The Golden Horseshoe and Other Stories (12 page)

“You ain't got nothin' on me.”

“What of that? How'd you like to do a thirty or a sixty on a vag charge?”

“Vag, hell!” he snarled, looking up at me. “I got five hundred smacks in my kick. Does that look like you can vag me?”

I grinned down at him.

“You know better than that, Ryan. A pocketful of money'll get you nothing in California. You've got no job. You can't show where your money comes from. You're made to order for the vag law.”

I had this bird figured as a dope peddler. If he was—or was anything else off color that might come to light when he was vagged—the chances were that he would be willing to sell Ashcraft out to save himself; especially since, so far as I knew, Ashcraft wasn't on the wrong side of the criminal law.

“If I were you,” I went on while he stared at the floor and thought, “I'd be a nice, obliging fellow and do my talking now. You're—”

He twisted sidewise in his chair and one of his hands went behind him.

I kicked him out of his chair.

The table slipped under me or I would have stretched him. As it was, the foot that I aimed at his jaw took him on the chest and carried him over backward, with the rocking-chair piled on top of him. I pulled the chair off and took his gun—a cheap nickel-plated .32. Then I went back to my seat on the corner of the table.

He had only that one flash of fight in him. He got up sniveling.

“I'll tell you. I don't want no trouble, an' it ain't nothin' to me. I didn't know there was nothin' wrong. This Ashcraft told me he was jus' stringin' his wife along. He give me ten bucks a throw to get his letter ever' month an' send it to him in Tijuana. I knowed him here, an' when he went south six months ago—he's got a girl down there—I promised I'd do it for him. I knowed it was money—he said it was his ‘alimony'—but I didn't know there was nothin' wrong.”

“What sort of a hombre is this Ashcraft? What's his graft?”

“I don't know. He could be a con man—he's got a good front. He's a Englishman, an' mostly goes by the name of Ed Bohannon. He hits the hop. I don't use it myself”—that was a good one—“but you know how it is in a burg like this, a man runs into all kinds of people. I don't know nothin' about what he's up to. I jus' send the money ever' month an' get my ten.”

That was all I could get out of him. He couldn't—or wouldn't—tell me where Ashcraft had lived in San Francisco or who he had mobbed up with. However, I had learned that Bohannon was Ashcraft, and not another go-between, and that was something.

Ryan squawked his head off when he found that I was going to vag him anyway. For a moment it looked like I would have to kick him loose from his backbone again.

“You said you'd spring me if I talked,” he wailed.

“I did not. But if I had—when a gent flashes a rod on me I figure it cancels any agreement we might have had. Come on.”

I couldn't afford to let him run around loose until I got in touch with Ashcraft. He would have been sending a telegram before I was three blocks away, and my quarry would be on his merry way to points north, east, south and west.

It was a good hunch I played in nabbing Ryan. When he was fingerprinted at the Hall of Justice he turned out to be one Fred Rooney, alias “Jamocha,” a peddler and smuggler who had crushed out of the Federal Prison at Leavenworth, leaving eight years of a tenner still unserved.

“Will you sew him up for a couple of days?” I asked the captain of the city jail. “I've got work to do that will go smoother if he can't get any word out for a while.”

“Sure,” the captain promised. “The federal people won't take him off our hands for two or three days. I'll keep him air-tight till then.”

III

From the jail I went up to Vance Richmond's office and turned my news over to him.

“Ashcraft is getting his mail in Tijuana. He's living down there under the name of Ed Bohannon, and maybe has a woman there. I've just thrown one of his friends—the one who handled the mail and an escaped con—in the cooler.”

“Was that necessary?” Richmond asked. “We don't want to work any hardships. We're really trying to help Ashcraft, you know.”

“I could have spared this bird,” I admitted. “But what for? He was all wrong. If Ashcraft can be brought back to his wife, he's better off with some of his shady friends out of the way. If he can't, what's the difference? Anyway, we've got one line on him safely stowed away where we can find it when we want it.”

The attorney shrugged, and reached for the telephone.

He called a number. “Is Mrs. Ashcraft there? … This is Mr. Richmond. … No, we haven't exactly found him, but I think we know where he is. … Yes. … In about fifteen minutes.”

He put down the telephone and stood up.

“We'll run up to Mrs. Ashcraft's house and see her.”

Fifteen minutes later we were getting out of Richmond's car in Jackson Street near Gough. The house was a three-story white stone building, set behind a carefully sodded little lawn with an iron railing around it.

Mrs. Ashcraft received us in a drawing-room on the second floor. A tall woman of less than thirty, slimly beautiful in a gray dress. Clear was the word that best fits her; it described the blue of her eyes, the pink-white of her skin, and the light brown of her hair.

Richmond introduced me to her, and then I told her what I had learned, omitting the part about the woman in Tijuana. Nor did I tell her that the chances were her husband was a crook nowadays.

“Mr. Ashcraft is in Tijuana, I have been told. He left San Francisco about six months ago. His mail is being forwarded to him in care of a cafe there, under the name of Edward Bohannon.”

Her eyes lighted up happily, but she didn't throw a fit. She wasn't that sort. She addressed the attorney.

“Shall I go down? Or will you?”

Richmond shook his head.

“Neither. You certainly shouldn't go, and I cannot—not at present. I must be in Eureka by the day after tomorrow, and shall have to spend several days there.” He turned to me. “You'll have to go. You can no doubt handle it better than I could. You will know what to do and how to do it. There are no definite instructions I can give you. Your course will have to depend on Mr. Ashcraft's attitude and condition. Mrs. Ashcraft doesn't wish to force herself on him, but neither does she wish to leave anything undone that might help him.”

Mrs. Ashcraft held a strong, slender hand out to me.

“You will do whatever you think wisest.”

It was partly a question, partly an expression of confidence.

“I will,” I promised.

I liked this Mrs. Ashcraft.

IV

Tijuana hadn't changed much in the two years I had been away. Still the same six or seven hundred feet of dusty and dingy street running between two almost solid rows of saloons,—perhaps thirty-five of them to a row,—with dirtier side streets taking care of the dives that couldn't find room on the main street.

The automobile that had brought me down from San Diego dumped me into the center of the town early in the afternoon, and the day's business was just getting under way. That is, there were only two or three drunks wandering around among the dogs and loafing Mexicans in the street, although there was already a bustle of potential drunks moving from one saloon to the next. But this was nothing like the crowd that would be here the following week, when the season's racing started.

In the middle of the next block I saw a big gilded horseshoe. I went down the street and into the saloon behind the sign. It was a fair sample of the local joint. A bar on your left as you came in, running half the length of the building, with three or four slot machines on one end. Across from the bar, against the right-hand wall, a dance floor that ran from the front wall to a raised platform, where a greasy orchestra was now preparing to go to work. Behind the orchestra was a row of low stalls or booths, with open fronts and a table and two benches apiece. Opposite them, in the space between the bar and the rear of the building, a man with a hair-lip was shaking pills out of a keno goose.

It was early in the day, and there were only a few buyers present, so the girls whose business it is to speed the sale of drinks charged down on me in a flock.

“Buy me a drink? Let's have a little drink? Buy a drink, honey?”

I shooed them away—no easy job—and caught a bartender's eye. He was a beefy, red-faced Irishman, with sorrel hair plastered down in two curls that hid what little forehead he had.

“I want to see Ed Bohannon,” I told him confidentially.

He turned blank fish-green eyes on me.

“I don't know no Ed Bohannon.”

Taking out a piece of paper and a pencil I scribbled,
Jamocha is copped
, and slid the paper over to the bartender.

“If a man who says he's Ed Bohannon asks for that, will you give it to him?”

“I guess so.”

“Good,” I said. “I'll hang around a while.”

I walked down the room and sat at a table in one of the stalls. A lanky girl who had done something to her hair that made it purple was camped beside me before I had settled in my seat.

“Buy me a little drink?” she asked.

The face she made at me was probably meant for a smile. Whatever it was, it beat me. I was afraid she'd do it again, so I surrendered.

“Yes,” I said, and ordered a bottle of beer for myself from the waiter who was already hanging over my shoulder.

The beer wasn't bad, for green beer; but at four bits a bottle it wasn't anything to write home about. This Tijuana happens to be in Mexico—by about a mile—but it's an American town, run by Americans, who sell American artificial booze at American prices. If you know your way around the United States you can find lots of places—especially near the Canadian line—where good booze can be bought for less than you are soaked for poison in Tijuana.

The purple-haired woman at my side downed her shot of whiskey, and was opening her mouth to suggest that we have another drink,—hustlers down there don't waste any time at all,—when a voice spoke from behind me.

“Cora, Frank wants you.”

Cora scowled, looking over my shoulder.

Then she made that damned face at me again, said “All right, Kewpie. Will you take care of my friend here?” and left me.

Kewpie slid into the seat beside me. She was a little chunky girl of perhaps eighteen—not a day more than that. Just a kid. Her short hair was brown and curly over a round, boyish face with laughing, impudent eyes. Rather a cute little trick.

I bought her a drink and got another bottle of beer.

“What's on your mind?” I asked her.

“Hooch.” She grinned at me—a grin that was as boyish as the straight look of her brown eyes. “Gallons of it.”

“And besides that?”

I knew this switching of girls on me hadn't been purposeless.

“I hear you're looking for a friend of mine,” Kewpie said.

“That might be. What friends have you got?”

“Well, there's Ed Bohannon for one. You know Ed?”

I shook my head.

“No—not yet.”

“But you're looking for him?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Maybe I could tell you how to find him, if I knew you were all right.”

“It doesn't make any difference to me,” I said carelessly. “I've a few more minutes to waste, and if he doesn't show up by then it's all one to me.”

She cuddled against my shoulder.

“What's the racket? Maybe I could get word to Ed.”

I stuck a cigarette in her mouth, one in my own, and lit them.

“Let it go,” I bluffed. “This Ed of yours seems to be as exclusive as all hell. Well, it's no skin off
my
face. I'll buy you another drink and then trot along.”

She jumped up.

“Wait a minute. I'll see if I can get him. What's your name?”

“Parker will do as well as any other,” I said, the name I had used on Ryan popping first into my mind.

“You wait,” she called back as she moved toward the back door. “I think I can find him.”

“I think so too,” I agreed.

Ten minutes went by, and a man came to my table from the front of the establishment. He was a blond Englishman of less than forty, with all the marks of the gentleman gone to pot on him. Not altogether on the rocks yet, but you could see evidence of the downhill slide plainly in the dullness of his blue eyes, in the pouches under his eyes, in the blurred lines around his mouth and the mouth's looseness, and in the grayish tint of his skin. He was still fairly attractive in appearance—enough of his former wholesomeness remained for that.

He sat down facing me across the table.

“You're looking for me?”

There was only a hint of the Britisher in his accent.

“You're Ed Bohannon?”

He nodded.

“Jamocha was picked up a couple of days ago,” I told him, “and ought to be riding back to the Kansas big house by now. He got word out for me to give you the rap. He knew I was heading this way.”

“How did they come to get him?”

His blue eyes were suspicious on my face.

“Don't know,” I said. “Maybe they picked him up on a circular.”

He frowned at the table and traced a meaningless design with a finger in a puddle of beer. Then he looked sharply at me again.

“Did he tell you anything else?”

“
He
didn't tell me anything. He got word out to me by somebody's mouthpiece. I didn't see him.”

“You're staying down here a while?”

“Yes, for two or three days,” I said. “I've got something on the fire.”

He stood up and smiled, and held out his hand.

“Thanks for the tip, Parker,” he said. “If you'll take a walk with me I'll give you something real to drink.”