“Sixty-fourth and Central Park East. Otherwise Fifth Avenue, boss.” The driver of the pink-and-gray made the announcement through the open window behind the wheel seat as he drew up at the park-side curb. “Where away, now?”
“Nowhere away. We’ve arrived. How much says the clock?”
“Dollar twenty—to you.” The overcharge was committed with the usual stress of favoring the fare.
Why-Not Pape reached across with two green singles. “Keep the bonus, friend robber. Likely you need it more than I. If you’ve any scruples, though, you can overcome ’em by telling me what building that is, the dingy one with the turrets, back among the park trees.”
“Arsenal they calls it. Police station.”
Succinct as his service, the licensed highwayman of city streets stepped on the gas and was off to other petty pilfering. Police stations and overcharges probably did not seem suitable to him on the same block.
“The Arsenal, eh?” Pape queried himself. “Ain’t the Arsenal where Pudge O’Shay threatened to take me to tea the afternoon Dot polkaed up those sacred rocks to the block-house?”
He crossed the oily asphalt, smeared with the spoor of countless motor vehicles; turned south a few steps; half way between Sixty-fourth and Sixty-third streets located the eight-hundred-odd number in which he was interested. A brownstone house, not particularly distinguishable from its neighbors it was, entered by a flight of steps above an old-fashioned or “American” basement. Noting that the ground floor was dark and the second and third illumined, he turned back across the Avenue and stopped in the shadow of the wall that bounds Central Park.
Between jerking into his hat and coat in full face of the astonishment of his own opera-box party and accomplishing the trip up in the fewest possible minutes which could cover the roundabout traffic route prescribed during “theater hours” he had not found time to think out just what he was going to do when he arrived at his destination. Now that he was on the scene of his next impertinence, he appreciated that its success demanded a careful plan. His self-selected lady’s dismissal of him had been so definite that he needed some tenable excuse for having followed her home. Stansbury caution warned him that an offer of assistance would, without doubt, be ignominiously spurned. But Pape initiative was in the saddle.
He had about decided on the most direct course—to rush up the steps, ring the bell, ask for her, tell her that he had come to give her the note and trust to subsequent events—when the front door of the house he was watching flew open. A hatless man bounded down to the sidewalk; straight as though following a surveyed line, headed for the entrance of the Arsenal.