VIII—A LEASH IS SLIPPED

Billy Kane lighted a cigarette. Red Vallon he already knew—Karlin he was supposed to know. “Let them in,” instructed Billy Kane.

He raised himself on his elbow.

“Hello, Karlin!” he greeted, as the two men stepped into the room. “Red’s told you I was laid up—eh? Glad to see you! Shake!”

His eyes, half closed, fixed on the other in scrutiny, as the man advanced toward the bed. Karlin was immaculately dressed—in sharp contrast to the untidy and careless attire of the stocky, brutal-faced gangster who followed close at his heels. The man was tall, slimly built, and, save that the black eyes were too close together and too small, had a pleasant and attractive face. It was a mask perhaps! The smile was too engaging; and it was rather curious how small the ears were, and how tightly they hugged the skull. He toyed with a little black Vandyke beard, as he shook hands.

“Same to you, Bundy!” The voice was soft, silky, persuasive. “Glad you’re back, too!” He made an almost imperceptible movement with his head toward Whitie Jack, who still remained near the door.

Red Vallon was more blunt.

“What about him, Bundy?” he growled, and jerked a thumb in Whitie Jack’s direction. “We got to mosey along as soon as we can. Savvy?”

“Sure!” said Billy Kane. “Whitie, you take a holiday for the night. Come back in the morning. Beat it!”

The cigarette hanging on Whitie Jack’s lip drooped in sudden dejection; but if he swallowed hard to choke back what was evidently a very grievous disappointment, he made no demur.

“All right, Bundy, if youse says so,” he blurted out, and went from the room, closing the door behind him.

The man’s footfalls mounting the cellar-like stairs to the street died away, and for a moment there was no sound except for a faint, irregular tapping from the floor above.

“What’s that?” demanded Karlin sharply.

Billy Kane blew a ring of smoke ceilingward, and lazily watched it dissolve into air. Whitie Jack, through judicious prodding, had served him well that day.

“Old Ignace—keeps the cobbler’s shop above—half blind, and has to work overtime—wife’s nearly seventy, and deaf.” Billy Kane was explaining almost wearily. “What do you think I hang onto this hole for?”

“Sure!” grunted Red Vallon corroboratingly. “But Karlin’s never been here before.” He pushed a chair with the toe of his boot across the floor toward Karlin, and appropriated one beside the table for himself. “Well, spill it, Bundy!” he invited. “We got to hurry! It’s too bad you’re laid up an’ can’t sit in on the showdown, but Merxler’s plum’s got ripe, an’ we got to pick it to-night. Savvy?”

Billy Kane duplicated the first smoke ring. Merxler! He had identified Karlin now! Karlin and Merxler! That was where he had heard Karlin’s name—in connection with Merxler—and it must, necessarily then be the same Merxler. Was young Merxler, whom he had heard of and had even met through David Ellsworth, more then than simply the notorious spendthrift that he was credited with being? Karlin, it was obvious, was leading a double life. Was Merxler another of the inner circle, another from the higher ranks of society—and the greater criminal therefor!

“Piker stuff!” commented Billy Kane complacently.

Karlin leaned forward with a jerk in his chair.

“Piker stuff!” he ejaculated, and the little black eyes contracted and fixed on Billy Kane in a puzzled glitter. “Piker stuff!” he echoed challengingly.

Billy Kane nodded indifferently. He was skating on thin ice, on perilously thin ice. Whatever the “Merxler plum” might be, it was obviously far from the definition he had given it, and having apparently displayed an intimacy with the affair, an intimacy that he was evidently supposed to possess, it was decidedly best left alone!

“That’s what I said,” he drawled deliberately. “Piker stuff—compared with what I’ve got. I told you I had something, Red—didn’t I?”

Red Vallon hitched sideways in his chair, his head thrust forward.

“Go to it, Bundy! Spill it!” He circled his lips with his tongue. “If you say so, that goes! What’s the lay?”

“Five hundred thousand dollars—a half million—cold”—Billy Kane had lowered his voice.

He did not look at either of the men, but he was watching them both intently—his eyes were on the mirror, the mirror of the bureau at the far end of the room, that bore testimony to the cunning of his unwitting host. The mirror held the door and the upper part of the room in focus; and, lying there on the bed, he had the profiles of the two men in distinct outline. Karlin was fingering his Vandyke in a sort of hesitant incredulity. Vallon’s face had suddenly blotched red with rapacious excitement.

“Gawd!” Red Vallon spluttered out. “D’ye mean that, Bundy?”

“Sure, I mean it!” Billy Kane answered a little curtly. “What do you think I told you to come here for? Sure, I mean it! It’s all there—right on the table, hitting you between the eyes.”

Red Vallon jerked himself around; and, as though he had taken the words literally, stared with a frown of bewilderment at the only thing in view upon the table—the newspaper that Whitie Jack had dropped there when he had answered the summons at the door.

Billy Kane laughed quietly.

“Get it, Red?” he inquired. “Five hundred thousand dollars—better than diamonds—blood-red rubies—red with blood, the paper says. Can’t you read?”

Karlin had forgotten his beard. His hands clenched on his knees.

“You mean the Ellsworth murder—the robbery?” He was whispering hoarsely.

“You win!” said Billy Kane.

“My God!” whispered Karlin. “Do you know where that stuff is?”

Billy Kane’s eyes had returned to the mirror, and now suddenly they shifted a little to the wall at the side of the bureau. Something cold and forbidding seemed to grip at him, numbing for an instant mental and physical action—and then left him in a state of grim, unnatural calmness. Was it imagination? He could have sworn that the wall moved slightly. He swung over on his left side, as though to face Karlin and Red Vallon more directly before he answered them—but his hand, slipping into his coat pocket, closed over his revolver. It might be imagination, but the possibility remained that someone was on the other side of that secret door, and, having pushed the door almost imperceptibly open, was listening there. If that were so, he must get rid of Red Vallon and Karlin before any dénouement came if possible, get rid of them without an instant’s loss of time; but equally vital was the necessity of setting in motion, and equally without loss of time, the machinery of the underworld upon which now he was practically staking his all.

“Pull your chair over here, closer to the bed, Red—and you, too, Karlin,” he said coolly. “We aren’t likely to be heard from the street, but that’s no reason for shouting. No; I don’t know where they are, I haven’t got the rubies in my pocket—but I know how to get them there. What?”

Red Vallon’s face was working in a sort of anticipatory and avaricious ugliness; Karlin’s expression was scarcely less rapacious.

“Go on, Bundy!” Karlin said under his breath. “What do you know about it?”

“What you could have read for yourself in the paper,” Billy Kane answered tersely. “And it looks like a cinch. It’s just a case of beating the police to it, and it sizes up as though we had the jump on them.” He was speaking almost mechanically. His mind was on that section of the wall that might have moved; and through half-closed eyes, but as though deep in thought and as though concentrated on what he was saying, he was watching it narrowly. It had not moved a second time, of that he was sure; perhaps it had not moved at all, it might be only nerves on his part, nerves high strung, taut to the breaking point, but his fingers were still rigid around the stock of his revolver, and, in the pocket, the weapon, resting on his hip as he lay sideways, held a bead on the panels of the secret door.

“I don’t quite get you,” muttered Karlin, with a frown.

Red Vallon swore roughly, intolerant in his eagerness.

“Aw, give him a chance!” he said impatiently. “If he says so, that’s good enough for me. Bundy never pulled a steer in his life, an’ if he says this is a cinch—that goes! Give him a chance!”

“It’s like this,” said Billy Kane. “It’s a thousand to one shot that this secretary chap who croaked the old millionaire and got away with the goods is still in New Work. Why? Well, I’ll tell you why. After pulling the murder, according to the papers, he beat it out of the house with the loot, and evidently hid the stuff somewhere. Then he came back to the house again, and the footman, Jackson, grabbed him. But there was a good half hour between the time the police found out about the murder and before this guy Kane came back to the house. Get me? And during that time the police got busy and shot flycops around all the stations and ferries. It’s a cinch, the way I look at it, that after he crawled into that lane and they lost him there, that he’s been crawling ever since somewhere around New York. He never left the city—he never had a chance.”

Red Vallon whistled low and complacently under his breath; Karlin, fingering his Vandyke again, nodded sharply now in approval.

“Besides,” added Billy Kane, “he had sort of queered his own game. He’d hidden the loot somewhere, and he couldn’t make a direct get-away then. He had to get hold of the goods again before he went. All right! What I want to know is who’s got the better chance of grabbing him—us or the police? He isn’t one of us. He’s working on his own. Well, all right! If we nip him, and he’s satisfied with a little rake-off, and is willing to cough up the rest, that’ll be treating him fair. If he isn’t strong on coughing up, we’ll find another way of making him come across that he won’t like so well, and we’ll get the half million, and he’ll get——” Billy Kane completed his sentence with a significant shrug of his shoulder.

An oath, the more callous and brutal for the soft purring way in which it fell from his lips, came from Red Vallon.

“What do you want done, Bundy?” Karlin was terse and to the point. “It looks good to me, if you can pull it off.”

“It’s the biggest haul we’ll ever get our mitts on if we live a hundred years!” Billy Kane’s eyes shifted for an instant from the wall to fix themselves impressively on the two men. “I’ve been lying here all day thinking it out. What do I want done? Well, I’ll tell you! I want every string and every wire we’ve got pulled. Savvy? We’ve got to beat the police to it. We’ve got to get Kane—first. I want all the boys that the bulls think they’ve got sewed up as stool pigeons to stool-pigeon the police and get all the inside dope. And then that fellow Jackson, the footman, looks like a bet we can’t throw down. He’s dead—but he looks like a good bet. He lived all through the night, but the papers don’t say anything about the story he told. Perhaps he knew something that will help, perhaps he didn’t; but he doesn’t go into the discard yet. Find out who he was and all about him, and get next to his family if he’s got one. If he told any story to the police, any of the family that were clustering around the bedside will be wise to it. Get the idea?”

“Birdie Rose is the boy for that!” Red Vallon’s bullet head was thrust forward in vicious earnestness, his red-rimmed black eyes were glittering with a feverish light.

“Let Birdie go to it, then!” said Billy Kane.

“Birdie was slated for the Merxler affair to-night.” Karlin spoke a little dubiously.

“Shift him!” snapped Billy Kane curtly. “Red’s right! Birdie’s the boy for this job.”

“All right!” agreed Karlin, and shrugged his shoulders. He turned to Red Vallon. “Put Bull McCann in Birdie’s place, then. See that he gets to Jerry’s back room before ten.”

“I’ll fix it!” grunted Red Vallon. “What’s next, Bundy? This goes—all the boys’ll fall for it.”

“There’s only one thing more—until something begins to crack open.” Billy Kane’s lips had tightened, his eyelids had drooped still lower. It was only a bare fraction of an inch at most—if at all—but it seemed that door had moved again. His words were coming barely above a whisper now. “There’s only one way he can get anything out of those rubies, and that’s through a ‘fence.’ They’re no good to him unless he can cash in. He’ll try to get rid of some of them as soon as he can. How soon depends on how well he knows his way about. But he’s probably slick enough to have got a line on a blind uncle or two. All right! The police, of course, have passed the word down the line, but here’s where we put one over on the police. There’s some of the joints they don’t know—we know them all. Kane might get away from the police there—but he can’t get away from us on that deal. I want every ‘fence’ in New York tipped off that he’s to stall on the job the minute he gets his lamps on a ruby that’s being shoved his way, and that instead of opening up to the police he’s to wise us up on the hop. That’s all for a starter—and now go to it!”

Red Vallon drew in his breath noisily, as though he were sucking at some luscious and juicy fruit.

“Some head, Bundy!” he applauded with undisguised admiration, as he pushed away his chair and stood up. “Sure, we’ll go to it! Karlin’s running the Merxler game to-night; but I’ll start this other thing bumping along on the high gear. What about the reports? Who’ll the boys make ’em to? You? Here?”

It was a moment before Billy Kane answered. It was the one thing he must have, the one thing upon which he was staking everything—an intimate knowledge of the result of every move made in this game that he had initiated, and, beyond that again, it was vital that he, and no one else should control each successive move. But Whitie Jack was gone for the night. In one way he deplored that fact, in another way he was relieved. If it was only imagination, if there was no one crouching there now on the other side of that secret door, Whitie Jack’s presence would not matter, but otherwise—his mind leaped to that other point—if Whitie Jack was not here to perform those very necessary introductions, and Red Vallon’s messengers came, messengers that he would be supposed to know but would not be able to recognize, it would spell almost certain disaster, and——

“There isn’t anything likely to break to-night, Red,” he said deliberately. “If there does you look after it; or if it’s anything very important you come here yourself. I want to get a night’s sleep if I can, I’m feeling pretty rocky. But I ought to be on my feet to-morrow, and in the morning you can swing the whole business over to me, and I’ll run it.”

“Attaboy!” said Red Vallon heartily. “See you in the morning, then.”

Karlin too had risen from his chair.

“Good-night, Bundy!” he said—and grinned. “I pay you the compliment of being the trickiest crook unhung!”