Sundry Accounts

The voices of her patrons came to him, and her voice as she repeated the numbers after them: "Greenwich 978, please."

"Larchmont 54 party J."

"Worth 9009, please, miss."

"Vanderbilt 100."

And so on and so forth, in a steady patter, like raindrops falling; but though he could hear he could not be seen. Altogether, the spot was, for his own purposes, admirably arranged.

So they sat and smoked, and pretty soon, the occasion and the conditions and the time being ripe, Marr outlined to his new friend Hartridge, on pledge of secrecy, a wonderfully safe and wonderfully simple plan for taking its ill-gotten money away from a Tenderloin pool room. Swiftly he sketched in the details; the opportunity, he divulged in strict confidence, had just come to him. He confessed to having taken a great liking to Hartridge during their short acquaintance; Hartridge had impressed him as one who might be counted upon to know a good thing when he saw it, and so, inspired by these convictions, he was going to give Hartridge a chance to join him in the plunge and share with him the juicy proceeds. Besides, the more money risked the greater the killing. He himself had certain funds in hand, but more funds were needed if a real fortune was to be realized.

There was need, though, for prompt decision on the part of all concerned, because that very afternoon – in fact, within that same hour – there in the Roychester he was to meet, by appointment, the conniving manager of an uptown branch office of the telegraph company, who would coöperate in the undertaking and upon whose good offices in withholding flashed race results at Belmont Park until his fellow conspirators, acting on the information, could get their bets down upon the winners, depended the success of the venture. Only, strictly speaking, it would not be a venture at all, but a moral certainty, a cinch, the surest of all sure things. Guaranties against mischance entailing loss would be provided; he could promise his friend Hartridge that; and the telegraph manager, when he came shortly, would add further proof.

The question then was: Would Hartridge join him as a partner? And if so, about how much, in round figures, would Hartridge be willing to put up? He must know this in advance because he was prepared to match Hartridge's investment dollar for dollar.

And at that Hartridge, to Marr's most sincere discomfiture, shook his head.

"I'll tell you how it is with me," said Hartridge. "These broker fellows downtown have been touchin' me up purty hard. I guess this here New York game ain't exactly my game. I'm aimin' to close up what little deals I've still got on here and beat it back to God's country while I've still got a shirt on my back. I'm much obliged to you, Markham, for wantin' to take me into your scheme. It sounds good the way you tell it, but it seems like ever'thing round this burg sounds good till you test it out – and so I guess you better count me out and find yourself a partner somewheres else."

There was definiteness in his refusal; the shake of his head emphasized it too. Marr's rôle should have been the persuasive, the insistent, the argumentative, the cajoling; but Marr was distinctly out of temper.

Here he had ventured into danger to play for a fat purse and all he would get for his trouble and his pains and the risk he had run would be just those things – pains and trouble and risk – these, and nothing more nourishing.

"Oh, very well then, Hartridge," he said angrily, "if you haven't any confidence in me – if you can't see that this is a play that naturally can't go wrong – why, we'll let it drop."

"Oh, I've got confidence in you – " began Hartridge, but Marr, no patience left in him, cut him short.

"Looks like it, doesn't it?" he snapped. "Forget it! Let's talk about the weather."

He lifted his straw hat as though to ease its pressure upon his head and then settled it well down over his eyes. This was the sign to the Gulwings' messenger, watching him covertly from behind a newspaper over on the far side of the lobby, that the plan had failed. The signal he had so confidently expected to give – a trick of relighting his cigar and flipping the match into the air – would have conveyed to the watcher the information that all augured well. The latter's job then would have been to get up from his chair and step outside and bear the word to Sig Gulwing, who, letter-perfect in the part of the conspiring telegraph manager, would promptly enter and present himself to Marr, and by Marr be introduced to the Westerner. The hat-shifting device had been devised in the remote contingency of failure on Marr's part to win over the chosen victim. Plainly the collapse of the plot had been totally unexpected by the messenger. Over his paper he stared at Marr until Marr repeated the gesture. Then, fully convinced now that there had been no mistake, the messenger arose and headed for the door, the whole thing – signaling, duplicated signaling and all – having taken very much less time for its action than has here been required to describe it.

The signal bearer had taken perhaps five steps when Hartridge spoke words which instantly filled Marr with regret that he had been so impetuously prompt to take a no for a no.

"Say, hold your hosses, Markham," said Hartridge contritely. "Don't be in such a hurry! Come to think about it, I might go so far as to risk altogether as much, say, as eight or ten thousand dollars in this scheme of yours – I don't want to be a piker."

In the hundredth part of a second Marr's mind reacted; his brain was galvanized into speedy action. Ten thousand wasn't very much – not nearly so much as he had counted on – still, ten thousand dollars was ten thousand dollars; besides, if the Gulwings did their work cannily the ten thousand ought to be merely a starter, an initiation fee, really, for the victim. Once he was enmeshed, trust Sig and Alf to trim him to his underwear; the machinery of the wire-tapping game was geared for just that.

He must stop the departing messenger then, must make him understand that the wrong sign had been given and that the fish was nibbling the bait. Yet the messenger's back was to them; ten steps, fifteen steps more, and he would be out of the door.

For Marr suddenly to hail a man he was supposed not to know might be fatal; almost surely at this critical moment it would stir up suspicion in Hartridge's mind. Yet some way, somehow, at once, he must stop the word bearer. But how? That was it – how?

Ah, he had it! In the fraction of a moment he had it. It came to him now, fully formed, the shape of it conjured up out of that jumble of words which had been flowing to him from the telephone desk all the while he had been sitting there and which had registered subconsciously in his quick brain. The pause, naturally spaced, which fell between Hartridge's 'bout-faced concession and Marr's reply, was not unduly lengthened, yet in that flash of time Marr had analyzed the puzzle of the situation and had found the answer to it.

"Bully, Hartridge!" he exclaimed. "You'll never regret it. Our man ought to be here any minute now… By Jove! That reminds me – I meant to telephone for some tickets for to-night's Follies – you're going with me as my guest. Just a moment!"

He got on his feet and as he came out of the corner and still was eight feet distant from the telephone girl, he called out loudly, as a man might call whose hurried anxiety to get an important number made him careless of the pitch of his voice: "Worth 10,000! Worth 10,000!"

He feared to look toward the door – yet. For the moment he must seem concerned only with the hasty business of telephoning.

Annoyed by his shouting, the girl raised her head and stared at him as he came toward her.

"What's the excitement?" she demanded.

With enhanced vehemence he answered, putting on the key words all the emphasis he dared employ:

"I should think anybody in hearing could understand what I said and what I meant —Worth 10,000!"

He was alongside her now; he could risk a glance toward the door. He looked, and his heart rejoiced inside of him, for the messenger had swung about, as had half a dozen others, all arrested by the harshness of his words – and the messenger was staring at him. Marr gave the correct signal – with quick well-simulated nervousness drew a loose match from his waistcoat pocket, struck it, applied it to his cigar, then flipped the still burning match halfway across the floor. No need for him again to look – he knew the artifice had succeeded.

"Here's your number," said the affronted young woman. With a vicious little slam she stuck a metal plug into its proper hole.

Marr had not the least idea what concern or what individual owned Worth 10,000 for a telephone number. Nor did it concern him now. Even so, he must of course carry out the pretense which so well had served him in the emergency. He entered the booth, leaving the door open for Hartridge's benefit.

"Hello, hello!" he called into the transmitter. "This is V. C. Markham speaking. I want to speak to" – he uttered the first name which popped into his mind – "to George Spillane. Want to order some tickets for a show to-night." He paused a moment for the sake of the verities; then, paying no heed to the confused rejoinder coming to him from the other end of the wire, and improvising to round out his play, went on: "What's that?.. Not there? Oh, very well! I'll call him later… No, never mind, Spillane's the man I want. I'll call again."

He hung up the receiver. Out of the tail of his eye as he hung it up he saw Sig Gulwing just entering the hotel, in proper disguise for the character of the district telegraph manager with a grudge against pool rooms and a plan for making enough at one coup to enable him to quit his present job; the job was mythical, and the grudge, too – bits merely of the fraudulent drama now about to be played – but surely Gulwing was most solid and dependable and plausible looking. His make-up was perfect. To get here so soon after receiving the cue he must have been awaiting the word just outside the entrance. Gulwing was smart but he was not so smart as Marr – Marr exulted to himself. In high good humor, he dropped a dollar bill at the girl's elbow.

"Pay for the call out of that, miss, and keep the change," he said genially. "Sorry I was so boisterous just now."

Thirty minutes later, still radiating gratification, Marr stood at the cigar stand making a discriminating choice of the best in the humidor of imported goods. Gulwing and Hartridge were over there on the sofa, cheek by jowl, and all was going well.

Half aloud, to himself, he said, smiling in prime content: "Well, I guess I'm bad!"

"I guess you are!" said a voice right in his ear; "and you're due to be worse, Chappy, old boy – much worse!"

The smile slipped. He turned his head and looked into the complacent, chubby face and the pleased eyes of M. J. Brock, head of Brock's Detective Agency – the man of all men in this world he wished least to see. For once, anyhow, in his life Marr was shaken, and showed it.

"That's all right, Chappy," said Brock soothingly, rocking his short plump figure on his heels; "there won't be any rough stuff. I've got a cop off the corner who's waiting outside if I should need him – in case of a jam – but I guess we won't need him, will we? You'll go along with me nice and friendly in a taxicab, won't you?" He flirted his thumb over his shoulder. "And you needn't bother about Gulwing either. I've seen him – saw him as soon as I came in. I guess he'll be seeing me in a minute, too, and then he'll suddenly remember where it was he left his umbrella and take it on the hop."

Marr said not a word. Brock rattled on in high spirits, still maintaining that cat-with-a-mouse attitude which was characteristic of him.

"Never mind worrying about old pal Gulwing – I don't want him now. You're the one you'd better be worrying about; because that's going to be a mighty long taxi ride that you're going to take with me, Chappy – fifteen minutes to get there, say, and anywhere from five to ten years to get back – or I miss my guess… Yes, Chappy, you're nailed with the goods this time. Propbridge is going through; his wife too. They'll go to court; they'll shove the case. And Cheesy Zaugbaum has come clean. Oh, I guess it's curtains for you all right, all right."

"You don't exactly hate yourself, do you?" gibed Marr. "Sort of pleased with yourself?"

"Not so much pleased with myself as disappointed in you, Chappy," countered the exultant Brock. "I figured you were different from the rest of your crowd, maybe; but it turns out you're like all the others – you will do your thinking in a groove." He shook his head in mock sorrow. "Chappy, tell me – not that it makes any difference particularly, but just to satisfy my curiosity – curiosity being my business, as you might say – what number was it you called up from here about thirty minutes back? Come on. The young lady over yonder will tell me if you don't. Was it Worth 10,000?"

"Yes," said Marr, "it was."

"I thought so," said Brock. "I guessed as much. But say Chappy, that's the trunk number of the Herald. Before this you never were the one to try to break into the newspapers on your own hook. What did you want with that number?"

"That's my business," said Marr.

"Have it your way," assented Brock with ironic mildness. "Now, Chappy, follow me a minute and you'll see how you dished your own beans: You call up Worth 10,000 – that's a private matter, as you say. But Central gets the call twisted and gives you another number – that's a mistake. And the number she happens to give you is the number of my new branch office down in the financial district – that's an accident. And the fellow who answers the call at my shop happens to be Costigan, my chief assistant, who's been working on the Propbridge case for five weeks now – and that's a coincidence. He doesn't recognize your voice over the wire – that would be luck. But when, like a saphead, you pull your new moniker, but with the same old initials hitched to it, and when on top of that you ask for George Spillane, which is Cheesy by his most popular alias – when you do these things, why Chappy, it's your own fault.

"Because Costigan is on then, bigger than a house. You've tipped him your hand, see? And with our connections it's easy – and quick – for Costigan to trace the call to this hotel. And inside of two minutes after that he has me on the wire at my uptown office over here in West Fortieth. And here I am; as a matter of fact, I've been here all of fifteen minutes.

"It all proves one thing to me, Chappy. You're wiser than the run of 'em, but you've got your weak spot, and now I know what it is: You think in a groove, Chappy, and this time, by looking at the far end of the groove, you can see little old Warble-Twice-on-the-Hudson looming up. And you won't have to look very hard to see it, either… Well, I see Gulwing has taken a tumble to himself and has gone on a run to look for his umbrella. Suppose we start on our little taxi ride, old groove thinker?"

CHAPTER VII

MR. LOBEL'S APOPLEXY

The real purpose of this is to tell about Mr. Lobel's attack of apoplexy. What comes before must necessarily be in its nature preliminary and preparatory, leading up to the climactic stroke which leaves the distinguished victim stretched upon the bed of affliction.

First let us introduce our principal. Reader, meet Mr. Max Lobel, president of Lobel Masterfilms, Inc., also its founder, its chief stockholder and its general manager. He is a short, broad, thick, globular man and a bald one, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, carrying a gold-headed cane and using a private gold-mounted toothpick after meals. His collars are of that old-fashioned open-faced kind such as our fathers and Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Sr., used to wear; collars rearing at the back but shorn widely away in front to show two things – namely, the Adam's apple and that Mr. Lobel is conservative. But for his neckwear he patronizes those shops where ties are exclusively referred to as scarves and cost from five dollars apiece up, which proves also he is progressive and keeps abreast of the times. When he walks he favors his feet. Mostly, though, he rides in as good a car as domestic currency can buy in foreign marts.

Aside from his consuming desire to turn out those surpassing achievements of the cellular-cinema art known as Lobel's Masterfilms, he has in life two great passions, one personal in its character, the other national in its scope – the first a craving for fancy waistcoats, the second a yearning to see the name of Max Lobel in print as often as possible and in as large letters as likewise is possible; and for either of these is a plausible explanation. Mr. Lobel has a figure excellently shaped for presenting the patternings of a fanciful stomacher to the world and up until a few years ago there were few occasions when he might hope to see the name Lobel in print. For, know you, Mr. Lobel has not always been in the moving-picture business. Nobody in the moving-picture business has always been in the moving-picture business – excepting some of the child wonders under ten years of age. And ten years ago our hero was the M. Lobel Company, cloak and suit jobbers in rather an inconspicuous Eastern town.

What was true of him as regards his comparatively recent advent into the producing and distributing fields was true of his major associates. Back in 1911 the vice president and second in command, Mr. F. X. Quinlan, moved upward into a struggling infantile industry via the stepping-stone of what in the vernacular of his former calling is known as a mitt joint – summers at Coney, winters in store pitches – where he guided the professional destinies of Madame Zaharat, the Egyptian seeress, in private, then as now, Mrs. F. X. Quinlan née Clardy.

The treasurer and secretary, Mr. Simeon Geltfin, had once upon a time been proprietor of the Ne Plus Ultra Misfit Clothing Parlors at Utica, New York, a place where secondhand habiliments, scoured and ironed, dangled luringly in show windows bearing such enticing labels as "Tailor's Sample – Nobby – $9.80," "Bargain – Take Me Home For $5.60," and "These Trousers Were Uncalled For – $2.75."

The premier director, Mr. Bertram Colfax, numbered not one but two chrysalis changes in his career. In the grub stage, as it were, he had begun life as Lemuel Sims, a very grubby grub indeed, becoming Colfax at the same time he became property man for a repertoire troupe playing county-fair weeks in the Middle West.

As for the scenario editor and continuity writer, he in a prior condition of life had solicited advertisements for a trade journal. So it went right down the line.

At the time of the beginning of this narrative Lobel Masterfilms, Inc., had attained an eminence of what might be called fair-to-medium prominence in the moving-picture field. In other words, it now was able to pay its stars salaries running up into the multiples of tens of thousands of dollars a year and the bank which carried its paper had not yet felt justified in installing a chartered accountant in the home offices to check the finances and collect the interest on the loans outstanding. Before reaching this position the concern had passed through nearly all the customary intervening stages. Nearly a decade rearward, back in the dark ages of the filmic cosmos, the Jurassic Period of pictures, so to speak, this little group of pathfinders tracking under the chieftainship of Mr. Lobel into almost uncharted wilds of artistic endeavor had dabbled in slap-stick one reelers featuring the plastic pie and the treacherous seltzer siphon, also the trick staircase, the educated mustache and the performing doormat.

Next – following along the line of least resistance – the adventurers went in more or less extensively for wild-western dramas replete with stagecoach robberies and abounding in hair pants. If the head bad man – not the secondary bad man who stayed bad all through, or the tertiary bad man who was fatally extinguished with gun-fire in Reel Two, but the chief, or primary, bad man who reformed and married Little Nell, the unspoiled child of Death Valley – wore the smartest frontier get-up of current year's vintage that the Chicago mail-order houses could turn out; if Little Nell's father, appearing contemporaneously, dressed according to the mode laid down for Forty-niners by such indubitable authorities as Bret Harte; if the sheriff stalked in and out of lens range attired as a Mississippi River gambler was popularly supposed to have been attired in the period 1860 to 1875; and if finally the cavalry troopers from the near-by army post sported the wide hats and khaki shirts which came into governmental vogue about the time of the Spanish War, all very well and good. The action was everything; the sartorial accessories were as they might be and were and frequently still are.

Along here there intruded a season when the Lobel shop tentatively experimented with costume dramas – the Prisoner of Chillon wearing the conventional black and white in alternating stripes of a Georgia chain gang and doing the old Sing Sing lock step and retiring for the night to his donjon cell with a set of shiny and rather modern-looking leg irons on his ankles; Mary Queen of Scots and Catharine de' Medici in costumes strikingly similar; Oliver Goldsmith in Sir Walter Raleigh's neck ruff and Captain Kidd's jack boots.

But this season endured not for long. Costume stuff was nix. It was not what the public wanted. It was over their heads. Mr. Lobel himself said so. Wake him up in the middle of the night and he could tell you exactly what the public did and did not want. Divining the popular will amounted with him to a gift; it approximated an exact art; really it formed the corner stone of his success. Likewise he knew – but this knowledge perhaps had come to him partly by experience rather than altogether by intuition – that historical ten reelers dealing with epochal events in the life of our own people were entirely unsuited for general consumption.

When this particular topic untactfully was broached in his presence Mr. Lobel, recalling the fate of the elaborate feature entitled Let Freedom Ring, had been known to sputter violently and vehemently. Upon this production – now abiding as a memory only, yet a memory bitter as aloes – he had spared neither expense nor pains, even going so far as personally to direct the filming of all the principal scenes. And to what ends? Captious critics, including those who wrote for the daily press and those who merely sent in offensive letters – college professors and such like cheap high-brows – had raised yawping voices to point out that Paul Revere galloping along the pre-Revolutionary turnpike to spread the alarm passed en route two garages and one electric power house; that Washington crossing the Delaware stood in the bow of his skiff half shrouded in an American flag bearing forty-eight stars upon its field of blue; that Andrew Jackson's riflemen filing out from New Orleans to take station behind their cotton-bale breastworks marched for some distance beneath a network of trolley wires; that Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation did so while seated at a desk in a room which contained in addition to Lincoln and the desk and the Proclamation a typewriter and a Persian rug; that at Manila Bay Admiral Dewey wore spats and a wrist watch.

But these primitive adventurings, these earlier pioneering quests into the realm of the speculative were all in limbo behind them, all wiped off the slate, in part forgiven, in a measure forgotten. Since that primitive beginning and those formulative middle periods Lobel Masterfilms had found their field, and having found it, now plowed and tilled it. To those familiar with the rise and the ever-forward movement of this, now the fourth largest industry in the civilized globe – or is it the third? – it sufficiently will fix the stage of evolutionary development attained by this component unit of that industry when I state that Lobel Masterfilms now dealt preponderantly with vampires. To be sure, it continued to handle such side lines as taffy-haired ingénues from the country, set adrift among the wiles and pitfalls of a cruel city; such incidentals as soft-pie comickers and chin-whiskered by-Hectors; such necessary by-products as rarely beautiful he-juveniles with plush eyelashes and the hair combed slickly back off the forehead in the approved Hudson seal effect – splendid, manly youths these, who might have dodged a draft or two but never yet had flinched from before the camera's aiming muzzle. But even though it had to be conceded that Goldilockses and Prince Charmings endure and that while drolls and jesters may come and go, pies are permanent and stale not, neither do they wither; still, and with all that, such like as these were, in the Lobel scheme of things, merely so many side lines and incidentals and by-products devised and designed to fatten out a program.