They grabbed their wages and were gone before I had finished my speech. I returned to the Golden Horseshoe — to be on hand in case one of them should decide to sell me out and come back there to spill the deal to Gooseneck.
Kewpie had left her model husband, and met me at the door. She stuck an arm through mine and led me toward the rear of the building. I noticed that Gooseneck was gone from behind the bar. I wondered if he was out gunning for my four ex-employees.
“Business looks good,” I chattered as we pushed through the crowd. “You know, I had a tip on Beeswax this afternoon, and wouldn’t play the pup.” I made two or three more aimless cracks of that sort — just because I knew the girl’s mind was full of something else. She paid no attention to anything I said.
But when we had dropped down in front of a vacant table, she asked:
“Who were your friends?”
“What friends?”
“The four jobbies who were at the bar when you were there a few minutes ago.”
“Too hard for me, sister.” I shook my head. “There were slews of men there. Oh, yes! I know who you mean! Those four gents who seemed kind of smitten with Gooseneck’s looks. I wonder what attracted them to him — besides his beauty.”
She grabbed my arm with both hands.
“So help me God, Painless,” she swore, “if you tie anything on Ed, I’ll kill you!”
Her brown eyes were big and damp. She was a hard and wise little baby — had rubbed the world’s sharp corners with both shoulders — but she was only a kid, and she was worried sick over this man of hers. However, the business of a sleuth is to catch criminals, not to sympathize with their ladyloves.
I patted her hands.
“I could give you some good advice,” I said as I stood up, “but you wouldn’t listen to it, so I’ll save my breath. It won’t do any harm to tell you to keep an eye on Gooseneck, though — he’s shifty.”
There wasn’t any special meaning to that speech, except that it might tangle things up a little more. One way of finding what’s at the bottom of either a cup of coffee or a situation is to keep stirring it up until whatever is on the bottom comes to the surface. I had been playing that system thus far on this affair.
Hooper came into my room in the San Diego hotel at a little before two the next morning.
“Gooseneck disappeared, with Gorman tailing him, immediately after your first visit,” he said. “After your second visit, the girl went around to a ’dobe house on the edge of town, and she was still there when I knocked off. The place was dark.”
Gorman didn’t show up.
VII
A bell-hop with a telegram roused me at ten o’clock in the morning. The telegram was from Mexicali:
DROVE HERE LAST NIGHT HOLED UP WITH FRIENDS SENT TWO WIRES.
That was good news. The long-necked man had fallen for my play, had taken my four busted gamblers for four witnesses, had taken their nods for identifications. Gooseneck was the lad who had done the actual killing, and Gooseneck was in flight.
I had shed my pajamas and was reaching for my union suit when the boy came back with another wire. This one was from O’Gar, through the Agency:
ASHCRAFT DISAPPEARED YESTERDAY
I used the telephone to get Hooper out of bed.
“Get down to Tijuana,” I told him. “Stick up the house where you left the girl last night, unless you run across her at the Golden Horseshoe. Stay there until she shows. Stay with her until she connects with a big blond Englishman, and then switch to him. He’s a man of less than forty, tall, with blue eyes and yellow hair. Don’t let him shake you — he’s the big boy in this party just now. I’ll be down. If the Englishman and I stay together and the girl leaves us, take her, but otherwise stick to him.”
I dressed, put down some breakfast and caught a stage for the Mexican town. The boy driving the stage made fair time, but you would have thought we were standing still to see a maroon roadster pass us near Palm City. Ashcraft was driving the roadster.
The roadster was empty, standing in front of the adobe house, when I saw it again. Up in the next block, Hooper was doing an imitation of a drunk, talking to two Indians in the uniforms of the Mexican Army.
I knocked on the door of the adobe house.
Kewpie’s voice: “Who is it?”
“Me — Painless. Just heard that Ed is back.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed. A pause. “Come in.”
I pushed the door open and went in. The Englishman sat tilted back in a chair, his right elbow on the table, his right hand in his coat pocket — if there was a gun in that pocket it was pointing at me.
“Hello,” he said. “I hear you’ve been making guesses about me.”
“Call ’em anything you like.” I pushed a chair over to within a couple of feet of him, and sat down. “But don’t let’s kid each other. You had Gooseneck knock your wife off so you could get what she had. The mistake you made was in picking a sap like Gooseneck to do the turn — a sap who went on a killing spree and then lost his nerve. Going to read and write just because three or four witnesses put the finger on him! And only going as far as Mexicali! That’s a fine place to pick! I suppose he was so scared that the five- or six-hour ride over the hills seemed like a trip to the end of the world!”
The man’s face told me nothing. He eased himself around in his chair an inch or two, which would have brought the gun in his pocket — if a gun was there — in line with my thick middle. The girl was somewhere behind me, fidgeting around. I was afraid of her. She was crazily in love with this man in front of me, and I had seen the blade she wore on one leg. I imagined her fingers itching for it now. The man and his gun didn’t worry me much. He was not rattle-brained, and he wasn’t likely to bump me off either in panic or for the fun of it.
I kept my chin going.
“You aren’t a sap, Ed, and neither am I. I want to take you riding north with bracelets on, but I’m in no hurry. What I mean is, I’m not going to stand up and trade lead with you. This is all in my daily grind. It isn’t a matter of life or death with me. If I can’t take you today, I’m willing to wait until tomorrow. I’ll get you in the end, unless somebody beats me to you — and that won’t break my heart. There’s a rod between my vest and my belly. If you’ll have Kewpie get it out, we’ll be all set for the talk I want to make.”
He nodded slowly, not taking his eyes from me. The girl came close to my back. One of her hands came over my shoulder, went under my vest, and my old black gun left me. Before she stepped away she laid the point of her knife against the nape of my neck for an instant — a gentle reminder. I managed not to squirm or jump.
“Good,” I said when she gave my gun to the Englishman, who pocketed it with his left hand. “Now here’s my proposition. You and Kewpie ride across the border with me — so we won’t have to fool with extradition papers — and I’ll have you locked up. We’ll do our fighting in court. I’m not absolutely certain that I can tie the killings on either of you, and if I flop, you’ll be free. If I make the grade — as I hope to — you’ll swing, of course. But there’s always a good chance of beating the courts — especially if you’re guilty — and that’s the only chance you have that’s worth a damn.
“What’s the sense of scooting? Spending the rest of your life dodging bulls? Only to be nabbed finally — or bumped off trying to get away? You’ll maybe save your neck, but what of the money your wife left? That money is what you are in the game for — it’s what you had your wife killed for. Stand trial and you’ve a chance to collect it. Run — and you kiss it good-by. Are you going to ditch it — throw it away just because your cat’s-paw bungled the deal? Or are you going to stick to the finish — win everything or lose everything?”