Arthur Stringer

“ I admitted, thinking at the moment how her face in the strong side-light from the windows had taken on a quite accidental touch of pathos.
"It's simply that the man you are trying to save from Coke Whelan is Coke Whelan himself."
"That's impossible!" was my exclamation.
"It's not impossible," she said a little wearily, "because the whole thing's nothing more than a plant, a frame-up. And you may as well know it. It can't go on. The whole thing was a plan to trap you." ”

“ I inquired as she again sat in silence before me.
"In everything," she finally answered, as she rose to her feet. I was at once more conscious of her physical appeal, of her inalienable bodily buoyancy, as I saw her standing there at her full height. The deep flow of color in her loosely draped gown gave her an almost pontifical stateliness. Instinctively I rose as she did. And I could see by her eyes that the courtesy was neither negligible nor distasteful to her. She was about to say something; then she stopped and looked at me for a hesitating moment or two. ”

“ I did not look at him, for a moment or two, dreading as I did the approaching return to actuality. I let my gaze wander about the riotous-colored room into which the flood-tide of the after-theater crowds was now eddying. It held nothing either new or appealing to me. It was not the first time I had witnessed the stars of stageland sitting in perigean torpor through their seven-coursed suppers, just as it was not the first time I had meekly endured the assaulting vulgarities of onyx pillars and pornographic art for the sake of what I had found to be the most matchless cooking in America. ”

“ So my traveler friend took me up to a pool-room with racing-sheets and blackboards and half a dozen telegraph keys and twice as many telephones. It looked like the real thing to me. When the returns started to come in and we got our flash, our private tip from the Western Union office, I tried fifty dollars on a three-to-one shot."
"And of course you won," was my sympathetic rejoinder, as I sat listening to the old, sad tale. "You always do."
"Then I met the woman I spoke about, the woman who called herself the sister-in-law of the racing-wire manager." ”

“ You're a figure-model that a sculptor named Delisle took to Paris. You're the old running-mate of Adams in the Southam heir case. You're the wife of a Haytian half-caste Jew with a Spanish title. You're the woman who worked with Andrus, the wildcat mine-swindler who is now doing time in Sing Sing. And just at present you're the accomplice of a gang headed by a certain Coke Whelan, a wire-tapper well known to the police. ”

“ I've phoned for a telegraph operator called Downey to be there, so we can decide on a plan for tapping McGowan's wire."
"And what good does that do me?" demanded the mummy-faced youth.
"Why, that gives Mr. Kerfoot his chance to bet as much as he likes, to get as much back from McGowan as he wants to, without any risk of losing."
"But who handles the money?" demanded the wary Whelan.
"That's quite immaterial. You can, if you're his friend, or he can handle it himself. The important thing is to get your plan settled and your wire tapped. ”

“ All I knew was that he went down under a scattering geyser of black coffee. He did not fire again. He did not even move. But as he fell the woman in the cap and apron dropped on her knees beside him. She knelt there with an inarticulate cry like that of an animal over its fallen mate, a ludicrous, mouse-like sound that was almost a squeak. ”

“ I was still at the receiver when she came into the room and looked down for a moment at the woman moaning and whimpering on the coffee-stained floor. Then she began resolutely and calmly drawing on her gloves.
"Couldn't we do something for them?" I said as I stepped back into the bedroom for her hand-bag.
"What?" she demanded, as she leaned over the bed where Whelan's reviving body twitched and moved.
"There must be something."
"There's nothing. Oh, believe me, you can't help him. I can't help him. He's got his own way to go. ”

“ She had risen by this time and was moving restlessly about the room.
"Do you suppose I'd ever be satisfied to be one of those painted Broadway dolls and let my brain dry up like a lemon on a pantry shelf? I couldn't if I wanted to. I couldn't, although I can see how easy it makes everything. I tell you, a woman with a reputation like mine has got to pay, and keep on paying. She's got to pay twice over for the decencies of life. She's got to pay twice over for protection. Unless you're respectable you can't have respectable people about you. ”

“ He looked up, almost angrily, at my movement of impatience. "Well, what would you do about it?" he challenged.
"I'd get that money back or I'd get that gang behind the bars," was the answer I flung out at him. "I'd fight them to a finish."
"But there's nothing to fight. There's nobody to get hold of. That Western Union man was only a capper, a come-on. Their poolroom's one of those dirigible kind that move on when the police appear. Then they'd claim I was as bad as they were, trying to trick an honest bookmaker out of his money. ”

“ Then with an oddly nervous gesture of repudiation he caught up his hat and coat, turned on his heel, and passed like a shadow down the quietness of the deserted wharf.
I turned and followed him. The tragedy recorded on that pallid face was above all pretense. He could never be taken for a "dummy-chucker"; the thing was genuine. Any man who could squeeze life so dry that he thought of tossing it away like an orange-skin was worth following. ”

“ I'm going to get away where I can breathe in peace. Oh, believe me, I can be irreproachable without even an effort. I want to be. I prefer it. I've found how much easier it makes life. It's not my past I've been afraid of. It's that one drug-soaked maniac, that poor helpless thing who knows that if I step away from him he daren't round a street-corner without being arrested."
She stopped suddenly and the color ebbed out of her face. Then I saw her slowly rise to her feet and look undecidedly about the four corners of the room. ”

“ There is no activity more explosive than that of the chronic idler. Once out on Broadway, accordingly, I did not let the grass grow under my feet. Two minutes at the telephone and ten more in a taxicab brought me in touch with my old friend Doyle who was "working" a mulatto shooting case in lower Seventh Avenue as quietly as a gardener working his cabbage-patch.
"What do you know about a woman named Vinnie Brunelle?" ”

“ For at that moment the door abruptly opened. The maid in the white cap and apron stood trembling on its threshold.
"That's a lie!" she was crying, in her shrill and sudden abandon, and the twin badges of servitude made doubly incongruous her attitude of fierce revolt. "It's a lie, Tony! She's welched on you!"
She took three quick steps into the room.
"She's only playing you against this guy. I've heard every word of it. She never phoned for an operator. That's a lie. She's throwing you down, for good. She's told him who you are and what your game is!" ”

“ It seemed an equally old story to my new friend across the table, for as I turned away from the surrounding flurry of bare shoulders, as white and soft as a flurry of gull-wings, I saw that he had already ordered a meal that was as mysteriously sumptuous as it was startlingly expensive. ”

“ But on second thoughts she remained silent.
"If life were only as simple as you sentimental charity-workers try to make it!" she complained, studying me with a pitying look which I began most keenly to resent. She swept the room with a glance of contempt. "If all those hay-tossers who come to this town and have their money taken away from them were only as lamb-like as you people imagine they are!"
"Is this an effort toward the justification of theft?" I inquired. For the first time I saw a touch of deeper color mark her cheek. ”

“ The name clearly meant nothing to him.
"Give me something more to work on!"
"She's a young woman who lives by her wits. She keeps up a very good front, and now and then does a variety of the wire-tapping game."
"I wonder if that wouldn't be the Cassal woman Andrus used as a come-on for his Mexican mine game? But she claimed Andrus had fooled her."
"And what else?" I inquired.
Doyle stood silent, wrapt in thought for a moment or two.
"Oh, that's about all. I've heard she's an uncommonly clever woman, about the cleverest woman in the world. But what are you after?" ”

“ Then she worked with a mining share manipulator named Andrus. She was wise enough to slip from under before he was sent up the river. And since then they tell me, she's been doing a more or less respectable game or two with Coke Whelan, the wire-tapper. And that, I guess, is about all."
"Has she ever been arrested that you know of? Would they have her picture, for instance, down at Headquarters?"
The man who had grown old in the study of crime smiled a little.
"You can't arrest a woman until you get evidence against her." ”

“ This," with a hand-sweep about the cluster of dishes, "is some music I'll have to face alone. But what's that, when you're on the last inch of the last rope-end?"
"Your position," I ventured, "sounds almost like a desperate one."
"Desperate!" he echoed. "It's more than that. It's hopeless!" ”

“ He also allowed this friend of his was ready to phone him some early track-returns, for what he called a big rakeoff. He even took me down to the Western Union Building, on the corner of Dey and Broadway, and introduced me to a man he called the assistant superintendent. We met him in one of the halls—he was in his shirt-sleeves, and looked like a pretty busy man. He was to hold back the returns until our bets could be laid. He explained that he himself couldn't figure in the thing, but that his sister-in-law might possibly handle the returns over her own private wire. ”

“ Then she did a bit of secret service work for Wilkie's office in Washington that gave her more pull than all your Tammany 'politics' east of Broadway."
"Am I to understand that what you call politics and pull, then, will let a woman rob a man of thirty thousand dollars and go scot free?"
"My dear fellow, that type of woman never robs a man. She doesn't need to. They just blink and hand it over. ”

“ And I want to do what I can to help him out."
"How much did he lose?"
"About thirty thousand dollars, he claims."
"What was the game?"
"It appears to have been one of those so-called wire-tapping coups."
"Funny how that always gets 'em!" ruminated that verger of long-immured faces. "Well, here's what I know about Vinnie. Seven or eight years ago she was an artist's model. Then a sculptor called Delisle took her over to Paris—she was still in her teens then. But she was too brainy to stick to the studio-rat arrangement. She soon came to the end of her rope there. ”