Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 28, No. 3, November 12, 1927
- Автор: Alexander R. W., Ames John
- Год: 1927
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 28, No. 3, November 12, 1927». Краткое содержание книги:
“Asleep,” I said, “asleep already. He must have been exhausted.”
“He was exhausted,” Ruggles replied, “and, in addition to that, I put enough stuff in his brand to make him sleep even if he had been the least exhausted man in the world.”
Ruggles looked at his watch. “It is eight o’clock now. Markley will sleep until midnight at least. He will wake refreshed and clear-headed then, ready for our escape from the city.”
Ruggles got to his feet. “I’ll see what we’ve got in the ice box,” he went on. “You can’t go out to dinner anywhere made up as you are now — Markley’s description is all over the city, and you’d be picked up by the first policeman who saw you. Dorgan was a very popular police officer, and the Policemen’s Association has offered a reward of two thousand dollars for Markley’s arrest. Stannistreet didn’t mention that, but I heard about it.”
Ruggles went into the rear of our little apartment, and soon returned with a camp supper that was sufficient and satisfying.
When we had finished, and we had carried the dishes into the butler’s pantry and left them for Mrs. Watts, our excellent housekeeper, to wash in the morning, Ruggles telephoned downstairs to her that we were very busy and under no circumstances could see any one during the evening.
Mrs. Watts, the janitor’s wife, had looked after us for four years, and her promise that we should not be disturbed meant that, to all intents and purposes, the telephone was taken out and the front doorbell removed instantly from our apartment.
Ruggles stood near the locked door of the bedroom and listened to Markley’s snoring. Then, to make doubly sure that Markley was asleep, Ruggles dropped from one of the back windows into the court, and entered the bedroom through a hidden panel which, on more than one occasion, had served us well as both entrance and exit.
At Ruggles’s request, I had followed him now, and in a moment his flash light showed Markley’s dreadful face, more forbidding, it seemed to me, in slumber than during his waking hours.
Markley snored, but for all that he was as unconscious as a dead man. Nothing short of the last trumpet, which in his case would summon him to the blackest corner of Hades, could have wakened Markley.
We retraced our steps, and this time Ruggles settled himself in his accustomed chair in our living room.
“You can see how it is,” he said; “it’s come — the thing I’ve been afraid of every moment of the ten years since I turned straight.”
“You mean that that devil in there, Markley, has got something on you?”
“Yes, something real. I’ve told you more than once, Dan, that I was a near-crook; but I wore better. I thought I did, when I told you that.”
“Is there anything we can do?”
“I’m glad you said we,” Ruggles said. He put his hand on my shoulder with a quick, eloquent pressure. Then he got to his feet wearily.
“I think I’ll stretch out on that couch, Dan. I’m tired for what I believe is the first time in my life; and I’ve got to do some thinking. I’ll just lie down there, close my eyes, and work this thing out somehow; and maybe after that I can get some sleep.”
His face, as I looked at it as he turned, seemed to me to have aged incredibly; his wide shoulders, which I never had seen slump before, were slumped now; his head, which I had always seen him carry as erect as a stag’s, was bowed on his breast.
“If I do go to sleep — and I need to — wake me in a couple of hours, will you. It will be half past ten then, and time for us to get started for Christopher Street.”
He lay down on the couch then, snapped off the light near its head, and closed his eyes.
I had not asked him any details of the sudden trouble which now racked him. I knew as much as I ever wanted to know: Ruggles was fighting a battle which not even I, his best friend, could help him with.
That dubious past, which he had buried and hidden under ten years of straight living and marvelous service in the suppression of crime, had come to life again.
Markley knew about it — knew all of it; so did his four companions; the five had constituted a gang with which Ruggles had worked; in just what capacity, was not clear yet; but it must have been definite enough, for Markley had come, now, given his orders, and Ruggles had not even made an attempt to disobey.
His association with this gang of criminals had been definite; he had known them long and known them only too well.
And I saw in this the answer to a question which had come back and back to me: how had Ruggles come to know so well the working of the criminal mind? Yes, I knew the answer to that question now — he knew the criminal because he had once—
Not even now, could I bring myself to finish that statement. But my thoughts raced on: it was because he had lived with them, that he was able now to anticipate the workings of the criminal mind.
For he did know the underworld so marvelously well; he knew all the organizations of crime in America, Europe, and the Far East, as well as Mexico and South America.
But he knew best New York’s great underworld, this vast, teeming Manhattan where, of all the world, perhaps, were the most highly specialized, best organized, and best financed syndicates of crime whose chiefs, lieutenants, and sub-lieutenants he had dedicated himself, his life, and all his extraordinary abilities to fight.
He knew them all, the whole rank and file, from the carefully shrouded backers, whose names never appeared, down to those conscienceless, desperate, mentally undeveloped creatures who ferociously executed their chiefs’ commands and so formed what might be called the cutting edge.
Ruggles knew them all, and they knew him — knew that his death was the only thing that could spell safety for them. He had them all on his list, and he was steadily working down it. Many he had convicted already and placed in the chair or behind the bars. The rest he would reach as soon as their turns came.
For those new recruits of the underworld, those who had not realized until too late that the net was closing in on them, Ruggles felt only the profoundest pity, and for them he did all he could.
But to those who came out, nightly, like the predatory animals they were, to roam the jungles of the greatest city in the world, he showed no mercy; for well he knew that they would show him none when the final show-down came.
Bribes, threats, attacks on his life — all had been tried, time after time, and would be tried, we both knew, until the end.
This continuous hazard was inseparable from the work he did; and for this work he was peculiarly well equipped: his restless and eager mind was a veritable storehouse of information on every subject under the sun, and all of this limitless mass of fact and detail was ever ready at the call of his photographic memory.
Added to this was his extraordinary ability as an actor; and this, and his recently demonstrated power as a master in the art of makeup, had saved us in many desperate crises. And he was able as readily to detect another’s masquerade.
Physically he was quite the finest human animal I have ever seen: something over six feet in height, weighing nearly two hundred stripped, an extremely proficient boxer, he combined with the terrific hitting power of the best heavyweights, that catlike activity and speed which is as a rule associated only with the best of the lightweights.
Chapter IV
An Unholy Conference
If, I say, Ruggles had ever lived less than straight, he was doing his best to atone for it now. It was enough for me that, from the first day of our association, I had found him the unfailing, effective, and sympathetic refuge of the terrified, the helpless, and the oppressed who, though innocent, were too terrified even to attempt to prove their innocence.