“Wax fruit looks swell in a bowl,” he said, “but it’s pretty disappointing as fruit.”
“Thanks, Greg. You’re being sweet.”
Vi Dawson left him and went into the parlor. Cooper’s eyes followed her briefly. There was an easy grace in her, a gallant straightness to her shoulders. Vi Dawson didn’t have to pick a setting or put on an act to win masculine attention; she had only to be herself.
Hito, the Japanese, was standing inside the front door with his hands clasped behind his back. Greg Cooper stopped beside him.
“Did Mr. Arlington come out yet?”
“No, Sar. He still talk to Misser Senator Weller. Yess.”
“Okay. Tell the senator I had to go down town for an hour.”
Greg Cooper went out into the balmy air of late afternoon. It was Indian summer weather and traffic flowed in a steady stream along the paved Memorial Highway. He tooled his car out of the broad parking strip behind the house and joined the procession of cars that was moving down the pavement to Washington.
“I’m a sap and a meddler,” he said, “but perhaps I am performing a public service at that.”
He was frowning at the winged goddess on his radiator cap. Behind him he was leaving a house that contained over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in currency. Before him lay Hannigan’s joint on Ninth Street and, he hoped, a date with Beau Bridwell, one of the last of the old time cracksmen.
Twenty-two minutes after leaving the senator’s house, he pulled his car to the Ninth Street curb. There was a burlesque house and a hamburger place, a couple of chili parlors, several saloons, two theaters specializing in Grade B westerns — and Hannigan’s.
Hannigan’s was a restaurant and a saloon and a club of sorts. Burglars, pickpockets, petty grifters and yeggmen down on their luck made a hangout of Hannigan’s and Big Steve Hannigan minded his own business. He knew his customers by name and reputation and business, but if they behaved themselves in his place, he didn’t care what they might plan there against the peace and the well-being of other people. The police kept an eye on him but they didn’t tap anybody on the shoulder in Hannigan’s; they made their collars outside. On the whole, it was a decent place; a little long on odors and short on beauty, but discreetly shadowed and fitted with booths that were not sounding boards.
Beau Bridwell wasn’t there, but Hannigan knew where he could be found. “I’ll have him here in five minutes, skipper,” he said. Cooper seated himself in a booth, ordered a beer and waited. Beau Bridwell showed up in four minutes flat. Hannigan’s service was always good.
The years had not been kind to Bridwell. He was undersized and stoop-shouldered and he entered a door with a kind of furtive duck that brought him in sidewise. His pasty white face was covered with dirty gray stubble. His eyes rolled uneasily under bushy eyebrows that were already gray.
“You got something for me, Mr. Cooper?” he croaked. “Hannigan says you were askin’.”
“That’s right, Beau. Have a beer.”
Cooper gave the order for the beer which would keep Hannigan from butting in for a few minutes. He was measuring Bridwell thoughtfully. It was hard to believe that this shabby little down-and-outer had once been an aristocrat of the underworld; a master hand at the art of opening safes.
“I’ve got a box to be opened, Beau,” he said.
The little man jerked convulsively. His lips worked. “Nix. I’m all washed up. One more rap would finish me. I’m running straight, Mr. Cooper.”
“This is straight, Beau. I’ll take the responsibility. I am Senator Weller’s secretary. I’ll let you into his house and you open the box. You do not steal anything and you won’t have to run from cops or worry about burglar alarms.”
The little man stopped the nervous jerking of his features. He lived in a world of sharp dealing, of chiseling, of games and rackets that played along the fringe of the law. His eyes stopped rolling and concentrated shrewdly on Cooper’s face. He saw an angle and he was wondering how far he could play along in safety.
“You ain’t risking a swell job and a rep to glom some of the senator’s marbles,” he said finally. “I guess maybe I can work for you.”
“Okay.” Cooper was relieved. “Can you still open a safe by listening for the tumblers to fall?”
Beau Bridwell wet his lips. “If the box is 1910 or before that, yes. After that, maybe. One o’ them new boxes, no.”
“It’s pretty old.”
“That’s swell.”
The little man took a deep draught of the beer. He wiped his lips with his fingers. “If you wasn’t a friend o’ mine when you was on the papers, I wouldn’t touch it,” he said. “But friend or no friend, I gotta have a bit o’ money for my work. I gotta have it now.”
“How much?”
Bridwell’s eyes narrowed. “A hundred bucks, Cooper.”
“I haven’t got that much money on me, Beau.”
“I’ll take a check. I ain’t scared o’ rubber in your paper.”
The little man had thrown off his air of frightened humility. Cooper had come to him and Cooper had hired him for a job that no one else could do. The thought gave him dignity. He had a certain grim stubbornness under the dignity, too. Measuring him, Cooper knew that the man would stand on the demand for a hundred dollars and not a cent less. Cooper laid his check flat on the sticky table top and wrote.
“One hundred dollars, Beau. You won’t get drunk on me?”
“This beer is my last. I don’t drink when I’ve got a job to do.”
“That’s the spirit. Get out to the senator’s house on Mount Vernon Highway at three a.m. The back door will be unlocked and I’ll be waiting for you. Better hire a car and leave it alongside the highway.”
“Okay.” Beau Bridwell took one look at the check and folded it away swiftly. There was a tightening in the man’s slack lips, a gleam in his eye. Cooper rose slowly. He could read in the man’s face the reason for the swift acceptance of the check idea, the fixing of the amount above what a man might be expected to carry in his pocket.
That check was Beau Bridwell’s insurance against a frame-up or a slip. It was his proof of employment by Greg Cooper. Cooper’s lips twisted in a wry grin.
He stepped out of the booth and stopped short with surprise. Terry Black, the taxi driver, was sitting on a stool at the bar with a straight whiskey in his hand and his eyes fixed on the booth. When he saw Cooper’s eyes on him, he turned his back and huddled over the whiskey glass. Greg Cooper’s eyes narrowed.
He strode out to his car. He had taken a long step. If everything went all right tonight, he would take a hundred and fifty odd thousands of dollars from the senator’s safe. Provided that he was not interrupted, he would take that money and hide it in a panel that he had discovered years ago in the parlor mantel. There would be hell to pay in the morning but until the senator found his money, he would not be able to lose any of it to blondes, confidence men or second story workers.
It was not stealing money, he told himself; it was removing it from the control of its owner during a period of danger. “I know the senator better than he knows himself,” he thought. “He isn’t smart enough to go up against professional talent and win. By shifting the stakes out of the way, I’ve got a chance of confusing the players and of finding out what the senator is up against.”
But he was not entirely reassured. Whatever the moral issue might be, there would be a period of time between the safe and the mantel panel when he would be, in the eyes of the law, a burglar.
Chapter IV
Blazing Currency
Dinner at Bradford Weller’s was a dull meal for everyone except the senator himself. The senator enjoyed it because he made no attempt to follow the desperate attempts that were made at conversation and because he paid no attention to anyone save himself. He found his own thoughts not only satisfying but exciting.