The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  “I would rather stay in my own little place,” she said. “You know, I must sell it soon, and I want to be there as long as I can, for I was happier there than I will ever be again. It is all there is left of my dream.”

  At the preliminary hearing the Glad-rags Kid, as was inevitable, was held for trial before the higher court and was moved from the City Prison to the County Jail, located on the outskirts of the city. On the next day Blackie summoned Ann.

  “I have waited until now,” he said, “to tell you a plan.”

  “Tell me quickly, Blackie,” cried Ann, rising excitedly.

  “You know the Black Maria in which prisoners are taken back and forth from the County Jail to the downtown courtrooms,” Blackie began. “Well, as you know, it is a closed machine, boarded up all round, and with a door opening at the rear. In that door is a barred window big enough for a man to get through if the bars were sawed out and then cemented back into place to hide the cuts until the time for the get-away came. A copper is supposed to ride outside on the steps behind the door on the trip downtown, but it is a long trip and tiresome work standing on the steps; so three times out of four the coppers ride on the seat with the chauffeur until they get downtown. Well, Ann, if those bars were sawed through some night while the Black Maria is standing in the old jail stables, which are unguarded, and the Glad-rags Kid pulled out the sawed bars and climbed out just where the County Jail drive joins the Ingleside Boulevard, a fast car could pick him up and race him away to safety before anyone could interfere, even if some snitch in the Maria gave the alarm.”

  “You will saw those bars for me, Blackie?” Alibi Ann was trembling from head to foot.

  “Of course,” he said.

  A week later the Glad-rags Kid was scheduled to appear in court to have his case set for trial. Ann visited him on the day before and explained Blackie’s plan. Instantly the Kid’s bravado and swagger returned. He threw back his shoulders immediately.

  “Gee, but it will be great to be on the street once more,” he said. “This will be some little sensation for the town, won’t it! You’re all right, Annie.”

  At midnight Blackie returned to the flat where Mary and Ann were waiting, and reported the bars cut and everything ready.

  A big touring car idled along the Ingleside Boulevard in the bright sunshine the following morning as the Black Maria began its daily journey into the city. Blackie was at the wheel, with Ann beside him. In the tonneau was a grimy suit of workman’s clothes—the disguise in which the Glad-rags Kid was to attempt an escape from the State after his rescue.

  The prison car and Blackie’s, approaching each other diagonally, drew nearer together. The junction of the roads at which the escape was to be made was at hand. There was no policeman on the rear step. As the cars drew abreast Blackie saw that the bars of the wicket were out and the way to escape open. Then a head appeared through the aperture—a helmeted head—-and a hand holding a revolver.

  “A copper!” cried Blackie. “He’s riding inside and guarding the open wicket. They’re wise to the job, Ann. It’s all off.”

  Ann made no sound, and except for her ghastly pallor she might not have heard or understood. The Black Maria disappeared around a curve, and Blackie turned his car back toward the city, driving slowly on the trip that was to have been a wild race to freedom for a man now doomed.

  “Mary and I and you and the Kid himself knew of this,” said Blackie. “Did you mention it in any way to anyone?”

  Ann shook her head.

  “It’s strange,” Blackie continued. “There isn’t one chance in a million that the coppers would discover the cut bars without information. And yet they did.”

  Ann neither cried, spoke nor gave outward indication of the bitterness of her disappointment. She sat silent and still and very white, staring straight ahead with eyes whose far-away look reminded Blackie of what he had seen in them on the night she stood on the deck of the Piedmont with a bottle of poison in her hand and said “Why not?”

  Blackie returned to the Palms and sent old Mother McGinn out to the County Jail to investigate. She came back toward night with the explanation:

  “The Kid snitched on himself,” she reported. “He bragged to his cellmate during the night that he’d be free and on the street before the Black Maria got downtown, and that the papers would be full of it. His cell-partner tipped it off to the guards the first thing in the morning, and they frisked the Maria from top to bottom and finally found the cut bars. They’re going to take him downtown in a special car with gun-guards from now on. The Glad-rags Kid has let his tongue put a rope round his neck.”

  “I thought he had done it himself,” said Blackie to Ann, who sat staring into the street with dull, glazed eyes. “I’m afraid it’s all off now, little woman. They’ll guard him as if he were the Kaiser every moment he’s out of his cell. There’s not a chance on earth to save him now.”

  “Not a chance on earth now, Blackie,” repeated Ann in a lifeless monotone. “Not one! Well—”

  She stepped to Mother McGinn’s mirror and smoothed her hair and straightened her hat. Then she began to talk as if her mind suddenly were freed of a crushing burden.

  “That was some diamond stunt that was pulled the other night out at the Pullman mansion, eh, Blackie!” she began, and then chatted on, discussing the “big job” with all the zest of a crook-woman without a care or a worry. “Well, I’ve got to get downtown and see Drennan before he closes up for the night,” she said finally. “I’ll see you tomorrow or next day, Blackie. Be good to yourself, old pal, and thanks.”

  She was gone, leaving Blackie staring after her in perplexity.

  “I don’t get her idea this time,” he said to himself. “But whatever it is that’s on her mind, it worries me.

  The next day Alibi Ann was missing. Frequently both Blackie and Mary called her ’phone number without getting a reply. They called at her flat and found it locked and deserted.

  “Probably gone on one of her diamond hunts. She was trying to raise a big bunch of money for the Kid’s defense,” conjectured Blackie; but somehow this explanation did not satisfy, and he was distinctly uneasy.

  Other days passed without any word from Ann, and then from prisoners discharged from the County Jail, San Francisco’s crook-world heard startling news. It was that Ann had “quit” the Glad-rags Kid.

  “She sent him a note by her lawyer tellin’ him she was beatin’ it,” Reddy the Rube reported. “He’s ravin’ like a lunatic and callin’ her copper-hearted and a rat and so on. She didn’t even pay his mouthpiece” (lawyer), “and the Kid had to hock all his stones to make good. It’s the right dope, folks. I heard the Kid tell it with my own ears.”

  “It’s a lie, even though that fool Kid is telling it. It will take better evidence than his to convince me that Alibi Ann has turned ‘wrong,’” Blackie answered angrily.

  But notwithstanding his denial, Boston Blackie was worried. He called at Drennan’s office.

  “Some of the gang just in from the ‘County’ are spreading the news that Ann has quit the Glad-rags Kid,” Blackie began. “They say she sent him a note by you saying she was going. I know it isn’t true—”

  “It is true, Blackie,” Drennan interrupted. “I delivered the note myself. She came here and told me what she was going to do. She surprised me, I’ll admit. After he finished raving over it, the Kid gave me the note to keep for him. I’ll show it to you if you like.”

  He drew an envelope addressed to her husband in Ann’s writing from his desk and handed it to Blackie, who took it with the air of one disbelieving his eyes. This is what he read:

  Dear Tom:

  Good luck and good-by. I’ve done all I can for you, but there isn’t a chance in the world, and I’m on my way. You’ll have to sell your diamonds and car to pay Drennan. I would, but I haven
’t the money.

  —Ann.

  Blackie was stunned by the note’s revelations. This tiling wasn’t possible, he felt, and yet it was true.

  “She must have worried herself crazy,” he insisted. “In her right mind Alibi Ann never could have written that note to a husband facing the gallows. Why, it’s downright yellow.”

  “She was in her right mind when she wrote the note,” the lawyer replied gravely.

  On the day that the Glad-rags Kid went to trial for the murder at the Trocadero, Boston Blackie and a few others were in the Chinese room at the Palms, when Mac the Gun came bursting in with an afternoon paper.

  “Pipe the news, fellers!” he cried excitedly. “Glad-rags has copped a plea” (pleaded guilty) “an’ got off with a life jolt. That’s only half. Alibi Ann was grabbed las’ night for the big jewel-job up at the Pullman house. The bulls has her dead to rights. They found all the sparks and even the clothes and wig she wore when she was in the Pullman place. The old lady has identified her, and Ann sees it’s all off and comes clean with a confession to the dicks” (detectives).

  “What!” cried Blackie, snapping the paper from his hand.

  It was all there as Mac had related it. Ann, whose cunning in evading the best efforts of the police had supplied her moniker of “Alibi Ann,” had been tripped at last. And no less surprising was the sudden change in heart of the prosecuting attorney, who after stoutly asserting for weeks that he would insist on the death penalty for the Glad-rags Kid, had at the last moment permitted him to plead guilty and take a prison sentence.

  The paper passed from hand to hand, and as each read it, the men looked at one another questioningly, but hesitated before voicing something evidently in all their minds. Halsted Street Al was the first to speak:

  “There’s something rotten in Denmark, boys,” he said slowly, “and something else rottener yet right here in Frisco. Glad-rags saves his neck and gets let off light, and Alibi Ann is grabbed with the goods all in the same day. What for did that prosecutor let the Kid off with a stir jolt after bragging he would hang him—which he sure could have done? Not for nothing, believe me. Boys, somebody snitched on Alibi Ann, and that somebody is the Glad-rags Kid.”

  “Ann had quit him, and he was sore, anyway,” spoke up another. “She done wrong to blow him when he was up against it, but that don’t give him no license to turn copper. He’s plain rat, folks.”

  Blackie rose and put on his coat.

  “I’m going down to see Ann right now and find out exactly what has happened,” said Blackie.

  Alibi Ann greeted Blackie eagerly. He was amazed at her appearance. She looked almost happy—almost like the Ann who had lavished all her love on the now-desolate little flat on Lyons Street.

  “Oh, Blackie, I’m so glad you’re here!” she cried delightedly. “I was going to send for you, for there is something I want you to do for me.”

  She hesitated for a moment.

  “I suppose the gang are all saying the Kid snitched on me to save himself,” she went on, studying Blackie’s face as she talked.

  “Isn’t that what they ought to be saying?” demanded Blackie. “Isn’t that the truth?”

  “That’s the reason I wanted to see you, Blackie. I don’t want that said of Tom. I want you to tell everybody you know in town that it isn’t true.”

  “I won’t do it, Ann,” Blackie answered angrily. “I won’t give a rat like that a good name even for you.”

  “But he didn’t do it,” Ann asserted, and Blackie all at once realized that she spoke the truth. “As far as I know, Tom never heard of the Pullman jewels, and anyway, he couldn’t have snitched on me, because,”—she glanced cautiously over her shoulder and lowered her voice—“because, Blackie, I didn’t steal them.”

  “You didn’t!” cried Blackie. “Then why have you confessed that you did? Explain it, Ann, explain it. I can’t make even a guess at the answer.”

  Ann drew closer to him and spoke in a whisper.

  “You and Drennan are the only two in the world who will ever know the truth, Blackie. He’ll never tell, and I know you won’t,” Ann said. “On the day when the rescue failed, you told me there wasn’t a chance in the world to save the Kid, and there wasn’t, except one. That one chance was that the prosecutor would consent to let him take a plea and a prison sentence. The prosecutor wouldn’t consent—he wanted a hanging. Well, I had a plan of my own to change his mind.

  “He and the police department are at outs. I knew he would do almost anything to clear up the Pullman mystery and show up the police by getting back the jewels himself. I knew who pulled that job. It was Baltimore Ben and his Mollie. I followed them to Seattle, and there, Blackie, I bought the Pullman jewels of them.

  “When I got back, I sent Drennan to the prosecutor to hint that he might be able to fix it for him to get back the Pullman jewels. The ’cutor bit. He wanted those jewels bad. Drennan told him Tom knew where they were and might agree to tell if he could get a prison sentence. The ’cutor spluttered for a while, but finally agreed, except that he insisted that he must have the thief as well as the Pullman jewels—somebody has to do time for that job, he declared, or the Kid must hang.

  “Drennan came back, thinking it was all off and that he would have to go to trial with the Kid’s case, but I told him to agree to the ’cutor’s terms—the jewels and the thief too, in return for the Kid’s life. And that’s why, Blackie, I’m going to take a jolt at last—my first one and for a job I didn’t do!”

  “Ann! Ann!” murmured Blackie, divided between admiration for her gameness and sorrow for her fate. “You are buying the Kid’s life with yours.”

  “It’s cheap as dirt at the price,” she said, and she meant it.

  “But the note to the Kid saying you had quit him,” said Blackie. “You wrote that and let him believe it was so. Why?”

  “Camoufake, Blackie. Pure camoufake. You know it isn’t safe to trust Tom to keep anything to himself. And yet we had to convince the prosecutor that all this was absolutely on the square and that Tom had a real reason for hating me and wanting to see me in trouble. That’s why I wrote the note and let everybody think it was on the square. Up in the prosecutor’s office they’ll always think that Tom did the snitching, but I want you to be able to tell the gang he’s right and no snitch. When you say you know it’s so, they’ll all take your word for it.”

  “You’re a wonder, Ann,” Blackie said.

  “Oh, yes, I did the job up right with all the trimmings,” Ann admitted with a trace of pride. “I had Mollie describe exactly how she was dressed when she got into the Pullman house and conned the old lady while Ben turned the trick. I duplicated her costumes-hat, dress, shoes and all—and got a wig that matches Mollie’s hair. All this junk was in the flat ready for the ’cutor’s men to find when they pulled their raid and got me and the jewels. Of course, they dressed me up in the clothes this morning, and Mrs. Pullman identified me immediately. It isn’t half hard to alibi yourself into jail.”

  “How much time are they going to give you, Ann?” asked Blackie, turning his head to hide his eyes.

  “The limit—twenty years,” she answered calmly and without regret. “That’s the deal we made. The ’cutor was to be free to do his worst to the Pullman thief.”

  “Twenty years! Oh Annie,” ejaculated Blackie, “this is awful!”

  “It’s a long time, Blackie, an awful long time, but it was the best I could do,” said Ann, growing suddenly grave.

  “Do you know how old I’ll be in twenty years?” she asked after a long pause. “Nearly sixty! A white-haired old woman fit for nothing but the poor-house.”

  The weary, haggard look was stealing back over her face.

  “There is one last favor I’m going to ask you, Blackie,” she said unsteadily. “Tom is upstairs in the
anteroom waiting to be taken back to the County.

  If I don’t see him now to say good-by, I never will see him, Blackie—never again as long as I live. Will you try to fix it for me to be taken up there just for one moment?”

  “I won’t try to fix it; I’ll do it,” Blackie answered.

  The Glad-rags Kid was sitting with his back toward her, when Ann caught her first glimpse of him. Beside him, and with her hands clasped in his, sat Dessie Devries.

  Alibi Ann, as she caught sight of the girl, caught her breath in a quick, choking gasp. Then slowly she managed to force back to her lips the smile that had been on them when she entered.

  “I’ve come to say good-by, Tom,” she said gently.

  “Oh, it’s you, is it?” answered the Glad-rags Kid, looking up with a sneer. “Now that I’ve got myself out of danger, you turn up like a bad penny that’s not wanted anywhere. It strikes me you have your nerve with you to be here at all.”

  His anger and disdain grew as he talked.

  “That was a swell little note you sent me,” he continued. “That showed you up for what you are. I’d be headed for a death-cell by now if I had depended on you for anything. Didn’t even have the dough to help pay my lawyer, did you? But now when you’re in trouble yourself, you come sneaking back looking for sympathy. Nothing doing with me.”

  With the fear of death now safely behind him, the Glad-rags Kid was his old swaggering bullying self again.

  Alibi Ann stood looking down at him for a full minute with immeasurable love in eyes that seemed to be searching and memorizing every line in his face. Suddenly she stooped and kissed him.

  “Good-by Tom dear,” she whispered softly. “It’s the last time we will ever see each other in this world.”