Continental Op Stories · The Golden Horseshoe (7/7)

VIII

The car under me, I discovered, was surprisingly well engined for its battered looks⁠—its motor was so good that I knew it was a border-runner’s car. I nursed it along, not pushing it. There were still four or five hours of daylight left, and while there was any light at all I couldn’t miss the cloud of dust from the fleeing roadster.

I didn’t know whether we were following a road or not. Sometimes the ground under me looked like one, but mostly it didn’t differ much from the rest of the desert. For half an hour or more the dust-cloud ahead and I held our respective positions, and then I found that I was gaining.

The going was roughening. Any road that we might originally have been using had petered out. I opened up a little, though the jars it cost me were vicious. But if I was going to avoid playing Indian among the rocks and cactus, I would have to get within striking distance of my man before he deserted his car and started a game of hide and seek on foot. I’m a city man. I have done my share of work in the open spaces, but I don’t like it. My taste in playgrounds runs more to alleys, backyards and cellars than to canyons, mesas and arroyos.

I missed a boulder that would have smashed me up⁠—missed it by a hair⁠—and looked ahead again to see that the maroon roadster was no longer stirring up the grit. It had stopped.

The roadster was empty. I kept on.

From behind the roadster a pistol snapped at me, three times. It would have taken good shooting to plug me at that instant. I was bounding and bouncing around in my seat like a pellet of quicksilver in a nervous man’s palm.

He fired again from the shelter of his car, and then dashed for a narrow arroyo⁠—a sharp-edged, ten-foot crack in the earth⁠—off to the left. On the brink, he wheeled to snap another cap at me⁠—and jumped down out of sight.

I twisted the wheel in my hands, jammed on the brakes and slid the black touring car to the spot where I had seen him last. The edge of the arroyo was crumbling under my front wheels. I released the brake. Tumbled out. Shoved.

The car plunged down into the gully after him.

Sprawled on my belly, one of Gooseneck’s guns in each hand, I wormed my head over the edge. On all fours, the Englishman was scrambling out of the way of the car. The car was mangled, but still sputtering. One of the man’s fists was bunched around a gun⁠—mine.

“Drop it and stand up, Ed!” I yelled.

Snake-quick, he flung himself around in a sitting position on the arroyo bottom, swung his gun up⁠—and I smashed his forearm with my second shot.

He was holding the wounded arm with his left hand when I slid down beside him, picked up the gun he had dropped, and frisked him to see if he had any more.

He grinned at me.

“You know,” he drawled, “I fancy your true name isn’t Painless Parker at all. You don’t act like it.”

Twisting a handkerchief into a tourniquet of a sort, I knotted it around his wounded arm, which was bleeding.

“Let’s go upstairs and talk,” I suggested, and helped him up the steep side of the gully.

We climbed into his roadster.

“Out of gas,” he said. “We’ve got a nice walk ahead of us.”

“We’ll get a lift. I had a man watching your house, and another one shadowing Gooseneck. They’ll be coming out after me, I reckon. Meanwhile, we have time for a nice heart-to-heart talk.”

“Go ahead, talk your head off,” he invited; “but don’t expect me to add much to the conversation. You’ve got nothing on me.” (I’d like to have a dollar, or even a nickel, for every time I’ve heard that remark!) “You saw Kewpie bump Gooseneck off to keep him from peaching on her.”

“So that’s your play?” I inquired. “The girl hired Gooseneck to kill your wife⁠—out of jealousy⁠—when she learned that you were planning to shake her and return to your own world?”

“Exactly.”

“Not bad, Ed, but there’s one rough spot in it.”

“Yes?”

“Yes,” I repeated. “You are not Ashcraft!”

He jumped, and then laughed.

“Now your enthusiasm is getting the better of your judgment,” he kidded me. “Could I have deceived another man’s wife? Don’t you think her lawyer, Richmond, made me prove my identity?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Ed, I think I’m a smarter baby than either of them. Suppose you had a lot of stuff that belonged to Ashcraft⁠—papers, letters, things in his handwriting? If you were even a fair hand with a pen, you could have fooled his wife. She thought her husband had had four tough years and had become a hophead. That would account for irregularities in his writing. And I don’t imagine you ever got very familiar in your letters⁠—not enough so to risk any missteps. As for the lawyer⁠—his making you identify yourself was only a matter of form. It never occurred to him that you weren’t Ashcraft. Identification is easy, anyway. Give me a week and I’ll prove that I’m the Sultan of Turkey.”

He shook his head sadly.

“That comes from riding around in the sun.”

I went on.

“At first your game was to bleed Mrs. Ashcraft for an allowance⁠—to take the cure. But after she closed out her affairs in England and came here, you decided to wipe her out and take everything. You knew she was an orphan and had no close relatives to come butting in. You knew it wasn’t likely that there were many people in America who could say you were not Ashcraft. Now if you want to you can do your stalling for just as long as it takes us to send a photograph of you to England⁠—to be shown to the people that knew him there. But you understand that you will do your stalling in the can, so I don’t see what it will get you.”

“Where do you think Ashcraft would be while I was spending his money?”

There were only two possible guesses. I took the more reasonable one.

“Dead.”

I imagined his mouth tightened a little, so I took another shot, and added:

“Up north.”

That got to him, though he didn’t get excited. But his eyes became thoughtful behind his smile. The United States is all “up north” from Tijuana, but it was even betting that he thought I meant Seattle, where the last record of Ashcraft had come from.

“You may be right, of course,” he drawled. “But even at that, I don’t see just how you expect to hang me. Can you prove that Kewpie didn’t think I was Ashcraft? Can you prove that she knew why Mrs. Ashcraft was sending me money? Can you prove that she knew anything about my game? I rather think not. There are still any number of reasons for her to have been jealous of this other woman.

“I’ll do my bit for fraud, Painless, but you’re not going to swing me. The only two who could possibly tie anything on me are dead behind us. Maybe one of them told you something. What of it? You know damned well that you won’t be allowed to testify to it in court. What someone who is now dead may have told you⁠—unless the person it affects was present⁠—isn’t evidence, and you know it.”

“You may get away with it,” I admitted. “Juries are funny, and I don’t mind telling you that I’d be happier if I knew a few things about those murders that I don’t know. Do you mind telling me about the ins and outs of your switch with Ashcraft⁠—in Seattle?”

He squinted his blue eyes at me.

“You’re a puzzling chap, Painless,” he said. “I can’t tell whether you know everything, or are just sharpshooting.” He puckered his lips and then shrugged. “I’ll tell you. It won’t matter greatly. I’m due to go over for this impersonation, so a confession to a little additional larceny won’t matter.”

IX

“The hotel-sneak used to be my lay,” the Englishman said after a pause. “I came to the States after England and the Continent got uncomfortable. I was rather good at it. I had the proper manner⁠—the front. I could do the gentleman without sweating over it, you know. In fact there was a day, not so long ago, when I wasn’t ‘Liverpool Ed.’ But you don’t want to hear me brag about the select blood that flows through these veins.

“To get back to our knitting: I had rather a successful tour on my first American voyage. I visited most of the better hotels between New York and Seattle, and profited nicely. Then, one night in a Seattle hotel, I worked the tarrel and put myself into a room on the fourth floor. I had hardly closed the door behind me before another key was rattling in it. The room was night-dark. I risked a flash from my light, picked out a closet door, and got behind it just in time.

“The clothes closet was empty; rather a stroke of luck, since there was nothing in it for the room’s occupant to come for. He⁠—it was a man⁠—had switched on the lights by then.

“He began pacing the floor. He paced it for three solid hours⁠—up and down, up and down, up and down⁠—while I stood behind the closet door with my gun in my hand, in case he should pull it open. For three solid hours he paced that damned floor. Then he sat down and I heard a pen scratching on paper. Ten minutes of that and he was back at his pacing; but he kept it up for only a few minutes this time. I heard the latches of a valise click. And a shot!

“I bounded out of my retreat. He was stretched on the floor, with a hole in the side of his head. A bad break for me, and no mistake! I could hear excited voices in the corridor. I stepped over the dead chap, found the letter he had been writing on the writing-desk. It was addressed to Mrs. Norman Ashcraft, at a Wine Street number in Bristol, England. I tore it open. He had written that he was going to kill himself, and it was signed Norman. I felt better. A murder couldn’t be made out of it.

“Nevertheless, I was here in this room with a flashlight, skeleton keys, and a gun⁠—to say nothing of a handful of jewelry that I had picked up on the next floor. Somebody was knocking on the door.

“ ‘Get the police!’ I called through the door, playing for time.

“Then I turned to the man who had let me in for all this. I would have pegged him for a fellow Britisher even if I hadn’t seen the address on his letter. There are thousands of us on the same order⁠—blond, fairly tall, well set up. I took the only chance there was. His hat and topcoat were on a chair where he had tossed them. I put them on and dropped my hat beside him. Kneeling, I emptied his pockets, and my own, gave him all my stuff, pouched all of his. Then I traded guns with him and opened the door.

“What I had in mind was that the first arrivals might not know him by sight, or not well enough to recognize him immediately. That would give me several seconds to arrange my disappearance in. But when I opened the door I found that my idea wouldn’t work out as I had planned. The house detective was there, and a policeman, and I knew I was licked. There would be little chance of sneaking away from them. But I played my hand out. I told them I had come up to my room and found this chap on the floor going through my belongings. I had seized him, and in the struggle had shot him.

“Minutes went by like hours, and nobody denounced me. People were calling me Mr. Ashcraft. My impersonation was succeeding. It had me gasping then, but after I learned more about Ashcraft it wasn’t so surprising. He had arrived at the hotel only that afternoon, and no one had seen him except in his hat and coat⁠—the hat and coat I was wearing. We were of the same size and type⁠—typical blond Englishmen.

“Then I got another surprise. When the detective examined the dead man’s clothes he found that the maker’s labels had been ripped out. When I got a look at his diary, later, I found the explanation of that. He had been tossing mental coins with himself, alternating between a determination to kill himself, and another to change his name and make a new place for himself in the world⁠—putting his old life behind him. It was while he was considering the second plan that he had removed the markers from all of his clothing.

“But I didn’t know that while I stood there among those people. All I knew was that miracles were happening. I met the miracles halfway, not turning a hair, accepting everything as a matter of course. I think the police smelled something wrong, but they couldn’t put their hands on it. There was the dead man on the floor, with a prowler’s outfit in his pockets, a pocketful of stolen jewelry, and the labels gone from his clothes⁠—a burglar’s trick. And there I was⁠—a well-to-do Englishman whom the hotel people recognized as the room’s rightful occupant.

“I had to talk small just then, but after I went through the dead man’s stuff I knew him inside and outside, backward and forward. He had nearly a bushel of papers, and a diary that had everything he had ever done or thought in it. I put in the first night studying those things⁠—memorizing them⁠—and practicing his signature. Among the other things I had taken from his pockets were fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks, and I wanted to be able to get them cashed in the morning.

“I stayed in Seattle for three days⁠—as Norman Ashcraft. I had tumbled into something rich and I wasn’t going to throw it away. The letter to his wife would keep me from being charged with murder if anything slipped, and I knew I was safer seeing the thing through than running. When the excitement had quieted down I packed up and came down to San Francisco, resuming my own name⁠—Edward Bohannon. But I held onto all of Ashcraft’s property, because I had learned from it that his wife had money, and I knew I could get some of it if I played my cards right.

“She saved me the trouble of figuring out a deal for myself. I ran across one of her advertisements in the Examiner, answered it, and⁠—here we are.”

I looked toward Tijuana. A cloud of yellow dust showed in a notch between two low hills. That would be the machine in which Gorman and Hooper were tracking me. Hooper would have seen me set out after the Englishman, would have waited for Gorman to arrive in the car in which he had followed Gooseneck from Mexicali⁠—Gorman would have had to stay some distance in the rear⁠—and then both of the operatives would have picked up my trail.

I turned to the Englishman.

“But you didn’t have Mrs. Ashcraft killed?”

He shook his head.

“You’ll never prove it.”

“Maybe not,” I admitted.

I took a package of cigarettes out of my pocket and put two of them on the seat between us.

“Suppose we play a game. This is just for my own satisfaction. It won’t tie anybody to anything⁠—won’t prove anything. If you did a certain thing, pick up the cigarette that is nearer me. If you didn’t do that thing, pick up the one nearer you. Will you play?”

“No, I won’t,” he said emphatically. “I don’t like your game. But I do want a cigarette.”

He reached out his uninjured arm and picked up the cigarette nearer me.

“Thanks, Ed,” I said. “Now I hate to tell you this, but I’m going to swing you.”

“You’re balmy, my son.”

“You’re thinking of the San Francisco job, Ed,” I explained. “I’m talking about Seattle. You, a hotel sneak-thief, were discovered in a room with a man who had just died with a bullet in his head. What do you think a jury will make out of that, Ed?”

He laughed at me. And then something went wrong with the laugh. It faded into a sickly grin.

“Of course you did,” I said. “When you started to work out your plan to inherit all of Mrs. Ashcraft’s wealth by having her killed, the first thing you did was to destroy that suicide letter of her husband’s. No matter how carefully you guarded it, there was always a chance that somebody would stumble into it and knock your game on the head. It had served its purpose⁠—you wouldn’t need it. It would be foolish to take a chance on it turning up.

“I can’t put you up for the murders you engineered in San Francisco; but I can sock you with the one you didn’t do in Seattle⁠—so justice won’t be cheated. You’re going to Seattle, Ed, to hang for Ashcraft’s suicide.”

And he did.