V
“Meet Mr. Smith”
Right or wrong, that’s what we did. We stowed all those lovely clues away in a drawer, locked the drawer, and forgot them. Then we set out to find Creda Dexter’s masculine acquaintances and sift them for the murderer.
But it wasn’t as simple as it sounded.
All our digging into her past failed to bring to light one man who could be considered a suitor. She and her brother had been in San Francisco three years. We traced them back the length of that period, from apartment to apartment. We questioned everyone we could find who even knew her by sight. And nobody could tell us of a single man who had shown an interest in her besides Gantvoort. Nobody, apparently, had ever seen her with any man except Gantvoort or her brother.
All of which, while not getting us ahead, at least convinced us that we were on the right trail. There must have been, we argued, at least one man in her life in those three years besides Gantvoort. She wasn’t—unless we were very much mistaken—the sort of woman who would discourage masculine attention; and she was certainly endowed by nature to attract it. And if there was another man, then the very fact that he had been kept so thoroughly under cover strengthened the probability of him having been mixed up in Gantvoort’s death.
We were unsuccessful in learning where the Dexters had lived before they came to San Francisco, but we weren’t so very interested in their earlier life. Of course it was possible that some old-time lover had come upon the scene again recently; but in that case it should have been easier to find the recent connection than the old one.
There was no doubt, our explorations showed, that Gantvoort’s son had been correct in thinking the Dexters were fortune hunters. All their activities pointed to that, although there seemed to be nothing downright criminal in their pasts.
I went up against Creda Dexter again, spending an entire afternoon in her apartment, banging away with question after question, all directed toward her former love affairs. Who had she thrown over for Gantvoort and his million and a half? And the answer was always nobody—an answer that I didn’t choose to believe.
We had Creda Dexter shadowed night and day—and it carried us ahead not an inch. Perhaps she suspected that she was being watched. Anyway, she seldom left her apartment, and then on only the most innocent of errands. We had her apartment watched whether she was in it or not. Nobody visited it. We tapped her telephone—and all our listening-in netted us nothing. We had her mail covered—and she didn’t receive a single letter, not even an advertisement.
Meanwhile, we had learned where the three clippings found in the wallet had come from—from the Personal columns of a New York, a Chicago, and a Portland newspaper. The one in the Portland paper had appeared two days before the murder, the Chicago one four days before, and the New York one five days before. All three of those papers would have been on the San Francisco newsstands the day of the murder—ready to be purchased and cut out by anyone who was looking for material to confuse detectives with.
The agency’s Paris correspondent had found no less than six Emil Bonfilses—all bloomers so far as our job was concerned—and had a line on three more.
But O’Gar and I weren’t worrying over Emil Bonfils any more—that angle was dead and buried. We were plugging away at our new task—the finding of Gantvoort’s rival.
Thus the days passed, and thus the matter stood when Madden Dexter was due to arrive home from New York.
Our New York branch had kept an eye on him until he left that city, and had advised us of his departure, so I knew what train he was coming on. I wanted to put a few questions to him before his sister saw him. He could tell me what I wanted to know, and he might be willing to if I could get to him before his sister had an opportunity to shut him up.
If I had known him by sight I could have picked him up when he left his train at Oakland, but I didn’t know him; and I didn’t want to carry Charles Gantvoort or anyone else along with me to pick him out for me.
So I went up to Sacramento that morning, and boarded his train there. I put my card in an envelope and gave it to a messenger boy in the station. Then I followed the boy through the train, while he called out:
“Mr. Dexter! Mr. Dexter!”
In the last car—the observation-club car—a slender, dark-haired man in well-made tweeds turned from watching the station platform through a window and held out his hand to the boy.
I studied him while he nervously tore open the envelope and read my card. His chin trembled slightly just now, emphasizing the weakness of a face that couldn’t have been strong at its best. Between twenty-five and thirty, I placed him; with his hair parted in the middle and slicked down; large, too-expressive brown eyes; small well-shaped nose; neat brown mustache; very red, soft lips—that type.
I dropped into the vacant chair beside him when he looked up from the card.
“You are Mr. Dexter?”
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose it’s about Mr. Gantvoort’s death that you want to see me?”
“Uh-huh. I wanted to ask you a few questions, and since I happened to be in Sacramento, I thought that by riding back on the train with you I could ask them without taking up too much of your time.”
“If there’s anything I can tell you,” he assured me, “I’ll be only too glad to do it. But I told the New York detectives all I knew, and they didn’t seem to find it of much value.”
“Well, the situation has changed some since you left New York.” I watched his face closely as I spoke. “What we thought of no value then may be just what we want now.”
I paused while he moistened his lips and avoided my eyes. He may not know anything, I thought, but he’s certainly jumpy. I let him wait a few minutes while I pretended deep thoughtfulness. If I played him right, I was confident I could turn him inside out. He didn’t seem to be made of very tough material.
We were sitting with our heads close together, so that the four or five other passengers in the car wouldn’t overhear our talk; and that position was in my favor. One of the things that every detective knows is that it’s often easy to get information—even a confession—out of a feeble nature simply by putting your face close to his and talking in a loud tone. I couldn’t talk loud here, but the closeness of our faces was by itself an advantage.
“Of the men with whom your sister was acquainted,” I came out with it at last, “who, outside of Mr. Gantvoort, was the most attentive?”
He swallowed audibly, looked out of the window, fleetingly at me, and then out of the window again.
“Really, I couldn’t say.”
“All right. Let’s get at it this way. Suppose we check off one by one all the men who were interested in her and in whom she was interested.”
He continued to stare out of the window.
“Who’s first?” I pressed him.
His gaze flickered around to meet mine for a second, with a sort of timid desperation in his eyes.
“I know it sounds foolish, but I, her brother, couldn’t give you the name of even one man in whom Creda was interested before she met Gantvoort. She never, so far as I know, had the slightest feeling for any man before she met him. Of course it is possible that there may have been someone that I didn’t know anything about, but—”
It did sound foolish, right enough! The Creda Dexter I had talked to—a sleek kitten, as O’Gar had put it—didn’t impress me as being at all likely to go very long without having at least one man in tow. This pretty little guy in front of me was lying. There couldn’t be any other explanation.
I went at him tooth and nail. But when he reached Oakland early that night he was still sticking to his original statement—that Gantvoort was the only one of his sister’s suitors that he knew anything about. And I knew that I had blundered, had underrated Madden Dexter, had played my hand wrong in trying to shake him down too quickly—in driving too directly at the point I was interested in. He was either a lot stronger than I had figured him, or his interest in concealing Gantvoort’s murderer was much greater than I had thought it would be.
But I had this much: if Dexter was lying—and there couldn’t be much doubt of that—then Gantvoort had had a rival, and Madden Dexter believed or knew that this rival had killed Gantvoort.
When we left the train at Oakland I knew I was licked, that he wasn’t going to tell me what I wanted to know—not this night, anyway. But I clung to him, stuck at his side when we boarded the ferry for San Francisco, in spite of the obviousness of his desire to get away from me. There’s always a chance of something unexpected happening; so I continued to ply him with questions as our boat left the slip.
Presently a man came toward where we were sitting—a big burly man in a light overcoat, carrying a black bag.
“Hello, Madden!” he greeted my companion, striding over to him with outstretched hand. “Just got in and was trying to remember your phone number,” he said, setting down his bag, as they shook hands warmly.
Madden Dexter turned to me.
“I want you to meet Mr. Smith,” he told me, and then gave my name to the big man, adding, “he’s with the Continental Detective Agency here.”
That tag—clearly a warning for Smith’s benefit—brought me to my feet, all watchfulness. But the ferry was crowded—a hundred persons were within sight of us, all around us. I relaxed, smiled pleasantly, and shook hands with Smith. Whoever Smith was, and whatever connection he might have with the murder—and if he hadn’t any, why should Dexter have been in such a hurry to tip him off to my identity?—he couldn’t do anything here. The crowd around us was all to my advantage.
That was my second mistake of the day.
Smith’s left hand had gone into his overcoat pocket—or rather, through one of those vertical slits that certain styles of overcoats have so that inside pockets may be reached without unbuttoning the overcoat. His hand had gone through that slit, and his coat had fallen away far enough for me to see a snub-nosed automatic in his hand—shielded from everyone’s sight but mine—pointing at my waistline.
“Shall we go on deck?” Smith asked—and it was an order.
I hesitated. I didn’t like to leave all these people who were so blindly standing and sitting around us. But Smith’s face wasn’t the face of a cautious man. He had the look of one who might easily disregard the presence of a hundred witnesses.
I turned around and walked through the crowd. His right hand lay familiarly on my shoulder as he walked behind me; his left hand held his gun, under the overcoat, against my spine.
The deck was deserted. A heavy fog, wet as rain—the fog of San Francisco Bay’s winter nights—lay over boat and water, and had driven everyone else inside. It hung about us, thick and impenetrable; I couldn’t see so far as the end of the boat, in spite of the lights glowing overhead.
I stopped.
Smith prodded me in the back.
“Farther away, where we can talk,” he rumbled in my ear.
I went on until I reached the rail.
The entire back of my head burned with sudden fire … tiny points of light glittered in the blackness before me … grew larger … came rushing toward me. …