Crime Stories Page 10

  I caught a cab and dropped off in the shopping district. I visited the five largest department stores, going to all the women’s wear departments from shoes to hats, and trying to learn if a man—perhaps one answering Leighton’s description—had been buying clothes in the past couple days that would fit Audrey Gatewood.

  Failing to get any results, I turned the rest of the local stores over to one of the boys from the Agency, and went across the bay to canvass the Oakland stores.

  At the first one I got action. A man who might easily have been Leighton had been in the day before, buying clothes of Audrey’s size. He had bought lots of them, everything from lingerie to a coat, and—my luck was hitting on all cylinders—had had his purchases delivered to T. Offord, at an address on Fourteenth Street.

  At the Fourteenth Street address, an apartment house, I found Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Offord’s names in the vestibule for Apartment 202.

  I had just found the apartment number when the front door opened and a stout, middle-aged woman in a gingham house-dress came out. She looked at me a bit curiously, so I asked:

  “Do you know where I can find the superintendent?”

  “I’m the superintendent,” she said.

  I handed her a card and stepped indoors with her.

  “I’m from the bonding department of the North American Casualty Company”—a repetition of the lie that was printed on the card I had given her—“and a bond for Mr. Offord has been applied for. Is he all right so far as you know?” With the slightly apologetic air of one going through with a necessary but not too important formality.

  “A bond? That’s funny! He is going away tomorrow.”

  “Well, I can’t say what the bond is for,” I said lightly. “We investigators just get the names and addresses. It may be for his present employer, or perhaps the man he is going to work for has applied for it. Or some firms have us look up prospective employees before they hire them, just to be safe.”

  “Mr. Offord, so far as I know, is a very nice young man,” she said, “but he has been here only a week.”

  “Not staying long, then?”

  “No. They came here from Denver, intending to stay, but the low altitude doesn’t agree with Mrs. Offord, so they are going back.”

  “Are you sure they came from Denver?”

  “Well,” she said, “they told me they did.”

  “How many of them are there?”

  “Only the two of them; they’re young people.”

  “Well, how do they impress you?” I asked, trying to get over the impression that I thought her a woman of shrewd judgment.

  “They seem to be a very nice young couple. You’d hardly know they were in their apartment most of the time, they’re so quiet. I’m sorry they can’t stay.”

  “Do they go out much?”

  “I really don’t know. They have their keys, and unless I should happen to pass them going in or out I’d never see them.”

  “Then, as a matter of fact, you couldn’t say whether they stayed away all night some nights or not. Could you?”

  She eyes me doubtfully—I was stepping way over my pretext now, but I didn’t think it mattered—and shook her head.

  “No, I couldn’t say.”

  “They have many visitors?”

  “I don’t know. Mr. Offord is not—”

  She broke off as a man came in quietly from the street, brushed past me, and started to mount the steps to the second floor.

  “Oh, dear!” she whispered. “I hope he didn’t hear me talking about him. That’s Mr. Offord.”

  A slender man in brown, with a light brown hat—Leighton perhaps.

  I hadn’t seen anything of him except his back, nor he anything except mine. I watched him as he climbed the stairs. If he had heard the woman mention his name he would use the turn at the head of the stairs to sneak a look at me.

  He did.

  I kept my facestolid, but I knew him.

  He was “Penny” Quayle, a con man who had been active in the East four or five years before.

  His face was as expressionless as mine. But he knew me.

  A door on the second floor shut. I left the woman and started for the stairs.

  “I think I’ll go up and talk to him,” I told her.

  Coming silently to the door of Apartment 202, I listened. Not a sound. This was no time for hesitation. I pressed the bell-button.

  As close together as the tapping of three keys under the fingers of an expert typist, but a thousand times more vicious, came three pistol shots. And waist-high in the door of Apartment 202 were three bullet holes.

  The three bullets would have been in my fat carcass if I hadn’t learned years ago to stand to one side of strange doors when making uninvited calls.

  Inside the apartment sounded a man’s voice, sharp, commanding.

  “Cut it, kid! For God’s sake, not that!”

  A woman’s voice, shrill, bitter, spiteful, screaming blasphemies.

  Two more bullets came through the door.

  “Stop! No! No!” The man’s voice had a note of fear in it now.

  The woman’s voice, cursing hotly. A scuffle. A shot that didn’t hit the door.

  I hurled my foot against the door, near the knob, and the lock broke away.

  On the floor of the room, a man—Quayle—and a woman were tussling. He was bending over her, holding her wrists, trying to keep her down. A smoking pistol was in one of her hands. I got to it in a jump and tore it loose.

  “That’s enough!” I called to them when I was planted. “Get up and receive company.”

  Quayle released his antagonist’s wrists, whereupon she struck at his eyes with curved, sharp-nailed fingers, tearing his cheek open. He scrambled away from her on hands and knees, and both of them got to their feet.

  He sat down on a chair immediately, panting and wiping his bleeding cheek with a handkerchief.

  She stood, hands on hips, in the center of the room, glaring at me.

  “I suppose,” she spat, “you think you’ve raised hell!”

  I laughed—I could afford to.

  “If your father is in his right mind,” I told her, “he’ll do it with a razor strop when he gets you home again. A fine joke you picked out to play on him!”

  “If you’d been tied to him as long as I have, and had been bullied and held down as much, I guess you’d do most anything to get enough money so that you could go away and live your own life.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. Remembering some of the business methods Harvey Gatewood had used—particularly some of his war contracts that the Department of Justice was still investigating—I suppose the worst that could be said about Audrey was that she was her father’s own daughter.

  “How’d you rap to it?” Quayle asked me, politely.

  “Several ways,” I said. “First, one of Audrey’s friends saw her on Market Street between 8:15 and 8:45 the night she disappeared; and your letter to Gatewood was postmarked 9 p.m. Pretty fast work. You should have waited a while before mailing it. I suppose she dropped it in the post office on her way over here?”

  Quayle nodded.

  “Then second,” I went on, “there was that phone call of hers. She knew it took anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes to get her father on the wire at the office. If she had gotten to a phone while imprisoned, time would have been so valuable that she’d have told her story to the first person she got hold of—the switchboard operator, most likely. So that made it look as if, besides wanting to throw out that Twin Peaks line, she wanted to stir the old man out of his bullheadedness.

  “When she failed to show up after the money was paid, I figured it was a sure bet that she had kidnaped herself. I knew that if she came back home after faking this thing, we’d find it out before we’d talked to her very long—and I figured she knew that too, and would stay away.

  “The rest was easy—I got some good breaks. We knew a man was working with her after we found the woman’s clothes you left be
hind, and I took a chance on there being no one else in it. Then I figured she’d need clothes—she couldn’t have taken any from home without tipping her mitt—and there was an even chance that she hadn’t laid in a stock beforehand. She’s got too many girl friends of the sort that do a lot of shopping to make it safe for her to have risked showing herself in stores. Maybe, then, the man would buy what she needed. And it turned out that he did, and that he was too lazy to carry away his purchases, or perhaps there was too many of them, and so he had them sent out. That’s the story.”

  Quayle nodded again.

  “I was damned careless,” he said, and then, jerking a contemptuous thumb toward the girl. “But what can you expect? She’s had a skinful of hop ever since we started. Took all my time and attention keeping her from running wild and gumming the works. Just now was a sample—I told her you were coming up and she goes crazy and tries to add your corpse to the wreckage!”

  The Gatewood reunion took place in the office of the captain of inspectors, on the second floor of the Oakland City Hall, and it was a merry little party.

  For over an hour it was a toss-up whether Harvey Gatewood would die of apoplexy, strangle his daughter, or send her off to the state reformatory until she was of age. But Audrey licked him. Besides being a chip off the old block, she was young enough to be careless of consequences, while her father, for all his bullheadedness, had had some caution hammered into him.

  The card she beat him with was a threat of spilling everything she knew about him to the newspapers, and at least one of the San Francisco papers had been trying to get his scalp for years.

  I don’t know what she had on him, and I don’t think he was any too sure himself; but, with his war contracts still being investigated by the Department of Justice, he couldn’t afford to take a chance. There was no doubt at all that she would have done as she threatened.

  And so, together, they left for home, sweating hate for each other from every pore.

  We took Quayle upstairs and put him in a cell, but he was too experienced to let that worry him. He knew that if the girl was to be spared, he himself couldn’t very easily be convicted of anything.

  I was glad it was over. It had been a tough caper.

  THE DIMPLE

  Walter Dowe took the last sheet of the manuscript from his typewriter, with a satisfied sigh, and leaned back in his chair, turning his face to the ceiling to ease the stiffened muscles of his neck. Then he looked at the clock: three-fifteen. He yawned, got to his feet, switched off the lights, and went down the hall to his bedroom.

  In the doorway of the bedroom, he halted abruptly. The moonlight came through the wide windows to illuminate an empty bed. He turned on the lights, and looked around the room. None of the things his wife had worn that night were there. She had not undressed, then; perhaps she had heard the rattle of his typewriter and had decided to wait downstairs until he had finished. She never interrupted him when he was at work, and he was usually too engrossed by his labors to hear her footsteps when she passed his study door.

  He went to the head of the stairs and called:

  “Althea!”

  No answer.

  He went downstairs, into all the rooms, turning on the lights; he returned to the second story and did the same. His wife was not in the house. He was perplexed, and a little helpless. Then he remembered that she had gone to the theater with the Schuylers. His hands trembled as he picked up the telephone.

  The Schuylers’ maid answered his call . . . There had been a fire at the Majestic theater; neither Mr. nor Mrs. Schuyler had come home. Mr. Schuyler’s father had gone out to look for them, but had not returned yet. The maid understood that the fire had been pretty bad . . . Lots of folks hurt . . .

  Dowe was waiting on the sidewalk when the taxicab for which he had telephoned arrived. Fifteen minutes later he was struggling to get through the fire lines, which were still drawn about the theater. A perspiring, red-faced policeman thrust him back.

  “You’ll find nothing here! The building’s been cleared. Everybody’s been taken to the hospitals.”

  Dowe found his cab again and was driven to the City Hospital. He forced his way through the clamoring group on the grey stone steps. A policeman blocked the door. Presently a pasty-faced man, in solid white, spoke over the policeman’s shoulder:

  “There’s no use waiting. Were too busy treating them now to either take their names, or let anybody in to see them. We’ll try to have a list in the late morning edition; but we can’t let anybody in until later in the day.”

  Dowe turned away. Then he thought: Murray Bornis, of course! He went back to the cab and gave the driver Bornis’ address.

  Bornis came to the door of his apartment in pajamas. Dowe clung to him.

  “Althea went to the Majestic tonight, and hasn’t come home. They wouldn’t let me in at the hospital. Told me to wait; and I can’t! You’re a police commissioner; you can get me in!”

  While Bornis dressed, Dowe paced the floor, talking, babbling. Then he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror, and stood suddenly still. The sight of his distorted face and wild eyes shocked him back into sanity. He was on the verge of hysterics. He must take hold of himself. He must not collapse before he found Althea. Deliberately, he made himself sit down; made himself stop visualizing Althea’s soft, white body charred and crushed. He must think about something else: Bornis, for instance . . . But that brought him back to his wife in the end. She had never liked Bornis. His frank sensuality, and his unsavory reputation for numerous affairs with numerous women, had offended her strict conception of morality. To be sure, she had always given him all the courtesy due her husband’s friend; but it was generally a frigid giving. And Bornis, understanding her attitude, and perhaps a little contemptuous of her narrow views, had been as coolly polite as she. And now she was lying somewhere, moaning in agony, perhaps already cold . . .

  Bornis caught up the rest of his clothes and they went down to the street. He finished dressing in the taxicab.

  They went to the City Hospital first, where the police commissioner and his companion were readily admitted. They walked down long rooms, between rows of groaning and writhing bodies; looking into bruised and burned faces, seeing no one they knew. Then to Mercy Hospital, where they found Sylvia Schuyler. She told them that the crush in the theater had separated her from her husband and Althea, and she had not seen them afterward. Then she lapsed into unconsciousness again.

  When they got back to the taxicab, Bornis gave directions to the driver in an undertone, but Dowe did not have to hear them to know what they were: “To the morgue.” There was no place else to go.

  Now they walked between rows of bodies that were mangled horribly; denuded, discolored, and none the less terrible because they could not scream. Dowe had exhausted his feelings: he felt no pity, no loathing now. He looked into a face; it was not Althea’s; then it was nothing; he passed on to the next.

  Bornis’ fingers closed convulsively around Dowe’s arm.

  “There! Althea!”

  Dowe turned. A face that stampeding leather heels had robbed of features; a torso that was battered and blackened and cut, and from which the clothing had been torn. All that was human of it were the legs; they had somehow escaped disfigurement.

  “No! No!” Dowe cried.

  He would not have this begrimed, mangled thing his exquisite white Althea!

  Through the horror that for the moment shut Dowe off from the world, Bornis’s vibrant, anguished voice penetrated—a shriek:

  “I tell you it is!” Flinging out a hand to point at one smooth knee. “See! The dimple!”

  LAUGHING MASKS

  CHAPTER I

  A shriek, unmistakably feminine, and throbbing with terror, pierced the fog. Phil Truax, hurrying up Washington street, halted in the middle of a stride, and became as motionless as the stone apartment buildings that flanked the street. The shriek swelled, with something violin-like in it, and ended with a rising inflection. Hal
f a block away the headlights of two automobiles, stationary and oddly huddled together, glowed in the mist. Silence, a guttural grunt, and the shriek again! But now it held more anger than fear, and broke off suddenly.

  Phil remained motionless. Whatever was happening ahead was none of his business, and he was a meddler in other people’s affairs only when assured of profit therefrom. And, too, he was not armed. Then he thought of the four hundred dollars in his pocket: his winnings in the poker game he had just left. He had been lucky thus far tonight; mightn’t his luck carry him a little further if he gave it the opportunity? He pulled his hat down firmly on his head and ran towards the lights.

  The fog aided the headlights in concealing from him whatever was happening in the machines as he approached them, but he noticed that the engine of at least one was running. Then he skirted one of them, a roadster, checking his momentum by catching hold of a mudguard. For a fraction of a second he hung there, while dark eyes burned into his from a white face half hidden under a brawny hand.

  Phil hurled himself on the back of the man to whom the hand belonged; his fingers closed around a sinewy throat. A white flame seared his eyeballs; the ground went soft and billowy under his feet, as if it were part of the fog. Everything—the burning eyes, the brawny hand, the curtains of the automobile-rushed toward him—

  Phil sat up on the wet paving and felt his head. His fingers found a sore, swelling area running from above the left ear nearly to the crown. Both automobiles were gone. No pedestrians were in sight. Lights were shining through a few windows; forms were at many windows; and curious voices were calling questions into the fog. Mastering his nausea, he got unsteadily to his feet, though his desire was to lie down again on the cool, damp street. Hunting for his hat, he found a small handbag and thrust it into his pocket. He recovered his hat from the gutter, tilted it to spare the bruise, and set out for home, ignoring the queries of the pajamaed spectators.

  Dressed for bed, and satisfied that the injury to his head was superficial, Phil turned his attention to the souvenir of his adventure. It was a small bag of black silk, trimmed with silver beads, and still damp from its contact with the street. He dumped its contents out on the bed, and a bundle of paper money caught his eye. He counted the bills and found they aggregated three hundred and fifty-five dollars. Pushing the bills into the pocket of his bath-robe, he grinned. “Four hundred I win and three hundred and fifty I get for a tap on the head—a pretty good night!”