Fly Paper and Other Stories Page 9

  The sheriff was the only one of us who hadn’t a sneaky feeling that Sherry’s sleeves were loaded with assorted aces. The sheriff saw him already hanged.

  Sherry got a lawyer, a slick looking pale man with hornrim glasses and a thin twitching mouth. His name was Schaeffer. He went around smiling to himself and at us.

  When the district attorney had only thumb nails left and was starting to work on them, I borrowed a car from Ringgo and started following the railroad south, trying to learn where Sherry had left the train. We had mugged the pair, of course, so I carried their photographs with me.

  I displayed those damned photographs at every railroad stop between Farewell and Los Angeles, at every village within twenty miles of the tracks on either side, and at most of the houses in between. And it got me nothing.

  There was no evidence that Sherry and Marcus hadn’t gone through to Los Angeles.

  Their train would have put them there at ten-thirty that night. There was no train out of Los Angeles that would have carried them back to Farewell in time to kill Kavalov. There were two possibilities: an airplane could have carried them back in plenty of time; and an automobile might have been able to do it, though that didn’t look reasonable.

  I tried the airplane angle first, and couldn’t find a flyer who had had a passenger that night. With the help of the Los Angeles police and some operatives from the Continental’s Los Angeles branch, I had everybody who owned a plane—public or private—interviewed. All the answers were no.

  We tried the less promising automobile angle. The larger taxicab and hire-car companies said, “No.” Four privately owned cars had been reported stolen between ten and twelve o’clock that night. Two of them had been found in the city the next morning: they couldn’t have made the trip to Farewell and back. One of the others had been picked up in San Diego the next day. That let that one out. The other was still loose, a Packard sedan. We got a printer working on post card descriptions of it.

  To reach all the small-fry taxi and hire-car owners was quite a job, and then there were the private car owners who might have hired out for one night. We went into the newspapers to cover these fields.

  We didn’t get any automobile information, but this new line of inquiry—trying to find traces of our men here a few hours before the murder—brought results of another kind.

  At San Pedro (Los Angeles’s seaport, twenty-five miles away) a negro had been arrested at one o’clock on the morning of the murder. The negro spoke English poorly, but had papers to prove that he was Pierre Tisano, a French sailor. He had been arrested on a drunk and disorderly charge.

  The San Pedro police said that the photograph and description of the man we knew as Marcus fit the drunken sailor exactly.

  That wasn’t all the San Pedro police said.

  Tisano had been arrested at one o’clock. At a little after two o’clock, a white man who gave his name as Henry Somerton had appeared and had tried to bail the negro out. The desk sergeant had told Somerton that nothing could be done till morning, and that, anyway, it would be better to let Tisano sleep off his jag before removing him. Somerton had readily agreed to that, had remained talking to the desk sergeant for more than half an hour, and had left at about three. At ten o’clock that morning he had reappeared to pay the black man’s fine. They had gone away together.

  The San Pedro police said that Sherry’s photograph—without the mustache—and description were Henry Somerton’s.

  Henry Somerton’s signature on the register of the hotel to which he had gone between his two visits to the police matched the handwriting in Sherry’s note to the bungalow’s owner.

  It was pretty clear that Sherry and Marcus had been in San Pedro—a nine-hour train ride from Farewell—at the time that Kavalov was murdered.

  Pretty clear isn’t quite clear enough in a murder job: I carried the San Pedro desk sergeant north with me for a look at the two men.

  “Them’s them, all righty,” he said.

  VIII

  The district attorney ate up the rest of his thumb nails.

  The sheriff had the bewildered look of a child who had held a balloon in his hand, had heard a pop, and couldn’t understand where the balloon had gone.

  I pretended I was perfectly satisfied.

  “Now we’re back where we started,” the district attorney wailed disagreeably, as if it was everybody’s fault but his, “and with all those weeks wasted.”

  The sheriff didn’t look at the district attorney, and didn’t say anything.

  I said:

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. We’ve made some progress.”

  “What?”

  “We know that Sherry and the dinge have alibis.”

  The district attorney seemed to think I was trying to kid him. I didn’t pay any attention to the faces he made at me, and asked:

  “What are you going to do with them?”

  “What can I do with them but turn them loose? This shoots the case to hell.”

  “It doesn’t cost the county much to feed them,” I suggested. “Why not hang on to them as long as you can, while we think it over? Something new may turn up, and you can always drop the case if nothing does. You don’t think they’re innocent, do you?”

  He gave me a look that was heavy and sour with pity for my stupidity.

  “They’re guilty as hell, but what good’s that to me if I can’t get a conviction? And what’s the good of saying I’ll hold them? Damn it, man, you know as well as I do that all they’ve got to do now is ask for their release and any judge will hand it to them.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I’ll bet you the best hat in San Francisco that they don’t ask for it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They want to stand trial,” I said, “or they’d have sprung that alibi before we dug it up. I’ve an idea that they tipped off the Spokane police themselves. And I’ll bet you that hat that you get no habeas corpus motions out of Schaeffer.”

  The district attorney peered suspiciously into my eyes.

  “Do you know something that you’re holding back?” he demanded.

  “No, but you’ll see I’m right.”

  I was right. Schaeffer went around smiling to himself and making no attempt to get his clients out of the county prison.

  Three days later something new turned up.

  A man named Archibald Weeks, who had a small chicken farm some ten miles south of the Kavalov place, came to see the district attorney. Weeks said he had seen Sherry on his—Weeks’s—place early on the morning of the murder.

  Weeks had been leaving for Iowa that morning to visit his parents. He had got up early to see that everything was in order before driving twenty miles to catch an early morning train.

  At somewhere between half-past five and six o’clock he had gone to the shed where he kept his car, to see if it held enough gasoline for the trip.

  A man ran out of the shed, vaulted the fence, and dashed away down the road. Weeks chased him for a short distance, but the other was too speedy for him. The man was too well-dressed for a hobo: Weeks supposed he had been trying to steal the car.

  Since Weeks’s trip east was a necessary one, and during his absence his wife would have only their two sons—one seventeen, one fifteen—there with her, he had thought it wisest not to frighten her by saying anything about the man he had surprised in the shed.

  He had returned from Iowa the day before his appearance in the district attorney’s office, and after hearing the details of the Kavalov murder, and seeing Sherry’s picture in the papers, had recognized him as the man he had chased.

  We showed him Sherry in person. He said Sherry was the man. Sherry said nothing.

  With Weeks’s evidence to refute the San Pedro police’s, the district attorney let the case against Sherry come to trial. Marcus was held as a material witness, but there
was nothing to weaken his San Pedro alibi, so he was not tried.

  Weeks told his story straight and simply on the witness stand, and then, under cross-examination, blew up with a loud bang. He went to pieces completely.

  He wasn’t, he admitted in answer to Schaeffer’s questions, quite as sure that Sherry was the man as he had been before. The man had certainly, the little he had seen of him, looked something like Sherry, but perhaps he had been a little hasty in saying positively that it was Sherry. He wasn’t, now that he had had time to think it over, really sure that he had actually got a good look at the man’s face in the dim morning light. Finally, all that Weeks would swear to was that he had seen a man who had seemed to look a little bit like Sherry.

  It was funny as hell.

  The district attorney, having no nails left, nibbled his finger-bones.

  The jury said, “Not guilty.”

  Sherry was freed, forever in the clear so far as the Kavalov murder was concerned, no matter what might come to light later.

  Marcus was released.

  The district attorney wouldn’t say good-bye to me when I left for San Francisco.

  IX

  Four days after Sherry’s acquittal, Mrs. Ringgo was shown into my office.

  She was in black. Her pretty, unintelligent, Oriental face was not placid. Worry was in it.

  “Please, you won’t tell Dolph I have come here?” were the first words she spoke.

  “Of course not, if you say not,” I promised and pulled a chair over for her.

  She sat down and looked big-eyed at me, fidgeting with her gloves in her lap.

  “He’s so reckless,” she said.

  I nodded sympathetically, wondering what she was up to.

  “And I’m so afraid,” she added, twisting her gloves. Her chin trembled. Her lips formed words jerkily: “They’ve come back to the bungalow.”

  “Yeah?” I sat up straight. I knew who they were.

  “They can’t,” she cried, “have come back for any reason except that they mean to murder Dolph as they did father. And he won’t listen to me. He’s so sure of himself. He laughs and calls me a foolish child, and tells me he can take care of himself. But he can’t. Not, at least, with a broken arm. And they’ll kill him as they killed father. I know it. I know it.”

  “Sherry hates your husband as much as he hated your father?”

  “Yes. That’s it. He does. Dolph was working for father, but Dolph’s part in the—the business that led up to Hugh’s trouble was more—more active than father’s. Will you—will you keep them from killing Dolph? Will you?”

  “Surely.”

  “And you mustn’t let Dolph know,” she insisted, “and if he does find out you’re watching them, you mustn’t tell him I got you to. He’d be angry with me. I asked him to send for you, but he—” She broke off, looking embarrassed: I supposed her husband had mentioned my lack of success in keeping Kavalov alive. “But he wouldn’t.”

  “How long have they been back?”

  “Since the day before yesterday.”

  “Any demonstrations?”

  “You mean things like happened before? I don’t know. Dolph would hide them from me.”

  “I’ll be down tomorrow,” I promised. “If you’ll take my advice you’ll tell your husband that you’ve employed me, but I won’t tell him if you don’t.”

  “And you won’t let them harm Dolph?”

  I promised to do my best, took some money away from her, gave her a receipt, and bowed her out.

  Shortly after dark that evening I reached Farewell.

  X

  The bungalow’s windows were lighted when I passed it on my way uphill. I was tempted to get out of my coupé and do some snooping, but was afraid that I couldn’t out-Indian Marcus on his own grounds, and so went on.

  When I turned into the dirt road leading to the vacant house I had spotted on my first trip to Farewell, I switched off the coupé’s lights and crept along by the light of a very white moon overhead.

  Close to the vacant house I got the coupé off the path and at least partly hidden by bushes.

  Then I went up on the rickety porch, located the bungalow, and began to adjust my field glasses to it.

  I had them partly adjusted when the bungalow’s front door opened, letting out a slice of yellow light and two people.

  One of the people was a woman.

  Another least turn of the set-screw and her face came clear in my eyes—Mrs. Ringgo.

  She raised her coat collar around her face and hurried away down the cobbled walk. Sherry stood on the veranda looking after her.

  When she reached the road she began running uphill, towards her house.

  Sherry went indoors and shut the door.

  I took the glasses away from my eyes and looked around for a place where I could sit. The only spot I could find where sitting wouldn’t interfere with my view of the bungalow was the porch-rail. I made myself as comfortable as possible there, with a shoulder against the corner post, and prepared for an evening of watchful waiting.

  Two hours and a half later a man turned into the cobbled walk from the road. He walked swiftly to the bungalow, with a cautious sort of swiftness, and he looked from side to side as he walked.

  I suppose he knocked on the door.

  The door opened, throwing a yellow glow on his face, Dolph Ringgo’s face.

  He went indoors. The door shut.

  My watch-tower’s fault was that the bungalow could only be reached from it roundabout by the path and road. There was no way of cutting cross-country.

  I put away the field glasses, left the porch, and set out for the bungalow. I wasn’t sure that I could find another good spot for the coupé, so I left it where it was and walked.

  I was afraid to take a chance on the cobbled walk.

  Twenty feet above it, I left the road and moved as silently as I could over sod and among trees, bushes and flowers. I knew the sort of folks I was playing with: I carried my gun in my hand.

  All of the bungalow’s windows on my side showed lights, but all the windows were closed and their blinds drawn. I didn’t like the way the light that came through the blinds helped the moon illuminate the surrounding ground. That had been swell when I was up on the ridge getting cock-eyed squinting through glasses. It was sour now that I was trying to get close enough to do some profitable listening.

  I stopped in the closest dark spot I could find—fifteen feet from the building—to think the situation over.

  Crouching there, I heard something.

  It wasn’t in the right place. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. It was the sound of somebody coming down the walk towards the house.

  I wasn’t sure that I couldn’t be seen from the path. I turned my head to make sure. And by turning my head I gave myself away.

  Mrs. Ringgo jumped, stopped dead still in the path, and then cried:

  “Is Dolph in there? Is he? Is he?”

  I was trying to tell her that he was by nodding, but she made so much noise with her Is he’s that I had to say “Yeah” out loud to make her hear.

  I don’t know whether the noise we made hurried things up indoors or not, but guns had started going off inside the bungalow.

  You don’t stop to count shots in circumstances like those, and anyway these were too blurred together for accurate score-keeping, but my impression was that at least fifty of them had been fired by the time I was bruising my shoulder on the front door.

  Luckily, it was a California door. It went in the second time I hit it.

  Inside was a reception hall opening through a wide arched doorway into a living-room. The air was hazy and the stink of burnt powder was sharp.

  Sherry was on the polished floor by the arch, wriggling sidewise on one elbow and one knee, trying to reach a Luger that lay on an amb
er rug some four feet away. His upper teeth were sunk deep into his lower lip, and he was coughing little stomach coughs as he wriggled.

  At the other end of the room, Ringgo was upright on his knees, steadily working the trigger of a black revolver in his good hand. The pistol was empty. It went snap, snap, snap, snap foolishly, but he kept on working the trigger. His broken arm was still in the splints, but had fallen out of the sling and was hanging down. His face was puffy and florid with blood. His eyes were wide and dull. The white bone handle of a knife stuck out of his back, just over one hip, its blade all the way in. He was clicking the empty pistol at Marcus.

  The black boy was on his feet, feet far apart under bent knees. His left hand was spread wide over his chest, and the black fingers were shiny with blood. In his right hand he held a white bone-handled knife—its blade a foot long—held it, knife-fighter fashion, as you’d hold a sword. He was moving toward Ringgo, not directly, but from side to side, obliquely, closing in with shuffling steps, crouching, his hand turning the knife restlessly, but holding the point always towards Ringgo. Marcus’s eyes were bulging and red-veined. His mouth was a wide grinning crescent. His tongue, far out, ran slowly around and around the outside of his lips. Saliva trickled down his chin.

  He didn’t see us. He didn’t hear us. All of his world just then was the man on his knees, the man in whose back a knife—brother of the one in the black hand—was wedged.

  Ringgo didn’t see us. I don’t suppose he even saw the black. He knelt there and persistently worked the trigger of his empty gun.

  I jumped over Sherry and swung the barrel of my gun at the base of Marcus’s skull. It hit. Marcus dropped.

  Ringgo stopped working the gun and looked surprised at me.

  “That’s the idea; you’ve got to put bullets in them or they’re no good,” I told him, pulled the knife out of Marcus’s hand, and went back to pick up the Luger that Sherry had stopped trying to get.