by Helen Wells
“That’s it!” Cherry snapped her fingers. “They’ll gamble on my having checked that place already, and having given it up! Now, how to get in there?”
A substantial tip to Mr. Bixby, the superintendent, to admit her to the apartment? No, it might not work. Suppose Carroll had returned—then Bixby would tell Carroll about Cherry’s tip, forewarning him. Suppose Carroll actually was in the apartment? All right, she would ring the doorbell and simply walk in, or try to. Or, if he were not there—if the apartment was really vacant—? Then Cherry would have to get in on her own, somehow. And what time should she go? This morning? This afternoon? Cherry decided on the afternoon. She needed a little more time to think, a little more courage.
It was about one o’clock when Cherry dressed in entirely different clothes than she had worn on her last sleuthing expedition, hoping to be less recognizable, and left the Owens house. Once again she went to the expensive neighborhood and Carroll’s apartment building, but this time she stopped off on the way to purchase a large bouquet of flowers.
The doorman stopped her, as she had expected.
“I have to deliver these flowers to Apartment 9B,” Cherry said, shielding her face behind the bouquet.
The doorman did not remember her from the other day. He merely said, “Use the service elevator,” and waved her ahead.
Cherry discovered a second elevator and its operator, and also the stairs every apartment building must have in case of fire. She rode up on the service elevator to the ninth floor. She pretended, for the elevator operator’s benefit, to head toward 9B, but once the service elevator had gone down, she tucked the bouquet in a corner of the stairway.
She was on the floor below Carroll’s. She simply did not have the courage to go up, ring Carroll’s doorbell, and possibly come face to face with him or Mr. Thatch. Besides, they might not let her in. She had to get in some other way, without their knowing. But how?
Cherry listened. She heard no voices or footsteps. Good, the coast was clear. She slipped out into the corridor and her eye fell on the door of 9A—directly under Carroll’s apartment which was 10A. The door of 9A stood slightly ajar. Cherry tiptoed over to it, peeked in, and rejoiced.
The apartment under Carroll’s was empty of furniture and was in the process of being painted. Paint buckets, ladders, and canvases were strewn about the empty rooms. All the doors and windows had been left open, no doubt for circulation to dispel the paint odor. Best of all, the painters were nowhere in sight—gone on their lunch hour. Here was a piece of luck!
Cherry darted across the empty, paint-spattered living room and climbed out the window onto the fire escape. She quickly walked up one flight, praying no one would notice and report her on these outside iron stairs, praying that Carroll’s fire-escape window might be unlocked.
It was. A little tugging opened it. Cherry slipped over the window sill, her heart banging away in both guilt and exultation, and carefully closed the window behind her. She stood at last in Carroll’s elaborate living room. The apartment was still, dusty, hot from being unaired.
But she stood there only a split second, for she heard the elevator door clang open and then close on this floor, and several voices and footsteps in the hall. Cherry fled to the big couch and crouched behind it. Perhaps the people in the hall would head for another apartment than Carroll’s. She hoped so, for she wanted a chance to search his place. But even as she strained her ears for the direction of the footsteps, a key turned in the door.
Instantly Cherry dropped completely out of sight behind the sofa.
Footsteps—men’s voices—How many people had come in? Who had come in? Cherry listened hard, scarcely breathing. She wanted to get out at once. But she was trapped. She had to stay now.
“Open the windows, for heaven’s sake!” That was Carroll. Carroll himself! Cherry trembled.
She heard the sound of windows being pushed up, and then the traffic noises.
“I’ll go get the papers out of the file on this case.” That pedantic voice belonged to Mr. Thatch.
“For our council of war, huh?” A man speaking, a rough voice—who was he?
“Council of war thanks to you, you idiot,” Carroll said. “Papers right there in the wall safe, and you muffed it! You failed to get the most important thing!”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind a drink.” This was a woman’s voice and it sounded vaguely familiar. Someone sat down heavily on the sofa. Cherry fearfully looked up. She beheld tarnished blonde hair, a fat pink neck, a lace collar—why, it was Mrs. Crawford! The clairvoyant from Bluewater!
“I certainly am going to learn things today!” Cherry exulted even in the midst of her panic. “Even if I am trapped in here—Oh, Lordy, I hope they don’t find me! At least I hope they don’t find me before I hear enough! Maybe—maybe they’ll all leave together, as they came, or most of them anyhow, and then I can slip out unnoticed. I hope!”
“Come on, come on,” said still another man’s voice, and Cherry half-recognized this voice too. “Can’t we start the extortion even without the papers? When are you going to tell me the whole story? After all, I’ve put up the money for this job, I’ve got a right to know exactly how you work.”
“Certainly, certainly, Mercer,” Carroll replied smoothly.
Now she placed that voice! It belonged to the man who had limped out from in back of 79 Merriam Avenue and said he had sprained his ankle! The third confederate! Carroll—Mr. Thatch—this Mercer—Mrs. Crawford—And the fifth? Cherry lay flat on her stomach and peeked around the sofa leg. The fifth man was the man whose left shoulder was higher than his right one. Mr. Thatch was addressing him as Joe.
Cherry pulled her head back turtle fashion and lay down quietly to listen. She was so fascinated that her fear died down a little. The footsteps ceased, chairs creaked, papers rattled. Cherry smelled cigarette smoke. Apparently the five had sat down and settled themselves to talk.
“All right, tell me,” demanded the man called Mercer. “Now that we’re finally in a safe place, and all together, tell me exactly how you operate.”
“It is absurdly simple,” said Mr. Thatch, amusement in his precise voice. “We prefer it to laboring for a livelihood. We’ve really let you in on a very good thing, Mr. Mercer.”
“Shut up, Thatch, I’m head man here,” said Carroll. There was a prickly silence. “Mercer, you won’t regret your investment—you’ll quadruple your money. You’re just lucky that we needed ready money in a hurry and I had to take you in. But since you’ve bought your way in, I’ll tell you how we work it.”
Cherry literally held her breath, so as not to miss a syllable.
“We are a ring of fortunetellers,” Carroll explained, “and we operate throughout cities and towns and villages all over the country. We must have three, four hundred fortunetellers—How many, Thatch?”
“Nearly four hundred.”
“—nearly four hundred so-called fortunetellers working under my direction. All the fortunetelling we do, you can stick in your eye. We run an extortion racket. We get confidential personal information about some sucker—some information he’d rather keep quiet—and then we threaten to expose him, and demand hush money.”
Mercer asked curiously, “How do you get hold of such secret personal information?”
“In several ways, and we’re experts at all of them.” Mrs. Crawford let out a shrill laugh at this. Carroll said, “Quiet, Mamie! The easiest way to get information is from the ‘client’ himself—or herself, they’re mostly women.”
“I don’t get it,” Mercer said. “You mean people deliberately give away their secrets?”
“Not deliberately,” said Carroll. “We pump it out of ’em—or scare it out of ’em—in the course of telling their fortunes. We can get a person so upset that she doesn’t realize she is talking too much.”
“And then there are my methods.” This was Mr. Thatch’s dry voice. “I make polite conversation with the clients while they’re waiting to see The Master.
People trust a quiet, elderly man. Owens’s sister was invaluable, she talked her head off to me—in strict confidence, of course. I also chat with clients’ relatives, chauffeurs, delivery boys, friends, and business associates. Just a little innocent gossip—a little from this one, a little from that one, it adds up—then I turn the whole story over to Mr. Carroll. Then he goes to work.”
Carroll said crossly, “You spend enough of our money on telegrams and cables.”
Mr. Thatch said apologetically, “You want me to check up on every rumor I hear that could do us any good, don’t you? Besides, Mr. Mercer, I am a great newspaper reader—current papers and old ones. In fact, it was while I was going through a file of newspapers from twenty years ago that I dug up the information about Scott Owens.”
“And it was me who saw in the newspaper,” put in Mrs. Crawford, “that the Owenses were going to Blue-water for a rest. And then you sent me to Bluewater after them. And I got acquainted with Miss Owens and got her worked up and telling me—”
“Sure, Mamie, you’re a good girl.” Carroll cut her short.
“What about me?” growled the man who had trailed the Owens party. “You can give me a little credit, too!”
“Introducing Joe,” Carroll said with a derogatory little laugh. “Joe, who failed to get the papers last night! Mercer, Joe is the head of our corps of investigators—or in plain talk, Joe and his boys hit the road and track down people or facts we’re after. They pass themselves off as travelers, salesmen, or in a pinch, as private detectives.”
“For instance?” said Mercer.
“For instance,” said Joe. “I hung around Owens’s hotel in St. Louis to see that that nurse didn’t pull any fast ones and spirit him away. If she had—! It’d ’ve been unhealthy for her to try it.”
“That nurse!” said Mrs. Crawford. “She’s a nuisance.”
“Yeah?” said Joe. “You’re telling me? For instance, I went to her home town—Hilton it was—”
“That’s right, Mr. Mercer,” said Mrs. Crawford with satisfaction. “I worked it in Bluewater by advance appointment only—sounds exclusive, huh? That way I got the clients’ names in advance, and it gave Joe here time to go dig up some facts I could startle them with. It was just a piece of luck that the nurse came with her mother, for a reading, the same day the Owens woman showed up. And was that young snip of a nurse impressed with me! I told some junk about her own family.”
“Thanks to me, thanks to me,” said Joe. “All the week before, I hung around this little burg of Hilton trying to find something on Ames.” Here Cherry began to feel sick. “First, Mr. Mercer, I go to the Vital Records Building and find out Mrs. Ames’s maiden name and her mother’s name and who’s dead in the family and when they died. That’s good for the ghost act Mamie puts on. Then I sort of hang around town and keep my ears open. This Mr. Ames is in the real-estate game. So I go hang around the real-estate offices. Pretending I’m an out-of-town buyer, see? That way this Ames fellow tells me he’s thinking of selling his own house. Then Mamie has a ghost tell this stuff at the séance. It scares Kitty Owens so bad she loses her head and—”
“—so bad that,” said Mrs. Crawford gleefully, “when I started mentioning Uncle Matthew, feeling her out, you know, to find out if we were on the right track on that old scandal, she screamed like a fool. That scream told me Uncle Matthew was the root of the trouble, all right.”
“I also do a little strong-arm stuff, Mr. Mercer,” Joe boasted. “For instance, last night—if anybody’d stopped me, I would’ve—” Cherry shuddered.
“Oh, we have it well organized,” Gregory Carroll said.
Mercer said impatiently, “Let’s get on. You’ve only explained how it works from the top, from you. Where do those four hundred fortunetellers all over the country come in? How much do they get of the take?” His voice was greedy and anxious.
“They get a pittance. Don’t worry, Mercer. You and Thatch and I aren’t risking the penitentiary for nickels and dimes. The big money stays right here.” Cherry heard a sound which must have been Carroll slapping his pocket. She would have liked to see his saintly face at that moment. “Thatch, tell the new member of the firm how the small-time fortunetellers help us out.”
“Certainly, with pleasure,” came Mr. Thatch’s voice. “They have only one job—to pry information out of the suckers and pass that information along to us. I keep a master file of information on all wealthy or prominent or influential people. Mr. Carroll and I keep everything we hear or dig up, as well as newspaper clippings. Then we pass some of that information along to the out-of-town fortunetellers, so they’ll know which sucker is important enough to concentrate on, and what to say to him to force more information out of him.”
Mercer objected, “Isn’t it risky sending confidential blackmail stuff like that through the mails? There are postal regulations against it.”
“Oh, we wouldn’t do anything illegal,” Mr. Thatch replied with a little laugh. “We avoid that risk in two ways, Mr. Mercer. First, we mail out what appears to be an innocent gossip column—it is a mimeographed bulletin, even has the suckers’ photographs and license numbers of their cars. That advises the out-of-town fortunetellers in advance, so they can recognize the right suckers.”
“But suppose a client walks in without appointment, without warning, and the fortuneteller never saw or heard of him before?”
“Often a client’s license plates on his car are enough to identify him to these experts. Or they simply ask a few adroit questions. Then,” said Mr. Thatch, “the outof-town fortuneteller asks the client to wait, and quietly calls me up long-distance. He tells me over the phone whatever he could find out by himself, and I tell him whatever I have in the master file—within limits, of course. Then the local reader has, so to speak, a knife to put in the sucker’s back. That is the way he can force out still more confidential information—the kind of information Mr. Carroll and I will eventually frame him with.”
“I see, I see,” said Mercer. “By long-distance telephone. Very clever.”
Very clever, Cherry was thinking, and remembering the unexpected ring of a phone somewhere. Where was that? Where had that happened? She closed her eyes tightly and memory took her back to the overgrown rut in the road on the way to the witch’s house. Wasn’t it there she had thought she heard a telephone ring? Yes, it was, and she had dismissed the sound as imagination when she had seen the tumble-down shack. But there had been a phone in there! The witch had phoned Mr. Thatch! But how had she known Owens was coming?—they had had no appointment. Then Cherry remembered, too, the ten-minute wait while the witch did something in the other room. “Sick husband,” she had said. Sick husband, indeed! That hag had been whispering into the telephone, and listening to Mr. Thatch.
“Yes, by telephone and by bulletin,” Gregory Carroll repeated. “Also, one fortuneteller in the ring recommends a client to other fortunetellers in the ring. Some people are so crazy for fortunetellers, they go from one to another, like Kitty Owens. So we try to keep our suckers right in the family.”
“I sent Kitty Owens to The Witch,” Mrs. Crawford remarked. “Told her I was doing her a great favor, and she couldn’t get there fast enough!”
Cherry behind the sofa sighed for Miss Kitty’s folly.
“And I advised her to consult Lucy Pride,” Mr. Thatch said. “I am not certain it was worth the trouble. I played the helpful errand boy and bought all Miss Owens’s railroad tickets for their tour, so I could discover their itinerary. Once I learned what towns they would be in, I notified our fortunetellers in those towns and urged Miss Owens to go to see them.”
“Pride isn’t worth a nickel cigar to us,” Joe said disgustedly. “We’ll have to get rid of her, before she squeals on us.”
“She won’t squeal on us,” Carroll said dryly. “Remember she’s honestly psychic and remember she got into trouble with the police in her town for telling fortunes. She didn’t know how to get around the law like we do. We showed her how
. Remember she was absolutely alone, too. Why, she was a starving seamstress when we paid her bail and trapped her into working with us. We’ll let her starve again and face the police again if she doesn’t—ah—cooperate.”
So little Miss Pride was as much a victim of Carroll as the clients! Cherry’s heart turned over in pity, particularly at Mr. Thatch’s next words:
“Mr. Mercer, Lucy Pride is a character! We pay her only half of what we pay anyone else and she does not even suspect it! Or if she did, she would be too frightened to say so.”
“I wish The Witch were as easy to handle,” Carroll remarked. “That tough old faker—there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for money. She boldly threatened to expose us to the police. She’s corrupt all the way through, a born racketeer,” he said in admiration. “But we have something on her and we keep her poor enough so she’ll have to go on working for us.”
“All right, all right,” said Mercer, impatient again. “So much for the details. I still don’t understand why I’ve had to duck around calling myself Fuller or James Smith, or why I had to let you use my Merriam Avenue house. I’ve certainly been taking a lot on faith.”
“We’ve had to move around on account of that blamed nurse of Owens’s,” said Gregory Carroll. “I tried to scare her off—warned her not to meddle—I knew when I first saw her that she was aggressive. I knew she’d come looking for us.”
Cherry grinned to herself.
“How’d you have liked to talk over our plans to squeeze Owens, some place where that nurse might be listening?” Carroll demanded. “That’s why we had to move around—to get out of earshot.”