"What of the relations between Kinkaid and old Mrs. Llewellyn? Do they get along as brother and sister should?"
Vance looked up at Markham languidly.
"I'd thought of that angle, too." He mused for a moment. "Of course, the old lady is ashamed of her wayward brother--it's quite annoyin' for a fanatical social worker to harbor a brother who's a professional gambler; and while they're outwardly civil to each other, I imagine there's internal friction, especially as the Park-Avenue house belongs to them jointly and they both live under its protectin' roof. But I don't think the old girl would carry her animosity so far as to do any plotting against Kinkaid. . . . No, no. We can't find an explanation for the letter along that line. . . ."
At this moment Currie entered the library.
"Pardon me, sir," he said to Vance in a troubled tone; "but there's a person on the telephone who wishes me to ask you if you intend to be at the Casino tonight--"
"Is it a man or a woman?" Vance interrupted.
"I--really, sir--" Currie stammered, "I couldn't say. The voice was very faint and indistinct--disguised, you might say. But the person asked me to tell you that he--or she, sir--would not say another word, but would wait on the wire for your answer."
Vance did not speak for several moments.
"I've rather been expecting something of the sort," he murmured finally. Then he turned to Currie. "Tell my ambiguously sexed caller that I will be there at ten o'clock."
Markham took his cigar slowly from his mouth and looked at Vance with troubled concern.
"You actually intend to go to the Casino because of that letter?"
Vance nodded seriously.
"Oh, yes--quite."
CHAPTER II
THE CASINO
(Saturday, October 15; 10:30 p. m.)
Richard Kinkaid's famous old gambling establishment, the Casino, in West 73rd Street, near West End Avenue, had, in its heyday, many claims to the glories of the long-defunct Canfield's. It flourished but a short time, yet its memory is still fresh in many minds, and its fame has spread to all parts of the country. It forms a glowing and indispensable link in the chain of resorts that runs through the spectacular history of the night life of New York. A towering apartment house, with terraces and penthouses, now rises where the Casino once stood.
To the uninitiated passer-by the Casino was just another of those large and impressive gray-stone mansions which were once the pride of the upper West Side. The house had been built in the 'Nineties and was the residence of Richard's father, Amos Kinkaid (known as "Old Amos"), one of the city's shrewdest and wealthiest real-estate operators. This particular property was the one parcel that had been willed outright to Richard Kinkaid in Old Amos's will: all the other property had been bequeathed jointly to his two children, Kinkaid and Mrs. Anthony Llewellyn. Mrs. Llewellyn, at the time of the inheritance, was already a widow with two children, Lynn and Amelia, both in their early teens.
Richard Kinkaid had lived alone in the gray-stone house for several years after Old Amos's death. He had then locked its doors, boarded up its windows, and indulged his desire for travel and adventure in the remote places of the earth. He had always had an irresistible instinct for gambling--perhaps a heritage from his father--and in the course of his travels he had visited most of the famous gambling resorts of Europe. As you may recall, the accounts of his spectacular gains and losses often reached the front pages of this country's press. When his losses had far exceeded his gains Kinkaid returned to America, a poorer but no doubt a wiser man.
Counting on political influence and powerful personal connections, he then decided to make an endeavor to recoup his losses by opening a fashionable gambling house of his own, patterned along the lines of some of America's famous houses of the old days.
"The trouble with me," Kinkaid had told one of his chief under-cover supporters, "is that I've always gambled on the wrong side of the table."
He had the big house in 73rd Street remodelled and redecorated, furnished it with the most lavish appointments, and entered upon his notorious enterprise "on the right side of the table." These embellishments of the house, so rumor had it, all but exhausted the remainder of his patrimony. He named the new establishment Kinkaid's Casino, in cynical memory perhaps of Monte Carlo. But so well known did the place become among the social elect and the wealthy, that the prefix "Kinkaid's" soon became superfluous: there was only one "Casino" in America.
The Casino, like so many of the extra-legal establishments of its kind, and like the various fashionable night-clubs that sprang up during the prohibition era, was run as a private club. Membership was requisite, and all applicants were prudently investigated and weighed. The initiation fee was sufficiently high to discourage all undesirable elements; and the roster of those who were accorded the privileges of the "club" read almost like a compilation of the names of the socially and professionally prominent.
For his chief croupier and supervisor of the games, Kinkaid had chosen Morgan Bloodgood, a cultured young mathematician whom he had met at his sister's home. Bloodgood had been at college with Lynn Llewellyn, though the latter was his senior by three years; and, incidentally, it was Bloodgood who brought about the meeting of Virginia Vale and young Llewellyn. Bloodgood, while in college and during the time he had taught mathematics, had, as a hobby, busied himself with the laws of probability. He applied his findings especially to the relation of these laws to numerical gambling, and had figured out elaborately the percentages in all the well-known games of chance. His estimates of permutations, possibilities of repetitions and changes of sequence as bearing on card games are today officially used in computing chances in drawings; and he was at one time associated with the District Attorney's office in exposing the overwhelming chances in favor of the owners in connection with a city-wide campaign against slot-machines of all types.
Kinkaid was once asked why he had chosen young Bloodgood in preference to an old-time, experienced croupier; and he answered:
"I am like Balzac's old Gobseck, who gave all his personal legal business to the budding solicitor, Derville, on the theory that a man under thirty can be relied upon, but that after that age no man may be wholly trusted."
The assistant croupiers and dealers at the Casino were likewise chosen from the ranks of well-bred, non-professional young men of good appearance and education; and they were carefully trained in the intricacies of their duties.*
* It is interesting to note that this same method of selecting and training dealers has been followed at Agua Caliente.
Cynical though Kinkaid's philosophy may have been, the practical application of it met with success. His gambling from the "right side of the table" prospered. He was content with the usual house percentage, and the shrewdest of gamblers and experts were never able to bring against him an accusation of "fixing" any of his games.* In all disputes between a player and the croupier, the player was paid without question. Many small fortunes were lost and won at the Casino during its comparatively brief existence; and the play was always large, especially on Friday and Saturday nights.
* Kinkaid even employed the European roulette wheels with only the single "0".
When Vance and I arrived at the Casino on that fatal Saturday night of October 15, there was as yet only a scattering of guests present. It was too early for the full quota of habitués who, as a rule, came after the theatre.
As we walked up the wide stone steps from the paved outer court and entered the narrow vestibule of plate glass and black ironwork, we were greeted with a nod from a Chinese porter who stood at the left of the entrance. By some secret signal our identity was communicated to those in charge on the inside; and almost simultaneously with our arrival in the vestibule the great bronze door (which Old Amos had brought over from Italy) was swung open. In the spacious reception hall, fully thirty feet square, hung with rich brocades and old paintings, and furnished in luxurious Italian Renaissance style, our hats and coats were taken from us by two uniformed attendant
s, both of them extremely tall and powerful men.*
* I imagine Kinkaid got his idea for these enormous attendants from the impressive giants in the entrance-hall of the Savoy dining-room in London.
At the rear of the hall was a divided marble stairway which led, on either side of a small glistening fountain, to the gaming rooms above.
On the second floor Kinkaid had combined the former drawing-room and the reception-room into one large salon which he had christened the Gold Room. It ran the entire width of the house and was perhaps sixty feet long. The west wall was broken by an alcove which was furnished as a small lounge. The salon was decorated in modified Roman style, with an occasional suggestion of Byzantine ornamentation. The walls were covered with gold leaf, and the flat marble pilasters, which broke them into large rectangular panels, were of a subdued ivory tone that blended with the gold of the walls and the buff-colored ceiling. The draperies at the long windows were of yellow silk brocaded with gold; and the deep-piled carpet was a neutralized ochre in color.
There were three roulette tables set down the centre of the room, two black-jack, or vingt-et-un, tables at the middle of the east and west walls, four chuck-a-luck tables, or bird cages, in the four corners, and an elaborate dice table at the far end, between the windows. At the rear of the Gold Room, to the west, was a private card room, with a row of small individual tables where any form of solitaire could be played, and a dealer to look on and to pay or collect, according to the luck and skill of the player. Adjoining this room, to the east, was a crystal bar with a wide archway leading into the main salon. Here only the finest liquors and wines were served. These two rooms had evidently been the main dining-room and the breakfast room of the old Kinkaid mansion. A cashier's cage had been constructed in what had once been a linen closet, to the left of the bar.
Richard Kinkaid's private office had been constructed by shutting off the front end of the upper hallway. It had one door leading into the bar and another into the Gold Room. This office was about ten feet square and was paneled in walnut--a sombre yet beautifully appointed room, with a single frosted-glass window opening on the front court.
(I mention the office here because it played so important a part in the final terrible climax of the tragedy that was soon to begin before our eyes.)
When, that Saturday night, we had reached the narrow hall on the second floor, that led, through a wide draped entrance, into the main salon, Vance glanced casually into the two playing rooms and then turned into the bar.
"I think, Van, we'll have ample time for a sip of champagne," he said, with a curious restraint in his voice. "Our young friend is sitting in the lounge, quite by himself, apparently absorbed in computations. Lynn is a system player; and all manner of prelimin'ries are necess'ry before he can begin. If anything untoward is going to befall him tonight, he is either blissfully unaware of it or serenely indifferent. However, there's no one in the room now who could reasonably be interested in his existence--or his non-existence, for that matter--so we might as well bide a wee in here."
He ordered a bottle of 1904 Krug, and settled back, with outward placidity, in the sprawling chair beside the little table on which the wine was served. But, despite his apparently languid manner, I knew that some unusual tension had taken hold of him: this was obvious to me from the slow, deliberate way in which he took his cigarette from his mouth and broke the ashes in the exact centre of the tray.
We had scarcely finished our champagne when Morgan Bloodgood, emerging from a rear door, passed through the bar toward the main salon. He was a tall, slight man with a high, somewhat bulging forehead, a thin straight aquiline nose, heavy, almost flabby, lips, a pointed chin, and prominent Darwinian ears with abnormally large tragi and receding lobes. His eyes were hard and smouldering and of a peculiar gray-green cast; and they were so deeply sunken as to appear in almost perpetual shadow. His hair was thin and sand-colored; and his complexion was sallow to the point of bloodlessness. Yet he was not an unattractive man. There was coolness and calm in the ensemble of his features--an immobility that gave the impression of latent power and profound trains of thought. Though I knew he was barely thirty, he could easily have passed for a man of forty or more.
When he caught sight of Vance he paused and nodded with reserved pleasantry.
"Going to try your luck tonight, Mr. Vance?" he asked in a deep mild voice.
"By all means," Vance returned, smiling only with his lips. Then he added: "I have a new system, don't y' know."
"That's bully for the house," grinned Bloodgood. "Based on Laplace or von Kries?" (I thought I detected a suggestion of sarcasm in his voice.)
"Oh, my dear fellow!" Vance replied. "Really, now! I rarely go in for abstruse mathematics: I leave that branch of research to experts. I prefer Napoleon's simple maxim: 'Je m'engage et puis je vois.'"
"That's as good--or as bad--as any other system," Bloodgood retorted. "They all amount to the same thing in the end." And with a stiff bow he passed on into the Gold Room.
Through the divided portières we saw him take his place at the wheel of the centre roulette table.
Vance put down his glass and, carefully lighting another Régie, rose leisurely.
"I opine the time to mingle has come," he murmured, as he moved toward the archway leading into the Gold Room.
As we entered the salon the door of Kinkaid's office opened, and Kinkaid appeared. On seeing Vance he smiled professionally, and greeted him in a tone of stereotyped geniality:
"Good evening, sir. You're quite a stranger here."
"Charmed not to have been entirely forgotten, don't y' know," Vance returned dulcetly. "Especially," he added, in a steady, flat voice, "as one of my objects in comin' tonight was to see you."
Kinkaid stiffened almost imperceptibly.
"Well, you see me, don't you?" he asked, with a cold smile and a simulated air of good-nature.
"Oh, quite." Vance, too, became facetiously cordial. "But I should infinitely prefer seein' you in the restful Jacobean surroundings of your private office."
Kinkaid looked at Vance with narrowed searching eyes. Vance returned the gaze steadily, without permitting the smile to fade from his lips.
Without a word Kinkaid turned and reopened the office door, stepping aside to let Vance and me precede him. He followed us, and closed the door behind him. Then he stood stiffly and, with steady eyes on Vance, waited.
Vance lifted his cigarette to his lips, took a deep inhalation, and blew a ribbon of smoke toward the ceiling.
"I say, might we sit down?" he asked casually.
"By all means--if you're tired." Kinkaid spoke in a metallic voice, his face an expressionless mask.
"Thanks awfully." Vance ignored the other's attitude, and settling himself in one of the low leather-covered chairs near the door, crossed his knees in lazy comfort.
Despite Kinkaid's unfriendly manner, I felt that the man was not at bottom antagonistic to his guest, but that, as a hardened gambler, he was assuming a defensive bearing in the face of some possible menace the nature of which was unknown to him. He knew, as every one else in the city knew, that Vance was closely, even though unofficially, associated with the District Attorney; and it occurred to me that Kinkaid probably thought Vance had come to him as proxy on some unpleasant official mission. His reaction to such a suspicion would naturally have been this belligerently guarded attitude.
Richard Kinkaid, his superficial appearance as the conventional gambler notwithstanding, was a cultured and intelligent man. He had been an honor student at college, and held two academic degrees. He spoke several languages fluently and, in his younger days, had been an archæologist of considerable note. He had written two books on his travels in the Orient, both of which may be found today in every public library.
He was a large man, nearly six feet tall; and despite his tendency to corpulency, it was obvious that he was powerfully built. His iron-gray hair, cut in a short pompadour, looked very light in contrast with his ruddy
complexion. His face was oval, but his coarse features gave him an aspect of ruggedness. His brow was low and broad; his nose short, flat and irregular; and his mouth was pinched and hard--a long, straight, immobile slit. His eyes, however, were the outstanding feature of his face. They were small, and the lids sloped downward at the outer corners, like those of a man with Bright's disease, so that the pupils seemed always to be above the centres of the visible orbs, giving to his expression a sardonic, almost sinister, cast. There were shrewdness, perseverance, subtlety, cruelty and aloofness in his eyes.
As he stood before us that night, one hand resting on the beautifully carved flat-top desk at the window, the other stuffed deep into the side pocket of his dinner jacket, he kept his gaze fixed on Vance, without displaying either annoyance or concern: his was the perfect "poker face."
"What I wished to see you about, Mr. Kinkaid," Vance remarked at length, "is a letter I received this morning. It occurred to me it might interest you, inasmuch as your name was not too fondly mentioned in it. In fact, it intimately concerns the various members of your family."
Kinkaid continued to gaze at Vance without change of expression. Nor did he speak or make the slightest move.
Vance contemplated the end of his cigarette for a moment. Then he said:
"I think it might be best if you perused this letter yourself."
He reached into his pocket and handed the two typewritten pages to Kinkaid, who took them indifferently and opened them.
I watched him closely as he read. No new expression appeared in his eyes, and his lips did not move; but the color of his face deepened perceptibly, and, when he had reached the end, the muscles in his cheeks were working spasmodically. His fat neck bulged over his collar, and ugly splotches of red spread over it.
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