The Greatest Crime Novels of Frank L. Packard (14 Titles in One Edition). Frank L. Packard

move!” ordered Jimmie Dale grimly.

      “Just this far,” smiled Laroque. “I hear them coming along the hall inside now. Don't forget there's one of your police on guard outside the window, and——”

      The room was in instant darkness. The bare fraction of a second passed, not more; there was a faint scraping sound from the direction where Laroque had been standing—and Jimmie Dale's flashlight, whipped from his pocket, was sweeping around him.

       The room was empty!

      Jimmie Dale's face was set like chiselled marble. Empty! Gone! The man was gone! But that was not all! Voices were ringing that slogan of the old days in his ears again: “Death to the Gray Seal!” He did not need to be told what it meant to be caught by either police or underworld. He, too, heard those guarded footsteps inside the tenement and coming now along the hall. His mind, alert, virile, was working with lightning speed. The doorway was behind him, and Laroque could not have gone that way—nor by the window guarded by the police. There must be some secret exit from the room. If so, given but a second, while he, Jimmie Dale, was attempting an escape, Laroque could get back again and secure the diamonds that lay upon the table. And he, Jimmie Dale, was responsible for them now!

      And now Jimmie Dale in action was swift as his racing thoughts. Whether he could save himself or not, there was at least a way to save the stones. With the flashlight switched on, he propped it on the end of the table, its ray streaming over the gems and playing in the opposite direction from the connecting door.

      “If you can hear me, Laroque,” he whispered, “I warn you—don't try it! All you'll get off that table will be a bullet, whether I'm caught or not!”

      It was utter blackness behind him. He backed swiftly, silently through the connecting door, and across the outer room to the door that led into the hall. His automatic held a line on the table top. He crouched at the far side of the door casing. They were here now. He heard a whispered consultation outside, as his fingers, closing on the key, silently unlocked the door. Queer! His brain was racing again. A queer sight! All blackness back here—and, through the connecting doorway, a light, apparently coming from nowhere, streamed over a shimmering, scintillating mass of diamonds, and ended by imposing itself in a white, luminous circle on a dirty, greasy wall behind! His eyes never left the table; his automatic never wavered in its line. Queer! The Phantom! Gentleman Laroque—Isaac Shiftel! Could it be? Was that a partial answer to the Tocsin's “score of aliases and score of domiciles”? Was Gentleman Laroque the Phantom? Yet how had she taken this for Laroque's home if she hadn't known the two men were one? And she hadn't known. She had said so. But—yes, it was not unexplainable. It might easily have been—just as it had been with him, Jimmie Dale, as Larry the Bat, or as Smarlinghue. She might have seen Laroque come here some evening—and Shiftel might have come out—while she thought Laroque remained at home. It might easily be that she did not know Shiftel, and so——

      “Bust it in!” The words came sharp, incisive, from the hall; then a quick exclamation: “Blamed if the door ain't unlocked! Come on!”

      The door was flung violently open. A man swung forward into the room—and halted abruptly, staring toward the connecting doorway.

      “For Heaven's sake, sergeant, look at that!” he burst out.

      A man behind pushed eagerly forward. And Jimmie Dale, crouching low by the baseboard in the blackness, slipped through the doorway behind the other without a sound, and in a moment was outside the tenement and walking quietly along the street—in a direction that ignored the areaway.

      Half an hour later Jimmie Dale mounted the steps of a palatial residence on Riverside Drive. He smiled softly as he stumbled and shuffled so noisily that before he had gained the topmost step the door was opened for him by the white-haired old butler, who had been butler to Jimmie Dale's father before him, and whose proudest boast was that he had dandled his Master Jim upon his knee. It would have been so easy to have slipped in, and passed the old man, and gone upstairs to bed—and broken the old man's heart to have been found out asleep at his self-appointed post.

      “What!” said Jimmie Dale severely—and used identically the same words he had used on a hundred similar occasions: “Sitting up again for me, Jason? How many times am I to tell you that I won't have it? Jason, go to bed at once!”

      “Yes, sir,” said Jason. “Thank you, sir. Thank you, Master Jim, sir—I will.”

      IV.

       Threads

       Table of Contents

      Two weeks had passed.

      It was evening; and Jimmie Dale, as Smarlinghue now, the seedy, down-at-the-heels artist, better known as Smarly in the Bad Lands, and still better known again in the ultra-exclusive dens and dives, where the first citizens of New York's crimeland foregathered, as a dope fiend shattered beyond repair, a character shady enough from any angle to entitle him to homage even in that unhallowed circle of the élite, slouched along an East Side street—but the slouching gait was strangely and incredibly swift. He skulked in the night shadows of the buildings like some evil thing that sought darkness as kindred to itself. But at intervals, as he moved along with that strange illusive swiftness, the rays of a street lamp, as though in ironic mockery at his inability to evade them, brought out into sharp relief the disreputable figure whose coat was a size too small for him, and from the short sleeves of which protruded blatantly the frayed and soiled wristbands of his shirt, whose shoulders were stooped, and whose face, what could be seen of it under a battered felt hat, was hollow cheeked, and gaunt with a half starved look.

      And now he entered a house that made the corner of a lane, a house that was as disreputable as himself, a dwelling of some old-time pretentions, but with the city's onward march a derelict now, metamorphosed into a mean and squalid tenement. He passed along the dark, musty hallway to the rear room on the ground floor, and, opening the door, stepped inside. He closed the door, locked it behind him, and for an instant stood still, his glance seeming to search into the very shadows themselves where they lay heaviest in the far corners of the room.

      It was the Sanctuary that for a year now—or was it two?—had housed the character of Smarlinghue, as, in the days gone by, the old Sanctuary, before the fire had destroyed it, had housed the character of Larry the Bat. Through a top-light high up near the ceiling above the French window, which latter, a relic of past glory, opened on a level with the floor, the moonlight flickered in. It disclosed in nebulous outline a battered easel in one corner of the room, and near it, against the wall and strewn upon the floor, a number of canvases of different sizes. A cot bed, its covers in disorder, occupied the wall space opposite the door. For the rest, there were a filthy, threadbare rag of carpet upon the floor, a battered table, a rickety washstand, and two disabled chairs.

      Satisfied that the moonlight was the sole intruder, Jimmie Dale nodded shortly to himself, and stepping abruptly forward examined the drawn roller shade on the French window, and particularly a rent therein that was fastened together with a pin. Again he nodded. Then a diminutive gas-jet, choked with air, hissed and spluttered under his match, and supplanting the moonlight, threw a sickly yellow glow about the room. He crossed then to the corner near the door, knelt down on the floor, and after an instant's work removed an ingeniously fitted section of the baseboard. From the aperture he took out the carefully folded dinner suit which he had been wearing on the evening when he had last left his residence on Riverside Drive.

      He began to cast off the shabby, disreputable garments of Smarlinghue. He worked swiftly. With the clothes discarded, there came another change. The hollow cheeks, the thin, extended lips, the widened nostrils disappeared as little distorting pieces of wax were removed. Before a cracked mirror propped up on the rickety washstand, he washed away the stain that previously had given a jaundiced, unhealthy hue to his face and hands—and with minutest care took stock of the result in the mirror.

      And then the light went out. The rest could be completed in the darkness. Smarlinghue