Part 16

"You interest me more every minute. Pray bear in mind I have seen no newspapers, while you, I daresay, have read more than one report of my disappearance from the Port Royal . . . No doubt, then, you can tell me who claimed the honour of having recovered the necklace."

"What necklace?"

"The one I am credited with having stolen from the wife of your worthy Chief of Police."

"Guess you mean Commissioner of Police--Commissioner Enright." Frankly mistrustful examination of Lanyard's face ended in the generous verdict: "Somebody's been kidding you, son."

"I will not dispute that--I begin to be distressed to discriminate the statements of fact which have recently been made me from what would seem to have been the fictions of a lively fancy. I have, for example, on the one hand, your word, as I understand it, that the good wife of Commissioner Enright did not, shortly prior to the sailing of the Port Royal, suffer the loss by theft of a valuable diamond necklace."

"Nor at any other time. Or if she did--and if he's got a wife--the Commish kept it darned quiet."

"On the other hand, I am suspected of having done much business in the Lone Wolf's well-known line--"

"Sure are."

"During a period which began, I take it, about the first of the year--"

"Some time before Christmas."

"And ended with my late but well-timed decease."

"Thought I told you nobody in this burg takes any stock in that fairy tale."

"But you didn't answer my question: Why not?"

"Because all New York knows, if the Lone Wolf was drowned last June, his ghost goes prowling on."

"What are you telling me?"

"Just what you hear: When the news leaked out that you'd croaked in the Bahamas, everybody who had anything worth stealing drew a long breath and turned over to get a few winks of badly needed sleep. Right there was the wide open chance your ghost couldn't overlook without losing face in the spirit underworld. And didn't: no ghost ever walked that shook a livelier hoof. If it's any satisfaction to you, its latest manifestations have converted the entire Police Department of the City of New York into a posse of wild-eyed spiritualists."

"And you, my friend?"

Crane twinkled like a roguish wooden Indian. "Who, me? I ain't all converted yet. An hour ago I was wabbly, but now I see you sitting before me as large as life and twice as unnatural, I'm just on the fence. One thing I'm sure of: You ain't noticeably demised. But that isn't saying you're not responsible for the performances that have been given in your name, these last few weeks."

"While I was sustaining life on shellfish in the Bahamas?"

"That's your story. I don't say it isn't gospel: but you've got to admit you'd have told it, or something like it, if you had been in Town here all the time. Not only that, but how do I know you aren't what they call psychic--a medium--able to swing a mean ectoplasm?"

"But--bear with me, my friend, remembering that this to me is the gravest of questions--admit that any one capable of trading on my posthumous reputation must have been equally capable of impersonating me while I was still presumed to be alive."

"That's reasonable . . ."

Lanyard had a thoughtful moment. "Do me another favour," he resumed--"allow me to use your good offices to make another test of my information. Take that telephone on the table by your elbow, call the Hotel Walpole, ask for Madame de Montalais. If she is no longer stopping there, find out, if you can, when she left, and whether the management knows her present address."

"Madame de Montalais . . ." Crane took the telephone instrument to his bosom and called for the Walpole, but while he waited for the connection made no secret of the spirit of inquisitiveness in which he was mulling over that strange new name. "If it's a fair question--"

"The lady with whom I dined at the Inn of the Green Woods, an hour before my misfortune on the Armonk Road."

Before Crane could comment, the Walpole answered; and after some delay the hotel detective, none too well pleased to be waked up at three in the morning but obligingly bestirring himself on behalf of a colleague, reported that Madame de Montalais had "checked out" to sail for France on the ninth of March, leaving the forwarding address of Château de Montalais, near the town of Nant, in the Department of the Lozère.

Lanyard nodded doleful acknowledgement of this facer to hopes cruelly reanimated by the discovery that Liane Delorme had, in the course of their conference on board the Port Royal, and for reasons of her own that remained illegible, been guilty of more than one lache in respect of the truth. "That avenue is closed, then. I feared it would be. But give me a moment now to put my thoughts in order . . ."

More to cover his disconsolation than for the reason alleged, he bent forward with an elbow on a knee and a hand shading his eyes. "You tell me," he presently pursued, "no one you know has seen me in the flesh since we met at Folly McFee's . . ."

"Any number of reputable citizens have caught glimpses of you," Crane corrected--"and very much in the flesh, very busy raising particular hell with their property rights."

"But nobody in fact who knew me personally, who could swear to my identity with the man who passed for me?"

"Nobody. Just the same, the descriptions they turned in were middling good portraits of the Lone Wolf in action. More than that, there's that flashlight photo--"

"I was coming to that: Liane mentioned it, and I have wondered . . . It was secured, I believe, when the Lone Wolf descended upon the family fold of the Stuyvesant Ashes?"

"It was so."

"Have you a copy at hand, by any chance?"

Crane grunted testily, drew a rusty leather wallet from under his pillow, and from the papers with which it was stout sorted out an unmounted photographic print of post-card size. "Gaze on that," he recommended in grim humour, "and see if maybe it don't put a kick in the poor dear memory."

Lanyard hitched his chair nearer the light and with eyes bent over the print. But his first glance caused his heart to fail him: idle to challenge the fidelity of that likeness, as well deny the lineaments that looked out from one's shaving mirror every morning . . .

The man whom the flashlight had surprised was kneeling with one ear to a safe built in flush with a wall, his face turned squarely to the camera as he eavesdropped upon the hidden tumblers clicking and thumping in response to manipulation of the combination-dial by his slender, clever fingers. The latter were neatly gloved in white kid, for the man wore formal evening clothes beneath an inverness cloak of good theatrical effect. The hand that wasn't busy with the dial held an electric torch whose beam, of course, had been too weak to register in the intense glare of the flashlight explosion. On the rug between his knee and the wall lay an open leather case stocked with what appeared to be a compact kit of burglar's tools.

"Well!" Crane urged, not without a shade of professional malice, when Lanyard's silent contemplation of the photograph threatened to know no end: "how about it?"

Lanyard straightened up and cheerfully smiled. "Pretty thing," he said--"jolly well done . . . If you can find yourself another, I'd be grateful for the gift of this."

"You're much obliged. I can lay my hands on a gross or two any time I want. The Police Department struck 'em off by the thousand."

"Pity!" Lanyard deplored: "such a curiosity really ought to be a rarity. Thus does commercial photographing ring the death-knell of Art."

"But joking aside--" Crane began with some asperity.

"You ask too much," Lanyard interrupted. "Do you honestly expect me to gaze on this and keep a straight face?"

"If you want my opinion, I'll say it's no laughing matter for you."

"But do you tell me that as one who has given this photograph close and intelligent study?"

"What's the matter with it? Don't you think it does your fatal beauty justice?"

"But more: I am overcome by the appreciation which this drives home of the dashing figure I cut of old in the popular eye. Prior to this, I have always imagined that the public took the gentleman cracksman with a grain of salt--holding his attitudinizing in romantic evening dress properly peculiar to his appearances on the stage and the cinema screen. And you, my dear Crane! a man of your wide acquaintance with the ways of crooks taking this blatant bit of imposition seriously--!"

Crane's mouth tightened, his brows combatively beetled. "There are crooks and crooks. I never thought so badly of you as to suppose you worked like the rank and file."

"But like this!" Lanyard gave the print a derisive flick of fingernails. "Take my word for it, I was never such an ass."

"Never did a job in a full dress suit?"

"Never to my knowledge did I costume myself like a man in a play when deliberately setting out to open a safe. Furthermore"--Lanyard wrinkled a nose of scorn over the photograph--"never in my life have I been caught wearing a soft-bosomed shirt with a tail coat: an antic one cheerfully resigns to dancing men. By-the-bye: whatever did become of Mallison?"

"Jumped his bail," the detective growled--"along with the others you rounded up for me that night at Mrs. McFee's."

"And you have never been able to find him?"

"Not a chance."

There was bitterness in that to win a quick, keen look from Lanyard; but Crane added nothing more than a grin half-sheepish, half-sullen.

"He must be shrewder than I thought, that one."

"I don't know . . . he's got brains enough to lay low and stand in with Morphew, that's all."

"And the devil takes care of his own."

"You got the idea exactly."

"But tell me, why does this great city of yours tolerate its Morphews?"

"What's it going to do? You can't pin anything on a guy like Morphew; he always keeps well inside the law, never turns a trick with his own hand; and pulls too strong an oar politically not to be able to look after the people he hires to do his dirty work. Stands to reason, he's got to; he can't afford to risk somebody's turning State's evidence for lack of protection."

"But surely a man of his type must have enemies in high places as well as friends--"

"Maybe so; but they're not in the saddle just now; we'll have to be patient and wait for New York to pull another of its periodical spasms of civic virtue before an ordinary dick like me can go out after the likes of Morphew without hearing a still small voice whispering at his shoulder, if he cares anything about his job he'd better lay off. Remember that time we raided the Clique Club? That had a follow-up that still sticks in my crop . . ."

"But if Morphew were actually caught, as you say, with the goods on--"

"That's different: prove anything on that bird and outraged public sentiment will do the rest."

"Do you happen to know where he lives?"

Crane recited the address in sulky abstraction from which he emerged abruptly with a gleam of alarm. "Look here! don't tell me you're simp enough to dream of starting anything with Morphew--"

"My dear friend: I never was, it was Morphew took the offensive with me, unprovoked--"

"And you're a glutton for punishment, eh?"

"Do you take me for one to endure such malice without striking a blow for self-respect? What way I shall take with the animal I am as yet undecided, I count on events to show it to me; and now I count on something more--your passive countenance, at least."

"Oh, don't worry! I won't ever come between you two; and if I ever see a chance to land on Morphew when he isn't looking, because he's too busy keeping his guard up against you--you can bet your life I'll do it. All the same, if you'll take a fool's advice, you'll quit right now, admit you're licked and let it go at that."

"It may be your advice is wiser than you think," Lanyard conceded.

"Well: I'm not going to lose any sleep on your account. Morphew's out of Town, nobody seems to know just where . . ."

"Like Mallison, eh?"

"Why keep fretting about Mallison? He's out."

"Perhaps . . ."

"What do you mean, 'perhaps'?"

"Jumping one's bail is not precisely proof of a clear conscience; that act of the dancing yegg's ought to be enough for you--no matter what your mind may be with respect to my guilt or innocence."

"Don't get your point."

"It's rather an obvious point in the sight of one who knows what I know--that Mallison claimed to be on intimately friendly terms with the Stuyvesant Ashes, with Mrs. Ashe, at least; Mary, I remember he called the lady, in mentioning her to Folly McFee."

"Well?"

"Is it not at least a curious circumstance that this print, this so well posed and composed likeness of the Lone Wolf wearing his working clothes for the night shift, should have been snapped in the home of people reputed to be on friendly terms with Mallison?"

"That only goes to show how little you know New York Society, if you've got any idea the Ashes--one of the oldest and best families in Town--would lend themselves to any frame-up engineered by a cheap little crook like that egg."

"One infers that no Ashe has ever been known to be guilty of a mis-step--"

"I don't say that. The men of that family have always stepped out pretty lively--"

"But isn't it possible Mallison may have known something which the present Stuyvesant Ashe preferred to keep secret from the general public? You're surely not forgetting blackmail was one of Mallison's ways of earning a dishonest living."

"Meaning you believe Mallison blackmailed Stuyvesant Ashe and his wife into letting him snap a phoney photograph of some one made up to look like you, trying to open their safe?"

"Really, you read my mind."

"Well!" Crane snorted his contempt--"that bright little theory blows up like a toy balloon somebody pokes a hot cigarette into--because the bird you see in front of that safe got away with every little thing it held. I guess you won't go so far as to tell me the Stuyvesant Ashes would fall for blackmail to that extent."

"I tell you nothing, because I know nothing--I do but recommend the possibility to your thoughtful consideration. Conceding the thanklessness of trying to get the Stuyvesant Ashes to contradict the story they told, I can only point out its more glaring absurdities." Smilingly Lanyard put the print into the detective's hands. "Look closely, my good Crane! and tell me how you would describe the look of this alleged Lone Wolf."

"Looks sort of flabbergasted," Crane replied. "Who wouldn't with a flashlight going off all of a sudden under his nose when he's keyed up to G trying to pull off a big job?"

"But have you never observed that a man actually taken by surprise never shows it in a flashlight photograph? The flash comes and goes too quickly for such an one to put on an appropriate expression for the camera to catch. It is the man who is, as you put it, all keyed up in expectation of the flash who looks startled in the picture."

Crane took another look. "Something in that, maybe," he grudged.

"Consider then, these other anomalies: Not only am I represented as being idiot enough to go a-burgling in evening dress--"

"But you claim you didn't know what you were doing when all this happened."

"What I claim is, if it is fair to assume a rap on the head caused me to revert to foregone ways of knavery, it is only fair to assume further that I would have displayed at least a little reverence for the principles of common sense that formerly guided my errant footsteps. The succès fou of the Lone Wolf in pre-War Paris did not result from the expenditure of a medium of mental effort. That one never touched burglar's tools, far less carried a kit of them, once he had served out his apprenticeship. If he could solve the secret of a safe by ear--as the fellow in this amusing picture would have us believe he can--why burden himself with tools which, if found upon him, would spell his damnation in the esteem of the police? Finally, we are asked to believe not only that the Lone Wolf neglected to search for burglar-alarm wiring on this occasion--and if he had taken that first precaution of all competent cracksmen he could hardly have overlooked the wire which led to the flashlight--but that after the flash had gone off in his face he proceeded methodically to open the safe, abstract what valuables it contained, and make good his escape!"

"Well!" Crane argued in the last ditch--"but we've always been told the Lone Wolf was a cool hand."

Lanyard laughed aloud. "But I am in a position to assure you the coolth of that hand would have been nothing compared with the coldness of his feet, had anything like this ever happened to him; I have my low pride, my friend, and while I will never admit the Lone Wolf was a white-livered cur, I am free to confess that, in circumstances such as must have attended the taking of this photograph, he would have tucked tail between legs and ingloriously have run for cover without an instant of needless delay."

"I don't know," Crane reluctantly conceded. "All you say sounds reasonable enough, and I've got a mean feeling I was the world's prize dumbell not to think of your arguments before. But admitting all that--where does it get us?"

"To the point I promised to bring you to, where you are obliged to admit I may not have been the author of those recent robberies attributed to the Lone Wolf."

"And where do we go from there?"

"I can speak only for myself," said Lanyard, rising: "I go to find out the truth. I do not know what happened, where I lay hid, or what I did, in all those seven months. It may be this conviction that I feel, that I had no hand in the crimes imputed to me, is merely a mirage of vain hope cheating my good judgement. It is possible I shall find I myself am the man--even the posing popinjay one sees in this snapshot. In that event--one so subject to spells of criminal activity in phases of submerged consciousness is too dangerous to remain at large; I shall return and let you put me where I can do no more harm. But I don't believe you need hope to see me again on these terms; and if we should chance to meet before I succeed in satisfying myself--well! bear in mind, I ask no quarter. It is your duty to lay me by the heels if you can--and if you do, the fault will be mine, I'll have no right to complain. I have only one favour to ask of you, and that runs on all fours with your duty: don't let anxiety to bag Michael Lanyard make you forget that Mallison likewise is at liberty and may very well turn out to be the key to all this mystery."

Crane's face wrinkled into a radiating grin. "Funny thing about all this is," he asserted, "I believe in you--I even believe you'll come in and take your medicine like a little man if you find you're the guilty party." He wrung Lanyard's hand with painful cordiality. "Go to it, old son: maybe I'm being kidded to a fare-ye-well, but I'm for you. You won't mind my not getting up to see you to the window?"

XVIII

Confident that their interview just ended had converted an active antagonist, the most dangerous he knew because the most intelligent and dispassionately devoted to his duty, into at worst a passive opponent disposed to let the benefit be his of any legitimate doubt and to adopt a policy of hands-off in as far as Lanyard's still nebulous plans might affect a common enemy; confident as well that the change in his appearance insured against casual identification by any other adversary, public or private: Lanyard on leaving Crane none the less went his way as warily as one who walked in living dread of being ambushed at every corner.

From the door of the building in which Crane lodged to the maw of an underground railway station was only a step, but a step which Lanyard took with all the furtive haste of a ghost belated at the hour of cockcrow. The last coin that lined his pockets passed him through a clattering turnstile to a bare platform from which, while waiting for one of the occasional trains of the post-midnight schedule, he watched both entrances with eyes quick in the cast shadow of a ragged hat-brim. But not another soul followed into the station, he was able to board a northbound train unvexed by any hint of espionage; though he reckoned this poor compensation for a sense of quandary only aggravated by advices which, dependable though he must hold them, coming as they had from Crane, had paradoxically proved more benighting than otherwise with the new light they shed upon his dark perplexities.

He knew no amazement in the discovery that Liane had lightly trifled with the truth in her version of his seven months of lost existence; but her capricious warping of certain facts and suppression of others only added one more mystery to that company whose faces of empty imbecility now mocked every waking effort to read their meaning and, when Lanyard slept, like nightmares drifted through his dreams. Not that he found it hard to understand that she had woven her tissue of deception hoping thereby to fix a lien upon his gratitude. Either he had been her lover for a time, as she asserted, and she was bent on holding him by hook or crook, or he had not and she thought to win him by making him believe himself bound to her in honour; wherefore the inventions of the purloined necklace and the forced flight from New York that had been infeasible without her friendly offices, as well as of the sanctuary and aid that Liane claimed to have given Lanyard when he was hard pressed in his flagrant course as the Lone Wolf redivivus.

In this last allegation there might be, no doubt there was, some half-truth latent: Lanyard was not yet prepared to deny that the Lone Wolf had lately prowled again in his own flesh if in his mental dissociation; but the conflict of testimony that proved the distortion to Liane's purposes of half the truth at least made it competent to him to question whether her story had had any foundation in the truth whatever. Certain it was--Crane's word for this--that Lanyard's long absence from the city had failed to put a period to that sequence of thievish feats which New York credited to the Lone Wolf's cunning. And, as Lanyard had insisted, there was nothing to show that the author of these more recent exploits had not been the author likewise of the series which had predated his flight. Nothing forbade his hugging that contention to his heart and getting what comfort he could of it.

As a matter of fact, he got precious little: nothing seemed of any real moment, just then, measured by the riddle of Eve's return to France as the report of the Hotel Walpole posed it; a statement which circumstantially refuted Liane's account of that event, which happened unhappily to be the only explanation Lanyard could accept without reluctance. By the implications inherent in Liane's version, the lovers had parted prior to the beginning of that bad new chapter in the history of the Lone Wolf, had parted in tenderness and sadly, because of Lanyard's set refusal to let Eve link her life with that of a reclaimed criminal. And with all his heart Lanyard wanted to believe it had been so. . . . But Crane asserted that the Lone Wolf had been active in New York before Christmas, and that Liane had been deported during the month of February, while the Hotel Walpole fixed the date of Eve's departure on the ninth of March! Liane, then, could have had no personal acquaintance with the reasons which had impelled Eve to leave America. But could they have been anything else than heartbreak resulting from failure to reanimate the spirit of the man she loved in the being of the Lone Wolf?