The Essential Noir Bundle, page 109
“As soon as I heard that Mr. Gantvoort had been killed I had a hunch that Madden had done it. But then it seemed like a certainty that he was in New York the next day, and I thought I had done him an injustice. And I was glad he was out of it. But now—”
She whirled around to her erstwhile confederate.
“Now I hope you swing, you big sap!”
She spun around to me aagin. No sleek kitten, this, but a furious, spitting cat, with claws and teeth bared.
“What kind of looking fellow was the one who went to New York for him?”
I described the man I had talked to on the train.
“Evan Felter,” she said, after a moment of thought. “He used to work with Madden. You’ll probably find him hiding in Los Angeles. Put the screws on him and he’ll spill all he knows—he’s a weak sister! The chances are he didn’t know what Madden’s game was until it was all over.”
“How do you like that?” she spat at Madden Dexter. “How do you like that for a starter? You messed up my little party, did you? Well, I’m going to spend every minute of my time from now until they pop you off helping them pop you!”
And she did, too—with her assistance it was no trick at all to gather up the rest of the evidence we needed to hang him. And I don’t believe her enjoyment of her three-quarters of a million dollars is spoiled a bit by any qualms over what she did to Madden. She’s a very respectable woman now, and glad to be free of the con man.
THE GOLDEN HORSESHOE
“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, gray-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.
“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.
“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. 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. 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’ll decide whether it’s 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.”
I got up and reached for my hat.
“See you around the second of the month,” I said, as I left the office.
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 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 his clothes needed brushing and pressing.
He came straight to the desk in front of which I stood fiddling with some papers. 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. 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.
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:
Mr. Edward Bohannon,
Golden Horseshoe Café,
Tijuana, Baja California,
Mexico
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 said. “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.”
“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.
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 been here in Frisco for a solid year.”
“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.”
“Ryan?” I asked.
“Yes—John Ryan.”
I chalked that up against him. 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. This bird was a hop-head, and he had given me a phony-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.
“Where’s Ashcraft?” I threw at him.
“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 at the booby-hatch 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. “I got five hundred smacks in my kick.”
I grinned 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, that shot 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 nickleplated .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. 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 somethin’ 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.”
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.
Ryan squawked his head off when he found that I was going to vag him.
“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 pedlar 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 airtight till then.”
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.”
The attorney 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 fit her; it described the blue of her eyes, the pink-white of her skin, and the light brown of her hair.
