Boston Blackie Read online

  Boston Blackie

  Jack Boyle

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  FOREWORD

  The great fire that followed the San Francisco earthquake had burned itself out. Half the city was a seared waste of smouldering ruins. Though the sky by night still reflected the red but dying glow of the wall of flame that had leaped from block to block like a pursuing creature of prey, the undevastated remnant was safe.

  Those of us who had lived through the four unforgettable days of chaos just passed, began to look about us once more with seeing eyes. Men smiled again, as amid the ruin, they planned the reconstruction of a city more beautiful than the one they had lost. The indomitable spirit of a people united by a great and common disaster rose undaunted and hope mastered despair.

  For the moment all men were equal. Gold had lost its value. Food, first of all necessities, was not for sale, and master and servant, banker and laborer, millionaire and beggar, waited together at the relief stations for their equal daily ration.

  Every park, every square, every plot of ground was covered with the improvised camps of the refugees. One hundred thousand people had fled from their homes before the incredibly swift sweep of the fire. They had fled with only such possessions as they could throw together in a moment and carry on their backs. With this inadequate material men built such makeshift shelters for their families as individual skill permitted. Each man was “on his own,” the sole protector and provider for his mate and children.

  Out in Golden Gate Park one Sunday afternoon—the fourth after the earthquake—I came upon a rude but comfortable refuge with a blanket forming each of three walls and a tarpaulin for a roof. Before the uncurtained entrance a man sat cross-legged with a little child on his lap. With masculine clumsiness he was trying to fashion a rag doll from a torn piece of sheeting and a bit of blue ribbon. The tot on his knee watched, smiling, with eyes wide with excitement and pleasure. Nearby, three other kiddies—the eldest not older than six or seven—sprawled on the grass, playing contentedly.

  Something prompted me to pause. The man looked up and smiled.

  “Some job for a mere man, this is,” he said, indicating the caricature of a doll on which he was working.

  “Not so bad, evidently, from your little girl’s viewpoint,” I answered, with another glance at the glowing eyes of the waiting child. “But maybe her mother will improve on it.”

  “I’m the only mother there is in this camp,” he answered. Then, as if he sensed my curiosity: “You see, pardner, none of them is mine.”

  “None of them yours?” I echoed in amazement.

  “Not one. I picked them up, lost and crying—poor, little stray lambs—during the fire. And now it’s up to me to take care of them. I’m hoping their folks, if they’re alive, will wander by my nursery and find ’em. If they don’t—well, I guess we’ll stick together, eh, little pals.”

  That was my first meeting with the strange but, to me, wonderfully human character I have tried to picture with photographic accuracy in the following story. I have hidden his identity under the name “Boston Blackie.” To the police and the world he is a professional crook, a skilled and daring safe cracker, an incorrigible criminal made doubly dangerous by intellect. To the world “Boston Blackie” is that and nothing more. But to me, who saw him in the park, caring, tenderly as a mother, for the forsaken little children the fire had sent him, “Blackie” is something more—a man with more than a spark of the Divine Spirit that lies hidden somewhere in the heart of even the worst of men. University graduate, scholar and gentleman, the “Blackie” I know is a man of many inconsistencies and a strangely twisted code of morals—a code that he guards from violation as a zealot guards his religion. He makes no compromise between right and wrong as he sees it. Principle is, to him, a thing beyond price. To-day “Boston Blackie” would go, smilingly content, to a lifetime behind prison bars rather than dishonor the conscience that guides him.

  And shall we judge him, you and I? When prompted to do so, inexorably there rises in my mind the picture of a man, grave faced and kindly, sitting cross-legged on the grass and making a rag doll with loving hands for a lost and homeless little child. It was Christ who said: “Suffer little children to come unto Me” and “Even as ye have done unto the least of these so even have ye done unto Me.”

  With these words before me I halt, leaving the verdict to God Himself.

  JACK BOYLE.

  March 1, 1919.

  CHAPTER I

  BOSTON BLACKIE

  Boston Blackie … in the archives of a hundred detective bureaus the name, invariably followed by a question mark, was pencilled after the records of unsolved safe-robberies of unequalled daring and skill.

  The constantly recurring interrogation point was proof of the uncanny shrewdness and prevision of a crook who pitted his wits against those of organized society and gambled his all on the result of the game he played—for it was in the spirit of a man playing a vitally engrossing game against incalculable odds that Boston Blackie lived the life of crookdom. The question mark meant that the police suspected his guilt—even thought they knew it—but had no proof.

  The name, Boston Blackie, was an anathema at the annual convention of police chiefs. The continually growing list of exploits attributed to him left them raging impotently at his incomparable audacity. He neither looked, worked nor lived as experience taught them a crook should. Traps innumerable had been laid for him without result. Always, it seemed, an intuitive foreknowledge of what the police would do guided him to safety. In short, Boston Blackie, safe-cracker de luxe, was the great enigma of the harried, savagely incensed guardians of property rights.

  Though detectives never guessed it, the secret of Boston Blackie’s invulnerability lay in his mental attitude toward the law and those paid to uphold it. In his own mind he was not a criminal but a combatant. He had declared war upon Society and, if defeated, was ready to pay the penalty it inflicted. Undefeated, he felt the world could not hold a grudge against him. The laws of the statute books he discarded as mere “scraps of paper.” He saw himself not as a lawbreaker but as a law-upholder, for he lived under the rigid mandates of a crook-world code that he held more sacred than life itself. A guilty conscience proves the downfall of most prison inmates. Blackie, his conscience clear, played the game winningly with the zest of a school-boy and the joy of a gambler confidently risking great stakes.

  Boston Blackie was no roystering cabaret habitue squandering the proceeds of his exploits in night-life dissipation. University trained and with a natural predilection for good literature, his pleasures were those of a gentleman of independent means with a mental trend toward the humanitarian problems of the day. His home was his place of recreation and in that home, sharing joyously the perils and pleasures of his strangely ordered life was Mary, his wife—Boston Blackie’s Mary to the crook-world that looked up to them with unfeigned adulation as the chief exponents of its queerly warped creed.

  Mary was Boston Blackie’s best loved pal and sole confidant. She alone knew all he did and why, and, knowing, she joined in his exploits with the wholeheartedness of unquestioning love. Together they played; together they worked and always they were happy in good fortune or evil. A strange couple, so unusual in thought and life and habit that detectives, judging them by other crooks, were forever at sea.

  Seated in their cozy apartment in San Francisco which for the time was their home Blackie suddenly dropped the current volume on mysticism which he had been reading and looked across the room to Mary, busy with an intricate piece of embroidery.

  “We need a bit of excitement, Mary,” he said with the unconcerned air of a husband about to suggest an evening at the theatre. “We’ll take the Wilmerding jewel co
llection to-night.”

  “I’ll drive your car myself if you’re going out there,” she answered with the faintest trace of womanly anxiety in her voice.

  “Well, then, that’s settled.”

  Boston Blackie resumed his reading and Mary her embroidery.

  CHAPTER II

  BOSTON BLACKIE’S LITTLE PAL

  The room was faintly illumined by the intermittent flame of a wood-fire slowly dying on the hearth of an open grate. The house was silent dark, seemingly deserted. Outside, the dripping San Francisco fog clung to everything in the heavy impenetrable folds that isolated the residence from its neighbors as though it stood alone in an otherwise empty world.

  Inside the handsomely furnished living-room, and opposite the fire which now and then leaped up and cast his shadow in grotesque shapes against the ceiling, stood a man intently studying the paneled walls—a man with a white handkerchief masking his face and a coat that sagged under the weight of the gun slung ready for instant use beneath one of its lapels.

  The man was Boston Blackie. Concealed behind the oaken panels he inspected so painstakingly was a safe in which lay the Wilmerding jewels—a famous collection.

  For two generations San Franciscans had eyed them with envy. Handed down from mother to daughter they had played their part in the social warfare of the city of the Golden Gate for half a century. And Blackie was there to make them his own.

  He ran acutely sensitive fingers—sandpapered until the blood showed redly below the skin—over the woodwork, seeking the hidden spring he knew was there—for an incautious servant’s remark had traveled up through the underworld until it reached Blackie, the one in a thousand expert enough to use it. Quickly his questing fingers located the key panel, and the door rolled noiselessly back, disclosing a steel strong-box.

  “Ah, neatly arranged!” murmured the safe-cracker in an inaudible and satisfied whisper as he stooped and gently turned the combination-knob. It revolved without perceptible sound, but science is an impartial ally—the ally of able crooks as well as of those who war upon them. Blackie laid a tiny metal disk against the combination. Wires led from it to a transmitter he hooked over his ear. Then he turned the dial-knob again slowly and with’ infinite care. The audion bulb within the transmitter—science’s newest device for magnifying otherwise imperceptible sound—carried to his ear plainly the faint click of the tumblers within as the dial crossed the numbers of the combination that guarded the jewels. One by one he memorized them, slowly but surely reading the combination that, once his, would enable him to open the safe, take the gems, relock the strong-box and depart without leaving behind the slightest outward evidence that robbery had been done. The cracksman smiled contentedly as he worked. Already he reckoned the Wilmerding collection of jewels as his own.

  A faint sound from behind caught his ear. He straightened quickly, dropped the audion bulb into his pocket and slid the panel noiselessly back into place.

  “A step on the stair!” he whispered in sudden alarm. “And I was sure the house was empty except for the two servants asleep below-stairs—I counted them out one by one; and yet there’s some one coming down from above. Coming down slowly, stealthily, too!”—as he heard a second cautious step. “Too bad! In another five minutes I’d have been gone.”

  He drew his mask higher over his face and stepped backward into the shadow of the drapery before the window he had prepared for a quick exit in an emergency. Then he waited, listening with every sense alert, every muscle rigid.

  Again he heard the step, now close to the doorway. Then in the dim firelight a small tousled head appeared—the head of a little child who stood irresolute outside the room.

  The boy—a mere baby of four—hesitated on the threshold of the dark room, evidently trying to summon courage to enter. The safe-cracker from his refuge saw and read a conflict between fear and determination in the wide eyes of the little intruder. For a full minute the child hung back; then suddenly with a low cry, half fearful, half courageous, he ran across the room to the window and tumbled straight into the arms of the safe-cracker, of whose presence he had no inkling.

  Blackie, fearing an outcry, spoke quickly, soothingly, but the boy neither screamed nor cried. He stared wonderingly for a moment into the kind eyes that looked down into his, and then with a faint sigh of relief involuntarily nestled closer in the protecting arms that held him—a lonely, frightened child finding comfort and consolation in the unexpected solace of human companionship.

  “Who is you?” lisped the little fellow, smiling confidingly up into Blackie’s perplexed face. Then with suddenly increased interest: “You isn’t Santy, is you? No, you isn’t Santy ’cause that on your face is a hanky, not beards.” He had reached up and given the partially disarranged handkerchief mask a gentle, impairing tug.

  Blackie smiled back at him.

  “No, I’m not Santa Claus to-night, little man,” he said. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Martin Wilmerding, Junior, and I’m four years old,” the boy said proudly.

  “You are! Well, well! And where is your mamma and your papa?”

  “Papa’s gone away, Mamma says, and Mamma’s gone to a party; and w’en Mamma was gone, then Nursey went out too, and said she’d spank me if I told. John and Emily is downstairs s’eeping, and I woke up an’ it was dark, and I was ’fraid—a little.”

  “So they’ve all traipsed off and left you alone for me to entertain, have they!” said Blackie, his eyes narrowing grimly as understanding of the situation came to him. “But what were you coming, downstairs for? Looking for Mamma?”

  “Oh, no—Mamma won’t come for ever and ever so long. I was all alone and ’fraid, and I came down for Rex.”

  “Rex—who is he?” asked Blackie quickly. “He’s my doggie, my woolly doggie. See, here he is.”

  The boy squirmed out of Blackie’s arms and pattered in bare feet to the window-seat, where he resurrected Rex from beneath a cushion. Then he hurried back to Boston Blackie and climbed to his lap with the toy dog clasped in his arms.

  “Rex s’eeps upstairs with me,” the child informed his new-found friend. “But to-night Nursey forgot him, an’ I woked up an’ ’membered where he was, an’ it was so dark an’ I wanted him so bad, so I corned downstairs for him. I isn’t ’fraid when I has Rex, ’cause I can hold him close an’ talk to him, an’ then we bofe goes to s’eep. See, isn’t he a dear little doggie?”

  Unconsciously Boston Blackie’s arms tightened around the soft little body nestling contentedly against his breast.

  “You poor, abandoned little kiddie !” he said softly. “You poor little orphan! You’re a little man, too, for it took real nerve to come down here after your pal Rex—far more nerve than I had to use to get in here.”

  “I likes you. You’re a nice man,” said the boy with childish intuitive understanding that the man in whose arms he lay was a friend.

  Blackie looked at his burden in puzzled indecision. He hadn’t the heart to desert his new-found pal, and yet he was a safe-breaker in a strange house, with each passing minute doubling his risk. Even the sound of their voices, low-pitched though they were, was an imminent danger. The boy, quiet and content, cuddled close to him, hugging his precious woolly dog.

  “Hadn’t you better run back to bed, Martin?” said Blackie gently at last. “Nursey will be back soon, and she’ll be cross if she finds you down here.”

  The child clutched the arms that sheltered him.

  “Y-e-s,” he admitted slowly. Then wistfully: “It’s awful dark and quiet upstairs. If you come up and tuck me an’ Rex in bed, we’ll be good and go right to s’eep. P’ease.”

  “Of course I will,” said the safe-cracker a bit huskily. “I’d do it if the whole house were full of coppers.”

  He rose with the boy still in his arms.

  “You must show me the way, Martin,” he said. “And we mustn’t make any noise and wake John and Emily. Now we’ll go.”

/>   They climbed the dark stairway together and, the child directing, came to the open door of a big deserted nursery. A little empty bed revealed the refuge from which Martin Wilmerding, Jr., had begun his perilous adventure in search of Rex and companionship. Blackie laid the boy down and covered him gently as a mother might have done.

  “Good-night, little pal,” he said. “I’m glad I happened to be here to-night.”

  The boy clutched his hand.

  “P’ease stay and hold my hand,” he pleaded. “I’s going right to s’eep if you will. P’ease, ’cause it’s awful dark.”

  Boston Blackie sat on the edge of the bed and took a tiny hand in his. The boy with a sigh of perfect contentment nestled snugly in downy comforts.

  “Goo’ night,” he said drowsily.

  “Good night, little pal,” answered Blackie. Silence descended over the nursery as Blackie with aching throat waited hand in hand with the little Wilmerding heir, who was learning too soon that life’s problems must be mastered alone and unaided.

  Five minutes passed, and Blackie, looking down, saw the boy was fast asleep with baby lips parted in a peaceful smile, and Rex’s fuzzy head tightly clasped to his breast. The safe-cracker gently withdrew his hand and smoothed the covers.

  “Poor little chap!” he said. “Everything in the world that doesn’t count and only one real friend—Rex. Poor, lonely little chap!”

  The safe-cracker crept noiselessly down the stairs to the room that contained the purpose of his visit. The fire had died to a few glowing embers. Again he rolled back the paneled door and exposed the safe. Again he adjusted the audion bulb and began anew the task of deciphering the combination. And again with his work but half finished there came a startling interruption—a short and a long blast from an autohorn that sounded from somewhere out in the fog.

  “Mary’s signal! Some one’s coming,” he reflected disgustedly. Quickly he drew a damp cloth from his pocket and mopped off the door of the safe and the woodwork to destroy the possibility of telltale fingerprints, then once more closed the panel. He drew back into the comparatively safe shelter of the window-hangings, and waited.