Yust grinned stupidly across the street, and repeated:
“Where you going?”
Owen Sack tried to answer, to say something – safety seemed to lie in words – but, though he did achieve a sound, it was inarticulate, and would have told the other nothing, even if it had travelled more than ten feet from the little man’s throat.
Yust laughed boomingly. He was apparently in high good humour.
“Now, you mind what I told you this afternoon,” he roared, wagging a thick forefinger at Owen Sack. “If I find that you done it -“
The thick forefinger flashed back to tap the left breast of his coat.
Owen Sack screamed at the suddenness of the gesture – a thin, shrill scream of terror, which struck amusingly upon the big man’s drunken fancy.
Laughter boomed out of his throat again, and his gun came into his hand. His brother’s arrest and Owen Sack’s supposed part in that arrest were, for the time, forgotten in his enjoyment of the little man’s ridiculous fright.
With the sight of the gun, Owen Sack’s last shred of sanity departed. Terror had him fast. He tried to plead, but his mouth could not frame the words. He tried to raise both his hands high above his head in the universal posture of submission, a posture that had saved him many times before. But the strap holding his pack hampered him. He tried to loosen the strap, to fling it off.
To the alcohol-muddled eyes and brain of the man across the street Owen Sack’s right hand was trying to get beneath his coat on the left side. Rip Yust could read but one meaning into that motion – the little man was going for his gun.
The weapon in Yust’s hand spat flame!
Owen Sack sobbed. Something struck him heavily on one side. He fell, sat down on the sidewalk, his eyes wide and questioning and fixed upon the smoking gun across the street.
Somebody, he found, was bending over him. It was Henny Upshaw, in front of whose establishment he had fallen. Owen Sack’s eyes went back to the man on the opposite curb, who, cold sober now, his face granite, stood awaiting developments, the gun still in his hand.
Owen Sack didn’t know whether to get up, to remain still, or to lie down. Upshaw had struck him aside in time to save him from the first bullet; but suppose the big man fired again?
“Where’d he get you?” Upshaw was asking.
“What’s that?”
“Now take it easy,” Upshaw advised. “You’ll be all right! I’ll get one of the boys to help me with you.”
Owen Sack’s fingers wound into one of Upshaw’s sleeves.
“Wh – what happened?” he asked.
“Rip shot you, but you’ll be all right. Just lay -“
Owen Sack released Upshaw’s sleeve, and his hands went feeling about his body, exploring. One of them came away red and sticky from his right side, and that side – where he had felt the blow that had taken him off his feet – was warm and numb.
“Did he shoot me?” he demanded in an excited screech.
“Sure, but you’re all right,” Upshaw soothed him, and beckoned to the men who were coming slowly into the street, drawn forward by their curiosity, but retarded in their approach by the sight of Yust, who still stood, gun in hand, waiting to see what happened next.
“My God!” Owen Sack gasped in utter bewilderment. “And it ain’t no worse than that!”
He bounded to his feet – his pack sliding off – eluded the hands that grasped at him, and ran for the door of Upshaw’s place. On a shelf beneath the cash register he found Upshaw’s black automatic, and, holding it stiffly in front of him at arm’s length, turned back to the street.
His china-blue eyes were wide with wonder, and from out of his grinning mouth issued a sort of chant:
“
All these years I been running,
And it ain’t no worse than that!
All these years I been running,
And it ain’t no worse than that!”
Rip Yust, crossing the roadway now, was in the middle when Owen Sack popped out of Upshaw’s door.
The onlookers scattered. Rip’s revolver swung up, and roared. A spray of Owen Sack’s straw-coloured hair whisked back.
He giggled, and fired three times, rapidly. None of the bullets hit the big man. Owen Sack felt something burn his left arm. He fired again, and missed.
“I got to get closer,” he told himself aloud.
He walked across the sidewalk – the automatic held stiffly before him – stepped down into the roadway, and began to stride toward where pencils of fire sprang to meet him from Yust’s gun.
And as the little man strode he chanted his silly chant, and fired, fired, fired… Once something tugged at one of his shoulders, and once at his arm – above where he had felt the burn – but he did not even wonder what it was.
When he was within ten feet of Rip Yust, that man turned as if to walk away, took a step, his big body curved suddenly in a grotesque arc, and he slid down into the sand of the roadway.
Owen Sack found that the weapon in his own hand was empty, had been empty for some time. He turned around. Dimly he made out the broad doorway of Upshaw’s place. The ground clung to his feet, trying to pull him down, to hold him back, but he gained the doorway, gained the cash register, found the shelf, and returned the automatic to it.
Voices were speaking to him, arms were around him. He ignored the voices, shook off the arms, reached the street again. More hands to be shaken off. But the air lent him strength. He was indoors again, leaning over the firearm showcase in Jeff Hamline’s store.
“I want the two biggest handguns you got, Jeff, and a mess of cartridges. Fix ‘em up for me and I’ll be back to get ‘em in a little while.”
He knew that Jeff answered him, but he could not separate Jeff’s words from the roaring in his head.
The warmer air of the street once more. The ankle-deep dust of the roadway pulling at his feet. The opposite sidewalk. Doc Johnstone’s door. Somebody helping him up the narrow stairs. A couch or table under him; he could see and hear better now that he was lying down.
“Fix me up in a hurry, Doc! I got a lot of things to tend to.”
The doctor’s smooth professional voice:
“You’ve nothing to attend to for a while except taking care of yourself.”
“I got to travel a lot, Doc. Hurry!”
“You’re all right, Sack. There’s no need of your going away. I saw Yust down you first from my window, and half a dozen others saw it. Self-defence if there ever was a case of it!”
“’Tain’t that!” A nice man was Doc, but there was a lot he didn’t understand. “I got a lot of places to go to, a lot of men I got to see.”
“Certainly. Certainly. Just as soon as you like.”
“You don’t understand, Doc!” The doc was talking to him like he was a child to be humoured, or a drunk. “My God, Doc! I got to back-track my whole life, and I ain’t young no more. There’s men I got to find in Baltimore, and Australia, and Brazil, and California, and God knows where – all. And some of ‘em will take a heap of finding. I got to do a lot of shootin’. I ain’t young no more, and it’s a mighty big job. I got to get going! You got to hurry me up, Doc! You got to…”
Owen Sack’s voice thickened to a mumble, to a murmur, and subsided.
Also in the room that first time were his wife, a roly-poly woman with lines in a plump white face like scratches in ivory; his daughter Phyllis, a smart popular-member-of-the-younger-set type; and the maid who had opened the door for me, a big-boned blond girl in apron and cap.
I had introduced myself as a representative of the North American Casualty Company’s San Francisco office, which I was in a way. There was no immediate profit in admitting I was a Continental Detective Agency sleuth, just now in the casualty company’s hire, so I held back that part.
“I want a list of the stuff yon lost,” I told Toplin, “but first -“
“Stuff?” Toplin’s yellow sphere of a skull bobbed off the pillows, and he wailed to the ceiling, “A hundred thousand dollars if a nickel, and he calls it stuff!”
Mrs. Toplin pushed her husband’s head down on the pillows again with a short-fingered fat hand.
“Now, Frank, don’t get excited,” she soothed him.
Phyllis Toplin’s dark eyes twinkled, and she winked at me.
The man in bed turned his face to me again, smiled a bit shame-facedly, and chuckled.
“Well, if you people want to call your seventy-five-thousand-dollar loss stuff, I guess I can stand it for twenty-five thousand.”
“So it adds up to a hundred thousand?” I asked.
“Yes. None of them were insured to their full value, and some weren’t insured at all.”
That was very usual. I don’t remember ever having anybody admit that anything stolen from them was insured to the hilt – always it was half, or at most, three-quarters covered by the policy.
“Suppose you tell me exactly what happened,” I suggested, and added, to head off another speech that usually comes, “I know you’ve already told the police the whole thing, but I’ll have to have it from you.”
“Well, we were getting dressed to go to the Bauers’ last night. I brought my wife’s and daughter’s jewellery – the valuable pieces – home with me from the safe-deposit box. I had just got my coat on and had called to them to hurry up when the doorbell rang.”
“What time was this?”
“Just about half-past eight. I went out of this room into the sitting-room across the passageway and was putting some cigars in my case when Hilda” – nodding at the blond maid – “came walking into the room, backward. I started to ask her if she had gone crazy, walking around backward, when I saw the robber. He -“
“Just a moment.” I turned to the maid. “What happened when you answered the bell?”
“Why, I opened the door, of course, and this man was standing there, and he had a revolver in his hand, and he stuck it against my – my stomach, and pushed me back into the room where Mr. Toplin was, and he shot Mr. Toplin, and -“
“When I saw him and the revolver in his hand” – Toplin took the story away from his servant – “it gave me a fright, sort of, and I let my cigar case slip out of my hand. Trying to catch it again – no sense in ruining good cigars even if you are being robbed – he must have thought I was trying to get a gun or something. Anyway, he shot me in the leg. My wife and Phyllis came running in when they heard the shot and he pointed the revolver at them, took all their jewels, and had them empty my pockets. Then he made them drag me back into Phyllis’s room, into the closet, and he locked us all in there. And mind you, he didn’t say a word all the time, not a word – just made motions with his gun and his left hand.”
“How bad did he bang your leg?”
“Depends on whether you want to believe me or the doctor. He says it’s nothing much. Just a scratch, he says, but it’s my leg that’s shot, not his!”
“Did he say anything when you opened the door?” I asked the maid.
“No, sir.”
“Did any of you hear him say anything while he was here?”
None of them had.
“What happened after he locked you in the closet?”
“Nothing that we knew about,” Toplin said, “until McBirney and a policeman came and let us out.”
“Who’s McBirney?”
“The janitor.”
“How’d he happen along with a policeman?”
“He heard the shot and came upstairs just as the robber was starting down after leaving here. The robber turned around and ran upstairs, then into an apartment on the seventh floor, and stayed there – keeping the woman who lives there, a Miss Eveleth, quiet with his revolver – until he got a chance to sneak out and get away. He knocked her unconscious before he left, and – and that’s all. McBirney called the police right after he saw the robber, but they got here too late to be any good.”
“How long were you in the closet?”
“Ten minutes – maybe fifteen.”
“What sort of looking man was the robber?”
“Short and thin and -“
“How short?”
“About your height, or maybe shorter.”
“About five feet five or six, say? What would he weigh?”
“Oh, I don’t know – maybe a hundred and fifteen or twenty. He was kind of puny.”
“How old?”
“Not more than twenty-two or -three.”
“Oh, Papa,” Phyllis objected, “he was thirty, or near it!”
“What do you think?” I asked Mrs. Toplin.
“Twenty-five, I’d say.”
“And you?” to the maid.
“I don’t know exactly, sir, but he wasn’t very old.”
“Light or dark?”
“He was light,” Toplin said. “He needed a shave and his beard was yellowish.”
“More of a light brown,” Phyllis amended.
“Maybe, but it was light.”
“What colour eyes?”
“I don’t know. He had a cap pulled down over them. They looked dark, but that might have been because they were in the shadow.”
“How would you describe the part of his face you could see?”
“Pale, and kind of weak-looking – small chin. But you couldn’t see much of his face; he had his coat collar up and his cap pulled down.”
“How was he dressed?”
“A blue cap pulled down over his eyes, a blue suit, black shoes, and black gloves – silk ones.”
“Shabby or neat?”
“Kind of cheap-looking clothes, awfully wrinkled.”
“What sort of gun?”
Phyllis Toplin put in her word ahead of her father.
“Papa and Hilda keep calling it a revolver, but it was an automatic a thirty-eight.”
“Would you folks know him if you saw him again?”
“Yes,” they agreed.
I cleared a space on the bedside table and got out a pencil and paper.
“I want a list of what he got, with as thorough a description of each piece as possible, and the price you paid for it, where you bought it, and when.” I got the list half an hour later.
“Do you know the number of Miss Eveleth’s apartment?” I asked.
“702, two floors above.”
I went up there and rang the bell. The door was opened by a girl of twenty-something, whose nose was hidden under adhesive tape. She had nice clear hazel eyes, dark hair, and athletics written all over her.
“Miss Eveleth?”
“Yes.”
“I’m from the insurance company that insured the Toplin jewellery, and I’m looking for information about the robbery.”
She touched her bandaged nose and smiled ruefully.
“This is some of my information.”
“How did it happen?”
“A penalty of femininity. I forgot to mind my own business. But what you want, I suppose, is what I know about the scoundrel. The doorbell rang a few minutes before nine last night and when I opened the door he was there. As soon as I got the door opened he jabbed a pistol at me and said, ‘Inside, kid!’
“I let him in with no hesitancy at all; I was quite instantaneous about it and he kicked the door to behind him.
“’Where’s the fire escape?’ he asked.
“The fire escape doesn’t come to any of my windows, and I told him so, but he wouldn’t take my word for it. He drove me ahead of him to each of the windows; but of course he didn’t find his fire escape, and he got peevish about it, as if it were my fault. I didn’t like some of the things he called me, and he was such a little half-portion of a man so I tried to take him in hand. But – well, man is still the dominant animal so far as I’m concerned. In plain American, he busted me in the nose and left me where I fell. I was dazed, though not quite all the way out, and when I got up he had gone. I ran out into the corridor then, and found some policemen on the stairs. I sobbed out my pathetic little tale to them and they told me of the Toplin robbery. Two of them came back here with me and searched the apartment. I hadn’t seen him actually leave, and they thought he might be foxy enough or desperate enough to jump into a closet and stay there until the coast was clear. But they didn’t find him here.”
“How long do you think it was after he knocked you down that you ran out into the corridor?”
“Oh, it couldn’t have been five minutes. Perhaps only half that time.”
“What did Mr. Robber look like?”
“Small, not quite so large as I; with a couple of days’ growth of light hair on his face; dressed in shabby blue clothes, with black cloth gloves.”
“How old?”
“Not very. His beard was thin, patchy, and he had a boyish face.”
“Notice his eyes?”
“Blue; his hair, where it showed under the edge of his cap, was very light yellow, almost white.”
“What sort of voice?”
“Very deep bass, though he may have been putting that on.”
“Know him if you’d see him again?”
“Yes, indeed!” She put a gentle finger on her bandaged nose. “My nose would know, as the ads say, anyway!”
From Miss Eveleth’s apartment I went down to the office on the first floor, where I found McBirney, the janitor, and his wife, who managed the apartment building. She was a scrawny little woman with the angular mouth and nose of a nagger; he was big, broad-shouldered, with sandy hair and moustache, good-humoured, shiftless red face, and genial eyes of a pale and watery blue.
He drawled out what he knew of the looting.
“I was fixin’ a spigot on the fourth floor when I heard the shot. I went up to see what was the matter, an’ just as I got far enough up the front stairs to see the Toplins’ door, the fella came out. We seen each other at the same time, an’ he aims his gun at me. There’s a lot o’ things I might of done, but what I did do was to duck down an’ get my head out o’ range. I heard him run upstairs, an’ I got up just in time to see him make the turn between the fifth and sixth floors.
“I didn’t go after him. I didn’t have a gun or nothin’, an’ I figured we had him cooped. A man could get out o’ this buildin’ to the roof of the next from the fourth floor, an’ maybe from the fifth, but not from any above that; an’ the Toplins’ apartment is on the fifth. I figured we had this fella. I could stand in front of the elevator an’ watch both the front an’ back stairs; an’ I rang for the elevator, an’ told Ambrose, the elevator boy, to give the alarm an’ run outside an’ keep his eye on the fire escape until the police came.
“The missus came up with my gun in a minute or two, an’ told me that Martinez – Ambrose’s brother, who takes care of the switchboard an’ the front door – was callin’ the police. I could see both stairs plain, an’ the fella didn’t come down them; an’ it wasn’t more’n a few minutes before the police – a whole pack of ‘em – came from the Richmond Station. Then we let the Toplins out of the closet where they were, an’ started to search the buildin’. An’ then Miss Eveleth came runnin’ down the stairs, her face an’ dress all bloody, an’ told about him bein’ in her apartment; so we were pretty sure we’d land him. But we didn’t. We searched every apartment in the buildin’, but didn’t find hide nor hair of him.”
“Of course you didn’t!” Mrs. McBirney said unpleasantly. “But if you had -“
“I know,” the janitor said with the indulgent air of one who has learned to take his pannings as an ordinary part of married life, “if I’d been a hero an’ grabbed him, an’ got myself all mussed up. Well, I ain’t foolish like old man Toplin, gettin’ himself plugged in the foot, or Blanche Eveleth, gettin’ her nose busted. I’m a sensible man that knows when he’s licked – an’ I ain’t jumpin’ at no guns!”
“No! You’re not doing anything that -“
This Mr. and Mrs. stuff wasn’t getting me anywhere, so I cut in with a question to the woman. “Who is the newest tenant you have?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Jerald – they came the day before yesterday.”
“What apartment?”
“704 – next door to Miss Eveleth.”
“Who are these Jeralds?”
“They come from Boston. He told me he came out here to open a branch of a manufacturing company. He’s a man of at least fifty, thin and dyspeptic – looking.”
“Just him and his wife?”
“Yes. She’s poorly too – been in a sanatorium for a year or two.”