“Right!” admitted Elsa grimly. “Where, as you just said, he’d be bound to go anyway. And on the other hand, if he is somehow in the clear—and is protecting someone—and that someone would, under the circumstances, be a woman—he’ll give her name on the stand—or her husband’s name—her residence—something—probably everything—she’ll be subpœnaed—by yours truly—and she’ll be tangled ten ways going before she gets done testifying—but muh client will git acquitted.”
“Woof!’ And Keene Larborough threw up his two hands in a helpless gesture. “And the client’s attorney will scrub floors in the county jail for six months.”
“Scrub—floors? What—what do you mean, Keene?”
“I simply mean, child, that whether your client merely locks himself in the chair—or whether he divulges some woman’s name and saves his reddish scalp—he’ll know, after he comes out of his truth-telling spree, that he’s been tricked. And will ‘beef’ there and then. And tell the S.A. about the gum. And the passing of the gum, in court, will be remembered. And you’ll be called before the bench—to explain every last detail about where you got a piece of gum, doped with some kind of a drug, and flavored with God-Help-Me or whatever you call it and—”
“Oh, you make me wish, Keene Larborough,” Elsa said, with a fearful sigh, “that a great tidal wave would engulf Chicago in the next hour, sweeping away Prairie Avenue—the Loop—this building—”
“God forbid!” he said unsmilingly. “Because wheelchairs don’t float. But see here—ye’ve more than a’rned yer favor, cheel! So what is it you wanted me to do for you—towards clearing your office of some obstruction, or—or obstructionist?”
“Well here ’tis, my good fran’. I want you to ring my office the very minute I leave here—and keep ringing it at several minute intervals, for I more than surmise that the party now squatting there will be using my phone galleywest to make as many outside business calls as he can—hence you’ll have to insert yourself gently in between and betwixt a couple of his, see? I shan’t wait to see the simple op’ration done—for a certain dress shop where I’m hieing for closes down between 6:30 and 7—at least, last time I was gazing hungrily in its windows, its lights went out about that time, and right in my face to boot. Anyway, here’s what I want you to say to this party, Keene: Say—but first ask for Miss Colby. In a werry brusque businesslike voice. And when this party says—as it’s 101 per cent certain he will—in honeyed tones: ‘She is not here, but left me to take any messages,’ you say quickly, ‘Well, this is the Police Department speaking—Department Z—’—that Department Z is something, Keene, made up in my own head, see?—’—we have Mr. Silas Moffit’s umbrella, and are seeking Mr. Moffit.’ And then hang up, Keene—bango!—before even the man on the wire with you can say ‘I’m Mr. Moffit, and who are your”—or even ‘Jack Spratt’—or anything.”
“Hanging up,” said Larborough, “is one of the skillfulest things I do. Thanks to various creditors. Before he even says ‘I’m,’ he’ll get a click. But just what will happen then, Elsa? Of benefit to you?”
“What will happen, Keene, will happen soon’s I get back and unleash the gent in question. He will urge himself out of my place so fast ’twill surprise even me.”
“To recover—an old umbrella!” Keene Larborough asked skeptically.
“To recover a lucky umbrella,” amended Elsa. “The numerical focus—no less!—of umty-teen numerological and astrological concatenations. And computations! And which lucky umbrella he needs tonight—of all the night in his career. Oh, yes he does—as I happen to know, Keene.
For—but since, Keene,” she broke off, “I am the proud author of this plan I’m setting forth, I must perforce state that it’s perfectly motivated—and motived—at all points. Even by Fate itself. Yes, he’ll get after that umbrella—lying in hypothetical ‘Department Z’!—And which department, I’m sorry to say, he’ll never never find, since you and I anyway know there are only three official sub-departments to the Police Department!—anyway, he’ll get after that umbrella in ‘Department Z’ without a moment’s delay—” She gazed out of the window. And noted the utter starlessness of the sky, now that night had dropped down. “Look—even the sky is helping me! Promising rain. The chance of somebody in ‘Department Z’ temporarily borrowing the found umbrella—then loaning it in turn to somebody else—and then—no, Mr. Silas Moffit won’t take chances on that! Not on this, for him, night of nights!”
“But do the police locate lost umbrellas?” asked Keene Larborough laughingly.
“No, Keene. And don’t kid me. My Uncle Silas Moffit uses his, as I’ve found out, as a portfolio. And he’s always carrying mortgages and documents and quitclaims and deeds and bills of sale around in it. I half suspect he even picks up a few unsmoked cigar butts during the day, and drops them in too! But be that as it may, there will more than likely have been some legal paper in the umbrella he lost somewhere yesterday—or maybe ’twas last night—and in a cigar store, as it appears—which conceivably could have caused the bumbershoot to have been turned over to the nearest policeman by an honest picker-up thereof—in the said cigar store, see?—and which paper in turn would serve as a clew for the department—perhaps just the name of the grantor on some deed, if the paper were such—by which the department would conceivably have phoned my uncle at his apartment—only to find he’s not there. And for the quite logical reason that he’s squatting in my office, now! And thus, shunted by someone to Niece Elsa for information—for there’s one or two persons, I’m pretty sure, over in the P. D., who know that he and I are related—well anyway, shunted to Niece Elsa for infor—listen, Keene, I got to go. If I’m not to lose my only chance to supplant this rag. And—”
“Run!” he said. “And I’ll fulfill your plan as brilliantly as the plan itself is. Now git!”
And Elsa got! Not knowing, even as she emerged from the doors downstairs, that Keene Larborough was doing the identical thing she’d asked him to do—and hanging up: before ever her uncle had even a chance to utter so much as ‘I’m.’ Nor did she know, moreover, as she went down Monroe Street some minutes later, that Keene Larborough, was at that very minute talking to no other than Louis Vann, State’s Attorney. Though a bit shamefacedly.
“Yes, Vann,” he was saying, “I’m grateful to you for being willing now specifically to omit me from that injunction as a ‘qualified, authorized courts agent.’ Very much so! For I need that calendrical info badly to carry on this sheet. My only livelihood. As for the girl, I really hate to apparently double-cross her, but—but—well, goddamn it, I’m an invalid, Vann, and—and have to live. Besides—I consider she’s—she’s all wet anyway as to even being able to hornswoggle this Chinese doctor, whoever he may be, out of a single dose of that drug. He’ll—he’ll give her some harmless powder. And last but far from least, she’s up the creek anyway, so far as Doe being, by any possibility, innocent. He’s—well, I don’t know what your opinion is, Vann, but mine, gained from the facts in the papers, is that he’s an out-of-town gunman drafted in on that crib job because the crib job itself amounted to nothing, but the gunmanship might amount to much. Viz.—poor Reibach. Who, as things turned out, didn’t even merit triggerwork. And who—but anyway, Vann, you have the gist of the facts now. She has nothing to offer in the way of defense. This red-headed gunman has given her absolutely nothing. She hasn’t a leg to stand on. And therefore proposes—as soon as she sees the case is lost—to feed John Doe—who she hopefully half-believes may be some gay Lothario now doing the knight-in-armor act after his bedroom act is over—proposes, as I told you, to feed him a stick of specially made-up gum doctored with that drug, and make him divulge the name of the married woman he may have been with last night. Q. E. D.”
To which Louis Vann was giving but a cheerful chuckle. And replying:
“And that’s quite all, Keene, I would really like to know, to be frank. The full story—out of th
at bird’s own mouth—on the witness stand—before court and press and all—of how he knocked in my safe and killed poor Reibach. For, Keene, that red-headed son-of-a-bitch is no boudoir hound. I know men, Keene—unerringly. And I give you my personal word—as State’s Attorney of Cook County—and before any revelations during the trial, or before execution—I even promise you a hundred years’ lease on that court info you require in your business, if I’m wrong—that Doe is a resourceful, cool, grim, hard-as-nails professional underworld character—moreover, a real cribman—who’s been mixed up with crime and regular safe-cracking so much and so often that he knows every play that may have to be made—as well as when not to play!—and to unlock his tongue about himself for 15 sweet minutes tonight would be all I’d really want—and all that the police of many cities are wanting right this minute—only they don’t know it yet!”
“Only,” Larborough was qualifying, “that Chinese doctor will never pry loose to Colby of a single grain of that drug—for any such purposes.”
“No? Well, old man, I happen to know that doctor—see? A fact! And I can tell you here and now—if it’ll make you feel any better—that you haven’t ‘double-crossed’ friend Colby in the least—for I guarantee you that this Chinese doc will give her the dose of that drug she wants tonight—and wherever she wants it, to boot! Because I have it from his own lips, Keene, that there isn’t a truth-telling drug in existence that will function if the teller, by his words, is putting himself in extreme danger. Patients—Chinese boys, as I think you’ve said—may have blabbed plenty to this doc under this drug—but only, Keene, because they knew that the doc—of their own race—would never bring ’em to justice. Whereas this fellow Doe—even under a triple dose—would only stay ‘tight’ on the witness stand, i.e. hand out a categorical denial, and thereafter stand mute.”
“This—this Chinaman assured you of that? But is he the same man? She didn’t tell me his name, and—”
“That doesn’t matter—in this case. For your statement about him having a Chinese girl sweetheart on the city’s West Side clinches the matter by 100 per cent. This girl, moreover, has a brother who right now is locked up over in the county jail, waiting trial on a more or less oblique complicity in a tong killing. And whose case I can nolle prosse should I so desire, because of various circumstance in it. And this Chink doctor came to me last week—and got down on his actual knees begging me to nolle prosse the case against the young Chink—for which, he, the doc, offered to do anything. And—”
“Well, I suppose he’s the same one, then, for—”
“Of course. Man who’s been experimenting in personality-changing drugs for some years. Of course he didn’t tell me the specific thing he confided to Colby—because I’m theoretically an officer of the law, and might conceivably want his scalp! But he told me a hell of a lot about the whole subject, and gave me a most amazing demonstration—”
“Of this truth-telling drug?”
“No. Of another discovery that he made. Namely, that a powder made up of one-half cocaine and one-half some salt of zirconium—zircaine, he calls the combination!—will make a man lie his blooming head off—and when he hasn’t even the least occasion to lie. This doc mixed up some of the powder he happened to have with him, with a few drops of water—and injected it, with a hypodermic syringe, into a chocolate drop, and we called in the Reverend Horatio Kilgallon, Leo Kilgallon’s uncle, who was in the next room with Leo. Pastor, you know, of St. Ignatius’ Church?” Vann chuckled audibly. “And 15 minutes after Reverend H. had eaten it—at our request, of course, to see if he could tell us the flavor!—he was solemnly declaring that Christ was not divine, and that he himself had been unfrocked in 1880—which, incidentally, was before he was born—and he told us—us, the Law!—that he owned the biggest house of prostitution on the South Side.”
“Wow, Vann! Watta drug!”
“I’ll say! And of no practical utility to anybody. Well, old man, just forget your seeming ‘double-crossing’ of Colby. I don’t think for a single minute that her experiment will work—but, even if it did, with an all-round crook like Doe, with a criminal record, it could only work to the State’s benefit. Plus the benefit of a lot of police departments—in a lot of cities. And so her experiment shall go through—exactly as she wishes. For I’ll see myself that she actually gets the drug from this Chinese doc. For I’ll contact him ahead of her—both via the Chinese gal!—and by covering his office in Chinatown. And she’ll get the drug all right—and her experiment shall go through. And Keene Larborough will find—after, that is, he reads tomorrow’s papers—that truth-telling drug or no truth-telling drug in J. Doe’s veins, when the latter’s neck was in danger, he stood mute as a drum. Will stand—as now, in advance of tonight, I should put it—for I’m personally going to see, Keene, that our little friend Colby is provided by ye Doc Oriental with one good hyper-man-sized dose of—”
“Okay then, Vann,” Keene was saying hurriedly. “And thanks again—for everything. I—I naturally knew you’d like to know what was going on—on the other side of the legal fence. So I’ll let you go now. Good-bye.”
And he hung up, not hearing—Keene Larborough!—Vann’s throaty laugh and the latter’s finish to his own words as he too hung up. And which consisted of—
“—one good hyper-man-sized dose of zircaine, with which her client will catapult himself the balance of the way into the electric chair with the biggest and wildest goddamned lie ever perpetrated in court. Oh-boy!”
But of all these things—uttered both in the Ulysses S. Grant building—and in the City Hall—Elsa, of course, heard quite nothing. For she was, at this very moment, gazing open-mouthed at a dress in the still-lighted Francine de Loux window, which dress bore a price-sign of $27.50 only, yet was literally made for her alone—with her red hair—her blue-green eyes—her freckles; and she was, as she gazed, saying:
“Oh-boy!”
CHAPTER XXVIII
“—In Care Elsa Colby”
It was a full 30 minutes before Elsa emerged from the De Loux shop, a tied-up dress box in her hand. For that so-marvelous creation—which had been given her without question by Francine de Loux, on presentation of Aunt Linda’s order—had required several cunning alterations, made on the spot, however, by the shop seamstress, a woman with eyes as black as Francine De Loux’s obviously dyed hair.
And it was at least a further 8 minutes before Elsa, stepping off of a State Street car, and hurrying up narrow Plymouth Court, cut into the Ulysses S. Grant Building by its convenient and quicker rear entrance on Plymouth Court, and which entrance—like all the other entrances in that particular block—was merely an iron-framed large square door for the passage of freight, with a freight elevator just to its side.
Her tied-up dress box had, however, during her progress from the Plymouth Court corner attained an appendage—an appendage which now traveled with it as cockily and as snugly as a hobo riding a blind baggage: no less, in short, than a tightly rolled copy of a late Despatch—the latest, considering the fact that the wagon which, as Elsa hurriedly approached Plymouth Court on the North Side of Van Buren, had dropped into the arms of the waiting newsboy across the street a couple of dozen damp fresh papers and driven clatteringly off, had been a Despatch wagon. And it had been after Elsa crossed the corner diagonally that she had received her non-paying “passenger”—for her young friend Clubfoot, who owned that stand, seeing a box being piloted across the street by a very small young lady with fiery red hair, had himself clumped hastily across Plymouth Court, rolled-up Despatch in fist and, intercepting her, had lifted up one end of her box and gallantly tucked his gift under the string thereof with the words, “Take dis, willya, Miss Co’by, f’r dat leg’l inflammation you gi’ me.” And thus it was—as a fee!—and delivered f.o.b. under the string of her box!—that Elsa became provided with a newspaper of late enough issue to contain that scheduled repudiation.
Whether the one evening passenger elevator of the Ulysses S. Grant Building was waiting right now to take up passengers or not, Elsa, entering by the Plymouth Court side, could not see, because of the complete sheet-iron wall which entirely cut off the four-elevator shaft from the rear freight-handling area; and the little snug iron door in that wall, far to one side, was, as always it was, closed. But the big freight elevator stood there, its sliding vertical gates open, but evidently just about to transport heavenward a heavy piece of office furniture which had come in after office hours. No less, in fact, than a huge glass-covered and handcarved mahogany desk which filled at least a third of the platform. And, with one hand on the upper corrugated gate about to draw it down—and one hand on the steel pull cable—stood “Deafy” Olson, the old deaf-as-stone operator. Catching sight of her, he stopped the coming together of the gates, and motioned Elsa in.
“Yump een, Miss Colby,” he commanded. “Ay tak’ you up—an’ ask baysness quaystion.”
Being such a one as loved passionately to ride freight elevators—and bursting also with super-feminine curiosity as to who could be moving into that old building with such a fine desk, Elsa hastily got aboard. Upon which, “Deafy” drew the corrugated freight doors to with a loud bang, and slowly the car—with a series of ever-threatening jerks—started to ascend. And then “Deafy,” free for a few minutes, turned to her.
“Mees Colby,” he began worriedly, “aye vass drunk night before last, an’ aye hit may brooder. An’ hay is going to arrest me w’en hay com’ back from Ceencinnati, day after tomorrow. Now how mach eet cost me dat you go see haim, an’ try to talk haim out of it?” To which “Deafy” quickly added: “Can you do eet for $3?”
The Man with the Wooden Spectacles Page 30