He was taking his time. He was engaged in a burglary conspiracy, no matter how he might explain his motives to himself. He could not afford to be seen or delayed by any member of a nerve-taut household. He took the darkened stairs a step at a time and paused at the bottom. His forehead creased in a worried frown.
There was a line of light under the door of the senator’s study.
He moved forward swiftly now, his nerves strung like fine wires beneath his skin. He had taken a half dozen steps when he was conscious of movement behind him. A masked figure seemed to rise from the ground and there was a gun pressing against Cooper’s back.
“Take it easy!” the man growled. “And walk straight ahead.”
Cooper grunted. He had turned partly into that gun but only an idiot would try to turn the rest of the way. He saw no percentage in mock heroics.
“I was going straight ahead when you stopped me,” he said.
The man in the mask did not reply. He stayed close to Cooper and Cooper marched. Before the study door, Cooper came to a halt. The gun barrel jabbed him.
“Go on in.”
There was more nervousness than toughness in the man with the gun. Cooper could sense that from the voice and from the way in which the man gave his orders. Cooper did not find the fact reassuring. A nervous man was likely to be more dangerous with a gun than a tough man. Cooper turned the knob and stepped into the study.
There was a little man crouched in front of the safe, his fingers pressing the dial lightly. At the sound of the opening door, he leaped to his feet. There was terror in his white face as he turned, and Cooper swore.
“Bridwell!”
The man behind Cooper relaxed. He evidently hadn’t recognized Cooper in the darkness. Beau Bridwell was leaning against the safe for support.
“You scared me, Mr. Cooper. I... I—”
“You thought you’d try a double-cross?”
“Oh, no. No, sir.”
“Baloney. Who’s this wolf?”
Cooper turned. The man with the gun was holding it like a man in evening clothes holding a greasy tire iron. He no longer looked formidable, merely disconcerted. Cooper jerked the loosely strung handkerchief from his face and stared at him in astonishment.
The man with the gun was Terry Black of the taxicab. He flushed under Cooper’s hard stare, but his mouth was sullen. There was a raw odor of liquor about him.
“I ain’t interested in anything but what’s mine,” he growled.
“You mean the two hundred and fifty dollars?”
“You bet.”
“It wasn’t yours. You owed it.”
“Maybe. I was willing to admit that I did. If the senator needed the dough, it was his, see? But when I saw all that money stacked up—”
“Okay. It still isn’t your money.”
Cooper turned back to Bridwell, his jaw hard. “And you, you doublecrossing chiseler, I suppose you just got here early and went to work, eh?”
“Yes, sir. That’s how it was. My watch only cost a buck in the first place and—”
“And you’re a liar. You gave me the doublecross. You had my check if anything went wrong and you were going to glom off that money for yourself.”
“No. You got me wrong on that.”
There was white fear in Beau Bridwell’s face; the fear of a man who has served too many years behind gray walls and who knows that he will never come out if he goes in again. Cooper stood with his hands on his hips. His eyes shifted from one man to the other. Terry Black showed less fear but he was trembling with nervousness. Beau Bridwell kept moistening his lips.
Two men to one and with a gun in the hand of one of them, they had the advantage over Cooper and they seemed unmindful of it. If they wanted the contents of the safe enough to pull a doublecross to get it, they could still carry out their original intention. With his check in Beau Bridwell’s pocket, Greg Cooper was in no position to call for help. The thought, however, did not alarm him. He felt there was no need of help.
He was dealing with a broken yeggman who had dropped into the ranks of petty thievery and with a desperate taxi driver who had turned crooked only because he had learned bitterness and had washed his bitterness down with too much liquor. Small time crooks were always frightened by the size of a big job. Their imaginations were not equal to it. They would steal a hundred or two — and maybe slap a man like Cooper out of the way to get it; but a safe holding thousands was frightening. They let fright paralyze them. Cooper shoved his jaw forward aggressively.
“Put that gun on the table, Black!” he growled.
The taxi driver stopped trembling. For a second his eyes were hot with defiance; then he shrugged and laid the gun down. “You got most of it wrong,” he said. “This ain’t a double-cross. It’s a different deal, that’s all. I was going to bring Beau out here even if you hadn’t got to him first. I got desperate thinking of all the money I saw out here and how much that two fifty meant to me. I was going to take it back, that’s all.”
Cooper looked at him searchingly and believed him. He turned toward Bridwell. “And what were you going to get?”
Bridwell passed his tongue over his lips. “Just a little stake for myself, Guv’ner. I was just going to take maybe a thousand.”
Strangely enough, Greg Cooper found himself believing Bridwell, too. It was the fear of big money again. Beau Bridwell had sunk to a level where he knew that the mere possession of money in large amounts would ruin him. He wouldn’t have dared to take it — even with it lying under his hands. Terry Black was lighting a cigarette.
“It was a different deal,” he repeated. “I was going to blow. Beau was going to hang around and when you let him in, he was going to open the box again for you.”
Cooper nodded. It was fantastic and it was obviously fact. Beau Bridwell had merely hired himself out to two different men — under agreement to open the same safe twice in a night.
“You set the time pretty close,” he said.
Beau Bridwell shook his head.
“Not us. We left lots o’ time. We were going to try that box at two bells, but there was somebody moving around down here.”
Cooper stiffened. “There was what?”
“Somebody down here in this room.”
The two men were looking at him. Cooper shook his head slowly. He was regretting that nap that he had taken upstairs.
“Did you get the box open?” he asked.
Bridwell shook his head. “Nope. But I can do it.”
“Okay. Open it up.” Cooper sat on the corner of his own desk. He gestured with one hand toward the ashes in the fireplace. “There are people in this house,” he said, “who will bet you that there is a lot of money in those ashes and nothing in the safe. I’ll reverse the bet. I’ll bet you that there is nothing in the ashes and a lot of money in the safe. Go to it!”
The little cracksman looked at him curiously and bent over the dial. It was hot in the study and very still as Beau Bridwell stiffened with concentration, his head close to the steel door of the safe and his eyes fixed in a stare that was almost glassy. He moved the dial slowly, calling upon the skill of his youth — feeling for the fall of the tumblers.
Greg Cooper was holding his breath. It didn’t seem quite real and his mind refused to encompass the idea of personal danger. He was looking at the safe as, earlier in the evening, he had looked at the fire in the open grate. That hadn’t been real, either.
He had refused to believe, then, that it was possible for a man who had been miserly with money all of his life to deliberately destroy it as a gesture of spite. Trickery and malice were believable in Bradford Weller, but never a big, irrevocable gesture.