The House of Intrigue/Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
WHEN a woman housecleans her heart she usually goes clear to the attic. As I sat on that green-slatted park bench, accordingly, I did a heap of overhauling in the musty corners of memory. Something was wrong, and I wanted to find out where. So I took up my whole past life, and sat there turning it round and round, like a park squirrel with a peanut. Then I took it up in a more comprehensive way, as though it were a movie-film, and let it unreel, year by tangled year. My only trouble was in finding a beginning, for things in this world don't seem to have beginnings, but just flow into one another and shift and change and pass while life goes stumbling on and those little midgets called men and women crisscross one another's trails and wonder why they're so much more unhappy than they intended to be.
But on that park bench, as at every other time I got thinking about the past, I found myself marking the first mile-stone by beginning with Bud Griswold, poor old "Carnation Bud" who always wore a pink in his button-hole, on parade, and prided himself on being as neat a dresser as Robert Hilliard himself.
I can see now that they were all cheap and tawdry and pathetic, those foolish old creeds and vanities of Bud's. But there was a time when they stood for nothing but splendor to me, just as there's an earlier time when a crimson Noah's Ark can mean grandeur and a string of coral can spell wealth. For Bud, that afternoon on Sixth Avenue when he stepped into my life, stood for everything that was princely and resplendent. Myrtle Menchen, who'd been exploring that third-rate department store with me, so weakened before a kolinsky pillow-muff that she calmly walked away from the fur-counter with the muff in her hand. But Myrtle, I found out later, had overlooked the minor detail of paying for it. When she got to the swing-doors and saw the store "flyman" on her trail, she said "Hold this, Baddie, till I button me coat!" In other words, she unloaded on me and discreetly melted away. And there I stood, with that stolen muff in my hand and that store flyman with his hand on my shoulder, when Carnation Bud came pushing through the crowd.
"You can't pinch that girl," he said with all the authority of a precinct captain.
"I've got her with the goods on—and you can do your talking with the cop that's coming across the street!" announced that sheep-nosed sleuth.
Bud talked with the cop that came across the street. He talked low and long, and called over the flyman himself, and continued that talk inside the store. Then he pulled out a roll of bills the size of a baby's arm, paid for the muff, and handed it over to me with a bow that made me think of John Barrymore in the movies. Then he led me out and signaled for a taxi.
"I s'pose you want to go home?" he said, as we swung off down the crowded avenue.
"I didn't steal that muff," was all the answer I gave to that question of his.
"Of course you didn't," he said, as solemn as a judge. But I knew he didn't believe me.
"Myrtle Menchen stole that muff," I persisted, "and handed it on to me to save her own neck."
"Don't you want to get back to your folks?" Bud gently inquired.
I told him I had no folks.
"Well, back to your home?"
"My home's been in a Greenwich Village rooming house with Myrtle. But from this day out I live with no girl like that." And I insisted on recounting the entire affair of the muff once more.
"Then what are you going to do?" asked that gallant prince who smelt of Florida water—but in those days it seemed a fit and finishing aura for such a golden hero.
"I don't know," was my listless response. Then Bud, in his lordly and masterful way, promptly took things in his own hands. He needed a good sharp girl in his work, which was that of a lock-inspector, and took him to all the biggest cities in America. And I in my innocence didn't understand what Bud's laugh stood for. So I agreed to swing in with him, and he promised that the job could end at any minute that he didn't treat me white.
Bud treated me white—and in going back to those old days, I found I couldn't keep from phrasing things in the language of that lower world. When you talk about city wild-life, you've got to use city wild-life words. Bud treated me white, with the one exception of not explaining, from the first, just what he had meant by inspector of locks. For when Bud inspected a lock it was usually done in the presence of a skeleton-key.
I was only a flapper, in those days, and there was no woman about to whom I could go for advice. I remember the day, on the Monday after he'd sent me ahead of him to Philadelphia, when I saw him filing a key-blank and he confessed that he was really a house-man. I was so green then that I didn't even know what the word meant. He had to go on and explain that he was really a supper-worker, and a supper-worker, I duly came to understand, was the underworld phrase for a dress-suit burglar.
It took my breath away—and I think my common sense must have gone with it. But the strange city intimidated me. I felt friendless and helpless and alone, in that great town of unknown streets and unknown faces. And when Bud left me to think it out and come to some sort of decision, I was foolish enough to feel relieved when I heard his step in the hall. And that decided me. I became a chicken-stall for a confidence man and second-story worker.
The thing that most deluded me, I think, was Bud's lopsided decency. For outside of his work he was the cleanest-minded man I had ever met. He had been true blue in his promise about being white to me, and I didn't want to add to that color-scheme by showing a yellow streak. So I was weak enough to let him surmise that I was going to stick. I'm not sure now whether I intended to or not. If the chance had come I'm afraid I might have bolted. But the chance never came. There was one condition, of course, which he very well knew I'd always insist upon. And he was wise enough to respect that. He kept me as guarded from the uglier side of life, in fact, as though I'd been his own daughter. And my sliding over into that newer world came so gradually, like a vestibuled Limited sliding out of the yards into the open, that I was under way, full tilt before I quite realized what was happening. Then the sheer movement of the thing, the activity of it, the excitement of it, got into my blood, and the need of Bud himself got fixed in my mind.
I learned to look at life as he did. I dropped into the trick of talking as he did. I got so I could face a tight fade without a quaver, and do my gay-cat part in sloughing our make as easily as rolling off a log. And all the while it seemed a sort of game, which could of course be dropped when the league disbanded and the autumn leaves blew through the bleachers. It never dawned on me then that a woman must be only what she has been, that every year of her past is the link of a chain which drags forever at her heels. But, as I've already said, I was only a flapper in those days.
We worked the Eastern Coast that first winter, all the big cities excepting New York. The bulls were out for Bud there, and he usually fought clear of the Big Burg—and the day came when I most devoutly thanked God for that, since it left me with a clear record on Manhattan Island and allowed me later on to start over again, when the chance came. Bud flossed me out with a Bonwit-Teller hand-me-down and I joined him at Albany. Then we beat it to Boston and worked the Bean-Town suburbs harnessed for a course dinner. Sometimes I'd brace the bell, and sometimes Bud would. When no one answered the ring Bud would slip in through a side window and make his clean-up. I'd play gay-cat while he dug for glass and junk. Sometime I'd even have to do the dummy-chucker act or spill a faint, to give him a chance for his getaway.
How the old words and the old way of looking up things came back, as I went over those days again! It seemed the only way to describe the tricks of the old trade. For instance, when an alarm went up and Bud seemed to be in for a rumble, I'd swoon. I'd wait until the crowd got big enough and then I'd flop right down, happy-hems and all. I even got the trick of making myself go white, when I wanted to. That was why my stall could nearly always work, and the hen-flock would always hang around until I came to, and start me off in a taxi or a limousine to some bloomer address in the outskirts. Bud, in the meantime, would hop the fence for a fade-away.
He specialized on glass or ice, which same means simply diamonds, and he had a pet theory that the only kind of thieving that could ever pay in the long run was diamond stealing. A diamond, he said, was always as good as money. It never depreciated. It could always be pried out of its setting and be split or re-cut and could never be traced. And it served women right, he claimed, to lose their glass, for the parading of such stones was not only a vanity but an incitement to the poor. Bud even acknowledged that when he'd got me properly trained in the business the two of us could start out as the biggest glass lifters in the world. He had mapped out some visionary plan of campaign, to take us right through Europe. We were to go only after the best stones in the land. By that time we'd have a deep heel, which means plenty of ready cash, so that we could feed our fence until the blow-over and unload in the Amsterdam markets like a regular dealer.
One point that Bud was especially careful about was always to keep me within the law. He never so much as asked me to steal a postage-stamp. He said he didn't want a blot against me, and he said it was for business purposes. Whether or not that was the truth I could never quite tell. For Bud guarded me in ways that weren't always necessary. He kept me away from what he called the "skirts" and "ribs" of his profession. He seemed to have known a good many of these women, in his time. Sometimes I used to wonder what his relations with them had been. And sometimes, too, I used to be jealous of them. At first it was of Third-Arm Annie, who had beryl-green eyes and a thatch of red bangs that made her look out of place off Fourteenth Street. But Bud told me that she was one of the cleverest "dips" and pickpockets in America, and explained how she'd got her name working as a shop-lifter, with a dummy third arm which she rested on a counter or show-case while her own unnoticed right hand was busy raking the chattels into her split-skirt pocket.
But later on it was another woman who most disturbed me, for I couldn't help feeling that this woman had her ropes laid for the rounding up of my Bud. Her name was Cookson, but in her own circle she was always known as Copperhead Kate, She was well named, all right. For she wore her hair low over her ears, and this hair was of thick copper, standing out on each side of her head in two rounded lobes. Her nose was rather short and blunt, and these two lobes seemed to add to the receding line of her flattened profile. So when you saw her at certain angles she kind of brought your heart up into your mouth, for her head was as much like the head of a copperhead snake as any human cranium could be. This snaky feeling was carried out still further in her movements themselves, for they were languid and lazy and graceful, as a rule. There was a scaly sort of shimmer about her, too, a smoothness and quietness which seemed to mark her down as belonging more to the shadows than the open street.
When her trail would cross with Bud's I'd have to edge away and fade into the background, for it was Bud's play, of course, always to deny that I was chicken-stalling for him. He wouldn't even recognize me in public, though we had a sign-language that would have made any Sicilian black-hander green-eyed with envy. I'd have to sit back and see Copperhead Kate dragging out her heart-to-heart talk with my Bud, and even then I was in some wordless way afraid of her, I hated that touch of stealth about her movements, that air of lazy self-concernment, that pose of gliding indifference to all the world about her. Bud told me that she was an uncommonly clever woman, as much cleverer than Third-Arm Annie, for instance, as Annie herself was cleverer than the every-day shop-lifter. But he stubbornly denied that he had ever worked with her, and claimed that for several years she'd been the gun-moll of a peterman called Whispering Wat, who'd a bullet-wound in his throat that rather interfered with his talking.
Bud nursed an open contempt for yeggs and petermen and lush-dips and that brand of crooks, and it was only when funds ran low that he turned back to actual porch-climbing. He always considered that line of work as a mere apprenticeship. He had his ambitions, had Bud, and sometimes he used to talk of how he'd handle the higher lines of work, once he was ready for the job. But he was never quite sure what this was to be. At one time he'd ramble on about switching back into the wire-tapping game, explaining that it was a game that never grew old and always had a rich sucker-list waiting for easy money. Then at other times he'd talk about the high-life sloughing, and say he wanted the two of us to get so we could saunter into Tiffany's or the Newport Casino or Bailey's Beach and spot the best stones in America without letting the Four Hundred know we weren't one of them. After talks like this Bud would plant me in the highest-priced hotels, to study the women there at close range, and catch the trick of talking as they did, and wearing my clothes as they seemed to wear theirs.
I was quick enough at doing this, though it always disturbed me in a way I can't quite explain. But I knew, all the time, that my splendor was only a flash in the pan. I knew I was only cheap plate, an impostor. And all the while, deep down in my soul, I had that never-ending ache to be the real thing.
There were times, too, when Bud himself seemed to fail in what he pretended to be. He used to seem almost pathetic to me, on my off days, for I felt then that his clothes were flashier than they ought to be, that his Lord-Chesterfield manners weren't the manners of the other men in those softly carpeted hotels, that even his affectation of a Harvard accent was actory and artificial. This never really came home to me until I met another man. And that man was my Hero-Man.
Somewhere in her life, I think, every woman, must have a Hero-Man, whether he's the new minister or the kingly floor-walker in a close-fitting Prince-Albert or a movie actor with his eyes beaded or some melancholy-eyed neighbor who is supposed to be misunderstood by his wife. But he must not be too near, or too accessible, otherwise his halo is likely to wither and his glory to fade into the light of common day.
It had been that way, I'm afraid, with Bud, although I had never been able to admit it. For Bud no longer seemed the resplendent being, smelling of Florida water, that he was that morning on Sixth Avenue when Myrtle Menchen stole the kolinsky muff. And my new Hero-Man was quite different from the old one, though there was a coincidence or two in the way they both appeared over the horizon.
Bud was hanging out at the Hotel Breslau, down at Long Beach, and was putting through a coup for milking the bathing-beach lockers during the swimming-hour. The Breslau double locker room is right under the hotel and reached from the shore by passing under the board-walk and in through a tunnel. On one side is the men's locker room, and on the other is the women's, with a slim in charge of one and a flapper in charge of the other. The lockers, of course, were for the use of the hotel guests, who undressed there before piking out for the beach in their bathing-suits.
Bud decided there was good booty in those lockers every afternoon, so he planned to have me call the locker-girl away for as long as I could hold her. Then he'd work his bone-keys and make his clean-up. It wasn't work he liked, but a turn of hard luck had left the coin-coffer at low ebb, and he had to take the first decent chance that came along.
A plump actor's wife came puddling in, in a wet bathing-suit, and caught Bud in her locker. Bud apologized and explained that his wife had sent him in from the beach for her rings, and he was awfully sorry he'd blundered into the wrong cubby-hole. Then he had the nerve to open up the second next locker, still under that plump dowager's eye, unpin an emerald pendant that was fastened to a waist hanging there, relock the door, and start smilingly back for the beach.
I didn't dream anything was wrong, at the time, until the plump person began to scream at the top of her lungs that she'd been robbed. Even then I didn't worry. I merely sauntered on through the tunnel to the beach, where I spotted Bud losing himself in the crowd. But the busty lady in the wet bathing-suit had also spotted him. I saw her coming, like a ball down the bowling-ally. I managed to brush by Bud just in time to have him pass me his loot, wrapped up tight in a pocket handkerchief. Then I ambled on, with the package stowed inside my sleazy blouse-neck as I languidly pushed in my hairpins. No one, apparently was any the wiser. But that was where I missed my one good guess.
I sank down beside a cool-eyed young man in gray flannels. He was smiling at the scene with a detached sort of contentment. He even smiled at me. Bud, by this time, had his hat in his hand and his Lord Chesterfield heels together. He was bowing and explaining and urbanely requesting that he be searched, if need be, to put the poor woman's mind at rest. But I didn't like the looks of things.
"What are they doing to that poor man?" I inquired of the cool-eyed youth beside me. He wasn't so young, I noticed, as I first thought him.
"I rather fancy they're going to have the house-detective search him," was my companion's quiet reply. He scarcely looked at me.
"Isn't that ridiculous?" I ventured. The whole thing, you see, somewhat bored me.
"It's more than ridiculous—it's useless," said the man at my side.
I looked at him out of the corner of a very guarded eye.
"Why?" I lazily inquired. But the search, I noticed, was already under way, and a triumphant if slightly indignant Bud Griswold was enduring it without any loss of standing.
"Because his confederate now has his haul safely tucked away under her shirt-waist,"' answered the man with the crême-de-menthe smile.
I sat there blinking at the blue Atlantic while a little runway of chills went arrowing up and down my spine. For this quiet-eyed stranger knew that I had that stolen jewelry on me, and he had just taken the trouble to let me know that he knew. In one panicky moment I saw myself blue-birded up to headquarters, mugged and measured, and my bright young life turning turtle into the Tombs.
But I didn't intend to give up the ship, without a last gasp or two.
"Do you think she can escape?" I quietly inquired.
He thought this over.
"That all depends on how intelligent she is," was his final response.
"I hope she does," I sighed. "For I think we all like to see a woman get a fighting chance!"
His smile broadened. Then he grew quite serious again.
"When the engagement has every aspect of fairness," he ventured. And that made me rather sit up again. He was intimating, of course, that sneak-thieving wasn't exactly the noblest of pastimes.
"I wonder what she really ought to do?" I impersonally inquired.
For the second time he found it necessary to give my question considerable thought.
"I should think the easiest solution of the situation would be for her to drop the little parcel intact into the hotel mail-box," he told me. "In that way the unfortunate lady will be relieved of all possible embarrassment and the owners of the missing—er—ornaments will undoubtedly come into possession of them again!"
I was still staring out at the blue Atlantic.
"I believe that is exactly what the lady intends to do," I quietly announced.
"When?" he inquired.
I did not answer him at once, for Bud, who was hovering about the background, was telling me by sign-talk to stick to the stranger and follow on to the city when the way was clear.
"When?" demanded my new friend.
"Right away," I acknowledged. For I had thrown back to Bud the high-sign that I was wise to his tip.
The man at my side turned and studied me, apparently for the first time.
"Im sorry, you know," he began. "But I rather think it would make it safer if you'd dine with me here to-night."
"I haven't been oppressed by any sense of impending danger," I told him, with a forced laugh.
"Then perhaps it escaped your attention that the locker-girl has just pointed you out to the hotel detective?"
"That is interesting," I said, but I wasn't one half as comfortable as I pretended to be.
"It is so interesting that I think it will be advisable for us to return to the hotel by way of the board-walk," he explained, as he rose to his feet. "And in case there is any necessity for using it, remember, my name is Wendy Washburn."
He said it as though he nursed the comfortable belief that there was considerable weight in that rather silly-sounding name.
"And mine is Baddie Pretlow," I told him, as I rose to my feet.
"Baddie," he repeated, with a glint of humor.
"That's short for Barbara, you know," I explained, as we began to move forward.
"There positively ought to be a society for the prenatal suppression of impossible names," he declared, as we mounted to the board-walk. "Imagine an able-bodied man being sent out into the world with such a name as 'Wendy,' And a nice-looking girl being compelled to answer to the soubriquet of 'Baddie!'"
"I suspect the latter may fit a little nearer than you think," I told him.
He stopped and stared at me, long and earnestly. Under that steady look, in fact, I could feel my color deepen.
"On the contrary," he said with quiet decision, "I think you are entirely wrong in that intimation."
"Thank you!" was my stammered and altogether stupid reply to his absurd declaration of faith. By this time we were back at the hotel and I was directing my course so as to lead us to the lobster-colored mail-box. I turned away from him and stooped in front of it.
"Will you pardon me a moment," I murmured, "for I've a letter I'd like to mail here!"
He did not look, but I'm sure he heard the chink of metal as the little parcel fell into the lobster-colored box. And I took a deep breath as I turned around to where he was waiting for me.
"It may seem rather an absurd hour to dine, but the sooner we dig ourselves in, so to speak, the safer we may be for any possible attack," my Hero-Man suggested. And I hadn't eaten my second oyster before I realized the wisdom of that strategy.
It was not the house-detective, however, but the hotel manager himself who came to confer with Wendy Washburn. That conference took place just beyond my hearing. It showed that my Hero-Man, whatever he may have been, was at least a good actor. He neither lost his dignity nor over-did the part. He neither expostulated nor argued. He merely announced. And he did it so quietly that that hotel manager tucked his last suspicion into its four-poster of official politeness and apologized for what must have been a mistake of his employees.
"That's over, I imagine," my Hero-Man announced, as he rejoined me, quite unruffled. And as he sat across the table from me and went on with his dinner, as calmly as though we had dined together a thousand times, I did my best to study his face. I wanted to understand him.
But that face didn't seem an easy one to understand. At first it struck me as being cold. Then it struck me as the face of one of those oldish-looking young Americans who begin to worry over things too early in life and get a sprinkling of gray over the ears while their eyes are still young. For his eyes were still young, young and eager, though the rest of his face looked tired and his smile was a half-cynical one. There was just a touch of disdain about his eyebrows, too, though you forgot that in the humor of his smile. He made that humor, I think, a kind of armor, as though he wanted to laugh at himself before you got a chance to laugh at him. And he had a funny little trick of holding back what he was about to say, for a second or two, as though he might be giving his brain time to work before he let his mental ponies trot out into the ring of talk. His lips would pucker up a little, as he did this, in a way that made you think of a kid. But that lean jaw and that straight mouth with just the tiniest twist at the end soon told you he could be strong enough, when the strain came. He had a way of looking at you critically, yet quizzically, though he made me feel that he'd be honest before he'd be kind-hearted. He gave me the impression, even then, that he was expecting a great deal from his possible friends, that it might hurt him a lot if you didn't live up to his expectations, and that in some way it would always be better to have him on your side than against you.
"I disappoint you, I see," he announced, without looking up, as I completed what I thought was a secret survey of him.
"No," I told him. "You puzzle me."
"Not half so much, I fancy, as you have been puzzling me," was his retort. "And I've just been thinking that you ought to read Browning. He'd really help you a lot!"
"Who's Browning?" I asked.
"He's the gentleman who first observed that it's better being good than bad, and that it's much safer being sane than mad—bromidic utterances, I'll allow, but then one might claim that bromides are bromides simply because they express essential truths that are so undisputed everybody has to keep on saying 'em!"
"I'll get his works!" I solemnly promised.
"Please don't," implored my Hero-Man. "Or I'll find you my enemy for life. But you don't get much time for reading, I take it?"
I confessed that I didn't. I even told him that I hated to dwaddle, that I had to keep on the move, that I needed excitement as much as most women needed tea.
"Of course," he admitted, as though he understood it all from the first. And without quite knowing it he led me out, step by step, until he had me Bertilloned and pigeonholed. And the harder I tried to explain myself, to redeem myself, the wider his eyes became.
"You poor little muddle-headed kid!" he said in a tone that gave me a funny feeling in the throat, "they haven't handed you half a chance!"
Then he told me, in his steely yet offhanded way, that he was going to motor me back to town.
It was still easy for me to recall the smell of the sea, the sound of waves plunging under the board-walk, the lights of his high-power roadster as he circled in to take me aboard. It didn't seem real. It was like a dream. I thought he was going to preach, on the way in, but he was silent during most of that run. I even thought he was going to say something about our meeting again, or ask, as Bud's friends would, where he'd be able to find me when he had a day off. But he said no such thing. What he did say was something quite different from what I had expected.
"Under the circumstances, you know," he quietly explained, after we had crossed the bridge, "it would be obviously absurd for me to give you my home address. But if you find yourself confronted by a predicament that—well, that seems in any way desperate, you might send me a line at the Aldine Club. I mean that if you actually need help, and I can help you, I'll do it!"
I swallowed my disappointment. I was so hurt, in fact, without knowing just where or how, that I sat silent until he dropped me at the Grand Central, as I had asked him to do. The tangle of traffic there must have taken all his attention, for he merely nodded, and neither looked back nor called out to me, as he rolled away.