The Man with the Crimson Box

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  “And I presume,” said Mr. Wainwright, musingly, “that once that property would be reconveyed by Mr. Muff—it would be utterly unrecoverable—by Miss Coe? On any basis—whatsoever? For I once had an aunt who had the possibility of recovery of a lost title, but the piece of real estate became passed, though once only, in the meanwhile, and—”

  Rutgers Allstyn raised a hand to indicate that an obvious case need not be rehearsed to him.

  “Quite correct. And in this case I might say that should Mr. Muff ever acquire technical ownership of that square block of valuable land, it would immediately be reconveyed by him within a few minutes to a certain rascally son-in-law he possesses—and in turn to the son-in-law’s father, who is a large builder on the Northwest Side. And who covets the site. And it would then be 101-per cent unrecoverable in law on any score whatsoever—even that of temporary insanity!—which young love, at 18, undoubtedly is!”

  But Mr. Wainwright’s face showed that he did not grasp passion of that type. Nevertheless, he asked an eager question.

  “Well what, Mr. Allstyn were you able to do for this girl then?—if, as you say, you dared not attempt to assail the contract?”

  “My advice to her,” stated Allstyn slowly, “had to be—believe it or not, Mr. Wainwright—to let the contract stand as was; but to counteract neatly that dangerous joker in it. In other words, to pull a certain swift one. On that rascally uncle! And I showed her a one hundred percent certain chess move by which to do exactly this. And, later, we made arrangements for the making of this chess move. And so—when it comes time for these possible contingencies to arise—well, they just can’t now; for the cards are all in her hands.”

  “But what were the two contingencies?” eagerly asked Mr. Wainwright. “By which she virtually kissed her $100,000 interest in her own property good-by?”

  “Well, the joker provided, Mr. Wainwright, that in the event that—” Allstyn stopped, and studied his client.

  “Maybe,” he said musingly, “I oughtn’t to tell you this—inasmuch as it’s never been publicized in any newspaper story, thanks to Silas Moff—ahem—Muff’s—having undoubtedly passed something to the recording clerk. However, facts are but facts. And I rather think you’re an individual who can keep his mouth shut.”

  “I am, believe it or not,” Wainwright assented.

  “I am sure you are,” the lawyer said. “Well—” he paused. “Well, the joker in question provided that in the event this girl failed to gain an acquittal in her first criminal case, or was disbarred during her first three months of practice—then that paper I spoke of was a quitclaim!”

  “And how,” Mr. Wainwright asked plaintively, “if you don’t mind telling me—did you effect a sure method of counteracting the joker?”

  “Very simply,” pronounced Allstyn, grimly. “I have a brother who is a judge on the Criminal Bench. Just now, however, in India on a trip. And it’s all arranged that when he comes back and ascends the bench again, Elsa is to be given some case due to come up before him, where acquittal of the defendant is all preordained. By ineluctable facts, you see. One of those purely formal trials. And that—that will be her first case.”

  “And pending which, Mr. Wainwright countered, “Miss Coe is naturally not chancing matters—by practicing?”

  “Oh no! Miss Coe is not chancing matters by going into court as a trial lawyer. But is practicing. Advising, you know—and so forth—on the outside of courtrooms.”

  “Well what,” asked Mr. Wainwright, “if she were suddenly appointed, by some judge, to defend some defendant? Right—right off the bat?”

  Allstyn raised his brows quizzically. “In such case, she’d have to get in touch with me—and let me pull the wires with the Chief Justice of the Criminal Assignment Bench, who is a friend of mine, and would get her released. That’s all there would be to that. I wouldn’t even have to explain to him.”

  “Yet it’s too bad,” Mr. Wainwright now said, “that her contract wasn’t smash—”

  “No,” said Allstyn firmly. “I assure you, my dear young man, that the method I just outlined was—and is—the simplest method of sidestepping that dangerous clause. And, thanks to it, she cannot now lose her $100,000 interest in her property. For she has the precise chessman—and the precise move—namely, nonappearance in court just now, and appearance later on, under circumstances arranged by my judiciarial brother—to render her provisional quitclaim quite impotent. I have related the whole case solely to show you how people sometimes can cut their own throats—with their own fountain pens.”

  “And all of which narration cheers me up very much,” was Mr. Wainwright’s comment. “For I sure would like to smash my contract and—but here—here is my contract.”

  And he handed his single sheet of paper to Allstyn.

  Allstyn unfolded it. Its jet-black typewritten lines were in carbon imprint only, but it was signed with many and various names, as undoubtedly was its original counterpart. And tilting back at ease in his swivel chair, Allstyn proceeded, with considerable curiosity, to read the extremely brief document.

  CHAPTER XXI

  An Offer, and an Acceptance

  State’s Attorney Vann, seated in the single wooden chair in the incommunicado cell of “John Doe,” tilted back against the cold stone wall, stared with puzzlement at his brown-eyed reddish-haired and quite cheeky prisoner. “So you won’t tell me anything, eh?” he said.

  “Why should I?” asked the other coolly, from the edge of the hardwood shelf-like bench where he sat. “You’re the State’s Attorney. Your business is prosecuting, isn’t it?”

  “Very much so—yes,” assented Vann. He was speculatively silent. And then barked suddenly: “Got a police record?”

  “Why ask me?” grunted the other. “You’ll know—within a few hours. For they took my fingerprints out there.” And he held up his ten fingers, around the balls of which faint black rings showed.

  Vann gave a helpless gesture with his own hands.

  “Well—why not say then, now?”

  “Listen,” was the other’s gruff retort. “You’re leading—in this race. And I’m following the pace to the 6-furlong pole—and holding anything I got in wraps.”

  “Following the pace?” echoed Vann. “To—to the six furlong pole? And holding—oh yes—I get it. Been a track tout in your day, eh?”

  The reddish-haired man stroked his chin as though perhaps he’d said too much. Then he replied. “Maybe! Maybe even a bookie. Maybe only an odds-checker. Maybe even a jock—in my youth!”

  “That last is easily believable. You’ve got a slim build as though you’d been light when you were a boy. How old are you?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Thirty-five. Am I right?”

  “Your error isn’t what you might call egregious.”

  ‘Ho! Had some schooling, haven’t you?”

  “Not so much as I might have had—if I’d lived in the 5th century.”

  ‘The 5th cent—why?”

  “Because Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Socrates, Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were all alive in that one century.”

  “Hm? You know things that I don’t.”

  “And why shouldn’t I?”

  “No reason at all,” said Vann testily. He paused. “Well, I hear you’re going to make things hard for me? That is—that you’re going to try to! With a long-drawn-out fight against indictment—and then against going to trial—going, in short, to use up a half-year or more?”

  “Did I say that—to anybody? I did not. What the hell difference, I’d like to know, would it be to me whether I was tried tomorrow—or a year from tomorrow? The verdict would be the same, wouldn’t it? As a matter of fact, I’d take a trial right tonight—tonight, Mr. State’s Attorney!—and a bench trial to boot!—if I could get it before Judge Hilford Penworth.”

 
Vann screwed up his forehead. “Of course,” he said grumpily, “that’s baloney that you’d take a trial tonight, but—but why Hilford Penworth, if I may ask? You been up against him before? And he was ‘easy’—with you?”

  “Hell—no! I never saw the man in my life. Would I be willing to go up against him again—if I had a trial record? No, I’ve got it from good authority—authority inside the law-chap in another city, however—that Penworth is the one judge on the criminal bench here in Chi who has an ultra-legal mind.”

  Vann laughed mirthlessly. “And God help you—if you come up against a strictly legal mind! You’d get the chair—in front of such—whereas, I’ll freely concede, in front of a jury of non-legal minds, you might, yes, you might come off with life imprisonment only.”

  “Well,” retorted the other gruffly, “I said what I said. Give me a legal mind—Penworth—and that’s all I’d ask. However,” and he shrugged his shoulders. “All this would be impossible anyway. So why discuss it? There’s the matter of indictment and—”

  “And coroner’s inquest—and everything,” admitted Vann. “However, for your education, Doe, let me say that a coroner’s inquest over the man you bumped off requires only 5 minutes—and will be over, moreover, by 3:30 o’clock or thereabouts today. While an indictment can be secured by the State’s Attorney from the sitting grand jury—and there’s always a grand jury sitting—in 10 minutes—in 5, in fact where the defendant waives contest, and requests the indictment under the law. As sometimes happens. So you see how little you know? However, about Judge Penworth, I happen to know he hasn’t heard a case in 6 months. Because he’s been hopelessly confined to his home, on Prairie Avenue, with severe gout in his right foot and equally severe arthritis in his left knee. Practically doesn’t leave his bedroom. And if it weren’t for that, believe me, I’d call your cheap bluff about him, because—”

  “Because why? And why—cheap bluff?”

  For good and sufficient reasons, Vann did not answer that first query. But did the second.

  “Why—bluff? Because that’s what it is—based on some knowledge on your part that Penworth’s laid up. But you’re playing close to the cushion on a belief like that, for Penworth would hold a trial in a minute—if I asked him—with an open-and-shut case like yours, certain to be settled within two hours at most. Except that—”

  “Yes? Except that—what?”

  “Except that, of course, he couldn’t go down to the courthouse. Which makes your bluff 24-carat!”

  “Oh, it does, eh? Well, do you imagine for a minute that I don’t know a judge can determine any spot he wishes for his courtroom? His own house—if he wants to? So—where’s my bluff now, eh? It’s you, S. A., who’s the cheap bluffer. For you need an entire year to lay out a case against me. O-kay! You shall have it. But a full year. For when I get hold of a lawyer—which I haven’t got yet—I’ll first file a—”

  “Wait!”

  Vann was staring unbelievably at his prisoner.

  “Wait, Doe! Are you really on the level—with what you says Would you actually take a trial—before Penworth—and tonight? And would you sign a jury waiver in the next hour?—and a request to the grand jury for immediate indictment to clear self of criminal charge!—as it’s called?—and a petition for immediate trial?—and an acceptance of tonight as a trial date?—if I sent them all over to you?”

  “Certainly I would. So what—”

  “So—what? Hell fire, if you would—if you did—I can get you the trial okay—right in Penworth’s own home. For he lives—alone and a bachelor—in an ancient old house with rooms like—like barns. Like carbarns—so far as that goes. And he—but hell,” added Vann, disgusted with himself for having talked, in semi-friendly mien, this long with a murderer and safe-burglar, “you’re dishing out the bunk.”

  “Am I?” said the other coolly. “I’ll show you whether I am or not. Send over all those papers you have to have signed—and I’ll sign ’em. And I’ll go before Penworth tonight. For the sooner I go on trial—the sooner I can be on my way.”

  Vann stared at the other. This was so good an offer for his purpose that it was literally too good to be true. “You’d better think on it,” he said cautiously. “For five minutes.” And rang for the turnkey. “Because I don’t want to go to all that trouble—if you’re going to change your mind. Yes, think on it. I’ll be right back.”

  But, on the other side now of the big iron-barred door, Vann turned to the prisoner. And through the grating asked a single question.

  “Who’d be your mouthpiece?”

  “Mouthpiece? Oh—I don’t need one.”

  “Don’t need one? Oh—yes—you—do! If for no other reason than that your trial might be set aside by a higher court if you didn’t have one. We-ell—if that’s your dodge, Doe, we’ll just call it a day and—”

  “No—wait!” The other was at the grating. “I tell you I don’t want a mouthpiece. Nor need one. But if you insist on my having one—okey, then.”

  “Well—who would you want?”

  “Why ask me? I—I don’t know any mouthpieces—here in Chi.”

  “So?” retorted Vann. “So! Then they imported you in here for that cribcracking job, eh?”

  “Oh, sure—sure,” said the other, with what proved, however to be sarcasm. “I was flown in here all the way from—Cicero!”

  “And that,” declared Vann, “may be more truth than poetry. I’ve known more than one cribcracker who came from Al Capone’s territory just the other side of our west boundary. I wouldn’t be surprised if I picked up a hot pedigree on you—out there in Cicero.”

  “You might at that,” agreed the other laconically. “And then again—you might not! But let’s get back to business. I told you I was willing to go to bat. Tonight. Before Penworth. Penworth only. And if you think I have to have a mouthpiece, then pass me one—any one. The Public Def—”

  “We don’t have a Public Defender any more,” said Vann curtly. “The office has been abolished. If you had no lawyer of your own, the judge himself, in that event, would assign you one. And—however, wait a minute.” And Vann went up the empty corridor lined with equally empty cells, and into the triple-glassed telephone booth standing at the further end. Where he rang the Criminal Records Department at the Detective Bureau. “Riggs talking,” came an alert voice on the other end of the wire.

  “Vann speaking, Riggs. I don’t suppose that by any chance whatsoever you’ve yet dug up a pedigree—on that noon-hour arrest made by the Squad Car Number 18? The fellow, I mean, who’s being held in my own lockup?”

  “No, Mr. Vann, I haven’t. But I can tell you definitely right away that he has no record here in Chicago. Including Cicero.”

  “Including Al-Caponeville too, eh? So he’s an out-of-towner? But—how do you know all this so soon, Riggs! And how do you happen to be able to include Bad-Man-town to our west, there?”

  “Well, Mr. Vann, your man has an unusual pattern on his thumb that throws him definitely in a category in which there isn’t over 300 cards. And almost an equally odd one on his index finger that puts him in a sub-class of that with not over 20 cards. Which makes it possible to say, right off the bat, that he has no record in Chicago. Since he was a special pickup of yours, I tried to make things as complete for you as possible. And called up Charlie Graines, who handles the Cicero records at present; and gave him the two patterns on the phone. And got a reply even while our connection was still on. No record. But of course your man may have plenty of records—in some other burg.”

  “Yes. Maybe and probably!”

  “What are you holding him for, Mr. Vann r’ If you don’t mind saying?”

  “Watch the papers!” replied Vann. “And you’ll see what he was brought into Chicago for. Thanks, Riggs. Send his card over to my office, will you?”

  And he hung up.

  And called another
number.

  And, to a man’s voice which answered, he asked:

  “Let me speak to Mr. Silas Moffat.”

  “Silas Moffit speaking.”

  “Oh—Mr. Moffit? I rather thought that was your voice—but wasn’t sure. Well, Mr. Moffit, this is Vann—Louis Vann—the State’s Attorney. Mr. Moffit, you told me about a week ago—in discussing with me the more or less impossibility of your renewing the mortgage on my home out there in Rogers Park, to let you know the moment I had a 100 per cent watertight case—one scheduled, that is, no only to go before a senior judge, but one where absolutely everything was against the defendant, and he had no attorney—nor money for any. Where—in short—as you put it—the case was in the bag for the State—and the trial practically a formality. And you intimated—I trust you remember that?—that if I’d let you know of such a case well in advance—you might extend my mortgage at least till a month or so after election. To be honest with you, Mr. Moffit, the tentative and somewhat semi-proposition smacked just a bit of no less than a certain one of those old-time melodramas played a few years back on the Dixiebelle. That showboat that was anchored here a while in the river—and it—but anyway, you recall your proposition?”