“Yes.”
I addressed the Old Man: “Now about the police?”
Chappell began: “No, not the police! Won’t they—?”
I interrupted him: “We’ve got to tell them, in case something goes wrong and to have them all set for action as soon as Mrs. Chappell is safely home again. We can persuade them to keep their hands off till then.” I asked the Old Man: “Don’t you think so?”
He nodded and reached for his telephone. “I think so. I’ll have Lieutenant Fielding and perhaps someone from the District Attorney’s office come up here and we’ll lay the whole thing before them.”
Fielding and an Assistant District Attorney named McPhee came up. At first they were all for making the Turk-and-Larkin-Street-brick-pile a midnight target for half the San Francisco police force, but we finally persuaded them to listen to reason. We dug up the history of kidnaping from Ross to Parker and waved it in their faces and showed them that the statistics were on our side: more success and less grief had come from paying what was asked and going hunting afterwards than from trying to nail the kidnapers before the kidnaped were released.
At half past eleven o’clock that night Chappell left his house, alone, with five thousand dollars wrapped in a sheet of brown paper in his pocket. At twenty minutes past twelve he returned.
His face was yellowish and wet with perspiration and he was trembling.
“I put it there,” he said difficultly. “I didn’t see anybody.”
I poured out a glass of his whiskey and gave it to him.
He walked the floor most of the night. I dozed in a sofa. Half a dozen times at least I heard him go to the street door to open it and look out. Detective-sergeants Muir and Callahan went to bed. They and I had planted ourselves there to get any information Mrs. Chappell could give us as soon as possible.
She did not come home.
At nine in the morning Callahan was called to the telephone. He came away from it scowling.
“Nobody’s come for the dough yet,” he told us.
Chappell’s drawn face became wide-eyed and open-mouthed with horror. “You had the place watched?” he cried.
“Sure,” Callahan said, “but in an all right way. We just had a couple of men stuck up in an apartment down the block with field-glasses. Nobody could tumble to that.”
Chappell turned to me, horror deepening in his face. “What—?”
The door-bell rang.
Chappell ran to the door and presently came back excitedly tearing a special-delivery-stamped envelope open. Inside was another of the crudely printed letters.
MARTIN CHAPPELL
DEAR SIR—
WE GOT THE MONEY ALL RIGHT BUT HAVE GOT TO HAVE MORE TONIGHT THE SAME AMOUNT AT THE SAME TIME AND EVERYTHING ELSE THE SAME. THIS TIME WE WILL HONESTLY SEND YOUR WIFE HOME ALIVE IF YOU DO AS YOU ARE TOLD. IF YOU DO NOT OR SAY A WORD TO THE POLICE YOU KNOW WHAT TO EXPECT AND YOU BET YOU WILL GET IT.
Callahan said: “What the hell?”
Muir growled: “Them ¾ ¾ at the window must be blind.”
I looked at the postmark on the envelope. It was earlier that morning. I asked Chappelclass="underline" “Well, what are you going to do?”
He swallowed and said: “I’ll give them every cent I’ve got if it will bring Louise home safe.”
At half past eleven o’clock that night Chappell left his house with another five thousand dollars. When he returned the first thing he said was: “The money I took last night is really gone.”
This night was much like the previous one except that he had less hopes of seeing Mrs. Chappell in the morning. Nobody said so, but all of us expected another letter in the morning asking for still another five thousand dollars.
Another special-delivery letter did come, but it read:
MARTIN CHAPPELL
DEAR SIR—
WE WARNED YOU TO KEEP THE POLICE OUT OF IT AND YOU DISOBEYED. TAKE YOUR POLICE TO APT. 313 AT 895 POST ST. AND YOU WILL FIND THE CORPSE WE PROMISED YOU IF YOU DISOBEYED.
Callahan cursed and jumped for the telephone.
I put an arm around Chappell as he swayed, but he shook himself together and turned fiercely on me.
“You’ve killed her!” he cried.
“Hell with that,” Muir barked. “Let’s get going.”
Muir, Chappell, and I went out to Chappell’s car, which had stood two nights in front of the house. Callahan ran out to join us as we were moving away.
The Post Street address was only a ten-minute ride from Chappell’s house the way we did it. It took a couple of more minutes to find the manager of the apartment house and to take her keys away from her. Then we went up and entered apartment 313.
A tall slender woman with curly red hair lay dead on the living-room floor. There was no question of her being dead: she had been dead long enough for discoloration to have got well under way She was lying on her back. The tan flannel bathrobe — apparently a man’s — she had on had fallen open to show pinkish lingerie. She had on stockings and one slipper. The other slipper lay near her.
Her face and throat and what was visible of her body were covered with bruises. Her eyes were wide open and bulging, her tongue out: she had been beaten and then throttled.
More police detectives joined us and some policemen in uniform. We went into our routine.
The manager of the house told us the apartment had been occupied by a man named Harrison M. Rockfield. She described him: about thirty-five years old, six feet tall, blond hair, gray or blue eyes, slender, perhaps a hundred and sixty pounds, very agreeable personality, dressed well. She said he had been living there alone for three months. She knew nothing about his friends, she said, and had not seen Mrs. Chappell before. She had not seen Rockfield for two or three days but had thought nothing of it as she often went a week or so without seeing some tenants.
We found a plentiful supply of clothing in the apartment, some of which the manager positively identified as Rockfield’s. The police department experts found a lot of masculine fingerprints that we hoped were his.
We couldn’t find anybody in adjoining apartments who had heard the racket that must have been made by the murder.
We decided that Mrs. Chappell had probably been killed as soon as she was brought to the apartment — no later than the night of her disappearance, anyhow.
“But why?” Chappell demanded dumbfoundedly.
“Playing safe. You wouldn’t know till after you’d come across. She wasn’t feeble. It would be hard to keep her quiet in a place like this.”
A detective came in with the package of hundred-dollar bills Chappell had placed under the brick-pile the previous night.
I went down to headquarters with Callahan to question the men stationed at a nearby apartment-window to watch the vacant lot. They swore up and down that nobody — “not as much as a rat” — could have approached the brick-pile without being seen by them. Callahan’s answer to that was a bellowed “The Hell they couldn’t — they did!”
I was called to the telephone. Chappell was on the wire. His voice was hoarse.
“The telephone was ringing when I got home,” he said, “and it was him.”
“Who?”
“Death and Co., he said. That’s what he said, and he told me that it was my turn next. That’s all he said. ‘This is Death and Co., and it’s your turn next.’”
“I’ll be right out,” I said. “Wait for me.”
I told Callahan and the others what Chappell had told me.
Callahan scowled. “—,” he said, “I guess we’re up against another of those — damned nuts!”
Chappell was in a bad way when I arrived at his house. He was shivering as if with a chill and his eyes were almost idiotic in their fright.