But he did move then, to look cautiously around the corner of the furnace which protected him. He peered out, and he saw a man who must be Peace, standing in the middle of the furnace room, with a small leather case, covered with coal dust, on the floor at his feet.
This must be Peace; there was no likelihood that any other would be here. Yet save for his stature there was nothing to suggest his identity. When the lights came crashing on, he was just stepping out of an overall suit of the sort mechanics wear; he stood there clad only in his undergarments, with rubber gloves upon his hands, halfway up his arms. And his face was black with coal, the whites of his eyes gleaming.
Another bag was open at his side, and a suit of clothes lay ready there.
He wore one thing more; a shoulder holster strapped over his underclothes.
And for an instant after the lights came on, the little man stood motionless, shaken by the shock of that sudden illumination. Then his gun was in his hand! He balanced the weapon easily, and his teeth shone in the sooty blackness that was his countenance, and he called in a mocking tone:
“All right, who’s first, gentlemen?”
He was pilloried in the light, immolated as though upon a pedestal, fifteen feet from the nearest cover. Blackness ringed him in. There were shadows all about him, in which many men might hide.
“Come, who’s first?” he repeated insistently.
Hagan spoke, from inside the laundry door, invisible.
“Drop your gun, Peace,” he said.
“Nonsense,” the man retorted gaily. “Shoot if you must this old gray head! I’d as soon go now. Or show yourself, if you’ve got insides in you, and we’ll talk it over. Here I am! Who’s first, my friends?”
No one answered; and the man asked challengingly: “Where’s the old fat one, Inspector Tope? I believe he’d come out if he were here. No fear in that old man! Inspector, are you there?”
“Sorry, Peace,” Tope called. “I can’t oblige. Better drop your gun. They’ll shoot your legs out from under you.”
“You won’t come?” Peace echoed. “Man, you disappoint me, fair!” He hesitated; and he laughed again. “Why, gentlemen, if you won’t oblige,” he protested, “I suppose I’ll have to leave you . . .”
Hagan said sternly: “There are two men behind you, Peace. There are two here with me, and two more back of the furnaces, and two down by the light switches, and a dozen more outside. There’s no chance for you to get away!”
Peace echoed mockingly: “No escape at all? You are not particularly acute, my friend. May I show you one road you cannot close? Observe!”
And he lifted the muzzle of his weapon, with an almost indolent gesture, to his brow.
And a shot roared and reverberated against the concrete walls.
But it was not his gun which was discharged! A bullet struck the weapon from his hands; the pistol rebounded with a metallic sound across the floor. The man shook his stinging fingers ruefully; he seemed to crouch; he whispered, as though suddenly in pity for himself:
“Eh, but the game’s never fair!”
And suddenly like a cat he moved; he was gone!
Tope had predicted that Peace would come by way of the window of that room he formerly had occupied; so the room had been left untenanted to make his entrance easy. That way now he ran. Hagan was after him; but the smaller man moved two feet to Hagan’s one.
He might have made clean away. But a door that is left open may be closed after a man has gone in, so that he cannot come out again. It was thus they dealt with Peace now. He scrambled through the window—into waiting arms . . .
There was, they found, a certain pride in the man. With the abnormal vanity of the essentially criminal mind he talked to them freely; to Tope, and Hagan and Dave Howell, and the other lesser figures who did cluster ’round.
It was at first a sporting proposition, he said. He discovered in himself a gift for mimicry; he amused himself, on three or four occasions, by devising some disguise and confronting his closest friends to their befoolment. Later, he perceived possibilities of profit in this gift, and laid a deeper plan, with Canter and eventually Hammond for his confederates.
Canter was a rogue at heart, he said; Hammond had suffered once through poverty. Cupidity could drive them both to any end. They would serve him so long as they served without risk and were well paid. “So I faked the automobile accident,” he boasted. “Canter came along right behind me. I nosed into a tree, and he picked me up—I wasn’t hurt at all—and took me into his hospital right next door. And during the next two years I built up the Peace the world knew by sight.” He added with a grin: “Canter began to increase the price; but I paid. I could dismiss him when the time came. He and Hammond, too!”
Hagan prompted: “And you did dismiss them?”
“Canter was luck!” the man admitted. “I expected some trouble in arranging that. But he came to see Lola; and—I wanted her myself. Then the little Jervis girl dropped a gun right under my eyes. I had only to pick it up, wait for the proper time, walk from Hammond’s dressing room to Lola’s, shoot him, shove him out of sight and get back to Hammond’s room again.”
Howell asked: “How did you get away, the night we lost you, two months ago?”
And the man chuckled. “I didn’t. I took on a new job,” he explained. “Two of them, in fact. I became Burke, the janitor, in the daytime; I was Mayhew at night. I was already Mayhew when I left the theatre that night. You didn’t inquire; but anyone would have told you that Mayhew had been losing weight these two months gone, as fast as Burke did. I talked to you myself one evening. Remember, Inspector Howell?” His eyes were all derisive.
He confirmed Tope’s guess in the matter of Hammond’s death. Hammond, infuriated by Peace’s attempt to persuade Lola to run away with him, had demanded that they divide the loot and separate. Peace told him the bonds were hidden in the cellar.
“I hadn’t quite decided to kill him,” he explained. “But I found the rat digging in the coal, trying to get the stuff himself. So that was that!”
And when he was done, he answered their questions with the utmost freedom, till at last Hagan said:
“Well, that’s all, I guess. We’ll move.”
So they took him away; but Tope and Dave Howell carried the little leather bag with its rich contents up to show to Miss Moss. She was waiting for them, with the young folk They had to hear the story; and then Dave Howell departed taking the treasure with him for safe-keeping, and the other: talked for long, going over and over every aspect of the tale until at last Clint was sleepy, and Mat and Clara likewise went to their room, and Miss Moss and Inspector Tope were left alone.
Silence held them for a space. He said then, doubtfully: “I don’t know as you’re pleased, ma’am. Having the bonds back. But it had to be that way.”
She smiled faintly. “Why, I’m not worried now,” she assured him. “Clara has found herself. I like Mat.” She added: “I didn’t like Kay as much as Clint did, but that has—cleared up, too.”
He considered this, and he looked at his hands where they rested on his plump knees. “If you haven’t got them to look out for, you’ll be kind of out of a job, ma’am, it seems to me,” he said at last, and his throat was dry.
“There’s always the Trust,” she pointed out. “Although Clint will soon be handling that.”
“So you won’t have a thing to do at all,” he insisted.
“Not a thing!” she agreed, with a gay lift in her tones. “Unless, of course, someone else comes along to—offer me a job!”
He cleared his throat sharply, and he swallowed hard. “Why, ma’am—” he began, and hesitated then; and presently the old Inspector wagged his head and smiled.
“Why, ma’am,” he said, “I guess we’d get along a lot faster with this business if you tell me your first name!”
THE END
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Lady in Peril Page 18
