Edward H. Hurlbut

“ Instantly the babble from the voices of many volatile Italians ceased. The saloon on the moment became quiet, save for the rattling of glasses and one click of the old-fashioned maplewood cash register. The detectives passed the time with Bresci, casually “sized up” the gathering, missing Lanagan and myself, and left. Instantly there broke forth a riot of sputtering Italian. The word “Ratto” we heard and then, obviously at some motion toward our curtains from Bresci, the babble stopped as suddenly as it began and within five moments the throng had idled out and the saloon was still. ”

“ Lanagan stopped short in his rapid walk and laid his hand on my shoulders.
“I’ve been in this game fifteen years, Norrie,” he said, with a solemnity new in him. “Let me tell you something, and I say it who have the right: there comes a time just once every so often when a newspaper man puts humanity above his paper. Remember that. You are betraying no trust with your paper when you do; you are betraying your trust with yourself, with your fellow man, and with your conscience when you do not. ”

“ SUSPECT JAILED FOR MONTEAGLE MURDER!
“Norton!”
It was Sampson’s voice. When Sampson shot that curt call in his ugly voice through the swinging doors of his office I felt as though the warden was calling me from the condemned cell for the drop. Only the able-bodied newspaper man who has been trimmed hard by the men of the opposition papers can understand the sensation. It belongs in its exquisite misery solely to such as speak the language of the tribe. For the head in the Enquirer—my story—had been only a three-column:
POLICE ARE BAFFLED IN MONTEAGLE MYSTERY! ”

“ I saw Maloney, his blue-nosed revolver in hand, half risen, make the sign of the adoration, touching his forehead and his chest with that grim muzzle. Leslie stood slowly upright, his massive head sunk into his breast. Lanagan breathed hard and deep. It was awesome; we were held in the spell of that strange and extraordinary occurrence. On that beautiful voice went to the end:
“And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil. Amen.” ”

“ Within the city proper, plain-clothes men by shoals flooded every hotel and lodging house that might by any possibility harbour the pair. The hospitals were watched; half a dozen doctors known to Leslie worked among their professional brothers, but no one was attending such a man as Turner.
And the wonder grew to Lanagan that the story, scattered now well over the city, was even yet escaping the innumerable sources of news of the Times and the braggart Herald, to say nothing of the evening papers, the Record and the Tribune. ”

“ A man who might have been any age from twenty to forty swung himself to a sitting position on a disordered bed and glared at us with eyes that were wide open but only half seeing.
“Full of hop; and I might as well jam him on a gamble,” said Lanagan, in an aside to me as he stepped quickly over and pulled Thorne to his feet, slapped him across the face, and sat him down in a chair. A high-pitched, querulous protest was voiced at the treatment, and then Thorne whimpered:
“Oh, you are so cruel! What have I ever done to be treated so cruelly?” He began to cry. ”

“ There was a prolonged talk, and Swanson made the mistake of chiding the fiend on his habits. Desire coming upon him strongly, Thorne finally exhibited himself in all his ugly weakness, and the spectacle was too much for the eyes of Swanson, unaccustomed to such sights. He was stooping his way out of the little room after sternly refusing Thorne’s appeal for money, when the long, lean fingers of the half-insane man, with some congenital strain outcropping perhaps of that vagabond, dissolute father, found an easy goal in a man already half-suffocated in the thick air of the place. ”

“ Leslie wheeled. Lanagan’s eyes were lighting up with that curious brightness that flamed there when the strange brain of the man was at work, when there was action promised, when the tortuous mazes of some enigma were unfolding to that inner sight.
“Say, chief,” he went on, “I wonder if I could make a trip, say to Paris, on about one-half of that reward? I’ve always had a curiosity to study that Paris police system. I don’t approve of newspaper men taking blood money. It isn’t in our game. ”

“ I glanced again at the pitiable little misshapen thing dragged away from her home to a cell and an iron bed at the city prison and I couldn’t trust myself to reply to Thomas.
By a curious change that is gradually making me less valuable as a newspaper man the older I become in the business, I find myself unconsciously taking sides against my paper with fellow beings whose frailties or sorrows make them grist for the newspaper mill. ”

“ Lanagan studied the front and profile of a young man of twenty-six, a face of surprising frankness and honesty. Every line held to Lanagan’s critical eye the lie to the number striped across his breast; another feature of our brilliant American police system that puts the rogue’s gallery blazon on a man before he is tried. ”

“ AT THE END OF THE LONG NIGHT “EXTRA! EXTRA!” in shrill diminuendo awakened Jack Lanagan from the very heart of his morning slumber. The morning paper man sleeps late and nothing short of cataclysm or the cry of an extra is likely to awaken him. Lanagan was from his bed to the window in a lanky leap hailing the newsboy.
It was the Evening Record with a “screamer” head and two hundred words of black-face type. Lanagan swept through it in a comprehensive flash. With more speed than was his custom he thereupon dressed.
“Swanson!” he said. ”

“ The type of loyal retainer. You’re not the type that falls in love with the daughter of the house. You never loved Elvira; you never murdered Elvira; and you are concealing now the name of the murderer, telling a poor weak lie that could not have stood at the outside for twenty-four hours! Who killed Elvira?”
Lanagan had arisen and glowered above the ashen Martin. Leslie was leaning forward, his eyes, gimletlike, boring into Martin’s. Brady swung around, too, to face him, caught as well under the spell of fierce magnetism of the newspaper man. ”

“ Women, Lanagan reflected, are like electric wires. They are drawn to carry just so much voltage. A little overplus and they burn out. Each time he had bullied the woman just as her nerves were at the breaking point.
The matron bustled in with a side compliment on Lanagan for his brutality, and lifted the limp form. Lanagan, bitterly chagrined at the events of the day, turned on his heel to return to San Francisco. On the ferry he broke a vow of six months and fell back on absinthe. ”

“ Every ex-convict, “fiend,” vagrant, or questionable character of the district, white, yellow, or black, male or female, had been put through the police mill. The opium dens had been emptied of their wastrels, blinking like bats in the light of day. Swanson’s past and his present life were run under a high-power lens; his servants’ and his employees’ lives and the lives of his former servants and former employees; Chief Leslie was a fellow member of the Cosmos Club with Swanson, and if any additional good to his natural police pride were necessary to spur him on, that afforded it. ”

“ One who has settled into marriage where her like settle, with as little concern, into the round circle of the night lights. Everything different except that generic vanity. Rather an odd mating for a clerk, and a plodder at that, to judge from his picture,” thought Lanagan.
Lanagan sat with his back to the window, putting Mrs. Watson in the full light.
“Is there anything you can say, Mrs. Watson, that could throw any light upon this affair? Any enemies that Miller ever spoke about? Any visitors that he has had of late? Any letters or other messages that he received? Any threats?” ”

“ It was a long, fine chance; but the most brilliant of newspaper successes are scored on long, fine chances. Lanagan determined to take it. He “rapped” to the hunch, as he used to style it; under the impulse of his new idea he was a human dynamo.
He was back in San Francisco within an hour, and headed straight for Billy Connors’ Buckets of Blood, that famed rendezvous within a stone’s throw of the Hall of Justice, where the leaders of the thieves’ clans foregathered. There he waited an hour until “Kid” Monahan, popularly designated as King of the Pick-pockets, came in. ”

“ Waters was a man well advanced in years. The strain of the appearance at the coroner’s jury and the preliminary hearings in the police court appeared slightly to unbalance his mind. The spectacle of the murdered man that he beheld through the windows of the vacant house was constantly before him. He was a man who had gone through a placid life and never figured in any scene of shocking violence or of murder. ”

“ Lanagan moved most of the time by “hunches,” as many successful newspaper men—to say nothing of detectives—do. Hunches and luck may be called by such fancy brands as inductive or deductive, intensive or extensive analytical capacity; but in the long run most crimes are solved on luck, hunches, and through the invaluable aid of police “stool pigeons,” more politely known as “sources.” [Pg 38] An intuitive judgment of men is about as good an asset as a reporter or detective can have, coupled with a faculty for quick decision and personal bravery. ”

“ She turned and stumbled for the stairs. A quick look flashed from Lanagan to the Chief.
“One minute, madam,” said Leslie, sternly. “You had better come along, too.”
“No!” cried Cutting. “Never, Chief, as you are a man! Never in a million years! She has never known of my work out here; she knew me before Moyomemsing; she stuck by me during it all; she married me and we came out here. She knows nothing; nothing. She may have suspected, but she knew nothing. The old call claimed me, going through those houses making estimates on cleaning; why, it’s a disease, that’s all, Chief! ”

“ When we got back to the cottage the coroner’s deputies had gone, as had Phillips and Castle. Camera men were taking the house from many angles; artists were busy sketching the interior—that was the heyday of “yellow journalism”—marking the “spot” with the old familiar cross. Reporters were still cluttering around. A crowd of morbid persons, attracted out of the very sky like vultures, were already gathered.
“Suppose you’ve got it all cleared?” remarked Bradley of the Times to Lanagan. He was Lanagan’s nearest approach to a rival as a police reporter. ”

“ In this fashion does the police reporter best serve his paper; for it is by such unholy contact that he keeps in touch with the circles within circles of the police department of a great city. Some he handles by fear, some he wins by favour, some he wheedles. In the end, if he be a brother post-graduate, the grist of the headquarters’ mill is his.
Of the shysters there is Horace Lathrop, for instance, who boasts a Harvard degree when he is drunk—never when he is sober.
Horace is sitting with Lanagan at Fogarty’s rear room table, while Lanagan sips moodily at his drink. ”

“ What ‘dead hand’ is it that has slain her issue and blighted her poor hopes for happiness and her passionate ambition for motherhood?”
And Bannerman, with his high silk hat and his frock coat and his impeccable respectability, came before him insistently; Bannerman, with his dry Martini and his quart of wine and his vis-a-vis dinner with “William” Fogarty.
Many thoughts that apparently flash into the mind spontaneously are but the products of a chain of thought carried consistently over a period of time.
It was so with Lanagan and his sudden theory of the “dead hand” ”

“ It was Leslie’s electric whisper, and at his signal we crashed with our united strength. With the crashing came two shots, and I caught Lanagan’s harsh curse at my ear and his swift mutter: “Too late!” The door gave.
She knelt with her head fallen upon her clasped hands, just as she had knelt in that final prayer, beside the bed. He was lying back upon the pillow.
There was no dry eye there. Veteran thief-takers, men who had stood with their backs to the wall and death baying them a score of times; men who would risk the billy or knife or gun as blithely as they would go to their morning meal ”

“ There is system in crime these days as in all things else.
“Kind of stuck it in and broke it off, didn’t they?” he continued.
“I’ve stood one panning from Sampson; I don’t want another from you,” I retorted savagely.
“Norrie,” he said, “you overlooked a very vital point. The King and I have been talking it over,”—he had the three morning papers spread out before him—“and we have concluded that there was a woman in the case. And when two eminent criminologists, like Kid Monahan and Jack Lanagan, agree that there is a woman in a case, it at least is worthy of consideration.” ”

“ He who seemed to be the leader of the four (“Marshall, chief revenue inspector,” Lanagan whispered to me) , took the man’s pulse after the examination was ended. No one had spoken. In the faces of all, as far as I could detect in the murky light of the smoky chimney of an oil lamp, was a set, grim look; not the look that officers usually wear when there has been a killing or a successful capture in a crime. ”