There was no answer. The man, his lips twitching, was still staring at the back of his hand.
With a sudden movement, Jimmie Dale emptied the contents of the portfolio upon the table. He brushed them into a heap with the diamonds already there.
“They belong together,” said Jimmie Dale, in a curious monotone, “and I couldn't bear to see them left behind. They'll be found together too, Isaac, for I am afraid it will be impossible to make any one believe now that Jathan Lane's safe has never been disturbed.” His voice hardened suddenly. “You're going up for this, Isaac. I make no bargain with you. The police are going to be tipped off over the phone, and they are going to find you here trussed up in that chair with the diamonds in front of you. But before the police get you, you are going to deal with me. I want to know who the man is you, and those with you, take your orders from. And before we are through you are going to tell me, Isaac—all you know.”
Shiftel's tongue was circling his lips. He shook his head. He was cringing now, supplicating with his hands.
“I don't know anything,” he protested wildly. “You're all wrong. You're all wrong about everything. I don't know anything about Jathan Lane. I don't know where the diamonds came from. I never ask questions in my business. They were brought in here for me to shove, and——”
“That's enough, Isaac!” snapped Jimmie Dale. “The game is up! Your friend, Patrick Denton, alias the Minister, is dead up there on the floor of Jathan Lane's private library, where he——”
“Dead!” Shiftel's hands had ceased their movements. The man stood rigid. Something stronger than himself seemed to have stripped him of further power to dissimulate. “Dead! You—you killed him?”
“Never mind about that!” Jimmie Dale bit off his words. “It's enough for you to know for the present that he is dead. You're not quite so innocent as you were—are you, Isaac? And as for the man who brought those stones here, a friend of mine has kindly arranged to have the police pay a little visit at Gentleman Laroque's at just about this time; to be precise”—he drew his watch from his pocket—“at——”
Jimmie Dale's words ended abruptly. He, too, was suddenly standing tense and rigid. A footstep, guarded, cautious, was coming along the areaway out there. It was coming nearer to the open window—the drawn shade did not hide the sound. Instinctively his eyes sought the dial of his watch.
It was half past three.
“At Laroque's!” Shiftel, his ears strained toward the window, was whispering the words. “The police—at Laroque's!” And then he raised both fists in fury and shook them above his head. “You snitch, you cursed snitch”—the low, whispered words seemed but to accentuate the man's sudden flood of passion—“we'll get you yet for this!”
For an instant Jimmie Dale's brain seemed to reel in turmoil and chaos. That voice was no longer Shiftel's. Those words! Once he had heard those exact words before, and—with a quick step forward, his hand reached out, tearing beard and spectacles from the other's face.
“Gentleman Laroque!”
“Yes, you fool!” said Laroque, still whispering. “So you've tripped at last, eh? You didn't know, and you've brought the police here. Well, take the consequences! It's you who's trapped!” He was backing slowly away from both table and window toward the inner wall of the room. “Perhaps you'll explain the possession of those stones! You fool, you and that woman with you, you don't know what you're up against, but——”
“Don't move!” ordered Jimmie Dale grimly.
“Just this far,” smiled Laroque. “I hear them coming along the hall inside now. Don't forget there's one of your police on guard outside the window, and——”
The room was in instant darkness. The bare fraction of a second passed, not more; there was a faint scraping sound from the direction where Laroque had been standing—and Jimmie Dale's flashlight, whipped from his pocket, was sweeping around him.
The room was empty!
Jimmie Dale's face was set like chiselled marble. Empty! Gone! The man was gone! But that was not all! Voices were ringing that slogan of the old days in his ears again: “Death to the Gray Seal!” He did not need to be told what it meant to be caught by either police or underworld. He, too, heard those guarded footsteps inside the tenement and coming now along the hall. His mind, alert, virile, was working with lightning speed. The doorway was behind him, and Laroque could not have gone that way—nor by the window guarded by the police. There must be some secret exit from the room. If so, given but a second, while he, Jimmie Dale, was attempting an escape, Laroque could get back again and secure the diamonds that lay upon the table. And he, Jimmie Dale, was responsible for them now!
And now Jimmie Dale in action was swift as his racing thoughts. Whether he could save himself or not, there was at least a way to save the stones. With the flashlight switched on, he propped it on the end of the table, its ray streaming over the gems and playing in the opposite direction from the connecting door.
“If you can hear me, Laroque,” he whispered, “I warn you—don't try it! All you'll get off that table will be a bullet, whether I'm caught or not!”
It was utter blackness behind him. He backed swiftly, silently through the connecting door, and across the outer room to the door that led into the hall. His automatic held a line on the table top. He crouched at the far side of the door casing. They were here now. He heard a whispered consultation outside, as his fingers, closing on the key, silently unlocked the door. Queer! His brain was racing again. A queer sight! All blackness back here—and, through the connecting doorway, a light, apparently coming from nowhere, streamed over a shimmering, scintillating mass of diamonds, and ended by imposing itself in a white, luminous circle on a dirty, greasy wall behind! His eyes never left the table; his automatic never wavered in its line. Queer! The Phantom! Gentleman Laroque—Isaac Shiftel! Could it be? Was that a partial answer to the Tocsin's “score of aliases and score of domiciles”? Was Gentleman Laroque the Phantom? Yet how had she taken this for Laroque's home if she hadn't known the two men were one? And she hadn't known. She had said so. But—yes, it was not unexplainable. It might easily have been—just as it had been with him, Jimmie Dale, as Larry the Bat, or as Smarlinghue. She might have seen Laroque come here some evening—and Shiftel might have come out—while she thought Laroque remained at home. It might easily be that she did not know Shiftel, and so——
“Bust it in!” The words came sharp, incisive, from the hall; then a quick exclamation: “Blamed if the door ain't unlocked! Come on!”
The door was flung violently open. A man swung forward into the room—and halted abruptly, staring toward the connecting doorway.
“For Heaven's sake, sergeant, look at that!” he burst out.
A man behind pushed eagerly forward. And Jimmie Dale, crouching low by the baseboard in the blackness, slipped through the doorway behind the other without a sound, and in a moment was outside the tenement and walking quietly along the street—in a direction that ignored the areaway.
Half an hour later Jimmie Dale mounted the steps of a palatial residence on Riverside Drive. He smiled softly as he stumbled and shuffled so noisily that before he had gained the topmost step the door was opened for him by the white-haired old butler, who had been butler to Jimmie Dale's father before him, and whose proudest boast was that he had dandled his Master Jim upon his knee. It would have been so easy to have slipped in, and passed the old man, and gone upstairs to bed—and broken the old man's heart to have been found out asleep at his self-appointed post.
“What!” said Jimmie Dale severely—and used identically the same words he had used on a hundred similar occasions: “Sitting up again for me, Jason? How many times am I to tell you that I won't have it? Jason, go to bed