“You ain’t got nothin’ on me.”
“What of that? How’d you like to do a thirty or a sixty on a vag charge?”
“Vag, hell!” he snarled, looking up at me. “I got five hundred smacks in my kick. Does that look like you can vag me?”
I grinned down at him.
“You know better than that, Ryan. A pocketful of money’ll get you nothing in California. You’ve got no job. You can’t show where your money comes from. You’re made to order for the vag law.”
I had this bird figured as a dope peddler. If he was—or was anything else off color that might come to light when he was vagged—the chances were that he would be willing to sell Ashcraft out to save himself; especially since, so far as I knew, Ashcraft wasn’t on the wrong side of the criminal law.
“If I were you,” I went on while he stared at the floor and thought, “I’d be a nice, obliging fellow and do my talking now. You’re—”
He twisted sidewise in his chair and one of his hands went behind him.
I kicked him out of his chair.
The table slipped under me or I would have stretched him. As it was, the foot that I aimed at his jaw took him on the chest and carried him over backward, with the rocking-chair piled on top of him. I pulled the chair off and took his gun—a cheap nickel-plated .32. Then I went back to my seat on the corner of the table.
He had only that one flash of fight in him. He got up sniveling.
“I’ll tell you. I don’t want no trouble, an’ it ain’t nothin’ to me. I didn’t know there was nothin’ wrong. This Ashcraft told me he was jus’ stringin’ his wife along. He give me ten bucks a throw to get his letter ever’ month an’ send it to him in Tijuana. I knowed him here, an’ when he went south six months ago—he’s got a girl down there—I promised I’d do it for him. I knowed it was money—he said it was his ‘alimony’—but I didn’t know there was nothin’ wrong.”
“What sort of a hombre is this Ashcraft? What’s his graft?”
“I don’t know. He could be a con man—he’s got a good front. He’s a Englishman, an’ mostly goes by the name of Ed Bohannon. He hits the hop. I don’t use it myself”—that was a good one—“but you know how it is in a burg like this, a man runs into all kinds of people. I don’t know nothin’ about what he’s up to. I jus’ send the money ever’ month an’ get my ten.”
That was all I could get out of him. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me where Ashcraft had lived in San Francisco or who he had mobbed up with. However, I had learned that Bohannon was Ashcraft, and not another go-between, and that was something.
Ryan squawked his head off when he found that I was going to vag him anyway. For a moment it looked like I would have to kick him loose from his backbone again.
“You said you’d spring me if I talked,” he wailed.
“I did not. But if I had—when a gent flashes a rod on me I figure it cancels any agreement we might have had. Come on.”
I couldn’t afford to let him run around loose until I got in touch with Ashcraft. He would have been sending a telegram before I was three blocks away, and my quarry would be on his merry way to points north, east, south and west.
It was a good hunch I played in nabbing Ryan. When he was fingerprinted at the Hall of Justice he turned out to be one Fred Rooney, alias “Jamocha,” a peddler and smuggler who had crushed out of the Federal Prison at Leavenworth, leaving eight years of a tenner still unserved.
“Will you sew him up for a couple of days?” I asked the captain of the city jail. “I’ve got work to do that will go smoother if he can’t get any word out for a while.”
“Sure,” the captain promised. “The federal people won’t take him off our hands for two or three days. I’ll keep him airtight till then.”
III
From the jail I went up to Vance Richmond’s office and turned my news over to him.
“Ashcraft is getting his mail in Tijuana. He’s living down there under the name of Ed Bohannon, and maybe has a woman there. I’ve just thrown one of his friends—the one who handled the mail and an escaped con—in the cooler.”
“Was that necessary?” Richmond asked. “We don’t want to work any hardships. We’re really trying to help Ashcraft, you know.”
“I could have spared this bird,” I admitted. “But what for? He was all wrong. If Ashcraft can be brought back to his wife, he’s better off with some of his shady friends out of the way. If he can’t, what’s the difference? Anyway, we’ve got one line on him safely stowed away where we can find it when we want it.”
The attorney shrugged, and reached for the telephone.
He called a number. “Is Mrs. Ashcraft there? … This is Mr. Richmond. … No, we haven’t exactly found him, but I think we know where he is. … Yes. … In about fifteen minutes.”
He put down the telephone and stood up.
“We’ll run up to Mrs. Ashcraft’s house and see her.”
Fifteen minutes later we were getting out of Richmond’s car in Jackson Street near Gough. The house was a three-story white stone building, set behind a carefully sodded little lawn with an iron railing around it.
Mrs. Ashcraft received us in a drawing-room on the second floor. A tall woman of less than thirty, slimly beautiful in a gray dress. Clear was the word that best fits her; it described the blue of her eyes, the pink-white of her skin, and the light brown of her hair.
Richmond introduced me
