“Lathrom, the big eye surgeon, Steve,” whispered Wally to me. “I’ve had Miss Lane calling on the eye people since yesterday noon. Go on, Miss Lane.”
“He operated in August of last year on a short, stocky man, French or Austrian, of about sixty-five, he thought, who gave the name of Gans and who was almost totally blind from double cataract which had been previously operated upon unsuccessfully. Doctor Lathrom restored his sight. I showed the doctor the picture of Janvier among six other pictures. He picked out Janvier’s.”
Wally struck his hands together. “I told Cantrell so. I told him it was another Janvier job; and that Janvier was in Chicago, too. He always cut his plates in Chicago. He couldn’t work in the east.”
“Does the doctor happen to remember anybody who might have been with this Gans?” I asked Miss Lane.
“Yes, sir. Not only Gans impressed the doctor, but his daughter, also. Since Gans was blind when Doctor Lathrom first saw him, she brought him to the doctor and made all the original arrangements. She was about twenty—he thinks; he remembers her for unusually attractive, of the active type. Dark hair; pert nose, he particularly recalled.”
Wally wasn’t paying any attention to this; he already had what he wanted and he was chatting on about the superior artistic inspiration of Chicago over Manhattan, even in counterfeiting.
“I told Cantrell it was a Chicago job on the plates, anyway; New York is a photo-engravers’ town; an artist like Janvier couldn’t cut a plate like that within five hundred miles of Broadway. He’d smear it, if he tried to. Maybe they printed in the east; or made the paper, there; probably did.”
He was waiting for the switchboard operator to get a connection with the secret service so he could scream his news at them.
If he had learned what he wanted, I had, too. It was perfectly plain to me, of course, that my partner Cleopatra—Doris Wellington, with maid, from Denver—was this daughter of Janvier, engraver of government notes without the government’s coöperation. Her bit in the business was—to employ the convenient phrase of the Flamingo Feather—to blow out the bad dough, to shove “the queer.”
You may gather that this realization did not come exactly as a shock to me; in fact, I felt rather a relief. Participation in that affair at the Flamingo Feather might imply so many customs worse than the mere personal issue of money that I drifted back to the Blackstone with cheer. What I’d found about her family certainly might have been a lot worse; yes, a whole lot. She’d stuck with her father, evidently. I liked that.