Anthony Trent, Master Criminal
“You must have studied this thing deeply,” Lund commented.
“I have,” Anthony Trent admitted; “I know the histories of most of the great criminals and their crimes. The police do too, but I know more than they. I make a study of the man as well as his crime. I find vanity at the root of many failures.”
“Cherchez la femme,” Mr. Lund insisted.
“Not that sort of vanity,” Anthony Trent corrected. “I mean the sheer love to boast about one’s abilities when other men are boasting of theirs. There was a man called Paul Vierick, by profession a second story man. He was short, stout and a great consumer of beer and in his idle 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 gutter pipe on the roof. Vierick told the young man who had hit it there how to get it. It was so dangerous looking a climb that the lad refused. Some of the guests suggested in fun that Vierick should try. They made him mad. He thought they were laughing at his two hundred pound look. They were not to know that a more expert porch climber didn’t exist than this man who had been a professional trapeze man in a circus. They say he ran up the side of that house like a monkey. Directly he had done it and people began talking he knew he’d been unwise. He had been posing as a retired dentist and here he was running up walls like the count in Dracula. He moved away and presently denied the story so vehemently that an intelligent young lawyer investigated him and he is now up the river.”
“That’s an interesting study,” Mr. Lund commented. He was thoroughly taken up with the subject. “Do you know any more instances like that?”
“I know hundreds,” Anthony Trent returned smiling. “I could keep on all night. Your town of Somerville produced Blodgett the Strangler. You must have heard of him?”
“I was at school with him,” Lund said almost excitedly. It was a secret he had buried in his breast for years. Now it seemed to admit him to something of a kinship with Anthony Trent. “He was always chasing after women.”
“That wasn’t the thing which got him. It was the desire to set right a Harvard professor of anatomy on the subject of strangulation. Blodgett had his own theories. You may remember he strangled his stepfather when he was only fifteen.”
“He nearly strangled me once,” Mr. Lund exclaimed. “He would have done if 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 of crime is full of the little mistakes that take the cleverest of them to the chair. And yet,” he mused, “it’s a great life. One man pitting his courage and knowledge against all the forces organized by society to stamp him out. You’ve got to be above the average in almost every quality to succeed if you work alone.”
Mr. Lund felt a trifle uncomfortable. The bright laughing face that had been Anthony Trent to him had given place to a sterner cast of countenance. The new Trent reminded him of a hawk. There was suddenly brought to the rather timid and elderly man the impression of ruthless strength and tireless energy. He had been a score of times in Anthony Trent’s room and had always found him amusing and light hearted. Never until 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 his courage he reverted to his former grievance. The sustaining cigar had long ceased to give comfort.
“I must protest at being waked up night after night by your typewriting machine. Everybody seems to be in bed and asleep but you. I must have my eight hours, Mr. Trent.”
Anthony Trent came to his side.
“Everybody asleep?” he gibed. “Why, man, the shadows are alive if you’ll only look into them. And as to the night, it is never quiet. A myriad strange sounds are blended into this stillness you call night.” His voice sank to a whisper and he took the discomfited Lund’s arm. “Can you see 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 came from the El. She’s been waiting for a man and he ought to be by in a few minutes now. She’s known in every rogues’ gallery in the world. Scotland Yard knows her as Gipsey Lee, and if ever a woman deserved the chair she does.”
“Not murder?” Lund hazarded timidly. He shivered. “It’s a little cold by the window.”
“Don’t move,” Anthony commanded. “You may see a tragedy unroll itself before your eyes in a little while. She’s waiting for a banker named Pereira 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 which hid Gipsey Lee.
“We ought to warn him,” Mr. Lund protested.
“Not on your life,” he was told. “This time it is punishment, not murder. She saved his life and he deserted her. Pereira’s pretending to be drunk. I wonder why. He dare not touch a drop because he has Bright’s disease in the last stages.”
A minute later Mr. Lund, indignant and commanding as his inches permitted, was shaking an angry finger at his host.
“You’ve no right to frighten me,” he exclaimed, “with your Gipsey Lee and Pereira when it was only poor Mrs. Clarke waiting for that drunken scamp of a husband who spends all he earns at the corner saloon.”
Heavy steps passed along the passage. It was Clarke making his bedward way to his wife’s verbal accompaniment.
“You ought to be pleased to get a thrill like that for nothing,” said Anthony 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 such stories 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 the old machine. Somewhere a Gipsey Lee is waiting for a defaulting South American banker or a Captain Despard is planning to get a priceless stone, or a humbler Vierick plotting to climb into an inviting window, or some one like your boyhood chum Blodgett planning to get his hands around 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 my living 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 folks are asleep.”
“If you’ll take the advice of an older man,” said Mr. Lund with an air of firmness, “you’ll let crook stories alone and choose something a little healthier. Your mind is full of them.”
Still a little outraged Mr. Lund bowed himself from the room. Anthony Trent fed his ancient briar and took the seat by the window.
“I wonder if he’s right,” mused Anthony Trent.
CHAPTER III
THE DAY OF TEMPTATION
THE dawn had long passed and the milkmen had awakened their unwilling clients two hours agone before Anthony Trent finished his story. He was not a quick worker. His was a mind that labored heavily unless the details of his work were accurate. This time he was satisfied. It was a good story and the editor for whom he was doing a series would be pleased. He might even increase his rates.
Crosbeigh, the editor of the magazine which sought Anthony Trent’s crook stories, was an amiable being who had won a reputation for profundity by reason of eloquent silences. He would have done well in any line of work where originality was not desired. He knew, from what his circulation manager told him, that Trent’s stories made circulation and he liked the writer apart from his work. Perhaps because he was not a disappointed author he was free from certain editorial prejudices.
“Sit down,” he cried cordially, when Anthony Trent was shown in. “Take a cigarette and I’ll read this right away.” Crosbeigh was a nervous man who battled daily with subway crowds and was apt to be irritable.
“It’s great,” he said when he had finished it, “Great! Doyle, Hornung, well – there you are!” It was one of his moments of silent eloquence. The listener might have inferred anything.
“But they are paid real money,” replied Anthony Trent gloomily.
“You get two cents a word,” Crosbeigh reminded him, “you haven’t a wife and children to support.”
“I’d be a gay little adventurer to try it on what I make at writing,” Trent told him. “It takes me almost a month to write one of those yarns and I get a hundred and fifty each.”
“You are a slow worker,” his editor declared.
“I have to be,” he retorted. “If I were writing love slush and pretty heroine stuff it would be different. Do you know, Crosbeigh, there isn’t a thing in these stories of mine that is impossible? I take the most particular care that my details are correct. When I began I didn’t know anything about burglar alarms. What did I do? I got a job in the shop that makes the best known one. I’m worth more than two cents a word!”
“That’s our maximum,” Crosbeigh asserted. “These are not good days for the magazine business. Shot to pieces. If I said what I knew. If you knew what I got and how much I had to do with it!”
Anthony Trent looked at him critically. He saw a very carefully dressed Crosbeigh to-day, a man whose trousers were pressed, whose shoes were shined, who exuded prosperity. Never had he seen him so apparently affluent.
“Come into money?” he enquired. “Whence the prosperity? Whose wardrobe have you robbed?”
“These are my own clothes,” returned Crosbeigh with dignity, “at least leave me my clothes.”
“Sure,” said Trent amiably, “if I took ’em you’d be arrested. But tell me why this sartorial display. Are you going to be photographed for the ‘great editors’ series?”
“I’m lunching with an old friend,” Crosbeigh answered, “a man of affairs, a man of millions, a man about whom I could say many things.”
“Say them,” his contributor demanded, “let me in on a man for whom you have arrayed yourself in all your glory. Who is your friend? Is she pretty? I don’t believe it’s a man at all.”
“It’s a man I know and respect,” he said, a trifle nettled at the comments his apparel had drawn. “It’s the man who takes me every year to the Yale-Harvard boat race.”
“Your annual jag party? He’s no fit company for a respectable editor.”
“It is college spirit,” Crosbeigh explained.
“You can call it by any name but it’s too strong for you. What is the name of your honored friend?”
“Conington Warren,” Crosbeigh said proudly.
“That’s the millionaire sportsman with the stable of steeple-chasers, isn’t it?” Trent demanded.
“He wins all the big races,” Crosbeigh elaborated.
“He’s enormously rich, splendidly generous, has everything. Only one thing – drink.” Crosbeigh fell into silence.
“You’ve led him astray you mean?” The spectacle of the sober editor consorting with reckless bloods of the Conington Warren type amused Trent.
“Same year at college,” Crosbeigh explained, “and he has always been friendly. God knows why,” the editor said gloomily. The difference in their lot seemed suddenly to appal him.
“There must be something unsuspectedly bad in your make-up,” Trent declared, “which attracts him to you. It can’t be he wants to sell you a story.”
“There are all sorts of rumors about him,” Crosbeigh went on meditatively, “started by his wife’s people, I believe. He was wild. Sometimes he has hinted at it. I know him well enough to call him ‘Connie’ and go up to his dressing-room sometimes. That’s a mark of intimacy. My Lord, Trent, but it makes me envious to see with what luxury the rich can live. He has a Japanese valet and masseur, Togoyama, and an imported butler who looks like a bishop. They know him at his worst and worship him. He’s magnetic, that’s what Connie is, magnetic. Have you ever thought what having a million a year means?”
“Ye Gods,” groaned Trent, “don’t you read my lamentations in every story you buy from me at bargain rates?”
“And a shooting box in Scotland which he uses two weeks a year in the grouse season. A great Tudor residence in Devonshire overlooking Exmoor, a town house in Park Lane which is London’s Fifth Avenue! And you know what he’s got here in his own country. Can you imagine it?”
“Not on forty dollars a week,” said Anthony Trent gloomily.
“You’d make more if you were the hero of your own stories,” Crosbeigh told him.
Anthony Trent turned on him quickly, “What do you mean?”
“Why this crook you are making famous gets away with enough plunder to live as well as Conington Warren.”
“Ah, but that’s in a story,” returned the author.
“Then you mean they aren’t as exact and possible as you’ve been telling me?”
“They are what I said they were,” their author declared. “They could be worked out, with ordinary luck, by any man with an active body, good education and address. The typical thick-witted criminal wouldn’t have a chance.”
It was a curious thing, thought Anthony Trent, that Crosbeigh should mention the very thing that had been running in his mind for weeks. To live in such an elaborate manner as Conington Warren was not his ambition. The squandering of large sums of money on stage favorites of the moment was not to his taste; but he wanted certainly more than he was earning. Trent had a passion for fishing, golf and music. Not the fishing that may be indulged in on Sunday and week-day on fishing steamers, making excursions to the banks where one may lose an ear on another angler’s far flung hook, but the fly fishing where the gallant trout has a chance to escape, the highest type of fishing that may appeal to man.
And his ambitions to lower his golf handicap until it should be scratch could not well be accomplished by his weekly visit to Van Cortlandt Park. He wished to be able to join Garden City or Baltusrol and play a round a day in fast company. And this could not be accomplished on what he was making.
And as to music, he longed to compose an opera. It was a laudable ambition and would commence, he told himself, with a grand piano. He had only a hard-mouthed hired upright so far. Sometimes he had seen himself in the rôle of his hero amply able to indulge himself in his moderate ambitions. It was of this he had been thinking when Mr. Lund came to his room. And now the very editor for whom he had created his characters was making the suggestion.
“I was only joking,” Crosbeigh assured him.
“It is not a good thing to joke about,” Anthony Trent answered, “and an honest man at forty a week is better than an outlaw with four hundred.”
He made this remark to set his thoughts in less dangerous channels, but it sounded dreadfully hollow and false. He half expected that Crosbeigh would laugh aloud at such a hackneyed sentiment, but Crosbeigh looked grave and earnest. “Very true,” he answered. “A man couldn’t think of it.”
“And why not?” Anthony Trent demanded; “would the fictional character I created do as much harm to humanity as some cotton mill owner who enslaved little children and gave millions to charity?”
A telephone call relieved Crosbeigh of the need to answer. Trent swept into his brief case the carbon copy of his story which he had brought by mistake.
“Where are you going?” the editor demanded.
“Van Cortlandt,” the contributor answered; “I’m going to try and get my drive back. I’ve been slicing for a month.”
“Conington Warren has a private eighteen-hole course on his Long Island place,” Crosbeigh said with pride. “I’ve been invited to play.”
“You’re bent on driving me to a life of crime,” Trent exclaimed frowning. “An eighteen-hole private course while I struggle to get a permit for a public one!”
But Anthony Trent did not play golf that afternoon at Van Cortlandt Park. As a matter of fact he never again invaded that popular field of play.
Outside Crosbeigh’s office he was hailed by an old Dartmouth chum, one Horace Weems.
“Just in time for lunch,” said Weems wringing his hand. Weems had always admired Anthony Trent and had it been possible would have remodeled himself physically and mentally in the form of another Trent. Weems was short, blond and perspired profusely.
“Hello, Tubby,” said Trent without much cordiality, “you look as though the world had been treating you right.”
“It has,” said Weems happily. “Steel went to a hundred and twelve last week and it carried me up with it.”
Weems had been, as Trent remembered, a bond salesman. Weems could sell anything. He had an ingratiating manner and a disability to perceive snubs or insults when intent on making sales. He had paid his way through college by selling books. Trent had been a frequent victim.
“What do you want to sell me this time?” he demanded.
“Nothing,” Weems retorted, “I’m going to buy you the best little lunch that Manhattan has to offer. Anywhere you say and anything you like to eat and drink.” Weems stopped a cruising taxi. “Hop in, old scout, and tell the pirate where to go.”
Trent directed the man to one of the three famous and more or less exclusive restaurants New York possesses.
“I hope you have the price,” he commented, “otherwise I shall have to cash a check I’ve just received for a story.”
“Keep your old check,” jeered Weems, “I’m full of money. Why, boy, I own an estate and have a twelve-cylinder car of my own.”
Over the luncheon Horace Weems babbled cheerfully. He had made over three hundred thousand dollars and was on his way to millionairedom.
“You ought to see my place up in Maine,” he said presently.
“Maine?” queried his guest. It was in Maine that Anthony Trent, were he fortunate enough, would one day erect a camp. “Where?”
“On Kennebago lake,” Weems told him and stopped when an expression of pain crossed the other’s face. “What’s the matter? That sauce wrong?”
“Just sheer envy,” Trent admitted, “you’ve got what I want. I know every camp on the Lake. Which is it?”
“The Stanley place,” said Weems. “The finest camp on the whole Lake. I bought it furnished and it’s some furniture believe me. There’s a grand piano – that would please you – and pictures that are worth thousands, one of ’em by some one named Constable. Ever hear of him?”
“Yes,” Trent grunted, “I have. Fancy you with a Constable and a grand piano when you don’t know one school of painting from another and think the phonograph the only instrument worth listening to!”
“I earned it,” Weems said, a little huffily. “Why don’t you make money instead of getting mad because I do?”
“Because I haven’t your ability, I suppose,” Trent admitted. “It’s a gift and the gods forgot me.”
“Some of the boys used to look down on me,” said Weems, “but all I ask is ‘where is little Horace to-day?’ This money making game is the only thing that counts, believe me. Up in Hanover I wasn’t one, two, three, compared with you. Your father was well off and mine hadn’t a nickel. You graduated magna cum laude and I had to work like a horse to slide by. You were popular because you made the football team and could sing and play.” Weems paused reflectively, “I never did hear any one who could mimic like you. You should have taken it up and gone into vaudeville. How much do you make a week?”
“Forty – with luck.”
“I give that to my chauffeur and I’m not rich yet. But I shall be. I’m out to be as rich as that fellow over there.”
He pointed to a rather high colored extremely well dressed man about town to whom the waiters were paying extreme deference.
“That’s Conington Warren,” Weems said with admiration in his voice, “he’s worth a million per annum.”
Anthony Trent turned to look at him. There was no doubt that Conington Warren was a personage. Just now he was engaged in an argument with the head waiter concerning Château Y’Quem. Trent noticed his gesture of dismissal when he had finished. It was an imperious wave of his hand. It was his final remark as it were.
“Some spender,” Weems commented. “Who’s the funny old dodger with him? Some other millionaire I suppose.”
“I’ll tell him that next time I see him,” laughed Trent beholding Crosbeigh, Crosbeigh who looked wise where vintages were discussed and knew not one from another. A well-dressed man paused at Warren’s side and Weems, always anxious to acquire information, begged his guest to be silent.
“Did you get that?” he asked when the man had moved away.
“I don’t make it a habit to listen to private conversations,” Trent returned stiffly.
“Well I do,” said Weems unabashed. “If I hadn’t I shouldn’t have got in on this Steel stuff. I’m a great little listener. That fellow who spoke is Reginald Camplyn, the man who drives a coach and four and wins blue ribbons at the horse show. Warren asked him to a dinner here to-morrow night at half past eight in honor of some horse who’s done a fast trial.” Weems made an entry in his engagement book.
“Are you going, too?” Trent demanded.
“I’m putting down the plug’s name,” said Weems, “Sambo,” he said. “That’s no name for a thoroughbred. Say couldn’t you introduce me?”
“I don’t know him,” Trent asserted.
“You know the man with him. That’s enough for me. If you do it right the other fellow’s bound to introduce you. Then you beckon me over and we’ll all sit down together.”
“That isn’t my way of doing things,” replied Trent with a frown.
Weems made a gesture of despair and resignation.
“That’s why you’ll always be poor. That’s why you’ll never have a grand piano and a Constable and a swell place up in Maine.”
Anthony Trent looked at him and smiled.
“There may be other ways,” he said slowly.
“You try ’em,” Weems retorted crossly. “Here you are almost thirty years old, highly educated, prep school and college and you make a week what I give my chauffeur.”
“I think I will,” Trent answered.
Weems attacked his salad angrily. If only Trent had been what he termed aggressive, an introduction could easily have been effected. Then Weems would have seen to it that he and Warren left the restaurant together. Some one would be bound to see them. Then, for Weems had an expansive fancy, it would be rumored that he, Horace Weems, who cleaned up on Steel, was friendly with the great Conington Warren. It might lead to anything!
“Well,” he commented, “I’d rather be little Horace Weems, who can’t tell a phonograph from a grand piano than Mr. Anthony Trent, who makes with luck two thousand a year.”
“I’m in bad company to-day,” replied Trent. “First Crosbeigh and now you tempting me. You know very well I haven’t that magic money making ability you have. My father hadn’t it or he would have left money when he died and not debts.”
“Magic!” Weems snorted. “Common sense, that’s what it is.”
“It’s magic,” the other insisted, “as a boy you exchanged a jack knife for a fishing pole and the fishing pole for a camera and the camera for a phonograph and the phonograph for a canoe and the canoe for a sailing boat and so on till you’ve got your place in Maine and a chauffeur who makes more than I do! Magic’s the only name for it.”
“You must come up and see me in Maine,” Weems said, later.
“Make your mind easy,” Trent assured him, “I will.”
CHAPTER IV
BEGINNING THE GAME
WHEN he left Weems, it was too late to start a round of golf so Trent took his homeward way intent on starting another story. Crosbeigh was always urging him to turn out more of them.
His boarding house room seemed shabbier than ever. The rug, which had never been a good one, showed its age. The steel engravings on the wall were offensive. “And Weems,” he thought, “owns a Constable!”
His upright piano sounded thinner to his touch. “And Weems,” he sighed, “has been able to buy a grand.”
Up from the kitchen the triumphant smell of a “boiled New England dinner” sought out every corner of the house. High above all the varied odors, cabbage was king. The prospect of the dinner table was appalling, with Mr. Lund, distant and ready to quarrel over any infringement of his rights or curtailment of his portion. Mrs. Clarke ready to resent any jest as to her lord’s habits. The landlady eager to give battle to such as sniffed at what her kitchen had to offer. Wearisome banter between brainless boarders tending mainly to criticism of moving picture productions and speculations as to the salaries of the stars. Not a soul there who had ever heard of William Blake or Ravel! Overdressed girls who were permanently annoyed with Anthony Trent because he would never take them to ice-cream parlors. Each new boarder as she came set her cap for him and he remained courteous but disinterested.