Crime Stories Page 29

  “Dr. Estep’s first wife—after going to a lot of trouble to see that she wasn’t followed—connected with Ledwich yesterday afternoon. And from what we can learn he seems to be a crook of some sort.”

  “What would that indicate?”

  “I’m not sure what it means, but I can do a lot of guessing. Ledwich knew both the doctor and the doctor’s first wife; then it’s not a bad bet that she knew where her husband was all the time. If she did, then it’s another good bet that she was getting money from him right along. Can you check up his accounts and see whether he was passing out any money that can’t be otherwise accounted for?”

  The attorney shook his head.

  “No, his accounts are in rather bad shape, carelessly kept. He must have had more than a little difficulty with his income−tax statements.”

  “I see. To get back to my guesses: If she knew where he was all the time, and was getting money from him, then why did his first wife finally come to see her husband? Perhaps because—”

  “I think I can help you there,” Richmond interrupted. “A fortunate investment in lumber nearly doubled Dr.

  Estep’s wealth two or three months ago.”

  “That’s it, then! She learned of it through Ledwich. She demanded, either through Ledwich, or by letter, a rather large share of it—more than the doctor was willing to give. When he refused, she came to see him in person, to demand the money under threat—we’ll say—of instant exposure. He thought she was in earnest.

  Either he couldn’t raise the money she demanded, or he was tired of leading a double life. Anyway, he thought it all over, and decided to commit suicide. This is all a guess, or a series of guesses—but it sounds reasonable to me.”

  “To me, too,” the attorney said. “What are you going to do now?”

  “I’m still having both of them shadowed—there’s no other way of tackling them just now. I’m having the woman looked up in Louisville. But, you understand, I might dig up a whole flock of things on them, and when I got through still be as far as ever from finding the letter Dr. Estep wrote before he died.

  “There are plenty of reasons for thinking that the woman destroyed the letter—that would have been her wisest play. But if I can get enough on her, even at that, I can squeeze her into admitting that the letter was written, and that it said something about suicide—if it did. And that will be enough to spring your client.

  How is she to−day—any better?”

  His thin face lost the animation that had come to it during our discussion of Ledwich, and became bleak.

  “She went completely to pieces last night, and was removed to the hospital, where she should have been taken in the first place. To tell you the truth, if she isn’t liberated soon, she won’t need our help. I’ve done my utmost to have her released on bail—pulled every wire I know—but there’s little likelihood of success in that direction.

  “Knowing that she is a prisoner—charged with murdering her husband—is killing her. She isn’t young, and she has always been subject to nervous disorders. The bare shock of her husband’s death was enough to prostrate her—but now—You’ve got to get her out—and quickly!”

  He was striding up and down his office, his voice throbbing with feeling. I left quickly.

  Six

  From the attorney’s office, I returned to the Agency, where I was told that Bob Teal had phoned in the address of a furnished apartment he had rented on Laguna Street. I hopped on a street car, and went up to take a look at it.

  But I didn’t get that far.

  Walking down Laguna Street, after leaving the car, I spied Bob Teal coming toward me. Between Bob and me—also coming toward me—was a big man whom I recognized as Jacob Ledwich: a big man with a big red face around a tiny mouth.

  I walked on down the street, passing both Ledwich and Bob, without paying any apparent attention to either.

  At the next corner I stopped to roll a cigarette, and steal a look at the pair.

  And then I came to life!

  Ledwich had stopped at a vestibule cigar stand up the street to make a purchase. Bob Teal, knowing his stuff, had passed him and was walking steadily up the street.

  He was figuring that Ledwich had either come out for the purpose of buying cigars or cigarettes, and would return to his flat with them; or that after making his purchase the big man would proceed to the car line, where, in either event, Bob would wait.

  But as Ledwich had stopped before the cigar stand, a man across the street had stepped suddenly into a doorway, and stood there, back in the shadows. This man, I now remembered, had been on the opposite side of the street from Bob and Ledwich, and walking in the same direction.

  He, too, was following Ledwich.

  By the time Ledwich had finished his business at the stand, Bob had reached Sutter Street, the nearest car line.

  Ledwich started up the street in that direction. The man in the doorway stepped out and went after him. I followed that one.

  A ferry−bound car came down Sutter Street just as I reached the corner. Ledwich and I got aboard together.

  The mysterious stranger fumbled with a shoe−string several pavements from the corner until the car was moving again, and then he likewise made a dash for it.

  He stood beside me on the rear platform, hiding behind a large man in overalls, past whose shoulder he now and then peeped at Ledwich. Bob had gone to the corner above, and was already seated when Ledwich, this amateur detective—there was no doubting his amateur status—and I got on the car.

  I sized up the amateur while he strained his neck peeping at Ledwich. He was small, this sleuth, and scrawny and frail. His most noticeable feature was his nose—a limp organ that twitched nervously all the time. His clothes were old and shabby, and he himself was somewhere in his fifties.

  After studying him for a few minutes, I decided that he hadn’t tumbled to Bob Teal’s part in the game. His attention had been too firmly fixed upon Ledwich, and the distance had been too short thus far for him to discover that Bob was also tailing the big man.

  So when the seat beside Bob was vacated presently, I chucked my cigarette away, went into the car, and sat down, my back toward the little man with the twitching nose.

  “Drop off after a couple of blocks and go back to the apartment. Don’t shadow Ledwich any more until I tell you. Just watch his place. There’s a bird following him, and I want to see what he’s up to,” I told Bob in an undertone.

  He grunted that he understood, and, after a few minutes, left the car.

  At Stockton Street, Ledwich got off, the man with the twitching nose behind him and me in the rear. In that formation we paraded around town all afternoon.

  The big man had business in a number of poolrooms, cigar stores, and soft−drink parlors—most of which I knew for places where you can get a bet down on any horse that’s running in North America, whether at Tanforan, Tijuana, or Timonium.

  Just what Ledwich did in these places, I didn’t learn. I was bringing up the rear of the procession, and my interest was centered upon the mysterious little stranger. He didn’t enter any of the places behind Ledwich, but loitered in their neighborhoods until Ledwich reappeared.

  He had a rather strenuous time of it—labouring mightily to keep out of Ledwich’s sight, and only succeeding because we were downtown, where you can get away with almost any sort of shadowing. He certainly made a lot of work for himself, dodging here and there.

  After a while, Ledwich shook him.

  The big man came out of a cigar store with another man. They got into an automobile that was standing beside the curb and drove away, leaving my man standing on the edge of the sidewalk twitching his nose in chagrin.

  There was a taxi stand just around the corner, but he either didn’t know it or didn’t have enough money to pay the fare.

  I expected him to return to Laguna Street then, but he didn’t. He led me down Kearny Street to Portsmouth, where he stretched himself out on the grass face—down, lit a b
lack pipe, and lay looking dejectedly at the Stevenson Monument, probably without seeing it.

  I sprawled on a comfortable piece of sod some distance away—between a Chinese woman with two perfectly round children and an ancient Portuguese in a gaily checkered suit—and we let the afternoon go by.

  When the sun had gone low enough for the ground to become chilly, the little man got up, shook himself, and went back up Kearny Street to a cheap lunchroom, where he ate meagerly. Then he entered a hotel a few doors away, took a key from the row of hooks, and vanished down a dark corridor. Running through the register, I found that the key he had taken belonged to a room whose occupant was ‘John Boyd, St. Louis, Mo.,’ and that he had arrived the day before.

  This hotel wasn’t of the sort where it is safe to make inquiries, so I went down to the street again, and came to rest on the least conspicuous near−by corner.

  Twilight came, and the street—and shop−lights were turned on. It got dark. The night traffic of Kearny Street went up and down past me: Filipino boys in their too−dapper clothes, bound for the inevitable blackjack game; gaudy women still heavy−eyed from their day’s sleep; plain−clothes men on their way to headquarters, to report before going off duty; Chinese going to or from Chinatown; sailors in pairs, looking for action of any sort; hungry people making for the Italian and French restaurants; worried people going into the bail−bond broker’s office on the corner to arrange for the release of friends and relatives whom the police had nabbed; Italians on their homeward journeys from work; odds and ends of furtive−looking citizens on various shady errands.

  Midnight came, and no John Boyd, and I called it a day, and went home.

  Before going to bed, I talked with Dick Foley over the wire. He said that Mrs. Estep had done nothing of any importance all day, and had received neither mail nor phone calls. I told him to stop shadowing her until I solved John Boyd’s game.

  I was afraid Boyd might turn his attention to the woman, and I didn’t want him to discover that she was being shadowed. I had already instructed Bob Teal to simply watch Ledwich’s flat—to see when he came in and went out, and with whom—and now I told Dick to do the same with the woman.

  My guess on this Boyd person was that he and the woman were working together—that she had him watching Ledwich for her, so that the big man couldn’t double−cross her. But that was only a guess—and I don’t gamble too much on my guesses.

  Seven

  The next morning I dressed myself up in an army shirt and shoes, an old faded cap, and a suit that wasn’t downright ragged, but was shabby enough not to stand out too noticeably beside John Boyd’s old clothes.

  It was a little after nine o’clock when Boyd left his hotel and had breakfast at the grease−joint where he had eaten the night before. Then he went up to Laguna Street, picked himself a corner, and waited for Jacob Ledwich.

  He did a lot of waiting. He waited all day, because Ledwich didn’t show until after dark. But the little man was well−stocked with patience—I’ll say that for him. He fidgeted, and stood on one foot and then the other, and even tried sitting on the curb for a while, but he stuck it out.

  I took it easy, myself. The furnished apartment Bob Teal had rented to watch Ledwich’s flat from was a ground−floor one, across the street and just a little above the corner where Boyd waited. So we could watch him and the flat with one eye.

  Bob and I sat and smoked and talked all day, taking turns watching the fidgeting man on the corner and Ledwich’s door.

  Night had just definitely settled when Ledwich came out and started up toward the car line. I slid out into the street, and our parade was under way again—Ledwich leading, Boyd following him, and we following him.

  Half a block of this, and I got an idea!

  I’m not what you’d call a brilliant thinker—such results as I get are usually the fruits of patience, industry, and unimaginative plugging, helped out now and then, maybe, by a little luck—but I do have my flashes of intelligence. And this was one of them.

  Ledwich was about a block ahead of me; Boyd half that distance. Speeding up, I passed Boyd, and caught up with Ledwich. Then I slackened my pace so as to walk beside him, though with no appearance from the rear of having any interest in him.

  “Jake,” I said, without turning my head, “there’s a guy following you!”

  The big man almost spoiled my little scheme by stopping dead still, but he caught himself in time, and, taking his cue from me, kept walking.

  “Who the hell are you?” he growled.

  “Don’t get funny!” I snapped back, still looking and walking ahead. “It ain’t my funeral. But I was coming up the street when you came out, and I seen this guy duck behind a pole until you was past, and then follow you up.”

  That got him.

  “You sure?”

  “Sure! All you got to do to prove it is turn the next corner and wait.”

  I was two or three steps ahead of him by this time. I turned the corner, and halted, with my back against the brick building front. Ledwich took up the same position at my side.

  “Want any help?” I grinned at him—, a reckless sort of grin, unless my acting was poor.

  “No.”

  His little lumpy mouth was set ugly, and his blue eyes were hard as pebbles.

  I flicked the tail of my coat aside to show him the butt of my gun.

  “Want to borrow the rod?” I asked.

  “No.”

  He was trying to figure me out, and small wonder.

  “Don’t mind if I stick around to see the fun, do you?” I asked mockingly.

  There wasn’t time for him to answer that. Boyd had quickened his steps, and now he came hurrying around the corner, his nose twitching like a tracking dog’s.

  Ledwich stepped into the middle of the sidewalk, so suddenly that the little man thudded into him with a grunt. For a moment they stared at each other, and there was recognition between them.

  Ledwich shot one big hand out and clamped the other by a shoulder.

  “What are you snooping around me for, you rat? Didn’t I tell you to keep away from ‘Frisco?”

  “Aw, Jake!” Boyd begged. “I didn’t mean no harm. I just thought that—”

  Ledwich silenced him with a shake that clicked his mouth shut, and turned to me.

  “A friend of mine,” he sneered.

  His eyes grew suspicious and hard again and ran up and down me from cap to shoes.

  “How’d you know my name?” he demanded.

  “A famous man like you?” I asked, in burlesque astonishment.

  “Never mind the comedy!” He took a threatening step toward me. “How’d you know my name?”

  “None of your damned business,” I snapped.

  My attitude seemed to reassure him. His face became less suspicious.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “I owe you something for this trick, and—How are you fixed?”

  “I have been dirtier.” Dirty is Pacific Coast argot for prosperous.

  He looked speculatively from me to Boyd, and back.

  “Know The Circle?” he asked me.

  I nodded. The underworld calls Wop Healey’s joint The Circle.

  “If you’ll meet me there tomorrow night, maybe I can put a piece of change your way.”

  “Nothing stirring!” I shook my head with emphasis. “I ain’t circulating that prominent these days.”

  A fat chance I’d have of meeting him there! Wop Healey and half his customers knew me as a detective. So there was nothing to do but to try to get the impression over that I was a crook who had reasons for wanting to keep away from the more notorious hang−outs for a while. Apparently it got over. He thought a while, and then gave me his Laguna Street number.

  “Drop in this time tomorrow and maybe I’ll have a proposition to make you—if you’ve got the guts.”

  “I’ll think it over,” I said noncommittally, and turned as if to go down the street.

  “Just a minute,” he calle
d, and I faced him again. “What’s your name?”

  “Wisher,” I said. “Shine, if you want a front one.”

  “Shine Wisher,” he repeated. “I don’t remember ever hearing it before.”

  It would have surprised me if he had—I had made it up only about fifteen minutes before.

  “You needn’t yell it,” I said sourly, “so that everybody in the burg will remember hearing it.”

  And with that I left him, not at all dissatisfied with myself. By tipping him off to Boyd, I had put him under obligations to me, and had led him to accept me, at least tentatively, as a fellow crook. And by making no apparent effort to gain his good graces, I had strengthened my hand that much more.

  I had a date with him for the next day, when I was to be given a chance to earn—illegally, no doubt—‘a piece of change.’

  There was a chance that this proposition he had in view for me had nothing to do with the Estep affair, but then again it might; and whether it did or not, I had my entering wedge at least a little way into Jake Ledwich’s business.

  I strolled around for about half an hour, and then went back to Bob Teal’s apartment.

  “Ledwich come back?”

  “Yes,” Bob said, “with that little guy of yours. They went in about half an hour ago.”

  “Good! Haven’t seen a woman go in?”

  “No.”

  I expected to see the first Mrs. Estep arrive sometime during the evening, but she didn’t. Bob and I sat around and talked and watched Ledwich’s doorway, and the hours passed.

  At one o’clock Ledwich came out alone.

  “I’m going to tail him, just for luck,” Bob said, and caught up his cap.

  Ledwich vanished around a corner, and then Bob passed out of sight behind him.

  Five minutes later Bob was with me again.

  “He’s getting his machine out of the garage.”

  I jumped for the telephone and put in a rush order for a fast touring car.

  Bob, at the window, called out, “Here he is!”