The unpretentious, brownstone-fronted home of Deputy Copeland was
visited, late that night, by a woman. She was dressed in black, and
heavily veiled. She walked with the stoop of a sorrowful and middle-aged
widow.
She came in a taxicab, which she dismissed at the corner. From the house
steps she looked first eastward and then westward, as though to make sure
she was not being followed. Then she rang the bell.
She gave no name; yet she was at once admitted. Her visit, in fact,
seemed to be expected, for without hesitation she was ushered upstairs
and into the library of the First Deputy.
He was waiting for her in a room more intimate, more personal, more
companionably crowded than his office, for the simple reason that it was
not a room of his own fashioning. He stood in the midst of its warm
hangings, in fact, as cold and neutral as the marble Diana behind him. He
did not even show, as he closed the door and motioned his visitor into a
chair, that he had been waiting for her.
The woman, still standing, looked carefully about the room, from side to
side, saw that they were alone, made note of the two closed doors, and
then with a sigh lifted her black gloved hands and began to remove the
widow’s cap from her head. She sighed again as she tossed the black crepe
on the dark-wooded table beside her. As she sank into the chair the light
from the electrolier fell on her shoulders and on the carefully coiled
and banded hair, so laboriously built up into a crown that glinted
nut-brown above the pale face she turned to the man watching her.
“Well?” she said. And from under her level brows she stared at Copeland,
serene in her consciousness of power. It was plain that she neither liked
him nor disliked him. It was equally plain that he, too, had his ends
remote from her and her being.
“You saw Blake again?” he half asked, half challenged.
“No,” she answered.
“Why?”
“I was afraid to.”
“Didn’t I tell you we’d take care of your end?”
“I’ve had promises like that before. They weren’t always remembered.”
“But our office never made you that promise before, Miss Verriner.”
The woman let her eyes rest on his impassive face.
“That’s true, I admit. But I must also admit I know Jim Blake. We’d
better not come together again, Blake and me, after this week.”
She was pulling off her gloves as she spoke. She suddenly threw them down
on the table. “There’s just one thing I want to know, and know for
certain. I want to know if this is a plant to shoot Blake up?”
The First Deputy smiled. It was not altogether at the mere calmness with
which she could suggest such an atrocity.
“Hardly,” he said.
“Then what is it?” she demanded.
He was both patient and painstaking with her. His tone was almost
paternal in its placativeness.
“It’s merely a phase of departmental business,” he answered her. “And
we’re anxious to see Blake round up Connie Binhart.”
“That’s not true,” she answered with neither heat nor resentment, “or you
would never have started him off on this blind lead. You’d never have had
me go to him with that King Edward note and had it work out to fit a
street in Montreal. You’ve got a wooden decoy up there in Canada, and
when Blake gets there he’ll be told his man slipped away the day before.
Then another decoy will bob up, and Blake will go after that. And when
you’ve fooled him two or three times he’ll sail back to New York and
break me for giving him a false tip.”
“Did you give it to him?”
“No, he hammered it out of me. But you knew he was going to do that. That
was part of the plant.”
She sat studying her thin white hands for several seconds. Then she
looked up at the calm-eyed Copeland.
“How are you going to protect me, if Blake comes back? How are you going
to keep your promise?”
The First Deputy sat back in his chair and crossed his thin legs.
“Blake will not come back,” he announced. She slewed suddenly round on
him again.
“Then it _is_ a plant!” she proclaimed.
“You misunderstand me, Miss Verriner. Blake will not come back as an
official. There will be changes in the Department, I imagine; changes for
the better which even he and his Tammany Hall friends can’t stop, by the
time he gets back with Binhart.”
The woman gave a little hand gesture of impatience.
“But don’t you see,” she protested, “supposing he gives up Binhart?
Supposing he suspects something and hurries back to hold down his place?”
“They call him Never-Fail Blake,” commented the unmoved and dry-lipped
official. He met her wide stare with his gently satiric smile.
“I see,” she finally said, “you’re not going to shoot him up. You’re
merely going to wipe him out.”
“You are quite wrong there,” began the man across the table from her.
“Administration changes may happen, and in—”
“In other words, you’re getting Jim Blake out of the way, off on this
Binhart trail, while you work him out of the Department.”
“No competent officer is ever worked out of this Department,” parried the
First Deputy.
She sat for a silent and studious moment or two, without looking at
Copeland. Then she sighed, with mock plaintiveness. Her wistfulness
seemed to leave her doubly dangerous.
“Mr. Copeland, aren’t you afraid some one might find it worth while to
tip Blake off?” she softly inquired.
“What would you gain?” was his pointed and elliptical interrogation.
She leaned forward in the fulcrum of light, and looked at him soberly.
“What is your idea of me?” she asked.
He looked back at the thick-lashed eyes with their iris rings of deep
gray. There was something alert and yet unparticipating in their steady
gaze. They held no trace of abashment. They were no longer veiled. There
was even something disconcerting in their lucid and level stare.
“I think you are a very intelligent woman,” Copeland finally confessed.
“I think I am, too,” she retorted. “Although I haven’t used that
intelligence in the right way. Don’t smile! I’m not going to turn
mawkish. I’m not good. I don’t know whether I want to be. But I know one
thing: I’ve got to keep busy—I’ve got to be active. I’ve _got_ to be!”
“And?” prompted the First Deputy, as she came to a stop.
“We all know, now, exactly where we’re at. We all know what we want, each
one of us. We know what Blake wants. We know what you want. And I want
something more than I’m getting, just as you want something more than
writing reports and rounding up push-cart peddlers. I want my end, as
much as you want yours.”
“And?” again prompted the First Deputy.
“I’ve got to the end of my ropes; and I want to swing around. It’s no
reform bee, mind! It’s not what other women like me think it is. But I
can’t go on. It doesn’t lead to anything. It doesn’t pay. I want to be
safe. I’ve _got_ to be safe!”
He looked up suddenly, as though a new truth had just struck home with
him. For the first time, all that evening, his face was ingenuous.
“I know what’s behind me,” went on the woman. “There’s no use digging
that up. And there’s no use digging up excuses for it. But there _are_
excuses—good excuses, or I’d never have gone through what I have, because
I feel I wasn’t made for it. I’m too big a coward to face what it leads
to. I can look ahead and see through things. I can understand too
easily.” She came to a stop, and sat back, with one white hand on either
arm of the chair. “And I’m afraid to go on. I want to begin over. And I
want to begin on the right side!”
He sat pondering just how much of this he could believe. But she
disregarded his veiled impassivity.
“I want you to take Picture 3,970 out of the Identification Bureau, the
picture and the Bertillon measurements. And then I want you to give me
the chance I asked for.”
“But that does not rest with me, Miss Verriner!”
“It will rest with you. I couldn’t stool with my own people here. But
Wilkie knows my value. He knows what I can do for the service if I’m on
their side. He could let me begin with the Ellis Island spotting. I could
stop that Stockholm white-slave work in two months. And when you see
Wilkie to-morrow you can swing me one way or the other!”
Copeland, with his chin on his bony breast, looked up to smile into her
intent and staring eyes.
“You are a very clever woman,” he said. “And what is more, you know a
great deal!”
“I know a great deal!” she slowly repeated, and her steady gaze succeeded
in taking the ironic smile out of the corners of his eyes.
“Your knowledge,” he said with a deliberation equal to her own, “will
prove of great value to you—as an agent with Wilkie.”
“That’s as you say!” she quietly amended as she rose to her feet. There
was no actual threat in her words, just as there was no actual mockery in
his. But each was keenly conscious of the wheels that revolved within
wheels, of the intricacies through which each was threading a way to
certain remote ends. She picked up her black gloves from the desk top.
She stood there, waiting.
“You can count on me,” he finally said, as he rose from his chair. “I’ll
attend to the picture. And I’ll say the right thing to Wilkie!”
“Then let’s shake hands on it!” she quietly concluded. And as they shook
hands her gray-irised eyes gazed intently and interrogatively into his.
V
When Never-Fail Blake alighted from his sleeper in Montreal he found one
of Teal’s men awaiting him at Bonaventure Station. There had been a hitch
or a leak somewhere, this man reported. Binhart, in some way, had slipped
through their fingers.
All they knew was that the man they were tailing had bought a ticket for
Winnipeg, that he was not in Montreal, and that, beyond the railway
ticket, they had no trace of him.
Blake, at this news, had a moment when he saw red. He felt, during that
moment, like a drum-major who had “muffed” his baton on parade. Then
recovering himself, he promptly confirmed the Teal operative’s report by
telephone, accepted its confirmation as authentic, consulted a timetable,
and made a dash for Windsor Station. There he caught the Winnipeg
express, took possession of a stateroom and indited carefully worded
telegrams to Trimble in Vancouver, that all out-going Pacific steamers
should be watched, and to Menzler in Chicago, that the American city
might be covered in case of Binhart’s doubling southward on him. Still
another telegram he sent to New York, requesting the Police Department to
send on to him at once a photograph of Binhart.
In Winnipeg, two days later, Blake found himself on a blind trail. When
he had talked with a railway detective on whom he could rely, when he had
visited certain offices and interviewed certain officials, when he had
sought out two or three women acquaintances in the city’s sequestered
area, he faced the bewildering discovery that he was still without an
actual clue of the man he was supposed to be shadowing.
It was then that something deep within his nature, something he could
never quite define, whispered its first faint doubt to him. This doubt
persisted even when late that night a Teal Agency operative wired him
from Calgary, stating that a man answering Binhart’s description had just
left the Alberta Hotel for Banff. To this latter point Blake promptly
wired a fuller description of his man, had an officer posted to inspect
every alighting passenger, and early the next morning received a
telegram, asking for still more particulars.
He peered down at this message, vaguely depressed in spirit, discarding
theory after theory, tossing aside contingency after contingency. And up
from this gloomy shower slowly emerged one of his “hunches,” one of his
vague impressions, coming blindly to the surface very much like an
earthworm crawling forth after a fall of rain. There was something wrong.
Of that he felt certain. He could not place it or define it. To continue
westward would be to depend too much on an uncertainty; it would involve
the risk of wandering too far from the center of things. He suddenly
decided to double on his tracks and swing down to Chicago. Just why he
felt as he did he could not fathom. But the feeling was there. It was an
instinctive propulsion, a “hunch.” These hunches were to him, working in
the dark as he was compelled to, very much what whiskers are to a cat.
They could not be called an infallible guide. But they at least kept him
from colliding with impregnabilities.
Acting on this hunch, as he called it, he caught a Great Northern train
for Minneapolis, transferred to a Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul express,
and without loss of time sped southward. When, thirty hours later, he
alighted in the heart of Chicago, he found himself in an environment more
to his liking, more adaptable to his ends. He was not disheartened by his
failure. He did not believe in luck, in miracles, or even in coincidence.
But experience had taught him the bewildering extent of the resources
which he might command. So intricate and so wide-reaching were the secret
wires of his information that he knew he could wait, like a spider at the
center of its web, until the betraying vibration awakened some
far-reaching thread of that web. In every corner of the country lurked a
non-professional ally, a secluded tipster, ready to report to Blake when
the call for a report came. The world, that great detective had found,
was indeed a small one. From its scattered four corners, into which his
subterranean wires of espionage stretched, would in time come some
inkling, some hint, some discovery. And at the converging center of those
wires Blake was able to sit and wait, like the central operator at a
telephone switchboard, knowing that the tentacles of attention were
creeping and wavering about dim territories and that in time they would
render up their awaited word.
In the meantime, Blake himself was by no means idle. It would not be from
official circles, he knew, that his redemption would come. Time had
already proved that. For months past every police chief in the country
had held his description of Binhart. That was a fact which Binhart
himself very well knew; and knowing that, he would continue to move as he
had been moving, with the utmost secrecy, or at least protected by some
adequate disguise.
It would be from the underworld that the echo would come. And next to New
York, Blake knew, Chicago would make as good a central exchange for this
underworld as could be desired. Knowing that city of the Middle West, and
knowing it well, he at once “went down the line,” making his rounds
stolidly and systematically, first visiting a West Side faro-room and
casually interviewing the “stools” of Custom House Place and South Clark
Street, and then dropping in at the Café Acropolis, in Halsted Street,
and lodging houses in even less savory quarters. He duly canvassed every
likely dive, every “melina,” every gambling house and yegg hang out. He
engaged in leisurely games of pool with stone-getters and gopher men. He
visited bucket-shops and barrooms, and dingy little Ghetto cafés. He
“buzzed” tipsters and floaters and mouthpieces. He fraternized with till
tappers and single-drillers. He always made his inquiries after Binhart
seem accidental, a case apparently subsidiary to two or three others
which he kept always to the foreground.
He did not despair over the discovery that no one seemed to know of
Binhart or his movements. He merely waited his time, and extended new
ramifications into newer territory. His word still carried its weight of
official authority. There was still an army of obsequious underlings
compelled to respect his wishes. It was merely a matter of time and
mathematics. Then the law of averages would ordain its end; the needed
card would ultimately be turned up, the right dial-twist would at last
complete the right combination.
The first faint glimmer of life, in all those seemingly dead wires, came
from a gambler named Mattie Sherwin, who reported that he had met
Binhart, two weeks before, in the café of the Brown Palace in Denver. He
was traveling under the name of Bannerman, wore his hair in a pomadour,
and had grown a beard.
Blake took the first train out of Chicago for Denver. In this latter city
an Elks’ Convention was supplying blue-bird weather for underground
“haymakers,” busy with bunco-steering, “rushing” street-cars and “lifting
leathers.” Before the stampede at the news of his approach, he picked up
Biff Edwards and Lefty Stivers, put on the screws, and learned nothing.
He went next to Glory McShane, a Market Street acquaintance indebted for
certain old favors, and from her, too, learned nothing of moment. He
continued the quest in other quarters, and the results were equally
discouraging.
Then began the real detective work about which, Blake knew, newspaper
stories were seldom written. This work involved a laborious and
monotonous examination of hotel registers, a canvassing of ticket
agencies and cab stands and transfer companies. It was anything but
story-book sleuthing. It was a dispiriting tread-mill round, but he was
still sifting doggedly through the tailings of possibilities when a
code-wire came from St. Louis, saying Binhart had been seen the day
before at the Planters’ Hotel.
Blake was eastbound on his way to St. Louis one hour after the receipt of
this wire. And an hour after his arrival in St. Louis he was engaged in
an apparently care free and leisurely game of pool with one Loony Ryan,
an old-time “box man” who was allowed to roam with a clipped wing in the
form of a suspended indictment. Loony, for the liberty thus doled out to
him, rewarded his benefactors by an occasional indulgence in the
“pigeon-act.”
“Draw for lead?” asked Blake, lighting a cigar.
“Sure,” said Loony.
Blake pushed his ball to the top cushion, won the draw, and broke.
“Seen anything of Wolf Yonkholm?” he casually inquired, as he turned to
chalk his cue. But his eye, with one quick sweep, had made sure of every
face in the room.
Loony studied the balls for a second or two. Wolf was a “dip” with an
international record.
“Last time I saw Wolf he was out at ’Frisco, workin’ the Beaches,” was
Loony’s reply.
Blake ventured an inquiry or two about other worthies of the underworld.
The players went on with their game, placid, self-immured,
matter-of-fact.
“Where’s Angel McGlory these days?” asked Blake, as he reached over to
place a ball.
“What’s she been doin’?” demanded Loony, with his cue on the rail.
“She’s traveling with a bank sneak named Blanchard or Binhart,” explained
Blake. “And I want her.”
Loony Ryan made his stroke.
“Hep Roony saw Binhart this mornin’, beatin’ it for N’ Orleans. But he
wasn’t travelin’ wit’ any moll that Hep spoke of.”
Blake made his shot, chalked his cue again, and glanced down at his
watch. His eyes were on the green baize, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
“I got ’o leave you, Wolf,” he announced as he put his cue back in the
rack. He spoke slowly and calmly. But Wolf’s quick gaze circled the room,
promptly checking over every face between the four walls.
“What’s up?” he demanded. “Who’d you spot?”
“Nothing, Wolf, nothing! But this game o’ yours blamed near made me
forget an appointment o’ mine!”
Twenty minutes after he had left the bewildered Wolf Ryan in the pool
parlor he was in a New Orleans sleeper, southward bound. He knew that he
was getting within striking distance of Binhart, at last. The zest of the
chase took possession of him. The trail was no longer a “cold” one. He
knew which way Binhart was headed. And he knew he was not more than a day
behind his man.