THE boy stepped up to Carson’s desk.
“Mister Gordon sent this over,” he shrilled. And left as precipitately as he had come.
With an appreciable degree of curiosity Carson ripped open the envelope which Ramsey Gordon, the ever and most courteous, had forborne to do. Inside was a generously sized message, evidently replete with many details, and its full contents read:
Man described in your wire is lawyer in this town, somewhere between shyster and legitimate. Not above crooked practices, with also several judgments recorded against him. Needs money. Has wife. Also two children. Lives in fashionable suburb. Tries to maintain front, but has fairly shady and tricky business. Has strangle-hold on all cheap vaudeville, theatrical and circus business this town, which forms bulk of his practice. Best wishes. Rang party on receipt of your wire and found same to be staying Ratagoba House, your city, today.
Sam.
Carson read the telegram carefully twice. It didn’t disclose very much of value, except perhaps the vital fact that Casper Wolff who had turned snake investigator and housebreaker was at least a man with a semi-reputation to maintain, vested in a wife and two children living in a suburb. What would be his reaction under these conditions when he was confronted with the knowledge that the facts were out that he had broken the law by entering a house and could be sent to the penitentiary? How much could he be bluffed?
There was no such thing as either procrastination or fear in Carson’s make-up. He had been from boyhood up the original “go and do it,” type. Writing a hasty note for his stenographer, he put his hat on his head and went downstairs into the bright post-noontime sunlight. Straight west to Clark Street he walked, and there boarded a car which carried him northward across the river with its dilapidated pilings and its archaic wooden sailing vessels, plastered with bright-colored theatre lithographs, moored to the docks. From here the car rolled downward into a block of cheap lodging houses such as sailors occupied, and then stopped at the corner where the Ratagoba House reared its seven or more ancient stories into the sky.
Inside at the desk he found that Casper Wolff was booked in room 418, and dismounting at the fourth floor a few seconds later from the ancient wheezing elevator he made his way along a hall covered with worn faded red carpet, redolent with the smell of surreptitiously cooking coffee trailing over the transoms of rooms occupied by out-of-work chorus girls. At length he knocked on the door of room 418.
A pause, and then footsteps. The door was flung open by a man in his vest and shirt-sleeves, a man of about fifty with rather bushy grey hair, with keen but not too strictly honest greenish eyes, with ready-made suit that fit neither well nor badly, garish silk shirt with excessively large cuff-buttons, face muscles sagging a bit, his whole appearance suggesting the lawyer who makes a living large enough to carry his family on from week to week, but never enough to climb into a condition of financial security. In the sunny old-fashioned window sat a girl with a child’s picture book of the Mother Goose type in her hands, the gaudily colored illustrations carrying clear across the room to Carson in the doorway; she was a girl of about nineteen, but with somewhat immature childish face, pretty to be sure in that same childish way, but dressed flashily and cheaply.
“Your name is Wolff? Casper Wolff?” asked Carson.
“The same,” said the man in the doorway. Surprise was in his voice.
“May I speak with you?”
“Certainly. Alone?”
“If you please.”
The man turned to the girl with the bright picture-book in her hands. “Run along to your room, Lo. This gentleman and I wish to talk business.” The girl obediently, her bright book under her arm, arose and left the room, turning up the hall apparently to a room of her own on the same floor.
Wolff motioned his visitor to a chair and then closed the door. His tone of voice was impatience tempered appreciably by curiosity.
“Now what is it you wanted to see me about?”
Carson fastened his gaze undeviatingly on the St. Paul lawyer.
“Mr. Wolff, what would you say were I to tell you that last night you wilfully entered the home of a Chicagoan on St. Giles Lane, tried to break open an old-fashioned safe in that house, dropped evidence which has led me here as straight as an arrow to its target, and left enough of your finger-prints on that old strongbox to send you to our Illinois state penitentiary for about five years?” The last was a shot in the dark. “And you — a man with a wife and two children.”
The man Wolff’s jaw dropped. His eyes opened in dismay. Consternation was written in his flabby features. He sank weakly into the nearest chair. He tried to speak, but only swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat. It was plain that the completeness of the case against him had staggered him. He half moved one hand toward his vest pocket as though to try and regain whatever evidence he had dropped, and then stopped the motion with a weak gesture.
“You — you — you are from the Police Department?” he managed to say finally, admitting nothing.
“No,” replied Carson curtly, “I am not from the Police Department. I am merely on my way from Chicago’s Loop to the East Chicago Avenue police station to have you brought over there and questioned. Wolff, what’s the idea? What made you book yourself up for Joliet Penitentiary for from five years to longer?”
Wolff rose from his chair, his whole attitude that of anxiety. It was plain that he didn’t know how much his opponent knew.
“Kate Barwick has been — has — you know Kate? — Kate has talked?”
“I am saying nothing,” laughed Carson mirthlessly. “All you need know is that here in your room I sit in full possession of the facts and last night I didn’t know you even existed.”
Wolff passed a hand over a brow that glistened with moisture. “What do you want?” he asked. “What — what did you come here for?”
“Wolff,” said the younger man, “you are monkeying in a certain case concerning a Zuri snake from India, in which I and my fiancée are slightly involved. It concerns us not, I am frank to say — but it concerns us a great deal when you enter her home to steal it. Wolff, I am going to give you a chance to get out of this thing providing you are willing to come clean — otherwise I am going to turn you over to the police. I have always believed in going to the man first in a case like this, because — well — because the police are too quick to forget a man’s wife and his kids in their zeal to send him back to the greystone building with the iron bars on the window. So it’s up to you, Wolff. I’ve got the goods on you. What have you got to say?”
Wolff heaved a great sigh. An experienced psychologist could see that he was a man who was able to grasp a changed status of affairs in an instant — a man who knew at a glance when the chessmen were so arrayed that the king was to be checkmated.
“You’re not from the police?” he said hopefully.
“I am not,” Carson repeated. “Nor am I a newspaperman. Carson is my name, and I’m a Government employe, engaged to the young woman in the family whose house you broke into last night.” And he added shrewdly, as a final bombshell: “And how is Mrs. Wolff going to take the inevitable White Slave charges that the police are going to lodge against you with respect to the girl I just glimpsed in this room? Brought the girl down here with you from St. Paul, didn’t you?”
Wolff paled till he was as white as chalk, at the same time making an utterly hopeless gesture with his hands. “I’m going to come clean with you, young man, because — as you say — I’ve got a wife and two kids in a certain city in this country. And for God’s sake be decent. If this thing ever got into the papers, the little woman back home would never survive it. For I well know the police won’t end with the housebreaking charge. They’ll — they’ll tack on a Mann Act charge with respect to that girl Lola. And that — I’m innocent of that, I tell you — that would just about kill my wife.” He gulped. “As for what I’m doing here — well, let me tell you something. There isn’t a man on earth who won’t fall for big money — at least any man who has tried to buck the high cost of living with a family of three besides himself. But I’ll do anything you say to avoid notoriety — and — and any Mann Act charges. I’ve mixed up in something that was no business of mine. I admit it. And by Heavens, I’m singed for doing it. I’ll tell you about that Zuri snake. It’s the key and the only key to the location of an unrecorded twenty thousand dollar Federal Reserve Bank gold note stolen from the bank of Bixburg, North Dakota!”