As the night advanced she determined to stick to her post. What could it have been that Drummond was doing? It was no good, she felt positive.
Suddenly before her eye, glued to its eavesdropping aperture, she saw a strange sight. There was a violent commotion in the store. Blue-coated policemen seemed to swarm in from nowhere. And in the rear, directing them, appeared Drummond, holding by the arm the unfortunate Sleighbells, quaking with fear, evidently having been picked up already elsewhere by the wily detective.
Muller put up a stout resistance, but the officers easily seized him and, after a hasty but thorough search, unearthed his cache of the contraband drug.
As the scene unfolded, Constance was more and more bewildered after having witnessed that which preceded it, the signing of the letter and the passing of the money. Muller evidently had nothing to say about that. What did it mean?
The police were still holding Muller, and Constance had not noted that Drummond had disappeared.
“It’s on the first floor—left, men,” sounded a familiar voice outside her own door. “I know she’s there. My shadow saw her buy the dope and take it home.”
Her heart was thumping wildly. It was Drummond leading his squad of raiders, and they were about to enter the apartment of Adele. They knocked, but there was no answer.
A few moments before Constance would have felt perfectly safe in saying that Adele was out. But if Drummond’s man had seen her enter, might she not have been there all the time, be there still, in a stupor? She dreaded to think of what might happen if the poor girl once fell into their hands. It would be the final impulse that would complete her ruin.
Constance did not stop to reason it out. Her woman’s intuition told her that now was the time to act—that there was no retreat.
She opened her own door just as the raiders had forced in the flimsy affair that guarded the apartment of Adele.
“So!” sneered Drummond, catching sight of her in the dim light of the hallway. “You are mixed up in these violations of the new drug law, too!”
Constance said nothing. She had determined first to make Drummond display his hand.
“Well,” he ground out, “I’m going to get these people this time. I represent the Medical Society and the Board of Health. These men have been assigned to me by the Commissioner as a dope squad. We want this girl. We have others who will give evidence; but we want this one, too.”
He said it with a bluster that even exaggerated the theatrical character of the raid itself. Constance did not stop to weigh the value of his words, but through the door she brushed quickly. Adele might need her if she was indeed there.
As she entered the little living-room she saw a sight which almost transfixed her. Adele was there—lying across a divan, motionless.
Constance bent over. Adele was cold. As far as she could determine there was not a breath or a heart beat!
What did it mean? She did not stop to think. Instantly there flashed over her the recollection of an instrument she had read about at one of the city hospitals, It might save Adele. Before any one knew what she was doing she had darted to the telephone in the lower hall of the apartment and had called up the hospital frantically, imploring them to hurry. Adele must be saved.
Constance had no very clear idea of what happened next in the hurly-burly of events, until the ambulance pulled up at the door and the white-coated surgeon burst in carrying a heavy suitcase.
With one look at the unfortunate girl he muttered, “Paralysis of the respiratory organs—too large a dose of the drug. You did perfectly right,” and began unpacking the case.
Constance, calm now in the crisis, stood by him and helped as deftly as could any nurse.
It was a curious arrangement of tubes and valves, with a large rubber bag, and a little pump that the doctor had brought. Quickly he placed a cap, attached to it, over the nose and mouth of the poor girl, and started the machine.
“Wh-what is it?” gasped Drummond as he saw Adele’s hitherto motionless breast now rise and fall.
“A pulmotor,” replied the doctor, working quickly and carefully, “an artificial lung. Sometimes it can revive even the medically dead. It is our last chance with this girl.”
Constance had picked up the packet which had fallen beside Adele and was looking at the white powder.
“Almost pure cocaine,” remarked the young surgeon, testing it. “The hydrochloride, large crystals, highest quality. Usually it is adulterated. Was she in the habit of taking it this way?”
Constance said nothing. She had seen Muller make up the packet—specially now, she recalled. Instead of the adulterated dope he had given Adele the purest kind. Why? Was there some secret he wished to lock in her breast forever?
Mechanically the pulmotor pumped. Would it save her?
Constance was living over what she had already seen through the detectascope. Suddenly she thought of the strange letter and of the money.
She hurried into the drug store. Muller had already been taken away, but before the officer left in charge could interfere she picked up the carbon sheet on which the letter had been copied, turned it over and held it eagerly to the light.
She read in amazement. It was a confession. In it Muller admitted to Dr. Moreland Price that he was the head of a sort of dope trust, that he had messengers out, like Sleighbells, that he had often put dope in the prescriptions sent him by the doctor, and had repeatedly violated the law and refilled such prescriptions. On its face it was complete and convincing.
Yet it did not satisfy Constance. She could not believe that Adele had committed suicide. Adele must possess some secret. What was it?
“Is—is there any change?” she asked anxiously of the young surgeon now engrossed in his work.
For answer he merely nodded to the apparently motionless form on the bed, and for a moment stopped the pulmotor.
The mechanical movement of the body ceased. But in its place was a slight tremor about the lips and mouth.
Adele moved—was faintly gasping for breath!
“Adele!” cried Constance softly in her ear. “Adele!”
Something, perhaps a far-away answer of recognition, seemed to flicker over her face. The doctor redoubled his efforts.
“Adele—do you know me?” whispered Constance again.
“Yes,” came back faintly at last. “There—there’s something—wrong with it—They—they—”
“How? What do you mean?” urged Constance. “Tell me, Adele.”
The girl moved uneasily. The doctor administered a stimulant and she vaguely opened her eyes, began to talk hazily, dreamily. Constance bent over to catch the faint words which would have been lost to the others.
“They—are going to—double cross the Health Department,” she murmured as if to herself, then gathering strength she went on, “Muller and Sleighbells will be arrested and take the penalty. They have been caught with the goods, anyhow. It has all been arranged so that the detective will get his case. Money—will be paid to both of them, to Muller and the detective, to swing the case and protect him. He made me do it. I saw the detective, even danced with him and he agreed to do it. Oh, I would do anything—I am his willing tool when I have the stuff. But—this time—it was—” She rambled off incoherently.
“Who made you do it? Who told you?” prompted Constance. “For whom would you do anything?”
Adele moaned and clutched Constance’s hand convulsively. Constance did not pause to consider the ethics of questioning a half-unconscious girl. Her only idea was to get at the truth.
“Who was it?” she reiterated.
Adele turned weakly.
“Dr. Price,” she murmured as Constance bent her ear to catch even the faintest sound. “He told me—all about it—last night—in the car.”
Instantly C
onstance understood. Adele was the only one outside who held the secret, who could upset the carefully planned frame-up that was to protect the real head of the dope trust who had paid liberally to save his own wretched skin.
She rose quickly and wheeled about suddenly on Drummond.
“You will convict Dr. Price also,” she said in a low tone. “This girl must not be dragged down, too. You will leave her alone, and both you and Mr. Muller will hand over that money to her for her cure of the habit.”
Drummond started forward angrily, but fell back as Constance added in a lower but firmer tone, “Or I’ll have you all up on a charge of attempting murder.”
Drummond turned surlily to those of his “dope squad,” who remained:
“You can go, boys,” he said brusquely.
“There’s been some mistake here.”
CHAPTER XII
THE FUGITIVES
“Newspaper pictures seldom look like the person they represent,” asserted Lawrence Macey nonchalantly.
Constance Dunlap looked squarely at the man opposite her at the table, oblivious to the surroundings. It was a brilliant sight in the great after-theater rendezvous, the beautiful faces and gowns, the exquisite music, the bright lights and the gayety. She had chosen this time and place for a reason. She had hoped that the contrast with what she had to say would be most marked in its influence on the man.
“Nevertheless,” she replied keenly, “I recognize the picture—as though you were Bertillon’s new ‘spoken portrait’ of this Graeme Mackenzie.”
She deliberately folded up a newspaper clipping and shoved it into her hand-bag on a chair beside the table.
Lawrence Macey met her eye unflinchingly.
“Suppose,” he drawled, “just for the sake of argument, that you are right. What would you do?”
Constance looked at the unruffled exterior of the man. With her keen perception she knew that it covered just as calm an interior. He would have said the same thing if she had been a real detective, had walked up behind him suddenly in the subway crush, had tapped his shoulder, and whispered, “You’re wanted.”
“We are dealing with facts, not suppositions,” she replied evasively.
Momentarily, a strange look passed over Macey’s face. What was she driving at—blackmail? He could not think so, even though he had only just come to know Constance. He rejected the thought before it was half formed.
“Put it as you please,” he persisted. “I am, then, this Graeme Mackenzie who has decamped from Omaha with half a million—it is half a million in the article, is it not?—of cash and unregistered stocks and bonds. Now what would you do?”
Constance felt unconsciously the shift which he had skilfully made in their positions. Instead of being the pursuer, she was now the pursued, at least in their conversation. He had admitted nothing of what her quick intuition told her.
Yet she felt an admiration for the sang-froid of Macey. She felt a spell thrown over her by the magnetic eyes that seemed to search her own. They were large eyes, the eyes of a dreamer, rather than of a practical man, eyes of a man who goes far and travels long with the woman on whom he fixes them solely.
“You haven’t answered my hypothetical question,” he reminded her.
She brought herself back with a start. “I was only thinking,” she murmured.
“Then there is doubt in your mind what you would do?”
“N—no,” she hesitated.
He bent over nearer across the table. “You would at least recall the old adage, ‘Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you’?” he urged.
It was uncanny, the way this man read her thoughts.
“You know whom they say quotes scripture,” she avoided.
“And am I a—a devil?”
“I did not say so.”
“You hinted it.”
She had. But she said, “No, nor hinted it.”
“Then you did not mean to hint it?”
She looked away a moment at the gay throng. “Graeme Mackenzie,” she said, slowly, “what’s the use of all this beating about? Why cannot we be frank with one another?”
She paused, then resumed, meditatively, “A long time ago I became involved with a man in a scheme to forge checks. I would have done anything for him, anything.”
A cloud passed over his face. She saw it, had been watching for it, but appeared not to do so. His was a nature to brook no rivalry.
“My husband had become involved in extravagances for which I was to blame,” she went on.
The cloud settled, and in its place came a look of intense relief. He was like most men. Whatever his own morals, he demanded a high standard in her.
“We formed an amateur partnership in crime,” she hurried on. “He lost his life, was unable to stand up against the odds, while he was alone, away from me. Since then I have been helping those who have become involved, on the wrong side, with the law. There,” she concluded simply, “I have put myself in your power. I have admitted my part in something that, try as they would, they could never connect me with. I have done it because—because I want to help you. Be as frank with me.”
He eyed her keenly again. The appeal was irresistible.
“I can tell you Graeme Mackenzie’s story,” he began carefully. “Six months ago there was a young man in Omaha who had worked faithfully for a safe deposit company for years. He was getting eighty-five dollars a month. That is more than it seems to you here in New York. But it was very little for what he did. Why, as superintendent of the safe deposit vaults he had helped to build up that part of the trust company’s business to such an extent that he knew he deserved more.
“Now, a superintendent of a safe deposit vault has lots of chances. Sometimes depositors give him their keys to unlock their boxes for them. It is a simple thing to make an impression in wax or chewing gum palmed in the hand. Or he has access to a number of keys of unrented boxes; he can, as opportunity offers, make duplicates, and then when the boxes are rented, he has a key. Even if the locks of unrented boxes are blanks, set by the first insertion of the key chosen at random, he can still do the same thing. And even if it takes two to get at the idle keys, himself and another trusted employe, he can get at them, if he is clever, without the other officer knowing it, though it may be done almost before his eyes. You see, it all comes down to the honesty of the man.”
He paused. Constance was fascinated at the coolness with which this man had gone to work, and with which he told of it.
“This superintendent earned more than he received. He deserved it. But when he asked for a raise, they told him he was lucky to keep the job,—they reduced him, instead, to seventy-five dollars. He was angry at the stinging rebuke. He determined to make them smart, to show them what he could do.
“One noon he went out to lunch and—they have been looking for him ever since. He had taken half a million in cash, stocks, and bonds, unregistered and hence easily hypothecated and traded on.”
“And his motive?” she asked.
He looked at her long and earnestly as if making up his mind to something. “I think,” he replied, “I wanted revenge quite as much as the money.”
He said it slowly, measured, as if realizing that there was now nothing to be gained by concealment from her, as if only he wanted to put himself in the best light with the woman who had won from him his secret. It was his confession!
Acquaintances with Constance ripened fast into friendships. She had known Macey, as he called himself, only a fortnight. He had been introduced to her at a sort of Bohemian gathering, had talked to her, direct, as she liked a man to talk. He had seen her home that night, had asked to call, and on the other nights had taken her to the theater and to supper.
Delicately unconsciously, a bond of friendship had grown up between them
. She felt that he was a man vibrating with physical and mental power, long latent, which nothing but a strong will held in check, a man by whom she could be fascinated, yet of whom she was just a little bit afraid.
With Macey, it would have been difficult to analyze his feelings. He had found in Constance a woman who had seen the world in all its phases, yet had come through unstained by what would have drowned some in the depths of the under-world, or thrust others into the degradation of the demi-monde, at least. He admired and respected her. He, the dreamer, saw in her the practical. She, an adventurer in amateur lawlessness saw in him something kindred at heart.
And so when a newspaper came to her in which she recognized with her keen insight Lawrence Macey’s face under Graeme Mackenzie’s name, and a story of embezzlement of trust company and other funds from the Omaha Central Western Trust of half a million, she had not been wholly surprised. Instead, she felt almost a sense of elation. The man was neither better nor worse than herself. And he needed help.
Her mind wandered back to a time, months before, when she had learned the bitter lesson of what it was to be a legal outcast, and had determined always to keep within the law, no matter how close to the edge of things she went.
Mackenzie continued looking at her, as if waiting for the answer to his first question.
“No,” she said slowly, “I am not going to hand you over. I never had any such intention. We are in each other’s power. But you cannot go about openly, even in New York, now. Some one besides myself must have seen that article.”
Graeme listened blankly. It was true. His fancied security in the city was over. He had fled to New York because there, in the mass of people, he could best sink his old identity and take on a new.
The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales Page 207