Crime Stories Read online

  “Fair enough!”

  He grabbed the gun, broke it to see that it was still loaded, and wheeled toward the rear of the flat. At the door he pulled up, hesitated, and faced me again. I kept him covered with my automatic.

  “Will you do me one favor I didn’t put in the bargain?” he asked.

  “What is it?”

  “That note of the doc’s is in an envelope with my handwriting and maybe my fingerprints on it. Let me put it in a fresh envelope, will you? I don’t want to leave any broader trail behind than I have to.”

  With my left hand—my right being busy with the gun—I fumbled for the envelope and tossed it to him. He took a plain envelope from the table, wiped it carefully with his handkerchief, put the note in it, taking care not to touch it with the balls of his fingers, and passed it back to me; and I put it in my pocket.

  I had a hard time to keep from grinning in his face.

  That fumbling with the handkerchief told me that the envelope in my pocket was empty, that the death note was in Ledwich’s possession—though I hadn’t seen it pass there. He had worked one of his bunko tricks upon me.

  “Beat it!” I snapped, to keep from laughing in his face.

  He spun on his heel. His feet pounded against the floor. A door slammed in the rear.

  I tore into the envelope he had given me. I needed to be sure he had double−crossed me.

  The envelope was empty.

  Our agreement was wiped out.

  I sprang to the front window, threw it wide open, and leaned out. O’Gar saw me immediately—clearer than I could see him. I swung my arm in a wide gesture toward the rear of the house. O’Gar set out for the alley on the run. I dashed back through Ledwich’s flat to the kitchen, and stuck my head out of an already open window.

  I could see Ledwich against the white−washed fence—throwing the back gate open, plunging through it into the alley.

  O’Gar’s squat bulk appeared under a light at the end of the alley.

  Ledwich’s revolver was in his hand. O’Gar’s wasn’t—not quite.

  Ledwich’s gun swung up—the hammer clicked.

  O’Gar’s gun coughed fire.

  Ledwich fell with a slow, revolving motion over against the white fence, gasped once or twice, and went down in a pile.

  I walked slowly down the stairs to join O’Gar; slowly, because it isn’t a nice thing to look at a man you’ve deliberately sent to his death. Not even if it’s the surest way of saving an innocent life, and if the man who dies is a Jake Ledwich—altogether treacherous.

  “How come?” O’Gar asked, when I came into the alley, where he stood looking down at the dead man.

  “He got out on me,” I said simply.

  “He must’ve.”

  I stooped and searched the dead man’s pockets until I found the suicide note, still crumpled in the handkerchief. O’Gar was examining the dead man’s revolver.

  “Lookit!” he exclaimed. “Maybe this ain’t my lucky day! He snapped at me once, and his gun missed fire. No wonder! Somebody must’ve been using an ax on it—the firing pin’s broke clean off!”

  “Is that so?” I asked; just as if I hadn’t discovered, when I first picked the revolver up, that the bullet which had knocked it out of Ledwich’s hand had made it harmless.

  ONE HOUR

  One

  “This is Mr. Chrostwaite,” Vance Richmond said.

  Chrostwaite, wedged between the arms of one of the attorney’s large chairs, grunted what was perhaps meant for an acknowledgment of the introduction. I grunted back at him, and found myself a chair.

  He was a big balloon of a man—this Chrostwaite—in a green plaid suit that didn’t make him look any smaller than he was. His tie was a gaudy thing, mostly of yellow, with a big diamond set in the center of it, and there were more stones on his pudgy hands. Spongy fat blurred his features, making it impossible for his round purplish face to even hold any other expression than the discontented hoggishness that was habitual to it. He reeked of gin.

  “Mr. Chrostwaite is the Pacific Coast agent for the Mutual Fire Extinguisher Manufacturing Company,”

  Vance Richmond began, as soon as I had got myself seated. “His office is on Kearny Street, near California.

  Yesterday, at about two forty−five in the afternoon, he went to his office, leaving his machine—a Hudson touring car—standing in front, with the engine running. Then minutes later, he came out. The car was gone.”

  I looked at Chrostwaite. He was looking at his fat knees, showing not the least interest in what his attorney was saying. I looked quickly back at Vance Richmond; his clean gray face and lean figure were downright beautiful beside his bloated client.

  “A man named Newhouse,” the lawyer was saying, “who was the proprietor of a printing establishment on California Street, just around the corner from Mr. Chrostwaite’s office, was run down and killed by Mr.

  Chrostwaite’s car at the corner of Clay and Kearny Streets, five minutes after Mr. Chrostwaite had left the car to go into his office. The police found the car shortly afterward, only a block away from the scene of the accident—on Montgomery near Clay.

  “The thing is fairly obvious. Someone stole the car immediately after Mr. Chrostwaite left it; and in driving rapidly away, ran down Newhouse; and then, in fright, abandoned the car. But here is Mr. Chrostwaite’s position; three nights ago, while driving perhaps a little recklessly out—”

  “Drunk,” Chrostwaite said, not looking up from his plaid knees; and though his voice was hoarse, husky—it was the hoarseness of a whisky−burned throat—there was no emotion in his voice.

  “While driving perhaps a little recklessly out Van Ness Avenue,” Vance Richmond went on, ignoring the interruption, “Mr. Chrostwaite knocked a pedestrian down. The man wasn’t badly hurt, and he is being compensated very generously for his injuries. But we are to appear in court next Monday to face a charge of reckless driving, and I am afraid that this accident of yesterday, in which the printer was killed, may hurt us.

  “No one thinks that Mr. Chrostwaite was in his car when it killed the printer—we have a world of evidence that he wasn’t. But I am afraid that the printer’s death may be made a weapon against us when we appear on the Van Ness Avenue charge. Being an attorney, I know just how much capital the prosecuting attorney—if he so chooses—can make out of the really, insignificant fact that the same car that knocked down the man on Van Ness Avenue killed another man yesterday. And, being an attorney, I know how likely the prosecuting attorney is to so choose. And he can handle it in such a way that we will be given little or no opportunity to tell our side.

  “The worst that can happen, of course, is that, instead of the usual fine, Mr. Chrostwaite will be sent to the city jail for thirty or sixty days. That is bad enough, however, and that is what we wish to—”

  Chrostwaite spoke again, still regarding his knees. “Damned nuisance!” he said.

  “That is what we wish to avoid,” the attorney continued. “We are willing to pay a stiff fine, and expect to, for the accident on Van Ness Avenue was clearly Mr. Chrostwaite’s fault. But we—”

  “Drunk as a lord!” Chrostwaite said.

  “But we don’t want to have this other accident, with which we had nothing to do, given a false weight in connection with the slighter accident. What we want then, is to find the man or men who stole the car and ran down John Newhouse. If they are apprehended before we go to court, we won’t be in danger of suffering for their act. Think you can find them before Monday?”

  “I’ll try,” I promised; “though it isn’t—”

  The human balloon interrupted me by heaving himself to his feet, fumbling with his fat jewelled fingers for his watch.

  “Three o’clock,” he said. “Got a game of golf for three−thirty.” He picked up his hat and gloves from the desk.

  “Find ‘em, will you? Damned nuisance going to jail!”

  And he waddled out.

  Two

  From the a
ttorney’s office, I went down to the Hall of Justice, and, after hunting around a few minutes, found a policeman who had arrived at the corner of Clay and Kearny Streets a few seconds after Newhonse had been knocked down.

  “I was just leaving the Hall when I seen a bus scoot around the corner at Clay Street,” this patrolman—a big sandy−haired man named Coffee—told me. “Then I seen people gathering around, so I went up there and found this John Newhouse stretched out. He was already dead. Half a dozen people had seen him hit, and one of ‘em had got the license number of the car that done it. We found the car standing empty just around the corner on Montgomery Street, pointing north. There was two fellows in the car when it hit Newhouse, but nobody saw what they looked like. Nobody was in it when we found it.”

  “In what direction was Newhouse walking?”

  “North along Kearny Street, and he was about three−quarters across Clay when he was knocked. The car was coming north on Kearny, too, and turned east on Clay. It mightn’t have been all the fault of the fellows in the car—according to them that seen the accident. Newhouse was walking across the street looking at a piece of paper in his hand. I found a piece of foreign money—paper money—in his hand, and I guess that’s what he was looking at. The lieutenant tells me it was Dutch money—a hundred−florin note, he says.”

  “Found out anything about the men in the car?”

  “Nothing! We lined up everybody we could find in the neighborhood of California and Kearny Streets—where the car was stolen from—and around Clay and Montgomery Streets—where it was left at. But nobody remembered seeing the fellows getting in it or getting out of it. The man that owns the car wasn’t driving it—it was stole all right, I guess. At first I thought maybe there was something shady about the accident. This John Newhouse had a two—or three−day−old black eye on him. But we run that out and found that he had an attack of heart trouble or something a couple days ago, and fell, fetching his eye up against a chair. He’d been home sick for three days—just left his house half an hour or so before the accident.”

  “Where’d he live?”

  “On Sacramento Street—way out. I got his address here somewhere.”

  He turned over the pages of a grimy memoranda book, and I got the dead man’s house number, and the names and addresses of the witnesses to the accident that Coffee had questioned.

  That exhausted the policeman’s information, so I left him.

  Three

  My next play was to canvass the vicinity of where the car had been stolen and where it had been deserted, and then interview the witnesses. The fact that the police had fruitlessly gone over this ground made it unlikely that I would find anything of value; but I couldn’t skip these things on that account. Ninety−nine per cent of detective work is a patient collecting of details—and your details must be got as nearly first−hand as possible, regardless of who else has worked the territory before you.

  Before starting on this angle, however, I decided to run around to the dead man’s printing establishment—only three blocks from the Hall of Justice—and see if any of his employees had heard anything that might help me.

  Newhouse’s establishment occupied the ground floor of a small building on California, between Kearny and Montgomery. A small office was partitioned off in front, with a connecting doorway leading to the pressroom in the rear.

  The only occupant of the small office, when I came in from the street, was a short, stocky, worried−looking blond man of forty or thereabouts, who sat at the desk in his shirt−sleeves, checking off figures in a ledger against others on a batch of papers before him.

  I introduced myself, telling him that I was a Continental Detective Agency operative, interested in Newhouse’s death. He told me his name was Ben Soules, and that he was Newhouse’s foreman. We shook hands, and then he waved me to a chair across the desk, pushed back the papers and book upon which he had been working, and scratched his head disgustedly with the pencil in his hand.

  “This is awful!” he said. “What with one thing and another, we’re heels over head in work, and I got to fool with these books that I don’t know anything at all about, and—”

  He broke off to pick up the telephone, which had jingled.

  “Yes . . . This is Soules . . . We’re working on them now . . . I’ll give ‘em to you by Monday noon at the least . . . I know! I know! But the boss’s death set us back. Explain that to Mr. Chrostwaite. And . . . And I’ll promise you that we’ll give them to you Monday morning, sure!”Soules slapped the receiver irritably on its hook and looked at me.

  “You’d think that since it was his own car that killed the boss, he’d have decency enough not to squawk over the delay!”

  “Chrostwaite?”

  “Yes—that was one of his clerks. We’re printing some leaflets for him—promised to have ‘em ready yesterday—but between the boss’s death and having a couple new hands to break in, we’re behind with everything. I’ve been here eight years, and this is the first time we ever fell down on an order—and every damned customer is yelling his head off. If we were like most printers they’d be used to waiting; but we’ve been too good to them. But this Chrostwaite! You’d think he’d have some decency, seeing that his car killed the boss!”

  I nodded sympathetically, slid a cigar across the desk, and waited until it was burning in Soilless mouth before I asked:

  “You said something about having a couple new hands to break in. How come?”

  “Yes. Mr. Newhouse fired two of our printers last week—Fincher and Keys. He found that they belonged to the I.W.W., so he gave them their time.”

  “Any trouble with them or anything against them except that they were Wobblies?”

  “No—they were pretty good workers.”

  “Any trouble with them after he fired them?” I asked.

  “No real trouble, though they were pretty hot. They made red speeches all over the place before they left.”

  “Remember what day that was?”

  “Wednesday of last week, I think. Yes, Wednesday, because I hired two new men on Thursday.”

  “How many men do you work?”

  “Three, besides myself.”

  “Was Mr. Newhouse sick very often?”

  “Not sick enough to stay away very often, though every now and then his heart would go back on him, and he’d have to stay in bed for a week or ten days. He wasn’t what you could call real well at any time. He never did anything but the office work—I run the shop.”

  “When was he taken sick this last time?”

  “Mrs. Newhouse called up Tuesday morning and said he had had another spell, and wouldn’t be down for a few days. He came in yesterday—which was Thursday—for about ten minutes in the afternoon, and said he would be back on the job this morning. He was killed just after he left.”

  “How did he look—very sick?”

  “Not so bad. He never looked well, of course, but I couldn’t see much difference from usual yesterday. This last spell hadn’t been as bad as most, I reckon—he was usually laid up for a week or more.”

  “Did he say where he was going when he left? The reason I ask is that, living out on Sacramento Street, he would naturally have taken a car at that street if he had been going home, whereas he was run down on Clay Street.”

  “He said he was going up to Portsmouth Square to sit in the sun for half an hour or so. He had been cooped up indoors for two or three days, he said, and he wanted some sunshine before he went back home.”

  “He had a piece of foreign money in his hand when he was hit. Know anything about it?”

  “Yes. He got it here. One of our customers—a man named Van Pelt—came in to pay for some work we had done yesterday afternoon while the boss was here. When Van Pelt pulled out his wallet to pay his bill, this piece of Holland money—I don’t know what you call it—was among the bills. I think he said it was worth something like thirty−eight dollars. Anyway, the boss took it, giving Van Pelt his change. The boss said
he wanted to show the Holland money to his boys—and he could have it changed back into American money later.”

  “Who is this Van Pelt?”

  “He’s a Hollander—is planning to open a tobacco importing business here in a month or two. I don’t know much about him outside of that.”

  “Where’s his home, or office?”

  “His office is on Bush Street, near Sansome.”

  “Did he know that Newhouse had been sick?”

  “I don’t think so. The boss didn’t look much different from usual.”

  “What’s this Van Pelt’s full name?”

  “Hendrik Van Pelt.”

  “What does he look like?”

  Before Soules could answer, three evenly spaced buzzes sounded above the rattle and whirring of the presses in the back of the shop.

  I slid the muzzle of my gun—I had been holding it in my lap for five minutes—far enough over the edge of the desk for Ben Soules to see it.

  “Put both of your hands on top of the desk,” I said.

  He put them there.

  The pressroom door was directly behind him, so that, facing him across the desk, I could look over his shoulder at it. His stocky body served to screen my gun from the view of whoever came through the door, in response to Soules’s signal.

  I didn’t have long to wait.

  Three men—black with ink—came to the door, and through it into the little office. They strolled in careless and casual, laughing and joking to one another.

  But one of them licked his lips as he stepped through the door. Another’s eyes showed white circles all around the irises. The third was the best actor—but he held his shoulders a trifle too stiffly to fit his otherwise careless carriage.

  “Stop right there!” I barked at them when the last one was inside the office—and I brought my gun up where they could see it.

  They stopped as if they had all been mounted on the same pair of legs.