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One had raked success out of the fire of failure and had written what promised to be the season's dramatic sensation. One had earned the right to read her name, nightly, in Broadway's incandescent roster. I myself had been preserved from cannibal flesh-pots. All of us were seemingly brands snatched from the burning, and all of us were deeply miserable.
After months in the blindfolded canyons of New York's streets, a hemicircle of horizon, a hemisphere of sky, and a vast expanse of open water lent itself neither to calm appraisal nor to impromptu cuff-notes. It was recalled to my mind that the miracle of sunrise occurred every morning, and was not a rather belated alternation of illumination, following the quenching of Broadway's lights.
Now get that bunch over at the crap table." Merton Gill lost no time in relinquishing his cigarette. He dropped it into the wine glass which became a symbol of Broadway's dead-sea fruit. Thereafter he smoked only when he was in the picture. He felt that he was becoming screen wise. And Henshaw had remembered him.
You have committed some marvellous deeds under the very noses of the police you have boldly entered the homes of millionaires and held them up with an empty gun while you made free with their silver and jewels; you have sandbagged citizens in the glare of Broadway's electric lights; you have killed and robbed with superb openness and absolute impunity but when you boast that within forty-eight hours after committing a murder you can run down and actually bring me face to face with the detective assigned to apprehend you, I must beg leave to express my doubts remember, you are in New York."
Course, he's feelin' some hurt at bein' choked off so abrupt, but he takes it calm enough. "Oh, well," says he, "perhaps I can find someone else who will appreciate that this is the opportunity of a lifetime." "Sure you can," says I. "Broadway's just lined with willin' ears."
The people eating and drinking were of the kind usually to be found in Broadway's pleasure resorts rich men-about-town spending their money freely, hard-faced, square-jawed gamblers touting for business, callow youths having their first fling in metropolitan vice, motor-car parties taking in the sights, old roués seeking new sensations, faultlessly dressed wine agents promoting the sale of their particular brands, a few actors, a sprinkling of actresses of secondary importance, a bevy of chorus girls of the "broiler" type, a number of self-styled "grass widows" living quietly, but luxuriously on the generosity of discreet male admirers, and others still prettier, who made no secret of their calling, but insolently boasted of their profession being the most ancient in the world.
He practised a few transitions as he went on to press his evening clothes in the Patterson kitchen, and to dream, that night, that he rode his good old pal, Pinto, into the gilded cabaret to carry off Muriel Mercer, Broadway's pampered society pet, to the clean life out there in the open spaces where men are men.
The theatrical season was already on the wane; each day Broadway's pavements in the immediate vicinity of Forty-second Street became more congested with lean-looking thespians, just in from "the road." The Rialto the haven of every disheartened barnstormer, the cradle of every would-be Hamlet!
"Wull we?" Teddy asked regretfully. They went into the pushing and crowding of the streets; heard the shrill trill of the crossing policeman's whistle again; caught a glimpse of Broadway's lights, fanning lower and higher, and as the big signs rippled up and down. Martie drank it in eagerly, no faintest shadow of apprehension fell upon this evening.
Even if they should be found and identified as having been worn by the slayer of Sonntag, their presence there, he figured, would but serve to confuse the man hunt. Broadway's living tides flowed by, its component atoms seemingly ignorant of the fact that just round the corner below a man had been done to death.
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