I
Blake, the Second Deputy, raised his gloomy hound’s eyes as the door
opened and a woman stepped in. Then he dropped them again.
“Hello, Elsie!” he said, without looking at her.
The woman stood a moment staring at him. Then she advanced thoughtfully
toward his table desk.
“Hello, Jim!” she answered, as she sank into the empty chair at the desk
end. The rustling of silk suddenly ceased. An aphrodisiac odor of
ambergris crept through the Deputy-Commissioner’s office.
The woman looped up her veil, festooning it about the undulatory roll of
her hat brim. Blake continued his solemnly preoccupied study of the desk
top.
“You sent for me,” the woman finally said. It was more a reminder than a
question. And the voice, for all its quietness, carried no sense of
timidity. The woman’s pale face, where the undulating hat brim left the
shadowy eyes still more shadowy, seemed fortified with a calm sense of
power. It was something more than a dormant consciousness of beauty,
though the knowledge that men would turn back to a face so wistful as
hers, and their judgment could be dulled by a smile so narcotizing, had
not a little to do with the woman’s achieved serenity. There was nothing
outwardly sinister about her. This fact had always left her doubly
dangerous as a law-breaker.
Blake himself, for all his dewlap and his two hundred pounds of lethargic
beefiness, felt a vague and inward stirring as he finally lifted his head
and looked at her. He looked into the shadowy eyes under the level brows.
He could see, as he had seen before, that they were exceptional eyes,
with iris rings of deep gray about the ever-widening and ever-narrowing
pupils which varied with varying thought, as though set too close to the
brain that controlled them. So dominating was this pupil that sometimes
the whole eye looked violet, and sometimes green, according to the light.
Then his glance strayed to the woman’s mouth, where the upper lip curved
outward, from the base of the straight nose, giving her at first glance
the appearance of pouting. Yet the heavier underlip, soft and wilful,
contradicted this impression of peevishness, deepened it into one of
Ishmael-like rebellion.
Then Blake looked at the woman’s hair. It was abundant and nut-brown, and
artfully and scrupulously interwoven and twisted together. It seemed to
stand the solitary pride of a life claiming few things of which to be
proud. Blake remembered how that wealth of nut-brown hair was daily
plaited and treasured and coiled and cared for, the meticulous
attentiveness with which morning by morning its hip-reaching abundance
was braided and twisted and built up about the small head, an intricate
structure of soft wonder which midnight must ever see again in ruins,
just as the next morning would find idly laborious fingers rebuilding its
ephemeral glories. This rebuilding was done thoughtfully and calmly, as
though it were a religious rite, as though it were a sacrificial devotion
to an ideal in a life tragically forlorn of beauty.
He remembered, too, the day when he had first seen her. That was at the
time of “The Sick Millionaire” case, when he had first learned of her
association with Binhart. She had posed at the Waldorf as a trained
nurse, in that case, and had met him and held him off and outwitted him
at every turn. Then he had decided on his “plant.” To effect this he had
whisked a young Italian with a lacerated thumb up from the City Hospital
and sent him in to her as an injured elevator-boy looking for first-aid
treatment. One glimpse of her work on that thumb showed her to be
betrayingly ignorant of both figure-of-eight and spica bandaging, and
Blake, finally satisfied as to the imposture, carried on his
investigation, showed “Doctor Callahan” to be Connie Binhart, the con-man
and bank thief, and sent the two adventurers scurrying away to shelter.
He remembered, too, how seven months after that first meeting Stimson of
the Central Office had brought her to Headquarters, fresh from Paris,
involved in some undecipherable way in an Aix-les-Bains diamond robbery.
The despatches had given his office very little to work on, and she had
smiled at his thunderous grillings and defied his noisy threats. But as
she sat there before him, chic and guarded, with her girlishly frail body
so arrogantly well gowned, she had in some way touched his lethargic
imagination. She showed herself to be of finer and keener fiber than the
sordid demireps with whom he had to do. Shimmering and saucy and debonair
as a polo pony, she had seemed a departure from type, something above the
meretricious termagants round whom he so often had to weave his
accusatory webs of evidence.
Then, the following autumn, she was still again mysteriously involved in
the Sheldon wire-tapping coup. This Montreal banker named Sheldon, from
whom nearly two hundred thousand dollars had been wrested, put a bullet
through his head rather than go home disgraced, and she had straightway
been brought down to Blake, for, until the autopsy and the production of
her dupe’s letters, Sheldon’s death had been looked upon as a murder.
Blake had locked himself in with the white-faced Miss Elsie Verriner,
alias Chaddy Cravath, alias Charlotte Carruthers, and for three long
hours he had pitted his dynamic brute force against her flashing and
snake-like evasiveness. He had pounded her with the artillery of his
inhumanities. He had beleaguered her with explosive brutishness. He had
bulldozed and harried her into frantic weariness. He had third-degreed
her into cowering and trembling indignation, into hectic mental
uncertainties. Then, with the fatigue point well passed, he had marshaled
the last of his own animal strength and essayed the final blasphemous
Vesuvian onslaught that brought about the nervous breakdown, the ultimate
collapse. She had wept, then, the blubbering, loose-lipped, abandoned
weeping of hysteria. She had stumbled forward and caught at his arm and
clung to it, as though it were her last earthly pillar of support. Her
huge plaited ropes of hair had fallen down, thick brown ropes longer than
his own arms, and he, breathing hard, had sat back and watched them as
she wept.
But Blake was neither analytical nor introspective. How it came about he
never quite knew. He felt, after his blind and inarticulate fashion, that
this scene of theirs, that this official assault and surrender, was in
some way associated with the climacteric transports of camp-meeting
evangelism, that it involved strange nerve-centers touched on in
rhapsodic religions, that it might even resemble the final emotional
surrender of reluctant love itself to the first aggressive tides of
passion. What it was based on, what it arose from, he could not say. But
in the flood-tide of his own tumultuous conquest he had watched her
abandoned weeping and her tumbled brown hair. And as he watched, a vague
and troubling tingle sped like a fuse-sputter along his limbs, and fired
something dormant and dangerous in the great hulk of a body which had
never before been stirred by its explosion of emotion. It was not pity,
he knew; for pity was something quite foreign to his nature. Yet as she
lay back, limp and forlorn against his shoulder, sobbing weakly out that
she wanted to be a good woman, that she could be honest if they would
only give her a chance, he felt that thus to hold her, to shield her, was
something desirable.
She had stared, weary and wide-eyed, as his head had bent closer down
over hers. She had drooped back, bewildered and unresponsive, as his
heavy lips had closed on hers that were still wet and salty with tears.
When she had left the office, at the end of that strange hour, she had
gone with the promise of his protection.
The sobering light of day, with its cynic relapse to actualities, might
have left that promise a worthless one, had not the prompt evidence of
Sheldon’s suicide come to hand. This made Blake’s task easier than he had
expected. The movement against Elsie Verriner was “smothered” at
Headquarters. Two days later she met Blake by appointment. That day, for
the first time in his life, he gave flowers to a woman.
Two weeks later he startled her with the declaration that he wanted to
marry her. He didn’t care about her past. She’d been dragged into the
things she’d done without understanding them, at first, and she’d kept on
because there’d been no one to help her away from them. He knew he could
do it. She had a fine streak in her, and he wanted to bring it out!
A little frightened, she tried to explain that she was not the marrying
kind. Then, brick-red and bull-necked, he tried to tell her in his
groping Celtic way that he wanted children, that she meant a lot to him,
that he was going to try to make her the happiest woman south of Harlem.
This had brought into her face a quick and dangerous light which he found
hard to explain. He could see that she was flattered by what he had said,
that his words had made her waywardly happy, that for a moment, in fact,
she had been swept off her feet.
Then dark afterthought interposed. It crept like a cloud across her
abandoned face. It brought about a change so prompt that it disturbed the
Second Deputy.
“You’re—you’re not tied up already, are you?” he had hesitatingly
demanded. “You’re not married?”
“No, I’m not tied up!” she had promptly and fiercely responded. “My
life’s my own—my own!”
“Then why can’t you marry me?” the practical-minded man had asked.
“I could!” she had retorted, with the same fierceness as before. Then she
had stood looking at him out of wistful and unhappy eyes. “I could—if you
only understood, if you could only help me the way I want to be helped!”
She had clung to his arm with a tragic forlornness that seemed to leave
her very wan and helpless. And he had found it ineffably sweet to enfold
that warm mass of wan helplessness in his own virile strength.
She asked for time, and he was glad to consent to the delay, so long as
it did not keep him from seeing her. In matters of the emotions he was
still as uninitiated as a child. He found himself a little dazed by the
seemingly accidental tenderness, by the promises of devotion, in which
she proved so lavish. Morning by jocund morning he built up his airy
dreams, as carefully as she built up her nut-brown plaits. He grew
heavily light-headed with his plans for the future. When she pleaded with
him never to leave her, never to trust her too much, he patted her thin
cheek and asked when she was going to name the day. From that finality
she still edged away, as though her happiness itself were only
experimental, as though she expected the blue sky above them to deliver
itself of a bolt.
But by this time she had become a habit with him. He liked her even in
her moodiest moments. When, one day, she suggested that they go away
together, anywhere so long as it was away, he merely laughed at her
childishness.
It was, in fact, Blake himself who went away. After nine weeks of
alternating suspense and happiness that seemed nine weeks of inebriation
to him, he was called out of the city to complete the investigation on a
series of iron-workers’ dynamite outrages. Daily he wrote or wired back
to her. But he was kept away longer than he had expected. When he
returned to New York she was no longer there. She had disappeared as
completely as though an asphalted avenue had opened and swallowed her up.
It was not until the following winter that he learned she was again with
Connie Binhart, in southern Europe.
He had known his one belated love affair. It had left no scar, he
claimed, because it had made no wound. Binhart, he consoled himself, had
held the woman in his power: there had been no defeat because there had
been no actual conquest. And now he could face her without an eye-blink
of conscious embarrassment. Yet it was good to remember that Connie
Binhart was going to be ground in the wheels of the law, and ground fine,
and ground to a finish.
“What did you want me for, Jim?” the woman was again asking him. She
spoke with an intimate directness, and yet in her attitude were subtle
reservations, a consciousness of the thin ice on which they both stood.
Each saw, only too plainly, the need for great care, in every step. In
each lay the power to uncover, at a hand’s turn, old mistakes that were
best unremembered. Yet there was a certain suave audacity about the
woman. She was not really afraid of Blake, and the Second Deputy had to
recognize that fact. This self-assurance of hers he attributed to the
recollection that she had once brought about his personal subjugation,
“got his goat,” as he had phrased it. She, woman-like, would never forget
it.
“There’s a man I want. And Schmittenberg tells me you know where he is.”
Blake, as he spoke, continued to look heavily down at his desk top.
“Yes?” she answered cautiously, watching herself as carefully as an
actress with a rôle to sustain, a rôle in which she could never be quite
letter-perfect.
“It’s Connie Binhart,” cut out the Second Deputy.
He could see discretion drop like a curtain across her watching face.
“Connie Binhart!” she temporized. Blake, as his heavy side glance slewed
about to her, prided himself on the fact that he could see through her
pretenses. At any other time he would have thrown open the flood-gates of
that ever-inundating anger of his and swept away all such obliquities.
“I guess,” he went on with slow patience, “we know him best round here as
Charles Blanchard.”
“Blanchard?” she echoed.
“Yes, Blanchard, the Blanchard we’ve been looking for, for seven months
now, the Blanchard who chloroformed Ezra Newcomb and carried off a
hundred and eighteen thousand dollars.”
“Newcomb?” again meditated the woman.
“The Blanchard who shot down the bank detective in Newcomb’s room when
the rest of the bank was listening to a German band playing in the side
street, a band hired for the occasion.”
“When was that?” demanded the woman.
“That was last October,” he answered with a sing-song weariness
suggestive of impatience at such supererogative explanations.
“I was at Monte Carlo all last autumn,” was the woman’s quick retort.
Blake moved his heavy body, as though to shoulder away any claim as to
her complicity.
“I know that,” he acknowledged. “And you went north to Paris on the
twenty-ninth of November. And on the third of December you went to
Cherbourg; and on the ninth you landed in New York. I know all that.
That’s not what I’m after. I want to know where Connie Binhart is, now,
to-day.”
Their glances at last came together. No move was made; no word was
spoken. But a contest took place.
“Why ask _me_?” repeated the woman for the second time. It was only too
plain that she was fencing.
“Because you _know_,” was Blake’s curt retort. He let the gray-irised
eyes drink in the full cup of his determination. Some slowly accumulating
consciousness of his power seemed to intimidate her. He could detect a
change in her bearing, in her speech itself.
“Jim, I can’t tell you,” she slowly asserted. “I can’t do it!”
“But I’ve got ’o know,” he stubbornly maintained. “And I’m going to.”
She sat studying him for a minute or two. Her face had lost its earlier
arrogance. It seemed troubled; almost touched with fear. She was not
altogether ignorant, he reminded himself, of the resources which he could
command.
“I can’t tell you,” she repeated. “I’d rather you let me go.”
The Second Deputy’s smile, scoffing and melancholy, showed how utterly he
ignored her answer. He looked at his watch. Then he looked back at the
woman. A nervous tug-of-war was taking place between her right and left
hand, with a twisted-up pair of ecru gloves for the cable.
“You know me,” he began again in his deliberate and abdominal bass. “And
I know you. I’ve got ’o get this man Binhart. I’ve got ’o! He’s been out
for seven months, now, and they’re going to put it up to me, to _me_,
personally. Copeland tried to get him without me. He fell down on it.
They all fell down on it. And now they’re going to throw the case back on
me. They think it’ll be my Waterloo.”
He laughed. His laugh was as mirthless as the cackle of a guinea hen.
“But I’m going to die hard, believe me! And if I go down, if they think
they can throw me on that, I’m going to take a few of my friends along
with me.”
“Is that a threat?” was the woman’s quick inquiry. Her eyes narrowed
again, for she had long since learned, and learned it to her sorrow, that
every breath he drew was a breath of self-interest.
“No; it’s just a plain statement.” He slewed about in his swivel chair,
throwing one thick leg over the other as he did so. “I hate to holler
Auburn at a girl like you, Elsie; but I’m going—”
“Auburn?” she repeated very quietly. Then she raised her eyes to his.
“Can you say a thing like that to me, Jim?”
He shifted a little in his chair. But he met her gaze without a wince.
“This is business, Elsie, and you can’t mix business and—and other
things,” he tailed off at last, dropping his eyes.
“I’m sorry you put it that way,” she said. “I hoped we’d be better
friends than that!”
“I’m not counting on friendship in this!” he retorted.
“But it might have been better, even in this!” she said. And the artful
look of pity on her face angered him.
“Well, we’ll begin on something nearer home!” he cried.
He reached down into his pocket and produced a small tinted oblong of
paper. He held it, face out, between his thumb and forefinger, so that
she could read it.
“This Steinert check’ll do the trick. Take a closer look at the
signature. Do you get it?”
“What about it?” she asked, without a tremor.
He restored the check to his wallet and the wallet to his pocket. She
would find it impossible to outdo him in the matter of impassivity.
“I may or I may not know who forged that check. I don’t _want_ to know.
And when you tell me where Binhart is, I _won’t_ know.”
“That check wasn’t forged,” contended the quiet-eyed woman.
“Steinert will swear it was,” declared the Second Deputy.
She sat without speaking, apparently in deep study. Her intent face
showed no fear, no bewilderment, no actual emotion of any kind.
“You’ve got ’o face it,” said Blake, sitting back and waiting for her to
speak. His attitude was that of a physician at a bedside, awaiting the
prescribed opiate to produce its prescribed effect.
“Will I be dragged into this case, in any way, if Binhart is rounded up?”
the woman finally asked.
“Not once,” he asserted.
“You promise me that?”
“Of course,” answered the Second Deputy.
“And you’ll let me alone on—on the other things?” she calmly exacted.
“Yes,” he promptly acknowledged. “I’ll see that you’re let alone.”
Again she looked at him with her veiled and judicial eyes. Then she
dropped her hands into her lap. The gesture seemed one of resignation.
“Binhart’s in Montreal,” she said.
Blake, keeping his face well under control, waited for her to go on.
“He’s been in Montreal for weeks now. You’ll find him at 381 King Edward
Avenue, in Westmount. He’s there, posing as an expert accountant.”
She saw the quick shadow of doubt, the eye-flash of indecision. So she
reached quietly down and opened her pocket-book, rummaging through its
contents for a moment or two. Then she handed Blake a folded envelope.
“You know his writing?” she asked.
“I’ve seen enough of it,” he retorted, as he examined the typewritten
envelope postmarked “Montreal, Que.” Then he drew out the inner sheet. On
it, written by pen, he read the message: “Come to 381 King Edward when
the coast is clear,” and below this the initials “C. B.”
Blake, with the writing still before his eyes, opened a desk drawer and
took out a large reading-glass. Through the lens of this he again studied
the inscription, word by word. Then he turned to the office ’phone on his
desk.
“Nolan,” he said into the receiver, “I want to know if there’s a King
Edward Avenue in Montreal.”
He sat there waiting, still regarding the handwriting with stolidly
reproving eyes. There was no doubt of its authenticity. He would have
known it at a glance.
“Yes, sir,” came the answer over the wire. “It’s one of the newer avenues
in Westmount.”
Blake, still wrapped in thought, hung up the receiver. The woman facing
him did not seem to resent his possible imputation of dishonesty. To be
suspicious of all with whom he came in contact was imposed on him by his
profession. He was compelled to watch even his associates, his operatives
and underlings, his friends as well as his enemies. Life, with him, was a
_concerto_ of skepticisms.
She was able to watch him, without emotion, as he again bent forward,
took up the ’phone receiver, and this time spoke apparently to another
office.
“I want you to wire Teal to get a man out to cover 381 King Edward
Avenue, in Montreal. Yes, Montreal. Tell him to get a man out there
inside of an hour, and put a night watch on until I relieve ’em.”
Then, breathing heavily, he bent over his desk, wrote a short message on
a form pad and pushed the buzzer-button with his thick finger. He
carefully folded up the piece of paper as he waited.
“Get that off to Carpenter in Montreal right away,” he said to the
attendant who answered his call. Then he swung about in his chair, with a
throaty grunt of content. He sat for a moment, staring at the woman with
unseeing eyes. Then he stood up. With his hands thrust deep in his
pockets he slowly moved his head back and forth, as though assenting to
some unuttered question.
“Elsie, you’re all right,” he acknowledged with his solemn and
unimaginative impassivity. “You’re all right.”
Her quiet gaze, with all its reservations, was a tacit question. He was
still a little puzzled by her surrender. He knew she did not regard him
as the great man that he was, that his public career had made of him.
“You’ve helped me out of a hole,” he acknowledged as he faced her
interrogating eyes with his one-sided smile. “I’m mighty glad you’ve done
it, Elsie—for your sake as well as mine.”
“What hole?” asked the woman, wearily drawing on her gloves. There was
neither open contempt nor indifference on her face. Yet something in her
bearing nettled him. The quietness of her question contrasted strangely
with the gruffness of the Second Deputy’s voice as he answered her.
“Oh, they think I’m a has-been round here,” he snorted. “They’ve got the
idea I’m out o’ date. And I’m going to show ’em a thing or two to wake
’em up.”
“How?” asked the woman.
“By doing what their whole kid-glove gang haven’t been able to do,” he
avowed. And having delivered himself of that ultimatum, he promptly
relaxed into his old-time impassiveness, like a dog snapping from his
kennel and shrinking back into its shadows. At the same moment that
Blake’s thick forefinger again prodded the buzzer-button at his desk end
the watching woman could see the relapse into official wariness. It was
as though he had put the shutters up in front of his soul. She accepted
the movement as a signal of dismissal. She rose from her chair and
quietly lowered and adjusted her veil. Yet through that lowered veil she
stood looking down at Never-Fail Blake for a moment or two. She looked at
him with grave yet casual curiosity, as tourists look at a ruin that has
been pointed out to them as historic.
“You didn’t give me back Connie Binhart’s note,” she reminded him as she
paused with her gloved finger-tips resting on the desk edge.
“D’you want it?” he queried with simulated indifference, as he made a
final and lingering study of it.
“I’d like to keep it,” she acknowledged. When, without meeting her eyes,
he handed it over to her, she folded it and restored it to her
pocket-book, carefully, as though vast things depended on that small
scrap of paper.
Never-Fail Blake, alone in his office and still assailed by the vaguely
disturbing perfumes which she had left behind her, pondered her reasons
for taking back Binhart’s scrap of paper. He wondered if she had at any
time actually cared for Binhart. He wondered if she was capable of caring
for anybody. And this problem took his thoughts back to the time when so
much might have depended on its answer.
The Second Deputy dropped his reading-glass in its drawer and slammed it
shut. It made no difference, he assured himself, one way or the other.
And in the consolatory moments of a sudden new triumph Never-Fail Blake
let his thoughts wander pleasantly back over that long life which (and of
this he was now comfortably conscious) his next official move was about
to redeem.