The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 35

"You mean that the man I met and talked to last night is actually an accomplice of yours?"

"Yes," she answered, "if you care to put it that way."

"But I can't believe it. I _won't_ believe it until you bring him here and prove it."

She sank into her chair, with a half-listless motion for me to be seated.

"Do you know why he's called c.o.ke Whelan?" she demanded.

I did not.

"That, too, you've got to know. It's because he's a heroin and cocaine fiend. He's killing himself with the use of drugs. He's making everything impossible. It's left him irresponsible, as dangerous as any lunatic would be at large."

She turned and looked at a tiny jeweled watch.

"He will be here himself by ten o'clock. And if he heard me saving what I am at this moment, he would kill me as calmly as he'd sit at a cafe table and lie to you."

"But what's the good of those lies?"

"Don't you suppose he knew you were Witter Kerfoot, that among other things you owned a house, and a car, that you were worth making a try for? Don't you suppose he found all that out before he laid his ropes for this wire-tapping story? Can't you see the part _I_ was to play, to follow his lead and show you how we could never bring his money back, but that we could face the gang with their own fire. I was to weaken and show you how we could tap the tapper's own wire, choose the race that promised the best odds, and induce you to plunge against the house on what seemed a sure thing?"

I sat there doing my best to Fletcherize what seemed a remarkably big bite of information.

"But why are you telling me all this?" I still parried, pus.h.i.+ng back from the flattering consciousness that we had a secret in common, that I had proved worthy an intimacy denied others.

"Because I've just decided it's the easiest way out."

"For whom?"

"For me!"

"What made you decide that?"

"I've done a lot of thinking since you came into this room. And for a long time I've been doing a lot of thinking. I don't do things c.o.ke Whelan's way. I took pity on him, once. But I'm getting tired of trying to keep him up when he insists on dropping lower, lower and lower every day. Don't imagine, because you've got certain ideas of me and my life, that I haven't common sense, that I can't see what this other sort of thing leads to. I've seen too many of them, and how they all ended. I may have been mixed up with some strange company in my day, but I want you to know that I've kept my hands clean!"

She had risen by this time and was moving restlessly about the room.

"Do you suppose I'd ever be satisfied to be one of those painted Broadway dolls and let my brain dry up like a lemon on a pantry shelf?

I couldn't if I wanted to. I couldn't, although I can see how easy it makes everything. I tell you, a woman with a reputation like mine has got to pay, and keep on paying. She's got to pay twice over for the decencies of life. She's got to pay twice over for protection. Unless you're respectable you can't have respectable people about you. You've got to watch every one in your circle, watch them always, like a hawk.

You've got to watch every step you take, and every man you meet--and sometimes you get tired of it all."

She sat down, in the midst of her febrile torrent of words, and looked at me out of clouded and questioning eyes. I knew, as I met that troubled gaze, so touched with weariness and rebellion, that she was speaking the truth. I could see truth written on her face. I tried to imagine myself in her place, I tried to see life as she had seen it during those past years, which no charity could translate into anything approaching the beautiful. And much as I might have wished it, I could utter no emptiest phrase of consolation. Our worlds seemed too hopelessly wide apart for any common view-point.

"What are you going to do?" I asked, humiliated by the inadequacy of the question even as I uttered it.

"I'm going to get away from it. I'm going to get away where I can breathe in peace. Oh, believe me, I can be irreproachable without even an effort. I want to be. I prefer it. I've found how much easier it makes life. It's not my past I've been afraid of. It's that one drug-soaked maniac, that poor helpless thing who knows that if I step away from him he daren't round a street-corner without being arrested."

She stopped suddenly and the color ebbed out of her face. Then I saw her slowly rise to her feet and look undecidedly about the four corners of the room. Then she turned to me. Her eyes seemed ridiculously terrified.

"_He's come!_" she said, in little more than a whisper. "He's here now!"

The door opened before I could speak. But even before the mummy-faced man I had left at the cafe table the night before could stride into the room, the woman in front of me sank back into her chair. Over her face came a change, a veil, a quickly coerced and smiling-lipped blankness that reminded me of a pastoral stage-drop shutting out some grim and moving tragedy.

The change in the bearing and att.i.tude of the intruder was equally prompt as his startled eyes fell on me calmly seated within those four walls. He was not as quick as the woman in catching his cue.

I could plainly detect the interrogative look he flashed at her, the look which demanded as plain as words: "What is this man doing here?"

"This," said the woman at the table, in her most dulcet and equable tones, "is the altruistic gentleman who objects to your losing thirty thousand dollars in a race which I had no earthly way of controlling."

Here, I saw, was histrionism without a flaw. Her fellow-actor, I could also see, was taking more time to adjust himself to his role. He was less finished in his a.s.sumption of accusatory indignation. But he did his best to rise to the occasion.

"I've got to get that money back," he cried, leveling a shaking finger at her. "And I'm going to do it without dragging my friends into it!"

She walked over to the windows and closed them before she spoke.

"What's the use of going over all that?" she continued, and I had the impression of sitting before a row of foot-lights and watching an acted drama. "You took your risk and lost. I didn't get it. It's not my fault. You know as well as I do that McGowan and Noyes will never open up unless you're in a position to make them. It's a case of dog eat dog, of fighting fire with fire. And I've just been telling it all to your friend Mr. Kerfoot, who seems to think he's going to have some one arrested if we don't suddenly do the right thing."

"I want my money!" cried the man named Whelan. I could see, even as he delivered his lines, that his mind was floundering and groping wildly about for solid ground.

"And Mr. Kerfoot," continued the tranquil-voiced woman at the table, "says he has a house in Gramercy Square where we can go and have a conference. I've phoned for a telegraph operator called Downey to be there, so we can decide on a plan for tapping McGowan's wire."

"And what good does that do me?" demanded the mummy-faced youth.

"Why, that gives Mr. Kerfoot his chance to bet as much as he likes, to get as much back from McGowan as he wants to, without any risk of losing."

"But who handles the money?" demanded the wary Whelan.

"That's quite immaterial. _You_ can, if you're his friend, or he can handle it himself. The important thing is to get your plan settled and your wire tapped. And if Mr. Kerfoot will be so good as to telephone to his butler I'll dress and be ready in ten minutes."

She leaned forward and swung an equipoise phone-bracket round to my elbow.

But I did not lift the receiver from its hook. For at that moment the door abruptly opened. The maid in the white cap and ap.r.o.n stood trembling on its threshold.

"That's a lie!" she was crying, in her shrill and sudden abandon, and the twin badges of servitude made doubly incongruous her att.i.tude of fierce revolt. "It's a lie, Tony! She's welched on you!"

She took three quick steps into the room.

"She's only playing you against this guy. I've heard every word of it.

She never phoned for an operator. That's a lie. She's throwing you down, for good. She's told him who you are and what your game is!"

I looked at the other woman. She was now on her feet.

"Don't let her fool you this time, Tony," was the pa.s.sionate cry from the quivering breast under the incongruous white ap.r.o.n-straps. "Look at how she's treated you! Look at your picture there, that she cinched her talk with! She never did half what I did for you! And now you're letting her throw you flat! You're standing there and letting--"

The woman stopped, and put her hands over her ears. For she saw, even as I did, the hollow-eyed, mummy-faced youth reach a shaking hand back to his hip.

"You liar!" he said, as his hand swung up with the revolver in it.

"You lying welcher!" he cried, in a thin and throaty voice that was little more than a cackle.