“Even if the information I should disclose became of the greatest value to one of your other clients?”
He thought for a moment, then nodded.
“I should protect the confidences of one of my clients, regardless of who might benefit by the information.”
I got up and extended my hand.
“All right. Since you won’t give me the information I want I’ll have to go to the trouble of getting it myself.”
He laughed.
“There are some things even you can’t get, Jenkins, and this is one of them.”
“Maybe,” I said as I walked out. I was mad. I’d never been so fed up on this damned talk of ethics, of honor, virtue and all of the highbrow stuff in all my life. I wanted to go down in the underworld for a while just to get the sound of the highbrow talk out of my ears. I was getting as bad as the rest of ’em. Bah!
Three years ago and I’d have never given the thing a thought besides trying to figure some way to make mine out of it. Now the blamed flapper worried me. I went home and tried to sleep and didn’t make a very good job of it. I had need for all the sleep I could get.
Promptly at eight o’clock I heard steps in the hallway, saw Bobo’s tail give a wag or two, and then there came a gentle knock on the door.
I opened it to see Helen Chadwick standing there with a suitcase in her hand.
“Hello, Ed. Did you get the license all right? This has to be an elopement, you know. I told mother I was spending the night with some girlfriends, so I brought my baggage along.”
I didn’t answer the question directly.
“Put your grip in here, and we’ll go take a ride,” was all the answer I gave her.
She nodded, handed me the grip, and looked at the dog. “Hello, Bobo. Come on over here, boy.”
He trotted over to her and stood there, wagging his tail while she patted his head. I had a machine waiting downstairs, and I took the girl to it, stepped on the starter and headed into the traffic of Van Ness.
I’ll say one thing for that flapper. She knew when to talk and when to keep quiet. She saw after one glance at my face, that I had my mind made up and, after that, she didn’t say a word, just cuddled down there in the seat, looking tiny and helpless, her little face stuck up in the face of Fate, her hand resting on the dog’s head, and her eyes straight ahead.
I commenced to realize that she derived a lot of comfort from the dog. She was going through hell, and she was too game to say much. She wouldn’t even let me guess what was going on in her mind, but she let down the bars with the dog, and clung to him for sympathy. Bobo understood, and perhaps it was that which had impressed him from the first. The man who says a dog hasn’t some psychic sense which enables him to understand the emotional states of the person he comes in contact with, is a man who doesn’t know dogs.
Herman, himself, welcomed us at the door. I’d given him a ring earlier in the afternoon and told him we’d be out. I hadn’t told him anything else, and I could see that he was curious.
We went back into the little study, and I did the talking.
“I’ll take this thing on one condition,” I told him, “and that is that I don’t marry the girl. She can get me invited to the Kemper’s for a weekend as a very dear friend; perhaps she may have to let on that we’re engaged; but I won’t go through with the thing as her husband, and that’s final.”
He looked me over, his big, full-moon eyes, speculating a bit, turning things over in his mind. The girl had given one little gasp, and was sitting forward on the edge of the chair.
“Jenkins, you puzzle me,” said Herman at length. “Your record doesn’t show that you’re a bit mushy or soft-boiled. Frankly, it doesn’t make much difference to me, only I thought the idea would appeal to you more if there was to be a marriage. You have a taste for the bizarre, the unusual, and I felt that I’d got to dress up something out of the way to interest you in it at all. It suits me all right if you go out there in any capacity, provided only that you can spend several days and nights in the house, and have the run of the place as a guest.
“In other words, if it ever comes out that there was anything unusual happened there (and Miss Chadwick doesn’t know what I have in mind for you to do), I don’t want it to also happen that you will immediately be suspected. You are to be there as a guest, and an honored guest, one who has the entire place at his disposal.
“Miss Chadwick, do you think that you can arrange to have an invitation to the Kempers’ with Mr. Jenkins as a very dear friend?”
She nodded, her eyes fastened on my face instead of his.
“If we were engaged I could,” she said quietly, almost softly.
He waved his hand.
“That’s a detail for you folks to settle. Here are your instructions. Today is Friday. You are to arrange things so that you enter the Kemper home on Saturday afternoon and stay there over Saturday, Sunday and Monday. On Sunday night between eleven and twelve Mr. Jenkins is to have Mr. Kemper engaged in conversation. On Monday night he is to do the work I have assigned to him, picking his own time.
“Miss Chadwick, by the time you have been there up to midnight on Sunday I’ll know that you have gone though with your part of the bargain, and if you’ll come out here any time after that I’ll make an… er… adjustment with you of the matters which are between us. In fact, you can come between one and two in the morning if you wish.
“That’s all there is to it, except you people are not to compare notes in any way. Those are your instructions. You both are to profit if you carry them out, and you both are liable to a penalty if you fail me or try to double-cross me.”
I thought the situation over for a minute.
“Of course you’re on the square with us?”
He twisted his thick lip into a leer.
“Certainly.”
“All right,” I said as I rose and gave my arm to the girl. “We understand each other perfectly, then.”
He bowed us out into the night, and I could see he was thinking. Somehow, somewhere I had given him an inkling that I was working on a definite plan, and it made him uneasy. I could see him standing there in the door long after we had closed the gate. He was there when I started the car and drove away.
“You’ll have to take me out to the house now, Ed,” said the girl. “It’s going to be sudden enough as it is, but I don’t want to shock my circle too much. I wonder if you’d mind meeting mother tonight, and posing as a friend who met me while I was in college?”
I sighed. I was in for it and I knew it.
“All right,” I came back listlessly. My mind was far away.
She put her hand on mine.
“And, Ed, I want you to know that I think that was the whitest, squarest thing that you did tonight. I can’t begin to thank you. You are… well, Ed, you’re just a thoroughbred, and that’s all there is to it.”
I kept my eyes on the road ahead. If my ears were any judge, the kid was nearer a breakdown than she’d ever been when she was with me before, and I didn’t want any sobbing female woman on my shoulder.
She gave me the directions and I drove her out to her house.
Her mother was a stately dowager with kindly eyes, a face that was calm with stem pride and lined with grief. A look at the color of her skin showed that she wouldn’t stand very much in the line of a shock.
The kid pulled it off in nice shape. She’d been out to see her friends and had just happened to run into me on the street in front of my hotel. I’d just got in and insisted on paying a more formal call, but she’d kidnapped me and taken me out for her mother to meet.
Mother was curious, but she held it back nicely, acting the stately hostess. I sat there and swapped small talk with a chocolate cup between thumb and forefinger, little finger sticking straight out and a postage stamp napkin stuck on my knee. I felt like hell.