The music was good, so was the liquor, and the dance floor. All the houses on that side of the dingy block were more or less united in a sort of warren. There was only one entrance to the Nest, but there were several exits, known to the initiated. The back space of two adjoining basements had been made into one big room for general entertainment. The other rooms were used for private parties, for card games, for conferences of racketeers, the division of loot or its proceeds. One basement doorway was entirely closed. Above the other was one dingy electric bulb.
No one got through that entrance who was not wanted. An easier place to enter than to leave, for all the emergency exits, if you did not belong. A place suspected but not yet raided. A place protected, beyond question. At the back was a dingy stretch of ground. Adjoining fences were all negotiable, though the places for passage were masked.
Two entertainers were on the floor, a tawdry blonde who was still slender, still graceful, though her face showed the ravages of dissipation for all its make-up. Her dress was revealing rather than suggestive, she wore a number of gems that flashed too brilliantly to be genuine. Her partner was a slim, slick lizard of a man, with the eyes of a weasel and the suppleness of that feral brute.
They knew their audiences, and their audiences knew all their repertoire, save when, at rare intervals, the blonde introduced a new song. Her voice was husky but not unpleasing, there was still a lure about her of days when she might have been a headliner.
The dance over, dutifully applauded, she sprang up to a seat on the piano, played by a man whose pasty face had eyes in it dead looking as dried currants; from whose dry lips the fag of a cigarette constantly hung.
“I’m tryin’ out a new song to-night, people,” announced the blonde. “See how you like it? Jangle the pan, Looey.”
A couple were admitted after a whispered talk with the burly guard, a broken-nosed paluka, whose prize fighting ambitions had been flattened with his nasal organ. The man who came in looked as if he might be a truck driver. The girl was petite and pretty. The blonde looked at the newcomer with interest, her dancing partner surveyed the girl with a speculation that was an insult to decency, a speculation he was careful to keep veiled. He did not have too much courage, or masculinity, and it was a risky game in the Nest to interfere with another man’s girl. The man in question looked as if he could give a good account of himself.
The two gave their order, lit cigarettes, surveyed the room with languid interest. The blonde deliberately ogled the man. As the song ended, the proprietor of the Nest, an Italian named Salterno, came over to their table, nodded to them.
“My fren’, you say Dutch Frank tell you to come here to have good time, si? I hope you do that. When did you see heem last. You know where he ees, si?”
His beady eyes were more than inquisitive, they held a flame of doubtful hostility.
“I ain’t seen Dutch since I went up north on my last run,” said Jimmy Dugan. “Last I knew he was over on West Fifteenth.”
“Ah! You did not know he was on a trip up the reever? No?”
“You mean Dutch is in stir? That’s bad news. How long a stretch?”
Salterno held up five fingers.
Dugan whistled.
“Say, that’s too bad. What d’ye know about that, kid?”
The girl shook her head in commiseration.
“Dutch was a good guy,” she said. “It’s bum luck.”
“They spot heem by that bum mitt of hees,” said Salterno. “You know wheech feenger was missing, my friend?”
“What are you tryin’ to hand me?” said Dugan. “There was nothin’ wrong with Dutchey’s mitts. What’s the big idea?”
Salterno laughed.
“I theenk you are all right,” he said. “But we hav’ to be careful. You come an’ say Dutch send you here, an’ Dutch ees in stir. So, I ask you one question. Now you dreenk weeth me. Si.”
Nobody knew better than Jimmy Dugan, second-class detective, that Dutch Frank had nothing wrong with his hands. He had helped to send Dutch on that trip up the river. He knew his mug, his measurements, his Bertillon description.
He breathed a little more easily after Salterno expressed his satisfaction, not so much for his own sake as for that of his companion, Mary Brady. He knew that the very air one breathed in the Nest was fraught with danger to the intruder — and so did the girl — but, to enter there alone increased the risk, and he did not expect to do more than size up the clientèle.
As for Mary Brady, she also was in the game. Her present job was with the Garrity Detective Agency. She was holding down a counter job in a jeweler’s establishment where there had been a recent record of missing gems, valuable rings; believed to be an inside affair. Her evenings were her own, after the store closed, and she gave some of them to Jimmy Dugan.
It was not the first time they had worked together, though the association was not official. Jimmy hoped, some day, to make the partnership permanent. Then, he resolved, Mary would get out of the fascinating but risky game, too risky for the girl he loved, though the adventure of it was in her blood as well as his own.
He had a hint, also a hunch, that the Nest was a rendezvous of the gang known as the Blackbirds, their racket the looting from freight cars of valuable silks whose contents they knew beforehand. Their identity was still a secret to Centre Street, a secret Dugan meant to solve. There were vague descriptions of some of them, given by blackjacked watchmen and others who had been put out of the way.
There had been some who had been less mercifully treated. Floaters who had been found bumping against wharf pilings, brought in with the tide, shot in their defense of the goods the Blackbirds coveted. A desperate lot of racketeers with no thought of the value of human life outside their own.
Dugan watched those who entered the Nest. He and Mary Brady seemed the only strangers. But he recognized none as members of the Blackbirds. It was getting late. The place was filled with the fumes of cigarettes, the reek of liquor. Jests were bandied back and forth. He was conscious of the advances of the blonde entertainer, bolder as the general attitude became more rowdy, more intimate. She was dancing, off and on, with a red-headed, undersized, rat-faced man who seemed more eager than she was, though he was a fine partner, dancing almost as well as her professional team mate, who gave up his attempts to interest Mary Brady, foiled by her indifference.
It looked like an off night. Unless the red-headed man was one of the outfit he wanted. They had a note at headquarters that there was a red-head among the Blackbirds. He did not look like a potential villain, and, while he was evidently well-acquainted, Dugan saw no signs between him and any one else of close intimacy.
“You can stay here all night,” he said to Mary. “We might as well be going. It was just a chance lead.”
But Dugan was disappointed. It was the first time his hunch had failed him, the hunch that was an inborn attribute of the instinctive detective. Dugan was making good, though he had not been long a detective. Six months ago he had been a harness bull, pounding the pavement as two generations of Dugans had done before him. He had been lucky, he told himself, and might well have spelled the word with a p in front of it. “Pluck” and “luck,” and that mysterious phenomenon called a “hunch,” had helped him to promotion, still kept him on the highway to advancement.