Rich Crooks/Chapter 11
XI
THE following afternoon, Thursday, we had another visitor. It seemed that in spite of my calculations and rather queer precautions our visitors were coming in the daylight.
Yang, from his tireless station behind the curtains, saw the man walk hesitantly up and down the sidewalk before our house and glance continually, indecisively toward it. Yang attracted my attention and I peeked through a corner of the window. That was undoubtedly a fellow I wanted to see.
I hurried to a chair and sprawled in it. Shortly I heard a hard rap on the door. I called out—
“Come in!”
The door did not open. I called out again.
Then it opened slowly and Mr. Steve Ellis filled the doorway.
He was a big man with sharp, definite features, slow in his movements and deliberate. He did not need to speak for one to know that he was embittered. But his voice, though not loud, had a kind of husky insolence. He wore a felt hat of light gray that he took off reluctantly in the doorway. He was a little uneasy but not nervous. His fingers were steady. His coat was of dark brown material and double-breasted. He closed the door by reaching out behind his back and did not take his eyes off me.
“Won't you sit down?” I asked.
“No.”
He glanced about a little furtively. No one was in sight. My hands rested on the arms of the chair.
“You are Mr. Ellis, I believe. I've been expecting you.”
He made a slight start of surprize.
“Yes. I'm Steve Ellis. You are that fellow Smithers?”
It was a cross between an accusation and a question.
“I've used that name. Yes.”
“And you call yourself Everhard, too?”
Again the suggestion of a question with an undertone of contempt.
“You came looking for trouble?” I asked.
That rather surprized him but after a pause, after a moment of study, he said between clenched teeth:
“Yes, you dirty little tin-horn four-flusher, I come lookin' for trouble. I'm going to give you the beatin' of your life.”
I did not move, though he leaned forward as if to rush. With a suggestion of sarcasm I replied:
“I see. You find out that a man weighs about fifty pounds less than you and decide to beat him up. I believe that the prison system is designed to teach a man such caution, is it not?”
He replied by swearing at me and bracing himself as if to jump. He was considerate enough, however, to tell me that there was just one way that I could escape being beaten-up—that was to give him the little black steel box.
“Indeed?”
He cursed me. He was rather infuriated because I did not seem to be frightened. He told me that he would have killed me but he had promised the Governor not to kill anybody.
“I see. Governor Walsh let you out on condition that you would steal for him.”
“You keep that talk up and I'll”
He did not finish what he would do. He stopped.
“Just why do you think. you would like to try to kill me?”
He assured me that I knew, and then went on to mention his wife.
“And so,” I said coldly, “you killed her.”
“I did not!” he shouted. “I never touched her! God, I loved her!”
I told him that a lot of love he must have had when he eagerly believed lies that made her out to be disreputable.
“Don't preach to me!” he cried.
“Preach to you? Preach to the devil, sir. If it be preaching to say that you are a jealous coward and cur, make the most of it. You had only one friend while you were in the pen and that was your wife. And when you came out you killed her because she had to let rooms to keep from going hungry, and you bargain with a crooked governor for a pardon.”
He threw back his coat and jerked at a gun-handle.
“Of course you are ready to shoot a man you think unarmed.”
I had not moved. My legs were extended before the chair; my hands were on the chair's arms.
“Try it and see how many policemen pounce on to you.”
He looked about hurriedly. I smiled.
“You are very simple and a little stupid. Don't you know the police are looking for you? Don't you know I came here so you would think it was easy to find me alone. I got your letter and your threats. Do you think I would be here alone to receive a—a—wife-murderer?”
AGAIN he cursed me, but he did not offer to shoot. He rammed the gun angrily into the holster and looked about, a little dazed.
“I didn't kill Dan Cornwall,” he said with something of hopelessness in his voice.
He had read the papers. He knew why the police wanted him.
I asked him just what he had meant by saying that I did Daniel Cornwall's dirty work, and got out of him the belief that I had been one of Cornwall's gun-fighters. He had several of them to jump copper claims and that sort of thing. Who had told him that I did Cornwall's dirty work? Why, one of the guard in the penitentiary—the same guard that had told him stories about his wife. The guard knew me for one of Cornwall's spies and gunmen.
Cornwall had showed a good deal of cunning when he bought that guard.
“Do you know how you came to be paroled that time? You were paroled, weren't you? Pardoned then, too. You seem to be rather fortunate in getting pardons.”
He said that he had been sent over on a frame-up, that he had been in Cornwall's employ and refused to carry out some crooked work. A friend of his had had a claim; Cornwall wanted it jumped. Ellis said that he had sworn he would stand by his friend. Cornwall had trumped up a theft charge and sent him over.
I asked why he had supposed that the fellow called Smithers would have killed the man Taggart, sent to burglarize Mrs. Ellis' house, if he too had been one of Cornwall's men.
He didn't, or said he didn't, know Taggart had been sent by Cornwall. He claimed that he didn't know what Taggert had been after, that he had thought Taggart was after Smithers.
I called him a liar and he quivered as if jabbed with a hot piece of iron.
“Do you know how you came to get out of prison that time?”
“Walsh—he was attorney-general then—tipped off the governor. He knew about the frame-up on me. Walsh told me himself—this last time.”
By digging into him with questions I discovered—though I was, for a moment, rather of the opinion that he lied—that Mrs. Ellis had sent word only that she had got hold of something that would help toward his pardon. He never knew what it was. His wife had been killed the day he got out. I knew very well that he had not killed her and was rather predisposed to favor his side of the case, though in my opinion it was not much worse to murder a wife than to believe a blackguard's lies about her.
She had not, he said, told him of having the little steel box Cornwall so treasured, though he had been with her most of the day. That night he had gone down-town to see a man about a job. After the man had refused to give him the job, he walked about the streets for hours, worried and brooding. When he got home his wife was dead. He couldn't explain where he had been. The guard in the penitentiary swore he, Ellis, had said he would get both his wife and that fellow Smithers.
Ellis admitted he had threatened Smithers—never his wife.
The ways of woman are strange, incomprehensible. I could not understand why Mrs. Ellis had not mentioned the black box to him, but I eventually learned—or learned enough to surmise—that Daniel Cornwall had, when she was using it as a lever to make him pry Ellis from the prison, exacted from her the promise to tell no one that she had it. She had kept her promise.
It appeared, from what I also learned, that Mrs. Ellis, who had no liking for the Cornwalls and wisely trusted them not at all, had said she would not surrender the box until Daniel Cornwall admitted that he had framed-up the case against her husband. That is a rather important point as explaining many things that would otherwise be obscure. She was perfectly right in her attitude. She was a fine woman.
In the course of our talk Ellis acknowledged unconsciously, by his manner, that I had rather bluffed him. He sat down and fumbled with his hat brim. He answered my questions with a kind of monotonous. hopelessness of tone as if it were useless to think of fighting his luck.
I next found how he had come to know that Cornwall set such store by the box.
“You told Mrs. Ellis that if it could be got, Cornwall could be made to do anything. How did you know it?”
HE explained that once he, Cornwall and Cornwall's secretary were taking a little trip, and the secretary carried the little black box.
“If you ever get in trouble with the old man,” said the secretary half-jokingly at first, “get your mits on to this box. I mean it, Steve. Nobody's ever seen the inside of it as I know of. Between you and me, I think the old man's got the dope on somebody and he thinks more of this box than of his bank-account. I am giving you a real tip, Steve. Just nail this box if you see trouble coming. But the old man never lets it get far away from him.”
I thought that over carefully and concluded that it might be true, then changed the conversation to Joseph Cornwall.
“That skunk!” Ellis exclaimed. “He spread around that I was a drunk and I don't know what all. I've been drunk. Every man has. He tried to get my wife to leave me; then he got my daughter. How do you suppose a man feels having his daughter take up with skunks like that just because they're rich? Her mother would disown her and her mother loved her more than anything on earth.”
His voice almost broke at that.
“Ellis,” I told him, more gently than I usually speak to any one, “most men's troubles in this world come because they trust women. You've caught it the other way round. Cora never knew the truth about the Cornwalls. Your wife never told her, at least not enough to brace her up against their lies and what she mistook for generosity. You see, they are a bad lot, but Joseph knows he's sick and likely to die one of these days, and a little bit of conscience has been fermenting down inside him. Maybe he did hoodwink himself into believing that he really loved Mrs Ellis—though I doubt it—and so wanted to show kindness to her daughter.
“But let me tell you this: Cora went out of that house just as soon as she found what kind of a deal they had framed up against you. She found out some other things, too, Ellis, and I'm not going to tell you or anybody till the telling means something more than mere information, but she wants you; she wants you more than she does a rich cousin of mine who is trying to marry her. Now who do you suppose could have struck her over the head?”
He answered promptly that it was some one of the Cornwalls' dirty-workers and hurried on to insist that I tell him everything about Cora.
We had a long talk about one thing and another, and in the course of the conversation I told him that I knew positively that Mrs. Ellis had been given the little black box at the time she was working for his pardon. He doubted me.
“Couldn't some of your friends have got it for her?”
“Mister—” he fumbled over my name, not a knowing what to call me, and repeated—“Mister, I ain't got any friends. None of 'em would have done anything for me. Walsh—it's some stuff on him that Cornwall had in that box—he told me he wasn't doing it for friendship. He said Cornwall had some evidence that would ruin him, but he'd got to the place where Cornwall could ruin and be. He said he was going to come clean. There was an awful roar over his pardoning me, but he said he was convinced I hadn't touched my wife and that he was going to follow his conscience, and the Cornwalls and everybody else could go to the devil.”
“You are sure of that?”
“I know it. He said it to me right in his own office. He said the Cornwalls had been afraid, ever since he got in office, that he would cut lose and get 'em. That's why they got out of Utah—but they could ruin him. 'That little black box will be my coffin,' he said. And I knew right away what he meant. I remembered from the time when I'd seen it.
“You see, mister, Cornwall sent him a picture of that box and a key once and a note—Walsh told me all about it—saying he wanted Walsh to have a key to that box, cause what was in it really belonged to him and he might want to open it sometime in court to show what a fine, up-standing citizen he was. Sarcastic note, it was. Walsh told me all about it. He was excited. And when I saw in the papers all about you having it, I thought I could do the governor a good turn. Besides, old Joe Cornwall told me you was Smithers.
“I don't know why I'm telling all this to you. I'm no friend of yours—'cept if you have been good to my girl. Now call in the police you've got stuck around here. I thought I'd fight it out if lever got cornered again, but I'll give up. I'm innocent this time too, though I wish to God I was guilty! I'd give my soul any day to kill Dan Cornwall.”
I assured him that he was unduly agitated—that there were no police about.
He was dazed a little at that and stared around.
I told him that if he wished to do something for the governor to be at the Treborne Hotel, Suite C, Thursday at 2.35 p.m.
“Be there promptly, and come right in. I'll give you the little black steel box and you can give it to the governor. He'll be there, too. Now don't look at me that way. You know it isn't a trap. As for traps, if my little, withered old Chinese servant hadn't shaken his head as you came up the walk, you would now know how it feels to to trapped. You see, somebody hit him over the head recently, and we are waiting for that person to call again. I rather wondered if, after all, it had not been you.”
A little grateful, much bewildered and scarcely knowing whether or not he was dreaming, Ellis got out of the house. In his hand he carried a little slip of paper upon which I had written his Thursday's appointment. He would at least have that to assure him that he had not been dreaming.