II
On the afternoon of the first, I went down to the post office and got hold of Lusk, the inspector in charge of the division at the time.
“I’ve got a line on a scratcher from up north,” I told Lusk, “who is supposed to be getting his mail at the window. Will you fix it up so I can get a spot on him?”
Post office inspectors are all tied up with rules and regulations that forbid their giving assistance to private detectives except on certain criminal matters. But a friendly inspector doesn’t have to put you through the third degree. You lie to him—so that he will have an alibi in case there’s a kickback—and whether he thinks you’re lying or not doesn’t matter.
So presently I was downstairs again, loitering within sight of the A to D window, with the clerk at the window instructed to give me the office when Ashcraft’s mail was called for. There was no mail for him there at the time. Mrs. Ashcraft’s letter would hardly get to the clerks that afternoon, but I was taking no chances. I stayed on the job until the windows closed at eight o’clock, and then went home.
At a few minutes after ten the next morning I got my action. One of the clerks gave me the signal. A small man in a blue suit and a soft gray hat was walking away from the window with an envelope in his hand. A man of perhaps forty years, though he looked older. His face was pasty, his feet dragged, and, although his clothes were fairly new, they needed brushing and pressing.
He came straight to the desk in front of which I stood fiddling with some papers. Out of the tail of my eye I saw that he had not opened the envelope in his hand—was not going to open it. He took a large envelope from his pocket, and I got just enough of a glimpse of its front to see that it was already stamped and addressed. I twisted my neck out of joint trying to read the address, but failed. He kept the addressed side against his body, put the letter he had got from the window in it, and licked the flap backward, so that there was no possible way for anybody to see the front of the envelope. Then he rubbed the flap down carefully and turned toward the mailing slots. I went after him. There was nothing to do but to pull the always reliable stumble.
I overtook him, stepped close and faked a fall on the marble floor, bumping into him, grabbing him as if to regain my balance. It went rotten. In the middle of my stunt my foot really did slip, and we went down on the floor like a pair of wrestlers, with him under me. To botch the trick thoroughly, he fell with the envelope pinned under him.
I scrambled up, yanked him to his feet, mumbled an apology and almost had to push him out of the way to beat him to the envelope that lay face down on the floor. I had to turn it over as I handed it to him in order to get the address:
Mr. Edward Bohannon,
Golden Horseshoe Café,
Tijuana, Baja California,
Mexico.
I had the address, but I had tipped my mitt. There was no way in God’s world for this little man in blue to miss knowing that I had been trying to get that address.
I dusted myself off while he put his envelope through a slot. He didn’t come back past me, but went on down toward the Mission Street exit. I couldn’t let him get away with what he knew. I didn’t want Ashcraft tipped off before I got to him. I would have to try another trick as ancient as the one the slippery floor had bungled for me. I set out after the little man again.
Just as I reached his side he turned his head to see if he was being followed.
“Hello, Micky!” I hailed him. “How’s everything in Chi?”
“You got me wrong.” He spoke out of the side of his gray-lipped mouth, not stopping. “I don’t know nothin’ about Chi.”
His eyes were pale blue, with needlepoint pupils—the eyes of a heroin or morphine user.
“Quit stalling.” I walked along at his side. We had left the building by this time and were going down Mission Street. “You fell off the rattler only this morning.”
He stopped on the sidewalk and faced me.
“Me? Who do you think I am?”
“You’re Micky Parker. The Dutchman gave us the rap that you were headed here. They got him—if you don’t already know it.”
“You’re cuckoo,” he sneered. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about!”
That was nothing—neither did I. I raised my right hand in my overcoat pocket.
“Now I’ll tell one,” I growled at him. “And keep your hands away from your clothes or I’ll let the guts out of you.”
He flinched away from my bulging pocket.
“Hey, listen, brother!” he begged. “You got me wrong—on the level. My name ain’t Micky Parker, an’ I ain’t been in Chi in six years. I been here in Frisco for a solid year, an’ that’s the truth.”
“You got to show me.”
“I can do it,” he exclaimed, all eagerness. “You come down the drag with me, an’ I’ll show you. My name’s Ryan, an’ I been livin’ aroun’ the corner here on Sixth Street for six or eight months.”
“Ryan?” I asked.
“Yes—John Ryan.”
I chalked that up against him. Of course there have been Ryans christened John, but not enough of them to account for the number of times that name appears in criminal records. I don’t suppose there are three old-time yeggs in the country who haven’t used the name at least once; it’s the John Smith of yeggdom.
This particular John Ryan led me around to a house on Sixth Street, where the landlady—a rough-hewn woman of fifty, with bare arms that were haired and muscled like the village smithy’s—assured me that her tenant had to her positive knowledge been in San Francisco for months, and that she remembered seeing him at least once a day for a couple of weeks back. If I had been really suspicious that this Ryan was my mythical Micky Parker from Chicago, I wouldn’t have taken the woman’s word for it, but as it was I pretended to be satisfied.
That seemed to be all right then. Mr. Ryan had been led astray, had been convinced that I had mistaken him for another crook, and that I was not interested in the Ashcraft letter. I would be safe—reasonably safe—in letting the situation go as it stood. But loose ends worry me. And you can’t always count on people doing and thinking what you want. This bird was a hophead, and he had given me a phony-sounding name, so …
“What do you do for a living?” I asked him.
“I ain’t been doin’ nothin’ for a coupla months,” he pattered, “but I expec’ to open a lunch room with a fella nex’ week.”
“Let’s go up to your room,” I suggested. “I want to talk to you.”
He wasn’t enthusiastic, but he took me up. He had two rooms and a kitchen on the third floor. They were dirty, foul-smelling rooms. I dangled a leg from the corner of a table and waved him into a squeaky rocking chair in front of me. His pasty face and dopey eyes were uneasy.
“Where’s Ashcraft?” I threw at him. He jerked, and then looked at the floor.
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” he mumbled.
“You’d better figure it out,” I advised him, “or there’s a nice cool cell down in the booby-hutch that will be wrapped around you.”
“You ain’t got nothin’ on me.”
“What of that? How’d you like to do a thirty or a sixty on a vag charge?”
“Vag, hell!” he snarled, looking up at me. “I got five hundred smacks in my kick. Does that look like you can vag me?”
I grinned down at him.
“You know better than that, Ryan. A pocketful of money’ll get you nothing in California. You’ve got no job. You can’t show where your money comes from. You’re made to order for the vag law.”
I had this bird figured as a dope peddler. If he was—or was anything else off color that might come to light when he was vagged—the chances were that he would be willing to sell Ashcraft out to save himself; especially since, so far as I knew, Ashcraft wasn’t on the wrong side of the criminal law.
“If I were you,” I went on while he stared at the floor and thought, “I’d be a nice, obliging fellow and do my talking now. You’re—”
He twisted sidewise in his chair and one of his hands went behind him.
I kicked him out of his chair.
The table slipped under me or I would have stretched him. As it was, the foot that I aimed at his jaw took him on the chest and carried him over backward, with the rocking-chair piled on top of him. I pulled the chair off and took his gun—a cheap nickel-plated .32. Then I went back to my seat on the corner of the table.
He had only that one flash of fight in him. He got up sniveling.
“I’ll tell you. I don’t want no trouble, an’ it ain’t nothin’ to me. I didn’t know there was nothin’ wrong. This Ashcraft told me he was jus’ stringin’ his wife along. He give me ten bucks a throw to get his letter ever’ month an’ send it to him in Tijuana. I knowed him here, an’ when he went south six months ago—he’s got a girl down there—I promised I’d do it for him. I knowed it was money—he said it was his ‘alimony’—but I didn’t know there was nothin’ wrong.”
“What sort of a hombre is this Ashcraft? What’s his graft?”
“I don’t know. He could be a con man—he’s got a good front. He’s a Englishman, an’ mostly goes by the name of Ed Bohannon. He hits the hop. I don’t use it myself”—that was a good one—“but you know how it is in a burg like this, a man runs into all kinds of people. I don’t know nothin’ about what he’s up to. I jus’ send the money ever’ month an’ get my ten.”
That was all I could get out of him. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me where Ashcraft had lived in San Francisco or who he had mobbed up with. However, I had learned that Bohannon was Ashcraft, and not another go-between, and that was something.
Ryan squawked his head off when he found that I was going to vag him anyway. For a moment it looked like I would have to kick him loose from his backbone again.
“You said you’d spring me if I talked,” he wailed.
“I did not. But if I had—when a gent flashes a rod on me I figure it cancels any agreement we might have had. Come on.”
I couldn’t afford to let him run around loose until I got in touch with Ashcraft. He would have been sending a telegram before I was three blocks away, and my quarry would be on his merry way to points north, east, south and west.
It was a good hunch I played in nabbing Ryan. When he was fingerprinted at the Hall of Justice he turned out to be one Fred Rooney, alias “Jamocha,” a peddler and smuggler who had crushed out of the Federal Prison at Leavenworth, leaving eight years of a tenner still unserved.
“Will you sew him up for a couple of days?” I asked the captain of the city jail. “I’ve got work to do that will go smoother if he can’t get any word out for a while.”
“Sure,” the captain promised. “The federal people won’t take him off our hands for two or three days. I’ll keep him airtight till then.”