Never-Fail Blake

  NEVER-FAIL BLAKE

  by

  ARTHUR STRINGER

  [Frontispiece: "Then why can't you marry me?"]

  Mckinlay, Stone & MackenzieNew YorkCopyright, 1913, byThe Bobbs-Merrill Company

  NEVER-FAIL BLAKE

  I

  Blake, the Second Deputy, raised his gloomy hound's eyes as the dooropened and a woman stepped in. Then he dropped them again.

  "Hello, Elsie!" he said, without looking at her.

  The woman stood a moment staring at him. Then she advancedthoughtfully toward his table desk.

  "Hello, Jim!" she answered, as she sank into the empty chair at thedesk end. The rustling of silk suddenly ceased. An aphrodisiac odorof ambergris crept through the Deputy-Commissioner's office.

  The woman looped up her veil, festooning it about the undulatory rollof her hat brim. Blake continued his solemnly preoccupied study of thedesk top.

  "You sent for me," the woman finally said. It was more a reminder thana question. And the voice, for all its quietness, carried no sense oftimidity. The woman's pale face, where the undulating hat brim leftthe shadowy eyes still more shadowy, seemed fortified with a calm senseof power. It was something more than a dormant consciousness ofbeauty, though the knowledge that men would turn back to a face sowistful as hers, and their judgment could be dulled by a smile sonarcotizing, had not a little to do with the woman's achieved serenity.There was nothing outwardly sinister about her. This fact had alwaysleft her doubly dangerous as a law-breaker.

  Blake himself, for all his dewlap and his two hundred pounds oflethargic beefiness, felt a vague and inward stirring as he finallylifted his head and looked at her. He looked into the shadowy eyesunder the level brows. He could see, as he had seen before, that theywere exceptional eyes, with iris rings of deep gray about theever-widening and ever-narrowing pupils which varied with varyingthought, as though set too close to the brain that controlled them. Sodominating was this pupil that sometimes the whole eye looked violet,and sometimes green, according to the light.

  Then his glance strayed to the woman's mouth, where the upper lipcurved outward, from the base of the straight nose, giving her at firstglance the appearance of pouting. Yet the heavier underlip, soft andwilful, contradicted this impression of peevishness, deepened it intoone of Ishmael-like rebellion.

  Then Blake looked at the woman's hair. It was abundant and nut-brown,and artfully and scrupulously interwoven and twisted together. Itseemed to stand the solitary pride of a life claiming few things ofwhich to be proud. Blake remembered how that wealth of nut-brown hairwas daily plaited and treasured and coiled and cared for, themeticulous attentiveness with which morning by morning its hip-reachingabundance was braided and twisted and built up about the small head, anintricate structure of soft wonder which midnight must ever see againin ruins, just as the next morning would find idly laborious fingersrebuilding its ephemeral glories. This rebuilding was donethoughtfully and calmly, as though it were a religious rite, as thoughit were a sacrificial devotion to an ideal in a life tragically forlornof beauty.

  He remembered, too, the day when he had first seen her. That was atthe time of "The Sick Millionaire" case, when he had first learned ofher association with Binhart. She had posed at the Waldorf as atrained nurse, in that case, and had met him and held him off andoutwitted him at every turn. Then he had decided on his "plant." Toeffect this he had whisked a young Italian with a lacerated thumb upfrom the City Hospital and sent him in to her as an injuredelevator-boy looking for first-aid treatment. One glimpse of her workon that thumb showed her to be betrayingly ignorant of bothfigure-of-eight and spica bandaging, and Blake, finally satisfied as tothe imposture, carried on his investigation, showed "Doctor Callahan"to be Connie Binhart, the con-man and bank thief, and sent the twoadventurers scurrying away to shelter.

  He remembered, too, how seven months after that first meeting Stimsonof the Central Office had brought her to Headquarters, fresh fromParis, involved in some undecipherable way in an Aix-les-Bains diamondrobbery. The despatches had given his office very little to work on,and she had smiled at his thunderous grillings and defied his noisythreats. But as she sat there before him, chic and guarded, with hergirlishly frail body so arrogantly well gowned, she had in some waytouched his lethargic imagination. She showed herself to be of finerand keener fiber than the sordid demireps with whom he had to do.Shimmering and saucy and debonair as a polo pony, she had seemed adeparture from type, something above the meretricious termagants roundwhom he so often had to weave his accusatory webs of evidence.

  Then, the following autumn, she was still again mysteriously involvedin the Sheldon wire-tapping coup. This Montreal banker named Sheldon,from whom nearly two hundred thousand dollars had been wrested, put abullet through his head rather than go home disgraced, and she hadstraightway been brought down to Blake, for, until the autopsy and theproduction of her dupe's letters, Sheldon's death had been looked uponas a murder.

  Blake had locked himself in with the white-faced Miss Elsie Verriner,alias Chaddy Cravath, alias Charlotte Carruthers, and for three longhours he had pitted his dynamic brute force against her flashing andsnake-like evasiveness. He had pounded her with the artillery of hisinhumanities. He had beleaguered her with explosive brutishness. Hehad bulldozed and harried her into frantic weariness. He hadthird-degreed her into cowering and trembling indignation, into hecticmental uncertainties. Then, with the fatigue point well passed, he hadmarshaled the last of his own animal strength and essayed the finalblasphemous Vesuvian onslaught that brought about the nervousbreakdown, the ultimate collapse. She had wept, then, the blubbering,loose-lipped, abandoned weeping of hysteria. She had stumbled forwardand caught at his arm and clung to it, as though it were her lastearthly pillar of support. Her huge plaited ropes of hair had fallendown, thick brown ropes longer than his own arms, and he, breathinghard, had sat back and watched them as she wept.

  But Blake was neither analytical nor introspective. How it came abouthe never quite knew. He felt, after his blind and inarticulatefashion, that this scene of theirs, that this official assault andsurrender, was in some way associated with the climacteric transportsof camp-meeting evangelism, that it involved strange nerve-centerstouched on in rhapsodic religions, that it might even resemble thefinal emotional surrender of reluctant love itself to the firstaggressive tides of passion. What it was based on, what it arose from,he could not say. But in the flood-tide of his own tumultuous conquesthe had watched her abandoned weeping and her tumbled brown hair. Andas he watched, a vague and troubling tingle sped like a fuse-sputteralong his limbs, and fired something dormant and dangerous in the greathulk of a body which had never before been stirred by its explosion ofemotion. It was not pity, he knew; for pity was something quiteforeign to his nature. Yet as she lay back, limp and forlorn againsthis shoulder, sobbing weakly out that she wanted to be a good woman,that she could be honest if they would only give her a chance, he feltthat thus to hold her, to shield her, was something desirable.

  She had stared, weary and wide-eyed, as his head had bent closer downover hers. She had drooped back, bewildered and unresponsive, as hisheavy lips had closed on hers that were still wet and salty with tears.When she had left the office, at the end of that strange hour, she hadgone with the promise of his protection.

  The sobering light of day, with its cynic relapse to actualities, mighthave left that promise a worthless one, had not the prompt evidence ofSheldon's suicide come to hand. This made Blake's task easier than hehad expected. The movement against Elsie Verriner was "smothered" atHeadquarters. Two days later she met Blake by appointment. That day,for the first time in his life, he gave flowers to a woman.

  Two weeks later he startled her
with the declaration that he wanted tomarry her. He did n't care about her past. She 'd been dragged intothe things she 'd done without understanding them, at first, and she 'dkept on because there 'd been no one to help her away from them. Heknew he could do it. She had a fine streak in her, and he wanted tobring it out!

  A little frightened, she tried to explain that she was not the marryingkind. Then, brick-red and bull-necked, he tried to tell her in hisgroping Celtic way that he wanted children, that she meant a lot tohim, that he was going to try to make her the happiest woman south ofHarlem.

  This had brought into her face a quick and dangerous light which hefound hard to explain. He could see that she was flattered by what hehad said, that his words had made her waywardly happy, that for amoment, in fact, she had been swept off her feet.

  Then dark afterthought interposed. It crept like a cloud across herabandoned face. It brought about a change so prompt that it disturbedthe Second Deputy.

  "You 're--you 're not tied up already, are you?" he had hesitatinglydemanded. "You 're not married?"

  "No, I 'm not tied up!" she had promptly and fiercely responded. "Mylife 's my own--my own!"

  "Then why can't you marry me?" the practical-minded man had asked.

  "I could!" she had retorted, with the same fierceness as before. Thenshe had stood looking at him out of wistful and unhappy eyes. "Icould--if you only understood, if you could only help me the way I wantto be helped!"

  She had clung to his arm with a tragic forlornness that seemed to leaveher very wan and helpless. And he had found it ineffably sweet toenfold that warm mass of wan helplessness in his own virile strength.

  She asked for time, and he was glad to consent to the delay, so long asit did not keep him from seeing her. In matters of the emotions he wasstill as uninitiated as a child. He found himself a little dazed bythe seemingly accidental tenderness, by the promises of devotion, inwhich she proved so lavish. Morning by jocund morning he built up hisairy dreams, as carefully as she built up her nut-brown plaits. Hegrew heavily light-headed with his plans for the future. When shepleaded with him never to leave her, never to trust her too much, hepatted her thin cheek and asked when she was going to name the day.From that finality she still edged away, as though her happiness itselfwere only experimental, as though she expected the blue sky above themto deliver itself of a bolt.

  But by this time she had become a habit with him. He liked her even inher moodiest moments. When, one day, she suggested that they go awaytogether, anywhere so long as it was away, he merely laughed at herchildishness.

  It was, in fact, Blake himself who went away. After nine weeks ofalternating suspense and happiness that seemed nine weeks ofinebriation to him, he was called out of the city to complete theinvestigation on a series of iron-workers' dynamite outrages. Daily hewrote or wired back to her. But he was kept away longer than he hadexpected. When he returned to New York she was no longer there. Shehad disappeared as completely as though an asphalted avenue had openedand swallowed her up. It was not until the following winter that helearned she was again with Connie Binhart, in southern Europe.

  He had known his one belated love affair. It had left no scar, heclaimed, because it had made no wound. Binhart, he consoled himself,had held the woman in his power: there had been no defeat because therehad been no actual conquest. And now he could face her without aneye-blink of conscious embarrassment. Yet it was good to remember thatConnie Binhart was going to be ground in the wheels of the law, andground fine, and ground to a finish.

  "What did you want me for, Jim?" the woman was again asking him. Shespoke with an intimate directness, and yet in her attitude were subtlereservations, a consciousness of the thin ice on which they both stood.Each saw, only too plainly, the need for great care, in every step. Ineach lay the power to uncover, at a hand's turn, old mistakes that werebest unremembered. Yet there was a certain suave audacity about thewoman. She was not really afraid of Blake, and the Second Deputy hadto recognize that fact. This self-assurance of hers he attributed tothe recollection that she had once brought about his personalsubjugation, "got his goat," as he had phrased it. She, woman-like,would never forget it.

  "There 's a man I want. And Schmittenberg tells me you know where heis." Blake, as he spoke, continued to look heavily down at his desktop.

  "Yes?" she answered cautiously, watching herself as carefully as anactress with a role to sustain, a role in which she could never quiteletter-perfect.

  "It's Connie Binhart," cut out the Second Deputy.

  He could see discretion drop like a curtain across her watching face.

  "Connie Binhart!" she temporized. Blake, as his heavy side glanceslewed about to her, prided himself on the fact that he could seethrough her pretenses. At any other time he would have thrown open theflood-gates of that ever-inundating anger of his and swept away allsuch obliquities.

  "I guess," he went on with slow patience "we know him best round hereas Charles Blanchard."

  "Blanchard?" she echoed.

  "Yes, Blanchard, the Blanchard we 've been looking for, for sevenmonths now, the Blanchard who chloroformed Ezra Newcomb and carried offa hundred and eighteen thousand dollars."

  "Newcomb?" again meditated the woman.

  "The Blanchard who shot down the bank detective in Newcomb's room whenthe rest of the bank was listening to a German band playing in the sidestreet, a band hired for the occasion."

  "When was that?" demanded the woman.

  "That was last October," he answered with a sing-song wearinesssuggestive of impatience at such supererogative explanations.

  "I was at Monte Carlo all last autumn," was the woman's quick retort.

  Blake moved his heavy body, as though to shoulder away any claim as toher complicity.

  "I know that," he acknowledged. "And you went north to Paris on thetwenty-ninth of November. And on the third of December you went toCherbourg; and on the ninth you landed in New York. I know all that.That's not what I 'm after. I want to know where Connie Binhart is,now, to-day."

  Their glances at last came together. No move was made; no word wasspoken. But a contest took place.

  "Why ask _me_?" repeated the woman for the second time. It was onlytoo plain that she was fencing.

  "Because you _know_," was Blake's curt retort. He let the gray-irisedeyes drink in the full cup of his determination. Some slowlyaccumulating consciousness of his power seemed to intimidate her. Hecould detect a change in her hearing, in her speech itself.

  "Jim, I can't tell you," she slowly asserted. "I can't do it!"

  "But I 've got 'o know," he stubbornly maintained. "And I 'm going to."

  She sat studying him for a minute or two. Her face had lost itsearlier arrogance. It seemed troubled; almost touched with fear. Shewas not altogether ignorant, he reminded himself, of the resourceswhich he could command.

  "I can't tell you," she repeated. "I'd rather you let me go."

  The Second Deputy's smile, scoffing and melancholy, showed how utterlyhe ignored her answer. He looked at his watch. Then he looked back atthe woman. A nervous tug-of-war was taking place between her right andleft hand, with a twisted-up pair of ecru gloves for the cable.

  "You know me," he began again in his deliberate and abdominal bass."And I know you. I 've got 'o get this man Binhart. I 've got 'o! He's been out for seven months, now, and they 're going to put it up tome, to _me_, personally. Copeland tried to get him without me. Hefell down on it. They all fell down on it. And now they're going tothrow the case back on me. They think it 'll be my Waterloo."

  He laughed. His laugh was as mirthless as the cackle of a guinea hen."But I 'm going to die hard, believe me! And if I go down, if theythink they can throw me on that, I 'm going to take a few of my friendsalong with me."

  "Is that a threat?" was the woman's quick inquiry. Her eyes narrowedagain, for she had long since learned, and learned it to her sorrow,that every breath he drew was a breat
h of self-interest.

  "No; it's just a plain statement." He slewed about in his swivelchair, throwing one thick leg over the other as he did so. "I hate toholler Auburn at a girl like you, Elsie; but I 'm going--"

  "Auburn?" she repeated very quietly. Then she raised her eyes to his."Can you say a thing like that to me, Jim?"

  He shifted a little in his chair. But he met her gaze without a wince.

  "This is business, Elsie, and you can't mix business and--and otherthings," he tailed off at last, dropping his eyes.

  "I 'm sorry you put it that way," she said. "I hoped we 'd be betterfriends than that!"

  "I'm not counting on friendship in this!" he retorted.

  "But it might have been better, even in this!" she said. And theartful look of pity on her face angered him.

  "Well, we 'll begin on something nearer home!" he cried.

  He reached down into his pocket and produced a small tinted oblong ofpaper. He held it, face out, between his thumb and forefinger, so thatshe could read it.

  "This Steinert check 'll do the trick. Take a closer look at thesignature. Do you get it?"

  "What about it?" she asked, without a tremor.

  He restored the check to his wallet and the wallet to his pocket. Shewould find it impossible to outdo him in the matter of impassivity.

  "I may or I may not know who forged that check. I don't _want_ toknow. And when you tell me where Binhart is, I _won't_ know."

  "That check was n't forged," contended the quiet-eyed woman.

  "Steinert will swear it was," declared the Second Deputy.

  She sat without speaking, apparently in deep study. Her intent faceshowed no fear, no bewilderment, no actual emotion of any kind.

  "You 've got 'o face it," said Blake, sitting back and waiting for herto speak. His attitude was that of a physician at a bedside, awaitingthe prescribed opiate to produce its prescribed effect.

  "Will I be dragged into this case, in any way, if Binhart is roundedup?" the woman finally asked.

  "Not once," he asserted.

  "You promise me that?"

  "Of course," answered the Second Deputy.

  "And you 'll let me alone on--on the other things?" she calmly exacted.

  "Yes," he promptly acknowledged. "I 'll see that you 're let alone."

  Again she looked at him with her veiled and judicial eyes. Then shedropped her hands into her lap. The gesture seemed one of resignation.

  "Binhart's in Montreal," she said.

  Blake, keeping his face well under control, waited for her to go on.

  "He 's been in Montreal for weeks now. You 'll find him at 381 KingEdward Avenue, in Westmount. He 's there, posing as an expertaccountant."

  She saw the quick shadow of doubt, the eye-flash of indecision. So shereached quietly down and opened her pocket-book, rummaging through itscontents for a moment or two. Then she handed Blake a folded envelope.

  "You know his writing?" she asked.

  "I 've seen enough of it," he retorted, as he examined the typewrittenenvelope post-marked "Montreal, Que." Then he drew out the innersheet. On it, written by pen, he read the message: "Come to 381 KingEdward when the coast is clear," and below this the initials "C. B."

  Blake, with the writing still before his eyes, opened a desk drawer andtook out a large reading-glass. Through the lens of this he againstudied the inscription, word by word. Then he turned to the office'phone on his desk.

  "Nolan," he said into the receiver, "I want to know if there 's a KingEdward Avenue in Montreal."

  He sat there waiting, still regarding the handwriting with stolidlyreproving eyes. There was no doubt of its authenticity. He would haveknown it at a glance.

  "Yes, sir," came the answer over the wire. "It's one of the neweravenues in Westmount."

  Blake, still wrapped in thought, hung up the receiver. The womanfacing him did not seem to resent his possible imputation ofdishonesty. To be suspicious of all with whom he came in contact wasimposed on him by his profession. He was compelled to watch even hisassociates, his operatives and underlings, his friends as well as hisenemies. Life, with him, was a concerto of skepticisms.

  She was able to watch him, without emotion, as he again bent forward,took up the 'phone receiver, and this time spoke apparently to anotheroffice.

  "I want you to wire Teal to get a man out to cover 381 King EdwardAvenue, in Montreal. Yes, Montreal. Tell him to get a man out thereinside of an hour, and put a night watch on until I relieve 'em."

  Then, breathing heavily, he bent over his desk, wrote a short messageon a form pad and pushed the buzzer-button with his thick finger. Hecarefully folded up the piece of paper as he waited.

  "Get that off to Carpenter in Montreal right away," he said to theattendant who answered his call. Then he swung about in his chair,with a throaty grunt of content. He sat for a moment, staring at thewoman with unseeing eyes. Then he stood up. With his hands thrustdeep in his pockets he slowly moved his head back and forth, as thoughassenting to some unuttered question.

  "Elsie, you 're all right," he acknowledged with his solemn andunimaginative impassivity. "You 're all right."

  Her quiet gaze, with all its reservations, was a tacit question. Hewas still a little puzzled by her surrender. He knew she did notregard him as the great man that he was, that his public career hadmade of him.

  "You've helped me out of a hole," he acknowledged as he faced herinterrogating eyes with his one-sided smile. "I 'm mighty glad you 'vedone it, Elsie--for your sake as well as mine."

  "What hole?" asked the woman, wearily drawing on her gloves. There wasneither open contempt nor indifference on her face. Yet something inher bearing nettled him. The quietness of her question contrastedstrangely with the gruffness of the Second Deputy's voice as heanswered her.

  "Oh, they think I 'm a has-been round here," he snorted. "They 've gotthe idea I 'm out o' date. And I 'm going to show 'em a thing or twoto wake 'em up."

  "How?" asked the woman.

  "By doing what their whole kid-glove gang have n't been able to do," heavowed. And having delivered himself of that ultimatum, he promptlyrelaxed into his old-time impassiveness, like a dog snapping from hiskennel and shrinking back into its shadows. At the same moment thatBlake's thick forefinger again prodded the buzzer-button at his deskend the watching woman could see the relapse into official wariness.It was as though he had put the shutters up in front of his soul. Sheaccepted the movement as a signal of dismissal. She rose from herchair and quietly lowered and adjusted her veil. Yet through thatlowered veil she stood looking down at Never-Fail Blake for a moment ortwo. She looked at him with grave yet casual curiosity, as touristslook at a ruin that has been pointed out to them as historic.

  "You did n't give me back Connie Binhart's note," she reminded him asshe paused with her gloved finger-tips resting on the desk edge.

  "D' you want it?" he queried with simulated indifference, as he made afinal and lingering study of it.

  "I 'd like to keep it," she acknowledged. When, without meeting hereyes, he handed it over to her, she folded it and restored it to herpocket-book, carefully, as though vast things depended on that smallscrap of paper.

  Never-Fail Blake, alone in his office and still assailed by the vaguelydisturbing perfumes which she had left behind her, pondered her reasonsfor taking back Binhart's scrap of paper. He wondered if she had atany time actually cared for Binhart. He wondered if she was capable ofcaring for anybody. And this problem took his thoughts back to thetime when so much might have depended on its answer.

  The Second Deputy dropped his reading-glass in its drawer and slammedit shut. It made no difference, he assured himself, one way or theother. And in the consolatory moments of a sudden new triumphNever-Fail Blake let his thoughts wander pleasantly back over that longlife which (and of this he was now comfortably conscious) his nextofficial move was about to redeem.