"See here!" Crane bounced up in his bed and with every evidence of
strong emotion levelled a bony forefinger; but second thought closed the
lips that stormy indignation had opened, bewilderment blanked out the
fire that had flamed up in his eyes, frustration slackened his arm; in
mild despair he fell back upon his pillow. "I don't get you," he uttered
feebly--"that's all: I just don't get you."
"But, my dear sir, it is now and ever will be my ambition to make sure
that you, in your official capacity, never do get me."
But the detective wasn't in a humour to be patient with persiflage. "I
don't get you," he mulishly reiterated. "If you're aiming to give me
some sort of a steer, I don't connect with the big idea, when your one
best bet--and _I_ know _you're_ wise enough to know it--is to keep all
the scenery you can between you and me all the time, and not come
stalling around in fancy dress to give me an earful that don't matter a
whoop if it ain't true. Because, I tell you this, Lanyard! . . ."
Crane was again sitting up and brandishing an admonitory forefinger.
"Let me tell you this here and now, for your own good: As long as I
believed in you, there wasn't much you could name I wouldn't have done
for you; but the way things look now, unless you're prepared to come
through with something more nourishing to my confidence than
drawing-room manners and a baby stare, you're monkeying with high
explosive this very minute; because just as soon as ever you leave this
flat and I'm no longer bound by my promise not to mix things up with
you"--a move of a disgusted hand designated the pistol whose return had
put the detective on his honour--"I'm going to light out after you and
camp on your trail night and day till I get you right--so help me!"
"Amen!" Lanyard piously chanted. "No: don't be angry, but believe I mean
that in all seriousness. Had I not expected to find such fidelity to
principle in you, that even friendship cannot corrupt, I should have
held to my ancient rule and played a lone hand in this game of Blind
Wolf's Buff: I am here tonight for a single purpose: to ask your aid and
offer you mine in the business of bringing the Lone Wolf to book,
whether he prove to be myself or some impostor trading on my old-time
reputation."
"So that's the song and dance, eh?"
Lanyard shrugged. "I must not resent your tone, matters being as they
have been made to seem. But I shall persuade you of my sincerity before
I bid you good night, and more, that grounds exist for reasonable doubt
concerning my guilt of the crimes imputed to me; or . . . I will
surrender to you forthwith and let the law take its course."
In a hard stare Crane wondered aloud: "You mean that, Lanyard?" But a
smile was all his answer; and after another little pause the detective
silently extended a hand which Lanyard leaned forward to grasp. "Now lay
'em on the table, face up."
"I have every confidence in your charity," Lanyard responded, sitting
back; "but what I shall tell you now will test it. On the night of the
third of November last--"
"That night after you pulled that turn with Mallison at little Mrs.
McFee's?"
"Precisely--"
"Night of the day you disappeared!"
"'Disappeared'?"
"Nobody I know has seen hair nor hide of you since."
"That's most interesting," Lanyard commented, making mental memoranda.
"You know nothing, then, of a motor accident on the Armonk Road in which
I was involved on the night in question?"
"First I've heard of it."
"There was such an accident, notwithstanding, in which I sustained grave
injuries; I bear a new scar upon my head, beneath the hair, that
satisfies me at least one hurt was grave."
"Well!" Crane laughed shortly--"guess you ought to know if anybody."
"That's the very point: I ought to--but I don't."
"Mean to say you don't remember--?"
"Between the moment when I was struck and thrown by a motor-car that
night of November, and the moment when, on the morning of the fifth of
June, I bumped my head badly, falling from a companion-ladder on the
Port Royal, I remember nothing. For all I know of my life between these
dates, I am indebted to a lady who may or may not be a sacred vessel of
the unbiased truth--Mademoiselle Delorme."
"Liane Delorme!" cried Crane--"where in time did you meet up with that
war-horse?"
"On board the Port Royal."
"Funny! that dame sailed for France last February--by request--and
specially requested not to come back, too."
"You are sure?"
"Made it my business to see her off. The Lone Wolf had just begun to be
a regular pest, about that time, and I thought maybe little Liane knew
more than she was willing to let on. So we got the Government to put on
the screws; it amounted to her being deported, though she was given to
understand the Government's memory might go bad if her's got good. But
she left swearing in seven languages, none of 'em ladylike, she didn't
know the first thing about you and was a cruelly misjudged woman and all
like that."
"Yet she must have returned, to have sailed on the Port Royal with me."
"Oh! there are a hundred different ways, all good, for an undesirable
alien to sneak into this country--by rail from Canada or Mexico, or
through any port but New York--running next to no risk of being spotted
and held up except by accident."
"You interest me more every minute. Pray bear in mind I have seen no
newspapers, while you, I daresay, have read more than one report of my
disappearance from the Port Royal . . . No doubt, then, you can tell me
who claimed the honour of having recovered the necklace."
"What necklace?"
"The one I am credited with having stolen from the wife of your worthy
Chief of Police."
"Guess you mean Commissioner of Police--Commissioner Enright." Frankly
mistrustful examination of Lanyard's face ended in the generous verdict:
"Somebody's been kidding you, son."
"I will not dispute that--I begin to be distressed to discriminate the
statements of fact which have recently been made me from what would seem
to have been the fictions of a lively fancy. I have, for example, on the
one hand, your word, as I understand it, that the good wife of
Commissioner Enright did not, shortly prior to the sailing of the Port
Royal, suffer the loss by theft of a valuable diamond necklace."
"Nor at any other time. Or if she did--and if he's got a wife--the
Commish kept it darned quiet."
"On the other hand, I am suspected of having done much business in the
Lone Wolf's well-known line--"
"Sure are."
"During a period which began, I take it, about the first of the year--"
"Some time before Christmas."
"And ended with my late but well-timed decease."
"Thought I told you nobody in this burg takes any stock in that fairy
tale."
"But you didn't answer my question: Why not?"
"Because all New York knows, if the Lone Wolf was drowned last June, his
ghost goes prowling on."
"What are you telling me?"
"Just what you hear: When the news leaked out that you'd croaked in the
Bahamas, everybody who had anything worth stealing drew a long breath
and turned over to get a few winks of badly needed sleep. Right there
was the wide open chance your ghost couldn't overlook without losing
face in the spirit underworld. And didn't: no ghost ever walked that
shook a livelier hoof. If it's any satisfaction to you, its latest
manifestations have converted the entire Police Department of the City
of New York into a posse of wild-eyed spiritualists."
"And you, my friend?"
Crane twinkled like a roguish wooden Indian. "Who, me? I ain't all
converted yet. An hour ago I was wabbly, but now I see you sitting
before me as large as life and twice as unnatural, I'm just on the
fence. One thing I'm sure of: You ain't noticeably demised. But that
isn't saying you're not responsible for the performances that have been
given in your name, these last few weeks."
"While I was sustaining life on shellfish in the Bahamas?"
"That's your story. I don't say it isn't gospel: but you've got to admit
you'd have told it, or something like it, if you had been in Town here
all the time. Not only that, but how do I know you aren't what they
call psychic--a medium--able to swing a mean ectoplasm?"
"But--bear with me, my friend, remembering that this to me is the
gravest of questions--admit that any one capable of trading on my
posthumous reputation must have been equally capable of impersonating me
while I was still presumed to be alive."
"That's reasonable . . ."
Lanyard had a thoughtful moment. "Do me another favour," he
resumed--"allow me to use your good offices to make another test of my
information. Take that telephone on the table by your elbow, call the
Hotel Walpole, ask for Madame de Montalais. If she is no longer stopping
there, find out, if you can, when she left, and whether the management
knows her present address."
"Madame de Montalais . . ." Crane took the telephone instrument to his
bosom and called for the Walpole, but while he waited for the connection
made no secret of the spirit of inquisitiveness in which he was mulling
over that strange new name. "If it's a fair question--"
"The lady with whom I dined at the Inn of the Green Woods, an hour
before my misfortune on the Armonk Road."
Before Crane could comment, the Walpole answered; and after some delay
the hotel detective, none too well pleased to be waked up at three in
the morning but obligingly bestirring himself on behalf of a colleague,
reported that Madame de Montalais had "checked out" to sail for France
on the ninth of March, leaving the forwarding address of Château de
Montalais, near the town of Nant, in the Department of the Lozère.
Lanyard nodded doleful acknowledgement of this facer to hopes cruelly
reanimated by the discovery that Liane Delorme had, in the course of
their conference on board the Port Royal, and for reasons of her own
that remained illegible, been guilty of more than one lache in respect
of the truth. "That avenue is closed, then. I feared it would be. But
give me a moment now to put my thoughts in order . . ."
More to cover his disconsolation than for the reason alleged, he bent
forward with an elbow on a knee and a hand shading his eyes. "You tell
me," he presently pursued, "no one you know has seen me in the flesh
since we met at Folly McFee's . . ."
"Any number of reputable citizens have caught glimpses of you," Crane
corrected--"and very much in the flesh, very busy raising particular
hell with their property rights."
"But nobody in fact who knew me personally, who could swear to my
identity with the man who passed for me?"
"Nobody. Just the same, the descriptions they turned in were middling
good portraits of the Lone Wolf in action. More than that, there's that
flashlight photo--"
"I was coming to that: Liane mentioned it, and I have wondered . . . It
was secured, I believe, when the Lone Wolf descended upon the family
fold of the Stuyvesant Ashes?"
"It was so."
"Have you a copy at hand, by any chance?"
Crane grunted testily, drew a rusty leather wallet from under his
pillow, and from the papers with which it was stout sorted out an
unmounted photographic print of post-card size. "Gaze on that," he
recommended in grim humour, "and see if maybe it don't put a kick in the
poor dear memory."
Lanyard hitched his chair nearer the light and with eyes bent over the
print. But his first glance caused his heart to fail him: idle to
challenge the fidelity of that likeness, as well deny the lineaments
that looked out from one's shaving mirror every morning . . .
The man whom the flashlight had surprised was kneeling with one ear to a
safe built in flush with a wall, his face turned squarely to the camera
as he eavesdropped upon the hidden tumblers clicking and thumping in
response to manipulation of the combination-dial by his slender, clever
fingers. The latter were neatly gloved in white kid, for the man wore
formal evening clothes beneath an inverness cloak of good theatrical
effect. The hand that wasn't busy with the dial held an electric torch
whose beam, of course, had been too weak to register in the intense
glare of the flashlight explosion. On the rug between his knee and the
wall lay an open leather case stocked with what appeared to be a compact
kit of burglar's tools.
"Well!" Crane urged, not without a shade of professional malice, when
Lanyard's silent contemplation of the photograph threatened to know no
end: "how about it?"
Lanyard straightened up and cheerfully smiled. "Pretty thing," he
said--"jolly well done . . . If you can find yourself another, I'd be
grateful for the gift of this."
"You're much obliged. I can lay my hands on a gross or two any time I
want. The Police Department struck 'em off by the thousand."
"Pity!" Lanyard deplored: "such a curiosity really ought to be a rarity.
Thus does commercial photographing ring the death-knell of Art."
"But joking aside--" Crane began with some asperity.
"You ask too much," Lanyard interrupted. "Do you honestly expect me to
gaze on this and keep a straight face?"
"If you want my opinion, I'll say it's no laughing matter for you."
"But do you tell me that as one who has given this photograph close and
intelligent study?"
"What's the matter with it? Don't you think it does your fatal beauty
justice?"
"But more: I am overcome by the appreciation which this drives home of
the dashing figure I cut of old in the popular eye. Prior to this, I
have always imagined that the public took the gentleman cracksman with a
grain of salt--holding his attitudinizing in romantic evening dress
properly peculiar to his appearances on the stage and the cinema screen.
And you, my dear Crane! a man of your wide acquaintance with the ways of
crooks taking this blatant bit of imposition seriously--!"
Crane's mouth tightened, his brows combatively beetled. "There are
crooks and crooks. I never thought so badly of you as to suppose you
worked like the rank and file."
"But like this!" Lanyard gave the print a derisive flick of fingernails.
"Take my word for it, I was never such an ass."
"Never did a job in a full dress suit?"
"Never to my knowledge did I costume myself like a man in a play when
deliberately setting out to open a safe. Furthermore"--Lanyard wrinkled
a nose of scorn over the photograph--"never in my life have I been
caught wearing a soft-bosomed shirt with a tail coat: an antic one
cheerfully resigns to dancing men. By-the-bye: whatever did become of
Mallison?"
"Jumped his bail," the detective growled--"along with the others you
rounded up for me that night at Mrs. McFee's."
"And you have never been able to find him?"
"Not a chance."
There was bitterness in that to win a quick, keen look from Lanyard; but
Crane added nothing more than a grin half-sheepish, half-sullen.
"He must be shrewder than I thought, that one."
"I don't know . . . he's got brains enough to lay low and stand in with
Morphew, that's all."
"And the devil takes care of his own."
"You got the idea exactly."
"But tell me, why does this great city of yours tolerate its Morphews?"
"What's it going to do? You can't pin anything on a guy like Morphew;
he always keeps well inside the law, never turns a trick with his own
hand; and pulls too strong an oar politically not to be able to look
after the people he hires to do his dirty work. Stands to reason, he's
got to; he can't afford to risk somebody's turning State's evidence for
lack of protection."
"But surely a man of his type must have enemies in high places as well
as friends--"
"Maybe so; but they're not in the saddle just now; we'll have to be
patient and wait for New York to pull another of its periodical spasms
of civic virtue before an ordinary dick like me can go out after the
likes of Morphew without hearing a still small voice whispering at his
shoulder, if he cares anything about his job he'd better lay off.
Remember that time we raided the Clique Club? That had a follow-up that
still sticks in my crop . . ."
"But if Morphew were actually caught, as you say, with the goods on--"
"That's different: prove anything on that bird and outraged public
sentiment will do the rest."
"Do you happen to know where he lives?"
Crane recited the address in sulky abstraction from which he emerged
abruptly with a gleam of alarm. "Look here! don't tell me you're simp
enough to dream of starting anything with Morphew--"
"My dear friend: I never was, it was Morphew took the offensive with me,
unprovoked--"
"And you're a glutton for punishment, eh?"
"Do you take me for one to endure such malice without striking a blow
for self-respect? What way I shall take with the animal I am as yet
undecided, I count on events to show it to me; and now I count on
something more--your passive countenance, at least."
"Oh, don't worry! I won't ever come between you two; and if I ever see a
chance to land on Morphew when he isn't looking, because he's too busy
keeping his guard up against you--you can bet your life I'll do it. All
the same, if you'll take a fool's advice, you'll quit right now, admit
you're licked and let it go at that."
"It may be your advice is wiser than you think," Lanyard conceded.
"Well: I'm not going to lose any sleep on your account. Morphew's out of
Town, nobody seems to know just where . . ."
"Like Mallison, eh?"
"Why keep fretting about Mallison? He's out."
"Perhaps . . ."
"What do you mean, 'perhaps'?"
"Jumping one's bail is not precisely proof of a clear conscience; that
act of the dancing yegg's ought to be enough for you--no matter what
your mind may be with respect to my guilt or innocence."
"Don't get your point."
"It's rather an obvious point in the sight of one who knows what I
know--that Mallison claimed to be on intimately friendly terms with the
Stuyvesant Ashes, with Mrs. Ashe, at least; Mary, I remember he called
the lady, in mentioning her to Folly McFee."
"Well?"
"Is it not at least a curious circumstance that this print, this so well
posed and composed likeness of the Lone Wolf wearing his working clothes
for the night shift, should have been snapped in the home of people
reputed to be on friendly terms with Mallison?"
"That only goes to show how little you know New York Society, if you've
got any idea the Ashes--one of the oldest and best families in
Town--would lend themselves to any frame-up engineered by a cheap little
crook like that egg."
"One infers that no Ashe has ever been known to be guilty of a
mis-step--"
"I don't say that. The men of that family have always stepped out pretty
lively--"
"But isn't it possible Mallison may have known something which the
present Stuyvesant Ashe preferred to keep secret from the general
public? You're surely not forgetting blackmail was one of Mallison's
ways of earning a dishonest living."
"Meaning you believe Mallison blackmailed Stuyvesant Ashe and his wife
into letting him snap a phoney photograph of some one made up to look
like you, trying to open their safe?"
"Really, you read my mind."
"Well!" Crane snorted his contempt--"that bright little theory blows up
like a toy balloon somebody pokes a hot cigarette into--because the bird
you see in front of that safe got away with every little thing it held.
I guess you won't go so far as to tell me the Stuyvesant Ashes would
fall for blackmail to that extent."
"I tell you nothing, because I know nothing--I do but recommend the
possibility to your thoughtful consideration. Conceding the
thanklessness of trying to get the Stuyvesant Ashes to contradict the
story they told, I can only point out its more glaring absurdities."
Smilingly Lanyard put the print into the detective's hands. "Look
closely, my good Crane! and tell me how you would describe the look of
this alleged Lone Wolf."
"Looks sort of flabbergasted," Crane replied. "Who wouldn't with a
flashlight going off all of a sudden under his nose when he's keyed up
to G trying to pull off a big job?"
"But have you never observed that a man actually taken by surprise never
shows it in a flashlight photograph? The flash comes and goes too
quickly for such an one to put on an appropriate expression for the
camera to catch. It is the man who is, as you put it, all keyed up in
expectation of the flash who looks startled in the picture."
Crane took another look. "Something in that, maybe," he grudged.
"Consider then, these other anomalies: Not only am I represented as
being idiot enough to go a-burgling in evening dress--"
"But you claim you didn't know what you were doing when all this
happened."
"What I claim is, if it is fair to assume a rap on the head caused me to
revert to foregone ways of knavery, it is only fair to assume further
that I would have displayed at least a little reverence for the
principles of common sense that formerly guided my errant footsteps.
The succès fou of the Lone Wolf in pre-War Paris did not result from the
expenditure of a medium of mental effort. That one never touched
burglar's tools, far less carried a kit of them, once he had served out
his apprenticeship. If he could solve the secret of a safe by ear--as
the fellow in this amusing picture would have us believe he can--why
burden himself with tools which, if found upon him, would spell his
damnation in the esteem of the police? Finally, we are asked to believe
not only that the Lone Wolf neglected to search for burglar-alarm wiring
on this occasion--and if he had taken that first precaution of all
competent cracksmen he could hardly have overlooked the wire which led
to the flashlight--but that after the flash had gone off in his face he
proceeded methodically to open the safe, abstract what valuables it
contained, and make good his escape!"
"Well!" Crane argued in the last ditch--"but we've always been told the
Lone Wolf was a cool hand."
Lanyard laughed aloud. "But I am in a position to assure you the coolth
of that hand would have been nothing compared with the coldness of his
feet, had anything like this ever happened to him; I have my low pride,
my friend, and while I will never admit the Lone Wolf was a
white-livered cur, I am free to confess that, in circumstances such as
must have attended the taking of this photograph, he would have tucked
tail between legs and ingloriously have run for cover without an instant
of needless delay."
"I don't know," Crane reluctantly conceded. "All you say sounds
reasonable enough, and I've got a mean feeling I was the world's prize
dumbell not to think of your arguments before. But admitting all
that--where does it get us?"
"To the point I promised to bring you to, where you are obliged to admit
I may not have been the author of those recent robberies attributed to
the Lone Wolf."
"And where do we go from there?"
"I can speak only for myself," said Lanyard, rising: "I go to find out
the truth. I do not know what happened, where I lay hid, or what I did,
in all those seven months. It may be this conviction that I feel, that I
had no hand in the crimes imputed to me, is merely a mirage of vain hope
cheating my good judgement. It is possible I shall find I myself am the
man--even the posing popinjay one sees in this snapshot. In that
event--one so subject to spells of criminal activity in phases of
submerged consciousness is too dangerous to remain at large; I shall
return and let you put me where I can do no more harm. But I don't
believe you need hope to see me again on these terms; and if we should
chance to meet before I succeed in satisfying myself--well! bear in
mind, I ask no quarter. It is your duty to lay me by the heels if you
can--and if you do, the fault will be mine, I'll have no right to
complain. I have only one favour to ask of you, and that runs on all
fours with your duty: don't let anxiety to bag Michael Lanyard make you
forget that Mallison likewise is at liberty and may very well turn out
to be the key to all this mystery."
Crane's face wrinkled into a radiating grin. "Funny thing about all
this is," he asserted, "I believe in you--I even believe you'll come in
and take your medicine like a little man if you find you're the guilty
party." He wrung Lanyard's hand with painful cordiality. "Go to it, old
son: maybe I'm being kidded to a fare-ye-well, but I'm for you. You
won't mind my not getting up to see you to the window?"