“Drunk,” Chrostwaite said, not looking up from his plaid knees; and though his voice was hoarse, husky – it was the hoarseness of a whisky-burned throat – there was no emotion in his voice.
“While driving perhaps a little recklessly out Van Ness Avenue,” Vance Richmond went on, ignoring the interruption, “Mr. Chrostwaite knocked a pedestrian down. The man wasn’t badly hurt, and he is being compensated very generously for his injuries. But we are to appear in court next Monday to face a charge of reckless driving, and I am afraid that this accident of yesterday, in which the printer was killed, may hurt us.
“No one thinks that Mr. Chrostwaite was in his car when it killed the printer – we have a world of evidence that he wasn’t. But I am afraid that the printer’s death may be made a weapon against us when we appear on the Van Ness Avenue charge. Being an attorney, I know just how much capital the prosecuting attorney – if he so chooses – can make out of the really, insignificant fact that the same car that knocked down the man on Van Ness Avenue killed another man yesterday. And, being an attorney, I know how likely the prosecuting attorney is to so choose. And he can handle it in such a way that we will be given little or no opportunity to tell our side.
“The worst that can happen, of course, is that, instead of the usual fine, Mr. Chrostwaite will be sent to the city jail for thirty or sixty days. That is bad enough, however, and that is what we wish to -“
Chrostwaite spoke again, still regarding his knees.
“Damned nuisance!” he said.
“That is what we wish to avoid,” the attorney continued. “We are willing to pay a stiff fine, and expect to, for the accident on Van Ness Avenue was clearly Mr. Chrostwaite’s fault. But we -“
“Drunk as a lord!” Chrostwaite said.
“But we don’t want to have this other accident, with which we had nothing to do, given a false weight in connection with the slighter accident. What we want then, is to find the man or men who stole the car and ran down John Newhouse. If they are apprehended before we go to court, we won’t be in danger of suffering for their act. Think you can find them before Monday?”
“I’ll try,” I promised; “though it isn’t -“
The human balloon interrupted me by heaving himself to his feet, fumbling with his fat jewelled fingers for his watch.
“Three o’clock,” he said. “Got a game of golf for three-thirty.” He picked up his hat and gloves from the desk. “Find ‘em, will you? Damned nuisance going to jail!”
And he waddled out.
Two
From the attorney’s office, I went down to the Hall of Justice, and, after hunting around a few minutes, found a policeman who had arrived at the corner of Clay and Kearny Streets a few seconds after Newhonse had been knocked down.
“I was just leaving the Hall when I seen a bus scoot around the corner at Clay Street,” this patrolman – a big sandy-haired man named Coffee – told me. “Then I seen people gathering around, so I went up there and found this John Newhouse stretched out. He was already dead. Half a dozen people had seen him hit, and one of ‘em had got the license number of the car that done it. We found the car standing empty just around the corner on Montgomery Street, pointing north. There was two fellows in the car when it hit Newhouse, but nobody saw what they looked like. Nobody was in it when we found it.”
“In what direction was Newhouse walking?”
“North along Kearny Street, and he was about three-quarters across Clay when he was knocked. The car was coming north on Kearny, too, and turned east on Clay. It mightn’t have been all the fault of the fellows in the car – according to them that seen the accident. Newhouse was walking across the street looking at a piece of paper in his hand. I found a piece of foreign money-paper money – in his hand, and I guess that’s what he was looking at. The lieutenant tells me it was Dutch money – a hundred-florin note, he says.”
“Found out anything about the men in the car?”
“Nothing! We lined up everybody we could find in the neighbourhood of California and Kearny Streets – where the car was stolen from – and around Clay and Montgomery Streets – where it was left at. But nobody remembered seeing the fellows getting in it or getting out of it. The man that owns the car wasn’t driving it – it was stole all right, I guess. At first I thought maybe there was something shady about the accident. This John Newhouse had a two – or three-day-old black eye on him. But we run that out and found that he had an attack of heart trouble or something a couple days ago, and fell, fetching his eye up against a chair. He’d been home sick for three days – just left his house half an hour or so before the accident.”
“Where’d he live?”
“On Sacramento Street – way out. I got his address here somewhere.”
He turned over the pages of a grimy memoranda book, and I got the dead man’s house number, and the names and addresses of the witnesses to the accident that Coffee had questioned.
That exhausted the policeman’s information, so I left him.
Three
My next play was to canvass the vicinity of where the car had been stolen and where it had been deserted, and then interview the witnesses. The fact that the police had fruitlessly gone over this ground made it unlikely that I would find anything of value; but I couldn’t skip these things on that account. Ninety-nine per cent of detective work is a patient collecting of details – and your details must be got as nearly first-hand as possible, regardless of who else has worked the territory before you.
Before starting on this angle, however, I decided to run around to the dead man’s printing establishment – only three blocks from the Hall of Justice – and see if any of his employees had heard anything that might help me.
Newhouse’s establishment occupied the ground floor of a small building on California, between Kearny and Montgomery. A small office was partitioned off in front, with a connecting doorway leading to the pressroom in the rear.
The only occupant of the small office, when I came in from the street, was a short, stocky, worried-looking blond man of forty or thereabouts, who sat at the desk in his shirt-sleeves, checking off figures in a ledger against others on a batch of papers before him.
I introduced myself, telling him that I was a Continental Detective Agency operative, interested in Newhouse’s death. He told me his name was Ben Soules, and that he was Newhouse’s foreman. We shook hands, and then he waved me to a chair across the desk, pushed back the papers and book upon which he had been working, and scratched his head disgustedly with the pencil in his hand.
“This is awful!” he said. “What with one thing and another, we’re heels over head in work, and I got to fool with these books that I don’t know anything at all about, and -“
He broke off to pick up the telephone, which had jingled.
“Yes… This is Soules… We’re working on them now… I’ll give ‘em to you by Monday noon at the least… I know! I know! But the boss’s death set us back. Explain that to Mr. Chrostwaite. And… And I’ll promise you that we’ll give them to you Monday morning, sure!”
Soules slapped the receiver irritably on its hook and looked at me.
“You’d think that since it was his own car that killed the boss, he’d have decency enough not to squawk over the delay!”
“Chrostwaite?”
“Yes – that was one of his clerks. We’re printing some leaflets for him – promised to have ‘em ready yesterday – but between the boss’s death and having a couple new hands to break in, we’re behind with everything. I’ve been here eight years, and this is the first time we ever fell down on an order – and every damned customer is yelling his head off. If we were like most printers they’d be used to waiting; but we’ve been too good to them. But this Chrostwaite! You’d think he’d have some decency, seeing that his car killed the boss!”
I nodded sympathetically, slid a cigar across the desk, and waited until it was burning in Soilless mouth before I asked:
“You said something about having a couple new hands to break in. How come?”
“Yes. Mr. Newhouse fired two of our printers last week – Fincher and Keys. He found that they belonged to the I.W.W., so he gave them their time.”
