The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  A voice, or rather voices, seemed to come from the box itself. It was uncanny.

  “Hello, is this Mrs. LeMar?” came from it.

  “What is it?” whispered Halsey, as if fearful of being overheard.

  “A telegraphone,” replied Constance, shutting it off for a moment.

  “A telegraphone? What is that?”

  “A machine for registering telephone conversations, dictation, anything of the sort you wish. It was invented by Valdemar Poulsen, the Danish Edison. This is one of his new wire machines. The record is made by a new process, localized charges of magnetism on this wire. It is as permanent as the wire itself. There is only one thing that can destroy them—rubbing over the wire with this magnet. Listen.”

  She had started the machine again. Whose voice was it calling Bella? Constance was looking fixedly at Drummond. He shifted uneasily.

  “How much is he in for now?” pursued the voice.

  Halsey gasped. It was Drummond’s own voice.

  “Two hundred and fifty shares,” replied Bella’s voice.

  “Good. Keep at him. Don’t lose him. To-night I’ll drop in.”

  “And your client will make good?” she anxiously.

  “Absolutely. We will pay five thousand dollars for the evidence that will convict him.”

  Constance’s little audience was stunned. But she did not let the telegraphone pause. Skipping some unimportant calls, she began again.

  This was a call from Bella to Watson.

  “Ross, that fellow Drummond called up to-day.”

  “Yes?”

  “He is going to pull it off to-night. His client will make good—five thousand if they catch Halsey with the goods. How about it?”

  “Pretty soft—eh, Bella?” came back from Watson.

  “My God! it’s a plant!” exclaimed Halsey, staggering and dropping heavily into a chair. “I’m ruined. There is no way out!”

  “Wait,” interrupted Constance. “Here’s another call. It may serve to explain why luck was with me to-night. I came prepared.”

  “Yes, Mrs. LeMar,” came another strange voice from the machine. “We’d do anything for Mr. Watson. What is it—a pack of strippers?”

  “Yes. The aces stripped from the ends, the kings from the sides.”

  The group looked eagerly at Constance.

  “From the maker of fake gambling apparatus, I find,” she explained, shutting off the machine. “They were ordering from him cards cut or trimmed so that certain ones could be readily drawn from the deck, or ‘stripped.’ Small wedge-shaped strips are trimmed off the edges of all the other cards, leaving the aces, say, projecting just the most minute fraction of an inch beyond the others. Everything is done carefully. The rounded edges at the corners are recut to look right. When the cards are shuffled the aces protrude a trifle over the edges of the other cards. It is a simple matter for the dealer to draw or strip out as many aces as he wants, stack them on the bottom of the pack as he shuffles the cards, and draw them from the bottom whenever he wants them. Strippers are one of the newest things in swindling. Marked cards are out of date. But some decks have the aces stripped from the ends, the kings from the sides. With this pack, as you can see, a sucker can be dealt out the kings, while the house player gets the aces.”

  Drummond brazened it out. With a muttered oath he turned to Watson again. “What rot is this? The stock, Watson,” he repeated. “Where is that stock I heard them talking about?”

  Mrs. Noble, forgetting all now but Halsey, paled. Bella LeMar was fumbling at her gold mesh bag. She gave a sudden, suppressed little scream.

  “Look!” she cried. “They are blank—those stock certificates he gave me.”

  Drummond seized them roughly from her hands.

  Where the signatures should have been there was nothing at all!

  Across the face of the stock were the words in deep black, “Sample Certificate,” written in an angular, feminine hand.

  What did it mean? Halsey was as amazed as any of them. Mechanically he turned to Constance.

  “I didn’t say anything last night,” she remarked incisively. “But I had my suspicions from the first. I always look out for the purry kind of ‘my dear’ woman. They have claws. Last night I watched. To-day I learned—learned that you, Mr. Drummond, were nothing but a blackmailer, using these gamblers to do your dirty work. Haddon, they would have thrown you out like a squeezed lemon as soon as the money you had was gone. They would have taken the bribe that Drummond offered for the stock—and they would have left you nothing but jail. I learned all that over the telegraphone. I learned their methods and, knowing them, even I could not be prevented from winning to-night.”

  Halsey moved as if to speak. “But,” he asked eagerly, “the stock certificates—what of them!”

  “The stock?” she answered with deliberation. “Did you ever hear that writing in quinoline will appear blue, but will soon fade away, while other writing in silver nitrate and ammonia, invisible at first, after a few hours appears black? You wrote on those certificates in sympathetic ink that fades, I in ink that comes up soon.”

  Mrs. Noble was crying softly to herself. They still had her notes for thousands.

  Halsey saw her. Instantly he forgot his own case. What was to be done about her? He telegraphed a mute appeal to Constance, forgetful of himself now. Constance was fingering the switch of the telegraphone.

  “Drummond,” remarked Constance significantly, as though other secrets might still be contained in the marvelous little mechanical detective, “Drummond, don’t you think, for the sake of your own reputation as a detective, it might be as well to keep this thing quiet?”

  For a moment the detective gripped his wrath and seemed to consider the damaging record of his conversation with Bella LeMar.

  “Perhaps,” he agreed sullenly.

  Constance reached into her chatelaine. From it she drew an ordinary magnet, and slowly pulled off the armature.

  “If I run this over the wires,” she hinted, holding it near the spools, “the record will be wiped out.” She paused impressively. “Let me have those I O U’s of Mrs. Noble’s. By the way, you might as well give me that blank stock, too. There is no use in that, now.”

  As she laid the papers in a pile on the table before her she added the old forged certificates from Halsey’s pocket. There it lay, the incriminating, ruining evidence.

  Deliberately she passed the magnet over the thin steel wire, wiping out what it had recorded, as if the recording angel were blotting out from the book of life.

  “Try it, Drummond,” she cried, dropping on her knees before the open fireplace. “You will find the wire a blank.”

  There was a hot, sudden blaze as the pile of papers from the table flared up.

  “There,” she exclaimed. “These gambling debts were not even debts of honor. If you will call a cab, Haddon, I have reserved a table at Jade’s for you and Mrs. Noble. It is a farewell. Drummond will not occupy his place in the corner to-night. But—after it—you are to forget—both of you—forever. You understand?”

  CHAPTER V

  THE EAVESDROPPERS

  “I suppose you have heard something about the troubles of the Motor Trust? The other directors, you know, are trying to force me out.”

  Rodman Brainard, president of the big Motor Corporation, searched the magnetic depths of the big brown eyes of the woman beside his desk. Talking to Constance Dunlap was not like talking to other women he had known, either socially or in business.

  “A friend of yours, and of mine,” he added frankly, “has told me enough about you to convince me that you are more than an amateur at getting people out of tight places. I asked you to call because I think you can help me.”

  There was a directness about Brainard which Constance liked
.

  “It’s very kind of you to place such confidence in me—on such short acquaintance,” she returned pointedly, searching his face.

  Brainard laughed.

  “I don’t need to tell you, Mrs. Dunlap, that anything I have said so far is an open secret in Wall Street. They have threatened to drag in the Sherman law, and in the reorganization that will follow the investigation, they plan to eliminate Rodman Brainard—perhaps set in motion the criminal clauses of the law. It’s nothing, Mrs. Dunlap, but a downright hypocritical pose. They reverse the usual process. It is doing good that evil may result.”

  He watched her face intently. Something in her expression seemed to please him. “By George,” he thought to himself, “this is a man’s woman. You can talk to her.”

  Brainard, accustomed to quick decisions, added aloud, “Just now they are using Mrs. Brainard as a catspaw. They are spreading that scandal about my acquaintance with Blanche Leblanc, the actress. You have seen her? A stunning woman—wonderful. But I long ago saw that such a friendship could lead to nothing but ruin.” He met Constance’s eye squarely. There was nothing of the adventuress in it as there had been in Blanche Leblanc. “And,” he finished, almost biting off the words, “I decided to cut it out.”

  “How does Blanche Leblanc figure in the Motor Trust trouble?” asked Constance keenly.

  “They had been shadowing me a long time before I knew it, ferreting back into my past. Yesterday I learned that some one had broken into Miss Leblanc’s apartments and had stolen a package of letters which I wrote to her. It can’t hurt her. People expect that sort of thing of an actress. But it can hurt the president of the Motor Trust—just at present.”

  “Who has been doing the shadowing?”

  “Worthington, the treasurer, is the guiding spirit of the ‘insurgents’ as they call themselves—it sounds popular, like reform. I understand they have had a detective named Drummond working for them.”

  Constance raised her eyes quickly at the name. “Was Drummond always to cross her trail?

  “This story of the letters,” he went on, “puts on the finishing touch. They have me all right on that. I can tell by the way that Sybil—er, Mrs. Brainard—acts, that she has read and reread those letters. But, by God,” he concluded, bringing down his fist on the desk, “I shall fight to the end, and when I go down,”—he emphasized each word with an additional blow,—“the crash will bring down the whole damned structure on their own heads, too.”

  He was too earnest even to apologize to her. Constance studied the grim determination in the man’s face. He was not one of those destined to fail.

  “All is not lost that is in peril, Mr. Brainard,” she remarked quietly. “That’s one of the maxims of your own Wall Street.”

  “What would you do?” he asked. It was not an appeal; rather it was an invitation.

  “I can’t say, yet. Let me come into the office of the Trust. Can’t I be your private secretary?”

  “Consider yourself engaged. Name your figure—after it is over. My record on the Streets speaks for how I stand by those who stand by me. But I hate a quitter.”

  “So do I,” exclaimed Constance, rising and giving him her hand in a straight-arm shake that made Brainard straighten himself and look down into her face with unconcealed admiration.

  The next morning Constance became private secretary to the president of the Motor Trust.

  “You will be ‘Miss’ Dunlap,” remarked Brainard. “It sounds more plausible.”

  Quietly he arranged her duties so that she would seem to be very busy without having anything which really interfered with the purpose of her presence.

  She had been thinking rapidly. Late in the forenoon she reached a decision. A little errand uptown kept her longer than she expected, but by the late afternoon she was back again at her desk, on which rested a small package which had been delivered by messenger for her.

  “I beg you won’t think as badly of me as it seems on the surface, Miss Dunlap,” remarked Brainard, stopping beside her desk.

  “I don’t think badly of you,” she answered in a low voice. “You are not the only man who has been caught with a crowd of crooks who plan to leave him holding the bag.”

  “Oh, it isn’t that,” he hastened, “I mean this Blanche Leblanc affair. May I be frank with you?”

  It was not the first time Constance had been made a confidante of the troubles of the heart, and yet there was something fascinating about having a man like Brainard consider her worthy of being trusted with what meant so much to him.

  “I’m not altogether to blame,” he went on slowly. “The estrangement between my wife and myself came long before that little affair. It began over—well—over what they call a serious difference in temperament. You know a man—an ambitious man—needs a partner, a woman who can use the social position that money gives not alone for pleasure but as a means of advancing the partnership. I never had that. The more I advanced, the more I found her becoming a butterfly—and not as attractive as the other butterflies either. She went one way—I, another. Oh well—what’s the use? I went too far—the wrong way. I must pay. Only let me save what I can from the wreck.”

  It was not Constance, the woman, to whom he was talking. It was Constance, the secretary. Yet it was the woman, not the secretary, who listened.

  Brainard stopped again beside her desk.

  “All that is neither here nor there,” he remarked, forcing a change in his manner. “I am in for it. Now, the question is—what are we going to do about it!”

  Constance had unwrapped the package on her desk, disclosing an oblong box.

  “What’s that?” he asked curiously.

  “Mr. Brainard,” she answered tapping the box, “there’s no limit to the use of this little machine for our purposes. We can get at their most vital secrets with it. We can discover every plan which they have against us. We may even learn the hiding place of those letters Why, there is no limit. This is one of those new microphone detectives.”

  “A microphone?” he repeated as he opened the box, looked sharply at the two black little storage batteries inside, the coil of silk-covered wire, a little black rubber receiver and a curious black disc whose face was pierced by a circular row of holes.

  “Yes. You must have heard of them. You hide that transmitter behind a picture or under a table or desk. Then you run the wire out of the room and by listening in the receiver you can hear everything!”

  “But that is what detectives use—”

  “Well?” she interrupted coolly, “what of it? If it is good for them, is it not just as good for us?”

  “Better!” he exclaimed. “By George, you are the goods.”

  It was late before Constance had a chance to do anything with the microphone. It seemed as if Worthington were staying, perversely, later than usual. At last, however, he left with a curt nod to her.

  The moment the door was closed she stopped the desultory clicking of her typewriter with which she had been toying in the appearance of being busy. With Brainard she entered the board room where she had noticed Worthington and Sheppard often during the day.

  It was, without exaggeration, one of the most plainly furnished rooms she had ever seen. A long mahogany table with eight large mahogany chairs, a half inch pile of velvety rug on the floor and a huge chandelier in the middle of the ceiling constituted the furniture. Not a picture, not a cabinet or filing case broke the blankness of the brown painted walls.

  For a moment she stopped to consider. Brainard waited and watched her narrowly.

  “There isn’t a place to put this transmitter except up above that chandelier,” she said at length.

  He gave her his hand as she stepped on a chair and then on the table. There was a glimpse of a trim ankle. The warmth and softness of her touch caused him to hol
d her hand just a moment longer than was absolutely necessary. A moment later he was standing on the table beside her.

  “This is the place, all right,” she said, looking at the thick scum of dust on the top of the reflector.

  Quickly she placed the little black disc close to the center on the top of the reflector. “Can you see that from the floor?” she asked.

  “No,” he answered, walking about the room, “not a sign of it.”

  “I’ll sit here,” she said in just a tremor of excitement over the adventure, “and listen while you talk in the board room.”

  Brainard entered. It seemed ridiculous for him to talk to himself.

  “If the microphone works,” he said at length, “rap on the desk twice.” Then he added, half laughing to himself, “If it doesn’t, rap once—Constance.”

  A single rap came in answer.

  “If you couldn’t hear,” he smiled entering her office, “why did you rap once!”

  “It didn’t work smoothly on that last word.”

  “What—Constance?”

  He thought there was a subtle change in their relations since the microphone incident. At any rate she was not angry. Were they not partners?

  “I think it will be better if I turn that microphone around,” she remarked. “I placed it face downwards. Let me change it.”

  Again he helped her as she jumped up on the board room table. This time his hand lingered a little longer in hers and she did not withdraw it so soon. When she did there was a quick twinkle in her eyes as she straightened the microphone and offered her hand to him again.

  “Jump!” he said, as if daring her.

  A moment she paused. “I never could take a dare,” she answered.

  She leaped lightly to the floor. For just a moment she seemed about to lose her balance. Then she felt an arm steadying her. He had caught her and for an instant their eyes met.

  “Well, Rodman—I scarcely thought it was as brazen as this!”