The Essential Noir Bundle, page 131
I don’t know whether the noise we made hurried things up indoors or not, but guns had started going off inside the bungalow.
You don’t stop to count shots in circumstances like those, and anyway these were too blurred together for accurate scorekeeping, but my impression was that at least fifty of them had been fired by the time I was bruising my shoulder on the front door.
Luckily, it was a California door. It went in the second time I hit it.
Inside was a reception hall opening through a wide arched doorway into a living-room. The air was hazy and the stink of burnt powder was sharp.
Sherry was on the polished floor by the arch, wriggling sidewise on one elbow and one knee, trying to reach a Luger that lay on an amber rug some four feet away.
At the other end of the room, Ringgo was upright on his knees, steadily working the trigger of a black revolver in his good hand. The pistol was empty. It went snap, snap, snap, snap foolishly, but he kept on working the trigger. His broken arm was still in the splints, but had fallen out of the sling and was hanging down. His face was puffy and florid with blood. His eyes were wide and dull. The white bone handle of a knife stuck out of his back, just over one hip, its blade all the way in. He was clicking the empty pistol at Marcus.
The black boy was on his feet, feet far apart under bent knees. His left hand was spread wide over his chest, and the black fingers were shiny with blood. In his right hand he held a white bone-handled knife—its blade a foot long—held it, knife-fighter fashion, as you’d hold a sword. He was moving toward Ringgo, not directly, but from side to side, obliquely, closing in with shuffling steps, crouching, his hand turning the knife restlessly, but holding the point always towards Ringgo.
He didn’t see us. He didn’t hear us. All of his world just then was the man on his knees, the man in whose back a knife—brother of the one in the black hand—was wedged.
Ringgo didn’t see us. I don’t suppose he even saw Marcus. He knelt there and persistently worked the trigger of his empty gun.
I jumped over Sherry and swung the barrel of my gun at the base of Marcus’s skull. It hit. Marcus dropped.
Ringgo stopped working the gun and looked surprised at me.
“That’s the idea; you’ve got to put bullets in them or they’re no good,” I told him, pulled the knife out of Marcus’s hand and went back to pick up the Luger that Sherry had stopped trying to get.
Sherry was lying on his back now. His eyes were closed.
He looked dead, and he had enough bullet holes in him to make death a good guess.
Hoping he wasn’t dead, I knelt beside him—going around him so I could kneel facing Ringgo—and lifted his head up a little from the floor.
“Sherry,” I said sharply. “Sherry.”
He didn’t move. His eyelids didn’t even twitch.
I raised the fingers of the hand that was holding up his head, making his head move just a trifle.
“Did Ringgo kill Kavalov?” I asked the dead or dying man.
Even if I hadn’t known Ringgo was looking at me I could have felt his eyes on me.
“Did he, Sherry?” I barked into the still face.
The dead or dying man didn’t move.
I cautiously moved my fingers again so that his dead or dying head nodded, twice.
Then I made his head jerk back, and let it gently down on the floor again.
“Well,” I said, standing up and facing Ringgo, “I’ve got you at last.”
CHAPTER 11
I’ve never been able to decide whether I would actually have gone on the witness stand and sworn that Sherry was alive when he nodded, and nodded voluntarily, if it had been necessary for me to do so to convict Ringgo.
I don’t like perjury, but I knew Ringgo was guilty, and there I had him.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to decide.
Ringgo believed Sherry had nodded, and then, when Marcus gave the show away, there was nothing much for Ringgo to do but try his luck with a plea of guilty.
We didn’t have much trouble getting the story out of Marcus. Ringgo had killed his beloved capitaine. The boy was easily persuaded that the law would give him his best revenge.
After Marcus had talked, Ringgo was willing to talk.
He stayed in the hospital until the day before his trial opened. The knife Marcus had planted in his back had permanently paralyzed one of his legs, though aside from that he recovered from the stabbing.
Marcus had three of Ringgo’s bullets in him. The doctors fished two of them out, but were afraid to touch the third. It didn’t seem to worry him. By the time he was shipped north to begin an indeterminate sentence in San Quentin for his part in the Kavalov murder he was apparently as sound as ever.
Ringgo was never completely convinced that I had suspected him before the last minute when I had come charging into the bungalow.
“Of course I had, right along,” I defended my skill as a sleuth. That was while he was still in the hospital. “I didn’t believe Sherry was cracked. He was one hard, sane-looking scoundrel. And I didn’t believe he was the sort of man who’d be worried much over any disgrace that came his way. I was willing enough to believe that he was out for Kavalov’s scalp, but only if there was some profit in it. That’s why I went to sleep and let the old man’s throat get cut. I figured Sherry was scaring him up—nothing more—to get him in shape for a big-money shakedown. Well, when I found out I had been wrong there I began to look around.
“So far as I knew, your wife was Kavalov’s heir. From what I had seen, I imagined your wife was enough in love with you to be completely in your hands. All right, you, as the husband of his heir, seemed the one to profit most directly by Kavalov’s death. You were the one who’d have control of his fortune when he died. Sherry could only profit by the murder if he was working with you.”
“But didn’t his breaking my arm puzzle you?”
“Sure. I could understand a phony injury, but that seemed carrying it a little too far. But you made a mistake there that helped me. You were too careful to imitate a left-hand cut on Kavalov’s throat; did it by standing by his head, facing his body when you cut him, instead of by his body, facing his head, and the curve of the slash gave you away. Throwing the knife out the window wasn’t so good, either. How’d he happen to break your arm? An accident?”
“You can call it that. We had that supposed fight arranged to fit in with the rest of the play, and I thought it would be fun to really sock him. So I did. And he was tougher than I thought, tough enough to even up by snapping my arm. I suppose that’s why he killed Mickey too. That wasn’t on the schedule. On the level, did you suspect us of being in cahoots?”
I nodded.
“Sherry had worked the game up for you, had done everything possible to draw suspicion on himself, and then, the day before the murder, had run off to build himself an alibi. There couldn’t be any other answer to it: he had to be working with you. There it was, but I couldn’t prove it. I couldn’t prove it till you were trapped by the thing that made the whole game possible—your wife’s love for you set her to hire me to protect you. Isn’t that one of the things they call ironies of life?”
Ringgo smiled ruefully and said:
“They should call it that. You know what Sherry was trying on me, don’t you?”
“I can guess. That’s why he insisted on standing trial.”
“Exactly. The scheme was for him to dig out and keep going, with his alibi ready in case he was picked up, but staying uncaught as long as possible. The more time they wasted hunting him, the less likely they were to look elsewhere, and the colder the trail would be when they found he wasn’t their man. He tricked me there. He had himself picked up, and his lawyer hired that Weeks fellow to egg the district attorney into not dropping the case. Sherry wanted to be tried and acquitted, so he’d be in the clear. Then he had me by the neck. He was legally cleared forever. I wasn’t. He had me. He was supposed to get a hundred thousand dollars for his part. Kavalov had left Miriam something more than three million dollars. Sherry demanded one-half of it. Otherwise, he said, he’d go to the district attorney and make a complete confession. They couldn’t do anything to him. He’d been acquitted. They’d hang me. That was sweet.”
“You’d have been wise at that to have given it to him,” I said.
“Maybe. Anyway I suppose I would have given it to him if Miriam hadn’t upset things. There’d have been nothing else to do. But after she came back from hiring you she went to see Sherry, thinking she could talk him into going away. And he lets something drop that made her suspect I had a hand in her father’s death, though she doesn’t even now actually believe that I cut his throat.
“She said you were coming down the next day. There was nothing for me to do but go down to Sherry’s for a showdown that night, and have the whole thing settled before you came poking around. Well, that’s what I did, though I didn’t tell Miriam I was going. The showdown wasn’t going along very well, too much tension, and when Sherry heard you outside he thought I had brought friends, and—fireworks.”
“What ever got you into a game like that in the first place?” I asked. “You were sitting pretty enough as Kavalov’s son-in-law, weren’t you?”
“Yes, but it was tiresome being cooped up in that hole with him. He was young enough to live a long time. And he wasn’t always easy to get along with. I’d no guarantee that he wouldn’t get up on his ear and kick me out, or change his will, or anything of the sort.
“Then I ran across Sherry in San Francisco, and we got to talking it over, and this plan came out of it. Sherry had brains. On the deal back in Cairo that you know about, both he and I made plenty that Kavalov didn’t know about. Well, I was a chump. But don’t think I’m sorry that I killed Kavalov. I’m sorry I got caught. I’d done his dirty work since he picked me up as a kid of twenty, and all I’d got out of it was damned little except the hopes that since I’d married his daughter I’d probably get his money when he died—if he didn’t do something else with it.”
They hanged him.
THE GUTTING OF COUFFIGNAL
Wedge-shaped Couffignal is not a large island, and not far from the mainland, to which it is linked by a wooden bridge. Its western shore is a high, straight cliff that jumps abruptly up out of San Pablo Bay. From the top of this cliff the island slopes eastward, down to a smooth pebble beach that runs into the water again, where there are piers and a clubhouse and moored pleasure boats.
Couffignal’s main street, paralleling the beach, has the usual bank, hotel, moving-picture theater, and stores. But it differs from most main streets of its size in that it is more carefully arranged and preserved. There are trees and hedges and strips of lawn on it, and no glaring signs. The buildings seem to belong beside one another, as if they had been designed by the same architect, and in the stores you will find goods of a quality to match the best city stores.
The intersecting streets—running between rows of neat cottages near the foot of the slope—become winding hedged roads as they climb toward the cliff. The higher these roads get, the farther apart and larger are the houses they lead to. The occupants of these higher houses are the owners and rulers of the island. Most of them are well-fed old gentlemen who, the profits they took from the world with both hands in their younger days now stowed away as safe percentages, have bought into the island colony so they may spend what is left of their lives nursing their livers and improving their golf among their kind. They admit to the island only as many storekeepers, working people, and similar riffraff as are needed to keep them comfortably served.
This is Couffignal.
It was some time after midnight. I was sitting in a second-story room in Couffignal’s largest house, surrounded by wedding presents whose value would add up to something between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars.
Of all the work that comes to a private detective (except divorce work, which the Continental Detective Agency doesn’t handle) I like weddings as little as any. Usually I manage to avoid them, but this time I hadn’t been able to. Dick Foley, who had been slated for the job, had been handed a black eye by an unfriendly pickpocket the day before. That let Dick out and me in. I had come up to Couffignal—a two-hour ride from San Francisco by ferry and auto stage—that morning, and would return the next.
This had been neither better nor worse than the usual wedding detail. The ceremony had been performed in a little stone church down the hill. Then the house had begun to fill with reception guests. They had kept it filled to overflowing until some time after the bride and groom had sneaked off to their eastern train.
The world had been well represented. There had been an admiral and an earl or two from England; an ex-president of a South American country; a Danish baron; a tall young Russian princess surrounded by lesser titles, including a fat, bald, jovial and black-bearded Russian general, who had talked to me for a solid hour about prizefights, in which he had a lot of interest, but not so much knowledge as was possible; an ambassador from one of the Central European countries; a justice of the Supreme Court; and a mob of people whose prominence and near-prominence didn’t carry labels.
In theory, a detective guarding wedding presents is supposed to make himself indistinguishable from the other guests. In practice, it never works out that way. He has to spend most of his time within sight of the booty, so he’s easily spotted. Besides that, eight or ten people I recognized among the guests were clients or former clients of the Agency, and so knew me. However, being known doesn’t make so much difference as you might think, and everything had gone off smoothly.
A couple of the groom’s friends, warmed by wine and the necessity of maintaining their reputations as cutups, had tried to smuggle some of the gifts out of the room where they were displayed and hide them in the piano. But I had been expecting that familiar track, and blocked it before it had gone far enough to embarrass anybody.
Shortly after dark a wind smelling of rain began to pile storm clouds up over the bay. Those guests who lived at a distance, especially those who had water to cross, hurried off for their houses. Those who lived on the island stayed until the first raindrops began to patter down. Then they left.
The Hendrixson house quieted down. Musicians and extra servants left. The weary house servants began to disappear in the direction of their bedrooms. I found some sandwiches, a couple of books and a comfortable armchair, and took them up to the room where the presents were now hidden under gray-white sheeting.
Keith Hendrixson, the bride’s grandfather—she was an orphan—put his head in at the door. “Have you everything you need for your comfort?” he asked.
“Yes, thanks.”
He said good night and went off to bed—a tall old man, slim as a boy.
The wind and the rain were hard at it when I went downstairs to give the lower windows and doors the up-and-down. Everything on the first floor was tight and secure, everything in the cellar. I went upstairs again.
Pulling my chair over by a floor lamp, I put sandwiches, books, ashtray, gun and flashlight on a small table beside it. Then I switched off the other lights, set fire to a Fatima, sat down, wriggled my spine comfortably into the chair’s padding, picked up one of the books, and prepared to make a night of it.
The book was called The Lord of the Sea, and had to do with a strong, tough, and violent fellow named Hogarth, whose modest plan was to hold the world in one hand. There were plots and counterplots, kidnapings, murders, prisonbreakings, forgeries and burglaries, diamonds large as hats and floating forts larger than Couffignal. It sounds dizzy here, but in the book it was real as a dime.
Hogarth was still going strong when the lights went out.
In the dark, I got rid of the glowing end of my cigarette by grinding it in one of the sandwiches. Putting the book down, I picked up gun and flashlight, and moved away from the chair.
Listening for noises was no good. The storm was making hundreds of them. What I needed to know was why the lights had gone off. All the other lights in the house had been turned off some time ago. So the darkness of the hall told me nothing.
I waited. My job was to watch the presents. Nobody had touched them yet. There was nothing to get excited about.
Minutes went by, perhaps ten of them.
The floor swayed under my feet. The windows rattled with a violence beyond the strength of the storm. The dull boom of a heavy explosion blotted out the sounds of wind and falling water. The blast was not close at hand, but not far enough away to be off the island.
Crossing to the window, peering through the wet glass, I could see nothing. I should have seen a few misty lights far down the hill. Not being able to see them settled one point. The lights had gone out all over Couffignal, not only in the Hendrixson house.
That was better. The storm could have put the lighting system out of whack, could have been responsible for the explosion—maybe.
Staring through the black window, I had an impression of great excitement down the hill, of movement in the night. But all was too far away for me to have seen or heard even had there been lights, and all too vague to say what was moving. The impression was strong but worthless. It didn’t lead anywhere. I told myself I was getting feeble-minded, and turned away from the window.
Another blast spun me back to it. This explosion sounded nearer than the first, maybe because it was stronger. Peering through the glass again, I still saw nothing. And still had the impression of things that were big moving down there.
Bare feet pattered in the hall. A voice was anxiously calling my name. Turning from the window again, I pocketed my gun and snapped on the flashlight. Keith Hendrixson, in pajamas and bathrobe, looking thinner and older than anybody could be, came into the room.
“Is it—”
“I don’t think it’s an earthquake,” I said, since that is the first calamity your Californian thinks of. “The lights went off a little while ago. There have been a couple of explosions down the hill since the—”
