The Big Book of Rogues and Villains

by Otto Penzler

  “Fact number four!” mentally noted Armiston. “Are not you in mortal fear of robbery with all of this wealth?”

  Mrs. Wentworth laughed lightly.

  “That is why we live in a fortress,” she said.

  “Have you never, then, been visited by thieves?” asked the author boldly.

  “Never!” she said.

  “A lie,” thought Armiston. “Fact number five! We are getting on swimmingly.”

  “I do not believe that even your Godahl the Infallible could get in here,” Mrs. Wentworth said. “Not even the servants enter this room. That door is not locked with a key; yet it locks. I am not much of a housekeeper,” she said lazily, “but such housekeeping as is done in this room is all done by these poor little hands of mine.”

  “No! Most amazing! May I look at the door?”

  “Yes, Mr. Godahl,” said this woman, who had lived more lives than Godahl himself.

  Armiston examined the door, this strange device that locked without a key, apparently indeed without a lock, and came away disappointed.

  “Well, Mr. Godahl?” his hostess said tauntingly. He shook his head in perplexity.

  “Most ingenious,” he said; and then suddenly: “Yet I will venture that if I turned Godahl loose on this problem he would solve it.”

  “What fun!” she cried clapping her hands.

  “You challenge him?” asked Armiston.

  “What nonsense is this!” cried Wentworth, coming forward.

  “No nonsense at all,” said Mrs. Wentworth. “Mr. Armiston has just said that his Godahl could rob me. Let him try. If he can—if mortal man can gain the secret of ingress and egress of this room—I want to know it. I don’t believe mortal man can enter this room.”

  Armiston noted a strange glitter in her eyes.

  “Gad! She was born to the part! What a woman!” he thought. And then aloud:

  “I will set him to work. I will lay the scene of his exploit in—say—Hungary, where this room might very well exist in some feudal castle. How many people have entered this room since it was made the storehouse of all this wealth?”

  “Not six besides yourself,” replied Mrs. Wentworth.

  “Then no one can recognize it if I describe it in a story—in fact, I will change the material details. We will say that it is not jewels Godahl is seeking. We will say that it is a——”

  Mrs. Wentworth’s hand touched his own. The tips of her fingers were cold. “A white ruby,” she said.

  “Gad! What a thoroughbred!” he exclaimed to himself—or to Godahl. And then aloud: “Capital! I will send you a copy of the story autographed.”

  The next day he called at The Towers and sent up his card to Mr. Benson’s apartments. Surely a man of Benson’s standing could be trusted with such a secret. In fact it was evidently not a secret to Benson, who in all probability was one of the six Mrs. Wentworth said had entered that room. Armiston wanted to talk the matter over with Benson. He had given up his idea of having fun with him by sending him a marked copy of the magazine containing his tale. His story had taken complete possession of him, as always had been the case when he was at work dispatching Godahl on his adventures.

  “If that ruby really exists,” Armiston said, “I don’t know whether I shall write the story or steal the ruby for myself. Benson is right. Godahl should not steal any more for mere money. He is after rare, unique things now. And I am Godahl. I feel the same way myself.”

  A valet appeared, attired in a gorgeous livery. Armiston wondered why any self-respecting American would consent to don such raiment, even though it was the livery of the great Benson family.

  “Mr. Armiston, sir,” said the valet, looking at the author’s card he held in his hand. “Mr. Benson sailed for Europe yesterday morning. He is spending the summer in Norway. I am to follow on the next steamer. Is there any message I can take to him, sir? I have heard him speak of you, sir.”

  Armiston took the card and wrote on it in pencil:

  “I called to apologize. I am Martin Brown. The chance was too good to miss. You will pardon me, won’t you?”

  For the next two weeks Armiston gave himself over to his dissipation, which was accompanying Godahl on this adventure. It was a formidable task. The secret room he placed in a Hungarian castle, as he had promised. A beautiful countess was his heroine. She had seen the world, mostly in man’s attire, and her escapades had furnished vivacious reading for two continents. No one could possibly connect her with Mrs. Billy Wentworth. So far it was easy. But how was Godahl to get into this wonderful room where the countess had hidden this wonderful rare white ruby? The room was lined with chilled steel. Even the door—this he had noted when he was examining that peculiar portal—was lined with layers of steel. It could withstand any known tool.

  However, Armiston was Armiston, and Godahl was Godahl. He got into that room. He got the white ruby!

  The manuscript went to the printers, and the publishers said that Armiston had never done anything like it since he started Godahl on his astonishing career.

  He banked the check for his tale, and as he did so he said: “Gad! I would a hundred times rather possess that white ruby. Confound the thing! I feel as if I had not heard the last of it.”

  —

  Armiston and his wife went to Maine for the summer without leaving their address. Along in the early fall he received by registered mail, forwarded by his trusted servant at the town house, a package containing the envelope he had addressed to J. Borden Benson, The Towers. Furthermore it contained the dollar bills he had dispatched to that individual, together with his note which he had signed “Martin Brown.” And across the note, in the most insulting manner, was written in coarse, greasy blue-pencil lines:

  “Damnable impertinence. I’ll cane you the first time I see you.”

  And no more. That was enough of course—quite sufficient.

  In the same mail came a note from Armiston’s publishers, saying that his story, “The White Ruby,” was scheduled for publication in the October number, out September twenty-fifth. This cheered him up. He was anxious to see it in print. Late in September they started back to town.

  “Aha!” he said as he sat reading his paper in the parlor car—he had caught this train by the veriest tip of its tail and upset the running schedule in the act—“Ah! I see my genial friend, J. Borden Benson, is in town, contrary to custom at this time of year. Life must be a great bore to that snob.”

  A few days after arriving in town he received a package of advance copies of the magazine containing his story, and he read the tale of “The White Ruby” as if he had never seen it before. On the cover of one copy, which he was to dispatch to his grumpy benefactor, J. Borden Benson, he wrote:

  Charmed to be caned. Call any time. See contents.

  Oliver Armiston.

  On another he wrote:

  Dear Mrs. Wentworth: See how simple it is to pierce your fancied security!

  He dispatched these two magazines with a feeling of glee. No sooner had he done so, however, than he learned that the Wentworths had not yet returned from Newport. The magazine would be forwarded to them no doubt. The Wentworths’ absence made the tale all the better, in fact, for in his story Armiston had insisted on Godahl’s breaking into the castle and solving the mystery of the keyless door during the season when the château was closed and strung with a perfect network of burglar alarms connecting with the gendarmerie in the near-by village.

  That was the twenty-fifth day of September. The magazine was put on sale that morning.

  On the twenty-sixth day of September Armiston bought a late edition of an afternoon paper from a leather-lunged boy who was hawking “Extra!” in the street. Across the first page the headlines met his eye:

  ROBBERY AND MURDER

  IN THE WENTWORTH MANSION!

  Private watchmen, summoned by burglar alarm at ten o’clock this morning, find servant with skull crushed on floor of mysterious steel-doored room. Murdered man’s pockets filled wit
h rare jewels. Police believe he was murdered by confederate who escaped.

  The Wentworth Butler, Stone Deaf, Had Just Returned From Newport to Open House at Time of Murder.

  It was ten o’clock that night when an automobile drew up at Armiston’s door and a tall man with a square jaw, square shoes, and a square mustache alighted. This was Deputy Police Commissioner Byrnes, a professional detective whom the new administration had drafted into the city’s service from the government secret service.

  Byrnes was admitted, and as he advanced to the middle of the drawing-room, without so much as a nod to the ghostlike Armiston who stood shivering before him, he drew a package of papers from his pocket.

  “I presume you have seen all the evening papers,” he said, spitting his words through his half-closed teeth with so much show of personal malice that Armiston—never a brave man in spite of his Godahl—cowered before him.

  Armiston shook his head dumbly at first, but at length he managed to say: “Not all; no.”

  The deputy commissioner with much deliberation drew out the latest extra and handed it to Armiston without a word.

  It was the Evening News. The first page was divided down its entire length by a black line. On one side and occupying four columns, was a word-for-word reprint of Armiston’s story, “The White Ruby.”

  On the other, the facts in deadly parallel, was a graphic account of the robbery and murder at the home of Billy Wentworth. The parallel was glaring in the intensity of its dumb accusation. On the one side was the theoretical Godahl, working his masterly way of crime, step by step; and on the other was the plagiarism of Armiston’s story, following the intricacies of the master mind with copybook accuracy.

  The editor, who must have been a genius in his way, did not accuse. He simply placed the fiction and the fact side by side and let the reader judge for himself. It was masterly. If, as the law says, the mind that conceives, the intelligence that directs, a crime is more guilty than the very hand that acts, then Armiston here was both thief and murderer. Thief, because the white ruby had actually been stolen. Mrs. Billy Wentworth, rushed to the city by special train, attended by doctors and nurses, now confirmed the story of the theft of the ruby. Murderer, because in the story Godahl had for once in his career stooped to murder as the means, and had triumphed over the dead body of his confederate, scorning, in his joy at possessing the white ruby, the paltry diamonds, pearls, and red rubies with which his confederate had crammed his pockets.

  Armiston seized the police official by his lapels.

  “The butler!” he screamed. “The butler! Yes, the butler. Quick, or he will have flown.”

  Byrnes gently disengaged the hands that had grasped him.

  “Too late,” he said. “He has already flown. Sit down and quiet your nerves. We need your help. You are the only man in the world who can help us now.”

  When Armiston was himself again he told the whole tale, beginning with his strange meeting with J. Borden Benson on the train, and ending with his accepting Mrs. Wentworth’s challenge to have Godahl break into the room and steal the white ruby. Byrnes nodded over the last part. He had already heard that from Mrs. Wentworth, and there was the autographed copy of the magazine to show for it.

  “You say that J. Borden Benson told you of this white ruby in the first place.”

  Armiston again told, in great detail, the circumstances, all the humor now turned into grim tragedy.

  “That is strange,” said the ex-secret-service chief. “Did you leave your purse at home or was your pocket picked?”

  “I thought at first that I had absent-mindedly left it at home. Then I remembered having paid the chauffeur out of the roll of bills, so my pocket must have been picked.”

  “What kind of a looking man was this Benson?”

  “You must know him,” said Armiston.

  “Yes, I know him; but I want to know what he looked like to you. I want to find out how he happened to be so handy when you were in need of money.”

  Armiston described the man minutely.

  The deputy sprang to his feet. “Come with me,” he said; and they hurried into the automobile and soon drew up in front of The Towers.

  Five minutes later they were ushered into the magnificent apartment of J. Borden Benson. That worthy was in his bath preparing to retire for the night.

  “I don’t catch the name,” Armiston and the deputy heard him cry through the bathroom door to his valet.

  “Mr. Oliver Armiston, sir.”

  “Ah, he has come for his caning, I expect. I’ll be there directly.”

  He did not wait to complete his toilet, so eager was he to see the author. He strode out in a brilliant bathrobe and in one hand he carried an alpenstock. His eyes glowed in anger. But the sight of Byrnes surprised as well as halted him.

  “Do you mean to say this is J. Borden Benson?” cried Armiston to Byrnes, rising to his feet and pointing at the man.

  “The same,” said the deputy; “I swear to it. I know him well! I take it he is not the gentleman who paid your carfare to New Haven.”

  “Not by a hundred pounds!” exclaimed Armiston as he surveyed the huge bulk of the elephantine clubman.

  The forced realization that the stranger he had hitherto regarded as a benefactor was not J. Borden Benson at all, but some one who had merely assumed that worthy’s name while he was playing the conceited author as an easy dupe, did more to quiet Armiston’s nerves than all the sedatives his doctor had given him. It was a badly dashed popular author who sat down with the deputy commissioner in his library an hour later. He would gladly have consigned Godahl to the bottom of the sea; but it was too late. Godahl had taken the trick.

  “How do you figure it?” Armiston asked, turning to the deputy.

  “The beginning is simple enough. It is the end that bothers me,” said the official. “Your bogus J. Borden Benson is, of course, the brains of the whole combination. Your infernal Godahl has told us just exactly how this crime was committed. Now your infernal Godahl must bring the guilty parties to justice.”

  It was plain to be seen that the police official hated Godahl worse than poison, and feared him too.

  “Why not look in the Rogues’ Gallery for this man who befriended me on the train?”

  The chief laughed.

  “For the love of Heaven, Armiston, do you, who pretend to know all about scientific thievery, think for a moment that the man who took your measure so easily is of the class of crooks who get their pictures in the Rogues’ Gallery? Talk sense!”

  “I can’t believe you when you say he picked my pocket.”

  “I don’t care whether you believe me or not; he did, or one of his pals did. It all amounts to the same thing, don’t you see? First, he wanted to get acquainted with you. Now the best way to get into your good graces was to put you unsuspectingly under obligation to him. So he robs you of your money. From what I have seen of you in the last few hours it must have been like taking candy from a child. Then he gets next to you in line. He pretends that you are merely some troublesome toad in his path. He gives you money for your ticket, to get you out of his way so he won’t miss his train. His train! Of course his train is your train. He puts you in a position where you have to make advances to him. And then, grinning to himself all the time at your conceit and gullibility, he plays you through your pride, your Godahl. Think of the creator of the great Godahl falling for a trick like that!”

  Byrnes’s last words were the acme of biting sarcasm.

  “You admit yourself that he is too clever for you to put your hands on.”

  “And then,” went on Byrnes, not heeding the interruption, “he invites you to lunch and tells you what he wants you to do for him. And you follow his lead like a sheep at the tail of the bellwether! Great Scott, Armiston! I would give a year’s salary for one hour’s conversation with that man.”

  Armiston was beginning to see the part this queer character had played; but he was in a semi-hysterical state, and, like a wo
man in such a position, he wanted a calm mind to tell him the whole thing in words of one syllable, to verify his own dread.

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “I don’t quite follow. You say he tells me what he wants me to do.”

  Byrnes shrugged his shoulders in disgust; then, as if resigned to the task before him, he began his explanation:

  “Here, man, I will draw a diagram for you. This gentleman friend of yours—we will call him John Smith for convenience—wants to get possession of this white ruby. He knows that it is in the keeping of Mrs. Billy Wentworth. He knows you know Mrs. Wentworth and have access to her house. He knows that she stole this bauble and is frightened to death all the time. Now John Smith is a pretty clever chap. He handled the great Armiston like hot putty. He had exhausted his resources. He is baffled and needs help. What does he do? He reads the stories about the great Godahl. Confidentially, Mr. Armiston, I will tell you that I think your great Godahl is mush. But that is neither here nor there. If you can sell him as a gold brick, all right. But Mr. John Smith is struck by the wonderful ingenuity of this Godahl. He says: ‘Ha! I will get Godahl to tell me how to get this gem!’

  “So he gets hold of yourself, sir, and persuades you that you are playing a joke on him by getting him to rant and rave about the great Godahl. Then—and here the villain enters—he says: ‘Here is a thing the great Godahl cannot do. I dare him to do it.’ He tells you about the gem, whose very existence is quite fantastic enough to excite the imagination of the wonderful Armiston. And by clever suggestion he persuades you to lay the plot at the home of Mrs. Wentworth. And all the time you are chuckling to yourself, thinking what a rare joke you are going to have on J. Borden Benson when you send him an autographed copy and show him that he was talking to the distinguished genius all the time and didn’t know it. That’s the whole story, sir. Now wake up!”

  Byrnes sat back in his chair and regarded Armiston with the smile a pedagogue bestows on a refractory boy whom he has just flogged soundly.

  “I will explain further,” he continued. “You haven’t visited the house yet. You can’t. Mrs. Wentworth, for all she is in bed with four dozen hot-water bottles, would tear you limb from limb if you went there. And don’t you think for a minute she isn’t able to. That woman is a vixen.”