THE VOCAPHONE
Promptly to the dot I met Garrick at the appointed place. Not a word so
far had been heard, either from Violet Winslow or Mrs. de Lancey. There
was one thing encouraging about it, however. If they had become
separated while shopping, as sometimes happens, we should have been
likely to hear of it, at least from her aunt.
Garrick was tugging the heavy suitcase which I had seen standing ready
down in his office during the afternoon, as well as a small package
wrapped up in paper.
"Let me carry that suitcase," I volunteered.
We trudged along across the park, my load getting heavier at every step.
"I'm not surprised at your being winded," I panted, soon finding myself
in the same condition. "What's in this--lead?"
"Something that we may need or may not," Garrick answered
enigmatically, as we stopped in the shadow to rest.
He carefully took an automatic revolver from an inside pocket and
stowed it where it would be handy, in his coat.
We resumed our walk and at last had come nearly up to the house on the
first floor of which the maid Lucille was. The suitcase was engaging
all my attention, as I shifted it from one hand to the other. Not so
Garrick, however. He was looking keenly about us.
"Gad, I must be seeing things to-night!" he exclaimed, his eyes fixed
on a figure slouching along, his hat pulled down over his eyes, passing
just about opposite us on the other side of the street. I looked also
in the gathering dusk. The figure had something indefinably familiar
about it, but a moment later it was gone, having turned the corner.
Garrick shook his head. "No," he said half to himself, "it couldn't
have been. Don't stop, Tom. We mustn't do anything to rouse suspicion,
now."
We came a moment later to the flat-house through the hall of which we
had reached the roof that morning and in the excitement of the
adventure I forgot, for the time, the mysterious figure across the
street, which had attracted Garrick's attention.
Again, we managed to elude the tenants, though it was harder in the
early evening than it had been in the daytime. However, we reached the
roof apparently unobserved. There at least, now that it was dark, we
felt comparatively safe. No one was likely to disturb us there,
provided we made no noise.
Unwrapping the smaller, paper-covered package, Garrick quickly attached
the wires, as he had left them, to another cedar box, like that which
he had already let down the chimney up the street.
I now had a chance to examine it more closely under the light of
Garrick's little electric bull's-eye. I was surprised to find that it
resembled one of the instruments we had used down in the room in the
Old Tavern.
It was oblong, with a sort of black disc fixed to the top. In the face
of the box, just as in the other we had used, were two little square
holes, with sides also of cedar, converging inward, making a pair of
little quadrangular pyramidal holes which seemed to end in a small
round black circle in the interior, small end.
I said nothing, but I could see that it was a new form, to all intents
and purposes, of the detectaphone which we had already used.
The minutes that followed seemed like hours, as we waited, not daring
to talk lest we should attract attention.
I wondered whether Miss Winslow would come after all, or, if she did,
whether she would come alone.
"You're early," said a voice, softly, near us, of a sudden.
I leaped to my feet, prepared to meet anything, man or devil. Garrick
seized me and pulled me down, a strong hint to be quiet. Too surprised
to remonstrate, since nothing happened, I waited, breathless.
"Yes, but that is better than to be too late. Besides, we've got to
watch that Garrick," said another voice. "He might be around."
Garrick chuckled.
I had noticed a peculiar metallic ring in the voices.
"Where are they?" I whispered, "On the landing below?"
Garrick laughed outright, not boisterously, but still in a way which to
me was amazing in its bravado, if the tenants were really so near.
"What's this?" I asked.
"Don't you recognize it?" he answered.
"Yes," I said doubtfully. "I suppose it's like that thing we used down
at the Old Tavern."
"Only more so," nodded Garrick, aloud, yet careful not to raise his
voice, as before, so as not to disturb the flat dwellers below us. "A
vocaphone."
"A vocaphone?" I repeated.
"Yes, the little box that hears and talks," he explained. "It does more
than the detectaphone. It talks right out, you know, and it works both
ways."
I began to understand his scheme.
"Those square holes in the face of it are just like the other
instrument we used," Garrick went on. "They act like little megaphones
to that receiver inside, you know,--magnify the sound and throw it out
so that we can listen up here just as well, perhaps better than if we
were down there in the room with them."
They were down there in the back room, Lucille and a man.
"Have you heard from her?" asked the man's voice, one that I did not
recognise.
"Non,--but she will come. Voila, but she thought the world of her
Lucille, she did. She will come."
"How do you know?"
"Because--I know."
"Oh, you women!"
"Oh, you men!"
It was evident that the two had a certain regard for each other, a sort
of wild, animal affection, above, below, beyond, without the law. They
seemed at least to understand each other.
Who the man was I could not guess. It was a voice that sounded
familiar, yet I could not place it.
"She will come to see her Lucille," repeated the woman. "But you must
not be seen."
"No--by no means."
The voice of the man was not that of a foreigner.
"Here, Lucille, take this. Only get her interested--I will do the
rest--and the money is yours. See--you crush it in the
handkerchief--so. Be careful--you WILL crush it before you want to use
it. There. Under her nose, you know. I shall be there in a moment and
finish the work. That is all you need do--with the handkerchief."
Garrick made a motion, as if to turn a switch in the little vocaphone,
and rested his finger on it.
"I could make those two jump out of the window with fright and
surprise," he said to me, still fingering the switch impatiently. "You
see, it works the other way, too, as I told you, if I choose to throw
this switch. Suppose I should shout out, and they should hear,
apparently coming from the fireplace, 'You are discovered. Thank you
for telling me all your plans, but I am prepared for them already.'
What do you suppose they would--"
Garrick stopped short.
From the vocaphone had come a sound like the ringing of a bell.
"Sh!" whispered Lucille hoarsely. "Here she comes now. Didn't I tell
you? Into the next room!"
A moment later came a knock at a door and Lucille's silken rustle as
she hurried to open it.
"How do you do, Lucille?" we heard a sweetly tremulous voice repeated
by the faithful little vocaphone.
"Comment vous portez-vous, Mademoiselle?"
"Tres bien."
"Mademoiselle honours her poor Lucille beyond her dreams. Will you not
be seated here in this easy chair?"
"My God!" exclaimed Garrick, starting back from the vocaphone. "She is
there alone. Mrs. de Lancey is not with her. Oh, if we could only have
prevented this!"
I had recognized, too, even in the mechanical reproduction, the voice
of Violet Winslow. It came as a shock. Even though I had been expecting
some such thing for hours, still the reality meant just as much,
perhaps more.
Independent, self-reliant, Violet Winslow had gone alone on an act of
mercy and charity, and it had taken her into a situation full of danger
with her faithless maid.
At once I was alive to the situation. All the stories of kidnappings
and white slavery that I had ever read rioted through my head. I felt
like calling out a warning. Garrick had his finger on the switch.
"Since I have been ill, Mademoiselle, I have been doing some
embroidery--handkerchiefs--are they not pretty?"
It was coming. There was not time for an instant's delay now.
Garrick quickly depressed the switch.
Clear as a bell his voice rang out.
"Miss Winslow--this is Garrick. Don't let her get that handkerchief
under your nose. Out of the door--quick. Run! Call for help! I shall be
with you in a minute!"
A little cry came out of the machine.
There was a moment of startled surprise in the room below. Then
followed a mocking laugh.
"Ha! Ha! I thought you'd pull something like that, Garrick. I don't
know where you are, but it makes no difference. There are many ways of
getting out of this place and at one of them I hare a high-powered car.
Violet--will go--quietly--" there were sounds of a struggle--"after the
needle--"
A scream had followed immediately after a sound of shivering glass
through the vocaphone. It was not Violet Winslow's scream, either.
"Like hell, she'll go," shouted a wildly familiar voice.
There was a gruff oath.
We stayed to hear no more. Garrick had already picked up the heavy
suitcase and was running down the steps two at a time, with myself hard
after him.
Without waiting to ring the bell at 99, he dashed the suitcase through
the plate glass of the front door, reached in and turned the lock. We
hurried into the back room.
Violet was lying across a divan and bending over her was Warrington.
"She--she's unconscious," he gasped, weak with the exertion of his
forcible entrance into the place and carrying from the floor to the
divan the lovely burden which he had found in the room. "They--they
fled--two of them--the maid, Lucille--and a man I could not see."
Down the street we heard a car dashing away to the sound of its
changing gears.
"She's--not--dying--is she, Garrick?" he panted bending closer over her.
Garrick bent over, too, felt the fluttering pulse, looked into her
dilated eyes.
I saw him drop quickly on his knees beside the unconscious girl. He
tore open the heavy suitcase and a moment later he had taken from it a
sort of cap, at the end of a rubber tube, and had fastened it carefully
over her beautiful, but now pale, face.
"Pump!" Garrick muttered to me, quickly showing me what to do.
I did, furiously.
"Where did you come from?" he asked of Warrington. "I thought I saw
someone across the street who looked like you as we came along, but you
didn't recognise us and in a moment you were gone. Keep on with that
pulmotor, Tom. Thank heaven I came prepared with it!"
Eagerly I continued to supply oxygen to the girl on the divan before us.
Garrick had stooped down and picked up both the handkerchief with its
crushed bits of the kelene tube and near it a shattered glass
hypodermic.
"Oh, I got thinking about things, up there at Mead's," blurted out
Warrington, "and I couldn't stand it. I should have gone crazy. While
the doctor was out I managed to slip away and take a train to the city.
I knew this address from the letter. I determined to stay around all
night, if necessary. She got in before I could get to her, but I rang
the bell and managed to get my foot in the door a minute later. I heard
the struggle. Where were you? I heard your voice in here but you came
through the front door."
Garrick did not take time to explain. He was too busy over Violet
Winslow.
A feeble moan and a flutter of the eyelids told that she was coming out
from the effects of the anaesthetic and the drug.
"Mortimer--Mortimer!" she moaned, half conscious. "Don't let them take
me. Oh where is--"
Warrington leaned over, as Garrick removed the cap of the pulmotor, and
gently raised her head on his arm.
"It's all right--Violet," he whispered, his face close to hers as his
warm breath fanned her now flushed and fevered cheek.
She opened her eyes and vaguely understood as the mist cleared from her
brain.
Instinctively she clung to him as he pressed his lips lightly on her
forehead, in a long passionate caress.
"Get a cab, Tom," said Garrick turning his back suddenly on them and
placing his hand on my shoulder as he edged me toward the hall. "It's
too late to pursue that fellow, now. He's slipped through our fingers
again--confound him!"