IX
“The hotel-sneak used to be my lay,” the Englishman said after a pause. “I came to the States after England and the Continent got uncomfortable. I was rather good at it. I had the proper manner—the front. I could do the gentleman without sweating over it, you know. In fact there was a day, not so long ago, when I wasn’t ‘Liverpool Ed.’ But you don’t want to hear me brag about the select blood that flows through these veins.
“To get back to our knitting: I had rather a successful tour on my first American voyage. I visited most of the better hotels between New York and Seattle, and profited nicely. Then, one night in a Seattle hotel, I worked the tarrel and put myself into a room on the fourth floor. I had hardly closed the door behind me before another key was rattling in it. The room was night-dark. I risked a flash from my light, picked out a closet door, and got behind it just in time.
“The clothes closet was empty; rather a stroke of luck, since there was nothing in it for the room’s occupant to come for. He—it was a man—had switched on the lights by then.
“He began pacing the floor. He paced it for three solid hours—up and down, up and down, up and down—while I stood behind the closet door with my gun in my hand, in case he should pull it open. For three solid hours he paced that damned floor. Then he sat down and I heard a pen scratching on paper. Ten minutes of that and he was back at his pacing; but he kept it up for only a few minutes this time. I heard the latches of a valise click. And a shot!
“I bounded out of my retreat. He was stretched on the floor, with a hole in the side of his head. A bad break for me, and no mistake! I could hear excited voices in the corridor. I stepped over the dead chap, found the letter he had been writing on the writing-desk. It was addressed to Mrs. Norman Ashcraft, at a Wine Street number in Bristol, England. I tore it open. He had written that he was going to kill himself, and it was signed Norman. I felt better. A murder couldn’t be made out of it.
“Nevertheless, I was here in this room with a flashlight, skeleton keys, and a gun—to say nothing of a handful of jewelry that I had picked up on the next floor. Somebody was knocking on the door.
“ ‘Get the police!’ I called through the door, playing for time.
“Then I turned to the man who had let me in for all this. I would have pegged him for a fellow Britisher even if I hadn’t seen the address on his letter. There are thousands of us on the same order—blond, fairly tall, well set up. I took the only chance there was. His hat and topcoat were on a chair where he had tossed them. I put them on and dropped my hat beside him. Kneeling, I emptied his pockets, and my own, gave him all my stuff, pouched all of his. Then I traded guns with him and opened the door.
“What I had in mind was that the first arrivals might not know him by sight, or not well enough to recognize him immediately. That would give me several seconds to arrange my disappearance in. But when I opened the door I found that my idea wouldn’t work out as I had planned. The house detective was there, and a policeman, and I knew I was licked. There would be little chance of sneaking away from them. But I played my hand out. I told them I had come up to my room and found this chap on the floor going through my belongings. I had seized him, and in the struggle had shot him.
“Minutes went by like hours, and nobody denounced me. People were calling me Mr. Ashcraft. My impersonation was succeeding. It had me gasping then, but after I learned more about Ashcraft it wasn’t so surprising. He had arrived at the hotel only that afternoon, and no one had seen him except in his hat and coat—the hat and coat I was wearing. We were of the same size and type—typical blond Englishmen.
“Then I got another surprise. When the detective examined the dead man’s clothes he found that the maker’s labels had been ripped out. When I got a look at his diary, later, I found the explanation of that. He had been tossing mental coins with himself, alternating between a determination to kill himself, and another to change his name and make a new place for himself in the world—putting his old life behind him. It was while he was considering the second plan that he had removed the markers from all of his clothing.
“But I didn’t know that while I stood there among those people. All I knew was that miracles were happening. I met the miracles halfway, not turning a hair, accepting everything as a matter of course. I think the police smelled something wrong, but they couldn’t put their hands on it. There was the dead man on the floor, with a prowler’s outfit in his pockets, a pocketful of stolen jewelry, and the labels gone from his clothes—a burglar’s trick. And there I was—a well-to-do Englishman whom the hotel people recognized as the room’s rightful occupant.
“I had to talk small just then, but after I went through the dead man’s stuff I knew him inside and outside, backward and forward. He had nearly a bushel of papers, and a diary that had everything he had ever done or thought in it. I put in the first night studying those things—memorizing them—and practicing his signature. Among the other things I had taken from his pockets were fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks, and I wanted to be able to get them cashed in the morning.
“I stayed in Seattle for three days—as Norman Ashcraft. I had tumbled into something rich and I wasn’t going to throw it away. The letter to his wife would keep me from being charged with murder if anything slipped, and I knew I was safer seeing the thing through than running. When the excitement had quieted down I packed up and came down to San Francisco, resuming my own name—Edward Bohannon. But I held onto all of Ashcraft’s property, because I had learned from it that his wife had money, and I knew I could get some of it if I played my cards right.
“She saved me the trouble of figuring out a deal for myself. I ran across one of her advertisements in the Examiner, answered it, and—here we are.”
I looked toward Tijuana. A cloud of yellow dust showed in a notch between two low hills. That would be the machine in which Gorman and Hooper were tracking me. Hooper would have seen me set out after the Englishman, would have waited for Gorman to arrive in the car in which he had followed Gooseneck from Mexicali—Gorman would have had to stay some distance in the rear—and then both of the operatives would have picked up my trail.
I turned to the Englishman.
“But you didn’t have Mrs. Ashcraft killed?”
He shook his head.
“You’ll never prove it.”
“Maybe not,” I admitted.
I took a package of cigarettes out of my pocket and put two of them on the seat between us.
“Suppose we play a game. This is just for my own satisfaction. It won’t tie anybody to anything—won’t prove anything. If you did a certain thing, pick up the cigarette that is nearer me. If you didn’t do that thing, pick up the one nearer you. Will you play?”
“No, I won’t,” he said emphatically. “I don’t like your game. But I do want a cigarette.”
He reached out his uninjured arm and picked up the cigarette nearer me.
“Thanks, Ed,” I said. “Now I hate to tell you this, but I’m going to swing you.”
“You’re balmy, my son.”
“You’re thinking of the San Francisco job, Ed,” I explained. “I’m talking about Seattle. You, a hotel sneak-thief, were discovered in a room with a man who had just died with a bullet in his head. What do you think a jury will make out of that, Ed?”
He laughed at me. And then something went wrong with the laugh. It faded into a sickly grin.
“Of course you did,” I said. “When you started to work out your plan to inherit all of Mrs. Ashcraft’s wealth by having her killed, the first thing you did was to destroy that suicide letter of her husband’s. No matter how carefully you guarded it, there was always a chance that somebody would stumble into it and knock your game on the head. It had served its purpose—you wouldn’t need it. It would be foolish to take a chance on it turning up.
“I can’t put you up for the murders you engineered in San Francisco; but I can sock you with the one you didn’t do in Seattle—so justice won’t be cheated. You’re going to Seattle, Ed, to hang for Ashcraft’s suicide.”
And he did.