Ashcraft and I were as thick as thieves, on the surface, but neither of us ever lost his distrust of the other, no matter how drunk we got—and we got plenty drunk. He went up against his mud-pipe regularly. I don’t think the girl used the stuff, but she had a pretty capacity for hard liquor. I would go to sleep not knowing whether I was going to wake up or not; but I had nothing on me to give me away, so I figured that I was safe unless I talked myself into a jam. I didn’t worry much,—bedtime usually caught me in a state that made worry impossible.
Three days of this, and then, sobering up, I was riding back to San Francisco, making a list of what I knew and guessed about Norman Ashcraft, alias Ed Bohannon.
The list went something like this:
(1) He suspected, if he didn’t know, that I had come down to see him on his wife’s account: he had been too smooth and had entertained me too well for me to doubt that; (2) he apparently had decided to return to his wife, though there was no guarantee that he would actually do so; (3) he was not incurably addicted to drugs; he merely smoked opium and, regardless of what the Sunday supplements say, an opium smoker is little, if any, worse off than a tobacco smoker; (4) he might pull himself together under his wife’s influence, but it was doubtful: physically he hadn’t gone to the dogs, but he had had his taste of the gutter and seemed to like it; (5) the girl Kewpie was crazily in love with him, while he liked her, but wasn’t turning himself inside out over her.
A good night’s sleep on the train between Los Angeles and San Francisco set me down in the Third and Townsend Street station with nearly normal head and stomach and not too many kinks in my nerves. I put away a breakfast that was composed of more food than I had eaten in three days, and went up to Vance Richmond’s office.
“Mr. Richmond is still in Eureka,” his stenographer told me. “I don’t expect him back until the first of the week.”
“Can you get him on the phone for me?”
She could, and did.
Without mentioning any names, I told the attorney what I knew and guessed.
“I see,” he said. “Suppose you go out to Mrs. A’s house and tell her. I will write her tonight, and I probably shall be back in the city by the day after tomorrow. I think we can safely delay action until then.”
I caught a street car, transferred at Van Ness Avenue, and went out to Mrs. Ashcraft’s house. Nothing happened when I rang the bell. I rang it several times before I noticed that there were two morning newspapers in the vestibule. I looked at the dates—this morning’s and yesterday morning’s.
An old man in faded overalls was watering the lawn next door.
“Do you know if the people who live here have gone away?” I called to him.
“I don’t guess so. The back door’s open, I seen this mornin’.”
He returned his attention to his hose, and then stopped to scratch his chin.
“They may of gone,” he said slowly. “Come to think on it, I ain’t seen any of ’em for—I don’t remember seein’ any of ’em yesterday.”
I left the front steps and went around the house, climbed the low fence in back and went up the back steps. The kitchen door stood about a foot open. Nobody was visible in the kitchen, but there was a sound of running water.
I knocked on the door with my knuckles, loudly. There was no answering sound. I pushed the door open and went in. The sound of water came from the sink. I looked in the sink.
Under a thin stream of water running from one of the faucets lay a carving knife with nearly a foot of keen blade. The knife was clean, but the back of the porcelain sink—where water had splashed with only small, scattered drops—was freckled with red-brown spots. I scraped one of them with a finger-nail—dried blood.
Except for the sink, I could see nothing out of order in the kitchen. I opened a pantry door. Everything seemed all right there. Across the room another door led to the front of the house. I opened the door and went into a passageway. Not enough light came from the kitchen to illuminate the passageway. I fumbled in the dusk for the light-button that I knew should be there. I stepped on something soft.
Pulling my foot back, I felt in my pocket for matches, and struck one. In front of me, his head and shoulders on the floor, his hips and legs on the lower steps of a flight of stairs, lay a Filipino boy in his underclothes.
He was dead. One eye was cut, and his throat was gashed straight across, close up under his chin. I could see the killing without even shutting my eyes. At the top of the stairs—the killer’s left hand dashing into the Filipino’s face—thumb-nail gouging into eye—pushing the brown face back—tightening the brown throat for the knife’s edge—the slash—and the shove down the steps.
The light from my second match showed me the button. I clicked on the lights, buttoned my coat, and went up the steps. Dried blood darkened them here and there, and at the second-floor landing the wall paper was stained with a big blot. At the head of the stairs I found another light-button, and pressed it.
I walked down the hall, poked my head into two rooms that seemed in order, and then turned a corner—and pulled up with a jerk, barely in time to miss stumbling over a woman who lay there.
She was huddled on the floor, face down, with knees drawn up under her and both hands clasped to her stomach. She wore a nightgown, and her hair was in a braid down her back.
I put a finger on the back of her neck. Stone-cold.
Kneeling on the floor—to avoid the necessity of turning her over—I looked at her face. She was the maid who had admitted Richmond and me four days ago.
I stood up again and looked around. The maid’s head was almost touching a closed door. I stepped around her and pushed the door open. A bedroom, and not the maid’s. It was an expensively dainty bedroom in cream and gray, with French prints on the walls. Nothing in the room was disarranged except the bed. The bed clothes were rumpled and tangled, and piled high in the center of the bed—in a pile that was too large. …
Leaning over the bed, I began to draw the covers off. The second piece came away stained with blood. I yanked the rest off.
Mrs. Ashcraft was dead there.
Her body was drawn up in a little heap, from which her head hung crookedly, dangling from a neck that had been cut clean through to the bone. Her face was marked with four deep scratches from temple to chin. One sleeve had been torn from the jacket of her blue silk pajamas. Bedding and pajamas were soggy with the blood that the clothing piled over her had kept from drying.
I put the blanket over her again, edged past the dead woman in the hall, and went down the front stairs, switching on more lights, hunting for the telephone. Near the foot of the stairs I found it. I called the police detective bureau first, and then Vance Richmond’s office.
“Get word to Mr. Richmond that Mrs. Ashcraft has been murdered,” I told his stenographer. “I’m at her house, and he can get in touch with me here any time during the next two or three hours.”
Then I went out of the front door and sat on the top step, smoking a cigarette while I waited for the police.
I felt rotten. I’ve seen dead people in larger quantities than three in my time, and I’ve seen some that were hacked up pretty badly; but this thing had fallen on me while my nerves were ragged from three days of boozing.
The police automobile swung around the corner and began disgorging men before I had finished my first cigarette. O’Gar, the detective sergeant in charge of the Homicide Detail, was the first man up the steps.
“Hullo,” he greeted me. “What have you got hold of this time?”
I was glad to see him. This squat, bullet-headed sergeant is as good a man as the department has, and he and I have always been lucky when we tied up together.
“I found three bodies in there before I quit looking,” I told him as I led him indoors. “Maybe a regular detective like you—with a badge and everything—can find more.”
“You didn’t do bad—for a lad,” he said.
My wooziness had passed. I was eager to get to work. These people lying dead around the house were merely counters in a game again—or almost. I remembered the feel of Mrs. Ashcraft’s slim hand in mine, but I stuck that memory in the back of my mind. You hear now and then of detectives who have not become callous, who have not lost what you might call the human touch. I always feel sorry for them, and wonder why they don’t chuck their jobs and find another line of work that wouldn’t be so hard on their emotions. A sleuth who doesn’t grow a tough shell is in for a gay life—day in and day out poking his nose into one kind of woe or another.
I showed the Filipino to O’Gar first, and then the two women. We didn’t find any more. Detail work occupied all of us—O’Gar, the eight men under him, and me—for the next few hours. The house had to be gone over from roof to cellar. The neighbors had to be grilled. The employment agencies through which the servants had been hired had to be examined. Relatives and friends of the Filipino and the maid had to be traced and questioned. Newsboys, mail carriers, grocers’ delivery men, laundrymen, had to be found, questioned and, when necessary, investigated.
When the bulk of the reports were in, O’Gar and I sneaked away from the others—especially away from the newspaper men, who were all over the place by now—and locked ourselves in the library.
“Night before last, huh? Wednesday night?” O’Gar grunted when we were comfortable in a couple of leather chairs, burning tobacco.
I nodded. The report of the doctor who had examined the bodies, the presence of the two newspapers in the vestibule, and the fact that neither neighbor, grocer nor butcher had seen any of them since Wednesday, combined to make Wednesday night—or early Thursday morning—the correct date.
“I’d say the killer cracked the back door,” O’Gar went on, staring at the ceiling through smoke, “picked up the carving knife in the kitchen, and went upstairs. Maybe he went straight to Mrs. Ashcraft’s room—maybe not. But after a bit he went in there. The torn sleeve and the scratches on her face mean that there was a tussle. The Filipino and the maid heard the noise—heard her scream maybe—and rushed to her room to find out what was the matter. The maid most likely got there just as the killer was coming out—and got hers. I guess the Filipino saw him then and ran. The killer caught him at the head of the back stairs—and finished him. Then he went down to the kitchen, washed his hands, dropped the knife, and blew.”
“So far, so good,” I agreed; “but I notice you skip lightly over the question of who he was and why he killed.”
He pushed his hat back and scratched his bullet head.
“Don’t crowd me,” he rumbled; “I’ll get around to that. There seem to be just three guesses to take your pick from. We know that nobody else lived in the house outside of the three that were killed. So the killer was either a maniac who did the job for the fun of it, a burglar who was discovered and ran wild, or somebody who had a reason for bumping off Mrs. Ashcraft, and then had to kill the two servants when they discovered him.
“Taking the knife from the kitchen would make the burglar guess look like a bum one. And, besides, we’re pretty sure nothing was stolen. A good prowler would bring his own weapon with him if he wanted one. But the hell of it is that there are a lot of bum prowlers in the world—half-wits who would be likely to pick up a knife in the kitchen, go to pieces when the house woke up, slash everybody in sight, and then beat it without turning anything over.
“So it could have been a prowler; but my personal guess is that the job was done by somebody who wanted to wipe out Mrs. Ashcraft.”
“Not so bad,” I applauded. “Now listen to this: Mrs. Ashcraft has a husband in Tijuana, a mild sort of hop-head who is mixed up with a bunch of thugs. She was trying to persuade him to come back to her. He has a girl down there who is young, goofy over him, and a bad actor—one tough youngster. He was planning to run out on the girl and come back home.”
“So-o-o?” O’Gar said softly.
“But,” I continued, “I was with both him and the girl, in Tijuana, night before last—when this killing was done.”
“So-o?”
A knock on the door interrupted our talk. It was a policeman to tell me that I was wanted on the phone. I went down to the first floor, and Vance Richmond’s voice came over the wire.
“What is it? Miss Henry delivered your message, but she couldn’t give me any details.”
I told him the whole thing.
“I’ll leave for the city tonight,” he said when I had finished. “You go ahead and do whatever you want. You’re to have a free hand.”
“Right,” I replied. “I’ll probably be out of town when you get back. You can reach me through the Agency if you want to get in touch with me. I’m going to wire Ashcraft to come up—in your name.”
After Richmond had hung up, I called the city jail and asked the captain if John Ryan, alias Fred Rooney, alias Jamocha, was still there.
“No. Federal officers left for Leavenworth with him and two other prisoners yesterday morning.”
Up in the library again, I told O’Gar hurriedly:
“I’m catching the evening train south, betting my marbles that the job was made in Tijuana. I’m wiring Ashcraft to come up. I want to get him away from the Mexican town for a day or two, and if he’s up here you can keep an eye on him. I’ll give you a description of him, and you can pick him up at Vance Richmond’s office. He’ll probably connect there first thing.”
Half an hour of the little time I had left I spent writing and sending three telegrams. The first was to Ashcraft.
Edward Bohannon,
Golden Horseshoe Cafe,
Tijuana, Mexico.
Mrs. Ashcraft is dead. Can you come immediately?
VANCE RICHMOND.
The other two were in code. One went to the Continental Detective Agency’s Kansas City branch, asking that an operative be sent to Leavenworth to question Jamocha. The other requested the Los Angeles branch to have a man meet me in San Diego the next day.
Then I dashed out to my rooms for a bagful of clean clothes, and went to sleep riding south again.
VI
San Diego was gay and packed when I got off the train early the next afternoon—filled with the crowd that the first Saturday of the racing season across the border had drawn. Movie folk from Los Angeles, farmers from the Imperial Valley, sailors from the Pacific Fleet, gamblers, tourists, grifters, and even regular people, from everywhere. I lunched, registered and left my bag at a hotel, and went up to the U. S. Grant Hotel to pick up the Los Angeles operative I had wired for.
I found him in the lobby—a freckle-faced youngster of twenty-two or so, whose bright gray eyes were busy just now with a racing program, which he held in a hand that had a finger bandaged with adhesive tape. I passed him and stopped at the cigar stand, where I bought a package of cigarettes and straightened out an imaginary dent in my hat. Then I went out to the street again. The bandaged finger and the business with the hat were our introductions. Somebody invented those tricks back before the Civil War, but they still worked smoothly, so their antiquity was no reason for discarding them.
I strolled up Fourth Street, getting away from Broadway—San Diego’s main stem—and the operative caught up with me. His name was Gorman, and he turned out to be a pretty good lad. I gave him the lay.
“You’re to go down to Tijuana and take a plant on the Golden Horseshoe Café. There’s a little chunk of a girl hustling drinks in there—short curly brown hair; brown eyes; round face; rather large red mouth; square shoulders. You can’t miss her; she’s a nice-looking kid of about eighteen, called Kewpie. She’s the target for your eye. Keep away from her. Don’t try to rope her. I’ll give you an hour’s start. Then I’m coming down to talk to her. I want to know what she does right after I leave, and what she does for the next few days. You can
get in touch with me at the”—I gave him the name of my hotel and my room number—“each night. Don’t give me a tumble anywhere else. I’ll most likely be in and out of the Golden Horseshoe often.”
We parted, and I went down to the plaza and sat on a bench under the palms for an hour. Then I went up to the corner and fought for a seat on a Tijuana stage.
Fifteen or more miles of dusty riding—packed five in a seat meant for three—a momentary halt at the Immigration Station on the line, and I was climbing out of the stage at the entrance to the race track. The ponies had been running for some time, but the turnstiles were still spinning a steady stream of customers into the track. I turned my back on the gate and went over to the row of jitneys in front of the Monte Carlo—the big wooden casino—got into one, and was driven over to the Old Town.
The Old Town had a deserted look. Nearly everybody was over watching the dogs do their stuff. Gorman’s freckled face showed over a drink of mescal when I entered the Golden Horseshoe. I hoped he had a good constitution. He needed one if he was going to do his sleuthing on a distilled cactus diet.
The welcome I got from the Horseshoers was just like a homecoming. Even the bartender with the plastered-down curls gave me a grin.
“Where’s Kewpie?” I asked.
“Brother-in-lawing, Ed?” a big Swede girl leered at me. “I’ll see if I can find her for you.”
Kewpie came through the back door just then.
“Hello, Painless!” She climbed all over me, hugging me, rubbing her face against mine, and the Lord knows what all. “Down for another swell souse?”
“No,” I said, leading her back toward the stalls. “Business this time. Where’s Ed?”