The Wheel of Death/Chapter 2

Strange things happen in New York taxis, especially after dark. There are horrid things and disgusting things which occur in the semi-seclusion of these cabs as they whirl through the lighted streets of the city. Young girls have their lives wrecked, and old men are made foolish by the clinging playthings of Broadway. There are robberies, murders and even more ugly crimes committed behind the backs of the drivers. A passer-by catches but a glimpse, and the driver is often too bored to look into the little mirror which reveals what is going on behind him when the blinds are not drawn to cut off his view.

As the taxi sped away from Grogan's Restaurant with the man and the unconscious girl, the driver suspected that something was wrong. But he had seized the crumpled bank note which had been thrust into his hand and he had opened it sufficiently to see that it was a fifty-dollar bill. And he had heard the magic words: "There's another one coming."

In his little apartment uptown he had a wife and five kids to feed. Also he knew that a driver sometimes received a bullet in the back when he did not do what he was told to do. So he drove on, turning into the stream of traffic flowing north upon an avenue.

And behind the driver's back the man who called himself Dick supported the girl with his left arm while, with his right hand, he extracted another fifty-dollar bill from a well-filled pocketbook. Through a glazed window of the pocketbook was exposed a New York Police Department pistol permit. The name on the permit was Richard Wentworth, and the address was one of the most fashionable sections of Park Avenue.

It was evident that the man with the plastered hair had not lied when he had intimated that his name was Dick. But not one of his fashionable friends would have believed it possible for the fashionable Richard Wentworth to carry away a young lady in a fainting condition, from so tawdry an eating place as Grogan's Restaurant. His friends would not even have recognized him if they had passed him on the street in his present disguise.

But few of his friends really knew much about Richard Wentworth. Occasionally he flashed into public view upon the polo field. At times he was reported to be engaged in adventurous enterprises in far-away countries. At other times his name was connected with police investigations of criminal activities. In his clubs and in the drawing-rooms of New York he was seldom seen. It was usually where danger and excitement dwelt that Richard Wentworth might be found.

It was this liking for danger which had brought him, that night, to Grogan's restaurant whose sinister secret, if uncovered in time, would, he believed mean the saving of many lives and much misery.

As the taxi rolled northward, Wentworth lit a cigarette with his free hand and watched Molly as she began to recover consciousness. He was, he knew, in a difficult situation. No man can tell how a strange woman will come out of a faint. Some women snap back to full life very quickly; others are slow and sometimes very sick. Molly might be hysterical and attract police attention by screaming. And police attention was the last thing that Wentworth desired. The Spider would undoubtedly be sent to the electric chair, if he were ever apprehended. And the Spider's death seal was upon the foreheads of the two men in Grogan's Restaurant. Certainly the two men had deserved the death penalty, but the law does not permit private individuals to become agents of justice— even when the law fails, itself, to bring deserved punishment.

Molly moved her head, with its short, fair curls, upon Wentworth's shoulder. Her blue eyes fluttered open and closed again. She really had very pretty hair, Wentworth observed, and her skin was clear and almost without make-up. Dressed fashionably, she might have been beautiful. Yet the driver, who was shooting glances into his little mirror, wondered why a man would spend as much as fifty dollars for such a girl when he might easily have one quite wide awake for a fraction of that amount.

"Turn into Central Park," directed Wentworth as they came to 59th Street, "and keep going."

The spoken words roused Molly to complete consciousness. She lifted her head from Wentworth's shoulder and stared wildly around her. It was a tense moment. If she became hysterical or lost control of herself through fright, Wentworth might have a very difficult situation to face. It would be almost impossible for him to explain his position to a policeman. But awkward problems and difficult situations, especially if accompanied by danger, were the wine of life to Richard Wentworth. He waited. A few moments would tell the story.

"Hey, mister!" It was the driver speaking as they swung into Central Park. "Do you know that we are being followed? There's a blue, closed car just behind us. I've been watching it for the last half mile."

Wentworth glanced back and saw the car. There were two men in the tonneau beside the driver. Certainly it was not a police car, which meant that it must belong to some member of the underworld. Wentworth had another problem upon his hands, a problem that might be far more dangerous than the problem of Molly.

"Keep on going," he ordered the taxi driver quietly. "Ill tell you what to do in a few minutes."

The driver did as he was told, but he was nervous. He suspected that they were being followed by some members of the criminal world which infested the great city in which he worked. And he knew that disagreements among criminals often ended in a hail of bullets. He edged out to the left and shot his car ahead of the slower traffic. But the blue car followed closely.

Meanwhile Molly did the unexpected thing by leaning back in her corner of the cab and commencing to cry and sob as if her heart would break. She had looked at Wentworth and recognized him as the man who had sat, uninvited, at her table. But she showed no fear. Her sobbing was obviously the expression of heartbreaking grief— not of terror.

Wentworth knew women. He let Molly cry briefly while he glanced back and saw that the blue car was still following them. He saw something more. One of the men in the tonneau seemed to be lifting a bulky object from the floor and adjusting it. He could not be certain, but the man seemed to be handling a machine gun. In the shadows of the tonneau the other man appeared to be very large and to resemble Grogan.

The situation was becoming complicated. Central Park offers many stretches of road where, at night, traffic is slight and where a burst of machine-gun fire can be delivered with impunity by bold criminals.

Wentworth turned to the girl. "There is nothing to be afraid of, Molly," he said.

"I'm not afraid," she replied, sobbing. "I just don't care any more. It— it's too late to care now!"

Wentworth considered this reply, but could not understand it. However, there was the blue car to think about. He felt that he had to think about that car, if he and Molly were to go on living. He had been watching the following car guardedly through the rear window of the taxi and once, under a road lamp, he had recognized big Dan Grogan beyond any chance of mistake.

Grogan could have no reason for the pursuit except to bring death to the two occupants of the taxi.

The taxi driver also had been studying the pursuing car by means of his rear-view mirror, and he was becoming more and more nervous. He knew his New York, and he thought that his wife and kids needed him more than he needed the second fifty.

"I don't like it, mister," he said, beginning to slow his taxi. "You'll have to get out and walk."

Wentworth said nothing, but he partly exposed a pistol from under his coat. Molly did not see the weapon. The driver, however, saw it in his little mirror, and the taxi shot ahead again.

"You are a good girl not to be afraid, Molly," Wentworth said, speaking pleasantly and easily. "But why is it too late to care now?"

"You wouldn't care much about anything if your father was going to die tonight, would you?" she asked.

Wentworth caught his breath in surprise. He had been very fond of his father, who had been killed in the war— in the same battle in which he, himself, had been seriously wounded.

"What made you ask that question?" he inquired, looking at her gravely.

"Because my father is going to be electrocuted at ten o'clock tonight."

Wentworth flipped his wrist over and glanced at the watch which was strapped upon it. It was half past eight. He looked down at the little girl beside him and saw that her eyes were flooded with tears.

Behind them Grogan's blue car was creeping up and was turning out to pass them. It would be in passing, while the two cars were traveling at almost the same speed, that the stream of machine gun bullets would sweep into the taxi.

"Jam on your brakes!" barked Wentworth at the driver.

"Hard, man! If you want to live!"

The brakes of the taxi screamed as the car came to such a sudden stop that Wentworth had to hold Molly to prevent her from being hurled forward off the seat. At the same time the blue car shot past them too fast for any marksman to take aim and fire. As the other car disappeared around a bend in the road, the taxi driver looked back at Wentworth and positively refused to go on. Since it was a one-way road there was nothing to do except stay where they were at the side of the road. To go back against the traffic would mean running foul of a traffic policeman. And policemen were almost as dangerous to Wentworth as were the criminals who were after his scalp.

"All right," he said quietly to the driver. "Smoke a cigarette and get back your nerve."

"It isn't a case of nerve, Mister," the driver argued. "It's a case of common sense. I saw what they had in that blue car, and I'm not paid to get my head blown off."

As the taxi stood by the roadside Wentworth turned again to Molly. "What is your father's name?" he asked.

"Arnold Dennis."

Then Wentworth understood. Arnold Dennis had been a bookkeeper for the Mack Syndicate, a wealthy corporation which handled a great deal of contract work for the city, chiefly the supplying of materials for construction work. Dennis had been convicted of the murder of a junior partner of the company while working overtime very late at night.

At the trial evidence was given that the junior partner had caught Dennis falsifying the books and had been shot by the elderly bookkeeper in an endeavor to cover up his crime. The pistol had been exhibited, bearing Dennis' finger prints.

Molly Dennis had at last stopped crying. But there was hopeless misery upon her young face. Her father had an hour and a half to live, and the tragedy of it was more than she could bear.

"But what were you doing in Grogan's Restaurant, Molly?" asked Wentworth.

"Father was framed," she answered. "He described the real murderer to me, but he didn't know his name. He also told me that the Mack Syndicate had some dealings with Dan Grogan, entered in a secret ledger which Mortimer Mack, President of the Mack Syndicate, kept in his private safe at home."

Wentworth looked at her sharply. If this were true, he had not been far wrong in his assumptions concerning Grogan's restaurant. He was on the trail of one of the greatest scandals in the history of New York! For if the Mack Syndicate, famed for its large business deals with the city, had any kind of commerce with a man like Dan Grogan, it could only mean one thing— that the seeming respectability of the syndicate cloaked shocking corruption of the most sinister sort.

Yet Wentworth, for the moment at least, was more interested in the human story of Molly and her father than he was in the possibility of some great crime in the making.

"But what were you doing in Grogan's Restaurant, Molly?" he persisted.

She told him that she had been looking for the real murderer; and that Grogan closely resembled the description given her by her father. That night, in desperation, she had risked an open visit to the restaurant, praying that she might gather some new evidence to free her father. And she had overheard sufficient of the conversation in the curtained booth to make it evident that Grogan was known in the underworld as the real murderer of the junior partner of the Mack Syndicate!

There was no doubt regarding Molly's truthfulness. Wentworth had only to look at her to know that she was sincere. It was possible, even probable, that her father was innocent. Nothing was too hideous to be possible if such a firm as the Mack Syndicate had undercover dealings with Dan Grogan.

Such a condition of corruption was the kind of thing which, above all else, Richard Wentworth loved to fight. And, when the happiness of a young girl was also at stake, he asked for nothing better.

But he wondered grimly whether in this case the odds against him were not too great to overcome. A man must die in less than one hour and a half. Could he stop the execution? He was in a taxi in Central Park. His clothes were such that his friends would be shocked if they saw him. Only the Governor of the State of New York could reprieve the man who was to be executed so soon. Governors are difficult people to reach quickly, and they are not easy to influence. In the case of Arnold Dennis, condemned to death, Wentworth had no new evidence which would be accepted in a court of law.

But he had faith in himself, and he loved a fight.

"Molly— " he began. Then broke off abruptly, as the taxi driver gave a shout of alarm.

Backing down the road toward them came the blue car which had passed them. Something barrel-like and menacing projected from the rear window of the backing car.

The taxi driver flung wide his door and leaped into the park, racing across the open space. For Wentworth to have followed him, even if he had been unencumbered by Molly, would have been suicidal. He would have been shot down before he had covered twenty-five yards of the open space.

"Molly," Wentworth said, taking her hand and touching her for the first time since she had recovered consciousness, "let's make a fight of it."

And in the second before Richard Wentworth went into action her eyes glistened. He smiled. There was satisfaction in fighting for an Irish girl with courage. ..