VII
Sherry’s baggage remained uncalled for in the Los Angeles passenger station all day Saturday. Late that afternoon the sheriff made public the news that Sherry and the black were wanted for murder, and that night the sheriff and I took a train south.
Sunday morning, with a couple of men from the Los Angeles police department, we opened the baggage. We didn’t find anything except legitimate clothing and personal belongings that told us nothing.
That trip paid no dividends.
I returned to San Francisco and had bales of circulars printed and distributed.
Two weeks went by, two weeks in which the circulars brought us nothing but the usual lot of false alarms.
Then the Spokane police picked up Sherry and Marcus in a Stevens Street rooming house.
Some unknown person had phoned the police that one Fred Williams living there had a mysterious black visitor nearly every day, and that their actions were very suspicious. The Spokane police had copies of our circular. They hardly needed the H. S. monograms on Fred Williams’ cuff links and handkerchiefs to assure them that he was our man.
After a couple of hours of being grilled, Sherry admitted his identity, but denied having murdered Kavalov.
Two of the sheriff’s men went north and brought the prisoners down to the county seat.
Sherry had shaved off his mustache. There was nothing in his face or voice to show that he was the least bit worried.
“I knew there was nothing more to wait for after my dream,” he drawled, “so I went away. Then, when I heard the dream had come true, I knew you johnnies would be hot after me—as if one can help his dreams—and I—ah—sought seclusion.”
He solemnly repeated his orange-tree-voice story to the sheriff and district attorney. The newspapers liked it.
He refused to map his route for us, to tell us how he had spent his time.
“No, no,” he said. “Sorry, but I shouldn’t do it. It may be I shall have to do it again some time, and it wouldn’t do to reveal my methods.”
He wouldn’t tell us where he had spent the night of the murder. We were fairly certain that he had left the train before it reached Los Angeles, though the train crew had been able to tell us nothing.
“Sorry,” he drawled. “But if you chaps don’t know where I was, how do you know that I was where the murder was?”
We had even less luck with Marcus. His formula was:
“Not understand the English very good. Ask the capitaine. I don’t know.”
The district attorney spent a lot of time walking his office floor, biting his finger nails, and telling us fiercely that the case was going to fall apart if we couldn’t prove that either Sherry or Marcus was within reach of the Kavalov house at, or shortly before or after, the time of the murder.
The sheriff was the only one of us who hadn’t a sneaky feeling that Sherry’s sleeves were loaded with assorted aces. The sheriff saw him already hanged.
Sherry got a lawyer, a slick looking pale man with horn-rim glasses and a thin twitching mouth. His name was Schaeffer. He went around smiling to himself and at us.
When the district attorney had only thumb nails left and was starting to work on them, I borrowed a car from Ringgo and started following the railroad south, trying to learn where Sherry had left the train. We had mugged the pair, of course, so I carried their photographs with me.
I displayed those damned photographs at every railroad stop between Farewell and Los Angeles, at every village within twenty miles of the tracks on either side, and at most of the houses in between. And it got me nothing.
There was no evidence that Sherry and Marcus hadn’t gone through to Los Angeles.
Their train would have put them there at ten-thirty that night. There was no train out of Los Angeles that would have carried them back to Farewell in time to kill Kavalov. There were two possibilities: an airplane could have carried them back in plenty of time; and an automobile might have been able to do it, though that didn’t look reasonable.
I tried the airplane angle first, and couldn’t find a flyer who had had a passenger that night. With the help of the Los Angeles police and some operatives from the Continental’s Los Angeles branch, I had everybody who owned a plane—public or private—interviewed. All the answers were no.
We tried the less promising automobile angle. The larger taxicab and hire-car companies said, “No.” Four privately owned cars had been reported stolen between ten and twelve o’clock that night. Two of them had been found in the city the next morning: they couldn’t have made the trip to Farewell and back. One of the others had been picked up in San Diego the next day. That let that one out. The other was still loose, a Packard sedan. We got a printer working on post card descriptions of it.
To reach all the small-fry taxi and hire-car owners was quite a job, and then there were the private car owners who might have hired out for one night. We went into the newspapers to cover these fields.
We didn’t get any automobile information, but this new line of inquiry—trying to find traces of our men here a few hours before the murder—brought results of another kind.
At San Pedro (Los Angeles’s seaport, twenty-five miles away) a Negro had been arrested at one o’clock on the morning of the murder. The Negro spoke English poorly, but had papers to prove that he was Pierre Tisano, a French sailor. He had been arrested on a drunk and disorderly charge.
The San Pedro police said that the photograph and description of the man we knew as Marcus fit the drunken sailor exactly.
That wasn’t all the San Pedro police said.
Tisano had been arrested at one o’clock. At a little after two o’clock, a white man who gave his name as Henry Somerton had appeared and had tried to bail the Negro out. The desk sergeant had told Somerton that nothing could be done till morning, and that, anyway, it would be better to let Tisano sleep off his jag before removing him. Somerton had readily agreed to that, had remained talking to the desk sergeant for more than half an hour, and had left at about three. At ten o’clock that morning he had reappeared to pay the black man’s fine. They had gone away together.
The San Pedro police said that Sherry’s photograph—without the mustache—and description were Henry Somerton’s.
Henry Somerton’s signature on the register of the hotel to which he had gone between his two visits to the police matched the handwriting in Sherry’s note to the bungalow’s owner.
It was pretty clear that Sherry and Marcus had been in San Pedro—a nine-hour train ride from Farewell—at the time that Kavalov was murdered.
Pretty clear isn’t quite clear enough in a murder job: I carried the San Pedro desk sergeant north with me for a look at the two men.
“Them’s them, all righty,” he said.