Constance was determined to speak.
‘You remember that man the girls spoke of?’ she began.
‘Yes. What of him?’ asked Adele with almost a note of defiance.
‘Well, I really do know him,’ confessed Constance. ‘He is a detective.’
Constance watched her companion curiously, for at the mere word she had stopped short and faced her. ‘He is?’ she asked quickly. ‘Then that was why Dr Price –’
She managed to suppress the remark and continued her walk home without another word.
In Adele’s little apartment Constance was quick to note that the same haggard look had returned to her friend’s face.
Adele had reached for her pocketbook with a sort of clutching eagerness and was about to leave the room.
Constance rose. ‘Why don’t you give up the stuff?’ she asked earnestly. ‘Don’t you want to?’
For a moment Adele faced her angrily. Then her real nature seemed slowly to come to the surface. ‘Yes,’ she murmured frankly.
‘Then why don’t you?’ pleaded Constance.
‘I haven’t the power. There is an indescribable excitement to do something great, to make a mark. It’s soon gone, but while it lasts, I can sing, dance, do anything – and then – every part of my body begins crying for more of the stuff again.’
There was no longer any necessity of concealment from Constance. She took a pinch of the stuff, placed it on the back of her wrist and quickly sniffed it. The change in her was magical. From a quivering wretched girl she became a self-confident neurasthenic.
‘I don’t care,’ she laughed hollowly now. ‘Yes, I know what you are going to tell me. Soon I’ll be “hunting the cocaine bug”, as they call it, imagining that in my skin, under the flesh, are worms crawling, perhaps see them, see the little animals running around and biting me.’
She said it with a half-reckless cynicism. ‘Oh, you don’t know. There are two souls in the cocainist – one tortured by the pain of not having the stuff, the other laughing and mocking at the dangers of it. It stimulates. It makes your mind work – without effort, by itself. And it gives such visions of success, makes you feel able to do so much, and to forget. All the girls use it.’
‘Where do they get it?’ asked Constance ‘I thought the new law prohibited it.’
‘Get it?’ repeated Adele. ‘Why, they get it from that fellow they call “Sleighbells”. They call it “snow”, you know, and the girls who use it “snowbirds”. The law does prohibit its sale, but…’
She paused significantly.
‘Yes,’ agreed Constance; ‘but Sleighbells is only a part of the system after all. Who is the man at the top?’
Adele shrugged her shoulders and was silent. Still, Constance did not fail to note a sudden look of suspicion which Adele shot at her. Was Adele shielding someone?
Constance knew that someone must be getting rich from the traffic, probably selling hundreds of ounces a week and making thousands of dollars. Somehow she felt a sort of indignation at the whole thing. Who was it? Who was the man higher up?
In the morning as she was working about her little kitchenette an idea came to her. Why not hire the vacant apartment across the hall from Adele? An optician, who was a friend of hers, in the course of a recent conversation, had mentioned an invention, a model of which he had made for the inventor. She would try it.
Since, with Constance, the outlining of a plan was tantamount to the execution, it was not many hours later before she had both the apartment and the model of the invention.
Her wall separated her from the drug store and by careful calculation she determined about where came the little prescription department. Carefully, so as to arouse no suspicion, she began to bore away at the wall with various tools, until finally she had a small, almost imperceptible opening. It was tedious work, and toward the end needed great care so as not to excite suspicion. But finally she was rewarded. Through it she could see just a trace of daylight, and by squinting could see a row of bottles on a shelf opposite.
Then, through the hole, she pushed a long, narrow tube, like a putty blower. When at last she placed her eye at it, she gave a low exclamation of satisfaction. She could now see the whole of the little room.
It was a detectascope, invented by Gaillard Smith, adapter of the detectaphone, an instrument built up on the principle of the cytoscope which physicians use to explore internally down the throat. Only, in the end of the tube, instead of an ordinary lens, was placed what is known as a ‘fish-eye’ lens, which had a range something like nature has given the eyes of fishes, hence the name. Ordinarily cameras, because of the flatness of their lenses, have a range of only a few degrees, the greatest being scarcely more than ninety. But this lens was globular, and, like a drop of water, refracted light from all directions. When placed so that half of it caught the light it ‘saw’ through an angle of 180 degrees, ‘saw’ everything in the room instead of just that little row of bottles on the shelf opposite.
Constance set herself to watch, and it was not long before her suspicions were confirmed, and she was sure that this was nothing more than a ‘coke’ joint. Still she wondered whether Muller was the real source of the traffic of which Sleighbells was the messenger. She was determined to find out.
All day she watched through her detectascope. Once she saw Adele come in and buy more dope. It was with difficulty that she kept from interfering. But, she reflected, the time was not ripe. She had thought the thing out. There was no use in trying to get at it through Adele. The only way was to stop the whole curse at its source, to dam the stream. People came and went.
