 Section 1 of Five Continental Ops Stories This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Winston Tharp. Five Continental Ops Stories by Daschel Hammett. Arson Plus Jim Tarr picked up a cigar I rolled across his desk, looked at the band, bit off an end and reached for a match. Fifteen cents straight, he said. You must want me to break a couple of laws for you this time. I had been doing business with this fat sheriff of Sacramento County for four or five years, ever since I came to the Continental Detective Agency's San Francisco office, and I had never known him to miss an opening for a sour crack, but it didn't mean anything. Wrong both times, I told him. I get two of them for a quarter, and I'm here to do you a favor instead of asking for one. The company that ensured Thornburg's house thinks somebody touched it off. That's bright enough, according to the fire department. They tell me the lower part of the house was soaked with gasoline, but God knows how they could tell. There wasn't a stick left standing. I've got my clump working on it, but he hasn't found anything to get excited about yet. What's the layout? All I know is that there was a fire. Tar leaned back in his chair, turned his red face to the ceiling, and bellowed. Hey, Mac! The pearl pushed buttons on his desk or ornaments, so far as he is concerned. Deputy Sheriff's McHale, McClump and Macklin came to the door together. McNab evidently wasn't with him in hearing. What's the idea? The sheriff demanded a clump. Are you carrying a bodyguard around with you? The two other deputies, thus informed as to whom Mack referred to this time, went back to their cribbage game. We've got a city slicker here to catch our firebug for us, Tar told his deputy. But we've got to tell him what it's all about first. McClump and I had worked together on an express robbery several months before. He's a rangy, tow-headed youngster of twenty-five or six, with all the nerve in the world, and most of the laziness. Ain't the Lord good to us? He had himself draped across the chair by now, always his first objective when he comes into a room. Well, here's how she stands. This fellow Thorenberg's house was a couple miles out of town on the old country road, an old frame house. About midnight, night before last, Jeff Pringle, the nearest neighbor, half a mile or so to the east, saw a glare in the sky from over that way and phoned in the alarm. But by the time the fire-wagons got there there wasn't enough of the house left to bother about. Pringle was the first of the neighbors to get to the house, and the roof had already fell in then. Nobody saw anything suspicious, no strangers hanging around or nothing. Thorenberg's help just managed to save themselves, and that was all. They didn't know much about what happened, too scared, I reckon. But they did see Thorenberg at his window just before the fire got him. A fellow here in town, name of Handerson, saw that part of it, too. He was driving home from Wheaton and got to the house just before the roof caved in. The fire department people say they found signs of gasoline. The Coonses, Thorenberg's help, say they didn't have no gas on the place. So there you are. Thorenberg have any relatives? Yeah, niece in San Francisco, a Mrs. Evelyn Trowbridge. She was up yesterday, but there was nothing she could do, and she couldn't tell us nothing much, so she went home. Where are the servants now? Here in town, staying at a hotel on I Street. I told them to stick around for a few days. Thorenberg own the house? Uh-huh. Bought it from Newlin and Weed a couple of months ago. You got anything to do this morning? Nothing but this. Good. Let's go out and dig around. We found the Coonses in their room at the hotel on I Street. Mr. Coons was a small-boned plump man with a smooth, meaningless face and the suavity of the typical male house servant. His wife was a tall, stringy woman, perhaps five years older than her husband, say, forty, with a mouth and a chin that seemed shaped for gossiping. But he did all the talking, while she nodded her agreement every second or third word. We went to work for Mr. Thorenberg on the fifteenth of June, I think. He said and replied in my first question. We came to Sacramento about the first of the month and put in applications at the Alice Employment Bureau. A couple of weeks later they sent us out to see Mr. Thorenberg and he took us on. Where were you before you came here? In Seattle, sir, with a Mrs. Comerford. But the climate there didn't agree with my wife. She has bronchial trouble, so we decided to come to California. We most likely would have stayed in Seattle, though, if Mrs. Comerford hadn't given up her house. What do you know about Thorenberg? Very little, sir. He wasn't a talkative gentleman. He hadn't any business that I know of. I think he was a retired seafaring man. He never said he was, but he had that manner and look. He never went out or had anybody in to see him, except his niece, once, and he didn't ride or get any mail. He had a room next to his bedroom fixed up as a sort of workshop. He spent most of his time in there. I always thought he was working on some sort of invention, but he kept the door locked and wouldn't let us go near it. Haven't you had any idea at all what it was? No, sir. We never heard any hammering or noises from it, and never smelt anything, either. And none of his clothes were ever the least bit soiled, even when they were ready to go to the laundry. They would have been if he had been working on anything like machinery. Was he an old man? He couldn't have been over fifty, sir. He was very erect, and his hair and beard were thick, with no gray hairs. Ever have any trouble with him? Oh, no, sir. He was, if I may say it, a very peculiar gentleman in a way. And he didn't care about anything except having his meals fixed right, having his clothes taken care of. He was very particular about them, and not being disturbed, except early in the morning and at night we'd hardly see him all day. Now, about the fire. Tell us the whole thing, everything you remember. Well, sir, I and my wife had gone to bed about ten o'clock, our regular time, and had gone to sleep. Our room was on the second floor in the rear. Some time later I never did know exactly what time it was. I woke up coughing. The room was all full of smoke, and my wife was sort of strangling. I jumped up and dragged her down the back stairs and out the back door, not thinking of anything but getting her out of there. When I had her safe in the yard I thought of Mr. Thornburg, and tried to get back in the house, but the whole first floor was just flames. I ran around front then to see if it got out, but didn't see anything of him. The whole yard was his lightest day by then. Then I heard him scream. A horrible scream, sir. I can hear it yet. And I looked up at his window. That was the front second-story room, and saw him there trying to get out the window. But all the woodwork was burning, and he screamed again and fell back, and right after that the roof over his room fell in. There wasn't a ladder or anything I could have put up to the window for him. There wasn't anything I could have done. In the meantime a gentleman had left his automobile in the road, and come up to where I was standing. But there wasn't anything we could do. The house was burning everywhere and falling in here and there. So we went back to where I had left my wife, and carried her father away from the fire, and brought her to. She had faded. And that's all I know about it, sir. Hear any noises earlier that night, or see anybody hanging around? No, sir. Have any gasoline around the place? No, sir. Mr. Thornburg didn't have a car. No gasoline for cleaning. No, sir, none at all, unless Mr. Thornburg had it in his workshop. When his clothes needed cleaning I took them to town, and all his laundry was taken by the grocer's man when he brought our provisions. Don't know anything that might have some bearing on the fire? No, sir. I was surprised when I heard that somebody had set the house of fire. I could hardly believe it. I don't know why anybody should want to do that. What do you think of them? I asked my clump as we left the hotel. They might pad the bills, or even go south with some of the silver. But they won't figure as killers in my mind. That was my opinion, too. But they were the only persons known to have been there when the fire started except the man who had died. We went around to the Alice Employment Bureau and talked to the manager. He told us that the Coonses had come to his office on June 2nd, looking for work, and had given Mrs. Edward Comerford forty-five Woodman C. Terrace, Seattle, Washington as reference. In reply to a letter he always checked up the references of servants. Mrs. Comerford had written that the Coonses had been in her employ for a number of years, and had been extremely satisfactory in every respect. On June 13th Thornburg had telephoned the bureau, asking that a man and his wife be sent out to keep house for him, and Alice had sent two couples that he had listed. Neither had been employed by Thornburg, though Alice considered them more desirable than the Coonses, who were finally hired by Thornburg. All that would certainly seem to indicate that the Coonses hadn't deliberately maneuvered themselves into the place, unless they were the luckiest people in the world, and a detective can't afford to believe in luck or coincidence unless he has unquestionable proof of it. At the office of the real estate agents, through whom Thornburg had bought the house, newling and weed, we were told that Thornburg had come in on the eleventh of June, and had said he had been told the house was for sale, had looked it over, and wanted to know the price. The deal had been closed the next morning, and he had paid for the house with a check for forty-five hundred dollars on the Siemens Bank of San Francisco. The house was already furnished. After lunch in, Maclump and I called on Howard Henderson, the man who had seen the fire while driving home from Weighton. He had an office in the Empire Building with his name and the title Northern California Agent Instant Sheen Cleanser Company on the door. He was a big, careless-looking man, of forty-five or so, with a professionally jovial smile that belongs to the salesman. He had been in Weighton, on business the day of the fire, he said, and had stayed there until rather late, going to dinner and afterward playing pool with a grocer named Hammersmith, one of his customers. He had left Weighton in his machine about ten-thirty and set out for Sacramento. At Tavender he had stopped at the garage for oil and gas and to have one of his tires blown up. Just as he was about to leave the garage, the garage man had called his attention to a red glare in the sky, and had told him that it was probably from a fire somewhere along the old county road that paralleled the State Road into Sacramento. So Henderson had taken the county road and had arrived at the burning house just in time to seek Thornburg try to fight his way through the flames that involved him. It was way too late to make any attempt to put out the fire, and the man upstairs was beyond saving by then, undoubtedly dead even before the roof collapsed. So Henderson had helped Coon's revive his wife and stayed there watching the fire until it had burned itself out. He had seen no one on the county road while driving to the fire. What do you know about Henderson? I asked MacLump when we were on the street. Came here from somewhere in the east, I think, early in the summer to open that cleanser agency. Lives at the Garden Hotel. Where do we go next? We get a machine and take a look at what's left of the Thornburg house. An enterprising incendiary couldn't have found a lovelier spot in which to turn himself loose if he looked the whole county over. Tree-topped hills hit it from the rest of the world on three sides, while away from the fourth an uninhabited plain rolled down to the river. The county road that passed the front gate was shunned by automobiles, so MacLump said, in favor of the State Highway to the north. Where the house had been was now a mound of blackened ruins. We poked around in the ashes for a few minutes, not that we expected to find anything, but because it's in the nature of man to poke around in ruins. A garage in the rear, whose interior gave no evidence of recent occupation, had a badly scorched roof in front, what was otherwise undamaged. A shed behind it, sheltering an axe, a shovel, and various odds and ends of gardening tools, had escaped the fire altogether. The lawn in front of the house and the garden behind the shed, about an acre in all, had been pretty thoroughly cut and trampled by wagon wheels and the feet of the firemen and the spectators. Having ruined our shoe-shines, MacLump and I got back in our machine and swung off in a circle around the place, calling at all the houses within a mile radius, and getting little besides jolts for our trouble. The nearest house was that of Pringle, the man who had turned in the alarm. But he not only knew nothing about the dead man, but said he had never seen him. In fact, only one of the neighbors had ever seen him, a Mrs. Jabin, who lived about a mile to the south. She had taken care of the key to the house while it was vacant, and a day or two before he bought it Thornburg had come to her house inquiring about the vacant one. She had gone over there with him and showed him through it, and he had told her that he intended buying it if the price of which neither of them knew anything wasn't too high. He had been alone, except for the chauffeur of the hired car in which he had come from Sacramento, and save that he had no family he had told her nothing about himself. Hearing that he had moved in, she went over to call on him several days later, just to neighborly visit. But had been told by Mrs. Coons that he was not at home. Most of the neighbors had talked to the Coonses and had got the impression that Thornburg did not care for visitors, so they had let him alone. The Coonses were described as pleasant enough to talk to when you meet them, but reflecting their employer's desire not to make friends. McClump summarized what the afternoon had taught us as we pointed our machine toward Tavender. Any of these folks could have touched off the place, but we got nothing to show that any of them even knew Thornburg, let alone had a bone to pick with him. Tavender turned out to be a cross-road settlement of a general store and post office, a garage, a church, and six dwellings about two miles from Thornburg's place. McClump knew the storekeeper and postmaster, a scrawny little man named Philo who stuttered moistly. I never thought Thornburg, he said. And I never had any mail for him. Coons, it sounded like one of those things butterflies come out. He used to come in once a week to order groceries. They didn't have a phone. He used to walk in and I'd suspend the stuff over in my car. Then I'd see him once in a while, waiting for the stage to sacramento, who drove the stuff out to Thornburg's. My boy, want to talk to him? The boy was a juvenile addition of the old man, but without the stutter. He had never seen Thornburg on any of his visits, but his business had taken him only as far as the kitchen. He hadn't noticed anything peculiar about the place. Who's the night man at the garage? I asked him after we had listened to the little he had to tell. Billy Loose, I think you can catch him there now. I saw him go in a few minutes ago. We crossed the road and found Loose. Night before last, the night of the fire down the road, was there a man here talking to you when you first saw it? He turned his eyes upward in that vacant stair which people used to aid their memory. Yes? I remember now. He was going to town, and I told him that if he took the county road instead of the state road, he'd see the fire on his way in. What kind of looking man was he? Middle-aged? A big man, but sort of slouchy. I think he had on a brown suit baggy and wrinkled. Medium complexion? Yes. Smile when he talked? Yes. A pleasant sort of fellow. Curly brown hair? Have a hard loose left. I didn't put him under a magnifying glass. From Tavender we drove over to Wheaton. Loose's description had fit Handerson all right, but while we were at it we thought we might as well check up to make sure that he had been coming from Wheaton. We spent exactly twenty-five minutes in Wheaton, ten of them finding Hammersmith, the grocer with whom Handerson had said he dined and played pool, five minutes finding the proprietor of the pool-room, and ten verifying Handerson's story. What do you think of it now, Mac? I asked as we roll back toward Sacramento. Mac's too lazy to express an opinion or even form on unless he's driven to it, but that doesn't mean they aren't worth listening to, if you can get them. There ain't a hell of a lot to think, he said cheerfully. Handerson is out of it, if he ever was in it. There's nothing to show that anybody but the Coonses and Kornburg were there when the fire started, but they may have been a regiment there. Them Coonses ain't too honest looking, maybe, but they ain't killers or I miss my gas. But the fact remains that they're the only bet we got so far. Maybe we ought to try to get a line on them. All right, I agreed. I'll get a wire off to our Seattle office asking them to interview Mrs. Comerford and see what she can tell about them as soon as we get back in town. Then I'm going to catch a train for San Francisco and see Thornburg's niece in the morning. Next morning, at the address Maclump had given me a rather elaborate apartment building on California Street, I had to wait three-quarters of an hour for Mrs. Evelyn Trowbridge to dress. If I had been younger, or a social caller, I suppose I'd have felt amply rewarded when she finally came in, a tall slender woman of less than thirty, and some sort of clinging black affair, with a lot of black hair over very white face, strikingly set off by a small red mouth and big hazel eyes that looked black until you got close to them. But I was a busy middle- age detective who was fuming over having his time wasted, and I was a lot more interested in finding the bird who struck the match than I was in feminine beauty. However, I smothered my grouch, apologised for disturbing her at such an early hour and got down to business. I want you to tell me all you know about your uncle. His family, friends, enemies, business connections, everything. I had scribbled on the back of the card I had sent into her what my business was. He hasn't any family, she said. Unless I might be it. He was my mother's brother, and I am the only one of the family now living. Where was he born? Here in San Francisco. I don't know the date, but he was about fifty years old, I think, three years older than my mother. What was his business? He went to see when he was a boy, and so far as I know always followed it until a few months ago. Captain? I don't know. Sometimes I wouldn't see or hear from him for several years, and he never talked about what he was doing. Although he would have mentioned some of the places he had visited. Rio de Janeiro, Madagascar, Tobago, Cristiana. Then about three months ago, sometime in May, he came here and told me that he was through with wandering. That he was going to take a house in some quiet place where he could work undisturbed on an invention in which he was interested. He lived at the Francisco Hotel while he was in San Francisco. After a couple of weeks he suddenly disappeared. And then about a month ago I received a telegram from him asking me to come to see him at his house near Sacramento. I went up the very next day, and I thought that he was acting very clearly. He seemed very excited over something. He gave me a will that he had just drawn up in some life insurance policies in which I was beneficiary. Immediately after that he insisted that I return home, and hinted rather plainly that he did not wish me to either visit him again or write until I heard from him. I thought all that rather peculiar as he had always seemed fond of me. I never saw him again. What was this invention he was working on? I really don't know. I asked him once, but he became so excited, even suspicious, that I changed the subject and never mentioned it again. Are you sure that he really did follow the sea all those years? No. I am not. I just took it for granted. But he may have been doing something altogether different. Was he ever married? Not that I know of. Know any of his friends or enemies? No, none. Remember anybody's name that he ever mentioned? No. I don't want you to think this next question insulting, though I admit it is. But it has to be asked. Where were you the night of the fire? At home. I had some friends here to dinner, and they stayed until about midnight. Mr. and Mrs. Walter Kellogg, Mrs. John DePree, and Mr. Kilmer, who was a lawyer. I can give you their addresses, or you can get them from the phone book if you want to question them. For Mrs. Trowbridge's apartment I went to the Francisco Hotel. Thornburg had been registered there from May 10th to June 13th, and hadn't attracted much attention. He had been a tall, broad shouldered, erect man of about fifty, with rather long brown hair brushed straight back, a short pointed brown beard, and healthy, ruddy complexion. Grave, quiet, punctilious in dress and manner, his hours had been regular, and he had had no visitors that any of the hotel employees remembered. At the Seaman's Bank upon which Thornburg's check and payment of the house had been drawn, I was told that he had opened an account there on May 15th, having been introduced by W. W. Jeffers and Sons, local stockbrokers. A balance of little more than four hundred dollars remained to his credit. The castle checks on hand were all to the order of various life insurance companies, and for amounts that if they represented premiums testified to rather large policies. I jotted down the names of the life insurance companies, and then went to the offices of W. W. Jeffers and Sons. Thornburg had come in, I was told, on the 10th of May, with four thousand dollars' worth of liberty bonds that he wanted sold. During one of his conversations with Jeffers, he had asked the broker to recommend a bank, and Jeffers had given him a letter of introduction to the Seaman's Bank. That was all Jeffers knew about him. He gave me the numbers of the bonds, but tracing liberty bonds isn't the easiest thing in the world. He replied to me, and then my Seattle telegram was waiting for me at the agency when I arrived. Mrs. Edward Comerford, rented apartment at address you give on May 25, gave it up June 6, trunks to San Francisco, same day. Check numbers GN 452 587 and 8 and 9. Tracing baggage is no trick at all if you have the dates and check numbers to start with. As many a bird who was wearing somewhat similar numbers on his chest and back, because he overlooked that detail when making his getaway, can tell you. And twenty-five minutes in a baggage room at the ferry and half an hour in the office of a transfer company gave me my answer. The trunks had been delivered to Mrs. Evelyn Trowbridge's apartment. I got Jim Tarr on the phone and told him about it. Good shooting! he said, forgetting for once to indulge his wit. We'll grab the Coonses here, and Mrs. Trowbridge there, and that's the end of another mystery. Wait a minute! I cautioned him. It's not all straightened out yet. There are still a few kinks in the plot. It's straight enough for me. I'm satisfied. You're the boss, but I think you're being a little hasty. I'm going up to talk with Anise again. Give me a little time before you phone the police here to make the pinch. I'll hold her till they get there. Evelyn Trowbridge let me in this time instead of the maid who had opened the door for me in the morning, and she led me to the same room in which we had had our first talk. I let her pick out a seat, and then I selected one that was closer to either door than hers was. On the way up I had planned a lot of innocent-sounding questions that would get her all snarled up. But after taking a good look at this woman sitting in front of me, leaning comfortably back on her chair, coolly waiting for me to speak my peace, I discarded the trick stuff and came out cold turkey. Ever use the name Mrs. Edward Comerford? Oh, yes. As casual as a nod on the street. When? Often. You see, I happen to have been married not so long ago to Mr. Edward Comerford, so it's not really strange that I should have used the name. Use it in Seattle recently? I would suggest, she said sweetly, that if you are leading up to the references I gave Coons and his wife, you might save time by coming right to it. That's fair enough, I said, let's do that. There wasn't a half tone, a shading, and voice, manner, or expression to indicate that she was talking about anything half so serious or important to her as a possibility of being charged with murder. She might have been talking about the weather or a book that hadn't interested her particularly. During the time that Mr. Comerford and I were married we lived in Seattle, where he still lives. After the divorce I left Seattle and resumed my maiden name, and the Coons' were now our employee as you might learn if you care to look it up. You'll find my husband or former husband at the Chelsea apartments, I think. Last summer or late spring I decided to return to Seattle. The truth of it is, I suppose all my personal affairs will be aired anyhow, that I thought perhaps Edward and I might patch up our differences. So I went back and took an apartment on Woodman C. Terrace. As I was known in Seattle as Mrs. Edward Comerford, and as I thought using his name might influence him a little perhaps, I used it while I was there. Also, I telephoned the Coons' to make tentative arrangements in case Edward and I should open our house again. But Coons told me they were going to California and so I gladly gave them an excellent recommendation when some days later I received a letter of inquiry from an employment bureau in Sacramento. After I had been in Seattle for about two weeks I changed my mind about the reconciliation. Edward's interest I learned was all centered elsewhere. So I returned to San Francisco. Very nice, but if you will permit me to finish, she interrupted, when I went to see my uncle in response to his telegram I was surprised to find the Coons' in his house. Knowing my uncle's peculiarities and finding them now increased and remembering his extreme secretiveness about his mysterious invention, I cautioned the Coons' not to tell him that they had been in my employ. He certainly would have discharged them, and Justice certainly would have quarreled with me. He would have thought that I was having him spied upon. Then when Coons telephoned me after the fire I knew that to admit the Coons' had been formally in my employ would, in view of the fact that I was my uncle's heir, cast suspicious on all three of us. So we foolishly agreed to say nothing about it and carry on the deception. That didn't sound all wrong, but it didn't sound all right. I wished Tar had taken it easier and let us get a better line on these people before having them thrown in the coop. The coincidence of the Coons' stumbling into my uncle's house is, I fancy, too much for your detecting instincts. She went on, as I didn't say anything. Am I to consider myself under arrest? I'm beginning to like this girl. She's a nice, cool piece of work. Not yet, I told her, but I'm afraid it's going to happen pretty soon. She smiled a little mocking smile at that and another when the doorbell rang. It was a harrow from police headquarters. We turned the apartment upside down and inside out, but didn't find anything of importance except the will she had told me about dated July 8th and her uncle's life insurance policies. They were all dated between May 15th and June 10th and added up to a little more than $200,000. I spent an hour grilling the maid after O'Hara had taken Evelyn Trowbridge away, but she didn't know any more than I did. However, between her, the janitor, the manager of the apartments, and the names Mrs. Trowbridge had given me, I learned that she had really been entertaining friends on the night of the fire, until after eleven o'clock anyway, and that was late enough. Half an hour later I was riding the short line back to Sacramento. I was getting to be one of the line's best customers, and my anatomy was on bouncing terms with every bump in the road, and the bumps, as Rubberhead Davis used to say about the flies and mosquitoes and Alberta in summer, is freely plentiful. Between bumps I tried to fit the pieces of the Thornburg puzzle together. The niece and the coons is fit in somewhere, but not just where we had them. We had been working on the job sort of lopsided, but it was the best we could do with it. In the beginning we had turned to the coons as an Evelyn Trowbridge because there was no other direction to go, and now we had something on them, but a good lawyer could make hash of our case against them. The coonses were in the county jail when I got to Sacramento. After some questioning they had admitted their connection with the niece and had come through with stories that matched hers in every detail. Tar, Maclump and I sat around the sheriff's desk and argued. Those yarns are pipe dreams, the sheriff said. We got all three of them cold, and there's nothing else to it. They're as good as convicted of murder. Maclump grinned derisively at his superior and then turned to me. Go on. You tell him about the holes in this little case. He ain't your boss. Can't take it out on you later for being smarter than he is, Tar glared from one of us to the other. Spill it, you wise guys! He ordered. Our dope is, I told him, figuring that Maclump's view of it was the same as mine, that there's nothing to show that even Thornburg knew he was going to buy that house before the 10th of June, and that the coonses were in town looking for work on the second. And besides, it was only by luck that they got the jobs. The employment agency sent two couples out there ahead of them. They'll take a chance on letting the jury figure that out. Yes? You'll also take a chance on them figuring out that Thornburg, who seems to have been a nut all right, might have touched off the place himself. We've got something on these people, Jim, but not enough to go into court with them. How are you going to prove that when the coonses were planted in Thornburg's house, if you can even prove they were, they and the troverage woman knew he was going to load up with insurance policies? The sheriff spat disgustedly. You guys are the limit. You run around in circles digging up the dope on these people until you've got enough to hang them, and then you run around hunting for outs. What the hell's the matter with you now? I answered him from half-way to the door. The pieces were beginning to fit together under my skull. Going to run some more circles. Come on, Mac. Maclump and I held a conference on the fly, and then I got a machine from the nearest garage and headed for Tavender. We made time going out and got there before the general store was closed for the night. The stuttering philo separated himself from the two men with whom he had been talking, Hiram Johnson, and followed me to the rear of the store. Do you keep an itemized list of the laundry you handle? No, no, just the amounts. Let's look at Thornburg's. He produced of a grime and ruffled account book and we picked out the weekly items I wanted. 260, 310, 225, and so on. Got the last batch of laundry here? Yes, he said, it just came out from the city to today. I tore open the bundle. Some sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths, towels, napkins, some feminine clothing, some shirts, collars, underwear, socks that were unmistakably coonses. I thanked Philo while running back to my machine. Back in Sacramento again, Maclump was waiting for me at the garage where I had hired the car. Registered at the hotel on June 15, rented the office on the 16th. I think he's in the hotel now, he greeted me. We hurried around the block to the Garden Hotel. Mr. Henderson went out a minute or two ago. The night clerk told us. He seemed to be in a hurry. Know where he keeps his car? In the hotel garage, around the corner. We were within two pavements of the garage when Henderson's automobiles shot out and turned up the street. Oh, Mr. Henderson! I cried, trying to keep my voice level and smooth. He stepped on the gas and streaked away from us. Want him? Maclump asked, and at my nod, stopped a passing roaster by the simple expedient of stepping out in front of it. We climbed aboard. Maclump flashed his star at the bewildered driver and pointed out Henderson's dwindling tail light. After he had persuaded himself that he wasn't being boarded by a couple of bandits, the commandeered driver did his best, and we picked up Henderson's tail light after two or three turnings and closed in on him, though his machine was going at a good clip. By the time we reached the outskirts of the city we had crawled up to within safe shooting distance and I sent a bullet over the fleeting man's head. Thus encouraged he managed to get a little more speed out of his car, but we were definitely overhauling him now. Just at the wrong minute Henderson decided to look over his shoulder at us. An unevenness in the road twisted his wheels, his machine suede, skidded, went over on its side. Almost immediately from the heart of the tangle came a flash and a bullet moan past my ear, another. And then, while I was still hunting for something to shoot at in the pile of junk we were drawing down upon, Maclump's ancient and battered revolver roared in my other ear. Henderson was dead when we got to him. Maclump's bullet had taken him over one eye. Maclump spoke to me over the body. I ain't an inquisitive sort of fellow, but I sure hope you don't mind telling me why I shot this lad. Because he was Thornburg. He didn't say anything for about five minutes. Then, I reckon that's right. How'd you guess it? We were sitting beside the wreckage now waiting for the police that we had sent our commandeered chauffeur to phone for. He had to be, I said, when you think it all over. Funny we didn't hit on it before. All that stuff we were told about Thornburg had a fishy sound. Whiskers in an unknown profession, immaculate and working on a mysterious invention, very secretive and born in San Francisco, where the fire wiped out all the old records, just a sort of fake that could be cooked up easily. Then nobody with the Coonses, Evelyn Trowbridge and Henderson ever saw him, except between the 10th of May and the middle of June when he bought the house. The Coonses and the Trowbridge woman were tied up together in this affair somehow, we knew. So that left only Henderson to consider. You had told me he came to Sacramento some time early this summer, and the dates you got tonight show that he didn't come until after Thornburg had bought his house. All right. Now compare Henderson with the descriptions we got of Thornburg. Both are about the same size and age with the same color hair. The differences are all things that can be manufactured. Clothes, a little sunburn, and a month's growth of beard, along with little acting would do the trick. Tonight I went out to Tavener and took a look at the last batch of laundry, and there wasn't any that didn't fit the Coonses, and none of the bills all the way back were large enough for Thornburg to have been as careful about his clothes as we were told he was. It must be great to be a detective, MacLump Grinn, as the police ambulance came and began discouraging policemen. I reckoned somebody must have tipped Henderson off that I was asking about him this evening, and then regretfully. So we ain't going to hang them folks for murder after all. No. But we oughtn't to have any trouble convicting them of arson plus conspiracy to defraud, and anything else that the prosecuting attorney can think up. End of ARSON PLUS II OF FIVE CONTINENTAL OPS STORIES by DASHALL HAMMIT Harvey Gatewood had issued orders that I was to be admitted as soon as I arrived, so it only took me a little less than fifteen minutes to thread my way past the doorkeepers, office boys, and secretaries who filled up most of the space between the Gatewood Lumber Corporation's front door and the President's private office. His office was large, all mahogany and bronze and green plush, with a mahogany desk as big as a bed in the center of the floor. Gatewood, leaning across the desk, began to bark at me as soon as the obsequious clerk who had bowed me in bowed himself out. My daughter was kidnapped last night. I want the blank that did it if it takes every cent I got. Tell me about it, I suggested, drawing up the chair that he hadn't thought to offer me. But he wanted results, it seemed, and not questions, and so I wasted nearly an hour getting information that he could have given me in fifteen minutes. He's a big bruiser of a man, something over two hundred pounds of hard red flesh, and a czar from the top of his bullet head to the toes of his shoes that would have been at least number twelve's if they hadn't been made to measure. He had made his several millions by sandbagging everybody that stood in his way, and the rage that he's burning up with now doesn't make him any easier to deal with. His wicked jaws sticking out like a knob of granite, and his eyes are filmed with blood. He's in a lovely frame of mind. For a while it looks as if the Continental Detective Agency is going to lose a client, because I've made up my mind that he's going to tell me all I want to know or I'm going to chuck up the job. But finally I got the story out of him. His daughter Audrey had left their house on Clay Street at about seven o'clock the preceding evening, telling her maid that she was going out for a walk. She had not returned that night, though Gatewood had not known that until after he had read the letter that came this morning. The letter had been from someone who said that she had been kidnapped. She demanded fifty thousand dollars for her release, and instructed Gatewood to get the money ready in hundred-dollar bills, so that there might be no delay when he is told in what manner it is to be paid over to his daughter's captors. As proof that the demand was not a hoax, a lock of the girl's hair, a ring she always wore, and a brief note from her, asking her father to comply with the demands, had been enclosed. Gatewood had received the letter at his office, and had telephoned to his house immediately. He had been told that the girl's bed had not been slept in the previous night, and that none of the servants had seen her since she started out for her walk. He had then notified the police, turning the letter over to them, and a few minutes later he had decided to employ private detectives also. Now, he burst out, after I had wormed these things out of him, and he had told me that he knew nothing of his daughter's associates or habits. Go ahead and do something. I'm not paying you to sit around and talk about it. What are you going to do? I asked. Me? I'm going to put those blanks behind the bars if it takes every cent I've got in the world. Sure. But first you can get that fifty thousand ready, so that you can give it to them when they ask you for it. He clicked his jaw-shot, thrust his face into mine. I have never been clubbed into doing anything in my life, and I'm too old to start now, he said. I'm going to call these people's bluff. That's going to make it lovely for your daughter. But aside from what it'll do to her, it's the wrong play. Fifty thousand isn't a whole lot to you, and paying it over will give us two chances that we haven't got now. One, when the payment is made, a chance to either nab whoever comes for it or get a line on them, and the other, when your daughter is returned. No matter how careful they are, it's a cinch that she'll be able to tell us something that will help us grab them. He shook his head angrily, and I was tired of arguing with him, so I left him, hoping that he'd see the wisdom of the course I had advised before too late. At the Gatewood residence I found butlers, second men, chauffeurs, cooks, maids, upstairs girls, downstairs girls, and a raft of miscellaneous flunkies. He had enough servants to run a hotel. What they told me amounted to this. The girl had not received a phone call, note by messenger or telegram, the time-honored devices for luring a victim out to a murder or abduction, before she left the house. She had told her maid that she would be back within an hour or two, but the maid had not been alarmed when her mistress failed to return all that night. Audrey was the only child, and since her mother's death she had come and gone to suit herself. She and her father didn't hit it off very well together, their natures were too much alike, I gathered, and he never knew where she was, and there was nothing unusual about her remaining away all night as she seldom bothered to leave word when she was going to stay overnight with friends. She was nineteen years old, but looked several years older, about five feet five inches tall and slender. She had blue eyes, brown hair, very thick and long, was pale and very nervous. Her photographs, of which I took a handful, showed that her eyes were large, her nose small and regular, and her chin obstinately pointed. She was not beautiful, but in the one photograph where a smile had wiped off the sulleness of her mouth she was at least pretty. When she left the house she had worn a light tweed skirt and a jacket with London Taylor's labels in them, a boff silk shirt waist with stripes of shade darker, brown wool stockings, low-heeled brown oxfords and an untrimmed gray-felt hat. I went up to her rooms, she had three on the third floor, and looked through all her stuff. I found nearly a bushel of photographs of men, boys, and girls, and a great stack of letters of varying degrees of intimacy, signed with a wide assortment of names and nicknames. I made notes of all the addresses I found. Nothing there seemed to have any bearing on her abduction, but there was a chance that one of the names and addresses might be of someone who had served as a decoy. Also some of her friends might be able to tell us something of value. I dropped in at the agency and distributed the names and addresses among the three operatives who were idle, sending them out to see what they could dig up. Then I reached the police detectives who were working on the case, a gar and thode, by telephone, and went down to the Hall of Justice to meet them. Lusk, a post office inspector, was also there. We turned the job around and around, looking at it from every angle, but not getting very far. We were all agreed, however, that we couldn't take a chance on any publicity or work in the open until a girl was safe. They had had a worse time with Gatewood than I. He had wanted to put the whole thing in the newspapers with the offer of a reward, photographs and all. Of course, Gatewood was right in claiming that this was the most effective way of catching the kidnappers, but it would have been tough on his daughter if her captors happened to be persons of sufficiently hardened character, and kidnappers as a rule aren't lambs. I looked at the letter they had sent. It was printed with pencil on a ruled paper of the kind that is sold in pads by every stationery dealer in the world. The envelope was just as common, also addressed in pencil, and postmarked San Francisco, September 29 p.m. That was the night she had been seized. The letter reads, Sir, we have your charming daughter and place a value of $50,000 upon her. You will get the money ready in $100 bills at once, so that there will be no delay when we tell you how it is to be paid over to us. We beg to assure you that things will go badly with your daughter should you not do as you're told, or should you bring the police into this matter, or should you do anything foolish? $50,000 is only a small fraction of what you stole while we were living in mud and blood in France for you, and we mean to get that much are blank. Three, a peculiar note in several ways. They are usually written with a great pretence of partial illiterateness. Almost always there's an attempt to lead suspicion astray. Perhaps the ex-service stuff was there for that purpose, or perhaps not. Then there was the post-script. We know a Chinaman who will buy her even after we are through with her, in case you won't listen to reason. The letter from the girl was written jerkily on the same kind of paper, apparently with the same pencil. Daddy, please do as they ask. I am so afraid. Audrey. A door at the other end of the room opened and a head came through. Agar! Thode! Gatwood just called up, got up to his office, right away. The four of us tumbled out of the Hall of Justice and into a machine. Gatwood was pacing his office like a maniac when we pushed aside enough hirelings to get to him. His face was hot with blood and his eyes at an insane glare in them. She just phoned me! he cried thickly when he saw us. It took a minute or two to get him calm enough to tell us about it. She called me on the phone, said, Oh, Daddy, do something. I can't stand this. They're killing me. I asked her if she knew where she was, and she said, No, but I can see Twin Peaks from here. There's three men and a woman, and then I heard a man curse and a sound as if he had struck her, and the phone went dead. I tried to get Central to give me the number, but she couldn't. It's a damned outrage the way the telephone system has run. We pay enough for service, God knows, and we... Agar scratched his head and turned away from Gatwood. Insight at Twin Peaks! There are hundreds of houses that are. Gatwood, meanwhile, had finished announcing the telephone company and was pounding on his desk with a paperweight to attract our attention. Have you people done anything at all? He demanded. I answered him with another question. Have you got the money ready? No, he said, I won't be held up by anybody. But he said him mechanically, without his usual conviction. The talk with his daughter had shaken him out of some of his stubbornness. He was thinking of her safety a little now instead of altogether of his own fighting spirit. We went at him hammer and tongs for a few minutes, and after a while he sent a clerk out for the money. We split up the field, then. Thode was to take some men from headquarters and see what he could find in the Twin Peaks' end of town. But we weren't very optimistic over the prospects there. The territory was too large. Lusk and Agar were to carefully mark the bills that the clerk brought from the bank, and then stick as close to Gatwood as they could get without attracting attention. I was to go out to Gatwood's house and stay there. The abductors had plainly instructed Gatwood to get the money ready immediately so that they could arrange to get it on short notice, not giving him time to communicate with anyone or make any plans. Gatwood was to get hold of the newspapers, give them the whole story, with the $10,000 reward he was offering for the abductors' capture, to be published as soon as the girl was safe, so that we would get the help of publicity at the earliest possible moment without jeopardizing the girl. The police in all the neighboring towns had already been notified. That had been done before the girl's phone message had assured us that she was held in San Francisco. Nothing happened at the Gatwood residence all that evening. Harvey Gatwood came home early, and after dinner he paced his library floor and drank whiskey until bedtime, demanding every few minutes that we, the detectives in the case, do something besides sit around like a lot of damned mummies. Agar, Lusk, and Thode were out in the street, keeping an eye on the house and neighborhood. At midnight Harvey Gatwood went to bed. I declined to bed in favor of the library couch which I dragged over beside the telephone, an extension of which was in Gatwood's bedroom. At 2.30 the bell rang. I listened in while Gatwood talked from his bed. A man's voice crisp and curt. Gatwood? Yes. Got the dough? Yes. Gatwood's voice was thick and blurred. I could imagine the boiling that was going on inside him. Good! came the brisk voice. Put a piece of paper around it and leave the house with it right away. Walk down Clay Street, keeping it on the same side as your house. Don't walk too fast and keep walking. If everything's all right and there's no elbows tagging along, somebody will come up to you between your house and the waterfront. They'll have a handkerchief up to their face for a second and then they'll let it fall to the ground. When you see that, you'll lay the money on the pavement, turn around and walk back to your house. If the money isn't marked and you don't try any fancy tricks, you'll get your daughter back in an hour or two. If you try to pull anything, remember what we wrote you about the chink. Got it straight. Gatwood spluttered something that was meant for an affirmative and the telephone clicked silent. I didn't waste any of my precious time tracing the call. It would be from a public telephone on you, but yelled up the stairs to Gatwood. You do as you were told and don't try any foolishness. Then I ran out into the early morning air to find the police detectives and the post office inspector. They had been joined by two plainclothes men and had two automobiles waiting. I told them what the situation was and we laid hurried plans. O'Gar was to drive in one of the machines down Sacramento Street and thode in the other down Washington Street. These streets parallel clay when on each side. They were to drive slowly, keeping pace with Gatwood, and stopping at each cross street to see the detast. When he failed to cross within a reasonable time they were to turn up to Clay Street and their actions from then on would have to be guided by chants and their own wits. Lusk was to wander along a block or two ahead of Gatwood on the opposite side of the street pretending to be mildly intoxicated and keeping his eyes and ears open. I was to shadow Gatwood down the street with one of the plainclothes men behind me. The other plainclothes man was to turn in a call at headquarters for every available man to be sent to Clay Street. They would arrive too late, of course, and as likely as not it would take them some time to find us, but we had no way of knowing what was going to turn up before the night was over. Our plan was sketchy enough, but it was the best we could do. We were afraid to grab whoever got the money from Gatwood. The girls talked with their father that afternoon. It sounded too much as if her captors were desperate for us to take any chances on going after them roughshod until she was out of their hands. We had hardly finished our plans when Gatwood, wearing a heavy overcoat, left his house and turned down the street. Further down Lusk, weaving along, talking to himself, was almost invisible in the shadows. There was no one else in sight. That man I had to give Gatwood at least two blocks lead so that the man who came for the money wouldn't tumble to me. One of the plainclothes men was half a block behind me on the other side of the street. Two blocks down we walked, and then a little chunky man in a derby hat came into sight. He passed Gatwood, passed me, went on. Three blocks more. A touring car, large, black, powerfully engineed and with lowered curtains, came from the rear, passed us, and went on. Possibly a scout. I scrawled his license number down on my pad without taking my hand out of my overcoat pocket. Another three blocks. A policeman passed, strolling along an ignorance of the game being played under his nose, and then a taxi cab with a single male passenger. I wrote down its license number. Four blocks with no one in sight ahead of me but Gatwood. I couldn't see Lusk any more. Just ahead of Gatwood a man stepped out of a black doorway, turned around, called up to a window for someone to come down and open the door for him. We went on. Coming from nowhere a woman stood on the sidewalk fifty feet ahead of Gatwood, a handkerchief to her face. It flooded to the pavement. Gatwood stopped, standing stiff-legged. I could see his right hand come up, lifting the side of the overcoat in which it was pocketed, and I knew the hand was gripped around a pistol. For perhaps half a minute he stood like a statue. Then his left hand came out of his pocket and the bundle of money fell to the sidewalk in front of him where it made a slight blur in the darkness. Gatwood turned abruptly and began to retrace his steps homeward. The woman had recovered her handkerchief. Now she ran to the bundle, picked it up, and scuttled the black mouth of an alley a few feet distant, a rather tall woman bent and in dark clothes from head to feet. In the black mouth of the alley she vanished. I had been compelled to slow up while Gatwood and the woman stood facing each other, and I was more than a block away now. As soon as the woman disappeared I took a chance and started pounding my rubber soles against the pavement. The alley was empty when I reached it. It ran all the way through to the next street, but I knew that the woman couldn't have reached the other end before I got to this one. I carry a lot of weight these days, but I can still step a block or two in good time. Along both sides of the alley were the rears of apartment buildings, each with its back door looking blankly, secretively at me. The plainclothes man who had been trailing behind me came up, then O'Gar and Thode in their machines, and soon Lusk. O'Gar and Thode rode off immediately to wind through the neighbouring streets, hunting for the woman. Lusk and the plainclothes man each planted himself on a corner, which two of the streets enclosed in the block could be watched. I went through the alley, hunting vainly for an unlocked door, an open window, a fire escape that would show recent use, any of the signs that a hurried departure from the alley might leave. Nothing. O'Gar came back shortly with some reinforcements from headquarters that he had picked up, and Gatewood. Gatewood was burning. Bungle the damn thing again! I won't pay your agency a nickel and I'll see that some of those so-called detectives get put back in a uniform and set to walking beats. What did the woman look like? I asked him. I don't know. I thought you were hanging around to take care of her. She was old and bent kind of, I guess, but I couldn't see her face for her veil. I don't know. What the hell are you men doing? It's a damned outrage of the way. I finally got him quieted down and took him home, leaving the city men to keep the neighbourhood under surveillance. There was fourteen or fifteen of them on the job now, and every shadow held at least one. The girl would naturally head for home as soon as she was released, and I wanted to be there to pump her. There was an excellent chance of reaching her abductors before they got very far if she could tell us anything at all about them. Home, Gatewood went up against the whiskey bottle again, while I kept one ear cocked on the telephone and the other at the front door. O'Gar and Fode phoned every half hour to ask if we'd heard from the girl. They had still found nothing. At nine o'clock they, with lust, arrived at the house. The woman in black had turned out to be a man and had gotten away. In the rear of one of the apartment buildings that touched the alley, just a foot or so within the back door, they found a woman's skirt, long coat, hat and veil, all black. Investigating the occupants of the house, they had learned that an apartment had been rented to a young man named Layton three days before. Layton was not at home when they went up to his apartment. His rooms had a lot of cold cigarette butts and an empty bottle and nothing else that had not been there when he rented it. The inference was clear. He had rented the apartment so that he might have access to the building. Wearing woman's clothes over his own, he had gone out of the back door, leaving it unlatched behind him, to meet Gatewood. Then he had run back into the building, discarded his disguise, and hurried through the building out the front door and away before we had our feeble net around the block. Perhaps dodging into dark doorways here and there to avoid O'Gar and Thode in their automobiles. Layton, it seemed, was a man of about thirty, slender, about five feet eight or nine inches tall, with dark hair and eyes, rather good-looking and well-dressed on the two occasions when people living in the building had seen him, in a brown suit and a light brown felt hat. There was no possibility, according to the opinions of both of the detectives and the post office inspector, that the girl might have been held even temporarily in Layton's apartment. Ten o'clock came, and no word from the girl. Gatewood had lost his domineering bullheadedness by now, and was breaking up. The suspense was getting him, and the liqueur he had put away wasn't helping him. I didn't like him either personally or by reputation, but at that I felt sorry for him this morning. I talked to the agency over the phone and got the reports of the operatives who had been looking up Audrey's friends. The last person to see her had been Agnes Dangerfield, who had seen her walking down Market Street near Sixth, alone, on the night of her abduction, sometime between 8.15 and 8.45. Audrey had been too far away for the Dangerfield girl to speak to her. For the rest, the boys had learned nothing, except that Audrey was a wild, spoiled, youngster who hadn't shown any great care in selecting her friends, just the sort of girl who could easily fall into the hands of a mob of high binders. Noon struck. No sign of the girl. We told the newspapers to turn loose the story with the added developments of the past few hours. Gatewood was broken. He sat with his head in his hands, looking at nothing. Just before I left to follow a hunch I had, he looked up at me, and I'd never have recognized him if I hadn't seen the change take place. What do you think is keeping her away? He asked. I didn't have the heart to tell him what I was beginning to suspect, not that the money had been paid and she had failed to show up, so I stalled with some vague assurances and left. I caught a streetcar and dropped off down in the shopping district. I visited the five largest department stores going to all the women's wear departments, from shoes to hats, and trying to learn if a man, perhaps one answering Layton's description, had been buying clothes that would fit Audrey Gatewood within the last couple days. Failing to get any results, I turned the rest of the local stores over to one of the boys from the agency and went across the bay to canvas the Oakland stores. At the first one I got action. A man who might easily have been Layton had been in the day before, buying clothes that could easily fit Audrey. He had bought lots of them, everything from lingerie to a cloak, and, my luck was hitting on all its cylinders, had had his purchases delivered to T. Offord at an address on 14th Street. At the 14th Street address, an apartment house, I found Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Offord's names under the vestu-yield telephone for apartment 202. I had just found them when the front door opened and a stout middle-aged woman in a gingham house dress came out. She looked at me a bit curiously, so I asked, Do you know where I can find a manager? I'm the manager? She said. I handed her card and stepped indoors with her. I'm from the bonding department of the North American Casualty Company. A repetition of the lie that was printed on the card I had given her. And a bond from Mr. Offord has been applied for. Is he all right so far, as you know? With a slightly apologetic error of one going through with the necessary, but not too important, formality. She frowned. A bond? That's funny. He is going away tomorrow. Well, I can't say what the bond is for. I said lightly, we investigators just get the names and the addresses. It may be for his present employer. Or perhaps the man he is going to work for wherever he's going has applied for it. Or some firms of us look up prospective employees before they hire them just to be safe. Mr. Offord, so far as I know, is a very nice young man, she said. But he has been here only a week. Not staying long, then. I know. They came here from Denver intending to stay. But the low altitude doesn't agree with Mr. Offord, so they are going back. Are you sure they came from Denver? Well, she said. They told me they did. How many of them are there? Only the two of them. They're young people. Well, how do they impress you? I asked. Trying to get the impression that I thought her a woman of shrewd judgment over. They seem to be a very nice young couple. You'd hardly know they were in their apartment most of the time. They were so quiet. I'm sorry they can't stay. Do they go out much? I really don't know. They have their keys. And unless I should happen to pass them going in or out, I never see them. That is a matter of fact you couldn't say whether they stayed away all night some nights or not, could you? She eyed me doubtfully. I was stepping way over my pretext now, but I couldn't think it mattered, and shook her head. No, I couldn't say. They have many visitors? I don't know. Mr. Offord is not— She broke off as a man came in quietly from the street, brushed past me, and started to mount the steps to the second floor. Oh, dear! she whispered. I hope he didn't hear me talking about him. That's Mr. Offord. A slender man in brown with a light brown hat. Layton, perhaps. I hadn't seen anything of him except his back, nor he anything except mine. I watched him as he climbed the stairs. If he had heard the manager mention his name he would use the turn at the head of the stairs to sneak a look at me. He did. I kept my face stolid, but I knew him. He was Penny Quail, a con man who had been active in the East four or five years before. His face was as expressionless as mine, but he knew me. A door on the second floor shut. I left the manager and started for the stairs. I think I'd go up and talk to him, I told her. Coming silently to the door of Apartment 202 I listened, not a sound. This was no time for hesitation. I pressed the bell button. As close together as the tapping of three keys under the fingers of an expert typist, but a thousand times more vicious came three pistol shots, and waist high in the door of Apartment 202 were three bullet holes. The three bullets would have been in my fat carcass if I hadn't learned years ago to stand at one side of strange doors when making uninvited calls. Inside the apartment sounded a man's voice sharp, commanding. Cut it, kid! For God's sake, not that! A woman's voice shrill, bitter, spiteful, screaming blasphemies. Two more bullets came through the door. Stop! No! No! The man's voice had a note of fear in it now. The woman's voice cursing hotly. A scuffle. A shot that didn't hit the door. I hurled my foot against the door near the knob and the lock broke away. On the floor of the room a man, Quayle, and a woman were tussling. He was bending over her, holding her wrist, trying to keep her down. A smoking automatic pistol was in one of her hands. I got to it in a jump and tore it loose. That's enough! I called on them when I was planning. Get up! And receive company! Quayle released his antagonist wrists, whereupon she struck at his eyes with curved, sharp, nailed fingers, tearing his cheek open. He scrambled away from her on hands and knees, and both of them got to their feet. He sat down on a chair immediately, panting and wiping his bleeding cheek with a handkerchief. She stood hands on hips in the center of the room, glaring at me. I suppose, she spat, you think you've raised hell. I laughed. I could afford to. If your father is in his right mind, I told her, he'll do it with a razor-strap when he gets you home again. A fine joke you picked out to play on him. If you had been tied to him as long as I have and had been bullied and held down as much, I guess you'd do most anything to get enough money so that you could go away and live your own life. I didn't say anything to that. Remembering some of the business methods Harvey Gatewood had used, particularly some of his war contracts that the Department of Justice was still investigating, I suppose the worst that could be said about Audrey was that she was her father's own daughter. How'd you wrap to it? Quayle asked me politely. Several ways, I said. First, I'm a little doubtful about grown persons being kidnapped in cities. Maybe it happens sometimes, but at least nine-tenths of the cases you hear about are fakes. Second, one of Audrey's friends saw her on Market Street between 8.15 and 8.45 the night she disappeared, and your letter to Gatewood was postmarked 9 p.m. Pretty fast work. You should have waited a while before mailing it, even if it had to miss the first morning delivery. I suppose she dropped it in the post office on her way over here. Quayle nodded. Then third, I went on, there was that phone call of hers. She knew it took anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes to get her father on the wire at the office. If time had been as valuable as it would have been if she had gotten to a phone while imprisoned, she'd have told her story to the first person she got a hold of, the phone girl, most likely. So that made it look as if, besides wanting to throw out that Twin Peaks line, she wanted to stir the old man out of his bullheadedness. When she failed to show up after the money was paid, I figured it was a sure bet that she had kidnapped herself. I knew that if she came back home after faking this thing we'd find it out before we'd talk to her very long, and I figured she knew that too and would stay away. The rest was easy, as I got some good breaks. We knew a man was working with her after we found the woman's clothes you left behind, and I took a chance on there being no one else in it. Then I figured she'd need clothes. She couldn't have taken any from home without tipping her mitt, and there was an even chance that she hadn't laid in a stock beforehand. She'd got too many girlfriends of the sort to do a lot of shopping to make it safer to risk showing herself in stores. Maybe then the man would buy what she needed for her, and it turned out that he did, and that he was too lazy to carry away his purchases, or perhaps it was too many of them, and so he had them sent out. That's the story. Quail nodded again. I was damned careless, he said, and then jerking a contemptuous thumb toward the girl. But what can you expect? She said a skinful of hop ever since we started, took all my time and attention keeping her from running wild and gumming the works. Just now was a sample. I told her you were coming up, and she goes crazy and tries to add your corpse to the wreck. The Gatewood reunion took place in the office of the Captain of Inspectors on the second floor of Oakland City Hall, and it was a merry little party. For an hour it was a toss-up whether Harvey Gatewood would die of apoplexy, strangle his daughter, or send her off to the state reformatory until she was of age. But Audrey licked him. Besides being a chip off the old block, she was young enough to be careless of consequences, while her father, for all his bullheadedness, had some caution hammered into him. The card she beat him with was a threat of spilling everything she knew about him to the newspapers, and at least one of the San Francisco pavers had been trying to get his scalp for years. I don't know what she had on him, and I don't think he was any too sure himself, but with his war-contracts, even then being investigated by the Department of Justice, he couldn't afford to take a chance. There was no doubt at all that she would have done as she threatened. And so, together, they left for home, sweating hate for each other and every poor. We took Quail upstairs and put him in a cell. But he was too experienced to let that worry him. He knew that, if the girl was to be spared, he himself couldn't very easily be convicted of anything. The papers are full of it, and have been for three days, I said. And I've read them, but I'll have to have the whole story first hand. There isn't very much to tell. This Frederick Grover was a short, slender man of something under thirty years, and dressed like a picture out of Vanity Fair. His almost girly features and voice did nothing to make him more impressive, but I began to forget these things after a few minutes. He wasn't a sap. I knew that, downtown, where he was rapidly building up a large and lively business in stocks and bonds without calling for too much help from his father's millions, he was considered a shrewd article. And I wasn't surprised later when Benny Foreman, who ought to know, told me that Frederick Grover was the best poker player west of Chicago. He was a cool, well-balanced, quick-thinking little man. Grover has lived here alone with the servants since mother's death two years ago, he went on. I am married, you know, and live in town. Last Saturday evening he dismissed Barton. Barton was his butler valet, and had been with father for quite a few years, at a little after nine, saying that he did not want to be disturbed during the evening. Father was here in the library at the time, looking through some papers. The servants' rooms are in the rear, and none of the servants seem to have heard anything during the night. At seven-third did the following morning, Sunday, Barton found father lying on the floor, just to the right of where you were sitting, dead, stabbed in the throat with a brass paper-knife that was always kept on the table here. The front door was ajar. The police found bloody fingerprints on the knife, the table, and the front door, but so far they have not found the man who left the prince, which is why I am employing your agency. The physician who came with the police placed the time of father's death at between eleven o'clock and midnight. Later, on Monday, we learned that father had drawn ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills from the bank Saturday morning. No trace of the money has been found. My fingerprints, as well as the servants, were compared with the ones found by the police, but there was no similarity. I think that is all. Do you know of any enemies your father had? He shook his head. I know of none, although he may have had them. You see, I really didn't know my father very well. He was a very reticent man, and until his retirement about five years ago he spent most of his time in South America, where most of his mining interests were. He may have had dozens of enemies, though Barton, who probably knew more about him than anyone, seems to know of no one who hated father enough to kill him. How about relatives? I was his heir and only child, if that is what you are getting at. So far as I know he had no other living relatives. I'll talk to the servants, I said. The maid in the cook could tell me nothing, and I learned very little more from Barton. He had been with Henry Grover since 1912, had been with him in Yunnan, Peru, Mexico, and Central America, but apparently he knew little or nothing of his master's business or acquaintances. He said that Grover had not seemed excited or worried on the night of the murder, and that nearly every night Grover dismissed him at about the same time with orders that he not be disturbed. So no importance was to be attached to that part of it. He knew of no one with whom Grover had communicated during the day, and he had not seen the money Grover had drawn from the bank. I made a quick inspection of the house and grounds, not expecting to find anything, and I didn't. Half the jobs had come to a private detective like this one, three or four days and often as many weeks have passed since the crime was committed. The police work on the job until they are stumped. Then the injured party calls in a private sleuth, dumps him down on a trail that is old and cold and badly trampled, and expects, oh well, I picked out this way of making a living, so. I looked through Grover's papers. He had a safe and desk full of them, but didn't find anything to get excited about. They were mostly columns of figures. I'm going to set an accountant out here to go over your father's books, I told Frederick Grover. Give him everything he asks for and fix it up with a bank so they'll help him. I caught a streetcar and went back to town, called at Ned Root's office, and headed him out toward Grover's. Ned is a human-adding machine with educated eyes, ears, and nose. He can spot a kink in a set of books farther than I can see the covers. Keep digging until you find something, Ned, and you can charge Grover whatever you like. Give me something to work on, quick. The murder had all the earmarks of one that had grown out of blackmail. Though there was, there always is a chance that it might have been something else. But it didn't look like the work of an enemy or burglar. Either of them would have packed his weapon with him, would not have trusted defining it on the grounds. Of course, if Frederick Grover or one of the servants had killed Henry Grover, but the fingerprints said no. Just to play safe I put in a few hours getting a line on Frederick. He had been at a ball on the night of the murder. He had never so far as I could learn quarreled with his father. His father was liberal with him, giving him everything he wanted, and Frederick was taking in more money in his brokerage office than he was spending. No motive for a murder appeared on the surface there. At the city detective bureau I hunted up the police sleuths who had been assigned to the murder, Marty O'Hara and George Dean. It didn't take them long to tell me what they knew about it. Whoever had made the bloody fingerprints was not known to the police here. They had not found the prints in their files. The classifications had been broadcast to every large city in the country but with no results so far. A house four blocks from Grover's had been robbed on the night of the murder, and there was a slim chance that the same man might have been responsible for both jobs. But the burglary had occurred after one o'clock in the morning, which made the connection look not so good. A burglar who had killed a man, and perhaps picked up ten thousand dollars on the bargain, wouldn't be likely to turn his hand to another job right away. I looked at the paper knife with which Grover had been killed, and at the photographs of the bloody prints, but they couldn't help me much just now. There seemed to be nothing to do but get out and dig around until I turned up something somewhere. Then the door opened, and Joseph Klain was ushered into the room where Ahara, Dean, and I were talking. Klain was a hard-bitten citizen for all his prosperous look, fifty or fifty-five, I'd say, with eyes, mouth, and jaw that held plenty of humor, but none of what is sometimes called the milk of humankindness. He was a big man, beefy, and all dressed up in a tight-fitting checkered suit, fawn-colored hat, patent leather shoes with buff-uppers, and the rest of the things that go with that sort of combination. He had a harsh voice that was as empty of expression as his hard-red face, and he held his body stiffly, as if he were afraid the buttons on his too-tight clothes were about to pop off. Even his arms hung woodenly at his sides with thick fingers that were lifelessly motionless. He came right to the point. He had been a friend of the murdered man's, and thought that perhaps what he could tell us would be of value. He had met Henry Grover, he called him Hennie, in 1894 in Ontario, where Grover was working a claim, the goldmine that had started the murdered man along the road to wealth. Claim had been employed by Grover as foremen, and the two men had become close friends. A man named Dennis Waldemann had a claim adjoining Grovers and a dispute had arisen over their boundaries. The dispute ran on for some time, the men coming to blows once or twice. But finally Grover seems to have triumphed, for Waldemann suddenly left the country. Claim's idea was that if we could find Waldemann we might find Grover's murderer, for considerable money had been involved in the dispute, and Waldemann was a mean cuss for a fact, and not likely to have forgotten his defeat. Claim and Grover had kept in touch with each other, corresponding or meeting at irregular intervals, but the murdered man had never said or written anything that would throw a light on his death. Claim too had given up mining, and now had a small string of race horses which occupied all his time. He was in the city for a rest between racing meets, had arrived two days before the murder, but had been too busy with his own affairs, he had discharged his trainer and was trying to find another to call upon his friend. Claim was staying at the Marquis Hotel, and would be in the city for a week or ten days longer. How come you waited three days before coming to tell us all this? Dean asked him. I wasn't always sure I had ought to do it. I wasn't never sure in my mind, but what may be Henny done for that fellow Waldemann? He disappeared suddenly like. And I didn't want to do anything to dirty Henny's name. But finally I decided to do the right thing. And then there's another thing. You found some fingerprints in Henny's house, didn't you? The newspaper sets out. We did. Well, I want you to take mine and match them up. I was out with a girl the night of the murder. He lured suddenly, boastingly, all night. And she's a good girl. Got a husband and lots of folks. But it wouldn't be a right to drag her into this to prove I wasn't in Henny's house when he was killed, in case you maybe think I killed him. So I thought maybe I'd come down here, tell you all about it, and get you to take my fingerprints and have it all over with. We went up to the identification bureau and had Claim's prints taken. They were not at all like the murderers. After we pumped Claim dry I went out and sent a telegram to our Toronto office, asking them to get a line on the Waldemann angle. Then I hunted up a couple of boys who eat, sleep and breathe horse racing. They told me that Claim was well known in racing circles, as the owner of a small string of near horses that ran as irregularly as the stewards would permit. At the Marquis Hotel I got hold of the house detective, who was a helpful chap so long as his hand has kept greased. He verified my information about Claim's status in the sporting world and told me that Claim has stayed at the hotel for several days at a time off and on within the past couple years. He tried to trace Claim's telephone calls for me, but as usual when you want them the records were jumbled. I arranged to have the girls on the switchboard listen in on any talking he did during the next few days. Ned Root was waiting for me when I got down to the office the next morning. He had worked on Grover's accounts all night and had found enough to give me a start. Within the past year, that was as far back as Ned had gone, Grover had drawn out of his bank accounts nearly fifty thousand dollars that could not be accounted for. Nearly fifty thousand exclusive of the ten thousand he had drawn the day of the murder. Ned gave me the amounts and the dates. May 6, 1922, 15,000, June 10, 5,000, August 1st, 5,000, October 10, 10,000, January 3rd, 1923, 12,500, 47,500 dollars. Somebody was getting fat off of him. The local managers of the telegraph companies raised the usual howl about respecting their patron's privacy, but I got an order from the prosecuting attorney and put a clerk at work on the files of each office. Then I went back to the Marquis Hotel and looked at the old registers. Claim had been there from May 4th to 7th and from October 8th to 15th last year. That checked off two of the dates upon which Grover had made his withdrawals. I had to wait until nearly six o'clock from my information from the telegraph companies, but it was worth waiting for. On the 3rd of last January Henry Grover had telegraphed $12,500 to Joseph Claim in San Diego. The clerks hadn't found anything on the other dates I had given them, but I wasn't at all dissatisfied. I had Joseph Claim fixed as the man who had been getting fat off Grover. I sent Dick Foley, he is the agency's shadow ace, and Bob Teal, a youngster who will be a world beater some day, over to Claim's hotel. Plant yourselves in the lobby, I told him. I'll be over in a few minutes to talk to Claim, and I'll try to bring him down in the lobby where you can get a good look at him. Then I want him shadowed until he shows up at police headquarters tomorrow. I want to know where he goes and who he talks to. And if he spends much time talking to any one person or if their conversation seems very important, I want one of you boys to trail the other man to see who he is and what he does. If Claim tries to blow town, grab him and have him thrown in the can. But I don't think he will. I gave Dick and Bob time enough to get themselves placed and then went to the hotel. Claim was out, so I waited. He came in a little after eleven and I went up to his room with him. I didn't have him in awe, but came out cold turkey. All the signs point to Grover's having been blackmailed. Do you know anything about it? No, he said. Grover drew a lot of money out of his banks at different times. You got some of it, I know, and I suppose you got most of it. What about it? He didn't pretend to be insulted or even surprised by my talk. He smiled a little grimly, maybe, but as if he thought it the most natural thing in the world, and it was at that, for me to suspect him. I told you that me and Henny were pretty chummy, didn't I? We ought to know that all us fellas at Fool with a bang-tails have our streaks of bad luck. Whenever I'd get up against it, I'd hit Henny up for a steak, like at Tijuana last winter when I got into a flock of bad breaks. Henny lent me twelve or fifteen thousand and I got back on my feet again. I've done that often. He ought to have some of my letters and wires in his stuff. If you look through his things you'll find him. I didn't pretend that I believed him. Suppose you drop into police headquarters at nine in the morning and we'll go over everything with a city dicks, I told him. I meant to make my place stronger. I wouldn't make it much later than nine. They might be out looking for you. Ah! was all the answer I got. I got back to the agency and planted myself within reach of a telephone, waiting for word from Dick and Bob. I thought I was sitting pretty. Clayne had been blackmailing Grover. I didn't have a single doubt of that. And I didn't think he'd been very far away when Grover was killed. That woman alibi of his sounded all wrong. But the bloody fingerprints were not Claynes. Unless the police identification bureau had pulled an awful boner, and the man who had left the prints, was the bird I was setting my cap for, Clayne had that three days pass between the murder and his appearance at headquarters. The natural explanation for that would be that his partner, the actual murderer, had needed nearly that much time to put himself in the clear. My present game was simple. I had stirred Clayne up with the knowledge that he was still suspected, hoping that he would have to repeat whatever precautions were necessary to protect his accomplice in the first place. He had taken three days then. I was giving him about nine hours now. Time enough to do something but not too much time, hoping that he would have to hurry things along and that in his haste he would give Dick and Bob a chance to turn up his partner, the owner of the fingers that had smeared blood on the knife, the table, and the door. At a quarter to one in the morning, Dick Telephone that Clayne had left the hotel a few minutes behind me had gone to an apartment house on Polk Street and was still there. I went up to Polk Street and joined Dick and Bob. They told me that Clayne had gone in apartment number twenty-seven and that the director in the vestibule showed this apartment was occupied by George Farr. I stuck around with the boys until two o'clock when I went home for some sleep. At seven I was with him again and was told that our man had not appeared yet. It was a little after eight when he came out and turned down Geary Street with the boys trailing him while I went into the apartment house for a talk with the manager. She told me that Farr had been living there for four or five months, lived alone, and was a photographer by trade with a studio on Market Street. I went up and rang his bell. He was a husky of thirty or thirty-two with bleary eyes that looked as if they hadn't had much sleep that night. I didn't waste any time with him. I'm from the Continental Detective Agency and I am interested in Joseph Clayne. What do you know about him? He was wide awake now. Nothing. Nothing at all? No, sullenly. Do you know him? No. What can you do with a bird like that? Farr, I said, I want you to go down to headquarters with me. He moved like a streak and his sullen manner had me a little off my guard, but I had turned my head in time to take the punch above my ear instead of on the chin. At that it carried me off my feet and I wouldn't have met a nickel that my skull was intended, but luck was with me and I fell across the doorway holding the door open and managed to scramble up, stumble through some rooms, and catch one of his feet as it was going through the bathroom window to join its maid on the fire escape. I got a split lip and a kicked shoulder in the scuffle, but he behaved after a while. I didn't stop to look at his stuff. That could be done more regularly later. I put him in a taxi cab and took him to the Hall of Justice. I was afraid that if I waited too long, Clayne would take a run out on me. Clayne's mouth fell open when he saw Farr, but neither of them said anything. I was feeling pretty chirp in spite of my bruises. Let's get this bird's fingerprints and get it over with, I said to O'Hara. Dean was not in. And keep an eye on Clayne. I think maybe I'll have another story to tell us in a few minutes. We got in the elevator and took our men up to the identification bureau, where we put Farr's fingers on the pad. Farr's, he's the department's expert, took one look at the results and turned to me. Well, what of it? What of what, I asked. This isn't the man who killed Henry Grover. Clayne laughed. Farr laughed. O'Hara laughed, and Farr's laughed. I didn't. I stood there and pretended to be thinking, trying to get myself in hand. Are you sure you haven't made a mistake? I blurted, my face a nice rosy red. You can tell how badly upset I was with that. It's plain suicide to say a thing like that to a fingerprint expert. Farr's didn't answer. He just looked me up and down. Clayne laughed again, like a crow calling, and turned his ugly face to me. Do you want to take my prints again, Mr. Slick Private Detective? Yeah, I said. Just that. I had to say something. Clayne held his hands out to fells, who ignored them, speaking to me with heavy sarcasm. Better take them yourself this time, so you'd be sure it's done right. I was mad clean through. Of course it was my own fault. But I was pigheaded enough to go through with anything, particularly anything that would hurt somebody's feelings, so I said, that's not a bad idea. I'd walked over and took hold of one of Clayne's hands. I'd never taken a fingerprint before, but I had seen it done often enough to throw a bluff. I started to ink Clayne's fingers and found that I was holding them wrong. My own fingers were in the way. Then I came back to earth. The balls of Clayne's fingers were too smooth, or rather too slick, without the slight clinging feeling that belongs to flesh. I turned his hands over so fast I nearly upset him and looked at the fingers. I don't know what I expected to find, but I didn't find anything, not anything that I could name. Fells, I called. Look here. He forgot his injured feelings and bent to look at Clayne's hand. I'll be, he began. And then the two of us were busy for a few minutes, taking Clayne down and sitting on him, while Ohara quieted far, who had also gone suddenly into action. When things were peaceful again, Fells examined Clayne's hands carefully, scratching the fingers with a fingernail. He jumped up, leaving me to hold Clayne and paying no attention to my, What is it? Got a cloth and some liquid and washed the fingers thoroughly. We took his prints again. They matched the bloody ones taken from Grover's house. Then we all sat down and had a nice talk. I told you about the trouble Henny had with that fellow Waldemann. Clayne began after he had far decided to come clean. There was nothing else they could do. And how he won in the argument because Waldemann disappeared? Well, Henny done for him, shot him one night and buried him. And I saw it. Grover was one bad actor in them days, a tough ombrade I tangled with, so I didn't try to make nothing out of what I knew. But after he got older and richer, he got soft. What a man go like that. Must have been worrying over it because when I ran into him in New York accidentally about four years ago, it didn't take me long to learn that he was pretty well tamed, and he told me that he hadn't been able to forget the look on Waldemann's face when he drilled him. So I took a chance and braced Henry for a couple thousand. I got them easy, and after that, whenever I was flat, I either went to him or sent him word, and he always came across. But I was careful not to crowd him too far. I knew what a terror he was in the old days, and I didn't want to push him into busting loose again. But that's what I did in the end. I phoned him Friday, then I needed money, and he said he'd call me and let me know where to meet in the next night. He called me up about half past nine Saturday night, and told me to come out to the house. So I went out there, and he was waiting for me on the porch and took me upstairs and gave me the ten thousand. I told him that this was the last time I'd ever bother him. I always told him that. He had a good effect on him. Naturally, I wanted to get away as soon as I had the money, but he must have felt sort of talkative for change, because he kept me there for half an hour or so, gassing about men we used to know up in the province. After a while I began to get nervous. He was getting a look in his eyes like he used to have when he was young. And then all of a sudden he flared up and tied into me. He had me by the throat and was bending me back across the table when my hand touched that brass knife. It was either me or him. So I let him have it where it could do the most good. I beat it then and went back to the hotel. Newspapers were all full of it next day, had a whole lot of stuff about bloody fingerprints. That gave me a jolt. I didn't know nothing about fingerprints. And there I'd left them all over the dump. And then I got to worrying over the whole thing, and it seemed like any must have had my name written down somewhere as among his papers, and maybe it saved some of my letters or telegrams, though they were written in careful enough language. Anyway, I figured the police would want to be asking me some questions sooner or later. There I'd be with fingers that fit the bloody prints, and nothing for what Far calls a alibi. That's when I thought of Far. I had his address and I knew he'd been a fingerprint sharp at the east, so I decided to take a chance on him. I went to him and told him the whole story, and between us we figured out what to do. He said he'd dope my fingers. And I was to come here and tell the story we'd fixed up and have my fingerprints taken, and then I'd be safe no matter what leaked out about me and Henny. So he smeared up the fingers and told me to be careful not to shake hands with anybody or touch anything, and I came down here and everything went like three of a kind. Then that little fat guy, meaning me, came round to the hotel last night and as good as told me that he thought I had done for Henny, and that I'd better come down here this morning. I beat it for Far's right away to see whether I had to run for it, and sit tight, and Far said, sit tight. So I stayed there all night, and he fixed up my hands this morning. That's my yarn. Fells turned to Far. I've seen fake prints before, but never any this good. How'd you do it? These scientific birds are funny. Here was Far, looking a nice long stretch in the face as accessory after the fact, and yet he brightened up under the admiration and fell's tone and answered with a voice that was chock full of pride. It's simple. I got hold of a man whose prints I knew weren't in any police gallery. I didn't want any slip up there, and took his prints and put them on a copper plate, using the ordinary photo-engraving process, but etching it pretty deep. Then I coated Plain's fingers with gelatin, just enough to cover all his markings and press them against the plates. That way I got everything, even to the pores, and when I left the bureau ten minutes later Far and Fells were still sitting, knee to knee, jabbering white each other as only a couple of birds who are cuckoo on the same subject can. End of Slippery Fingers.