Even Helen Chadwick had left the study. She stood at the head of the stairs, looking after the officers as they stormed into the lower hallway, and wasted their time in fruitless questions, contradictory orders.
Silently I slipped into the study and over to the safe. The lights had been turned on now, and the room blazed with incandescent brilliance. The safe, as I had expected would be the case, was coated with some sticky, varnishlike preparation which would register the imprint of any finger upon it. There was a small metal lock box which was also covered with a similar coating.
I had only time for a brief survey, and then I heard the sound of voices, footsteps on the stairs, the booming voice of Paul Boardman raised in a very ecstasy of irritation.
They were coming back.
There was a closet back of the safe and I dived into this. The place was filled with books, papers, old clothes, junk.
I picked a hiding place back of the old clothes, and placed the plate-holder on the floor, under my heel. In the event I was discovered I could merely place my weight upon it and shatter the plates into a thousand fragments. And yet I felt that I would not be discovered. They would never expect that a fugitive would make his escape only to return and conceal himself in the very place from which he had escaped. Almost all of my sensational escapes had been predicated upon doing the thing which was the most illogical for a man in my position to do, yet which, by reason of that very fact, actually became the most logical.
I could hear Bob Garret’s voice running along in a continued stream of babbling conversation. Apparently he feared that Boardman would blame him for the miscarriage of the plan by which Helen Chadwick was to be trapped — and he didn’t know the half of it yet.
Boardman seemed to pay no attention to the string of alibis which Garret was pouring forth. His voice interrupted the stream of conversation.
“Never mind all that. Get the exposed plate out of the camera. Then find out what that second flash was about. How did it happen?”
Together they went over to the camera. Bit by bit the situation dawned on them.
“I had the lense stopped way down, and used a very powerful flash, that’ll give sharp detail.”
It was Garret speaking, his words an oral smirk of supreme self-satisfaction.
“Well, where is the plate?” asked Boardman.
There was a period of silence.
“Good God!” exclaimed Garret.
“You mean it’s gone?”
“Worse than that... Someone apparently reversed the plate and set off another flashlight, then took both plates. You see there were two plates in the holder, one in each side...”
Boardman finished the sentence.
“And that means Ed Jenkins has a picture of us struggling with this girl before the safe, trying to get her to sign that paper.”
There was no further conversation for a moment or two. Each of the men was busy with his own thoughts, thinking just what it would mean to him if that picture should be released at just the proper time.
The silence was broken by Helen Chadwick’s voice, and in it there was a happy, triumphant lilt which somehow seemed much more than mere relief. It was as though I had somehow vindicated her faith in me, and had placed her in a position to show these men that her faith had been justified.
“I knew that Ed Jenkins wouldn’t let you frame anything like that on me. You men are lucky to have escaped so easily.”
It was undoubtedly the way the kid felt, but there wasn’t anything she could have said that would have been more like dumping emotional gasoline on the smouldering fires of their wrath.
Boardman answered her, and his voice quavered with fury.
“You and your crook, Ed Jenkins! Who do you think you are? Before another twenty-four hours have passed, Ed Jenkins will be dead, either killed outright, or in jail with a charge framed against him that he’ll never be able to explain away. D’you think any man can come in here and pull anything like that and get away with it?
“And as for you — don’t forget that you’re going to face this thing alone. Ed Jenkins won’t be able to help you. We haven’t the photograph, but we still have our testimony and the fingerprints you’ve left on the safe and on the box that was within that safe. It’ll take that precious crook of yours a long time to think up some nice, plausible explanation about how your fingerprints happened to be on that safe.”
Because of the silence that followed I could tell that Helen Chadwick realized her mistake in seeking to rub it in on these two political crooks. The political crook has forgotten more about double dealing and general crookedness than the average yeggman or gangster ever learns. Yet it would have been the same in any event. They would have reached the same conclusion themselves, even if Helen Chadwick hadn’t spoken. It was a cinch that I had been the one to take that second flashlight, to remove that plate-holder, and with what I knew, and the photographic evidence I had, it would be unsafe for these men to allow me to live. Word would go out into the highways and byways of crime. Every crooked cop on the force would receive whispered instructions. Every stool-pigeon would start out with a new hope, a new lease on life, a fresh supply of police-furnished dope. The word would spread like wild fire.
Ed Jenkins must die.
How the news would trickle through the sub-strata of society! Cops would know that I was to be arrested, and that I was to be killed while “resisting arrest.” Every gangster would know that should he be the one to speed the fatal bullet he could write a ticket of immunity from prosecution until he cleaned up his pile. Every stoolie would know the most valued information that could be given to the police.
Bob Garret was in virtual control of the police.
Paul Boardman was in virtual control of the city.
These two had willed that I should die, and many and varied would be the instrumentalities that would bow to their will.
Boardman spoke in a low tone.
“Get her fingerprints, Bob, and turn her loose. She can’t run away, and she won’t dare to talk.”
Garret had a worried note in his voice.
“We don’t even need her fingerprints. It’ll look better if we haven’t got ’em. The prints are on the safe, and she can’t ever change her fingertips. If we decide to have her arrested we’ll throw her in, tell our story, and then let the fingerprint men examine the safe. We’ll pretend we don’t even know there’s a fingerprint there. But we’ve got to be careful. She’s our hold on Ed Jenkins, and he knows too damned much to live. If we can’t get him any other way we can always get him through her.”
I could hear the throaty rumble with which Boardman growled his assent.
There was a rustling from without, a rustling which signified the motion of human bodies. Apparently they had left the police outside, such as had not started out to scour the neighborhood for me. They had taken the girl back in the room with them, seeking to browbeat her once more into submission, and then the discovery of the stolen plate-holder had made them realize just how precarious their own position was. That second photograph meant disaster to them. If that photograph should find its way into the hands of the Chief, for instance — if it should suddenly appear in one of the hostile papers— Oh, they had their hands full of their own affairs right now.
“I have it!”
It was Garret’s voice again, and there was a note of confident triumph in it. Crouched there in the dark stuffiness of the closet, I wondered what had happened. I had heard nothing but the faint rustlings of moving bodies. For a moment I wondered if Helen Chadwick had suddenly thrown a gun down on them, if she had some wild idea of arresting them, some hope that it would be possible to start the ordinary machinery of justice grinding in the case of a man of such political influence as Paul Boardman. For a second I was almost in a panic. Green in the ways of politics, knowing nothing of the extent of civic depravity which exists in so many of our cities, the kid might have thought she could find some channel of justice which would lend an ear to her story.