“Up north. His wife kicked off and he’s gone to collect the remains.”
“That makes you sorry?”
She showed her big white teeth in a boy’s smile of pure happiness.
“You bet! It’s tough on me that papa has come into a lot of sugar.”
I looked at her out of the corner of my eyes—a glance that was supposed to be wise.
“And you think Ed’s going to bring the jack back to you?”
Her eyes snapped darkly at me.
“What’s eating you?” she demanded.
I smiled knowingly.
“One of two things is going to happen,” I predicted. “Ed’s going to ditch you—he was figuring on that, anyway—or he’s going to need every brownie he can scrape up to keep his neck from being—”
“You God-damned liar!”
Her right shoulder was to me, touching my left. Her left hand flashed down under her short skirt. I pushed her shoulder forward, twisting her body sharply away from me. The knife her left hand had whipped up from her leg jabbed deep into the underside of the table. A thick-bladed knife, I noticed, balanced for accurate throwing.
She kicked backward, driving one of her sharp heels into my ankle. I slid my left arm around behind her and pinned her elbow to her side just as she freed the knife from the table.
“What th’ hell’s all ’is?”
I looked up.
Across the table a man stood glaring at me—legs apart, fists on hips. He was a big man, and ugly. A tall, raw-boned man with wide shoulders, out of which a long, skinny yellow neck rose to support a little round head. His eyes were black shoe-buttons stuck close together at the top of a little mashed nose. His mouth looked as if it had been torn in his face, and it was stretched in a snarl now, baring a double row of crooked brown teeth.
“Where d’ yuh get ’at stuff?” this lovely person roared at me.
He was too tough to reason with.
“If you’re a waiter,” I told him, “bring me a bottle of beer and something for the kid. If you’re not a waiter—sneak.”
He leaned over the table and I gathered my feet in. It looked like I was going to need them to move around on.
“I’ll bring yuh a—”
The girl wriggled out of my hands and shut him up.
“Mine’s liquor,” she said sharply.
He snarled, looked from one of us to the other, showed me his dirty teeth again, and wandered away.
“Who’s your friend?”
“You’ll do well to lay off him,” she advised me, not answering my question.
Then she slid her knife back in its hiding place under her skirt and twisted around to face me.
“Now what’s all this about Ed being in trouble?”
“You read about the killing in the papers?”
“Yes.”
“You oughtn’t need a map, then,” I said. “Ed’s only out is to put the job on you. But I doubt if he can get away with that. If he can’t, he’s nailed.”
“You’re crazy!” she exclaimed. “You weren’t too drunk to know that both of us were here with you when the killing was done.”
“I’m not crazy enough to think that proves anything,” I corrected her. “But I am crazy enough to expect to go back to San Francisco wearing the killer on my wrist.”
She laughed at me. I laughed back and stood up.
“See you some more,” I said as I strolled toward the door.
I returned to San Diego and sent a wire to Los Angeles, asking for another operative. Then I got something to eat and spent the evening lying across the bed in my hotel room smoking and scheming and waiting for Gorman.
It was late when he arrived, and he smelled of mescal from San Diego to St. Louis and back, but his head seemed level enough.
“Looked like I was going to have to shoot you loose from the place for a moment,” he grinned. “Between the twist flashing the pick and the big guy loosening a sap in his pocket, it looked like action was coming.”
“You let me alone,” I ordered. “Your job is to see what goes on, and that’s all. If I get carved, you can mention it in your report, but that’s your limit. What did you turn up?”
“After you blew, the girl and the big guy put their noodles together. They seemed kind of agitated—all agog, you might say. He slid out, so I dropped the girl and slid along behind him. He came to town and got a wire off. I couldn’t crowd him close enough to see who it was to. Then he went back to the joint. Things were normal when I knocked off.”
“Who is the big guy? Did you learn?”
“He’s no sweet dream, from what I hear. ‘Gooseneck’ Flinn is the name on his calling cards. He’s bouncer and general utility man for the joint. I saw him in action against a couple of gobs, and he’s nobody’s meat—as pretty a double throw-out as I’ve ever seen.”
So this Gooseneck party was the Golden Horseshoe’s clean-up man, and he hadn’t been in sight during my three-day spree? I couldn’t possibly have been so drunk that I’d forget his ugliness. And it had been on one of those three days that Mrs. Ashcraft and her servants had been killed.
“I wired your office for another op,” I told Gorman. “He’s to connect with you. Turn the girl over to him, and you camp on Gooseneck’s trail. I think we’re going to hang three killings on him, so watch your step. I’ll be in to stir things up a little more tomorrow; but remember, no matter what happens, everybody plays his own game. Don’t ball things up trying to help me.”
“Aye, aye, Cap,” and he went off to get some sleep.
The next afternoon I spent at the race track, fooling around with the bangtails while I waited for night. The track was jammed with the usual Sunday crowd. I ran into any number of old acquaintances, some of them on my side of the game, some on the other, and some neutral. One of the second lot was “Trick-hat” Schultz. At our last meeting—a copper was leading him out of a Philadelphia court room toward a fifteen-year bit—he had promised to open me up from my eyebrows to my ankles the next time he saw me. He greeted me this afternoon with an eight-inch smile, bought me a shot of what they sell for gin under the grandstand, and gave me a tip on a horse named Beeswax. I’m not foolish enough to play anybody’s tips, so I didn’t play this one. Beeswax ran so far ahead of the others that it looked like he and his competitors were in separate races, and he paid twenty-something to one. So Trick-hat had his revenge after all.
After the last race, I got something to eat at the Sunset Inn, and then drifted over to the big casino—the other end of the same building. A thousand or more people of all sorts were jostling one another there, fighting to go up against poker, craps, chuck-a-luck, wheels of fortune, roulette and twenty-one with whatever money the race track had left or given them. I didn’t buck any of the games. My playtime was over. I walked around through the crowd looking for my men.
I spotted the first one—a sunburned man who was plainly a farm hand in his Sunday clothes. He was pushing toward the door, and his face held that peculiar emptiness which belongs to the gambler who has gone broke before the end of the game. It’s a look of regret that is not so much for the loss of the money as for the necessity of quitting.
I got between the farm hand and the door.
“Clean you?” I asked sympathetically when he reached me.
A sheepish sort of nod.
“How’d you like to pick up five bucks for a few minutes’ work?” I tempted him.
He would like it, but what was the work?
“I want you to go over to the Old Town with me and look at a man. Then you get your pay. There are no strings to it.”
That didn’t exactly satisfy him, but five bucks are five bucks; and he could drop out any time he didn’t like the looks of things. He decided to try it.
I put the farm hand over by a door, and went after another—a little, p
lump man with round, optimistic eyes and a weak mouth. He was willing to earn five dollars in the simple and easy manner I had outlined. The next man I braced was a little too timid to take a chance on a blind game. Then I got a Filipino—glorious in a fawn-colored suit, with a coat split to the neck and pants whose belled bottoms would have held a keg apiece—and a stocky young Greek who was probably either a waiter or a barber.
Four men were enough. My quartet pleased me immensely. They didn’t look too intelligent for my purpose, and they didn’t look like thugs or sharpers. I put them in a jitney and took them over to the Old Town.
“Now this is it,” I coached them when we had arrived. “I’m going into the Golden Horseshoe Café, around the corner. Give me two or three minutes, and then come in and buy yourselves a drink.” I gave the farm hand a five-dollar bill. “You pay for the drinks with that—it isn’t part of your wages. There’s a tall, broad-shouldered man with a long, yellow neck and a small ugly face in there. You can’t miss him. I want you all to take a good look at him without letting him get wise. When you’re sure you’d know him again anywhere, give me the nod, and come back here and you get your money. Be careful when you give me the nod. I don’t want anybody in there to find out that you know me.”
It sounded queer to them, but there was the promise of five dollars apiece, and there were the games back in the casino, where five dollars might buy a man into a streak of luck that—write the rest of it yourself. They asked questions, which I refused to answer, but they stuck.
Gooseneck was behind the bar, helping out the bartenders, when I entered the place. They needed help. The joint bulged with customers. The dance floor looked like a mob scene. Thirsts were lined up four deep at the bar. A shotgun wouldn’t have sounded above the din: men and women laughing, roaring and cursing; bottles and glasses rattling and banging; and louder and more disagreeable than any of those noises was the noise of the sweating orchestra. Turmoil, uproar, stink—a Tijuana joint on Sunday night.
I couldn’t find Gorman’s freckled face in the crowd, but I picked out the hatchet-sharp white face of Hooper, another Los Angeles operative, who, I knew then, had been sent down in response to my second telegram. Kewpie was farther down the bar, drinking with a little man whose meek face had the devil-may-care expression of a model husband on a tear. She nodded at me, but didn’t leave her client.
Gooseneck gave me a scowl and the bottle of beer I had ordered. Presently my four hired men came in. They did their parts beautifully!
First they peered through the smoke, looking from face to face, and hastily avoiding eyes that met theirs. A little of this, and one of them, the Filipino, saw the man I had described, behind the bar. He jumped a foot in the excitement of his discovery, and then, finding Gooseneck glaring at him, turned his back and fidgeted. The three others spotted Gooseneck now, and sneaked looks at him that were as conspicuously furtive as a set of false whiskers. Gooseneck glowered at them.
The Filipino turned around, looked at me, ducked his head sharply, and bolted for the street. The three who were left shot their drinks down their gullets and tried to catch my eye. I was reading a sign high on the wall behind the bar:
ONLY GENUINE PRE-WAR AMERICAN AND BRITISH WHISKEYS SERVED HERE
I was trying to count how many lies could be found in those nine words, and had reached four, with promise of more, when one of my confederates, the Greek, cleared his throat with the noise of a gasoline engine’s backfire. Gooseneck was edging down the bar, a bungstarter in one hand, his face purple.
I looked at my assistants. Their nods wouldn’t have been so terrible had they come one at a time; but they were taking no chances on my looking away again before they could get their reports in. The three heads bobbed together—a signal that nobody within twenty feet could, or did, miss—and they scooted out of the door, away from the long-necked man and his bung-starter.
I emptied my glass of beer, sauntered out of the saloon and around the corner. They were clustered where I had told them to wait.
“We’d know him! We’d know him!” they chorused.
“That’s fine,” I praised them. “You did great. I think you’re all natural-born gumshoes. Here’s your pay. Now if I were you boys, I think I’d sort of avoid that place after this; because, in spite of the clever way you covered yourselves up—and you did nobly!—he might possibly suspect something. There’s no use taking chances, anyway. ”
They grabbed their wages and were gone before I had finished my speech. I returned to the Golden Horseshoe—to be on hand in case one of them should decide to sell me out and come back there to spill the deal to Gooseneck.
Kewpie had left her model husband, and met me at the door. She stuck an arm through mine and led me toward the rear of the building. I noticed that Gooseneck was gone from behind the bar. I wondered if he was out gunning for my four ex-employees.
“Business looks good,” I chattered as we pushed through the crowd. “You know, I had a tip on Beeswax this afternoon, and wouldn’t play the pup.” I made two or three more aimless cracks of that sort—just because I knew the girl’s mind was full of something else. She paid no attention to anything I said.
But when we had dropped down in front of a vacant table, she asked:
“Who were your friends?”
“What friends?”
“The four jobbies who were at the bar when you were there a few minutes ago.”
“Too hard for me, sister.” I shook my head. “There were slews of men there. Oh, yes! I know who you mean! Those four gents who seemed kind of smitten with Gooseneck’s looks. I wonder what attracted them to him—besides his beauty.”
She grabbed my arm with both hands.
“So help me God, Painless,” she swore, “if you tie anything on Ed, I’ll kill you!”
Her brown eyes were big and damp. She was a hard and wise little baby—had rubbed the world’s sharp corners with both shoulders—but she was only a kid, and she was worried sick over this man of hers. However, the business of a sleuth is to catch criminals, not to sympathize with their ladyloves.
I patted her hands.
“I could give you some good advice,” I said as I stood up, “but you wouldn’t listen to it, so I’ll save my breath. It won’t do any harm to tell you to keep an eye on Gooseneck, though—he’s shifty.”
There wasn’t any special meaning to that speech, except that it might tangle things up a little more. One way of finding what’s at the bottom of either a cup of coffee or a situation is to keep stirring it up until whatever is on the bottom comes to the surface. I had been playing that system thus far on this affair.
Hooper came into my room in the San Diego hotel at a little before two the next morning.
“Gooseneck disappeared, with Gorman tailing him, immediately after your first visit,” he said. “After your second visit, the girl went around to a ’dobe house on the edge of town, and she was still there when I knocked off. The place was dark.”
Gorman didn’t show up.
VII
A bell-hop with a telegram roused me at ten o’clock in the morning. The telegram was from Mexicali:
DROVE HERE LAST NIGHT HOLED UP WITH FRIENDS SENT TWO WIRES.
GORMAN.
That was good news. The long-necked man had fallen for my play, had taken my four busted gamblers for four witnesses, had taken their nods for identifications. Gooseneck was the lad who had done the actual killing, and Gooseneck was in flight.
I had shed my pajamas and was reaching for my union suit when the boy came back with another wire. This one was from O’Gar, through the Agency:
ASHCRAFT DISAPPEARED YESTERDAY
I used the telephone to get Hooper out of bed.
“Get down to Tijuana,” I told him. “Stick up the house where you left the girl last night, unless you run across her at the Golden Horseshoe. Stay there until she shows. Stay
with her until she connects with a big blond Englishman, and then switch to him. He’s a man of less than forty, tall, with blue eyes and yellow hair. Don’t let him shake you—he’s the big boy in this party just now. I’ll be down. If the Englishman and I stay together and the girl leaves us, take her, but otherwise stick to him.”
I dressed, put down some breakfast and caught a stage for the Mexican town. The boy driving the stage made fair time, but you would have thought we were standing still to see a maroon roadster pass us near Palm City. Ashcraft was driving the roadster.
The roadster was empty, standing in front of the adobe house, when I saw it again. Up in the next block, Hooper was doing an imitation of a drunk, talking to two Indians in the uniforms of the Mexican Army.
I knocked on the door of the adobe house.
Kewpie’s voice: “Who is it?”
“Me—Painless. Just heard that Ed is back.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed. A pause. “Come in.”
I pushed the door open and went in. The Englishman sat tilted back in a chair, his right elbow on the table, his right hand in his coat pocket—if there was a gun in that pocket it was pointing at me.
“Hello,” he said. “I hear you’ve been making guesses about me.”
“Call ’em anything you like.” I pushed a chair over to within a couple of feet of him, and sat down. “But don’t let’s kid each other. You had Gooseneck knock your wife off so you could get what she had. The mistake you made was in picking a sap like Gooseneck to do the turn—a sap who went on a killing spree and then lost his nerve. Going to read and write just because three or four witnesses put the finger on him! And only going as far as Mexicali! That’s a fine place to pick! I suppose he was so scared that the five- or six-hour ride over the hills seemed like a trip to the end of the world!”
The man’s face told me nothing. He eased himself around in his chair an inch or two, which would have brought the gun in his pocket—if a gun was there—in line with my thick middle. The girl was somewhere behind me, fidgeting around. I was afraid of her. She was crazily in love with this man in front of me, and I had seen the blade she wore on one leg. I imagined her fingers itching for it now. The man and his gun didn’t worry me much. He was not rattle-brained, and he wasn’t likely to bump me off either in panic or for the fun of it.