Never-Fail Blake Part 3

If he became a figure of note, and fattened on power, he found it no longer possible to keep as free as he wished from entangling alliances.

He had by this time learned to give and take, to choose the lesser of two evils, to pay the ordained price for his triumphs. Occasionally the forces of evil had to be bribed with a promise of protection. For the surrender of dangerous plates, for example, a counterfeiter might receive immunity, or for the turning of State's evidence a guilty man might have to go scott free. At other times, to squeeze confession out of a crook, a cruelty as refined as that of the Inquisition had to be adopted. In one stubborn case the end had been achieved by depriving the victim of sleep, this Chinese torture being kept up until the needed nervous collapse. At another time the midnight cell of a suspected murderer had been "set" like a stage, with all the accessories of his crime, including even the cadaver, and when suddenly awakened the frenzied man had shrieked out his confession. But, as a rule, it was by imposing on his prisoner's better instincts, such as gang-loyalty or pity for a supposedly threatened "rag," that the point was won. In resources of this nature Blake became quite conscienceless, salving his soul with the altogether Jesuitic claim that illegal means were always justified by the legal end.

By the time he had fought his way up to the office of Second Deputy he no longer resented being known as a "rough neck" or a "flat foot." As an official, he believed in roughness; it was his right; and one touch of right made away with all wrong, very much as one grain of pepsin properly disposed might digest a carload of beef. A crook was a crook.

His natural end was the cell or the chair, and the sooner he got there the better for all concerned. So Blake believed in "hammering" his victims. He was an advocate of "confrontation." He had faith in the old-fashioned "third-degree" dodges. At these, in his ponderous way, he became an adept, looking on the nervous system of his subject as a nut, to be calmly and relentlessly gnawed at until the meat of truth lay exposed, or to be cracked by the impact of some sudden great shock.

Nor was the Second Deputy above resorting to the use of "plants."

Sometimes he had to call in a "fixer" to manufacture evidence, that the far-off ends of justice might not be defeated. He made frequent use of women of a certain type, women whom he could intimidate as an officer or buy over as a good fellow. He had his _aides_ in all walks of life, in clubs and offices, in p.a.w.nshops and saloons, in hotels and steamers and barber shops, in pool rooms and anarchists' cellars. He also had his visiting list, his "fences" and "stool-pigeons" and "shoo-flies."

He preferred the "outdoor" work, both because he was more at home in it and because it was more spectacular. He relished the bigger cases. He liked to step in where an underling had failed, get his teeth into the situation, shake the mystery out of it, and then obliterate the underling with a half hour of blasphemous abuse. He had scant patience with what he called the "high-collar cops." He consistently opposed the new-fangled methods, such as the _Portrait Parle_, and pin-maps for recording crime, and the graphic-system boards for marking the movements of criminals. All anthropometric nonsense such as Bertillon's he openly sneered at, just as he scoffed at card indexes and finger prints and other academic innovations which were debilitating the force. He had gathered his own data, at great pains, he nursed his own personal knowledge as to habitual offenders and their aliases, their methods, their convictions and records, their a.s.sociates and hang outs. He carried his own gallery under his own hat, and he was proud of it. His memory was good, and he claimed always to know his man. His intuitions were strong, and if he disliked a captive, that captive was in some way guilty--and he saw to it that his man did not escape. He was relentless, once his professional pride was involved. Being without imagination, he was without pity. It was, at best, a case of dog eat dog, and the Law, the Law for which he had such reverence, happened to keep him the upper dog.

Yet he was a comparatively stupid man, an amazingly self-satisfied toiler who had chanced to specialize on crime. And even as he became more and more a.s.sured of his personal ability, more and more entrenched in his tradition of greatness, he was becoming less and less elastic, less receptive, less adaptive. Much as he tried to blink the fact, he was compelled to depend more and more on the office behind him. His personal gallery, the gallery under his hat, showed a tendency to become both obsolete and inadequate. That endless catacomb of lost souls grew too intricate for one human mind to compa.s.s. New faces, new names, new tricks tended to bewilder him. He had to depend more and more on the clerical staff and the finger-print bureau records. His position became that of a villager with a department store on his hands, of a country shopkeeper trying to operate an urban emporium. He was averse to deputizing his official labors. He was ignorant of system and science. He took on the pathos of a man who is out of his time, touched with the added poignancy of a pa.s.sionate incredulity as to his predicament. He felt, at times, that there was something wrong, that the rest of the Department did not look on life and work as he did. But he could not decide just where the trouble lay. And in his uncertainty he made it a point to entrench himself by means of "politics." It became an open secret that he had a pull, that his position was impregnable. This in turn tended to coa.r.s.en his methods.

It lifted him beyond the domain of compet.i.tive effort. It touched his carelessness with arrogance. It also tinged his arrogance with occasional cruelty.

He redoubled his efforts to sustain the myth which had grown up about him, the myth of his vast cleverness and personal courage. He showed a tendency for the more turbulent centers. He went among murderers without a gun. He dropped into dives, protected by nothing more than the tradition of his office. He pushed his way in through thugs, picked out his man, and told him to come to Headquarters in an hour's time--and the man usually came. His appet.i.te for the spectacular increased. He preferred to head his own gambling raids, ax in hand.

But more even than his authority he liked to parade his knowledge. He liked to be able to say: "This is Sheeny Chi's coup!" or, "That's a job that only Soup-Can Charlie could do!" When a police surgeon hit on the idea of etherizing an obdurate "dummy chucker," to determine if the prisoner could talk or not, Blake appropriated the suggestion as his own. And when the "press boys" trooped in for their daily gist of news, he asked them, as usual, not to couple his name with the incident; and they, as usual, made him the hero of the occasion.

For Never-Fail Blake had made it a point to be good to the press boys.

He acquired an ability to "jolly" them without too obvious loss of dignity. He took them into his confidences, apparently, and made his disclosures personal matters, individual favors. He kept careful note of their names, their characteristics, their interests. He cultivated them, keeping as careful track of them from city to city as he did of the "big" criminals themselves. They got into the habit of going to him for their special stories. He always exacted secrecy, pretended reluctance, yet parceled out to one reporter and another those dicta to which his name could be most appropriately attached. He even surrendered a clue or two as to how his own activities and triumphs might be worked into a given story. When he perceived that those worldly wise young men of the press saw through the dodge, he became more adept, more adroit, more delicate in method. But the end was the same.

It was about this time that he invested in his first sc.r.a.p-book. Into this secret granary went every seed of his printed personal history.

Then came the higher records of the magazines, the ill.u.s.trated articles written about "Blake, the Hamard of America," as one of them expressed it, and "Never-Fail Blake," as another put it. He was very proud of those magazine articles, he even made ponderous and painstaking efforts for their repet.i.tion, at considerable loss of dignity. Yet he adopted the pose of disclaiming responsibility, of disliking such things, of being ready to oppose them if some effective method could only be thought out. He even hinted to those about him at Headquarters that this seeming garrulity was serving a good end, claiming it to be harmless pother to "cover" more immediate trails on which he pretended to be engaged.

But the sc.r.a.p-books grew in number and size. It became a task to keep up with his clippings. He developed into a personage, as much a personage as a grand-opera prima donna on tour. His successes were talked over in clubs. His name came to be known to the men in the street. His "camera eye" was now and then mentioned by the scientists.

His unblemished record was referred to in an occasional editorial.

When an ex-police reporter came to him, asking him to father a macaronic volume bearing the t.i.tle "Criminals of America," Blake not only added his name to the t.i.tle page, but advanced three hundred dollars to a.s.sist towards its launching.

The result of all this was a subtle yet unmistakable shifting of values, an achievement of public glory at the loss of official confidence. He excused his waning popularity among his co-workers on the ground of envy. It was, he held, merely the inevitable penalty for supreme success in any field. But a hint would come, now and then, that troubled him. "You think you 're a big gun, Blake," one of his underworld victims once had the temerity to cry out at him. "You think you 're the king of the Hawkshaws! But if you were on _my_ side of the fence, you 'd last about as long as a s...o...b..ll on a crownsheet!"

III

It was not until the advent of Copeland, the new First Deputy, that Blake began to suspect his own position. Copeland was an out-and-out "office" man, anything but a "flat foot." Weak looking and pallid, with the sedentary air of a junior desk clerk, vibratingly restless with no actual promise of being penetrating, he was of that indeterminate type which never seems to acquire a personality of its own. The small and bony and steel-blue face was as neutral as the spare and reticent figure that sat before a bald table in a bald room as inexpressive and reticent as its occupant. Copeland was not only unknown outside the Department; he was, in a way, unknown in his own official circles.

And then Blake woke up to the fact that some one on the inside was working against him, was blocking his moves, was actually using him as a "blind." While he was given the "cold" trails, younger men went out on the "hot" ones. There were times when the Second Deputy suspected that his enemy was Copeland. Not that he could be sure of this, for Copeland himself gave no inkling of his att.i.tude. He gave no inkling of anything, in fact, personal or impersonal. But more and more Blake was given the talking parts, the role of spokesman to the press. He was more and more posted in the background, like artillery, to intimidate with his remote thunder and cover the advance of more agile columns. He was encouraged to tell the public what he knew, but he was not allowed to know too much. And, ironically enough, he bitterly resented this role of "mouthpiece" for the Department.

"You call yourself a gun!" a patrolman who had been shaken down for insubordination broke out at him. "A gun! why, you 're only a _park_ gun! That's all you are, a broken-down bluff, an ornamental has-been, a park gun for kids to play 'round!"

Blake raged at that, impotently, pathetically, like an old lion with its teeth drawn. He prowled moodily around, looking for an enemy on whom to vent his anger. But he could find no tangible force that opposed him. He could see nothing on which to centralize his activity.

Yet something or somebody was working against him. To fight that opposition was like fighting a fog. It was as bad as trying to shoulder back a shadow.

He had his own "spots" and "finders" on the force. When he had been tipped off that the powers above were about to send him out on the Binhart case, he pa.s.sed the word along to his underlings, without loss of time, for he felt that he was about to be put on trial, that they were making the Binhart capture a test case. And he had rejoiced mightily when his dragnet had brought up the unexpected tip that Elsie Verriner had been in recent communication with Binhart, and with pressure from the right quarter could be made to talk.

This tip had been a secret one. Blake, on his part, kept it well m.u.f.fled, for he intended that his capture of Binhart should be not only a personal triumph for the Second Deputy, but a vindication of that Second Deputy's methods.

So when the Commissioner called him and Copeland into conference, the day after his talk with Elsie Verriner, Blake prided himself on being secretly prepared for any advances that might be made.

It was the Commissioner who did the talking. Copeland, as usual, lapsed into the background, cracking his dry knuckles and blinking his pale-blue eyes about the room as the voices of the two larger men boomed back and forth.

"We 've been going over this Binhart case," began the Commissioner.

"It's seven months now--and nothing done!"

Blake looked sideways at Copeland. There was m.u.f.fled and meditative belligerency in the look. There was also gratification, for it was the move he had been expecting.

"I always said McCooey was n't the man to go out on that case," said the Second Deputy, still watching Copeland.

"Then who _is_ the man?" asked the Commissioner.

Blake took out a cigar, bit the end off, and struck a match. It was out of place; but it was a sign of his independence. He had long since given up plug and fine-cut and taken to fat Havanas, which he smoked audibly, in plethoric wheezes. Good living had left his body stout and his breathing slightly asthmatic. He sat looking down at his ma.s.sive knees; his oblique study of Copeland, apparently, had yielded him scant satisfaction. Copeland, in fact, was making paper fans out of the official note-paper in front of him.

"What's the matter with Washington and Wilkie?" inquired Blake, attentively regarding his cigar.

"They 're just where we are--at a standstill," acknowledged the Commissioner.

"And that's where we 'll stay!" heavily contended the Second Deputy.

The entire situation was an insidiously flattering one to Blake. Every one else had failed. They were compelled to come to him, their final resource.

"Why?" demanded his superior.

"Because we have n't got a man who can turn the trick! We have n't got a man who can go out and round up Binhart inside o' seven years!"

"Then what is your suggestion?" It was Copeland who spoke, mild and hesitating.

"D'you want my suggestion?" demanded Blake, warm with the wine-like knowledge which, he knew, made him master of the situation.

"Of course," was the Commissioner's curt response.

"Well, you 've got to have a man who knows Binhart, who knows him and his tricks and his hang outs!"

"Well, who does?"

"I do," declared Blake.

The Commissioner indulged in his wintry smile.

"You mean if you were n't tied down to your Second Deputy's chair you could go out and get him!"

"I could!"

"Within a reasonable length of time?"

"I don't know about the time! But I could get him, all right."

"If you were still on the outside work?" interposed Copeland.

"I certainly would n't expect to dig him out o' my stamp drawer," was Blake's heavily facetious retort.