The Amazing Web, Page 2

  “My name is Gonzalez,” he said in good English. “Manuel Gonzalez.” He took up the sword and holding it aloft showed engraved along its edge what appeared to be a scale divided into inches and half-inches, each of which was numbered. “The longest sword-swallowing act on record is 15 inches. That’s done by Du Bois of London. Now watch, if you will, please.”

  With a deft motion he slipped off his ready-tied tie, and unloosed his batwing collar. He stood erect, throwing his head back. Raising the sword just above his face he placed the point in his open mouth and lowered it gently, slowly, cautiously, down, down, down. At last the fascinating downward progress of the steel weapon stopped. Gonzalez closed his lips gently on the flat sides of the blade. He pointed. Even from where he sat, Lipke could plainly see that the lips were closed together on the engraved mark which said 17 inches. He nodded, and the sword was swiftly withdrawn. Gonzalez proceeded to button up his collar and replace his bow tie.

  Lipke with a glance at his watch turned to the huge ox-like Teuton.

  “And you?”

  “Hugo Daumstaddter,” he said. “Der only strong man by vaudeville — vot can lift two horses vit one hand. So!” He took from a flat newspaper package a large glossy coloured photograph showing a man, with muscles bulging, clad in a gaudy trunk with red and blue stripes and silver stars, lifting up a wooden beam from each end of which, in a specially constructed harness, hung a husky-looking draught horse whose legs stuck comically out and whose eyes popped from his equine head.

  Lipke inspected the photograph very carefully, surveying the man across from him and studying every detail of the picture. Then he laid it down on his desk and turned to the next applicant, the dapper little fellow with the jet-black hair and the loud but expensive suit.

  “George Murphy,” was the name by which that individual introduced himself quickly and easily, at the same time lighting a cigarette. “Known as Boko, the handcuff king. Guarantee to get out of any pair of handcuffs in America in sixty seconds and to get out of a wooden box tied by any three selected members of an audience and dropped into a glass tank of water. Claring of ‘Frisco claims to do the stunt, but everybody in the profesh knows that he uses three picked men and the double slip knot. I use a perfected method of my own. Devised it myself.”

  Lipke thought for a moment, a very long moment in fact. Then he turned to the quiet, foreign-looking man with the light hair and the steely blue eyes.

  “And your name and act?” he inquired.

  “Gus Chevalo,” said the other in slow, precise English. “Four years with Barnum & Bailey as Crazo, the daredevil cyclist. Have just perfected the newest spectacular feat in cycle work. Hasn’t yet been shown in public. It’s the double loopless loop-the-loop on a bicycle.”

  Lipke leaned forward. “The double loopless loop-the-loop on a bicycle,” he exclaimed.

  “Two complete loops in mid-air without a track,” Chevalo explained proudly. “It’s the evolution supreme of the old jump-the-gap and loop-the-loop.”

  Lipke stroked his smooth chin reflectively. “You say this act has never been done in public before?” he asked.

  Chevalo laughed a quaint laugh. “If I fail, then the neck goes” — he made a suggestive motion — “snap!”

  Lipke rested his chin in the palm of his hand for a full minute. Then he turned to the other three men. “I think I’ve got the act I want,” he pronounced. “So I’ll excuse the rest of you gentlemen so as not to take up your time. Have a cigar.”

  They rose disgruntledly, and after conducting them to the doorway and bowing them out, Lipke was alone with Chevalo.

  “Chevalo, tell me all about this act of yours.”

  “Nothing much to tell,” said the little foreigner modestly. “I been practising on and off for four years on the stunt. Did my practising with a net under me, out at my home in the country on Long Island. Best I could do was the single loop-the-loop, until after about three thousand failures I got the secret by changing the angle of incline of the edge of the jump-off track. The double loop-the-loop’s never been done in circus history.”

  “You carry your own apparatus?”

  “Yes. Fits in a space 9 by 12 by 6 when taken down. Costs about two dollars a mile for transportation.”

  “Chevalo, what do you expect to pull down in the circus on this act?”

  “Ought to be worth four hundred a week,” said the other.

  Lipke calculated a moment. “For fourteen performances a week that means slightly less than 30 dollars a performance.” He pondered. “Chevalo, I think you’ve got the stunt I want. I want to use you in Chicago for one performance and one only. The price I offer is 1,000 dollars. Just what my idea is in using you I don’t feel at liberty to say. This much I can tell you: There will be no advance featuring, no advertising, no publicity.” He paused. “Got any photograph that will give me an idea of this act?”

  Chevalo drew from a large photograph container he had brought with him a glass snapshot taken evidently by a high-grade quick-action camera. It showed a man dressed in circus tights, surrounded by all the evidences of country life, such as chickens, cows and horses in the background and a white-frame cottage some distance off out of the focus, in the act itself of turning a somersault on a bicycle which at that second hung upside-down in mid-air between the ends of two white-painted platforms, one evidently the end of an incline, the other a landing platform.

  “Do you guarantee if you fail that there’s no fee?” asked Lipke cautiously, looking up from the photograph.

  Chevalo again laughed his quaint, quiet laugh. He pointed significantly to his neck. “The neck and spinal column guarantee it,” he commented sagely.

  Lipke drew up his chair closer. After fifteen minutes of details and carefully worked-out future arrangements, Chevalo bowed himself out, and Lipke dropped back by the window which looked out on Broadway.

  “It couldn’t be better for the purpose,” he ruminated to himself. “The rubberneck newspaper reporters ought to foot the bill for giving ‘em the story they’ll get out of it. And the story — ah — it makes the scheme absolutely police proof. Neither the best news-hound on the Chicago Press nor the sharpest plain-clothes man on the Chicago police force has a chance to get wise to the connection with Archibald Chalmers. Chalmers may go to the electric chair yet — and he may not; but he’s got a good team working for him in the team of Lipke and Crosby.” And at his facetious coupling up of the names of Lipke and Crosby, he smiled a smooth, satisfied smile that to an onlooker would somehow have suggested power — the power of unscrupulousness and daring; a smile in which one corner of his mouth turned up and the other remained unchanged in its angle. And there he remained sitting, staring unseeingly down at the traffic of Broadway.

  Now we are going to throw back our story to October, 1923, to the little town of Brossville, Kansas, where practised a rising young attorney, by name David Crosby. In this way we shall introduce ourselves to the more virtuous and upright half of the team which Al Lipke calls the team of Lipke and Crosby, and better yet we shall view the very events which some years later are to place Al Lipke, screened from any too-prying members of the New York detective bureau by the less notorious name of “Mr. Cloyd,” in a high-priced hotel on Broadway. In fact, we shall know in detail whethe the risking of the neck of Gus Chevalo, the daredevil cyclist, in a double loopless loop-the-loop, is to save from the electric chair and its deadly 2,200 volts Archibald Chalmers, Chicago society’s popular idol, and defendant in a charge of murder in the first degree. But we must start from the beginning.

  CHAPTER II

  THE DEFENCE OF LINDELL TRENT

  IT was the morning of the trial of Lindell Trent for grand larceny.

  From a window in his office in the modern three-storey Jones Building, David Crosby, attorney-at-law, œtat 26, stared out at the one and principal street of the town of Brossville, Kansas. Across the way was the one-storey red-brick building which housed the tiny town’s only other attorney, Henr
y White; and down at the foot of the Jones Building, with its great grey scabs of paint peeling away, due to the annual visitation of the hot Kansas sun, lay the long dusty road fronted on each side with ramshackle buildings and hitching-posts that bore the dignified appellation of Main Street.

  With a long sigh, Crosby turned from the window to the battered desk which comprised the chief article of furniture in the painfully bare office, and taking up a shiny new leather portfolio of papers from it, closed the door behind him and went out into the bright October morning sunlight. Outside he walked slowly, thoughtfully, a troubled — even pained — expression on his face, as far as the town lock-up, and there turned up the short flight of stone steps that led into that very undesirable residence.

  A nod to a fatherly-looking, bearded man chewing away at a huge cud of tobacco, and Crosby was ushered into one of two rooms which fronted each other across a wooden hallway, where Lindell Trent sat on the edge of a tiny cot. A table containing a ponderous Bible chained to the wooden top, a hard-seated rocker and a straight chair completed the furnishings of the tiny cell, for the bars on the high-up window showed only too plainly the nature of the room.

  She was a girl of perhaps nineteen, slim almost to slightness. Her black dress was simple, and revealed threadbare poverty. Eyes big and dark, jet hair slightly disarrayed, complexion a little pale, a strained look about the sweetly curved mouth. Her face lighted up, and then the light faded, as David Crosby, entering the room with the lock-up keeper, nodded to the old man and was left alone with her. Without a word he took up the straight chair, and drew it close to the bed on which she sat.

  “What have you decided, Lindell?”

  The girl looked at him, a frightened, hurt look in her eyes.

  “David, you know I have decided but one thing, to stick to my story. I am not guilty.”

  Crosby’s face carried a pained, stubborn look.

  “But I tell you, Lindell, it will do you no good. It will mean a conviction. Why fly into the face of certain disaster, dear, against a jury of farmers and townspeople who will be antagonized by your deliberately trying to play innocent?”

  Into the girl’s face came the suggestion almost that she was about to break into tears — tears that must flow from the breaking of a heart. But the man saw them not; his eyes saw only the spectacle of a young and rising attorney defending a girl guilty of grand larceny who brazened it out in spite of all the damning circumstances against her. Into his eyes came a sanctimonious look, and then as they rested upon her the look softened, and his eyes radiated love. He leaned forward, his hard bony hand — the hand that had pitched hay fourteen hours a day in the harvest fields of Kansas to put him through the little college — clasping hers.

  “Lindell, dearest, listen to me, please. The trial takes place now inside of a half-hour. I am your attorney, appointed by the court, even though Zelina is my half sister-in-law. Lindell, you are supposed in law always to take the advice of your counsel. I am a lawyer of three months’ experience. While you have been engaged in your daily tasks, I have seen a number of instances of the psychology of men confronted with facts such as the ones in your case. Just so sure does it mean a verdict of guilty by those grizzled farmers. This is no big city, dear one, where a girl’s brown eyes influence a jury of men. These are old churchgoers, stern, righteous, men with daughters, natives of a place which looks upon you as haughty, condescending. As your lawyer, I — I have a right to handle your case to your best advantage.

  “Lindell, it makes no difference to me what or why you did it, or why you maintain your innocence. I love you just the same, just as dearly. I am not as the others in this town, ready to turn away. I am going to handle your case as I see fit, and I am going to minimize the results of your folly, and then we are going to marry, and never refer again to the thing as long as we live. We can go away to Millville, to Prairie City, to Reedtown, to a number of places, and get away from it all. But I maintain” — his voice rose — “from my superior knowledge of the psychology of juries, that a plea for mercy is the only thing in your case. To fight, to contest, to hold forth as you wish will bring down from those stern old farmers a sure verdict of guilty. And in such case, old Judge Hibbard will be unable to do anything but impose a penalty.”

  He paused, and the girl stared listlessly at the opposite wall. Finally she spoke.

  “I am too tired, too worn, David dearest, to argue with you. I shall not plead guilty. But the handling of the case is, after all, your affair. Oh, how I wish — how I wish that I had never seen this hateful town!”

  “In which case,” replied Brossville’s youngest attorney pompously, “you would never have met me.” He glanced at a cheap silver stem-winding watch. “I must go now, Lindell. We will do the very best we can, and trust that the men who hear our case will see fit to temper their justice with mercy.” He leaned over and kissed her full on the lips, but the response from them was the response of a tired child. Then he turned swiftly, and still carrying the shiny portfolio under his right arm, left the lock-up and strode down Main Street.

  The one and only court-room of the town, with its high cobwebby ceiling, was crowded. Old Judge Hibbard, chewing tobacco, his gold-rimmed glasses perched upon his nose, sat at the top of the bench and near-sightedly gazed over the crowd of rustics and townspeople. In the jury-box twelve dour, serious-looking men of the American farmer type waited expectantly and righteously. Henry White, prosecutor, bald-headed, batwing collar soiled, fumbled at the lawyers’ table with a mass of papers.

  And the audience! Who has not seen a small town audience assembled in a court-room? The younger men chewing tobacco, the girls in their finery tittering; the youths nudging the tittering girls; strait-laced matrons come to see the viper sent from their midst.

  And the cause of all this excitement? Lindell Trent, Zelina Miles’s orphan girl, whom she had taken from the county poorhouse, had returned her mistress’s kindness by stealing a diamond ring from her and had been found out!

  The tittering stopped abruptly and hats were removed with startling rapidity when the tobacco-chewing old man with the gold-rimmed glasses on his nose nodded from his raised bench to the clerk, Fat Winter, who arose and read off the notice that “court has conve — ened.” A deathly silence filled the room as a white-faced, slim girl in black, with great dark eyes, entered a tiny enclosure through a battered wooden door at the side of the big room, accompanied by a fatherly-looking man who took a seat at one side of her.

  The court-room was unnaturally quiet as the girl responded to old Judge Hibbard’s opening question. But her reply was so faint as to be scarcely audible.

  “Not guilty, sir,” were the three brief words which carried scarcely to the jury-box.

  Henry White’s opening speech was short and to the point, punctuated by a nervous fumbling at the dirty batwing collar. Then he turned and, nodding to a woman across the way, finished his speech.

  “The first of the two witnesses for the ah — State — will be the plaintiff, our honourable townswoman, Mrs. — ah — Zelina Miles.”

  Mrs. Zelina Miles, arising in her dignity from the mass of onlookers, gave a pert nod to her half-brother-in-law, David Crosby, as she passed the lawyers’ table and stepped into the witness-box. She was an austere-looking woman of forty-five or thereabouts and was garbed for the occasion in a black silk dress, and carried a black silk parasol. Henry White, rubbing his bald head, began the examination of the witness.

  “How long have you known the defendant?”

  “You mean this here girl there?” she pointed at the white-faced creature in the enclosure.

  “The same,” said Henry White.

  “Sence I took her out of the poorhouse at Prairie City, a year back, to help me with my sewing for customers,” declared the witness, who was the town’s only dressmaker.

  “Now will you relate,” went on the prosecutor, still fumbling with the refractory batwing collar, “the events which transpired on the day and evening
of October 1st, a week ago?”

  The witness straightened out her black silk waist, and adjusted the compact knot on her head.

  “The girl never impressed me,” she said, turning to Judge Hibbard, who chewed away impassively, “as bein’ a thief. So when I go up to Prairie City early on the morning of the first to do some shoppin’, leaving her a goodly pile o’ sewin’ to do, I went in perfec’ understanding that anythin’ I lef’ in the house would be perfec’ly safe. I was away all day, buyin’ a number o’ things and takin’ in the sights o’ the town, an’ I lef’ there on the three o’clock westbound. While I waited the ten minutes at Pott’s Junction from 4.05 to 4.15 to catch the southbound Texas and Southern Kansas, I got a sort o’ premonyshun that mebbe I’d made a mistake by leavin’ of my bedroom unlocked while I was gone all day. I — ”

  “Will you please tell the jury,” said Henry White, “about the object of value you left in that bedroom?”

  “My diamon’ ring,” stated Zelina hurriedly. “Amos give it to me in the year 1904, the time o’ the big crops when we was farmin’ the Dean place out west of town. I’d allus wanted one. It cost $200. It was in my bureau drawer next to my prayer book. It — ”

  “Had the defendant ever seen that ring? And did she know where it was kept? Tell the jury about that.”

  “She’s seen it a hundred times if she’s seen it once, and she’s seen where I kep’ it a hundred times when we been house cleanin’ together,” declared Zelina emphatically.

  “Now proceed with the story,” said Henry White, glancing rather pityingly at young Crosby, who sat erect and impassive at the lawyers’ table across from him.

  “So, as I says, while I waits on the platform o’ Pott’s Junction for the ten minutes, I says to myself: ‘Zeliny, you hadn’t oughter have left that ring in that place with that girl alone. You don’t know nothin’ about that girl, her mother bein’ an Australian brought here by Dan Trent who a’n’t no good himself nohow, the two of ‘em havin’ to be buried at the county’s expense and their dotter brought up in a orphan home.’ So when the train gets into town prompt at 5.05, I comes home and gets in within ten minutes, stoppin’ only a minute to pass the time o’ day with old Mrs. Jellifer across her garden fence. I goes home and asks Lindell if she was busy all day, earnin’ her dollar a week an’ keep as she should. She shows me a pile o’ sewin’ that she claims she done. She acts sorta queer somehow, it seems to me. Then I goes into the bedroom, feelin’ somehow that everything wasn’t right. I looks into my drawer and the ring is gone.”