilcourse or the girl had fixed him, and had fixed my informant, then it was hopeless for me to try to prove that they weren’t on the rear porch when the shot was fired. Joplin had a crowd of hangers-on who would swear to anything he told them without batting an eye. There would be a dozen supposed witnesses to their presence on the rear porch.

Thus the only thing for me to do was to take it for granted that Porky was coming clean with me.

“Have you seen Dick Foley?” I asked, since Dick had been shadowing Kilcourse.

“No.”

“Hunt around and see if you can find him. Tell him I’ve gone up to talk to Joplin, and tell him to come on up. Then you can stick around where I can get hold of you if I want you.”

I went in through a French window, crossed an empty dance-floor and went up the stairs that lead to Tin-Star Joplin’s living quarters in the rear second story. I knew the way, having been up there before. Joplin and I were old friends.

I was going up now to give him and his friends a shake-down on the off-chance that some good might come of it, though I knew that I had nothing on any of them. I could have tied something on the girl, of course, but not without advertising the fact that the dead poet had forged his brother-in-law’s signature to a check. And that was no go.

“Come in,” a heavy, familiar voice called when I rapped on Joplin’s living-room door.

I pushed the door open and went in.

Tin-Star Joplin was standing in the middle of the floor: a big-bodied ex-yegg with inordinately thick shoulders and an expressionless horse face. Beyond him Kilcourse sat dangling one leg from the corner of a table, alertness hiding behind an amused half-smile on his handsome dark face. On the other side of a room a girl whom I knew for Jeanne Delano sat on the arm of a big leather chair. And the poet hadn’t exaggerated when he told me she was beautiful.

“You!” Joplin grunted disgustedly as soon as he recognized me. “What the hell do you want?”

“What’ve you got?”

My mind wasn’t on this sort of repartee, however; I was studying the girl. There was something vaguely familiar about her — but I couldn’t place her. Perhaps I hadn’t seen her before; perhaps much looking at the picture Pangburn had given me was responsible for my feeling of recognition. Pictures will do that.

Meanwhile, Joplin had said:

“Time to waste is one thing I ain’t got.”

And I had said:

“If you’d saved up all the time different judges have given you, you’d have plenty.”

I had seen the girl somewhere before. She was a slender girl in a glistening blue gown that exhibited a generous spread of front, back and arms that were worth showing. She had a mass of dark brown hair above an oval face of the color that pink ought to be. Her eyes were wide-set and of a grey shade that wasn’t altogether unlike the shadows on polished silver that the poet had compared them to.

I studied the girl, and she looked back at me with level eyes, and still I couldn’t place her. Kilcourse still sat dangling a leg from the table corner.

Joplin grew impatient.

“Will you stop gandering at the girl, and tell me what you want of me?” he growled.

The girl smiled then, a mocking smile that bared the edges of razor-sharp little animal teeth. And with the smile I knew her!

Her hair and skin had fooled me. The last time I had seen her — the only time I had seen her before — her face had been marble-white, and her hair had been short and the color of fire. She and an older woman and three men and I had played hide-and-seek one evening in a house in Turk Street over a matter of the murder of a bank messenger and the theft of a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Liberty Bonds. Through her intriguing three of her accomplices had died that evening, and the fourth — the Chinese — had eventually gone to the gallows at Folsom prison. Her name had been Elvira then, and since her escape from the house that night we had been fruitlessly hunting her from border to border, and beyond.

Recognition must have shown in my eyes in spite of the effort I made to keep them blank, for, swift as a snake, she had left the arm of the chair and was coming forward, her eyes more steel than silver.

I put my gun in sight.

Joplin took a half-step toward me.

“What’s the idea?” he barked.

Kilcourse slid off the table, and one of his thin dark hands hovered over his necktie.

“This is the idea,” I told them. “I want the girl for a murder a couple months back, and maybe — I’m not sure — for tonight’s. Anyway, I’m—”

The snapping of a light-switch behind me, and the room went black.

I moved, not caring where I went so long as I got away from where I had been when the lights went out.

My back touched a wall and I stopped, crouching low.

“Quick, kid!” A hoarse whisper that came from where I thought the door should be.

But both of the room’s doors, I thought, were closed, and could hardly be opened without showing gray rectangles. People moved in the blackness, but none got between me and the lighter square of windows.

Something clicked softly in front of me — too thin a click for the cocking of a gun — but it could have been the opening of a spring-knife, and I remembered that Tin-Star Joplin had a fondness for that weapon.

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” A harsh whisper that cut through the dark like a blow.

Sounds of motion, muffled, indistinguishable... one sound not far away...

Abruptly a strong hand clamped one of my shoulders, a hard-muscled body strained against me. I stabbed out with my gun, and heard a grunt.

The hand moved up my shoulder toward my throat.

I snapped up a knee, and heard another grunt.

A burning point ran down my side.

I stabbed again with my gun — pulled it back until the muzzle was clear of the soft obstacle that had stopped it, and squeezed the trigger.

The crash of the shot. Joplin’s voice in my ear — a curiously matter-of-fact voice:

“God damn! That got me.”

XV

I spun away from him then, toward where I saw the dim yellow of an open door. I had heard no sounds of departure. I had been too busy. But I knew that Joplin had tied into me while the others made their get-away.

Nobody was in sight as I jumped, slid, tumbled down the steps — any number at a time. A waiter got in my path as I plunged toward the dance-floor. I don’t know whether his interference was intentional or not. I didn’t ask. I slammed the flat of my gun in his face and went on. Once I jumped a leg that came out to trip me; and at the outer door I had to smear another face.

Then I was out in the semi-circular driveway, from one end of which a red tail-light was turning east into the county road.

While I sprinted for Axford’s car I noticed that Pangburn’s body had been removed. A few people still stood around the spot where he had lain, and they gaped at me now with open mouths.

The car was as Axford had left it, with idling engine. I swung it through a flower-bed and pointed it east on the public road. Five minutes later I picked up the red point of a tail-light again.

The car under me had more power than I would ever need, more than I would have known how to handle. I don’t know how fast the one ahead was going, but I closed in as if it had been standing still.

A mile and a half, or perhaps two—

Suddenly a man was in the road ahead — a little beyond the reach of my lights. The lights caught him, and I saw that it was Porky Grout!

Porky Grout standing facing me in the middle of the road, the dull metal of an automatic in each hand.

The guns in his hands seemed to glow dimly red and then go dark in the glare of my headlights — glow and then go dark, like two bulbs in an automatic electric sign.

The windshield fell apart around me.

Porky Grout — the informant whose name was a synonym for cowardice the full length of the Pacific Coast — stood in the center of the road shooting at a metal comet that rushed down upon him...

I didn’t see the end.

I confess frankly that I shut my eyes when his set white face showed close over my radiator. The metal monster under me trembled — not very much — and the road ahead was empty except for the fleeing red light. My windshield was gone. The wind tore at my uncovered hair and brought tears to my squinted-up eyes.

Presently I found that I was talking to myself, saying, “That was Porky. That was Porky.” It was an amazing fact. It was no surprise that he had double-crossed me. That was to be expected. And for him to have crept up the stairs behind me and turned off the lights wasn’t astonishing. But for him to have stood straight up and died—

An orange streak from the car ahead cut off my wonderment. The bullet didn’t come near me — it isn’t easy to shoot accurately from one moving car into another — but at the pace I was going it wouldn’t be long before I was close enough for good shooting.

I turned on the searchlight above the dashboard. It didn’t quite reach the car ahead, but it enabled me to see that the girl was driving, while Kilcourse sat screwed around beside her, facing me. The car was a yellow roadster.

I eased up a little. In a duel with Kilcourse here I would have been at a disadvantage, since I would have had to drive as well as shoot. My best play seemed to be to hold my distance until we reached a town, as we inevitably must. It wasn’t midnight yet. There would be people on the streets of any town, and policemen. Then I could close in with a better chance of coming off on top.

A few miles of this and my prey tumbled to my plan. The yellow roadster slowed down, wavered, and came to rest with its length across the road. Kilcourse and the girl were out immediately and crouching in the road on the far side of their barricade.

I was tempted to dive pell-mell into them, but it was a weak temptation, and when its short life had passed I put on the brakes and stopped. Then I fiddled with my searchlight until it bore full upon the roadster.

A flash came from somewhere near the roadster’s wheels, and the searchlight shook violently, but the glass wasn’t touched. It would be their first target, of course, and...

Crouching in my car, waiting for the bullet that would smash the lense, I took off my shoes and overcoat.

The third bullet ruined the light.

I switched off the other lights, jumped to the road, and when I stopped running I was squatting down against the near side of the yellow roadster. As easy and safe a trick as can be imagined.

The girl and Kilcourse had been looking into the glare of a powerful light. When that light suddenly died, and the weaker ones around it went, too, they were left in pitch unseeing blackness, which must last for the minute or longer that their eyes would need to readjust themselves to the gray-black of the night. My stockinged feet had made no sound on the macadam road, and now there was only a roadster between us; and I knew it and they didn’t.

From near the radiator Kilcourse spoke softly:

“I’m going to try to knock him off from the ditch. Take a shot at him now and then to keep him busy.”

“I can’t see him,” the girl protested.

“Your eyes’ll be all right in a second. Take a shot at the car anyway.”

I moved toward the radiator as the girl’s pistol barked at the empty touring car.

Kilcourse, on hands and knees, was working his way toward the ditch that ran along the south side of the road. I gathered my legs under me, intent upon a spring and a blow with my gun upon the back of his head. I didn’t want to kill him, but I wanted to put him out of the way quick. I’d have the girl to take care of, and she was at least as dangerous as he.

As I tensed for the spring, Kilcourse, guided perhaps by some instinct of the hunted, turned his head and saw me — saw a threatening shadow.

Instead of jumping I fired.

I didn’t look to see whether I had hit him or not. At that range there was little likelihood of missing. I bent double and slipped back to the rear of the roadster, keeping on my side of it.

Then I waited.

The girl did what I would perhaps have done in her place. She didn’t shoot or move toward the place the shot had come from. She thought I had forestalled Kilcourse in using the ditch and that my next play would be to circle around behind her. To offset this, she moved around the rear of the roadster, so that she could ambush me from the side nearest Axford’s car.

Thus it was that she came creeping around the corner and poked her delicately chiseled nose plunk into the muzzle of the gun that I held ready for her.

She gave a little scream.

Women aren’t always reasonable: they are prone to disregard trifles like guns held upon them. So I grabbed her gun hand, which was fortunate for me. As my hand closed around the weapon, she pulled the trigger, catching a chunk of my forefinger between hammer and frame. I twisted the gun out of her hand; released my finger.

But she wasn’t done yet.

With me standing there holding a gun not four inches from her body, she turned and bolted off toward where a clump of trees made a jet-black blot to the north.

When I recovered from my surprise at this amateurish procedure, I stuck both her gun and mine in my pockets, and set out after her, tearing the soles of my feet at every step.

She was trying to get over a wire fence when I caught her.

XVI

“Stop playing, will you?” I said crossly, as I set the fingers of my left hand around her wrist and started to lead her back to the roadster. “This is a serious business. Don’t be so childish!”

“You are hurting my arm.”

I knew I wasn’t hurting her arm, and I knew this girl for the direct cause of four, or perhaps five, deaths; yet I loosened my grip on her wrist until it wasn’t much more than a friendly clasp. She went back willingly enough to the roadster, where, still holding her wrist, I switched on the lights.

Kilcourse lay just beneath the headlight’s glare, huddled on his face, with one knee drawn up under him.

I put the girl squarely in the line of light.

“Now stand there,” I said, “and behave. The first break you make, I’m going to shoot a leg out from under you,” and I meant it.

I found Kilcourse’s gun, pocketed it, and knelt beside him.

He was dead, with a bullet-hole above his collar-bone.

“Is he—” her mouth trembled.

“Yes.”

She looked down at him, and shivered a little.

“Poor Fag,” she whispered.

I’ve gone on record as saying that this girl was beautiful, and, standing there in the dazzling white of the headlights, she was more than that. She was a thing to start crazy thoughts even in the head of an unimaginative middle-aged thief-catcher. She was—

Anyhow, I suppose that is why I scowled at her and said:

“Yes, poor Fag, and poor Hook, and poor Tai, and poor kind of a Los Angeles bank messenger, and poor Burke,” calling the roll, so far as I knew it, of men who had died loving her.

She didn’t flare up. Her big grey eyes lifted, and she looked at me with a gaze that I couldn’t fathom, and her lovely oval face under the mass of brown hair — which I knew was phoney — was sad.

“I suppose you do think—” she began.

But I had had enough of this; I was uncomfortable along the spine.

“Come on,” I said. “We’ll leave Kilcourse and the roadster here for the present.”

She said nothing, but went with me to Axford’s big machine, and sat in silence while I laced my shoes. I found a robe on the back seat and gave it to her.

“Better wrap this around your shoulders. The windshield is gone. It’ll be cool.”

She followed my suggestion without a word, but when I had edged our vehicle around the rear of the roadster, and had straightened out in the road again, going east, she laid a hand on my arm.

“Aren’t we going back to the White Shack?”

“No. Redwood City — the county jail.”

A mile perhaps, during which, without looking at her, I knew she was studying my rather lumpy profile. Then her hand was on my forearm again and she was leaning toward me so that her breath was warm against my cheek.

“Will you stop for a minute? There’s something — some things I want to tell you.”

I brought the car to a halt in a cleared space of hard soil off to one side of the road, and screwed myself a little around in the seat to face her more directly.

“Before you start,” I told her, “I want you to understand that we stay here for just so long as you talk about the Pangburn affair. When you get off on any other line — then we finish our trip to Redwood City.”

“Aren’t you even interested in the Los Angeles affair?”

“No. That’s closed. You and Hook Riordan and Tai Choon Tau and the Quarres were equally responsible for the messenger’s death, even if Hook did the actual killing. Hook and the Quarres passed out the night we had our party in Turk Street. Tai was hanged last month. Now I’ve got you. We had enough evidence to swing the Chinese, and we’ve even more against you. That is done — finished — completed. If you want to tell me anything about Pangburn’s death, I’ll listen. Otherwise—”

I reached for the self-starter.

A pressure of her fingers on my arm stopped me.

“I do want to tell you about it,” she said earnestly. “I want you to know the truth about it. You’ll take me to Redwood City, I know. Don’t think that I expect — that I have any foolish hopes. But I’d like you to know the truth about this thing. I don’t know why I should care especially what you think, but—”

Her voice dwindled off to nothing.

XVII

Then she began to talk very rapidly — as people talk when they fear interruptions before their stories are told — and she sat leaning slightly forward, so that her beautiful oval face was very close to mine.

“After I ran out of the Turk Street house that night — while you were struggling with Tai — my intention was to get away from San Francisco. I had a couple of thousand dollars, enough to carry me any place. Then I thought that going away would be what you people would expect me to do, and that the safest thing for me to do would be to stay right here. It isn’t hard for a woman to change her appearance. I had bobbed red hair, white skin, and wore gay clothes. I simply dyed my hair, bought these transformations to make it look long, put color on my face, and bought some dark clothes. Then I took an apartment on Ashbury Avenue under the name of Jeanne Delano, and I was an altogether different person.

“But, while I knew I was perfectly safe from recognition anywhere, I felt more comfortable staying indoors for a while, and, to pass the time, I read a good deal. That’s how I happened to run across Burke’s book. Do you read poetry?”

I shook my head. An automobile going toward Halfmoon Bay came into sight just then — the first one we’d seen since we left the White Shack. She waited until it had passed before she went on, still talking rapidly.

“Burke wasn’t a genius, of course, but there was something about some of his things that — something that got inside me. I wrote him a little note, telling him how much I had enjoyed these things, and sent it to his publishers. A few days later I had a note from Burke, and I learned that he lived in San Francisco. I hadn’t known that.

“We exchanged several notes, and then he asked if he could call, and we met. I don’t know whether I was in love with him or not, even at first. I did like him, and, between the ardor of his love for me and the flattery of having a fairly well-known poet for a suitor, I really thought that I loved him. I promised to marry him.

“I hadn’t told him anything about myself, though now I know that it wouldn’t have made any difference to him. But I was afraid to tell him the truth, and I wouldn’t lie to him, so I told him nothing.

“Then Fag Kilcourse saw me one day on the street, and knew me in spite of my new hair, complexion and clothes. Fag hadn’t much brains, but he had eyes that could see through anything. I don’t blame Fag. He acted according to his code. He came up to my apartment, having followed me home; and I told him that I was going to marry Burke and be a respectable housewife. That was dumb of me. Fag was square. If I had told him that I was ribbing Burke up for a trimming, Fag would have let me alone, would have kept his hands off. But when I told him that I was through with the graft, had ‘gone queer,’ that made me his meat. You know how crooks are: everyone in the world is either a fellow crook or a prospective victim. So if I was no longer a crook, then Fag considered me fair game.

“He learned about Burke’s family connections, and then he put it up to me — twenty thousand dollars, or he’d turn me up. He knew about the Los Angeles job, and he knew how badly I was wanted. I was up against it then. I knew I couldn’t hide from Fag or run away from him. I told Burke I had to have twenty thousand dollars. I didn’t think he had that much, but I thought he could get it. Three days later he gave me a check for it. I didn’t know at the time how he had raised it, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I had known. I had to have it.

“But that night he told me where he got the money; that he had forged his brother-in-law’s signature. He told me because, after thinking it over, he was afraid that when the forgery was discovered I would be caught with him and considered equally guilty. I’m rotten in spots, but I wasn’t rotten enough to let him put himself in the pen for me, without knowing what it was all about. I told him the whole story. He didn’t bat an eye. He insisted that the money be paid Kilcourse, so that I would be safe, and began to plan for my further safety.

“Burke was confident that his brother-in-law wouldn’t send him over for forgery, but, to be on the safe side, he insisted that I move and change my name again and lay low until we knew how Axford was going to take it. But that night, after he had gone, I made some plans of my own. I did like Burke — I liked him too much to let him be the goat without trying to save him, and I didn’t have a great deal of faith in Axford’s kindness. This was the second of the month. Barring accidents, Axford wouldn’t discover the forgery until he got his cancelled checks early the following month. That gave me practically a month to work in.

“The next day I drew all my money out of the bank, and sent Burke a letter, saying that I had been called to Baltimore, and I laid a clear trail to Baltimore, with baggage and letters and all, which a pal there took care of for me. Then I went down to Joplin’s and got him to put me up. I let Fag know I was there, and when he came down I told him I expected to have the money for him in a day or two.

“He came down nearly every day after that, and I stalled him from day to day, and each time it got easier. But my time was getting short. Pretty soon Burke’s letters would be coming back from the phoney address I had given him, and I wanted to be on hand to keep him from doing anything foolish. And I didn’t want to get in touch with him until I could give him the twenty thousand, so he could square the forgery before Axford learned of it from his cancelled checks.

“Fag was getting easier and easier to handle, but I still didn’t have him where I wanted him. He wasn’t willing to give up the twenty thousand dollars — which I was, of course, holding all this time — unless I’d promise to stick with him for good. And I still thought I was in love with Burke, and I didn’t want to tie myself up with Fag, even for a little while.

“Then Burke saw me on the street one Sunday night. I was careless, and drove into the city in Joplin’s roadster — the one back there. And, as luck would have it, Burke saw me. I told him the truth, the whole truth. And he told me that he had just hired a private detective to find me. He was like a child in some ways: it hadn’t occurred to him that the sleuth would dig up anything about the money. But I knew the forged check would be found in a day or two at the most. I knew it!

“When I told Burke that he went to pieces. All his faith in his brother-in-law’s forgiveness went. I couldn’t leave him the way he was. He’d have babbled the whole thing to the first person he met. So I brought him back to Joplin’s with me. My idea was to hold him there for a few days, until we could see how things were going. If nothing appeared in the papers about the check, then we could take it for granted that Axford had hushed the matter up, and Burke could go home and try to square himself. On the other hand, if the papers got the whole story, then Burke would have to look for a permanent hiding-place, and so would I.

“Tuesday evening’s and Wednesday morning’s papers were full of the news of his disappearance, but nothing was said about the check. That looked good, but we waited another day for good measure. Fag Kilcourse was in on the game by this time, of course, and I had had to pass over the twenty thousand dollars, but I still had hopes of getting it — or most of it — back, so I continued to string him along. I had a hard time keeping him off Burke, though, because he had begun to think he had some sort of right to me, and jealousy made him wicked. But I got Tin-Star to throw a scare into him, and I thought Burke was safe.

“Tonight one of Tin-Star’s men came up and told us that a man named Porky Grout, who had been hanging around the place for a couple of nights, had made a couple of cracks that might mean he was interested in us. Grout was pointed out to me, and I took a chance on showing myself in the public part of the place, and sat at a table close to his. He was plain rat — as I guess you know — and in less than five minutes I had him at my table, and half an hour later I knew that he had tipped you off that Burke and I were in the White Shack. He didn’t tell me all this right out, but he told me more than enough for me to guess the rest.

“I went up and told the others. Fag was for killing both Grout and Burke right away. But I talked him out of it. That wouldn’t help us any, and I had Grout where he would jump in the ocean for me. I thought I had Fag convinced, but— We finally decided that Burke and I would take the roadster and leave, and that when you got here Porky Grout was to pretend he was hopped up, and point out a man and a woman — any who happened to be handy — as the ones he had taken for us. I stopped to get a cloak and gloves, and Burke went on out to the car alone — and Fag shot him. I didn’t know he was going to! I wouldn’t have let him! Please believe that! I wasn’t as much in love with Burke as I had thought, but please believe that after all he had done for me I wouldn’t have let them hurt him!

“After that it was a case of stick with the others whether I liked it or not, and I stuck. We ribbed Grout to tell you that all three of us were on the back porch when Burke was killed, and we had any number of others primed with the same story. Then you came up and recognized me. Just my luck that it had to be you — the only detective in San Francisco who knew me!

“You know the rest: how Porky Grout came up behind you and turned off the lights, and Joplin held you while we ran for the car; and then, when you closed in on us, Grout offered to stand you off while we got clear, and now...”

XVIII

Her voice died, and she shivered a little. The robe I had given her had fallen away from her white shoulders. Whether or not it was because she was so close against my shoulder, I shivered, too. And my fingers, fumbling in my pocket for a cigarette, brought it out twisted and mashed.

“That’s all there is to the part you promised to listen to,” she said softly, her face turned half away. “I wanted you to know. You’re a hard man, but somehow I—”

I cleared my throat, and the hand that held the mangled cigarette was suddenly steady.

“Now don’t be crude, sister,” I said. “Your work has been too smooth so far to be spoiled by rough stuff now.”

She laughed — a brief laugh that was bitter and reckless and just a little weary, and she thrust her face still closer to mine, and the grey eyes were soft and placid.

“Little fat detective whose name I don’t know” — her voice had a tired huskiness in it, and a tired mockery — “you think I am playing a part, don’t you? You think I am playing for liberty. Perhaps I am. I certainly would take it if it were offered me. But— Men have thought me beautiful, and I have played with them. Women are like that. Men have loved me and, doing what I liked with them, I have found men contemptible. And then comes this little fat detective whose name I don’t know, and he acts as if I were a hag — an old squaw. Can I help then being piqued into some sort of feeling for him? Women are like that. Am I so homely that any man has a right to look at me without even interest? Am I ugly?”

I shook my head.

“You’re quite pretty,” I said, struggling to keep my voice as casual as the words.

“You beast!” she spat, and then her smile grew gentle again. “And yet it is because of that attitude that I sit here and turn myself inside out for you. If you were to take me in your arms and hold me close to the chest that I am already leaning against, and if you were to tell me that there is no jail ahead for me just now, I would be glad, of course. But, though for a while you might hold me, you would then be only one of the men with which I am familiar: men who love and are used and are succeeded by other men. But because you do none of these things, because you are a wooden block of a man, I find myself wanting you. Would I tell you this, little fat detective, if I were playing a game?”

I grunted noncommittally, and forcibly restrained my tongue from running out to moisten my dry lips.

“I’m going to this jail tonight if you are the same hard man who has goaded me into whining love into his uncaring ears, but before that, can’t I have one whole-hearted assurance that you think me a little more than ‘quite pretty’? Or at least a hint that if I were not a prisoner your pulse might beat a little faster when I touch you? I’m going to this jail for a long while — perhaps to the gallows. Can’t I take my vanity there not quite in tatters to keep me company? Can’t you do some slight thing to keep me from the afterthought of having bleated all this out to a man who was simply bored?”

Her lids had come down half over the silver-grey eyes; her head had tilted back so far that a little pulse showed throbbing in her white throat; her lips were motionless over slightly parted teeth, as the last word had left them. My fingers went deep into the soft white flesh of her shoulders. Her head went further back, her eyes closed, one hand came up to my shoulder.

“You’re beautiful as all hell!” I shouted crazily into her face, and flung her against the door.

It seemed an hour that I fumbled with starter and gears before I had the car back in the road and thundering toward the San Mateo County jail. The girl had straightened herself up in the seat again, and sat huddled within the robe I had given her. I squinted straight ahead into the wind that tore at my hair and face, and the absence of the windshield took my thoughts back to Porky Grout.

Porky Grout, whose yellowness was notorious from Seattle to San Diego, standing rigidly in the path of a charging metal monster, with an inadequate pistol in each hand. She had done that to Porky Grout — this woman beside me! She had done that to Porky Grout, and he hadn’t even been human! A slimy reptile whose highest thought had been a skinful of dope had gone grimly to death that she might get away — she — this woman whose shoulders I had gripped, whose mouth had been close under mine!

I let the car out another notch, holding the road somehow.

We went through a town: a scurrying of pedestrians for safety, surprised faces staring at us, street lights glistening on the moisture the wind had whipped from my eyes. I passed blindly by the road I wanted, circled back to it, and we were out in the country again.

XIX

At the foot of a long, shallow hill I applied the brakes and we snapped to motionlessness.

I thrust my face close to the girl’s.

“Furthermore, you are a liar!” I knew I was shouting foolishly, but I was powerless to lower my voice. “Pangburn never put Axford’s name on that check. He never knew anything about it. You got in with him because you knew his brother-in-law was a millionaire. You pumped him, finding out everything he knew about his brother-in-law’s account at the Golden Gate Trust. You stole Pangburn’s bank book — it wasn’t in his room when I searched it — and deposited the forged Axford check to his credit, knowing that under those circumstances the check wouldn’t be questioned. The next day you took Pangburn into the bank, saying you were going to make a deposit. You took him in because with him standing beside you the check to which his signature had been forged wouldn’t be questioned. You knew that, being a gentleman, he’d take pains not to see what you were depositing.

“Then you framed the Baltimore trip. He told the truth to me — the truth so far as he knew it. Then you met him Sunday night — maybe accidentally, maybe not. Anyway, you took him down to Joplin’s, giving him some wild yarn that he would swallow and that would persuade him to stay there for a few days. That wasn’t hard, since he didn’t know anything about either of the twenty-thousand-dollar checks. You and your pal Kilcourse knew that if Pangburn disappeared nobody would ever know that he hadn’t forged the Axford check, and nobody would ever suspect that the second check was phoney. You’d have killed him quietly, but when Porky tipped you off that I was on my way down you had to move quick — so you shot him down. That’s the truth of it!” I yelled.

All this while she had watched me with wide grey eyes that were calm and tender, but now they clouded a little and a pucker of pain drew her brows together.

I yanked my head away and got the car in motion.

Just before we swept into Redwood City one of her hands came up to my forearm, rested there for a second, patted the arm twice, and withdrew.

I didn’t look at her, nor, I think, did she look at me, while she was being booked. She gave her name as Jeanne Delano, and refused to make any statement until she had seen an attorney. It all took a very few minutes.

As she was being led away, she stopped and asked if she might speak privately with me.

We went together to a far corner of the room.

She put her mouth close to my ear so that her breath was warm again on my cheek, as it had been in the car, and whispered the vilest epithet of which the English language is capable.

Then she walked out to her cell.