Keeban (Little, Brown and Company)/Chapter 22
Doris was up and she was steady. "You didn't get the gas," Jerry was telling her.
She said nothing to him. It was harder for her than for me to understand what he had done; yet she got it before I did.
"You're Jerry Fanneal," she said to him.
"That's me."
He went to a window and threw up the sash and flung back the shutter. He fired three shots in the air.
"You were here—not Harry Vine—just now."
"He's been cold for half an hour. That's what delayed you."
"What?"
"Christina stopped to croak him, Harry Vine, Keeban. She wouldn't take a chance."
He was wiping blood from his shoulder where he'd been hurt. I was bloody in several spots and Margaret was wiping that off me.
"Come along," said Jerry: and he took us downstairs. And there he lay—himself in duplicate—dead on the floor. He had been stabbed through the throat.
I bent over him and, with Jerry himself bending beside me, still I got a shock at seeing him. "Two of you," I said over and over. "Two of you." I was still shaken, you see.
"Two of us!" said Jerry, and he touched that body so identical with his own. "The difference between us was this: when he was turned loose, he walked the wrong way across the Lincoln Park grass."
"Two of you!" I said and straightened, my arm on Jerry's shoulder. "See here! When we were boys, with our beds side by side, what was the book you kept underneath to read in the mornings?"
"The Wonder Clock," he told me.
"And the story you liked best of all?"
"'One Good Turn Deserves Another.'"
"Jerry!" I cried to him; and I stood there holding to him, staring down at Keeban.
"I didn't kill him," Jerry said to me. "I came here to get him; I meant to bag him. Christina came with him but she worked with me. She knew I was here. She meant to kill him. I didn't know that till after I'd stepped out and went at him. She gave him the steel; she wanted to croak him. She thought he'd get her, if she didn't."
Doris said: "He would have. Where's she now?"
"Gone," said Jerry; and Doris asked no more.
Jerry ceased to stare down at Keeban. "We were twins, I suppose; that must be it; and he walked the wrong way across Lincoln Park. That was all there was to it." His mind kept going back to that. "Steve," he said to me.
"What?" I asked; I thought again he was turned to philosophy; but he said.
"Upstairs, you swung your chair hard, old top. I thought you'd never do it."
"I see now," I replied. "You were waiting for me to do that."
He nodded. "You had to make the move; then I could do the rest. You got to it just in time, old fellow!"
"In time?" I said stupidly. "The pipe wasn't turned on."
"Yet you were just in time; in a minute more, they'd got wise that it wasn't."
We heard men downstairs now. "Who's that?" I said.
"Must be the bulls; his gang," Jerry glanced at Keeban again, "got out; all that will ever get. Well, come on, bulls; a lot you can hurt me now!"
He looked up from his brother and straightened; and I felt for him perhaps one thousandth of his relief from what had been on him since that night he came into my room, after the Sparlings' dance, and said Keeban had come and gone with Dorothy Crewe.
I put my hand on him while we waited, Doris and he and I, for the approaching steps of the bulls.
"You can go back to anybody now; you can go back to Dorothy Crewe."
"I'll not go back," he told me.
"You wouldn't," I said.
"Are you going back, Steve?"
"Where?" I asked.
"To the bean business and—your Dorothy Crewe?"
"I don't know about going back to the bean business," I said. "And I never had any Dorothy Crewe; but if I had I wouldn't go back to her. No; I know that!"
The bulls came on us. We were in the light, but they flashed their own lanterns in our faces. "Up with 'em!" They had our hands over our heads at the points of their pistols. And when they saw Jerry, they felt sure of a haul.
"Here's him!" they called to those behind. "Here's him who's wanted from Chi to the Street! Here's him!"
"Take a look at the floor," Jerry advised them. "And when you take me along, have him with us."
"How's this, Mr. Fanneal? How's this?" And then I reaped one advantage of my previous notoriety. They knew me; and there, with Jerry beside me and Keeban on the floor, I tried to tell them.
Of course, they took us to the station for the second telling, which was not the last by any means. They held Jerry that night; but they did not hold Margaret and me. Of her, they knew nothing; and what I knew of her, I did not tell them.
If I told them all the truth about her, one section of this truth ought to make up for the other; her trying to warn Teverson, and taking the risk she ran, surely was full compensation for her passing "the queer." I felt that; but not being certain that others would so judge, I kept to myself what I knew. And I kept her to myself, too.
I had her in a cab; and this was no stray taxi, you may be sure. This was certain to go where I ordered it; and the number I gave was that of my friend on the Avenue.
"We can both go there and stay," I said. "That's one use for friends."
"No," said Doris. "Not for me."
"Oh, yes," I said; and, being alone with her in the back of that taxi, I firmly and forcibly held her. Also I kissed her, several times.
"Don't!" She fought with me; and furiously, too.
"I love you," I repeated to her. "And you love me. God knows why, but you kissed me in that closet; and you"
She told me then and there that none of that counted. She had thought we were going to be killed, you see, or she never would have shown any interest in me. Now we weren't killed, she said; and certainly that was true. We'd have to go back to our own lines, me to the bean business and she to "shoving the queer."
"You can't do that," I told her.
"Why not?" she came back at me.
"You've no more of the queer to shove. Your father's taken."
"And you're glad of that!" she accused me.
"I'm not glad!" I denied. "I'd do anything to free him."
"You wouldn't shove the queer with me!" she retorted.
"Didn't I do it—just about?"
"But you didn't want to. You didn't like it!"
"I never liked anything so much as that trip on the train, except when I had you later."
"Well, that's over now!" she said.
"I guess not. You and I have just started!"
"We've not . . ."
That's how we argued in that cab. I was wild about her; she did love me; and after a while I made her remember it. Naturally we had quite a time; we'd just been under rather a strain together.
I took her to my friends that night; and the second day I took her to the Church Around the Corner and married her. I waited till the second day so Jerry could be best man.
Jerry has not yet gone back to the bean business; I think he never will return. One of many results of his finding Keeban is that Jerry found his mother—an old woman who, when she was young, had twin boys one of whom wandered away; and for twenty-five years she has known only the one who turned to crime. Now she knows Jerry; he knows her. Naturally he's bewildered a bit about his future.
I am back in the bean business; that's where I belong. I'm at my desk. I've returned.
But I've returned rather like the soldier Kipling sings about who returned to Hackensack "but not the same." And I'm not the same for a similar reason.
"Things 'ave transpired which made me learn,
The size and meanin' of the game."
I've thought about that a lot, these days. My parents picked up Jerry and adopted him to "broaden" me and immediately set about the business of making him as much like ourselves as possible. They succeeded to the point where we both would have gone through life bean merchants, and happy at it, but for Keeban.
He's the one that did things to us.
But for him, the game would have been my club and golf course, the Drive, the Drake, the other items I've mentioned.
I'd have married, I suppose, some girl with my exact previous notions of the game.
Now, as I've mentioned, I'm married to Doris. And I have, I know, the best wife in the world. Certainly the most interesting.
Some of the family friends, who know the facts, feel there is something fundamentally wrong with my wife.
There is not; and there never was anything wrong—except counterfeiting.
She doesn't admit that was wrong. She concedes that now that she's married to me there is no actual occasion for anyone in the family engraving a steel plate but she makes this concession in a way which suggests that, should occasion ever arise, she will not be without recourse as a breadwinner.
The interesting part, for me, is I don't know how much she means it. So I'm playing that bean business safe to keep the occasions down below and quite out of her reach.
If one ever blows the lid off, I'll tell you.
THE END