“Mr. Ashcraft is in Tijuana, I have been told. He left San Francisco about six months ago. His mail is being forwarded to him in care of a café there, under the name of Edward Bohannon.”
Her eyes lighted up happily, but she didn’t throw a fit. She wasn’t that sort. She addressed the attorney.
“Shall I go down? Or will you?”
Richmond shook his head.
“Neither. You certainly shouldn’t go, and I cannot—not at present. I must be in Eureka by the day after tomorrow, and shall have to spend several days there.” He turned to me. “You’ll have to go. You can no doubt handle it better than I could. You will know what to do and how to do it. There are no definite instructions I can give you. Your course will have to depend on Mr. Ashcraft’s attitude and condition. Mrs. Ashcraft doesn’t wish to force herself on him, but neither does she wish to leave anything undone that might help him.”
Mrs. Ashcraft held a strong, slender hand out to me.
“You will do whatever you think wisest.”
It was partly a question, partly an expression of confidence.
“I will,” I promised.
I liked this Mrs. Ashcraft.
IV
Tijuana hadn’t changed much in the two years I had been away. Still the same six or seven hundred feet of dusty and dingy street running between two almost solid rows of saloons—perhaps thirty-five of them to a row—with dirtier side streets taking care of the dives that couldn’t find room on the main street.
The automobile that had brought me down from San Diego dumped me into the center of the town early in the afternoon, and the day’s business was just getting under way. That is, there were only two or three drunks wandering around among the dogs and loafing Mexicans in the street, although there was already a bustle of potential drunks moving from one saloon to the next. But this was nothing like the crowd that would be here the following week, when the season’s racing started.
In the middle of the next block I saw a big gilded horseshoe. I went down the street and into the saloon behind the sign. It was a fair sample of the local joint. A bar on your left as you came in, running half the length of the building, with three or four slot machines on one end. Across from the bar, against the right-hand wall, a dance floor that ran from the front wall to a raised platform, where a greasy orchestra was now preparing to go to work. Behind the orchestra was a row of low stalls or booths, with open fronts and a table and two benches apiece. Opposite them, in the space between the bar and the rear of the building, a man with a hair-lip was shaking pills out of a keno goose.
It was early in the day, and there were only a few buyers present, so the girls whose business it is to speed the sale of drinks charged down on me in a flock.
“Buy me a drink? Let’s have a little drink? Buy a drink, honey?”
I shooed them away—no easy job—and caught a bartender’s eye. He was a beefy, red-faced Irishman, with sorrel hair plastered down in two curls that hid what little forehead he had.
“I want to see Ed Bohannon,” I told him confidentially.
He turned blank fish-green eyes on me.
“I don’t know no Ed Bohannon.”
Taking out a piece of paper and a pencil I scribbled, Jamocha is copped
, and slid the paper over to the bartender.
“If a man who says he’s Ed Bohannon asks for that, will you give it to him?”
“I guess so.”
“Good,” I said. “I’ll hang around a while.”
I walked down the room and sat at a table in one of the stalls. A lanky girl who had done something to her hair that made it purple was camped beside me before I had settled in my seat.
“Buy me a little drink?” she asked.
The face she made at me was probably meant for a smile. Whatever it was, it beat me. I was afraid she’d do it again, so I surrendered.
“Yes,” I said, and ordered a bottle of beer for myself from the waiter who was already hanging over my shoulder.
The beer wasn’t bad, for green beer; but at four bits a bottle it wasn’t anything to write home about. This Tijuana happens to be in Mexico—by about a mile—but it’s an American town, run by Americans, who sell American artificial booze at American prices. If you know your way around the United States you can find lots of places—especially near the Canadian line—where good booze can be bought for less than you are soaked for poison in Tijuana.
The purple-haired woman at my side downed her shot of whiskey, and was opening her mouth to suggest that we have another drink—hustlers down there don’t waste any time at all—when a voice spoke from behind me.
“Cora, Frank wants you.”
Cora scowled, looking over my shoulder.
Then she made that damned face at me again, said “All right, Kewpie. Will you take care of my friend here?” and left me.
Kewpie slid into the seat beside me. She was a little chunky girl of perhaps eighteen—not a day more than that. Just a kid. Her short hair was brown and curly over a round, boyish face with laughing, impudent eyes. Rather a cute little trick.
I bought her a drink and got another bottle of beer.
“What’s on your mind?” I asked her.
“Hooch.” She grinned at me—a grin that was as boyish as the straight look of her brown eyes. “Gallons of it.”
“And besides that?”
I knew this switching of girls on me hadn’t been purposeless.
“I hear you’re looking for a friend of mine,” Kewpie said.
“That might be. What friends have you got?”
“Well, there’s Ed Bohannon for one. You
