Part 45 (1/2)
A match crackled and flared up. A lamp was lighted. Larry the Bat sulked sullenly against the wall.
Terror-stricken, wide-eyed, Mrs. Hagan had clutched the child lying beside her to her arms, and was sitting bolt upright in bed.
”Now then, no fuss about it!” said the officer in charge, with brutal directness. ”You might as well make a clean breast of Mike's share in that murder downstairs--Larry the Bat, here, has already told us the whole story. Come on, now--out with it!”
”Murder!”--her face went white. ”My Mike--MURDER!” She seemed for an instant stunned--and then down the worn, thin, haggard face gushed the tears. ”I don't believe it!” she cried. ”I don't believe it!”
”Come on now, cut that out!” prodded the officer roughly. ”I tell you Larry the Bat, here, has opened everything up wide. You're only making it worse for yourself.”
”Him!” She was staring now at Jimmie Dale. ”Oh, G.o.d!” she cried.
”So that's what you are, are you--a stool-pigeon for the cops? Well, whatever you told them, you lie! You're the curse of this neighbourhood, you are, and if my Mike is bad at all, it's you that's helped to make him bad. But murder--you LIE!”
She had risen slowly from the bed--a gaunt, pitiful figure, pitifully clothed, the black hair, gray-streaked, streaming thinly over her shoulders, still clutching the baby that, too, was crying now.
The officers looked at one another and nodded.
”Guess she's handing it straight--we'll have a look on our own hook,”
the leader muttered.
She paid no attention to them--she was walking straight to Jimmie Dale.
”It's you, is it,” she whispered fiercely through her sobs ”that would bring more shame and ruin here--you that's selling my man's life away with your filthy lies for what they're paying you--it's you, is it, that--” Her voice broke.
There was a frightened, uneasy look in Larry the Bat's eyes, his lips were twitching weakly, he drew far back against the wall--and then, glancing miserably at the officers, as though entreating their permission, began to edge toward the door.
For a moment she watched him, her face white with outrage, her hand clenched at her side--and then she found her voice again.
”Get out of here!” she said, in a choked, strained way pointing to the door. ”Get out of here--you dirty skate!”
”Sure!” mumbled Larry the Bat, his eyes on the floor. ”Sure!” he mumbled--and the door closed behind him.
PART TWO: THE WOMAN IN THE CASE
CHAPTER I
BELOW THE DEAD LINE
Whisperings! Always whisperings, low, sibilant, floating errantly from all sides, until they seemed a component part of the drug-laden atmosphere itself. And occasionally another sound: the soft SLAP-SLAP of loose-slippered feet, the faint rustle of equally loose-fitting garments. And everywhere the sweet, sickish smell of opium. It was Chang Foo's, simply a cellar or two deeper in Chang Foo's than that in which Dago Jim had quarrelled once--and died!
Larry the Bat, vicious-faced, unkempt, disreputable, lay sprawled out on one of the dive's bunks, an opium pipe beside him. But Larry the Bat was not smoking; instead, his ear was pressed closely against the boarding that formed the rather flimsy part.i.tion at the side of the bunk. One heard many things in Chang Foo's if one cared to listen--if one could first win one's way through the carefully guarded gateway, that to the uninitiated offered nothing more interesting than the entrance to a Chinese tea-shop, and an uninviting one at that!
HAD HE BEEN FOLLOWED IN HERE? He had been shadowed for the last hour; of that, at least, he was certain. Why? By whom? For an hour he had dodged in and out through the dens of the underworld, as only one who was at home there and known to all could do--and at last he had taken refuge in Chang Foo's like a fox burrowing deep into its hole.
Few could find their way into the most infamous opium den in all New York, where not only the poppy ruled as master, but where crime was hatched, ay, and carried to its ghastly consummation, sometimes, as well; and of those few, not one but was of the underworld itself. And it was that fact which held his muscles strained and rigid now under the miserable rags that covered them, and it was that which kept the keen, quick brain alert and active, every faculty keyed up and tense. If it were the police, he had little to fear, for they could not force their way in without warning; but if it were the underworld, he was in imminent peril, and had done little better than run himself into a trap from which there was no escape.
”DEATH TO THE GRAY SEAL!”--he had heard that whispered more than once in this very place. Who knew at what moment the role of Larry the Bat would be uncovered, and the underworld, where now he held so high a place, would be at his throat like a pack of snarling wolves! Who had been shadowing him during the last hour?
Whisperings! Nothing tangible! He could catch no words. Only the never-ending whisperings of gathered groups here and there--and sometimes the clink of coin where some game was in progress.