Boston Blackie by Jack Boyle

Author:Jack Boyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road

CHAPTER XVI

THE FRAME-UP

The robbery of the S. S. Humboldt grew to be a very nasty thorn in the tender side of the Seattle police.

Larry Rentor, chief of detectives, slammed up his ’phone, chewed the end from the unlighted cigar between his clenched teeth and banged a heavy, hairy fist upon his desk in savage exasperation.

“Wants his gold bars back or my job, does he?” Rentor growled angrily. “It’s safe to trust old Jim Clancy to want somebody’s scalp if anything happens to singe his hide. Does the doddering idiot think a crook smart enough to make sixty thousand dollars in gold vanish at sea from a steamer’s double-locked strong-room is likely to leave it lying around where my bunch of half-witted four-flushers can find it?”

Chief Rentor spat out the mutilated remnant of his cigar and eyed his ’phone speculatively and with growing gravity. Over it but a moment before he had been told by James J. Clancy, aged and irascible president of the Northwestern Steamship Company, that unless the Humboldt’s mysteriously missing gold was recovered, the resultant police shake-up would jar loose the gold star at present glittering on the breast of Rentor’s uniform. The harried Chief knew that Clancy had both the will and political prestige to uphold his threat.

“It’s up to me to get busy or get out, and I’ll not get out—not if I can help it,” the Chief said to the empty room. “I’ll get the gold if I can. If I can’t, I’ll find a goat and tie this caper to him.”

Then, being a shrewd and politic detective well aware of the undeniable advantage of favorable publicity, Larry Rentor pressed a button and told his secretary to admit the newspaper men waiting impatiently in the outer office. To these he dictated an interview brimming with assurance, in which he hinted a solution of the mystery was at hand, predicted the early arrest of the Humboldt robber gang and promised the recovery of the loot “within a few hours.” With the reporters satisfied and out of his way for the moment, the Chief seized a fresh cigar, sagged down in his chair and concentrated the full power of his by no means mediocre mentality on the problem that confronted him.

Three unbroken days and nights of unmitigated third degree harrying had developed nothing more satisfactory than increasingly vehement denials of guilt from Tatman and his partner; and Chief Rentor, shrewd in judging men of their type, at last was forced to the conclusion that they spoke the truth.

Who, then, had stolen the gold?

“If Tatman is innocent, as I know he is,” Rentor said to himself, “the man I want is the one who struck him down outside the strong-room door. No one on shipboard, passenger, officer or seaman, admits giving the blow. That proves it wasn’t struck to protect the gold.”

The detective’s mind leaped to the logical conclusion.

“One of two things is true,” he decided. “There was another crook ‘mob’ aboard the steamer, and it, not a

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