All that was as I wanted it.
“Now tell me about it,” I ordered Jack.
XI
“Well, I found the open window,” the boy began.
“I know all that part,” I cut in. “You came in and told your friends—Papadopoulos and Flora—about the girl’s escape, and that Carey and I were coming. You advised them to make out you had captured them single-handed. That would draw Carey and me in. With you unsuspected behind us, it would be easy for the three of you to grab the two of us. After that you could stroll down the road and tell Andy I had sent you for the girl. That was a good scheme—except that you didn’t know I had Dick and Mickey up my sleeve, didn’t know I wouldn’t let you get behind me. But all that isn’t what I want to know. I want to know why you sold us out—and what you think you’re going to do now.”
“Are you crazy?” His young face was bewildered, his young eyes horrified. “Or is this some—?”
“Sure, I’m crazy,” I confessed. “Wasn’t I crazy enough to let you lead me into that trap in Sausalito? But I wasn’t too crazy to figure it out afterward. I wasn’t too crazy to see that Ann Newhall was afraid to look at you. I’m not crazy enough to think you could have captured Papadopoulos and Flora unless they wanted you to. I’m crazy—but in moderation.”
Jack laughed—a reckless young laugh, but too shrill. His eyes didn’t laugh with mouth and voice. While he was laughing his eyes looked from me to the gun in his hand and back to me.
“Talk, Jack,” I pleaded huskily, putting a hand on his shoulder. “For God’s sake why did you do it?”
The boy shut his eyes, gulped, and his shoulders twitched. When his eyes opened they were hard and glittering and full of merry hell.
“The worst part of it,” he said harshly, moving his shoulder from under my hand, “is that I wasn’t a very good crook, was I? I didn’t succeed in deluding you.”
I said nothing.
“I suppose you’ve earned your right to the story,” he went on after a little pause. His voice was consciously monotonous, as if he was deliberately keeping out of it every tone or accent that might seem to express emotion. He was too young to talk naturally. “I met Ann Newhall three weeks ago, in my own home. She had gone to school with my sisters, though I had never met her before. We knew each other at once, of course—I knew she was Nancy Regan, she knew I was a Continental operative.
“So we went off by ourselves and talked things over. Then she took me to see Papadopoulos. I liked the old boy and he liked me. He showed me how we together could accumulate unheard-of piles of wealth. So there you are. The prospect of all that money completely devastated my morals. I told him about Carey as soon as I had heard from you, and I led you into that trap, as you say. He thought it would be better if you stopped bothering us before you found the connection between Newhall and Papadopoulos.
“After that failure, he wanted me to try again, but I refused to have a hand in any more fiascos. There’s nothing sillier than a murder that doesn’t come off. Ann Newhall is quite innocent of everything except folly. I don’t think she has the slightest suspicion that I have had any part in the dirty work beyond refraining from having everybody arrested. That, my dear Sherlock, about concludes the confession.”
I had listened to the boy’s story with a great show of sympathetic attentiveness. Now I scowled at him and spoke accusingly, but still not without friendliness.
“Stop spoofing! The money Papadopoulos showed you didn’t buy you. You met the girl and were too soft to turn her in. But your vanity—your pride in looking at yourself as a pretty cold proposition—wouldn’t let you admit it even to yourself. You had to have a hard-boiled front. So you were meat to Papadopoulos’ grinder. He gave you a part you could play to yourself—a super-gentleman-crook, a mastermind, a desperate suave villain, and all that kind of romantic garbage. That’s the way you went, my son. You went as far as possible beyond what was needed to save the girl from the hoosegow—just to show the world, but chiefly yourself, that you were not acting through sentimentality, but according to your own reckless desires. There you are. Look at yourself.”
Whatever he saw in himself—what I had seen or something else—his face slowly reddened, and he wouldn’t look at me. He looked past me at the distant road.
I looked into the lighted room beyond him. Tom-Tom Carey had advanced to the center of the floor, where he stood watching us. I jerked a corner of my mouth at him—a warning.
“Well,” the boy began again, but he didn’t know what to say after that. He shuffled his feet and kept his eyes from my face.
I stood up straight and got rid of the last trace of my hypocritical sympathy.
“Give me your gun, you lousy rat!” I snarled at him.
He jumped back as if I had hit him. Craziness writhed in his face. He jerked his gun chest-high.
Tom-Tom Carey saw the gun go up. The swarthy
