Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns (16 page)

“Put on the lights now, Jansen. Has he hit anybody?”

The lights went up suddenly. The bullet-headed porter was looking stupidly at a wrist and arm that were red with blood.

A shorter edition of the porter came into view round the angle of the corridor, and looked at the senseless detective.

“Help me get him into the cubby, Jansen.”

Jansen only stopped to inspect the wound of the hall porter.

“There’s nothing to it,” he said. “Bind it up with your handkerchief. It’s just a scratch. Gee, you’re lucky, Fred!”

He turned his attention to the senseless man. There was neither malice nor anger, but rather admiration in his glance.

“Help me get him into the cubby,” he said.

In reality he needed no help. He was a man of extraordinary strength. Stooping, he lifted the unconscious Reeder, dragged him through the passage into a little room, and dropped him into a chair.

“He’s OK,” he said.

The little man, who had come from the passage, looked at the detective with an expression of amazement.

“Is that the bull?” he said incredulously.

Jansen nodded.

“That’s the bull,” he said grimly. “And don’t laugh, Baldy. That guy’s got more men in stir than any other fellow that ever broke from the pen.”

“He looks nuts to me,” grunted Baldy.

He had a shock of fair hair. Mr Reeder, who was listening intently, found himself wondering, in his inconsequent way, how he had earned his name.

“Feed him some water. Here, give it to me.” Jansen took a glass from the man’s hand and threw it into the face of the drooping figure. Mr Reeder opened his eyes and stared round. His glove had been pulled off. The knuckleduster had disappeared.

“I hand it to you, Reeder,” said Jansen amiably. “If I’d not been all kinds of a sap, I’d have known you had that duster in your glove.”

He felt his jaw and grinned.

“Have a drink?”

He turned the leaves of a table and a nest of decanters rose.

“Brandy will do you no harm.”

He poured out a large portion and handed it to the detective; Mr Reeder sipped it.

Putting his hand to his head he felt a large egg-sized bump, but no abrasion.

“All right, Baldy. I’ll ring for you.” Jansen dismissed his assistant. When he had gone: “Let’s get right down to cases. You’re Reeder. Who am I?”

“Your name is Redsack,” said Reeder without hesitation. “You are what I would describe as a fugitive from justice.”

Jansen nodded amiably.

“You’re right first time,” he said. “That Dutch accent wasn’t bad though? Now how far have you got, Reeder? You and me are old-timers and hard-boiled. We’ll talk it right out, just as we feel, and we’re not going to get sour with each other. You went out for a prize and got a blank. There’s only one way of treating blanks, Reeder – and that’s the way you’re going to be treated. Have some more brandy?”

“Thank you, I’ve had enough.”

“Maybe you’d like a cup of tea?”

Jansen was genuinely solicitous. He was not acting. He had pronounced the sentence of death upon the man who had come seeking his life, but he was entirely without animosity. Death was the natural and proper sequel to failure, because dead men cannot take the stand and testify to one’s undoing.

“I think I would like a cup of tea.”

Jansen turned the switch and bellowed an order. Then switched it off again.

“You can’t say you haven’t met Jansen.” He grinned again.

Mr Reeder nodded and winced.

“No, I met him in Lincoln’s Inn Fields – a very unpleasant old gentleman.”

“A clever old guy,” interrupted Redsack. “In his way as clever as you. I picked him up when I came to England. He was doping then, and sleeping on the old Thames Embankment. He’d been so long away from home and he had no friends in England, I thought Jansen might be as good a name for me as for him, and he didn’t care anyway. It’s been a grand racket, Reeder; if I clear up tonight we’ll go on for a year or two.

“I came to this country with ten thousand dollars. Part of it I brought on the boat, and part of it I snitched from a passenger’s cabin. It was so long since I’d been in England that I didn’t know how easy it was. You’re all so damn law-abiding here that any big racket, if it looks good, would surely get past.”

He settled himself comfortably in his chair, but rose almost immediately to open the panel, and take out a cup of tea.

“You can drink that. If you like, I’ll drink half of it. Say, these poisoners make me sick. You know what I got the dungeon for in Sing-Sing? It was for beating up a guy who’d poisoned his wife and mother-in-law. I just hated to see him around. He told them I was trying to escape and that he wouldn’t stand by me. But that’s ancient history, Mr Reeder. Drink your tea.”

Mr Reeder drank and put down the cup carefully.

“I wasn’t a month in this country before I found a young bank clerk who’d been playing the races and snitching money from the bank. He got tight and told me all about it, and I saw how easy it was to make big money; so I just organised him, and he got away with a hundred thousand dollars.”

He leaned forward and raised a warning finger.

“Don’t say I didn’t play fair with him, because I did. We shared fifty-fifty. The great thing was to hide him up for a month, and the next big thing was to get him away, and that was hard. I never realised before that England was surrounded by water, and that’s where Jansen came in useful. I set him up in some rooms in Harley Street, but he was never entirely satisfactory, because we couldn’t keep him sober. We had one or two narrow escapes with the invalids he was escorting across the Channel.” He chuckled as though it were a pleasant memory, and then with a deprecating smile: “You know what it is, Reeder, when you and me have to depend on second-class people and not on ourselves. We’re so near being sunk that a lifebelt doesn’t mean a damned thing.”

“When did you start the nursing home for infectious diseases?”

Mr Redsack laughed uproariously and smacked his knee.

“Say, I wasn’t sure whether you knew about that. You’re clever. You got it, did you? Why, that happened after one or two of these birds had tried to double-cross us. You see, what we did was to put this advertisement in every paper once a week. Naturally we had thousands of letters, but we waited till we got a man who could hand in the dough. You’ve got no idea how bank clerks don’t know how to look after money! If he was just an ordinary five-cent man, we passed him on. But you’d be surprised at the number of big fellows – I once had an Assistant General Manager, who was so old that he couldn’t be dishonest. But we got a good few real smarties; as soon as we picked on them, we’d tell them that, as a very special honour and on the recommendation of the Lord knows who, they’d been elected members of the Strangers Club. We got a whole range of private rooms. But naturally we didn’t want any member to meet another member. We gave ’em good food, free tickets for the theatre. Just made them feel they were staying with Uncle John. How the hell they thought we did it on ten dollars a year I don’t know. But I dare say you find, Reeder, that thieves are mean cusses.

“Once we got them here the benevolent brothers started their operations. I was the agent, and I had to make sure they were men you could trust. I’m not going to give you the long of it, but it was not easy to get the smarties to fall for this grand idea. Most men are thieves at heart, but the thing that scares them is: how am I going to get away without a lagging? They can get the stuff all right, but where is it going to be put? Where will they hide? How will they leave the country? We did everything for them; passports, transportation. Why, we even chartered a tug to get that guy who pulled down half a million from the Liverpool bank, from England to Belgium, and he didn’t leave from Dover either. He went from London by water to Zeebrugge, and was carried aboard and ashore on a stretcher with so many bandages on his face that half the people who saw him land were crying before the ambulance took him on to Brussels. We made more than half a million bucks out of that, and he is living like a prince in Austrak.

“We give service, Reeder. That’s the keynote of our organisation – service. We took ’em out of London in ambulances marked ‘infectious diseases only’. Can you see any policeman with children of his own stopping them and inspecting the patients? Why, you could smell that camphor dope before you saw the ambulance.

“You guessed right when you took an inspection of our nursing home at the back, and you guessed right when, after you had opened the door, you decided you wouldn’t go in. We keep all our runaways snug in that home for a month. Sometimes two months, and no harm comes to them. They are out of the country as per contract. Service!”

He shook his head, and used the word lovingly.

“We picked ’em up from the bank, we brought ’em to London, we hid them and we got ’em out of the country, and never had a failure. Hallaty was yellow. In the first place, he didn’t bring all the stuff to us; he cached nearly half of it at a small public house on the Essex road. Then he tried to get away and we naturally had to go after him. That kid Reigate, he got religious. We thought we had everything set, but he jumped out of the ambulance on his way to Gravesend, and naturally Baldy, his escort, had to stop him talking.

“I’m glad you didn’t come in when you used that key. I shouldn’t have had the pleasure of talking to you. We had a machine gun on you, and Baldy was all ready with his motorcycle to cover up the sound. But you didn’t come in and, honestly, Reeder, I’m glad.”

He was very earnest. “You’re the kind of guy I wanted to meet.”

He shook his head, genuinely sad.

“I wish I could think of some other way out for you, but you’re tied up to your graft, the same as I am to mine.”

Mr Reeder smiled with his eyes, and that was very rare in him.

“May I say not – um – as a matter of politeness, but in all sincerity, that if I have to go out at the hands of a desperado – if you’ll forgive me using the word – I would prefer that it should be the best kind of desperado and an – um – artist.”

He paused.

“May I ask whether you plan to let the matter end in this interesting and complicated building, or have you a more spectacular method in your mind?”

Mr Redsack smiled.

“You’re a classy talker, Reeder, and I could listen to you for hours. Naturally you would think that I’d be thinking of something bad for a fellow who’s given me the worst sock in the jaw I’ve ever had in my life.” He touched his swollen cheek tenderly. “But I’ve got no malice in me. I guess we’ll try the grand old-time American operation. We’ll take you for a ride. If you’ve got any particular place you’d prefer, why, I’m willing to oblige you, Mr Reeder, so long as it gives me a chance of getting back before daylight.”

Mr Reeder thought for a minute.

“I naturally would prefer Brockley, which has been, as it were, and to use an expression which will be familiar to you, Mr Redsack, my home town, but I realise that this highly populated suburb is not suitable for your purpose, and I suggest, respectfully, that one of the arterial roads out of London would suit both of us admirably.”

Redsack switched on his loudspeaker and gave an order.

He took from the belt under his waistcoat a large-sized automatic and examined it as carefully as Mr Reeder earlier in the evening had inspected his own lethal weapon.

“Let’s go,” he said.

He led the way, opened the door again, and Mr Reeder passed through into the passage.

“Turn right!”

Mr Reeder followed his directions, and came to the blank end of the passage.

“There’s a door there that’ll open in a minute,” said Redsack encouragingly.

They waited a few seconds. Nothing happened. Pushing past him, Redsack rapped on the wall and a narrow crack appeared in one corner. It opened wider and wider, and the door swung open.

“Say, what’s the idea?” said Redsack loudly, and even as he spoke he whipped out his gun and fired twice.

It was a lucky day for Chief Inspector Dance. One bullet whipped off his hat; the second passed between his arm and his coat.

He fired back, but by this time Redsack was flying along the passage and had turned the corridor.

When they came up, halting gingerly to feel their way, there was nobody in sight. They heard the whirr of the lift, but whether it was going up or down they could not tell.

Then again the lights went out from some central control.

“Back to where we came,” said Dance.

They fled along the passage, through the door, down the steep flight of stairs. These turned sharply, and Mr Reeder saw what it was. They were out in the mews, but not quickly enough; as Dance fumbled with the lock, they heard two gates open with a crash, the pulsation of an engine and the roar of it as it shot past. By the time they were out in the mews the Strangers Club had lost its proprietor, janitor and chief attendant.

“Both keys worked,” Dance reported hastily. “I gathered he’d got you and I advanced the time five minutes.”

He saw Mr Reeder rub his head.

“Hurt?” he asked anxiously.

“Only in my feelings,” said Mr Reeder.

They made a quick search of the garage and found the battered motorcycle on which Hallaty had tried to make his escape, and the big ambulance with its warning sign, which had assisted Redsack so vitally in his ingenious scheme.

“If the Deputy Chief had given me the sanction to raid this place, I’d have had enough men here to catch ’em,” growled Dance. “Where is this nursing home, and which is the way in?”

It took a long time before they finally reached the secret suites where three panic-stricken ‘patients’ were waiting their discharge to that life of comfort which their depredations had earned for them.

Back at Scotland Yard, a chastened Deputy Chief Constable was anxious to do all that was possible to correct his error, for he had been on the ’phone to his sick chief, and what passed between them is not on record.

In the middle of the night a more careful search was made of the garage. Mr Reeder had seen a door which, he had imagined, led to a store. When the lights were turned on, the thickness of the doors revealed the character of this store. It was a steel-lined safe – it was empty. The accumulations of five years’ hard work had gone. A barrage, immediately laid down about London, was established too late, and at five o’clock in the morning a tug left Greenwich and proceeded leisurely down the river, made its signal to Gravesend and passed out into the open sea.