The Art of Detection (33 page)

     Instead, I was leading him in the opposite direction, while he positively hopped about with frustration.

     ‘But we know who it is!’ he protested, his voice ringing loudly through the silent canyons of the financial district. ‘We need to go and catch him.’

     We, I reflected, the smile returning briefly to my lips: We from a boy who had introduced himself by picking my pocket three nights before.

     ‘And when we have caught him, what do we do with him?’ I asked.

     ‘Well, turn him over to the authorities,’ he replied indignantly.

     Such innocence and trust was, in its way, an encouraging sign. I stopped to look at Ledbetter’s face in the light of the street-lamp, and found him looking at me with the enthusiasm and urging of a dog whose master held the ball. I had intended merely to take myself to my rooms and grimly contemplate the walls, but instead I found myself thinking, Why not? I placed my hand on his shoulder, and said, ‘Mr Ledbetter, perhaps you might be of assistance by allowing me to review the case aloud.’

     We adjourned to my rooms, ignoring the raised eyebrows of the doorman, the night desk clerk, and the elevator boy along the way. Inside, I turned up the lights and told him to help himself to a drink. When I came back from washing my hands, having exchanged my outer coats for a dressing-gown, he was sitting in a chair far from the desk.

     ‘You really must learn to return drawers to their original state,’ I advised him as I poured my own glass. I pulled open the offending drawer, saw with interest that he had merely looked, not taken, then closed it again and went to sit in the chair across from the furiously blushing, possibly reformed young thief.

     ‘The man’s name is Gregory Halston,’ I began without preamble. ‘He, too, is a junior officer stationed on Fort Barry, and as he has been there longer than Raynor, he is technically in a superior position.

     ‘Either happenstance, or some unconscious awareness of a degree of similarity on the part of their commanding officer, brought these two young men together. And once they were assigned to the same post, they of necessity lived together, the only two officers in their half-deserted fort.

     ‘Both men had a secret, the same secret, unbeknown to the other. I do not know if sodomy is a hanging offence in the United States Army, or merely cause for corporal punishment and dishonourable discharge, but once they had seen each other on the street, in similar circumstances, neither was in doubt.

     ‘The two might have cast their eyes in opposite directions and agreed that the evening had never happened, uneasy but content that their blackmail was mutual, except for one thing: The following day a letter arrived, and Raynor determined to leave the Army altogether.’

     ‘What letter?’

     ‘From a legal gentleman in the southern part of the state. I believe Lieutenant Raynor made the fatal mistake of telling his neighbour and fellow officer his plans, possibly under the assumption that Halston would feel reassured at his future absence. Instead, it had the opposite effect: Halston panicked, believing that once Raynor was safely out, their mutual hold over each other would fail. Guilt,’ I mused, ‘has an interesting way of twisting one’s thoughts.’

     ‘So, Halston bashed him and hid him in the gun room. We need to go tell his commanding officer.’

     ‘How do you propose that we approach that revelation? None of us on this side of the Gate would make the most solid of witnesses on the stand. I, after all, presented myself as a Raynor family lawyer, which I am not. Or perhaps you would like to go in my stead?’ I allowed him to consider that distasteful turn of affairs, then added, ‘Or perhaps Miss Birdsong?’

     ‘So we can’t pin the bastard down because none of us could testify?’

     ‘There is little proof other than our word.’

     ‘But, his hand!’

     ‘Ah, so you wish to place Mr Winfield on the stand?’

     ‘Yeah, he’d be just great,’ Ledbetter admitted, and took a hefty swallow from his glass. ‘Come on, now, there’s got to be some kind of evidence. Detectives always find evidence.’

     ‘A foot-print that matches the shoe of a man who spends many hours down on his knee before a target with a rifle. As do half the men on the base. The cryptic note of a meeting-place, which again could have come from any side. Letters leading to inescapable conclusions that would mortify a family and turn their wrath against your friend the singer? I believe Jack Raynor would prefer to go unavenged, than have that path of destruction.’

     Ledbetter slapped his glass down on the table, sending the contents flying, although fortunately the glass was nearly empty. ‘So he’s got away with it?’

     ‘I did not say that.’

     He looked at me askance. ‘You’re going to sneak up on him and shoot him in the back?’

     ‘Mr Ledbetter, what sort of fiction do you read?’ I asked, more than a little shocked. ‘Certainly not. We simply need a better grade of witness.’

     ‘Do we have one?’

     ‘Not yet.’

     ‘Damn it, you sound awfully complacent about all this.’

     ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘because I have done this before.’

     I waited, to see if he could work it out on his own. His eyes narrowed in thought, and after a minute, began to take on a twinkle of excitement. ‘You want to set a trap for him.’

     ‘Something of the sort.’

     ‘A secret meeting at night,’ he said, his words tumbling in excitement, ‘like the one he and Raynor had! Say, this is as good as a Sherlock Holmes story!’

     Indeed, the unnecessarily melodramatic twist he proposed was just the sort of thing Conan Doyle would have enjoyed, and my immediate impulse was to dismiss it out of hand. However, I held myself and considered, and on thinking it over, I decided that it was true: a parallel meeting by night could be, as Ledbetter might put it, just the ticket. I found myself smiling.

     ‘Mr Ledbetter,’ I told him, ‘you are a man after my own heart.’

     Now it was just a matter of suborning a major of the United States Army.

THIRTEEN

It was a curious sensation, to find myself the conservative and hesitant half of a pair, but young Ledbetter had the bit in his teeth now, and nothing would do but that we compose a deliberately mysterious note and arrange to deliver it to Lieutenant Halston before morning. I sat at the desk with a piece of anonymous white paper and, after a moment’s thought, wrote the following:

Gregory Halston, you were seen that night, but 50 dollars in cash will purchase my continued silence.
Tonight, at the same hour and place he died.

     ‘Hey,’ my novice accomplice exclaimed, ‘you’re pretty good at this.’

     ‘I ought to be,’ I told him, which served to remind him that, in truth, he had little idea who I was or on which side of the law I walked. I retrieved the note, and placed it in a plain envelope, writing Halston’s name on the outside. ‘I shall take this over to Fort Baker in the morning, and have it delivered to him.’

     ‘Oh no, you can’t just give it to him.’

     ‘I could, actually, simply telling him that some person unknown to me had handed it to me as I approached the grounds. However, I did not intend to do so. I shall merely leave it anonymously with the fort postmaster.’

     ‘Let me do it.’

     ‘Your presence in the fort would take explanation, where I already have reason to be there. Don’t worry, Ledbetter, I shall call on you for the evening’s efforts.’

     ‘You won’t try to take this guy on all on your own?’

     ‘By no means. It is a long-time habit of mine to depend on others when it comes to open warfare. And now, young man, you need to take yourself home and sleep through as much of the day as you can manage. I shall expect you at Fisherman’s Wharf at ten-thirty tonight. Dress warmly, in dark clothing, and be sure nothing you wear rustles or rattles.’

     He left me, reluctantly. I waited at the window until I had seen him pass down the street and round a corner, then resumed my outer garments and let myself out. By good fortune, a taxi driver was sleeping at the kerb, and interrupted his slumber to take me to Fisherman’s Wharf. I arranged with him to continue his sleep there, as paid employment, and I was standing at the oddly-rigged fishing boat when the Chinese crew came up two hours later.

     They were not pleased to see me at first, but the bills in my hand softened them considerably, and the promise of more bought me their services for all of Friday night.

     Well pleased, I woke my snoring driver a second time and had him deliver me to the ferry terminus. At Fort Baker, I arranged for the letter to be given to Lieutenant Halston, concluded business with his commanding officer, and again crossed over to the city on the Bay.

     Upon returning to the hotel, I tacked a note onto my door threatening violence to anyone who disturbed me, and slept through what remained of the daylight hours.

     I woke, persuaded the hotel kitchen that I did require a meal at that hour, and dressed in the sort of clothing I had recommended to Ledbetter.

     When the sun was well down on the horizon, the Chinese crew and I set out from the fishing boats and made north across the fierce currents. A small pier serving the emplacements at Fort Barry was tucked into a cove laid about with jagged rocks, with the Bonita lighthouse sitting at its outer edge and a single track of tramway leading straight up the cliff behind. As I rode the deck, in the fading light I noted the curious difference of colour in the ground on the right and left of the pier, brought together at a sharp fold of earth. I speculated about the presence of a fault here, what it meant for the future of the city behind me. And then the light winked out, and all was darkening outline.

     The crew negotiated the dangerous rocks of the small bay, the captain directing them with terse commands as the rush of waters attempted to drive us onto one set of rocks or another. When we reached the pier, it was nearly dark. I stepped off the boat onto the boards, turning back to accept two lanterns from one of the crew. The first I placed at the westernmost corner of the pier’s end. The other I set fifty feet up its ramp. Then I went back to call across the intervening water at the captain.

     ‘Do you want me to light them for a few minutes?’

     ‘No, is fine,’ he answered; the concentrated expertise with which he studied his surroundings assured me that he had a chance of making it in with nothing but those two lamps to mark his way. After all, smuggling, which required night-time markers such as my two lanterns, was a common occupation along this coast. I nodded.

     ‘Eleven o’clock, then.’

     ‘Yes.’ And his engines reversed him into the cove and back to the shipping channel. When he had gone, I settled my rucksack onto my shoulders and set out up the steep slope of the track leading away from the pier.

     The hours passed slowly, aided by a flask of tea (coffee being too liable to give one away by its stronger aroma). The night’s blackness was complete, three days short of the new moon, and the wind dropped by the time I made my way back down to the pier at half past ten.

     Ledbetter arrived at the arranged time, and the lamps I had lit brought the Chinese boat in with neat competence. I led my young friend up the hill and settled him into his position, adjuring him to absolute silence. Or more accurately, I told him that if he lit a cigarette or fiddled with the change in his pocket, I would throw him off the cliff.

     We waited.

     Waves pounded on the cliffs below, leaving faint stirs of white in the darkness as their crests broke. The lighthouse flared at its set pattern, silent for once with the absence of coastal fog. The occasional night bird rasped overhead, a fox yipped in the distance.