Crime Stories Page 40

  “But that night he told me where he got the money; that he had forged his brother-inlaw’s signature. He told me because, after thinking it over, he was afraid that when the forgery was discovered I would be caught with him and considered equally guilty. I’m rotten in spots, but I wasn’t rotten enough to let him put himself in the pen for me, without knowing what it was all about. I told him the whole story. He didn’t bat an eye. He insisted that the money be paid Kilcourse, so that I would be safe, and began to plan for my further safety.

  “Burke was confident that his brother-inlaw wouldn’t send him over for forgery, but, to be on the safe side, he insisted that I move and change my name again and lay low until we knew how Axford was going to take it. But that night, after he had gone, I made some plans of my own. I did like Burke—I liked him too much to let him be the goat without trying to save him, and I didn’t have a great deal of faith in Axford’s kindness. This was the second of the month. Barring accidents, Axford wouldn’t discover the forgery until he got his canceled checks early the following month. That gave me practically a month to work in.

  “The next day I drew all my money out of the bank, and sent Burke a letter, saying that I had been called to Baltimore, and I laid a clear trail to Baltimore, with baggage and letters and all, which a pal there took care of for me. Then I went down to Joplin’s and got him to put me up. I let Fag know I was there, and when he came down I told him I expected to have the money for him in a day or two.

  “He came down nearly every day after that, and I stalled him from day to day, and each time it got easier. But my time was getting short. Pretty soon Burke’s letters would be coming back from the phony address I had given him, and I wanted to be on hand to keep him from doing anything foolish. And I didn’t want to get in touch with him until I could give him the twenty thousand, so he could square the forgery before Axford learned of it from his canceled checks.

  “Fag was getting easier and easier to handle, but I still didn’t have him where I wanted him. He wasn’t willing to give up the twenty thousand dollars—which I was, of course, holding all this time—unless I’d promise to stick with him for good. And I still thought I was in love with Burke, and I didn’t want to tie myself up with Fag, even for a little while.

  “Then Burke saw me on the street one Sunday night. I was careless, and drove into the city in Joplin’s roadster—the one back there. And, as luck would have it, Burke saw me. I told him the truth, the whole truth. And he told me that he had just hired a private detective to find me. He was like a child in some ways: it hadn’t occurred to him that the sleuth would dig up anything about the money. But I knew the forged check would be found in a day or two at the most. I knew it!

  “When I told Burke that, he went to pieces. All his faith in his brother-in-law’s forgiveness went. I couldn’t leave him the way he was. He’d have babbled the whole thing to the first person he met. So I brought him back to Joplin’s with me. My idea was to hold him there for a few days, until we could see how things were going. If nothing appeared in the papers about the check, then we could take it for granted that Axford had hushed the matter up, and Burke could go home and try to square himself. On the other hand, if the papers got the whole story, then Burke would have to look for a permanent hiding-place, and so would I.

  “Tuesday evening’s and Wednesday morning’s papers were full of the news of his disappearance, but nothing was said about the check. That looked good, but we waited another day for good measure. Fag Kilcourse was in on the game by this time, of course, and I had had to pass over the twenty thousand dollars, but I still had hopes of getting it—or most of it—back, so I continued to string him along. I had a hard time keeping off Burke, though, because he had begun to think he had some sort of right to me, and jealousy made him wicked. But I got Tin-Star to throw a scare into him, and I thought Burke was safe.

  “Tonight one of Tin-Star’s men came up and told us that a man named Porky Grout, who had been hanging around the place for a couple of nights, had made a couple of cracks that might mean he was interested in us. Grout was pointed out to me, and I took a chance on showing myself in the public part of the place, and sat at a table close to his. He was plain rat—as I guess you know—and in less than five minutes I had him at my table, and half an hour later I knew that he had tipped you off that Burke and I were in the White Shack. He didn’t tell me all this right out, but he told me more than enough for me to guess the rest.

  “I went up and told the others. Fag was for killing both Grout and Burke right away. But I talked him out of it. That wouldn’t help us any, and I had Grout where he would jump in the ocean for me. I thought I had Fag convinced, but—We finally decided that Burke and I would take the roadster and leave, and that when you got here Porky Grout was to pretend he was hopped up, and point out a man and a woman—any who happened to be handy—as the ones he had taken for us. I stopped to get a cloak and gloves, and Burke went on out to the car alone—and Fag shot him. I didn’t know he was going to! I wouldn’t have let him! Please believe that! I wasn’t as much in love with Burke as I had thought, but please believe that after all he had done for me I wouldn’t have let them hurt him!

  “After that it was a case of stick with the others whether I liked it or not, and I stuck. We ribbed Grout to tell you that all three of us were on the back porch when Burke was killed, and we had any number of others primed with the same story. Then you came up and recognized me. Just my luck that it had to be you—the only detective in San Francisco who knew me!

  “You know the rest: how Porky Grout came up behind you and turned off the lights, and Joplin held you while we ran for the car; and then, when you closed in on us, Grout offered to stand you off while we got clear, and now . . .”

  Her voice died, and she shivered a little. The robe I had given her had fallen away from her white shoulders. Whether or not it was because she was so close against my shoulder, I shivered, too. And my fingers, fumbling in my pocket for a cigarette, brought it out twisted and mashed.

  “That’s all there is to the part you promised to listen to,” she said softly, her face turned half away. “I wanted you to know. You’re a hard man, but somehow I—”

  I cleared my throat, and the hand that held the mangled cigarette was suddenly steady.

  “Now don’t be crude, sister,” I said. “Your work has been too smooth so far to be spoiled by rough stuff now.”

  She laughed—a brief laugh that was bitter and reckless and just a little weary, and she thrust her face still closer to mine, and the gray eyes were soft and placid.

  “Little fat detective whose name I don’t know”—her voice had a tired huskiness in it, and a tired mockery—“you think I am playing a part, don’t you? You think I am playing for liberty. Perhaps I am. I certainly would take it if it were offered me. But—Men have thought me beautiful, and I have played with them. Women are like that. Men have loved me and, doing what I liked with them, I have found men contemptible. And then comes this little fat detective whose name I don’t know, and he acts as if I were a hag—an old squaw. Can I help then being piqued into some sort of feeling for him? Women are like that. Am I so homely that any man has a right to look at me without even interest? Am I ugly?”

  I shook my head. “You’re quite pretty,” I said, struggling to keep my voice as casual as the words.

  “You beast!” she spat, and then her smile grew gentle again. “And yet it is because of that attitude that I sit here and turn myself inside out for you. If you were to take me in your arms and hold me close to the chest that I am already leaning against, and if you were to tell me that there is no jail ahead for me just now, I would be glad, of course. But, though for a while you might hold me, you would then be only one of the men with which I am familiar: men who love and are used and are succeeded by other men. But because you do none of these things, because you are a wooden block of a man, I find myself wanting you. Would I tell you this, little fat detective, if I were playing a g
ame?”

  I grunted non-committally, and forcibly restrained my tongue from running out to moisten my dry lips.

  “I’m going to this jail tonight if you are the same hard man who has goaded me into whining love into his uncaring ears, but before that, can’t I have one whole-hearted assurance that you think me a little more than ‘quite pretty’? Or at least a hint that if I were not a prisoner your pulse might beat a little faster when I touch you? I’m going to this jail for a long while—perhaps to the gallows. Can’t I take my vanity there not quite in tatters to keep me company? Can’t you do some slight thing to keep me from the afterthought of having bleated all this out to a man who was simply bored?”

  Her lids had come down half over the silver-gray eyes, her head had tilted back so far that a little pulse showed throbbing in her white throat; her lips were motionless over slightly- parted teeth, as the last word had left them. My fingers went deep into the soft white flesh of her shoulders. Her head went further back, her eyes closed, one hand came up to my shoulder.

  “You’re beautiful as all hell!” I shouted crazily into her face, and flung her against the door.

  It seemed an hour that I fumbled with starter and gears before I had the car back in the road and thundering toward the San Mateo County jail. The girl had straightened herself up in the seat again, and sat huddled within the robe I had given her. I squinted straight ahead into the wind that tore at my hair and face, and the absence of the windshield took my thoughts back to Porky Grout.

  Porky Grout, whose yellowness was notorious from Seattle to San Diego, standing rigidly in the path of a charging metal monster, with an inadequate pistol in each hand. She had done that to Porky Grout—this woman beside me! She had done that to Porky Grout, and he hadn’t even been human! A slimy reptile whose highest thought had been a skinful of dope had gone grimly to death that she might get away—she—this woman whose shoulders I had gripped, whose mouth had been close under mine!

  I let the car out another notch, holding the road somehow.

  We went through a town: a scurrying of pedestrians for safety, surprised faces staring at us, street lights glistening on the moisture the wind had whipped from my eyes. I passed blindly by the road I wanted, circled back to it, and we were out in the country again.

  At the foot of a long, shallow hill I applied the brakes and we snapped to motionless.

  I thrust my face close to the girl’s.

  “Furthermore, you are a liar!” I knew I was shouting foolishly, but I was powerless to lower my voice. “Pangburn never put Axford’s name on that check. He never knew anything about it. You got in with him because you knew his brother-in-law was a millionaire. You pumped him, finding out everything he knew about his brother-in-law’s account at the Golden Gate Trust. You stole Pangburn’s bank book—it wasn’t in his room when I searched it—and deposited the forged Axford check to his credit, knowing that under those circumstances the check wouldn’t be questioned. The next day you took Pangburn into the bank, saying you were going to make a deposit. You took him in because with him standing beside you the check to which his signature had been forged wouldn’t be questioned. You knew that, being a gentleman, he’d take pains not to see what you were depositing.

  “Then you framed the Baltimore trip. He told the truth to me—the truth so far as he knew it. Then you met him Sunday night—maybe accidentally, maybe not. Anyway, you took him down to Joplin’s, giving him some wild yarn that he would swallow and that would persuade him to stay there for a few days. That wasn’t hard, since he didn’t know anything about either of the twenty-thousand-dollar checks. You and your pal Kilcourse knew that if Pangburn disappeared nobody would ever know that he hadn’t forged the Axford check, and nobody would ever suspect that the second check was phony. You’d have killed him quietly, but when Porky tipped you off that I was on my way down you had to move quick—so you shot him down. That’s the truth of it!” I yelled.

  All this while she watched me with wide gray eyes that were calm and tender, but now they clouded a little and a pucker of pain drew her brows together.

  I yanked my head away and got the car in motion.

  Just before we swept into Redwood City one of her hands came up to my forearm, rested there for a second, patted the arm twice, and withdrew.

  I didn’t look at her, nor, I think, did she look at me, while she was being booked. She gave her name as Jeanne Delano, and refused to make any statement until she had seen an attorney. It all took a very few minutes.

  As she was being led away, she stopped and asked if she might speak privately with me.

  We went together to a far corner of the room.

  She put her mouth close to my ear so that her breath was warm again on my cheek, as it had been in the car, and whispered the vilest epithet of which the English language is capable.

  Then she walked out to her cell.

  DEATH ON PINE STREET

  A plump maid with bold green eyes and a loose, full−lipped mouth led me up two flights of steps and into an elaborately furnished boudoir, where a woman in black sat at a window. She was a thin woman of a little more than thirty, this murdered man’s widow, and her face was white and haggard.

  “You are from the Continental Detective Agency?” she asked before I was two steps inside the room.

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to find my husband’s murderer.” Her voice was shrill, and her dark eyes had wild lights in them.

  “The police have done nothing. Four days, and they have done nothing. They say it was a robber, but they haven’t found him. They haven’t found anything!”

  “But, Mrs. Gilmore,” I began, not exactly tickled to death with this explosion, “you must—”

  “I know! I know!” she broke in. “But they have done nothing, I tell you—nothing. I don’t believe they’ve made the slightest effort. I don’t believe they want to find h—him!”

  “Him?” I asked, because she had started to say her. “You think it was a man?”

  She bit her lip and looked away from me, out of the window to where San Francisco Bay, the distance making toys of its boats, was blue under the early afternoon sun.

  “I don’t know,” she said hesitantly; “it might have—”

  Her face spun toward me—a twitching face—and it seemed impossible that anyone could talk so fast, hurl words out so rapidly one after the other.

  “I’ll tell you. You can judge for yourself. Bernard wasn’t faithful to me. There was a woman who calls herself Cara Kenbrook. She wasn’t the first. But I learned about her last month. We quarrelled. Bernard promised to give her up. Maybe he didn’t. But if he did, I wouldn’t put it past her—a woman like that would do anything—anything. And down in my heart I really believe she did it!”

  “And you think the police don’t want to arrest her?”

  “I didn’t mean exactly that. I’m all unstrung, and likely to say anything. Bernard was mixed up in politics, you know; and if the police found, or thought, that politics had anything to do with his death, they might—I don’t know just what I mean. I’m a nervous, broken woman, and full of crazy notions.” She stretched a thin hand out to me. “Straighten this tangle out for me! Find the person who killed Bernard!”

  I nodded with empty assurance, still not any too pleased with my client.

  “Do you know this Kenbrook woman?” I asked.

  “I’ve seen her on the street, and that’s enough to know what sort of person she is!”

  “Did you tell the police about her?”

  “No−o.” She looked out of the window again, and then, as I waited, she added, defensively:

  “The police detectives who came to see me acted as if they thought I might have killed Bernard. I was afraid to tell them that I had cause for jealousy. Maybe I shouldn’t have kept quiet about that woman, but I didn’t think she had done it until afterward, when the police failed to find the murderer. Then I began to think she had done it; but I couldn’t make myself go to
the police and tell them that I had withheld information. I knew what they’d think. So I—You can twist it around so it’ll look as if I hadn’t known about the woman, can’t you?”

  “Possibly. Now as I understand it, your husband was shot on Pine Street, between Leavenworth and Jones, at about three o’clock Tuesday morning. That right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where was he going?”

  “Coming home, I suppose; but I don’t know where he had been. Nobody knows. The police haven’t found out, if they have tried. He told me Monday evening that he had a business engagement. He was a building contractor, you know. He went out at about half−past eleven, saying he would probably be gone four or five hours.”

  “Wasn’t that an unusual hour to be keeping a business engagement?”

  “Not for Bernard. He often had men come to the house at midnight.”

  “Can you make any guess at all where he was going that night?”

  She shook her head with emphasis.

  “No. I knew nothing at all about his business affairs, and even the men in his office don’t seem to know where he went that night.”

  That wasn’t unlikely. Most of the B. F. Gilmore Construction Company’s work had been on city and state contracts, and it isn’t altogether unheard−of for secret conferences to go with that kind of work. Your politician−contractor doesn’t always move in the open.

  “How about enemies?” I asked.

  “I don’t know anybody that hated him enough to kill him.”

  “Where does this Kenbrook woman live, do you know?”

  “Yes—in the Garford Apartments on Bush Street.”