of her cheek.
“Can’t we arrange it somehow?” he asked. “Couldn’t we fix it so that the charges might be – er – unofficially disregarded for the present?”
Cassidy’s heavy brows came down and the red of his face darkened.
“Are you tryin’ to -“
He stopped, and his small blue eyes narrowed almost to the point of vanishing completely.
“Go ahead! You’re doin’ the talkin’.”
Bribery, Carter knew, was a serious matter, and especially so when directed toward an officer of the law. The law is not to be lightly set aside, perverted, by an individual. To fling to this gigantic utensil a few bits of green- engraved paper, expecting thus to turn it from its course, was, to say the least, a foolhardy proceeding.
Yet the law as represented by this fat Cassidy in baggy, not too immaculate garments, while indubitably the very same law, seemed certainly less awe-inspiring, less unapproachable. Almost it took on a human aspect – the aspect of a man who was not entirely without his faults. The law just now, in fact, looked out through little blue eyes that were manifestly greedy, for all their setting in a poker face.
Carter hesitated, trying to find the words in which his offer would be most attractively dressed; but the detective relieved him of the necessity of broaching the subject.
“Listen, mister,” he said candidly. “I get you all right! But on the level, I don’t think it’d be worth what it’d cost you.” “What would it cost?”
“Well, there’s four hundred in rewards offered for her that I know of – maybe more.”
Four hundred dollars! That was considerably more than Carter had expected to pay. Still, he could get several times four hundred dollars’ worth of material from her.
“Done!” he said. “Four hundred it is!”
“Woah!” Cassidy rumbled. “That don’t get me nothin’! What kind of chump do you think I am? If I turn her in I get that much, besides credits for promotion. Then what the hell’s the sense of me turnin’ her loose for that same figure and runnin’ the risk of bein’ sent over myself if it leaks out?” Carter recognised the justice of the detective’s stand. “Five hundred,” he bid. Cassidy shook his head emphatically.
“On the level, I wouldn’t touch it for less’n a thousan’ – and you’d be a sucker to pay that much! She’s a keen kid all right, but the world’s full of just as keen ones that’ll come a lot cheaper.”
“I can’t pay a thousand,” Carter said slowly; he had only a few dollars more than that in his bank.
His common sense warned him not to impoverish himself for the girl’s sake, warned him that the payment of even five hundred dollars for her liberty would be a step beyond the limits of rational conduct. He raised his head to acknowledge his defeat, and to tell Cassidy that he might take the girl away; then his eyes focused on the girl. Though she still struggled to maintain her attitude of ironic indifference to her fate, and did attain a reckless smile, her chin quivered and her shoulders were no longer jauntily squared.
The dictates of reason went for nothing in the face of these signs of distress.
Without conscious volition, Carter found himself saying, “The best I can do is seven hundred and fifty.”
Cassidy shook his head briskly, but he caught one corner of his lower lip between his teeth, robbing the rejecting gesture of its finality.
The girl, stirred into action by the detective-sergeant’s indecision, put an impulsive hand on his arm and added the weight of her personality to the temptation of the money.
“Come on, Cassidy,” she pleaded. “Be a good guy – give me a break! Take the seven fifty! You got rep enough without turning me in!”
Cassidy turned abruptly to Carter. “I’m makin’ a sap o” myself, but give me the dough!”
At the sight of the check book that Carter took from a desk drawer, Cassidy balked again, demanding cash. Finally they persuaded him to accept a check made payable to ‘Cash.’
At the door he turned and wagged a fat finger at Carter.
“Now remember,” he threatened, “if you try any funny business on this check I’m going to nail you if I have to frame you to do it!”
“There’ll be no funny business,” Carter assured him.
There was no doubt of the girl’s hunger; she ate ravenously of the cold beef, salad, rolls, pastry, and coffee that Carter put before her. Neither of them talked much while she ate. The food held her undivided attention, while Carter’s mind was busy planning how his opportunity might be utilised to the utmost.
Over their cigarettes the girl mellowed somewhat, and he persuaded her to talk of herself. But clearly she had not accepted him without many reservations, and she made no pretence of lowering her guard.
She told him her story briefly, without going into any details.
“My old man was named John Cardigan, but he was a lot better known as Taper-Box John,’ from his trick of carrying his tools around in an unsuspicious-looking shoebox. If I do say it myself, he was as slick a burglar as there was in the grift! I don’t remember Ma very well. She died or left or something when I was a little kid and the old man didn’t like to talk about her.
“But I had as good a bringing up, criminally speaking, as you ever heard of. There was the old man, a wizard in his line; and my older brother Frank – he’s doing a one-to-fourteen-year stretch in Deer Lodge now – who wasn’t a dub by any means with a can opener – safe-ripping, you know. Between them and the mobs they ran with, I got a pretty good education along certain lines.
“Everything went along fine, with me keeping house for the old man and Frank, and them giving me everything I wanted, until the old man got wiped out by a night watchman in Philly one night. Then, a couple weeks later, Frank got picked up in some burg out in Montana – Great Falls. That put me up against it. We hadn’t saved much money – easy come, easy go – and what we had I sent out to Frank’s mouthpiece – a lawyer – to try to spring him. But it was no go-they had him cold, and they sent him over.
“After that I had to shift for myself. It was a case of either cashing in on what the old man and Frank had taught me or going on the streets. Of course, I wouldn’t have had to go on the streets actually – there were plenty of guys who were willing to take me in – it’s just that it’s a rotten way of making a living. I don’t want to be owned!
“Maybe you think I could have got a job somewhere in a store or factory or something. But in the first place, a girl with no experience has a hard time knocking down enough jack to live on; and then again, half the dicks in town know me as the old man’s daughter, and they wouldn’t keep it a secret if they found me working any place – they’d think I was getting a job lined up for some mob.
“So, after thinking it all over, I decided to try the old man’s racket. It went easy from the first. I knew all the tricks and it wasn’t hard to put them into practice. Being a girl helped, too. A couple times, when I was caught cold, people took my word for it that I had got into the wrong place by mistake.
“But being a girl had its drawbacks, too. As the only she-burglar in action, my work was sort of conspicuous, and it wasn’t long before the bulls had a line on me. I was picked up a couple times, but I had a good lawyer, and they couldn’t make anything stick, so they turned me loose; but they didn’t forget me.
“Then I got some bad breaks, and pulled some jobs that they knew they could tie on me; and they started looking for me proper. To make things worse, I had hurt the feelings of quite a few guys who had tried to get mushy with me at one time or another, and they had been knocking me – saying I was up-stage and so on – to everybody, and that hadn’t helped me any with the people who might have helped me when I was up against it.
“So besides hiding from the dicks I had to dodge half the guns in the burg for fear they’d put the finger on me – turn me up to the bulls. This honour among thieves stuff doesn’t go very big in New York!
“Finally it got so bad that I couldn’t even get to my room, where my clothes and what money I had were. I was cooped up in a hang-out I had across town, peeping out at dicks who were watching the joint, and knowing that if I showed myself I was a goner.
“I couldn’t keep that up, especially as I had no food there and couldn’t get hold of anybody I could trust; so I took a chance tonight and went over the roof, intending to knock over the first likely-looking dump I came to for the price of some food and a ducat out of town.
“And this was the place I picked, and that brings my tale up to date.”
They were silent for a moment, she watching Carter out of the corners of her eyes, as if trying to read what was going on in his mind, and he turning her story around in his head, admiring its literary potentialities.
She was speaking again, and now her voice held the slightly metallic quality that it had before she had forgotten some of her wariness in her preoccupation with her story.
