Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

Then he switched the light out and slipped noiselessly through the window, closing it behind him; he even took the trouble to fasten the window-catch again from the outside.

  “I do hope the lady came by the mazuma honest!” he remarked to himself, as he started to climb down the fire-escape. “I surely would hate to handle any o’ this money if it was tainted.”

  Then he dropped ten feet or so into the yard below, making about half as much noise as a cat would have done in performing the same feat, and vanished into the darkness, still chuckling.

  CHAPTER II. — Which Introduces Woman Number One

  IT was at least two hours after Ikey Hole left it through the window that the owner of the bedroom entered through the door. She is woman number one, who helps to spoil the story, so perhaps her name is relevant; besides, a name is one of the few things in this world that don’t cost anything, and even school- teachers have them; her name was Lizzie Wingfield. Describe her for yourself.

  Imagine the prettiest girl you can — not too tall and not too short — fair or dark as your fancy dictates and multiply the resulting loveliness by two; after that you’ve only got yourself to blame if you don’t like her, and the story will get along famously.

  I’ve told you she was a schoolteacher; she was dressed in a low-cut evening gown, for description of which see any one of the current fashion magazines; and she didn’t look like a school-teacher in the least — at least not like your idea of one. The point is that she was a school-teacher, and that she had been to a dance. Remember, I said was.

  Her mind was still centered on the gaiety and the garish lights and the lingering airs of waltz music; as she entered the room she was still humming the air of the last tune she had waltzed to. As she walked across the room she stumbled over the pile of lingerie that Ikey had heaped so carelessly on the floor, and the humming ceased. Then she turned on the light.

  No. She didn’t swear. Ladies don’t do that. At all events, her sort don’t.

  But she sat down on the bed and stared at the confusion, and wished that it were proper for her to swear, and you will admit that that is a bird of quite another feather.

  She still had a certain amount of equanimity left, for the knowledge that she had so much frilly stuff to scatter about was, so to speak, forced on her notice; no woman in the world can repress a quite pardonable feeling of pride when she realized the extent of her possessions of that kind, and especially when the garments in question are all new and clean, and were bought at absolutely bargain prices.

  But then she noticed that the right-hand top drawer of the bureau was not quite closed; and she had left it locked. Her heart began to flutter now in real earnest. She was afraid even to open the drawer and look, she was so frightened.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the bureau, and felt herself going goose-fleshy all over, and for two whole minutes she could not screw up sufficient nerve to investigate.

  Then she seized the knob and jerked the drawer open, as though to get the worst over quickly, and her face grew as white as the pile of petticoats on the floor as she discovered what the reader knows already — that the fifty beautiful, new, crinkly, yellow hundred-dollar hills were missing.

  No. She didn’t scream. And she didn’t wring her hands, or the bell, or the neck of the answering chambermaid; and if that doesn’t make you like her, nothing will. She just stood still and turned over the handkerchiefs and all the other things in the drawer one by one to make you like her, nothing will. She just stood still and turned over the handkerchiefs and all the other things in the drawer one by one to make sure, and then — guess! She looked under the bed for burglars!

  Not a hurried peep, either; she took a good, hard look, and made absolutely certain that there weren’t any. Then she knelt down on the floor and laid her arms on the bed, and laid her head on her arms and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

  Poor little woman! She had a right to sob. She had resigned her position as school-teacher that very day with a view to getting married the following month, and that five thousand dollars was all, absolutely every cent, that she and her intended had got to marry on. And the worst of it was that he was nowhere near to comfort her; he was all the way across the continent in San Francisco.

  She couldn’t rush down-stairs, and down the street a couple of blocks, and round the corner, and ring the bell of his flat, and weep on his big, broad bosom; she had to weep alone, and that is an unsatisfactory business. She realized it before long, and left off weeping.

  Although he was not near to comfort her, his letters were — two or three hundred of them; the burglar hadn’t taken those. She took a bundle of them from the back of the drawer and untied the piece of blue ribbon, and removed the top letter and opened it; but she extracted very little comfort from it.

  It was the very last letter he had written her, and the five thousand dollars had been enclosed in the same registered envelope. No. We won’t look over her shoulder.

  A man’s love-letters make disgusting reading, and for that reason they ought to be sacred, if for no other. But part of that letter has a bearing on the story, and, as he was a very business-like young fellow for a lover when he was writing about business, and as he put all the poetry and kisses in the first six and the last ten pages, we can give part of the middle page without making anybody’s gorge rise or offending anybody’s sense of propriety. It was something like this:

  I have only saved five thousand dollars in all these years. (NOTE — He had on been saving for five years and five months. Pretty steady sort of young fellow that, eh?) It makes me feel like a beast when I think that I have only that much with which to begin life with you; if I had on met you earlier I would have saved more, for I would have had something to work for. I am sending you the money enclosed in this envelope; take it round to any good bank in your immediate neighborhood am open an account in your own name. The money will surely be safer in your hands than in mine, and as long as you’ve got it I sha’n’t be able to embark on any speculative undertaking without your consent. One of my chief faults is a desire to speculate and get rich quickly. A man came to me yesterday with a proposition that absolutely glittered, and I have seldom felt more tempted in my life; what made it still more tempting was the fact that I had the money; it was out on mortgage and I had called it in; the mortgagor, who happens to be a friend of mine, paid me yesterday. So in order to put myself out of the reach of further temptation of that kind I am mailing the whole of the five thousand dollars to you, where I know it will be safe.

  She read no further than that. She couldn’t. The bitter irony of it was too much for her, and she knelt down again beside the bed with the letter all crumpled up in her fingers, and dropped great big salt tears all over it, and sobbed as though her heart would break.

  It wasn’t all her fault, but what difference did that make? The money was gone. And he had trusted her. The registered letter had arrived after banking hours, and she had thought that the money would be safe in that drawer for one night, especially as nobody in the house knew she had it.

  Of course, she ought to have given it to somebody else — her landlady, for instance — to keep for her, but she hadn’t thought of that; she had been too busy thinking how proud she was to be trusted like that, and how good Walter was — yes, his name was Walter — and what a fine, honest, straightforward, manly fellow he was, and how she loved him! And then she had gone to the dance! That was the cruelest part of it; if only she had kept her trust and stayed at home to watch the money, she could have fought for it, and died over it if need was; but the money had disappeared while she was out enjoying herself. And Walter had worked for five long years to save it!

  It would be kinder to leave her there to sob herself to sleep, but we can’t do it; the requirements of a short story are as inexorable as fate itself, and she had more mortification in store for her yet.

  There was still a chance to recover the money, although it was a slim one.

  She summoned her
landlady first; and when that elderly and excitable person had finished telling her what she knew already — that she was a ninny and a donkey and a rash, foolish, thoughtless female for leaving all that money loose in a bureau drawer — the two of them ran out just as they were, without either hats or cloaks on, to look for a policeman. And, of course, they couldn’t find one.

  So they came back again and did what they should have done in the first instance — telephoned to headquarters; they overlooked that idea at first in the distress and excitement of the overwhelming disaster. After an almost interminable delay two policemen came — one in uniform and one in a blue serge suit. They both had muddy boots.

  They examined everything in the room, the window especially. They looked extremely wise at first, until they realized that Ikey had left no tracks at all; then they looked scornful and began to take notes.

  They trampled mud over everything, including some of the lingerie that was still lying on the floor; and they asked Lizzie Wingfield her age. and how long she’d lived there; and the landlady her age, and how long she’d lived there; and one of them sat on the bed; and the both of them kept their hats on, and when she didn’t know the numbers of the bills they looked openly incredulous, and even the sight of the registered envelope in which the bills came failed to convince them.

  They said that they would make a report, and that the matter would be fully investigated, and went; but they left the impression behind them that they believed the whole thing to be a frame-up, and that young women who lived in rooms away from their parents, even when they were school-teachers and hadn’t any parents, were people of no account, to put it mildly.

  And Lizzie Wingfield turned the light out and threw herself down on the bed without undressing and sobbed herself to sleep. And there for the present we will leave her.

  CHAPTER III. — Ha, Ha! Woman Number Two! The Plot Thickens!

  KEYHOLE IKEY sat in the front parlor of his seven-room flat in Eighty-First Street, and crooned the burglar’s lullaby to his eldest-born. It is a sweetly sentimental song, and gets the youngsters off to sleep better than anything. Try it. This is the first verse:

  Sleep, my grafterling! None o’ your lip! You’ll be a “baron,” though daddy’s a “dip”! Daddy is watching for “buzzards” and “screws,” Cops cannot catch you; it’s slumber for youse! The son of a “gun” should know better than weep, For “suckers” are born for him while he’s asleep! Sleep, my grafterling! Cover your glims! Dreams of the “boodle” are better than hymns, So dream of the “boodle” and dream of the “dough,” Dream of the dodges a “grafter” should know! Hurry to dreamland before it gets light! Daddy must go on the “rustle” tonight!

  There are six more verses, and Ikey sang them all; while his eldest and only son lay face upward on his lap and knocked pieces off the welkin in celebration of the arrival of his first tooth. But Ikey was a proud and devoted father, and amazingly patient, so he sang the song all over again from the beginning.

  “Hush, sonny!” he exclaimed when he had finished. “You’re fitter to be a bull than a gun if you make so much noise! You gotter learn to keep quiet!” But sonny wouldn’t hush — not even when Mrs. Ikey came in and cuddled him.

  She is the second woman, so take due note of her. Petite, svelte, good- looking, copper-haired, tailor-made, neat, not in the least degree flashy. She was wearing just that amount of jewelry that the “countess” in the home notes column of the Married Woman’s Weekly says one should wear in the park of an afternoon, and not one sparkler more.

  The diamonds were good ones, even if they did rightly belong to other people, but they were none of them very large or noticeable.

  She was quite an unusual woman was Mrs. Ikey, in more ways than one. She labored under no delusions as to Ikey’s method of earning his living; she never had done, for that matter. She had married him with her eyes open after careful consideration of all the points involved.

  She had come to the conclusion that physical comfort, and nice dresses, and plenty to eat, together with the company of a crook who loved her, were preferable to the long days of toil and tribulation in a department-store, where she worked when Ikey met her. She herself was intensely respectable, and never even used slang.

  She went to church, and called on her friends, who were quite the “best” people in her immediate neighborhood; and she was charitable and agreeable, and not in the least stuck-up; in fact, as I said before, she was quite an unusual woman.

  She never came into contact with the tools of Ikey’s trade, because Ikey did not keep them at the flat.

  Ikey had a little office several blocks away, with an electric meter in it that occasionally registered enormous quantities of current; but as Ikey always paid his bills promptly, it was nobody’s business to make inquiries about that, and the sort of electric furnace that Ikey used takes up so little room that it is quite easily concealed.

  Mrs. Ikey handled the investment end of the business. She took the pecuniary proceeds, after Ikey had settled with the “fence,” and invested them in real estate bonds in her own name, so that even if Ikey should happen to be “unfortunate,” and get “rapped,” and “soaked the limit,” she would be well provided for, anyhow.

  And Ikey had drilled her carefully in all the devious by-routes of the criminal law, so that if he should happen to get “lagged” she would know exactly what to do and when to do it.

  She smiled at him bewitchingly as she relieved him of the squalling infant, and Ikey looked the very picture of contentment. Why shouldn’t he? He had never for a single instant had cause to regret his marriage, and the pleased air of proprietorship with which he surveyed her would have made any woman proud; so she smiled at him again, and Ikey’s world was all rose-pink and beautiful.

  “I’ll take him in the park a while. Ikey,” she said; “perhaps the fresh air will send him off to sleep.”

  “Nothin’ else will,” said Ikey. “I’ve tried all the other stunts; sometimes the last shot sinks the ship, though; you go ahead and have a try. Say, but you’re the swell guy this afternoon! They’ll be thinkin’ your husband’s one o’ these society dudes! Go on; you cut along into the park afore I fall in love with you all over again!?

  So Mrs. Ikey, smiling sweetly at her lord and master, put the baby into a brand new hundred dollar perambulator and wheeled him off to Central Park, while Ikey stayed at home to cogitate.

  As a matter of fact, Ikey never did go about much in the afternoons; quite naturally he slept rather late, and ate his breakfast when other people were eating their luncheons; and after that he liked to sit about and read the paper. But this afternoon he was more than usually anxious to stay indoors and think.

  He had five thousand dollars in his coat-pocket, and he was undecided what to do with it. Added to what Mrs. Ikey had salted down already, it was still not quite enough money to retire on; doubled it would just do. And Ikey was by birth, and upbringing, and instinct, and inclination, first and last, a born gambler. Mrs. Ikey had weaned him of the habit at the time she married him; but the desire still remained; and here was a gorgeous opportunity for one big, final plunge without consulting Mrs. Ikey.

  If he lost the money she would know nothing about it, for he had said nothing to her yet about his haul of the night before; and if he doubled it, or trebled it — Gee! It was almost too good to think about. He was still undecided when Mrs. Ikey came back two hours later with the child.

  He noticed that his wife seemed to be singularly disturbed about something on her return, but he asked her no questions; Ikey had ideas of his own about the management of women, and having found them successful in practise, he acted up to them.

  It was a part of his fixed policy never to meet trouble half-way, and to wait until his wife chose to make a disturbance before attempting to find out the reason for it or to quell it. So he sat back in his arm-chair, and held his tongue, and waited. But he had not to wait for long.

  She put the infant to bed in another roo
m, and in less than ten minutes’ time she was back again into the parlor to talk to him; and Ikey, irritated into a condition of extreme sensitiveness by his abstention from coffee and cigarettes, knew at once, even before she put her arms round his neck, that something big was coming.

  “Where were you last night, Ikey?” she asked him.

  “Business, as usual,” said Ikey, who hated talking “shop” when he saw no necessity for it.

  “I’ll tell you why I want to know. When I was going into the park just now, Ikey, I passed one of the prettiest, sweetest-looking girls I ever saw. She was sitting on one of the seats crying. I sat down on the seat beside her; I simply couldn’t go past her, Ikey, she looked so sad and miserable; and after a while I got into conversation with her. One couldn’t sit there and say nothing; it was simply heart-breaking; so I spoke to her after a while, and asked her if I couldn’t do anything for her, or help her in any way.”

  “And she touched you for a five-spot, I suppose?” said Ikey.

  “Oh, no! She wasn’t that kind at all. She said no, and got up and wanted to go away; she was evidently an awfully nice girl, and didn’t like talking to strangers. But I held her back, and after a minute or two I convinced her that I really wanted to hear her story and see whether I couldn’t help her. She said she was sure I couldn’t help her, but she told me the story.”

  “Some ‘con’ game, I’ll bet!” remarked Ikey in an undertone.

  “It seems she is engaged to be married. The man she is going to marry, or was going to — she can’t marry him now — lives in San Francisco, and he sent her five thousand dollars, all the money he had in the world, to keep for him until he came to New York.”

  “What a rummy!” murmured Ikey.

  “She put the money in a bureau drawer and went out to a dance; and while she was away somebody came into the room and forced the drawer open and took it. Was it you, Ikey?”

  Ikey said nothing.