“Naturally you will wonder why I should give you instructions. I know you, Ed Jenkins, know your record, know your activities, know much more than you think. You are a Lone Wolf, one who obeys no man. You have brains, so clever are you that you are known to the police of a dozen states as ‘The Phantom Crook,’ because of your ability to slip through their fingers, to obscure your connection with any crime.
“It is because of your ability that I am asking you to do this for me. In return I shall do something for you.”
With the words he reached in his desk and took out two envelopes.
“This envelope contains two thousand dollars,” he said, slitting the flap and sliding the envelope toward me. I could see the edges of the bank notes peeping out, but I did not pick it up. I waited. It had suited my pleasure to keep silent, to leave the burden of the conversation upon this great, hulking figure at the desk. I would use as few words as possible.
At my side I could hear the quick breathing of the girl. She was excited, tense. Her quick breathing told of a racing heart. There was more to this than appeared on the surface.
“This second envelope,” went on the man at the desk, “contains papers which should be of interest to you.”
He slid it over, and I took a quick glance at the contents. A glance was all I needed. Those papers were ones that I had searched for, high and low; through all of the devious channels of crookdom I had searched for them. They implicated one Chadwick in a crooked scheme, a scheme which would have sent him to the penitentiary. Chadwick was dead, but his wife and daughter lived, and they were of the upper crust, the elite of the city, the cream of society. Helen Chadwick, the daughter, was one girl who had meant much to me, one who had used me square. Her father had been blackmailed over those papers, had given notes to a crook for an even hundred thousand dollars because of those papers. I had helped the girl out of that scrape, but the papers remained outstanding. Somewhere in the great, inky pool of organized crookdom, of blackmailing intrigue, those papers had vanished, and I had searched for them. Their existence was a continuing menace to the squarest girl in the world, a girl who was a pal, who had fearlessly played the game…
I put those papers in the pocket of my coat. They could do what they pleased, and be damned to them. Those papers would not leave my possession.
The ice-cold eyes never left my face.
“I see you are reasonable, Jenkins. You are a man of honor, and your word is good. I shall ask your word that you will open a certain safe for me before midnight tomorrow. When you have given me your word you will be free to leave here with the papers and the cash.”
I nodded. I would have spoken, but I did not want my tone to betray my eagerness. I was a crook and he was a crook. I had the papers in my pocket. I would open any safe in the world for those papers. If I could earn them that way, well and good. If not, they remained with me, anyway. I was in his own castle, in his stronghold, but I had been in tighter places before.
He rubbed the fat flesh of his flabby hands together. His face did not change. There had never been so much as a ripple of the soft skin of that flabby face to indicate expression. The rubbing of the hands was the only sign of emotion.
“I see you are a wise man, Jenkins. My assistant will call on you in good time and give you complete instructions.”
I spoke at that, the first time I had spoken since entering the room. “Get this and get it straight. I give you my word to open the safe. However, it is understood that I am to be given a square deal. If you double-cross me in any way I am free to do as I please.”
The corners of the flabby lips may have twisted a bit at that. I couldn’t tell in the half-light.
“If you dare to play with me, Ed Jenkins, if you dare to disobey my instructions, you are at liberty to do so; but you will act at your peril.”
I sighed. He had the same old complex, the warped mind that fancied he controlled all power. I said nothing. There was no need. I had given him my warning.
He again opened the desk and took out a long manila envelope, an envelope that was sealed with great blobs of red sealing wax. On the outside of the envelope appeared simply a number. 543290 was the typewritten number which was on the envelope. It was thin, evidently enclosing but a single sheet of paper.
“Mr. Colby will call on you at your apartment. When he calls you may give him this envelope. He will know what to do with it. Thank you for coming. Maude, you are to be congratulated on having carried out my instructions. You may take Mr. Jenkins to his apartment.”
There was no good-night, nothing to show that the interview was ended other than the touch of finality in the tone. The huge figure remained motionless, the icy eyes glaring balefully forth from the semi-darkness.
“I will be at my apartment from nine to eleven tomorrow morning,” I told the man, determined to have the last word.
He said nothing, made no sign of having heard. His eyes watched me with unwinking appraisal. The girl’s hand rested on my arm. “Come,” she whispered, and I noticed that her hand was trembling. Together we left the room, wound our way through evil-smelling passageways, out into the store and to the street.
“Ed, would you mind driving?” she asked, and then I noticed that the girl was completely unnerved. Her face was chalky, her nostrils quivering, and she was shaking like a leaf. Was it excitement, or was it fear? I watched her closely and could not determine.
“So your name is Maude?” I asked her as I stepped on the starter.
She nodded absently. “Maude Enders,” she said.
I drove in silence, straight to the door of my apartment.
“Better run up,” I told her. “I’ll brew you a cup of tea. You seem all in.”
She shook her head abruptly. “No, I have only commenced,” she said, and there was still that absentminded ring to her voice. It was almost as though she was talking in her sleep.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Maude, you did me a good turn tonight. The papers I received mean a lot to me.”
That did not draw her out.
“Yes, yes, I know,” she agreed in the same toneless voice, and pressed her foot on the throttle I had relinquished, racing the engine a trifle, indicating that she was impatient to be gone.
“Wait just a minute,” I told her, “I’ll only detain you for a moment, but I want to give you something.”
With the words I turned and ran up the steps to my apartment house. However, I didn’t take the elevator. I skipped out of the back door and into my garage. There I opened the outer door, started the motor on my speedster, and got the engine nicely warmed up, then I went back into the apartment house, along the corridor and out the front door again.
“I thought I had a bottle of whiskey left,” I apologized, “and I was going to give it to you; but the janitor evidently found my hiding-place. It’s gone.”
She nodded, her eyes fixed on the road ahead, and slipped in the clutch and purred away, without even a good night. Was she hypnotized, this girl with the mole? Those icy, blue-gray eyes gleaming from the half-darkness of that room in a Chinatown dive seemed to have changed her. However, I was not finished with the problem, not as yet. I had promised to open a safe. That far and that far only was I committed. I wasn’t even committed that far if they were double-crossing me.
I sprinted down the driveway, into my machine, and swung down the boulevard scarcely more than two blocks behind the girl’s car. I cut down the lead as quickly as I felt it was safe to do so, and followed the other machine. The girl drove as I might have expected, steadily, mechanically, looking neither to the right nor the left.