“I am ready to leave here, if you please,” said Elsie, holding back her tears and holding her voice steady with a great effort. “Will you kindly have your servant show me out?”
Slim seated himself before his big mahogany table. He tapped his delicate fingers on the polished surface of the table top. Then, very decisively, he shook his head in the negative.
“I can’t do that — let you leave. Not for a week at least. Perhaps ten days.”
“You can’t mean that you will dare to keep me prisoner? You had better consider the danger of that.”
“You can’t blame me,” he said, touching another match coolly to his long cigar. “You walked into it yourself. The only way you could have found out where I live was by following my automobile from Sing Sing. Well, then, you had no business following Lawrence here.”
“I demand to be permitted to leave this house this instant!”
“Don’t try hysterics. They’ll get you nothing, Miss Lane,” he retorted, looking squarely into her blazing eyes. “You see, you know who I am.”
“Slim Gegan, the man who has fostered Jack Lawrence in a life of habitual crime!” she blurted.
“There you see. And the first thing you’d do when you got out of here would be to tell the police where I make my home. I can’t permit it. You’ll have to be my guest for awhile, Miss Lane.
“Oh, your person will be perfectly safe. I haven’t the slightest intention of offering you any insult or attacking you. This isn’t a movie. You see, I know too many other beautiful women who are more of my kind — more to my mind.
“I realize it will put you to a great inconvenience and cause tremendous anxiety to two or three movie magnates by my holding you here for, say, ten days. But please consider the tremendous inconvenience to which you are putting me. I’m certain you’d talk tell where you found me.
“It would be very annoying and upset several of my plans to have the headquarters bulls and stools spying around here on me. It means that I will have to move elsewhere, much as I hate to do so. I am situated very comfortably here.
“But I’ll have to get out — go to live somewhere of which you know nothing about. And while that little transfer is being made, you are going to stay here. As I said before, you’ve brought it upon yourself. That should be clear to you.”
“Why, it would be kidnaping! You wouldn’t dare?”
“Miss Lane, spare yourself any useless display of emotion. On the other hand, consider that I am really being very mild with you. Only kidnaping when,” and he fixed her with a hard, clear gaze, “at my order I might put you out of my way for good and all!”
“Murder?”
“You’d get me if you could — send me to prison for the rest of my life, if it was in your power to do so. You already know too much. I don’t want blood on my hands, but you’ve walked into my parlor unbidden, unwanted, trouble-seeking, and now you’ll have to take your medicine. It will not serve you in the least to scream or shriek. For very good reasons of my own, I have had the walls of this room made absolutely sound proof.”
He stepped toward the big table.
“Please go quietly with my butler when he comes. He will take you to his wife, my housekeeper.
“She will give you a comfortable room and see that you are supplied with whatever woman’s stuff you’ll need to wear while you are here. Please don’t make a fuss, because if you do we will not be able to deal with you gently. We’ll bind and gag you if necessary, Miss Lane.”
She stood gazing at him with the silence of the spellbound as he put his fingers forward to the button under the table.
But he didn’t touch it. Instead he snatched his hand away as if stung.
For the door at the rear of the room flew open with a force that sent it banging against the wall.
Miss Lane uttered an involuntary scream at the wild-eyed and disheveled figure she saw there.
It was Dopey Buddy. His long, pale, straw-colored hair was in a tangle on his forehead, falling half over pale-blue, red-lined, inflamed eyes. Bright red patches burned in his otherwise chalk-white cheeks. His loose, weak mouth was writhing, his malformed chin quivering.
Slim’s small head darted forward on his shoulders like the head of a viper. His eyes shone with white anger.
“What the hell do you mean, you dog, you less than dog, by breaking into this room in that manner?” he snapped.
“Less than dog, I was, I may have been!” screamed the youth. “But I’ll be no more a dog of yours — no more your whining, whimpering cur! What a fool I’ve been to grovel at your feet, to beg, to kiss your hand for the relief I must have when I could all along have so easily changed it all; as I’m going to change it now.”
“Get out of this room or I’ll have Markey tie you to a bedpost and I’ll whip and lash you raw!” cried Slim Gegan.
But Dopey Buddy laughed at him, loudly, with the stridency of the insane.
“Listen, Gegan, I can’t live a month. I found that out at a hospital a few days ago. The drugs you’ve given me have eaten the very heart out of me. I can’t live a month, you understand? But, Gegan, you’re not going to live another minute! The law can’t get you, but, by God, I can!”
His right hand whipped out of his pocket. His lean, white wasted fingers were clutching an automatic.
Gegan put out his hand toward a drawer in the table where he kept a pistol.
“Don’t move!” cried the boy. “Or I’ll shoot!”
“Buddy, don’t be a fool. Don’t put murder on your soul.”
His tone was now that of one addressing a child.
“There — over there is the drawer that holds a six months’ supply for you. Go over and take it.”
Now the young drug-fiend’s voice came very calmly.
“I am going to do that when I have finished the job. It is just as I said, Gegan. The law couldn’t get you, but I can.”
With a gesture that appeared queerly nonchalant he lifted the weapon and fired once, twice, thrice at Slim Gegan’s heart.
The little, gray master crook grasped at the end of the table, stood swaying for a second, not more. His gray face took on the green-gray pallor of death. His head suddenly fell striking the table, bounded away from it and it was the corpse of Slim Gegan that curled on the floor.
Dopey Buddy stared at it. He chattered at it and laughed at it. Then he rushed for the drawer and with a queer cry of joy possessed himself of the box from which Gegan had long doled him the drug at the cost of his complete degradation and poignant suffering.
The box tucked under his coat, the pistol slipped back into another pocket, he suddenly appeared to become conscious of Elsie’s presence.
“Nobody has heard,” he said. “No sounds can get out of this room. You’ve got time to get out of here. I don’t know who you are, but you look — look decent. You don’t want to be in this. Get out of here. Through the door I came in.
“Three flights down, then into the main hall and keep to the back stairway. It lets you out on an alley. You can get away from the place without the boys in the hall seeing you.
“Hurry. It will be lots of trouble for you, if the police come before you get away. Although I’m going to tell them that I did it. I’m proud that I did it. That wasn’t a man I killed. It was a devil. He belonged where I sent him — to hell!”
By this time Elsie was at the door. She fled down the rear stairways and with a relieved heart made her way out of the apartment house unseen. She hastened to her car and was soon a way.