Children of the Whirlwind, Leroy Scott [read full novel txt] 📗

/> "Just after you left Headquarters Officer Gavegan showed up. He had this Larry Brainard in tow - had pinched him out on Long Island."

This announcement staggered Maggie; for the moment made all her strenuous planning seem to have lost its purpose. In her normal condition she might either have given up or betrayed her real intent. But just now, in her super-excited state, in which she felt she was fighting desperately for others, she was acting far above her ordinary capacity; and she was making decisions so swift that they hardly seemed to proceed from conscious thought. So Barlow, vigilant watcher of faces that he was, saw nothing unusual in her expression or manner.

"What did you do with him?" she asked.

"Left him with Gavegan - and with Casey, who had just come in. Trailing with Brainard was a swell named Hunt, cussing mad. He was snorting around about being pals with most of the magistrates, and swore he'd have Brainard out on bail inside an hour. But what he does don't make any difference to me. Your proposition seems to me dead cold, since I've already got Brainard, and got him right. I wouldn't have bothered to have come here at all except for something you let drop about the pals he might have been working with these last few months."

"That's exactly it," she caught him up. "I never thought that you'd catch Larry Brainard here. How could I, when, if you know me as you say, you also know that he and I are in different camps - are fighting each other? What's going to happen here is something that will show you the people Larry Brainard's been mixed up with - that will turn up for you the people you want."

"But what's going to happen?" Barlow demanded.

To this Maggie answered in much the same strain she had used with Hannigan a few minutes earlier. "I told you down at Headquarters that everything that's important you'll learn by being present when the thing actually happened. What I tell you doesn't count for much - it might not be true. It's what you see and hear for yourself when things begin to happen. You're to wait in here." She led him to the second large closet and opened the door.

"See here," he demanded, "are you framing something on me?"

"How can I, in a big hotel like this? And even if I were to try, you'd certainly make me pay for it later. Besides, you've got a gun. Please go in quick; I'm expecting the people here any minute. And don't make a sound that might arouse their suspicions and queer everything."

He entered, and she closed the door. So carefully that he did not hear it, she locked the door; no more than in Hannigan's case did she want Barlow to come bungling into a scene before it had reached its climax.

All was now ready for the curtain to rise. Quivering all through she waited for Barney Palmer, whose entrance was to open her drama. She glanced at her wrist-watch which she had left upon the little lacquered writing-table. Ten minutes of nine. Ten more minutes to wait. She felt far more of sickening suspense than ever did any young playwright on the opening night of his first play. For she was more than merely playwright. In her desperate, overwrought determination Maggie had assumed for herself the super-mortal role of dea ex machina. And in those moments of tense waiting Maggie, who so feverishly loathed all she had been, was not at all sure whether she was going to succeed in her part of goddess from the machine.

At five minutes to nine there was a ring. She gave a little jump at the sound. That was Barney. Though generally when Barney came he used the latch-key which his assumed dear cousinship, and the argued possibility of their being out and thus causing him to wait around in discomfort, Miss Grierson's sense of propriety had unbent far enough to permit him to possess. The truth was, of course, that Barney had desired the key so that he might have most private conferences with Maggie, at any time necessity demanded, without the stolidly conscientious Miss Grierson ever knowing what had happened and being therefore unable to give dangerous testimony.

Maggie crossed and opened the door. But instead of Barney Palmer, it was Larry who stepped in. He quickly closed the door behind him.

"Larry!" she cried startled. "Why - why, I thought the police had you!"

"They did. But Hunt was with me, and he got hold of a magistrate who would have made Hunt a present of the Tombs and Police Headquarters if he had owned them."

"Then you're out on bail?"

"Got out about ten minutes ago. Hunt didn't have any property he could put up as security, so he 'phoned my grandmother. She walked in with an armload of deeds. Why, she must own as much property in New York as the Astor Estate."

"Larry, I'm so glad!" And then, remembering what, according to her plan, was due to begin to happen almost any moment, she exclaimed in dismay: "But, Larry, oh, why did you come here now!"

"I wanted to know - you understand - what you had decided to do after learning about your father. And I wanted to tell you that, after all my great boasts to you, I seem to have failed in every boast. Item one, the police have got me. Item two, since the police have got me, my old pals will also most likely get me. Item three, when I was arrested at Cedar Crest Miss Sherwood learned that I had known you all along and believes I was part of a conspiracy to clean out the family; so she chucked me - and I've lost what I believed my big chance to make good. So, you see, Maggie, it looks as if you were right when you predicted that I was going to fail in everything I said I was going to do."

"Larry - Miss Sherwood believes that!" she breathed. And then she remembered again, and caught his arm with sudden energy. "Larry, you mustn't stay here!"

"Why not?"

Her answer was almost identical with one she had given the previous evening. "Because Barney Palmer may be here the next minute!"

His response was in sense also identical. "Then I'll stay right here. There's no one I want to see as much as Barney Palmer. And this time I'll have it out with him!"

Maggie was in consternation at this unexpected twist which was not in the brain-manuscript of her play at all - which indeed threatened to take her play right out of her hands. "Please go, Larry!" she cried desperately. "And please give me a chance! You'll spoil it all if you stay!"

"I'm going to stay right here," was his grim response.

She realized there was no changing him. She glimpsed a closet door behind him, and caught at the chance of saving at least a fragment of her drama.

"Stay, then but, Larry, please give me a chance to do what I want to do! Please!" By this time she had dragged him across the room and had started to unlock the closet. "Just wait in here - and keep quiet! Please!"

He took the key from her fumbling hands, unlocked the door, and slipped the key into his pocket. "All right - I'll give you your chance," he promised.

He stepped through the door and closed it upon himself, entombing himself in blackness. The next moment the glare of a pocket flash was in his face, blinding him.

"Larry Brainard!" gritted a low voice in the darkness.

Larry could see nothing, but there was no mistaking that voice. "Red Hannigan!" he exclaimed.

"Yes - you damned squealer! And I'm going to finish you off right here!"

The light clicked out, and a pair of lean hands almost closed on Larry's wind-pipe. But Larry caught the wrists of the older man in a grip the other could not break. There was a brief struggle in the blackness of the closet, then the slighter man stood still with his wrists manacled by Larry's hands.

"Evidently you haven't a gun on you, Red, or you, wouldn't have tried this," Larry commented. "Anyhow, you couldn't have got away with killing in a big hotel, whether you had strangled me or shot me. I don't blame you for being sore at me, Red - only you've got me all wrong. But you and I are evidently here for the same purpose: to get next to something that's going to happen out in the room. What do you say, Red? - let's suspend hostilities for the present. You've got me where you can follow me, and you can get me any time."

"You bet I'll get you!" declared Hannigan. And then after a few more words an armistice was agreed upon between the two men in the closet and silently, tensely, they stood in the dark awaiting whatever was to happen.

Outside Maggie, that amateur playwright who had tried so desperately to prearrange events, that inexperienced goddess from the machine, stood in a panic of fear and suspense the like of which she had never known.


CHAPTER XXXIV


But when Barney's latch-key slid into the door and Barney, in a smart dinner jacket, came in, Maggie was herself again. Indeed she was better than herself, for there rushed to her support that added power which she had just been despairing of, which carries some people through an hour of crisis, and which may occasionally lift an actor above himself when fortune gives him a difficult yet splendid part which is the great chance of his career.

And Maggie showed to the eye that she was better than her best, for Barney exclaimed the instant he was beside her: "Gee, Maggie, you look like the Queen of Sheba, whoever that dame was! Any guy would fall for you to-night - and fall so hard that he'd break, or go broke!"

But Barney was too eager to await any response. "What's behind the hurry-up call you sent in? Anything broken yet?"

"Something big! But sit down. There's a lot to tell. And I must tell it quick - before my" - she could not force herself to say "father" - "before Old Jimmie comes, and Dick."

"Then Dick's coming?"

"Yes. Things have taken a twist so that everything breaks to-night. But sit down, and I'll tell you everything."

She had noted that the door behind which Larry stood, and to which he had captured the key, was open a bare half-inch. It looked no more suspicious than any closet door that by accident had swung free of its latch, but by deft maneuvering Maggie managed so that Barney sat at the table with his back toward both closets.

"Go to it, Maggie," he urged.

The plan which had swiftly developed from Dick Sherwood's idea required that she should tell much that was the truth and much that was not truth, and required that she should play with every faculty and every attraction she possessed upon Barney's tremendous vanity and upon his jealous admiration of her. She had to make him believe more in her as a pal than ever before; she had to make him want her more as a woman than ever before. And at this moment she felt herself thrillingly equal to this vampire role her over-stimulated sense of justice had commanded her to undertake.

"Things have gone great," she began, speaking concisely,