My heart leaped as he produced a little bag of tobacco. I held my breath as he fished a cigarette paper out of another pocket. What he was doing was almost reflex action. He had gone through these same physical actions fifty or more times a day for the past twenty years. Now he repeated it completely unaware of what he was doing.
He rolled the tobacco in the paper in his usual clumsy fashion. He thrust the end of the cigarette between his lips. He fumbled in his pockets for a match. Swiftly I whipped a packet from my pocket, struck a light and held it for him. He leaned forward his cigarette toward the flame and I felt the snappy crumple of a hundred dollar bill in my wallet.
But I had enumerated the chickens an instant before they were hatched. Perhaps, he caught sight of the expression of gloating triumph on my face. Anyway he uttered an exclamation of utter horror, snatched the cigarette from between his lips and flung it on the floor.
Then he leaned back in the chair looking like a man who has just missed being hit with an atomic bomb. I shook out the match ruefully and returned to my own desk.
Sackler aimed a trembling forefinger in my direction. “Rat,” he said, “you tried to trick me into lighting that cigarette. You are wilful and wicked. Get out of my sight.”
I stood up and donned my hat. I said, “Do you mean that I have the rest of the day off?”
“I do not. Go to the Public Library and check Fleming’s quotation. While you’re doing that, which should be a simple task for even one of your moderate intelligence, I shall check on this Donald Dworkin. Perhaps by sundown we shall be some eleven hundred dollars the richer.”
The we was rhetorical. Invariably the firm was a plural entity until the payoff came, then I was given to understand I was strictly a paid employee who should be grateful for my weekly salary without trying to cut in on management’s profits.
We’d argued this so often I didn’t bother to bring it up again. I went out of the office silently hoping that no one in the Metropolitan area had ever heard of Donald Lionel Dworkin.
Rather to my surprise I spent the better part of the day in the 42nd Street library. I came out into the street again at half past four, hopped a bus and went back to the office. He was grinning behind his desk as I came in.
“Joey,” he said, “for once I’ve been lucky.”
“For once?” I said bitterly. “You were born with a pair of golden and loaded dice in your mouth.”
He was far too happy to dispute that point.
“This Dworkin,” he said, “I got him.”
“Do tell,” I said sourly.
“The super of the house at the address Fleming gave me knew nothing. Naturally, I went to the post office to see if he’d left a forwarding address.”
“And,” I said, “he had.”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Because you’re lucky. Because once in your youth you doubtless sold your miserable soul to the devil. Because—”
But he was too spiritually high to argue with me. “Yes,” he said. “Dworkin left a forwarding address of a place upstate. I phoned them and spoke to his sister. He’s now living in Texas. She hears from him regularly. She gave me the address. One afternoon’s work and we’ve made eleven hundred dollars.”
“You,” I corrected him, “have made a thousand.”
He looked at me and faint alarm came into his eyes. He said slowly and fearfully, “You mean—”
“I mean that I’ve been through every book in the Library and I could not find any record of that corny crack Fleming asked you to run down.”
Sackler groaned and clapped a hand to his head. “You looked in Bartlett?”
“I looked in Bartlett and every other book of quotations, every reference book, and I requested and received the aid of two librarians. We couldn’t find it.”
Sackler looked stricken now.
I said: “You’ve made a grand on the Dworkin deal. What are you looking so miserable about?”
“But I lose a hundred dollars,” he said hollowly. “On a simple matter like that quotation. A hundred dollars, Joey. That kind of money doesn’t grow on trees.”
“I repeat, you’ve made a thousand.”
But Rex Sackler didn’t look at it that way. He felt he was out a hundred bucks just as surely as if someone had picked his pocket.
“Well,” he said at last, “we’ve got a couple of days. Tomorrow I’ll go to the library myself.”
I shrugged my shoulders. I was concerned about a hundred dollars of my own. I had three months to trick Sackler into smoking a cigarette and I’d feel much easier when it was done.
I arrived at the office on the following morning, having spent a restless night. Sackler had not come in yet. I let myself in with the key, seated myself at the desk and picked up the morning paper.
I finished that, went downstairs and purchased a copy of the early edition of the afternoon paper, and Sackler had not returned yet.
It was almost noon when the door opened and he arrived. There was dark melancholy in his eyes and a worried expression on his thin face. He shook his head sadly and sank wearily into his chair.
“Joey,” he said, “you were right. I can’t find that quotation.”
“Good,” I said. “Now you’ll have to give him the hundred bucks back.”
He uttered a groan which sounded like the agony of a lost soul. However, it came as sweet melody into my ears. Next to making money myself I loved to see Sackler lose it.
An instant later the door opened again and a heavy footfall sounded on the floor. I swung my head around to see Inspector Woolley.
Chapter Two
The Racket Boys
Woolley was a big, impressive man with a pair of black mustachios. He did not like Rex Sackler and at the moment that dislike was written clearly on his face. He strode across the room, halted before Sackler’s desk, pointed an accusing forefinger and said loudly: “What do you know of one Arthur Freuh?”
Then before Sackler could open his mouth to reply, Woolley added darkly: “You’d better come clean. This is important and legal business.”
Sackler, whose affection for Woolley was only equalled by the Inspector’s regard for him smiled coldly and said: “I know no Arthur Freuh. I never heard of him. And if he is a criminal I resent you suggesting that I have ever associated with him.”
“Well,” said Woolley heavily to me, “ain’t he the white knight, though.” He turned back to Sackler and addressed him with severity. “If you don’t come clean you’ll be associating with quite a number of criminals, son.”
Sackler lifted cold, interrogating eyebrows. “What do you mean by that?”
“You’re supposed to have a sharp mind. I mean I’ll throw you in the clink.”
“On what charge?”
“Suspicion of anything, or as a material witness held in the kind of bond it’d kill you to pay. Now what about this Freuh?”
Some of Sackler’s arrogance had left him. He knew that nothing would give Woolley more pleasure than to throw him in the pokey.
He said more mildly: “I’ve told you I know nothing of a man named Freuh. Now, suppose, you tell me why you think I do.”
Woolley took a small leather notebook from his pocket. “This,” he announced, “is one of those daily reminder books. Each page bears a date, one for each day of the year. On the page dated yesterday there are written the names of three men with whom its owner apparently had appointments yesterday. The first of those names is Joseph Capelli.”
“The big racket boy,” I said.
“The second,” said Woolley, “is that of Ralph Barnshaw.”