The Crevice Part 22

"Not so fast, Pennold. I have a warrant here for your arrest!"

"Don't you believe him, Wally!" shrilled Mame. "It's a fake! Don't you talk to him! Put him out."

"The warrant was issued this morning, and I am empowered to arrest you. You can look at it for yourselves; you've both seen them before."

He opened the paper and spread it out for them to read. "Walter Pennold, alias William Perry, alias Wally the Scribbler, number 09203 in the Rogues' Gallery. First term at Joliet, for forgery; second at Sing Sing for shoving the queer. This warrant only holds you as a suspicious character, Pennold, but we can dig up plenty of other things, if it's necessary; there's a forger named Griswold in the Tombs now awaiting trial, who will snitch about that Rochester check, for one thing."

"Don't let him bluff you, Wally." Mame faced Morrow from her husband's side. "They can't rake up a thing that ain't outlawed by time. You've lived clean more'n seven years, an' you're free from the bulls. They can't hold you."

"I haven't any warrant yet for you, Mrs. Pennold," observed Morrow, imperturbably. "I admit that it's more than seven years since every department-store detective was on the look-out for Left-handed Mame. I believe you specialized in furs and laces, didn't you?"

"What's it to you? You can't lay a finger on me now!" the woman stormed, defiantly.

"Not for shop-lifting or forgery--but how about receiving stolen goods?"

The shot found an instant target. Walter Pennold slumped and crumpled down into his chair, his arms outspread upon the table. He laid his head upon them, and a single dry, shuddering sob tore its way from his throat. The woman backed slowly away, and for the first time a shadow as of approaching terror crossed her hard, challenging face.

"Stolen goods!" she repeated. "What are you tryin' to put over? Do you think we're so green at the game that you can plant the goods here an' get us put away on the strength of a past record? You're a--"

"Nothing like it!" Morrow leaned forward impressively. "We don't have to do any planting, Mame. It's a good deal less than seven years since the Mortimer Chase's silver plate lay in your cellar."

"Silver plate--in our cellar!" echoed Mame in genuine amazement.

She stepped forward again, her shrewish chin out-thrust, but Walter Pennold raised his face, and at sight of it she stopped as if turned to stone.

"It's no use!" he cried, brokenly. "They've got me, Mame!"

"Got you? They'll never get you!" her startled scream rang out.

"Wally, d'you know what the next term means? It's a lifer, on any count! I don't know what he means about any silver plate, but it's a bluff! Don't let him get your nerve!"

"Is it a bluff, Pennold?" asked Morrow, with dominant insistence.

The broken figure huddled in the chair shuddered uncontrollably.

"No, it ain't," he muttered. "I--I held out on you, Mame! I knew you wouldn't risk it, so I didn't say nothin' to you about it, but the money was too easy to let get by. The old gang offered me five hundred bucks just to keep it ten days, and pa.s.s it on to Jennings. He came here with a rag-picker's cart, you remember? You wondered what I was givin' him, an' I told you it was some rolls of old carpet I got from that place I was night watchman at, in Vandewater Street. I hid the stuff under the coal--"

"Shut up!" cried Mame, fiercely. "You don't know what you're sayin'.

Wally, hold your tongue for G.o.d's sake! Where's your spirit? Are you goin' to break down now like a reformatory brat, you that had 'em all guessin' for twenty years!"

The gaunt woman had recovered from the sudden shock of her husband's unexpected revelation and now towered protectingly over his collapsed form, her palsied hands for once steady and firm upon his shoulders, while her keen eyes glittered shrewdly at the young operative confronting them.

"Look here!" she said, shortly. "If you wanted us for receiving stolen goods, you wouldn't come around here with a warrant for Wally's arrest as a suspicious character, an' you wouldn't have worked that Brunell plant. What's your lay?"

"Information," responded Morrow, frankly. "The police don't know where the plate was, for those ten days, and there's no immediate need that they should. Blaine cleaned up that case eventually, you know--recovered the plate and caught the butler in Southampton, under the noses of the Scotland Yard men. I want to know what you can tell me about Brunell--and about your nephew, Charley Pennold."

Walter opened his lips, but closed them without speech, and his wife replied for him.

"We're no snitchers," she said coldly. "There's nothin' we can tell.

Jimmy Brunell's run straight for near twenty years, so far as we know."

"And Charley?" persisted Morrow.

"It's no use, Mame," Walter Pennold repeated, dully. "If I go up again, it means the end for me. Charley's got to take his chance, same as the rest of us. G.o.d knows I tried to do the right thing by the boy, same as Jimmy did by his daughter, but Charley's got the blood in him. It's h.e.l.l to peach on your own, but it's worse to hear that iron door clank behind you, and to know it's for the last time! After all, there ain't nothin' in what we can tell about Charley that a lot of other people wouldn't spill, an' nothin' that could land him behind the bars. I ain't the man I was, or I'd take my medicine without squealin', but I can't face it again, Mame, I can't! I'm an old man now, old before my time, perhaps, but it's been so long since I smelled the prison taint, so long since I had a number instead of a name, that I'd die now, quick, before I'd rot in a cell!"

The terrible, droning monotone ceased, and for a moment there was silence in the squalid little room. The woman's face was as impa.s.sive as Morrow's, as she waited. Only the tightening of her hands upon her husband's shoulders, until her bony knuckles showed white through the drawn skin, betrayed the storm of emotion which swept over her, at the memories evoked by the broken words.

"I'm not asking you to snitch, Pennold," Morrow said, not unkindly.

"We know all we want to about Brunell's life at present--his home in the Bronx, and his little map-making shop--and we're not trying to rake up anything from the past to hold over him now; it is only some general information I want. As to your nephew, you've got to tell me all you know about him, or it's all up with you. Blaine won't give you away, if you'll answer my questions frankly and make a clean breast of it, and this is your only chance."

Pennold licked his dry lips.

"What do you want to know?" he asked, at last.

"When did Jimmy Brunell turn his last trick?"

"Years ago; I've forgotten how many. It's no harm speakin' of it now, for he did his seven years up the river for it--his first and only conviction. That was the time old Cowperthwaite's name was forged to five checks amounting to thirty thousand, all told, and Jimmy was caught on the last."

"Where was his plant?"

"In a bas.e.m.e.nt on Dye Street. The bulls never found it. He was running a little printer's shop in front, as a blind--oh, he was clever, old Jimmy, the sharpest in his line!"

"What became of his outfit, when he was sent up?"

"Dunno. It just disappeared. Some of his old pals cribbed it, I guess, or Jimmy may have fixed it with them to remove it. He was always close-mouthed, and he never would tell me. I knew where his plant was, of course, and I went there myself, after he was sent up and the coast was clear, to get the outfit, to--to take care of it for him until he came out. Oh, I ain't afraid to tell now; it's so long ago! I could take you to the place to-day, but the outfit's gone."

"And when he had served his term, what happened?"

"He came out to find that his wife was dead, and Emily, the little girl that was born just after he went up, was none too well treated by the people her mother'd had to leave her with. He'd learned in the pen' to make maps, an' he opened a little shop an' made up his mind to live straight, an'--an' so far as I know, he has." Pennold faltered, as if from weakness, and for a moment his voice ceased. Then he went on: "I ain't seen him for a long time, but we kept track of each other, an' when you come with that c.o.c.k-an'-bull story about the bonds, and the bank backed you up in it, why I--I went to see him."

"You wrote him first. Why did you send a cipher letter?"

"Because I suspicioned the whole thing was a plant, just like it turned out to be, an' I didn't want to get an old pal into no trouble.

The cipher's an old one we used years ago, in the gang, an' I know he wouldn't forget it. I never thought he'd squeal on me to Blaine!"

"He didn't. The letter--er--came into Blaine's possession, and he read it for himself."

"He did?" Pennold looked up quickly, with a flash of interest on his sullen face. "He's a wonder, that Blaine! If he'd only got started the other way, the way we did, what a crook he would have made! As it is, I guess we ain't afraid of all the organized police on earth combined, as much as we are of him. It's a queer thing he ain't been shot up or blown into eternity long ago, an' yet they say he's never guarded. He must be a cool one! Anyhow, I'm glad Jimmy didn't squeal on me; I'd hate to think it of him. When I went to see him about the bonds, he wouldn't have nothin' to do with them. Swore they was a plant, he did, an' warned me off. He seemed real excited, considerin' he had nothin'

to worry about, but I took his word for it, an' beat it. That's the last I seen of him."

"Did you send your nephew to him?"

"Me?" Pennold's tones quickened in surprise. "I ain't seen him in a long while, an' I don't believe he even remembers old Jimmy; he was only a kid when Jimmy went up the river. What would I send Charley for, when I'd gone myself an' it hadn't worked?"

It was evident to Morrow that the man he was interrogating was ignorant of Brunell's connection with the Lawton case, and he changed his tactics.

"Tell me about Charley. You say you tried to do right by him."

"Of course I did! Wasn't he my brother's boy?" Pennold hunched over the table, and continued eagerly: "Mame kept him clean an' fed, an' we sent him to public school, just like any other kid. But it wasn't no use. He had it in him to go wrong, without the wit to get away with it. He was caught pinchin' lead piping when he was sixteen, an' sent to Elmira for three years. Them three years was his finish. When he came out he'd had what you'd call a graduate course in every form of crookedness under the sun, from fellers harder an' cleverer than he'd ever thought of bein', an' he was bitter besides, an' desperate. There wasn't no chance for him then, an' he just drifted on down the line. I never heard of him turnin' a real trick himself, an' he never got caught at nothin' again, but he chummed in with the gang, an' he always seemed to have coin enough. I ain't seen him in more'n a year.

The last I heard of him, he was workin' as a stool-pigeon an' snitcher for the worst scoundrel of the lot."