“Boy,” I exhaled softly. I’d never been so glad to see anyone in my life. I got on the shoes, and sheathed the long flat box in the waist-band of my trousers, upright against my side. It stayed there pretty securely, and without making a very noticeable bulge.
There was a minute-and-a-half yet before the train left. I couldn’t resist asking him, as I stood up: “Limpy, did you have any idea what was in this box?”
“Sure,” he said unhesitatingly. “Several thousands dollars in cash.”
I stared at him, startled. “How did you know?”
“I couldn’t help seeing it, the lid came open while I was wrapping it. You maybe thought you locked it the last time you took it out, but in your excitement or hurry you must have forgot to. It was open.”
I just stared at him unbelievingly. “You’re what I call an honest man, Limpy. There aren’t many like you.”
“But you’re my friend, Mr. Nugent,” he protested. “A guy don’t do that to his friends.”
“Sure no one followed you?” I said as we made our way toward the track.
“The two of them were still waiting there when I came away. The other guy had come back again. I guess they think you’ll still show up there eventually from that club where you gave him the slip,” he explained softly.
He came out to the train with me to see me off. There was less than a minute left now. A day-coach had been all I’d been able to get, at the last minute like that. I got aboard, found a seat by the window, and spoke to him on the platform outside, where he’d remained standing, through a two-inch opening left at the bottom of the pane, bending over so I could see him. The shade had been drawn down to match.
“Look,” I said. “There’s a lot of swell clothes, some of them I never had time to wear yet, and gadgets I’m leaving behind at the hotel. I want you to have them. The rooms have been paid for until tomorrow night. You still have the key. You go up there and take them with you.”
“I couldn’t do that, Mr. Nugent,” he said disclaimingly. “F’rinstance, if I wore clothes that looked too good, it would kill my way of earning a livelihood. But I’ll take your belongings over to my place and look after them for you there, until you come back to town. I’ll give you my address, so you’ll know where to find me. Or in case you want them forwarded, drop me a line. Just Limpy Jones. I got a room on the third floor, over at 410 Pokanoke Street. You can remember that name, can’t you?”
“Look, Limpy, I want to do something for you—” I protested to him vehemently.
“Four ten Pokanoke Street,” he insisted.
Somebody had dropped heavily into the seat beside me. I lowered my voice so I wouldn’t be overheard. “I’ll never forget what you did for me tonight. I’m O. K. now, the train’ll be pulling out in a few more seconds. Take care of yourself, Limpy.”
“Lots of luck, Mr. Nugent,” he said. He turned and drifted away through the groups on the platform. There went a swell guy, I said to myself.
I sank back in my scat, tilted my hat well down on the bridge of my nose to shade my eyes, and prepared to doze.
I pushed my hat up off my eyes again and turned to the man beside me. “Pardon me, would you mind taking your elbow out of my ribs, I’m trying to take a little nap here.”
“That ain’t my elbow,” was the casual answer.
I looked and it was a gun. He had his right arm tucked under his left, and the gun came out just about where his left elbow would have been.
The wheels had given their first jerky little turn under us. “Time we were getting off, isn’t it?” He was as matter-of-fact about it as though we were a couple of fellow-commuters riding out to the same station together of an evening. That was the deadly thing about him; no tension, no pallor, no strain, like that fellow to the washroom.
“You can’t hijack me off the middle of a crowded train, gun or no gun.”
“The gun ain’t the important part,” he agreed languidly. “The tin is.” His hand came out of his vest, showed it to me, put it back again, “The gun is just to hold you still so you’ll take time to look at it.” The wheels were starling to pick up tempo. He raised his voice authoritatively, so that it would reach the vestibule. “Hold that door, conductor, two rain-checks!” And to me: “Get going.”
I walked down the aisle ahead of him, made the transfer to the platform beginning to sidle past, and he hopped off at my heels, without breaking the twist he had on my arm.
He stopped there a moment and frisked me, in full sight of everyone, while the train hurtled by. “What’s this?” he said, when he came to the tin box.
“Money.”
He transferred it to his own outside coat-pocket. “All right,” he said, “now if you don’t want the bracelets in front of everyone, just walk quietly out through the station with me.”
I began walking. A dick. And all along I’d thought it was a matter of personal vengeance on the part of the real Lee Nugent. “What’s it for?” I asked him as we made our way back across the main rotunda.
He gave me a halfway smile. “What’re you trying to do, kid me? You don’t know, do you? You haven’t the slightest idea. Are you Lee Nugent or aren’t you?”
Sure, it had to do with that. They must have changed their minds, turned it over to the police, when they found I’d slipped through their own fingers. What could I do but brazen it out? “I’m Lee Nugent,” I answered crisply. “And that money is rightfully mine.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said drily. “Nobody’s talking about the money. You’re wanted for murder. Long time no catch. But all that publicity you got a couple days ago sure dropped you in our laps pretty. Pictures n everything. Brother, you must think we don’t keep records and haven’t got good memories.”
I’d taken sudden root on the mosaic flooring. Even the gun couldn’t get me to stir for a second. So that explained why the account hadn’t been claimed! The original Nugent had known better than to show up, 12,000 or no 12,000. And I like a fool had walked straight into the trap!
“No, wait — listen to me a minute — I’ll make a clean breast of it, I’m not Lee Nugent. I crashed that account. My right name is—”
He smiled humorlessly. “So now you’re not. A minute ago you were. You sure change fast. Keep moving.”
I stumbled on out to the street beside him. They must have fingerprints and things like that on record; I could clear myself, I could prove I wasn’t the same individual. But suppose they didn’t, suppose it was just one of those circumstantial cases —
We’d stopped beside a car standing waiting a short distance down from the main entrance to the station. There was one other man in it, in civilian clothes, at the wheel. He swung the door open as we neared it. The dick collared me into the back ahead of him and then got in after me. Neither he nor the driver said anything to one another, and the car started off without any instructions being given.
“Look,” I began again in another minute or two, “I tell you I’m not Lee Nugent. There must be a difference in our descriptions, there must be something that’ll—”
“Don’t tell it to me,” he said with stony unconcern, “tell it where we’re going when we get there — if it’ll do you any good. Personally, I don’t give a hoot who you are. To me you’re just a guy I was sent out to bring in.”
I didn’t speak again for a while — what was the use? — until a wrong street had ticked by, and then a second and a third. I looked out sharply, and then sharply back to them. “This isn’t the way to headquarters.”
Something darker than the overtones of the official arrest began to descend on me; an oppressive sense of doom, a complete extinction of hope. The police, though they may err at times, at least are not vindictive just for the sake of being so. Private vengeance is.