CHAPTER II
ANTHONY TRENT TALKS ON CRIME
ANTHONY TRENTwas working his typewriter at top speed when there came asudden, peremptory knocking at his door.
"Lord!" he grumbled, rising, "it must be old Lund to say I'm keeping himawake."
He threw open his door to find a small, choleric and elderly man clad ina faded dressing gown. It was a man with a just grievance and a desireto express it.
"This is no time to hammer on your typewriter," said Mr. Lund fiercely."This is a boarding house and not a private residence. Do you realizethat you generally begin work at midnight?"
"Come in," said Anthony Trent genially. With friendly force he draggedthe smaller man along and placed him in a morris chair. "Come in andgive me your opinion of the kind of cigar smoked by the president of thepublishing house for whose magazines I work noisily at midnight."
Mr. Lund found himself a few seconds later sitting by an open window, anexcellent cigar between his teeth, and the lights of New York spreadbefore him. And he found his petulance vanishing. He wondered why it wasthat although he had before this come raging to Anthony Trent's door, healways suffered himself to be talked out of his ill humors. It wassomething magnetic and engaging that surrounded this young writer ofshort stories.
"I can't smoke a cigar when I'm working," said Trent, lighting a pipe.
"Surely," said Mr. Lund, not willing so soon to be robbed of hisgrievance, "you choose the wrong hours to work. Mrs. Clarke says youhardly ever touch your typewriter till late."
"That's because you don't appreciate the kind of story I write," AnthonyTrent told him. "If I wrote the conventional story of love or matrimonyI could work so many hours a day and begin at nine like any businessman. But I don't. I begin to write just when the world I write of beginsto live. My men and women are waking into life now, just when the otherfolks are climbing into their suburban beds."
"I understood you wrote detective stories," Mr. Lund remarked. Hisgrievances were vanishing. His opinion of the president of Trent'smagazine was a high one.
"Crook stories," Anthony Trent confided. "Not the professional doings ofthoughtless thugs. They don't interest me a tinker's curse. I likesubtlety in crime. I could take you now into the great restaurants onBroadway or Fifth Avenue and point out to you some of the kings ofcrime--men who are clever enough to protect themselves from the police.Men who play the game as a good chess player does against a poorer one,with the certainty of being a move ahead."
Mr. Lund conjured up a vision of such a restaurant peopled by such afestive crowd. He felt in that moment that an early manhood spent inSomerville had perhaps robbed him of a chance to live.
"They all get caught sooner or later," asserted the little man in themorris chair.
"Because they get careless or because they trust another. If you want tobe a successful crook, Mr. Lund, you'll have to map out your plan oflife as carefully as an athlete trains for a specific event. Now if youwent in for crime you'd have to examine your weaknesses."
"Thank you," said Mr. Lund a little huffily, "I am not going in for alife of crime. I am perfectly content with my own line." This, withunconscious sarcasm for Mr. Lund, pursued what he always told theborders was "the advertising."
"There are degrees in crime I admit," said Anthony Trent, "but I amperfectly serious in what I say. The ordinary crook has a low mentalcapacity. He generally gets caught in the end as all such clumsy assesshould. The really big man in crime often gets caught because he is notaware of his weaknesses. Drink often brings out an incautious boastingside of a man. If you are going in for crime, Mr. Lund, cut out drink Ibeg of you."
"I do not need your advice," Mr. Lund returned with some dignity. "Ihave tasted rum once only in my life."
Trent looked at him interested.
"It would probably make you want to fight," he said.
"I don't care to think of it," said Mr. Lund.
"And the curious part of it is," mused Trent, "that in the sort of crowdthese high class crooks mix with it is most unusual not to drink, andthe man who doesn't is almost always under suspicion. The great thing isto be able to take your share and stop before the danger mark isreached. Did you ever hear of Captain Despard?"
"I think not," Lund answered.
"A boyhood idol of mine," Anthony Trent admitted. "One of the fewgentleman crooks. Most of the so-called gentlemen criminals have beenanything but gentlemen born. Despard was. I was in Devonshire on my lasttrip to the other side and I made a pilgrimage to the place where he wasborn. Funny to think that a man brought up in one of the 'stately homesof England, how beautiful they stand,' should come to what he was."
"Woman, I suppose," said Lund, as one man of the world to another.
"Not in the beginning," Anthony Trent answered. "He was a cavalryofficer in India--Kipling type you know--and had a craze for preciousstones. Began to collect them honestly enough and found his pay andprivate fortune insufficient. He got kicked out of his regiment anywayand went to Cape Town. One night a very large diamond was stolen from abedroom of the Mount Nelson hotel and he was suspected. They couldn'tprove anything, but he came over here to New York and sold it, underanother name, and with a different history, to one of the Pierpoints.The trouble with Captain Despard was that he used to drink heavily whenhe had pulled a big thing off. While he was planning a _coup_ he wastemperate and he never touched a drop while he was working."
"Started to boast, I suppose?" Lund suggested.
"No," said Anthony Trent. "Not that sort at all. He lived at a prettyfair sort of club here in the forties and was well enough liked untilthe drink was in him. It was then that he began to think of his formermode of life and the kind he was now living. He used to think the othermembers were trying to slight him or avoid him. He laboriously pickedquarrels with some of them. He beat up one of them in a fist fight inthe club billiard room. This fellow brooded over his licking for a longtime and then with another man, also inflamed with cocktails, went up toDespard's room to beat him up. Despard was out, so they broke hisfurniture. They found that the legs of chairs and tables had beenhollowed so as to conceal what Despard stole. It was in one of thechairs that they found the Crediton pearls which had been missing for ayear. They waited for him and he was sent to Sing Sing but escaped. Heshot a man later in Denver and was executed. He might have been livingcomfortably but for getting suspicious when he had been drinking."
"You must have studied this thing deeply," Lund commented.
"I have," Anthony Trent admitted; "I know the histories of most of thegreat criminals and their crimes. The police do too, but I know morethan they. I make a study of the man as well as his crime. I find vanityat the root of many failures."
"_Cherchez la femme_," Mr. Lund insisted.
"Not that sort of vanity," Anthony Trent corrected. "I mean the sheerlove to boast about one's abilities when other men are boasting oftheirs. There was a man called Paul Vierick, by profession a secondstory man. He was short, stout and a great consumer of beer and in hisidle hours fond of bowling. He was staying in Stony Creek, Connecticut,one summer, when a tennis ball was hit up high and lodged in a gutterpipe on the roof. Vierick told the young man who had hit it there how toget it. It was so dangerous looking a climb that the lad refused. Someof the guests suggested in fun that Vierick should try. They made himmad. He thought they were laughing at his two hundred pound look. Theywere not to know that a more expert porch climber didn't exist than thisman who had been a professional trapeze man in a circus. They say he ranup the side of that house like a monkey. Directly he had done it andpeople began talking he knew he'd been unwise. He had been posing as aretired dentist and here he was running up walls like the count inDracula. He moved away and presently denied the story so vehemently thatan intelligent young lawyer investigated him and he is now up theriver."
"That's an interesting study," Mr. Lund commented. He was thoroughlytaken up with the subject. "Do you know any more instances like that?"
"I know hun
dreds," Anthony Trent returned smiling. "I could keep on allnight. Your town of Somerville produced Blodgett the Strangler. You musthave heard of him?"
"I was at school with him," Lund said almost excitedly. It was a secrethe had buried in his breast for years. Now it seemed to admit him tosomething of a kinship with Anthony Trent. "He was always chasing afterwomen."
"That wasn't the thing which got him. It was the desire to set right aHarvard professor of anatomy on the subject of strangulation. Blodgetthad his own theories. You may remember he strangled his stepfather whenhe was only fifteen."
"He nearly strangled me once," Mr. Lund exclaimed. "He would have doneif I hadn't had sufficient presence of mind to bite him in the thumb."
"Good for you," said the other heartily. "You'll find the history ofcrime is full of the little mistakes that take the cleverest of them tothe chair. And yet," he mused, "it's a great life. One man pitting hiscourage and knowledge against all the forces organized by society tostamp him out. You've got to be above the average in almost everyquality to succeed if you work alone."
Mr. Lund felt a trifle uncomfortable. The bright laughing face that hadbeen Anthony Trent to him had given place to a sterner cast ofcountenance. The new Trent reminded him of a hawk. There was suddenlybrought to the rather timid and elderly man the impression of ruthlessstrength and tireless energy. He had been a score of times in AnthonyTrent's room and had always found him amusing and light hearted. Neveruntil to-night had they touched upon crime. The New York over which Mr.Lund gazed from the seat by the window no longer seemed a friendly city.Crime and violence lurked in its every corner, he reflected.
Mr. Lund was annoyed with himself for feeling nervous. To brace up hiscourage he reverted to his former grievance. The sustaining cigar hadlong ceased to give comfort.
"I must protest at being waked up night after night by your typewritingmachine. Everybody seems to be in bed and asleep but you. I must have myeight hours, Mr. Trent."
Anthony Trent came to his side.
"Everybody asleep?" he gibed. "Why, man, the shadows are alive if you'llonly look into them. And as to the night, it is never quiet. A myriadstrange sounds are blended into this stillness you call night." Hisvoice sank to a whisper and he took the discomfited Lund's arm. "Can yousee a woman standing there in the shadow of that tree?"
"It might be a woman," Lund admitted guardedly.
"It is," he was told; "she followed not ten yards behind you as you camefrom the El. She's been waiting for a man and he ought to be by in a fewminutes now. She's known in every rogues' gallery in the world. ScotlandYard knows her as Gipsey Lee, and if ever a woman deserved the chair shedoes."
"Not murder?" Lund hazarded timidly. He shivered. "It's a little cold bythe window."
"Don't move," Anthony commanded. "You may see a tragedy unroll itselfbefore your eyes in a little while. She's waiting for a banker namedPereira who looted Costa Rica. He's a big, heavy man."
"He's coming now," Lund whispered. "I don't like this at all, Mr.Trent."
"He won't either," muttered the other.
Unable to move Mr. Lund watched a tall man come toward the shadows whichhid Gipsey Lee.
"We ought to warn him," Mr. Lund protested.
"Not on your life," he was told. "This time it is punishment, notmurder. She saved his life and he deserted her. Pereira's pretending tobe drunk. I wonder why. He dare not touch a drop because he has Bright'sdisease in the last stages."
A minute later Mr. Lund, indignant and commanding as his inchespermitted, was shaking an angry finger at his host.
"You've no right to frighten me," he exclaimed, "with your Gipsey Leeand Pereira when it was only poor Mrs. Clarke waiting for that drunkenscamp of a husband who spends all he earns at the corner saloon."
Heavy steps passed along the passage. It was Clarke making his bedwardway to his wife's verbal accompaniment.
"You ought to be pleased to get a thrill like that for nothing," saidAnthony Trent laughing. "I'd pay good money for it."
"I don't like it," Mr. Lund insisted. "I thought you meant it."
"I did," the other asserted, "for the moment. New York is full of suchstories and if they don't happen in this street they happen in another.They always happen after midnight and I've got to put them down on theold machine. Somewhere a Gipsey Lee is waiting for a defaulting SouthAmerican banker or a Captain Despard is planning to get a pricelessstone, or a humbler Vierick plotting to climb into an inviting window,or some one like your boyhood chum Blodgett planning to get his handsaround some one's throat."
Anthony Trent leaned from the window and breathed in the soft night air.
"It's a great old city," he said, half affectionately, "and I make myliving by letting my hook down into the night and drawing up a mystery.You mustn't mind if I sometimes rattle the old Royal when better folksare asleep."
"If you'll take the advice of an older man," said Mr. Lund with an airof firmness, "you'll let crook stories alone and choose something alittle healthier. Your mind is full of them."
Still a little outraged Mr. Lund bowed himself from the room. AnthonyTrent fed his ancient briar and took the seat by the window.
"I wonder if he's right," mused Anthony Trent.