An extravagant appellation, doubtless, but that was Marston: Suave, sinister, debonair—the social roturier equally with the manipulator. He had acquired the name naturally enough, for most of his operations were carried on in the hotels and clubs.
He had an office hard by the “Alley” and it was from its ornate splendor that he issued, on occasion, gardenia in buttonhole, cane hooked over his arm, dark face with its inscrutable smile flashing upon the habitués with what meaning only he could say. And he did not choose to tell.
And Marston had wanted those documents; they spelled the difference to him between durance and liberty—aye, between life and death....
For Hubert Marston had made the one slip that, soon or late, the most careful criminal makes: He had, yielding on a sudden to his one rare impulse of hate, commissioned the murder of a man who stood in his way, and—he had paid for it, as he had thought, in good crisp treasury notes, honest as the day, certainly! But the payment had been made at second—or third-hand—that was Marston’s way. And for once it had betrayed him.
For those documents—as he had found out, too late—were counterfeit treasury notes. The go-between had seen to that, paying the hired killer with them, and pocketing the genuine. And Quarrier, himself the watch-dog of those interests that Marston would have despoiled, (he had been retained by them for some time now as their private investigator) had found, first, the disgruntled bravo himself, obtained the spurious notes, together with the man’s confession, traced them backward to the go-between—and now, hard upon the arch-criminal’s heels, he waited only for the morning, and that which would follow.
Quarrier had given the driver a number in the West Eighties, but now, glancing from the window, his eyes narrowed with a sudden, swift concern.
“The devil!” he ejaculated, under his breath. “Now, if I thought—”
But the sentence was never completed. They were in a narrow, unfamiliar street; a street silent, tenantless, as it seemed, save for dark doorways, and here and there a furtive, drifting shadow-shape—the tall fronts of warehouses, with blind eyes to the night, silent, grim.
The echoing roar of the engine beat in a swift clamor against those iron walls—and suddenly, with a sort of click, he remembered where it was he had seen that lupine countenance—the dark face of the driver separated from him by the width of a single pane of glass.
It had been behind glass that he had seen it. A month or so previous, at the invitation of his friend, Gregory Vinson, captain of detectives (with whom he had formerly been associated, prior to his present connection), he had visited headquarters; and it had been there, in the gallery which is given over to rogues, that he had marked that face, its features, even among the many crooks, thugs, strong-arm men, yeggs, hoisters, pennyweighters, housemen, and scratchers. And now he remembered it when it was too late!