She looked at Genevieve, looked at me, looked back at Ramon Gomez, then without a word, picked up the suitcase and started for the door.
“A most interesting young woman,” Ramon Gomez said, as he beamed at me. “She has the power of decision — a realist. I fancy we shall get along splendidly.”
Gomez stood near the door, the automatic pressed close against his side. His eyes swept the room as Daphne Strate marched through the doorway into the corridor.
“I followed her here from Ruttling’s house, and what a fortunate bit of shadowing that was.”
I met his eyes and said guilelessly, “And when am I free to go?”
“My dear Señor Sabin,” he said, “go any time you damn please,” and stepped out into the corridor and pulled the door shut behind him.
Chapter Fourteen
Genevieve Hotling said, “Are you really the one they call The Phantom Crook?”
I ground out the end of my cigarette in an ash tray and merely smiled.
She said almost wistfully, “I remember when you cleaned up your record and started going straight. What happened after that? Did you slip?”
I said, “Something happened that made it so I didn’t care one way or another. The police did the rest. You know, it’s very difficult for the police to say to the newspaper reporters, ‘We just don’t know. We haven’t any clues’. Much easier to say, ‘Yes, we know who did it. We’ll have him in custody within another day or two if he stays in the state, but he’s probably gone down to Mexico or back East somewhere.’ ”
“Meaning you?” she asked.
“Meaning me. The public have an idea I’m responsible for about ninety percent of the unsolved crimes.”
“How many of them are you responsible for?”
“None.”
“It’s difficult to believe that.”
“I’m not asking you to believe it; I’m simply telling you.”
“Don’t you care whether I believe you or not?”
I started to say no, then at something peculiar in her eyes, said yes instead.
“What,” she asked, “do we do now?”
“What would you like to do?”
She said, “We can go out and—”
“Don’t be silly,” I told her. “He stayed here long enough to bait his trap. If we went out now, it would be fatal. Got any playing cards?”
“Yes. Why?”
I said, “Get me a deck. Where are the bedclothes?”
She nodded toward a closet.
I went over to the closet, pulled out the bedclothes, cut blankets into strips and started tying the strips together.
“A rope?” she asked.
I nodded.
We tied them together in a long rope, and tossed the loose end out of the window. Then we tied the other end to the radiator.
“We go down that?” Genevieve asked me dubiously.
I smiled and said, “We go up. I noticed a couple of blank spaces on the directory. Probably those apartments are vacant.”
I walked across to pick up her suitcase. I didn’t trust to the elevator, but took the stairs, located one of the vacant apartments and did things to the lock.
The place was completely furnished.
I switched on the lights and closed the door. I held a chair for her and said casually, “After all, there aren’t very many good two-handed card games. How about a cigarette? And then let’s try cribbage.”
She took one, said, “I simply can’t understand Daphne.”
I lit her cigarette, shuffled the cards, said, “I understand her, all right. Cut the cards.”
We played two or three hands. Then there were sounds coming from the apartment house, below us, the sounds of doors opening and closing, of heavy feet in the corridors. Outside on the street, cars roared into noise and sped away. We could hear the rumble of men’s voices.
“I’m frightened,” Genevieve said.
I scooped up the cards. “Just to be on the safe side, we’d better turn out the lights and sit in the dark. They won’t search the apartment house, but if they should happen to see a light in an apartment that’s supposed to be vacant, it might cause trouble.”
I turned out the lights. We went over and sat on the davenport. There was enough light coming in from the street to show objects in shadowy outline.
“After all,” Genevieve said, “you don’t need to be so standoffish. I’m scared.”
I slid my arm around her shoulders, drew her over close to me. “There’s nothing for you to be frightened about.”
“Why?”
“If they catch us, you simply tell the truth. I forced you to come up here.”
“You aren’t frightened?”
“Not in the way you mean.”
“Don’t you think they’ll catch you?”
“They may.”
“How long have you lived like this?”
“Like what?”
“Being on the dodge?”
“Almost ever since I can remember.”
“Do you want to tell me about yourself?” she asked me.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“How did you get started?”
“The same way most of them get started. My parents were divorced. My mother took my custody. Then she fell in love and married again. The man didn’t like me. My mother had another child by this man. When you’re young and sensitive and hungry for love, and find you can’t get that love, it does things to you. You get bitter. You get harsh. You get a mental maturity which hasn’t been properly seasoned. I turned to the companionship of other boys. We weren’t particularly vicious; we simply wanted action. Then something happened, and they blamed our gang for it. Circumstantial evidence pointed pretty strongly to one of the boys, but I knew he was absolutely innocent. They brought him into Juvenile Court. The judge was a misfit. He tried to break the boy’s spirit. After a while, they sent him to reform school. It made me bitter. I learned to hate the law.
“After that, it was an easy step to find myself outsmarting the police. Then there came a time when I wasn’t clever enough. By that time, I was old enough to take the jolt. They threw the book at me.
“In the Big House, I made up my mind that if I was going to be a crook I’d be a top-notcher. There’s plenty of chance to pick up miscellaneous information in stir. I kept my eyes and ears open. Then, about a year before I got out, I realized it was a game you couldn’t beat. I decided to go straight. That shows all I knew about what we call justice.
“When a man gets out of prison, he either has to have a job and friends who are interested in seeing that he goes straight, or he has to team up with the underworld and make a living out of crime. Otherwise, you can’t beat the game. I know, because I tried. I tried to be a lone wolf. The underworld couldn’t understand me — thought I’d gone soft. Men whom I’d met in stir and who had educated me in all the tricks of the profession, thinking they’d have a young, skillful apprentice to help them later on, felt that I’d betrayed them. In a way, I had.”
“But surely,” she said, “that didn’t drag you back into the underworld!”
“No, the police did that. They started using me as a scapegoat. I was the fall guy for any crime the police couldn’t solve.”
“It doesn’t seem possible,” she said.
“It wouldn’t have been,” I told her, “if I hadn’t been so young and thought I was so smart. I decided that it would be easier to let the police try to catch me, and to outwit them, than to go into court and try and clear my name.”
“But I can’t understand that.”
“To understand it,” I said, “you have to know something about our system of law. Well-balanced justice permeates our law in theory but not in practice. Getting justice implanted in laws which, for the most part, go back for decades is quite a job. Because we have been so jealous of our liberties, we have fought to retain many of our ancient laws, and some of those weren’t too good. They go back to a day when public executions were as exciting and as well attended as a country fair.