Creeping Siamese and Other Stories (14 page)

The police easily ran back the trail of blood drops. They ended with a red smear in an alley beside a small hotel just off Market Street. In the hotel, the police found the room from which the man had jumped, fallen, or been thrown. The bed was soggy with blood. On it were torn and twisted sheets that had been knotted and used rope-wise. There was also a towel that had been used as a gag.

The evidence read that the naked man had been gagged, trussed up and worked on with a knife. The doctors said the ribbons of flesh had been cut loose, not torn or clawed. After the knife-user had gone away, the naked man had worked free of his bonds, and, probably crazed by pain, had either jumped or fallen out of the window. The fall had crushed his skull and broken his arm, but he had managed to walk a block and a half in that condition.

The hotel management said the man had been there two days. He was registered as H. F. Barrows, City. He had a black gladstone bag in which, besides clothes, shaving implements and so on, the police found a box of .38 cartridges, a black handkerchief with eye-holes cut in it, four skeleton keys, a small jimmy, and a quantity of morphine, with a needle and the rest of the kit. Elsewhere in the room they found the rest of his clothes, a .38 revolver and two quarts of liquor. They didn't find a cent.

The supposition was that Barrows had been a burglar, and that he had been tied up, tortured and robbed, probably by pals, between eight and nine that morning. Nobody knew anything about him. Nobody had seen his visitor or visitors. The room next to his on the left was unoccupied. The occupant of the room on the other side had left for his work in a furniture factory before seven o'clock.

While this was happening I was at the office, sitting forward in my chair to spare my back, reading reports, all of which told how operatives attached to various Continental Detective Agency branches had continued to fail to turn up any indications of the past, present, or future whereabouts of Papadopoulos and Nancy Regan. There was nothing novel about these reports—I had been reading similar ones for three weeks.

The Old Man and I went out to luncheon together, and I told him about the previous night's adventures in Sausalito while we ate. His grandfatherly face was as attentive as always, and his smile as politely interested, but when I was half through my story he turned his mild blue eyes from my face to his salad and he stared at his salad until I had finished talking. Then, still not looking up, he said he was sorry I had been cut. I thanked him and we ate a while.

Finally he looked at me. The mildness and courtesy he habitually wore over his cold-bloodedness were in face and eyes and voice as he said:

“This first indication that Papadopoulos is still alive came immediately after Tom-Tom Carey's arrival.”

It was my turn to shift my eyes.

I looked at the roll I was breaking while I said: “Yes.”

That afternoon a phone call came in from a woman out in the Mission who had seen some highly mysterious happenings and was sure they had something to do with the well-advertised bank robberies. So I went out to see her and spent most of the afternoon learning that half of her happenings were imaginary and the other half were the efforts of a jealous wife to get the low-down on her husband.

It was nearly six o'clock when I returned to the Agency. A few minutes later Dick Foley called me on the phone. His teeth were chattering until I could hardly get the words.

“C-c-canyoug-g-get-t-townt-t-tooth-ar-r-rbr-r-spittle?”

“What?” I asked, and he said the same thing again, or worse. But by this time I had guessed that he was asking me if I could get down to the Harbor Hospital.

I told him I could in ten minutes, and with the help of a taxi I did.

V

The little Canadian operative met me at the hospital door. His clothes and hair were dripping wet, but he had had a shot of whisky and his teeth had stopped chattering.

“Damned fool jumped in bay!” he barked as if it were my fault.

“Angel Grace?”

“Who else was I shadowing? Got on Oakland ferry. Moved off by self by rail. Thought she was going to throw something over. Kept eye on her. Bingo! She jumps.” Dick sneezed. “I was goofy enough to jump after her. Held her up. Were fished out. In there,” nodding his wet head toward the interior of the hospital.

“What happened before she took the ferry?”

“Nothing. Been in joint all day. Straight out to ferry.”

“How about yesterday?”

“Apartment all day. Out at night with man. Roadhouse. Home at four. Bad break. Couldn't tail him off.”

“What did he look like?”

The man Dick described was Tom-Tom Carey.

“Good,” I said. “You'd better beat it home for a hot bath and some dry rags.”

I went in to see the near-suicide.

She was lying on her back on a cot, staring at the ceiling. Her face was pale, but it always was, and her green eyes were no more sullen than usual. Except that her short hair was dark with dampness she didn't look as if anything out of the ordinary had happened.

“You think of the funniest things to do,” I said when I was beside the bed.

She jumped and her face jerked around to me, startled. Then she recognized me and smiled—a smile that brought into her face the attractiveness that habitual sullenness kept out.

“You have to keep in practice—sneaking up on people?” she asked. “Who told you I was here?”

“Everybody knows it. Your pictures are all over the front pages of the newspapers, with your life history and what you said to the Prince of Wales.”

She stopped smiling and looked steadily at me.

“I got it!” she exclaimed after a few seconds. “That runt who came in after me was one of your ops—tailing me. Wasn't he?”

“I didn't know anybody had to go in after you,” I answered. “I thought you came ashore after you had finished your swim. Didn't you want to land?”

She wouldn't smile. Her eyes began to look at something horrible.

“Oh! Why didn't they let me alone?” she wailed, shuddering. “It's a rotten thing, living.”

I sat down on a small chair beside the white bed and patted the lump her shoulder made in the sheets.

“What was it?” I was surprised at the fatherly tone I achieved. “What did you want to die for, Angel?”

Words that wanted to be said were shiny in her eyes, tugged at muscles in her face, shaped her lips—but that was all. The words she said came out listlessly, but with a reluctant sort of finality. They were:

“No. You're law. I'm thief. I'm staying on my side of the fence. Nobody can say—”

“All right! All right!” I surrendered. “But for God's sake don't make me listen to another of those ethical arguments. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Thanks, no.”

“There's nothing you want to tell me?”

She shook her head.

“You're all right now?”

“Yes. I was being shadowed, wasn't I? Or you wouldn't have known about it so soon.”

“I'm a detective—I know everything. Be a good girl.”

From the hospital I went up to the Hall of Justice, to the police detective bureau. Lieutenant Duff was holding down the captain's desk. I told him about the Angel's dive.

“Got any idea what she was up to?” he wanted to know when I had finished.

“She's too far off center to figure. I want her vagged.”

“Yeah? I thought you wanted her loose so you could catch her.”

“That's about played out now. I'd like to try throwing her in the can for thirty days. Big Flora is in waiting trial. The Angel knows Flora was one of the troupe that rubbed out her Paddy. Maybe Flora don't know the Angel. Let's see what will come of mixing the two babies for a month.”

“Can do,” Duff agreed. “This Angel's got no visible means of support, and it's a cinch she's got no business running around jumping in people's bays. I'll put the word through.”

From the Hall of Justice I went up to the Ellis Street hotel at which Tom-Tom Carey had told me he was registered. He was out. I left word that I would be back in an hour, and used that hour to eat. When I returned to the hotel the tall swarthy man was sitting in the lobby. He took me up to his room and set out gin, orange juice and cigars.

“Seen Angel Grace?” I asked.

“Yes, last night. We did the dumps.”

“Seen her today?”

“No.”

“She jumped in the bay this afternoon.”

“The hell she did.” He seemed moderately surprised. “And then?”

“She was fished out. She's O.K.”

The shadow in his eyes could have been some slight disappointment.

“She's a funny sort of kid,” he remarked. “I wouldn't say Paddy didn't show good taste when he picked her, but she's a queer one!”

“How's the Papadopoulos hunt progressing?”

“It is. But you oughtn't have split on your word. You half-way promised you wouldn't have me shadowed.”

“I'm not the big boss,” I apologized. “Sometimes what I want don't fit in with what the headman wants. This shouldn't bother you much—you can shake him, can't you?”

“Uh-huh. That's what I've been doing. But it's a damned nuisance jumping in and out of taxis and back doors.”

We talked and drank a few minutes longer, and then I left Carey's room and hotel, and went to a drug-store telephone booth, where I called Dick Foley's home, and gave Dick the swarthy man's description and address.

“I don't want you to tail Carey, Dick. I want you to find out who is trying to tail him—and that shadower is the bird you're to stick to. The morning will be time enough to start—get yourself dried out.”

And that was the end of that day.

VI

I woke to a disagreeable rainy morning. Maybe it was the weather, maybe I'd been too frisky the day before, anyway the slit in my back was like a foot-long boil. I phoned Dr. Canova, who lived on the floor below me, and had him look at the cut before he left for his downtown office. He rebandaged it and told me to take life easy for a couple of days. It felt better after he had fooled with it, but I phoned the Agency and told the Old Man that unless something exciting broke I was going to stay on sick-call all day.

I spent the day propped up in front of the gas-log, reading, and smoking cigarettes that wouldn't burn right on account of the weather. That night I used the phone to organize a poker game, in which I got very little action one way or the other. In the end I was fifteen dollars ahead, which was just about five dollars less than enough to pay for the booze my guests had drunk on me.

My back was better the following day, and so was the day. I went down to the Agency. There was a memorandum on my desk saying Duff had phoned that Angel Grace Cardigan had been vagged—thirty days in the city prison. There was a familiar pile of reports from various branches on their operatives' inability to pick up anything on Papadopoulos and Nancy Regan. I was running through these when Dick Foley came in.

“Made him,” he reported. “Thirty or thirty-two. Five, six. Hundred, thirty. Sandy hair, complexion. Blue eye. Thin face, some skin off. Rat. Lives dump in Seventh Street.”

“What did he do?”

“Tailed Carey one block. Carey shook him. Hunted for Carey till two in morning. Didn't find him. Went home. Take him again?”

“Go up to his flophouse and find out who he is.”

The little Canadian was gone half an hour.

“Sam Arlie,” he said when he returned. “Been there six months. Supposed to be barber—when he's working—if ever.”

“I've got two guesses about this Arlie,” I told Dick. “The first is that he's the gink who carved me in Sausalito the other night. The second is that something's going to happen to him.”

It was against Dick's rules to waste words, so he said nothing.

I called Tom-Tom Carey's hotel and got the swarthy man on the wire.

“Come over,” I invited him. “I've got some news for you.”

“As soon as I'm dressed and breakfasted,” he promised.

“When Carey leaves here you're to go along behind him,” I told Dick after I had hung up. “If Arlie connects with him now, maybe there'll be something doing. Try to see it.”

Then I phoned the detective bureau and made a date with Sergeant Hunt to visit Angel Grace Cardigan's apartment. After that I busied myself with paper work until Tommy came in to announce the swarthy man from Nogales.

“The jobbie who's tailing you,” I informed him when he had sat down and begun work on a cigarette, “is a barber named Arlie,” and I told him where Arlie lived.

“Yes. A slim-faced, sandy lad?”

I gave him the description Dick had given me.

“That's the hombre,” Tom-Tom Carey said. “Know anything else about him?”

“No.”

“You had Angel Grace vagged.”

It was neither an accusation nor a question, so I didn't answer it.

“It's just as well,” the tall man went on. “I'd have had to send her away. She was bound to gum things with her foolishness when I got ready to swing the loop.”

“That'll be soon?”

“That all depends on how it happens.” He stood up, yawned and shook his wide shoulders. “But nobody would starve to death if they decided not to eat any more till I'd got him. I oughtn't have accused you of having me shadowed.”

“It didn't spoil my day.”

Tom-Tom Carey said, “So long,” and sauntered out.

I rode down to the Hall of Justice, picked up Hunt, and we went to the Bush Street apartment house in which Angel Grace Cardigan had lived. The manager—a highly scented fat woman with a hard mouth and soft eyes—already knew her tenant was in the cooler. She willingly took us up to the girl's rooms.

The Angel wasn't a good housekeeper. Things were clean enough, but upset. The kitchen sink was full of dirty dishes. The folding bed was worse than loosely made up. Clothes and odds and ends of feminine equipment hung over everything from bathroom to kitchen.