# Those Who Dance

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Extracted from Everybody's Magazine, Nov. 1922, pp. 135–172. Accompanying illustration may be omitted. Those Who Dance was filmed in 1930.
A Novel Complete in This Issue
Those Who Dance
A Woman Goes Down into the Depths to Save Her Brother, Finds a Husband—and Something Greater. It Takes Hold—This Narrative of the Underworld with its Gunmen and the Women Who Love Them
By George Kibbe Turner
Illustrations by E. Hopper
THOSE who dance in New York are many—of many, many kinds, with many and varied styles and inheritances of dancing. But none dance more continuously, with more zest and exhilaration and appetite for the dance, than the so-called underworld—the little gamblers and the big gamblers and the tin-horn sports, the stalls and the dips, the swell mob and the real good thieves. After nightfall you may be sure that the underworld of New York and its woman are dancing.
It was to one of the best of these functions—for, of course, there are sharp social lines drawn in the underworld—that Flame Carney and her brother The were on their way in their taxi-cab. It was the dance of the semihumorously named Hectic Club, which for many seasons now had been a fixture of the social year, being pulled off in old Jasper Hall every spring upon the first Monday evening after Lent.
You would have known the pair for brother and sister anywhere. They were both clearly of the “Red” Carneys, well known in the old Seventh Ward. But Flame was properly enough the handsomer—the flower of the tribe, who had raised to its highest point the unusual qualities of family temper and hair which had given her her name.
She was showing now a little of the former as the taxi passed recklessly through the overcrowded streets.
“Out for a 'caravan!'” she said, with sharp criticism. “To-night of all nights!”
“It's a big one,” replied The Carney unemotionally. “We can't afford to miss it.”
“You might give me one night when I could be easy—long enough to enjoy myself.”
“More than that,” he went on, in the way men talk to women on business matters. “This was the best possible night for it. The dicks will all be resting easy, knowing we're all in here. And, if our foot should slip, anyway,” he continued, in her rather sullen silence, “we're safe just the same—up to being nailed flat.”
“How?” she asked him harshly.
“The simplest thing in the world. I'll go in with the Floor Committee into the old side room, and we'll slip out the old side door into the alley. And there won't be one in ten but will think we're there. Talk about your alibis! We'll have right here two hundred people who will swear their heads off that we never left the hall. And don't forget,” he ended, for they were now on the dingy street of old Jasper Hall, “when this is pulled off, it will mean something more to you than a dance.”
“Yes—when it's pulled off,” she said, still sullenly.
“You're a sweet-singing song-bird, ain't you?” he asked her angrily, touched by the good thieves' ancient superstition—the fear of the inauspicious word.
“If I had my way, you'd be back at your trade,” she told him.
“Well, forget it. It's fixed now, anyhow.”
They went together into the hall—danced the first dance together without speaking; and Flame Carney passed on to her many other partners and the excitements of the evening.
They dance, they say, the underworld—the good thieves and the bad and their women—partly to forget, largely because life becomes so dull and tasteless between the periodic excitements of their profession—making the dance an institution, like gambling, or the “hop” or “snow” for the older and more worn, an established institution of the underworld—a fact which brings the underworld and its woman into much closer and more ardent fellowship in the pleasures of life than the upper world and its wife perhaps ever attain.
Flame Carney, caught up into the bright excitement of the swell dance of the good thieves, lost herself half deliberately, like the rest—did not even notice when it was that her brother slipped away.
“A CARAVAN from Arabia” might seem to the uninitiated eye a big, tarpaulined, unpoetical motor-truck. Yet silk may be the loading of motor-trucks as it was long years ago of the camels; and if it is not technically a desert these modern caravans traverse, yet there are few more desolate wastes for their extent on this continent than the Jersey marshes—the meadows of the Hackensack, through which the new caravans from the silk-manufacturing country just west of them must pass to the great city of New York.
This particular caravan crawled like a clumsy bug across the interminable straight line of the road that cuts these marshes, its two white lights focusing upon its whitened path ahead, till suddenly it stopped, when three men with handkerchiefs on their lower faces flagged it, and one on either side swung up with his automatic.
It was but a few minutes before the two men on the front seat were trussed and put in the discard—laid to rest behind a pile of rotting ties thrown aside from one of the many railroads which cut across the desert ed swamp—left to wait for rescue in the morning.
Their three captors removed their handkerchiefs and swung up on the seat of the caravan. And again the great brown bug pushed the white spot before it eastward, a tall, red-haired man driving.
It had not gone very far before, in the darkness of the hood over the seat, there was the sound of ugly talking.
“Let me ask you this,” said the man sitting on the right of the three, speaking with a somewhat foreign accent underneath the patois of New York: “If you're all right, what was it you were talking over that other night—in there shut up with Slip Blaney?”
Another, in the middle, called him a liar. Evidently Slip Blaney, whoever he might be, was a person not to be seen closeted with. The dialogue tended to increasing bitterness—the worse and more threatening for the fact that both men were armed.
“Shut up, you damned dumb-bells!” said the big red man driving. “If you don't, I'll take a hand in this myself. Close up, Joe!” he said to the man with the long, straight nose' on the end, who seemed to be the aggressor in the quarrel. “This is a hell of a time to start a thing like this!”
“Yeah?” replied the one in the middle. “And it will be a hell of a nice time to wake up some night like this and find ourselves trapped by this thing. What I say is, if the damned wop is a belcher, there's no time or place no better than right now to croak him.”
“You could go ahead and finish it right now—both of you—for all of me,” said the large man, “if it wasn't for leaving me here with this cargo on my hands. Now, close your teeth together.”
Both men started doing what he told them to. But before obeying finally, Joe, the foreigner, made one more statement, in the manner of the hot-headed southern Europeans from whom he was apparently descended.
“Listen,” he said, with a great oath; “if I ever did know—if it was ever showed to me that you belched, I'd get you, if I went to the chair for it the next minute.” . He had hardly stopped speaking when dim figures sprang up from the side of the raised road, two of them apparently lifting up motor-cycles.
“The dicks, you rat!” cried Joe the Greek, and, drawing his cannon, so-called, suddenly, while the attention of the man with whom he had been quarreling was leveled out before him, shot him through the head. Then the shooter was off the seat of the still moving truck—back through the detached hood, and had swung free with his still smoking automatic into the darkness beside the wheels. But he had hardly hit the road when another man, in citizen's clothes—a detective, evidently—was beside him.
And now a very singular and unexpected thing happened. The fugitive stopped, passed the warm weapon into the detective's hand, looked round, and, without a word from either, had plunged through the darkness down the raised bank into the edge of the great meadows—in which at night there would have been not one chance in ten of locating a man at all wise in his movements.
The man who now had the pistol slipped it into his pocket, and after hastily examining the dead man in the road, ran toward the truck. It had stopped now. The one man left upon it had evidently decided it was useless to outspeed the motor-cycles with his lumbering vehicle, or put up a fight with four armed police while he was doing it.
The detective reached the truck just as the two men on motor-cycles were dismounting, keeping the driver's hands up.
“Wait! I'll frisk him!” he said to the others, in the voice of a man in the position of commander. And, climbing up upon the s«t, he took another automatic from the right-hand coat pocket of the driver, who sat staring at him until he was finished and was down.
“Slip Blaney! By God!” the driver said then, like a man coming out of a daze.
“Yes, The, my boy,” replied the detective's pleased, suave voice. “And this is the time we've got you right. Come on back here,” he said now to the two men on foot. “We'll take a look at what's back here in the road.” And leaving the two motor-cycle men to guard the prisoner, he passed back with the others to the crushed heap on the roadway.
“That's the other one,” said Slip Blaney, turning him over under his flash-light. “That's Black Tony Vachris.”
“It was, you mean,” said another man, a young-looking officer, dismissing the horrible object he was looking at with a show of bravado.
“And here's what did it,” said Blaney, drawing out an automatic from his pocket. “Have we got him to rights this time?”
“Oh, no!” the other one assented.
“This means the chair,” said Slip Blaney.
THE widows, so-called, of the good thieves are more inglorious figures than the widows of sailors and soldiers killed in action—but their emotions are not necessarily less poignant, even if, so to speak, less recognized by the strict letter of the law; and their creation by death by violence is not—counted relatively as to numbers—so much more infrequent.
Death never lies so very far from the path of the good thief, even in his hours of pleasure—as the walls of old Jasper Hall could abundantly testify if they could but speak. A dispute over a dance between members of the Hectic Club, a few barks of the cannon outside the entrance, a scurry of feet, a dead man on the sidewalk, and inside—dancing still, perhaps—his widow.
They dance, the women of the thieves, perhaps more for excitement, to forget—more as an act of bravado, even, than the good thieves themselves. A flirt of short bright skirts in the face of fate, and their dancing-days are ended—by death perhaps, by separation from their dancing partners very possibly—in that primitive and almost savage relation of the good thieves and their women, which is so easily and quickly begun and ended without sanction of the law. But even this relation, immoral as it is, has the quality of its defects, breeds a certain quick and almost hysterical courage, a certain desperate loyalty, which is perhaps inherent in the position of woman without protection of any law in her relations with the man she elects to live with.
There was one widow dancing that night, Flick Kramer, the woman of Black Tony Vachris—a white-faced girl, with a wide, thin line of reddened lips, who danced with all the more abandon and bravado among the heavy men and their slender thin-faced girls from her knowledge of the danger that was on—until at last, toward dawn, “the wireless” from police head quarters brought in the news of what had happened in the Jersey meadows.
Then, of course, the hysterical collapse, the disheveled bunches of hair tumbling from beside her ears, and the pale face paler for its white complexion-paste, and the wide lips red from the lip-stick—the sudden transformation of the dancing woman into a heap of light silken fabric.
The woman of Straight-nosed Joe, the Greek, was not there at the dance of the Hectic Club that night—it having been found better, to her intense disappointment, that her partner be at home that night, quite ill.
But there was a third woman, of course, in the affair—in a peculiar position. Not a widow—not divorced, as the woman of the good thief becomes when the latter is sent up to prison—although the good thief whose flat she kept was in a jam now, and a very bad one. For Flame Carney was the sister, not the mistress of the man she lived with. And The Carney, whose tribal and family traditions on marriage ran back, without his knowledge of the fact, some hundreds or thousands of years before the good thieves of New York or New York itself existed, saw to it that she stayed with him alone. And although she went in and out among the women of the good thieves, without reflection upon or questioning of their moral standing, she still kept for herself the inheritances in the matter of women's morals of the Red Carneys.
She went home in the first light of morning in her taxi-cab—alone—her cheek bones showing more prominently than usual in her flushed face. She knew what she must do—telephone to the good thieves' lawyer, who would reach the good thieves' professional bondsmen—their politicians—pull the many strings of justice and politics and business which the good thief, in a jam in New York, has already arranged in advance to have pulled for him.
A YEAR is a long time in the life of a woman situated as Flame Carney was—even if relatively short in the course of a trial for murder. But now the end of Lent was here again, and the annual ball of the Hectic Club on Easter Monday but a week off; and, by an unpleasant coincidence, the death of The Carney was set for that very week of the fixed festival of Christendom and the good thieves.
Flame Carney looked little enough like dancing now. Her face was thin; her dress was almost shabby. If she had lived high on crooked money in the past, there was little enough left to worry her conscience to-day—some thirty-five dollars in all when she took out her purse in the Grand Central Station to buy a ticket to Ossining. The lawyers, the court-costs, the politicians big and little had disposed of most of the vanished remainder.
They brought her finally, when she had reached Sing Sing prison as the one close relation of the condemned man, to his cell. She spoke to The, keeping her distance, the deputy watching them.
“Now, listen, Flame!” said The Carney, after a while. It was a very different The Carney from the prosperous thief with strong political connections. His voice was hoarse, his complexion sick, and his eyes—the green-blue eyes of the Red Carneys—looked out steadily at her from between his prominent cheek-bones. “If things shouldn't go the way we hope for——”
“But they will!” his sister broke in.
“Well, say they don't,” he said briefly. “They might not. It isn't as if the thing was all tied up.”
“They've got to!” she insisted, her color growing suddenly in her pale face. “We're going to get our commutation unless they're all lying to me. The governor is going our way.”
“Yes—but, on the other hand, you want to remember there's quite a drag against us yet—influences you can't figure out—all that business crowd—all the police.”
“The police!” said Flame Carney, as one speaks of a disgusting thing. “We showed up how they swore their heads off about that cannon—the one they slid in on you—in place of yours.”
“Sure!” said The Carney. “They would. They had to, didn't they?”
“To save their own dirty skins—the rats!”
“But you've got to remember, too, that Blaney put up quite a tale proving that gun was mine. He could. Trust him!”
“That's one thing I never could see.”
“What's that?”
“Why, sitting there, you didn't nail it on one of them—remember what bull it was that shot Tony.”
“Haven't I told you a hundred times,” replied The Carney in the voice of one impatiently reopening an old dispute, “that you couldn't see anything for sure in that light, moving along the way we were?
“But that's done and over with,” he told her, when she didn't answer. “What I was saying now to you is, remember this: Either way—if things go right—or go wrong, the opposite of what we hope for—I want you to go over with me how you stand—either way. If the best happens, if I get my sentence commuted, I will be in jail still—won't I?—and you alone outside.”
“Never mind me. Forget it!”
“How much have you got left?” he insisted.
“Never mind. I can take care of myself.”
“You might,” said The Carney dryly. “But it's no harm to have a boost now and then, is it?”
“No,” said Flame Carney ungraciously. It was a funny thing to listen to. The two Red Carneys, either one of whom would have given his life for the other, were speaking curtly, almost with hostility, to one another—each one with the set purpose of considering the other and the other only.
“All right,” said the brother. “Just remember this, then: Any time, if you ever need anything, you go to Straight-nosed Joe and tell him I said to come on through. He owes me something, and he'll pay it to you—if he isn't a rat.”
“He's paid you a lot already in this—in your trial, with the governor,” observed his sister, watching him.
“He hasn't paid me all yet,” said Carney. “You get me?”
“I get you,” replied Flame Carney. “Now, are you through with that? If you are, let's talk about yourself.”
And she talked about what she could do for him, as women do when their men are in trouble—even the women of thieves—worrying grotesquely now about his warmth and food and health and all the small creature comfort which women worry over lest their men go without.
“Time's up,” said the deputy warden.
Flame Carney might have broken down entirely if she had been a soft thing, a mere domestic woman, and not a Red Carney, and schooled carefully in the unwritten laws which govern the lives of the women of the good thieves.
As it was, she bit the inside of her lip until it bled, and smiled the old, straight, fighting smile of the Carneys—kissing her brother and joshing him, and covering over that continual fear that it might be the last time she'd ever see him.
FLAME CARNEY raised up her desperate eyes as she heard her name called.
“Look! Come over here,” said the ivory-blond girl who had waved out from the line of those waiting for the arriving passengers. Flame Carney noticed then the discoloration on the almost too fair skin beneath her eye.
“How'd you come to meet me here to-day, Vida?” Flame asked her.
“You told me you were going up the river this afternoon, didn't you? So, then, I waited for you—till you came.”
“Well, what's the game?”
“Look! Come on over here,” said the woman of Joe Anargas, glancing nervously round and then going on ahead alone to the women's waiting-room, where they found seats.
“What's he been doing to you now?” asked Flame, noticing again the discoloration beneath the thick powder on the fair skin. Flame Carney never cared for that kind herself—with their soft skins and their soft souls, and their baby-blue eyes that got red after any excitement. And yet she had played in with this one.
“Beating me up some more,” replied Vida Vernon, as she called herself—hiding her real name, as the women of the thieves do, partly because they think they have found a more ornamental one, partly for other reasons.
“And you stand for it?” cried Flame. “You poor dummy! If you had the nerve of a flea—” she said, starting up in anger.
The other pulled her down again quickly into her seat.
“That's what I'm here for,” she said, looking round apprehensively. “To see you.”
“What?”
“I'm through with him!” said the woman of Straight-nosed Joe.
“Through?”
“Yes; if you can help me.”
“Help you?”
“Will you help me—if I help you?” Flame Carney stared at her. “How much longer has The got,” asked Vida Vernon.
“You know. Five days—till Tuesday next week.”
VIDA looked about her once more at the inoffensive occupants of the room and leaned forward.
“I can save him,” she said then, in the low, emotionless voice of the well-trained woman of the thief. “And I'm the only one who can.”
“What do you mean?” asked Flame Carney, gripping the other's wrist until she flinched.
“You think the governor's coming through—that he'll commute The's sentence?”
“I sure do!” said Flame Carney, the sharpness of sudden fear in her voice now.
“Forget it! You lose.”
“Lose?”
“He's jobbed,” the other woman said.
“That's great news!” said Flame Carney sarcastically.
“From start to finish,” the other went on. “By everybody—way up to the governor.”
“What are you raving about?” asked Flame, but her voice was hoarse with apprehension.
“He never killed Tony Vachris.”
“Say—you're full of news to-day!”
“And neither did the cops—the way you think they did—the way they tried to show it at the trial.”
“Who did, then?” asked Flame, a light of fear coming to her eyes—a special fear rising from many little apprehensions she had felt before.
“Joe did.”
“Joe!”
“Shut up!” said the other, looking round. “Joe and Blaney,” she went on in a low voice. “It was a frame-up from the first.” And she rehearsed the details—the plant of local cops under Blaney upon the Jersey road; the plan of Joe and Blaney for Joe's getaway, and the switching of the automatic pistols.
“Who was in this?” asked Flame Carney, with dry mouth after a motionless silence.
“Just those two—they pulled it off on the others—all just common country bulls out working under Blaney——”
“And what was it all about? What was there in it?” went on Flame Carney.
Vida Vernon told her—one fact after another.
“They were out to break it up—the silk people. They got word to Blaney they'd slip him five thousand on the side. And he got word to Joe that he'd split fifty-fifty—if Joe'd turn the whole thing up.”
“Joe!”
“He's been playing with Blaney for months. Both him and Black Tony. Behind The's back.”
“But at that,” objected Flame Carney, “why should they go out and croak Tony?”
“He claimed that he and Blaney knew he was going to squeal on them. He might have been. I don't say he wasn't.”
“But why frame it onto The?”
“You know why that was.”
“No.”
“You ought to. It was you!”
“Me!” cried Flame Carney, staring.
“You remember that time Joe got gay with you—and The smashed him before the bunch?”
“They made that up long ago.”
“Yes,” said Vida Vernon. “They do—that kind—always! He'd be likely to.”
“Me!” repeated Flame, staring ahead. “I don't believe it! If it was so—why hasn't The told me all this?”
“Because that's the frame-up,” the other one told her. “He couldn't tell you or anybody else—the way they had it fixed. Joe got word to him that he'd go to the front if The gave the word. He had to do that much.” Flame Carney, instructed in the code of the good thieves, nodded. “Just as he knew—that The would never squeal.”
“A swell chance,” said Flame, confirming her, “that The would turn informer to the police after all these years.”
“Sure!” said Vida. “Joe knew that, naturally. And he knew he'd never drag him into the thing if he died for it. Besides that, he could make it out that it would be better always for one of them to be out around, with his hands free, pulling things right among the pol and the lawyers, than to have both of them sitting there canned, eating their hearts out and getting nailed together, with nobody really interested out pulling on the ropes.”
“Sure!” assented Flame Carney, seeing the sound foundation of that statement in the affairs of the world of thieves. “And then what?”
“Then he double-crossed him—that's all.”
“Double-crossed him?”
“Yes. All along the line. Working all the time with Blaney—to railroad The on through to the chair.”
“But Blaney—why should he be out to bump off The?”
“How do I know? What reason has he had for all the rest he's framed up that got in his way somewhere? A man's life means no more to that man than an alley cat's.”
“That's right,” said Flame Carney, remembering all the other things that went round the underworld about that murderer.
“They wanted him dead—both of them—I know that,” said Vida Vernon. “And they had big help—the silk people, who take Blaney's word naturally on anything—wouldn't they?”
“All right. Say they would.”
“And all the time they were feeding The and you and the rest with glad tales that everything was going right—up to now—when you all get the sure tip that the governor's coming through.”
“Isn't he?” asked Flame Carney, with a sudden clutch of her sleeve.
“A swell chance—with the police and the big business bunch and their special pols and private wires all pulling the same direction! And Blaney steering them all!”
“You're trying to tell me——”
“I'm telling you the truth,” reaffirmed Joe Anargas's woman. “You know how The is. He thinks everybody's like himself. They've stalled him along—advising him what defense to make—getting him in deeper and deeper. And then, next week—those two are free! Dead men tell no tales.”
“Why should you come out with this—now—at this late day?” cried Flame.
“This—for one thing!” the other replied, lifting her hand, freed again, to the discoloration of her face. “But that's only part. Don't you see—the rest—how I'll stand when The's gone? I'll be the next in line, won't I? The only one left that knows besides themselves. How long do you think it will be before they pull me out of the river? Especially with him hitting the hootch the way he is now.”
“Is he at that again?”
“Oh, awful! He's jumping shadows this last week—till this is over.”
“Five days!” exclaimed Flame Carney dully. “Four, you might say! And now you come round and pass this to me—at this time. And you my friend—or claim to be!” she said, with a burst of savage scorn.
“What would I do—with him threatening to blow my head off? What would you do?” pleaded the other thief's woman, evidently of softer metal—on the verge of tears. “Besides—I came through finally, didn't I?”
“Yes. You came through nice!” replied Flame Carney bitterly—practically convinced now by the woman's manner and her own knowledge of the probabilities of the case that she was telling the truth, but still testing her out. “But why—which can I believe? Will he kill you—or won't he—for telling me now any more than he did?”
“Can't you see how I'm fixed?” pleaded the other.”I've got to tell it to somebody. I've got to—to have somebody else know—or where am I? I've to get him before he gets me—that's all. You don't know those knife-carriers—those dagoes. You don't know what I'm up against!” Her reddening eyes were filling up with tears.
“Here—cut that!” directed Flame Carney, jarring her softness with purposely harsh speech. “Look! You say you bring this to me—to help me. And you figure, somehow, I'm going to help you back—save your life—or don't you?”
“We could hitch up between us, I thought,” the Vernon girl answered weakly.
“How?” asked Flame in a sharp voice, convinced now by her manner of the unnerving truth. “How? At this late hour?”
THE two women started talking, debating together some plan for the prevention of the disaster hanging over them—each from her own angle, reasoning according to the habits and social codes round them.
“Why couldn't you come yourself—up to the flat with us—and tell him that The had sent you to stay with us—to be on the ground with him, talking things over these last days. He couldn't refuse you that—not the way he's fixed with The now. You could live there—we've got that extra bedroom in the flat. And maybe you could tell him,” Vida said, with a sudden inspiration from her fear, “that The had spilled everything to you and you could start and pump it all out of him.”
“And incidentally get you out from being croaked—by bringing me in,” returned the Carney girl scornfully. “And then have the Greek hop the town the next train—leaving me at the last minute with another earful of wind to hand to the governor and the district attorney—just contrary to everything we've been telling them up to date. Oh, no! Try again!”
“Well—suppose you did this—” said Vida, trying again. “Suppose you came in and play you didn't know anything at all—but was just sent there by The for us to look after you? And you didn't say anything to the Greek about it? Just laid low?”
“Well?”
“And then, nights, I could get him talking in the bedroom next to yours. He'll be jawing and threatening me all night, especially if he keeps after the hootch, as he probably will. And you could listen in—through our window.” And she showed in detail the arrangement of the fire-escape between the windows of the flat's two bedrooms.
“What if I did hear it—all? What could I do with it—at this late day? Who'd believe it—coming from me alone—all contrary to everything we've all sworn our heads off to up to now—to our trying to prove it was the police themselves that shot Vachris?”
“Well—that's so, I suppose,” the other had to admit dispiritedly at last.
So that idea was given up.
“I TELL you what you do,” said Vida, looking up suddenly again.
“What?”
“Oh nothing!” she said, her enthusiasm going as suddenly as it came. “You wouldn't do it.”
“What won't I do?” the other girl insisted.
“If you were like anybody else, you might double up with a man and come in. But you wouldn't do that. You're too good. You wouldn't do that—to save your life!” she said, with an intimation of resentment and scorn.
“Go ahead,” directed Flame, ignoring this. “What's the idea? Get it off your chest.”
“You could get some guy that's crazy over you. There's a dozen I know myself that would go the limit for you—if you'd come through and be human——”
“Go on,” said Flame Carney.
“And you could slip him in with you. Tell Joe we'd run the flat fifty-fifty—the way that so many of them are doing—especially lately, since the bright lights have been turned down. And Joe would fall for it, too. He's most broke—hollering his head off about expenses. He's Poverty's slave the last six months.”
“Say he would!”
“That would work!” exclaimed Vida, catching Flame's dress with a sudden flush of hope. “Joe'd fall for that—if he was sure of the guy—quicker than he would for you alone. It would be more natural—as well as cheaper. He wouldn't be on his guard the way he would with you alone. Then we could work that gag of letting you and the other guy listen in from the fire-escape.”
“And then?”
“Then you could come in and beat it out of him. He's not much—the shape he's got himself into now. Any decent guy could handle him—pound the story out of him.”
“Yes,” objected Flame Carney; “and have him deny it all when we brought him in to the governor or the district attorney.”
“I told you you wouldn't do it!” exclaimed Vida Vernon, resentful at being stooped at the edge of a possible solution.
“Do what?”
“Wouldn't go through with it, not to save your life—or The's. You're too good. You're real business,” she asserted in angry disappointment, “is picking the spots off of Spotless Town.”
“Why? Who said I wouldn't?” Flame Carney came back, with a still bitterer scorn. “What do you think I am? With The where he is, I'd be a nice specimen of a rat—wouldn't I?—if I balked at anything. Especially knowing what I do now—that The's going to the chair—that the whole thing started with that row because of me!”
The other looked up sharply, surprised, evidently, but hoping now that the Carney girl had put aside her old scruples and that they were making progress now toward something.
“It's the way—the only way,” she asserted, with strongly forced positiveness. “If you'll only say you'll do it——”
“Don't fret about me,” Flame reassured her. “That I won't come through—on that, or anything. But what would be the use? That's what I've got yet to see.”
They went on canvassing the situation.
“You've got four days now—starting to-morrow, you might say.”
“Yes.”
“And what you've got to do is to convince the governor or the district attorney or the police headquarters in that time.”
“That's right. But would those dirty buzzards pay attention to anything we pass to them—when they're framing The up for the chair?”
“You want to get it out of your mind, remember,” the Vernon girl reminded her, “that the police were all in this. It was only Blaney that framed The up.”
“You believe that, do you?” asked Flame.
“I know it.”
“But can it be done—that way—in that time? How will you convince them by that scheme of yours—even if they are on the level?”
“You've got to start something—haven't you?—right away.”
“I'll say so! This minute, if I could,” said Flame Carney, her whole life staked on the enterprise, now she was convinced the other woman told the truth.
“And we can work it out—plan it along, after we get in it,” urged the other.
“I know. But what about getting it through?”
“All we can do—” the other began, and then stopped, seeing a little start that Flame Carney gave. “What is it?” she asked. “What hit you?”
“I just thought——”
“Of what?”
“Of—” Flame said, looking up, and stopped. “A man,” she finished.
“Who?”
“Never mind. I'll tell you that if I can work it.”
“What?”
“Never mind,” said Flame, turning the talk. “But we agree on this, don't we? There's only just one thing we can do now. Slip a man in there with me.”
“That's sure,” said Vida Vernon, still looking at her surprised—with that baby stare that light blondes have.
“All right,” said Flame Carney. “I'll have one there to-morrow night some way.”
THE first weeks of the man in brand-new police equipment are full of bewilderments and anxieties. So many things must be done—so many more avoided. There are so many forces, normal and abnormal, focusing upon him. But this experience of John Kane was certainly most difficult to understand—not to say stand still under.
“What's this?” he said to himself, keeping steady, while his mind jumped forty ways. “Are they trying to make out that I'm a crook with a record?”
Monahan, the head of the detective force, was no more committal than is the habit of his profession. He did the questioning—using John Kane's examination-papers which he was holding in his hands.
“You're five feet eleven. Blue eyes. A hundred and eighty pounds.”
“Yes, sir,” said John Kane stiffly. “That's all right—just as you've got it there.”
And the chief of detectives tinned to examine again the stand of photographs, arranged on leaves swinging like a book's, before which they stood together. He looked up at Kane, and back again.
“It's near enough,” he stated. “The best we can do, anyhow.”
“What is this thing?” broke out John Kane finally. “Do you think you've got me mugged there—in the rogues' gallery? What's coming on here?”
“The chance of your lifetime, maybe,” stated Monahan briefly—and turned and pointed a fat finger at one face in the page of photographs. “That's the one—'Scar' Henry,” he said, pointing.
“You think I'm him?” asked John Kane hotly.
“Do you look like him—or don't you?” asked Monahan, with now a spark of humor in his light-blue eyes.
“I don't know—do I?” asked John Kane, his voice hardening a little under the strain.
“The most of any man in this department,” said Monahan, his plump face now loosening up a bit as he placed his hand on the young officer's shoulder. “You're in luck,” he said, “or, maybe, you are— I don't know. Come on over here and sit down and we'll find out.”
“Do you want to take a chance at making a name for yourself—your first fortnight on the force?” he asked, when they had sat down.
“How will I?” returned John Kane.
“You saw that picture I was showing you?”
“Yes.”
“That's Scar Henry—one of the best thieves in this country. One of the mob from the West—from Colorado. He broke jail out there three weeks ago. Well, we're looking for a ringer for him inside the force—right now on a hurry job. And you come nearest to qualifying.”
“I get that much,” said John Kane.
“For a little game we've got on. Are you there? Have you got a strong heart?” asked the chief, with a faint grin.
“I might have,” Kane answered.
“All right. And are you married?”
“Married—no!” said Kane. “What's that got to do with it?”
“Quite a bit,” said the chief of detectives. And he went on and told him partly what he was after. “I can trust you, can I?” he asked.
“I guess you can—yes,” said Kane briefly.
“I'll take the chance, anyhow. You've got good people vouching for you.” John Kane answered not at all. “But this is a close inside job,” went on Monahan, drawing his chair closer, as if the walls of the police department had ears—as many claim they have. “We're after somebody inside the department—who has been under suspicion before.”
“I see,” said John Kane. “And you want me to impersonate this big Western crook?”
“Yes; and it's some job.”
“Yeah?” asked Kane, undisturbed.
“He might even drop in here—into New York—and give you a close-up. He was in Chi the last we heard.”
“All right,” said Kane. “Let him. But what about that scar that he's named from—there on his right cheek?”
“Oh, that's easy fixed. We'll paint you up.”
“So it'll stick?”
“Oh, well enough.”
“Let it go at that,” said Kane. “Now, then, one more thing——”
“What?”
“What's being married got to do with it?”
“I'll let her tell you.”
“Her!” exclaimed John Kane.
“Look!” said the chief of detectives, not answering him. “I'm going over to my office now—see? Alone. And in about three minutes you drift along over—so we won't be seen together.”
“I get you,” said Kane.
“You'll get the whole story there,” said Monahan, “first-hand. You may not want to go through with it when you hear it That's up to you.”
John Kane saluted as his superior went out.
THE tall, straight girl with the straight mouth and the wonderful head of flame- red hair stood up and looked John Kane over, sizing him up as he came into the smaller office.
“Miss Carney,” said the chief, introducing her. “Sit down, Officer. Now, then,” he said to the girl, when Kane had done so, “you've seen him?”
“Yes,” said the girl.
“Do you want to go on?”
“Yes.”
'All right, then,” said Monahan. “Now I'll tell it to him in your presence—so you'll see he gets it right. How much have I told you before?” he asked John Kane.
“Nothing,” Kane answered shortly. Being a little embarrassed in the presence of this unknown, cold-looking, very handsome girl, he kept his eyes strictly on the chief.
“You're willing to take that for the truth?” asked Monahan of the girl.
“Go ahead,” said Flame Carney impatiently.
“You heard about that thing over in the Jersey meadows,” said Monahan, looking over now at Kane, “a year ago, in one of those silk-mill auto robberies, where a party named Carney bumped off a dago named Vachris—Black Tony Vachris? And was picked up by Blaney and a squad from Jersey City?” John Kane nodded. “Well, Carney's her brother,” said Monahan, jerking his thumb toward the girl.
John Kane did not look at her.
“All right, sir,” he said.
SO THE chief of detectives went on from there and told Kane the story for the first time—Kane's eyes upon him still, and the girl's eyes, as Kane knew well, always watching, studying himself.
“It's a frame-up, you see,” said Monahan, summing up; “so she says. Between this Greek and Slip Blaney, here in this bureau, to railroad her brother to the chair.” “I get that.”
“And there's just four days to work in, counting to-day.”
“All right.”
“I'll tell you now,” said Monahan, turning to the girl and talking the gruff way a man in his position talks to a thief or a thief's woman, “you'd had a swell chance of getting me into this thing here—coming in the way you did—if there hadn't been other dope before—on this man of mine—you know who”—avoiding using Blaney's name always when he could. “If some of the things you claim hadn't fitted in with other things we had about his movements—about the pistols that time, for instance—the story at the start that there were three instead of two.”
“All right,” said John Kane, breaking in, trying to help out the girl—make her more comfortable from the old chief's going after her—and forgetting his own position for the minute. “But what's next? What am I going to do?”
“Are you in a hurry?” said the chief, giving him the cold eye.
“No, sir; not in particular.”
“Then wait a minute,” said Monahan—and then went on after a minute, looking past him, speaking to the girl. “It's some idea,” he said. “I'll give you credit for that.”
“Was there any other way?” asked the girl in a quick, hard, rebellious voice, “that would work out?”
“I don't suppose there was.”
“Was there any other you could think of?” she insisted in a still harder voice, and looked as she said it, John Kane thought, with especial bitterness and resentment toward him, as if for some reason she had a special grudge against him in connection with her scheme, whatever it was. “Was there anything else that could possibly work for me—in the time we've got?”
“There was not,” Monahan was answering. “And I don't even know that this one will work in the time, either.”
“Listen,” said Kane finally, looking from one to the other; “as long as we've got this far, let me in on this thing—if you don't mind, sir,” he put in, recollecting himself again.
“I just told you,” said the chief in reply, “about her brother four days from the chair. And all the various moves they've made to drag him out from under—and fallen down.”
“Yes.”
“And now she says—and she's right—there's just one way to save him.”
“How?” asked John Kane.
The eyes of the girl, like a watchful, defiant wild thing in a corner never left his face now.
“To get a stay—of any kind—for him. She's got to convince the department and the district attorney's office that this frame-up—this story of hers I just gave you—is right.”
“I get that,” said Kane.
“In four days.”
“Yes.”
“And there's just one way in the world that would really do that business with us now. And that is to show us—our own man—our own agent.”
“Meaning me—if I go?” said Kane.
“Right!”
“And how'll I get in—work that out—in four days' time?”
“There's only one way in the world for that, too.”
“What?”
“She's got to get you in herself. Got to introduce you. Bring you right in where you can get to this man himself—this Greek—so he'll spill himself.”
“Me—a stranger—in four days!” said Kane. “How?”
“I'll show you how. It's her scheme—not mine, you understand,” said Monahan, putting his position on record. “And you don't have to do it, understand, unless you want to.”
John Kane felt the hungry, resentful eyes of the girl always on him—saw the strain and tension of the waiting grow on her.
“Go ahead,” he answered. “Please.”
“I'll say this,” the chief went on, looking over now at the girl herself—taking his own time: “You're right. It's the only chance in the world you've got—always assuming you're telling the truth—and the only way to get a man from the department inside that bunch of yours in that time. I'll have to give you credit for that.”
“What is it?” asked John Kane again in a little louder and more peremptory voice than is usually employed with a superior. But he was always that way more or less from a boy; he could never stand by and see anything in trouble—a, woman especially.
“You know how they live over there—those good thieves with money?” Monahan asked him finally—when he wanted to. “In those flats, with their women,” he said, and named the locality.
“I've heard about it,” said Kane.
The girl's hard, handsome set face did not change, he noticed, a particle, when the chief mentioned the women. He wondered for a second what she was—what her real history had probably been.
“All right,” said the chief. “She proposes to get you in—to live in this man's—this Straight-nosed Joe's flat with him and his woman.”
“How?”
“By your doubling up with her—and starting housekeeping with this other couple,” said Monahan simply and definitely.
THE man and woman faced each other, looked into each others eyes—a long, straight, level look. It was John Kane who drew his eyes away first, paying attention to what Monahan was telling him.
“Now, then, you'll ask me,” said the chief, anticipating, “just how she'll work you in there with that Greek and his woman—at that. Or probably you've got an idea already—from that in the other room there,” he suggested, jerking his thumb back toward the rogues' gallery—“that Scar Henry.” John Kane barely nodded, watching him. “Do you see?” his superior asked him. “She gets you in as a good thief—somebody this Greek would know is right.”
“Yes.”
“On the other hand, she can't make you out as some local crook—somebody that gang would know. So what does she do? And quite a slick idea, too,” said Monahan. “She thinks up this Scar Henry, who was a side-partner of this brother of hers when he was out a year working through Colorado. Is that right?” he asked the girl.
“Yes,” she said, her lips barely moving.
“But who's known all over as a big thief. And who they know she knows all about from his being with her brother. And she tells them she's bringing him with her into this flat.”
“I get you,” said Kane, looking first as if he were going to say something more, but then setting his lips close together.
“You see how she figures,” continued the chief. “She's a close friend herself of this Greek's woman—this Vida Vernon, she calls herself. And then she can tell the Greek that her brother The is asking it—and he can't refuse under the circumstances—not while her brother's living, anyhow—always holding over him the chance of spilling what really did happen out on the Jersey meadows that night. You get that?”
“I get you—yes,” said Kane, but stopped there without going any further, waiting for the other one.
“So I picked you out for this job,” said the chief, winding up his explanation, “first, because you were like this Scar Henry in a general way. Second, because you're a new cop, and nobody's had time to spot you yet—whereas. they'd spot an older man on the force sure. And, third, because I know your record—or know those that do. And I think I can trust you with a ticklish job. But you don't have to do it, remember,” he added, seeing Kane's face, “if you don't want to. You understand that.”
John Kane looked down, looked up, and, seeing the tense eyes of the girl upon him still, asked a question.
“Let me get this right,” he said. “I'm to impersonate this Scar Henry?”
“Yes.”
“Who's supposed to be living with her?”
“But never has!” said the girl fiercely, breaking in for the first time of her own accord.
Both men looked at her—and looked away, defeated by her eyes.
“But I'm to live with her—in this flat, with this Greek and his woman—pretending we are man and wife,” Kane went on, after a little silence, looking at his superior steadily. “Is that it?”
He had been a decent boy, with a good, decent mother, and he didn't want to be starting in wrong in the department—to get to be used right away in the kind of work they use some of them for, with women.
“Yes; but you don't have to,” Monahan told him again.
John Kane looked down, considering. It might be quite a chance, and yet, at that— Then he looked up—into the eyes of the girl, stared into them, in spite of himself—caught by their expression—the fierce anxiety there that was more than pleading.
There was something else there, too, that he might not have expected. Those eyes looked to him like the eyes of a woman who is straight—an eye which a man brought up like John Kane on the streets of a city like New York gets to think he knows.
“I'll go!” said John Kane, on an impulse, looking into the steady eyes of that thief's woman. They stood up now face to face, Monahan standing between them.
“You're satisfied to do this thing, then?” he asked Kane.
“Yes.”
“Are you?” he asked the girl. “With him?”
“I am—yes,” she answered in a dry voice.
It seemed to John Kane—the whole thing—the way they stood with Monahan at one side between them—to be in a kind crazy way like a marriage ceremony.
What the girl thought, of course, he could not know. She stood stock-still, facing in his direction, close beside him. He saw beneath her blue-green eyes the small freckles beside her nose standing out from her pale skin. She didn't daub on the powder like the most of them. That was one thing to be said in her favor. And he didn't think, either, that those thin red lips of hers came off of any lip-stick.
“All right,” she said, letting his eyes go at last and turning now to Monahan. “That's fixed. Now, then,” she asked, “what's his name? You haven't told me that yet.”
“John Kane,” said the name's owner, when the other man did not reply at once.
“All right,” said Monahan to him. “But you didn't have to tell her.”
“I'm not afraid,” said Kane.
And yet he thought—now her eyes were off his—that it might have been a mistake at that.
“Now,” said the girl to Monahan again, “now that's settled, can I speak to him private?”
“Surest thing you know!” said Monahan, after a look at her. And showed them the anteroom where she could do so.
“When you get it all fixed up, call me,” he told them.
THEY stood and then sat facing each other in the border of that tiny side-room—the untried young cop and this woman of the good thieves, the sister of this condemned murderer—natural enemies, thrown together in their strange enterprise by one of the crazy chances which govern the wild, abnormal daily life of the underworld.
“Now, listen,” said the girl promptly, “let's get in right to start with—so there'll be no mistakes.”
“That's right,” assented Kane, watching her, sizing her up—as all men do all women always.
“This is business, not pleasure—we're in together.”
“Right!”
“You get out it a chance to make a reputation for yourself—your first month on the force. You get that,” she told him, with a steady look into his eyes and a wait, “and that's all.”
“That's enough for me,” said Kane, getting her meaning of course, and giving her her steady look back again.
She went at it right; you could say that for her. No false modesty. But just plain, straight notice where he stood. But he watched her just the same—judging her, as all men judge all women always. After all, whatever his first instincts might have told him what she was, he knew just one thing sure about her—the kind of cattle she had been brought up with. They were traditional enemies.
“And I get my brother's life,” she went on.
“If we win out,” he cautioned her.
“We'll win!” said the girl. “We've got to!”
He liked one thing about her on the start. She had nerve. You could see that the first look. They had that, of course, a good many of these women of the thieves—the courage of the devil.
She went on then, right off, to wise him up on her part in their plant—about this Scar Henry, this big crook from Colorado—this old side-partner of her brother's in the West that she was giving herself out now to be living with.
“That was all right—what he was giving you in there,” she told Kane. “Only this: I not only never lived with him—or any other man. I never saw him. I was out there—but I never saw this man.”
“I get you,” said Kane, watching her, seeing her come back to that point again.
And then she went on:
“I'm telling you this, not only so you'll have the right dope on me—but on the rest of them at the same time. They'll all think different—you want to understand that—even this Vida Vernon I've been telling you about—this Greek's woman.” And then she went on and gave him his instructions about their handling her. “She's in to help up to that point. She's scared solid he's going to croak her—as soon as The's light goes out. She'll work her head off so long as she thinks you're in the game—that you're this Scar Henry. But she'd turn inside out if she knew what you really were—lose her grip entirely. She's soft as mashed potatoes,” she told him scornfully.
Then, after putting him wise on her, she went on and explained the layout of the flat—the two bedrooms next to each other, and their two windows and the fire-escape. And the idea of the Greek's woman of getting him to spill himself nights, with the window open a little, and they listening from the fire-escape; and then the next idea of that Vida Vernon, that when they got their ear full and got the story of the frame-up on this man—the brother of the Carney girl—and the old side-partner of this Henry—that Kane, or Henry, as the woman would think, would break in and beat up the Greek until he came through and promised to go right off with them to the police or the district attorney and cough the whole thing up.
“How bad is he?” Kane asked her. “How much of a battle would he put up?”
“He's not so easy at that,” she told him, “for a black man. It depends some on the effect of the hootch he's drinking all the time. But a battle won't be necessary—will it?—not the way Vida thinks. For we'll be following out a different program as I get it. You'll get the information, and they're going to wait—the other dicks—watch from the outside—while we work inside. And then they'll try and round up Blaney and the Greek together themselves—probably at the Hectic Club dance—if not before,” she said, stopping, getting nervous, thinking of her brother probably, Kane thought, and how little time there was left to save him.
“All right,” said Kane, going on to plan it out with her. For he saw she was bright—right there always with the head-work. “But suppose we didn't get in there—or shut out from the window somehow, and we didn't get the dope that way. What then? Could we go after him, anyway—talk to him direct or something?”
“Not on your hope of heaven,” she told him. “He'd hop over South America the first jump—if he thought we knew anything.”
“How would we get it, then?” Kane asked her.
“We'll get it some way. The main thing is to get started,” she told him.
“What about one of those dictographs, they're running in so much everywhere,” he asked her. “Working from his room to ours?”
But she warned him off of that.
“That's old stuff,” she told him. “We'd be done if either one of them got it. And she'd almost have to. I'll get the dope to you all right. We don't need to take any such chances.”
AND then they went along and worked out how they'd act, especially Kane, so as not to be with this Greek where he could look him over more than he had to.
“We can get through one day,” she told him, “by saying you're down and out from dodging the police. We can say you're all in and leave you in bed.”
John Kane smiled. She certainly had a head on her—you could see that.
“And then again,” she was telling him, “he's not too friendly with anybody—at first—till he's got their measure. And especially when he's drinking—the way he is now. It always makes him leery of everybody—Vida included. And now, of course, he's leery, anyhow. And then, besides that, he'll be away a lot the next few days. He's on the committee of the Hectic Club ball next Monday. And I know he's out pretending to be working on my brother's case. He won't bother you much. And we might turn it off the very first night,” she told him, “before he even gets a look at you.”
“We might,” said Kane. “But we can't count on that. As I get it, we're going to stay there till they pull us out—maybe clear through to going to the ball next Monday night.”
“Well, anyhow, that's about as far as we can go now, isn't it?” she told him finally. “Till we get in there together.”
And he thought she was right. They had gone over the thing up and down, backward and forward, as far as they could figure it. They got to talking more or less easy, feeling freer with each other. But now, at the end, she stiffened up again.
“Now, then,” she said, going back to where she started out from, “we understand each other about that other thing?”
“What other thing?” asked Kane, not getting her for the minute.
“You might not believe it, but I'm straight.”
“I haven't doubted it, have I?” said Kane, his voice hardening again.
“Well, that's understood. I didn't know,” she went on, her voice increasing its hardness after his did, “knowing what's in this for me—my brother's life and all that—but you might think you had me cold. But don't start in with that idea, because there's nothing in it.”
“I won't. Don't worry,” he told her.
“Because, after all,” she said, “you've got to remember it's a stand-off between us. If you've got my brother's life in your fingers, all I've got to do to get yours, any hour of the day, is just bawl you out to the gang that will be round you. Not that I'd do that, either,” she said, giving him a look. “Not while I've got a gun of my own.”
“You don't have to threaten me,” said Kane, holding himself back—but with a touch of scorn in his own voice just the same. “I was brought up decent.”
“I just wanted to tell you—that's all—at the start-off,” she said to him, giving him another look with those hard eyes. She was a handsome devil. If she'd been a man, she'd have been a bad one to handle—he could see that.
So they fixed it up, where he'd meet her that night, after she had made the arrangement with the other two.
“Do you want to be there and hear me telephoning?” she asked him, “so as to see I'm working on the level?”
“No,” he told her. “I'll take my chance with you. I'll have to, anyway. It's just as you said here a minute ago. It's a stand off between us. I'll have his life, in a way. And you'll have mine. I guess we'll play straight.”
“I guess we will,” she told him.
And from there, after she was gone, John Kane got his final instructions from the chief, who started in telling him what they had on this Slip Blaney.
“For that's the boy I'm sending you out after,” he told him. “I've got to get Blaney if we're going to keep running a detective bureau in this town. It's whether decent men run it or the crooks, that's all,” he said, and then went on and gave John Kane his instructions: How he'd listen in nights, and how each night at two o'clock he was to drop a message out the window into the back court of the flat—for he couldn't telephone with any safety at either end of the line. And how he'd go right on through to the dance on Monday night, if the thing didn't break any sooner—for they couldn't get any word to him probably until it did break. But all the time, of course, he would have other men trailing both the Greek and Blaney to see if they could nail them together. And then he warned him against the crowd he was getting into in general, and the girl in particular. “For they're all alike,” he said, “crawling poison snakes. Now go on,” he said finally. “Beat it out and get that scar painted on your face. And get ready to go.”
IT WAS a Friday night. The dance was on Monday, and The Carney's day was set for Wednesday—in the early morning. John Kane, with his little old hand-bag and the roll of money they had staked him for in the department, came out at nine o'clock; and when he had met the girl in front of the drug store, as they had agreed, she took him up to this flat of the Greek's.
The Greek was out when they got there, but his woman was waiting—this Vida Vernon, one of those soft, washed blondes, full of her airs and graces—nervous, probably, over what was coming.
“Where's Joe?” Flame asked her.
“He's out late to-night,” the other one told her. “He said he was sorry, but you'd have to excuse him this time. He's on the committee for the club dance Monday and a dozen other things. He's running his head off lately.”
“I know that,” said Flame.
And the two of them went into their room and left their things there and came out again into the living-room. They sat there and talked—in one of those little gaudy flats the thieves fix up for themselves when they're in funds. And finally Kane started acting dead from sleep—the way the girl had told him to.
“Well, I guess it was time you were hitting the hay. Scar,” she said, looking over at him—and then at the blond girl. “I told you how it was,” she explained. “He's been out ninety-six hours without any sleep.”
That was the high sign for him to go off and leave them alone, so they could talk together. Kane got up.
“If it's all the same to you,” he said.
“Sure!” said the Carney girl. “You toddle along in, Scar. We'll sit out here and buzz a while.”
So she sat out there working the Vernon girl, getting the lay of the land.
“You know where he is,” Vida Vernon told her about the Greek. “He's out talking this all over with Blaney. He won't walk across the street without going into conference with him now.”
“Won't we get a chance to hear you get him talking to-night? We've only got three nights, remember,” the Carney girl told her, “not counting in that night of the dance.”
“I'll do what I can. That's all I can do.”
They sat there talking a couple of hours or so, but finally, round midnight somewhere, the Carney girl came into the bedroom, where Kane was sitting in the dark, waiting for her.
“He's coming now pretty quick,” she told him. “He just telephoned.”
“I heard it,” said Kane, talking low, like she did.
And then, after a little while, they put out the light and fixed the window out on the fire-escape and sat there near the window waiting.
PRESENTLY the Greek came in, and he and Vida went into their own room. You could hear them talking low—first the man's voice growling, and then the light voice of the woman. And finally the Greek went to bed, and the woman evidently came and put up the shade and raised the window up a little and went to bed herself.
Kane was out on the fire-escape, listening. It didn't reach quite over to the other window, but near enough so he could hear their voices.
They were talking about Blaney—he got that—and the Greek's visit to him that night; and it was just as his woman had said—the two of them, he and Blaney, were jumping shadows about this time, leery of everything that moved. And, of course, that included Kane.
Joe had been hitting the hootch. You could tell by his voice he was jumpy.
“Say,” he asked her, all of a sudden; “is that window open to-night?”
“Like it always is.”
“Go and shut it, then.”
“I'll die with the heat if I do.”
“Shut it first, and die afterward,” he told her. “I'm not taking any chances of talking anywhere where anybody can listen in anywhere.”
She had to do it finally. And finally Kane had to crawl back to where the Carney girl was and tell her it was done—he couldn't hear any more.
“What'll we do?” she asked him, whispering, all excited.
“I don't know,” said Kane, steadying her. “We'll work up something.”
And after the first minute or two—when she got over her first disappointment—she was all right.
But it was going to be a tough nut to crack; Kane could see that. He was glad he had that new telephone thing in his pocket—an arrangement that Monahan had given him instead of a dictograph. But he didn't speak to her about it yet—on account of her opposing the dictograph idea so strongly.
But by and by they heard the voices stop in the other room, and they knew it was no use for them to stay awake any longer.
“You'd better go over to your side of the room,” he told her, for they had agreed beforehand to kind of split up the room between them, each one to have his side. “You'd better turn in,” he said, “and get some sleep.”
And after a while she said she would, and she went over and lay down on the bed—in some sort of a loose gown she had put on when she first came in. He could see her just dimly, his eyes having got used to the dark room. And he could see her reach in and put something under her pillow—an automatic pistol, he thought it might be—and thought what Monahan had said about watching her always, and after that some more!
Then, at two o'clock, he went and dropped out one of the little pebbles he had brought in for the purpose into the court with the piece of paper wrapped round it, for Monahan. He had written on it:
Out with B. to-night. No other news.
Looking out, Kane thought he saw a figure coming out of the shadows, three stories underneath, and picking it up. Then he went back and lay down in the corner, on a blanket and one of the pillows which she had fixed up for him on the floor.
John Kane didn't sleep. He was thinking, naturally, of what he could do—whether there was any chance of pulling this thing off, especially in the time she would have to do it in now—to get her information for him to give the department, and save her brother.
He was kind of sorry for her. She might be a thief's woman, brought up in a bad bunch, but she was a sticker, and game from head to toe—you could say that for her. And it was a hard thing for any woman to be going through—an awful strain, say what you wanted about how wild these women were, and how they lived on excitement and danger.
Kane lay still while he was going over this in his head, but his eyes were open all the time—for he was thinking. He looked over to the bed, where the girl was, and she was lying awake, too, he made up his mind, though she didn't move a particle.
But finally he saw her raise herself up, an inch at a time, looking over, it seemed like, to where he was. He didn't say anything, but just lay there, waiting. And by and by he saw her reach under the pillow—where her automatic was.
And then he almost had to laugh out loud—for he saw what she was doing. She was sitting there, telling her beads, praying for her brother, probably. She had had her rosary under her pillow. It was a queer thing, too—when he thought of it—that thief's woman sitting there in the dark, praying.
But a policeman sees a good many things you wouldn't believe could happen. John Kane, after watching her a minute, eased his head back, crossed himself, said his own prayers and went to sleep—as much as he could there on the floor.
{di|T}HE next day was the one that they had it framed up that Kane—or this Scar Henry, as he made himself out to be—was to lie abed, all in from chasing round, dodging the police those last four or five days. And they knew now, of course, that the Greek wouldn't butt in—not wanting to see him, for reasons of his own, until he had to. So the Carney girl went out and got Kane's breakfast and brought it back to him.
“He's gone already,” she told him, “after leaving word for us that he was sorry but he couldn't help it. He had to go out of town—up to Albany, maybe—to see the politicians on the stay for The. What's really going on is he's stalling, waiting until he hears from Blaney just how he's got to act. He's been drinking so—this wild poison stuff you get now—that Blaney's keeping his hand right on him all the time, for fear he might go stony-eyed and spill the whole thing.”
She was getting pretty nervous herself—Kane could see that—over the way the thing was going.
“What'll we do?” she asked him, her face getting flushed. “Supposing he don't come back here? Have we run into a rat-trap where we can't get out? This leaves us only two nights more.”
“We'll work something for you,” said Kane. He was getting good and sorry for the girl—whatever she might be. It was too much to put any woman through. “We'll keep on going from here. The next thing's clear enough.”
“What's that?”
“His being out of here. We can use that time just as well as he can. You take her out”—referring to the Vernon woman—“and I'll take a look around.”
“Be careful now,” she told him, getting ready to go. “Don't leave any traces behind you. Don't forget you're dealing with a scared dago murderer—something more sensitive than a burned baby.”
He hadn't told her about that telephone thing of his—remembering what she said about the dictograph—thinking he'd put it in first and tell her afterward. And this would give him his chance to put it in.
He went all over the place first—and there was nothing incriminating that he could find. He had hardly expected that there would be. And then he went into that gaudy bedroom of the Greek and looked round to see where he would set up this little telephone—this instrument for listening in.
There was a woman's dresser on the wall next to their room, one of those fancy ones with a big, swinging oval mirror. And Kane, hurrying all the time for fear they might walk in on him, took out his little bit and got through the base-board, and ran a wire up in back of the dresser and put the little receiver in there, just below where the mirror would swing back. You could barely see the thing, and the wire was colored so you'd hardly notice it. But in his hurry he made a rough job of it.
He cleaned everything up, so far as he could see, and got back in his own room and on his bed there, lying with all his clothes on but coat and shoes, ready to duck in under when the women came. But they did not come.
He got up after a while and shaved himself, and while doing this he was more or less worried about that scar they had painted on his face. It was there all right—as they told him it would be. But it looked to him as if it might have faded out just a little. He wished it wasn't there. He had to take all kinds of pains with his shaving—not to get it wet or rub it. They said it would stand some wet and any ordinary rubbing it might get—but you didn't want to be too reckless about handling it, especially when you knew it couldn't be put on again if it ever did go wrong.
After he shaved, he lay down again on the bed, listening for the girls to come back. But they didn't show up for quite some time. And, naturally, he got to thinking of that girl he was with.
There might be some excuse for her—being hauled into that life by her brother—you couldn't tell. And she might use her automatic at that, if anybody bothered her—for he certainly thought, in spite of what Monahan had said, that the girl was all right.
“She certainly acted so up to now,” he said to himself, and dropped off to sleep for a minute before they came back—for he hadn't slept any too much that night before.
“What'd you get—anything?” Flame asked him, standing before the mirror, putting her hair in order. Kane, watching her, thought he'd never seen such hair in his life—or a straighter, finer-looking girl.
“Nothing much,” he said, not telling her yet what he'd done. “Did you get anything out of her?”
“No,” she told him; “except that the Greek's pretty sure to be back here late to-night.”
“That's something,” said Kane.
“But what will we do then,” she asked him, “if that window's closed again?”
“Is she going to try to keep it open?”
“If she can—yes. But can she?”
“Well—we'll work it out some way,” he told her. “But I'm sorry now I didn't hang onto that first idea I had about sneaking in a dictograph,” he went on—not telling her yet what he'd done, but getting her ready, thinking the more anxious she was—the more she thought she was in a hole—the more satisfied she would be when she found he had pulled her out of it by this thing he'd put in there—even if she had thought it would be taking too many chances.
He got up and ate lunch with them—stuff out of the delicatessen shop, of course. And then went back in and lay down again, saving he could stand some sleep, which was no lie. He tested out his telephone instrument once, when the two women were in the other bedroom. And it worked fine. You could hear a pin drop. And then he rolled over and took a go long sleep till they got him up for dinner.
THEY played cards that night—women's poker. He had a chance to practise on the Greek's woman how he'd act when the Greek finally showed up. There was one thing he made up his mind he'd work. Being a big thief, like that Scar Henry, feeling ugly after what he'd gone through, he didn't have to put himself out much for anybody else—or do much talking. If he wanted to shut up, he could play the grouch and get away with it. And when the Greek didn't come toward eleven o'clock, Kane told them he was going to call it a day, and went back and got his listening-machine all ready for him when he did show up.
“The next train from Albany,” the Greek's woman had told them before he went into the room, “is just before midnight. So probably he'll think he'll come in right after that.”
And then the two women decided they wouldn't wait for him, and then Flame Carney came into Kane's room, where he was dickering with that instrument.
“What's this?” she asked him, a sharp tone coming into her voice.
And then he told her at last.
“Where'd you put it?”
And he told her that, too.
“In back of her dresser?” she said in a still sharper voice.
“Yes. Why?”
“You might have asked me—that's all,” she said, “before you did a thing like that.”
“Why—what's the matter with that place?”
“Oh nothing—only it's about the worst place you could have picked out.”
“Why?” he asked her again. And she told him what she was afraid of.
“She's got a place there—fixed on the back of that dresser—where she hides what she doesn't want him to get wise to, where she puts her own bank-roll and all that—a kind of cloth pocket she's tacked on. She's always into that, or looking to see if it's all right. It's a wonder you didn't see that yourself. Well, it's done, anyhow. It may end in murder—but it might go through all right. We'll hope so, anyhow,” she told him. That was one thing you could say of her. When a thing was done, she made the most of it.
“It's good,” she said, when he had her listen in. “There'll be nothing get away from as while it's up there—you can say that.”
So they sat in there listening, waiting; and finally, after midnight, the Greek did come in—ugly from his hootch, as usual.
“What did you find out?” John Kane, with his ear glued to the telephone, heard his woman ask him.
“About what?” he asked back, evidently ugly.
“What does Blaney say about him—this Henry?”
“He ain't satisfied yet. He's looking him up through the wireless out in Chi. That's where they all claim he was dug in at last accounts.”
“You're off your head,” said the Vernon woman. “Flame Carney'd be likely to be doubling up—dragging somebody in here she didn't know. That would be real probable, wouldn't it?”
And he seemed to agree to that.
“But that's all right. Suppose he is—just what he claims to be,” he said then. “And we happen to drop a word—you, especially—that would give him a line on how things really stand with The.”
“Or you, more likely,” she told him. “When you're loaded to the gills with this varnish you're drinking now.
“Or suppose that The had got an idea somewhere that I had double-crossed him—and sent the both of them in here—to listen in some way and find out.”
“You're jumping the moon—that's what's the matter with you,” said the girl back. “What will you think of next?”
THE telephone was working fine. They got fighting again then about opening the window. And he wouldn't let her open it. But she kept him on just the same—talking along that line they started on, working out his suspicion that at the last minute Carney might get wise to what they were doing—how they were foxing him about what the governor was going to do; and he might cough up the real dope on the murder that he'd been holding back all this time—at the last minute.
“What harm would that do now?” the Vernon woman was asking him. “Nobody would believe it at this late day—after the defense they put up, swearing the bulls shot him. They'd have a swell chance to make anybody believe the real dope now.”
“That's all right,” the Greek told her. “You never can tell. There's always a slip in these things when you least expect it. But if there was—if there was any frame-up in this—and you let her in on me, working your friendship, believe me, you can count on one thing: I'd croak you first before anybody else. I'd make sure of one. So put that down on the slate and keep watching!”
He was talking rough, without a doubt—half drunk, trying to scare her. But you could hear her voice change—the fear in it—when he told her. She was soft stuff—Kane could get that even through the telephone. Some different from the girl who sat there beside him in the dark while he listened, still as an image, never moving to disturb him—though she must be half crazy to know the stuff he was getting through that receiver.
“What was it?” she asked finally, when the two shut off talking.
“Flash up that little flash-light,” he whispered back to her, and he looked at his watch. It was almost two o'clock already.
So he scrawled out his message to Monahan on the paper—and showed it to her.
Her story O.K. C. innocent. B. and A. together all day. Nail them.
“I heard enough for that,” he whispered to her—and saw her face go red from white, even in the dim outside edge of the light from that flash-light.
“Now flash it out,” he told her—and they were in the dark again.
And he went over and dropped the paper out, and saw it lying there at the mouth of the court—a little spot of white—till the shadow stole out again from the corner and grabbed it up. Then he went back and sat down and told her all about what he had been hearing. And after he was through, she didn't say anything for a while. And then, all at once, she spoke up in a low voice, kind of hoarse.
“I want to shake hands,” she said. And she reached out her hand and missed his a little in the dark, and finally shook it as a man would.
“For why?” asked John Kane, a little fussed.
“For what you wrote about my brother,” she said in a still hoarser voice, and let his hand go.
“Oh, that's all right,” he told her, not thinking of anything else to say.
And then they both were still a minute—till Kane spoke up again.
“You go to bed, girl,” he said. “Lie down and get some rest. You'll need it.”
He had no sooner said it than he caught himself up.
“This won't do,” he said to himself, after she had gone across the room and he had lain down in the corner she had fixed up for him. “The next thing you know,” he said to himself, “you'll be falling for her!”
He lay awake there, thinking what a wild thing it was—he, a cop, and she in that thieves' gang—shut up here together, getting naturally closer and closer together in this thing—this plant they were working out—and after two or three days more separated forever, most probably bitter enemies. He lay there till he saw her telling over her beads again in the dark, and after that he got to sleep once more.
THAT was the second night. And going over it on waking up, Kane felt fairly well satisfied. Of course, naturally, it would have been more satisfactory if he could have heard from headquarters what they were doing shadowing Blaney, but, as it was, all there was to do was to stick and keep on boring in here till they called him off.
He was wondering now whether or not he ought to show himself and give the Greek a chance to see him if he wanted to. Whether he wouldn't think it was queer if he always kept out of sight. And he decided—he and the girl together—that he'd better come out. And so he did. He went out to have some coffee and rolls they had for breakfast, along between nine and ten o'clock, when they got up.
Then, after him a while, the Greek came out—a dark, medium-sized man, dressed up a little gaudy, the way those foreigners are, with a couple of rings and a diamond scarf-pin, and one of those corset-shaped coats with high waists—and that long, straight nose he got his name from. John Kane had heard them speak in one place and another praising up Greek faces and figures, but he made up his mind that a nose like that looked better on a statue than it did on a crook in a short-waisted coat.
He shook hands with Kane in a rough and hearty way, like a prize-fighter, and started in talking to the Carney girl, apologizing for being so busy—looking after the case of her brother and with the trip he said he had made the day before to Albany to be good and sure everything was all right.
Illustration: The detective reached the truck just as the two men on motor-cycles were dismounting, keeping the driver's hands up.
“I know just how you're feeling, Flame,” he told her. “I would be myself. But don't fret. Rest easy. I know. I tell you now I've got through to the biggest there are in politics in this state, and they've been on through to the governor. And I know. He's coming through with a commutation of sentence—sure. It may be out on Monday, and it may be he'll hold it over till the last day, Tuesday. But, one day or the other, it will come off.”
The girl didn't say anything—or show anything in her face. Just said, “Thank you, Joe,” and sat there studying him—doing her stunt at acting just the same as he did. And the thought came to John Kane watching them: How'd you like to live in a world like this, where everybody's watching each other day and night—to stop getting the double cross or the knife in the back any hour? He could see the Greek studying him out of the corners of his eyes. The man was going on now, telling the girl about the dance Monday night.
“You can come out now,” he said, “and be easy while you're dancing. They'll all expect you. They're going to pull off a little something for The, and they'll look for you to be there.”
“I'd be there, anyhow,” she said, throwing up her head that way she had—her face flushing up and her eyes hard again. “Just to show them.”
“Sure!” said Vida Vernon, coming in. “As the fellow said—if the guys can die cracking safes for us, we can die dancing with them.”
And then the Greek turned to Kane—made a crack at him about coming to the dance, too.
“Why not?” he said, when Kane did not know. “You'd be as safe there as you are here—safer. You can tell him how it is, Flame. We've always had the dicks fixed so they don't butt in on that ball. They know better. They have their orders.”
“How'll it be about this?” asked Kane, still objecting. “All the clothes I've got is just what I've got on?”
“Oh, that'll be all right,” said the Greek. “There'll be plenty of others there like that.”
“Well, I might go at that,” said Kane finally. “I'd like to take the girl here,” he said. “I would, without thinking, if it wasn't for this here”—meaning his scar.
He hadn't called attention to it before; he thought maybe he ought not to have.
“Ah, forget it! You'll be safe enough, I'll guarantee that,” the Greek told him. But Kane could see him looking him over still, studying him out of the corners of his eyes—especially that scar, or so Kane thought.
THAT scar worried Kane most of the time now, and when the Greek pulled out he thought he'd take the girl into their room and ask her to look over it. It wasn't long before the Greek went.
“I don't want to take my hands off a minute, you see, for The's sake,” he said, looking at Flame and then over at John Kane. “And Sunday's the great day for the pols—when you can get them altogether. So you see I'-m quite a busy guy to-day—and I guess probably you'll excuse me.”
“Out for the day with Blaney,” said Vida Vernon, after he was down-stairs.
She didn't know about the telephone stunt into her room, of course—that they had listened in that night before. And she was sore and excited about the Greek's making her keep the window down again.
“Honest to God, I tried all I had in me to stop it,” she told them.
“It's the last night—you want to remember,” said Flame Carney, pretending to be excited and probably feeling so, too—always when she thought of the small amount of time she had.
“I'll have the thing open to-night,” said the Vernon girl, after going over what the Greek had told her the night before about everything, “or die in the attempt. But if I don't, you go out in the living-room and listen in at that door. He'll have some news for you to-night. He's going to get what Blaney's dug up about you to-day,” she said to the supposed Scar Henry'. “He'll be full of that when he gets back—and of hootch, too, probably. And he'll talk his arm off to me—about everything. And, after that, to-morrow—if not to-night—you can jump in and confront him with what you heard him say, and you can beat it out of him and drag him over to the police or the district attorney's office. He's a rat at heart, and he's worse now—almost on the verge of tears.”
“Will you stick—when we get him up there?” Flame Carney asked her.
“Stick? Why not? Sure I will!” she said. “I've got to, haven't I? It's like I told you. It hasn't changed any. I can't take the chance of letting The's light get blown out and sitting here—waiting—next in line. I'll come through,” she promised them. But yet her eyes wavered—the way that kind's do—when she said it.
And then Kane went back into his room and left the two girls alone again, knowing that Flame could pump her better when he wasn't there.
There was another long day—that second one—that Sunday. They ate a lunch of delicatessen stuff along between one and two, and the girls played double Canfield while he went through the Sunday papers. And they read over together what it had to say about The's execution, and a little item down in the comer from Chicago about their hunting for Scar Henry, the big thief out there. And then, after that, they decided all parties would take a nap, and he went in with the Carney girl into their room again, and they sat ere looking out the window—and got talking they way you do, passing away the time.
She acted different—since she had seen that note he sent out that night before, saying her brother was innocent—friendlier, more grateful, not so hard—with a look in her eyes as if she didn't hate him. And finally he got her to telling him about her people down there in the old Seventh Ward. Her mother had died, it seemed, when she was a kid.
“And that makes a great difference to a kid—girl or boy,” said Kane, looking over at her.
“You bet your life it does!” she said, looking out the window.
And then he told her about his mother—and all she'd done for him, raising him up after his father was killed that time.
“But a mother means more to you. I'll say,” she told him after listening, “than a father.”
And she went on and told him about her old man. In the trucking business, down there for years—and did pretty well till he got drinking after the wife died.
“You know how it is in that business, or was, anyhow—in and out the saloons,” she told him.
It surprised him in a way, listening to her talk—how many things they had in common with each other after all. And then she went on from there and told him about that brother, The—how he started out in a garage, making good right along until one time he thought the man at the head of it framed him, and he smashed him and got through. And then how, being out of work and sore, he got into that silk-robbery game—that lies just round the corner, as everybody knows, from the business he was in and his father was in before him.
“They're always hanging round trying out the men in the trucking business—you know that,” she told him.
“Sure!” he said—and they stopped talking, looking out the window.
“You can't tell—what will happen to you, can you?” she asked him after a while, with a little kind of a sigh.
“You sure can't!” he told her.
THEN they sat still some more, looking out the window, both thinking. It was Sunday, of course and the men were home, ugly from nothing to do. You could hear their voices jawing with the women, and now and then one smashing a kid, and the kid hollering. But it was quieter than most flats at that—having more of these thieves and just their women.
But all at once, unexpectedly, the girl beside Kane broke out in a kind of hoarse, rebellious voice—as if she were choking.
“God! How I hate it! How I hate it!” she cried. “Why did I have to have all this,” she said, “wished onto me? Why have I had to fight, fight, all my life? Just to be plain decent!”
He looked at her—not knowing what to say. She wasn't crying any—just looking out across the court with hard, dry eyes.
“I'm not so much,” she said. “I know that. I came along with The, staying with him still when he went bad. I didn't quit him. I stayed and took that money. Oh, I'm no saint! But I'm not that other thing. Not like the rest of these women. Maybe I'm too wise,” she said, with a hard laugh, “after seeing the way the most of them go afterward.” She stopped and thought it over. “I should have quit The, I suppose,” she said. “And yet—well, I didn't; that's all.”
“I guess probably you're not much of a quitter,” said Kane, helping her out.
“I don't know,” she said; “maybe. And then I hoped, maybe, sometime I might get him to quit himself. But I'm not apologizing or excusing myself, either,” she told him in a kind of bitter voice. “I'm not so much. And after this—here, with you,” she went on, “I don't know what will happen to me. I've got the name now, anyhow. And probably,” she said, her voice getting harder and harder now, “I'll have the game before I'm through—especially if The—” she said, her voice breaking.
“Don't worry,” Kane started telling her, finding the place where he thought he could speak finally. “The least the governor can do now is——”
She wasn't listening to him, but went on like a person talking to himself.
“Not that I grudge it to The,” she said, throwing up her head that independent way she had. “I'd be a nice thing if I didn't come across with The—to the limit.”
“You're good. I'll say,” said John Kane, reaching over and patting her hand in a kind of awkward way, not knowing exactly what his cue was in the circumstances. She drew her hand quickly away.
“Don't get the idea I'm whining—or condemning The, either. Only, I always wish all this hadn't happened. That he'd never got going in this direction.”
“I get you,” said Kane, his hand back on his own chair-arm.
And they were still again—till she got herself under good control once more and started off talking over their plans. And then Kane brought up that thing about that scar on his face that had been troubling him.
“Does it look faded out any?”
“I don't know. I don't think so—maybe just a little.”
“It's got me worried some,” he told her.
“Wait,” she said, and went over to a drawer in the bureau and came back with one of those lip-sticks, and he stood still while she touched one or two places with it, just faintly.
“There!” she said, standing off looking at it—talking brighter and brisker. “That's all right. We're lucky to have it. First aid to the injured.”
She was giving him a very different look now from what she did at first—not so hard, a look of confidence and gratitude that she hadn't had on her face before. And she smiled a little, but he didn't smile back this time at once.
“Say—look!” he said to her, after a minute. “You don't use one of those things, do you?”
“What things?”
“Those lip-sticks.”
“No,” she said; “I just found it there in the drawer. Why?”
“You look better without it. They all do.”
It made him smile himself, thinking it over afterward. You'd think, to hear him, he owned her. And another funny thing, too, he noticed—she took it from him just as he gave it—with no come-back at all.
It was all a queer thing, anyhow, John Kane thought to himself—how he had got there in with this girl and was getting acquainted the way they were—and then, in a week's time, probably he'd never see her again. And yet he didn't know at that He felt better acquainted with her already than any woman he'd ever seen in his life. In spite of what Monahan had told him about these women being all alike, he knew this one was straight through and through every way. If she wasn't—if he couldn't trust her—then he never wanted to see another woman again.
They went all over the thing they were working together—sitting up rather close, talking low, so that the Vernon girl couldn't get on to what they were saying if she happened to think she'd like to listen in. And that girl—that Flame Carney—had more sense and quick wit about her than any woman Kane had ever run against.
They went over that Vernon girl's part in the thing, and what they could expect of her, and the chance of her finding that telephone arrangement on the wall back of her dresser. They figured they would probably be taking about as much of a chance trying to get it out now as they would be in leaving it, and they'd lose the other chance of getting more dope that night through it.
THE Greek came home late again, and the three of them went to their rooms without waiting for him.
“Listen, girl!” said John Kane to this Flame Carney. He had got calling her that all the time since they got talking to each other that afternoon about their lives and their people. “You can't tell when he'll be along. Why not put out the light, and you go and lie down—and try to sleep?” And finally he got her to do it.
She must have been pretty well in, for in a few minutes, listening to her breathing, he could hear she was asleep. He sat there thinking and waiting, and all at once the girl started struggling and whimpering and crying out in her sleep; and in a second or two he saw what it was. She was in a bad dream—a nightmare—carrying along, probably, her troubles out of the daytime.
John Kane spoke to her once or twice—more or less in a low voice—but she paid no attention to him, kept struggling, making those hard, distressing noises you make in a nightmare—as if you were just going to die. And finally Kane couldn't stand it, and he stepped over, not thinking, into her side of the room. He stood by the further side of the bed and put his hand on her shoulder, trying to wake her up.
Right away she was sitting up and had that gun of hers under his nose. He thought she'd shoot him sure before she got awake.
“What's this?” she asked him.
He stood still, letting her wake up—not moving for fear she'd let him have it.
“And I trusted you,” she said, “like a fool!”
“You got me wrong,” said Kane. “You were crying out—waking up the whole neighborhood. You had the nightmare.”
By that time she had the light of her pocket flash-light in his face, watching.
“Well, get over,” she told him, half convinced he wasn't lying to her, “to your own side of the room. I'm awake now, anyhow.”
And John Kane went back and sat there in the dark, thinking, more or less sore, and yet realizing, after all, how natural it all was from her standpoint.
After a bit the girl got up and came over and sat by John Kane, not saying anything about what she had said to him before—but apologizing, in a way, by just coming. And they sat there waiting, and finally the Greek came bumping in again after midnight.
He was seeing red lights—drunker than he had been yet. John Kane, with his ear on the little receiver, could hear that just as soon as he started talking. He began speaking low and hoarse and ugly the minute the door of his bedroom went closed behind him—cursing her out, abusing her—but not coming to the real thing till the Vernon woman worked it out of him.
“What's struck you?” she said to him after a while.
“You know what Blaney got through from Chicago to-night?”
“No,” she said.
She was sitting now, John Kane could hear, in front of that dresser of hers. Fixing her hair probably, keeping her courage up—and maybe watching the Greek in the mirror.
“Scar Henry!” said the Greek, his voice sinking down like a threatening dog's just before he jumps.
“What about him?”
“He's still out there—in Chicago.”
“In Chicago?” said the woman's sharp voice.
“Yes—and you know it!” the Greek told her.
“No. I don't—I don't—I don't!” she answered him—the way women and children do when a man's got hold of them, hurting them.
“What is this—a plant?” the Greek asked her in his hoarse drinking-voice. “Because if it is, I'll croak the three of you.”
And then John Kane heard the woman give a sudden cry and there was a kind of a bang—and just then the telephone stopped working.
FOR a second Kane sat there, surprised—the way you do when the telephone goes dead on you. He wasn't sure at first just what it all meant—whether the Greek had shoved her, the way a drunk does, and banged that dresser up against the instrument on the wall there and broken it, or whether one of them had seen the instrument suddenly and done something to it.
“What is it?” the girl back of him was whispering.
“It's gone dead,” he whispered back. “I don't know just what has happened.”
“The!” she said out loud—showing in that word what was always in her mind first.
“Don't get excited,” said John Kane. “It's all right, probably.”
And then they stopped and listened again.
John Kane didn't know just what to do. If they'd found that instrument, there might be a battle right off now—any time—with the Greek lit up the way he was now.
On the other hand, if he was slamming this woman of his, he might get busy and kill her before they broke in on him, and yet, if they once broke in, the whole game was up.
“There's only one thing,” Flame Carney was whispering in his ear. “The door in there—we've got to go out in the living-room and listen in there.”
“You're right,” Kane whispered, and started crawling toward the door into the main room. He had to hand it to her; her mind turned three revolutions to his one.
But before he got started, she had her hand on his arm again.
“Not you,” she said. “Me.”
He tried to shake her hand off gently, not wanting her to take the chance out there. But she made him let her go.
“You're too big,” she said. “I know the place—ever inch.”
She crept out by him and left him waiting in his own doorway. There was a little light coming in the window in the living-room from some sort of moon outside. He could see her go along—without a sound—stop at the door, listening.
THEY talked—the man and the woman— in the next room, softer and lower as they went along. That was a good sign, of course. But John Kane learned nothing till the talking finally stopped and he saw the figure of the Carney girl at their door move finally and come back to him.
“It's all right,” she whispered, “for the minute.”
She came in and sat down by him, and told him about what she got listening.
“They didn't find it,” she told him, “that telephone thing of yours. He must have smashed it when he slammed her back against the dresser.”
“Was he hurting her much?” Kane wanted to know.
“No. She convinced him she wasn't in any frame-up. That she believed you were what you said you were—me introducing you and being—in here—with you. She talked him over finally. She would, for that matter. That's just what she does think—that you're Scar Henry.”
“And now what?”
“That's it,” said Flame. “They don't know what to think. They're both up in the air, and the Greek's half crazy.”
“What do you suppose he does think?”
“They figured it out together, and the best thing they could do was that I was lying probably. That you were somebody I'd fallen for, and was hiding out for some reason—and using this outside crook's name to throw everybody off the scent. The last idea they'll fall over—either one of them—is the real thing—knowing me—that I'd be in here with a—an officer.”
John Kane noticed the last word. It was the first time he had ever heard her speak of the police without some slurring nickname.
“So we are safe for the present, anyhow,” she told him. “We would be—for that matter.”
“How do you make that out?” Kane asked.
“Just put yourself in the place of that Greek—that rat,” she advised him. “He can't move one way or the other—can he?—till he finds out just what is going on. If we are all right, he'll want to stay here, anyhow—not excite suspicion by ducking out just now. And if we're all wrong—if I've found out, say, what he'd done to The—and got my crowd out to finish him, we'd be watching him probably—or somebody else we had would—to get him on the outside before we tackled him. And getting out might be just the worst move he could make. Oh, you don't know,” she said, “what things go on in this kind of a bunch, when once they get out after each other.”
“Thank God, no!” said Kane. “But what about her?” he whispered. “That Vernon girl? Won't he get loose from himself some night and finish her?”
“He can't—not yet.”
“Why not?”
“She's the only thing he's got to work on us with and find out what's going on here. And, of course, she fell in with that idea—she promised everything he wanted, naturally.”
“What's the main thing he's after?” Kane asked her.
“To get us out in the open—to be looked over,” she answered him.
And then she told him the idea that those two had been talking over inside the door while she was there, listening. They talked low, naturally; she could only get a part of it—but enough to show the general plan they had, which was to pull Kane and the girl both out of the flat to the dance that next night—so Blaney and some of the rest would look them over and see who Kane was.
“All right. We'll give them a chance,” said Kane. “We'll have to—unless Monahan comes in sooner.”
And at that he noticed she began all at once shivering—as if she had suddenly got out of her control.
“What is it, girl?” he asked her, using that name again that he had promised himself he wouldn't.
“I don't see what they're holding off for—Monahan and the rest—after that note of yours last night,” she said, and started shivering worse yet.
He saw, of course, what it was—the strain, the anxiety of waiting and wondering about her brother.
“Don't worry too much. It's coming out right. Monahan will see it's all looked after—about him,” he told her, when she began to cry a little. “Don't!”
And, without half thinking, he put his arm across her shoulder. She had it off, jumping up before it was hardly there.
“None of that!” she said.
“What?”
“None of that sympathy act. That don't go!”
“You're quite a thistle, aren't you?” said John Kane, a little sore at the way she acted—at the way she seemed always to be suspicious of him.
“I have to be,” she told him, “fixed the way I've always been.”
He didn't know whether it was a kind of apology or not—but yet he could see, after a minute, the sense in it.
Then all at once it struck him it was about time he was writing that note and chucking it out the window to Monahan.
“Flash your light, will you?” he asked her. And he saw, when she did, it was ten minutes past two.
It gave him a little jolt—it was the first time he had been late. So he took a page of paper off his little pocket pad and scrawled on it.
We may need help at dance.
He was in a hurry to write it and get it out—but he figured they could take care of themselves until they got there—to that dance, anyhow.
So she turned her little light out, and he wrapped the paper up round a pebble and tossed it out the window as usual.
He hadn't fastened it on right—being late and in a hurry, and going down it looked to him as if the paper got unwrapped and went sliding down by itself. He lost it then, so he didn't see, naturally, whether it was picked up or not.
He thought at first maybe he would write another one, but he made up his mind it would probably be all right, anyhow. The man down there would get it some way.
“Did you see them getting it all right?” she whispered to him.
“It looks so,” he told her.
He wasn't going to worry her any more than he had to. She had enough on her mind as it was. And after they planned some more what they would have to do the next day, they both turned in and tried to get some sleep.
THEY got up late that next, and last, day—coming out the usual late hour for breakfast—to keep everything looking natural. The Greek was gone; they heard him going earlier, leaving word he was sorry, but it had to be done. He was like an eel. But it was just as well, after all—as they had figured that it would be—that he was out of the way—on account of that Vida Vernon.
She looked all right one way; he hadn't beaten her up, that is. But she was scared floppy; her eyes were opened up like a watch. And there was no powder needed on her face.
She started into a fit the minute they came out.
“You've got to get me out of this!” she began crying out to Flame Carney.
“What's happened?” Flame asked her back. “Did he beat you up again?”
She didn't answer that—she didn't seem to hear her, even.
“You've got to get me out of this! You got me in, and now you've got to get me out!” she kept repeating, tugging at the other woman's dress.
“What's the matter—are you crazy?” Flame Carney asked her.
“He's onto us!” she came back, still dragging at Flame's clothing until she loosened her hands. “He's going to croak us all!”
“What is this?” Flame asked her, holding her wrists.
She pulled them away and made a jump for the table. There was a napkin there lying loose, and she grabbed that and poured some water out of a glass on it; and while they were watching her, wondering what she was at, she came over with it in front of Kane.
“Listen,” she said in a high, crazy voice; “who are you?” And making a pass at him with the wet napkin, she drew it across his face where that phony scar was. “I thought so!” she said, pulling it back.
It only hit a little corner, Kane warding her hand off—but enough to show her.
“I thought so!” she said, glancing at his face and then at the napkin. “I thought so!” And she sat down on the floor, having hysterics. Flame down on her knees beside her—having all she could do to handle her.
“No! No! Let me out of here!” she kept saying over and over again, struggling. “Before he gets back!”
“He won't be back, will he? Not until afternoon,” said Flame, arguing with her.
That didn't make any difference; she had to go now—before she got killed.
Flame finally took both her arms in her hands and shook her like a kid.
“Look!” she said, when she had shaken her silent. “Do you want to die sure?” And the Vernon girl looked at her—just like a scared child would—with her eyes red from crying. “If you do,” Flame said, “keep right on!”
“But who is he?” Vida asked, still blubbering. “Who are you?” she said to Kane.
“Do you want to know who he is?” Flame asked, turning the girl's face back toward hers.
She nodded her head, staring at her with those frightened baby-blue eyes with red borders.
“He's a dick—from the Central Office,” said Flame.
“A dick!” said the other one, standing up on her feet and backing away.
It was lucky, John Kane thought, that she lost her voice at that time instead of finding it. But, even at that, Flame was always right there with her, handling her all the time—would have been, anyway.
“Yes; a dick,” she was saying to her. “Lucky for you.”
“Lucky!” the other one said, staring.
“You'd be out of luck if he wasn't.” And made her sit down while she laid out the program to her—what they were really doing. She took it hard—fighting off at first—getting crazy again to run away.
“No; hold on! Wait!” said Flame, holding her till she was still again. “You know the best way for you to commit suicide?'
No. She didn't.
“I'll tell you, then. Let Joe get loose now—let him get a smell of this thing and get away. You know him, don't you, and what he was planning to do to you anyhow—after The passed along? All right! How long do you think, after this, now, before he'll get you?”
You could see that hit home. The other girl gave a kind of sudden jump when she said it.
“But if you stay in with us,” said Flame Carney, “and play on through——”
“A dick!” said the Vernon girl, as if she was talking to herself.
“You know your own proposition,” Flame went on arguing. “Your idea that got me into this thing in the first place. The only chance you had.”
“What's that?” said the other one in a dull voice.
“To get him first—the Greek—before he gets you. Is that right—or did I dream it?” she said, going after her in that fierce, straight way she had.
“Why, yes,” the other one had to admit.
“All right, then. What are you kicking about—when I frame something up for you a lot surer than the thing you wanted?”
“You doubling up with a dick!” said the Vernon woman, staring still more.
“That's my business,” said the Carney girl. “If I want to—to pull The and you out—that's my privilege, isn't it?”
AND then she went on and told her what she and Kane were going to do—what they knew would happen and a lot more they didn't know—getting her fixed to keep her mouth shut till after that ball.
“But if he gets you in there,” said the Vernon girl, drawing back again, “you know what he'll do. He'll croak you there in the hall or outside. Pull that old stunt of a dance-fight.”
“How—you fool?” asked Flame Carney. “Unless he's going to kill us all. Have some sense. See how he stands—if we all stick, even if he knows we are trimming him! We're safe—all of us. And if you just keep your mouth shut and go on to the dance—do the thing he's framing up for us to do—it will be all over by midnight. By midnight to-night,” she repeated—all a pure bluff, of course—“the Greek and Blaney will be headed for the chair and all your troubles will be over—and The's! We'll get the Greek first—just the way you wanted it.”
“Do you know this?” the other one asked her.
“Sure I know it! What am I living with a cop for?” Flame Carney said, looking at Kane for a minute, and then turning away, her face fiery red.
But she had the other girl going now.
“Is this right?” she asked, watching her eyes.
“Sure it's right!” Flame answered her. “Isn't it?” she asked Kane.
“Nothing surer,” he chimed in.
“The whole place will be surrounded,” lied Flame Carney. “He can't get away.”
“And will I be taken care of afterward?” the Vernon girl said, convinced—starting bargaining for herself.
“You sure will!” Kane told her.
“I'll stick,” she said finally.
“But will she?” Kane asked Flame Carney when they had gone over the thing—the three together—and he and Flame had gone back to their room to look and see how much damage she'd done to that false scar on his face.
“Sure—she'll stick,” she told him.
“Why?”
“She didn't come through to him last night, did she? She didn't give herself away—in spite of all the threatening she got?”
“No.”
“She knows the way she's got to go—the only way out for her—that's why. She knows I'm telling her the truth about what he'd do to her if he got away after this thing.”
“Would he get her, you think?”
“Would he get her?” she said, with a hard look.
John Kane couldn't help thinking what she must have seen. And then the next minute she was going on, looking out for Kane himself—his interests.
“That isn't what's worrying me,” she said.
“What is?”
“You.”
“Me?” said Kane, watching her. “Don't worry about me.”
“For I didn't tell her in there the whole truth—about how we really stand. If the Greek should ever really get wise to what is going on!”
“Stand—how?”
“He wouldn't have to croak us all—not to get what he wants, would he?”
“Why not?”
“He'd only need to get one—that's all. The only one whose testimony would count.”
“And that is?” asked Kane watching her.
“You know who it is,” she told him. “Don't play you don't. There's only one in the three whose testimony the police or the district attorney would take for anything—and that's yours! And you know what he's getting you to that dance for—to have Blaney look you over. Does Blaney know you?”
“I don't think so,” Kane told her. But in his heart he wasn't exactly sure. They said Blaney was apt to watch all the new men on the force as they came in. “Don't worry about me. I might do some of the shooting myself,” he told her. “Anyhow, I'll stick, I'll have to—won't I?—till I'm pulled off. And don't fret, girl—any more than you have to. We'll get your brother out all right.”
“I suppose that's what you might call sticking to your post,” she said, looking at him, “what you're doing here.”
“You might at that,” Kane answered, shifting up a little, thinking she was slamming the police again, “if you wanted to.”
“You're a man—I'll say that for you!” said Flame Carney, her face flushing up. And then she turned onto other things—especially the fixing-up of that scar on his face.
It was getting a little dull, he thought, in addition to that dab the Vernon girl had wiped off the corner of it. It looked a little dim and ragged in spite of all the Carney girl could do. But what was there to do about it? Kane had to go ahead just the same, whether it was go or not. So he told her finally it was good, first-class, all right—and let it go at that.
THE girls spent the great part of the day by themselves, putting together what they were going to wear that night. Kane stayed in his room and read some and slept some, and wondered more—what Monahan was doing, whether that last note got to him out of the window the night before, just how far they could count on them when they got into that hall.
The Greek didn't come the first of the afternoon. They didn't think he would, and the girls kept on fooling with their dresses and planning for the night, and Flame talking to the other one and steadying her while they were on their gowns. The Vernon girl was going in bright green; Flame had just the one dress to wear now—the black velvet she had left over from the dance the year before. She hadn't been dancing much those past few months.
“I don't care a whole lot about going to-night—even if we have got to do it,” she told Kane—one of those times she came into their room to get something.
“Naturally,” said Kane, knowing her mind was not away from her brother a minute.
“There was a time,” she told him, “I wouldn't have cared. Heraus with it! Anything to let myself go—to forget! And there's something to be said for that idea at that,” she said, looking up again at him with those wonderful eyes of hers—reckless-looking things sometimes when she let them be. and then again as hard as ice.
“Like the liquor for a man,” said Kane.
“Maybe,” she told him. “But not now—not for me. All the life seems gone out of me to-day.” And then, suddenly stiffening through her whole body, she lifted and bit at the back of her hand like a wild creature.
“Don't!” said Kane, taking hold of her, stopping it—but knowing, of course, what she was always tearing at in her mind. “He's all right, I tell you. The least the governor will do is to give him a stay until we can come in with what we've got to say.”
“All right. I guess so,” she said, dabbing the white teeth-marks on her hand with handkerchief and then pushing her hair back from her forehead and brightening up, the way she did by main strength and willpower. And went out again to keep that Vida Vernon going.
AU the afternoon he could hear them out there—fussing over their dresses, fixing up each other's hair and nails—Flame still talking to Vida, bracing her up, getting her ready for the Greek when he came—and that last evening!
When he did come finally, he certainly didn't look dangerous on the surface. He was all smiles and kind words and affection and excuses—especially for the Carney girl.
“I just got word,” he told her, “about it—over the long-distance from Albany. That's what's kept me away all day again, waiting for it. The governor's coming through—but not to-night.”
“Not to-night!” repeated Flame, acting scared—without much trouble probably.
“No. I'm sorry about that,” he lied to her. “There was some reason they had for holding it until after the dance. Can you keep a secret?” he asked, giving a wise smile, or pretending to, with those black Judas-eyes of his. “What it is is this—if you will keep it behind your eyebrows strictly,” he went lying on, lowering his voice and looking round for effect. “The real truth is the paper's all signed and out in Albany. We've seen it, but they're getting the governor to hold it off a day—so that the little purse they'll pull out for The at the dance to-night—when we've got all the pols and big gamblers out—won't lose by it.”
John Kane just looked at him, keeping the expression out of his face—trying to. He'd have given his shoes to have him alone, where he could have broken his dirty, lying neck. But they all stood there, playing their parts pretty well, even the empty-faced blonde, as he went lying on.
“But you know the truth,” he said, talking now, all the time, straight at Flame. “You can go to the dance and rest easy—knowing what you do. Shake the shimmy and enjoy yourself”—ending up with a laugh and a pat on the shoulder the way those black boys have with the women.
Flame laughed back—that reckless laugh that came from her sometimes with that reckless light in those green-blue eyes.
Kane wondered how she kept up—knowing now how her mind really acted, how it must strike her—that stuff about her brother.
THEY sat out in the living-room—the Greek and Kane—and smoked while the women were in the Greek's room dressing each other for the dance; and Kane went on, carrying out his act, keeping up the farce as well as he could. But he was glad when the two women were through dressing and the Greek went in to put on his dress suit and Flame came back again to their own room.
“Is she all right? Will she stick?” he asked her again.
“Sure!” she told him. “I've got her scared worse than he has.”
She wasn't worrying about that now, it seemed. Apparently she had something else on her mind.
“What is it, girl?” he asked her finally. “Is there anything new?”
“What do you suppose he is thinking now?”
“Who?” he asked, knowing full well already.
“The. Sitting there—awaiting!”
“They're feeding him the same old fairy-tales about the governor probably,” said Kane, doing the best he could for her.
“Maybe,” she said. “If he believes them.”
“He may at that,” said Kane.
“But what do you suppose he thinks about me—three days without a word?” she said in the low voice that always they had to talk in, getting hoarser and lower as she talked. She didn't cry; but it was worse—the way she stared.
“The question is,” said Kane, putting his hand on her shoulder, meaning to comfort her, “what he'll think of you when we've pulled this off for him.”
She gave a little queer gesture—had a queer expression on her face that Kane didn't quite understand.
“I wonder,” she said.
“What?”
“What he will think of me—now? After all this stunt—here, with you—if he does come free?” she said, and went on, before Kane fairly got her meaning: “But you're right, at that. This is the time to forget—everything. There's nothing left in the world now—but to-night!”
And not so long after that the taxi came to carry the four of them to the Hectic Club dance.
THE dance of the Hectic Club on every Easter Monday evening is an occasion of great joy, attended by many and varied joy-makers, in addition to the good thieves. Next to the dance of the big gamblers, it is perhaps the gayest of all dances in the eternally gay underworld.
Special privileges are extended it by those in position to extend them—some not unconnected with a room without windows at the left of the hall marked “Mineral Spring” and the much forbidden sale of liquor; others dispensing with the too close surveillance of the police, and in fact with a general freedom from restraint upon that holiday occasion, due principally to the friendly offices of politicians who plead each spring with success that the “boys and girls” should be allowed to loosen up and have their good times once a year, as much as the folks on Fifth Avenue.
There are others, also, who are not averse to loosening up with them in that great moral democracy of the annual dance of the good thieves. The pols are there—with and without their wives—smiling, laughing and shaking hands most heartily with a profane gladness contrasting sharply with their somber black suits. Minor judges of minor courts are there. The retained lawyers of the good thieves—who may or may not be elected minor judges later. The professional bondsmen they most favor or who most cultivate their profitable business. The more social and friendly of the police—but out for pleasure strictly and not duty—ununiformed, of course. The little gamblers and the big gamblers with their wives—too fat from restaurant-eating, lit up with diamonds like cut-glass chandeliers. All these and many more—of even higher standing in New York politics or legal machinery—join in with the good thieves and their merry women to make Easter Monday in old Jasper Hall the maddest, gladdest season of the year.
It is always well toward midnight before the dance really starts to warm up beneath the paper streamers in the bare old ugly hall and the holiday temper begins to show itself in the vivacity of talk and cries and well-liberated emotions.
At this stage of the dance, two men sat at one end of the ancient balcony, apparently discussing casually but very earnestly two tall figures that had been dancing much together that special night—a man with a marked scar on his right cheek and a girl with flame-red hair in a black-velvet dress and wearing a string of jade beads—who were followed by more whispers and side glances than any couple in the hall.
“That's the one,” said the taller of the watchers from the balcony with barely moving lips, as he followed the figure of the man with his eyes. “I got him right away. He just came on the force two weeks ago.”
The other man—with a long, straight nose—watched with the same strange, studied combination of indifference and fear—cursing now with sudden surprise.
“Trailing us,” he said. “Out of the Central Office!”
“It's Monahan after me again,” said Slip Blaney.
“What'll we do?” asked Joe the Greek.
“What do you think he could have got out of you—in the flat?”
“Nothing—out of me. I wasn't there—only nights.”
“What about his listening in nights? How are your bedrooms fixed?” asked Blaney with his barely moving lips, as he smiled down at a hand-waver from the floor. “Smiling Blaney,” he was sometimes called.
“No! No!” said the other one—and then gave a sudden start of recollection. “Unless—” His eye went suddenly down among the dancers and sought out a woman in a bright-green dress—a slim blond girl with a very white face, who had waved nervously at them when she had looked up at them in the balcony as she danced by underneath.
And then he told Blaney about the strange insistence of his woman—that Vida Vernon—upon open windows and fresh air since the two visitors had been in the flat.
“That's it!” said Slip Blaney, with conviction. “She's not only talked but she's brought them in—and got him listening in on you somehow.”
And the Greek, watching the slow-moving maelstrom of laughing dancers underneath, told under his breath of the horrors he was going to inflict on the woman in the green gown.
“That ain't the question,” Slip Blaney interrupted him.
“What is?”
“The question is—how to keep ourselves out of the chair,” he said, smiling again, as he said it, and raising his hand to another friend in the opposite balcony.
The Greek cursed vilely. His close-set eyes had the same sparkle of fear as a cornered rat's, an animal to which he had often been compared—like many others in the underworld. He had not Slip Blaney's remarkable gift for covering his emotions with smiles.
“How will we?” he asked nervously.
“There's only one way,” said Blaney, with the end of a smile lingering on his thin, supple actor's face. “Croak him to-night! Before he gets in touch with Monahan again.”
“Croak him? What good would that do—with the two women out against me—to get my life?”
“Your life—you wop!” said the other, his smile narrowing to a grimace of pain and scorn. “What about mine? Listen,” he went on persuasively, his long, thin hands on the other's sleeve; “the women are all right. We don't need to worry about them. You can take care of yours, can't you?”
“You watch me,” said the Greek, with a gesture of cruelty.
“Even if you didn't, it would make no difference—her testimony. And for the other one—after what they've all sworn to in court already—if she came out now with a story like that against us, we'd make a monkey of her. “No,” said Slip Blaney softly, the mobile muscles around his mouth wrinkling in an expression that was half a smile. “There's only one party who really interests us in this thing.”
“How'll we get him?” asked the Greek, staring at the dancers down below.
THE dance of the Hectic Club was warming up well—both the bodies and the souls of its patrons as they looked down upon it—the slowly turning shoulders of the women, spotted with the green and yellow confetti, their very smooth or very ornate hair, their overbright complexions, their smiles and supple movements as they clung to the black coats of the heavier-moving men. Light, joyous young creatures, full of the exhilaration of the time—that time of color and warm odors and the glad insanity and forgetfulness of the jazz.
Slip Blaney sat looking down at them, considering.
“They'll be bringing out some new confetti and streamers the next dance or two,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“You go down and pass round the word to one or two of your bunch that that scar on his face is phony—and what he really is. They'll see it's a phony-looking scar. I can, from here.”
“All right,” said the Greek, listening.
“Then you go and get some girl you know—your own woman, if you say so—and get a handful of confetti or that other paper stuff—those little ribbons; and when you go by them dancing sometime, you bump them. And when you bump, have your girl reach up and scrub that face of his—that scar—good and hard—so he'll know it. Then start a free-for-all with him.”
“I get you,” said the Greek, his rat's eyes brightening.
“You know what'll happen,” went on Slip Blaney almost motionlessly. “It'll show up that phony scar in the first place—or a part of it. And you'll get your scrap—if you're any good—in the second.”
“I'll get the scrap,” the Greek promised.
“And then, when you get to talking raw and loud, get your bunch to hustle him out of the room—into that little old committee-room—the one with the door into the alley—the old Hole in the Wall.”
“The Hole in the Wall!” said the Greek, with memories in his mind of the many escapes from unpleasant situations which had been made through it—recorded in the oral traditions of the underworld.
“Not too big a crowd—four or five. Tell them that he is in here, trailing a lot of them, and has got the goods—anything you think of. Whisper to them you're leading him in there for a going-over and a little lesson—to give him the bum's rush at the end of it out into the alley. And when you get him in there,” said Blaney, his lips moving barely more than a ventriloquist's, his eyes roving round to see that no one watched or overheard, “you can keep working yourself up—getting uglier—more excited, and, finally, when the time comes—let him have it.”
“They holding him, probably, all the time,” said the Greek, quick to catch the humor of the situation he had developed.
“Sure!” said the other. “And then break for the door and make your getaway. And leave him there for them to take care of.”
“Yes,” said the Greek, smiling a black smile of appreciation of what he saw was one of the masterpieces of Slip Blaney's genius for intrigue. “He'll be on their hands to take care of.”
“Sure!” said Blaney, not unappreciative of his own work. “It'll be their move.”
And the Greek, restless, already looking down on the floor to see the one about to be concerned among the dancers, nodded.
“Out he goes!” said Blaney. “Out the Hole in the Wall into the alley—like many another big stiff before him!”
The other one, with both nervousness and anticipation in his face, was already rising to go down.
“And I'll be out there by the door on the outside, seeing things are being kept clear for you.” The Greek was out of his seat, going by him. “Don't forget this,” the thin motionless lips of Blaney were telling him: “Don't make any mistake. When you get him—get him right—through the head.”
“Don't worry,” said Straight-nosed Joe, turning up the side aisle.
The oer, half turning, watched him with his ready smile—a very peculiar smile now, indeed—a smile furtive, sinister, almost menacing.
“WHAT'S this?” cried John Kane, grunting as the man's body struck him and the exceedingly white-faced girl in the green dress reached up with a strident laugh and scrubbed his face with a handful of colored paper.
His cheek was scratched, a piece of confetti stuck its edge into his eye, and the weight of the man against his leg strained his knee painfully and almost threw him down.
Half blinded by the paper in his eye, John Kane, working at last successfully to get it out, heard the Greek cursing him for his awkwardness.
“What do you mean, you big stiff,” he said, “by walking over people like that? You ought to be in the bull-pen—not dancing round with civilized people. For fifty cents I'd smash you—big as you are!”
John Kane, feeling the warning clutch of Flame Carney on his arm, held himself back, realized through his sudden, pained confusion that something untoward was going on.
“Oh, look what's here!” cried the Greek in a sharp, jeering voice to a crowd of men that had some way gathered round him. And he came up, almost laying his pointing finger on the smeared scar upon Kane's right cheek. “What'd I tell you?” he said to the three or four big men who were closing in on him and Kane. “It's phony. Just the same as he is!”
“Look out!” Flame Carney whispered in Kane's ear. “We're framed!”
He had hardly heard her when a crowd of men brushed her aside, were on him, crushing him, pressing his useless arms beside him. The dance in their immediate vicinity was suspended.
“Gentlemen,” said the watchful floor-manager, with the suave but peremptory manners of the referee of a prize-fight, “this must stop.”
“Don't worry. We'll get him out. The bum's rush for you!” said a leader. And suddenly John Kane, big as he was, felt himself, in spite of his struggling, carried bodily, helplessly, half strangled by the hand over his mouth, through a door in the wall beside him, which opened as the crowd approached and closed after them. The sound of low cursing and scuffling feet was over, and the little company of men stood for a second in a small bare room—noiseless but for the muffled sounds of the music in the hall beyond and the heavy breathing of the men. The silence was quickly broken.
“How the hell did you get in here?” asked the voice of the Greek sharply.
The hands of the men at Kane's face relaxed so that he strained his head around.
“You put me out—if you can!” said Flame Carney. “If you want men in here in two minutes that will spatter rats' brains all over the ceiling——”
“Let her stay—if she wants to,” said one of the men with Kane—while another one behind him extracted Kane's pistol from his pocket. “She may help us out.”
“If she stays, she'll have herself to thank,” said Joe the Greek. “You better go—while you're alive,” he told her. A queer, desperate light had come into his eyes since he saw her there—the expression of a man cornered, driven by an unforeseen happening on to unforeseen and desperate action. “I advise you to go,” he said grimly, “while you've got the chance.”
One of the others laughed.
“Let her stay,” he advised. “She may learn some things she don't know about her fly cop.”
Flame Carney gave a sudden start.
“Fly cop!” she cried shrilly. “Who says so?”
“I can prove it,” said the Greek. “I've known it right along,” he lied. “All the time you were up there in the flat with us!”
“You lie!” said Flame Carney, lying angrily in her turn, “and you know it.”
“I proved it already to the satisfaction of these men,” he said, with a glance at the grinning group. “This thing is enough,” he went on, going up to Kane struggling with his captors, and touching the smeared painted scar upon his cheek. “Oh, you can't put that over on us!” he said, giving Kane's cheek an ugly jab with his forefinger.
“Ask him! Let him speak for himself!” cried Flame, standing facing them—apparently more and more excited by what she saw. “You won't yell—will you?” she asked Kane to promise.
John Kane promised with his head that he would not.
“Let him loose!” said Flame Carney, coming closer. “He won't lie to you! He's no cheap Greek murderer,” she said, with a glance at the latter.
“All right,” said the ringleader beside her. “We'll take the chance. If he does holler, it won't be but just one yelp.”
John Kane, released, stood looking at them a moment, getting back his breath enough to speak.
“Are you a dick?” asked Flame Carney. “Tell me!”
John Kane looked at her—and then at the Greek. It had needed no word from her to assure him that they were the victims of one of the sinister and sometimes fatal frame-ups which are not unusual in the dispensation of private justice as seen in the world of thieves.
“If I tell you the truth,” he asked them, “will you put her out of here?”
“We might,” said the leader. “Yes.”
“I am—yes,” said Kane, after a minute. “But she doesn't know it. I put it all over her,” he said, with a kind of raw laugh, “just the same as I've put it over you—just the same as you'll all get yours for this now! Now put her out. I don't want to see her any more. I've got all I needed out of her,” said John Kane, sneering.
THE temper of the crowd—as perhaps he had expected—changed noticeably from half-laughing roughness to anger.
But the greatest change came in the face of the girl.
“You dirty beast!” she cried, and, leaping forward like a lithe animal, struck Kane in the face with her flat hand.
“Don't let her fool you!” cried the sharp voice of the Greek. “It was a plant—from start to finish. Just as I told you. They were in it both together—she as much as he was! For thirty cents I'd croak the both of them.”
And now, with a quick motion, he flashed out his gun.
The face of Flame Carney had the expression of some wild hunting creature about to spring.
“Put it up, Joe!” said the voice of one of the men, anxiety sounding through its rough carelessness. “Don't be a damn fool!”
The voice of the Carney girl broke in.
“No! Don't put it up! Give it to me!” she cried hysterically. “Give it to me! You say I lie! Give it to me!”
And she sprang in front of the Greek, between him and Kane.
One of the others laughed indulgently—the laugh of a rough man at the capricious weakness of woman.
“What would you do with it?” he asked her.
“I'll show you!” said Flame Carney wildly. “I'll show you who was lying! I'll—I'll croak this thing here!” she cried, now indicating Kane. “That's what I'll do!”
The good thieves, accustomed to the transitory and finally harmless emotions of their own women, laughed at the huge joke of it.
“Give it to her, Joe,” they said. “Go on; call her bluff!”
It was several seconds before Joe Anargas came through, and smiled finally.
“I'll just about do that little thing,” he said then—and passed the automatic to her, still smiling
John Kane, watching between his captors, looked at her with amazement, almost with fear. She was a lithe young fury, a strident-voiced goddess of Vengeance. Her strange-colored red hair had fallen, torn down in the struggle coming in the door; her jade eyes stared like night-eyes from a jungle.
“And now you!” Flame called, turning with smooth swiftness. “I mean—you!”
JOHN MONAHAN, at his desk in the small office, looked up at the three young plain-clothes men whom he had picked because he believed they were straight and because neither Blaney nor the pols and crooks in that Hectic Club dance would know them.
“We know what we've got to do,” he said, “now we've located that last message from Kane finally.
“You two,” he said to the first two—the youngest ones, whose names were Paget and Mitchell—“will go inside and keep your eye out and help out Kane—if you ever see he needs you.
“But for you,” he said to the last one—the one named Zimmer, Adolph Zimmer—“I've got another kind of a job. I want you to keep your eye on the Hole in the Wall.”
“The Hole in the Wall?”
And Monahan explained it to him—about that back entrance on the alleyway—and what he wanted him to do there, and gave his orders about what to do if Blaney or the Greek should come out, and how he was not to move from there under any circumstances.
“And I'll be over here,” he told the other two, “by the drug store opposite—so if any time you need me, you'll get me quick.”
And then he started them out and took his place where he told them that he would, across the street.
He was waiting there when the two of them in the hall came running over and told him there was something wrong on over there—in that room—that they had got Kane and the girl in there, and when they started to break in after them, they'd hustled them out of the place. And that Blaney had run out.
So Monahan told the two of them to run and watch at the entrance of that blind alleyway and help out Zimmer if they thought he needed them. And then he went over into the hall himself.
“Send over for the floor-manager,” he said, going over by the door of the anteroom, “and tell him I want him here. And be damned quick about it!”
But as he said it there was the faint crack of a pistol—too faint, it seemed, al most, to come from that room inside; then, with a short interval of silence, the door-key turned inside and a half a dozen men came tumbling out.
John Monahan, with his own gun out, went in the door they left open, and, after one look, turned and locked the door behind him to shut out the gathering crowd.
Young Adolph Zimmer, in the deep old-time doorway in the little, dim-lighted pocket of a street, hugged the shadow of his place of hiding and alternately gave way to bored dejection and sudden starts of apprehension and responsibility.
It was a damp night; the light of the one gas-lamp and its reflection along the paving and on the pink-brick wall behind served principally to make the darkness round it more visible, and to emphasize the ugly possibilities of the dingy old brick ware houses which loomed above and beyond it, empty of life as the old skulls of dead men. Even the smells of the place, exaggerated in the dampness, seemed sinister and evil.
He stood there hours, it seemed, waiting—on one foot and then the other—watching the few signs of life, the sharp shoulders and bony tail of a prowling alley cat, the gray, alert nose of an inquisitive young rat poked out of the sewer entrance beneath the street light. He heard, confused and indistinct, the jumble of the music inside the hall, which, like the street-light, rather emphasized than relieved his loneliness. He wondered spasmodically whether Monahan really did have a hunch about this thing as they said he did—whether there might be something to it or whether it was all a false alarm. And finally, after too long wondering and attention, he ceased to wonder at all and stood there, stupid and uncomfortable—almost resentful.
Then, peering out for the thousandth time, he thought he saw a figure in the light at the entrance of the place stop, look hurriedly round and come into the alley's mouth. He crowded back into his door way. The steps of the approaching man came on—soft, but still loud enough in that dead alleyway. He thought at last that they would pass by his place of hiding.
But, instead, they stopped just before they got to him, arrested, apparently, some twelve or fifteen feet away at the back entrance to the hall—that Hole in the Wall that he was watching. After an ample wait he peered out from his hiding and saw the back of the man waiting there, watching, like himself, and thought, with a sudden lump of apprehension in his throat, that it looked—as well as he could see it in that light—like the back of Slip Blaney.
Whoever it was seemed restless, stood tense, watching that dim entrance—that Hole in the wall—with his right hand in his right coat pocket.
He moved. Zimmer jumped back, but as he did so, involuntarily looked out again. For he heard distinctly—inside somewhere—the muffled crack of a pistol-shot.
The man before him still stood watching; his right arm in his pocket stiffened. There was the sound of an opening door, a slam as it closed, and a man jumped down the two steps onto the pavement.
“Run, Slip; run!” said Joe the Greek in a stage-whisper. And as he said it, the tense arm of the man at the entrance whipped out from the pocket and, at the second sharp crack of a pistol, the man in the exit went down.
Zimmer jumped, his heart in his mouth, his own weapon in his hand. The shooter did not see him, nor did he, as Zimmer had expected, start to run. He was certainly cool—an old, experienced hand, you would have inferred, at murder. He had knelt down with a swift movement and examined the figure on the ground—shot, Zimmer saw, through the head.
THE figure, lying on its side, moved once, gave a convulsive kick, as the young policeman had seen slaughtered animals do, and lay still. He was dead without a question. And then, as quickly as he had stopped, the murderer rose and turned to run back through the alley—and looked into the muzzle of Zimmer's automatic.
“Just a minute!” said young Adolph Zimmer, with quietness in his voice and a sense of giddiness, of intense lightness in his feet.
And at the same time he heard the sound of steps from the mouth of the alley—of Paget and Mitchell running up with their guns out.
Slip Blaney looked from one to the other of their faces—must have recognized one, at least.
“Why, hello, boys!” he said—that quick smile lighting his face. “You're in on this, too? Well, I hand it to you. You're good for greenhorns; but you wouldn't have got him at that, I don't believe. You weren't placed quite right. There's a good getaway in the back of this place here you wouldn't know about as I do, being longer in the business. He'd have got away from you, I'm afraid,” said Slip Blaney, his speech and his smile both growing easier.
“I'll tell you how I happened to get here, boys,” he said when no one spoke, and smiled again his ingratiating smile at Zimmer, who stood nearest to him, now with his gun slightly lowered, “so you can get how it is done. There was a bad man,” he said, looking down, indicating Joe the Greek with the toe of his shoe. “I saw him starting something inside the hall, and I took a chance. I took a sneak and ran in back, and took a try at getting him back here, coming out of this place. 'The Hole in the Wall,' they call it. I know, because I've been here before.”
“I guess you have, at that,” said Zimmer, the oldest of the young cops, being the first to find his voice.
“Yes,” said Blaney, with a quick and friendly smile at him; “you learn the ropes after a while. I can give you a lot of points, boys, and I will, as time goes on—and we get more friendly on the force together.
“You saw what happened—or heard it, anyway,” he continued, turning now again to Zimmer. “You heard, as I did, I guess, that shot inside, and then this man bursting out from this door. You heard when I hollered at him to stop. I hollered twice. You must have heard me. And when he didn't, I let him have it. That's all I could do. You saw that? And I got him good—huh?”—giving Zimmer another sudden smile. “A little better than I expected. But I was in a hurry and I had to shoot quick—the way you do sometimes in this life when you're on duty.
“You saw that boys,” said Slip Blaney, going on, looking from one policeman to another, moistening his lips. “Or you did, anyhow,” he told Zimmer. “And it's damned lucky for me that I've got you here to testify for me. They're hard on a cop—these reformers especially. They raise hell if you make the least slip of your foot, as we all do sometimes. So we've all of us dicks got to stick together in a jam. You can't tell whose turn will come next. You know that”—taking Zimmer's arm—“all you boys. And now we're together in this thing—and after we get this all fixed right, there's many a turn I expect I can do for you.
“For I'm in right, boys, if I do say so. I'm in right with you know who in this department—way in back under. And, believe me, I can put my friends in right, too. So when Monahan comes into this—brings me up on the carpet, as he's sure to, you want to——”
“Wait a minute,” said Zimmer. “Here he is now. Tell it to him.”
And looking up the two steps. Slip Blaney saw Monahan in the open door of the Hole in the Wall.
“Bring in here,” directed John Monahan.
“God, Chief,” said Slip Blaney, looking smilingly into his superior's smileless face, “I got this fellow—too good! But when I called to him, he failed to stop. I heard this shot—I heard this shot inside, and I figured naturally there was gun-play in there—murder, probably, going on in there. And when he came jumping out and I called to him and he failed to stop, there was nothing else to do. I had to let him have it—to stop him.”
“You come inside with me,” said Monahan in answer. “You got his gun off him?” he asked the three young cops.
“No,” said Zimmer, hastening to do so with the great zealousness of one a little late in the performance of a duty.
“I'll take him,” said the old chief. “You three stay here. Cover that up. And keep them out—out of the place entirely.”
For the curiosity-seekers in the street outside, having located finally where the pistol-shot had come from, were beginning to gather in.
“Stand back there!” said the young plainclothes men briskly, showing their badges to unbelievers—glad to find a duty whose requirements they were sure of.
JOHN MONAHAN and Slip Blaney went back through the Hole in the Wall. “You first this time,” said the old chief grimly to his overpolite subordinate.
The door closed after them.
The tense figure of the girl in the black-velvet gown stepped forward eagerly in the small bare room—her strange sapphire-colored eyes shining, her white arms stretched out, her mass of framing hair bound in a hasty knot upon her neck.
“What happened?” cried Flame anxiously. “Did you get the Greek?”
“He did,” said Monahan laconically, indicating Blaney. “Sit down,” he said to the detective.
But the latter, disobeying him, stood staring at John Kane, standing staring back at him in the corner—in fear, as a man looks at a peculiarly unwelcome ghost.
“He had you down for dead,” explained old Monahan to Kane. “That's the idea.”
AND now Slip Blaney detached his eyes from Kane and sat down heavily with a kind of groan. There was no vestige now of his easy smile; it was wiped entirely from his face. Without it—that perpetual defense of a grimace—the face looked weak, the chin too small, the eyes unstable and afraid.
“What happened?” demanded Flame again, “to the Greek?”
And Monahan told her gruffly. It made perhaps less impression upon her than with women who had not seen murder at such close range as she had several times before.
“But where,” she asked him sharply, “does that leave The?”
“It leaves us all just right—don't it, Blaney?” Monahan could not resist asking the slumped figure in the old wooden armchair of the committee-room.
Slip Blaney cast his faded eyes up and then down again without answering.
“Now, then,” asked Monahan, turning from him to the girl again “what happened here—with you?”
“Nothing much,” said Kane, speaking for her. “Only, she saved my life—that's all—by her quick wit and good management.”
“Oh, what's the use?” said Flame Carney, reddening at his praise. “All I did——”
“I know what you did,” said John Kane, breaking in a little loudly. “I ought to. If it wasn't for what you did, I wouldn't be standing here now. I'd be lying—the way that Greek is out there this minute.”
“And the real witnesses in the case both gone, huh?” said Monahan, addressing the remark to Kane—for the benefit of Blaney.
“But go on,” he told the girl again. “Tell it to me—just what you did.”
Then she told him the trick by which she wheedled the gun away from the Greek—and his dashing out, trying to get away from her—when he saw from her face what she was going to do. And his jump behind the others and her shot at him as he ducked and made his getaway through the Hole in the Wall. And then how the others started in—scared—to take the gun away from her, and she and Kane, who had broken loose in the mix-up, being backed up together in the corner. And the rest of them having had enough of it for comfort and, hearing that pistol-shot outside, making their break for the door just as Monahan arrived.
“Young woman,” said Monahan, with a look of humorous appreciation in his eye when she was done, “you're there!”
“I'll say she is!” assented John Kane, looking at her with an almost personal pride. But she turned her face away very quickly and decidedly—changed the subject back to something that was deeply scored upon her mind.
“But The?” she asked Monahan.
“That's all taken care of,” said Monahan.
“But does The know,” she asked him. “Or is he sitting there—sitting—thinking—” she said and stopped, her flexible lips become inflexible with emotion.
“He knows—all there was to know,” said Monahan, “till now. That there was a stay. And now, when I take this out over to headquarters with me,” he said, indicating Blaney by his gesture, “I'll get word right up to him—of this latest development. That he can turn over and have some sleep.
“Come on,” said Monahan, now addressing the seated heap that had once been smiling Slip Blaney. “Let's go!”
“But wait!” said Flame Carney, leaning forward, anxiety still in her voice. “Will you do this, too, please, when you send your word—will you tell The how it was—about me? That I didn't quit him the way he's probably been thinking?”
“He'll know that himself,” responded Monahan.
“What?”
“Quit him!” said Monahan, without answering directly. “You couldn't quit—if you tried to. You wouldn't know how. You're there!”—with a final outburst of approval. “I wish I had fifty like you on my force. We'd do what they've been threatening to do for a hundred years now—we'd clean up New York.
“Now, you'd better stay here on the scene,” he continued, addressing Kane, “while I go over and take care of things and come back. I won't be gone a great while, and if I am, you can find somebody to talk to here, maybe, while I'm gone. Come on”—turning, still smiling, to the smileless Blaney. “It's your move.”
The door closing after them—snapping the spring-lock—left the two others in the bare little room, locked in together.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1952, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 72 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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