“Look here!” she said, shortly. “If you wanted us for receiving stolen goods, you wouldn’t come around here with a warrant for Wally’s arrest as a suspicious character, an’ you wouldn’t have worked that Brunell plant. What’s your lay?”
“Information,” responded Morrow, frankly. “The police don’t know where the plate was, for those ten days, and there’s no immediate need that they should. Blaine cleaned up that case eventually, you know––recovered the plate and caught the butler in Southampton, under the noses of the Scotland Yard men. I want to know what you can tell me about Brunell––and about your nephew, Charley Pennold.”
Walter opened his lips, but closed them without speech, and his wife replied for him.
“We’re no snitchers,” she said coldly. “There’s nothin’ we can tell. Jimmy Brunell’s run straight for near twenty years, so far as we know.”
“And Charley?” persisted Morrow.
“It’s no use, Mame,” Walter Pennold repeated, dully. “If I go up again, it means the end for me. Charley’s got to take his chance, same as the rest of us. God knows I tried to do the right thing by the boy, same as Jimmy did by his daughter, but Charley’s got the blood 178 in him. It’s hell to peach on your own, but it’s worse to hear that iron door clank behind you, and to know it’s for the last time! After all, there ain’t nothin’ in what we can tell about Charley that a lot of other people wouldn’t spill, an’ nothin’ that could land him behind the bars. I ain’t the man I was, or I’d take my medicine without squealin’, but I can’t face it again, Mame, I can’t! I’m an old man now, old before my time, perhaps, but it’s been so long since I smelled the prison taint, so long since I had a number instead of a name, that I’d die now, quick, before I’d rot in a cell!”
The terrible, droning monotone ceased, and for a moment there was silence in the squalid little room. The woman’s face was as impassive as Morrow’s, as she waited. Only the tightening of her hands upon her husband’s shoulders, until her bony knuckles showed white through the drawn skin, betrayed the storm of emotion which swept over her, at the memories evoked by the broken words.
“I’m not asking you to snitch, Pennold,” Morrow said, not unkindly. “We know all we want to about Brunell’s life at present––his home in the Bronx, and his little map-making shop––and we’re not trying to rake up anything from the past to hold over him now; it is only some general information I want. As to your nephew, you’ve got to tell me all you know about him, or it’s all up with you. Blaine won’t give you away, if you’ll answer my questions frankly and make a clean breast of it, and this is your only chance.”
Pennold licked his dry lips.
“What do you want to know?” he asked, at last.