Chapter 21. Aggie At Bay

________________________________________________
_ CHAPTER XXI. AGGIE AT BAY

Burke, after the lawyer had left him, watched the door expectantly for the coming of the girl, whom he had ordered brought before him. But, when at last Dan appeared, and stood aside to permit her passing into the office, the Inspector gasped at the unexpectedness of the vision. He had anticipated the coming of a woman of that world with which he was most familiar in the exercise of his professional duties--the underworld of criminals, some one beautiful perhaps, but with the brand of viciousness marked subtly, yet visibly for the trained eye to see. Then, even in that first moment, he told himself that he should have been prepared for the unusual in this instance, since the girl had to do with Mary Turner, and that disturbing person herself showed in face and form and manner nothing to suggest aught but a gentlewoman. And, in the next instant, the Inspector forgot his surprise in a sincere, almost ardent admiration.

The girl was rather short, but of a slender elegance of form that was ravishing. She was gowned, too, with a chic nicety to arouse the envy of all less-fortunate women. Her costume had about it an indubitable air, a finality of perfection in its kind. On another, it might have appeared perhaps the merest trifle garish. But that fault, if in fact it ever existed, was made into a virtue by the correcting innocence of the girl's face. It was a childish face, childish in the exquisite smoothness of the soft, pink skin, childish in the wondering stare of the blue eyes, now so widely opened in dismay, childish in the wistful drooping of the rosebud mouth.

The girl advanced slowly, with a laggard hesitation in her movements obviously from fear. She approached the desk, from behind which the Inspector watched, fascinated by the fresh and wholesome beauty of this young creature. He failed to observe the underlying anger beneath the girl's outward display of alarm. He shook off his first impression by means of a resort to his customary bluster in such cases.

"Now, then, my girl," he said roughly, "I want to know----"

There came a change, wrought in the twinkling of an eye. The tiny, trimly shod foot of the girl rose and fell in a wrathful stamp.

"How dare you!" The clear blue eyes were become darkened with anger. There was a deepened leaf of red in either cheek. The drooping lips drooped no longer, but were bent to a haughtiness that was finely impressive.

Before the offended indignation of the young woman, Burke sat bewildered by embarrassment for once in his life, and quite at a loss.

"What's that?" he said, dubiously.

The girl explained the matter explicitly enough.

"What do you mean by this outrage?" she stormed. Her voice was low and rich, with a charming roundness that seemed the very hallmark of gentility. But, now, it was surcharged with an indignant amazement over the indignity put upon her by the representatives of the law. Then, abruptly, the blue eyes were softened in their fires, as by the sudden nearness of tears.

"What do you mean?" the girl repeated. Her slim form was tense with wrath. "I demand my instant release." There was indescribable rebuke in her slow emphasis of the words.

Burke was impressed in spite of himself, in spite of his accustomed cold indifference to the feelings of others as necessity compelled him to make investigation of them. His harsh, blustering voice softened perceptibly, and he spoke in a wheedling tone, such as one might employ in the effort to tranquillize a spoiled child in a fit of temper.

"Wait a minute," he remonstrated. "Wait a minute!" He made a pacifically courteous gesture toward one of the chairs, which stood by an end of the desk. "Sit down," he invited, with an effort toward cajoling.

The scorn of the girl was superb. Her voice came icily, as she answered:

"I shall do nothing of the sort. Sit down, indeed!--here! Why, I have been arrested----" There came a break in the music of her tones throbbing resentment. A little sob crept in, and broke the sequence of words. The dainty face was vivid with shame. "I--" she faltered, "I've been arrested--by a common policeman!"

The Inspector seized on the one flaw left him for defense against her indictment.

"No, no, miss," he argued, earnestly. "Excuse me. It wasn't any common policeman--it was a detective sergeant."

But his effort to placate was quite in vain. The ingenuous little beauty with the child's face and the blue eyes so widely opened fairly panted in her revolt against the ignominy of her position, and was not to be so easily appeased. Her voice came vibrant with disdain. Her level gaze on the Inspector was of a sort to suggest to him anxieties over possible complications here.

"You wait!" she cried violently. "You just wait, I tell you, until my papa hears of this!"

Burke regarded the furious girl doubtfully.

"Who is your papa?" he asked, with a bit of alarm stirring in his breast, for he had no mind to offend any one of importance where there was no need.

"I sha'n't tell you," came the petulant retort from the girl. Her ivory forehead was wrinkled charmingly in a little frown of obstinacy. "Why," she went on, displaying new symptoms of distress over another appalling idea that flashed on her in this moment, "you would probably give my name to the reporters." Once again the rosebud mouth drooped into curves of sorrow, of a great self-pity. "If it ever got into the newspapers, my family would die of shame!"

The pathos of her fear pierced through the hardened crust of the police official. He spoke apologetically.

"Now, the easiest way out for both of us," he suggested, "is for you to tell me just who you are. You see, young lady, you were found in the house of a notorious crook."

The haughtiness of the girl waxed. It seemed as if she grew an inch taller in her scorn of the Inspector's saying.

"How perfectly absurd!" she exclaimed, scathingly. "I was calling on Miss Mary Turner!"

"How did you come to meet her, anyhow?" Burke inquired. He still held his big voice to a softer modulation than that to which it was habituated.

Yet, the disdain of the girl seemed only to increase momently. She showed plainly that she regarded this brass-buttoned official as one unbearably insolent in his demeanor toward her. Nevertheless, she condescended to reply, with an exaggeration of the aristocratic drawl to indicate her displeasure.

"I was introduced to Miss Turner," she explained, "by Mr. Richard Gilder. Perhaps you have heard of his father, the owner of the Emporium."

"Oh, yes, I've heard of his father, and of him, too," Burke admitted, placatingly.

But the girl relaxed not a whit in her attitude of offense.

"Then," she went on severely, "you must see at once that you are entirely mistaken in this matter." Her blue eyes widened further as she stared accusingly at the Inspector, who betrayed evidences of perplexity, and hesitated for an answer. Then, the doll-like, charming face took on a softer look, which had in it a suggestion of appeal.

"Don't you see it?" she demanded.

"Well, no," Burke rejoined uneasily; "not exactly, I don't!" In the presence of this delicate and graceful femininity, he experienced a sudden, novel distaste for his usual sledge-hammer methods of attack in interrogation. Yet, his duty required that he should continue his questioning. He found himself in fact between the devil and the deep sea--though this particular devil appeared rather as an angel of light.

Now, at his somewhat feeble remark in reply to her query, the childish face grew as hard as its curving contours would permit.

"Sir!" she cried indignantly. Her little head was thrown back in scornful reproof, and she turned a shoulder toward the official contemptuously.

"Now, now!" Burke exclaimed in remonstrance. After all, he could not be brutal with this guileless maiden. He must, however, make the situation clear to her, lest she think him a beast--which would never do!

"You see, young lady," he went on with a gentleness of voice and manner that would have been inconceivable to Dacey and Chicago Red; "you see, the fact is that, even if you were introduced to this Mary Turner by young Mr. Gilder, this same Mary Turner herself is an ex-convict, and she's just been arrested for murder."

At the dread word, a startling change was wrought in the girl. She wheeled to face the Inspector, her slender body swaying a little toward him. The rather heavy brows were lifted slightly in a disbelieving stare. The red lips were parted, rounded to a tremulous horror.

"Murder!" she gasped; and then was silent.

"Yes," Burke went on, wholly at ease now, since he had broken the ice thus effectually. "You see, if there's a mistake about you, you don't want it to go any further--not a mite further, that's sure. So, you see, now, that's one of the reasons why I must know just who you are." Then, in his turn, Burke put the query that the girl had put to him a little while before. "You see that, don't you?"

"Oh, yes, yes!" was the instant agreement. "You should have told me all about this horrid thing in the first place." Now, the girl's manner was transformed. She smiled wistfully on the Inspector, and the glance of the blue eyes was very kind, subtly alluring. Yet in this unbending, there appeared even more decisively than hitherto the fine qualities in bearing of one delicately nurtured. She sank down in a chair by the desk, and forthwith spoke with a simplicity that in itself was somehow peculiarly potent in its effect on the official who gave attentive ear.

"My name is Helen Travers West," she announced.

Burke started a little in his seat, and regarded the speaker with a new deference as he heard that name uttered.

"Not the daughter of the railway president?" he inquired.

"Yes," the girl admitted. Then, anew, she displayed a serious agitation over the thought of any possible publicity in this affair.

"Oh, please, don't tell any one," she begged prettily. The blue eyes were very imploring, beguiling, too. The timid smile that wreathed the tiny mouth was marvelously winning. The neatly gloved little hands were held outstretched, clasped in supplication. "Surely, sir, you see now quite plainly why it must never be known by any one in all the wide, wide world that I have ever been brought to this perfectly dreadful place--though you have been quite nice!" Her voice dropped to a note of musical prayerfulness. The words were spoken very softly and very slowly, with intonations difficult for a man to deny. "Please let me go home." She plucked a minute handkerchief from her handbag, put it to her eyes, and began to sob quietly.

The burly Inspector of Police was moved to quick sympathy. Really, when all was said and done, it was a shame that one like her should by some freak of fate have become involved in the sordid, vicious things that his profession made it obligatory on him to investigate. There was a considerable hint of the paternal in his air as he made an attempt to offer consolation to the afflicted damsel.

"That's all right, little lady," he exclaimed cheerfully. "Now, don't you be worried--not a little bit. Take it from me, Miss West.... Just go ahead, and tell me all you know about this Turner woman. Did you see her yesterday?"

The girl's sobs ceased. After a final dab with the minute handkerchief, she leaned forward a little toward the Inspector, and proceeded to put a question to him with great eagerness.

"Will you let me go home as soon as I've told you the teensy little I know?"

"Yes," Burke agreed promptly, with an encouraging smile. And for a good measure of reassurance, he added as one might to an alarmed child: "No one is going to hurt you, young lady."

"Well, then, you see, it was this way," began the brisk explanation. "Mr. Gilder was calling on me one afternoon, and he said to me then that he knew a very charming young woman, who----"

Here the speech ended abruptly, and once again the handkerchief was brought into play as the sobbing broke forth with increased violence. Presently, the girl's voice rose in a wail.

"Oh, this is dreadful--dreadful!" In the final word, the wail broke to a moan.

Burke felt himself vaguely guilty as the cause of such suffering on the part of one so young, so fair, so innocent. As a culprit, he sought his best to afford a measure of soothing for this grief that had had its source in his performance of duty.

"That's all right, little lady," he urged in a voice as nearly mellifluous as he could contrive with its mighty volume. "That's all right. I have to keep on telling you. Nobody's going to hurt you--not a little bit. Believe me! Why, nobody ever would want to hurt you!"

But his well-meant attempt to assuage the stricken creature's wo was futile. The sobbing continued. With it came a plaintive cry, many times repeated, softly, but very miserably.

"Oh, dear! Oh, dear!"

"Isn't there something else you can tell me about this woman?" Burke inquired in desperation before the plaintive outburst. He hoped to distract her from such grief over her predicament.

The girl gave no least heed to the question.

"Oh, I'm so frightened!" she gasped.

"Tut, tut!" the Inspector chided. "Now, I tell you there's nothing at all for you to be afraid of."

"I'm afraid!" the girl asserted dismally. "I'm afraid you will--put me--in a cell!" Her voice sank to a murmur hardly audible as she spoke the words so fraught with dread import to one of her refined sensibilities.

"Pooh!" Burke returned, gallantly. "Why, my dear young lady, nobody in the world could think of you and a cell at the same time--no, indeed!"

Instantly, the girl responded to this bald flattery. She fairly radiated appreciation of the compliment, as she turned her eyes, dewy with tears, on the somewhat flustered Inspector.

"Oh, thank you!" she exclaimed, with naive enjoyment.

Forthwith, Burke set out to make the most of this favorable opportunity.

"Are you sure you've told me all you know about this woman?" he questioned.

"Oh, yes! I've only seen her two or three times," came the ready response. The voice changed to supplication, and again the clasped hands were extended beseechingly.

"Oh, please, Commissioner! Won't you let me go home?"

The use of a title higher than his own flattered the Inspector, and he was moved to graciousness. Besides, it was obvious that his police net in this instance had enmeshed only the most harmless of doves. He smiled encouragingly.

"Well, now, little lady," he said, almost tenderly, "if I let you go now, will you promise to let me know if you are able to think of anything else about this Turner woman?"

"I will--indeed, I will!" came the fervent assurance. There was something almost--quite provocative in the flash of gratitude that shone forth from the blue eyes of the girl in that moment of her superlative relief. It moved Burke to a desire for rehabilitation in her estimation.

"Now, you see," he went on in his heavy voice, yet very kindly, and with a sort of massive playfulness in his manner, "no one has hurt you--not even a little bit, after all. Now, you run right home to your mother."

The girl did not need to be told twice. On the instant, she sprang up joyously, and started toward the door, with a final ravishing smile for the pleased official at the desk.

"I'll go just as fast as ever I can," the musical voice made assurance blithely.

"Give my compliments to your father," Burke requested courteously. "And tell him I'm sorry I frightened you."

The girl turned at the door.... After all, too great haste might be indiscreet.

"I will, Commissioner," she promised, with an arch smile. "And I know papa will be so grateful to you for all your kindness to me!"

It was at this critical moment that Cassidy entered from the opposite side of the office. As his eyes fell on the girl at the door across from him, his stolid face lighted in a grin. And, in that same instant of recognition between the two, the color went out of the girl's face. The little red lips snapped together in a line of supreme disgust against this vicissitude of fate after all her manoeuverings in the face of the enemy. She stood motionless in wordless dismay, impotent before this disaster forced on her by untoward chance.

"Hello, Aggie!" the detective remarked, with a smirk, while the Inspector stared from one to the other with rounded eyes of wonder, and his jaw dropped from the stark surprise of this new development.

The girl returned deliberately to the chair she had occupied through the interview with the Inspector, and dropped into it weakly. Her form rested there limply now, and the blue eyes stared disconsolately at the blank wall before her. She realized that fate had decreed defeat for her in the game. It was after a minute of silence in which the two men sat staring that at last she spoke with a savage wrath against the pit into which she had fallen after her arduous efforts.

"Ain't that the damnedest luck!"

For a little interval still, Burke turned his glances from the girl to Cassidy, and then back again to the girl, who sat immobile with her blue eyes steadfastly fixed on the wall. The police official was, in truth, totally bewildered. Here was inexplicable mystery. Finally, he addressed the detective curtly.

"Cassidy, do you know this woman?"

"Sure, I do!" came the placid answer. He went on to explain with the direct brevity of his kind. "She's little Aggie Lynch--con' woman, from Buffalo--two years for blackmail--did her time at Burnsing."

With this succinct narrative concerning the girl who sat mute and motionless in the chair with her eyes fast on the wall, Cassidy relapsed into silence, during which he stared rather perplexedly at his chief, who seemed to be in the throes of unusual emotion. As the detective expressed it in his own vernacular: For the first time in his experience, the Inspector appeared to be actually "rattled."

For a little time, there was silence, the while Burke sat staring at the averted face of the girl. His expression was that of one who has just undergone a soul-stirring shock. Then, presently, he set his features grimly, rose from his chair, and walked to a position directly in the front of the girl, who still refused to look in his direction.

"Young woman----" he began, severely. Then, of a sudden he laughed. "You picked the right business, all right, all right!" he said, with a certain enthusiasm. He laughed aloud until his eyes were only slits, and his ample paunch trembled vehemently.

"Well," he went on, at last, "I certainly have to hand it to you, kid. You're a beaut'!"

Aggie sniffed vehemently in rebuke of the gross partiality of fate in his behalf.

"Just as I had him goin'!" she said bitterly, as if in self-communion, without shifting her gaze from the blank surface of the wall.

Now, however, Burke was reminded once again of his official duties, and he turned quickly to the attentive Cassidy.

"Have you got a picture of this young woman?" he asked brusquely. And when Cassidy had replied in the negative, he again faced the adventuress with a mocking grin--in which mockery, too, was a fair fragment for himself, who had been so thoroughly within her toils of blandishment.

"I'd dearly love to have a photograph of you, Miss Helen Travers West," he said.

The speech aroused the stolid detective to a new interest.

"Helen Travers West?" he repeated, inquiringly.

"Oh, that's the name she told me," the Inspector explained, somewhat shamefacedly before this question from his inferior. Then he chuckled, for he had sense of humor sufficient to triumph even over his own discomfiture in this encounter. "And she had me winging, too!" he confessed. "Yes, I admit it." He turned to the girl admiringly. "You sure are immense, little one--immense!" He smiled somewhat more in his official manner of mastery. "And now, may I have the honor of asking you to accept the escort of Mr. Cassidy to our gallery."

Aggie sprang to her feet and regarded the Inspector with eyes in which was now no innocence, such as had beguiled him so recently from those ingenuous orbs.

"Oh, can that stuff!" she cried, crossly. "Let's get down to business on the dot--and no frills on it! Keep to cases!"

"Now you're talking," Burke declared, with a new appreciation of the versatility of this woman--who had not been wasting her time hitherto, and had no wish to lose it now.

"You can't do anything to us," Aggie declared, strongly. There remained no trace of the shrinking violet that had been Miss Helen Travers West. Now, she revealed merely the business woman engaged in a fight against the law, which was opposed definitely to her peculiar form of business.

"You can't do anything to me, and you know you can't!" she went on, with an almost convincing tranquillity of assertion. "Why, I'll be sprung inside an hour." There came a ripple of laughter that reminded the Inspector of the fashion in which he had been overcome by this woman's wiles. And she spoke with a certitude of conviction that was rather terrifying to one who had just fallen under the stress of her spells.

"Why, habeas corpus is my lawyer's middle name!"

"On the level, now," the Inspector demanded, quite unmoved by the final declarations, "when did you see Mary Turner last?"

Aggie resorted anew to her practices of deception. Her voice held the accents of unimpeachable truth, and her eyes looked unflinchingly into those of her questioner as she answered.

"Early this morning," she declared. "We slept together last night, because I had the willies. She blew the joint about half-past ten."

Burke shook his head, more in sorrow than in anger.

"What's the use of your lying to me?" he remonstrated.

"What, me?" Aggie clamored, with every evidence of being deeply wounded by the charge against her veracity. "Oh, I wouldn't do anything like that--on the level! What would be the use? I couldn't fool you, Commissioner."

Burke stroked his chin sheepishly, under the influence of memories of Miss Helen Travers West.

"So help me," Aggie continued with the utmost solemnity, "Mary never left the house all night. I'd swear that's the truth on a pile of Bibles a mile high!"

"Have to be higher than that," the Inspector commented, grimly. "You see, Aggie Lynch, Mary Turner was arrested just after midnight." His voice deepened and came blustering. "Young woman, you'd better tell all you know."

"I don't know a thing!" Aggie retorted, sharply. She faced the Inspector fiercely, quite unabashed by the fact that her vigorous offer to commit perjury had been of no avail.

Burke, with a quick movement, drew the pistol from his pocket and extended it toward the girl.

"How long has she owned this gun?" he said, threateningly.

Aggie showed no trace of emotion as her glance ran over the weapon.

"She didn't own it," was her firm answer.

"Oh, then it's Garson's!" Burke exclaimed.

"I don't know whose it is," Aggie replied, with an air of boredom well calculated to deceive. "I never laid eyes on it till now."

The Inspector's tone abruptly took on a somber coloring, with an underlying menace.

"English Eddie was killed with this gun last night," he said. "Now, who did it?" His broad face was sinister. "Come on, now! Who did it?"

Aggie became flippant, seemingly unimpressed by the Inspector's savageness.

"How should I know?" she drawled. "What do you think I am--a fortune-teller?"

"You'd better come through," Burke reiterated. Then his manner changed to wheedling. "If you're the wise kid I think you are, you will."

Aggie waxed very petulant over this insistence.

"I tell you, I don't know anything! Say, what are you trying to hand me, anyway?"

Burke scowled on the girl portentously, and shook his head.

"Now, it won't do, I tell you, Aggie Lynch. I'm wise. You listen to me." Once more his manner turned to the cajoling. "You tell me what you know, and I'll see you make a clean get-away, and I'll slip you a nice little piece of money, too."

The girl's face changed with startling swiftness. She regarded the Inspector shrewdly, a crafty glint in her eyes.

"Let me get this straight," she said. "If I tell you what I know about Mary Turner and Joe Garson, I get away?"

"Clean!" Burke ejaculated, eagerly.

"And you'll slip me some coin, too?"

"That's it!" came the hasty assurance. "Now, what do you say?"

The small figure grew tense. The delicate, childish face was suddenly distorted with rage, a rage black and venomous. The blue eyes were blazing. The voice came thin and piercing.

"I say, you're a great big stiff! What do you think I am?" she stormed at the discomfited Inspector, while Cassidy looked on in some enjoyment at beholding his superior being worsted. Aggie wheeled on the detective. "Say, take me out of here," she cried in a voice surcharged with disgust. "I'd rather be in the cooler than here with him!"

Now Burke's tone was dangerous.

"You'll tell," he growled, "or you'll go up the river for a stretch."

"I don't know anything," the girl retorted, spiritedly. "And, if I did, I wouldn't tell--not in a million years!" She thrust her head forward challengingly as she faced the Inspector, and her expression was resolute. "Now, then," she ended, "send me up--if you can!"

"Take her away," Burke snapped to the detective.

Aggie went toward Cassidy without any sign of reluctance.

"Yes, do, please!" she exclaimed with a sneer. "And do it in a hurry. Being in the room with him makes me sick! She turned to stare at the Inspector with eyes that were very clear and very hard. In this moment, there was nothing childish in their gaze.

"Thought I'd squeal, did you?" she said, evenly. "Yes, I will"--the red lips bent to a smile of supreme scorn--"like hell!" _

Read next: Chapter 22. The Trap That Failed

Read previous: Chapter 20. Who Shot Griggs?

Table of content of Within the Law: From the Play of Bayard Veiller


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book