IV
I went back to the Hall and helped boil more prisoners in oil until around eight o’clock, when my appetite reminded me I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I attended to that, and then turned down toward Larrouy’s, ambling along leisurely, so the exercise wouldn’t interfere with my digestion. I spent three-quarters of an hour in Larrouy’s, and didn’t see anybody who interested me especially. A few gents I knew were present, but they weren’t anxious to associate with me—it’s not always healthy in criminal circles to be seen wagging your chin with a sleuth right after a job has been turned.
Not getting anything there, I moved up the street to Wop Healy’s—another hole. My reception was the same here—I was given a table and let alone. Healy’s orchestra was giving “Don’t You Cheat,” all they had, while those customers who felt athletic were romping it out on the dance-floor. One of the dancers was Jack Counihan, his arms full of a big olive-skinned girl with a pleasant, thick-featured, stupid face.
Jack was a tall, slender lad of twenty-three or four who had drifted into the Continental’s employ a few months before. It was the first job he’d ever had, and he wouldn’t have had it if his father hadn’t insisted that if sonny wanted to keep his fingers in the family till he’d have to get over the notion that squeezing through a college graduation was enough work for one lifetime. So Jack came to the agency. He thought gumshoeing would be fun. In spite of the fact that he’d rather catch the wrong man than wear the wrong necktie, he was a promising young thief-catcher. A likable youngster, well-muscled for all his slimness, smooth-haired, with a gentleman’s face and a gentleman’s manner, nervy, quick with head and hands, full of the don’t-give-a-damn gaiety that belonged to his youthfulness. He was jingle-brained, of course, and needed holding, but I would rather work with him than with a lot of old-timers I knew.
Half an hour passed with nothing to interest me.
Then a boy came into Healy’s from the street—a small kid, gaudily dressed, very pressed in the pants-legs, very shiny in the shoes, with an impudent sallow face of pronounced cast. This was the boy I had seen sauntering down Broadway a moment after Beno had been rubbed out.
Leaning back in my chair so that a woman’s wide-hatted head was between us, I watched the young Armenian wind between tables to one in a far corner, where three men sat. He spoke to them—offhand—perhaps a dozen words—and moved away to another table where a snub-nosed, black-haired man sat alone. The boy dropped into the chair facing snub-nose, spoke a few words, sneered at snub-nose’s questions, and ordered a drink. When his glass was empty he crossed the room to speak to a lean, buzzard-faced man, and then went out of Healy’s.
I followed him out, passing the table where Jack sat with the girl, catching his eye. Outside, I saw the young Armenian half a block away. Jack Counihan caught up with me, passed me. With a Fatima in my mouth I called to him:
“Got a match, brother?”
While I lighted my cigarette with a match from the box he gave me I spoke behind my hands:
“The goose in the glad rags—tail him. I’ll string behind you. I don’t know him, but if he blipped Beno off for talking to me last night, he knows me. On his heels!”
Jack pocketed his matches and went after the boy. I gave Jack a lead and then followed him. And then an interesting thing happened.
The street was fairly well filled with people, mostly men, some walking, some loafing on corners and in front of soft-drink parlors. As the young Armenian reached the corner of an alley where there was a light, two men came up and spoke to him, moving a little apart so that he was between them. The boy would have kept walking apparently paying no attention to them, but one checked him by stretching an arm out in front of him. The other man took his right hand out of his pocket and flourished it in the boy’s face so that the nickel-plated knuckles on it twinkled in the light. The boy ducked swiftly under threatening hand and outstretched arm, and went on across the alley, walking, and not even looking over his shoulder at the two men who were now closing on his back.
Just before they reached him another reached them—a broad-backed, long-armed, ape-built man I had not seen before. His gorilla’s paws went out together. Each caught a man. By the napes of their necks he yanked them away from the boy’s back, shook them till their hats fell off, smacked their skulls together with a crack that was like a broom-handle breaking, and dragged their rag-limp bodies out of sight up the alley. While this was happening the boy walked jauntily down the street, without a backward glance.
When the skull-cracker came out of the alley I saw his face in the light—a dark-skinned, heavily-lined face, broad and flat, with jaw-muscles bulging like abscesses under his ears. He spit, hitched his pants, and swaggered down the street after the boy.
The boy went into Larrouy’s. The skull-cracker followed him in. The boy came out, and in his rear—perhaps twenty feet behind—the skull-cracker rolled. Jack had tailed them into Larrouy’s while I had held up the outside.
“Still carrying messages?” I asked.
“Yes. He spoke to five men in there. He’s got plenty of bodyguard, hasn’t he?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “And you be damned careful you don’t get between them. If they split, I’ll shadow the skull-cracker, you keep the goose.”
We separated and moved after our game. They took us to all the hangouts in San Francisco, to cabarets, grease-joints, poolrooms, saloons, flophouses, hook-shops, gambling-joints and what have you. Everywhere the kid found men to speak his dozen words to, and between calls, he found them on street-corners.
I would have liked to get behind some of these birds, but I didn’t want to leave Jack alone with the boy and his bodyguard—they seemed to mean too much. And I couldn’t stick Jack on one of the others, because it wasn’t safe for me to hang too close to the Armenian boy. So we played the game as we had started it, shadowing our pair from hole to hole, while night got on toward morning.
It was a few minutes past midnight when they came out of a small hotel up on Kearny Street, and for the first time since we had seen them they walked together, side by side, up to Green Street, where they turned east along the side of Telegraph Hill. Half a block of this, and they climbed the front steps of a ramshackle furnished-room house and disappeared inside. I joined Jack Counihan on the corner where he had stopped.
“The greetings have all been delivered,” I guessed, “or he wouldn’t have called in his bodyguard. If there’s nothing stirring within the next half hour I’m going to beat it. You’ll have to take a plant on the joint till morning.”
Twenty minutes later the skull-cracker came out of the house and walked down the street.
“I’ll take him,” I said. “You stick to the other baby.”
The skull-cracker took ten or twelve steps from the house and stopped. He looked back at the house, raising his face to look at the upper stories. Then Jack and I could hear what had stopped him. Up in the house a man was screaming. It wasn’t much of a scream in volume. Even now, when it had increased in strength, it barely reached our ears. But in it—in that one wailing voice—everything that fears death seemed to cry out its fear. I heard Jack’s teeth click. I’ve got horny skin all over what’s left of my soul, but just the same my forehead twitched. The scream was so damned weak for what it said.
The skull-cracker moved. Five gliding strides carried him back to the house. He didn’t touch one of the six or seven front steps. He went from pavement to vestibule in a spring no monkey could have beaten for swiftness, ease or silence. One minute, two minutes, three minutes, and the screaming stopped. Three more minutes and the skull-cracker was leaving the house again. He paused on the sidewalk to spit and hitch his pants. Then he swaggered off down the street.
“He’s your meat, Jack,” I said. “I’m going to call on the boy. He won’t recognize me now.”