Crime Stories Page 39

  Meanwhile, Joplin had said: “Time to waste is one thing I ain’t got.”

  And I had said: “If you’d saved up all the time different judges have given you, you’d have plenty.”

  I had seen the girl somewhere before. She was a slender girl in a glistening blue gown that exhibited a generous spread of front, back and arms that were worth showing. She had a mass of dark brown hair above an oval face of the color that pink ought to be. Her eyes were wide-set and a gray shade that wasn’t altogether unlike the shadows on polished silver that the poet had compared them to. I studied the girl, and she looked back at me with level eyes, and still I couldn’t place her. Kilcourse still sat dangling a leg from the table corner.

  Joplin grew impatient: “Will you stop gandering at the girl, and tell me what you want of me?” he growled.

  The girl smiled then, a mocking smile that bared the edges of razor-sharp little animal-teeth. And with the smile I knew her!

  Her hair and skin had fooled me. The last time I had seen her—the only time I had seen her before—her face had been marble-white, and her hair had been short and the color of fire. She and an older woman and three men and I had played hide-and-seek one evening in a house in Turk Street over a matter of the murder of a bank messenger and the theft of a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Liberty Bonds. Through her intriguing, three of her accomplices had died that evening, and the fourth—the Chinese-had eventually gone to the gallows at Folsom Prison. Her name had been Elvira then, and since her escape from the house that night we had been fruitlessly hunting her from border to border, and beyond.

  Recognition must have shown in my eyes in spite of the effort I made to keep them blank, for, as swift as a snake, she had left the arm of the chair and was coming forward, her eyes more steel than silver.

  I put my gun in sight.

  Joplin took a half-step toward me. “What’s the idea?” he barked.

  Kilcourse slid off the table, and one of his thin dark hands hovered over his necktie.

  “This is the idea,” I told them. “I want the girl for a murder a couple of months back, and maybe—I’m not sure—for tonight’s. Anyway, I’m—”

  The snapping of a light-switch behind me, and the room went black.

  I moved, not caring where I went so long as I got away from where I had been when the lights went out.

  My back touched a wall and I stopped, crouching low.

  “Quick, kid!” A hoarse whisper that came from where I thought the door should be.

  But both of the room’s doors, I thought, were closed, and could hardly be opened without showing gray rectangles. People moved in the blackness, but none got between me and the lighter square of windows.

  Something clicked softly in front of me- too thin a click for the cocking of a gun—but it could have been the opening of a spring-knife, and I remembered that Tin-Star Joplin had a fondness for that weapon.

  “Let’s go!” A harsh whisper that cut through the dark like a blow.

  Sounds of motion, muffled, indistinguishable . . . one sound not far away . . .

  Abruptly a strong hand clamped one of my shoulders, a hard-muscled body strained against me. I stabbed out with my gun, and heard a grunt.

  The hand moved up my shoulder toward my throat.

  I snapped up a knee, and heard another grunt.

  A burning point ran down my side.

  I stabbed again with my gun—pulled it back until the muzzle was free of the soft obstacle that had stopped it, and squeezed the trigger. The crash of the shot. Joplin’s voice in my ear, a curiously matter-of-fact voice: “God damn! That got me.”

  I spun away from him then, toward where I saw the dim yellow of an open door. I had heard no sounds of departure. I had been too busy. But I knew that Joplin had tied into me while the others made their get-away.

  Nobody was in sight as I jumped, slid, tumbled down the steps—any number at a time. A waiter got in my path as I plunged toward the dance-floor. I don’t know whether his interference was intentional or not. I didn’t ask. I slammed the flat of my gun in his face and went on. Once I jumped a leg that came out to trip me; and at the outer door I had to smear another face.

  Then I was out in the semi-circular driveway, from one end of which a red tail-light was turning east into the country road.

  While I sprinted for Axford’s car I noticed that Pangburn’s body had been removed. A few people still stood around the spot where he had lain, and they gaped at me now with open mouths.

  The car was as Axford had left it, with idling engine. I swung it through a flower-bed and pointed it east on the public road. Five minutes later I picked up the red point of a tail- light again.

  The car under me had more power than I would ever need, more than I would have known how to handle. I don’t know how fast the one ahead was going, but I closed in as if it had been standing still.

  A mile and a half, or perhaps two—

  Suddenly a man was in the road ahead—a little beyond the reach of my lights. The lights caught him, and I saw that it was Porky Grout!

  Porky Grout standing facing me in the middle of the road, the dull metal of an automatic in each hand.

  The guns in his hands seemed to glow dimly red and then go dark in the glare of my headlights—glow and then go dark, like two bulbs in an automatic electric sign.

  The windshield fell apart around me.

  Porky Grout—the informant whose name was a synonym for cowardice the full length of the Pacific Coast—stood in the center of the road shooting at a metal comet that rushed down upon him . . .

  I didn’t see the end.

  I confess frankly that I shut my eyes when his set white face showed close over my radiator. The metal monster under me trembled—not very much—and the road ahead was empty except for the fleeing red light. My windshield was gone. The wind tore at my uncovered hair and brought tears to my squinted-up eyes.

  Presently I found that I was talking to myself, saying, “That was Porky. That was Porky.” It was an amazing fact. It was no surprise that he had double-crossed me. That was to be expected. And for him to have crept up the stairs behind me and turned off the lights wasn’t astonishing. But for him to have stood straight up and died—

  An orange streak from the car ahead cut off my wonderment. The bullet didn’t come near me—it isn’t easy to shoot accurately from one moving car into another—but at the pace I was going it wouldn’t be long before I was close enough for good shooting.

  I turned on the searchlight above the dashboard. It didn’t quite reach the car ahead, but it enabled me to see that the girl was driving. While Kilcourse sat screwed around beside her, facing me. The car was a yellow roadster.

  I eased up a little. In a duel with Kilcourse here I would have been at a disadvantage, since I would have had to drive as well as shoot. My best play seemed to be to hold my distance until we reached a town, as we inevitably must. It wasn’t midnight yet. There would be people on the streets of any town, and policemen. Then I could close in with a better chance of coming off on top.

  A few miles of this and my prey tumbled to my plan. The yellow roadster slowed down, wavered, and came to rest with its length across the road. Kilcourse and the girl were out immediately and crouching in the road on the far side of their barricade.

  I was tempted to dive pell-mell into them, but it was a weak temptation, and when its short life had passed I put on the brakes and stopped. Then I fiddled with my searchlight until it bore full upon the roadster.

  A flash came from somewhere near the roadster’s wheels, and the searchlight shook violently, but the glass wasn’t touched. It would be their first target, of course, and . . .

  Crouching in my car, waiting for the bullet that would smash the lens, I took off my shoes and overcoat.

  The third bullet ruined the light.

  I switched off the other lights, jumped to the road, and when I stopped running I was squatting down against the near side of the yellow roadst
er. As easy and safe a trick as can be imagined.

  The girl and Kilcourse had been looking into the glare of a powerful light. When that light suddenly died, and the weaker ones around it went, too, they were left in pitch unseeing blackness, which must last for the minute or longer that their eyes would need to readjust themselves to the gray-black of the night. My stockinged feet had made no sound on the macadam road, and now there was only a roadster between us; and I knew it and they didn’t.

  From near the radiator Kilcourse spoke softly:

  “I’m going to try to knock him off from the ditch. Take a shot at him now and then to keep him busy.”

  “I can’t see him,” the girl protested.

  “Your eyes’ll be all right in a second. Take a shot at the car anyway.”

  I moved toward the radiator as the girl’s pistol barked at the empty touring car.

  Kilcourse, on hands and knees, was working his way toward the ditch that ran along the south side of the road. I gathered my legs under me, intent upon a spring and a blow with my gun upon the back of his head. I didn’t want to kill him, but I wanted to put him out of the way quick. I’d have the girl to take care of, and she was at least as dangerous as he.

  As I tensed for the spring, Kilcourse, guided perhaps by some instinct of the hunted, turned his head and saw me—saw a threatening shadow.

  Instead of jumping I fired.

  I didn’t look to see whether I had hit him or not. At that range there was little likelihood of missing. I bent double and slipped back to the rear of the roadster, keeping on my side of it. Then I waited.

  The girl did what I would perhaps have done in her place. She didn’t shoot or move toward the place the shot had come from. She thought I had forestalled Kilcourse in using the ditch and that my next play would be to circle around behind her. To offset this, she moved around the rear of the roadster, so that she could ambush me from the side nearest Axford’s car.

  Thus it was that she came creeping around the corner and poked her delicately chiseled nose plunk into the muzzle of the gun that I held ready for her.

  She gave a little scream.

  Women aren’t always reasonable: they are prone to disregard trifles like guns held upon them. So I grabbed her gun hand, which was fortunate for me. As my hand closed around the weapon, she pulled the trigger, catching a chunk of my forefinger between hammer and frame. I twisted the gun out of her hand; released my finger.

  But she wasn’t done yet. With me standing there holding a gun not four inches from her body, she turned and bolted off toward where a clump of trees made a jet-black blot to the north.

  When I recovered from my surprise at this amateurish procedure, I stuck both her gun and mine in my pockets, and set out after her, tearing the soles of my feet at every step.

  She was trying to get over a wire fence when I caught her.

  “Stop playing, will you?” I said crossly, as I set the fingers of my left hand around her wrist and started to lead her back to the roadster. “This is a serious business. Don’t be so childish!”

  “You are hurting my arm.”

  I knew I wasn’t hurting her arm, and I knew this girl for the direct cause of four, or perhaps five, deaths; yet I loosened my grip on her wrist until it wasn’t much more than a friendly clasp. She went back willingly enough to the roadster, where, still holding her wrist, I switched on the lights. Kilcourse lay just beneath the headlight’s glare, huddled on his face, with one knee drawn up under him.

  I put the girl squarely in the line of light.

  “Now stand there,” I said, “and behave. The first break you make, I’m going to shoot a leg out from under you,” and I meant it.

  I found Kilcourse’s gun, pocketed it, and knelt beside him.

  He was dead, with a bullet-hole above his collar-bone.

  “Is he—” her mouth trembled.

  “Yes.”

  She looked down at him, and shivered a little.

  “Poor Fag,” she whispered.

  I’ve gone on record as saying that this girl was beautiful, and, standing there in the dazzling white of the headlights, she was more than that. She was the thing to start crazy thoughts even in the head of an unimaginative middle-aged thief-catcher. She was—

  Anyhow, I suppose that is why I scowled at her and said:

  “Yes, poor Fag, and poor Hook, and poor Tai, and poor kid of a Los Angeles bank messenger, and poor Burke,” calling the roll, as far as I knew it, of men who had died loving her.

  She didn’t flare up. Her big gray eyes lifted, and she looked at me with a gaze that I couldn’t fathom, and her lovely oval face under the mass of brown hair—which I knew was phony—was sad.

  “I suppose you do think—” she began.

  But I had had enough of this; I was uncomfortable along the spine.

  “Come on,” I said. “We’ll leave Kilcourse and the roadster here for now.”

  She said nothing, but went with me to Axford’s big machine, and sat in silence while I laced my shoes. I found a robe on the back seat for her.

  “Better wrap this around your shoulders. The windshield is gone. It’ll be cool.”

  She followed my suggestion without a word, but when I had edged our vehicle around the rear of the roadster, and had straightened out in the road again, going east, she laid a hand on my arm.

  “Aren’t we going back to the White Shack?”

  “No. Redwood City—the county jail.”

  A mile perhaps, during which, without looking at her, I knew she was studying my rather lumpy profile. Then her hand was on my forearm again and she was leaning toward me so that her breath was warm against my cheek. “Will you stop for a minute? There’s something—some things I want to tell you.”

  I brought the car to a halt in a cleared space of hard soil off to one side of the road, and screwed myself a little around in the seat to face her more directly.

  “Before you start,” I told her, “I want you to understand that we stay here for just so long as you talk about the Pangburn affair. When you get off on any other line—then we finish our trip to Redwood City.”

  “Aren’t you even interested in the Los Angeles affair?”

  “No. That’s closed. You and Hook Riordan and Tai Choon Tau and the Quarres were equally responsible for the messenger’s death, even if Hook did the actual killing. Hook and the Quarres passed out the night we had our party in Turk Street. Tai was hanged last month. Now I’ve got you. We had enough evidence to swing the Chinese, and we’ve even more against you. That is done—finished—completed. If you want to tell me anything about Pangburn’s death, I’ll listen. Otherwise—”

  I reached for the self-starter.

  A pressure of her fingers on my arm stopped me.

  “I do want to tell you about it,” she said earnestly. “I want you to know the truth about it. You’ll take me to Redwood City, I know. Don’t think that I expect—that I have any foolish hopes. But I’d like you to know the truth about this thing. I don’t know why I should care especially what you think, but—”

  Her voice dwindled off to nothing.

  Then she began to talk very rapidly—as people talk when they fear interruptions before their stories are told—and she sat leaning slightly forward, so that her beautiful oval face was very close to mine.

  “After I ran out of the Turk Street house that night—while you were struggling with Tai—my intention was to get away from San Francisco. I had a couple of thousand dollars, enough to carry me any place. Then I thought that going away would be what you people would expect me to do, and that the safest thing for me to do would be to stay right here. It isn’t hard for a woman to change her appearance. I had bobbed red hair, white skin, and wore gay clothes. I simply dyed my hair, bought these transformations to make it look long, put color on my face, and bought some dark clothes. Then I took an apartment on Ashbury Avenue under the name of Jeanne Delano, and I was an altogether different person.

  “But, while I knew
I was perfectly safe from recognition anywhere, I felt more comfortable staying indoors for a while, and, to pass the time, I read a good deal. That’s how I happened to run across Burke’s book. Do you read poetry?”

  I shook my head. An automobile going toward Halfmoon Bay came into sight just then—the first one we’d seen since we left the White Shack. She waited until it had passed before she went on, still talking rapidly.

  “Burke wasn’t a genius, of course, but there was something about some of his things that—something that got inside me. I wrote him a little note, telling him how much I had enjoyed these things, and sent it to his publishers. A few days later I had a note from Burke, and I learned that he lived in San Francisco. I hadn’t known that.

  “We exchanged several notes, and then he asked if he could call, and we met. I don’t know whether I was in love with him or not, even at first. I did like him, and, between the ardor of his love for me and the flattery of having a fairly well-known poet for a suitor, I really thought that I loved him. I promised to marry him.

  “I hadn’t told him anything about myself, though now I know that it wouldn’t have made any difference to him. But I was afraid to tell him the truth, and I wouldn’t lie to him, so I told him nothing.

  “Then Fag Kilcourse saw me one day on the street, and knew me in spite of my new hair, complexion and clothes. Fag hadn’t much brains, but he had eyes that could see through anything. I don’t blame Fag. He acted according to his code. He came up to my apartment, having followed me home; and I told him that I was going to marry Burke and be a respectable housewife. That was dumb of me. Fag was square. If I had told him that I was ribbing Burke up for a trimming, Fag would have let me alone, would have kept his hands off. But when I told him that I was through with the graft, had ‘gone queer,’ that made me his meat. You know how crooks are: everyone in the world is either a fellow crook or a prospective victim. So if I was no longer a crook, than Fag considered me fair game.

  “He learned about Burke’s family connections, and then he put it up to me—twenty thousand dollars, or he’d turn me up. He knew about the Los Angeles job, and he knew how badly I was wanted. I was up against it then. I knew I couldn’t hide from Fag or run away from him. I told Burke I had to have twenty thousand dollars. I didn’t think he had that much, but I thought he could get it. Three days later he gave me a check for it. I didn’t know at the time how he had raised it, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I had known. I had to have it.