"This is Wednesday. Think it over for a week and I'll arrange to see you next Wednesday. Then I shall expect to hear, if you are not convinced, that the sharks swallowed you like a porgy."
CHAPTER XXV
When I got away from Mr. Tescheron that afternoon, it was after three o'clock, and I had to see Flanagan.
Luckily I found the coroner at his office and was received by him with that warmth of greeting and cordiality which springs from a political genius, said to be derived by contact with the Blarney Stone. At any rate, it makes its successful appeal to human nature and constitutes the capital of Tammany leaders holding their own against all reformers who fail to take into account the hearts of the poor. There wasn't anything in the world he wouldn't do for me. You may be sure that Jim and I had long ago changed our politics enough to vote for Flanagan, and he knew it. His handshaking, sympathetic attention and practical philanthropy kept him in power, and his record for square dealing in and out of office placed him apart from some of the crew he trained with. As another Irishman, Mr. Burke, has remarked you can't indict a nation, this countryman of his proved to me that it would not be possible to indict an entire political organization outside the broad scope of campaign oratory.
I laid the whole case before honest Tim Flanagan.
"And they were to have been married a week from to-day, you say? Whew! You come with me to see Tom Martin; he'll do anything I say."
It is wonderful how a Tammany Hall leader can help pull a case of complicated love out of the mire of despair, if the villainy runs counter to the law.
Tom Martin was the captain in charge of the detective bureau at police headquarters. If anybody had suggested concerning him that it was possible for a Tammany district leader to obtain a favor in that office involving what might technically be called the compounding of a crime, Martin's icy official rejoinder would wither his antagonist; but this ice could be cut by certain men. Tim Flanagan was one of them. When he and Tom Martin got together on this thing wheels within wheels began to work.