Who Killed Bob Teal? and Other Stories Page 5

When the coupé got me to the corner he was not in sight. He couldn’t have reached McAllister street. Unless he had gone into a building, Redwood street—the narrow one that split the block—was my best bet. I drove up Golden Gate avenue another block, turned south, and reached the corner of Franklin and Redwood just in time to see my man ducking into the back door of an apartment building that fronted on McAllister street.

  I drove on slowly, thinking.

  The building in which the Kid had spent the night and this building into which he had just gone had their rears on the same back street, on opposite sides, a little more than half a block apart. If the Kid’s room was in the rear of his building, and he had a pair of strong glasses, he could keep a pretty sharp eye on all the windows—and probably much of the interiors—of the rooms on that side of the McAllister street building.

  Last night he had ridden a block out of his way. Having seen him sneak into the back door just now, my guess was that he had not wished to leave the street car where he could be seen from this building. Either of his more convenient points of departure from the car would have been in sight of this building. This would add up to the fact that the Kid was watching someone in this building, and did not want them to be watching him.

  He had now gone calling through the back door. That wasn’t difficult to explain. The front door was locked, but the back door—as in most large buildings—probably was open all day. Unless the Kid ran into a janitor or someone of the sort, he could get in with no trouble. The Kid’s call was furtive, whether his host was at home or not.

  I didn’t know what it was all about, but that didn’t bother me especially. My immediate problem was to get to the best place from which to pick up the Kid when he came out.

  If he left by the back door, the next block of Redwood street—between Franklin and Gough—was the place for me and my coupé. But he hadn’t promised me he would leave that way. It was more likely that he would use the front door. He would attract less attention walking boldly out the front of the building than sneaking out the back. My best bet was the corner of McAllister and Van Ness. From there I could watch the front door as well as one end of Redwood street.

  I slid the coupé down to that corner and waited.

  Half an hour passed. Three quarters.

  The Whosis Kid came down the front steps and walked toward me, buttoning his overcoat and turning up the collar as he walked, his head bent against the slant of the rain.

  A curtained black Cadillac touring car came from behind me, a car I thought had been parked down near the City Hall when I took my plant here.

  It curved around my coupé, slid with chainless recklessness in to the curb, skidded out again, picking up speed somehow on the wet paving.

  A curtain whipped loose in the rain.

  Out of the opening came pale fire-streaks. The bitter voice of a small-caliber pistol. Seven times.

  The Whosis Kid’s wet hat floated off his head—a slow balloon-like rising.

  There was nothing slow about the Kid’s moving.

  Plunging, in a twisting swirl of coat-skirts, he flung into a shop vestibule.

  The Cadillac reached the next corner, made a dizzy sliding turn, and was gone up Franklin street. I pointed the coupé at it.

  Passing the vestibule into which the Kid had plunged, I got a one-eyed view of him, on his knees, still trying to get a dark gun untangled from his overcoat. Excited faces were in the doorway behind him. There was no excitement in the street. People are too accustomed to automobile noises nowadays to pay much attention to the racket of anything less than a six-inch gun.

  By the time I reached Franklin street, the Cadillac had gained another block on me. It was spinning to the left, up Eddy street.

  I paralleled it on Turk street, and saw it again when I reached the two open blocks of Jefferson Square. Its speed was decreasing. Five or six blocks further, and it crossed ahead of me—on Steiner street—close enough for me to read the license plate. Its pace was moderate now. Confident that they had made a clean getaway, its occupants didn’t want to get in trouble through speeding. I slid into their wake, three blocks behind.

  Not having been in sight during the early blocks of the flight, I wasn’t afraid that they would suspect my interest in them now.

  Out on Haight street near the park panhandle, the Cadillac stopped to discharge a passenger. A small man—short and slender—with cream-white face around dark eyes and a tiny black mustache. There was something foreign in the cut of his dark coat and the shape of his gray hat. He carried a walking-stick.

  The Cadillac went on out Haight street without giving me a look at the other occupants. Tossing a mental nickel, I stuck to the man afoot. The chances always are against you being able to trace a suspicious car by its license number, but there is a slim chance.

  My man went into a drug store on the corner and used the telephone. I don’t know what else he did in there, if anything. Presently a taxicab arrived. He got in and was driven to the Marquis Hotel. A clerk gave him the key to room 761. I dropped him when he stepped into an elevator.

  III

  At the Marquis I am among friends.

  I found Duran, the house copper, on the mezzanine floor, and asked him:

  “Who is 761?”

  Duran is a white-haired old-timer who looks, talks, and acts like the president of an exceptionally strong bank. He used to be captain of detectives in one of the larger Middle Western cities. Once he tried too hard to get a confession out of a safe-ripper, and killed him. The newspapers didn’t like Duran. They used that accident to howl him out of his job.

  “761?” he repeated in his grandfatherly manner. “That is Mr. Maurois, I believe. Are you especially interested in him?”

  “I have hopes,” I admitted. “What do you know about him?”

  “Not a great deal. He has been here perhaps two weeks. We shall go down and see what we can learn.”

  We went to the desk, the switchboard, the captain of bell-hops, and upstairs to question a couple of chambermaids. The occupant of 761 had arrived two weeks ago, had registered as Edouard Maurois, Dijon, France, had frequent telephone calls, no mail, no visitors, kept irregular hours and tipped freely. Whatever business he was in or had was not known to the hotel people.

  “What is the occasion of your interest in him, if I may ask?” Duran inquired after we had accumulated these facts. He talks like that.

  “I don’t exactly know yet,” I replied truthfully. “He just connected with a bird who is wrong, but this Maurois may be all right himself. I’ll give you a rap the minute I get anything solid on him.”

  I couldn’t afford to tell Duran I had seen his guest snapping caps at a gunman under the eves of the City Hall in daylight. The Marquis Hotel goes in for respectability. They would have shoved the Frenchman out in the streets. It wouldn’t help me to have him scared up.

  “Please do,” Duran said. “You owe us something for our help, you know, so please don’t withhold any information that might save us unpleasant notoriety.”

  “I won’t,” I promised. “Now will you do me another favor? I haven’t had my teeth in anything except my mouth since seven-thirty this morning. Will you keep an eye on the elevators, and let me know if Maurois goes out? I’ll be in the grill, near the door.”

  “Certainly.”

  On my way to the grillroom I stopped at the telephone booths and called up the office. I gave the night office man the Cadillac’s license number.

  “Look it up on the list and see whom it belongs to.”

  The answer was: “H. J. Paterson, San Pablo, issued for a Buick roadster.”

  That about wound up that angle. We could look up Paterson, but it was safe betting it wouldn’t get us anything. License plates, once they get started in crooked ways, are about as easy to trace as Liberty Bonds.

  All day I had been building up hunger.
I took it into the grillroom and turned it loose. Between bites I turned the day’s events over in my mind. I didn’t think hard enough to spoil my appetite. There wasn’t that much to think about.

  The Whosis Kid lived in a joint from which some of the McAllister street apartments could be watched. He visited the apartment building furtively. Leaving, he was shot at, from a car that must have been waiting somewhere in the vicinity. Had the Frenchman’s companion in the Cadillac—or his companions, if more than one—been the occupant of the apartment the Kid had visited? Had they expected him to visit it? Had they tricked him into visiting it, planning to shoot him down as he was leaving? Or were they watching the front while the Kid watched the rear? If so, had either known that the other was watching? And who lived there?

  I couldn’t answer any of these riddles. All I knew was that the Frenchman and his companions didn’t seem to like the Whosis Kid.

  Even the sort of meal I put away doesn’t take forever to eat. When I finished it, I went out to the lobby again.

  Passing the switchboard, one of the girls—the one whose red hair looks as if it had been poured into its waves and hardened—gave me a nod.

  I stopped to see what she wanted.

  “Your friend just had a call,” she told me.

  “You get it?”

  “Yes. A man is waiting for him at Kearny and Broadway. Told him to hurry.”

  “How long ago?”

  “None. They’re just through talking.”

  “Any names?”

  “No.”

  “Thanks.”

  I went on to where Duran was stalling with an eye on the elevators.

  “Shown yet?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Good. The red-head on the switchboard just told me he had a phone call to meet a man at Kearny and Broadway. I think I’ll beat him to it.”

  Around the corner from the hotel, I climbed into my coupé and drove down to the Frenchman’s corner.

  The Cadillac he had used that afternoon was already there, with a new license plate. I passed it and took a look at its one occupant—a thick-set man of forty-something with a cap pulled low over his eyes. All I could see of his features was a wide mouth slanting over a heavy chin.

  I put the coupé in a vacant space down the street a way. I didn’t have to wait long for the Frenchman. He came around the corner afoot and got into the Cadillac. The man with the big chin drove. They went slowly up Broadway. I followed.

  IV

  We didn’t go far, and when we came to rest again, the Cadillac was placed conveniently for its occupants to watch the Venetian Café, one of the gaudiest of the Italian restaurants that fill this part of town.

  Two hours went by.

  I had an idea that the Whosis Kid was eating at the Venetian. When he left, the fireworks would break out, continuing the celebration from where it had broken off that afternoon on McAllister street. I hoped the Kid’s gun wouldn’t get caught in his coat this time. But don’t think I meant to give him a helping hand in his two-against-one fight.

  This party had the shape of a war between gunmen. It would be a private one as far as I was concerned. My hope was that by hovering on the fringes until somebody won, I could pick up a little profit for the Continental, in the form of a wanted crook or two among the survivors.

  My guess at the Frenchman’s quarry was wrong. It wasn’t the Whosis Kid. It was a man and a woman. I didn’t see their faces. The light was behind them. They didn’t waste any time between the Venetian’s door and their taxicab.

  The man was big—tall, wide, and thick. The woman looked small at his side. I couldn’t go by that. Anything weighing less than a ton would have seemed tiny beside him.

  As the taxicab pulled away from the café, the Cadillac went after it. I ran in the Cadillac’s wake.

  It was a short chase.

  The taxicab turned into a dark block on the edge of Chinatown. The Cadillac jumped to its side, bearing it over to the curb.

  A noise of brakes, shouting voices, broken glass. A woman’s scream. Figures moving in the scant space between touring car and taxicab. Both cars rocking. Grunts. Thuds. Oaths.

  A man’s voice: “Hey! You can’t do that! Nix! Nix!”

  It was a stupid voice.

  I had slowed down until the coupé was barely moving toward this tussle ahead. Peering through the rain and darkness, I tried to pick out a detail or so as I approached, but I could see little.

  I was within twenty feet when the curbward door of the taxicab banged open. A woman bounced out. She landed on her knees on the sidewalk, jumped to her feet, and darted up the street.

  Putting the coupé closer to the curb, I let the door swing open. My side windows were spattered with rain. I wanted to get a look at the woman when she passed. If she should take the open door for an invitation, I didn’t mind talking to her.

  She accepted the invitation, hurrying as directly to the car as if she had expected me to be waiting for her. Her face was a small oval above a fur collar.

  “Help me!” she gasped. “Take me from here—quickly.”

  There was a suggestion of foreignness too slight to be called an accent.

  “How about—?”

  I shut my mouth. The thing she was jabbing me in the body with was a snub-nosed automatic.

  “Sure! Get in,” I urged her.

  She bent her head to enter. I looped an arm over her neck, throwing her down across my lap. She squirmed and twisted—a small-boned, hard-fleshed body with strength in it.

  I wrenched the gun out of her hand and pushed her back on the seat beside me.

  Her fingers dug into my arms.

  “Quick! Quick! Ah, please, quickly! Take me—”

  “What about your friend?” I asked.

  “Not him! He is of the others! Please, quickly!”

  A man filled the open coupé door—the big-chinned man who had driven the Cadillac.

  His hand seized the fur at the woman’s throat.

  She tried to scream—made the gurgling sound of a man with a slit throat. I smacked his chin with the gun I had taken from her.

  He tried to fall into the coupé. I pushed him out.

  Before his head had hit the sidewalk, I had the door closed, and was twisting the coupé around in the street.

  We rode away. Two shots sounded just as we turned the first corner. I don’t know whether they were fired at us or not. I turned other corners. The Cadillac did not appear again.

  So far, so good. I had started with the Whosis Kid, dropped him to take Maurois, and now let him go to see who this woman was. I didn’t know what this confusion was all about, but I seemed to be learning who it was all about.

  “Where to?” I asked presently.

  “To home,” she said, and gave me an address.

  I pointed the coupé at it with no reluctance at all. It was the McAllister street apartments the Whosis Kid had visited earlier in the evening.

  We didn’t waste any time getting there. My companion might know it or might not, but I knew that all the other players in this game knew that address. I wanted to get there before the Frenchman and Big Chin.

  Neither of us said anything during the ride. She crouched close to me, shivering. I was looking ahead, planning how I was to land an invitation into her apartment. I was sorry I hadn’t held on to her gun. I had let it fall when I pushed Big Chin out of the car. It would have been an excuse for a later call if she didn’t invite me in.

  I needn’t have worried. She didn’t invite me. She insisted that I go in with her. She was scared stiff.

  “You will not leave me?” she pleaded as we drove up McAllister street. “I am in complete terror. You cannot go from me! If you will not come in, I will stay with you.”

  I was willing enough to go in, but I didn’t want to leave the
coupé where it would advertise me.

  “We’ll ride around the corner and park the car,” I told her, “and then I’ll go in with you.”

  I drove around the block, with an eye in each direction for the Cadillac. Neither eye found it. I left the coupé on Franklin street and we returned to the McAllister street building.

  She had me almost running through the rain that had lightened now to a drizzle.

  The hand with which she tried to fit a key to the front door was a shaky, inaccurate hand. I took the key and opened the door. We rode to the third floor in an automatic elevator, seeing no one. I unlocked the door to which she led me, near the rear of the building.

  Holding my arm, with one hand, she reached inside and snapped on the lights in the passageway.

  I didn’t know what she was waiting for, until she cried:

  “Frana! Frana! Ah, Frana!”

  The muffled yapping of a small dog replied. The dog did not appear.

  She grabbed me with both arms, trying to crawl up my damp coat-front.

  “They are here!” she cried in the thin dry voice of utter terror. “They are here!”

  V

  “Is anybody supposed to be here?” I asked, putting her around to one side, where she wouldn’t be between me and the two doors across the passageway.

  “No! Just my little dog Frana, but—”

  I slid my gun half out of my pocket and back again, to make sure it wouldn’t catch if I needed it, and used my other hand to get rid of the woman’s arms.

  “You stay here. I’ll see if you’ve got company.”

  Moving to the nearest door, I heard a seven-year-old voice—Lew Maher’s—saying: “He can shoot and he’s plain crazy. He ain’t hampered by nothing like imagination or fear of consequences.”

  With my left hand I turned the first door’s knob. With my left foot I kicked it open.

  Nothing happened.

  I put a hand around the frame, found the button, switched on the lights.

  A sitting-room, all orderly.

  Through an open door on the far side of the room came the muffled yapping of Frana. It was louder now and more excited. I moved to the doorway. What I could see of the next room, in the light from this, seemed peaceful and unoccupied enough. I went into it and switched on the lights.