“Well,” I said, “if it’s so important you could’ve tried the front door. Would’ve saved you some time. Lot less chance of breaking your neck, too.”
Now, if any grown man had made a crack like that to Sara Howard, she’d have whipped out the derringer that was always hidden somewhere on her person and situated it uncomfortably close to his nose; but, probably because I was so much younger, she’d always been different with me, and we could talk straight. “I know,” she answered, laughing a bit at herself as she took off the nail-studded boots, shoved them into her satchel, and put on the more sensible footwear. “I just thought I could use the practice. If you’re going to catch criminals, you’ve got to be a bit of one yourself, I’ve found.”
“Ain’t that so.”
Miss Howard finished tying her laces, rubbed out her cigarette, and scattered the tobacco in the butt on the wind. Then rolled the remaining paper into a tight little ball and flicked it away. “Now, then-Dr. Kreizler’s not here, is he, Stevie?”
“Not a chance,” I answered. “Down at the Institute. Gotta be out by tomorrow morning.”
“Yes, I know.” Miss Howard bent her head in heartfelt sympathy and sorrow. “He must be crushed,” she added quietly.
“That and more. Almost as bad as-well, you know.”
“Yes…” The green eyes turned toward the park with a faraway look in them, and then she shook herself hard. “Well, with the Doctor away, you and Cyrus will be free to give me a hand. If you’re willing.”
“Where we going?”
“Mr. Moore’s apartments,” she said, doing her hair back into its usual bun. “He’s not answering his doorbell. Or his telephone.”
“Probably not home, then. You know Mr. Moore-you should get over to the Tenderloin, check the gaming houses. His grandmother’s only been dead six months, he can’t have lost all his inheritance yet.”
Miss Howard shook her head. “The man at the door to his building says that John came in over an hour ago. With a young lady. They haven’t left again.” A small, mischievous smile came into her face. “He’s home, all right, he just doesn’t want any interruptions. You, however, are going to get us in.”
For the briefest moment I thought of the Doctor, of how he’d been trying hard to discourage me from my lifelong tendency to get into the kind of goings-on what Miss Howard was currently suggesting; but, like I say, my moment of consideration was brief. “Cyrus just came in,” I said, returning her smile. “He’ll be game-this house’s been like a morgue, these days. We could use a little fun.”
Her smile grew into a grin. “Good! I knew I had the right man for the job, Stevie.”
I nodded. “Yeah,” I said, crawling back inside the room. “You just had the wrong shoes.”
Miss Howard laughed once more and took a swipe at me as we headed in to rouse Cyrus.
I hadn’t been wrong in thinking that, after a year of things going badly in the Seventeenth Street house, Cyrus would be ready for something that might break the routine. In a matter of seconds he was back in his light tweed suit, starched shirt, and tie, and as we headed down to the front door he pulled his favorite old bowler onto his head. The pair of us listened as Miss Howard explained that it was urgent we get Mr. Moore to Number 808 Broadway, where a lady in great distress was waiting for her return. The matter, Miss Howard declared, had “not only criminal but quite possibly international implications.” More than that she didn’t want to tell us just yet, and more than that neither me nor Cyrus needed to know-what we wanted was a bit of action, and we both knew from personal experience that, given our guide, we were likely to get it. Lengthy explanations could wait. We fairly shot through the foyer and out into the iron-fenced front yard, Cyrus-ever the careful one-pausing just long enough to make sure the house was securely locked up before we made our way down the small path to the gate, started west on the sidewalk of Seventeenth Street, then turned north on Third Avenue.
There was no point in either getting the horses and barouche back out of the small carriage house next door or wasting time trying to hail a cab, as it wasn’t but four and a half blocks’ walk to Number 34 Gramercy Park, where Mr. Moore had taken apartments at the beginning of the year after his grandmother’s death. As we moved from one circle of arc light to another under the street-lamps that ran up Third, passing by simple three- and four-story buildings and under the occasional sidewalk-wide awning of a grocery or vegetable stand, Miss Howard locked her arms into Cyrus’s right and my left and began to comment on the little bits of night activity that we saw along the way, plainly trying to control her excitement by talking of nothing in particular. Cyrus and I said little in reply, and before we knew it we’d turned onto Twentieth Street and reached the brownstone mass of Number 34 Gramercy Park, the square bay and turret windows of a few of its apartments still aglow with gas and electric light. It was one of the oldest apartment houses in the city, and also one of the first of the kind they called “cooperative,” meaning that all the tenants shared ownership. After his grandmother’s sudden death, Mr. Moore’d given some thought to moving into one of the fashionable apartment houses uptown, the Dakota or such, but in the end I don’t think he could face moving so far away from the neighborhoods of his youth. Having lost the second of the only two members of his family he’d ever been close to (the other, his brother, had fallen off a boat after jabbing himself full of morphine and drinking himself senseless many years earlier), Mr. Moore had tried hard to keep ownership of his grandmother’s house on Washington Square, but her will had stated that the place had to be sold and the proceeds divided up among her squabbling blue-blood heirs. Being suddenly and completely on his own in such a deep way was confusing enough for Mr. Moore without venturing into unknown neighborhoods: in the end, he came back to Gramercy Park, to the area where he’d grown up and where he’d learned his first lessons about the seamier side of life while slumming as a teenager over in the Gashouse District to the east.
As we started up the steps to the brown marble columns that surrounded the stained glass of the building’s entrance, I kept a sharp eye on the shadowy stretch of trees, hedges, and pathways-two blocks wide, one block long-that was Gramercy Park behind us. Oh, it was surrounded by wealthy houses and private clubs like the Players, sure enough, and was enclosed by a wrought-iron fence some six or seven feet high, to boot; but any Gashouse tough worth his salt could’ve made short work of that fence and used the park as a hiding place from which to jump unsuspecting passers-by. It wasn’t until I saw a cop walking his beat that I felt all right about turning away from that dark mass and joining Cyrus and Miss Howard at the door.