Читать книгу Marbleface - Max Brand - Страница 6

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IT started in with a low-life rich man's son, by name of Steven Cole. He was the son of Parker Cole who had yachts in the East and mines and ranches in the West. Steve was the brother of that Betty Cole who was beginning to break into the society headlines. She was all right, too. You'll hear more about her, before I'm through.

This Steven Cole was sitting in at a poker game with me and Charley Newman, that red-headed crook, and Dick Stephani, and Lew Waddell. The Cole kid hands me the deck to cut on his deal, and I find a double crimp in it. I saw that the hound had run up the pack of us and I handed the boys the high sign.

Up to that, everything was easy and straight in that game, but when the kid tried to frame us, we trimmed him down to the oil. We just about put him out. At three o'clock that morning, he owed the game twenty-five thousand and a few extra hundreds. He looked a little sick, but he signed I.O.U.'s. My share was nine thousand; Stephani got twelve; Lew Waddell was only in for a few grand.

Stephani went to the door with Steve Cole and tapped him on the shoulder.

"You know, Steve," said he, "we'll take our money inside of a week. We give you that much grace."

Steve Cole looked over his shoulder at Stephani's dark features. Dick was the handsomest man that ever lived, bar none. And the blond kid got sicker and sicker in the face.

He came back inside the room and leaned against the wall; said that he didn't know how he could pay; wanted to pay, but he'd already overdrawn his allowance, and only the month before he'd got into a scrape and his father had come to his assistance for the last time, as he said. We stood around and listened to this line of talk, and Waddell pointed out that Cole would have been ready to win; therefore, he had to be ready to lose and pay. Then Newman stepped up with his jaw sticking out and said that a week was too long to wait.

"There's a safe in the cellar of your father's house," he went on. "You can get the combination to that safe. And we'll call on you in two days and clean the safe out."

Mind you, I heard the robbery proposed and I wasn't even shocked. It looked all right to me. The kid owed us the money, and he had to come through. Cole wrinkled up his face so that I thought he was going to burst into tears. But he finally said:

"I see where I am. I think maybe this job will turn me straight, from to- night on. You crooks!"

He looked bitterly at us out of his brown eyes. He was a sleepy, good- natured young fellow, a little sleek and soft. He was about my age—twenty-two, at that moment.

I said to him: "You started running up the cards. Don't call me a crook."

He was game enough. He lost his temper and came savagely over toward me.

"I've a mind to break your neck, Poker-face!" he said to me. "You can bluff some, but you can't bluff me."

I had my nerves in hand. I was thinking about that kangaroo heart of mine that I had to keep in order. There wasn't even a quiver in me, but when I saw him double up his fist, I said:

"If you lift your hand, I'll kill you!"

He started to sneer, changed his mind, and turned as white as a piece of cloth. He backed out of that room, watching me as though I were a ghost. At the door he turned and said:

"All right. Night after next. I'll be ready!"

He cleared out.

Waddell said to me: "It's all right, Jerry. He's gone, ain't he? What you looking like that for, now that you're bluff has worked?"

"Shut up," says Newman. "It wasn't a bluff. He meant it."

Dick Stephani was lighting a cigarette. He looked up at me through the smoke.

"You didn't really mean it, kid?" said he to me.

"I've lost my fists. You know that," said I. "I'll kill the first man that tries to beat me up. What else could I do?"

Stephani began to look thoughtful. So did the others. We all said good night, and arranged when and where we would meet to go after the Cole money the night after next.

Then I turned in. I felt pretty good about life at that time. And why not? I had been making, as I said, about a thousand a week and saving half of that, and here was a good tidy haul—ten weeks' work in one, very nearly. So I decided that I'd take a rest—go to Europe and see what the doctors there could do for me. I'd heard a lot about a great man in Vienna who could take a heart to pieces and put it together again.

I went to sleep on that idea, and I was happy as could be until the time came for us to go to the Cole house.

Newman was to be outside man, across the street. Stephani took the next corner. Waddell went in with me. I remember how loudly he breathed as we stood in the thick black of the hall. There was a smell of flowers in the air, and the hall was warm. I uncorked a lantern and spilled a few drops of light across the polished floors, that looked like water. The rays blinked across a mirror or two, slid and shimmered across a table top, before I saw Steve Cole.

He met us and told us that the safe door was open. It was an easy cinch to go straight down into the cellar and help ourselves, only he hoped that we wouldn't take more than we needed to make up for the gambling debt. The kid was feeling bad. There seemed a moan in his voice even though it got no deeper in his throat than a whisper.

We told him, whispering, too, that we would have to clean out the whole thing, or else the job would look phony. I told him, for my part, that I would see that everything was returned except enough to cover the cash he owed us. He thanked me for that.

Just then a door closed with a faint booming sound, and slippers came padding down the stairs. Waddell and I backed up into a corner. Cole was left standing near the foot of the stairs, and someone fair banged into him, then called out.

I heard Cole gasp.

"It's you, Steve?" said a girl's voice.

"Yes, it's I," he answered.

"What are you doing down here in the dark?" she said. "What have you been whispering about? Who's here with you?"

She didn't whisper. She talked right out, not loudly, either. Her voice was soft and almost drawling. It was warm and deep the way a Negro's voice is, very often.

"Betty," said the youth, "quit it. You shut up and go back to bed."

"My goodness, Steve," said she, "you've grown up, all at once, haven't you? Ordering me about like this!"

"Betty, go back to bed," said he.

"I'm going back," said she. "I've no desire to spy on you. Only I had to come down and let you know that I guessed something was wrong. Now you go your own way, and get your hands and your heart just as dirty as you please. You know, Steve, the thing that makes me sick about you is that you're such a fool! Such a plain fool!"

She went running up the stairs again, and Steve came back to me.

"Will you quit this job for to-night, boys?" he asked. "You see my sister will suspect me."

"We're going to go through with it right now," growled Waddell.

He led the way. I followed. We got down into the cellar and found the safe. Its bright steel face was as easy to find as the moon in a clear, dark sky.

It was open, too, just as Cole had promised, and after we had pushed the door farther back, Waddell began to empty the contents of the drawers into a big felt bag that he had brought out from under his arm. He looked aside at me with an ugly expression.

"Do something!" said he. "Why just stand around and let somebody else do the dangerous work?"

"Show me what to do," said I. "Shall I hold your hat, you stiff?"

He looked at me again, with a twist and a lift of his upper lip. Just then, a little chamois bag that he was handling gaped open and a shower of diamonds fell on the floor.

"The devil!" breathed Waddell with delight.

Just as he spoke, I saw a shadow swing across the ceiling and I ducked my head. The weight of that blow whirred past my ear. I heard a man grunt right behind me. Two more were running from nowhere toward Waddell, and I heard him cry out like a bull terrier whining as he turned to face them and went down under their weight.

We had been trapped, d'you see? Instantly I suspected not the kid, not young Cole, so much, as Charley Newman and handsome Stephani, the black and the red of our gang!

I had my gun out as I turned. I fired and saw one of the three men whirl about and go down. I told myself that he was not killed; the bullet must have hit him high—in a shoulder, say. That was why the plunging weight of it whirled him about.

As he dropped, I stepped back through the door.

Two bullets split it from head to heel. There were the stairs in front of me, and I told myself that I didn't dare to run up them. Months and months of practice with sinking spells and collapses had taught me that the only way through a crisis was to go easily, smoothly, a step at a time. Still I feared the crash of my heart more than I did the bullets and the police. You see, the state of my heart was my professional preoccupation, so to speak.

Well, I got halfway up the steep flight of stairs before the door opened behind me. One man came charging through. One was flat with my bullet. The other was minding Waddell, you see. I turned around, but at the gleam of my gun, the detective gave a yelp, as though he had been kicked, and jumped for cover. I went on up the stairs and through the top door just as he opened fire.

But I didn't mind him so much; it was what might lie before me that troubled me.

When I came into the hallway, I could hear the hum and the roar of a big household waking up. In a corner of the hall I saw where Steve Cole had dropped into a chair. The girl was there beside him, shaking a finger at him and talking fast and hard. There was one light on. It made the hallways seem as big as a barn and as dreary. The high lights were like trembling ghosts on the watery floors and in the sheen of the mirrors.

"There's one now!" said the girl, spotting me. "If you've got the tenth part of a man in you, go for him, Steven Cole. Here's a gun. I'd rather see you dead than shamed!"