Lanagan, Amateur Detective

by Edward H. Hurlbut

And then—he “made good.” Weeks of poking and prying and shinning up and down telegraph poles brought their reward and Waters discovered another crime: that of Ratto. He had been slain with an ordinary blackjack, which was found by the body.

During the three days of excitement following the discovery of the commission merchant’s body Waters thrived upon the publicity that he received. He carried bundles of papers containing accounts of his “find” and with his picture taken in many ways: climbing up telegraph poles, peering into a window from a cross-tree—a camera man nearly lost his life slipping on a cross beam taking this picture, and as he looked ten years ago, his last “gallery” picture unearthed “exclusively” by a proud “cub” reporter. He was as tickled as a boy, and it was confidently predicted around police headquarters that he would find an end in an insane asylum from pure joy in a month.

But the Ratto case did not clear up quite as easily as had the Rosendorn case. It will be recalled in San Francisco that a swift night ride in the police launch to Black Diamond had resulted in the arrest of Bernardo Tosci, claimed by the police to be the leader of the Camorra in the west. A police theory of attempted blackmail by that organisation seemed to have been well bolstered up. The local ramifications of the Camorra were proved beyond all doubt. Mysterious persons, suspected of being Camorra agents, who had been seen talking to Ratto shortly before his disappearance, were being diligently sought. The fear of the Camorra by the residents of the Latin quarter seriously hindered the police and newspaper men in their work, even the native-speaking Italian detail of upper officemen making little progress against the terror that the shadow of the Camorra threw upon the quarter. Police and newspaper judgment were slowly settling that Ratto’s death was due to one of those far-reaching conspiracies of the Camorra chieftain and his minions.

Such was the situation at midnight when Lanagan and I dropped out of the reporters’ room. The arrest of Tosci—that we had been “scooped” on—had been made shortly after midnight the night before. A sullen “hunch” on Lanagan’s part that the crime was in no way reminiscent of the methods of the Camorra, as he understood those methods from a mass of inquiry and first-hand reading, had led us away from the police headquarters just a few moments before Tosci had been slipped up the back elevator and placed in detinue. The man regularly assigned to the night police detail at the Hall of Justice, a new man on the “beat,” had missed the arrest, working against seasoned men on the Times and the Herald with their inside sources of prison information. However, we were supposed to be doing the “heavy” work on the story, so the burden of the “trimming” fell upon us.

Lanagan was morose. He had nothing more to say as we walked down Kearney street and turned up Broadway. I thought he was going to Cæsar’s—the original Cæsar’s with the two tables and the marvellous cuisine that pioneered the way for the glaring café chantant of to-day’s slumming parties,—but he walked rapidly past Cæsar’s and on to turn in at Bresci’s, a short distance up the slope of Telegraph Hill. It was a dirty little place, one of the corner “wine joints” sprinkled thickly in out of the way pockets of the congested Latin quarter. At Bresci’s, in addition to the bar, there was a little eating place at the rear, separated from the bar by dingy curtains. One room further back held a piano, where on occasion one might hear his ash man, or the flower vendor from Third and Market streets, or a waiter off duty from the downtown cafés, volume forth the Prologue or swing faultlessly through the Toreador’s song.

“Just got a tip that they are trying to hook mine host Bresci into the thing as a Camorra leader,” was all that Lanagan said.

We sat at one of the tables while Lanagan pulled the faded curtains almost together. Madam Bresci, she of the famed sauté mêlé, was indisposed, so the daughter, Bina, would serve us, if agreeable? Perfectly so, said Lanagan, rather with a note of satisfaction it struck me, though when I glanced at his face in some surprise, for he was a man who was ordinarily unmoved of women, it was expressionless.

Bresci went on to his bar after giving orders at the kitchen, and we sat there some time in silence; long enough for Lanagan to send the nicotine of three evil Manilas to his lungs. I saw that his eyes never left the opening through the curtains. Then his cigar, from his mouth for the moment, was suspended in air on its travel back and I followed his sharp glance through the curtain.

Dinoli and Alberta, two plain-clothes men detailed in the Latin quarter, had entered the saloon. 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.

“Bresci,” demanded Lanagan suddenly, “what were they saying out there about Ratto? Were they Camorrists?”