CHAPTER NINE
When Teddie made ready for her conference with Gerald Rhindelander West she did so with a particularity which might have surprised both her recently abandoned maid and the immediate members of her own family. She went forth to the terra incognita of Nassau Street cuirassed in tailored and braided trimness and gauntleted in spotless kid with just the right array of wrinkles about her glove-tops. She was still further entrenched behind a four-skin scarf of blue-fox—which wasn't blue at all—and a canteen muff to match, to say nothing of seven cyanitic-looking orchids which completed the color-scheme and fluttered demurely above her slightly fluttering heart.
For it wasn't often that Teddie was as excited as she found herself that morning, just as it wasn't often that she had turned to give ponderable thought to the question of armor-plate. But it loomed up before her as a serious matter, this commandeering of a clever young attorney to her side of the case, and she felt the need of not producing an unfavorable impression on Gerry.
Yet even after she had unearthed Gerry's aerial office-suite in that seldom explored warren of industry known as Nassau Street, she found the attorney in question not quite so accessible as she had anticipated. For she was compelled to send in a card, and cool her heels in an outer room, and even after being admitted to the royal presence had to wait for a further minute or two while Gerry instructed an altogether unnecessarily attractive stenographer as to the procedure in manifolding a somewhat dignified array of documents.
He seemed still preoccupied, in fact, as he seated Teddie in a chair at his desk-end and absently took her muff and put it down and motioned away a secretarial-looking intruder and crisply asked just what he could do for her.
Teddie found it hard to begin. She made two false starts, in fact, before she was able to begin. And then she refused to be further intimidated by the paraded professional dignity of a person who'd once helped her paint zebra-stripes on a Jersey cow.
"Gerry, do you know Raoul Uhlan?" she found herself quite casually inquiring.
Gerry pondered the question for a moment. He was really thinking, all the time, how extraordinarily lovely Teddie could look in blue-fox.
"He's a man whom I have the privilege of not knowing," was Gerry's retarded but none the less satisfactory reply. "Why do you ask?"
"Because he's suing me for twenty-five thousand dollars," was Teddie's altogether unexpected announcement. Gerry, however, seemed determined to remain immobile.
"Not for breach of promise?" he asked, with an air of diffidence.
"No; it's for what I suppose you'd call breach of the peace," explained his client.
"What did you do?" inquired Gerry, with vivid but secret memories of the Nero incident.
"I had his nose thumped," acknowledged Teddie with vigor.
"Why?" asked Gerry, wondering why his mind kept straying back to one-eyed Russian rats.
Teddie hesitated. It wasn't an easy thing to talk about. That was a lesson she had already learned. But Gerry was different. He was one of her own world and one of her own set, and he'd look at the thing in the right way, in the only way.
"Why?" he repeated, secretly astounded by this new mood of humility in which he found Teddie Hayden immersed.
"Because he tried to kiss me," acknowledged Teddie, meeting Gerry's unwavering gaze.
"Fine!" said Gerry, as cool as a cucumber. "But who did the thumping?"
"A prize-fighter by the name of Dorgan—Gunboat Dorgan."
"Better still," calmly agreed her interlocutor, "for that implies it was a genuine professional thumping."
"It was," conceded Teddie. She was more than serious, she was even grim about it all. And if Gerry West had laughed at her, at any moment of that perilous mood, everything would have been over between them.
But Gerry was solemnity itself. "Go on!" he said, almost bruskly.
"Now Raoul Uhlan claims that he's lost a valuable commission through—through what was done to him. And the young lady who's interested in Gunboat Dorgan seems to think because I had him protect me in this way that I've interfered with her claim on this hero of hers."
"In what way interfered with him?" demanded Gerry.
"That I've—that I've made love to him," acknowledged the none too happy Theodora Lydia.
"Why do you say that?"
"Because she's seeing her lawyer about it."
"And this man Uhlan?"
"He sent his attorney, a man named Shotwell, to my studio to explain that because of his injuries he couldn't paint his twelve-thousand-dollar portrait. I was quite willing to pay for that until old Shotwell put in another claim for twelve thousand dollars for damages in general and an extra thousand for himself."
"So they're all trying after a bite," commented Gerry, studying his engagement-pad. "Now, tell me, Miss Hayden"
"Don't do that," was Teddie's sharp command.
"Don't do what?"
"Don't call me Miss Hayden."
"All right, Teddie," acquiesced her counsel-at-law, without a break in his solemnity. "But the first thing you must tell me is just what you intend doing."
"I don't know what to do. That's why I came to see you. That's what I'm willing to pay you for. But it's not entirely unnatural, I think, to nurse a fixed aversion to be chased around the map by an army of reporters and subpœna-servers."
"There are several things, of course, that we can do," explained Gerry, quite unruffled by this unmasking of the guns of irony. "But before we go any further there's a phase or two of the case I must understand. It was in your studio, you say, that this assault took place?"
"I hate that word!" interpolated Teddie.
"Well—er—this incident. Now, had you forbidden this man Uhlan entry, warned him away, and all that sort of thing?"
"No, he was coming there three times a week, to give me lessons," explained Teddie.
"For which he was being duly paid?"
"No, nothing was ever said about his being paid," she acknowledged. And Gerry's increase of gravity didn't altogether add to her happiness.
"And the day he got his thumping—why did he come to your studio on that occasion?"
For the second time Teddie hesitated. Life, after all, wasn't so simple as she had once imagined it.
"He came to make love to me," she finally admitted, not meeting Gerry's eyes. "And I had Gunboat Dorgan there to give him what he deserved."
Gerry wagged his head. He did so with what impressed Teddie as quite unnecessary solemnity.
"Now, about this man Dorgan: He knew exactly why he was doing what he did?"
"Of course!"
"And he expected to be duly paid for this—er—service he rendered you?" asked Gerry, seeming to persist in his determination that things should not be made too easy for her.
"No, he declined to have the matter of money come into it at all," Teddie rather falteringly acknowledged.
"Then what was the understanding?"
"There was no understanding."
"Then what did he do, when the thing was over?"
A silence fell between them.
"He kissed me," slowly acknowledged truthful Teddie, flushing up to the tiptilted brim of her hat.
Gerry swung sharply about. He swung about and stared out of the skyscraper window.
"He had no reason, no excuse, for doing anything like that!" supplemented the tingling Teddie.
"Didn't he, now!" silently soliloquized Gerry as he swung slowly back in his swivel-chair and sat staring at her. Then he added, aloud: "And what happened after that?"
"He presumed on his privileges to the extent of taking my car out of the garage and going joy-riding in it."
"Without your knowledge and permission?"
"Entirely! And bumped into a street-bus and broke my lamps."
"That's much better," Gerry surprised her by saying.
"Why?" asked Teddie, vaguely disturbed by her remembered failure to mention an offhanded proffer of this same car to this same knight with the cauliflower ear.
"Because we can settle his hash with a larceny action," retorted Gerry. "But our biggest nut to crack, I imagine, will be Uhlan!"
"What can we do about him?" asked Teddie, with the faintest trace of a tremor in her voice.
"There are quite a number of things we can do," coolly explained her solemn-eyed counsellor. "I can have him put out of the Camperdown Club, for one thing, before the week-end. I can demand an impartial appraisement of his physical injuries. I can see Shotwell, this attorney of his, and accept service. I can even get after 'em for blackmail. And there are several other things I can do. But each and every one of them will result in exactly the end we are most anxious to obviate. By that I mean publicity, newspaper talk, the reporters you spoke of as chasing you all over the map. That's the one thing, Teddie, we must not and shall not have!"
"No, we mustn't have that!" echoed Teddie, mysteriously comforted by the masterfulness of this new-found sage who could achieve such a cool-headed and clear-eyed view of the entire tangled-up muddle. It took a load off her mind, to know that she had some one so adroit and dependable as Gerry to stand beside her in this fight against the forces of evil. She felt sorry, in fact, that she hadn't come to Gerry in the first place. Then she felt rather glad in remembering that since she had come to him, she hadn't come looking like a frump.
"So the best thing you can do, Teddie," her new-found adviser was saying to her, "is to leave this entirely in my hands for a day or two. All I'm going to ask you to do is to keep mum, to sit tight. Before the week-end, I feel sure, we'll have the whole thing straightened out. And, by the way, what's the name and address of your prize-fighter's lady friend?"
He remained solemnity incarnate as he jotted Ruby Reamer's name and address down on his scratch-pad.
"Has it occurred to you," he said as he wrote, without looking up, "that this man Dorgan might have been the proper person for Uhlan to take action against?"
"I imagine he saw about all he wanted to of Dorgan," announced Teddie, with the icicle-look once more in her eyes.
"But not all he wanted to of you?" questioned Gerry, pretending to ignore her eye-flash of indignation. It was not often that he'd enjoyed the luxury of finding Teddie Hayden on the defensive, and he intended to make the most of it. "It's quite apparent he isn't afraid of you!"
"I was hoping you could make him that way," acknowledged Teddie. She said it quietly, but there was a barb in it which Gerry couldn't quite overlook.
"Well, we'll get him that way," he announced with vigor, as he rose to his feet. "If it's action they're after, they'll get all they want!"
A consciousness of clearing skies both elated and depressed the brooding-eyed Teddie. What Gerry was doing for her was being done merely in the way of a professional duty for which he would be duly paid. But they had been friends once, and she had treated him, she remembered, rather rottenly of late. She wanted to say something about that, make some effort to explain it away, yet she didn't quite know how to get that belated mood of repentance into words.
So, as she rose from her chair, she didn't even try to put it into words. She merely smiled softly and gratefully up into Gerry's eyes as he stood beside her, with the magnolia-white of her cheeks tinging into pink as he stared back at her, with his jaw-muscles set and a quick look of pain on the face that still remained pre-occupied.
"It's—it's awfully good of you, Gerry," she said as she held out her hand to him.
"That's how I make my living," was Gerry's unexpectedly brusk reply. But, apparently without knowing it, he still held her hand in his.
"It's awfully, awfully good of you," she repeated, as she reached with her free hand to restore the scarf which had slipped off her shoulder.
"It's not a bit good of me," he countered, almost harshly, as he put the scarf back where it belonged. And she would have been afraid of him, with that sudden black look in his eyes, if she hadn't remembered that Gerald Rhindelander West was a gentleman, a man of her own world and her own way of looking at things. And she rather liked that touch of camaraderie which was expressing itself in the unconsidered big-brothery weight of his hand on her unaverted shoulder.
"I feel so—so safe with you," she reassured him, with that misty look in her upraised eyes which can seem so much like a sigh made visible. And it was beginning to be a luxury, she felt, to find somebody she could feel that way with.
"Well, you're not!" he said in a voice that was almost a bark.
"Why do you mean I'm not?" she asked, perplexed, with a still more searching study of his face.
"I mean because"
He did not finish. Instead, with his hand still on her shoulder, he stooped and kissed her.
Teddie recoiled three full steps, and stood with her arms straight at her sides and a black rage in her startled eyes. Gerry's own hands had dropped to his side, and his head fell forward, for all the world like a chrysanthemum that needed watering.
"O-o-o-o-o-o!" gasped Teddie, with the most unmistakable accents of loathing and anger in her voice. "Are all men like that?"
"Wait!" called out Gerry, unhappily, pleadingly.
But Teddie had no intention of waiting. She withered him with one short look of revulsion, of utter repudiation, wheeled about, and strode out of the office.
She went, leaving behind her a blue-fox canteen muff and a much bluer young attorney who for quite a number of minutes stood staring morose and motionless out over the East River. He contemplated that wharf-fringed waterway very much as though he should like to take a header down into it. Then, as he slowly and dejectedly turned about, his eye fell on the forgotten muff.
He crossed to his desk and took the furry pillow up in his hands, turning it over and over. He meditatively stroked the deep pelt, sniffed at it, started for the door, and just as suddenly stopped. Then he quietly removed two tennis racquets and a box of golf-balls wrapped in a llama-wool sweater-coat from the bottom drawer of his desk and into this same drawer carefully tucked away the blue-fox muff—after which he stood, irresolute and unmoving, for another full five minutes.
Then Gerry West, as though to make up for lost time, exploded into a sudden fury of movement. He punched the buzzer-button for his stenographer, jerked down the messenger-call lever and caught up the telephone directory with one hand while he possessed himself of the receiver with the other.
"I'll show 'em," he muttered darkly to himself, "I'll show 'em they can't pull that cave-man stuff around my home circle!"
And in half an hour's time he had an ex-pool-roomer from a private detective agency busily shadowing Gunboat Dorgan, and another quiet-moving agent gathering what data he could as to the physical disabilities of Raoul Uhlan, and an expeditious clerk from the outer office confirming the address and movements of a certain Miss Ruby Reamer. Then, having started these wheels into motion, he hurriedly looked up a point or two of law, consulted his watch, and called up Louis Lipsett, of The Star, at the Press Club.
"Louis," he said over the wire, "I've got a great news story for you."
"Good!" promptly announced the other.
"Yes, it's so good, in fact, that you've got to come and help me kill it in the bud."
"Then let me add that what you want isn't a reporter, but an undertaker," retorted the unfeeling young White Hope of his over-saffroned daily.
"No, I want you, Louis, and I want you as quick as you can come," Gerry coolly averred.
"But why me?"
"Because you're the only ink-coolie on this Island who'd keep your word if you once promised to. So come over here in a taxi and let me unload."
Louis came, and smoked Gerry's good cigars, and listened, and remembered his promise with a true inkster's pang of regret.
"Now, the one thing that Avenue-robin can't stand, the one thing he doesn't want, in all this, is printer's ink. So it's up to us to give him what he's afraid of. It's up to us to hold a full-page Sunday story over his fat head. I want you to go right up to him as a reporter from The Star, with every detail I've given you. I want you to let him see just what it'll look like when it's unrolled, the entire unsavory story. And if he isn't sending a hurry-call in for the soft pedal before you're out of the elevator I'll buy The Star and give it to you to play with when you've got writer's cramp in the coco and can't dream up cable-despatches any more."
"And supposing our Romeo doesn't weaken?"
"He can't help it. But if he's crazy enough not to, I'll bring Gunboat Dorgan up there myself. And if that doesn't turn the trick, I'll call the rotter out myself and give 'im what he deserves. And if that doesn't work, I'll put a bullet into him!"
The man from The Star office smiled a bit wearily.
"Say, Gerry, doesn't this strike you as going pretty far for a mere client?"
"A mere client!" echoed the other. "A mere client?" he repeated as he looked his confederate straight in the eye. "She's a darned sight more than that. She's the girl, please God, that I 'm going to marry!"
"So at last I get you," announced the solemn-eyed Louis as he reached over the desk-end and solemnly shook hands with the other man. "And now I'll know how to put the screws to that palette-scraper!"
"Then let's get busy," suggested Gerry as he reached for his hat and coat, after a moment's talk over the wire. "They've got that Reamer girl for me, and the sooner we have our pow-wow the better!"