The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 33

"What was the game?"

"It appears to have been one of those so-called wire-tapping coups."

"Funny how that always gets 'em!" ruminated that verger of long-immured faces. "Well, here's what I know about Vinnie. Seven or eight years ago she was an artist's model. Then a sculptor called Delisle took her over to Paris--she was still in her teens then. But she was too brainy to stick to the studio-rat arrangement. She soon came to the end of her rope there. Then she came home--I've an idea she tried the stage and couldn't make it go. Then she was a pearl-agent in London. Then she played a variation of the 'lost-heir' game in what was called the Southam case, working under an English confidence-man called Adams.

Then she got disgusted with Adams and came back to America. She had to take what she could get, and for a few weeks was a capper for a high-grade woman's bucket-shop. When Headquarters closed up the shop she went south and was in some way involved in the Parra uprising in the eastern end of Cuba."

My apathetic chronicler paused for a moment or two, studying his lacerated cigar-end.

"Then she married a Haytian half-cast Jew in the Brazilian coffee business who'd bought a Spanish t.i.tle. Then she threw the t.i.tle and the coffee-man over and came back to Was.h.i.+ngton, where she worked the ropes as a lobbyist for a winter or two. Then she took to going to Europe every month or so. I won't say she was a steams.h.i.+p gambler. I don't think she was. But she made friends--and she could play a game of bridge that'd bring your back hair up on end. Then she worked with a mining share manipulator named Andrus. She was wise enough to slip from under before he was sent up the river. And since then they tell me, she's been doing a more or less respectable game or two with c.o.ke Whelan, the wire-tapper. And that, I guess, is about all."

"Has she ever been arrested that you know of? Would they have her picture, for instance, down at Headquarters?"

The man who had grown old in the study of crime smiled a little.

"You can't arrest a woman until you get evidence against her."

"Yet you're positive she was involved in a number of crooked enterprises?"

"I never called her a crook," protested my host, with an impersonality that suddenly became as Olympian as it was exasperating. "No one ever proved to me she was a crook."

"Well, I'm going to prove it. And I rather imagine I'm going to have her arrested. Why," I demanded, nettled by his satiric smile, "you don't mean to say that a woman like that's immune?"

"No, I wouldn't say she was immune, exactly. On the other hand, I guess she's helped our people in a case or two, when it paid her."

"You mean she's really an informer, what they call a welcher?"

"By no means. She's just clever, that's all. The only time she ever turned on her own people was when they threw her down, threw her flat.

Then she did a bit of secret service work for Wilkie's office in Was.h.i.+ngton that gave her more pull than all your Tammany 'polities'

east of Broadway."

"Am I to understand that what you call politics and pull, then, will let a woman rob a man of thirty thousand dollars and go scot free?"

"My dear fellow, that type of woman never _robs_ a man. She doesn't need to. They just blink and hand it over. Then they think of home and mother, about ten hours after."

"But that doesn't sound quite reasonable," I contended.

The older man looked solemnly at his cigar-end before asking his next question.

"Have you seen her yet?"

"No, I haven't," I replied as I rose to go. "But I intend to."

He moved his heavy shoulder in a quick half-circular forward thrust.

It might have meant anything. But I did not linger to find out. I was too impressed with the need of prompt and personal action on my part to care much for the advice of outsiders.

But as each wakeful hour went by I found myself possessed of an ever widening curiosity to see this odd and interesting woman who, as Doyle expressed it, had retained reputation at the expense of character.

It was extremely early the next morning that I presented myself at Vinnie Brunelle's apartment-hotel. I had not only slept badly; I had also dreamed of myself as a flagellant monk sent across scorching sands to beg a barbaric and green-eyed Thais to desist from tapping telegraph-wires leading into the camp of Alexander the Great.

The absurdity of that opianic nightmare seemed to project itself into my actual movements of the morning. The exacting white light of day withered the last tendril of romance from my quixotic crusade. It was only by a.s.suring myself, not so much that I was espousing the cause of the fallen, but that I was about to meet a type of woman quite new to my experience, that I was able to face Miss Brunelle's unbetrayingly sober door.

This door was duly answered by a maid, by a surprisingly decorous maid in white cap and ap.r.o.n. I was conscious of her veiled yet inquisitorial eye resting on my abashed person for the smallest fraction of a second. I almost suspected that in that eye might be detected a trace of something strangely like contempt. But, a little to my astonishment, I was admitted quite without question.

"Miss Brunelle is just back from her morning ride in the park," this maid explained.

I entered what was plainly a dining-room, a small but well-lighted chamber. Striped awnings still kept the tempered autumn sun from the opened windows, where a double row of scarlet geranium-tops stood nodding in the breeze. At one end of the table in the center of the room sat a woman, eating her breakfast.

She was younger looking, much younger looking, than I had thought she would be. Had she not sat there already inundated by the corroding acids of an earlier prejudice, I would even have admitted that she was an extremely beautiful woman.

She was in a rose-colored dressing-gown which showed a satin-like smoothness of skin at the throat and arms. Her eyes, I could see, were something between a hazel and a green, set wide apart under a Pallas Athena brow, that might have been called serene, but for some spirit of rebellion vaguely refracted from the lower part of the face. The vividness of her color, which even the flaming sweep of her gown could not altogether discount, made me think of material buoyancies, of living flesh and blood and a body freshly bathed.

Her gaze was direct, disconcertingly direct. It even made me question whether or not she was reading my thought as I noted that her hands were large and white, that her mouth, for all its brooding discontent, was not without humor, and, strangely enough, that her fingers, ears, and throat were without a touch of that jewelry which I had thought peculiar to her kind.

That she possessed some vague yet menacing gift of intimacy I could only too plainly feel, not so much from the undisturbed ease of her pose and the negligently open throat and arms as from the direct gaze of those searching and limpid eyes, which proclaimed that few of the poppied illusions of life could flower in their neighborhood. This discomforting sense of mental clarity, in fact, forced me into the consciousness not so much of being in the presence of a soft and luxurious body as of standing face to face with a spirit that in its incongruous way was as austere as it was alert.

"You wish to see me?" she said, over her coffee-cup. My second glance showed me that she was eating a breakfast of iced grape-fruit and chops and scrambled eggs and b.u.t.tered toast.

"Very much," I answered.

"About what?" she inquired, breaking a square of toast.

"About the unfortunate position of a young gentleman who has just parted company with thirty thousand dollars!"

She bent her head, with its loose and heavy coils of dark hair, and glanced at my card before she spoke again.

"And what could I possibly do for him?"

There was something neither soothing nor encouraging in her unruffled calmness. But I did not intend to be disarmed by any theatrical parade of tranquillity.

"You might," I suggested, "return the thirty thousand."

There was more languor than active challenge in her glance as she turned and looked at me.

"And I don't think I even know who you are," she murmured.

"But I happen to know just who you are," was my prompt and none too gentle rejoinder.

She pushed back her hair--it seemed very thick and heavy--and laughed a little.

"Who am I?" she asked, licking the toast-crumbs from her white finger-tips.

"I'll tell you who you are," I retorted with some heat. "You're a figure-model that a sculptor named Delisle took to Paris. You're the old running-mate of Adams in the Southam heir case. You're the wife of a Haytian half-caste Jew with a Spanish t.i.tle. You're the woman who worked with Andrus, the wildcat mine-swindler who is now doing time in Sing Sing. And just at present you're the accomplice of a gang headed by a certain c.o.ke Whelan, a wire-tapper well known to the police."

Her face showed no anger and no resentment as I unburdened myself of this unsavory pedigree. Her studious eyes, in fact, became almost contemplative.

"And supposing that's all true?" she finally asked. "What of it?"

She sat and looked at me, as cool as a cuc.u.mber. I could no longer deny that as a type she interested me. Her untamed audacities were something new to my experience. She seemed still in the feral state.

Her mere presence, as she sat there in the lucid morning light, exerted over me that same spell which keeps children rooted before a circus-animal's cage.