Vanity
Summary
A prairie sin, fossilized in poker chips and kerosene glare, erupts three decades late into the gilded hush of a Park-Row brownstone where Robert Armstrong—once a frontier gambler whose name was forged in another man’s blood—receives a venomous epistle from Tom Mason, the very pickaxe poet who framed him. Father and heir, Dick, stew in parlor lamplight while Manhattan’s distant L-trains clatter like cosmic dice; their whispered history of switched cards and a corpse in sawdust becomes prelude to fresh gunpowder. When Mason arrives to levy fiscal penance, darkness swallows the room, a solitary detonation flashes white, and the extortionist collapses—only to be dragged through French windows into rain-glazed rhododendrons by a dutiful son staging a suicidal masquerade. Enter Phyllis Lord, couture mannequin by daylight, moral contortionist by twilight, who barters her virtue for fifty borrowed dollars at Crandell’s roulette altar and loses; a sleuthing puppet-master, Burke, rigs her disgrace, drapes her in silk sabotage, and wires her boudoir for sound so that Dick’s confession might bloom. Yet love mutinies: Dick unmasks the honey-trap, Phyllis bleeds remorse, and patriarch Armstrong inks his own culpability in tremulous fountain-pen ink. Just as Burke prepares to clap iron on the wrong heartbeat, a death-bed letter surfaces—Bessie Allen’s posthumous trump card—revealing the detective himself as bigamist, and Phyllis, trembling, bargains one sin for another beneath the cold green eye of a dictaphone.
Synopsis
Robert Armstrong, falsely accused of a murder committed thirty years ago in a western gambling hall, faces the alternative of imprisonment or paying blackmail. A letter from Tom Mason, formerly a miner, prepares him for a visit, at which time he must make his choice. Armstrong confides in his son, Dick, assuring him that the murder was committed by Mason, who used trickery to make it seem that he (Armstrong) was the culprit. Dick broods over the injustice to his father, and Armstrong cannot conceal his nervousness. The visitor comes and makes his demands. Armstrong grapples with him as the lights are turned off. Suddenly there is a shot, and when the lights are turned on again Mason is lying dead on the floor. Fearing the servants will enter, Dick drags the body through a window to the grounds outside, takes Mason's pistol out of his pocket, fires a shot into the body and places the weapon in the dead man's hand. Dick returns to the house and a policeman hurries to the scene. Dick thinks he has covered up his tracks, but Burke, chief of detectives finds the other bullet in the body and has no difficulty in connecting the murder with the Armstrong family. He does not succeed in getting a confession from either father or son, and decides to resort to strategy. Phyllis Lord is a model in Martel's establishment for women's apparel. The discrepancy between the gowns she wears to display to customers and her own modest raiment eats into the girl's consciousness. Then, too, she is befriending Bessie Allen, a young wife who has been deserted by her husband, and finds herself unable to help Bessie as she would like. A wealthy woman who is buying gowns boasts of having won five hundred dollars at Crandell's, a fashionable gambling resort, on a five dollar wager. Phyllis obtains a card of admission to Crandell's, without permission borrows one of Martel's gowns, and visits the gambling house. She loses the money she has brought and fifty dollars more which Crandell loans her. Burke, who has been watching the girl, has Phyllis dismissed from Martel's, making it appear that she has stolen money, and she is placed in such a position that she is obliged to accept Burke's offer to help him with a case. She consents to get a confession from Dick Armstrong. She is installed in a handsome apartment and given beautiful clothes. Bessie Allen, who is ill, is taken to a hospital. Burke puts a dictaphone into Phyllis's apartment. The pre-arranged courtship progresses favorably. Dick finds the trick Phyllis has played and denounces her. Phyllis is heartbroken, and anxious to atone for what she has done. She goes to Dick's father, and Armstrong, greatly agitated, writes a confession saying that he alone shot Mason. At police headquarters Dick is put through the third degree, and finally he gasps, "I did it." Phyllis, in the next room, hears him, and rushes in with Armstrong's confession. Burke's lieutenant makes out a warrant for his arrest. Phyllis goes home, exhausted, when a messenger brings a letter from Bessie, written just before her death. The letter encloses her marriage certificate, and photograph of the husband who deserted her. Phyllis rushes to the minister who performed the ceremony, and takes him to Burke's office. It is Burke who is Bessie's husband, and as he has illegally married another woman, Phyllis threatens him with arrest on a charge of bigamy. She offers to exchange her documents for Armstrong's confession, and Burke accepts. Then Phyllis falls sobbing into a chair, holding out her hands in supplication to Dick.
