Phantom Wires: A Novel

by Arthur Stringer

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE ULTIMATE OUTCAST

  Any passion so neutral and negative as jealousy soon burned itself outin an actively positive brain like Durkin's. And it left, as so oftenhad happened with him, manifold gray ash-heaps of regret for pastmisdeeds. It also brought with it the customary revulsion of feeling,and a prowling hunger for some amendatory activity. Yet with thathunger came a new and disturbing sense of fear. He was realizing,almost too late, the predicament into which he and Frank had stumbled,the danger into which he had passively permitted his wife to drift.

  It was not until after two hours of fierce and troubled thought,however, that Durkin left the Bartholdi, and taking a hansom, drovedown that man-crowded crevasse where lower Broadway flaunted itsSemitic signboards to the world, directly to the Criminal Courtsbuilding in Centre street.

  Once there, he made his way to the office of the district-attorney. Ashe thoughtfully waited for admission into that democratized court oflast appeal there passed through his mind the dangers and the chancesthat lay before him. The situation had its menaces, both obvious andunforeseen, but the more he thought it over the more he realized thatthe emergency called for action, at once decisive and immediate. Hehad already bungled and hesitated and misjudged. Blind feeling hadwarped his judgment. Until then he had blocked out his path of actiononly crudely; there had been little time for the weighing ofconsequences and the anticipation of contingencies. He had actedquickly and blindly. He had both succeeded and been defeated.

  Still again the actual peril hanging over his wife came home to him.In the dust and tumult of battle, and in the black depths of thejealous vapors that had so blinded and sickened him, he had for themoment forgotten just what she meant to him, just how handicapped andhelpless he stood without her.

  If the thought of their separation touched him, because of moreemotional reasons, it was already too early in his mood of reaction toadmit it to his own shamefaced inner self. Yet he felt, now, thatthrough it all she was true gold. It was only when the tie stood moststrained and tortured that the sense of its actual strength came hometo him.

  As these thoughts and feelings swept disjointedly through his busy headword was sent out to him that he might see the district-attorney.

  The office he stepped into was curtain-draped and carpeted, and hungwith framed portraits, and strewn with heavy and comfortable-lookingleather arm-chairs. Durkin had expected it to look like aniron-grilled precinct police-station, and he was a little startled bythe sense of luxury and well-being pervading the place.

  Tilted momentarily back in a leather chair, behind a high-backedhardwood desk, the visitor caught a glimpse of one of those nervouslyalert, youngish-old figures which always seemed to him so typicallyAmerican.

  The man behind the high-backed desk paused in his task of checking alist of typewritten names, and motioned Durkin to a seat. The visitorcould see that he was with an official who would countenance noprofligate waste of time. So he plunged straight into the heart of hissubject.

  "This office is at present carrying on a campaign against RichardPenfield, the poolroom operator and gambler."

  The district-attorney put down his paper.

  "This office is carrying on a campaign against every lawbreaker broughtto its attention," he corrected, succinctly. Then he caught up anothertype-written sheet. "How much have you lost?" he asked over hisshoulder.

  "I'm not a gambler," retorted Durkin as crisply. His earlier timidityhad faded away, and more and more he felt the relish of this adventurewith the powers that were opposing him.

  "I suppose not--but how much were your losses?"

  "I've lost nothing!" Durkin was growing impatient of this curtlycondescending tone. It was the ponderosity of officialdom, he felt,grown playful, in the face of a passing triviality.

  The district-attorney turned over the card which had been brought in tohim, with a deprecating uplift of the eyebrows.

  "Most of the people who come here to talk about Penfield and hisfriends come to tell me how much they've lost." He leaned back, andsent a little cloud of cigarette smoke ceilingward. "And, of course,it's part of this office's duty to keep a fool and his moneytogether--as long as possible. What is it I can do for you?"

  "I want your help to get a woman out of Penfield's new downtown house!"

  "What woman?"

  "She is--well, she is a very near friend of mine! She's being held aprisoner there!"

  "By the police?"

  "No, by certain of Penfield's men."

  "What men?"

  "MacNutt, the wire tapper, is one of them!"

  "And you would like us to get after MacNutt?"

  "Yes, I would!"

  "On the charge of wire tapping?"

  "That should be one of them!"

  "Then I can only refer you to the decision of the Court of Appeals inthe McCord case, and the Appellate Division's reversal of the'green-goods' conviction of 1900! In other words, sir, there is no lawunder which a wire tapper can be prosecuted."

  "But it's not a conviction I want, as much as the woman. I want tosave _her_."

  "Is she a respectable woman?"

  Durkin felt that his look was answer enough.

  "Is she a frequenter of poolrooms?"

  Durkin hesitated, this time, and weighed his answer.

  "I don't think so."

  "She's not a frequenter?"

  "No!"

  "Some rather nice women are, you know, at times!"

  "She may have been, once, I suppose, but I know not recently."

  "Ah! I see! And what do you want us to do?"

  "I want your help to get her out of there, today, before any harm comesto her."

  "What sort of harm?"

  Durkin found it hard to put his fears and feelings into satisfactorywords. He was on dangerous seas, but he made his way doggedly on,between the Charybdis of reticence and the Scylla of plain-spokensuggestion.

  "I see--in other words, you want the police to raid Penfield's downtowngambling establishment before two o'clock this afternoon, and releasefrom that establishment a young lady who drove there, and probably notfor the first time, in an open cab in the open daylight, becausecertain ties which you do not care to explain bind you to the younglady in question?"

  The brief and brusque finality of tone in the other man warned Durkinthat he had made no headway, and he caught up the other's half-mockingand tacit challenge.

  "For which, I think, this office will be adequately repaid, by beingbrought into touch with information which will help out its previousaction against Penfield!"

  "Who will give us this?"

  Durkin looked at his cross-examiner, nettled and impatient.

  "I could!"

  "But will you?"

  "Yes, on the condition I have implied!"

  "In other words, you stand ready to bribe us into a doubtful andhazardous movement against the strongest gambler in all New York, onthe expectation of an adequate bribe! This office, sir, accepts nobribes!"

  "I would not call it bribery!"

  "Then how would you describe it?"

  "Oh, I might be tempted to call it--well, cooeperation!"

  Some tinge of scorn in his words nettled the officer of the law.

  "It all amounts to the same thing, I presume. Now, let me tell yousomething. Even though you came to me today with a drayful of crookedfaro layouts and doctored-up roulette wheels from Penfield's house, itwould be practically impossible, at this peculiar juncture of municipaladministration, to take in my men and carry out a raid over CaptainKuttrell's head!"

  "Ah, I see! You regard Penfield as immune!"

  "Penfield is _not_ immune!" said the public prosecutor. Theoldish-young face was very flushed and angry by this time. "Don'tmisunderstand me. As a recognized and respected citizen, you alwayshave the right to call on the officers of the law, to secure protectionand punishment of crime. But this must be sought through the naturaland legitimate channels."
>
  "What do you mean by that?"

  "I mean go to the police."

  "But to lay a charge with the police would be impracticable, in thiscase."

  "Why would it?"

  "Simply because it wouldn't get at Penfield, and it would only leadto--to embarrassing publicity!"

  "Exactly so! And you may be sure, young man, that Penfield is quiteaware of that fact. To be candid, it is just such things as this thatallow him to be operating today. If you start the wheels, you muststand the racket!"

  "Then you allow a notorious gambler to break every law of the land andsay you can give me no help whatever in balking what amounts to acriminal abduction?"

  The swivel-chair creaked peremptorily, as the public prosecutor turnedsharply back to his desk.

  "You'd better try the police!" he bit out impatiently.

  Durkin strode to the door. He was halfway through it, when he wascalled sharply back.

  "Don't carry away the impression, young man, that we're not fightingthis man Penfield as hard as we can!"

  "It looks like it!" mocked the man in the doorway.

  "One moment--we have been after this man Penfield, and his kind, andwe're still after them. But we don't pretend to accomplish miracles.This city is made up of mere human beings, and human beings still havethe failing of breaking out, morally, now in one place, now in another.We can compress and segregate those infectious blots, but until you canshow us the open sore we can't put on the salve. If you are convincedyou are the object of some criminal activity, and are willing to holdnothing back, I can detail two plain-clothes men from my own office togo with you and help you out."

  Durkin laughed, a little recklessly, a little scoffingly. Twoplain-clothes men to capture a steel-bound fortress!

  "Don't trouble them. They might make Penfield mad--they might getthemselves talked about--and there's no use, you know, making a mess ofone's mayoralty chances!"

  And he was through the door indignantly, and as indignantly out, beforethe district-attorney could so much as flick the ash off hiscigarette-end.

  But after doing so, he touched an electric button, and it was at onceanswered by an athletic-looking clerk with all the earmarks of thecollegian about him.

  "Tell Barney to follow that man who just went out. Tell him to keephim under his eye, closely, and report to me tonight! Hurry thesepapers back to the Fire Commissioner. Then get that window up, and letthe Mott Street Merchants' Protective Association in!"

  Durkin, in the meantime, hurried uptown in his hansom, consumed with afeeling of resentment, torn by a fury of blind revolt against allorganized society, against all law and authority and order. Still oncemore it seemed that some dark coalition of forces silently confrontedand combated him at every turn. The consciousness that he must nowfight, not only alone, but in the face of this unjust coalition broughtwith it a desperate and almost intoxicating sense of audacity. If thelaw itself was against him, he would take fate into his own hands, andgo to his own ends, in his own way. If the machinery of justice groundso loosely and so blindly, there remained no reason why he himself,however recklessly he went his way, should not in the end disregard itsengines and evade its ever-impending cogs.

  He would show them! He would teach them that red-tape and officialismcould only blunder blindly on at the heels of his elusive andlightfooted wariness. If they were bound to hold him down anddelegitimatize him and keep him a pariah and a revolter against order,he would show them what he, alone, could do in his own behalf.

  And as he drove hurriedly through the crowded city streets, stilllashing himself into a fury of resentment against organized society; heformulated his plan of action, and mentally took up, point by point,each new move and what it might mean. As he pictured, in his mind,each anticipated phase of the struggle he felt come over him, for thesecond time, a sort of blind and irrational fury, the fury of a rat ina corner, fighting for its life and the life of its mate.