Crime Stories Page 3

  The gaunt man in faded khaki frowned with patient annoyance and looked away from the blood−shot brown eyes in front of him, over the teak side of the jahaz to where the wrinkled snout of a muggar broke the surface of the river. When the small crocodile submerged again, Hagedom’s gray eyes came back to the pleading ones before him, and he spoke wearily, as one who has been answering the same arguments again and again.

  “I can’t do it, Barnes. I left New York two years ago to ;get you, and for two years I’ve been in this damned country here and in Yunnan hunting you. I promised my people I’d stay until I found you, and I kept my word. Lord! man,” with a touch of exasperation, “after all I’ve gone through you don’t expect me to throw them down now, now that the job’s as good as done!”

  The dark man in the garb of a native smiled an oily, ingratiating smile and brushed away his captor’s words with a wave of his hand.

  “I ain’t offering you a dinky coupla thousand dollars; I’m offering you your pick out of one of the richest gem beds in Asiaa bed that was hidden by the Mran−ma when the British jumped the country. Come back up there with me and I’ll show you rubies and sapphires and topazes that’ll knock your eye out. All I’m asking you is to go back up there with me and take a look at ‘em. If you don’t like ‘em you’ll still have me to take back to New York.”

  Hagedorn shook his head slowly.

  “You’re going back to New York with me. Maybe man−hunting isn’t the nicest trade in the world but it’s all the trade I’ve got, and this jewel bed of yours sounds phoney to me. I can’t blame you for not wanting to go backbut just the same I’m taking you.”

  Barnes glared at the detective disgustedly.

  “You’re a fine chump! And it’s costing me and you thousands of dollars! Hell!”

  He spat over the side insultingly native−like and settled himself back on his corner of the split−bamboo mat Hagedorn was looking past the lateen sail, down the river the beginning of the route to New York along which a miasmal breeze was carrying the fifty−foot boat with surprising speed. Four more days and they would be aboard a steamer for Rangoon; then another steamer to Calcutta, and in the end, one to New York home, after two years!

  Two years through unknown country, pursuing what until the very day of the capture had never been more than a vague shadow. Through Yunnan and Burma, combing wilderness with microscopic thoroughness a game of hide−and−seek up the rivers, over the hills and through the jungles sometimes a year, sometimes two months and then six behind his quarry. And now successfully home! Betty would be fifteen—quite a lady.

  Barnes edged forward and resumed his pleading, with a whine creeping into his voice.

  “Say, Hagedorn, why don’t you listen to reason? There ain’t no sense in us losing all that money just for something that happened over two years ago. I didn’t mean to kill that guy, anyway. You know how it is; I was a kid and wild and foolishbut I wasn’t mean and I got in with a bunch. Why, I thought of that hold−up as a lark when we planned it! And then that messenger yelled and I guess I was excited, and my gun went off the first thing I knew. I didn’t go to kill him; and it won’t do him no good to take me back and hang me for it.

  The express company didn’t lose no money. What do they want to hound me like this for? I been trying to live it down.”

  The gaunt detective answered quietly enough but what kindness there had been in his dry voice before was gone now.

  “I know the old story! And the bruises on the Burmese woman you were living with sure show that there’s nothing mean about you. Cut it, Barnes, and make up your mind to face it you and I are going back to New York.”

  “The hell we are!”

  Barnes got slowly to his feet and backed away a step.

  “I’d just as leave”

  Hagedorn’s automatic came out a split second too late; his prisoner was over the side and swimming toward the bank. The detective caught up his rifle from the deck behind him and sprang to the rail. Barnes’ head showed for a moment and then went down again, to appear again twenty feet nearer shore. Upstream the man in the boat saw the blunt, wrinkled noses of three muggars, moving toward the shore at a tangent that would intercept the fugitive. He leaned against the teak rail and summed up the situation.

  “Looks like I’m not going to take him back alive after all but my job’s done. I can shoot him when he shows again, or I can let him alone and the muggars will get him.”

  Then the sudden but logical instinct to side with the member of his own species against enemies from another wiped out all other considerations, and sent his rifle to his shoulder to throw a shower of bullets into the muggars.

  Barnes clambered up the bank of the river, waved his hand over his head without looking back, and plunged into the jungle.

  Hagedorn turned to the bearded owner of the jahaz, who had come to his side, and addressed him in his broke Burmese.

  “Put me ashore yu nga apau mye and wait thaing until I bring him back thu yughe.”

  The captain wagged his black beard protestingly.

  “Mahok!

  In the jungle here, sahib a man is as a lei Twenty men might find him in a week, or a month, it may take five years. I cannot wait that long.”

  The gaunt white man gnawed at his lower lip and looked down the river the road to New York.

  “Two years,” he said aloud to himself, “it took to fin him when he didn’t know I was hunting for him.

  Now−Oh, hell! It may take five years. I wonder about them jewel of his.”

  He turned to the boatman.

  “I go after him. You wait three hours,” pointing over head, “until noon ne apomha. If I am not back then do not wait malotu thaing, thwa. Thi?”

  The captain nodded.

  “Hokhe!”

  For five hours the captain kept the jahaz at anchor, and then, when the shadows of the trees on the west bank were creeping out into the river, he ordered the latten sail hoisted, and the teak craft vanished around a bend in the river.

  THE MASTER MIND

  Wherever crime or criminals were discussed by enlightened folk, the name of Waldron Honeywell could be heard. It was a symbol—to the citizens of Punta Arenas no less than to those of Tammerfors—for the ultimate in the prevention and detection of crime. A native of the United States, Honeywell’s work had overflowed the national boundaries. Thirty years of warfare upon crime had taken him into every quarter of the globe, and his fame into every nook where the printed word penetrated.

  Bringing to his work a singularly perspicacious intellect, and combining an exhaustive knowledge of both the scientific and more practical phases of his profession, he had reduced it to as nearly exact a science as possible; and his supremacy in his field had never been questioned.

  He had punctured Lombroso’s theories at a time when the scientific world regarded the Italian as a Messiah. The treatise with which he exploded the belief—fostered by no less an authority than the great W. J. Burns—that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have made a successful detective, and showed that the mysteries confronting Sherlock Holmes would have been susceptible

  to the routine methods of the ordinary policeman, was familiar to the readers of eight languages. The mastery with which he unearthed and frustrated the Versailles bomb plot before it was well on its feet; the dispatch with which he recovered the aircraft program memoranda; his success in finding the assassin of the emperor of Abyssinia, the details of which were suppressed for some obscure political reason; the effectual manner in which he coped with the epidemic of postal robberies—these were matters of history, but in no way more remarkable than a thousand-odd other exploits in which he had figured.

  Honors and decorations were showered upon him, governments sought his advice, scientists deferred to him, criminals shuddered at the sound of his name (one, who had avoided arrest for seventeen years, surrendered to the nearest policeman upon learning that Honeywell had been engaged to hunt him down), and his monetary rewards were enorm
ous.

  Early in 1922 Waldron Honeywell died, and left an estate consisting of $182.65 in cash, 37,500 shares of International Solar Power Corporation common, 42,555 shares of Cousin Tilly Gold, Platinum & Diamond Mining Company common, 6,430 shares of Universal Petroleum Corporation of Uruguay, S. A. preferred, and 75,000 shares of New Era Fuelless Motor Company common.

  THE SARDONIC STAR OF TOM DOODY

  “Come along without any fuss and there won’t be no trouble,” said the tall man with the protruding lower lip and the black bow tie.

  “And remember, anything you say will—” the fat man under the stiff straw hat warned, the rest of the prescribed caution dying somewhere within the folds of his burly neck.

  A frown of perplexed interrogation reduced the none too ample area between Tom Doody’s eyebrows and the roots of his hair. He cleared his throat uneasily and asked, “But what’s it for?”

  The protruding lower lip overlapped the upper in a smile that tempered derision with indulgence. “You ought to be able to guess—but it ain’t a secret. You’re arrested for stealing sixty-five thousand dollars from the National Marine Bank. We found the dough where you hid it, and now we got you.”

  “That’s what,” the fat man corroborated . . .

  Tom Doody leaned across the plain table in the visitors’ room and bent his beady eyes on the tired, middle-aged eyes of the woman from the Morning Bulletin.

  “Miss Envers, I have served three and a half years here and I’ve got nearly ten more to do, taking in account what I expect to get off for good behavior. A long time, I guess you think; but I’m telling you that I don’t regret a minute of it.” He paused to let this startling assertion sink in, and then leaned forward again over hands that lay flat, palms down, fingers spread, on the top of the table.

  “I came in here, Miss Envers, a safe-burglar that had been caught for the first and only time in fifteen years of crime. I am going out of here completely reformed, and with only one aim in my life; and that’s to do all I can to keep other people from following in my footsteps. I’m studying, and the chaplain is helping me, so that when I get out I can talk and write so as to get my message across. I used to be pretty good at reciting and making speeches when I was a kid in school, and I guess it’ll come back to me all right. I’m going from one end of the country to the other, if I have to ride freights, telling of my experiences as a criminal, and the light that busted—burst on me here in prison. I know what it is, and lots of people that maybe wouldn’t listen to a preacher or anybody else will pay attention to me. They’ll know that I know what I am talking about, that I’ve been through it, that I’m the man who robbed the National Marine Bank and lots of others.”

  “You were very nearly acquitted, at that; weren’t you?” Evelyn Envers asked.

  “Yes, nearly,” the convict said, “and as truly as I’m sitting here, Miss Envers, I thank God that I was convicted!”

  He stopped and tried to read surprise in the faded gray eyes across the table. Then he went on. “But for that—the chance for self-knowledge and thought that this place has gave—has given me—I might have gone on and on, might never have come to an understanding of what it means to be a Christian and know the difference between right and wrong. Here in prison I found for the first time in my life, liberty—yes, liberty!—freedom from the bonds of vice and crime and self-destruction!” With this paradox he rested.

  “Have you made any other plans for your career after leaving here?” the woman asked.

  “No. That’s too far ahead. But I am going to spend the rest of my life spreading the truth about crime as I know it, if I have to sleep in gutters and live on stale bread!”

  “He’s a fraud, of course,” Evelyn Envers told her typewriter as she threaded a sheet of paper into it, “but he’ll make as good a story as anything else.”

  So she wrote a column about Tom Doody and his high resolves and because the thought behind his reformation was so evident to her she took especial pains with the story, gilding the shabbier of his mouthings and garnishing him with no inconsiderable appeal.

  For several days after the story’s appearance letters came to the Morning Bulletin Readers’ Forum, commenting on Tom Doody and tendering suggestions of various sorts.

  The Rev. Randall Gordon Rand made Tom Doody the subject of one of his informal Sunday evening talks.

  And then John J. Kelleher, 1322 Britton street, was crushed to death by a furniture van after pushing little Fern Bier, five-year-old daughter of Louis Bier, 1304 Britton street, to safety; and it transpired that Kelleher had been convicted of burglary several years before, and was out on parole at the time of the accident.

  Evelyn Envers wrote a column about Kelleher and his dark-eyed little wife, and with doubtful relevance brought Tom Doody into the last paragraph. The Chronicle and the Intelligencer printed editorials in which Kelleher s death was adduced as demonstrative of the parole system’s merit.

  On the afternoon before the next regular meeting of the State Parole Board the football team of the state university—three members of the board were ardent alumni—turned a defeat into a victory in the last quarter.

  Tom Doody was paroled.

  From his room on the third floor of the Chapham hotel, Tom Doody could see one of the posters. Red and black letters across a fifteen-by-thirty field of virginal white gave notice that Tom Doody, a reformed safe-burglar of considerable renown, would talk at the Lyric Theater each night for one week on the wages of sin.

  Tom Doody tilted his chair forward, rested his elbows on the sill, and studied the poster with fond eyes. That bill-board was all right—though he had thought perhaps his picture would be on it. But Fincher had displayed no enthusiasm when a suggestion to that effect had been made, and whatever Fincher said went. Fincher was all right. There was the contract Fincher had given him—a good hundred dollars more a week than he had really expected. And then there was that young fellow Fincher had hired to put Tom Doody’s lecture in shape. There was no doubt that the lecture was all right now.

  The lecture began with his childhood in the bosom of a loving family, carried him through the usual dance-hall and pool-room introductions to gay society, and then rose in a crescendo of vague but nevertheless increasingly vicious crime to a smashing climax with the burglary of the National Marine Bank’s sixty-five thousand dollars, the resultant arrest and conviction, and the new life that had dawned as he bent one day over his machine in the prison jute-mill. Then a tapering off with a picture of the criminal’s inherent misery and the glory of standing four-square with the world. But the red meat of it was the thousand and one nights of crime—that was what the audience would come to hear.

  The young fellow who had been hired to mold and polish the Doody epic had wanted concrete facts—names and dates and amounts—about the earlier crimes; but Tom Doody had drawn the line there, protesting that such a course would lay him open to arrest for felonies with which the police had heretofore been unable to connect him, and Fincher had agreed with him. The truth of it was that there were no crimes prior to the National Marine Bank burglary—that conviction was the only picturesque spot in Tom Doody’s life. But he knew too much to tell Fincher that. At the time of his arrest the newspapers and the police—who, for quite perceptible reasons, pretend to see in every apprehended criminal an enormously adept and industrious fellow—had brought to light hundreds of burglaries, and even a murder or two, in which this Tom Doody might have been implicated. He felt that these fanciful accusations had helped expedite his conviction, but now the fanfare was to be of value to him—as witness the figure on his contract. As a burglar with but a single crime to his credit he would have been a poor attraction on the platform, but with the sable and crimson laurels the police and the press had hung upon him, that was another matter.

  For at least a year these black and red and white posters would accompany him wherever he went. His contract covered that period, and perhaps he could renew it for many years. Why not? The lect
ure was all right, and he knew he could deliver it creditably. He had rehearsed assiduously and Fincher had seemed pleased with his address. Of course he’d probably be a little nervous tomorrow night, when he faced an audience for the first time, but that would pass and he would soon feel at home in this new game. There was money in it—the ticket sales had been large, so Fincher said. Perhaps after a while—

  The door opened violently and Fincher came into the room—an apoplectic Fincher, altogether unlike the usual smiling, mellow manager of Fincher’s International Lecture Bureau.

  “What’s up?” Tom Doody asked, consciously keeping his eyes from darting furtively toward the door.

  “What’s up?” Fincher repeated the words, but his voice was a bellow. “What’s up?” He brandished a rolled newspaper shillalah-wise in Tom Doody’s face. “I’ll show you what’s up!” He seemed to be lashing himself into more vehement fury with reiterations of the ex-convict’s query, as lions were once said to do with their tails.

  He straightened out the newspaper, smoothed a few square inches of its surface, and thrust it at Tom Doody’s nose, with one lusty forefinger laid like an indicator on the center of the sheet. Tom Doody leaned back until his eyes were far enough away to focus upon the print around his manager’s finger.

  . . . by the police, Tom Doody, who was paroled several days ago after serving nearly four years for the theft of sixty-five thousand dollars from the National Marine Bank, has been completely exonerated of that crime by the deathbed confession of Walter Beadle, who . . .

  “That’s what’s up!” Fincher shouted, when Tom Doody had shifted his abject eyes from the paper to the floor. “Now I want that five hundred dollars I advanced to you!”

  Tom Doody went through his pockets with alacrity that poorly masked his despair, and brought out some bills and a handful of silver. Fincher grabbed the money from the exconvict’s hands and counted it rapidly.