The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  Jessen’s chin dropped to his chest. His strong brown hands were clenched. There was a long pause, during which the thought that he had been tricked by the girl he had learned to love on that last ill-fated voyage—the girl whose gentle “no” when he asked for her hand had not lessened his love—seared his brain like molten metal. Could she have been guilty of playing upon that love? Her face, sweet, kind and innocent, rose before him, and because he loved her, denied the accusation convincingly. If he named h«r, she, a woman, would be subjected to the tortures he was enduring. They might put her in a cell as they had him. Jessen straightened in his chair and met Rentor’s piercing eyes squarely.

  “I won’t tell you her name,” Jessen said quietly. “It wouldn’t be right. I know she isn’t a crook, but you won’t believe that. You would do to her what you are doing to me. I won’t name her.”

  “You’ll go to the penitentiary if you persist in protecting this woman crook. You understand that, don’t you?” asked Rentor.

  “If necessary, I’ll go,” replied Jessen wearily.

  “If this girl’s innocent, I won’t harm her. If she is guilty, unless you are her accomplice, why should you be willing to do time to protect her?” Rentor asked, probing the one phase of the situation that still puzzled him—Jessen’s apparently quixotic determination to sacrifice himself for a casual steamer acquaintance.

  “I’m innocent, and you’ve harmed me,” the purser answered.

  The pair studied each other eye to eye.

  “Chief,” began Jessen at last, with a note of boyish appeal in his voice, “I can understand how my refusal to name the girl who, unfortunately, has been dragged into this case, may seem suspicious to a man like you, whose business makes it necessary to suspect everybody. Even so, there’s a spark of humanity in you, I’m sure. For her sake and mine, I’m going to tell you everything, and then I know you’ll not demand her name.”

  “Go on,” said Rentor encouragingly.

  “She was a passenger on the Humboldt making the round trip to Alaska with us,” Jessen continued. “She was alone, and I tried to make the trip pleasant for her, first for duty’s sake and, then, when I grew to know her, because I treasured every moment I could be near her. Long before we reached Nome, I knew she is the one woman I want and always shall want for my wife.”

  “Ah!”

  “On the return trip, I asked her to marry me. She told me there is someone else, and”—Jessen raised a hand to shield himself from the coldly piercing eyes that never wavered from his face—“I’m glad she is going to be happy. That’s all there is to tell, Chief. Now you’ll understand why I can’t let the unlucky chance that led to the incident of the keys permit me to involve her even remotely in such a case as this. No decent man could do that. I know she is not a crook. Such a girl couldn’t be.”

  Rentor pressed the button that summoned the wait-ing officers.

  “Now I’ve got you just where I want you, my bucko!” he exclaimed gleefully. “The one thing I lacked to make my case complete was a motive that would explain why you try to protect the woman. You have just given it to me—the oldest and best motive in the world. Will you give me the name of this she-crook?”

  “Never,” said Jessen.

  “Take him away, boys,” Rentor ordered as his men appeared in the doorway. “Tell Clark to take this fellow’s Bertillon measurements and to mug him the first thing in the morning so I can give the afternoon papers his pictures tomorrow. This has been a neat piece of work, if I did do it myself.”

  Jessen, as he rose to follow his guards, looked down on burly Larry Rentor half in hatred, half in scorn.

  “I understand now how crooks are made,” Jessen said, in a voice whose evenness failed to hide the tempests of bitter anger that shook him from head to foot Larry Rentor merely laughed. When Jessen had been lodged again in his cell, the Chief called in four of his best men and gave his instructions for the continuation of the third degree.

  “Handcuff him to a chair and keep at him without a second’s let-up all night,” he ordered. “Never let him close his eyes. Never let him rest. Keep up a perfect stream of questions and drag answers out of him any way you can. Play on his love for his mother. Pretend that we have taken over the house to search it and turned her out. Pretend that we think she herself may be implicated and that she is to be brought down here in the morning for the same kind of a deal he’s getting. We’ll take her through one of the cells for an instant tomorrow and let him see her there. That’ll fetch him. Now go to it, boys. By the way, someone better go out and talk to the old lady. She might tell something worth knowing.”

  The men filed out. The result was a night of horror that Dave Jessen never forgot and never recalled without a shudder.

  While the stenographer was transcribing those portions of Jessen’s statement in which he admitted having both strong-room keys, admitted that he had given them momentarily into the possession of a woman passenger and in which he flatly refused to give her name, Chief Rentor analyzed the results of his night’s work.

  “Jessen has told the truth from beginning to end,” he decided. “First, he was this unknown woman’s goat, and now he is mine. It’s a hundred to one, without takers, that she made impressions of the keys during the moment he left them in her hands. She had pals aboard, and of course they turned the trick.”

  The Chief chewed his cigar reflectively, and his thoughts brought a look of shrewd and ruthless cunning to his eyes.

  “It’s the luckiest thing in the world that this fellow is fool enough to refuse me the girl’s name,” he thought. “If he had not done that, he would practically have cleared himself and put me up against the problem of finding the girl. As things stand now, I’ve almost got enough on Jessen to make a showing in court, and if I never find the woman or the gold, he gets all the blame. Anyway, it’s a safe bet now that old man Clancy will be satisfied I’m big enough for my job.”

  The fox-like cunning in the eyes beneath Rentor’s shaggy brows deepened.

  “If Tatman would say Jessen is the man who hit him in front of the strong-room door—it was directly opposite Jessen’s own door, too—my case would look good even before a jury,” he reflected. “That would be the final link in the chain. I’ll have a talk with him.”

  He ordered Tatman up from his cell. “Tatman,” said Rentor when they were alone, “Purser Jessen has been booked for complicity in the bullion robbery. He took both the keys to the strong-room on the northbound voyage, and admits he allowed them to go into the hands of a woman on board. He refuses to give her name. Were there any crooks on the Humboldt, either men or women, that you knew?”

  The ex-convict shook his head. The Chief continued:

  “You’re likely to stay inside a cell a long time, Tatman. I am fairly well satisfied you weren’t in on this, but I can’t let you go until I’ve cinched somebody—you understand that.”

  Tatman grinned without replying. He was an old hand at the game and knew the Chief’s sudden consideration had an explanation.

  “I’ve just been thinking, Tatman, that if you had caught a glimpse of the face of the man who hit you,” and that man happened to be Purser Jessen, I wouldn’t have any object in keeping you after you had identified him in court,” continued Rentor insinuatingly. “It would be a mighty lucky break for you, old timer, if you happened to be able to make that identification.”

  “I get you, Chief,” said the convict. “Lead me to ’im when you like. Hit might ’ave been ’im, for all I know; an’ anyway, Vs only a square shooter. Lead me to ’im; that’s my hanswer.”

  “You understand I want only the truth,” cautioned the detective.

  Tatman grinned knowingly.

  “I hunderstand,” he repeated.…

  CHAPTER XVIII

  AN ANSWER IN GRAND LARCENY

  The f
ollowing morning the papers told of Jessen’s arrest in flaring headlines. Boston Blackie’s Mary, in the seclusion of a friend’s flat in which she was awaiting the day when Blackie, now out of town, judged it safe to return for the Humboldt’s gold, felt a sickening sense of guilt grow with each line she read.

  “Poor boy! What a shame!” she murmured with deep regret. “What hopeless bunglers the coppers are.”

  When she read the account of her visit to the strong-room under Jessen’s guidance, and Renter’s assertion that she had taken wax impressions of the keys during the brief moment they were in her possession, the furrows in her brow deepened into wrinkles of concern.

  “A shrewd guess that hits the mark but that doesn’t involve the purser,” she thought.

  Then she came to a paragraph that brought a mist of tears to her eyes. It was the paragraph that quoted Jessen’s statement to Rentor that he declined to give her name—that he would go to prison himself rather than involve her.

  “Oh, oh, tell them! Tell them,” she cried, as if the accused man were within hearing. “It can’t harm me. Surely you must guess now that the name and address I gave you were both fictitious.”

  Then in a flash, because she was a woman with womanly intuition, she understood why Jessen had answered “Never!” to the police demand for her name.

  “He believes me innocent,” Mary murmured, awed by the proof of what principle may cost those who have it. “He still thinks I am what I seemed—an innocent girl, a girl about to be married, who would be ruined by a breath of scandal such as this. And because he believes that, he is sacrificing himself to save me.”

  She sprang to her feet and paced the room with clenched hands and cheeks wet with tears of compassion.

  “It’s the rightest act I ever knew,” she sobbed. “They sha’n’t railroad this poor, loyal boy. Oh, how I pity his distracted, broken-hearted old mother! What have Blackie and I done? What shall I do?”

  Like an answering message, the thought of Judge Mortimer Garber came to her.

  Judge Garber was an attorney of long-proved ability, whose specialty was criminal law. He was a trusted neutral in frequent negotiations between the police and the crook-world, for he never betrayed to either the secrets of its warring adversary. He despised police chicanery and hated thug brutality. He was respected, feared and trusted by both classes.

  As Mary was ushered into his office, he was frowning over the newspaper accounts of the Jessen identification by Tatman.

  “Well, well, Mary!” the Judge exclaimed cordially. “It has been a long, long time since either you or Blackie paid me a visit. Sit down and tell me all about it. I can see you are in trouble.”

  Mary slipped a hundred-dollar bill from her purse and pushed it across the table.

  “I want you to take a case for me, Judge Garber. There’s a retainer.”

  The lawyer handed back the money.

  “Tell me the case first,” he said. “We’ll discuss the fee later.”

  “It’s the Humboldt bullion-robbery,” began Mary.

  “I thought so the moment I saw you at the door,” interrupted Garber. “It’s fortunate I am a lawyer instead of a detective, Mary. When I read the first accounts of this affair, which for sheer ingenuity stands alone, I said to myself: ‘The one man I know who might have done this is Boston Blackie.’ Was this boy Dave Jessen mixed in it with you?”

  “He was not, Judge. That’s why I’m here. Rentor is trying to frame him,” said Mary.

  “I suspected that, the moment I read that this tame crook Tatman has suddenly recovered his memory and identified Jessen. I’m glad the lad isn’t implicated. Old Captain Jessen was my good friend for many years, and the boy has the dearest old mother in the world. Tell me the story from the beginning.”

  Mary told it, omitting nothing, mitigating nothing.

  The old Judge was muttering angrily to himself long before she finished.

  “So this rat Rentor, who is getting rich on the graft he is collecting from gambling houses and red light dens, thinks he’ll make a reputation by railroading to prison a boy whose only crime is that he is too decent to ruin a girl’s reputation!” growled Garber. “He won’t succeed as long as I keep my Southern blood and remain a member of the Seattle bar.”

  He looked across the table at Mary with shrewd but kindly eyes. “Well, what do you and Blackie want to do about it?” he demanded.

  “Blackie isn’t here,” said Mary. “If he were in town, he’d know what should be done, but I’m alone. That’s why I came to you. I thought that when I told you the circumstances, you might be willing to take Jessen’s case and clear him. We’ll stand all expenses if you will. I can’t see that boy Jessen ruined, Judge,” added Mary.

  The attorney pondered with half-closed eyes and touching finger-tips.

  “With the information you have given me, I can acquit him without a doubt before any jury that can be dragged together in the State of Washington,” he said at last. “But Mary, my dear, has it occurred to you that a mere acquittal won’t do? If Jessen even goes to trial on this charge, it will wreck his career and probably send his mother to her grave. You’ve shouldered a heavy responsibility, girl.”

  “I know,” she cried, “and I’m frantic with remorse. What can be done? If you went to Clancy of the steamship company and told him you know positively that Jessen is entirely innocent of any connection with the robbery, he would believe you; and Clancy is a man important enough to have his way at detective headquarters. He could have Jessen set free within an hour with an apology from Rentor to take home with him.”

  “Clancy could do that, but he wouldn’t,” said Garber. “He would never see any man free whose stubbornness was costing him a chance to get back sixty thousand dollars—stubbornness due to what Clancy would think a silly scruple. My judgment is that if he knew all you have just told me, he would wring your name from Jessen or see him hanged if he had his way. Jim Clancy is a man with a soul dead to all feeling that cannot spring from a dollar-mark, Mary.”

  “That’s true, and I hate him,” said Mary furiously, letting long-nourished resentment reveal itself. “He sent my father to prison wrongly, Judge, and Dad died there. Afterward, when the truth was discovered and Clancy was forced to admit that he had blundered he stated to the papers that the mistake was ‘less regrettable’ because poor old Dad was ‘no benefit either to himself or to society.’ The principal reason Blackie and I attempted this robbery is because Jim Clancy owns the Humboldt!”

  “That’s Clancy, with photographic accuracy,” assented Garber. “Well, Mary, Jessen’s predicament is a hard proposition. Shall we abandon it as hopeless now and content ourselves with doing something when he goes to trial?”

  “No, no,” she said. “Wait, Judge, please. I’m trying to decide something.”

  Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes passed.

  “It’s all right now, Judge,” she said resignedly at last. “I’ve decided. If you will trust us for your fee until Blackie gets money, you can call up Jim Clancy and tell him you know where his gold bars are and that you will return them to him ten minutes after Mr. Jessen is free and in possession of a written document from the Northwestern Steamship Company that admits his innocence and guarantees his position on its steamers. It’s hard to give up the day of righteous reckoning for which you’ve waited and prayed year after year; but”—with-a wry smile—“it’s worth even that price to feel as content as I do since I decided to forego revenge for a clear conscience.”

  A faint glow of gratification flushed the old lawyer’s cheeks.

  “Child, have you thought what Blackie will say to this?” he suggested gently. “Do you realize that you are planning to give away sixty thousand dollars that, according to his code, rightfully belongs to him?”

  “Neither Blackie nor I care about the money, T
he two things that worried me most were the debt I owe Clancy and can’t pay now, and the fact that all of the sixty thousand dollars doesn’t belong to us. We owe fourteen thousand, five hundred to those who helped us get the gold safely ashore. But we have enough banked to pay that off. I’ve just figured it up. We’ll have just twenty dollars left when we’re done. That’s why I told you you would have to wait for your fee.”

  The old Judge wiped his glasses.

  “Will Blackie approve this, Mary?”

  “Of course. Blackie always does right, no matter what the cost,” she answered, utterly unconscious of the naivete of the verdict she so confidently pronounced upon a man with a nation-wide reputation as a criminal. “He would never forgive me if I let a boy who had proved himself ‘right’ ruin himself for my sake. Call up Clancy, Judge. I want to feel sure that Jessen will be at home before night.”

  Garber reached for his ’phone with a hand that was tremulously eager.

  “By the way,” he said, “you haven’t told me yet where these trouble-making bars of gold are to be found.”

  Mary opened her purse and tossed a bit of metal across the table.

  “There’s the key of the safe-deposit box Blackie rented months ago for the gold,” she said, smiling. “It’s in Jim Clancy’s own vaults.”

  “Ho!” chuckled the man delightedly. “That’s a joke on the old skinflint that will be told on him to the last day he breathes, even though he out-ages Methuselah. I wouldn’t miss the sight of his face when I show him the missing gold stored in his own deposit vault, for all his millions.”

  “What’s your fee, Judge?” asked Mary, rising.

  “Fee!” shouted Judge Garber wrathfully. “Get out of my office, young woman, before I call my stenographer and have you thrown out. When I take a fee for an afternoon’s work like this, I’ll change my name to Clancy!”