The Continental Op (Novelettes and short stories)

Originally appeared in The Black Mask, November 1924

I

“I haven’t anything very exciting to offer you this time,” Vance Richmond said as we shook hands. “I want you to find a man for me — a man who is not a criminal.”

There was an apology in his voice. The last couple of jobs this lean, grey-faced attorney had thrown my way had run to gun-play and other forms of rioting, and I suppose he thought anything less than that would put me to sleep. Was a time when he might have been right — when I was a young sprout of twenty or so, newly attached to the Continental Detective Agency. But the fifteen years that had slid by since then had dulled my appetite for rough stuff. I don’t mean that I shuddered whenever I considered the possibility of some bird taking a poke at me; but I didn’t call that day a total loss in which nobody tried to puncture my short, fat carcass.

“The man I want found,” the lawyer went on, as we sat down, “is an English architect named Norman Ashcraft. He is a man of about thirty-seven, five feet ten inches tall, well built, and fair-skinned, with light hair and blue eyes. Four years ago he was a typical specimen of the clean-cut blond Britisher. He may not be like that now — those four years have been rather hard ones for him, I imagine.

“I want to find him for Mrs. Ashcraft, his wife. I know your Agency’s rule against meddling with family affairs, but I can assure you that no matter how things turn out there will be no divorce proceedings in which you will be involved.

“Here is the story. Four years ago the Ashcrafts were living together in England, in Bristol. It seems that Mrs. Ashcraft is of a very jealous disposition, and he was rather high-strung. Furthermore, he had only what money he earned at his profession, while she had inherited quite a bit from her parents. Ashcraft was rather foolishly sensitive about being the husband of a wealthy woman — was inclined to go out of his way to show that he was not dependent upon her money, that he wouldn’t be influenced by it. Foolish, of course, but just the sort of attitude a man of his temperament would assume. One night she accused him of paying too much attention to another woman. They quarreled, and he packed up and left.

“She was repentant within a week — especially repentant since she had learned that her suspicion had had no foundation outside of her own jealousy — and she tried to find him. But he was gone. It became manifest that he had left England. She had him searched for in Europe, in Canada, in Australia, and in the United States. She succeeded in tracing him from Bristol to New York, and then to Detroit, where he had been arrested and fined for disturbing the peace in a drunken row of some sort. After that he dropped out of sight until he bobbed up in Seattle ten months later.”

The attorney hunted through the papers on his desk and found a memorandum.

“On May 23, 1923, he shot and killed a burglar in his room in a hotel there. The Seattle police seem to have suspected that there was something funny about the shooting, but had nothing to hold Ashcraft on. The man he killed was undoubtedly a burglar. Then Ashcraft disappeared again, and nothing was heard of him until just about a year ago. Mrs. Ashcraft had advertisements inserted in the personal columns of papers in the principal American cities.

“One day she received a letter from him, from San Francisco. It was a very formal letter, and simply requested her to stop advertising. Although he was through with the name Norman Ashcraft, he wrote, he disliked seeing it published in every newspaper he read.

“She mailed a letter to him at the General Delivery window here, and used another advertisement to tell him about it. He answered it, rather caustically. She wrote him again, asking him to come home. He refused, though he seemed less bitter toward her. They exchanged several letters, and she learned that he had become a drug addict, and what was left of his pride would not let him return to her until he looked — and was at least somewhat like — his former self. She persuaded him to accept enough money from her to straighten himself out. She sent him this money each month, in care of General Delivery, here.

“Meanwhile she closed up her affairs in England — she had no close relatives to hold her there — and came to San Francisco, to be on hand when her husband was ready to return to her. A year has gone. She still sends him money each month. She still waits for him to come back to her. He has repeatedly refused to see her, and his letters are evasive — filled with accounts of the struggle he is having, making headway against the drug one month, slipping back the next.

“She suspects by now, of course, that he has no intention of ever coming back to her; that he does not intend giving up the drug; that he is simply using her as a source of income. I have urged her to discontinue the monthly allowance for a while. That would at least bring about an interview, I think, and she could learn definitely what to expect. But she will not do that. You see, she blames herself for his present condition. She thinks her foolish flare of jealousy is responsible for his plight, and she is afraid to do anything that might either hurt him or induce him to hurt himself further. Her mind is unchangeably made up in that respect. She wants him back, wants him straightened out; but if he will not come, then she is content to continue the payments for the rest of his life. But she wants to know what she is to expect. She wants to end this devilish uncertainty in which she has been living.

“What we want, then, is for you to find Ashcraft. We want to know whether there is any likelihood of his ever becoming a man again, or whether he is gone beyond redemption. There is your job. Find him, learn whatever you can about him, and then, after we know something, we will decide whether it is wiser to force an interview between them — in hopes that she will be able to influence him — or not.”

“I’ll try it,” I said. “When does Mrs. Ashcraft send him his monthly allowance?”

“On the first of each month.”

“Today is the twenty-eighth. That’ll give me three days to wind up a job I have on hand. Got a photo of him?”

“Unfortunately, no. In her anger immediately after their row, Mrs. Ashcraft destroyed everything she had that would remind her of him. But I don’t think a photograph would be of any great help at the post office. Without consulting me, Mrs. Ashcraft watched for her husband there on several occasions, and did not see him. It is more than likely that he has someone else call for his mail.”

I got up and reached for my hat.

“See you around the second of the month,” I said, as I left the office.

II

On the afternoon of the first, I went down to the post office and got hold of Lusk, the inspector in charge of the division at the time.

“I’ve got a line on a scratcher from up north,” I told Lusk, “who is supposed to be getting his mail at the window. Will you fix it up so I can get a spot on him?”

Post office inspectors are all tied up with rules and regulations that forbid their giving assistance to private detectives except on certain criminal matters. But a friendly inspector doesn’t have to put you through the third degree. You lie to him — so that he will have an alibi in case there’s a kick-back — and whether he thinks you’re lying or not doesn’t matter.

So presently I was downstairs again, loitering within sight of the A to D window, with the clerk at the window instructed to give me the office when Ashcraft’s mail was called for. There was no mail for him there at the time. Mrs. Ashcraft’s letter would hardly get to the clerks that afternoon, but I was taking no chances. I stayed on the job until the windows closed at eight o’clock, and then went home.

At a few minutes after ten the next morning I got my action. One of the clerks gave me the signal. A small man in a blue suit and a soft gray hat was walking away from the window with an envelope in his hand. A man of perhaps forty years, though he looked older. His face was pasty, his feet dragged, and, although his clothes were fairly new, they needed brushing and pressing.

He came straight to the desk in front of which I stood fiddling with some papers. Out of the tail of my eye I saw that he had not opened the envelope in his hand — was not going to open it. He took a large envelope from his pocket, and I got just enough of a glimpse of its front to see that it was already stamped and addressed. I twisted my neck out of joint trying to read the address, but failed. He kept the addressed side against his body, put the letter he had got from the window in it, and licked the flap backward, so that there was no possible way for anybody to see the front of the envelope. Then he rubbed the flap down carefully and turned toward the mailing slots. I went after him. There was nothing to do but to pull the always reliable stumble.

I overtook him, stepped close and faked a fall on the marble floor, bumping into him, grabbing him as if to regain my balance. It went rotten. In the middle of my stunt my foot really did slip, and we went down on the floor like a pair of wrestlers, with him under me. To botch the trick thoroughly, he fell with the envelope pinned under him.

I scrambled up, yanked him to his feet, mumbled an apology and almost had to push him out of the way to beat him to the envelope that lay face down on the floor. I had to turn it over as I handed it to him in order to get the address:

I had the address, but I had tipped my mitt. There was no way in God’s world for this little man in blue to miss knowing that I had been trying to get that address.

I dusted myself off while he put his envelope through a slot. He didn’t come back past me, but went on down toward the Mission Street exit. I couldn’t let him get away with what he knew. I didn’t want Ashcraft tipped off before I got to him. I would have to try another trick as ancient as the one the slippery floor had bungled for me. I set out after the little man again.

Just as I reached his side he turned his head to see if he was being followed.

“Hello, Micky!” I hailed him. “How’s everything in Chi?”

“You got me wrong.” He spoke out of the side of his gray-lipped mouth, not stopping. “I don’t know nothin’ about Chi.”

His eyes were pale blue, with needlepoint pupils — the eyes of a heroin or morphine user.

“Quit stalling.” I walked along at his side. We had left the building by this time and were going down Mission Street. “You fell off the rattler only this morning.”

He stopped on the sidewalk and faced me.

“Me? Who do you think I am?”

“You’re Micky Parker. The Dutchman gave us the rap that you were headed here. They got him — if you don’t already know it.”

“You’re cuckoo,” he sneered. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about!”

That was nothing — neither did I. I raised my right hand in my overcoat pocket.

“Now I’ll tell one,” I growled at him. “And keep your hands away from your clothes or I’ll let the guts out of you.”

He flinched away from my bulging pocket.

“Hey, listen, brother!” he begged. “You got me wrong — on the level. My name ain’t Micky Parker, an’ I ain’t been in Chi in six years. I been here in Frisco for a solid year, an’ that’s the truth.”

“You got to show me.”

“I can do it,” he exclaimed, all eagerness. “You come down the drag with me, an’ I’ll show you. My name’s Ryan, an’ I been livin’ aroun’ the corner here on Sixth Street for six or eight months.”

“Ryan?” I asked.

“Yes — John Ryan.”

I chalked that up against him. Of course there have been Ryans christened John, but not enough of them to account for the number of times that name appears in criminal records. I don’t suppose there are three old-time yeggs in the country who haven’t used the name at least once; it’s the John Smith of yeggdom.

This particular John Ryan led me around to a house on Sixth Street, where the landlady — a rough-hewn woman of fifty, with bare arms that were haired and muscled like the village smithy’s — assured me that her tenant had to her positive knowledge been in San Francisco for months, and that she remembered seeing him at least once a day for a couple of weeks back. If I had been really suspicious that this Ryan was my mythical Micky Parker from Chicago, I wouldn’t have taken the woman’s word for it, but as it was I pretended to be satisfied.

That seemed to be all right then. Mr. Ryan had been led astray, had been convinced that I had mistaken him for another crook, and that I was not interested in the Ashcraft letter. I would be safe — reasonably safe — in letting the situation go as it stood. But loose ends worry me. And you can’t always count on people doing and thinking what you want. This bird was a hop-head, and he had given me a phoney-sounding name, so...

“What do you do for a living?” I asked him.

“I ain’t been doin’ nothin’ for a coupla months,” he pattered, “but I expec’ to open a lunch room with a fella nex’ week.”

“Let’s go up to your room,” I suggested. “I want to talk to you.”

He wasn’t enthusiastic, but he took me up. He had two rooms and a kitchen on the third floor. They were dirty, foul-smelling rooms. I dangled a leg from the corner of a table and waved him into a squeaky rocking chair in front of me. His pasty face and dopey eyes were uneasy.

“Where’s Ashcraft?” I threw at him. He jerked, and then looked at the floor.

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” he mumbled.

“You’d better figure it out,” I advised him, “or there’s a nice cool cell down in the booby-hutch that will be wrapped around you.”

“You ain’t got nothin’ on me.”

“What of that? How’d you like to do a thirty or a sixty on a vag charge?”

“Vag, hell!” he snarled, looking up at me. “I got five hundred smacks in my kick. Does that look like you can vag me?”

I grinned down at him.

“You know better than that, Ryan. A pocketful of money’ll get you nothing in California. You’ve got no job. You can’t show where your money comes from. You’re made to order for the vag law.”

I had this bird figured as a dope peddler. If he was — or was anything else off color that might come to light when he was vagged — the chances were that he would be willing to sell Ashcraft out to save himself; especially since, so far as I knew, Ashcraft wasn’t on the wrong side of the criminal law.

“If I were you,” I went on while he stared at the floor and thought, “I’d be a nice, obliging fellow and do my talking now. You’re—”

He twisted sidewise in his chair and one of his hands went behind him.

I kicked him out of his chair.

The table slipped under me or I would have stretched him. As it was, the foot that I aimed at his jaw took him on the chest and carried him over backward, with the rocking-chair piled on top of him. I pulled the chair off and took his gun — a cheap nickel-plated .32. Then I went back to my seat on the corner of the table.

He had only that one flash of fight in him. He got up sniveling.

“I’ll tell you. I don’t want no trouble, an’ it ain’t nothin’ to me. I didn’t know there was nothin’ wrong. This Ashcraft told me he was jus’ stringin’ his wife along. He give me ten bucks a throw to get his letter ever’ month an’ send it to him in Tijuana. I knowed him here, an’ when he went south six months ago — he’s got a girl down there — I promised I’d do it for him. I knowed it was money — he said it was his ‘alimony’ — but I didn’t know there was nothin’ wrong.”

“What sort of a hombre is this Ashcraft? What’s his graft?”

“I don’t know. He could be a con man — he’s got a good front. He’s a Englishman, an’ mostly goes by the name of Ed Bohannon. He hits the hop. I don’t use it myself” — that was a good one — “but you know how it is in a burg like this, a man runs into all kinds of people. I don’t know nothin’ about what he’s up to. I jus’ send the money ever’ month an’ get my ten.”

That was all I could get out of him. He couldn’t — or wouldn’t — tell me where Ashcraft had lived in San Francisco or who he had mobbed up with. However, I had learned that Bohannon was Ashcraft, and not another go-between, and that was something.

Ryan squawked his head off when he found that I was going to vag him anyway. For a moment it looked like I would have to kick him loose from his backbone again.

“You said you’d spring me if I talked,” he wailed.

“I did not. But if I had — when a gent flashes a rod on me I figure it cancels any agreement we might have had. Come on.”

I couldn’t afford to let him run around loose until I got in touch with Ashcraft. He would have been sending a telegram before I was three blocks away, and my quarry would be on his merry way to points north, east, south and west.

It was a good hunch I played in nabbing Ryan. When he was fingerprinted at the Hall of Justice he turned out to be one Fred Rooney, alias “Jamocha,” a peddler and smuggler who had crushed out of the Federal Prison at Leavenworth, leaving eight years of a tenner still unserved.

“Will you sew him up for a couple of days?” I asked the captain of the city jail. “I’ve got work to do that will go smoother if he can’t get any word out for a while.”

“Sure,” the captain promised. “The federal people won’t take him off our hands for two or three days. I’ll keep him air-tight till then.”

III

From the jail I went up to Vance Richmond’s office and turned my news over to him.

“Ashcraft is getting his mail in Tijuana. He’s living down there under the name of Ed Bohannon, and maybe has a woman there. I’ve just thrown one of his friends — the one who handled the mail and an escaped con — in the cooler.”

“Was that necessary?” Richmond asked. “We don’t want to work any hardships. We’re really trying to help Ashcraft, you know.”

“I could have spared this bird,” I admitted. “But what for? He was all wrong. If Ashcraft can be brought back to his wife, he’s better off with some of his shady friends out of the way. If he can’t, what’s the difference? Anyway, we’ve got one line on him safely stowed away where we can find it when we want it.”

The attorney shrugged, and reached for the telephone.

He called a number. “Is Mrs. Ashcraft there?... This is Mr. Richmond... No, we haven’t exactly found him, but I think we know where he is... Yes... In about fifteen minutes.”

He put down the telephone and stood up.

“We’ll run up to Mrs. Ashcraft’s house and see her.”

Fifteen minutes later we were getting out of Richmond’s car in Jackson Street near Gough. The house was a three-story white stone building, set behind a carefully sodded little lawn with an iron railing around it.

Mrs. Ashcraft received us in a drawing-room on the second floor. A tall woman of less than thirty, slimly beautiful in a gray dress. Clear was the word that best fits her; it described the blue of her eyes, the pink-white of her skin, and the light brown of her hair.

Richmond introduced me to her, and then I told her what I had learned, omitting the part about the woman in Tijuana. Nor did I tell her that the chances were her husband was a crook nowadays.

“Mr. Ashcraft is in Tijuana, I have been told. He left San Francisco about six months ago. His mail is being forwarded to him in care of a café there, under the name of Edward Bohannon.”

Her eyes lighted up happily, but she didn’t throw a fit. She wasn’t that sort. She addressed the attorney.

“Shall I go down? Or will you?”

Richmond shook his head.

“Neither. You certainly shouldn’t go, and I cannot — not at present. I must be in Eureka by the day after tomorrow, and shall have to spend several days there.” He turned to me. “You’ll have to go. You can no doubt handle it better than I could. You will know what to do and how to do it. There are no definite instructions I can give you. Your course will have to depend on Mr. Ashcraft’s attitude and condition. Mrs. Ashcraft doesn’t wish to force herself on him, but neither does she wish to leave anything undone that might help him.”

Mrs. Ashcraft held a strong, slender hand out to me.

“You will do whatever you think wisest.”

It was partly a question, partly an expression of confidence.

“I will,” I promised.

I liked this Mrs. Ashcraft.

IV

Tijuana hadn’t changed much in the two years I had been away. Still the same six or seven hundred feet of dusty and dingy street running between two almost solid rows of saloons, — perhaps thirty-five of them to a row, — with dirtier side streets taking care of the dives that couldn’t find room on the main street.

The automobile that had brought me down from San Diego dumped me into the center of the town early in the afternoon, and the day’s business was just getting under way. That is, there were only two or three drunks wandering around among the dogs and loafing Mexicans in the street, although there was already a bustle of potential drunks moving from one saloon to the next. But this was nothing like the crowd that would be here the following week, when the season’s racing started.

In the middle of the next block I saw a big gilded horseshoe. I went down the street and into the saloon behind the sign. It was a fair sample of the local joint. A bar on your left as you came in, running half the length of the building, with three or four slot machines on one end. Across from the bar, against the right-hand wall, a dance floor that ran from the front wall to a raised platform, where a greasy orchestra was now preparing to go to work. Behind the orchestra was a row of low stalls or booths, with open fronts and a table and two benches apiece. Opposite them, in the space between the bar and the rear of the building, a man with a hair-lip was shaking pills out of a keno goose.

It was early in the day, and there were only a few buyers present, so the girls whose business it is to speed the sale of drinks charged down on me in a flock.

“Buy me a drink? Let’s have a little drink? Buy a drink, honey?”

I shooed them away — no easy job — and caught a bartender’s eye. He was a beefy, red-faced Irishman, with sorrel hair plastered down in two curls that hid what little forehead he had.

“I want to see Ed Bohannon,” I told him confidentially.

He turned blank fish-green eyes on me.

“I don’t know no Ed Bohannon.”

Taking out a piece of paper and a pencil I scribbled, Jamocha is copped, and slid the paper over to the bartender.

“If a man who says he’s Ed Bohannon asks for that, will you give it to him?”

“I guess so.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ll hang around a while.”

I walked down the room and sat at a table in one of the stalls. A lanky girl who had done something to her hair that made it purple was camped beside me before I had settled in my seat.

“Buy me a little drink?” she asked.

The face she made at me was probably meant for a smile. Whatever it was, it beat me. I was afraid she’d do it again, so I surrendered.

“Yes,” I said, and ordered a bottle of beer for myself from the waiter who was already hanging over my shoulder.

The beer wasn’t bad, for green beer; but at four bits a bottle it wasn’t anything to write home about. This Tijuana happens to be in Mexico — by about a mile — but it’s an American town, run by Americans, who sell American artificial booze at American prices. If you know your way around the United States you can find lots of places — especially near the Canadian line — where good booze can be bought for less than you are soaked for poison in Tijuana.

The purple-haired woman at my side downed her shot of whiskey, and was opening her mouth to suggest that we have another drink, — hustlers down there don’t waste any time at all, — when a voice spoke from behind me.

“Cora, Frank wants you.”

Cora scowled, looking over my shoulder.

Then she made that damned face at me again, said “All right, Kewpie. Will you take care of my friend here?” and left me.

Kewpie slid into the seat beside me. She was a little chunky girl of perhaps eighteen — not a day more than that. Just a kid. Her short hair was brown and curly over a round, boyish face with laughing, impudent eyes. Rather a cute little trick.

I bought her a drink and got another bottle of beer.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked her.

“Hooch.” She grinned at me — a grin that was as boyish as the straight look of her brown eyes. “Gallons of it.”

“And besides that?”

I knew this switching of girls on me hadn’t been purposeless.

“I hear you’re looking for a friend of mine,” Kewpie said.

“That might be. What friends have you got?”

“Well, there’s Ed Bohannon for one. You know Ed?”

I shook my head.

“No — not yet.”

“But you’re looking for him?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Maybe I could tell you how to find him, if I knew you were all right.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to me,” I said carelessly. “I’ve a few more minutes to waste, and if he doesn’t show up by then it’s all one to me.”

She cuddled against my shoulder.

“What’s the racket? Maybe I could get word to Ed.”

I stuck a cigarette in her mouth, one in my own, and lit them.

“Let it go,” I bluffed. “This Ed of yours seems to be as exclusive as all hell. Well, it’s no skin off my face. I’ll buy you another drink and then trot along.”

She jumped up.

“Wait a minute. I’ll see if I can get him. What’s your name?”

“Parker will do as well as any other,” I said, the name I had used on Ryan popping first into my mind.

“You wait,” she called back as she moved toward the back door. “I think I can find him.”

“I think so too,” I agreed.

Ten minutes went by, and a man came to my table from the front of the establishment. He was a blond Englishman of less than forty, with all the marks of the gentleman gone to pot on him. Not altogether on the rocks yet, but you could see evidence of the downhill slide plainly in the dullness of his blue eyes, in the pouches under his eyes, in the blurred lines around his mouth and the mouth’s looseness, and in the grayish tint of his skin. He was still fairly attractive in appearance — enough of his former wholesomeness remained for that.

He sat down facing me across the table.

“You’re looking for me?”

There was only a hint of the Britisher in his accent.

“You’re Ed Bohannon?”

He nodded.

“Jamocha was picked up a couple of days ago,” I told him, “and ought to be riding back to the Kansas big house by now. He got word out for me to give you the rap. He knew I was heading this way.”

“How did they come to get him?”

His blue eyes were suspicious on my face.

“Don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they picked him up on a circular.”

He frowned at the table and traced a meaningless design with a finger in a puddle of beer. Then he looked sharply at me again.

“Did he tell you anything else?”

“He didn’t tell me anything. He got word out to me by somebody’s mouthpiece. I didn’t see him.”

“You’re staying down here a while?”

“Yes, for two or three days,” I said. “I’ve got something on the fire.”

He stood up and smiled, and held out his hand.

“Thanks for the tip, Parker,” he said. “If you’ll take a walk with me I’ll give you something real to drink.”

I didn’t have anything against that. He led me out of the Golden Horseshoe and down a side street to an adobe house set out where the town fringed off into the desert. In the front room he waved me to a chair and went into the next room.

“What do you fancy?” he called through the door. “Rye, gin, tequila, Scotch—”

“The last one wins,” I interrupted his catalog.

He brought in a bottle of Black and White, a siphon and some glasses, and we settled down to drinking. When that bottle was empty there was another to take its place. We drank and talked, drank and talked, and each of us pretended to be drunker than he really was — though before long we were both as full as a pair of goats.

It was a drinking contest pure and simple. He was trying to drink me into a pulp — a pulp that would easily give up all of its secrets — and I was trying the same game on him. Neither of us made much progress. Neither he nor I was young enough in the world to blab much when we were drunk that wouldn’t have come out if we had been sober. Few grown men do, unless they get to boasting, or are very skillfully handled. All that afternoon we faced each other over the table in the center of the room, drank and entertained each other.

“Y’ know,” he was saying somewhere along toward dark, “I’ve been a damn’ ass. Got a wife — the nicesh woman in the worl’. Wantsh me t’ come back to her, an’ all tha’ short of thing. Yet I hang around here, lappin’ up this shtuff — hittin’ the pipe — when I could be shomebody. Arc — architec’, y’ un’ershtand — good one, too. But I got in rut — got mixsh up with theshe people. C-can’t sheem to break ’way. Goin’ to, though — no spoofin’. Goin’ back to li’l wife, nicesh woman in the worl’. Don’t you shay anything t’ Kewpie. She’d raishe hell ’f she knew I wash goin’ t’ shake her. Nishe girl, K-kewpie, but tough. S-shtick a bloomin’ knife in me. Good job, too! But I’m goin’ back to wife. Breakin’ ’way from p-pipe an’ ever’thing. Look at me. D’ I look like a hop-head? Course not! Curin’ m’self, tha’s why. I’ll show you — take a smoke now — show you I can take it or leave it alone.”

Pulling himself dizzily up out of his chair, he wandered into the next room, bawling a song at the top of his voice:

He came staggering into the room again carrying an elaborate opium layout — all silver and ebony — on a silver tray. He put it on the table and flourished a pipe at me.

“Have a li’l rear on me, Parker.”

I told him I’d stick to the Scotch.

“Give y’ shot of C. ’f y’d rather have it,” he invited me.

I declined the cocaine, so he sprawled himself comfortably on the floor beside the table, rolled and cooked a pill, and our party went on — with him smoking his hop and me punishing the liquor — each of us still talking for the other’s benefit, and trying to get the other to talk for our own.

I was holding down a lovely package by the time Kewpie came in, at midnight.

“Looks like you folks are enjoying yourselves,” she laughed, leaning down to kiss the Englishman’s rumpled hair as she stepped over him.

She perched herself on the table and reached for the Scotch.

“Everything’s lovely,” I assured her, though probably I didn’t say it that clear.

I was fighting a battle with myself just about then. I had an idea that I wanted to dance. Down in Yucatan, four or five months before — hunting for a lad who had done wrong by the bank that employed him — I had seen some natives dance the naual. And that naual dance was the one thing in the world I wanted to do just then. (I was carrying a beautiful bun!) But I knew that if I sat still — as I had been sitting all evening — I could keep my cargo in hand, while it wasn’t going to take much moving around to knock me over.

I don’t remember whether I finally conquered the desire to dance or not. I remember Kewpie sitting on the table, grinning her boy’s grin at me, and saying:

“You ought to stay oiled all the time, Shorty; it improves you.”

I don’t know whether I made any answer to that or not. Shortly afterward, I know, I spread myself beside the Englishman on the floor and went to sleep.

V

The next two days were pretty much like the first one. Ashcraft and I were together twenty-four hours each of the days, and usually the girl was with us, and the only time we weren’t drinking was when we were sleeping off what we had been drinking. We spent most of those three days in either the adobe house or the Golden Horseshoe, but we found time to take in most of the other joints in town now and then. I had only a hazy idea of some of the things that went on around me, though I don’t think I missed anything entirely. On the second day someone added a first name to the alias I had given the girl — and thereafter I was “Painless” Parker to Tijuana, and still am to some of them. I don’t know who christened me, or why.

Ashcraft and I were as thick as thieves, on the surface, but neither of us ever lost his distrust of the other, no matter how drunk we got — and we got plenty drunk. He went up against his mud-pipe regularly. I don’t think the girl used the stuff, but she had a pretty capacity for hard liquor. I would go to sleep not knowing whether I was going to wake up or not; but I had nothing on me to give me away, so I figured that I was safe unless I talked myself into a jam. I didn’t worry much, — bedtime usually caught me in a state that made worry impossible.

Three days of this, and then, sobering up, I was riding back to San Francisco, making a list of what I knew and guessed about Norman Ashcraft, alias Ed Bohannon.

The list went something like this:

(1) He suspected, if he didn’t know, that I had come down to see him on his wife’s account: he had been too smooth and had entertained me too well for me to doubt that; (2) he apparently had decided to return to his wife, though there was no guarantee that he would actually do so; (3) he was not incurably addicted to drugs; he merely smoked opium and, regardless of what the Sunday supplements say, an opium smoker is little, if any, worse off than a tobacco smoker; (4) he might pull himself together under his wife’s influence, but it was doubtful: physically he hadn’t gone to the dogs, but he had had his taste of the gutter and seemed to like it; (5) the girl Kewpie was crazily in love with him, while he liked her, but wasn’t turning himself inside out over her.

A good night’s sleep on the train between Los Angeles and San Francisco set me down in the Third and Townsend Street station with nearly normal head and stomach and not too many kinks in my nerves. I put away a breakfast that was composed of more food than I had eaten in three days, and went up to Vance Richmond’s office.

“Mr. Richmond is still in Eureka,” his stenographer told me. “I don’t expect him back until the first of the week.”

“Can you get him on the phone for me?”

She could, and did.

Without mentioning any names, I told the attorney what I knew and guessed.

“I see,” he said. “Suppose you go out to Mrs. A’s house and tell her. I will write her tonight, and I probably shall be back in the city by the day after tomorrow. I think we can safely delay action until then.”

I caught a street car, transferred at Van Ness Avenue, and went out to Mrs. Ashcraft’s house. Nothing happened when I rang the bell. I rang it several times before I noticed that there were two morning newspapers in the vestibule. I looked at the dates — this morning’s and yesterday morning’s.

An old man in faded overalls was watering the lawn next door.

“Do you know if the people who live here have gone away?” I called to him.

“I don’t guess so. The back door’s open, I seen this mornin’.”

He returned his attention to his hose, and then stopped to scratch his chin.

“They may of gone,” he said slowly. “Come to think on it, I ain’t seen any of ’em for — I don’t remember seein’ any of ’em yesterday.”

I left the front steps and went around the house, climbed the low fence in back and went up the back steps. The kitchen door stood about a foot open. Nobody was visible in the kitchen, but there was a sound of running water.

I knocked on the door with my knuckles, loudly. There was no answering sound. I pushed the door open and went in. The sound of water came from the sink. I looked in the sink.

Under a thin stream of water running from one of the faucets lay a carving knife with nearly a foot of keen blade. The knife was clean, but the back of the porcelain sink — where water had splashed with only small, scattered drops — was freckled with red-brown spots. I scraped one of them with a finger-nail — dried blood.

Except for the sink, I could see nothing out of order in the kitchen. I opened a pantry door. Everything seemed all right there. Across the room another door led to the front of the house. I opened the door and went into a passageway. Not enough light came from the kitchen to illuminate the passageway. I fumbled in the dusk for the light-button that I knew should be there. I stepped on something soft.

Pulling my foot back, I felt in my pocket for matches, and struck one. In front of me, his head and shoulders on the floor, his hips and legs on the lower steps of a flight of stairs, lay a Filipino boy in his underclothes.

He was dead. One eye was cut, and his throat was gashed straight across, close up under his chin. I could see the killing without even shutting my eyes. At the top of the stairs — the killer’s left hand dashing into the Filipino’s face — thumb-nail gouging into eye — pushing the brown face back — tightening the brown throat for the knife’s edge — the slash — and the shove down the steps.

The light from my second match showed me the button. I clicked on the lights, buttoned my coat, and went up the steps. Dried blood darkened them here and there, and at the second-floor landing the wall paper was stained with a big blot. At the head of the stairs I found another light-button, and pressed it.

I walked down the hall, poked my head into two rooms that seemed in order, and then turned a corner — and pulled up with a jerk, barely in time to miss stumbling over a woman who lay there.

She was huddled on the floor, face down, with knees drawn up under her and both hands clasped to her stomach. She wore a nightgown, and her hair was in a braid down her back.

I put a finger on the back of her neck. Stone-cold.

Kneeling on the floor — to avoid the necessity of turning her over — I looked at her face. She was the maid who had admitted Richmond and me four days ago.

I stood up again and looked around. The maid’s head was almost touching a closed door. I stepped around her and pushed the door open. A bedroom, and not the maid’s. It was an expensively dainty bedroom in cream and gray, with French prints on the walls. Nothing in the room was disarranged except the bed. The bed clothes were rumpled and tangled, and piled high in the center of the bed — in a pile that was too large...

Leaning over the bed, I began to draw the covers off. The second piece came away stained with blood. I yanked the rest off.

Mrs. Ashcraft was dead there.

Her body was drawn up in a little heap, from which her head hung crookedly, dangling from a neck that had been cut clean through to the bone. Her face was marked with four deep scratches from temple to chin. One sleeve had been torn from the jacket of her blue silk pajamas. Bedding and pajamas were soggy with the blood that the clothing piled over her had kept from drying.

I put the blanket over her again, edged past the dead woman in the hall, and went down the front stairs, switching on more lights, hunting for the telephone. Near the foot of the stairs I found it. I called the police detective bureau first, and then Vance Richmond’s office.

“Get word to Mr. Richmond that Mrs. Ashcraft has been murdered,” I told his stenographer. “I’m at her house, and he can get in touch with me here any time during the next two or three hours.”

Then I went out of the front door and sat on the top step, smoking a cigarette while I waited for the police.

I felt rotten. I’ve seen dead people in larger quantities than three in my time, and I’ve seen some that were hacked up pretty badly; but this thing had fallen on me while my nerves were ragged from three days of boozing.

The police automobile swung around the corner and began disgorging men before I had finished my first cigarette. O’Gar, the detective sergeant in charge of the Homicide Detail, was the first man up the steps.

“Hullo,” he greeted me. “What have you got hold of this time?”

I was glad to see him. This squat, bullet-headed sergeant is as good a man as the department has, and he and I have always been lucky when we tied up together.

“I found three bodies in there before I quit looking,” I told him as I led him indoors. “Maybe a regular detective like you — with a badge and everything — can find more.”

“You didn’t do bad — for a lad,” he said.

My wooziness had passed. I was eager to get to work. These people lying dead around the house were merely counters in a game again — or almost. I remembered the feel of Mrs. Ashcraft’s slim hand in mine, but I stuck that memory in the back of my mind. You hear now and then of detectives who have not become callous, who have not lost what you might call the human touch. I always feel sorry for them, and wonder why they don’t chuck their jobs and find another line of work that wouldn’t be so hard on their emotions. A sleuth who doesn’t grow a tough shell is in for a gay life — day in and day out poking his nose into one kind of woe or another.

I showed the Filipino to O’Gar first, and then the two women. We didn’t find any more. Detail work occupied all of us — O’Gar, the eight men under him, and me — for the next few hours. The house had to be gone over from roof to cellar. The neighbors had to be grilled. The employment agencies through which the servants had been hired had to be examined. Relatives and friends of the Filipino and the maid had to be traced and questioned. Newsboys, mail carriers, grocers’ delivery men, laundrymen, had to be found, questioned and, when necessary, investigated.

When the bulk of the reports were in, O’Gar and I sneaked away from the others — especially away from the newspaper men, who were all over the place by now — and locked ourselves in the library.

“Night before last, huh? Wednesday night?” O’Gar grunted when we were comfortable in a couple of leather chairs, burning tobacco.

I nodded. The report of the doctor who had examined the bodies, the presence of the two newspapers in the vestibule, and the fact that neither neighbor, grocer nor butcher had seen any of them since Wednesday, combined to make Wednesday night — or early Thursday morning — the correct date.

“I’d say the killer cracked the back door,” O’Gar went on, staring at the ceiling through smoke, “picked up the carving knife in the kitchen, and went upstairs. Maybe he went straight to Mrs. Ashcraft’s room — maybe not. But after a bit he went in there. The torn sleeve and the scratches on her face mean that there was a tussle. The Filipino and the maid heard the noise — heard her scream maybe — and rushed to her room to find out what was the matter. The maid most likely got there just as the killer was coming out — and got hers. I guess the Filipino saw him then and ran. The killer caught him at the head of the back stairs — and finished him. Then he went down to the kitchen, washed his hands, dropped the knife, and blew.”

“So far, so good,” I agreed; “but I notice you skip lightly over the question of who he was and why he killed.”

He pushed his hat back and scratched his bullet head.

“Don’t crowd me,” he rumbled; “I’ll get around to that. There seem to be just three guesses to take your pick from. We know that nobody else lived in the house outside of the three that were killed. So the killer was either a maniac who did the job for the fun of it, a burglar who was discovered and ran wild, or somebody who had a reason for bumping off Mrs. Ashcraft, and then had to kill the two servants when they discovered him.

“Taking the knife from the kitchen would make the burglar guess look like a bum one. And, besides, we’re pretty sure nothing was stolen. A good prowler would bring his own weapon with him if he wanted one. But the hell of it is that there are a lot of bum prowlers in the world — half-wits who would be likely to pick up a knife in the kitchen, go to pieces when the house woke up, slash everybody in sight, and then beat it without turning anything over.

“So it could have been a prowler; but my personal guess is that the job was done by somebody who wanted to wipe out Mrs. Ashcraft.”

“Not so bad,” I applauded. “Now listen to this: Mrs. Ashcraft has a husband in Tijuana, a mild sort of hop-head who is mixed up with a bunch of thugs. She was trying to persuade him to come back to her. He has a girl down there who is young, goofy over him, and a bad actor — one tough youngster. He was planning to run out on the girl and come back home.”

“So-o-o?” O’Gar said softly.

“But,” I continued, “I was with both him and the girl, in Tijuana, night before last — when this killing was done.”

“So-o?”

A knock on the door interrupted our talk. It was a policeman to tell me that I was wanted on the phone. I went down to the first floor, and Vance Richmond’s voice came over the wire.

“What is it? Miss Henry delivered your message, but she couldn’t give me any details.”

I told him the whole thing.

“I’ll leave for the city tonight,” he said when I had finished. “You go ahead and do whatever you want. You’re to have a free hand.”

“Right,” I replied. “I’ll probably be out of town when you get back. You can reach me through the Agency if you want to get in touch with me. I’m going to wire Ashcraft to come up — in your name.”

After Richmond had hung up, I called the city jail and asked the captain if John Ryan, alias Fred Rooney, alias Jamocha, was still there.

“No. Federal officers left for Leavenworth with him and two other prisoners yesterday morning.”

Up in the library again, I told O’Gar hurriedly:

“I’m catching the evening train south, betting my marbles that the job was made in Tijuana. I’m wiring Ashcraft to come up. I want to get him away from the Mexican town for a day or two, and if he’s up here you can keep an eye on him. I’ll give you a description of him, and you can pick him up at Vance Richmond’s office. He’ll probably connect there first thing.”

Half an hour of the little time I had left I spent writing and sending three telegrams. The first was to Ashcraft.

The other two were in code. One went to the Continental Detective Agency’s Kansas City branch, asking that an operative be sent to Leavenworth to question Jamocha. The other requested the Los Angeles branch to have a man meet me in San Diego the next day.

Then I dashed out to my rooms for a bagful of clean clothes, and went to sleep riding south again.

VI

San Diego was gay and packed when I got off the train early the next afternoon — filled with the crowd that the first Saturday of the racing season across the border had drawn. Movie folk from Los Angeles, farmers from the Imperial Valley, sailors from the Pacific Fleet, gamblers, tourists, grifters, and even regular people, from everywhere. I lunched, registered and left my bag at a hotel, and went up to the U. S. Grant Hotel to pick up the Los Angeles operative I had wired for.

I found him in the lobby — a freckle-faced youngster of twenty-two or so, whose bright gray eyes were busy just now with a racing program, which he held in a hand that had a finger bandaged with adhesive tape. I passed him and stopped at the cigar stand, where I bought a package of cigarettes and straightened out an imaginary dent in my hat. Then I went out to the street again. The bandaged finger and the business with the hat were our introductions. Somebody invented those tricks back before the Civil War, but they still worked smoothly, so their antiquity was no reason for discarding them.

I strolled up Fourth Street, getting away from Broadway — San Diego’s main stem — and the operative caught up with me. His name was Gorman, and he turned out to be a pretty good lad. I gave him the lay.

“You’re to go down to Tijuana and take a plant on the Golden Horseshoe Café. There’s a little chunk of a girl hustling drinks in there — short curly brown hair; brown eyes; round face; rather large red mouth; square shoulders. You can’t miss her; she’s a nice-looking kid of about eighteen, called Kewpie. She’s the target for your eye. Keep away from her. Don’t try to rope her. I’ll give you an hour’s start. Then I’m coming down to talk to her. I want to know what she does right after I leave, and what she does for the next few days. You can get in touch with me at the” — I gave him the name of my hotel and my room number — “each night. Don’t give me a tumble anywhere else. I’ll most likely be in and out of the Golden Horseshoe often.”

We parted, and I went down to the plaza and sat on a bench under the palms for an hour. Then I went up to the corner and fought for a seat on a Tijuana stage.

Fifteen or more miles of dusty riding — packed five in a seat meant for three — a momentary halt at the Immigration Station on the line, and I was climbing out of the stage at the entrance to the race track. The ponies had been running for some time, but the turnstiles were still spinning a steady stream of customers into the track. I turned my back on the gate and went over to the row of jitneys in front of the Monte Carlo — the big wooden casino — got into one, and was driven over to the Old Town.

The Old Town had a deserted look. Nearly everybody was over watching the dogs do their stuff. Gorman’s freckled face showed over a drink of mescal when I entered the Golden Horseshoe. I hoped he had a good constitution. He needed one if he was going to do his sleuthing on a distilled cactus diet.

The welcome I got from the Horseshoers was just like a homecoming. Even the bartender with the plastered-down curls gave me a grin.

“Where’s Kewpie?” I asked.

“Brother-in-lawing, Ed?” a big Swede girl leered at me. “I’ll see if I can find her for you.”

Kewpie came through the back door just then.

“Hello, Painless!” She climbed all over me, hugging me, rubbing her face against mine, and the Lord knows what all. “Down for another swell souse?”

“No,” I said, leading her back toward the stalls. “Business this time. Where’s Ed?”

“Up north. His wife kicked off and he’s gone to collect the remains.”

“That makes you sorry?”

She showed her big white teeth in a boy’s smile of pure happiness.

“You bet! It’s tough on me that papa has come into a lot of sugar.”

I looked at her out of the corner of my eyes — a glance that was supposed to be wise.

“And you think Ed’s going to bring the jack back to you?”

Her eyes snapped darkly at me.

“What’s eating you?” she demanded.

I smiled knowingly.

“One of two things is going to happen,” I predicted. “Ed’s going to ditch you — he was figuring on that, anyway — or he’s going to need every brownie he can scrape up to keep his neck from being—”

“You God-damned liar!”

Her right shoulder was to me, touching my left. Her left hand flashed down under her short skirt. I pushed her shoulder forward, twisting her body sharply away from me. The knife her left hand had whipped up from her leg jabbed deep into the underside of the table. A thick-bladed knife, I noticed, balanced for accurate throwing.

She kicked backward, driving one of her sharp heels into my ankle. I slid my left arm around behind her and pinned her elbow to her side just as she freed the knife from the table.

“What th’ hell’s all ’is?”

I looked up.

Across the table a man stood glaring at me — legs apart, fists on hips. He was a big man, and ugly. A tall, raw-boned man with wide shoulders, out of which a long, skinny yellow neck rose to support a little round head. His eyes were black shoe-buttons stuck close together at the top of a little mashed nose. His mouth looked as if it had been torn in his face, and it was stretched in a snarl now, baring a double row of crooked brown teeth.

“Where d’ yuh get ’at stuff?” this lovely person roared at me.

He was too tough to reason with.

“If you’re a waiter,” I told him, “bring me a bottle of beer and something for the kid. If you’re not a waiter — sneak.”

He leaned over the table and I gathered my feet in. It looked like I was going to need them to move around on.

“I’ll bring yuh a—”

The girl wriggled out of my hands and shut him up.

“Mine’s liquor,” she said sharply.

He snarled, looked from one of us to the other, showed me his dirty teeth again, and wandered away.

“Who’s your friend?”

“You’ll do well to lay off him,” she advised me, not answering my question.

Then she slid her knife back in its hiding place under her skirt and twisted around to face me.

“Now what’s all this about Ed being in trouble?”

“You read about the killing in the papers?”

“Yes.”

“You oughtn’t need a map, then,” I said. “Ed’s only out is to put the job on you. But I doubt if he can get away with that. If he can’t, he’s nailed.”

“You’re crazy!” she exclaimed. “You weren’t too drunk to know that both of us were here with you when the killing was done.”

“I’m not crazy enough to think that proves anything,” I corrected her. “But I am crazy enough to expect to go back to San Francisco wearing the killer on my wrist.”

She laughed at me. I laughed back and stood up.

“See you some more,” I said as I strolled toward the door.

I returned to San Diego and sent a wire to Los Angeles, asking for another operative. Then I got something to eat and spent the evening lying across the bed in my hotel room smoking and scheming and waiting for Gorman.

It was late when he arrived, and he smelled of mescal from San Diego to St. Louis and back, but his head seemed level enough.

“Looked like I was going to have to shoot you loose from the place for a moment,” he grinned. “Between the twist flashing the pick and the big guy loosening a sap in his pocket, it looked like action was coming.”

“You let me alone,” I ordered. “Your job is to see what goes on, and that’s all. If I get carved, you can mention it in your report, but that’s your limit. What did you turn up?”

“After you blew, the girl and the big guy put their noodles together. They seemed kind of agitated — all agog, you might say. He slid out, so I dropped the girl and slid along behind him. He came to town and got a wire off. I couldn’t crowd him close enough to see who it was to. Then he went back to the joint. Things were normal when I knocked off.”

“Who is the big guy? Did you learn?”

“He’s no sweet dream, from what I hear. ‘Gooseneck’ Flinn is the name on his calling cards. He’s bouncer and general utility man for the joint. I saw him in action against a couple of gobs, and he’s nobody’s meat — as pretty a double throw-out as I’ve ever seen.”

So this Gooseneck party was the Golden Horseshoe’s clean-up man, and he hadn’t been in sight during my three-day spree? I couldn’t possibly have been so drunk that I’d forget his ugliness. And it had been on one of those three days that Mrs. Ashcraft and her servants had been killed.

“I wired your office for another op,” I told Gorman. “He’s to connect with you. Turn the girl over to him, and you camp on Gooseneck’s trail. I think we’re going to hang three killings on him, so watch your step. I’ll be in to stir things up a little more tomorrow; but remember, no matter what happens, everybody plays his own game. Don’t ball things up trying to help me.”

“Aye, aye, Cap,” and he went off to get some sleep.

The next afternoon I spent at the race track, fooling around with the bangtails while I waited for night. The track was jammed with the usual Sunday crowd. I ran into any number of old acquaintances, some of them on my side of the game, some on the other, and some neutral. One of the second lot was “Trick-hat” Schultz. At our last meeting — a copper was leading him out of a Philadelphia court room toward a fifteen-year bit — he had promised to open me up from my eyebrows to my ankles the next time he saw me. He greeted me this afternoon with an eight-inch smile, bought me a shot of what they sell for gin under the grandstand, and gave me a tip on a horse named Beeswax. I’m not foolish enough to play anybody’s tips, so I didn’t play this one. Beeswax ran so far ahead of the others that it looked like he and his competitors were in separate races, and he paid twenty-something to one. So Trick-hat had his revenge after all.

After the last race, I got something to eat at the Sunset Inn, and then drifted over to the big casino — the other end of the same building. A thousand or more people of all sorts were jostling one another there, fighting to go up against poker, craps, chuck-a-luck, wheels of fortune, roulette and twenty-one with whatever money the race track had left or given them. I didn’t buck any of the games. My playtime was over. I walked around through the crowd looking for my men.

I spotted the first one — a sunburned man who was plainly a farm hand in his Sunday clothes. He was pushing toward the door, and his face held that peculiar emptiness which belongs to the gambler who has gone broke before the end of the game. It’s a look of regret that is not so much for the loss of the money as for the necessity of quitting.

I got between the farm hand and the door.

“Clean you?” I asked sympathetically when he reached me.

A sheepish sort of nod.

“How’d you like to pick up five bucks for a few minutes’ work?” I tempted him.

He would like it, but what was the work?

“I want you to go over to the Old Town with me and look at a man. Then you get your pay. There are no strings to it.”

That didn’t exactly satisfy him, but five bucks are five bucks; and he could drop out any time he didn’t like the looks of things. He decided to try it.

I put the farm hand over by a door, and went after another — a little, plump man with round, optimistic eyes and a weak mouth. He was willing to earn five dollars in the simple and easy manner I had outlined. The next man I braced was a little too timid to take a chance on a blind game. Then I got a Filipino — glorious in a fawn-colored suit, with a coat split to the neck and pants whose belled bottoms would have held a keg apiece — and a stocky young Greek who was probably either a waiter or a barber.

Four men were enough. My quartet pleased me immensely. They didn’t look too intelligent for my purpose, and they didn’t look like thugs or sharpers. I put them in a jitney and took them over to the Old Town.

“Now this is it,” I coached them when we had arrived. “I’m going into the Golden Horseshoe Café, around the corner. Give me two or three minutes, and then come in and buy yourselves a drink.” I gave the farm hand a five-dollar bill. “You pay for the drinks with that — it isn’t part of your wages. There’s a tall, broad-shouldered man with a long, yellow neck and a small ugly face in there. You can’t miss him. I want you all to take a good look at him without letting him get wise. When you’re sure you’d know him again anywhere, give me the nod, and come back here and you get your money. Be careful when you give me the nod. I don’t want anybody in there to find out that you know me.”

It sounded queer to them, but there was the promise of five dollars apiece, and there were the games back in the casino, where five dollars might buy a man into a streak of luck that — write the rest of it yourself. They asked questions, which I refused to answer, but they stuck.

Gooseneck was behind the bar, helping out the bartenders, when I entered the place. They needed help. The joint bulged with customers. The dance floor looked like a mob scene. Thirsts were lined up four deep at the bar. A shotgun wouldn’t have sounded above the din: men and women laughing, roaring and cursing; bottles and glasses rattling and banging; and louder and more disagreeable than any of those noises was the noise of the sweating orchestra. Turmoil, uproar, stink — a Tijuana joint on Sunday night.

I couldn’t find Gorman’s freckled face in the crowd, but I picked out the hatchet-sharp white face of Hooper, another Los Angeles operative, who, I knew then, had been sent down in response to my second telegram. Kewpie was farther down the bar, drinking with a little man whose meek face had the devil-may-care expression of a model husband on a tear. She nodded at me, but didn’t leave her client.

Gooseneck gave me a scowl and the bottle of beer I had ordered. Presently my four hired men came in. They did their parts beautifully!

First they peered through the smoke, looking from face to face, and hastily avoiding eyes that met theirs. A little of this, and one of them, the Filipino, saw the man I had described, behind the bar. He jumped a foot in the excitement of his discovery, and then, finding Gooseneck glaring at him, turned his back and fidgeted. The three others spotted Gooseneck now, and sneaked looks at him that were as conspicuously furtive as a set of false whiskers. Gooseneck glowered at them.

The Filipino turned around, looked at me, ducked his head sharply, and bolted for the street. The three who were left shot their drinks down their gullets and tried to catch my eye. I was reading a sign high on the wall behind the bar:

I was trying to count how many lies could be found in those nine words, and had reached four, with promise of more, when one of my confederates, the Greek, cleared his throat with the noise of a gasoline engine’s backfire. Gooseneck was edging down the bar, a bungstarter in one hand, his face purple.

I looked at my assistants. Their nods wouldn’t have been so terrible had they come one at a time; but they were taking no chances on my looking away again before they could get their reports in. The three heads bobbed together — a signal that nobody within twenty feet could, or did, miss — and they scooted out of the door, away from the long-necked man and his bung-starter.

I emptied my glass of beer, sauntered out of the saloon and around the corner. They were clustered where I had told them to wait.

“We’d know him! We’d know him!” they chorused.

“That’s fine,” I praised them. “You did great. I think you’re all natural-born gumshoes. Here’s your pay. Now if I were you boys, I think I’d sort of avoid that place after this; because, in spite of the clever way you covered yourselves up — and you did nobly! — he might possibly suspect something. There’s no use taking chances, anyway. ”

They grabbed their wages and were gone before I had finished my speech. I returned to the Golden Horseshoe — to be on hand in case one of them should decide to sell me out and come back there to spill the deal to Gooseneck.

Kewpie had left her model husband, and met me at the door. She stuck an arm through mine and led me toward the rear of the building. I noticed that Gooseneck was gone from behind the bar. I wondered if he was out gunning for my four ex-employees.

“Business looks good,” I chattered as we pushed through the crowd. “You know, I had a tip on Beeswax this afternoon, and wouldn’t play the pup.” I made two or three more aimless cracks of that sort — just because I knew the girl’s mind was full of something else. She paid no attention to anything I said.

But when we had dropped down in front of a vacant table, she asked:

“Who were your friends?”

“What friends?”

“The four jobbies who were at the bar when you were there a few minutes ago.”

“Too hard for me, sister.” I shook my head. “There were slews of men there. Oh, yes! I know who you mean! Those four gents who seemed kind of smitten with Gooseneck’s looks. I wonder what attracted them to him — besides his beauty.”

She grabbed my arm with both hands.

“So help me God, Painless,” she swore, “if you tie anything on Ed, I’ll kill you!”

Her brown eyes were big and damp. She was a hard and wise little baby — had rubbed the world’s sharp corners with both shoulders — but she was only a kid, and she was worried sick over this man of hers. However, the business of a sleuth is to catch criminals, not to sympathize with their ladyloves.

I patted her hands.

“I could give you some good advice,” I said as I stood up, “but you wouldn’t listen to it, so I’ll save my breath. It won’t do any harm to tell you to keep an eye on Gooseneck, though — he’s shifty.”

There wasn’t any special meaning to that speech, except that it might tangle things up a little more. One way of finding what’s at the bottom of either a cup of coffee or a situation is to keep stirring it up until whatever is on the bottom comes to the surface. I had been playing that system thus far on this affair.

Hooper came into my room in the San Diego hotel at a little before two the next morning.

“Gooseneck disappeared, with Gorman tailing him, immediately after your first visit,” he said. “After your second visit, the girl went around to a ’dobe house on the edge of town, and she was still there when I knocked off. The place was dark.”

Gorman didn’t show up.

VII

A bell-hop with a telegram roused me at ten o’clock in the morning. The telegram was from Mexicali:

That was good news. The long-necked man had fallen for my play, had taken my four busted gamblers for four witnesses, had taken their nods for identifications. Gooseneck was the lad who had done the actual killing, and Gooseneck was in flight.

I had shed my pajamas and was reaching for my union suit when the boy came back with another wire. This one was from O’Gar, through the Agency:

I used the telephone to get Hooper out of bed.

“Get down to Tijuana,” I told him. “Stick up the house where you left the girl last night, unless you run across her at the Golden Horseshoe. Stay there until she shows. Stay with her until she connects with a big blond Englishman, and then switch to him. He’s a man of less than forty, tall, with blue eyes and yellow hair. Don’t let him shake you — he’s the big boy in this party just now. I’ll be down. If the Englishman and I stay together and the girl leaves us, take her, but otherwise stick to him.”

I dressed, put down some breakfast and caught a stage for the Mexican town. The boy driving the stage made fair time, but you would have thought we were standing still to see a maroon roadster pass us near Palm City. Ashcraft was driving the roadster.

The roadster was empty, standing in front of the adobe house, when I saw it again. Up in the next block, Hooper was doing an imitation of a drunk, talking to two Indians in the uniforms of the Mexican Army.

I knocked on the door of the adobe house.

Kewpie’s voice: “Who is it?”

“Me — Painless. Just heard that Ed is back.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed. A pause. “Come in.”

I pushed the door open and went in. The Englishman sat tilted back in a chair, his right elbow on the table, his right hand in his coat pocket — if there was a gun in that pocket it was pointing at me.

“Hello,” he said. “I hear you’ve been making guesses about me.”

“Call ’em anything you like.” I pushed a chair over to within a couple of feet of him, and sat down. “But don’t let’s kid each other. You had Gooseneck knock your wife off so you could get what she had. The mistake you made was in picking a sap like Gooseneck to do the turn — a sap who went on a killing spree and then lost his nerve. Going to read and write just because three or four witnesses put the finger on him! And only going as far as Mexicali! That’s a fine place to pick! I suppose he was so scared that the five- or six-hour ride over the hills seemed like a trip to the end of the world!”

The man’s face told me nothing. He eased himself around in his chair an inch or two, which would have brought the gun in his pocket — if a gun was there — in line with my thick middle. The girl was somewhere behind me, fidgeting around. I was afraid of her. She was crazily in love with this man in front of me, and I had seen the blade she wore on one leg. I imagined her fingers itching for it now. The man and his gun didn’t worry me much. He was not rattle-brained, and he wasn’t likely to bump me off either in panic or for the fun of it.

I kept my chin going.

“You aren’t a sap, Ed, and neither am I. I want to take you riding north with bracelets on, but I’m in no hurry. What I mean is, I’m not going to stand up and trade lead with you. This is all in my daily grind. It isn’t a matter of life or death with me. If I can’t take you today, I’m willing to wait until tomorrow. I’ll get you in the end, unless somebody beats me to you — and that won’t break my heart. There’s a rod between my vest and my belly. If you’ll have Kewpie get it out, we’ll be all set for the talk I want to make.”

He nodded slowly, not taking his eyes from me. The girl came close to my back. One of her hands came over my shoulder, went under my vest, and my old black gun left me. Before she stepped away she laid the point of her knife against the nape of my neck for an instant — a gentle reminder. I managed not to squirm or jump.

“Good,” I said when she gave my gun to the Englishman, who pocketed it with his left hand. “Now here’s my proposition. You and Kewpie ride across the border with me — so we won’t have to fool with extradition papers — and I’ll have you locked up. We’ll do our fighting in court. I’m not absolutely certain that I can tie the killings on either of you, and if I flop, you’ll be free. If I make the grade — as I hope to — you’ll swing, of course. But there’s always a good chance of beating the courts — especially if you’re guilty — and that’s the only chance you have that’s worth a damn.

“What’s the sense of scooting? Spending the rest of your life dodging bulls? Only to be nabbed finally — or bumped off trying to get away? You’ll maybe save your neck, but what of the money your wife left? That money is what you are in the game for — it’s what you had your wife killed for. Stand trial and you’ve a chance to collect it. Run — and you kiss it good-by. Are you going to ditch it — throw it away just because your cat’s-paw bungled the deal? Or are you going to stick to the finish — win everything or lose everything?”

A lot of these boys who make cracks about not being taken alive have been wooed into peaceful surrender with that kind of talk. But my game just now was to persuade Ed and his girl to bolt. If they let me throw them in the can I might be able to convict one of them, but my chances weren’t any too large. It depended on how things turned out later. It depended on whether I could prove that Gooseneck had been in San Francisco on the night of the killings, and I imagined that he would be well supplied with all sorts of proof to the contrary. We had not been able to find a single finger-print of the killer’s in Mrs. Ashcraft’s house. And if I could convince a jury that he was in San Francisco at the time, then I would have to show that he had done the killing. And after that I would have the toughest part of the job still ahead of me — to prove that he had done the killing for one of these two, and not on his own account. I had an idea that when we picked Gooseneck up and put the screws to him he would talk. But that was only an idea.

What I was working for was to make this pair dust out. I didn’t care where they went or what they did, so long as they scooted. I’d trust to luck and my own head to get profit out of their scrambling — I was still trying to stir things up.

The Englishman was thinking hard. I knew I had him worried, chiefly through what I had said about Gooseneck Flinn. If I had pulled the moth-eaten stuff — said that Gooseneck had been picked up and had squealed — this Englishman would have put me down as a liar; but the little I had said was bothering him.

He bit his lip and frowned. Then he shook himself and chuckled.

“You’re balmy, Painless,” he said. “But you—”

I don’t know what he was going to say — whether I was going to win or lose.

The front door slammed open, and Gooseneck Flinn came into the room.

His clothes were white with dust. His face was thrust forward to the full length of his long, yellow neck.

His shoe-button eyes focused on me. His hands turned over. That’s all you could see. They simply turned over — and there was a heavy revolver in each.

“Your paws on the table, Ed,” he snarled.

Ed’s gun — if that is what he had in his pocket — was blocked from a shot at the man in the doorway by a corner of the table. He took his hand out of his pocket, empty, and laid both palms down on the table-top.

“Stay where y’r at!” Gooseneck barked at the girl.

She was standing on the other side of the room. The knife with which she had pricked the back of my neck was not in sight.

Gooseneck glared at me for nearly a minute, but when he spoke it was to Ed and Kewpie.

“So this is what y’ wired me to come back for, huh? A trap! Me the goat for yur! I’ll be y’r goat! I’m goin’ to speak my piece, an’ then I’m goin’ out o’ here if I have to smoke my way through the whole damn’ Mex army! I killed y’r wife all right — an’ her help, too. Killed ’em for the thousand bucks—”

The girl took a step toward him, screaming:

“Shut up, damn you!”

Her mouth was twisting and working like a child’s, and there was water in her eyes.

“Shut up, yourself!” Gooseneck roared back at her, and his thumb raised the hammer of the gun that threatened her. “I’m doin’ the talkin’. I killed her for—”

Kewpie bent forward. Her left hand went under the hem of her skirt. The hand came up — empty. The flash from Gooseneck’s gun lit on a flying steel blade.

The girl spun back across the room — hammered back by the bullets that tore through her chest. Her back hit the wall. She pitched forward to the floor.

Gooseneck stopped shooting and tried to speak. The brown haft of the girl’s knife stuck out of his yellow throat. He couldn’t get his words past the blade. He dropped one gun and tried to take hold of the protruding haft. Half-way up to it his hand came, and dropped. He went down slowly — to his knees — hands and knees — rolled over on his side — and lay still.

I jumped for the Englishman. The revolver Gooseneck had dropped turned under my foot, spilling me sidewise. My hand brushed the Englishman’s coat, but he twisted away from me, and got his guns out.

His eyes were hard and cold and his mouth was shut until you could hardly see the slit of it. He backed slowly across the floor, while I lay still where I had tumbled. He didn’t make a speech. A moment of hesitation in the doorway. The door jerked open and shut. He was gone.

I scooped up the gun that had thrown me, sprang to Gooseneck’s side, tore the other gun out of his dead hand, and plunged into the street. The maroon roadster was trailing a cloud of dust into the desert behind it. Thirty feet from me stood a dirt-caked black touring car. That would be the one in which Gooseneck had driven back from Mexicali.

I jumped for it, climbed in, brought it to life, and pointed it at the dust-cloud ahead.

VIII

The car under me, I discovered, was surprisingly well engined for its battered looks — its motor was so good that I knew it was a border-runner’s car. I nursed it along, not pushing it. There were still four or five hours of daylight left, and while there was any light at all I couldn’t miss the cloud of dust from the fleeing roadster.

I didn’t know whether we were following a road or not. Sometimes the ground under me looked like one, but mostly it didn’t differ much from the rest of the desert. For half an hour or more the dust-cloud ahead and I held our respective positions, and then I found that I was gaining.

The going was roughening. Any road that we might originally have been using had petered out. I opened up a little, though the jars it cost me were vicious. But if I was going to avoid playing Indian among the rocks and cactus, I would have to get within striking distance of my man before he deserted his car and started a game of hide and seek on foot. I’m a city man. I have done my share of work in the open spaces, but I don’t like it. My taste in playgrounds runs more to alleys, backyards and cellars than to canyons, mesas and arroyos.

I missed a boulder that would have smashed me up — missed it by a hair — and looked ahead again to see that the maroon roadster was no longer stirring up the grit. It had stopped.

The roadster was empty. I kept on.

From behind the roadster a pistol snapped at me, three times. It would have taken good shooting to plug me at that instant. I was bounding and bouncing around in my seat like a pellet of quicksilver in a nervous man’s palm.

He fired again from the shelter of his car, and then dashed for a narrow arroyo — a sharp-edged, ten-foot crack in the earth — off to the left. On the brink, he wheeled to snap another cap at me — and jumped down out of sight.

I twisted the wheel in my hands, jammed on the brakes and slid the black touring car to the spot where I had seen him last. The edge of the arroyo was crumbling under my front wheels. I released the brake. Tumbled out. Shoved.

The car plunged down into the gully after him.

Sprawled on my belly, one of Gooseneck’s guns in each hand, I wormed my head over the edge. On all fours, the Englishman was scrambling out of the way of the car. The car was mangled, but still sputtering. One of the man’s fists was bunched around a gun — mine.

“Drop it and stand up, Ed!” I yelled.

Snake-quick, he flung himself around in a sitting position on the arroyo bottom, swung his gun up — and I smashed his forearm with my second shot.

He was holding the wounded arm with his left hand when I slid down beside him, picked up the gun he had dropped, and frisked him to see if he had any more.

He grinned at me.

“You know,” he drawled, “I fancy your true name isn’t Painless Parker at all. You don’t act like it.”

Twisting a handkerchief into a tourniquet of a sort, I knotted it around his wounded arm, which was bleeding.

“Let’s go upstairs and talk,” I suggested, and helped him up the steep side of the gully.

We climbed into his roadster.

“Out of gas,” he said. “We’ve got a nice walk ahead of us.”

“We’ll get a lift. I had a man watching your house, and another one shadowing Gooseneck. They’ll be coming out after me, I reckon. Meanwhile, we have time for a nice heart-to-heart talk.”

“Go ahead, talk your head off,” he invited; “but don’t expect me to add much to the conversation. You’ve got nothing on me.” (I’d like to have a dollar, or even a nickel, for every time I’ve heard that remark!) “You saw Kewpie bump Gooseneck off to keep him from peaching on her.”

“So that’s your play?” I inquired. “The girl hired Gooseneck to kill your wife — out of jealousy — when she learned that you were planning to shake her and return to your own world?”

“Exactly.”

“Not bad, Ed, but there’s one rough spot in it.”

“Yes?”

“Yes,” I repeated. “You are not Ashcraft!”

He jumped, and then laughed.

“Now your enthusiasm is getting the better of your judgment,” he kidded me. “Could I have deceived another man’s wife? Don’t you think her lawyer, Richmond, made me prove my identity?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Ed, I think I’m a smarter baby than either of them. Suppose you had a lot of stuff that belonged to Ashcraft — papers, letters, things in his handwriting? If you were even a fair hand with a pen, you could have fooled his wife. She thought her husband had had four tough years and had become a hop-head. That would account for irregularities in his writing. And I don’t imagine you ever got very familiar in your letters — not enough so to risk any missteps. As for the lawyer — his making you identify yourself was only a matter of form. It never occurred to him that you weren’t Ashcraft. Identification is easy, anyway. Give me a week and I’ll prove that I’m the Sultan of Turkey.”

He shook his head sadly.

“That comes from riding around in the sun.”

I went on.

“At first your game was to bleed Mrs. Ashcraft for an allowance — to take the cure. But after she closed out her affairs in England and came here, you decided to wipe her out and take everything. You knew she was an orphan and had no close relatives to come butting in. You knew it wasn’t likely that there were many people in America who could say you were not Ashcraft. Now if you want to you can do your stalling for just as long as it takes us to send a photograph of you to England — to be shown to the people that knew him there. But you understand that you will do your stalling in the can, so I don’t see what it will get you.”

“Where do you think Ashcraft would be while I was spending his money?”

There were only two possible guesses. I took the more reasonable one.

“Dead.”

I imagined his mouth tightened a little, so I took another shot, and added:

“Up north.”

That got to him, though he didn’t get excited. But his eyes became thoughtful behind his smile. The United States is all “up north” from Tijuana, but it was even betting that he thought I meant Seattle, where the last record of Ashcraft had come from.

“You may be right, of course,” he drawled. “But even at that, I don’t see just how you expect to hang me. Can you prove that Kewpie didn’t think I was Ashcraft? Can you prove that she knew why Mrs. Ashcraft was sending me money? Can you prove that she knew anything about my game? I rather think not. There are still any number of reasons for her to have been jealous of this other woman.

“I’ll do my bit for fraud, Painless, but you’re not going to swing me. The only two who could possibly tie anything on me are dead behind us. Maybe one of them told you something. What of it? You know damned well that you won’t be allowed to testify to it in court. What someone who is now dead may have told you — unless the person it affects was present — isn’t evidence, and you know it.”

“You may get away with it,” I admitted. “Juries are funny, and I don’t mind telling you that I’d be happier if I knew a few things about those murders that I don’t know. Do you mind telling me about the ins and outs of your switch with Ashcraft — in Seattle?”

He squinted his blue eyes at me.

“You’re a puzzling chap, Painless,” he said. “I can’t tell whether you know everything, or are just sharp-shooting.” He puckered his lips and then shrugged. “I’ll tell you. It won’t matter greatly. I’m due to go over for this impersonation, so a confession to a little additional larceny won’t matter.”

IX

“The hotel-sneak used to be my lay,” the Englishman said after a pause. “I came to the States after England and the Continent got uncomfortable. I was rather good at it. I had the proper manner — the front. I could do the gentleman without sweating over it, you know. In fact there was a day, not so long ago, when I wasn’t ‘Liverpool Ed.’ But you don’t want to hear me brag about the select blood that flows through these veins.

“To get back to our knitting: I had rather a successful tour on my first American voyage. I visited most of the better hotels between New York and Seattle, and profited nicely. Then, one night in a Seattle hotel, I worked the tarrel and put myself into a room on the fourth floor. I had hardly closed the door behind me before another key was rattling in it. The room was night-dark. I risked a flash from my light, picked out a closet door, and got behind it just in time.

“The clothes closet was empty; rather a stroke of luck, since there was nothing in it for the room’s occupant to come for. He — it was a man — had switched on the lights by then.

“He began pacing the floor. He paced it for three solid hours — up and down, up and down, up and down — while I stood behind the closet door with my gun in my hand, in case he should pull it open. For three solid hours he paced that damned floor. Then he sat down and I heard a pen scratching on paper. Ten minutes of that and he was back at his pacing; but he kept it up for only a few minutes this time. I heard the latches of a valise click. And a shot!

“I bounded out of my retreat. He was stretched on the floor, with a hole in the side of his head. A bad break for me, and no mistake! I could hear excited voices in the corridor. I stepped over the dead chap, found the letter he had been writing on the writing-desk. It was addressed to Mrs. Norman Ashcraft, at a Wine Street number in Bristol, England. I tore it open. He had written that he was going to kill himself, and it was signed Norman. I felt better. A murder couldn’t be made out of it.

“Nevertheless, I was here in this room with a flashlight, skeleton keys, and a gun — to say nothing of a handful of jewelry that I had picked up on the next floor. Somebody was knocking on the door.

“‘Get the police!’ I called through the door, playing for time.

“Then I turned to the man who had let me in for all this. I would have pegged him for a fellow Britisher even if I hadn’t seen the address on his letter. There are thousands of us on the same order — blond, fairly tall, well set up. I took the only chance there was. His hat and topcoat were on a chair where he had tossed them. I put them on and dropped my hat beside him. Kneeling, I emptied his pockets, and my own, gave him all my stuff, pouched all of his. Then I traded guns with him and opened the door.

“What I had in mind was that the first arrivals might not know him by sight, or not well enough to recognize him immediately. That would give me several seconds to arrange my disappearance in. But when I opened the door I found that my idea wouldn’t work out as I had planned. The house detective was there, and a policeman, and I knew I was licked. There would be little chance of sneaking away from them. But I played my hand out. I told them I had come up to my room and found this chap on the floor going through my belongings. I had seized him, and in the struggle had shot him.

“Minutes went by like hours, and nobody denounced me. People were calling me Mr. Ashcraft. My impersonation was succeeding. It had me gasping then, but after I learned more about Ashcraft it wasn’t so surprising. He had arrived at the hotel only that afternoon, and no one had seen him except in his hat and coat — the hat and coat I was wearing. We were of the same size and type — typical blond Englishmen.

“Then I got another surprise. When the detective examined the dead man’s clothes he found that the maker’s labels had been ripped out. When I got a look at his diary, later, I found the explanation of that. He had been tossing mental coins with himself, alternating between a determination to kill himself, and another to change his name and make a new place for himself in the world — putting his old life behind him. It was while he was considering the second plan that he had removed the markers from all of his clothing.

“But I didn’t know that while I stood there among those people. All I knew was that miracles were happening. I met the miracles half-way, not turning a hair, accepting everything as a matter of course. I think the police smelled something wrong, but they couldn’t put their hands on it. There was the dead man on the floor, with a prowler’s outfit in his pockets, a pocketful of stolen jewelry, and the labels gone from his clothes — a burglar’s trick. And there I was — a well-to-do Englishman whom the hotel people recognized as the room’s rightful occupant.

“I had to talk small just then, but after I went through the dead man’s stuff I knew him inside and outside, backward and forward. He had nearly a bushel of papers, and a diary that had everything he had ever done or thought in it. I put in the first night studying those things — memorizing them — and practicing his signature. Among the other things I had taken from his pockets were fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks, and I wanted to be able to get them cashed in the morning.

“I stayed in Seattle for three days — as Norman Ashcraft. I had tumbled into something rich and I wasn’t going to throw it away. The letter to his wife would keep me from being charged with murder if anything slipped, and I knew I was safer seeing the thing through than running. When the excitement had quieted down I packed up and came down to San Francisco, resuming my own name — Edward Bohannon. But I held onto all of Ashcraft’s property, because I had learned from it that his wife had money, and I knew I could get some of it if I played my cards right.

“She saved me the trouble of figuring out a deal for myself. I ran across one of her advertisements in the Examiner, answered it, and — here we are.”

I looked toward Tijuana. A cloud of yellow dust showed in a notch between two low hills. That would be the machine in which Gorman and Hooper were tracking me. Hooper would have seen me set out after the Englishman, would have waited for Gorman to arrive in the car in which he had followed Gooseneck from Mexicali — Gorman would have had to stay some distance in the rear — and then both of the operatives would have picked up my trail.

I turned to the Englishman.

“But you didn’t have Mrs. Ashcraft killed?”

He shook his head.

“You’ll never prove it.”

“Maybe not,” I admitted.

I took a package of cigarettes out of my pocket and put two of them on the seat between us.

“Suppose we play a game. This is just for my own satisfaction. It won’t tie anybody to anything — won’t prove anything. If you did a certain thing, pick up the cigarette that is nearer me. If you didn’t do that thing, pick up the one nearer you. Will you play?”

“No, I won’t,” he said emphatically. “I don’t like your game. But I do want a cigarette.”

He reached out his uninjured arm and picked up the cigarette nearer me.

“Thanks, Ed,” I said. “Now I hate to tell you this, but I’m going to swing you.”

“You’re balmy, my son.”

“You’re thinking of the San Francisco job, Ed,” I explained. “I’m talking about Seattle. You, a hotel sneak-thief, were discovered in a room with a man who had just died with a bullet in his head. What do you think a jury will make out of that, Ed?”

He laughed at me. And then something went wrong with the laugh. It faded into a sickly grin.

“Of course you did,” I said. “When you started to work out your plan to inherit all of Mrs. Ashcraft’s wealth by having her killed, the first thing you did was to destroy that suicide letter of her husband’s. No matter how carefully you guarded it, there was always a chance that somebody would stumble into it and knock your game on the head. It had served its purpose — you wouldn’t need it. It would be foolish to take a chance on it turning up.

“I can’t put you up for the murders you engineered in San Francisco; but I can sock you with the one you didn’t do in Seattle — so justice won’t be cheated. You’re going to Seattle, Ed, to hang for Ashcraft’s suicide.”

And he did.