The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale Part 21

CAUGHT IN THE ACT

It was one of those countless streets on the East Side each so identical with another--dark, not over clean, flanked on both sides with small shops, bas.e.m.e.nt stores and tenement dwellings that crowded one upon the other in a sort of helpless confusion. Jimmie Dale moved quickly along.

The whimsical smile was back on his lips. Sonnino, whose business, the money-lending end of it, would naturally have kept him late at work, was now evidently intent on a belated meal; Sonnino, therefore, could be counted upon as a factor eliminated for at feast the next half hour--and half an hour was enough, a little more than enough!

Jimmie Dale glanced back over his shoulder. There was no one in sight.

A yard ahead of him, one of those relics of barbaric architecture, tunnelled as it were through the centre of a building that the s.p.a.ce overhead might not be wasted, was the black driveway that gave entrance to the courtyard behind, where Sonnino lived alone in one of a half dozen small, tottering-from-age frame houses. Jimmie Dale drew closer to the wall, came opposite the driveway--and disappeared from the street.

It was the Gray Seal now, the professional Jimmie Dale, as silent in his movements as the shadows about him. He traversed the driveway, and emerged on the courtyard. Here, it was scarcely less dark. There was no moon, and no lights in any of the houses that made the rear of the courtyard. He could just discern the houses as looming shapes against the sky line, that was all.

He crossed the courtyard, and, reaching the line of door-stepless, poverty-stricken hovels--they appeared to be little more than that--crept stealthily along to the end house at the left, halted an instant to press his face against a black window pane, then tried the door cautiously. It was locked, of course. Again there came the whimsical smile, but it was almost hidden now by the black silk mask that he slipped quickly over his face. His finger tips, that were like a magical sixth sense to Jimmie Dale, embodying all the other five, felt tentatively over the lock, then slipped into his pocket, selected unerringly one of his picklocks, and inserted the little steel instrument in the keyhole. An instant more and the door was opening without a sound under Jimmie Dale's hand. And then, the door open, he stepped over the threshold, and, in the act of closing the door behind him, stood suddenly rigid--and where the whimsical smile had been before, his lips were now compressed into a thin, straight line.

"What's that?" came a hoa.r.s.e, shaken whisper out of the blackness beyond.

"What's _what_?" demanded another voice--the whisper this time sharp and caustic. "I didn't hear anything!"

"Neither did I," admitted the first speaker. "It wasn't that--it was like a draft of air--as though the door or a window had been opened."

"Forget it!" observed the second voice contemptuously. "Cut out the jumps--we've got to get through here before Sonnino gets back. You'd make a wooden Indian nervous!"

There was silence for an instant, then a curious gnawing sound punctuated with quick, low, metallic rasps as of a ratchet at work--and upon Jimmie Dale for a moment came stunned dismay. Time, the one factor upon which he had depended, was lost to him; Clarie Archman and Gentleman Laroque were already at work in there in that room beyond. He stood motionless, his brain whirling; and then slowly, without a sound, an inch at a time, he began to close the door behind him. He could see nothing; but the door connecting the two rooms was obviously open--the distinctness with which the whispering voices had reached him was proof of that. They were working, too, without light, or he would have got a warning gleam when he had looked through the window. And now--what now?

The picklock was shifted to his left hand, as he drew his automatic from his pocket. There was only one answer to the question--to play the game out to the end, whatever that end might be!

Beneath the mask his face drew into chiselled lines, as the picklock silently locked the door. There was one exit from that inner room, and only _one_--through the room in which he stood. The Tocsin had drawn an accurate word-plan of the crude, shack-like place, and now in his mind he reconstructed it here in the darkness. The doorway into a small hall that led to the stairs adjoined the doorway of that inner room where the two were now at work--and in that room were no windows, it was a sort of blind cubby-hole where Niccolo Sonnino transacted his most private business.

Jimmie Dale crept forward up the room. There was no answering creak of board or flooring, no sound save that gnawing sound, and the rasping click of the ratchet. His place of vantage was against the wall between the two doors--there, he could both command the exit from, and see into, the inner room, while the doorway into the hall provided him with a means of retreat should the necessity arise. And then, suddenly, halfway up the room, he dropped down behind what was evidently a jeweller's workbench. A whisper, obviously Laroque's this time, came once more from the inner room.

"Shoot the flash again!" And then, savagely: "Curse it, not on the _ceiling_! Can't you hold it steady! What the devil is the matter with you!"

There was no answer. A dull glimmer of light filtered through the doorway, but from the position in which he lay Jimmie Dale could distinguish nothing in the inner room itself.

"All right! That'll do!" Laroque growled presently.

The light went out. Jimmie Dale crept forward again. And now he gained the rear wall of the room, and crouched down close against it between the two doorways.

Came the sound of breathing now, heavy, as from sustained exertion, making almost an undertone of the steady _click-click-click_ of the ratchet, and the sullen gnaw of the bit. The minutes pa.s.sed. The flashlight went on again--and Jimmie Dale strained forward. Two dark forms, backs to him, were outlined against the face of the safe which was at the far side of the room, a nickel dial glistened in the white ray--he could make out nothing else.

Then darkness again. And again, after a time, the flashlight. Ten, fifteen, perhaps twenty minutes dragged by. Jimmie Dale might have been a shadow moving against the wall for all the sound he made as he changed his cramped position; but, just below the mask, his lips were pressed fiercely together. Would Gentleman Laroque never get through! Sonnino was not only likely to return in a very few minutes now, but was almost certain to do so. Under his breath Jimmie Dale cursed the gangster's bungling methods--and not for their crudity alone. His first impulse had been to surprise the two, hold them up at the revolver point, but the result of such an act would have been abortive, for the disfigured safe would stand a mute, incontrovertible witness to the fact that an _attempt_ to force it had been made--and, whether it was actual robbery or attempted robbery that was proved against the son, it in no way deflected the blow aimed at David Archman. And, besides, there was the letter! If he, Jimmie Dale, had been in time even to have prevented Gentleman Laroque from sinking a bit into the safe, the letter would have counted not at all--but now it counted to the extent that it literally meant life and death. Who had it? Not Clarie Archman--that was certain. And the Tocsin had not said--obviously because she, too, had been in the dark in that respect. Therefore he could only wait, watch and follow every move of the game throughout the rest of the night, if necessary! It was the only course open to him; the letter, not the robbery, was paramount now.

A curious, m.u.f.fled, metallic thump, mingled with a quick, low-breathed, triumphant oath, came suddenly from the inner room--and then Laroque's voice, eager, the words clipped off as though in feverish elation:

"There she is! One nice little job--eh? Well, come on--shoot your light into her, and let's take a look at the Christmas tree!"

The flashlight's ray flooded the interior of the open safe. Laroque, on his knees, laughed suddenly, and thrust his hand inside.

"What did I tell you, eh?" he chuckled. "I got the straight tip, eh?

Four thousand, if there's a cent!"

Laroque began to remove what were evidently packages of banknotes from the safe--but Jimmie Dale was no longer watching the scene. He had edged suddenly back into the doorway of the hall, and was listening now intently. A footstep--he could have sworn he had caught the sound of a footstep--seemed to have come from just outside the front window. But all was still again. Perhaps he had been mistaken. No! Slight as was the sound, he heard, unmistakably now, a key grate in the lock--and then, stealthily, the front door began to open.

A bewildered look came into Jimmie Dale's face, as he retreated further back into the hallway itself now. It was probably Sonnino; but why did Sonnino come stealing into his own house like--well, like any one of the three predatory guests already there before him? And then Jimmie Dale's face cleared. Of course! From the window the glow of the flashlight in the inner room could be seen. Sonnino was forewarned, and undoubtedly--forearmed!

The front door closed softly, so softly that had Jimmie Dale, supersensitive as his hearing was, not been intent upon it, it would have escaped him. The glow from the inner room, faint as it was, threw into shadowy relief a man's form tiptoeing forward--and then a board creaked.

"_What's that_!" came in a wild whisper from Clarie Archman.

"Got 'em again!" Laroque snapped back. "You make me tired!"

"Let's get out of here! Let's get out of here--quick!" Clarie Archman's voice, not so low now, held a tone of frantic appeal.

"Nix!" said Laroque, in a vicious sneer. "Not till the job's done! D'ye think I'm going to spend half an hour cracking a safe and take a chance of missing any bets? We've got the coin all right, but there ought to be one or two of Sonnino's sparklers lying around in some of these drawers, and--"

There was a click of an electric-light switch, a cry from Clarie Archman, the inner room was ablaze with light, and--Jimmie Dale had edged forward again out of the hallway--Sonnino, revolver in hand, was standing just over the threshold facing Gentleman Laroque and the a.s.sistant district attorney's son.

Then silence--a silence of seconds that were as minutes. And then Gentleman Laroque laughed gratingly.

"h.e.l.lo, Sonnino!" he said coolly. "A little late, aren't you? You've kept me stalling for the last five minutes. Know my friend--Mr. Martin Moore, alias Mr. Clarie Archman? Clarie, this is Signor Niccolo Sonnino, the proprietor of this joint."

And then to Jimmie Dale, where before his mind had groped in darkness to reconcile apparently incongruous details, in a flash there came the light. The "plant" was a little more intricate, a little more cunning, a little more h.e.l.lish--that was all!

The boy, white to the lips, was swaying on his feet, grasping at the table in the centre of the room. He looked from one to the other, a miserable, dawning understanding in his eyes.

"You--you know my name?" His voice was scarcely audible.

"Sure!" said Laroque--and yawned insolently.

"So!" purred Sonnino, in excellent English. "Is it so! A thief! The son of the so-honest Mister Attorney--a thief!"

"It's a lie!" The boy's hands, clenched, were raised above his head, and then shaken almost maniacally in Gentleman Laroque's face. "It's a lie! I--I don't understand, but--but you two, you devils, are together in this!"

"Sure!" retorted Laroque, as insolently as before--and flung the other's hands away. "Sure, we are!"

"It's a lie!" said the boy again. "I was in a hole. I needed money. You told me you knew a man who would lend it to me. That's why I came here with you, and then--and then you held me here with your revolver, and began to open that safe."

"Sure!" returned Laroque, for the third time. "Sure--that's right! Well, what's the answer?"

"This!" cried the boy wildly. "I don't know what your game is, but this is my answer! Do you think I would have touched that money, or have let you--once I got out of here where I could have got help! I'm not a thief--whatever else I may be. That's my answer!"

Niccolo Sonnino's smile was oily.

"It is a little late, is it not?" he leered. "Listen, my little young friend; I will tell you a story. You work for a bank, eh? The bank does not like its young men to speculate--yes? But why should you not speculate a little, a very little, if you like--if you get the very private and good tips, eh? It is not wrong--no, certainly, it is not wrong. But at the same time the bank must not know. Very well! They shall not know--no one shall know. You are not the young Mr. Archman any more, you are--what is the name?--Martin Moore. But Martin Moore must have an address, eh? Very well! On Sixth Avenue there is a little store where one rents boxes for private mail, and where questions are never asked--is it not so, my very dear young friend?"

The boy was staring in a demented way into Sonnino's face, but he did not speak.

"Aw, hand it to him straight!" Gentleman Laroque broke in roughly. "I don't want to hang around here all night. Here, Archman, you listen to me! We piped you off on that lay about two weeks ago--and it looked good to us, and we played it for a winner, see? You got introduced to me, and found me a pretty good sort, and we got thick together--you know all about that. Also, you get introduced to some new brokers, who said they'd take good care of your margins--maybe they only ran a bucket-shop, but you didn't know it! All right! You got snarled up good and plenty. Yesterday you were wiped out, and three thousand dollars to the bad besides, and they were yelling for their money and threatening to expose you. They gave you until to-morrow morning to make good. You told me about it. I told you this morning I thought I knew a man who would lend you the coin, and"--he laughed mockingly, and jerked his hand toward the safe--"well, I led you to it, didn't I?"

"I--I don't understand," the boy mumbled helplessly.

"Don't you!" jeered Laroque. "Well, it looks big enough for a blind man to see! We've got this robbery wished on you to a fare-thee-well! A young man who speculates, who uses an a.s.sumed name, and runs a private letter box on Sixth Avenue, and has forty-eight hours in which to square up his debts or face exposure, has a h.e.l.l of a chance with a jury--_not_!"