Angelo

BY JOHN A. MOROSO

James Tierney pressed a pearl button on his desk in the handsome Wall Street suite of James Tierney, Inc., and supplemented the electric summons with a series of shouts for his first lieutenant, Mickey Reilley.

Reilley bounced into his chief's office with a shameful apology for a salute.

"Reilley," began the head of the famous private detective agency, with the expression of a martyr on his clean shaven, homely countenance, "y'gotta find me a Carrie again, a real nice Carrie, one of those things with a little walking cane, a fried-egg hat, yellow shoes and all the other frills."

Reilley looked his displeasure.

"Say," he asked, "what we runnin' now, a college annex?"

Tierney held before him a letter from one of his directors and backers, a Broad Street banker who had gathered an almost criminal share of the country's wealth.

"Yow! Wow!" he grunted as he studied the epistle. "Here's Mr. James Frothingham Phillips, one of the guys what put us in business, asking to have his daughter, Ione—get that name?—shadowed."

"What she doing, shoplifting?"

"Nix; making love to the family chauffeur."

Reilley dropped into a chair and put his head in his hands.

"Say," he groaned, "if they keep shootin' this kind of business at us we'll get to be a set of nice old ladies, believe me. I t'ought we was put here to look out f'r the banking business and watch the yeggs."

Tierney looked at his aide with glassy eyes.

"We're here to do just what they tell us to do," he said. "If your conscience hurts yuh, go up to police headquarters and work with the bulls until you're cured and then come back f'r a job." He grinned sarcastically.

"There's only one swell guy in reach," Reilley said, surrendering promptly. "He's outside now smoking a perfumed cigarette and making the office smell like—"

"Trot him in."

Reilley went to the waiting room and returned immediately with William Winthrop, only that very morning rechristened "Boston Willie."

Willie nodded patronizingly to Tierney as he stood flickering at his gray trousers with a silver-topped cane. He was a well set-up youngster of twenty-five, with broad shoulders, bright, clear, blue eyes, silky complexion and the hint of a smile playing about patrician lips.

A gorgeous blue scarf relieved the neutral gray of his well made morning suit. A black pearl set in carved gold for a stickpin was his only ornament. His gloves were chamois and of such freshness that it was evident that he was accustomed to having people open doors.

"How-do, Mr. Tierney," he said in a Harvard drawl that would have made an Eliot lecture sound like a Salvation Army appeal.

"How-do," repeated Tierney.

"It's—ah rawther a pleasant—ah morning."

"It's grand," said Tierney. "I gotta job f'r yuh."

"Thanks awf'ly, y'know, and all that sort of thing."

Tierney began to feel a pounding in his head. Reilley loomed in the background, grinning fiendishly as he watched his chief suffer.

"D'yuh know a society girl named Ione Phillips?" he asked when he felt that he could proceed without loss of reason.

"Ione Phillips?" repeated "Boston Willie." "I've heard the name. Ah, yes! She was at the Pawmer cotillon last New Year's eve, I believe."

"The Pawmer cotillon?" asked Tierney.

The young man nodded.

"The Pawmers, y'know," he explained.

"How do you spell them?"

"P-a-l-m-e-r-s."

"Oh, I gotcha, Steve," cried Tierney. "Yuh must excuse me, Mr. Winthrop. I don't talk Boston very well."

Reilley left the room to avoid an explosion of mirth.

"What about the—ah, young lady?" Boston Willie asked.

"She's trying to get the family chauffeur to elope," explained Tierney getting down to business. "She's the only daughter and her paw wants her to marry a duke, or anyhow, nuthin' cheaper than a count. He's got the price and if there was any kings in the discard he'd spend a few millions and pick one up."

"Jove," exclaimed Willie, "I remember them now. She's the daughter of Old Man Phillips."

"K'rect," said Tierney, "on her father's side and of Old Lady Phillips on her mother's side."

The smile about Willie's lips broke into a series of wide-spreading ripples and his eyes sparkled. "Ha!"

That one "ha" alone escaped his lips. It represented laughter. Mirth had stirred him profoundly.

When he recovered from this outburst Willie placed a gloved hand to his side as if it ached.

"My word, Mr. Tierney," he said, "you are droll."

Tierney looked at him suspiciously.

He made a mental note of that word "droll." He would look it up. His stenographer had a dictionary.

"Anyhow, Mr. Winthrop," he said, "yuh gotta see that she don't elope with the chauffeur. The gir-rl's paw writes me that he is a very handsome chauffeur, but he is a wop."

"A wop," repeated Tierney. "Some people would call him a Guinea, others might call him a Joe and I guess he calls himself an Eyetalian."

"Oh!"

"My talk is the rough stuff, Mr. Winthrop, but I'm telling you what yuh gotta do," went on Tierney, seriously now. "Don't let Ione marry the wop. Marry her yourself if it is absolutely necessary—but use that only as the last resort. You know you ain't no duke or even a count. Her old man's got all the money that Rockefeller didn't have time to pick up. Go out and hire the finest gazump that ever burned benzine. Buy all the fine clothes and little hats that you want. Blow yourself to more neckties and walking sticks. Do just as you please. If I sent Ione's paw an expense bill under a thousand a week he'd think I was loafing on the job and only a piker. Just see that she don't marry the family chauffeur."

"Why don't Mr. Phillips fire the chauffeur?" asked Willie.

"Why?" repeated Tierney. "Because just as soon as he fired him she'd run away and nothing could prevent her marrying the guy except sudden death. She'd give up home and candy and everything else and start life all over again in a hall bedroom with one gas jet and a frying pan. She'd take in washing until her husband got another job. That's the way they all do when the handsome chauffeur is fired."