“Better make it snappy,” I told him, “while she’s still in a faint, then she won’t know anything about it.”
He continued to move with the same mechanical efficiency.
“If she doesn’t like it, she can always faint again,” he said.
The nurse held the bowl of warm water. Doctor Krueg washed the wound with antiseptic. He stopped the bleeding. The girl was regaining consciousness as the doctor wound bandage around the arm.
“The dressing should be changed tomorrow afternoon,” he told me.
I nodded and pulled a wallet from my inside pocket.
“One hundred dollars,” he said.
I gave him two fifties. He nodded and pocketed the money. The nurse held the fur coat up to the girl and indicated the blood-soaked sleeve.
“You’d better carry it over your arm,” she said. “Wash it out with water when you get home.”
I nodded and arranged the coat so that the sleeve was on the inside, and concealed the bandage on the girl’s arm.
“Come,” I told her.
As I closed the door, Doctor Krueg was looking at us with that inscrutable stare of glittering black concentration. He said no word of farewell; nor did I.
I piloted the girl down the long corridor of the building to the elevators, and down to the car, which I had parked in the alley. There was a convenient parking place there which was only apparent after you drove into the alley. “Two-pair” Kinney had told me about it. He said that Doctor Krueg kept it there because it was near the freight elevator, and bad cases could come up that way.
“He charged a hundred dollars?” the young woman asked.
“Yes,” I said, “that’s his specialty. He treats only emergency cases and never asks names.”
“I’ll pay you back,” she said, “if you’ll open my handbag for me, please.”
“That can wait,” I told her. “Where do you want to go?”
“Some hotel,” she said.
“Haven’t you got an apartment?”
“Yes, but I can’t go to it.”
“Why?”
“I can’t explain why. I can’t go to it. Take me to a hotel, please.”
“You can’t go to a hotel with your arm wounded, and in those clothes. You’ll have to get some other clothes first,” I told her.
“I can’t get any other clothes,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t dare go back to my apartment.”
“Look here,” I told her, “there’s no use kidding yourself about this, you’re in a jam. In the first place, if you go to a hotel without any baggage, that will arouse suspicion. In the second place, the morning papers will have a description of the woman bandit, and an account of the robbery. The bellboys or the clerk at the hotel will start checking up on your description, then they’ll tip off the police. You’ve got a wounded arm and you’ve got no baggage. What’s more, it’s late.”
She looked at me with a tired, pathetic look in her eyes.
“Have you got a spare bed?” she asked.
I nodded.
“That’s where I’m going to stay,” she told me.
I started to protest.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I’ve been around, and I know a square shooter when I see one.”
“I told you,” I said, sternly, “that I was a crook.”
“So’m I,” she told me, settling back against the cushions of the car with a little snuggling motion, and smiling up at me.
“Home, James,” she said, and closed her eyes.
I had told her I was a crook, and had not lied. Yet, I could as well have told her that I was a private detective.
The city knew me as Bob Sabin, a private detective, whose business success had been based upon an uncanny knowledge of the underworld. The police also sought for me as Ed Jenkins, calling me The Phantom Crook, because I had so often slipped through their fingers. Neither public nor police suspected that Bob Sabin, the detective, and Ed Jenkins, the crook, were one and the same.
The police have announced a smug axiom: “Once a crook, always a crook.” Perhaps not even the police realize how frequently the truth of the axiom is demonstrated because of this attitude. Let a crook get sufficiently in the limelight to attract public attention, and immediately he becomes the goat for every unsolved crime that the police either cannot, or do not care to clear up.
In my own case, I had been wanted by the police of a dozen States. I had fought for years to clear up my record only to find that the police continued to blame crimes on me, whether I had been within a hundred miles of the scene or not.
And among the police, who are human, there is a small percentage who are crooked. These crooked police found me a very convenient means for hiding their misdeeds. Tagging me with their own crimes freed them from suspicion of guilt.
On the other side was the underworld. Those sinister prowlers, drawing their livelihood from crime, to whom human life and suffering are meaningless words, knew me, feared me, hated me. Too often, to save myself, I had enmeshed them in their own slimy webs, in which they had sought to ensnare me, to their own extermination or to such effect that they paid the penalty for their crimes.
Crooked police and the underworld alike sought my destruction or capture to be faced with a long term from which, a labeled crook, I could not escape. I was never at peace; always alert, my life and freedom ever at stake. And I had to live.
In the morning sun which streamed through the apartment window, I could see every little expression on the girl’s face. And I could see that she had reached some definite decision during the night.
“My name’s Edith,” she said. “What do I call you?”
“Call me Ed,” I told her.
She nodded her head.
“You said that you were a crook.”
“Yes,” I said, waiting for what was to come.
“What sort of a crook?”
“Well—I’ve never gone in for stick-up stuff or booze running.”
She leaned forward across the table, and balanced her coffee cup on the edge of her plate.
“How about doing a job for me?” she asked.
“What sort of a job?” I wanted to know.
“The job that I fell down on last night.”
“You were after something particular?” I asked.
She nodded.
“What?” I wanted to know.
“Look here,” she said, “you knew about the Vivian Loring gems?”
“Only generally,” I said. “That they had been taken to a jewelry store for cleaning and polishing; a messenger was returning them when a car drove up to the curb, and a man tried to hold up the messenger; the messenger put up a fight, shots were exchanged, the messenger was killed, the bandit got the gems and escaped, was subsequently captured by the police, and the gems are still missing. The bandit never would tell what he did with them.”
“That’s the newspaper version,” she told me.
“All right,” I said, “what’s yours?”
She set her coffee cup back in the saucer, moved her left arm, winced with pain, and reached out with her right for a cigarette.
“Arm hurt much?” I asked.
“Sore,” she told me.
“Any fever?”
“A little, I think, but not much. I feel sort of groggy.”
“Slept all right?”
“Fine.”
“All right, what’s the inside dope on this Loring case?”
“Howard Cove did the job,” she said.
“I thought it was a chap named Frank Jamie.”
“That’s the one the police arrested.”
“All right,” I told her, “go on from there.”
She looked me full in the eyes.
“I’m Frank Jamie’s pal,” she said, and waited for me to make a remark.
I made none.
“We had an apartment together,” she told me. “All my clothes are there.”