That was what I learned from the girl. She didn’t tell me all of it. She told me very little of it in those words. But that is the story I got by combining her words, her manner of telling them, her facial expressions, with what I already knew, and what I could guess.
And not once while she talked had her eyes turned from mine. Not once had she shown that she knew there were other men standing in the road with us. She stared into my face with a desperate fixity, as if she was afraid not to, and her hands held mine as if she might sink through the ground if she let go.
“How about your servants?” I asked.
“There aren’t any there now.”
“Papadopoulos persuaded you to get rid of them?”
“Yes—several days ago.”
“Then Papadopoulos, Flora and Angel Grace are alone in the house now?”
“Yes.”
“They know you ducked?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think they do. I had been in my room some time. I don’t think they suspected I’d dare do anything but what they told me.”
It annoyed me to find I was staring into the girl’s eyes as fixedly as she into mine, and that when I wanted to take my gaze away it wasn’t easily done. I jerked my eyes away from her, took my hands away.
“The rest of it you can tell me later,” I growled, and turned to give Andy MacElroy his orders. “You stay here with Miss Newhall until we get back from the house. Make yourselves comfortable in the car.”
The girl put a hand on my arm.
“Am I—? Are you—?”
“We’re going to turn you over to the police, yes,” I assured her.
“No! No!”
“Don’t be childish,” I begged. “You can’t run around with a mob of cutthroats, get yourself tied up in a flock of crimes, and then when you’re tripped say, ‘Excuse it, please,’ and go free. If you tell the whole story in court—including the parts you haven’t told me—the chances are you’ll get off. But there’s no way in God’s world for you to escape arrest. Come on,” I told Jack and Tom-Tom Carey. “We’ve got to shake it up if we want to find our folks at home.”
Looking back as I climbed the fence, I saw that Andy had put the girl in the car and was getting in himself.
“Just a moment,” I called to Jack and Carey, who were already starting across the field.
“Thought of something else to kill time,” the swarthy man complained.
I went back across the road to the car and spoke quickly and softly to Andy:
“Dick Foley and Mickey Linehan should be hanging around the neighborhood. As soon as we’re out of sight, hunt ’em up. Turn Miss Newhall over to Dick. Tell him to take her with him and beat it for a phone—rouse the sheriff. Tell Dick he’s to turn the girl over to the sheriff, to hold for the San Francisco police. Tell him he’s not to give her up to anybody else—not even to me. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“All right. After you’ve told him that and have given him the girl, then you bring Mickey Linehan to the Newhall house as fast as you can make it. We’ll likely need all the help we can get as soon as we can get it.”
“Got you,” Andy said.
X
“What are you up to?” Tom-Tom Carey asked suspiciously when I rejoined Jack and him.
“Detective business.”
“I ought to have come down and turned the trick all by myself,” he grumbled. “You haven’t done a damned thing but waste time since we started.”
“I’m not the one that’s wasting it now.”
He snorted and set out across the field again, Jack and I following him. At the end of the field there was another fence to be climbed. Then we came over a little wooded ridge and the Newhall house lay before us—a large white house, glistening in the moonlight, with yellow rectangulars where blinds were down over the windows of lighted rooms. The lighted rooms were on the ground floor. The upper floor was dark. Everything was quiet.
“Damn the moonlight!” Tom-Tom Carey repeated, bringing another automatic out of his clothes, so that he now had one in each hand.
Jack started to take his gun out, looked at me, saw I was letting mine rest, let his slide back in his pocket.
Tom-Tom Carey’s face was a dark stone mask—slits for eyes, slit for mouth—the grim mask of a manhunter, a mankiller. He was breathing softly, his big chest moving gently. Beside him, Jack Counihan looked like an excited schoolboy. His face was ghastly, his eyes all stretched out of shape, and he was breathing like a tire-pump. But his grin was genuine, for all the nervousness in it.
“We’ll cross to the house on this side,” I whispered. “Then one of us can take the front, one the back, and the other can wait till he sees where he’s needed most. Right?”
“Right,” the swarthy one agreed.
“Wait!” Jack exclaimed. “The girl came down the vines from an upper window. What’s the matter with my going up that way? I’m lighter than either of you. If they haven’t missed her, the window would still be open. Give me ten minutes to find the window, get through it, and get myself placed. Then when you attack I’ll be there behind them. How’s that?” he demanded applause.
“And what if they grab you as soon as you light?” I objected.
“Suppose they do. I can make enough racket for you to hear. You can gallop to the attack while they’re busy with me. That’ll be just as good.”
“Blue hell!” Tom-Tom Carey barked. “What good’s all that? The other way’s best. One of us at the front door, one at the back, kick
