CHAPTER XXVII
THE PERFECT “UNCLE-OUSTERING” IDEA OF ONE E. COLBY!
First, however, Elsa made her way down the soft, woodfloored hallway, passed several dark doors, to where a door panel was brightly lighted like her own on the floor below.
Except that—unlike her own—above this door hung a lighted red globe bearing on it black letters reading FIRE ESCAPE HERE! And—unlike her own—this door faced in such manner that its windows must look down over narrow Plymouth Court, constituting the rear of the old Ulysses S. Grant Building. On the lighted panel itself were the letters
DAILY COURTS CALENDAR
Keene Larborough, publisher
Elsa hurriedly turned the knob and walked in. The room was a large square one, and the fire escape—promised by the lighted globe outside—loomed dark and rust-red through both of its two windows. The walls were covered with photographs evidently of judges and lawyers—for many wore black gowns. A man seated in a wheelchair worked alone at a large table covered with proofs, paste pots, takes and whatnot. His fingerjoints were huge with arthritis, indicating plainly why his typewriter, nearby, was an electric one, and plugged into the wall. He was about 50, and had black curly hair, now well shot with gray, and black eyes set well apart in his head. He seemed to have about him the air of someone who had been something in the courts of law years ago. Which was exactly what Keene Larborough had been, for two decades ago he had been one of Chicago’s foremost trial lawyers. Till, unable to go into court any longer because of the streetcar accident that paralyzed his legs—he had become a “case-preparer” in the office of other attorneys. And then, subsequently, when the settlement he had received from his legs was gone, and arthritic changes in his hands—plus a little too much drinking on the side!—had made it impossible for him to do protracted or intensive inside work, he had fallen to publishing this tiny polygraphed leaflet from material gathered for him daily, at the close of the courts, by a part-time office boy, and getting it nightly into the mail for all lawyers, and everybody else connected with the courts, to have on their desks next morning.
The Daily Courts Calendar!
A simple, easy, puttering job to keep alive a body which once held a fine brain.
“Well, well, Elsa Colby,” he said, looking up, “it looks as though I shall never be able to put your name in spaced caps.”
“What do you mean, Mr. Larb—”
“Keene to everybody, Infant!”
“Well, just what do you mean, Keene?”
“Just,” he laughed, “that I allus puts a lawyer’s name in spaced caps—with a double line under it—when ’tis his first appearance in court. It gives ye subscribers a grin, you know! But you—you’re stealing a march on me! For tonight’s D.C.C. covers tomorrow’s courts—not tonight’s! And by tomorrow, it seems that your first appearance before Hizzoner —et alia!—will be over!”
“That’s true,” she assented dolorously. “Too—true! For—but where did you learn, Keene, that I was to make my ‘debut’ tonight?”
“Chief Justice Mike Shurley’s secretary is a good friend of mine, and slipped my wandering peripatetic—i.e. my errand boy—a third carbon of the special form he filled out covering tonight’s trial at Penworth’s home. There’s nothing in the papers—nor will be—for I queried the Herald City Editor while I was getting some dope on another matter—and he tells me all the Chicago sheets have passed their word to Lou Vann to print nothing about the trial—till it’s over and done—in exchange for representation, in the limited space available, of one man each.
And thus curiosity seekers, you see, are to be kept from milling around Hizzoner’s house!”
“I see,” Elsa nodded. Feeling oddly embittered, somehow, that, even when she had manfully shouldered a trial that was probably due to cost her everything in the world—even when the trial in question was an important trial on an important matter—Press and State had yet neatly combined to keep even a scintilla of publicity for herself out of her slender lap. But she dismissed her bitterness. “Well, Keene,” she explained, “what I just popped up here for was to ask you a small favor. I’ve—I’ve had a most awful infliction just worked on me. By Fate. Rather, by design, I think! And I’ve less than two hours—as you know, anyway!—to work up, on that awful case, what—whatever I expect to work up, God help me! Yet be it what it be, I expect to be talking confidentially on the wire in about an hour with one—two—three different parties. Who will be calling me up. And a man, Keene, whom I don’t trust any more than I would a green slimy snake, has just planked himself in my office. Determined to stay there.”
“Well,” Larborough said cheerfully, “use my phone here—to call your three parties. I’ll even roll myself out—while you do.”
“Unfortunately, Keene,” she explained, “all the parties are to call me—and can’t even now be gotten direct by me. The first party—a Chinese—is to be literally ‘captured’ for me tonight—and will almost certainly ring me, on ‘capture’ from the nearest drugstore to learn what it’s all about. The second, a—a—well, small-time manufacturer of sorts—is to ring me from a cafe booth after he gets gorged with a meal and disgorged of a visitor! The third party—a—a chemist, bearing the unchristian name of Cohenstein—well, I’ll jump over details and merely say that there’s no phone in the Cohensteinian home!—but that the party is going into a certain drugstore at 7 p.m., and will be told to ring me. Anyway,” Elsa broke off, defensively, “I—I just don’t want this party—who’s now in my office—to be there. For he’s—he’s out to peddle anything I say or do to the poorest place for it to be peddled to: the State’s Attorney.”
“Well—if there’s anything I can do, Elsa—just command me. We famous trial lawyers have to stick together, you know. As Lou Vann once said to me—”
Her face fell.
“You’re—you’re a personal friend—of Lou Vann’s?”
“Lou Vann,” Keene Larborough said bitterly, “is writing finis to my little business here—next week. For he’s filed an injunction order against the court clerks preventing them from handing out the calendrical info to anybody but practicing lawyers. And then only on direct personal inquiry across the rail. He maintains that my sheet goes to unauthorized persons. Like crooks. Who use the info for—but the sheet doesn’t go to crooks, Elsa. Well—that’s all.”
“Oh!” She felt cheered up at this news, even though it saddened her to realize that Keene Larborough was at the end of his leash, so to speak. “I’m sorry, really, about that—”
“Forget it!” he said brusquely. “I’ll no doubt start a trade journal for circus clowns. Or a—a gazette of disorderly houses. Resourceful—me, I may even start a magazine and call it Rip—a magazine designed to rip the curtain off of hundreds of our pseudo-charities, and likewise thousands of our hypocritical prize contests. Like, for instance—” And his voice grew scornful. “—the so-called ‘Two and a Half Million Dollar Prize Drawing’—allotting the ‘2½ Million Dollars in Prizes’ to be given to the holders of 500 lucky registration numbers amongst the people who attended the International Life Insurance Show last week at the Stadium. Which ‘people’ includes you, of courage, and me, and all Chicago, and the suburbs thrown in. Now there’s a beautiful exam—”
“But—but that was no racket, Keene? They really are going to draw 500 of the registration numbers on a wheel in front of a disinterested committee. Have already done so, probably—since, after all, today is Wednesday. And having promised in the Press to—well, they’ll have to give each one a $5,000 paid-up policy—and five hundred times $5,000 assuredly is—”
He raised a hand.
“Dear infant in matters of life insurance, may I—as one who in his youth studied to be an actuary—call your attention to the fact that those policies are D-8’s—absolutely the lowest form of life insurance that crawls on six legs! To be sure, they’re noncancellable—once issued!—for any cause whatsoever; but that’s merely characteristic of mere mail-order life insurance. The D-8 policies they’re giving are non-negotiable—non-assignable—non-surrenderable for cash—non-borrowable-on—non-everything there is. And don’t forget that the—”
“Mebbe they are, Keene,” said Elsa spiritedly, “but the companies to whom they’re assigned will have to kick out five thousand smackers to somebody every time the holder of one dies. And five thousand smackers is—”
Again he raised a hand.
“Yes,” he admitted, “they will have to kick out 5000 smackers. Yes. But only after the policies—most of them—have been lying dormant for decades. And the so-called reserve in each one—which is the real honest-to-God value—has been in the company’s possession—for decades.
And investable, under the law—since they are D-8’s!—in better paying securities than regular policies. Don’t forget, child, that a lonely dollar doubles itself in 10 years at 6 per cent compound interest.”
“Oh-oh—I get it! Then one of those policies—but see here, Keene, many of the winners will be old men, and—
“Dear child,” he interrupted her, almost impatiently, “don’t forget that every baby in Chicago was registerable in that ‘lottery’ vicariously—through its birth certificate only—without having to come down in that howling mob with presumably wet diapers! And every baby in Chicago was registered. And, by use of the standard life-expectation tables, it has been calculated by no less than Professor Angus Mundell that, based on the average age of registration and the run of the attendance—and terribly pulled down by the vast baby registration—those policies—because they are D-8’s, and also because they’re investable in C-securities—well, the average cost of each one to the Associated Companies Corporation this day in October—is but $1471.59. And that, therefore—for considerably less than seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars—and all of which came out of ‘advertising’ funds, the Associated Companies were enabled to run an actual lottery, with apparently two and a half million dollars in prizes—pah!—and, with all their amazing moving electrical graphs, and horrible pathological exhibits—ugh!—write not less than a fat billion dollars life insurance.” Keene Larborough paused. “Yea bo! ’At would be the headline article, child, in the first issue of Rip! Except that, alas, there won’t be any Rip—since magazine publishing takes hard capital, And I have naught but ye old polygraphing machine. And so—reverting once more to what I’ll do, now that Vann is chopping off this little racketette, I’ll probably start—oh—a polygraphed series of lessons on how to win at penny-ante. Or something. Resourceful, me—I say again. A fact! But here—let’s get back to you. Now what on earth, Elsa girl, are you expecting to even try to work—in a case like that John Doe one, which is plainly in Vann’s bag right now? What on earth do you even expect to do, child? I’m interested, naturally.”
“Are you, Keene? Well—I’ll tell you, I—but here—I’m going to ask you one. After all, you’re an old trial lawyer. Now exactly what would you do, Keene, in a case of a client who would tell you positively nothing—give you nary a witness—nary item for even a shred of an alibi—even a legitimate excuse for being where he was and as he was—when nabbed?”
“I’d grab my hundred bucks County-paid fee,” Keene Larborough said, “and to hell with such a lug. He’d deserve the chair for even playing like that with his own lawyer. And to be frank, Elsa, your client does deserve the chair! All right. Now I’ll ask you my question again. All over. What, besides grabbing your fee—and begging Hizzoner to be easy—are you going to do?”
“Well, Keene, I don’t know that I ought to get confidential—of course, you’re a right guy if ever there war one!—and Lou Vann’s razor is at your windpipe to boot. Hm?” She was a bit dubious.
“Is yo’ lookin’ fo’ a favuh ‘roun’ heah, gal?” he asked meaningfully.
“Sho’ is,” she said mockingly.
“Den git conf’dential, does yo’ wan’ dat favuh!” His tired eyes laughed.
“Sho’ will hab to,” she agreed, helplessly. And dropped her bantering tone.
“Well, Keene,” she said slowly, “here goes—for an opinion! A certain young lawyer—ahem!—had a client recently—for consultation only. The client was a Chinese doctor. Very much in love with some Chinese girl living somewhere to the west of the city—wanted to marry her—but was worrying whether he was possibly letting himself in for eventual legal trouble in a certain matter, and threatening his marriage. And he—well anyway, Keene, this doctor had heard of this young lawyer, and had consulted the same to find out whether he—yes, ye doc!—was breaking any law whatsoever—written or unwritten—on the statute books or not—musty or recently passed—in administering to certain patients a peculiar neuro-anesthetic against pain which he had invented—but administering it, however, unknown to those patients—”
She paused undecidedly.
“And your answer,” Keene Larborough put in, “was that he wasn’t breaking any Illinois law—so long as he had a valid sheepskin?”
“That was the young lawyer’s answer, yes. Based on the State of Illinois versus Dr. George Allenby, 1939.”
“But how—how does the chap administer an anesthetic—without the patient in question knowing it? Now a hyperdermic needle is a quite visib—”
“He administers it by the mouth, Keene. In a cube of Turkish-Paste-like candy.”
“In a cube of candy? But doesn’t it make the candy smell?—taste?—awfully druggy?”
“I’ll tell the cockeyed world it does, Keene! Smell druggy, I mean!” And Elsa’s nostrils contracted automatically. “I—ahem—this young lawyer got within a few feet of about a hundredth of a gram of the powder—in her client’s possession—and thought she had fallen head first out of an airplane into a drugstore, and smashed every bottle in the shop! Fortunately, however, for this Chinese doctor’s purpose, the drug doesn’t taste quite as badly as it smells! At least—a slight touch of sweetness, and any good strong flavor, will drown it out. And so what he does exactly is to administer it in a square of Chinese candy that is flavored with bamboo—and therefore drowns the drug out.”
“Bamboo! Oh my God, Elsa—I’d say that would be worse than the original drug! I’ve tried to drink the muikwuilo cordial the Chinese distill from Bamboo, and have nearly gagged!”
“But you’re not a Chinaman, Keene, see!” Elsa smiled.
“Anyway, he administers it in the bamboo candy; but it could, equally well, he says, be incorporated in an ordinary stick of chewing gum. He even had a small-time chicle manufacturer whose place is near his—rather, I should say, a chicle manufacturer who specializes only in putting certain laxatives and other drugs into chewing gums—a man named Band—but the name doesn’t matter, does it?—anyway, this Chinese doctor had this chicle man experiment a bit for him, and find out just how much of this particular drug an average stick of American chewing gum will hold in absorption—and he—yes, the Chinese doctor—found an ordinary stick would hold as much as 3 doses.”
“And might be chewed,” remarked Larborough, “provided the chewer held his nose with both hands, eh?”
“Just about—yes. To use it thus would involve flavoring the gum highly, that’s all—so that the ‘esters’—as he described them—constituting the ‘flavor,’ impinging on the nerve endings inside the nose, would drown out the smell of the drug. And—but back to this Chinese doctor! He’s been administering the drug—but to his own patients only—merely to get the thing worked out scientifically—as to dosages, effects, and so forth—rather than to get practical use out of it. And it has worked beautifully, he says—specially in one-tonsil operations on children. And lancing boils. And so forth. But the really peculiar thing about this neuro-anesthetic, Keene, seems to be that during the 15 minutes before it actually induces numbness—though it never induces unconsciousness, it seems, nor even motor paralysis—it starts the patient to talking a blue streak and telling truthful facts about himself. In fact, whenever in that stage, the patient will answer any interrogation truthfully. And if not queried, will bleat out anyway—maybe a hit out of sequence—all sorts off things that he really should not tell. Chinese boys have told this doctor of the windows they have maliciously smashed, and of grocery stores they’ve broken into, of bicycles they’ve stolen, even of unsavory episodes with little girls, of—but maybe you don’t believe my sto—rather, the Chinese doctor’s story?”
“Why, sure I’d believe it. Since he paid hard money for consultation on the facts in it. Anyway, there are a number of molecular compounds that do things in that precise line. Such as scopalamine, for instance, used originally in painless childbirth. And—but go ahead. I see a more than faint glimmer of something.”
“I guess you do, now! And you’re right! Well, suppose this young lawyer had—no, now has!—a client who is exactly like this John Doe in today’s papers. And who won’t divulge a single darn fact about himself—even to his own lawyer—and when his very life is at stake, in connection with a certain murder. And suppose this young lawyer has come to the ineluctable conclusion that the only possible explanation—if, that is, Keene, the young lawyer’s client is innocent, as he claims to be!—is that he is protecting the name of some high-up married woman in Chicago whom he was with—the entire night of the murder in question. Oh yes, Keene, such things are happening all the time. And men are men, you know.”
“But wait—if this client were with a married woman—”
“Yes, I know. Then why doesn’t he explain a certain skull part of his jam? Well, I—I wouldn’t put it past some married woman with a gangster lover—oh, there are women and women, Keene—some who double-cross men with no compunction—and others who have to have a whole pack of lovers to—to be happy—anyway, I wouldn’t put it past a married woman lying in both categories to shove a man straight into the electric chair. For a job done by one of her other lovers. Who—but anyway, Keene, what would you think of a lawyer who intended—if her whole defense turned sickeningly out, in the courtroom, to be nil—to put her client on the stand to deny the charge, only to slip him first a specially made stick of chewing gum, all dolled up with a fancy colored wrapper, but containing a good triple dose of this truth-telling drug, and disguised with a new synthetic flavor that is not only powerful enough to drown out even valerian, but which to him is exactly like—like fish to a cat; and—”
“Wait—wait!” Keene Larborough passed a hand weakly over his forehead. “You—you have to get this Chinese doctor actually to let loose, to you, of a stiff dose of the neuro-anesthetic in question?”
“Yes—speaking quite plainly. To turn it over, that is, to the chicle man—to be quickly fixed up for my purpose.”
“He’ll—he’ll never do it, Elsa. Never! Client or no client. For your proposed purpose, that is. For he’ll see the gates of the State prison loom—however, skip it! And you have to get the chicle man quickly to cook up some gum and roll you out a stick, loaded with a dose of this drug, and wrap it in colored paper?”
“Right-o!”
“And—”
“—the flavor. The without-which-not to both drown out the vile drug—and to break down the gum-chewing resistance of the client—at the same time? Well it happens, Keene, that he ain’t got no resistance at all—to a certain flavor known—at least off and on!—as ‘Oh God.’ And which a certain Negro drugstore, on the very threshold of Chinatown itself, has been trying out a bit in sodas. At least, up to some time ago—when it got skeered—or something. Anyway, the poor chemist who invented the flavor—and keeps quantities of it on hand for his own more or less fruitless business negotiations—lives up above the drugstore—”
“I get it. Monsieur Cohenstein?”
“—and,” Elsa continued, “comes into the said drugstore nightly—as have I ascertained via phone!—at 7 bells sharp—so regularly that he even puts the Wrigley Building clock—and all other clocks—to shame. And, as you may partly have noticed, Keene—and which I’ll herewith confirm completely—drugstore—chemist’s flat—Chinese doctor’s office—and chicle man’s factory—are all grouped together within only a few blocks of each other, and—wait!—all are right to the west of—in fact, practically in the back yard of!—the Penworth mansion where tonight Hizzoner is going to hold cour—”
“I get it! Everything has fallen together in my mind even more than it falls together spatially! And so Elsa Colby expects to—”
“—to pick up a certain piece of concocted ‘chewing gum’ on her way to court tonight, and—”
“Yes, of course. But Elsa Colby figures to—”
“—figures, Keene, that if all is lost anyway, she might as well go whole hog or none, pass her client a stick of gum radiating ‘Oh God’ for two feet all about itself!—and also up the chewer’s own nose—but ‘Oh God’ only!—a stick with which to moisten his—his doubtlessly by-then-dry whistle before he has to talk to the court for his very life; then slap him on the stand to deny categorically the charges in the indictment, only to—”
“—only to spill his guts instead,” said Keene Larborough unpoetically. “Before Hizzoner—Court—the Press—and all!”
“To spill his guts, yes,” acceded Elsa. “Including—” And her little white teeth came together. “—the—the name of the darned married woman in whose boudoir he spent—well,” she qualified, “maybe might possibly have spent—the night. Who knows?” And Elsa sighed. Frankly wishing, for a meeting second, that she was some exotic married woman, instead of a scrubby, red-headed, freckle-faced girl lawyer. “And so what’s the opinion, Keene—of an old vet like yourself—on the foregoing and aforesaid!”
“Well, Elsa girl,” Larborough said, “I can only say that it’s the wildest stunt ever pulled off in a courtroom. I’ve done many weird and strange things in my day—but this, I’d say, tops my wildest ones. Though what you propose to do—rather, to try to do!—for my belief is that this Chinese doc will refuse absolutely to give you a single milligram of that drug for such pur—”
“And I’m gambling,” said Elsa quietly, “from my one interview with him, that he’ll do that just to see his drug used in a legalistic sense instead of a medical one. For he has a scientific mind, and—”
“And I’m telling you I know the Chinese—and they are hellishly skittish of things like that. Puh—lenty! But let that be a question moot. And to answer your specific query: What you propose to do, Elsa, is justified—on the theory that anything that can’t make matters any worse for your client is justified. That baby you got there is all set to catch the chair—on any mere denial, categorical or otherwise, of things. So he might as well—yeah, that’s it: That’s just why your scheme is the wildest ever. For presuming and assuming him to be guilty, with a load of that drug in his veins, he’ll just lock himself right in that old 2200 volt chair. So that he never can be unlock—”
“Right!” admitted Elsa grimly. “Where, as you just said, he’d be bound to go anyway. And on the other hand, if he is somehow in the clear—and is protecting someone—and that someone would, under the circumstances, be a woman—he’ll give her name on the stand—or her husband’s name—her residence—something—probably everything—she’ll be subpœnaed—by yours truly—and she’ll be tangled ten ways going before she gets done testifying—but muh client will git acquitted.”
“Woof!’ And Keene Larborough threw up his two hands in a helpless gesture. “And the client’s attorney will scrub floors in the county jail for six months.”
“Scrub—floors? What—what do you mean, Keene?”
“I simply mean, child, that whether your client merely locks himself in the chair—or whether he divulges some woman’s name and saves his reddish scalp—he’ll know, after he comes out of his truth-telling spree, that he’s been tricked. And will ‘beef’ there and then. And tell the S.A. about the gum. And the passing of the gum, in court, will be remembered. And you’ll be called before the bench—to explain every last detail about where you got a piece of gum, doped with some kind of a drug, and flavored with God-Help-Me or whatever you call it and—”
“Oh, you make me wish, Keene Larborough,” Elsa said, with a fearful sigh, “that a great tidal wave would engulf Chicago in the next hour, sweeping away Prairie Avenue—the Loop—this building—”
“God forbid!” he said unsmilingly. “Because wheelchairs don’t float. But see here—ye’ve more than a’rned yer favor, cheel! So what is it you wanted me to do for you—towards clearing your office of some obstruction, or—or obstructionist?”
“Well here ’tis, my good fran’. I want you to ring my office the very minute I leave here—and keep ringing it at several minute intervals, for I more than surmise that the party now squatting there will be using my phone galleywest to make as many outside business calls as he can—hence you’ll have to insert yourself gently in between and betwixt a couple of his, see? I shan’t wait to see the simple op’ration done—for a certain dress shop where I’m hieing for closes down between 6:30 and 7—at least, last time I was gazing hungrily in its windows, its lights went out about that time, and right in my face to boot. Anyway, here’s what I want you to say to this party, Keene: Say—but first ask for Miss Colby. In a werry brusque businesslike voice. And when this party says—as it’s 101 per cent certain he will—in honeyed tones: ‘She is not here, but left me to take any messages,’ you say quickly, ‘Well, this is the Police Department speaking—Department Z—’—that Department Z is something, Keene, made up in my own head, see?—’—we have Mr. Silas Moffit’s umbrella, and are seeking Mr. Moffit.’ And then hang up, Keene—bango!—before even the man on the wire with you can say ‘I’m Mr. Moffit, and who are your”—or even ‘Jack Spratt’—or anything.”
“Hanging up,” said Larborough, “is one of the skillfulest things I do. Thanks to various creditors. Before he even says ‘I’m,’ he’ll get a click. But just what will happen then, Elsa? Of benefit to you?”
“What will happen, Keene, will happen soon’s I get back and unleash the gent in question. He will urge himself out of my place so fast ’twill surprise even me.”
“To recover—an old umbrella!” Keene Larborough asked skeptically.
“To recover a lucky umbrella,” amended Elsa. “The numerical focus—no less!—of umty-teen numerological and astrological concatenations. And computations! And which lucky umbrella he needs tonight—of all the night in his career. Oh, yes he does—as I happen to know, Keene.
For—but since, Keene,” she broke off, “I am the proud author of this plan I’m setting forth, I must perforce state that it’s perfectly motivated—and motived—at all points. Even by Fate itself. Yes, he’ll get after that umbrella—lying in hypothetical ‘Department Z’!—And which department, I’m sorry to say, he’ll never never find, since you and I anyway know there are only three official sub-departments to the Police Department!—anyway, he’ll get after that umbrella in ‘Department Z’ without a moment’s delay—” She gazed out of the window. And noted the utter starlessness of the sky, now that night had dropped down. “Look—even the sky is helping me! Promising rain. The chance of somebody in ‘Department Z’ temporarily borrowing the found umbrella—then loaning it in turn to somebody else—and then—no, Mr. Silas Moffit won’t take chances on that! Not on this, for him, night of nights!”
“But do the police locate lost umbrellas?” asked Keene Larborough laughingly.
“No, Keene. And don’t kid me. My Uncle Silas Moffit uses his, as I’ve found out, as a portfolio. And he’s always carrying mortgages and documents and quitclaims and deeds and bills of sale around in it. I half suspect he even picks up a few unsmoked cigar butts during the day, and drops them in too! But be that as it may, there will more than likely have been some legal paper in the umbrella he lost somewhere yesterday—or maybe ’twas last night—and in a cigar store, as it appears—which conceivably could have caused the bumbershoot to have been turned over to the nearest policeman by an honest picker-up thereof—in the said cigar store, see?—and which paper in turn would serve as a clew for the department—perhaps just the name of the grantor on some deed, if the paper were such—by which the department would conceivably have phoned my uncle at his apartment—only to find he’s not there. And for the quite logical reason that he’s squatting in my office, now! And thus, shunted by someone to Niece Elsa for information—for there’s one or two persons, I’m pretty sure, over in the P. D., who know that he and I are related—well anyway, shunted to Niece Elsa for infor—listen, Keene, I got to go. If I’m not to lose my only chance to supplant this rag. And—”
“Run!” he said. “And I’ll fulfill your plan as brilliantly as the plan itself is. Now git!”
And Elsa got! Not knowing, even as she emerged from the doors downstairs, that Keene Larborough was doing the identical thing she’d asked him to do—and hanging up: before ever her uncle had even a chance to utter so much as ‘I’m.’ Nor did she know, moreover, as she went down Monroe Street some minutes later, that Keene Larborough, was at that very minute talking to no other than Louis Vann, State’s Attorney. Though a bit shamefacedly.
“Yes, Vann,” he was saying, “I’m grateful to you for being willing now specifically to omit me from that injunction as a ‘qualified, authorized courts agent.’ Very much so! For I need that calendrical info badly to carry on this sheet. My only livelihood. As for the girl, I really hate to apparently double-cross her, but—but—well, goddamn it, I’m an invalid, Vann, and—and have to live. Besides—I consider she’s—she’s all wet anyway as to even being able to hornswoggle this Chinese doctor, whoever he may be, out of a single dose of that drug. He’ll—he’ll give her some harmless powder. And last but far from least, she’s up the creek anyway, so far as Doe being, by any possibility, innocent. He’s—well, I don’t know what your opinion is, Vann, but mine, gained from the facts in the papers, is that he’s an out-of-town gunman drafted in on that crib job because the crib job itself amounted to nothing, but the gunmanship might amount to much. Viz.—poor Reibach. Who, as things turned out, didn’t even merit triggerwork. And who—but anyway, Vann, you have the gist of the facts now. She has nothing to offer in the way of defense. This red-headed gunman has given her absolutely nothing. She hasn’t a leg to stand on. And therefore proposes—as soon as she sees the case is lost—to feed John Doe—who she hopefully half-believes may be some gay Lothario now doing the knight-in-armor act after his bedroom act is over—proposes, as I told you, to feed him a stick of specially made-up gum doctored with that drug, and make him divulge the name of the married woman he may have been with last night. Q. E. D.”
To which Louis Vann was giving but a cheerful chuckle. And replying:
“And that’s quite all, Keene, I would really like to know, to be frank. The full story—out of that bird’s own mouth—on the witness stand—before court and press and all—of how he knocked in my safe and killed poor Reibach. For, Keene, that red-headed son-of-a-bitch is no boudoir hound. I know men, Keene—unerringly. And I give you my personal word—as State’s Attorney of Cook County—and before any revelations during the trial, or before execution—I even promise you a hundred years’ lease on that court info you require in your business, if I’m wrong—that Doe is a resourceful, cool, grim, hard-as-nails professional underworld character—moreover, a real cribman—who’s been mixed up with crime and regular safe-cracking so much and so often that he knows every play that may have to be made—as well as when not to play!—and to unlock his tongue about himself for 15 sweet minutes tonight would be all I’d really want—and all that the police of many cities are wanting right this minute—only they don’t know it yet!”
“Only,” Larborough was qualifying, “that Chinese doctor will never pry loose to Colby of a single grain of that drug—for any such purposes.”
“No? Well, old man, I happen to know that doctor—see? A fact! And I can tell you here and now—if it’ll make you feel any better—that you haven’t ‘double-crossed’ friend Colby in the least—for I guarantee you that this Chinese doc will give her the dose of that drug she wants tonight—and wherever she wants it, to boot! Because I have it from his own lips, Keene, that there isn’t a truth-telling drug in existence that will function if the teller, by his words, is putting himself in extreme danger. Patients—Chinese boys, as I think you’ve said—may have blabbed plenty to this doc under this drug—but only, Keene, because they knew that the doc—of their own race—would never bring ’em to justice. Whereas this fellow Doe—even under a triple dose—would only stay ‘tight’ on the witness stand, i.e. hand out a categorical denial, and thereafter stand mute.”
“This—this Chinaman assured you of that? But is he the same man? She didn’t tell me his name, and—”
“That doesn’t matter—in this case. For your statement about him having a Chinese girl sweetheart on the city’s West Side clinches the matter by 100 per cent. This girl, moreover, has a brother who right now is locked up over in the county jail, waiting trial on a more or less oblique complicity in a tong killing. And whose case I can nolle prosse should I so desire, because of various circumstance in it. And this Chink doctor came to me last week—and got down on his actual knees begging me to nolle prosse the case against the young Chink—for which, he, the doc, offered to do anything. And—”
“Well, I suppose he’s the same one, then, for—”
“Of course. Man who’s been experimenting in personality-changing drugs for some years. Of course he didn’t tell me the specific thing he confided to Colby—because I’m theoretically an officer of the law, and might conceivably want his scalp! But he told me a hell of a lot about the whole subject, and gave me a most amazing demonstration—”
“Of this truth-telling drug?”
“No. Of another discovery that he made. Namely, that a powder made up of one-half cocaine and one-half some salt of zirconium—zircaine, he calls the combination!—will make a man lie his blooming head off—and when he hasn’t even the least occasion to lie. This doc mixed up some of the powder he happened to have with him, with a few drops of water—and injected it, with a hypodermic syringe, into a chocolate drop, and we called in the Reverend Horatio Kilgallon, Leo Kilgallon’s uncle, who was in the next room with Leo. Pastor, you know, of St. Ignatius’ Church?” Vann chuckled audibly. “And 15 minutes after Reverend H. had eaten it—at our request, of course, to see if he could tell us the flavor!—he was solemnly declaring that Christ was not divine, and that he himself had been unfrocked in 1880—which, incidentally, was before he was born—and he told us—us, the Law!—that he owned the biggest house of prostitution on the South Side.”
“Wow, Vann! Watta drug!”
“I’ll say! And of no practical utility to anybody. Well, old man, just forget your seeming ‘double-crossing’ of Colby. I don’t think for a single minute that her experiment will work—but, even if it did, with an all-round crook like Doe, with a criminal record, it could only work to the State’s benefit. Plus the benefit of a lot of police departments—in a lot of cities. And so her experiment shall go through—exactly as she wishes. For I’ll see myself that she actually gets the drug from this Chinese doc. For I’ll contact him ahead of her—both via the Chinese gal!—and by covering his office in Chinatown. And she’ll get the drug all right—and her experiment shall go through. And Keene Larborough will find—after, that is, he reads tomorrow’s papers—that truth-telling drug or no truth-telling drug in J. Doe’s veins, when the latter’s neck was in danger, he stood mute as a drum. Will stand—as now, in advance of tonight, I should put it—for I’m personally going to see, Keene, that our little friend Colby is provided by ye Doc Oriental with one good hyper-man-sized dose of—”
“Okay then, Vann,” Keene was saying hurriedly. “And thanks again—for everything. I—I naturally knew you’d like to know what was going on—on the other side of the legal fence. So I’ll let you go now. Good-bye.”
And he hung up, not hearing—Keene Larborough!—Vann’s throaty laugh and the latter’s finish to his own words as he too hung up. And which consisted of—
“—one good hyper-man-sized dose of zircaine, with which her client will catapult himself the balance of the way into the electric chair with the biggest and wildest goddamned lie ever perpetrated in court. Oh-boy!”
But of all these things—uttered both in the Ulysses S. Grant building—and in the City Hall—Elsa, of course, heard quite nothing. For she was, at this very moment, gazing open-mouthed at a dress in the still-lighted Francine de Loux window, which dress bore a price-sign of $27.50 only, yet was literally made for her alone—with her red hair—her blue-green eyes—her freckles; and she was, as she gazed, saying:
“Oh-boy!”