ANTHONY TRENT TALKS ON CRIME
ANTHONY TRENTwas working his typewriter at top speed when there came a
sudden, peremptory knocking at his door.
“Lord!” he grumbled, rising, “it must be old Lund to say I’m keeping him
awake.”
He threw open his door to find a small, choleric and elderly man clad in
a faded dressing gown. It was a man with a just grievance and a desire
to express it.
“This is no time to hammer on your typewriter,” said Mr. Lund fiercely.
“This is a boarding house and not a private residence. Do you realize
that you generally begin work at midnight?”
“Come in,” said Anthony Trent genially. With friendly force he dragged
the smaller man along and placed him in a morris chair. “Come in and
give me your opinion of the kind of cigar smoked by the president of the
publishing house for whose magazines I work noisily at midnight.”
Mr. Lund found himself a few seconds later sitting by an open window, an
excellent cigar between his teeth, and the lights of New York spread
before him. And he found his petulance vanishing. He wondered why it was
that although he had before this come raging to Anthony Trent’s door, he
always suffered himself to be talked out of his ill humors. It was
something magnetic and engaging that surrounded this young writer of
short stories.
“I can’t smoke a cigar when I’m working,” said Trent, lighting a pipe.
“Surely,” said Mr. Lund, not willing so soon to be robbed of his
grievance, “you choose the wrong hours to work. Mrs. Clarke says you
hardly ever touch your typewriter till late.”
“That’s because you don’t appreciate the kind of story I write,” Anthony
Trent told him. “If I wrote the conventional story of love or matrimony
I could work so many hours a day and begin at nine like any business
man. But I don’t. I begin to write just when the world I write of begins
to live. My men and women are waking into life now, just when the other
folks are climbing into their suburban beds.”
“I understood you wrote detective stories,” Mr. Lund remarked. His
grievances were vanishing. His opinion of the president of Trent’s
magazine was a high one.
“Crook stories,” Anthony Trent confided. “Not the professional doings of
thoughtless thugs. They don’t interest me a tinker’s curse. I like
subtlety in crime. I could take you now into the great restaurants on
Broadway or Fifth Avenue and point out to you some of the kings of
crime--men who are clever enough to protect themselves from the police.
Men who play the game as a good chess player does against a poorer one,
with the certainty of being a move ahead.”
Mr. Lund conjured up a vision of such a restaurant peopled by such a
festive crowd. He felt in that moment that an early manhood spent in
Somerville had perhaps robbed him of a chance to live.
“They all get caught sooner or later,” asserted the little man in the
morris chair.
“Because they get careless or because they trust another. If you want to
be a successful crook, Mr. Lund, you’ll have to map out your plan of
life as carefully as an athlete trains for a specific event. Now if you
went in for crime you’d have to examine your weaknesses.”
“Thank you,” said Mr. Lund a little huffily, “I am not going in for a
life of crime. I am perfectly content with my own line.” This, with
unconscious sarcasm for Mr. Lund, pursued what he always told the
borders was “the advertising.”
“There are degrees in crime I admit,” said Anthony Trent, “but I am
perfectly serious in what I say. The ordinary crook has a low mental
capacity. He generally gets caught in the end as all such clumsy asses
should. The really big man in crime often gets caught because he is not
aware of his weaknesses. Drink often brings out an incautious boasting
side of a man. If you are going in for crime, Mr. Lund, cut out drink I
beg of you.”
“I do not need your advice,” Mr. Lund returned with some dignity. “I
have tasted rum once only in my life.”
Trent looked at him interested.
“It would probably make you want to fight,” he said.
“I don’t care to think of it,” said Mr. Lund.
“And the curious part of it is,” mused Trent, “that in the sort of crowd
these high class crooks mix with it is most unusual not to drink, and
the man who doesn’t is almost always under suspicion. The great thing is
to be able to take your share and stop before the danger mark is
reached. Did you ever hear of Captain Despard?”
“I think not,” Lund answered.
“A boyhood idol of mine,” Anthony Trent admitted. “One of the few
gentleman crooks. Most of the so-called gentlemen criminals have been
anything but gentlemen born. Despard was. I was in Devonshire on my last
trip to the other side and I made a pilgrimage to the place where he was
born. Funny to think that a man brought up in one of the ‘stately homes
of England, how beautiful they stand,’ should come to what he was.”
“Woman, I suppose,” said Lund, as one man of the world to another.
“Not in the beginning,” Anthony Trent answered. “He was a cavalry
officer in India--Kipling type you know--and had a craze for precious
stones. Began to collect them honestly enough and found his pay and
private fortune insufficient. He got kicked out of his regiment anyway
and went to Cape Town. One night a very large diamond was stolen from a
bedroom of the Mount Nelson hotel and he was suspected. They couldn’t
prove anything, but he came over here to New York and sold it, under
another name, and with a different history, to one of the Pierpoints.
The trouble with Captain Despard was that he used to drink heavily when
he had pulled a big thing off. While he was planning a _coup_ he was
temperate and he never touched a drop while he was working.”
“Started to boast, I suppose?” Lund suggested.
“No,” said Anthony Trent. “Not that sort at all. He lived at a pretty
fair sort of club here in the forties and was well enough liked until
the drink was in him. It was then that he began to think of his former
mode of life and the kind he was now living. He used to think the other
members were trying to slight him or avoid him. He laboriously picked
quarrels with some of them. He beat up one of them in a fist fight in
the club billiard room. This fellow brooded over his licking for a long
time and then with another man, also inflamed with cocktails, went up to
Despard’s room to beat him up. Despard was out, so they broke his
furniture. They found that the legs of chairs and tables had been
hollowed so as to conceal what Despard stole. It was in one of the
chairs that they found the Crediton pearls which had been missing for a
year. They waited for him and he was sent to Sing Sing but escaped. He
shot a man later in Denver and was executed. He might have been living
comfortably but for getting suspicious when he had been drinking.”
“You must have studied this thing deeply,” Lund commented.
“I have,” Anthony Trent admitted; “I know the histories of most of the
great criminals and their crimes. The police do too, but I know more
than they. I make a study of the man as well as his crime. I find vanity
at the root of many failures.”
“_Cherchez la femme_,” Mr. Lund insisted.
“Not that sort of vanity,” Anthony Trent corrected. “I mean the sheer
love to boast about one’s abilities when other men are boasting of
theirs. There was a man called Paul Vierick, by profession a second
story man. He was short, stout and a great consumer of beer and in his
idle hours fond of bowling. He was staying in Stony Creek, Connecticut,
one summer, when a tennis ball was hit up high and lodged in a gutter
pipe on the roof. Vierick told the young man who had hit it there how to
get it. It was so dangerous looking a climb that the lad refused. Some
of the guests suggested in fun that Vierick should try. They made him
mad. He thought they were laughing at his two hundred pound look. They
were not to know that a more expert porch climber didn’t exist than this
man who had been a professional trapeze man in a circus. They say he ran
up the side of that house like a monkey. Directly he had done it and
people began talking he knew he’d been unwise. He had been posing as a
retired dentist and here he was running up walls like the count in
Dracula. He moved away and presently denied the story so vehemently that
an intelligent young lawyer investigated him and he is now up the
river.”
“That’s an interesting study,” Mr. Lund commented. He was thoroughly
taken up with the subject. “Do you know any more instances like that?”
“I know hundreds,” Anthony Trent returned smiling. “I could keep on all
night. Your town of Somerville produced Blodgett the Strangler. You must
have heard of him?”
“I was at school with him,” Lund said almost excitedly. It was a secret
he had buried in his breast for years. Now it seemed to admit him to
something of a kinship with Anthony Trent. “He was always chasing after
women.”
“That wasn’t the thing which got him. It was the desire to set right a
Harvard professor of anatomy on the subject of strangulation. Blodgett
had his own theories. You may remember he strangled his stepfather when
he was only fifteen.”
“He nearly strangled me once,” Mr. Lund exclaimed. “He would have done
if I hadn’t had sufficient presence of mind to bite him in the thumb.”
“Good for you,” said the other heartily. “You’ll find the history of
crime is full of the little mistakes that take the cleverest of them to
the chair. And yet,” he mused, “it’s a great life. One man pitting his
courage and knowledge against all the forces organized by society to
stamp him out. You’ve got to be above the average in almost every
quality to succeed if you work alone.”
Mr. Lund felt a trifle uncomfortable. The bright laughing face that had
been Anthony Trent to him had given place to a sterner cast of
countenance. The new Trent reminded him of a hawk. There was suddenly
brought to the rather timid and elderly man the impression of ruthless
strength and tireless energy. He had been a score of times in Anthony
Trent’s room and had always found him amusing and light hearted. Never
until to-night had they touched upon crime. The New York over which Mr.
Lund gazed from the seat by the window no longer seemed a friendly city.
Crime and violence lurked in its every corner, he reflected.
Mr. Lund was annoyed with himself for feeling nervous. To brace up his
courage he reverted to his former grievance. The sustaining cigar had
long ceased to give comfort.
“I must protest at being waked up night after night by your typewriting
machine. Everybody seems to be in bed and asleep but you. I must have my
eight hours, Mr. Trent.”
Anthony Trent came to his side.
“Everybody asleep?” he gibed. “Why, man, the shadows are alive if you’ll
only look into them. And as to the night, it is never quiet. A myriad
strange sounds are blended into this stillness you call night.” His
voice sank to a whisper and he took the discomfited Lund’s arm. “Can you
see a woman standing there in the shadow of that tree?”
“It might be a woman,” Lund admitted guardedly.
“It is,” he was told; “she followed not ten yards behind you as you came
from the El. She’s been waiting for a man and he ought to be by in a few
minutes now. She’s known in every rogues’ gallery in the world. Scotland
Yard knows her as Gipsey Lee, and if ever a woman deserved the chair she
does.”
“Not murder?” Lund hazarded timidly. He shivered. “It’s a little cold by
the window.”
“Don’t move,” Anthony commanded. “You may see a tragedy unroll itself
before your eyes in a little while. She’s waiting for a banker named
Pereira who looted Costa Rica. He’s a big, heavy man.”
“He’s coming now,” Lund whispered. “I don’t like this at all, Mr.
Trent.”
“He won’t either,” muttered the other.
Unable to move Mr. Lund watched a tall man come toward the shadows which
hid Gipsey Lee.
“We ought to warn him,” Mr. Lund protested.
“Not on your life,” he was told. “This time it is punishment, not
murder. She saved his life and he deserted her. Pereira’s pretending to
be drunk. I wonder why. He dare not touch a drop because he has Bright’s
disease in the last stages.”
A minute later Mr. Lund, indignant and commanding as his inches
permitted, was shaking an angry finger at his host.
“You’ve no right to frighten me,” he exclaimed, “with your Gipsey Lee
and Pereira when it was only poor Mrs. Clarke waiting for that drunken
scamp of a husband who spends all he earns at the corner saloon.”
Heavy steps passed along the passage. It was Clarke making his bedward
way to his wife’s verbal accompaniment.
“You ought to be pleased to get a thrill like that for nothing,” said
Anthony Trent laughing. “I’d pay good money for it.”
“I don’t like it,” Mr. Lund insisted. “I thought you meant it.”
“I did,” the other asserted, “for the moment. New York is full of such
stories and if they don’t happen in this street they happen in another.
They always happen after midnight and I’ve got to put them down on the
old machine. Somewhere a Gipsey Lee is waiting for a defaulting South
American banker or a Captain Despard is planning to get a priceless
stone, or a humbler Vierick plotting to climb into an inviting window,
or some one like your boyhood chum Blodgett planning to get his hands
around some one’s throat.”
Anthony Trent leaned from the window and breathed in the soft night air.
“It’s a great old city,” he said, half affectionately, “and I make my
living by letting my hook down into the night and drawing up a mystery.
You mustn’t mind if I sometimes rattle the old Royal when better folks
are asleep.”
“If you’ll take the advice of an older man,” said Mr. Lund with an air
of firmness, “you’ll let crook stories alone and choose something a
little healthier. Your mind is full of them.”
Still a little outraged Mr. Lund bowed himself from the room. Anthony
Trent fed his ancient briar and took the seat by the window.
“I wonder if he’s right,” mused Anthony Trent.