“You aren’t going to present those notes just yet, that is, present ’em to the administrator?”
He shook his glistening head.
“Not until I ask you to do something for me.”
She nodded, brightly.
“That’s the spirit. You know I might happen to do it.”
With that she threw him a glance back over her shoulder and tripped down the hall. He tagged along after her, and I beat it back out of the window. Somehow, I didn’t want him to know I’d overheard that conversation.
I picked up Bobo and slipped around through the shadows. At the front door she called “Good night” in that little flapper tone of hers, and skipped on down the steps and out into the darkness.
He stood outlined against the lighted hallway for a second, then closed the door. As he did so, she leaned back against one of the iron posts in the fence, and sobbed her heart out. J stood there, motioning to Bobo to keep quiet, listening to the sound of those heartbreaking sobs, waiting for her to get her cry out and beat it.
After five or ten minutes she straightened, gulped, and went off down the street.
I walked up the steps to the front door and rang the bell.
There were steps in the hall, a light flashed over my head, and a cautious voice inquired through a little sort of a peekhole:
“Who is it?”
“Ed Jenkins.”
Silence for a moment.
“What Jenkins?”
“The Phantom Crook,” I told him, spitting the words out. I’d strained a point calling on the big cheese in the first place, and I didn’t propose to stand out there in the night swapping courtesies.
I’d parked Bobo around the corner of the steps where he could be called, but where he was out of sight. I might need the dog before the interview was over. What Herman wanted was more than I knew, but I gathered he didn’t have these private interviews at night to give out charity — not after what I’d heard.
The door swung open.
“Come in, Mr. Jenkins.”
He didn’t make any attempt to hand me any salve, or do any greeting. He simply asked me in, slammed the door behind me and led the way into his study. So much, at least, was in his favor.
I sat down in the chair the girl had occupied, looked at the room from the other angle than when I’d been behind the desk, saw that he’d closed the safe and moved back the picture, crossed my legs and leaned back.
He looked at me for a long minute, then grunted:
“You’re the Phantom Crook?”
I nodded.
“Ed Jenkins, himself?”
I nodded again and let it go at that.
He sighed. “You don’t look like it. You look almost like a kid. Your record shows that you’ve been up a couple of times, are wanted in half a dozen states, and tricked ’em into dragging you into California so you could keep ’em from dragging you out again.”
I made no move, not even a nod. I just looked at him, expectantly.
“You earned your title because of the uncanny ability you showed at slipping through their fingers,” he went on. “Also it’s said of you that you can open any safe and not leave a mark on it. You’ve got something on the ball the others haven’t got, some method of getting the combination, of manipulating the tumblers.”
There was a question in his voice when he stopped this time, but that was all the good it did him.
“You’re the one that asked this interview,” I told him, shortly. “I came to listen.”
He moistened his lips again, reached for a cigar, and wrapped the spongy softness of his mouth around it, struck a match, exhaled a smoke cloud, inspected the end of the cigar, squirmed a bit, then got down to business.
“Know who I am?”
“A little.”
“Know enough to know that I can get what I want in politics?”
“You always have, according to reports.”
“All right, Jenkins, how’d you like to have complete pardons from every state where there’s a warrant for your arrest?”
I had to grip the sides of the chair to keep my face from showing my emotion. God! How would it feel to be able to wander free, to live as any other citizen, to call a cop when someone got rough, not to be always on the hide? I was afraid to dwell on the idea. I’d been a social outcast since I could remember. The world had always been against me, and I’d fought back, for Ed Jenkins is the sort that fights back…
“It can’t be done,” I said shortly.
He nodded his ponderous head, his lips twisted into a thick smile.
“Sure it can. Easiest thing in the world. I’ll prove it to yuh when the time comes.”
I sat back listening.
“It’s like this,” he went on when he saw I wasn’t going to make any great contribution to the evening’s conversation. “There is a man who is going to get in his possession a paper of which I want a copy made. I don’t care about having the original, but I do want an exact copy. I want to know what’s in that paper.”
He waited, and I waited.
“The name of the man is — Loring Kemper.”
He leaned forward as he shot that at me, waiting to see if I’d give him any clue to my thoughts by my facial expression.
It took him nearly ten seconds to decide he’d drawn a blank, and, when he was convinced of that, I noticed an expression of satisfaction creep into his eyes.
“Here’s the situation, Jenkins. I’m educated, polished after a fashion. I use better English than most of the society leaders, but I don’t get by with them. They can’t see me at all. I’m an outcast. Money I have, position I have, prestige I have, power I have, but I can’t get in with a certain social set. All of my life I’ve got what I wanted. Now it suits me to have the social recognition that’s been denied me. The contents of this paper are important. The man who knows the contents of that paper can make society here in San Francisco recognize him.”
I thought that over, turning it over and over in my mind in the silence which followed. I’d heard of stunts like that, but I didn’t believe in ’em. Still there was that interview with Helen Chadwick… At any rate all of this was nothing in my young life. I looked up.
“Well?”
“Well,” he replied, and his wide open pussyfooting eyes bored into mine. “You’re going to the house of Loring Kemper as a guest, and you’re going to get the paper I want out of his safe, make a photographic copy and return the original. When you get that photographic copy you can turn it over to me when, and only when I give you complete pardons from every state that has a warrant out for you.”
I looked him over again to make sure he wasn’t crazy.
“Why me?” I asked, casually, making conversation, leading him on.
“Because,” he shot back, “you are educated. When occasion requires you can pass yourself off as a social gentleman, you won’t pull a boner in the house of this multimillionaire social leader; and again because you can open the safe where that paper’ll be kept, make a photograph and get the paper back without anyone ever knowing the safe has been sprung.”
I laughed at that, laughed long and loud. He tickled me, this Don G. Herman.
“That’s fine,” I said. “It sure sounds like the original fairy tale of Cinderella and the slipper. You’re some little fairy godmother, all right, but, if you’re the social outcast you claim, if you can’t get in with society, how are you going to get me, Ed Jenkins, known from one end of the country to the other as ‘The Phantom Crook,’ how are you going to get me an invitation to spend a few days as the house guest of Loring Kemper, the leader of the ultra select of the ultra select?”
I grinned up at him as I handed him that little poser.
He leaned forward.
“You will be received in that house as the man you will be, not as the man you have been. You will be received by Mr. Loring Kemper, and by his wife, Edith Jewett Kemper, not as Ed Jenkins, but as Edward Gordon Jenkins, the husband of Helen Chadwick, daughter of H. Bolton Chadwick, deceased, and of Elsie Chadwick, his widow. Now then, damn you, LAUGH THAT OFF!”