“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 bellhop 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
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 rattlebrained, and he wasn’t likely to bump me off either in panic or for the fun of it.
I kept my chin going.
“You aren’t a sap, Ed, and neither am I. I want to take you riding north with bracelets on, but I’m in no hurry. What I mean is, I’m not going to stand up and trade lead with you. This is all in my daily grind. It isn’t a matter of life or death with me. If I can’t take you today, I’m willing to wait until tomorrow. I’ll get you in the end, unless somebody beats me to you—and that won’t break my heart. There’s a rod between my vest and my belly. If you’ll have Kewpie get it out, we’ll be all set for the talk I want to make.”
He nodded slowly, not taking his eyes from me. The girl came close to my back. One of her hands came over my shoulder, went under my vest, and my old black gun left me. Before she stepped away she laid the point of her knife against the nape of
