His stick was suddenly gone from him. One instant he held and spun it; the next, he was holding up a clenched fist that was empty – the ebony had vanished as if in a puff of smoke. He swung the girl up over the car door, hammered her down into the car – jammed her down upon the legs of a man who stood there – heard a bone break, and saw the man go down. Hands gripped him everywhere; hands pounded him. He cried aloud with joy when he saw the girl, huddled on the floor of the car, working with ridiculously small hands at the car’s mechanism.
The machine began to move. Holding with his hands, he lashed both feet out behind. Got them back on the step. Struck over the girl’s head with a hand that had neither thought nor time to make a fist – struck stiff-fingered into a broad red face.
The car moved. One of the girl’s hands came up to grasp the wheel, holding the car straight along a street she could not see. A man fell on her. Steve pulled him off – tore pieces from him – tore hair and flesh. The car swerved, scraped a building; scraped one side clear of men. The hands that held Steve fell away from him, taking most of his clothing with them. He picked a man off the back of the seat, and pushed him down into the street that was flowing past them. Then he fell into the car beside the girl.
Pistols exploded behind them. From a house a little ahead a bitter-voiced riflw emptied itself at them, sieving a mudguard. Then the desert – white and smooth as a gigantic hospital bed – was around them. Whatever pursuit there had been was left far behind.
Presently the girl slowed down, stopped.
“Are you all right?” Steve asked.
“Yes; but you’re -“
“All in one piece,” he assured her. “Let me take the wheel.”
“No! No!” she protested. “You’re bleeding. You’re -“
“No! No!” he mocked her. “We’d better keep going until we hit something. We’re not far enough from Izzard yet to call ourselves safe.”
He was afraid that if she tried to patch him up he would fall apart in her hands. He felt like that.
She started the car, and they went on. A great sleepiness came to him. What a fight! What a fight!
“Look at the sky!” she exclaimed.
He opened his heavy eyes. Ahead of them, above them, the sky was lightening – from blue-black to violet, to mauve, to rose. He turned his head and looked back. Where they had left Izzard, a monstrous bonfire was burning, painting the sky with jewelled radiance.
“Goodbye, Izzard,” he said drowsily, and settled himself more comfortably in the seat.
He looked again at the glowing pink in the sky ahead.
“My mother has primroses in her garden in Delaware that look like that sometimes,” he said dreamily. “You’ll like ‘em.”
His head slid over against her shoulder, and he went to sleep.
HOUSE DICK
The Montgomery Hotel’s regular detective had taken his last week’s rake-off from the hotel bootlegger in merchandise instead of cash, had drunk it down, had fallen asleep in the lobby, and had been fired. I happened to be the only idle operative in the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco branch at the time, and thus it came about that I had three days of hotel-coppering while a man was being found to take the job permanently.
The Montgomery is a quiet hotel of the better sort, and so I had a very restful time of it – until the third and last day. Then things changed.
I came down into the lobby that afternoon to find Stacey, the assistant manager, hunting for me.
“One of the maids just phoned that there’s something wrong up in 906,” he said.
We went up to that room together. The door was open. In the centre of the floor stood a maid, staring goggle-eyed at the closed door of the clothes-press. From under it, extending perhaps a foot across the floor toward us, was a snake-shaped ribbon of blood.
I stepped past the maid and tried the door. It was unlocked. I opened it. Slowly, rigidly, a man pitched out into my arms – pitched out backward – and there was a six-inch slit down the back of his coat, and the coat was wet and sticky.
That wasn’t altogether a surprise: the blood on the floor had prepared me for something of the sort. But when another followed him – facing me, this one, with a dark, distorted face – I dropped the one I had caught and jumped back.
And as I jumped a third man came tumbling out after the others.
From behind me came a scream and a thud as the maid fainted. I wasn’t feeling any too steady myself. I’m no sensitive plant, and I’ve looked at a lot of unlovely sights in my time, but for weeks afterward I could see those three dead men coming out of that clothespress to pile up at my feet: coming out slowly – almost deliberately – in a ghastly game of ‘follow your leader.’
Seeing them, you couldn’t doubt that they were really dead. Every detail of their falling, every detail of the heap in which they now lay, had a horrible certainty of lifelessness in it.
I turned to Stacey, who, deathly white himself, was keeping on his feet only by clinging to the foot of the brass bed.
“Get the woman out! Get doctors – police!”
I pulled the three dead bodies apart, laying them out in a grim row, faces up. Then I made a hasty examination of the room.
A soft hat, which fitted one of the dead men, lay in the centre of the unruffled bed. The room key was in the door, on the inside. There was no blood in the room except what had leaked out of the clothespress, and the room showed no signs of having been the scene of a struggle.
The door to the bathroom was open. In the bottom of the bathtub was a shattered gin bottle, which, from the strength of the odour and the dampness of the tub, had been nearly full when broken. In one corner of the bathroom I found a small whisky glass and another under the tub. Both were dry, clean, and odourless.
The inside of the clothespress door was stained with blood from the height of my shoulder to the floor, and two hats lay in the puddle of blood on the closet floor. Each of the hats fitted one of the dead men.
That was all. Three dead men, a broken gin bottle, blood.
Stacey returned presently with a doctor, and while the doctor was examining the dead men, the police detectives arrived.
The doctor’s work was soon done.
“This man,” he said, pointing to one of them, “was struck on the back of the head with a small blunt instrument, and then strangled. This one” – pointing to another – “was simply strangled. And the third was stabbed in the back with a blade perhaps five inches long. They have been dead for about two hours – since noon or a little after.”
The assistant manager identified two of the bodies. The man who had been stabbed – the first to fall out of the clothespress – had arrived at the hotel three days before, registering as Tudor Ingraham of Washington, D.C., and had occupied room 915, three doors away.
The last man to fall out – the one who had been simply choked – was the occupant of this room. His name was Vincent Develyn. He was an insurance broker and had made the hotel his home since his wife’s death, some four years before.
The third man had been seen in Develyn’s company frequently, and one of the clerks remembered that they had come into the hotel together at about five minutes after twelve this day. Cards and letters in his pockets told us that he was Homer Ansley, a member of the law firm of Lankershim and Ansley, whose offices were in the Miles Building – next door to Develyn’s office.