He rose. “Say not so. I — too!” And he would like much at that moment to have mopped off his brow. A second later the Galioto family and lawyer were in the outer hallway and as he heard them climb into the elevator, he dropped back into his swivel chair.
“Lucky for me I’ve been well equipped with all the data in the world necessary to prove my point. And honestly — to boot. Now if I’d been in any other business in the world, I couldn’t have given them the lowdown on where they stood. I owe the government a few thanks on that!” He mused a moment. “At that, I half believe it is the green paint on her house at 734 Sedgwick Street that really carried the day.”
And thus he continued musing. For whether the thing was a thing growing out of his own specialized knowledge, or a lucky discovery of the green paint on a house in Little Sicily, the whole matter had been an honest transaction. And therefore he was happy. It was straight and aboveboard. He had given an honest elucidation of certain conditions in the Texan and Mexican gas fields, not known to the layman at all. And through that — or else perchance, the green paint on No. 734 Sedgwick Street, he had made good Cary’s fearful mistake, with an honest $10,033 in currency, in which Mr. Cary himself would have an opportunity later to restore the thirty-three dollars.
And as he leaned forward at length and filled out the stub of his check-book, still gratefully reflecting that the tinted mate to that stub now constituted a paper which, as soon as it was perforated by Mrs. Galioto’s bank in the morning, protected him against all the allegations in the world concerning carelessness, larceny as bailee, or any other legal charge, a boy whom he recognized through the open door as Gordon’s office boy came into that outer office with a yellow envelope in his hand. And as the youth made his way gingerly over toward his desk, Carson dismissed from his mind all vestiges of the bad half hour he had just lived through, exactly as he had dismissed, thirty minutes earlier from his mind, the Henry Desmond problem, for he knew instinctively that that telegram gave the answer to the question of who was Casper Wolff, who entered people’s houses in the dead of night and left library slips concerning books on snakes in his wake.
CHAPTER XIV
THE BUBBLE
THE boy stepped up to Carson’s desk.
“Mister Gordon sent this over,” he shrilled. And left as precipitately as he had come.
With an appreciable degree of curiosity Carson ripped open the envelope which Ramsey Gordon, the ever and most courteous, had forborne to do. Inside was a generously sized message, evidently replete with many details, and its full contents read:
Man described in your wire is lawyer in this town, somewhere between shyster and legitimate. Not above crooked practices, with also several judgments recorded against him. Needs money. Has wife. Also two children. Lives in fashionable suburb. Tries to maintain front, but has fairly shady and tricky business. Has strangle-hold on all cheap vaudeville, theatrical and circus business this town, which forms bulk of his practice. Best wishes. Rang party on receipt of your wire and found same to be staying Ratagoba House, your city, today.
Sam.
Carson read the telegram carefully twice. It didn’t disclose very much of value, except perhaps the vital fact that Casper Wolff who had turned snake investigator and housebreaker was at least a man with a semi-reputation to maintain, vested in a wife and two children living in a suburb. What would be his reaction under these conditions when he was confronted with the knowledge that the facts were out that he had broken the law by entering a house and could be sent to the penitentiary? How much could he be bluffed?
There was no such thing as either procrastination or fear in Carson’s make-up. He had been from boyhood up the original “go and do it,” type. Writing a hasty note for his stenographer, he put his hat on his head and went downstairs into the bright post-noontime sunlight. Straight west to Clark Street he walked, and there boarded a car which carried him northward across the river with its dilapidated pilings and its archaic wooden sailing vessels, plastered with bright-colored theatre lithographs, moored to the docks. From here the car rolled downward into a block of cheap lodging houses such as sailors occupied, and then stopped at the corner where the Ratagoba House reared its seven or more ancient stories into the sky.
Inside at the desk he found that Casper Wolff was booked in room 418, and dismounting at the fourth floor a few seconds later from the ancient wheezing elevator he made his way along a hall covered with worn faded red carpet, redolent with the smell of surreptitiously cooking coffee trailing over the transoms of rooms occupied by out-of-work chorus girls. At length he knocked on the door of room 418.
A pause, and then footsteps. The door was flung open by a man in his vest and shirt-sleeves, a man of about fifty with rather bushy grey hair, with keen but not too strictly honest greenish eyes, with ready-made suit that fit neither well nor badly, garish silk shirt with excessively large cuff-buttons, face muscles sagging a bit, his whole appearance suggesting the lawyer who makes a living large enough to carry his family on from week to week, but never enough to climb into a condition of financial security. In the sunny old-fashioned window sat a girl with a child’s picture book of the Mother Goose type in her hands, the gaudily colored illustrations carrying clear across the room to Carson in the doorway; she was a girl of about nineteen, but with somewhat immature childish face, pretty to be sure in that same childish way, but dressed flashily and cheaply.
“Your name is Wolff? Casper Wolff?” asked Carson.
“The same,” said the man in the doorway. Surprise was in his voice.
“May I speak with you?”
“Certainly. Alone?”
“If you please.”
The man turned to the girl with the bright picture-book in her hands. “Run along to your room, Lo. This gentleman and I wish to talk business.” The girl obediently, her bright book under her arm, arose and left the room, turning up the hall apparently to a room of her own on the same floor.
Wolff motioned his visitor to a chair and then closed the door. His tone of voice was impatience tempered appreciably by curiosity.
“Now what is it you wanted to see me about?”
Carson fastened his gaze undeviatingly on the St. Paul lawyer.
“Mr. Wolff, what would you say were I to tell you that last night you wilfully entered the home of a Chicagoan on St. Giles Lane, tried to break open an old-fashioned safe in that house, dropped evidence which has led me here as straight as an arrow to its target, and left enough of your finger-prints on that old strongbox to send you to our Illinois state penitentiary for about five years?” The last was a shot in the dark. “And you — a man with a wife and two children.”
The man Wolff’s jaw dropped. His eyes opened in dismay. Consternation was written in his flabby features. He sank weakly into the nearest chair. He tried to speak, but only swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat. It was plain that the completeness of the case against him had staggered him. He half moved one hand toward his vest pocket as though to try and regain whatever evidence he had dropped, and then stopped the motion with a weak gesture.
“You — you — you are from the Police Department?” he managed to say finally, admitting nothing.
“No,” replied Carson curtly, “I am not from the Police Department. I am merely on my way from Chicago’s Loop to the East Chicago Avenue police station to have you brought over there and questioned. Wolff, what’s the idea? What made you book yourself up for Joliet Penitentiary for from five years to longer?”
Wolff rose from his chair, his whole attitude that of anxiety. It was plain that he didn’t know how much his opponent knew.
“Kate Barwick has been — has — you know Kate? — Kate has talked?”
“I am saying nothing,” laughed Carson mirthlessly. “All you need know is that here in your room I sit in full possession of the facts and last night I didn’t know you even existed.”
Wolff passed a hand over a brow that glistened with moisture. �
��What do you want?” he asked. “What — what did you come here for?”
“Wolff,” said the younger man, “you are monkeying in a certain case concerning a Zuri snake from India, in which I and my fiancée are slightly involved. It concerns us not, I am frank to say — but it concerns us a great deal when you enter her home to steal it. Wolff, I am going to give you a chance to get out of this thing providing you are willing to come clean — otherwise I am going to turn you over to the police. I have always believed in going to the man first in a case like this, because — well — because the police are too quick to forget a man’s wife and his kids in their zeal to send him back to the greystone building with the iron bars on the window. So it’s up to you, Wolff. I’ve got the goods on you. What have you got to say?”
Wolff heaved a great sigh. An experienced psychologist could see that he was a man who was able to grasp a changed status of affairs in an instant — a man who knew at a glance when the chessmen were so arrayed that the king was to be checkmated.
“You’re not from the police?” he said hopefully.
“I am not,” Carson repeated. “Nor am I a newspaperman. Carson is my name, and I’m a Government employe, engaged to the young woman in the family whose house you broke into last night.” And he added shrewdly, as a final bombshell: “And how is Mrs. Wolff going to take the inevitable White Slave charges that the police are going to lodge against you with respect to the girl I just glimpsed in this room? Brought the girl down here with you from St. Paul, didn’t you?”
Wolff paled till he was as white as chalk, at the same time making an utterly hopeless gesture with his hands. “I’m going to come clean with you, young man, because — as you say — I’ve got a wife and two kids in a certain city in this country. And for God’s sake be decent. If this thing ever got into the papers, the little woman back home would never survive it. For I well know the police won’t end with the housebreaking charge. They’ll — they’ll tack on a Mann Act charge with respect to that girl Lola. And that — I’m innocent of that, I tell you — that would just about kill my wife.” He gulped. “As for what I’m doing here — well, let me tell you something. There isn’t a man on earth who won’t fall for big money — at least any man who has tried to buck the high cost of living with a family of three besides himself. But I’ll do anything you say to avoid notoriety — and — and any Mann Act charges. I’ve mixed up in something that was no business of mine. I admit it. And by Heavens, I’m singed for doing it. I’ll tell you about that Zuri snake. It’s the key and the only key to the location of an unrecorded twenty thousand dollar Federal Reserve Bank gold note stolen from the bank of Bixburg, North Dakota!”
CHAPTER XV
THE STRANGE STORY OF TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS
AN UNRECORDED twenty thousand dollar Federal Reserve Bank gold note stolen from the bank of Bixburg, North Dakota!
At the St. Paul lawyer’s words, a roaring sound seemed to swell to a crescendo in Carson’s ears — he wondered if he had heard aright. An unrecorded twenty thousand dollar gold note stolen from a North Dakota bank! Only too well did he know that woven into the affairs of himself, Marcia, Cary — and even Mrs. Angelo Galioto — was a bill of that denomination — a huge and precious bill that had come in the very nick of time to save Cary Desmond from the results of his own folly. And only too well did he realize that coincidences in which twenty thousand dollar gold notes figure in the affairs of two different sets of people occur only in the minds of fevered writers of fiction. By instinct alone, if not instant and instinctive reasoning, he discerned that the strange communication with its equally strange contents which had come from Henry Desmond must have something, unbelievable as it sounded, to do with this case involving the Zuri snake, Jake Jennings, Casper Wolff and the girl Lo. Yet what the connection could be was an enigma at whose solution he threw up his hands. It was all too overpowering for him. His forehead was creased into painful lines as he leaned forward, chin on fingertips, and asked:
“You say, Wolff, that this snake is the sole key to the location of an unrecorded twenty thousand dollar gold note? And the note was stolen?” He paused. “Who — what has Jake Jennings to do with this case?”
The man Wolff took a couple of turns up and down the floor and then dropped into a chair from which he surveyed his visitor with an equally troubled look.
“I’d better tell you something about Jake Jennings and Lola first,” he said abruptly. He wet his lips. “I’m in the law business up in St. Paul — but you’ve evidently learned that already somehow; so no need of my repeating it. Most of my business is theatrical business, cheap stuff, to be sure, but it brings in the greater part of my income. Well — about Lo. Lola Jennings is her name. She’s Jake Jennings’ young wife. But when I first met Lola Jennings she happened to be Lola Higgs. Harry Purvis who owns the Purvis Carnival outfit was going through Missouri working the Ozark towns some years back. His snake charmer — girl by the name of Nellie LaSalle — died on him while they were traveling. Seems he heard that about ten miles from the town where his outfit was playing at this time there was a girl — a mere kid — who was known for miles around for her fearlessness in picking up reptiles, toads, scorpions, snakes of all kinds, and handling ‘em as if they were mere clay. So Harry rode over to this town. He saw the girl. She was Lola, Higgs — the girl you just saw in here. She was an ignorant girl dressed in a single garment of cotton. Never gone to a school a day in her life. Her pappy and her mammy, as she called ‘em, and about sixteen half-naked brats lived in a cave in the mountain side. The poorest of poor white trash they were; but if you’ve ever been around the Ozarks and Arkansaw you’ll have seen others like ‘em. Lo was about seventeen — couldn’t spell, couldn’t write her own name, couldn’t even count the fingers on her right hand. But she knew snakes — could handle any of ‘em — wasn’t afraid even of the famous Missouri Black Rattler.
“So Harry Purvis,” continued Wolff, “hired her to take the place of Nellie LaSalle in the snake pit; and the hillbilly girl, not being a bad looker, made good after being taught the ropes a bit — filled the place as well or better than the LaSalle woman. But up in the outskirts of St. Paul Harry Purvis got in trouble on account of her. Couple of women from the Children’s Aid Society got wind that a girl under age was working the snakes in his outfit, and tried to take her out. Harry came to me — I tied up the two women temporarily with an injunction — and in the meantime he had a chance to move his outfit across the state line into Wisconsin. After that Lo was taught to tell her age as eighteen when any busybody women asked her. Well — so much for that. It has a bearing on this matter.
“Next I heard of Lo was about eleven months later when a fellow named Jennings — a flashy-looking man that looked to me like a grafter of some sort — brought her into St. Paul and came to my office with her to find out whether there was any cause why she and he couldn’t be married. Seems he had glimpsed the kid in the snake-pit back in some small city, and had fallen for her. She was a bit under age, but I fixed it up for Jennings with some affidavits I got from her parents down in the Ozarks, signed with crosses; and thus Lola Higgs chucked Harry Purvis’ outfit and became Jake Jennings’ wife.”
“And where does that Zuri snake come into the affair?” asked Carson bewilderedly, wondering what the discussion of Lola’s illiteracy and her parentage had to do with the case in question.
“I’m coming to that,” said Casper Wolff resignedly. He heaved a sigh. “Well, I didn’t think I’d ever see or hear of Lola Higgs, now Lola Jennings, again till she came to my office Monday noon just four days ago. She’d spent the last cent she had on earth, saved up in a bag around her neck, to get to St. Paul. She’d left Bixburg, North Dakota, early that morning and when she got to St. Paul, somebody recognizing that part of my name that she was able to remember — Wolff — put her on a car and brought her over to my office. Remember, she couldn’t even read street signs.”
“Had she left Jennings?” asked Carson point
edly.
“I’ll say she had,” said Wolff. “She hated him worse than poison. She told me something of their life together since Jennings had married her out of the snake pit of Harry Purvis’ Carnival. A regular hand-to-mouth existence they’d led, Jennings mixed up practically all the time in various kinds of shady propositions. Once or twice they were actually down to hardpan — didn’t have the wherewithal for another meal. The final and big break between them, however, took place in Bixburg, North Dakota. Jennings, it seemed, had staked a friend of his — a fellow who worked along similar lines of graft in the West, and who was in trouble in Denver — to the costs of an appeal on a conviction this man had suffered in the Colorado courts. The appeal had failed, and his friend was slated to go over the road. So the friend, to pay Jennings partially back for the money the latter had thrown into the pot, sent Jennings a valuable list of names known as a ‘gilt-edged sucker list.’ This list, comprising over a thousand picked names and addresses, and all in alphabetical order according to the first letters of the last names, had been selected from many thousands of lucrative swindles, and comprised the cream of the so-called ‘mining-stock suckers’. Not a person on it but had within three years invested at least five hundred dollars in stocks of various companies purporting to be silver, copper and gold mining companies. You know the kind of schemes though, I guess.”
“Know them?” ejaculated Carson. “Know them? I should say I do know them. I’m in a business devoted to exposing such schemes. There are people who seem almost predisposed by birth to fall for any kind of a precious-metal mine. Their names are sold back and forth between sharpers for as high as ten and fifteen dollars apiece.”
The Riddle of the Yellow Zuri Page 20