by Helen Wells
“Sell me your hair! It’s magnificent!”
“I—I need it myself,” Cherry faltered. “Did you make a—”
“Black curls! Black! I’ll give you a good price.”
“No!” Cherry shouted back. “Please tell me if you made a red wig for a man.”
“My father did make a red wig, last year. Wait. I’ll look it up in my books.”
Cherry sat down and glanced around the strange shop. The man came back beaming. “Here it is. A red wig for Mrs. J. F. Thornton, 1474 Columbus Drive, shoulder length bob, with an additional chignon for evening wear.”
“No, that’s not it,” Cherry said wearily. “Thank you.—No! I won’t sell you my curls!”
She escaped in a hurry, laughing despite her disappointment.
Wigmakers four, five, six, and seven were also disappointments. The eighth looked more promising. “Effanjay’s Wig Company—Street Wear—Costume Wigs—Wigs for Dolls—Custom-Made and Rental.” Rental! Cherry went in.
“Yes, young lady, we rented a red wig to a man two weeks ago. But why do you want to know?”
Cherry smiled mischievously. “Because the man is my uncle and I want to play a joke on him. Only I haven’t his current address.” She hoped that by not asking the man’s name, she would sound convincing. It worked. The wigmaker opened his books.
“79 Merriam Avenue.”
“Thank you!”
Cherry flounced out, encouraged once more. Too bad she could not get the name, too, but the address was the thing. She was lucky to get it.
79 Merriam Avenue was a private frame house in the suburbs. Cherry strolled along the opposite side of the street, looking at it, hoping she was unobtrusive. It was just a gray house with a hedge in front of it, a flight of steps to the stoop. It stood between two other houses, their small lawns adjoining without fences. A window shade in one of 79’s second-story windows was pulled up as she watched. Someone was home. No car parked out in front. No dog. Cherry strolled around the block several times, wondering if she really dared go up and ring the doorbell.
Finally she screwed up all her courage and started to cross the street. Her heart thumped wildly. Was anyone watching her from those curtained windows? She did not venture to look up. What was she going to find in there? What danger was she deliberately walking into? Yet her feet carried her forward and her eyes looked ahead to the doorbell.
She was almost across the street when a man in shirt sleeves came limping from the back yard—but whether from the back yard of 79 or 77 Merriam Avenue, it was impossible to tell. He limped badly and was groaning. He almost stumbled into Cherry.
“Oh-h—excuse me, miss! Ugh, my ankle!”
Instantly her nurse’s instincts were alert. “Have you hurt yourself? Let’s see.”
The man extended a stiff ankle. “—working in my garage—fell and twisted my ankle—no one’s home—I’ve got to”—he said painfully—“get to the corner drugstore. Get Doc to look at this for me, if he’s in. At least get some liniment. Oh-h!”
“I’ll go get the liniment for you,” Cherry said. “I’m a nurse and I’ll look at your ankle for you. Which is your house?”
He pointed to Number 79. That was a stroke of luck! Now she could get in without having to force or talk her way in!
“Well, get in the house,” Cherry said. “I’ll be right in, with some liniment.”
He dug in his pants pocket. “Here’s a dollar for it. You’re awfully kind.”
“Not at all.” She sped away, after first seeing that the man slowly limped into Number 79.
In five minutes she was back with the liniment and heavy gauze—five minutes too late. A car with three men in it was just turning the corner at the far end of the block. And 79 Merriam Avenue, doors and windows locked, stood deserted.
CHAPTER XI
Nocturnal Visitor
CHERRY COULD GUESS ONLY TOO VIVIDLY WHAT THE consequences of her wild-goose chase might be. Her action had warned the blackmailing fortuneteller that Owens or his nurse was trying to fight back. Now he would strike in earnest—strike hard, and soon.
Cherry was sick with remorse at the way she had fumbled things and given her plans away. Whatever now befell Scott Owens, she would have accelerated it. She decided she must be extra careful, take every possible precaution—and make Mr. Scott do the same—to forestall any next step by Carroll and his gang.
But the musician insisted on a most foolish and reckless step.
The pianist was still ill and worrying. He was quite unreasonable in what he demanded, and that unreasonableness was a symptom of his illness. His nurse tried to point out to him that he was not thinking clearly. But to no avail: the impractical, oversensitive artist was never a very sensible being, even when well.
“No, you’ve got to do it for me, Cherry!” he insisted from his bed. “I want those papers—the proof—with me. Here. Right here in the house.”
“But they won’t be safe here,” Cherry pleaded. “And they are safe in the bank vault.”
“The papers will be perfectly all right at home. I have a wall safe here in my room.”
“A wall safe isn’t any too secure.”
“Yes, it is,” Scott insisted stubbornly. “The only reason I use a bank vault is because I’m away traveling so much, and don’t like to leave papers lying about in an empty house.”
“Please, please, Mr. Scott, leave the papers where they are! What do you want them for, anyhow? You can’t do anything much with them, you said.”
“Never mind that. I simply want them here. If I can touch them, see them, I’ll feel a lot better.”
He fretted so, and wore himself out with such worrying that after two or three days of useless argument, Cherry gave in. She agreed to go to the bank vault, get the precious papers of proof—she still did not know what they proved or disproved—and bring them home to Mr. Scott.
First, he instructed her to write a letter of explanation to Miss Kitty, and ask her to send the vault key and a written power of attorney to open the safety deposit box. He himself did not have this. Without these, Cherry could not have touched the box. She wrote as Scott Owens demanded. Two more days passed while awaiting a reply. Two anxious days during which Cherry tried yet again to get her patient to abandon his foolish plan. He would not be moved. Then Miss Kitty’s letter came, with the key enclosed.
“Now you’ll open the bank vault,” Scott Owens said.
“Please, no, Mr. Scott—”
“You must go—I’ll get out of bed and go myself—”
“All right, I’ll do as you say,” Cherry said, heavy with misgivings.
Scott’s thin face looked happy. “It’s documentary evidence of my innocence, don’t you see?”
“All the more reason it should be left in a safe place—at a time like this!”
But she had no choice. She went downtown to the bank.
The vault was reached by going down a flight of marble stairs, deep into the basement of the bank. Cherry followed an airless, electrically lighted corridor, protected by iron bars, and came to a locked, iron-bar door, like a prison door. An armed bank guard on the inside, gun in its holster on his hip, unlocked the door and admitted her. Cherry looked around. She had never been in one of these safety deposit vaults before, although almost every bank has one. She was in a storeroom of vast wealth.
This was a sort of noiseless subterranean office, with two men working at desks, fans and electric lights going. Five or six more uniformed, armed bank guards were ranged quietly along the room and in an inside room. A kind of mammoth safe, its thick round steel door standing open, its complicated time lock exposed, comprised a circular entrance into that next room, which was the vault itself. The whole second room seemed to be a giant safe.
“Yes?” One of the men at the desks looked up at Cherry.
“I wish to open the vault rented by Mr. Scott and Miss Kitty Owens. Here is the key, and power of attorney signed by Miss Owens, made out to me. And here is id
entification of who I am.” Cherry produced a letter addressed to her, and her own savings bankbook.
“Hmm.” The bank official examined them all very carefully. “Have you any further identification?”
“My Nurses’ Association card.” Cherry opened her purse and showed this too.
The man beckoned her to a small counter. While she waited, he pulled out a file, extracted a card with Miss Kitty’s signature, compared it to the signature on the power of attorney she had sent Cherry. Then he asked Cherry to sign her name and compared it with her signature on her nurse’s card. Satisfied, he finally permitted her to sign an authorization to open the Owens’s vault box, then he countersigned the authorization, then he stamped it in a bank machine, and at last handed it to her.
“Now, this admits you into the vault. Show this to one of the guards in there.”
“Gosh,” Cherry thought, “they certainly are careful. This is a regular arsenal.”
She stepped over the round, thick, steel rim into the vault itself, and found herself in an amazing room. Its walls were lined with hundreds of locked steel drawers, identified only by engraved numbers. Some of the drawers, or safety deposit boxes, were small, some deeper, some enormous. Four armed guards stood about this inside room. It could, Cherry saw, be closed off with an emergency gate. There was an emergency telephone in here, too. A few desks and chairs were placed in the center of this vault. At one of them, a man was sorting business papers. It was very quiet, except for the hum of fans. The electric lights threw a powerful glare into every possible corner.
A gray-haired guard was grinning at Cherry. “Haven’t you ever seen a vault before, young lady?”
“No, I haven’t. What’s in these boxes, anyhow?” Cherry asked curiously.
“Mostly people’s papers brought here for safekeeping—stocks and bonds, business contracts, insurance policies, wills, deeds to property, mortgages. But in some of those great big boxes there are valuable paintings, and gold and silver art objects. And there’re enough diamonds locked in these walls to ransom a king.”
Cherry was breathless. In one way this place looked only businesslike and rather grim, just rows of shining gray steel drawers. But it held enough drama, Cherry realized, enough potential fireworks for many, many people’s lives to—She cut short her imaginings and said, “May I have my box, please?” and handed the guard the key, with its tag bearing the number 14303.
The guard took her key and authorization slip, went down the rows of drawers, found 14303, unlocked it with the Owens’s key and then with an additional key which was chained to his belt. He slid the box out of its slot in the wall and brought it back to Cherry at one of the desks. She sat down and examined it. It was a very long, narrow, shallow, black metal box with a hinged lid.
Lifting the lid, she found it crammed with papers. There was also a red tooled-leather jewel box, locked, which Cherry passed over. Mr. Scott had said the papers he wanted were in a long blue envelope. Here it was! It was not sealed. Cherry was bursting with curiosity but she had no right to look at Mr. Owens’s confidential papers, and she did not. She put the blue envelope in her purse and tucked her purse tight against her side. The guard returned the box to its place in the wall safe, locked it in, and handed Cherry back her key. She walked out through the two rooms, and the heavy iron outer gate swung shut and locked again behind her.
It was only when she had climbed up the stairs and out onto the busy street that Cherry wondered if anyone could have been following her. She had no reason to think so—she had seen nothing, heard nothing untoward. But a faint prick of uneasiness needled her mind. A sort of animal instinct in her had been awakened, and she felt sure someone had been looking at her.
“I’m just being apprehensive,” she decided. “All I have to worry about is getting off this crowded street and home with these irreplaceable papers, as fast as I can!”
At home her patient was awaiting her, eager and bright-eyed. He put the blue envelope under his pillow.
“For goodness’ sake, Mr. Scott, don’t leave those papers under your pillow! Find a safer place!”
“Where? Inside my piano scores? In Kit’s desk? Oh, of course. There’s a wall safe here in my room—I’ll put them in right away—Why, Bébé! Hello! Come in, come in. I was wishing for visitors.”
Cherry bent over her patient and gently reminded him, “Mr. Scott, put the envelope away right now while we’re both thinking of it!”
Scott asked Bébé and Cherry to go outside in the hall. They waited a few minutes, until Scott called.
“Bébé, sit down,” he said lightheartedly. Scott seemed happier than in days, now that he had the papers with him. “No, not on that chair. On the big one.”
“That chair and me,” said the fat man, “is like Joe Spratt and his grandmother, no?”
“No!” Scott laughed. “You mean Jack Spratt and his—”
“Don’t told me already. I mean Humpty Plumpty and the Hi Diddle Doodle, no?”
Scott’s laughter rang out. “Bébé’s setting Mother Goose to music—Cherry, where are you going?”
“Nowhere. Just to my room. I—I’m a little tired.”
She was not so much tired as depressed about the presence of those papers. Later, again, she protested to Scott. But the sick man would not give them up. “I want the papers here, to show the press, just in case. But I do admit, Cherry, that Carroll would certainly like to have these papers in his possession. If he could get hold of them, the extortion would start at once.”
“Then why—why—” Cherry exhorted. But still he would not surrender them. Cherry wondered again what they told and what Mr. Scott was hiding.
“Nothing can happen!” he scoffed as Cherry made him comfortable for the night. “Jen and Lucien are right downstairs, and Lucien’s a light sleeper. We have three yapping poodles. And you’re on the same floor with me now.” For, in Miss Kitty’s absence and during Scott’s slow rest and recovery, Cherry had moved down a floor. She now temporarily occupied Miss Kitty’s bedroom, directly across the hall from Mr. Scott’s sleeping room.
“Well, at least we’ll take the precaution of using the bell,” Cherry said stubbornly.
Cherry referred to an arrangement she used now that Mr. Scott was no longer so ill. She had stopped her exhausting, all-night watching, and now went to bed and to sleep herself. Ordinarily a nurse would awaken at the sound of her own name. But Cherry was not certain of hearing a faint call from the patient’s bedroom. Therefore she had bought a small hand bell, tied a long cord to it, fastened the end of the cord to Mr. Scott’s bed, and nightly she placed the bell on the edge of a chair beside her own bed. A tug on the cord by Mr. Scott, and the bell tumbled down, making enough clatter to thoroughly arouse her. Scott Owens did not ring often, only once or twice so far.
The bell beside Cherry’s bed rang that night. Cherry awoke with a start. She groped for her robe, thinking it must be very late, and started to climb drowsily out of bed. Then she saw a figure in the hall, silhouetted between her open door and Mr. Scott’s open door, caught in the faint street light diffused from Scott’s windows. She was suddenly wide awake. Her patient had gotten out of bed!—she was horrified—she must get him right back into bed. Quickly she snapped on the lights, and choked back the screams rising in her throat. For it was not Scott Owens. It was a powerfully built man whose left shoulder was noticeably higher than his right one. He ran soundlessly down the stairs.
She heard the front door close, then heard the motor of a car. She ran into Mr. Scott’s room, leaned out the window, saw nothing. She turned on a lamp and ran to her patient. He was asleep. He awakened uneasily and blinked at her.
“What’s the matter?” he yawned.
Cherry apologetically told him she thought she had heard him call out for the papers hidden in the wall safe, and hastily added that she must have been dreaming.
Scott laughed sleepily and scoffingly told her not to worry about them—they were perfectly safe and he direc
ted her to the wall safe to check it. To her great relief, she found that the safe was closed tight. It had held fast against the thief’s efforts! The papers were still untouched.
But if the Carroll gang had been bold enough to break into their victim’s house—They surely were going to strike now!
Quickly Cherry settled her patient for the night and went back to her own room. She stumbled over Do, Re, and Mi, fast asleep on the stair landing.
CHAPTER XII
Miss Ames Is “Detained”
ALL THAT SLEEPLESS NIGHT, CHERRY EXAMINED HER conscience. It was a conscience that ached and reproached her. She felt it was partly her fault that the thug had broken in, for Mr. Scott’s papers of proof were here and she had brought them here. And she still felt it was her duty to take action for her helpless patient, in his behalf and for his protection. Miss Kitty was still out of town: there was not another soul besides Cherry who knew Scott Owens was in trouble: only Cherry remained to help him.
By morning she had come to a decision. She remained quietly in her own room to think things out. Carroll would strike soon. She could not delay action any longer. She could not go to the police for help. The only thing left was to smoke out Carroll and try to learn how he would strike. Forewarned, Scott might be forearmed. She was going out after Carroll. By any means that came to hand.
If her methods had to be questionable, at least her motives were beyond reproach. And if she were walking straight into danger—well, she was in a dangerous spot already. Cherry was desperate enough to try almost anything.
Her plan was logical and to the point. She reached it by tracing back all she had learned, and then putting together what she knew. The man who had broken in last night was the same man who had eavesdropped on the train, who had trailed them in St. Louis. He was obviously connected with Carroll. He had wanted the papers for Carroll. He would have to report back to Carroll. Where? Not to 79 Merriam Avenue, because the blackmailers knew Cherry was watching that address. Not to the Huneker Street place, either, because the talkative woman superintendent would surely tell them Cherry had been seeking them there. To some brand-new address? Possibly. Or—let’s see—Cherry tried to imagine herself in their place—it would be simpler for them to go some place already established. Like the big, expensive apartment. They undoubtedly believed, and could verify from Mr. Bixby, that Cherry thought the big headquarters apartment stood empty.