Chapter 8. A Tip From Headquarters

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_ CHAPTER VIII. A TIP FROM HEADQUARTERS

Presently, when she had finished the cigarette, Aggie proceeded to her own chamber and there spent a considerable time in making a toilette calculated to set off to its full advantage the slender daintiness of her form. When at last she was gowned to her satisfaction, she went into the drawing-room of the apartment and gave herself over to more cigarettes, in an easy chair, sprawled out in an attitude of comfort never taught in any finishing school for young ladies. She at the same time indulged her tastes in art and literature by reading the jokes and studying the comic pictures in an evening paper, which the maid brought in at her request. She had about exhausted this form of amusement when the coming of Joe Garson, who was usually in and out of the apartment a number of times daily, provided a welcome diversion. After a casual greeting between the two, Aggie explained, in response to his question, that Mary had gone out to keep an engagement with Dick Gilder.

There was a little period of silence while the man, with the resolute face and the light gray eyes that shone so clearly underneath the thick, waving silver hair, held his head bent downward as if in intent thought. When, finally, he spoke, there was a certain quality in his voice that caused Aggie to regard him curiously.

"Mary has been with him a good deal lately," he said, half questioningly.

"That's what," was the curt agreement.

Garson brought out his next query with the brutal bluntness of his kind; and yet there was a vague suggestion of tenderness in his tones under the vulgar words.

"Think she's stuck on him?" He had seated himself on a settee opposite the girl, who did not trouble on his account to assume a posture more decorous, and he surveyed her keenly as he waited for a reply.

"Why not?" Aggie retorted. "Bet your life I'd be, if I had a chance. He's a swell boy. And his father's got the coin, too."

At this the man moved impatiently, and his eyes wandered to the window. Again, Aggie studied him with a swift glance of interrogation. Not being the possessor of an over-nice sensibility as to the feelings of others, she now spoke briskly.

"Joe, if there's anything on your mind, shoot it."

Garson hesitated for a moment, then decided to unburden himself, for he craved precise knowledge in this matter.

"It's Mary," he explained, with some embarrassment; "her and young Gilder."

"Well?" came the crisp question.

"Well, somehow," Garson went on, still somewhat confusedly, "I can't see any good of it, for her."

"Why?" Aggie demanded, in surprise.

Garson's manner grew easier, now that the subject was well broached.

"Old man Gilder's got a big pull," he vouchsafed, "and if he caught on to his boy's going with Mary, he'd be likely to send the police after us--strong! Believe me, I ain't looking for any trip up the river."

Aggie shook her head, quite unaffected by the man's suggestion of possible peril in the situation.

"We ain't done nothin' they can touch us for," she declared, with assurance. "Mary says so."

Garson, however, was unconvinced, notwithstanding his deference to the judgment of his leader.

"Whether we've done anything, or whether we haven't, don't matter," he objected. "Once the police set out after you, they'll get you. Russia ain't in it with some of the things I have seen pulled off in this town."

"Oh, can that 'fraid talk!" Aggie exclaimed, roughly. "I tell you they can't get us. We've got our fingers crossed."

She would have said more, but a noise at the hall door interrupted her, and she looked up to see a man in the opening, while behind him appeared the maid, protesting angrily.

"Never mind that announcing thing with me," the newcomer rasped to the expostulating servant, in a voice that suited well his thick-set figure, with the bullet-shaped head and the bull-like neck. Then he turned to the two in the drawing-room, both of whom had now risen to their feet.

"It's all right, Fannie," Aggie said hastily to the flustered maid. "You can go."

As the servant, after an indignant toss of the head, departed along the passage, the visitor clumped heavily forward and stopped in the center of the room, looking first at one and then the other of the two with a smile that was not pleasant. He was not at pains to remove the derby hat which he wore rather far back on his head. By this single sign, one might have recognized Cassidy, who had had Mary Turner in his charge on the occasion of her ill-fated visit to Edward Gilder's office, four years before, though now the man had thickened somewhat, and his ruddy face was grown even coarser.

"Hello, Joe!" he cried, familiarly. "Hello, Aggie!"

The light-gray eyes of the forger had narrowed perceptibly as he recognized the identity of the unceremonious caller, while the lines of his firmly set mouth took on an added fixity.

"Well?" he demanded. His voice was emotionless.

"Just a little friendly call," Cassidy announced, in his strident voice. "Where's the lady of the house?"

"Out." It was Aggie who spoke, very sharply.

"Well, Joe," Cassidy went on, without paying further heed to the girl for a moment, "when she comes back, just tell her it's up to her to make a get-away, and to make it quick."

But Aggie was not one to be ignored under any circumstances. Now, she spoke with some acerbity in her voice, which could at will be wondrous soft and low.

"Say!" she retorted viciously, "you can't throw any scare into us. You hadn't got anything on us. See?"

Cassidy, in response to this outburst, favored the girl with a long stare, and there was hearty amusement in his tones as he answered.

"Nothing on you, eh? Well, well, let's see." He regarded Garson with a grin. "You are Joe Garson, forger." As he spoke, the detective took a note-book from a pocket, found a page, and then read: "First arrested in 1891, for forging the name of Edwin Goodsell to a check for ten thousand dollars. Again arrested June 19, 1893, for forgery. Arrested in April, 1898, for forging the signature of Oscar Hemmenway to a series of bonds that were counterfeit. Arrested as the man back of the Reilly gang, in 1903. Arrested in 1908 for forgery."

There was no change in the face or pose of the man who listened to the reading. When it was done, and the officer looked up with a resumption of his triumphant grin, Garson spoke quietly.

"Haven't any records of convictions, have you?"

The grin died, and a snarl sprang in its stead.

"No," he snapped, vindictively. "But we've got the right dope on you, all right, Joe Garson." He turned savagely on the girl, who now had regained her usual expression of demure innocence, but with her rather too heavy brows drawn a little lower than their wont, under the influence of an emotion otherwise concealed.

"And you're little Aggie Lynch," Cassidy declared, as he thrust the note-book back into his pocket. "Just now, you're posing as Mary Turner's cousin. You served two years in Burnsing for blackmail. You were arrested in Buffalo, convicted, and served your stretch. Nothing on you? Well, well!" Again there was triumph in the officer's chuckle.

Aggie showed no least sign of perturbation in the face of this revelation of her unsavory record. Only an expression of half-incredulous wonder and delight beamed from her widely opened blue eyes and was emphasized in the rounding of the little mouth.

"Why," she cried, and now there was softness enough in the cooing notes, "my Gawd! It looks as though you had actually been workin'!"

The sarcasm was without effect on the dull sensibilities of the officer. He went on speaking with obvious enjoyment of the extent to which his knowledge reached.

"And the head of the gang is Mary Turner. Arrested four years ago for robbing the Emporium. Did her stretch of three years."

"Is that all you've got about her?" Garson demanded, with such abruptness that Cassidy forgot his dignity sufficiently to answer with an unqualified yes.

The forger continued speaking rapidly, and now there was an undercurrent of feeling in his voice.

"Nothing in your record of her about her coming out without a friend in the world, and trying to go straight? You ain't got nothing in that pretty little book of your'n about your going to the millinery store where she finally got a job, and tipping them off to where she come from?"

"Sure, they was tipped off," Cassidy answered, quite unmoved. And he added, swelling visibly with importance: "We got to protect the city."

"Got anything in that record of your'n," Garson went on venomously, "about her getting another job, and your following her up again, and having her thrown out? Got it there about the letter you had old Gilder write, so that his influence would get her canned?"

"Oh, we had her right the first time," Cassidy admitted, complacently.

Then, the bitterness of Garson's soul was revealed by the fierceness in his voice as he replied.

"You did not! She was railroaded for a job she never done. She went in honest, and she came out honest."

The detective indulged himself in a cackle of sneering merriment.

"And that's why she's here now with a gang of crooks," he retorted.

Garson met the implication fairly.

"Where else should she be?" he demanded, violently. "You ain't got nothing in that record about my jumping into the river after her?" The forger's voice deepened and trembled with the intensity of his emotion, which was now grown so strong that any who listened and looked might guess something of the truth as to his feeling toward this woman of whom he spoke. "That's where I found her--a girl that never done nobody any harm, starving because you police wouldn't give her a chance to work. In the river because she wouldn't take the only other way that was left her to make a living, because she was keeping straight!... Have you got any of that in your book?"

Cassidy, who had been scowling in the face of this arraignment, suddenly gave vent to a croaking laugh of derision.

"Huh!" he said, contemptuously. "I guess you're stuck on her, eh?"

At the words, an instantaneous change swept over Garson. Hitherto, he had been tense, his face set with emotion, a man strong and sullen, with eyes as clear and heartless as those of a beast in the wild. Now, without warning, a startling transformation was wrought. His form stiffened to rigidity after one lightning-swift step forward, and his face grayed. The eyes glowed with the fires of a man's heart in a spasm of hate. He was the embodiment of rage, as he spoke huskily, his voice a whisper that was yet louder than any shout.

"Cut that!"

The eyes of the two men locked. Cassidy struggled with all his pride against the dominant fury this man hurled on him.

"What?" he demanded, blusteringly. But his tone was weaker than its wont.

"I mean," Garson repeated, and there was finality in his accents, a deadly quality that was appalling, "I mean, cut it out--now, here, and all the time! It don't go!" The voice rose slightly. The effect of it was more penetrant than a scream. "It don't go!... Do you get me?"

There was a short interval of silence, then the officer's eyes at last fell. It was Aggie who relieved the tension of the scene.

"He's got you," she remarked, airily. "Oi, oi! He's got you!"

There were again a few seconds of pause, and then Cassidy made an observation that revealed in some measure the shock of the experience he had just undergone.

"You would have been a big man, Joe, if it hadn't been for that temper of yours. It's got you into trouble once or twice already. Some time it's likely to prove your finish."

Garson relaxed his immobility, and a little color crept into his cheeks.

"That's my business," he responded, dully.

"Anyway," the officer went on, with a new confidence, now that his eyes were free from the gaze that had burned into his soul, "you've got to clear out, the whole gang of you--and do it quick."

Aggie, who as a matter of fact began to feel that she was not receiving her due share of attention, now interposed, moving forward till her face was close to the detective's.

"We don't scare worth a cent," she snapped, with the virulence of a vixen. "You can't do anything to us. We ain't broke the law." There came a sudden ripple of laughter, and the charming lips curved joyously, as she added: "Though perhaps we have bent it a bit."

Cassidy sneered, outraged by such impudence on the part of an ex-convict.

"Don't make no difference what you've done," he growled. "Gee!" he went on, with a heavy sneer. "But things are coming to a pretty pass when a gang of crooks gets to arguing about their rights. That's funny, that is!"

"Then laugh!" Aggie exclaimed, insolently, and made a face at the officer. "Ha, ha, ha!"

"Well, you've got the tip," Cassidy returned, somewhat disconcerted, after a stolid fashion of his own. "It's up to you to take it, that's all. If you don't, one of you will make a long visit with some people out of town, and it'll probably be Mary. Remember, I'm giving it to you straight."

Aggie assumed her formal society manner, exaggerated to the point of extravagance.

"Do come again, little one," she chirruped, caressingly. "I've enjoyed your visit so much!"

But Cassidy paid no apparent attention to her frivolousness; only turned and went noisily out of the drawing-room, offering no return to her daintily inflected good-afternoon.

For her own part, as she heard the outer door close behind the detective, Aggie's expression grew vicious, and the heavy brows drew very low, until the level line almost made her prettiness vanish.

"The truck-horse detective!" she sneered. "An eighteen collar, and a six-and-a-half hat! He sure had his nerve, trying to bluff us!"

But it was plain that Garson was of another mood. There was anxiety in his face, as he stood staring vaguely out of the window.

"Perhaps it wasn't a bluff, Aggie," he suggested.

"Well, what have we done, I'd like to know?" the girl demanded, confidently. She took a cigarette and a match from the tabouret beside her, and stretched her feet comfortably, if very inelegantly, on a chair opposite.

Garson answered with a note of weariness that was unlike him.

"It ain't what you have done," he said, quietly. "It's what they can make a jury think you've done. And, once they set out to get you--God, how they can frame things! If they ever start out after Mary----" He did not finish the sentence, but sank down into his chair with a groan that was almost of despair.

The girl replied with a burst of careless laughter.

"Joe," she said gaily, "you're one grand little forger, all right, all right. But Mary's got the brains. Pooh, I'll string along with her as far as she wants to go. She's educated, she is. She ain't like you and me, Joe. She talks like a lady, and, what's a damned sight harder, she acts like a lady. I guess I know. Wake me up any old night and ask me--just ask me, that's all. She's been tryin' to make a lady out of me!"

The vivaciousness of the girl distracted the man for the moment from the gloom of his thoughts, and he turned to survey the speaker with a cynical amusement.

"Swell chance!" he commented, drily.

"Oh, I'm not so worse! Just you watch out." The lively girl sprang up, discarded the cigarette, adjusted an imaginary train, and spoke lispingly in a society manner much more moderate and convincing than that with which she had favored the retiring Cassidy. Voice, pose and gesture proclaimed at least the excellent mimic.

"How do you do, Mrs. Jones! So good of you to call!... My dear Miss Smith, this is indeed a pleasure." She seated herself again, quite primly now, and moved her hands over the tabouret appropriately to her words. "One lump, or two?... Yes, I just love bridge. No, I don't play," she continued, simpering; "but, just the same, I love it." With this absurd ending, Aggie again arranged her feet according to her liking on the opposite chair. "That's the kind of stuff she's had me doing," she rattled on in her coarser voice, "and believe me, Joe, it's damned near killing me. But all the same," she hurried on, with a swift revulsion of mood to the former serious topic, "I'm for Mary strong! You stick to her, Joe, and you'll wear diamon's.... And that reminds me! I wish she'd let me wear mine, but she won't. She says they're vulgar for an innocent country girl like her cousin, Agnes Lynch. Ain't that fierce?... How can anything be vulgar that's worth a hundred and fifty a carat?" _

Read next: Chapter 9. A Legal Document

Read previous: Chapter 7. Within The Law

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