“It’s been done before,” Johnny Dolan said easily. “A moll with nice, shiny black hair an’ one o’ them greeny-brown skins t’ match an’ otherwise — why, Mae West. It’s been done before.”
“Positively, sucker, by guys that has what it takes an’ knows a few o’ the answers in the back o’ the book,” Mr. Binney agreed, “only not by no fish-faced dimwit like you, Johnny, with a pan which makes a person think the house is haunted every time he looks at it. Not by no imitation yegg like you, that couldn’t get the pennies offen a dead man’s eyes without knockin’ over the radio two flights up. Scratch it, kid; y’ain’t the type.”
“Hey, lissen!” Johnny Dolan protested, for he was a little hurt.
“An’ this also you gotta remember about molls,” Mr. Binney pursued, his eye kindling. “Big or little, fat or skinny, black, white or yeller, t’ the last frill, they’ll cross you!”
“Not the kind o’ moll I got in mind,” Johnny smiled serenely.
“Any moll that ever had a run in a stockin’!” Mr. Binney bawled, with swiftly rising heat, from the corner of his mouth. “Looka Flo, the time I had the place in Tenth Avenyer. The once in my life there was five yards in the register, she dumps it in a paper bag an’ scrams with a taxi-driver! Looka Jennie Lynch, that I was gonna marry. She rolls me for a four-carat rock an’ the price o’ furniture for the flat and then — yeah, Rat?” he said, suddenly gentle, for he was, always attentive to cash customers. “What is it you want?”
“A little less o’ yer private life, till I finish this steak in peace!” Mr. Rat McGee snarled, from the corner of his mouth, and went on eating at his table across the room.
He looked exactly the sort of person who would get less of a private life when he so requested.
He was smallish and stooped, but from the last scraggly hair to the tips of his toenails, he was mean. He had a long, sharp nose and a pair of steely gimlet eyes. When he rose, as he did now after tidying his mouth with the back of a hairy paw, one saw that he walked with a pronounced limp. This was the fault of a certain small-arms manufacturer who runs to heavy triggers. The householder who had meant to perforate Rat McGee’s heart, just after three that long-gone winter morning, had pulled down until he merely shattered an ankle.
“Hi, punk!” Mr. McGee said sharply to Johnny Dolan. “On our way!”
“Youse boys off for a little outin’, huh?” Mr. Binney inquired slyly.
“Well, y’see, Red, it’s like this,” Johnny Dolan beamed expansively. “Up in Westchester—”
“Why doncher give him the address an’ a road map?” the Rat rasped viciously.
“Er — sure! I gotcher, pal!” Johnny Dolan said hastily; and without so much as a formal good-by to Mr. Binney, he walked straight through the door, with the Rat clumping laboriously after.
Mr. McGee’s car was just around the corner, a nice enough little two-door affair, but cheap. That is the great disadvantage of using stolen cars exclusively: one must stick to the plentiful, low-priced models or risk trouble through the whole week before one wrecks the vehicle or it grows too hot for comfort. Still, this job was serviceable enough to get them to that very high-hat suburb, Falmont, by two o’clock.
“Run through it again!” the Rat snapped, as he drove up Fifth Avenue.
Johnny Dolan heaved a resigned sigh.
“I a’ready run through it ten thousand times. However, puttin’ on the record again: this doll is pretty near the richest girl in America. She’s one o’ these health cranks which for some reason wants to live a long time and consequently is always asleep before midnight. Accordin’ t’ what your girlfriend, the chambermaid, told you, she sleeps like she was full o’ hop.
“Her room is the last one on the east on the second floor an’ the screens ain’t been put up yet’ for the summer. The stuff is always kept in a green velvet box in a small, black, sorter Chinese cabinet which stands on the left side o’ the room, goin’ in by the window, an’ beyond the bed, which is t’ the right. The trick Chinese key is kept in the right-hand drawer of the doll’s vanity table, in a small purse. Okey dokey?”
“It is, if you really got it through that ivory dome an’ ain’t just reelin’ it off like a poll-parrot,” the Rat conceded grudgingly. “Got yer rod?”
“Don’t I wear it, day an’ night?”
“Loaded?”
“Did I bring it t’ eat soup with?” Johnny Dolan asked mildly.
“Naw, you brought it t’ cool the moll, in case you fall over yer own feet an’ wake her up!” Mr. McGee snarled forcefully. “An’ make no mistake about that angle, punk! The foist peep out o’ her, if she wakes up for any reason whatsoever, stick the rod between her eyes an’ give her the business!”
“Rat,” Johnny Dolan also snarled, and as ominously, for he knew about how Mr. McGee liked his conversation served, “the doll is the same as dead now!”
“If you gotta drill her, drill her quick an’ then chuck me this whole Chinese thing outa the window — an’ no slips!” Rat McGee rumbled on. “An’ remember, I’m only takin’ you in on this on account my bum leg won’t let me climb no ladders, an’ I’m handin’ you plenty when I cut it three ways an’ give you one.”
With a mighty effort, Johnny Dolan made his nod indifferent.
But, inside, was he indifferent? Yeah, he was indifferent just like the guy that sees the rope getting thrown when he’s going down for the third time, just like the guy that’s getting strapped in the hot seat and sees the keeper hurry in with word that the Governor is finally over his indigestion and has changed his mind.
Why? Well, for one reason, because him and the Rat was about to pull one of the ace jobs of the year and, only it don’t never do no good to show a party how grateful you are. Johnny Dolan could have thrown his arms around Rat McGee and kissed him, for letting him on this at all!
Different times, probably, you read in the papers about the jewels this Felicia Rudwell doll keeps around the house? The four emerald bracelets supposed to be worth twenty thousand fish apiece and this here famous Manama pearl necklace they tell you set old man Rudwell back half a million? Them figures, naturally, are a lot of baloney; but at that, the way they’d added it up with Solly Levine, who would be moving the stuff, when this tin Lizzie rolled back to Broadway she’d be carrying better than two hundred grand, net! Yeah, and that meant better than sixty grand for Johnny Dolan alone!
It hit him again, just as it had been hitting him at intervals for three days how, the sheer, incredible tremendousness of the whole enterprise. Once more, Johnny Dolan began to tremble. Why, take for instance, not counting nothing else, the kind of moll a person with sixty grand can drag around and—
“If that slug ain’t left the ladder exactly where I showed him,” Mr. McGee reflected pleasantly, aloud, “we’ll cut the soles offen his feet an’ rip his tongue out by the roots!”
The soles and tongue of the unnamed slug, however, were safe. Nicely hidden, the ladder reposed beneath the hedge. Beyond the hedge were smooth acres of velvet lawn and beyond the lawn, in utter darkness, loomed a great country house. The season’s first few débutante insects chirped drowsy encouragement as Johnny Dolan stole over the lawn at one end of the ladder and Mr. McGee at the other.
And here was the absolutely dippy thing: it seemed that in this big moment Johnny Dolan had sorter changed somehow; he could feel it inside him, like he’d quit being dumb and clumsy and sorter swelled up to the size of the job. What he meant, here they’d already covered about fifty miles of this grass and still he hadn’t tripped and gone down on his nose or been took with a noisy attack of sneezing or anything!