“All right. How’d you come down?”
“I drove,” the Randall woman said. “That’s my car, the big green one across the street.”
“Fine. Then he can ride back with you, but no funny business.”
The telephone rang again while they were assuring me there would be no funny business. Hammill said, “Wheelock’s here.”
“Send him in.”
The lawyer’s asthma nearly strangled him when he saw Ethel Furman. Before he could get himself straightened out I asked, “This is really Mrs. Furman?”
He wagged his head up and down, still wheezing.
“Fine,” I said. “Wait for me. I’ll be back in a little while.” I herded the two women out and across the street to the green car. “Straight up to the end of the street and then two blocks left,” I told the Randall woman, who was at the wheel.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To see Shane, the man who’s going to New York with you.”
Mrs. Dober, Wally’s landlady, opened the door for us.
“Wally in?” I asked.
“Yes, indeedy, Mr. Anderson. Go right on up.” She was staring with wide-eyed curiosity at my companions while talking to me.
We went up a flight of stairs and I knocked on his door.
“Who is it?” he called.
“Scott.”
“Come on in.”
I pushed the door open and stepped aside to let the women in.
Ethel Furman gasped, “Harry,” and stepped back.
Wally had a hand behind him, but my gun was already out in my hand. “I guess you win,” he said.
I said I guessed I did and we all went back to headquarters.
“I’m a sap,” he complained when he and I were alone in my office. “I knew it was all up as soon as I saw those two dames going into Fritz’s. Then, when I was ducking out of sight and ran into you, I was afraid you’d take me over with you, so I had to tell you one of ‘em knew me, figuring you’d want to keep me under cover for a little while anyhow – long enough for me to get out of town. And then I didn’t have sense enough to go.
“I drop in home to pick up a couple of things before I scram and that call of Hammill’s catches me and I fall for it plenty. I figure I’m getting a break. I figure you’re not on yet and are going to send me back to New York as the Detroit hood again to see what dope I can get out of these folks, and I’ll be sitting pretty. Well, you fooled me, brother, or didn’t – Listen, Scott, you didn’t just stumble into that accidentally, did you?”
“No. Furman had to be murdered by a copper. A copper was most likely to know reward circulars well enough to make a good job of forging one. Who printed that for you?”
“Go on with your story,” he said. “I’m not dragging anybody in with me. It was only a poor mug of a printer that needed dough.”
“Okay. Only a copper would be sure enough of the routine to know how things would be handled. Only a copper – one of my coppers – would be able to walk into his cell, bang him across the head, and string him up on the – Those bruises showed.”
“They did? I wrapped the blackjack in a towel, figuring it would knock him out without leaving a mark anybody’d find under the hair. I seem to’ve slipped up a lot.”
“So that narrows it down to my coppers,” I went on, “and – well – you told me you knew the Randall woman, and there it was, only I figured you were working with them. What got you into this?”
He made a sour mouth. “What gets most saps in jams? A yen for easy dough. I’m in New York, see, working on that Dutton job for you, palling around with gamblers, and racketeers, passing for one of them; and I get to figuring that here my work takes as much brains as theirs, and is as tough and dangerous as theirs, but they’re taking in big money and I’m working for coffee and doughnuts. That kind of stuff gets you.
“Then I run into this Ethel and she goes for me like a house afire. I like her, too, so that’s dandy; but one night she tells me about this husband of hers and how much dough he’s got and how nuts he is about her and how he’s still trying to find her, and I get to thinking. I think she’s nuts enough about me to marry me. I still think she’d marry me if she didn’t know I killed him. Divorcing him’s no good, because the chances are she wouldn’t take any money from him and, anyway, it would only be part. So I got to thinking about suppose he died and left her the roll.
“That was more like it. I ran down to Philly a couple of afternoons and looked him up and everything looked fine. He didn’t even have anybody else close enough to leave more than a little of his dough to. So I did it. Not right away; I took my time working out the details, meanwhile writing to her through a fellow in Detroit.
“And then I did it. I sent those circulars out – to a lot of places – not wanting to point too much at this one. And when I was ready I phoned him, telling him if he’d come to the Deerwood Hotel that night, some time between then and the next night, he’d hear from Ethel. And, like I thought, he’d’ve fallen for any trap that was baited with her. You picking him up at the station was a break. If you hadn’t, I’d’ve had to discover he was registered at the hotel that night. Anyway, I’d’ve killed him and pretty soon I’d’ve started drinking or something, and you’d’ve fired me and I’d’ve gone off and married Ethel and her half-million under my Detroit name.” He made the sour mouth again. “Only I guess I’m not as sharp as I thought.”
“Maybe you are,” I said, “but that doesn’t always help. Old man Kamsley, Ben’s father, used to have a saying, To a sharp knife comes a tough steak.’ I’m sorry you did it, Wally. I always liked you.”
He smiled wearily. “I know you did,” he said. “I was counting on that.”
DEATH ON PINE STREET
A plump maid with bold green eyes and a loose, full-lipped mouth led me up two flights of steps and into an elaborately furnished boudoir, where a woman in black sat at a window. She was a thin woman of a little more than thirty, this murdered man’s widow, and her face was white and haggard.
“You are from the Continental Detective Agency?” she asked before I was two steps inside the room.
“Yes.”
“I want you to find my husband’s murderer.” Her voice was shrill, and her dark eyes had wild lights in them. “The police have done nothing. Four days, and they have done nothing. They say it was a robber, but they haven’t found him. They haven’t found anything!”
“But, Mrs. Gilmore,” I began, not exactly tickled to death with this explosion, “you must -“
“I know! I know!” she broke in. “But they have done nothing, I tell you – nothing. I don’t believe they’ve made the slightest effort. I don’t believe they want to find h – him!”
“Him?” I asked, because she had started to say her. “You think it was a man?”
She bit her lip and looked away from me, out of the window to where San Francisco Bay, the distance making toys of its boats, was blue under the early afternoon sun.
“I don’t know,” she said hesitantly; “it might have -“
Her face spun toward me – a twitching face – and it seemed impossible that anyone could talk so fast, hurl words out so rapidly one after the other.
“I’ll tell you. You can judge for yourself. Bernard wasn’t faithful to me. There was a woman who calls herself Cara Kenbrook. She wasn’t the first. But I learned about her last month. We quarrelled. Bernard promised to give her up. Maybe he didn’t. But if he did, I wouldn’t put it past her – a woman like that would do anything – anything. And down in my heart I really believe she did it!”
“And you think the police don’t want to arrest her?”
“I didn’t mean exactly that. I’m all unstrung, and likely to say anything. Bernard was mixed up in politics, you know; and if the police found, or thought, that politics had anything to do with his death, they might – I don’t know just what I mean. I’m a nervous, broken woman, and full of crazy notions.” She stretched a thin hand out to me. “Straighten this tangle out for me! Find the person who killed Bernard!”
I nodded with empty assurance, still not any too pleased with my client.
“Do you know this Kenbrook woman?” I asked.
“I’ve seen her on the street, and that’s enough to know what sort of person she is!”
