The Mammoth Book Of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits Part 32

"By no means!" said Mme Storey, smiling. "I just wanted to warn you, so you wouldn't shoot at the sight of it."

Pulling the drawer toward her, she picked up her gold mesh bag, and tossed it on the table in front of him.

"Now the gun," he added. "Pick it up by the muzzle."

She obeyed. "I'd be glad if you'd let me have my hanky out of the bag," she said. "I may need it."

"Ah, cut the comedy," he told her with his indifferent air. "Where's your safe?"

"In the outer office. There's nothing in it but business papers. My secretary will open it for you."

"You go with her," said the leader to his man.

I leave you to imagine what my feelings were when I had to turn my back on the gun, and walk out of the room with it following me. I nearly died out of sheer terror. I felt a hundred bullets tearing through my body.

But I got the safe open somehow, and satisfied the young bandit that it contained nothing of value to him.

We returned to the other room. My mistress was smiling still. The young bandit was sitting now, with his chair tipped back in a parade of indifference.

No muscle of his waxen face had changed, but there was a glint in his eyes as he watched Mme Storey. He contemptuously permitted her to see that he approved of her as a woman.

When his man reported that there was nothing in the safe, he stood up.

"Then back out," he said, with a jerk of his head toward the door into the hall.

"Why hurry?" drawled my mistress. "Let's have in tea."

The leader stopped. An open, scornful admiration leaped up in his eyes. The insolence of it was simply indescribable.

"You're a pretty game chicken, ain't yeh?" he drawled, putting a hand on his hip in a swaggering fashion. "You look good to me."

He dropped his gun in his pocket he knew he had her disarmed and returned a step or two toward the table. He drew a ring off his finger and tossed it toward her.

"Wear that," he said. In a flash he was gone.

When the door closed after them I collapsed. I could hear myself bawling like a child, without any power to stop it. The next thing I knew I was pulling frantically at one of the cas.e.m.e.nts, so that I might alarm the street.

Mme Storey drew me away before I got it open.

"No good," she said. "They'll have a car waiting. You'll only start a panic among the kiddies in the park."

I could still hear myself crying and carrying on like somebody else. "Why didn't you send for the engineer? The b.u.t.ton is there under the edge of your table for just such an emergency."

"What!" she said, smiling at me. "And bring John in here empty-handed to get shot?"

"It's outrageous!" I cried. "Coming in here like that! And you take it so calmly. The way that man looked at you was intolerable."

Mme Storey smilingly quoted the childish couplet, slightly amended: "Sticks and stones will break my bones, But looks will never hurt me."

"Such insolence!" I cried. "I cannot bear it!"

"Oh, a shot of heroin will do wonders to buck up a man's self-esteem," she said calmly.

She was sitting there smiling, and examining the fellow's ring with the eye of a connoisseur. It was a handsome carnelian in a wonderful antique setting. Heaven knows from whom it had been stolen.

The sight of her indifference drove me almost into a frenzy. "Aren't you going to do anything?" I cried.

"Oh, surely," she said, partly arousing herself. "Do all the usual things, my Bella; telephone to the police and to the newspapers. But as for me-" she relapsed into her smiling, musing upon the ring " I intend to have a little fun out of this."

III.

With proper management this affair need never have got into the newspapers, since no whisper of an alarm had been raised. But Mme Storey disdained to conceal it; on the contrary, she informed the press herself.

"It would make such a good story, it would be a shame to keep it from them," she said in her provoking way.

Of course, as I was to learn later, this publicity was necessary to the plan that was even then shaping itself in her mind; but I couldn't guess that in the beginning.

Well, you can imagine what a sensation was created by the news. The famous Mme Storey held up in her own office by a pair of youthful bandits! To come as it did, right on the heels of her brilliant success in the Harker case, when her name and fame was on everybody's lips, gave point to the tale. While the newspapers were still terming her the greatest criminologist of modern times, here she was stuck up by a couple of boys and robbed of her pearls!

It is a weakness of all democracies, they say, that when a citizen is elevated above the heads of the mob, nothing pleases the said mob better than to find an excuse to turn and shy things at the hero. We had to submit to an unmerciful razzing, both public and private. What a chance it gave to the cartoonists!

Mme Storey, I need hardly say, took it all smilingly. Borne up by her secret knowledge of the retribution she was preparing, I think she actually enjoyed it. She encouraged the razzers that her revenge might be more complete in the end.

But it was a bad time for me. I ground my teeth every time the telephone rang. My temper was in a continual state of exacerbation. Not the least of what I had to submit to were the hypocritical condolences of all the old cats in the boarding house where I live.

Inspector Rumsey suffered no less than I did. That his police had allowed Mme Storey to be robbed right under their noses, so to speak, caused the worthy little man almost to burst with chagrin. He wanted to surround us afterward with a whole cordon of police wherever we went, but of course Mme Storey would not hear of anything like that.

What she had termed all the usual things were done, of course, and nothing came of it. We furnished the police with exact descriptions of the bandits, which were sent broadcast. Several of the best men attached to the Central Office were put on the case.

Mme Storey and I went down to headquarters and turned over hundreds of pages of the Rogues' Gallery, without finding the faces we were in search of. Inspector Rumsey was not surprised by it.

"Every year," he said bitterly, "we have a fresh crop of young desperadoes to deal with."

I could not but be sorry for our friend during these days. His difficulties were owing to no fault of his own. After our robbery the crime wave mounted to still greater heights. Nearly every day the police had a fresh holdup to deal with, and on some days three or four.

"The publicity attached to your case has bucked them up all down the line," Inspector Rumsey said bitterly.

Mme Storey herself took no direct measures toward searching for the bandits. One day when I was burning with indignation at the facetious comments of some newspaper or another, I ventured to remonstrate with her on this.

"Oh, our little holdup boys were merely p.a.w.ns in the game, my Bella," she told me. "I'm after the commanding pieces."

I was relieved to learn that she was not entirely idle in the matter.

One morning when she took off her hat I cried out in dismay upon perceiving that she had acquired a boy's haircut overnight. I must confess that it was very becoming, revealing as it did the beautiful shape of her head and emphasizing the pure line of her profile. Still I hated to see her adopt so extreme a fashion.

She smiled at my distress. "Wait!" she said, holding up her hand, and disappeared within the middle room.

An hour later she called me to her. I stopped in the doorway, aghast. She stood in the middle of the room, striking an att.i.tude.

I say "she", but at the first glance it seemed to me as if my mistress had vanished, leaving a horrible changeling in her stead. The closely cut hair was now silvered, and her face heavily made up, one might almost say enameled.

Around the eyes and mouth it was cunningly shadowed to suggest the hollows of growing age; in a phrase, the fashionable, hard-living woman of fifty.

She was wearing a costume cut in severe mannish lines, showing a rolling silk collar at the neck, and a Bohemian tie. A little tough hat went with it, and a malacca stick with a plain ivory k.n.o.b. I'm sure you get the picture: an elderly charmer of the highest fashion, handsome, hard, and utterly reckless.

"Will it pa.s.s?" she asked in a throaty voice with a hint of huskiness.

"It is marvelous," I murmured.

"I am Kate Arkledon," she went on, with a half sneer which was fixed in her face; to smile would have ruined the effect. "Have you ever heard of her?"

I shook my head.

"A little before your time, I suppose. Ten years ago Kate Arkledon was one of the cleverest confidence women in the United States. She was famous in her way. Then suddenly she dropped out of sight of all her former a.s.sociates. As a matter of fact, she is living in respectability and affluence not a dozen doors from me. Once upon a time I did her a service which she has never forgotten.

"Well, with her permission, I am staging a come-back for Kate Arkledon. There is a slight resemblance between us, which I have built upon. It will be good enough at least to deceive anybody who has not seen her for ten years."

I foresaw danger ahead, and my heart sank.

Mme Storey broke off, to study me through narrowed eyes. "Turn around," she said.

"What do you want of me?" I faltered.

"Get a permanent wave," she said.

"But I will look like a Hottentot!" I cried.

"Of course," she said calmly. "They all do when they come out from under the curlers. You will make a very effective red-haired vamp, my Bella. I will dress you and teach you how to make up for it."

"But the make-up is only the beginning!" I gasped. "I could not possibly keep up such a part."

"Certainly you could. It will not be nearly so difficult as the character of Canada Annie, which you carried off so well. You can be a Dumb Dora this time with nothing to do but sit and look unutterable things at men. All you will have to say is 'Ain't it the truth!' when you agree, or very scornfully, 'So's yer old man!' when you disagree."

All this was uttered in the sneering, husky tones of the character she was portraying. It made me shiver.

"What are we going to do?" I asked fearfully.

"We are going to organize a little holdup gang of our own," said Kate Arkledon with a wicked grin.

A cry was forced from me. I could not imagine anybody less fitted for the part of bandit than myself.

"Not really not really!" I faltered.

"It will be just as real as I can make it appear," she said. "I mean to pull off a stunt or two in the most spectacular style."

I groaned inwardly.

"This is how I figure it out, Bella," she said in her natural voice. "There is certainly an organization behind the crime wave; but it's operating along new lines. It's a very loose and flexible organization, with all the units working independently of each other. Well, my idea is to form a unit of my own which will function so brilliantly that the organization will be forced to make overtures to us. Inspector Rumsey is in the secret."

I tasted in advance the awful excitement that was in store, and my heart was like lead in my breast. But I would have torn my tongue out sooner than protest aloud.

IV.

Busy days followed. It was impossible to let our other business slide, and we had to lead double lives.

By day Mme Storey and her secretary, Bella Brickley, worked in the offices on Gramercy Park, taking care to give out an interview to the newspapers occasionally, so that our presence there was regularly established. By night Kate Arkledon and her pal, Peggy Ray, showed themselves in certain gilded resorts on the West Side.

A good many days pa.s.sed before I got accustomed to the sight of my painted and bedizened self in the mirror. On the whole, though, I had an easy role to play. All that was required of me was to act as a foil for my mistress.

For the purpose of enabling us to change from one character to another and back again, we engaged a room in one of the nondescript warrens on West Forty-Seventh Street, where all kinds of queer little businesses are carried on by all kinds of queer characters. One could enter or leave such a building at any hour without exciting remark.

For Kate Arkledon's regular hang-out we chose a well-known West Side street, once fashionable, and now much favored of the white collar gentry. It often breaks into the news. However, I shall not name it for fear of depressing real estate values.

We rented a four room flat in a pretentious apartment house, where the tenants' reference were not too closely scanned; and here we immediately began to gather our gang round us.

Mme Storey's princ.i.p.al aid in this affair was the man I shall call Benny Abell, though that was not his real name, nor yet the name by which he had become famous in the underworld. If you have read my account of the Melanie Soupert case you will remember him.

His specialty had been sticking up the box offices of theaters, always working alone, and displaying a truly superhuman nerve. Since my mistress had broken up the Varick Street gang he had become re-united with his family, and had gone straight.

Mme Storey needed him now as a sort of liaison officer with crookdom, where his exploits were still remembered. She never had any intention of using him in an actual hold-up, which would have been like a nightmare to the poor fellow who had been through so much.

Abell, when I first knew him, was a small, determined, white-faced man, of an elegant appearance. Trained to a finish by danger, he was like a sheaf of quivering nerves.

Now happiness had caused him to take on flesh, and his face to a.s.sume a serene expression. However, he worked hard to reduce for this emergency, and played his part admirably.

Next we took in George Stephens, one of our regular operatives, and the best man we had after Crider. I should have been glad to have had Crider himself at our back, but he has worked for us so long Mme Storey feared the danger of his being recognized. She didn't want to have any more disguises than she could help. Stephens had the advantage of not having been in America long. A young fellow of aristocratic appearance, he soon acquired the soubriquet of English George.

Our remaining man was Bert Farren, a mere boy who has done good work for us on one or two occasions. Mme Storey chose him because boy bandits seemed to be the fashion.

We still lacked a direct, present connection with the world of crooks; but my mistress said we would have to wait for circ.u.mstances to furnish that.

Very early in the game the scene of our first exploit was chosen. This was the jewelry store of B. & J. Fossberg, a large and handsome establishment on Broadway not a hundred miles from One Hundredth Street. It is the finest establishment of the sort on the upper West Side.

Inspector Rumsey was acquainted with Benjamin Fossberg, one of the proprietors, and after a great deal of persuasion won his consent to the staged hold-up. His brother was told, of course, but the clerks were kept in the dark.

It was arranged that the guns which were kept in the store for protection should be removed as if for repairs on the day of the stick-up.

Night after night the five of us met in the flat on West - Street to discuss and rehea.r.s.e our plans. I had no idea that such elaborate preparations were required to stage an affair which would be all over in a minute or two.

By day our three men watched the store until they were familiar with every detail of the business routine. The Fossbergs had not fallen for any of the idiotic safeguards such as tear gas, sirens, etc. They trusted to the imposing appearance of their establishment to overawe gunmen.

It was on a corner, and occupied the s.p.a.ce of three ordinary stores. No such big place had ever been attacked.

A detailed plan of the store was drawn out, together with a map of the neighborhood. This we all studied. Each of us was allotted his station, and many rehearsals took place.

To me fell the comparatively easy job of acting as look-out on the sidewalk. Mme Storey was to enter, and ask to have goods shown her. George and Bert were to cover her get-away with their guns, while Abell was to drive the car, which was to be waiting in the side street.

When the business of the evening was over, it was our custom to show ourselves at one or another of the gilded resorts in the neighborhood. Gradually we settled on the Boule' Miche' as our public hangout.