The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  Suddenly he stooped and kissed her gently on the forehead.

  “Permit an old man that privilege, my dear,” he said with the graceful deference of the old-school gentleman. “I’m honored in calling you and that mad scapegrace husband of yours my very dear friends.”

  A quick answer to her S. O. S. to Blackie, bade her take the night train to Spokane. The following afternoon in Spokane, looking into Boston Blackie’s face from the stool beside his chair, as she finished relating how old Jim Clancy’s wandering bars of gold had found their way back to his covetous fingers, she entreated, “Tell me I did right, dear. Tell me I did what you would have done.”

  “Right! Of course you did right. My girl never did anything else. She couldn’t,” declared Blackie, echoing the words Mary had spoken of him to Judge Garber. “Always remember, Mary, that an honest crook can afford anything but crooked honesty.”

  The smile of happiness in Mary’s eyes just then was worth more to Boston Blackie than all the gold the Humboldt ever carried.

  Blackie gravely flicked the glowing end of his cigarette.

  “How much money have we in bank, dear?” he asked. “We must give the others their bit on the day I named. We can’t give away their money.”

  “Enough,” said Mary. “But we will have only twenty dollars left.”

  “Twenty dollars and a crystal-like conscience,” corrected Blackie jubilantly. “Why, Mary dear, we’re rich.”

  CHAPTER XIX

  ALIBI ANN

  “It’s good to be home again, dear,” said Mary sinking wearily into a chair as Blackie dropped suitcases and put an arm caressingly about her shoulders.

  “Home again, broke but not broken, little girl,” he answered. “Let’s check up on that bankroll and then I’ll get busy.”

  He emptied his pockets.

  “Ten dollars and thirty cents,” he counted, “We owe Frank Cavaness $100 we borrowed for the trip home, too. Well, what does it matter? I’ll go down to Old Mother McGinn and borrow a thousand and then we’ll go out and get enough in a night to give us a good long rest. I’m better satisfied since you gave back that $60,000 than I have been in ten years. It’s proof to myself that we really live up to the code we preach. I’m off to Mother McGinn. I’ll be back for dinner. Rest, meanwhile, little sweetheart.”

  * * * *

  No one ever knew how or where Alibi Ann found the Glad-rags Kid. She had been absent from her haunts in San Francisco for a fortnight—nothing unusual, for Ann was accustomed to make solitary pilgrimages out of town that invariably caused consternation and frenzied but futile activity in the detective department of the Jewelers’ Protective Association. Then, unexpectedly as always, she appeared one night before the barred doors of the Palms Hotel—rendezvous and sanctuary of the elect among the Powers That Prey—and whistled up the speaking-tube to the cage-like cubby-hole where old Mother McGinn, knitting interminably, had sat for many years answering such summonses from the strange and furtive company that frequented her house.

  “It’s me, Mother,” said Ann softly into the tube. At the sound of her voice the door swung open. Ann and her companion entered, and the doors closed behind them. As they climbed the stairs, Mother McGinn’s quick ear detected the double step, and she appeared suddenly on the floor above them, gazing down suspiciously.

  “It’s all right, Mother,” said Ann quickly. “He’s with me.”

  Mother McGinn stared in speechless amazement. There was a new and strangely buoyant quality in Alibi Ann’s voice, and with her was a man. No wonder Mother McGinn almost unbelievingly watched them ascend the dingy, ill-lighted stairway. For many, many years Ann’s proudest boast had been her solitary spinsterhood. During the eventful double decade that had passed since Ann, then a young girl, had first been admitted to the Palms, many men of many kinds had made love to her in many ways. Some she had scorned silently; some she had laughed at gayly; some she had withered with the biting sarcasm of a ready tongue and a fertile wit. And to none had she ever listened. Yet now she was climbing the stairs of the familiar old hotel with a stranger—one who, had he appeared alone, might have whistled out his lungs without gaining admittance. It passed belief.

  Alibi Ann dropped her suitcase at the door of the tiny office. Her companion dropped another beside it, and as the light fell full upon him, Mother McGinn in one quick, curious glance sought to appraise him. She saw a youth who manifestly tried to belie immaturity beneath a self-conscious swagger that accentuated it. He was good-looking in a way, though a weak chin and self-indulgent mouth marred an otherwise attractive face. But Mother McGinn forgot his features in her wonder at his clothes—the last word in exaggeration as to both style and pattern. A mammoth diamond horseshoe scintillated from his tie. His Panama hat was one of the kind that is weighed by the ounce and priced by its weight in gold. He wore spats.

  Alibi Ann laid a trembling hand on the old woman’s shoulder, and Mother McGinn, looking at her for the first time, saw that her eyes were bright and eager and her cheeks flushed as they never before had been.

  “Mother,” said Ann with a queer little break in her voice, “meet my husband, Tom Coyne. Mitt her, Tom. Mother McGinn’s the pal of all the gang.”

  The old woman stuck out a gnarled and withered hand and clasped the newcomer’s palm.

  “Gracious Peter! Your husband!” she ejaculated turning to Ann. “‘Gratulations, folks.” Then in an aside to the girl: “We’ll all have to hand it to you, Annie my dear. You were a long time picking one, but when you did, you sure grabbed the original glad-rags kid.”

  Right there Tom Coyne ceased to exist. From that moment, in the world of Alibi Ann and her kind, he was the Glad-rags Kid. Mother McGinn had given him his “moniker.”

  “Are Boston Blackie and the bunch upstairs?” asked Ann.

  “Sure! Smoking in the Chink room,” answered the old woman. “Take your man up and let them give him the double O. The Kid and his clothes will astonish ’em, all right. He’ll give the crowd something to chew about all night.”

  “Not tonight, Mother,” said Ann. “But I wish you’d slip Blackie the news about me, and tell him I’m going out to the flat tomorrow afternoon to see his Mary. I want a long talk with her. And send old Crowder, the fence, down. We’ve brought back a swell bunch of stones, and we want dough. We’re going to scatter some, Tom and me.”

  Mother McGinn, chuckling hoarsely, made a gesture indicating the pulling of a champagne cork.

  “No, no,” corrected Ann. “Nothing like that for us. We’ve a better way than that to blow our coin.”

  “‘We—us—our!’” echoed the old woman pointedly, for Ann until now had always prided herself on making her money alone and spending it as she made it—alone.

  “‘We’ is right,” said Ann softly. “It’s fifty-fifty between Tom and me. Fifty-fifty now and always—in good luck or bad, eh, Tom?”

  “That’s it, fifty-fifty in good luck or bad,” repeated the Glad-rags Kid with whole-hearted enthusiasm.

  Alibi Ann’s eyes, as she looked up at him, revealed the possibilities that lie latent and hidden—except for one man—in all women’s eyes. But the Glad-rags Kid missed their message. He was too young, too self-centered, too unthinking even to perceive the heights to which love had raised the woman the world called Alibi Ann.

  Next day Ann called on her friend Mary.

  “Yes, it’s like that with me, Mary,” said Ann as she told of her marriage, “and I’m so happy that sometimes I wake in the night shivering with dread for fear it’s only a dream.”

  Ann’s words answered the thought in the mind of Boston Blackie’s Mary, who realized from the moment of her visitor’s appearance at the little apartment that a new and vastly altered Alibi Ann had taken the place of the self-sufficient, cynical diamond thief she knew so well. “A new and different world i
s opening itself to Ann,” Mary thought.

  “Love is a whole lot like the measles, Mary,” Ann continued after a pause. “The longer you escape it, the harder it hits you when it does come. Until I met the Glad-rags Kid, I never knew how empty and lonely my life was. I never knew what I was missing. I never knew how ignorant I am. Say, Mary, if you turn me loose at the diamond counter of a swell store, I can handle myself. But in a kitchen I’m as helpless as a three-year-old kid. But I’m going to learn—quick. Any half-wise flapper can steal for a man, but it takes class to cook for one so he’ll like it. Am I right or am I wrong, Mary?”

  “You’ve learned a lot about life and the road to happiness in—how long is it, Ann?”

  “A week. Just one little week, and it’s worth more to me than all the years that went before it. When I think that maybe there are hundreds of such weeks ahead, I begin to tremble. I know I don’t deserve them, and it don’t seem possible there can be that much happiness in this world. How long have you and Blackie been together?”

  “Seven years and a month.”

  “Seven years, each three hundred and sixty-five days long, and on every one of those days you’ve known you’ve had the love of the man you love. You’re the luckiest girl living, Mary.”

  There was a long silence in which a faintly troubling thought slowly furrowed Ann’s brow.

  “Do you know how old I am, Mary?” asked Ann at last.

  Mary shook her head.

  “In my thirties—well along in them,” said Ann almost defiantly.

  Mary made no comment.

  “And the Kid is twenty-four and doesn’t look even that”

  Alibi Ann gave the information with deeper—far deeper—anxiety than she would have made the announcement that police were breaking in the door. Then she added:

  “Mary, do you think that need make any difference in the years to come?”

  “It doesn’t matter if you really love each other,” Mary answered. And she slipped an arm around her friend and drew her closer. The unspoken message of sympathy and understanding reopened the flood-gates of Alibi Ann’s overfull heart.

  “Can you guess what we are planning, the Kid and I?” she began reverently as one approaching a sacred subject. “You will understand, Mary, for you love Blackie. We’re planning a home—a real home—one like this. We’re not going to have fuss and frills and things made for show instead of for comfort. The Kid and I want a place to live in—just for us two. It’s going to have big, deep easy-chairs and cushions everywhere and an open fireplace that we can enjoy together in the evenings. All the little comforts a man wants and enjoys without knowing what they are, will be there. And when it’s all ready—I’m not going to let Tom set his foot inside the door until it is ready—then I’ll show it all to him, and we’ll sit down to dinner at our own table.” She clasped her hands and looked up with glowing eyes. “And then, Mary, there’ll be a little bit of Heaven right here in old ’Frisco.”

  “And what will there be for you, Ann, in this bit of Heaven?” asked Mary, tightening her clasp about the shoulders of the woman the newspapers had often called “the most dangerous and incorrigible of professional criminals.”

  “For me? Why, for me there’s going to be a cook-stove—-the best I can buy,” replied Ann, laughing happily as a child. “I’m going to get a cookbook today—which is the best, Mary?—and learn it by heart. I’ve got to, for when the Kid and I decided on a home of our own, he asked me if I could cook, and I said: ‘You just wait and see, Tom, after you eat the first dinner I give you.’ Pure bluff, Mary, but I’ll deliver the goods, believe me, even though I never made a cup of coffee or fried a steak—”

  “Broiled a steak,” corrected Mary.

  “You see! What a simp I am about things that are really worth knowing! I don’t even know what the difference is. That’s one reason I’m up here now. I want you to help me make a list of things I’ll need, and tell me where to get them. I’m going to plan it all just as if it were the biggest diamond job I ever tried to put over. It’s the biggest job of my life, Mary.”

  Long after Alibi Ann had gone, list in hand, flushed and radiant with the excitement of her great adventure, Mary sat weighing the chances of her friend. Her face betrayed indecision.

  “Ann is right. It’s the biggest job she ever under-took,” Mary murmured to herself.

  A key turned in the lock, and she jumped up to throw her arms around Boston Blackie and drag him to a chair while she drew up a footstool from which she could look into his face.

  Alibi Ann has been up here all afternoon,” she began, “and she’s bound up heart and soul in the plans she’s making for a wonderful little home—just like this,” she added with the little smile that meant more than words to her husband.

  “Her new husband has been down at the Palms all afternoon, and he’s bound up heart and soul in the plans he’s making to corner the diamond market of the world—with Ann’s help,” said Blackie.

  “What sort is he, Blackie?” asked Mary anxiously. “He’s going to make Ann as—well, as happy as I am or as wretched as I would be without you.”

  Blackie caught her hands and held them with a caressing touch.

  “He’s a ten-dollar-check passer, loose-tongued and vain, who got his growth up here”—tapping his forehead—“about the time he went into long trousers. X-Y-Z is where I rate him.”

  “Poor Ann!” murmured Mary.

  “Poor Ann!” echoed Blackie with deeper regret than if she were on her way to prison.

  Alibi Ann spent two happy days in finding a flat exactly to suit, and five other days even more deliriously happy in selecting furniture.

  Then she was ready for the great event—the evening on which she would proudly give the Glad-rags Kid his first glimpse of their new home and cook his dinner for the first time with her own hands. With Mary’s assistance she planned and replanned every detail of that dinner. It was to be her great triumph—-a fitting culmination of all her dearest hopes, a suitable beginning for the new life that promised “a little bit of Heaven in old Frisco.”

  After an afternoon spent in helping Ann with her final preparations, Mary was back in her own apartment recounting the events of the exciting day to Blackie, for she had caught from Ann the spirit of the occasion.

  “The Glad-rags Kid is there now. He was to come at six,” Mary said, glancing at the clock. “Oh, I wish I could be there just for a second to see Ann’s face when he sees all she’s done.”

  A taxicab swung round the corner on two wheels and stopped before the door. There was a hurried ring at the bell.

  “Something has happened,” cried Mary as Blackie opened the door.

  “Here’s a package and a note,” said the taxi chauffeur. “It’s from Mrs. Coyne over on Lyons Street, and she promised me a five-dollar tip if I’d get here quick enough for you to answer her over the ’phone in five minutes. Four minutes is up already, lady, and I need that five-spot.”

  Mary tore open the note and read its scribbled contents; then she tore away the paper from the package. Within was a yellow pellet as thin and hard as a board.

  “Oh, look, look, Blackie,” she cried, midway between tears and laughter. “It’s supposed to be a biscuit.” She handed Blackie the note, and he read it aloud with occasional pauses for laughter.

  “‘Dear Mary: Tom is here and has asked for hot biscuit with dinner. I’ve made them twice exactly as the cook-book says, and they’re all like the thing in the package. Dinner is ready and waiting, but I’ve got to have biscuit. For the love of Mike, what’s wrong? ’Phone me quick, or I am disgraced—and everything else has been going so beautifully. Quick, Mary. Ann the Simp.”

  Blackie dropped the biscuit to the table. It struck with a resounding thud, bounced to the floor and rolled away like a silver dollar.

 
“Oh, oh, oh, this is too good!” he cried, collapsing into a chair, helpless with laughter. “She’s making ammunition, not biscuits.”

  “Don’t laugh, Blackie,” said Mary reprovingly. “It’s serious to poor Ann.”

  She recovered the sample of her friend’s cookery and broke it open. It was as yellow as a grapefruit. Mary ran to the ’phone. Ann, evidently waiting, answered instantly.

  “It’s yellow Ann, and it didn’t rise at all,” Mary cried. “It looks as if you had used baking soda. What? No—no, the book doesn’t say baking soda; it says baking powder—the little red can you put on the second shelf in the pantry. A teaspoonful and a half, Ann, and mix the dough just as it tells you in the book. Yes, hurry. Call me after dinner.”

  Two hours later the ’phone rang.

  “Oh, Mary,” said Ann’s voice softly over the wire, “the biscuits were fine, and the dinner was just perfect, the Kid says. When he finished, he said: ‘No more restaurants for me, Annie—you’re some cook!’ He’s sitting before the fire in the big chair with his feet on a footstool, and oh, Mary dear, I’m so happy.”

  Mary repeated Ann’s words to Blackie as they sat together before their own fire. Her hand slipped itself into his.

  “All Ann’s eggs are in one basket,” she murmured. “I pray from the bottom of my heart that the bottom doesn’t fall out.”

  CHAPTER XX

  BLACKIE’S PROPHECY COMES TRUE

  During the months that followed, the Glad-rags Kid became a conspicuous figure in petty police circles in San Francisco—so conspicuous that the newspapers discovered him and made the most of the discovery. He developed a perfect genius for publicity, the one indulgence a crook may not permit himself. After a trip with Ann to a Puget Sound city—a trip from which they brought back a palmful of gems that made the eyes of old Crowd-er gleam avariciously—the Kid bought a bright vermilion racing car which a salesman solemnly assured him was an exact duplicate of Barney Oldfield’s. His first taste of newspaper publicity followed the day on which he was arrested for speeding slightly over fifty miles an hour along a crowded driveway in Golden Gate Park. He appeared before the police judge next morning bedecked with diamonds and in apparel that made the room gasp, and gave reporters a chance to comment humorously on the descriptive justice of his nickname. The judge fined him fifty dollars. The Glad-rags Kid peeled a hundred-dollar bill from a thick roll and tossed it to the court clerk. “Buy yourself a smoke with the change,” he said carelessly. “I haven’t time to wait.”