Even when the newspapers said he had been the commander-in-chief of the thug army, when the hundred and six thousand dollar reward was offered for his arrest, she believed in his innocence. He convinced her that Flora and Red had simply put the blame for the whole thing on him so they could get off with lighter sentences. He was such a frightened old gink—who wouldn’t have believed him?
Then her father’s death in Mexico had come and grief had occupied her mind to the exclusion of most other things until this day, when Big Flora and another girl—probably Angel Grace Cardigan—had come to the house. She had been deathly afraid of Big Flora when she had seen her before. She was more afraid now. And she soon learned that Papadopoulos was not Flora’s slave but her master. She saw the old buzzard as he really was. But that wasn’t the end of her awakening.
Angel Grace had suddenly tried to kill Papadopoulos. Flora had overpowered her. Grace, defiant, had told them she was Paddy’s girl. Then she had screamed at Ann Newhall:
“And you, you damned fool, don’t you know they killed your father? Don’t you know—?”
Big Flora’s fingers, around Angel Grace’s throat, stopped her words. Flora tied up the Angel and turned to the Newhall girl.
“You’re in it,” she said brusquely. “You’re in it up to your neck. You’ll play along with us, or else— Here’s how it stands, dearie. The old man and I are both due to step off if we’re caught. And you’ll do the dance with us. I’ll see to that. Do what you’re told, and we’ll all come through all right. Get funny, and I’ll beat holy hell out of you.”
The girl didn’t remember much after that. She had a dim recollection of going to the door and telling Andy she didn’t want his services. She did this mechanically, not even needing to be prompted by the big blonde woman who stood close behind her. Later, in the same fearful daze, she had gone out her bedroom window, down the vine-covered side of the porch, and away from the house, running along the road, not going anywhere, just escaping.
That was what I learned from the girl. She didn’t tell me all of it. She told me very little of it in those words. But that is the story I got by combining her words, her manner of telling them, her facial expressions, with what I already knew, and what I could guess.
And not once while she talked had her eyes turned from mine. Not once had she shown that she knew there were other men standing in the road with us. She stared into my face with a desperate fixity, as if she was afraid not to, and her hands held mine as if she might sink through the ground if she let go.
“How about your servants?” I asked.
“There aren’t any there now.”
“Papadopoulos persuaded you to get rid of them?”
“Yes—several days ago.”
“Then Papadopoulos, Flora and Angel Grace are alone in the house now?”
“Yes.”
“They know you ducked?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think they do. I had been in my room some time. I don’t think they suspected I’d dare do anything but what they told me.”
It annoyed me to find I was staring into the girl’s eyes as fixedly as she into mine, and that when I wanted to take my gaze away it wasn’t easily done. I jerked my eyes away from her, took my hands away.
“The rest of it you can tell me later,” I growled, and turned to give Andy MacElroy his orders. “You stay here with Miss Newhall until we get back from the house. Make yourselves comfortable in the car.”
The girl put a hand on my arm.
“Am I—? Are you—?”
“We’re going to turn you over to the police, yes,” I assured her.
“No! No!”
“Don’t be childish,” I begged. “You can’t run around with a mob of cutthroats, get yourself tied up in a flock of crimes, and then when you’re tripped say, ‘Excuse it, please,’ and go free. If you tell the whole story in court—including the parts you haven’t told me—the chances are you’ll get off. But there’s no way in God’s world for you to escape arrest. Come on,” I told Jack and Tom-Tom Carey. “We’ve got to shake it up if we want to find our folks at home.”
Looking back as I climbed the fence, I saw that Andy had put the girl in the car and was getting in himself.
“Just a moment,” I called to Jack and Carey, who were already starting across the field.
“Thought of something else to kill time,” the swarthy man complained.
I went back across the road to the car and spoke quickly and softly to Andy:
“Dick Foley and Mickey Linehan should be hanging around the neighborhood. As soon as we’re out of sight, hunt ’em up. Turn Miss Newhall over to Dick. Tell him to take her with him and beat it for a phone—rouse the sheriff. Tell Dick he’s to turn the girl over to the sheriff, to hold for the San Francisco police. Tell him he’s not to give her up to anybody else—not even to me. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“All right. After you’ve told him that and have given him the girl, then you bring Mickey Linehan to the Newhall house as fast as you can make it. We’ll likely need all the help we can get as soon as we can get it.”
“Got you,” Andy said.
X
“What are you up to?” Tom-Tom Carey asked suspiciously when I rejoined Jack and him.
“Detective business.”
“I ought to have come down and turned the trick all by myself,” he grumbled. “You haven’t done a damned thing but waste time since we started.”
“I’m not the one that’s wasting it now.”
He snorted and set out across the field again, Jack and I following him. At the end of the field there was another fence to be climbed. Then we came over a little wooded ridge and the Newhall house lay before us—a large white house, glistening in the moonlight, with yellow rectangulars where blinds were down over the windows of lighted rooms. The lighted rooms were on the ground floor. The upper floor was dark. Everything was quiet.
“Damn the moonlight!” Tom-Tom Carey repeated, bringing another automatic out of his clothes, so that he now had one in each hand.
Jack started to take his gun out, looked at me, saw I was letting mine rest, let his slide back in his pocket.
Tom-Tom Carey’s face was a dark stone mask—slits for eyes, slit for mouth—the grim mask of a manhunter, a mankiller. He was breathing softly, his big chest moving gently. Beside him, Jack Counihan looked like an excited school-boy. His face was ghastly, his eyes all stretched out of shape, and he was breathing like a tire-pump. But his grin was genuine, for all the nervousness in it.
“We’ll cross to the house on this side,” I whispered. “Then one of us can take the front, one the back, and the other can wait till he sees where he’s needed most. Right?”
“Right,” the swarthy one agreed.
“Wait!” Jack exclaimed. “The girl came down the vines from an upper window. What’s the matter with my going up that way? I’m lighter than either of you. If they haven’t missed her, the window would still be open. Give me ten minutes to find the window, get through it, and get myself placed. Then when you attack I’ll be there behind them. How’s that?” he demanded applause.
“And what if they grab you as soon as you light?” I objected.
“Suppose they do. I can make enough racket for you to hear. You can gallop to the attack while they’re busy with me. That’ll be just as good.”
“Blue hell!” Tom-Tom Carey barked. “What good’s all that? The other way’s best. One of us at the front door, one at the back, kick ’em in and go in shooting.”
“If this new one works, it’ll be better,” I gave my opinion. “If you want to jump in the furnace, Jack, I won’t stop you. I won’t cheat you out of your heroics.”
“No!” the swarthy man snarled. “Nothing doing!”
“Yes,” I contradicted him. “We’ll try it. Better take twenty minutes
, Jack. That won’t give you any time to waste.”
He looked at his watch and I at mine, and he turned toward the house.
Tom-Tom Carey, scowling darkly, stood in his way. I cursed and got between the swarthy man and the boy. Jack went around my back and hurried away across the too-bright space between us and the house.
“Keep your feet on the ground,” I told Carey. “There are a lot of things to this game you don’t know anything about.”
“Too damned many!” he snarled, but he let the boy go.
There was no open second-story window on our side of the building. Jack rounded the rear of the house and went out of sight.
A faint rustling sounded behind us. Carey and I spun together. His guns went up. I stretched out an arm across them, pushing them down.
“Don’t have a hemorrhage,” I cautioned him. “This is just another of the things you don’t know about.”
The rustling had stopped.
“All right,” I called softly.
Mickey Linehan and Andy MacElroy came out of the tree-shadows.
Tom-Tom Carey stuck his face so close to mine that I’d have been scratched if he had forgotten to shave that day.
“You double-crossing—”
“Behave! Behave! A man of your age!” I admonished him. “None of these boys want any of your blood money.”
“I don’t like this gang stuff,” he snarled. “We—”
“We’re going to need all the help we can get,” I interrupted, looking at my watch. I told the two operatives: “We’re going to close in on the house now. Four of us ought to be able to wrap it up snug. You know Papadopoulos, Big Flora and Angel Grace by description. They’re in there. Don’t take any chances with them—Flora and Papadopoulos are dynamite. Jack Counihan is trying to ease inside now. You two look after the back of the joint. Carey and I will take the front. We’ll make the play. You see that nobody leaks out on us. Forward march!”
The swarthy man and I headed for the front porch—a wide porch, grown over with vines on the side, yellowly illuminated now by the light that came through four curtained French windows.
We hadn’t taken our first steps across the porch when one of these tall windows moved—opened.
The first thing I saw was Jack Counihan’s back.
He was pushing the casement open with a hand and foot, not turning his head.
Beyond the boy—facing him across the brightly lighted room—stood a man and a woman. The man was old, small, scrawny, wrinkled, pitifully frightened—Papadopoulos. I saw he had shaved off his straggly white mustache. The woman was tall, full-bodied, pink-fleshed and yellow-haired—a she-athlete of forty with clear gray eyes set deep in a handsome brutal face—Big Flora Brace. They stood very still, side by side, watching the muzzle of Jack Counihan’s gun.
While I stood in front of the window looking at this scene, Tom-Tom Carey, his two guns up, stepped past me, going through the tall window to the boy’s side. I did not follow him into the room.
Papadopoulos’ scary brown eyes darted to the swarthy man’s face. Flora’s gray ones moved there deliberately, and then looked past him to me.
“Hold it, everybody!” I ordered, and moved away from the window, to the side of the porch where the vines were thinnest.
Leaning out between the vines, so my face was clear in the moonlight, I looked down the side of the building. A shadow in the shadow of the garage could have been a man. I put an arm out in the moonlight and beckoned. The shadow came toward me—Mickey Linehan. Andy MacElroy’s head peeped around the back of the house. I beckoned again and he followed Mickey.
I returned to the open window.
Papadopoulos and Flora—a rabbit and a lioness—stood looking at the guns of Carey and Jack. They looked again at me when I appeared, and a smile began to curve the woman’s full lips.
Mickey and Andy came up and stood beside me. The woman’s smile died grimly.
“Carey,” I said, “you and Jack stay as is. Mickey, Andy, go in and take hold of our gifts from God.”
When the two operatives stepped through the window—things happened.
Papadopoulos screamed.
Big Flora lunged against him, knocking him at the back door.
“Go! Go!” she roared.
Stumbling, staggering, he scrambled across the room.
Flora had a pair of guns—sprung suddenly into her hands. Her big body seemed to fill the room, as if by willpower she had become a giantess. She charged—straight at the guns Jack and Carey held—blotting the back door and the fleeing man from their fire.
A blur to one side was Andy MacElroy moving.
I had a hand on Jack’s gun-arm.
“Don’t shoot,” I muttered in his ear.
Flora’s guns thundered together. But she was tumbling. Andy had crashed into her. Had thrown himself at her legs as a man would throw a boulder.
When Flora tumbled, Tom-Tom Carey stopped waiting.
His first bullet was sent so close past her that it clipped her curled yellow hair. But it went past—caught Papadopoulos just as he went through the door. The bullet took him low in the back—smeared him out on the floor.
Carey fired again—again—again—into the prone body.
“It’s no use,” I growled. “You can’t make him any deader.”
He chuckled and lowered his guns.
“Four into a hundred and six.” All his ill-humor, his grimness was gone. “That’s twenty-six thousand, five hundred dollars each of those slugs was worth to me.”
Andy and Mickey had wrestled Flora into submission and were hauling her up off the floor.
I looked from them back to the swarthy man, muttering, “It’s not all over yet.”
“No?” He seemed surprised. “What next?”
“Stay awake and let your conscience guide you,” I replied, and turned to the Counihan youngster. “Come along Jack.”
I led the way out through the window and across the porch, where I leaned against the railing. Jack followed and stood in front of me, his gun still in his hand, his face white and tired from nervous tension. Looking over his shoulder, I could see the room we had just quit. Andy and Mickey had Flora sitting between them on a sofa. Carey stood a little to one side, looking curiously at Jack and me. We were in the middle of the band of light that came through the open window. We could see inside—except that Jack’s back was that way—and could be seen from there, but our talk couldn’t be overheard unless we made it loud.
All that was as I wanted it.
“Now tell me about it,” I ordered Jack.
XI
“Well, I found the open window,” the boy began.
“I know all that part,” I cut in. “You came in and told your friends—Papadopoulos and Flora—about the girl’s escape, and that Carey and I were coming. You advised them to make out you had captured them single-handed. That would draw Carey and me in. With you unsuspected behind us, it would be easy for the three of you to grab the two of us. After that you could stroll down the road and tell Andy I had sent you for the girl. That was a good scheme—except that you didn’t know I had Dick and Mickey up my sleeve, didn’t know I wouldn’t let you get behind me. But all that isn’t what I want to know. I want to know why you sold us out—and what you think you’re going to do now.”
“Are you crazy?” His young face was bewildered, his young eyes horrified. “Or is this some—?”
“Sure, I’m crazy,” I confessed. “Wasn’t I crazy enough to let you lead me into that trap in Sausalito? But I wasn’t too crazy to figure it out afterward. I wasn’t too crazy to see that Ann Newhall was afraid to look at you. I’m not crazy enough to think you could have captured Papadopoulos and Flora unless they wanted you to. I’m crazy—but in moderation.”
Jack laughed—a reckless young laugh, but too shrill. His eyes
didn’t laugh with mouth and voice. While he was laughing his eyes looked from me to the gun in his hand and back to me.
“Talk, Jack,” I pleaded huskily, putting a hand on his shoulder. “For God’s sake why did you do it?”
The boy shut his eyes, gulped, and his shoulders twitched. When his eyes opened they were hard and glittering and full of merry hell.
“The worst part of it,” he said harshly, moving his shoulder from under my hand, “is that I wasn’t a very good crook, was I? I didn’t succeed in deluding you.”
I said nothing.
“I suppose you’ve earned your right to the story,” he went on after a little pause. His voice was consciously monotonous, as if he was deliberately keeping out of it every tone or accent that might seem to express emotion. He was too young to talk naturally. “I met Ann Newhall three weeks ago, in my own home. She had gone to school with my sisters, though I had never met her before. We knew each other at once, of course—I knew she was Nancy Regan, she knew I was a Continental operative.
“So we went off by ourselves and talked things over. Then she took me to see Papadopoulos. I liked the old boy and he liked me. He showed me how we together could accumulate unheard-of piles of wealth. So there you are. The prospect of all that money completely devastated my morals. I told him about Carey as soon as I had heard from you, and I led you into that trap, as you say. He thought it would be better if you stopped bothering us before you found the connection between Newhall and Papadopoulos.
“After that failure, he wanted me to try again, but I refused to have a hand in any more fiascos. There’s nothing sillier than a murder that doesn’t come off. Ann Newhall is quite innocent of everything except folly. I don’t think she has the slightest suspicion that I have had any part in the dirty work beyond refraining from having everybody arrested. That, my dear Sherlock, about concludes the confession.”