Part 10 (2/2)
The gun-pulling episode had taken place in Thirty-ninth Street, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, but nearer Broadway than Sixth Avenue, at a moment when that block of Thirty-ninth Street was as near empty as ever it gets to be. The meeting in the darkened place, just where the portico at the side entrance of the old Jollity Theatre, extending out across the sidewalk, made a patch of obscurity in the half-lit street, had been a meeting by chance so far as Trencher was concerned. He had not been looking for Sonntag; hadn't wanted to see Sonntag. Whether Sonntag had been seeking him was something which n.o.body probably would ever know this side the hereafter.
To the best of Trencher's belief there had been but one possible eyewitness to the actual shooting. Out of the tail of his eye, just before he and Sonntag came to grips, he had caught a glimpse of this surmisable third party. He had sensed rather than seen that an elderly bearded man, perhaps the watchman of the closed theatre, pa.s.sed along the sidewalk, going east. It was Trencher's impression that the man had gone on by without halting. However, on that point he could not be sure.
What the onlooker had seen--if indeed there were an onlooker--could have been only this: Two men, one fairly tall and dressed in a sprightly fas.h.i.+on, one short and dark, engaged in a vehement but whispered quarrel there in the cloaking shadow close up to the locked double doors of the Jollity; a sudden hostile move on the part of the slighter man, backing away and reaching for his flank; a quick forward jump by the taller man to close with the other; a short sharp struggle as the pair of them fought for possession of the revolver which the dark man had jerked from his flank pocket; then the tall man, victorious, shoving his antagonist clear of him and stepping back a pace; and on top of this the three sharp reports and the three little spurts of fire bridging the short gap between the sundered enemies like darting red hyphens to punctuate the enacted tragedy.
Now the tall man, the one conspicuously dressed, had been Trencher. The shooting accomplished he stood where he was only long enough to see Sonntag fold up and sink down in a slumped shape in the doorway. He had seen men, mortally stricken, who folded up in that very same way; therefore he appraised Sonntag as one already dead, or at least as one who would die very speedily.
As he stepped out across the sidewalk into the roadway he let the automatic fall alongside the curb. The instant he had done this the heat of his hate departed from him leaving him cool and clear-minded and alert. It was as though the hot fumes of rage had all evaporated from his brain in the same twentieth part of a second that he had spent in discarding the weapon. For the reason that he was again entirely himself, resourceful and steady, he did not fall into the error of running away. To run away in this instant was to invite pursuit.
Instead he walked to the middle of the street, halted and looked about him--the picture of a citizen who had been startled by the sound of shots. This artifice, he felt sure, served to disarm possible suspicion on the part of any one of the persons who came hurrying up from east and west and from the north, across the street. Two or three of these first arrivals almost brushed him as they lunged past, drawing in toward the spot where Sonntag's doubled-up body made a darker blot in the darkened parallelogram beneath the portico.
Trencher had been in close places before now--close places when something smacking of violence had occurred--and he knew or felt he knew what next would happen to give him the precious grace of seconds and perhaps of minutes. Those who came foremost upon the scene would, through caution, hesitate for a brief s.p.a.ce of time before venturing close up to where the hunched shape lay. Then having circled and drawn in about the victim of the shooting they would for another brief period huddle together, asking excited and pointless questions of one another, some of them perhaps bending down and touching the victim to see whether he lived, some of them looking round for a policeman, some of them doing nothing at all--except confusedly to get in the way of everybody else.
This would be true of ninety-nine average individuals out of an average hundred of city population. But the hundredth man would keep his wits about him, seeking for the cause of the thing rather than concerning himself with the accomplished effect. For the moment it was this hundredth man Trencher would have to fear. Nevertheless, it would never do for him to show undue haste. Bearing himself in the matter of a disinterested citizen who had business that was not to be interfered with by street brawls, he turned away from the south, toward which he had been looking, shrugged his shoulders, and moving briskly, but without any seeming great haste, he made for the revolving door at the Thirty-ninth Street entrance to Wallinger's Hotel, diagonally across from the Jollity. With one hand on a panel of the door he stopped again and looked back.
Already, so soon, a crowd was gathering over the way--a little crowd--which at once inevitably would become a dense jostling crowd. A policeman, not to be mistaken even at a distance of seventy feet or more for anyone but a policeman, had turned the corner out of Broadway and was running down the opposite pavement. The policeman's arrival was to be expected; it would be his business to arrive at the earliest possible moment, and having arrived to lead the man hunt that would follow. What Trencher, peering over his shoulder, sought for, was the hundredth man--the man who, ignoring the lesser fact of a dead body, would strive first off to catch up the trail of whosoever had done this thing.
Trencher thought he made him out. There was to be seen an elderly man, roughly dressed, possibly the same man whose proximity Trencher had felt rather than observed just before Sonntag made the gun play, and this man was half-squatted out on the asphalt with his back to where the rest circled and swirled about the body. Moreover, this person was staring directly in Trencher's direction. As Trencher pa.s.sed within the revolving door he saw the man pivot on his heels and start at an angle toward the policeman just as the policeman was swallowed up in the rings of figures converging into the theatre doorway.
If the policeman were of a common-enough type of policeman--that is to say, if he were the sort of policeman who would waste time examining Sonntag's body for signs of life and then waste more time asking questions of those who had preceded him to the place, and yet more time peering about for the weapon that had been used; or if, in the excitement with everybody shouting together, the one man who possibly had a real notion concerning the proper description of the vanished slayer found difficulty in securing the policeman's attention--why then, in any one of these cases, or better still, in all of them, Trencher had a chance. With a definite and intelligently guided pursuit starting forthwith he would be lost. But with three minutes, or two even, of delay vouchsafed him before the alarm took shape and purpose he might make it.
Accepting the latter contingency as the a.s.sured one he formed a plan instantaneously. Indeed, it sprang full-formed into his mind as the door swung round behind him. It added to the immediate difficulties of his present situation that he was most notably marked--by his garb. He had the dramatic sense well developed, as any man must have who succeeds at his calling. When Trencher played a part he dressed the part. In the staging of the plot for the undoing of the Cheyenne cattleman his had been the role of the sporting ex-telegraph operator, who could get ”flashes” on the result of horse races before the names of the winners came over an imaginary tapped wire to the make-believe pool room where the gull was stripped; and he had been at some pains and expense to procure a wardrobe befitting the character.
The worst of it was that he now wore the make-up--the short fawn-coloured overcoat with its big showy b.u.t.tons of smoked pearl, the brown derby hat with its striking black band, and the pair of light-tan spats. Stripped of these things he would be merely a person in a costume in nowise to be distinguished from the costumes of any number of other men in the Broadway district. But for the moment there was neither opportunity nor time to get rid of all of them without attracting the attention that would be fatal to his prospects. Men who have nothing to hide do not remove spats in a hotel lobby, nor do they go about public places bareheaded in the nighttime. Now he could do but one thing to alter his appearance.
Midway of the cross hall which he had entered and which opened into the main lobby he slowed his gait long enough to undo the overcoat and slip out of it. The top b.u.t.ton caught fast in its b.u.t.tonhole, the coat being new and its b.u.t.tonholes being stiff. He gave a sharp tug at the rebellious cloth, and the b.u.t.ton, which probably had been insecurely sewed on in the first place, came away from its thread fastenings and lodged in the fingers of his right hand. Mechanically he dropped it into a side pocket of the overcoat and a moment later, with the garment turned inside out so that only its silk lining showed, and held under his arm, he had come out of the sideway and was in the lobby proper.
He was prepared mentally to find signs of an alarm here--to encounter persons hurrying toward the Thirty-ninth Street side of the building.
But nothing of the sort was afoot. A darky orchestra was playing a jazz tune very loudly in the cafe at the left of the Broadway entrance, so it was not only possible but very likely that the sounds of the shots had not been heard inside the hotel at all. Certainly his eye, sweeping the place, discovered no evidences of any unusual stir. Perhaps half a dozen individuals were traversing the tiled floor, but none of them in any seeming hurry.
With no suggestion of agitation about him anywhere and with nothing furtive or stealthy in his movements, Trencher boldly pa.s.sed the corner of the desk, crossed the lobby, went along the front of the news stand, where a young woman stood among her wares, and through another set of revolving doors came out upon Broadway. It was that one hour of the night--a quarter of eleven o'clock, while the last acts are still going on and before the theatres give up their audiences--when Broadway's sidewalks are not absolutely overflowing with jostling, pouring currents of people. Numbers were abroad, for numbers always are abroad in this part of the town, be the time of day or of night what it may, but there was no congestion. This was as it should be; it suited this man's purposes exactly.
He issued forth, and a few rods north of the corner saw the person for whom he was seeking; at least he saw a most likely candidate--a ragged darky, in a district where ragged darkies unless they be beggars are not often seen, who with his hands in his pockets and his coat collar turned up was staring into the window of a small clothing shop two doors above the narrow-fronted hotel. Trencher made for him. Remember, all this--from the moment of the shooting until now--had taken much less time than has been required for me to describe it in sequence or for you to read about it.
He tapped the darky on the arm.
”Boy,” he said sharply, ”want to pick up some easy money quick?”
”Yas, suh, I does!” The negro's eyes shone.
”Listen then: I've got to catch a train--sooner than I expected. My bag's packed and waiting for me up here at my boarding house in West Forty-fifth Street--Number 374 is the address--just west of Broadway--tall brownstone house with a high stoop. Get me? The bag's downstairs in the hall. The hall boy--a coloured fellow named Fred--is watching it for me. If I go in a cab I may not get to the station in time. If you go after it for me at a run I may catch my train. See?
Here's a dollar down in advance. Tell Fred Mr. Thompson sent you--that's me, Thompson. He'll give it to you--I told him I'd send for it. I'll be waiting right here. If you get back with it in seven minutes I'll give you another dollar--and if you get back inside of seven minutes I'll make it two dollars more. Got the number in your mind?”
”Yas, suh--three seventy-fo' Wes' Forty-fift', you said.”
”Correct. Now run like the very devil up Broadway to Forty-fifth and turn west!”
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