The box from japan, p.68
The Box from Japan, page 68
“Good Lord!” he of the leather helmet and mustache exclaimed. “Old Artemus Baxter—of the Morning Sun! I couldn’t believe that yardlight at first. What the devil are you doing out here, man?”
“Hello, Inspector Grant. You’re just in time!” Baxter jerked his head in a combined forward and sidewise motion toward Halsey, still standing with hands upraised. “I was out here with that youngster over there—put ’em down, Halse; we’re all right now—watching the cleverest little scheme ever developed for running a Mexican Revolutionary army from outside Mexico, as it were.” He pointed over in the distant field. “See that balloon, Inspector, high up in the air—like a toy? See—look—the moon’s out now for a piece of a minute—and the balloon’s against that bright corner of the cloud just to the east. See it? With a teeny pork-chop griddle hanging under it? But man, man—that ain’t no toy balloon! No—sir! That fat baby, Inspector, is ten, fourteen feet in diameter, no less. And it’s—”
His words were broken off by the sudden sound of a scuffle, and loud cursing somewhere close: a pair of shots barked out hollowly within the house itself, in close succession to each other; and the radio-operating chamber which but a few minutes before had housed that villainous Teutonic figure and its repeating rifle suddenly lighted up in a flood of illumination pouring downward from its bright ceiling fixture, revealing a trio of gray-clad figures within it, one of whom had his fingers at that very moment on a wall snap-switch which evidently threw the main lights onto whatever source of electricity the concealed switchboard was then providing: the other two were struggling, surging back and forth, with a fourth—the brown-goateed man himself, whose rifle, still in his possession, was being twisted from his hands by the Federal operative closest to the window. The other Federal officer had his fingers about the bearded man’s thick low-collared neck. Thus they inched, all three, slowly backward toward the table, the officer at the light switch holding himself obviously in readiness. Those in the yard watched the combat, with its inevitable end, coolly. And it was over in a trice, with the stout, goateed man bent clear back on the table amid the wreckage of the rest of his smaller paraphernalia, and the gleam of another pair of handcuffs snapping over his pinioned hairy wrists told only too plainly that all shooting was over for the evening. The figure who had twisted the rifle from the big man’s grip, came forward to the open window and saluted, in the direction of the leader whom Baxter had addressed as Inspector Grant.
“Caught this bird, Chief,” he called out, “trying to slip through the back door with this Winchester in his hands. He turned tail when he saw us coming ’round the rear, and doubled back again. But the boys who were covering the inside front, and looking for a light switch at the same time, scared him off from there with their flashlights; so it looks as though we cornered him.” The speaker gazed about him, over both shoulders, perplexedly. “Looks like an illicit radio-dispatching outfit of some kind, Chief.”
“Bring him out to the van,” ordered Grant curtly, “and put him on deposit. Then go back in and search the whole house from top to bottom, cellar to attic. We’ll—”
Another of the many Federal operatives, one who had been kneeling on the grass some distance off by the side of the fallen Miguel, returned into the center of light.
“A greaser, Chief. Dead. About 26 years of age.”
“Damn fool! That’s what comes of running—from the Law. All right, Jackson. Have him slung up on the shelf of the van, and see that you strap him well so’s he won’t roll!”
With which briefly cool and unconcerned instructions, Grant turned back to Baxter again.
But Baxter spoke first:
“Jumping Jehosephat, Inspector, but how the devil did you and your gang ever happen to come down on us as you did? That Mexican-German devil you just landed was—say, get me one of your first aid kits, will you? I’ve a nick across my wrist. It’s oozing pretty lively. And a case of liniment too, if you’ve got one! I tripped in a tangle of grass when the bullet creased me, and fell like a ton of bricks. I’m—”
“First Aid kit, Bromley,” called Grant promptly. “Go on. Mexican-German, eh? Who the devil is—”
“He vellee glood catch, Inspector! He Auglust Flantzius, Generalissimo unt ride-hant bower uf der Mexigan Refolushondary Army! Why—that brown-spinached son of a sea-cook there was—” Baxter pointed back over his shoulder at the radio-dispatching chamber, unaware that the man he was indicating was already being hustled out of its door, “was smoking us out from beneath yon garage floor shot by shot, and I sure thought, Inspector, that our jig was up. Why, I—I even gave away my real age, I was so certain. Ach! Buena vista! Deo ex machina!” He grinned. And then stared with hopeless curiosity out toward the road at the big blue Federal police van whose idle motor still purred steadily away. “Inspector, how did you ever happen to raid this Mexican Revolutionary headquarters out here in the weeds?”
“We-e-ell,” said Grant slowly, his own face quite puzzled, “the way things were given to us, it sort of looked—well—it was so damned isolated, for one thing, that it looked like a racket of some sort. That is, taken in conjunction with other things phoned into me at Forest Park tonight. As for the gang here”—he indicated his men with a broad sweep of one hand— “I probably wouldn’t have brought the whole bunch—although I’d have come on myself, Baxter, be sure, with two or three men, anyway—except that we’d just staged a brewery raid, an hour or so ago, on a bum tip-off, at Power’s Grove, Du Page County—this Gyro-Van outfit, by the way, Baxter, is the Forest Park equipment, kept in the Federal hangar there, while the boys are all from downtown. Well, as I was starting to say, we found only a deserted decrepit old cider factory, instead of a nice busy brewery, which left the boys all disappointed as the devil, feeling cheated, and raring to go! So I decided to crack this joint—whatever it really was—and give it all we had, and—and keep ’em in practice. See? Well—I got an O.K. by phone from Forest Park, of course, from my Divisional Chief-Inspector-General Hagman. Probably you know him?” Baxter, one hand still holding that bleeding wrist nodded. “Well—I guess the bunch in the Maria knew we were coming down on something illicit long before we got here, for we heard the first shots, up in the gyro itself, as the Maria was crawling along that main road back there, trying, I guess, to locate this confounded Keegan’s Road by their map. We were high enough up ourselves to see the lighted up grounds here, but we kept with the road outfit so’s not to muff things in the least. Halfway up Keegan’s Road toward this house we heard more shots, even above the hum of our propellers, and the men in the van certainly must have heard ’em—because they stepped on the gas, and Paddy there in the harness-frame had to speed up his pulling propeller. So all of us were ready, you see, both below and above—with our cap pistols, even before the ground squad piled out, and us sparrows banged to earth. And zowie—what a bang Paddy gave us! I say, Paddy—another five feet to your left, and the corner of that garage roof would have snapped the tip off of one of your lifting blades. It’s all right though, boy. We’d have landed bottom side down, whether or no.”
Grant paused, while the man in the odd rigging between stubby plane wings scratched his head sheepishly.
“But as to raiding this place,” the Federal officer went on, in Baxter’s direction again, “I pulled it, really—and furthermore got the O.K. as well, to pull it—on account of certain information given out by a young woman who recovered consciousness tonight in Chicago, around 8 o’clock or so in the evening. And it sure has turned out to be a joint for fair! It—however, as to your question, Newspaperman! One of the North Central Police Station plainclothesmen—my own dear little brother, by the way, Baxter!—dropped in tonight to see how this young woman was, from some sort of a—well—accident she’d had, and she told him enough facts for him to have to ponder long and deep as between notifying the Chicago detective bureau—and Uncle Sam! Uncle Sam, it seems, won—and he caught me by phone at Forest Park the minute we came in from that bum raid at Power’s Grove. All I knew, Baxter, was that I was raiding the farm of one Carleton McCollum, who looked to be hiding a certain fellow wanted for murder by the local police back there—a Clifford Hemingway. And doing some other kind of international monkeywork that, coupled up with the facts this young woman gave out, had a phoney smell about it. That was why I phoned Hagman immediately for an O.K. to look in on it, and hopped out. Well—that’s all. First aid kit’s coming up, I see. Any questions?”
Halsey spoke up.
“The young lady you refer to,” he said, “is a Miss Loris? Of 810½ Tower Court?”
The tall mustached Federal officer looked toward Halsey curiously in the bright illumination from the closest yard light.
“That was the number,” he grunted. “Yes—810½ Tower Court. But the name she gave was—well—Miss Loris Hemingway!”
CHAPTER LIV
At One in the Morning
The automatic chimes in the tower of St. Ignatius’ Church, on Chicago’s Near North Side, were just tolling the hour of one in the morning when Carr Halsey, in a taxicab, drew up in front of Number 810½ Tower Court, and gazed questioningly out from the lowered window in the door of the vehicle. All around, at least as far as one could see from a taxicab seat, the city streets were quiet, devoid at this moment of even a single pedestrian; above, a million stars, in a sky that only a couple of hours before had been thick with clouds, twinkled and blinked down at little Tower Square, filled with a few empty wrought-iron benches and illumined only by the yellowish-green rays from the lights of North Michigan Avenue on its opposite edge. All the windows in Number 810½ were dark, but the low lamp post, with its round frosted globe, in front of Number 808, the building adjoining, revealed on the striped wooden bench at the top of Number 810½’s stone steps a solitary broad-shouldered figure, with gray slouch felt hat, prominent underjaw clinching a nearly smoked cigar between firm even teeth, and a silvered shield-shaped badge gleaming conspicuously, from between the lapels of a loosely thrown open coat, on the top of his vest.
“Come right on up,” the slouch-hatted figure said from atop the steps, toward the lone passenger. “Everything’s clear.”
At which Halsey hopped out, paid off the driver, and the cab drew off; and, keys in hand, he went slowly up the stone steps. He stopped near the top. The man in the slouch hat spoke.
“You’re Mr. Halsey, I take it?”
“Yes. And you are—”
“Sanders, from Federal headquarters, downtown. I came here an hour or so ago with that Federal squad delegated to pick up that bunch of Mex gunmen, but I had special orders to stick around here—in case you were squeamish about coming on up here tonight.”
“Well,” said Halsey, “I wasn’t particularly squeamish after I called a certain number Inspector Grant gave me tonight—called it from Central Air Field, that is—and found that you fellows had gone out on your raid, and probably had your men by that time. But I thought it wouldn’t hurt to gaze out of the taxi window, the way I did, for general—er—good measure—and have the driver step on the gas, if necessary!”
The Federal man smiled: “Come in from Central Air Field, did you?”
“Yes. A Federal gyro—Forest Park outfit—brought me in there from around near LaGrange, and I came on in the rest of the way in that machine I just drove up in. You people were notified from—” He stopped, questioningly.
“From Riverside,” replied the other. “Inspector Grant phoned in the order to Inspector Savage, my own superior.”
“Well—how is everything?” inquired Halsey. “With regard to those Mex’s? Were they here?”
“They sure were—and we got ’em all,” replied the other. “Two were parked in a closed limousine right in front of that lamp post there, and we nabbed ’em pronto. They didn’t even have time to ditch their hardware. Two were squatting in the dark courtway at the back of this house, where they could get on up to the roof later by means of the fire escape on the side of the Philatelists’ Club next door. There was one Spic covering each adjoining street corner—Chicago Avenue and Pearson, that is. The two in the courtway had already been up on the roof, and with a crowbar had pried away the lock on the rickety old trapdoor that leads into your fourth floor bathroom. So they were all set to get inside in the night—in case they didn’t get you outside. We picked ’em all up, however. Yellow-bellied rats, the whole damn raft of ’em. One of ’em whined like a whipped dog. We went through the whole house, just the same, room by room, closet by closet, just to make sure that all was in the clear—but six Spics was all there was. As we’d been informed. Bad-looking bunch of hombres, too, on their outsides. Three of ’em had knives as well as shooting irons.”
“Hm! Nice surprise party, I must say.” Halsey breathed a long sigh. “Say—did they let out what was back of why they were here—what they were supposed to do?”
The Federal man shook his head. There was a peculiarly baffled look in his own face. “No. They didn’t seem to know, themselves. All they knew, so far as I could see, was that they had orders to get you, that was all. They had your description, of course. One squawked pretty freely before they even left here. They were to lug you out to a house on Harbor Avenue, South Chicago; that’s all they knew. Looked to me more or less like a one-way ride! They were to get $50 apiece. They got all their orders from a Mexican hoodlum known evidently as ‘Weeping Louis’ Valdez, a sort of small-time heavy guy, apparently, who’s piled up a lot of illicit money racketeering in the marijuana cigarette field here in the Middle West—even growing the stuff on the outskirts of South Chicago. Say—is this Weeping Louis some enemy of yours?”
Halsey shook his head: “No, I don’t even know him.” He was silent a moment. “He was operating—for somebody else.” Again he was silent. Then he asked another question. “Was the Press in—on this pick-up?”
The other shook his head. “No. Our department doesn’t connect with the Press, nor any other arm of the local law. Orders were to soft-pedal on bulletins to the newspapers until later orders came in.” The Federal man himself was now silent for a moment. Then he, in turn, asked a question. “There was a rumor tonight—in the offices only, that is—that the boys at Forest Park made a raid somewhere this evening and caught that Hemingway fellow named in the police bulletins here. Are you connected, Mr. Halsey—with that matter?”
Halsey reflected a moment. Reflected deeply. Then he spoke: “I’m not supposed, either, to talk about this matter—any more than you, Mr. Sanders; but I can say, I think, with perfect propriety, that no Hemingway has been caught or found in any way.”
The other nodded. “I see.” It was quite plain that he did not see, and was very much befuddled by everything. And he added: “Well, that’s that, then, I suppose on that Bush Bourse killing. I bought a midnight edition of the Tribute a half-hour ago—and the Hemingway chap is still uncaptured.” He subsided. And after a pause added apologetically: “Well—I daresay you want to turn in, Mr. Halsey. I’m supposed to trot up and down the block now and then tonight in case any stray Spics come around looking for their vanished brothers or cousins; so if you look out in the night and see me smoking on the bench here—it’s only me!”
“Well, good night then. And thanks.”
And Halsey let himself in with his keys.
As he shut the big front door, a little reluctantly, to be sure, on the genial, but more or less benighted Federal officer, he found that the inside front hall, with its very tiny night bulb burning near the banister post, was not as dark as it usually was at this hour, for bright light poured over the old-fashioned transom of Miss Loris’s—or was it Miss Loris Hemingway’s—room.
And even as he tumbled in the gloom at his own portal with his bunch of keys, the door of the lighted room opened a foot or two, and Miss Kinneally thrust out her head. She peered at him in the half-light her action had thrown upon him, and then closing the door gently behind her stepped out into the hall.
“Mr. Halsey,” she called softly.
He paused, still in front of the door to his own room. “How do you do, Miss Kinneally,” he greeted her, in a low voice. “I understand you had a little excitement here tonight?”
“Oh—not particularly,” the trained nurse replied. “A couple of detectives went through the house, room by room, and then cleared out. They were very gentlemanly, and unobtrusive. I fear it irritated your landlady a bit—but the good lady has gone to bed now.”
“That’s good. And how is Miss Loris now—or is it Miss Hemingway? I understand she has come out entirely from the effects of the drug?”
The nurse nodded. “Yes, the injections of Myolpin wore off finally, and all danger of brain concussion is over. Dr. Anders was here at midnight, and gives us complete assurance on that.”
He turned, in the semi-gloom of the half-illumined hall, with his hand on the knob of his door. “And may I ask what Miss Lor—et, Miss Hemingway—did, as soon as she learned what had happened to her—and that she had been in a coma for so many, many hours?”
“She asked for Mrs. Morely, the landlady. Mrs. Morely, of course, came right up. The girl then asked if a Clifford Hemingway lived in this house, and when Mrs. Morely said no such person resided here or ever had resided here, and that she did not furthermore even know the man, the patient began to get excited. It was just about at this juncture that one of the detectives from the North Central police station—his name was Luke Grant—called to see how the victim of yesterday’s assault was coming out. He was just going off duty—was off duty already, in fact—but had orders to drop in here and file a report tomorrow. She had a long talk with him. I took the opportunity, in fact, to run over to my room while they were together, and write an urgent letter that I was supposed to have written a week ago. I got back while Detective Grant was still here. He was leaving, though. Indeed, he went away in quite a hurry, and since then she’s been sitting up in bed, wakeful, restless, in the peculiar condition anyone is in when they have slept artificially as long as she has.” She paused. “Would you like to see her? She is not likely to sleep now, Dr. Anders said when he was here, for another twenty-four hours. In fact, she should not, he says.”
