The Black Eagle Mystery
by Geraldine Bonner · English · Gutenberg #35484 · 389,428 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Black Eagle Mystery
Author: Geraldine Bonner
Illustrator: Frederic Dorr Steele
Release date: March 5, 2011 [eBook #35484]
Most recently updated: April 10, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35484
Credits: Darleen Dove, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLACK EAGLE MYSTERY ***
THE BLACK EAGLE MYSTERY
BY GERALDINE BONNER
Author of "The Girl at Central"
ILLUSTRATED BY
FREDERIC DORR STEELE
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON
1916
_Copyright 1916, by_
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
_Copyright, 1915, by P. F. Collier & Son, Inc._
Printed in the United States of America
[Illustration: _Mr. Harland’s body had been found on the sidewalk._]
CONTENTS
· FOREWORD
· LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
· CHAPTER I
· CHAPTER II
· CHAPTER III
· CHAPTER IV
· CHAPTER V
· CHAPTER VI
· CHAPTER VII
· CHAPTER VIII
· CHAPTER IX
· CHAPTER X
· CHAPTER XI
· CHAPTER XII
· CHAPTER XIII
· CHAPTER XIV
· CHAPTER XV
· CHAPTER XVI
· CHAPTER XVII
· CHAPTER XVIII
· CHAPTER XIX
· CHAPTER XX
· CHAPTER XXI
FOREWORD
The following story of what has been known as "The Black Eagle Mystery"
has been compiled from documents contributed by two persons thoroughly
conversant with the subject. These are Molly Morgenthau Babbitts and
John Reddy, whose position of inside observers and active participants
makes it possible for them to give to the public a consecutive and
detailed narrative of this most unusual case.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Mr. Harland’s body had been found on the sidewalk.
'Say,’ he said, ’you’re a live one, aren’t you?’
It was locked or I would have gone in.
'When did they discover it?’ she said in a low voice.
CHAPTER I
MOLLY TELLS THE STORY
"Hello!" said Babbitts from the sheets of the morning paper.
I’ll call him Babbitts to you because that’s the name you’ll remember
him by—that is if you know about the Hesketh Mystery. I generally call
him "Soapy," the name the reporters gave him, and "Himself," which comes
natural to me, my mother being Irish. Maybe you’ll remember that too?
And he calls me "Morningdew"—cute, isn’t it? It’s American for my last
name Morgenthau—I was Molly Morgenthau before I was married.
In case you _don’t_ know about the Hesketh Mystery I’ll have to give a
few facts to locate us. I was the telephone girl in Longwood, New
Jersey, met Babbitts there when he was a reporter for the _Dispatch_—he
is yet—and the switchboard lost one of its brightest ornaments. It was
town for us, an apartment on West Ninety-fifth Street, near the Subway,
five rooms on a corner, furnished like a Belasco play. If you read the
Hesketh Mystery you know how I came by that furniture, and if you didn’t
you’ll have to stay in ignorance, for I’m too anxious to get on to stop
and tell you. Every day at ten Isabella Dabney, a light-colored coon,
comes in to do the heavy work and I order her round, throwing a bluff
that I’m used to it and hoping Isabella isn’t on.
We’ve been married over two years and we’re still—Oh, what’s the use!
But we _do_ get on like a house on fire. I guess in this vast metropolis
there’s not a woman got anything on me when it comes to happiness. It
certainly _is_ wonderful how you bloom out and the mean part of you
fades away when someone thinks you’re the perfect article, handsewn,
silk-lined, made in America.
And so having taken this little run round the lot, I’ll come back to
Babbitts with his head in the morning paper saying "Hello!"
It was a clear, crisp morning in January—sixteenth of the month—and we
were at breakfast. Himself had just got in from Cleveland, where he’d
been sent to write up the Cheney graft prosecution. It took some minutes
to say "How d’ye do"—he’d been away two whole days—and after we’d
concluded the ceremonies I lit into the kitchen to get his breakfast
while he sat down at his end of the table and dived into the papers. His
egg was before him and I was setting the coffeepot down at my end when
he gave that "Hello," loud and startled, with the accent on the "lo."
"What’s up now?" said I, looking over the layout before me to see if I’d
forgotten anything.
"Hollings Harland’s committed suicide," came out of the paper.
"Lord, has he!" said I. "Isn’t that awful?" I took up the cream pitcher.
"Well, what do you make of that—the cream’s frozen."
"Last night at half-past six. Threw himself out of his office window on
the eighteenth story."
"Eighteenth story!—that’s some fall. I’ve got to take this cream out
with a spoon." I spooned up some, all white spikes and edges, wondering
if it would chill his coffee which he likes piping hot. "Darling, do you
mind waiting a little while I warm up the cream?"
"Darn the cream! What rotten luck that I was away. I suppose they put
Eddie Saunders on it, sounds like his flat-footed style. Listen to this:
'The body struck the pavement with a violent impact.’ That’s the way he
describes the fall of a man from the top of a skyscraper. Gee, why
wasn’t I here?"
"But, dearie," I said, passing him his cup, "Saunders would have done it
if you _had_ been here. You don’t do suicides."
"I do this one. Hollings Harland, one of the big corporation lawyers of
New York."
"Oh," I said, "he’s an important person."
"Rather. A top liner in his profession."
"Why did he commit suicide?"
"Caught in the Copper Pool, they think here."
With the cup at his lips he went on reading over its edge.
"Does it taste all right?" I asked and he grunted something that would
have been "A 1" if it hadn’t dropped into the coffee and been drowned.
My mind at rest about him I could give it to the morning sensation.
"What’s the Copper Pool?" I asked.
"A badly named weapon to jack up prices and gouge the public, young
woman. Just like a corner in hats. Suppose you could buy up all the
spring hats, you could pretty near name your own figure on them,
couldn’t you?"
"They do that now without a corner," I said sadly.
"Well, they can’t in copper. The Pool means that a bunch of financiers
have put up millions to corner the copper market and skyrocket the
price."
"Oh, he lost all his money in it and got desperate and jumped out."
"Um—from the hall window in the Black Eagle Building."
That made it come nearer, the way things do when someone you know is on
the ground.
"Why that’s where Iola Barry works—in Miss Whitehall’s office on the
seventeenth floor."
Babbitts’ eyes shifted from the paper to his loving spouse:
"That’s so. I’d forgotten it. Just one story below. I wonder if Iola was
there."
"I guess not, she goes home at six. It’s a good thing she wasn’t. She’s
a hysterical, timid little rat. Being round when a thing like that
happened would have broke her up more than a spell of sickness."
Iola Barry was a chum of mine. Four years ago, before I was transferred
to New Jersey, we’d been girls together in the same exchange, and though
I didn’t see much of her when I was Central in Longwood, since I’d come
back we’d met up and renewed the old friendship. Having the fatality
happen so close to her fanned my interest considerable and I reached
across and picked up one of the papers.
The first thing my eye lit on was a picture of Hollings Harland—a fine
looking, smooth-shaven man.
When I saw the two long columns about him I realized what an important
person he was and why Babbitts was so mad he’d missed the detail.
Besides his own picture there was one of his house—an elegant residence
on Riverside Drive, full of pictures and statuary, and a library he’d
taken years to collect. Then there was all about him and his life. He
was forty-six years of age and though small in stature, a fine physical
specimen, never showing, no matter how hard he worked, a sign of nerves
or weariness. In his boyhood he’d come from a town up state, and risen
from the bottom to the top, "cleaving his way up," the paper had it, "by
his brilliant mind, indomitable will and tireless energy." Three years
before, his wife had died and since then he’d retired from society,
devoting himself entirely to business.
Toward the end of the article came a lot of stuff about the Copper Pool,
and the names of the other men in it—he seemed to be in it too. There
was only one of these I’d ever heard of—Johnston Barker—which didn’t
prove that I knew much, as everybody had heard of him. He was one of the
big figures of finance, millionaire, magnate, plutocrat, the kind that
one paper calls, "A malefactor of great wealth," and its rival, "One of
our most distinguished and public-spirited citizens." That places him
better than a font of type. He was in the Copper Pool up to his neck—the
head of it as far as I could make out.
I had just got through with that part—it wasn’t interesting—and was
reading what had happened before the suicide when Babbitts spoke:
"Harland seems to have had a scene in his office with Johnston Barker in
the afternoon."
I looked up from my sheet and said:
"I’ve just been reading about it here. It tells how Barker came to see
him and they had some kind of row."
"Read it," said Babbitts. "I want to get the whole thing before I go
downtown."
I read out:
"According to Della Franks and John Jerome, Harland’s
stenographer and head clerk, Johnston Barker called on Harland
at half-past five that afternoon. The lawyer’s offices are a
suite of three rooms, one opening from the other. The last of
these rooms was used as a private office and into this Harland
conducted his visitor, closing the door. Miss Franks was in the
middle room working at her typewriter, Mr. Jerome at his desk
near-by. While so occupied they say they heard the men in the
private office begin talking loudly. The sound of the typewriter
drowned the words but both Miss Franks and Mr. Jerome agree that
the voices were those of people in angry dispute. Presently they
dropped and shortly after Mr. Harland came out. Miss Franks says
the time was a few minutes after six, as she had just consulted
a wrist watch she wore. Both clerks admitting that they were
curious, looked at Mr. Harland and agree in describing him as
pale, though otherwise giving no sign of anger or disturbance.
He stopped at Jerome’s desk and said quietly: ’I’ll be back in a
few minutes. Don’t go till I come,’ and left the office.
"Miss Franks and Mr. Jerome remained where they were. Miss
Franks completed her work and then, having a dinner engagement
with Mr. Jerome, sat on, waiting for Mr. Harland’s return. In
this way a half hour passed, the two clerks chatting together,
impatient to be off. It was a quarter to seven and both were
wondering what was delaying their employer when the desk
telephone rang. Jerome answered it and heard from the janitor on
the street level that Mr. Harland’s body had been found on the
sidewalk crushed to a shapeless mass. On hearing this, Miss
Franks, uttering piercing cries, rose and rushed into the hall
followed by Jerome. They rang frantically for the elevator which
didn’t come. There are only two cars in the building, and that
afternoon the express had broken and was not running. Getting no
answer to his summons Jerome dashed to the hall window and
throwing it up looked down on to the street, which even from
that height, he could see was black with people. Miss Franks,
who when interviewed was still hysterical, stood by the
elevators pressing the buttons. In their excitement both of them
forgot Mr. Barker who when they left was still in the back
office."
"Um," said Babbitts. "Is that all about Barker?"
I looked down the column.
"No—there’s some more in another place. Here: ’Johnston Barker, whose
interview with Harland is supposed to have driven the desperate lawyer
to suicide, was not found in his house last night. Repeated telephone
calls throughout the evening only elicited the answer that Mr. Barker
was not at home and it was not known where he was.’ Then there’s a lot
about him and his connection with the Copper Pool. Do you want to hear
it?"
"No, I know all that. Pretty grisly business. But I don’t see why
Barker’s lying low. Why the devil doesn’t he show up?"
"Perhaps he doesn’t like the notoriety. Does it say in your paper too
that they couldn’t find him?"
"About the same. Looks to me as if there was a nigger in the woodpile
somewhere."
"Maybe he never expected the man would kill himself and he’s prostrated
with horror at what he’s responsible for."
Babbitts threw down his paper with a sarcastic grin:
"I guess it takes more than that to prostrate Johnston Barker. You don’t
rise from nothing to be one of the plutocrats of America and keep your
conscience in cotton wool."
I turned the page of my paper and there, staring at me, was a picture of
the man we were talking about.
"Here he is," I said, "on the inside page," and then read: "’Johnston
Barker, whose interview with Hollings Harland is thought to have
precipitated the suicide and who was not to be found last evening at his
home or club.’"
Babbitts came round and looked over my shoulder:
"Did you ever see a harder, more forceful mug? Look at the nose—like a
beak. Men with noses like that always seem to me like birds of prey."
The picture did have that look. The face was thin, one of those narrow,
lean ones with a few deep lines like folds in the skin. The nose was, as
Babbitts said, a regular beak, like a curved scimitar, big and hooked. A
sort of military-looking, white moustache hid the mouth, and the eyes
behind glasses were keen and dark. I guess you’d have called it quite a
handsome face, if it hadn’t been for the grim, hard expression—like it
belonged to some sort of fighter who wouldn’t give you any mercy if you
stood in his way.
"It takes a feller like that to make millions in these trust-busting
days," said Babbitts.
"He looks as if he could corner copper and anything else that took his
fancy," I answered.
"If he’s really flown the coop there’ll be the devil to pay in Wall
Street." He gave my shoulder a pat. "Well, we’ll see today and the
sooner I get on the scene of action the sooner I’ll know. Good-by, my
Morningdew.—Kiss me and speed me on my perilous way."
After he’d gone I tidied up the place, had the morning powwow with
Isabella, and then drifted into the parlor. The sun was slanting bright
through the windows and as I stood looking out at the thin covering of
ice, glittering here and there on the roofs—there’d been rain before the
frost—I got the idea I ought to go down and see Iola. She was a frail,
high-strung little body and what had happened last night in the Black
Eagle Building would put a crimp in her nerves for days to come,
especially as just now she had worries of her own. Clara, her sister
with whom she lived, had gone into the hair business—not selling it,
brushing it on ladies’ heads—and hadn’t done well, so Iola was the main
support of the two of them. Three years ago she’d left the telephone
company to better herself, studying typing and stenography, and at first
she’d had a hard time, getting into offices where the men were so fierce
they scared her so she couldn’t work, or so affectionate they scared her
so she resigned her job. Then at last she landed a good place at Miss
Whitehall’s—Carol Whitehall, who had a real-estate scheme—villas and
cottages out in New Jersey.
Now while you think of me in my blue serge suit and squirrel furs, with
a red wing in my hat and a bunch of cherries pinned on my neckpiece,
flashing under the city in the subway, I’ll tell you about Carol
Whitehall. She’s important in this story—I guess you’d call her the
heroine—for though the capital "I"s are thick in it, you’ve got to see
that letter as nothing more than a hand holding a pen.
The first I heard of Miss Whitehall was nearly two years back from the
Cressets, friends of mine who live on a farm out Longwood way where I
was once Central. She and her mother—a widow lady—came there from
somewhere in the Middle West and bought the Azalea Woods Farm, a fine
rich stretch of land, back in the hills behind Azalea village. They were
going to run it themselves, having, the gossip said, independent means
and liking the simple life. The neighbors, high and low, soon got
acquainted with them and found them nice genteel ladies, the mother very
quiet and dignified, but Miss Carol a live wire and as handsome as a
picture.
They’d been in the place about a year when the railroad threw out a
branch that crossed over the hills near their land. This increased its
value immensely and folks were wondering if they’d sell out—they had
several offers—when it was announced that they were going to start a
villa site company to be called the Azalea Woods Estates. In the Autumn
when I was down at the Cressets—Soapy and I go there for Sundays
sometimes—the Cresset boys had been over in their new Ford car, and said
what were once open fields were all laid out in roads with little
spindly trees planted along the edges. There was a swell station, white
with a corrugated red roof, and several houses up, some stucco like the
station and others low and squatty in the bungalow style.
It was a big undertaking and there was a good deal of talk, no one
supposing the Whitehalls had money enough to break out in such a roomy
way, but when it came down to brass tacks, nobody had any real
information about them. For all Longwood and Azalea knew they might have
been cutting off coupons ever since they came.
As soon as the Azalea Woods Estates started they moved to town. Iola
told me they had a nice little flat on the East Side and the offices
were the swellest she’d ever been employed in. I’d never been in them,
though I sometimes went to the Black Eagle Building and took Iola out to
lunch. I didn’t like to go up, having no business there, and used to
telephone her in the morning and make the date, then hang round the
entrance hall till she came down.
Besides Miss Whitehall and Iola there was a managing clerk, Anthony
Ford. I’d never seen him no more than I had Miss Whitehall, but I’d
heard a lot about him. After Iola’d told me what a good-looker he was
and how he’d come swinging in in the morning, always jolly and full of
compliments, I got a hunch that she was getting too interested in him.
She said she wasn’t—did you ever know a girl who didn’t?—and when I
asked her point blank, ruffled up like a wet hen and snapped out:
"Molly Babbitts, ain’t I been in business long enough to know I got to
keep my heart locked up in the office safe?"
And I couldn’t help answering:
"Well, don’t give away the combination till you’re good and sure it’s
the right man that’s asking for it."
CHAPTER II
MOLLY TELLS THE STORY
The Black Eagle Building is part-way downtown—not one of the skyscrapers
that crowd together on the tip of the Island’s tongue and not one of the
advance guard squeezing in among the mansions of the rich, darkening
their windows and spoiling their chimney draughts—poor, suffering dears!
As I came up the subway stairs I could see it bulking up above the
roofs, a long narrow shape, with its windows shining in the sun. It
stood on a corner presenting a great slab of wall to the side street and
its front to Broadway. There were two entrances, the main one—with an
eagle in a niche over the door—on Broadway, and a smaller one on the
side street. There is only one other very high building near there—the
Massasoit—facing on Fifth Avenue, its back soaring above the small
houses that look like a line of children’s toys.
My way was along the side street, chilled by the shadow of the building,
and as I passed the small entrance I stopped and looked up. The wall
rose like a rampart, story over story, the windows as similar and even
as cells in a honeycomb. Way up, the cornice cut the blue with its dark
line. It was from that height the suicide had jumped. I thought of him
there, standing on the window ledge, making ready to leap. Ugh! it was
too horrible! I shuddered and walked on, pressing my chin into my fur
and putting the picture out of my mind.
When I turned the corner into Broadway it was brighter. The sun was
shining on the outspread wings of the eagle in his niche and turning the
icicles that hung from the window ledges into golden fringes. Near the
entrance a man in a checked jumper and peaked cap was breaking away the
bits of ice that stuck to the sidewalk with a long-handled thing like a
spade. And all about were people, queer, mangy-looking men and some
women, standing staring at the pavement and then craning their necks and
squinting up through the sunlight at the top of the building.
I sized up the man in the jumper as a janitor, and for all he seemed so
busy, you could see he was really hanging round for an excuse to talk.
He’d pick at a tiny piece of ice and skate it over careful into the
gutter when in ordinary times he’d have let it lie there, a menace to
the public’s bones. Every now and then one of the people standing round
would ask him a question and he’d stop in his scraping and try to look
weary while he was just bursting to go all over it again.
"Where did he fall?" asked a chap in a reach-me-down overcoat, fringy at
the cuffs, "there?" and pointed into the middle of the street. The
janitor gave him a scornful glance, let go his hoe and spat on his hand.
He spoke with a brogue:
"No, not there. Nor there neither," he pointed some distance down
Broadway. "But there," and that time he struck on the edge of the curb
with his hoe.
A girl who was passing slowed up, her face all puckered with horror:
"Did he come down with a crash?"
The janitor drew himself up, raised his eyebrows and looked at her from
under his eyelids like she was a worm:
"Is fallin’ from the top of the buildin’ like steppin’ from a limousine
on to a feather bed?" He turned wearily to his hoe and spoke to it as if
it was the only thing in sight that had any sense. "Crash! What’ll they
be after askin’ next?" Then he suddenly got quite excited, raised his
voice and stuck out his chin at the girl. "Why, the glasses off his nose
was nearly to the next corner. Didn’t I meself find the mounts of them
six feet from his body? And not a bit of glass left. There’s where I got
them—in the mud," he pointed out into the street and everyone looked
fixedly at the place. "Crash—and the pore corpse no more than a sack of
bones."
An old man with a white beard who’d been standing on the curb examining
the street as if he expected to find a treasure there said:
"Struck on his head, eh?"
"He did," said the janitor in a loud voice. "An’ if you’d listen to me
you’d have known it without me tellin’ yer."
The girl, who was sort of peeved at the way he answered her, spoke up:
"You never told it at all! You only spoke about the glasses."
The janitor gave her a look sort of enduring and patient as if, she
being a woman, he’d got to treat her gentle even if she _was_ a fool.
"Say, young lady," says he, "I’m not goin’ to bandy words with you. Have
it any way you like. _I_ was here, _I_ seen it, I seen the corpse lyin’
all bunched up, I seen the crowd, I seen the amberlanch, and I seen Mr.
Harland’s clerk come down and identify the body—but maybe I don’t know.
Take it or leave it—any way you choose."
The people snickered and looked at the girl, who got red and walked off
muttering. The janitor went back to picking at a piece of ice as big as
a half dollar, watching out for the next one to come along.
I hadn’t phoned to Iola this time and it being an unusual occasion I
decided to go up. There were men in the entrance hall talking together
in groups and from every group I could hear the name of Harland coming
in low tones. In the elevator when the other passengers had got out, the
boy looked at me and said:
"Tough what happened here last night, ain’t it?"
I agreed with him and as we shot up with the floors flashing between the
iron grills, _he_ had _his_ little say about it. One of the things that
seemed to trouble him most was that he hadn’t been there, as the express
elevator which he ran was broken early in the afternoon and he’d gone
home before the event.
The corridor of the seventeenth floor was a bare, clean place, all
shining stone, not a bit of wood about it but the doors. At one end was
a window looking out on the Broadway side and near it the stairs went
down, concrete with a metal balustrade. I’d asked for Miss Whitehall’s
office and as I got out of the car the boy had said, "First door to your
left, Azalea Woods Estates." There were two doors on each side, the
upper halves ground glass with gold lettering. Those to the right had
"The Hudson Electrical Company" on them and those to the left "Azalea
Woods Estates" with under that "Anthony Ford, Manager."
As I walked toward the first of these I could see out of the window the
great back of the Massasoit Building, tan color against the bright blue
of the sky. Pausing before I rang the bell, I leaned against the window
ledge and spied down. The street looked like a small, narrow gully,
dotted with tiny black figures, and the houses that fronted on it,
extending back to the Massasoit, no bigger than match boxes.
I pressed the bell and as I waited turned and looked down the corridor,
stretching away in its shiny scoured cleanness between the shut doors of
offices. Just beyond the elevator shafts there was a branch hall and
along the polished floor I could see the white, glassy reflection of
another window. That was on the side street, one of those I had looked
up at, and as I was thinking that, the door opened slowly and Iola
peered out, with her eyes big and scared and a sandwich in her hand.
"Good gracious, Molly!" she cried. "I’m so glad to see you. Come in."
I hesitated, almost whispering:
"Will Miss Whitehall mind?"
"She’s not here. I had a phone this morning to say she was sick and
wouldn’t be down, and Mr. Ford’s gone out to lunch." She took me by the
hand and pulled me in, shutting the door. "Jerusalem, but it’s good to
see you. I’m that lonesome sitting here I’m ready to cry."
She didn’t look very chipper. Usually she’s a pretty girl, the slim,
baby-eyed, delicate kind, with a dash of powder on the nose and a touch
of red on the lips to help out. But today she looked sort of peaked and
shriveled up, the way those frail little wisps of girls do at the least
jar.
"Isn’t it awful?" she said as soon as she’d got me in—"Just the floor
above us!"
I didn’t want her to talk about it, but she was like the janitor—only a
gag would stop her. So I let her run on while I looked round and took in
the place.
It was a fine, large room, two windows in the front and two more on the
sides. The furniture was massive and rich-looking and the rugs on the
floor as soft to your foot as the turf in the Park. On the walls were
blue and white maps, criss-crossed with lines, and pictures of houses,
in different styles. But the thing that got me was a little model of a
cottage on a table by the window. It was the cutest thing you ever
saw—all complete even to the blinds in the windows and the awning over
the piazza. I was looking at it when Iola, having got away with the
sandwich, said:
"Come on in to Mr. Ford’s office while I finish my lunch. I got to get
through with it before he comes back."
I followed her into the next room, nearly as large as the one we’d been
in, with a wide window and in the center a big roll-top desk. On the
edge of this stood a pasteboard box, with some crumpled wax paper in it
and an orange. Iola sat down in the swivel chair and picking up the
orange began to peel it.
"I hardly ever do this," she explained, "but I thought Miss Whitehall
wouldn’t mind today as I felt so mean I couldn’t face going out to
lunch. And then it was all right as she won’t be down and I’ll have it
all cleared off before Mr. Ford comes back."
"Would he be mad?"
You ought to have seen the look she gave me.
"Mad—Tony Ford? It’s easy seen you don’t know him. She wouldn’t say
anything either. She’s awful considerate. But she’s so sort of grand and
dignified you don’t like to ask favors off her."
"Was she here when it happened last night?"
"I don’t know, but I guess not. She generally leaves a little before
six. Thanks be to goodness, she told me I could go home early yesterday.
I was out of the building by half-past five." She broke the orange apart
and held out a piece. "Have a quarter?" I shook my head and she went on.
"We’re all out of here soon after six. Tony Ford generally stays last
and shuts up. Did you see all the papers this morning?"
"Most of them. Why?"
"I was wondering if any of them knew that Mr. Harland and Mr. Barker
were both in here yesterday afternoon."
"It wasn’t in any of the papers I saw."
"Well, they were—the two of them. And I didn’t know but what the
reporters, nosing round for anything the way they do, mightn’t have
heard it. Not that there was anything out of the ordinary about it. She
knew them both. Mr. Harland’s been in here a few times and Mr. Barker
often."
"Why did _he_ come?" I said, surprised, for Iola had never told me
they’d the magnate for a customer.
"Business," she looked at me over the orange that she was sucking, her
eyes sort of intent and curious. "Didn’t I tell you that? He was going
to buy a piece of land in the Azalea Woods Estates and build a house for
his niece."
"Seems to me," I said, "that the press’ll be interested to know about
those two visits."
"Well, if any reporters come snooping round here Tony Ford told me to
refer them to him or Miss Whitehall, and that’s what I’m going to do."
"What time was Mr. Harland here?"
"A little after four. He and Miss Whitehall went into the private office
and had a talk. And I’ll bet a new hat that he hadn’t no more idea of
suicide then than you have now, sitting there before me. When he came
out he was all smiles, just as natural and happy as if he was going home
to a chicken dinner and a show afterward."
"All the papers think it was what Mr. Barker said that drove him to it."
"And they’re right for a change—not that I’m saying anything against the
press with your husband in it. But it does make more mistakes than any
printed matter _I_ ever read, except the cooking receipts on the outside
of patent foods. It was Barker that put the crimp in _him_."
"Then Barker came in afterward?"
"Yes, just before I left. And he and she went into the private office."
I turned in my chair and looked through the open doorway into the third
room of the suite.
"Is that the private office?" I asked.
"Yes," says Iola with a giggle, "that’s its society name, but Mr. Ford
calls it the Surgery."
Before I could ask her why Mr. Ford called it that, the bell rang and
she jumped up, squashing the orange peel and bits of paper back in the
box.
"Here, you go and answer it," I said, "I’ll hide this." She went into
the front office and as I pushed the box out of sight on a shelf I could
hear her talking to a man at the door. The conversation made me stand
still listening.
The man’s voice asked for Miss Whitehall, Iola answering that she wasn’t
there.
"Where is she?" said the man, gruff and abrupt it seemed to me.
"In her own home—she hasn’t come down today at all."
"Is she coming later?"
"No, she’s sick in bed."
There was a slight pause and then he said:
"Well, I got to see her. I’ve notes here that are overdue and the
endorsee’s dead."
"Endorsee?" came Iola’s little pipe, full of troubled surprise, "who’s
he?"
"Hollings Harland who killed himself last night. What’s her address?"
I could hear Iola giving it and the man muttering it over. Then there
was a gruff "Good morning" and the door snapped shut.
Iola came back, her eyes big, her expression wondering.
"What do you suppose that means?" she said.
I didn’t know exactly myself but—notes, endorsee dead!—it had a bad
sound. As Iola reached down her lunch box and tied it up, talking
uneasily about the man and what he’d wanted, I remembered the gossip in
New Jersey when Miss Whitehall started her land scheme. There’d been
rumors then that maybe she was backed, and if Hollings Harland had been
behind it—My goodness! you couldn’t tell what might happen. But I wasn’t
going to say anything discouraging to Iola, so to change the subject I
moved to the door of the private office and looked in.
"Why does Mr. Ford call this the surgery?"
At the mention of the managing clerk Iola brightened up and said with a
smirk:
"Because it’s where Miss Whitehall chloroforms her clients with her
beauty and performs the operation of separating them from their money.
He’s always saying cute things like that."
We stood in the doorway and looked in. It was a smaller room than the
others, but furnished just as richly, with a mahogany center table, big
leather-covered armchairs and photographs of foreign views on the walls.
In one corner was an elegant, gold-embossed screen, that, when I spied
behind it, I saw hid a washstand. It was the last room of the suite and
had only one door that led into the office we’d been sitting in. In the
outside wall was a window from which you could see way over the city—a
wonderful view.
I walked to it and looked out. Over the roofs and chimneys I caught a
glimpse of the Hudson, a silvery gleam, and the Hoboken hills beyond.
Pressing my forehead against the glass I glimpsed down the sheer drop of
the walls to the roof of a church—a flat, black oblong with a squatty
dome at one end—squeezed as close as it could get against the lower
stories. Back of that were old houses, dwellings that would soon be
swept away, the yards behind them narrow strips with the separating
fences as small as lines made by a pencil.
I was so interested that for a moment I forgot Iola, but she brought me
back with a jerk.
"It was in the room above this that Mr. Harland was sitting with Mr.
Barker, before it happened."
"You don’t say," I answered. "Is it like this?"
"Exactly the same. I’ve seen it—one day when the boss was away and I
went up with Della Franks. They were in there just as we are in here and
then he went out this way—"
The door had been partly pushed to and she started to illustrate how he
had left the room, brushing round its edge. Something caught her, there
was a sound of ripping and she stopped, clapping her hand on her back:
"There go my pleats—Ding it!" she craned round over her shoulder trying
to see the back of her skirt. "What’s got me? Oh, the key. Well what do
you make of that—caught me like a hook."
She drew her dress off the key, which fell out of the lock on to the
floor.
"It’s only ripped," I said consolingly. "I can pin it for you."
"Well, there’s always something to be thankful for," she said, as I
pinned her up. "But it’s an unlucky day, I can feel _that_. That key’s
never before been on the inside of the door." She bent and picked it up.
"I’d like to know what smart Aleck changed it."
"Probably the scrubwoman."
"I guess so," she grumbled, "put it on the wrong side where it waited
patiently and then got its revenge on me. Such is life among the lowly."
That night Babbitts was late for dinner. I expected it but Isabella, who
says she never lived out except in families where the husband comes home
at six like a Christian, was getting restive about the chops, when he
finally showed up, tired as a dog.
"My Lord!" he said, as I helped him off with his coat. "What a day!"
"Because of the suicide?"
"Outcome of the suicide and all the rest of it. The wildest panic on the
Street. The Copper Pool’s gone smash. Let’s have something to eat. I’ve
had no lunch and I’m famished."
When we were at table and the edge off his hunger he told me more:
"It began this morning, and this afternoon when there was still no trace
of Barker—Gee whizz! it was an avalanche."
"You mean he’s _gone_? Disappeared?"
"That’s the way it looks. They had their suspicions when they couldn’t
find him last night. And today—nobody knows a thing about him at his
house or his office, can’t account for it, don’t understand. Then we
turned up something that looked like a clincher. One of his motors, a
limousine, and his chauffeur, fellow called Heney, have disappeared
too."
"What do they say about that at the house?"
"Same thing—know nothing. Nobody was in the garage from six to half-past
eight. When the other men who sleep there came back Heney and the
limousine were gone."
"Did anyone see Barker at the Black Eagle Building?"
"No—that’s the strongest proof that he’s decamped. You’d suppose with
such a scene as that going on he’d have shown up. But not a soul’s been
found who saw him there. If he wanted to slip out quietly he could
easily have done it. Jerome and the Franks girl say they were so
paralyzed they never gave him another thought and he could have passed
behind them, as they stood in the corridor, and gone down by the side
stairs. There’s another flight round the corner on the branch hall. The
street on that side was deserted—the boys say every human being in the
neighborhood was round on the Broadway front."
"But, but," I stammered, for I couldn’t understand it all, "what’s he
done? What’s the reason for his going?"
"Reason!" said Babbitts with a snort. "Believe me, there’s reason
enough. Somebody’s welched on the Copper Pool and they think it’s he and
that he’s disappeared with twenty million."
"Twenty million! How could he?"
"By selling out on the rest of the crowd. They think he’s been selling
copper to the Pool itself of which he was the head."
"Was that what he and Mr. Harland were supposed to be quarreling about
yesterday afternoon?"
"Yes. The idea now is that Harland, who was one of the Copper crowd,
suspected and accused him, that there was a fierce interview in the
course of which the lawyer realized he was beaten and ruined."
"Good gracious!" I said. "What are they going to do with him?"
"If he doesn’t show up, go after him. A group of ruined financiers
doesn’t kneel down and pray for their money to come back. And they’ve
got a man looking after their interests who’s a lightning striker. A
friend of yours. Guess who?"
"Wilbur Whitney!" I crowed.
"The same," said Babbitts.
"Then," I cried, "they’ll have him and the twenty millions served up on
a salver before the week’s out."
If you don’t know the story of the Hesketh Mystery you don’t know who
Wilbur Whitney is, so I’ll tell you here. He’s one of the biggest
lawyers in New York and one of the biggest men anywhere. You’d as soon
suspect that an insignificant atom like me would know a man like him as
that the palace ashman would know the Czar of Russia, but I do, well—I
guess I’m not stretching things if I say we’re friends. The Babbitts and
the Whitneys don’t exchange calls, but they think a lot of each other
just the same. And it’s my doing, little Molly’s—yes, sir, the
ex-telephone girl. In the Hesketh case I did a job for Mr. Whitney that
brought us together, and ever since it’s been kindnesses from the big
house off Fifth Avenue, to the little flat on Ninety-fifth Street. He
doesn’t forget—the real eighteen-carat people never do—and he’ll send me
tickets for the opera one night and tip off Soapy to a bit of news so
he’ll get a scoop the week after. Oh, he’s just _grand_!
And right in his office—Mr. Whitney’s assistant this year—is one of our
realest, truest, dearest pals, Jack Reddy. If this is your first
acquaintance with me you don’t know much about him and I’ll have to give
you a little sketch of him for he’s got a lot to do with this story.
To look at he’s just all right, brown with light-colored hair and gray
eyes, over six feet and not an ounce of fat on him. It’s not because
he’s my friend that I’m saying all this, everybody agrees on it. He’s
thirty years old now and not married. That’s because of a tragedy in his
life: the girl he loved was killed nearly three years ago. It’s a long
story—I can’t stop to tell it to you—but it broke him up something
dreadful, though I and Babbitts and all of us know it was better that he
shouldn’t have married her. Ever since I’ve been hoping he’d meet up
with his real affinity, someone who’d be the right woman for him. But he
hasn’t so far. Babbitts says the girl isn’t born I’d think good
enough—but I don’t know. I guess in the ninety millions of people we’ve
got scattered round this vast republic there’s a lady that’ll fill the
bill.
Once I had a crush on him—Babbitts teases me about it now—but it all
faded away when Himself came along with his curly blond hair and his
dear, rosy, innocent face. But Jack Reddy’s still a sort of hero to me.
He showed up so fine in those old dark days and he’s showed up fine ever
since—don’t drop off his pedestal and have to be boosted back. I’ve put
several people on pedestals and seen them so unsteady it made me
nervous, but he’s riveted on.
He’s got a country place out in New Jersey—Firehill—where he used to
live. But since he’s been with Mr. Whitney he stays in town, only going
out there in summer. His apartment’s down near Gramercy Park—an elegant
place—where his two old servants, David and Joanna Gilsey, keep house
for him and treat him like he was their only son. Babbitts and I go
there often, and Gee, we do have some eats!
"Well," I said, wagging my head proud and confident at Babbitts, "if
Wilbur Whitney and Jack Reddy are out to find that Barker man, they’ll
do it if he burrows through to China."
CHAPTER III
JACK TELLS THE STORY
The appalling suicide of Hollings Harland, followed by the
non-appearance of Johnston Barker, precipitated one of the most
spectacular smashes Wall Street had seen since the day of the Northern
Pacific corner. It began slowly, but as the day advanced and no news of
Barker was forthcoming it became a snowslide, for the rumor flew through
the city that there had been a "welcher" in the pool and that the
welcher was its head—Barker himself.
For years the man had loomed large in the public eye. He was between
fifty and sixty, small, wiry, made of iron and steel with a nerve
nothing could shake. Like so many of our big capitalists, he had begun
life in the mining camps of the far Northwest, had never married, and
had kept his doors shut on the world that tried to force his seclusion.
Among his rivals he was famed for his daring, his ruthless courage and
his almost uncanny foresight. He was a financial genius, the making of
money, his life. But as one coup after another jostled the Street, the
wiseacres wagged their heads and said "Some day!" It _looked_ now as if
the day had come. But that such a man had double-crossed his associates
and cleaned them out of twenty millions seemed incredible.
It was especially hard to believe—for us I mean—as on the morning of
January 15 he had been in the Whitney offices conferring with the chief
on business. His manner was as cool and non-committal as usual, his head
full of plans that stretched out into the future. Nothing in his words
or actions suggested the gambler concentrated on his last and most
tremendous coup. Only as he left he made a remark, that afterward struck
us as significant. It was in answer to a query of the chief’s about the
Copper Pool:
"There are developments ahead—maybe sensational. You’ll see in a day or
two."
It was the second day after the suicide and in the afternoon, having a
job to see to on the upper West Side, I decided to drop in on Molly
Babbitts and have a word with her. I always drop in on Molly when I
happen to be round her diggings. Three years ago, after the calamity
which pretty nearly put a quietus on me for all time, Molly and I
clasped hands on a friendship pact that, God willing, will last till the
grass is growing over both of us. She’s the brightest, biggest-hearted,
bravest little being that walks, and once did me a good turn. But I
needn’t speak of that—it’s a page I don’t like to turn back. It’s enough
to say that whatever Molly asks me is done and always will be as long as
I’ve breath in my body.
As I swung up the long reach of Central Park West—she’s a few blocks in
from there on Ninety-fifth Street—my thoughts, circling round the
Harland affair, brought up on Miss Whitehall, whose offices are just
below those of the dead man. I wondered if she’d been there and hoped
she hadn’t, a nasty business for a woman to see. I’d met her several
times—before she started the Azalea Woods Estates scheme—at the house of
a friend near Longwood and been a good deal impressed as any man would.
She was one of the handsomest women I’d ever seen, dark and tall,
twenty-five or -six years of age and a lady to her finger tips. I was
just laying round in my head for an excuse to call on her when the villa
site business loomed up and she and her mother whisked away to town.
That was the last I saw of them, and my fell design of calling never
came off—what was decent civility in the country, in the town looked
like butting in. Bashful? Oh, probably. Maybe I’d have been bolder if
she’d been less good-looking.
Molly was at home, and had to give me tea, and here were Soapy’s cigars
and there were Soapy’s cigarettes. Blessed little jolly soul, she
welcomes you as if you were Admiral Dewey returning from Manila Bay.
Himself was at the Harland inquest and maybe he and the boys would be
in, as the inquest was to be held at Harland’s house on Riverside Drive.
So as we chatted she made ready for them—on the chance. That’s Molly
too.
As she ran in and out of the kitchen she told me of a visit she’d paid
the day before to Miss Whitehall’s office and let drop a fact that gave
me pause. While she was there a man had come with a note from some bank
which, from her description, seemed to be protested. That was a
surprise, but what was a greater was that Harland had been the endorsee.
Out Longwood way there’d been a good deal of speculation as to how the
Whitehalls had financed so pretentious a scheme. Men I knew there were
of the opinion there had been a silent partner. If it was Harland—who
had a finger in many pies—the enterprise was doomed. I sat back puffing
one of Babbitts’ cigars and pondering. Why the devil _hadn’t_ I called?
If it was true, I might have been of some help to them.
Before I had time to question her further, the hall door opened and
Babbitts came in with a trail of three reporters at his heels. I knew
them all—Freddy Jaspar, of the _Sentinel_, who three years ago had tried
to fix the Hesketh murder on me and had taken twelve months to get over
the agony of meeting me, Jones, of the _Clarion_, and Bill Yerrington,
star reporter of a paper which, when it couldn’t get its headlines big
enough without crowding out the news, printed them in blood red.
They had come from the inquest and clamored for food and drink, crowding
round the table and keeping Molly, for all her preparations, swinging
like a pendulum between the kitchen and the dining-room. I was keen to
hear what had happened, and as she whisked in with Jaspar’s tea and
Babbitts’ coffee, a beer for Yerrington and the whiskey for Jones, they
began on it.
There’d been a bunch of witnesses—the janitor, the elevator boy,
Harland’s stenographer who’d had hysterics, and Jerome, his head clerk,
who’d identified the body and had revealed an odd fact not noticed at
the time. The front hall window of the eighteenth story—the window
Harland was supposed to have jumped from—had been closed when Jerome ran
into the hall.
"Jerome’s positive he opened it," said Babbitts. "He said he remembered
jerking it up and leaning out to look at the crowd on the street."
"How do they account for that?" I asked. "Harland couldn’t have stood on
the sill and shut it behind him."
Jaspar explained:
"No—It wasn’t that window. He went to the floor below, the seventeenth.
The janitor, going up there an hour afterward, found the hall window on
the seventeenth floor wide open."
"That’s an odd thing," I said—"going down one story."
"You can’t apply the ordinary rules of behavior to men in Harland’s
state," said Jones. "They’re way off the normal. I remember one of my
first details was the suicide of a woman, who killed herself by
swallowing a key when she had a gun handy. They get wild and act wild."
Yerrington, who was famous for injecting a sinister note into the most
commonplace happenings, spoke up:
"The window’s easily explained. What is queer is the length of time that
elapsed between his leaving the office and his fall to the street. That
Franks girl, when she wasn’t whooping like a siren in a fog, said it was
6.05 when he went out. At twenty-five to seven the body fell—half an
hour later." He looked at me with a dark glance. "What did he do during
that time?"
"I’ll tell you in two words," said Jaspar. "Stop and think for a moment.
What was that man’s mental state? He’s ruined—he’s played a big game and
lost. But life’s been sweet to him—up till now it’s given him everything
he asked for. There’s a struggle between the knowledge that death is the
best way out and the desire to live."
"To express it in language more suited to our simple intellects," said
Jones, "he’s taken half an hour to make up his mind."
"Precisely."
"Where did he spend that half hour?" said Yerrington, in a deep,
meaningful voice.
"Hi, you Yerrington," cried Babbitts, "this isn’t a case for posing as
Burns on the Trail. What’s the matter with him spending it in the
seventeenth floor hall?"
Molly, who was sitting at the head of the table in a mess of cups and
steaming pots, colored the picture.
"Pacing up and down, trying to get up his nerve. Oh, I can see him
perfectly!"
"Strange," said Yerrington, looking somberly at the droplight, "that no
one saw him pacing there."
"A great deal stranger if they had," cut in Jones, "considering there
was no one there to see. It was after six—the offices were empty."
They had the laugh on Yerrington who muttered balefully, dipping into
his glass.
"It fits in with the character of Harland," I said, "the stuff in the
papers, all you hear about him. He was an intellect first—cool,
resolute, hard as a stone. That kind of man doesn’t act on impulse. As
Mrs. Babbitts says, he probably paced up and down the empty corridor
with his vision ranging over the situation, arguing it out with himself
and deciding death was the best way. Then up with the window and out."
"Do you suppose Mr. Barker had any idea he was going to do it when he
left?" Molly asked.
Babbitts laughed.
"Ask us an easier one, Molly."
Jaspar answered her, looking musingly at the smoke of his cigarette.
"I guess Barker wasn’t bothering much about anybody just then. His own
get-away was occupying _his_ thoughts."
"You’re confident he’s lit out?" said Jones.
"What else? Why, if he wasn’t lying low in that back room, didn’t he
come out when he heard Miss Franks’ screams? Why hasn’t he showed up
since? Where is he? That idea they’ve got in his office that he may have
had aphasia or been kidnapped is all tommyrot. They’ve got to say
something and they say that. The time was ripe for his disappearance and
things worked out right for him to make it then and there. If he didn’t
slip out while Miss Franks and Jerome were at the hall window, he did it
after they’d gone down. It was nearly an hour before the police went up.
He could have taken his time, quietly descended the side stairs and
picked up his auto which was waiting in some place he’d designated."
"That’s the dope," said Babbitts. "And it won’t be many more ’sleeps,’
as the Indians say, before that car is run to earth. You can’t hide a
man and a French limousine for long."
He was right. Johnston Barker’s car was located the next day and the
public knew that the head of the Copper Pool had disappeared by design
and intention. His clerks and friends who had desperately suggested loss
of memory, kidnapping, accident, were silenced. Their protesting voices
died before evidence that was conclusive. Judge for yourself.
On the morning of January the eighteenth, Heney, the chauffeur, turned
up in the Newark court, telling a story that bore the stamp of truth. At
five o’clock on the day of the suicide he had received a phone message
in the garage from Barker. This message instructed him to take the
limousine that evening at 8.15 to the corner of Twenty-second Street and
Ninth Avenue. There he was to wait for his employer, but not in any
ordinary way. The directions were explicit and, in the light of
subsequent events, illuminating. He was not to stop but to move about
the locality, watching for Barker. When he saw him he was to run along
the curb, slowing down sufficiently for the older man to enter the car.
From there he was to proceed to the Jersey Ferry, cross and continue on
to Elizabeth. The objective point in Elizabeth was the railway depot,
but instead of going straight to it, the car was to stop at the foot of
the embankment on the Pennsylvania side, where Barker would alight.
Further instructions were that Heney was to mention the matter to no
one, and if asked on the following day of Barker’s whereabouts, deny all
knowledge of it. Pay for his discretion was promised.
Heney said he was astonished, as he had been in Barker’s employment two
years and never piloted the magnate on any such mysterious enterprise.
But he did what he was told, sure of his money and trusting in his boss.
At the corner of the two streets he saw no one, looped the block, and on
his return made out a figure moving toward him that slowed up as he came
in sight. He ran closer and by the light of a lamp recognized Barker;
and skirted the curb as he’d been ordered. With a nod and glance at him,
Barker opened the car door and entered.
The run to Elizabeth was made without incident. Heney stopped the car at
the Pennsylvania side of the culvert, above which the station lights
shone. Barker alighted and with a short "Good night" mounted the steps
to the depot.
On the way home, going at high speed, Heney, rounding a corner, ran into
a wagon and found himself face to face with a pair of angry farmers.
They haled him before a magistrate to whom he gave a false name,
representing himself as a chauffeur joy-riding in a borrowed car. He
told this lie hoping to be able to hush the matter up the next day.
When he read of his boss’ disappearance in the papers he was uneasy,
knowing discovery could not be long postponed. The number of the
car—overlooked in the rush of bigger matters—was made public in the
evening papers of the seventeenth. Then he knew the game was up,
admitted his deception and the identity of his employer.
Inquiries at the Elizabeth depot confirmed his story. The Jersey Central
and Pennsylvania tracks run side by side through the station. At
nine-thirty on the night of January fifteenth the ticket agent of the
Pennsylvania Line remembered selling a Philadelphia ticket to a man
answering the description of Barker. He did not see this man board the
train, being busy at the time in his office. None of the train officials
had any recollection of such a passenger, but as the coaches were full,
the coming and going of people continuous, he might easily have been
overlooked.
After this there was no more doubt as to Barker’s flight. The papers
announced it to an amazed public, shaken to its core by the downfall of
one of its financial giants. The collapse of the Copper Pool was
complete and Wall Street rocked in the last throes of panic. From the
wreckage the voices of victims called down curses on the traitor, the
man who had planned the ruin of his associates and got away with it.
They congregated in the Whitney office where the air was sulphurous with
their fury. And from the Whitney office the Whitney detectives, Jerry
O’Mally at their head, slipped away to Philadelphia, with their noses to
the trail. With his picture on the front page of every paper in the
country it would be hard for Barker to elude them, but he had three
days’ start, and, as O’Mally summed it up, "It has only taken seven to
make the world."
CHAPTER IV
MOLLY TELLS THE STORY
The day after the Harland inquest I meant to go down and see Iola and
find out if she’d heard anything from Miss Whitehall. But that day I got
sidetracked some way or other and the next it rained.
Usually I don’t mind rain, but this was the real wet, straight kind that
would get in at you if you wore a diver’s suit. As I stood at the parlor
window, looking down at the street all pools and puddles, with the walls
shining under a thin glaze of water, and the umbrellas like wet, black
mushrooms, I got faint-hearted. I could just as well phone, and if
anything had transpired (it was the business I was uneasy about) go down
and help Iola through the fit of blind staggers she’d be bound to have.
So presently it was:
"Hello, Iola, I was coming down today but it’s too moistuous."
Then Iola’s voice, sort of groaning:
"Oh, Molly, is that you? I _do_ wish it had been fine and you’d have
come."
"Why—anything wrong?"
"Oh, yes, everything. Miss Whitehall isn’t back yet, and Mr. Ford’s
hardly been in at all and has such a gloom on him you wouldn’t know him,
and I’m awful discouraged."
"Have you tried to see Miss Whitehall?"
"No, I can’t seem to get up enough spunk."
"Why don’t you phone her?"
"Well, I don’t know, I’m sort of scared of what I’ll hear. I thought I’d
better sit around and wait, and then I thought I ought to find out, and
between the two—Oh, dear, _what’s the use_!"
That was just like Iola. The only way you can be sure she’s got a mind
at all is the trouble she has making it up. If it’s true that men like
the helpless kind she ought to have a string of lovers as long as the
line at the box office when Caruso sings _Pagliacci_. I wonder _I_ ever
got married!
"Tell you what, girlie," I said, "you come up tonight and dine with me.
Himself is going to be late and we two bandits will steal out after
dinner and make a raid on Miss Whitehall’s."
Even then she hung back. I had to coax and urge and it was only me
promising I’d see her through and if necessary ask the questions, made
her finally agree.
The rain held on all day and it was teeming when we started out. Miss
Whitehall’s flat was on the other side of town—the East Sixties—and we
had to go round the Park, crowding on and off cars, fighting our way
through packs of people, Iola clawing at my back and catching her
umbrella in men’s hats and women’s hair till you’d think she did it on
purpose. When we got to the street we turned east, walking from Madison
Avenue over Park with its great huge apartment houses, and then on a
ways—not far, but far enough to make you feel Miss Whitehall’s home
wasn’t as stylishly located as her office. Iola was that nervous I was
afraid she’d forget the number, but we found it, on a corner over a drug
store, where there were large, glassy bottles in the window and
advertisements of ladies offering pills and candy with such glad,
inviting smiles you’d know it was damaged stock.
The entrance was round on the side, and as we stood in the vestibule,
dimly lit, with a line of letter boxes on each side, I couldn’t help but
whisper:
"You’d never think from her offices she’d live over a store."
And Iola answered, pushing the button under a letter box marked "Mrs.
Serena Whitehall."
"It’s a shock to me. I’d no more connect her with a push-button than I
would you with a glass-topped entrance and a man in knee pants."
The door clicked and we went up the stairs, one feeble little electric
bulb furnishing the light. There was a smell in the air like one of the
tenants had had lamb stew for dinner and another was smoking the kind of
cigar that tells you it’s strong and hearty half a block off. The
first-floor landing was hers—a card in a frame by the door told us
so—and we pressed on the bell, hearing it give a loud, whirring ring
inside.
The door was opened by a young girl, very neat in a black dress and
white apron. She was sure we couldn’t speak to Miss Whitehall, but
perhaps Mrs. Whitehall would see us and she showed us up the tiny little
hall into the dining-room. I’d never have believed a room furnished so
plain could be so elegant. There was a square of brown carpet on the
floor and ecru linen curtains—no lace, just hemstitched—at the windows
and on the side table some silver; yet it had a refined, classy look.
Two doors opened from it, one into the hall hung with a blue portière
and double ones that I guessed led into the parlor. We could hear voices
coming from there, low and murmuring.
By this time Iola was that nervous she was licking her lips with her
tongue like a baby that’s had a sugar stick. I was just edging round to
give her a dig and whisper, "Brace up," when the curtain into the hall
was lifted and a lady came in.
As she was well along in years—near to fifty I’d say—I knew she was Mrs.
Whitehall. She was very dignified and gentle, with black hair turning
gray and lots of lines on her forehead and round her eyes, which were
dark like her hair and had a sad, weary expression. I guessed she’d been
handsome once, but she looked as if she’d had her troubles, and when I
heard her voice, low and so quiet, there was something in it that made
me feel she was having them still.
I’d promised to be spokesman and not seeing any reason to waste time I
went straight to the point. Mrs. Whitehall stood listening, her hands
clasped on the back of a chair, her eyes on the little fern plant in the
center of the table.
"Perhaps it would be best," she said, in that soft, faded sort of voice,
"if Miss Barry were to see my daughter. I hardly know what to say to
her."
She turned and left the room by the hall door and Iola gasped at me:
"Oh, Molly, it’s true!"
"Don’t cross your bridges till you come to them," I said, but all the
same, I thought it looked bad.
"What’ll I do if the business shuts down?"
"Shut up till you know if it does," I whispered back.
The double doors rolled back and Mrs. Whitehall stood between them. She
looked at Iola.
"If you’ll come in here, Miss Barry," she said, "my daughter will see
you."
It was plain she didn’t expect me, so I stood by the table without
moving. As Mrs. Whitehall drew back and before Iola got to the doorway,
there was a moment when I saw into the room. It looked real artistic,
flowered cretonne curtains, wicker chairs with cushions and low
bookcases around the walls, the whole lit up by the yellow glow of
lamps. But I wasn’t interested in the furniture—what caught my eye was a
couch just opposite the open door, on which a woman was lying.
There was a lamp on a stand beside her and its light fell full over her.
If I hadn’t known Carol Whitehall was there I’d have guessed right off
it was she from the likeness to her mother. She had just the same hair
and deep, rich-looking eyes except in her the hair was black as night
and the eyes were young. She had a newspaper in her hand and as the
doors opened she’d looked up, intent and questioning, and I saw she was
beautiful. She was like a picture, leaning forward with that inquiring
expression, her features clear in the flood of soft light. I got an
impression of her then that I’ve never forgotten—of force and strength.
It didn’t come from anything especial in her face, but from something in
her general makeup, something vivid and warm, like she was alive
straight through.
They stayed in the room some time while I sat waiting. I’d sized up
everything in sight, especially two little glass lamps on the sideboard
that I thought would be a nice present for Babbitts to give me on my
next birthday, when the doors slid back and Iola came in. She didn’t say
anything and seemed in a hurry to be off. Mrs. Whitehall showed us out,
very polite but depressed, and when the door was shut on us and we stole
down the stairs, I felt the worst had come. In the vestibule I looked at
Iola and said: "Well?"
She was struggling with her umbrella, her face bent over it.
"Fired!" she answered in a husky voice.
The rain was coming down in torrents, and wanting to cuddle up
comforting against her, I didn’t raise my umbrella and we walked up the
street, squeezed together, with the downpour spattering around us.
Believe me, the water fell under Iola’s umbrella pretty nearly as heavy
as it did outside it. Miss Whitehall was broke. Mr. Harland _had_ been
her financial backer and now she was ruined and the business would
close. The surprise and horror of the whole thing had prostrated her and
as soon as she was better she’d wind up the Azalea Woods Estates and try
and sublet her offices, on which she had still a six months’ lease.
"She was awful sweet," Iola sobbed. "She gave me a full month’s salary
and said she’d meant to keep me forever. Oh, Molly, why did it have to
happen?"
I squeezed her and said:
"That’s all right, dearie. We’ll all hustle and get you another job. I
got lots of money and what’s mine’s yours—the way it always is between
good and true friends."
But Iola wouldn’t be comforted.
"I can’t take your money. I never took a cent yet. And I thought I was
fixed for life. I thought even if the business didn’t pan out big she’d
marry Mr. Barker and get a place for me."
"Marry Mr. Barker!" I cried out astonished.
"Yes—that’s what I thought was coming."
Believe _me_, I was surprised. She’d never dropped a hint of it.
"Why didn’t you tell me that before?" I asked.
"Because Tony Ford told me not to. He said I wasn’t to tell anybody—that
Barker being such a big bug it would get in the papers and that might
break it all up."
"But are you _sure_? Did he act like he was in love with her?"
We were passing one of those arc lights on Park Avenue, and the scornful
look she cast at me, tears and all, was plain.
"Wouldn’t you think a man was in love—even if he was a magnate—who’d buy
a house and lot just for an excuse to _see_ a lady?"
"Did you ever _hear_ him making love to her?"
"No—but I didn’t need to. I’ve been made love to enough myself to know
the signs without hearing. First it was all business, and I believed it
was only that. Then, one day when Mr. Ford was out, he came in and
lingered round making conversation. You know the way they do it, and for
all he was a magnate Mr. Barker was just the same as the errand boy.
That’s the way it is with men—they got no variety. He wanted to know
about her home and the farm and before that. Oh, Indiana, a fine state,
Indiana! It made me laugh to see him with his hook nose and gray hair
handing out the same line of talk that Billy Dunn gave me when I was in
the linen envelope place."
"Did _she_ seem to care for him?"
"Not at first. She was very formal, just a bow and then right off about
the bungalow. But _he_ had the symptoms from the start—looking at her
like he couldn’t take his eyes off and not caring whether the bungalow
was as small as a hencoop or as big as the Waldorf.
"They went along that way for a while then something happened—a fight, I
guess when Tony Ford and I weren’t there. Anyhow, after it she was so
cold and distant you’d wonder he had the nerve to come. Then one
afternoon he came in and asked her low—I heard him—if he could have a
few words with her in the private office. She hesitated but I guess she
couldn’t see her way to refusing, so in they went and had a long powwow.
Whatever it was they said to each other it smoothed out all the
wrinkles. After that she was as different to him as summer is to winter.
In my own mind I thought they were engaged, for she’d brighten up when
he came in and _smile_. I never saw her smile like that at anyone, and
once when they thought I couldn’t hear I heard him call her ’dear.’
They’d go into the private office and talk. Gee! how they talked! And
always low like they were afraid Tony Ford and I might overhear. And on
the top of all _that_ he disappears."
"Perhaps that’s why she’s been sick."
"Sure it is. It’s bad enough to lose your own money, but wouldn’t it
make you sick to lose millions, let alone the man you’re in love with,
even if he has a nose you could hang an umbrella on?"
"Poor thing!" I said, for I could see now what the lady lying on the
couch had been up against.
"We’re all poor things," said Iola, beginning to get sorry for herself
again. "Miss Whitehall, and the man that’s dead, and Tony Ford who’s
lost his job, and me, poor unfortunate me, that I thought was on velvet
for the rest of my days."
Babbitts didn’t get home till late that night, but I was so full of what
Iola had said that I waited up for him. When he did come, he hadn’t but
one kiss, when I pulled away from him and told him.
"Doesn’t it seem to you, Soapy," I said, "that that story ought to go
back to Mr. Whitney?"
He looked at me sideways with a sly, questioning glance.
"Why?" he asked.
"Why, if Barker’s in love with her don’t you think maybe he’ll try and
creep back or get in touch with her some way?"
He burst out laughing.
"Oh, Morningdew, there’s a lot of nice things about you, but one of the
nicest is that you never disappoint a fellow. I was wondering if you’d
see it. Go back to Mr. Whitney? It’ll go back the first thing tomorrow
morning and you’ll take it."
CHAPTER V
MOLLY TELLS THE STORY
The next morning Babbitts and I started out for the offices of Whitney &
Whitney. They’re far downtown, near Wall Street, way up in the top of a
skyscraper where the air is good even in summer. I’d been in them
before, and it was funny as we shot up in the elevator to think of those
first visits, when I was so scared of Mr. Whitney—"the chief," as Jack
Reddy calls him, and it’s his name all right.
We were shown right into his office, like we’d come with a
million-dollar lawsuit, and when he saw me he got up and held out his
big, white hand.
"Well, well, Molly! How’s the smartest girl in New York?" Then he looked
from me to Babbitts with a twinkle in his eye. "She’s looking fine, my
boy. You’ve taken good care of her." And then back to me, "Treats you
well, eh? If he _doesn’t_—remember—Whitney & Whitney’s services are
yours to command."
That’s the way he is, always glad to see you, always with his joke. But,
there’s another side to him—a sort of terrible, fierce quiet—I’ve seen
it and—Gee whiz! If he ever got after me the way I once saw him get
after a man he thought was guilty I’d crawl under the table and die
right there on the carpet. He isn’t a bit good-looking—a big, clumsy
sort of man, stoop-shouldered, and with a head of rough gray hair and
eyes set deep under bushy brows. When he questions you those eyes look
at you kind and pleasant—but, _forget it_! There’s not a thing they
don’t see. _You_ think your face is solid flesh and blood. It is to
most—but to Mr. Whitney it’s no more than a pane of glass.
His son George—he was there and Jack Reddy too—doesn’t favor his father.
He’s an awful stylish chap, with blond hair sleeked down on his skull,
and glasses set pert on the bridge of his nose. They say he’s smart, but
not as big as the old man, and he hasn’t got the same genial, easy way.
But he’s always very cordial to us, and even if he wasn’t his father’s
son and a close friend of Jack Reddy’s, I guess I’d like him anyhow.
They were very interested in what I had to say, but with Mr. Whitney
himself you never can guess what he thinks. He sits listening, slouched
down in his armchair, with his shirt bosom crumpled, like an old bear
ruminating—or hibernating is it?—in a hollow tree. When I was through he
stretched out his hand, took a cigar from a box on the table and said:
"Just call up the Azalea Woods Estates, George, and find out how long
Miss Whitehall expects to be there." Then as Mr. George left the room he
turned to me and said, "Want to make some money?"
I have a lot of money—ten thousand dollars, the reward they gave me
after the Hesketh Mystery was solved—so money doesn’t cut much ice with
me. But doing something for Mr. Whitney does, and I guessed right off he
had a little job for Molly Babbitts.
"I want to do whatever Whitney & Whitney asks," I said. "That’s a
privilege and you don’t get paid for privileges."
He burst out laughing and said:
"It’s easily seen half of you’s Irish, Molly. There is something you can
do for me, and whether you want it or not, you’ll be paid for your
services just as O’Mally, my own detective, is. Here it is. That
information you got from your little friend is valuable. As you were
sharp enough to see, Barker may try to get in touch with Miss Whitehall.
To my mind he’d be more inclined to try her office than her home where
there’s a mother and a servant to overhear and ask questions. What would
you think about going on the switchboard again?"
My old work, the one thing I _could_ do!
"Bully!" I cried out, forgetting my language in my excitement.
Mr. Whitney smiled:
"Then we’re agreed. As soon as I can arrange matters I’ll let you know,
probably this afternoon. I don’t now know just where we’ll put you but I
fancy in the Black Eagle’s own central. And I don’t need to say to both
of you that you’re to keep as silent as you did in the Hesketh case."
I smiled to myself at that. Mr. Whitney knew, no one better, that when
it comes to keeping mum a deaf mute hasn’t anything over me.
Just then Mr. George came back. He had got Tony Ford on the wire and
heard from him that Miss Whitehall might be in her offices some time
yet, as she was trying to sublet them.
Late that afternoon I had my instructions. The next morning I was to go
to the Black Eagle Building and begin work as a hello girl. If
questioned I was to answer that all I knew was Miss McCalmont, the old
girl, had been transferred and I was temporarily installed in her place.
It was my business to listen to every phone message that went into or
out from the Azalea Woods Estates. I would be at liberty to give my full
attention as almost every office had its own wire. Miss Whitehall had
had hers but it had been disconnected since her failure, and she was
only accessible through the building’s central. The work was so easy it
seemed a shame to take the money.
The first two days there was nothing doing and it was desperate dull.
The telephone office was off the main hall to one side of the elevator,
a bright little place on the street level. A good part of the time I sat
at the desk looking out at the people passing like shadows across the
ground glass of the windows. There were some calls for Miss Whitehall,
all business. These, no matter what they were, I listened to but got
nothing. Sometimes she answered, sometimes Tony Ford.
My desk was set so I could see out through the doorway into the hall,
and the first morning I was there I saw her pass. She looked better than
she had that night in her own apartment, but her face had a grave,
worried expression which you couldn’t be surprised at, seeing how things
stood with her.
It was the second evening and I was thinking of getting ready to go—the
building’s exchange closed at half-past six—when a tall fellow with a
swagger in his walk and his shoulders held back like he thought a lot of
his shape, stopped in the doorway and called out:
"Hello, Miss McCalmont. How goes the times?"
I looked up surprised and when he saw it wasn’t Miss McCalmont he looked
surprised too, raising his eyebrows and opening his eyes with an
exaggerated expression like he did it to make you laugh. He was a
fine-looking chap if size does it—over six feet and wide across the
chest—but his face, broad and flat, with cheeks too large for his
features, wasn’t the kind I admire. Also I noticed that the good-natured
look it had was contradicted by the gray, small eyes, sharp as a gimlet
and hard as a nail. I supposed he was some clerk from one of the offices
come to ask Miss McCalmont to dinner—they’re always doing that—and
answered careless, fingering at the plugs:
"Miss McCalmont’s been transferred."
"You don’t say," says he, leaning easy against the doorpost. "Since when
is that?"
"Since I came," I answered.
He grinned, showing teeth as white as split almonds, and his eyes over
the grin began to size me up, shrewd and curious. Taking him for some
fresh guy that Miss McCalmont was jollying along—they do that too—I paid
no attention to him, humming a tune and looking languid at my finger
nails. He wasn’t phazed a little bit, but making himself comfortable
against the doorpost, said:
"Going to stay on here?"
"The central’ll give you all the information you want," I answered and
wheeling round in my chair looked at the clock. "Ten minutes past six.
How slow the time goes when you’re dull."
He burst out laughing and he _did_ have a jolly, infectious kind of
laugh.
"Say," he said, "you’re a live one, aren’t you?"
[Illustration: _'Say,’ he said, ’you’re a live one, aren’t you?’_]
"I wouldn’t be long, if I had to listen to all the guys that ain’t got
anything better to do than block up doorways and try to be fresh."
He laughed louder and lolled up against the woodwork.
"I like you fine," said he. "Are you a permanency or just a fleeting
vision?"
"Talking of fleeting visions, ain’t it about your dinner hour?"
"You act to me as if this was your first job," was his answer, sort of
thoughtful.
Wouldn’t it make you smile! It did me—a small quiet smile all to myself.
He saw it, dropped his head to one side and said, as smooth and sweet as
molasses:
"What do they call you, little one?"
It was all I could do to keep from laughing, but I crumpled up my
forehead into a scowl and looked cross at him:
"What my name is you’ll never know and what yours is you needn’t tell me
for I’ve guessed. I’ve met members of your tribe before—it’s large and
prominent—the ancient and honorable order of jackasses."
He made me a low bow.
"So flattered at this speedy recognition," he says, airy and smiling.
"You may know the tribe, but not the individual. Permit me to introduce
myself—Anthony Ford."
I gave a start and turned it into a stretch. So _this_ was the wonderful
Tony Ford—a slick customer all right.
"That don’t convey anything to my mind," I answered. "A rose by any
other name still has its thorns."
"For more data—I’m the managing clerk of the Azalea Woods Estates, see
seventeenth floor, first door to your left."
"Ain’t I heard you were closed up there?"
"We are. This may be the last time you’ll ever see me, so look well at
me. Er—what did you say your name was?"
"One of the unemployed!" I said, falling back in my chair and rolling my
eyes up at the ceiling. "Hangs round my switchboard and hasn’t the price
of a dinner in his jeans."
"I was too hasty," said he; "this isn’t your first job."
"If your place is shut what are you doing here—not at this present
moment, the actions of fools are an old story to me—but in the
building?"
"Closing up the business. Did you think I was nosing round for an
unlocked door or an open safe? Does this fresh, innocent countenance
look like the mug of a burglar?" He grinned and thrusting a hand into
his pocket rattled the loose silver there. "Hear that? Has a sound like
a dinner, hasn’t it?"
_That_ made me mad—the vain fool thinking he could flirt with me as he
had with Iola. I slanted a side look at him and his broad shining face
with the eyes that didn’t match it gave me a feeling like I longed to
slap it good and hard. Gee, I’d have loved to feel my hand come _whang_
up against one of those fat cheeks! But it’s the curse of being a
perfect lady that you can’t hit when you feel like it—except with your
tongue.
"I ain’t known many burglars," I answered, "but now that I look at you
it _does_ come over me that you’ve a family resemblance to those few
I’ve met. Seeing which I’ll decline the honor of your invitation. Safety
first."
That riled him. He flushed up and a surly look passed over his face
making it ugly. Then he shrugged up his shoulders and leaned off the
doorpost, giving a hitch to the front of his coat.
"I generally like a dash of tabasco in mine," says he, "but when it
comes to the whole bottle spilled in the dish, it’s too hot. Just make a
note of that against our next meeting. I don’t like being disappointed
twice. Good evening."
And off he went, swaggering down the hall.
On the way home I wondered what Soapy’d say when I told him, but when he
came in Tony Ford went straight out of my head for at last there was
exciting news—Barker had been located in Philadelphia.
Two people had seen him there, one a man who knew him well, and saw him
the night before in a taxi, the other an Italian who kept a newsstand.
That same evening between eight and nine Barker had stopped at the stand
and bought several New York papers. The Italian, who was quick-witted,
recognized him from his pictures in the papers, and reported to the
police.
"He’s evidently only going out after dark," said Babbitts. "But a man
can’t hide for long whose picture’s spread broadcast over the country."
"And who’s got a face like the American Eagle after it’s grown a white
mustache," I answered.
That was Thursday night. Friday morning I toddled down to my job,
feeling there wasn’t much in it and that when I came home I’d hear
Barker was landed and it would be domestic life again for little Molly.
The day went by quiet and uneventful as the others had been. I read a
novel and sewed at a tray cloth, and now and then jacked in for a call.
It was getting on for evening and I was thinking about home and dinner
when—Bang! came two calls, one right after the other, that made me feel
I was earning my money.
The first was at a quarter to five. Our central came sharp and clear:
"Hello, Gramercy 3503—Long Distance—Philadelphia’s calling you."
Philadelphia! Can you see me stiffening up, with my hand ready to raise
the cam?
"All right—Gramercy 3503."
I could hear the girls in our central, the wait of hum and broken
sounds—how well I knew it!—and then a distant voice, brisk and
business-like, "Hello, Philadelphia—Waiting." Then a pause and presently
the whispering jar of the wires, "Here’s your party. Gramercy 3503, all
right for Philadelphia."
Running over those miles and miles the voice—a man’s—came clear as a
bell.
"I want to speak to the Azalea Woods Estates."
I made the connection, softly lifted the cam, and listened in.
"Is this the office of the Azalea Woods Estates?"
A woman’s voice answered, as close as if she was in the next room:
"Yes—who is it?"
"Is Mr. Anthony Ford there?"
"No, Mr. Ford has left my employment. I am Miss Whitehall, my business
is closed."
There was a pause. My heart which had hit up a lively gait began to ease
down. Only Tony Ford—Pshaw!
"Are you there?" said the woman.
"Yes," came the answer. "Could you give me his address?"
"Certainly. Hold the wire for a moment."
After a wait of a minute or two she was back with the address which she
gave him. He repeated it carefully, thanked her and hung up.
Talk of false alarms! I was so disappointed thinking I’d got something
for Mr. Whitney, that I sat crumpled up in my chair sulking, and right
in the middle of my sulks came the second call.
It was Long Distance again—Toronto.
"I wonder what Toronto wants with her," I thought as I jacked in, and
then, leaning my elbow on the desk listened, not much interested. Three
sentences hadn’t passed before I was as still as a graven image, all my
life gone into my ears.
"Is that you, Carol?" I could just hear it, a fine little thread of
sound as if it came from a ghost in the other world.
"Yes—who’s speaking?"
"It’s I—J. W. B."
Barker’s initials! My heart gave a leap and then began to fox trot. If I
had any doubts, her answer put an end to them. I could hear the gasp in
her breath, the fright in her voice.
"You? What are you doing this for?"
"There’s no danger. I’m careful. Did you get my letter?"
"Yes, this morning."
"Will you come?"
"Are you sure it’s all right? Have you seen the papers here?"
"All of them. Don’t be afraid. I’m taking no risks. Are you coming?"
"Yes."
"When?"
"I can leave tonight. There’s a train at eight."
"Good. I’ll meet you and explain everything. Do as I said in the letter.
I’ll be there."
"Very well—understand. Please ring off. Good-bye."
For a moment I sat thinking. She was going to Toronto to meet Barker by
a train that left at eight, and it was now half-past five. There was no
use trying to trace the call—I knew enough for that—so I got Mr.
Whitney’s office and told him, careful, without names. He was awful
pleased and handed me out some compliments that gave me the courage to
ask for something I was crazy to get—the scoop for Babbitts. It would be
a big story—Barker landed through the girl he was in love with. I knew
they’d follow her and could Babbitts go along? I don’t have to tell you
that he agreed, making only one condition—if they were unsuccessful,
_silence_. O’Mally, who was up from Philadelphia, would go. Babbitts
could join him at the Grand Central Station.
I took a call for the _Dispatch_, found Babbitts and told him enough to
send him home on the run—but not much; there’s too many phones in those
newspaper offices. It was nearly seven when I got there myself, dragged
him into our room, and while I packed his grip gave him the last
bulletins. He was up in the air. It would be the biggest story that had
ever come his way.
I had to go down to the station with him, for neither he nor O’Mally
knew her. I was desperate afraid she wouldn’t come—get cold feet the way
women do when they’re eloping. But at a quarter of eight she showed up.
She didn’t look a bit nervous or rattled, and went about getting her
ticket as quiet as if she was going for a week-end to Long Island.
O’Mally—he was a fat, red-faced man, looking more like a commercial
traveler than a sleuth—was right behind her as she bought it. Then as
she walked to the track entrance with her suitcase in her hand, I saw
them follow her, lounging along sort of neighborly and casual, till the
three of them disappeared under the arch.
It was late before I went to sleep that night. I kept imagining them
tracking her through the Toronto Depot, leaping into a taxi that
followed close on hers, and going somewhere—but where I couldn’t
think—to meet Barker. For the first time I began to wonder if any harm
could come to Babbitts. In detective stories when they shadowed people
there were generally revolvers at the finish. But, after all, Johnston
Barker wasn’t flying for his life, or flying from jail. As far as I
could get it, he was just flying away with the Copper Pool’s money.
Perhaps that wasn’t desperate enough for revolvers.
When I finally did go to sleep I dreamed that all of us, the fat man,
Babbitts, Carol Whitehall and I and Mr. Barker, were packed together in
one taxi, which was rushing through the dark, lurching from side to
side. As if we weren’t enough, it was piled high with suitcases, on one
of which I was sitting, squeezed up against Mr. Barker, who had a face
like an eagle, and kept telling me to move so he could get his revolver.
I don’t know what hour I awoke, but the light was coming in between the
curtains and the radiators were beginning to snap with the morning heat
when I opened my eyes. I came awake suddenly with that queer sensation
you sometimes have that you’re not alone.
And I wasn’t. There sitting on a chair by the bedside, all hunched up in
his overcoat, with his suitcase at his feet, was Himself, looking as
cross as a bear.
I sat up with a yelp as if he’d been a burglar.
"_You_ here?" I cried.
He looked at me, glum as an owl, and nodded.
"Yes. It’s all right."
"Why—why—what’s happened?"
"Nothing."
"You haven’t been to Toronto and back in this time?"
"I’ve been to Rochester and back," he snapped. "She got out there,
waited most of this infernal night and took the first return train."
"Came back?"
"Isn’t that what I’m saying?" For Himself to speak that way to me showed
he was riled something dreadful. "She got off at Rochester and stayed
round in the depot—didn’t see anyone, or speak to anyone, or send a
phone, or a wire. She got a train back at three, we followed her and saw
her go up the steps of her own apartment."
"Why—what do you make of it?"
He shrugged:
"Only one of two things. She either changed her mind or saw she was
being shadowed."
CHAPTER VI
JACK TELLS THE STORY
This chapter in our composite story falls to me, not because I can write
it better but because I was present at that strange interview which
changed the whole face of the Harland case. Even now I can feel the
tightening of the muscles, the horrified chill, as we learned, in one of
the most unexpected and startling revelations ever made in a lawyer’s
office, the true significance of the supposed suicide.
It was the morning after the night ride of Babbitts and O’Mally, and I
was late at the office. The matter had been arranged after I left the
evening before and I knew nothing of it. As I entered the building I ran
into Babbitts, who was going to the Whitney offices to report on his
failure and in the hopes that some new lead might have cropped up.
Drawing me to the side of the hall he told me of their expedition. I
listened with the greatest interest and surprise. It struck me as
amazing and rather horrible. Until I heard it I had not believed the
story of the typewriter girl—that Barker was in love with Miss
Whitehall—but in the face of such evidence I had nothing to say.
We were both so engrossed that neither noticed a woman holding a child
by the hand and moving uncertainly about our vicinity. It wasn’t till
the story was over and we were walking toward the elevator that I was
conscious of her, looking this way and that, jostled by the men and
evidently scared and bewildered. Judging her too timid to ask her way,
and too unused to such surroundings—she looked poor and shabby—to
consult the office directory on the wall, I stopped and asked her where
she wanted to go.
She gave a start and said with a brogue as rich as butter:
"It’s to L’yer Whitney’s office I’m bound, but where is it I don’t know
and it’s afeared I am to be demandin’ the way with everyone runnin’ by
me like hares."
"I’m going there myself," I said, "I’ll take you."
She bubbled out in relieved thanks and followed us into the elevator. As
the car shot up I looked her over wondering what she could want with the
chief. She was evidently a working woman, neatly dressed in a dark coat
and small black hat under which her hair was drawn back smooth and
tight. Her face was of the best Irish type, round, rosy and honest. One
of her hands clasped the child’s, his little fingers crumpled inside her
rough, red ones. She addressed him as "Dannie," and when passengers
crowded in and out, drew him up against her, with a curious, soft
tenderness that seemed instinctive.
He was a pale, thin little chap, eight or nine, with large, gray eyes,
that he’d lift to the faces round him with a solemn, searching look. I
smiled down at him but didn’t get any response, and it struck me that
both of them—woman and boy—were in a state of suppressed nervousness.
Every time the gate clanged she’d jump, and once I heard her mutter to
him "not to be scared."
Inside the office Babbitts went up the hall to the old man’s den and I
tried to find out what she wanted. Her nervousness was then obvious.
Shifting from foot to foot, her free hand—she kept a tight clutch on the
boy—fingering at the buttons of her coat, she refused to say. All I
could get out of her was that she had something important to tell and
she wouldn’t tell it to anyone but "L’yer Whitney."
By this time my curiosity was aroused. I asked her if she was a witness
in a case, and with a troubled look she said "maybe she was," and then,
backing away from me against the wall, reiterated with stubborn
determination, "But I won’t speak to no one but L’yer Whitney himself."
I went up to the private office where the old man and George were
talking with Babbitts and told them. George was sent to see if he could
manage better than I had and presently was back again with the
announcement:
"I can’t get a thing out of her. She insists on seeing you, father, and
says she won’t go till she does."
"Bring her in," growled the chief, and as George disappeared he turned
to Babbitts and said, "Wait here for a moment. I want to ask you a few
more things about that girl last night."
Babbitts drew back to the window and I, taking a chair by the table,
said, laughing:
"She’s probably been sued by her landlord and wants you to take the
case."
"Maybe," said the old man quietly. "I’m curious to see."
Just then the woman came in, the child beside her, and George following.
She looked at the chief with a steady, inquiring gaze, and he rose, as
urbanely welcoming as if she were a star client.
"You want to see me, Madam?"
"I do," she answered, "if you’re L’yer Whitney. For it’s to no one else
I’ll be goin’ with what I’m bringin’."
He assured her she’d found the right man, and waved her to a chair. She
sat down, drawing the boy against her knee, the chief opposite, leaning
a little forward in his chair, all encouraging attention.
"Well, what is it?" he said.
"It’s about the Harland suicide," she answered, "and it’s my husband,
Dan Meagher, who drives a dray for the Panama Fruit Company, who’s sent
me here. ’Go to L’yer Whitney and tell him,’ he says to me, ’and don’t
be sayin’ a word to a soul, not your own mother if she was above the sod
to hear ye.’"
George, who had been standing by the table with the sardonic smile he
affects, suddenly became grave and dropped into a chair. The chief,
nodding pleasantly, said:
"The Harland suicide, Mrs. Meagher; that’s very good. We’d like any
information you can give us about it."
The woman fetched up a breath so deep it was almost a gasp. With her
eyes on the old man she bent forward, her words, with their rich rolling
r’s, singularly impressive.
"It’s an honest woman I am, your Honor, and what I’ll be after tellin’
you is God’s truth for me and for Dannie here, who’s never lied since
the day he was born."
The little boy looked up and spoke, his voice clear and piping, after
the fuller tones of his mother:
"I’m not lying."
"Let’s hear this straight, Mrs. Meagher," said the chief. "I’m a little
confused. Is it you or the boy here that knows something?"
"_Him_," she said, putting her hand on the child’s shoulder, "he _seen
something_. It’s this way, your Honor. I’m one of the cleaners in the
Massasoit Building. The three top floors is mine and I go on duty to rid
up the offices from five till eight. It’s my habit to take Dannie with
me, he bein’, as maybe you can see, delicate since he had the typhoid,
and not allowed to go to school yet or run on the street."
"I empty the trash baskets," piped up the little boy.
"Don’t speak, Dannie, till your evidence is wanted," said she. "On the
evenin’ of the suicide, L’yer Whitney, I was doin’ my chores on the
seventeenth floor, in the Macauley-Blake Company’s offices, they bein’,
as you may know, at the back of the buildin’. I was through with the
outer room by a quarter past six, so I turned off the lights and went
into the inner room, closin’ the door, as I had the window open and
didn’t want the cold air on the boy."
"You left him in the room that looks over the houses to the front of the
Black Eagle Building?"
"By the window," spoke up the little boy. "I was leanin’ there lookin’
out."
"That’s it," said she. "The office was dark and as I shut the door I
seen him, by the sill, peerin’ over some books they had there." She took
the little boy’s hand and, fondling it in hers, said, "Now, Dannie, tell
his Honor what you saw, same as you tolt Paw and me this day." She
turned to the chief. "It’s no lie he’ll be after sayin’, L’yer Whitney,
I’ll swear that on the Book."
The little boy raised his big eyes to the old man’s and spoke, clearly
and slowly:
"I was lookin’ acrost at the Black Eagle Building, at the windows
opposite. On the floor right level with me they was all dark, ’cept the
hall one. That was lit and I could see down into the hall, and there was
no one in it. Suddent a door opened, the one nearest to the window, and
a head come out and looked quick up and down and then acrost to our
building. Then it went in and I was thinkin’ how it couldn’t see me
because it was all dark where I was, when the door opened again, slow,
and an awful sort of thing came out."
He stopped and turned to his mother, shrinking and scared. She put her
arm round him and coaxed softly:
"Don’t be afeart, darlint. Go on, now, and tell it like you tolt it to
me and Paw at breakfast."
The old man was motionless, his face as void of expression as a stone
mask. George was leaning forward, his elbows on the table, his eyes on
the boy in a fixed stare.
"What was it you saw, Dannie?" said the chief, his voice sounding deep
as an organ after that moment of breathless hush. "Don’t be afraid to
tell us."
The boy spoke again, pressing back against his mother:
"It was like an animal creepin’ along, crouched down——"
"Show the gentlemen," said Mrs. Meagher, and without more urging the
little chap slid down to the floor on his hands and knees and began
padding about, bent as low as he could. It was a queer sight, believe
me—the tiny figure creeping stealthily along the carpet—and we four men,
all but the old man, now up on our feet, leaning forward to watch with
faces of amazement.
"That way," he said, looking up sideways. "Just like that—awful quick
from the door to the window." He rose and went back to his mother,
cowering against her. "I thought it was some kind of bear, and I was
terrible scairt. I was so scairt I couldn’t raise a yell or make a break
or nothin’. I stood lookin’ and I saw it was a man, and——" He stopped,
terrified memory halting the words.
She had to coax again, her arm around him, her face close to his.
"Go on, Dannie boy, you want the gintlemin to think you’re the brave man
that ye are. Go on, now, lamb." Over his head she looked at the chief
and said, "It’s a sight might have froze the heart of anyone, let alone
a pore, sickly kid."
The boy went on, almost in a whisper:
"He had another man on his back, still, like he was dead, with his arms
hangin’ down. I could see the hands draggin’ along the floor like they
was bits of rope. And when he got to the window, quick—I never seen
nothin’ so quick—the one that was creepin’ slid the other on to the
sill. He done it this way." He crouched down on his knees with his hands
raised over his head and made a forward, shoving motion. "Pushing him
out. Just for a second I could see the dead one, acrost the sill, with
his head down, and then the other gave a big shove and he went over."
There was a moment of dead silence in which you could hear the tick of
the clock on the mantel. I had an impression of Babbitts, his face full
of horror, and George, bent across the table, biting on his under lip.
Only the old man held his pose of bland stolidity.
"And what did the man—the one that was on his knees—do then, Dannie?" he
asked gently.
"He got up and made a break for the door. Whisht," he shot one palm
across the other with a swift gesture—"like that, and went in."
"Which door was that—which side?"
Dannie waved his right hand.
"This one—the door he came out of—this side!"
"The Azalea Woods Estates," came from George.
The old man gave him a quick glance, a razor-sharp reproof, and turning
to Dannie held out his hand.
"Well, Dannie, that’s a wonderful story, and it’s great the way you tell
it. Let’s shake on it." The little boy stepped forward and put his
small, thin paw in the chief’s big palm. "You’ve told it to all the
fellows on the block, haven’t you?"
Dannie shook his head.
"I ain’t told it to a soul till this mornin’, when I couldn’t hold it no
more and let out to Paw and Maw."
"Why didn’t you tell?"
"I was scairt. I didn’t want to. I kep’ dreamin’ of it at night and I
didn’t know what to do. And this mornin’ when Paw and Maw was gassin’
about the suicide I just busted out. I—I——" his lips trembled and the
tears welled into his eyes.
"It’s thrue what he says, every word," said Mrs. Meagher. "It’s sick
he’s been ever sence, and me crazy not knowin’ what was eatin’ into him.
And this mornin’ he breaks into a holler and out it comes."
As she was speaking the old man patted the thin hand, eyeing the child
with a deep, quiet kindliness.
"You’re a wise boy, Dannie," said he. "And you want to keep on being a
wise boy and not tell anyone. Will you answer a question or two, saying
when you don’t know or don’t remember? I’ll see that you get something
pretty nice afterward, if you do."
"Yes," says Dannie, "I’ll answer."
"Could you see what the man looked like, the man that was alive?"
"No—I wasn’t near enough. They was like—like"—he paused and then said,
his eyes showing a troubled bewilderment—"like shadows."
"He would have seen the figures in silhouette," George explained, "black
against the lit window."
"That’s it," he turned eagerly to George. "And it was acrost the street
and the houses on Broadway."
"Um," said the chief, "too far for any detail. Well, this man, the one
that went on his hands and knees, was he a fat man?"
The child shook his head.
"No, sir. He—he was just like lots of men."
"Now look over these three gentlemen," said the chief, waving his hand
at us. "Which of them looks most like him? Not their faces, but their
bodies."
Dannie looked at us critically and carefully. His eye passed quickly
over Babbitts, medium height, broad and stocky, lingered on me, six feet
two with the longest reach in my class at Harvard, then brought up on
George, who tips the beam at one hundred and sixty pounds.
"Most like him," he said, pointing a little finger at the junior member
of Whitney & Whitney. "Skinny like him."
"Very well done, Dannie," said the old man, then turned to George.
"Lightly built. He would have no means of judging height."
George took up the interrogation:
"Could you see at all what kind of clothes he wore?"
"No—he went too quick."
"And he looked over at your building?"
"Yes—but he couldn’t have seen anything. Maw’s floors was all dark."
"Did you see him come out of the room again?"
"No. I was that scairt I crep’ away back to where Maw was."
"Come in to me like a specter," said Mrs. Meagher. "And not a word out
of him only that he was cold."
"Well, Mrs. Meagher," said the chief, "this is a great service you’ve
done us, and it’s up to us to do something for you."
"Oh, your Honor," she answered, "it’s not pay I’m wantin’. It was my
dooty and I done it. Now, Dannie boy, it’s time we was gettin’ home."
"Wait a moment," said the old man. "You say your husband’s a drayman.
Tell him to come and see me—my home’s the best place—this evening if
possible. And tell him—and this applies as much to you"—his bushy brows
came down over his eyes and his expression grew lowering—"not to mention
one word of this. If you keep your mouths shut, your future’s made. If
you blab"—he raised a warning finger and shook it fiercely in her
face—"God help you."
Mrs. Meagher looked terrified. She clutched Dannie and drew him against
her skirts.
"It’s not a word I’ll be after sayin’, your Honor," she faltered. "I’ll
swear it before the priest."
"That’s right. I’ll see the priest about it." He suddenly changed,
straightened up, and was the genial old gentleman who could put the
shyest witness at his ease. "The little chap doesn’t look strong. New
York’s no place for him. He ought to run wild in the country for a bit."
"Ah, don’t be after sayin’ it," she shook her head wistfully. "That’s
what the doctor tolt me. But what can a poor scrubwoman do?"
"Not as much, maybe, as a lawyer can. You leave that to me. I’ll see he
goes and you’ll be along. All I ask in return is"—he put his finger on
his lips—"just one word—silence."
She tried to say something, but laughing and pooh-poohing her attempts
at thanks, he walked her to the door.
"There—there—no back-talk. Hustle along now, and don’t forget, I want to
see Dan Meagher tonight. Ask the clerk in the waiting room for the
address. Good-bye." He shook hands with her and patted Dannie on the
shoulder. "A month on a farm and you won’t know this boy. Good-bye and
good luck to you!"
As the door shut on her his whole expression and manner changed. He
turned back to the room, his hands deep in his pockets, his shoulders
hunched, his eyes, under the drooping thatch of his hair, looking from
one to the other of us.
"Well, gentlemen?" he said.
"_Murder!_" came from George on a rising breath.
"Murder," repeated his father. "A fact that I’ve suspected since the
inquest."
CHAPTER VII
MOLLY TELLS THE STORY
_Murder!_ Will I ever forget that night when Babbitts told me, the two
of us shut in our room! I can see his face now, thrust out toward me,
all strained and staring, his voice almost a whisper. As for me—I guess
I looked like the Village Idiot, with my mouth dropped open and my eyes
bulged so you could cut ’em off with a shingle.
The next day the same word went out to us that was given to Mrs.
Meagher—_silence_. Not a whisper, not a breath! Neither the public, nor
the press, nor the police must get an inkling. All there was to go upon
was the story of a child, and until this could be confirmed by other
facts, the outside world was to know nothing. _If_ corroborative
evidence were found it would be the biggest sensation the Whitney office
had ever had. Babbitts was promised the scoop, but if he gave away a
thing before the time was ripe it would be the end of us as far as
Whitney & Whitney went.
Six shared the secret, the Whitneys, father and son, the Babbittses,
husband and wife, Jack Reddy and O’Mally. In twenty-four hours Mrs.
Meagher and Dannie were spirited off to a farm up-state and the old man
had a séance with Meagher, the drayman, that shut his mouth tighter than
a gag.
The six of us were organized into a sort of band to work on the case. It
seemed to me we were like moles, tunneling along underground, not a soul
on the surface knowing we were there, and if they’d found it out, not
able to make a guess what we were after.
O’Mally and I were the only two that were put right on the scene of the
crime. I was to stay on the Black Eagle switchboard to pick up all I
could from Troop, the boy who operated the one elevator which was
running that night—to find out about the people he had taken up or down
from the seventeenth floor between five and six-thirty. O’Mally was
commissioned to examine the Azalea Woods Estates offices, and get next
to Mrs. Hansen, cleaner of the top floors, and see if she had seen
anything on the evening of January fifteenth.
What we ferreted out I’ll put down as clearly and quickly as I can. It
may not be interesting, but to understand a case that _was_ interesting,
it’s necessary to know it.
O’Mally got busy right off—quicker than I, but he knew better how to do
it. The Azalea Woods Estates was vacated and _that_ was easy. His search
only gave up one thing, two dark spots on the floor of the private
office close by the window. With a chisel he shaved off the wood on
which they were and it was sent to a chemist who analyzed the spots as
blood.
What he heard from Mrs. Hansen was even more important, and he did it
well, worming it out of her in easy talk about the suicide. I’ll boil it
down to simple facts, not as I heard him tell it in Mr. Whitney’s den,
with bits about Mrs. Hansen that you couldn’t help but laugh at.
On the night of January the fifteenth she was at work on the seventeenth
floor at half-past five. Behind the elevators, round on the side
corridor where the service stairs go down, is a sink closet where the
cleaners kept their brooms and dusters. Having finished with a rear
office she went into this closet to empty and refill her pails, at a
little before six. While in there she could hear nothing because of the
running water, but when she turned it off she heard steps coming down
the stairs on the Broadway side. She had moved out into the hall when
the steps stopped, and rounding the corner by the elevators she saw Mr.
Harland standing at the door of the Azalea Woods Estates offices.
He was in profile and didn’t see her, and didn’t hear her, she said,
because she wore old soft shoes that made no sound. Just as she caught
sight of him she remembered she’d left her duster in the sink closet and
went back for it. When she returned to the main corridor he was gone,
and she went into the Hudson Electrical Company’s offices, staying there
till six-twenty—she noted the time by a nickel clock on one of the
desks. She decided to do the Azalea Woods Estates rooms next but on
trying the door found it was locked. This didn’t bother her, as she had
found it so once or twice before during the past month. She then went
down the hall into a rear suite in which she was shut when the suicide
occurred.
This fixed the fact that Harland had gone straight from his own office,
down the stairs on the Broadway side, into the Azalea Woods Estates, and
that he or somebody in there had locked the door.
Who had let him in? What man had access to these offices? Can you see me
as I sat listening to O’Mally and thinking of the fresh guy who’d wanted
to take me out to dinner? Lord, I felt queer!
And I felt queerer, considerable queerer, when the day after that I got
hold of Troop—_and_ information. Wait till I tell you.
Mr. Whitney had told me to take my time, there was no rush, and above
all things not to raise the ghost of a suspicion in Troop’s mind. So I
went about it very foxy, lying low in my little den behind the
elevators. But when I’d see Troop, lounging in the door of his car, I’d
flash a smile at him and get a good-natured grin back.
The evening after O’Mally’d brought in his stuff I thought the time was
ready to gather in mine. So after I’d put on my hat and coat I stood
loitering by the desk, keeping one eye on the door. Troop came off duty
at half-past six, and regular, a few minutes after that, I’d see him
sprinting down the hall for the main entrance.
As he came in sight I took up my purse, and he, looking in as I knew he
would, caught me just right. There I was staring distracted into it and
scrabbling round in the inside, pulling out handkerchiefs and samples
and buttons and latchkeys.
"Hello," says he, drawing up, "you look like you’d lost something."
"Oh, Mr. Troop," I answered, "how fortunate you happened along! I _have_
lost something, my carfare. And I ain’t got another cent but a
ten-dollar bill. Will you come across with a nickel till tomorrow?"
"Sure I will, and more too! Which way do you go?"
"Uptown," said I. Neither he nor anyone else in the building knew where
I lived or who I was. Miss Morgenthau, temporarily in charge, was all
they had on me.
"That’s my direction—One Hundred and Fifty-ninth Street, subway."
Now I didn’t see myself sleuthing as I hung from a strap in the sub. But
in this world you got to grab your chance when it comes, so, "The subway
for mine," I said, speaking in a cheerful, unmarried voice, and out we
trotted into the street.
It was the thick of the rush hours and we were in the thick of the rush.
Like we were leaves on a raging torrent we were whirled through the
gate, swept on to the platform and carried into the car. Then the
conductor came and pressed on us, leaned and squeezed, and when he’d
mashed us in, slid the door shut for fear we’d burst out and flood the
platform.
Troop got hold of a strap and I got hold of Troop, and, dangling
together like a pair of chickens hung up to grow tender, I opened on the
familiar subject of the Harland suicide. It wasn’t as hard as I thought,
for what with people clawing their way out and prying their way in,
questions and answers were bound to be straight, with no trimmings.
"Where were you when it happened?" I said, getting a jiujitsu grip on
the front of his coat.
"In the car, halfway down. Didn’t know a thing till I got to the ground
floor and saw the stampede."
"What did you do?"
"Ran for the street—forgot my job, forgot there was only one car
running, forgot everything and made a break. Every passenger did the
same—seized us all same as a panic, all racin’ and hollerin’. I was
right behind Mr. Ford."
It was sooner than I’d expected. The jump I gave was lost in that crush,
just as the look that started out on my face wouldn’t be noticed, or, if
it was, be set down to a stamp on my toe.
"Was he in the car with you?"
"Yes, I’d just gone up to the seventeenth floor for him. Here, you want
to get a firm holt on me or you’ll be swep’ away."
"I’m holding," I gasped, and believe me I was, for a line of people
coming out like a bit of the Johnstown Flood was like to tear me loose
from my moorings. "Then he must have been in the elevator when Harland
jumped?"
"That’s it. It was his ring brought me up to the seventeenth floor. He
got in and it was while we was goin’ down the body fell. Struck the
street a few minutes before we reached the bottom."
We were whizzing through the blackness of the tunnel to Times Square.
The overflow that had drained off at Forty-second Street had loosened
things up a little. I unwrapped myself from around Troop, taking hold of
the strap over his hand, and pigeonholing what he’d said. In that
boiling pack of people I was cold and shivery down the spine.
"Did Mr. Ford run out in the street like the rest?"
"_Did_ he? He done a Marathon! I couldn’t make a dint on the crowd, but
he shoved through, and when he come back he was all broke up. ’What do
you make of that?’ says he. ’There’s a man committed suicide and they
say it’s Rollings Harland.’"
"Broke up! I shouldn’t wonder. He was in the office late wasn’t he—till
half-past six?"
"He was _that_ night, and he _had_ been once or twice before this last
month. Told me he was working overtime, though if you’d asked _me_ I’d
have said he wasn’t the kind to do more than his salary called for."
"No," I said, thinking hard underneath. "Seems sort of loaferish."
"Well, I wouldn’t say that, but easy, good-humored—you know the sort.
But lately he’s been on the job, busy, I guess, gettin’ ready for the
collapse. The night of the suicide he left early, soon after Miss Barry.
And a little after six—ten or fifteen minutes maybe—he come bustling
back sayin’ he’d forgotten some papers and for me to shoot him up
quick."
We slowed up for Sixty-ninth Street and two girls in the middle of the
car began a football rush for the door. It was a good excuse to be
quiet, to get it straight in my head: Ford left early, came back, went
into the office after Harland, left probably three or four minutes
before the body was flung from the window. This is the way I was
thinking while we hung easy from our strap, swinging out sideways like
the woman in "Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight," clinging to the tongue of
the bell.
"Now that was real conscientious of him," I said, suspended over a large
fat man and crushing down the paper he was trying to read, "coming back
for papers he’d forgotten."
"It sure was," answered Troop. "Many a man would have let them wait."
The fat man dropped the paper and raised his eyes to me with a look like
he was determined to be patient—but _why_ did I do it?
"Pardon me, sir," says I, "but it’s not me that’s spoiling your homeward
journey, it’s the congested condition of the Empire City." And then to
Troop, pleasant and regretful, "Dear, dear, that’s a lesson not to pass
judgment on your fellow creatures. He must have a strong sense of duty.
I suppose you waited for him?"
"Not me," said Troop. "That’s the time I’m on the jump with all the
offices emptying, and especially that night with the other elevator out
of commission. Besides it wouldn’t have been no use, for he was in there
quite a while. It wasn’t till nearly half-past six he rang for the car."
"Pity he didn’t wait a few minutes longer. Maybe if Mr. Harland had seen
him he’d have given up the idea of suicide."
"I’ve thought of that myself, for accordin’ to the inquest, Harland was
round that corridor for a half-hour, like as not pacin’ up and down
while Ford was sittin’ in the office near by. Strange, ain’t it, the way
things happen in this world?"
It was—a great deal stranger than he thought.
For a moment I didn’t say anything. I was kind of quivering in my
insides with the excitement of it. O’Mally hadn’t got anything to beat
_this_. We swung lazily back and forth, my hand clasped below Troop’s,
and the fat man giving up in despair. Only when my wrist bag caught him
on the hat, he gave me one reproachful look and then settled the hat
hard on his head to show me what he was suffering.
The train began to slow up, white-tiled walls glided past the windows,
and the conductor opened the door and yelled, "Ninety-sixth Street."
It had worked out just right. I had my information and here was where I
got off. I thanked Troop for the ride I’d had off him, told him I’d give
him his nickel tomorrow, and forging to the door like the _Oregon_ going
round Cape Horn, scrambled out.
Himself wasn’t at home to tell things to—it was one of his late
nights—so I took a call for Mr. Whitney’s house and told him I’d got the
stuff for him—_real_ stuff. He said to come down that evening at
half-past eight, they’d all be there. And after a glass of milk and a
soda cracker—I hadn’t time or appetite for more—out I lit, as excited as
if I was going to a six-reel movie.
I was late and ran panting up the steps of the big, grand house in the
West Fifties. I’d been there before, and as I stood waiting in the
vestibule I couldn’t but smile thinking of that other time when I was so
scared, and Himself—he was "Mr. Babbitts" then—had had to jolly me up.
He didn’t know me as well then as he does now, bless his dear, faithful
heart!
The unnatural solemn butler wasn’t on the job tonight. Mr. George opened
the door for me and showed me into that same room off the hall, with the
gold-mounted furniture and the pale-colored rugs and the lights in
crystal bunches along the walls. A fire was burning in the grate, its
red reflection leaping along the uncovered spaces of floor, polished and
smooth as ice. On a center table, all gilt and glass, was a common
student lamp, looking cheap and mean in that quiet, rich, glittering
room, and beside it were some sheets of paper and several pencils. Old
Mr. Whitney and George were there, also Jack Reddy, but O’Mally hadn’t
come yet.
I told them what Troop had said and they listened as silent as the
grave, not batting an eye while I spoke. You didn’t have to guess at
what they thought. It was in the air. The first real move had been made.
When I finished, Mr. George, who had been making notes on one of the
bits of paper, threw down his pencil, and gave a long, soft whistle. The
old man, sitting by the fire looking into it, his hands clasped loosely
together, the fingers moving round each other—which was a way he had
when he was thinking—said very quiet:
"Thank you, Molly—you’ve done well."
"This puts Ford in the center of the stage," said Mr. George, then
turning to his father, "Pretty conclusive, eh, Governor?"
The old man grunted without looking up, his face in the firelight, heavy
and brooding.
Jack rose and leaning over Mr. George’s shoulder looked at the scribbled
notes:
"Left soon after the Barry girl, came back about 6.15 and went to the
Azalea Woods Estates offices. That would have been about fifteen to
twenty minutes after Harland. Came out about half-past six and was in
the elevator when the body fell."
"Positive proof that he was in the rooms with Harland," said Mr. George,
"and equally positive proof he was not the man seen by the Meagher
child."
"Evidently two men," said Jack.
"Two men," echoed Mr. George. Then turned to me, "Where was Miss
Whitehall? Did this Troop fellow say anything about when _she_ left?"
Jack looked up from the notes and cast a quick, sharp glance at me.
"She’d gone already, of course?" he said.
"Yes, she’d gone," I answered. "Anyway, Iola Barry said she always went
before six." Then in answer to Mr. George, "I didn’t ask Troop anything
about her. I didn’t think there was any need and I was afraid I’d get
him curious if I wanted to know too much."
"Good girl," came from the old man in a rumbling growl.
At that moment there was a ring at the bell. With an exclamation of
"O’Mally," Mr. George jumped up and went into the hall. It was O’Mally,
red as a lobster, and with an important roll to his walk. He stood in
the door and looked at the old man in a triumphant way till you’d
suppose he’d got the murderer outside chained to the door handle.
Babbitts, who’d come to know him well on the trip to Rochester, said he
was a first-rate chap and as sharp as a needle, if you could get over
his taking himself so dead serious.
When he heard my story some of the starch was taken out of him, but I
will say he was so interested that, after the first shock, he forgot to
be jealous and was as keen as mustard.
"Two men sure enough," he agreed. "And two men who operated together,
one of them in that back room."
"How do you make that out?" asked Jack.
"I’ll show you—I’ve been busy this afternoon." He looked round, selected
a gold-legged chair and pulling it to the table, sat down, and taking a
fountain pen from his pocket, drew a sheet of paper toward him. "Right
next to the church, as you may remember, there are three houses,
dwellings. The one nearest the church is occupied by a private party,
the two beyond have been thrown together and are run as a boarding
house. The last of the two has a rear extension built out to the end of
the lot. The day we examined the Azalea Woods Estates I saw that the
windows of that extension commanded the side wall of the Black Eagle
Building.
"This afternoon I went to the boarding house, said I was a writer
looking for a quiet place to work, and asked if they had an empty room
in the extension. They had one, not yet vacated, but to be in February.
It was occupied by an old lady—Miss Darnley—who being there gave me
permission to see it.
"Now here’s where I get busy," he drew the paper toward him and began
marking it with long straight lines and little squares. "Miss Darnley is
a nice old lady and some talker. We got gassing, as natural as could be,
on the horrible suicide of Mr. Harland, so close by. She took me to the
window and showed me where his offices were, and told me how it was her
habit, every evening as night fell, to sit in that window and watch the
lights start out, especially in the Black Eagle Building. She sat there
always till half-past six, when the first gong sounded for dinner. And
if I took the room I was to be sure and go down then—the food was
better—she always did.
"By a little skillful jollying—mostly surprise at her powers of
observation and memory—I got from her some significant facts about the
lights on the seventeenth floor of the Black Eagle Building on the night
of January fifteenth. The Harland suite—she’d located it from the
papers—was lit till she went down to dinner. Wonderful how she’d
remembered! How was the floor below—bet a hat she couldn’t remember
_that_! She could, and proud as a peacock, gave a demonstration. All
dark as it usually was at six, then a light in the fourth window—Azalea
Woods Estates, private office. Then that goes out and the three front
windows are bright. Just before she goes down to dinner, she notices
that every window on the whole sweep of the seventeenth floor is dark
except that fourth one—Azalea Woods Estates, private office."
He stopped and pushed the paper he’d been drawing on across to George.
"Here it is, with the time as I make it marked on each window."
Jack and Mr. George leaned down studying the diagram and Mr. Whitney
slowly rose and coming up behind them looked at it over their shoulders.
All their faces, clear in the lamplight, with O’Mally’s red and proud
glancing sideways at the drawing, were intent and frowning.
"Let’s see how the thing works out," said Mr. George, taking up a pencil
and pulling a sheet of paper toward him. Mr. Whitney straightened up
with a sort of tired snort and slouched back to his seat by the fire.
Mr. George began, figuring on the paper:
"The Azalea Woods Estates were cleared at six—all lights out. At a few
minutes after, Harland came down the stairs and entered them, going
through to the private office and switching on the light, or meeting
someone there who switched it on as he came. Some ten or fifteen minutes
later Ford came in. That’s evidently the moment, according to your old
lady, when the private office was dark and the other two lit up. Just
before 6:30—time when Ford left—the front rooms are all dark again. Good
deal of a mess to me." He tilted back in his chair so that he could see
his father. "What do you make of it, Governor?"
"Let’s hear what O’Mally has to say first," said Mr. Whitney. They
couldn’t see his face which was turned to the fire, but I could, and it
had a slight, amused smile on it.
O’Mally sprawled back in his chair with his chest thrown out:
"Well, I don’t like to commit myself so early in the game, but there are
a few things that seem pretty clear. Though the Azalea Woods Estates
were dark when Harland came down somebody was there."
"Who?" asked Jack.
O’Mally looked sort of pitying at him:
"His murderer. This man didn’t attempt the job alone. Must have held
Harland in talk in the private office till later when Tony Ford came in
and helped, if he didn’t do the actual killing. When _that_ was over
Ford went, leaving the other man to carry out the sensational
denouement."
"What could have been Ford’s motive?" said Mr. George. "Did he know
Harland?"
O’Mally grinned.
"Oh, we’ll find a motive all right. Wait till we’ve turned up the earth
in his tracks. Wait a few days."
"This ’other man,’ O’Mally," said Mr. Whitney, "have you any ideas about
him?"
"There you got me stumped," said the detective. "Of course we don’t know
Harland’s inner life—had he an enemy and if so who? But—" he paused and
let his glance move over the faces of the two young men. "_If_ the thing
hadn’t been physically impossible I’d have turned my searchlight eye on
Johnston Barker."
"Barker!" exclaimed Mr. George. "But Barker was——"
O’Mally interrupted him with a wave of his hand—
"I _said_ it was physically impossible."
The old man got up, shaking himself like a big, drowsy animal and came
forward into the lamplight.
"Nevertheless, gentlemen," he said quietly, "I’m convinced that it _was_
Johnston Barker."
They all gaped at him. I think for the first moment they thought he had
some information they hadn’t heard and waited open-mouthed for him to
give it to them. But he stood there, smiling a little, his eyes moving
from one to the other, sort of quizzical as if their surprise tickled
him.
"Now, father," said Mr. George, "what’s the sense of saying that when we
know that Barker was on the floor above, unable to get out without being
seen?"
"I know, George, I know," said his father mildly. "I’m perfectly willing
to admit it. But in that room—on the floor above—there had been a
quarrel between the two men. Since the disappearance of Barker there’s
been a good deal of speculation as to the nature of that quarrel. That
is, the public has speculated; _I_ have felt sure. After the
disappearance that quarrel, as far as I could see, had only one
interpretation—the lawyer had discovered the perfidy of his associate
and threatened exposure. And we all know that the only silent man is a
dead man."
"That’s all very well," said O’Mally, "but it doesn’t get round the fact
that Barker couldn’t possibly have been there to instigate a murder, or
help in murder or commit a murder himself."
"Quite true," said the old man, "as far as we know at present, but you
see we know very little. We can speak with more authority when we’ve
made a second examination of the Whitehall offices and a first one of
the Harland suite. That’s up to you, O’Mally, as soon as you can manage
it. There’s another important matter but I can’t see my way clear to
getting it just yet—Ford’s own explanation of his movements that
evening. I’m curious to hear what he has to say. But that’ll have to
wait till——"
He paused and Mr. George cut in:
"We land him in jail which I hope will be soon."
"Presently, presently," said his father, turning to the fire. "And now,
gentlemen, I think we’ll end this little séance. Just look out, George,
and see if the limousine’s there for Molly."
It was, and they all drifted out, talking as they went, making the date
and arranging the plan for the examination of the two offices.
I’d said good-bye to the old man and was following them into the hall,
when he caught me by the arm and drawing me back from the door said very
low:
"You’ll be on duty at the Black Eagle Building for a few days more. Try
and get Troop again and ask him what time Miss Whitehall left that
night. Don’t say a word of what he tells you to anyone, but as soon as
you get it let me know."
CHAPTER VIII
MOLLY TELLS THE STORY
For the next few days my moling was stopped—Troop was down with grippe
and a substitute in his place. There was nothing to do but sit in my
little hole by the elevators, passing the time with a novel and the tray
cloth I was embroidering. At night, when Himself and I’d meet up, I’d
hear from him how O’Mally was getting on in _his_ tunnel. Babbitts kept
in close touch with him, for he had the promise of being along when they
made the inspection of the offices.
It took some days to arrange for that and while O’Mally was laying his
wires for a midnight search, his men were tracking back over Tony Ford’s
trail. It didn’t take them long and there was nothing much brought to
light when you considered the kind of a man Tony Ford must be.
For the last three years he’d held clerkships in New York and Albany and
once, for six months in Detroit. From some he’d resigned, from others
been fired, not for anything bad, but because he was slack and lazy,
though bright enough. The only thing they turned up that was shady was
over two years before in Syracuse, when he’d been in a small real estate
business with a partner and was said to have absconded with some of the
funds. Nobody knew much of this and the man he’d been in with couldn’t
be found. The detectives said it was so vague they didn’t put much
reliance in it, thought maybe it might be spite work.
Anyway, it wasn’t the record of a desperado, and they’d have been sort
of baffled to fit his past actions with his present, if it hadn’t been
for one thing that, according to their experience, was very significant.
In the last two months he’d spent a lot more money than his salary. As
Miss Whitehall’s managing clerk he had been paid sixty-five dollars a
week, and he had been living at the rate of a man who has hundreds. It
wasn’t in his place—that was simple enough—a back room in a lodging
house—but he’d been a spender in the white lights of Broadway. At
expensive restaurants and lobster palaces he’d become a familiar figure,
the gambling houses knew him, and he’d ridden round in motors like a
capitalist.
"By the swath he’s been cutting," said Babbitts, "you’d suppose he had
an income in five figures."
"O Soapy," I said horrified. "They don’t think he was _paid_ for it?"
Himself looked solemn at me and nodded:
"That’s exactly what they _do_ think, Morningdew. He was paid and
evidently paid high. Whoever the ’Other Man’ was he could afford to be
extravagant in his accomplice. Their idea is that Ford was engaged for
his superior strength, and demanded a big retainer in advance."
"What a terrible man," I murmured and thought of him standing in the
doorway smiling at me like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. "He’s a
regular gunman."
"Worse than a gunman, for he’s educated," said Babbitts. "Gee, wasn’t it
a lucky thing Iola got out of that place!"
The morning after that conversation I bid Babbitts good-bye as if he was
going to the South Pole, for that was the night they’d selected to
examine the two offices. Three of them were in it, O’Mally, Babbitts,
and one of O’Mally’s men, a chap called Stevens. Himself would turn up
for breakfast if he could, but if there was anything pressing at the
paper or more developed than they expected, I wasn’t to look for him
till the evening of the next day.
I went down to my work and had a dull time for Troop was still sick and
there was nothing to do but now and then jack in for a call and sew on
my tray cloth. No Babbitts that night and no Babbitts for breakfast, and
me piling down town for another eight hours in that dreary room with
Troop not yet back and not a soul to speak to.
If, when I came home that evening, I’d found Babbitts still away I
believe I’d have forgotten I was a lady sleuth and started a general
alarm for him. But thank goodness, I didn’t need to. For there he was on
the Davenport with his muddy boots on the best plush cushion, sound
asleep.
I didn’t intend to wake him, but creeping round to our room, looking at
him as I crept, I ran into the Victrola with a crash, and up he sat,
wide awake, thanking me sarcastic for having roused him in such a
delicate, tactful manner.
In a minute I was sitting on the edge of the Davenport—you’ll know how I
felt when I tell you I forgot his feet on the cushion—squeezed up
against him and staring into his face:
"Quick—go ahead! Did you find anything?"
"We did, Morningdew."
"Did you get any nearer who the other man is?"
"We got next. The chief was right. It’s Johnston Barker!"
"_Barker!_ But, Soapy——"
He raised a finger and pointed in my face:
"Don’t begin with any buts till you know. Now if you’ll be quiet and
listen like a nice little girl, you’ll see."
This is what he told me as I sat pressed up against him, every now and
then giving myself a hitch to keep from sliding off, too eager listening
to rise up and get a chair.
They gained access to both offices without any trouble, O’Mally flashing
his badge at the nightman, whom he’d already seen and fixed with a story
that he was after important papers for the Copper Pool men. They tried
the Harland offices first, a cursory inspection showing nothing. It
wasn’t till O’Mally himself got busy in the rear room that they began to
move forward. A mark on the window sill was what started him. It was a
circular scrape about as big round as a butter plate and was made, he
said, by the heel of a man’s boot.
Then he turned his attention to the window casing, the ledge and the
outside frame. He used a small pocket searchlight, also matches,
dropping them as they burned down and examining every inch of the
surface. The first thing he lit upon was the cleat to which the awning
rope is fastened in summer. It is always screwed securely down to the
woodwork, and has to be strong and firm to hold the awnings in heavy
winds, especially at that height. The cleat outside the window was
loosened, and between its base and the wood were a few torn threads of
rope that had caught in the head of the upper screw. These threads,
carefully untangled and preserved, were from a new rope, clean and
yellow, not the gray wind and weather-worn shreds that would have been
left from the summer. Below the cleat were scratches, some long and
deep, some wide, zigzag scrapes. By the color of these he said they had
been recently made.
From there they descended to the Whitehall suite. Here O’Mally wasted
little time on the front rooms but went direct to the rear office and
began on the window. Babbitts and Stevens were ordered to search the
floors and walls, which was easy as the furniture was gone and the place
was bare except for the radiator and the washstand. I may as well put
here that their investigations produced nothing.
But O’Mally’s did. He went to work just as he had on the floor above.
This cleat was secure, but on the sill were more scratches, several long
deep ones, and on the stone ledge that same round, circular mark. But
what he found there that was the vital thing was a button. It was lodged
in a corner made by one of the small wooden rims that go up the window
casing parallel with the window. Anyone could have overlooked it, hardly
visible in this little angle where it might have been sent by the
cleaner’s duster as she flicked about the sill and the ledge. It was a
metal button of the kind used on men’s clothes to fasten their braces
to, and it bore round it in raised letters the name of a fashionable
tailor.
By the time they had done all this it was coming on for morning. They
slipped out of the building and went to an all-night restaurant near-by
to wait for daylight when O’Mally had decided to make an inspection of
the roof of the church. He and Babbitts would do this, while Stevens, as
soon as the day was far enough advanced, was commissioned to go to the
tailor whose name was on the button, and find out when and for whom he
had made any suits having that button upon them.
Meantime the day had broken into morning. With a caution to Babbitts to
stay where he was O’Mally sauntered off to see about fixing things for
getting on the roof of the church. Babbitts was left wondering whether
they were going to be plumbers or tin workers or members of the
congregation admiring the sacred edifice. But when O’Mally came back
he’d got a new one on Soapy, for he’d depicted them to the sexton as an
architect and builder from the West who were so struck by the dome they
wanted to get up on the roof and study its proportions.
Fortunately it was a black, heavy day, the kind when the lights shine
out in dark offices and people come to the windows and yank up the
shades. If anyone did notice them they’d have looked like a couple of
men searching for a leak, especially as they were busy in one spot—the
space below the two windows marked by the burnt ends of the matches
O’Mally had dropped.
And here, with the scattered matches all around it, caught in a ledge
just above the gutter, they made the greatest find of all—a scarf pin.
It was a star sapphire set in a twist of gold and platinum. An hour
after they had it in their possession it was identified by George and
Mr. Whitney as one they had seen on Johnston Barker the morning of
January fifteenth.
From the tailor came further testimony. He identified the button as made
from a new mould, the first consignment of which he had received late in
December. So far he had only used it on two suits, one for a mining man
from Nevada and the other for Johnston Barker—a dark brown cheviot with
a reddish line. This had been the suit Barker had on when he visited the
Whitney office that morning.
When he came to the end of all this I was balanced on the edge of the
sofa, with my feet braced on the floor to keep from sliding off and my
eyes glued on my loving spouse.
"Do you mean he came _down_ from one window to the other, Soapy?"
Babbitts nodded:
"Lowering himself by a rope fastened to the upper cleat which his weight
loosened."
"But—my goodness!" I was aghast at the idea. "A man of Barker’s age
dangling down along the wall that you could see for miles!"
"You couldn’t have seen him twenty feet off. The wall’s dark and it was
a black dark night. If you’d been watching with a glass you couldn’t
have made out anything at that height and at that hour."
"But the danger of it?"
"He was on a desperate job and had to take chances. Besides it’s not as
risky as it sounds. The distance he had to drop was short. The ceilings
are low in those office buildings and the awning supports have to be
unusually strong because of the summer storms. And then the man himself
was small and light and is known to have kept himself in the pink of
condition. With a strong rope thrown over the cleat he could easily have
swung himself to the story below, stood on the stone ledge which his
feet scratched, and pushed up the window which Ford had probably left
slightly raised."
"The whole thing was a plot?"
"A consummate plot—not a murder committed on the spur of the moment but
a murder carefully planned. Whitney thinks Barker had scented Harland’s
suspicions long before they broke out in the quarrel, in fact that he
had provoked it to give color to the suicide theory. When Barker went up
that afternoon the rope was under his coat. When Ford left the Azalea
Woods Estates early he knew every move he was to make from that time
till he boarded the elevator. There were only two weak spots in it, the
open window on the seventeenth floor and the length of time that Harland
was supposed to have been in the corridor—the two points upon which
Whitney based his suspicions."
I was silent a minute, turning it over in my mind, then I said slowly:
"When Barker was coming down that way—it would have taken some time
wouldn’t it?—Harland must have been in the front office."
"Yes. O’Mally’s puzzled over that point—What kept him there?"
"Looks like he might have had a date with someone," I said pondering.
"Ford, of course, but nobody can imagine what he wanted to see Ford
about. Oh, there’s a lot of broken links in the chain yet."
I looked on the floor, frowning and thoughtful:
"It’s awful strange. I’d like to know what made him come down there—what
was put up to him to lure him that way to his death."
CHAPTER IX
JACK TELLS THE STORY
With the fitting of the murder on Johnston Barker, the office of Whitney
& Whitney drew in its breath, took a cinch in its belt, and went at the
work with a quiet, deadly zest. It was the most sensational and one of
the biggest cases that had ever come their way. No one on the inside
could have failed to feel the thrill of it, the horror of the crime, and
the excitement of the subterranean chase for the criminal.
I was as keen as the rest of them, but there was one feature of the
secret investigations that I detested—the dragging in of Carol
Whitehall’s name. It couldn’t be helped. The affair had taken place in
her offices, but it was hateful to me to hear her mentioned in our
conferences, even though it was merely as an outside figure, a person as
ignorant of the true state of the case as Troop or Mrs. Hansen.
The tapped phone message and the subsequent trip to Rochester had given
me no end of a jar. Up till then I couldn’t imagine her as caring for
Barker. Everybody admitted that his private life had been beyond
reproach—entirely free from entanglements with women—but even so I
couldn’t picture the girl I’d met in New Jersey in love with him. He was
between fifty and sixty, more than twice her age. George said it was his
money, but George has lived among the fashionable rich, women who’d
marry an octogenarian for a house on Fifth Avenue and a string of
pearls. I would have staked my last dollar she wasn’t that kind—proud
and pure as Diana, only giving herself where her heart went first.
But if it had been hard to imagine her as fond of Barker the magnate,
what was it now when he was Barker the murderer? It made me sick. All I
could hope for was that we’d get him and save the unfortunate girl by
showing her what he was. And while we were doing this it was up to us to
keep her out of it, shield her and protect her in every possible way.
She was a lady, the kind of woman that every man wants to keep aloof
from anything sordid and brutal.
I was thinking this one morning, a few days after our last séance, on my
way to the office. I had been detained on work uptown and was late,
entering upon a conference of the chief, George and O’Mally. When I
heard what they’d been evolving, I didn’t show the expected enthusiasm.
Miss Whitehall was to be asked to come to Whitney & Whitney’s that
afternoon, the hope being to trap or beguile her into some information
about Barker’s whereabouts. It was the chief’s plan—a poor one, I
thought, and said so—but he was as enigmatic as usual, remarking that
whether it succeeded or not, he wanted to see her. It didn’t add to my
good humor to hear that, as I knew the girl, they’d selected me for
their messenger.
Not being able to strike straight at their subject they’d framed up a
story, one that would give them scope for questions and be a
sufficiently plausible excuse to get her there. It seemed to me absurd,
but the old man was satisfied with it. Everybody now knew that Harland
had been her silent partner. Their story was that they’d heard Barker
was also in the enterprise, she’d had a double backing, his visits to
her office gave color to the rumor, and so forth and so on. I left the
office while they were conning it over.
As I mounted the stairs to her apartment I felt a good deal of a cad. If
it had been anyone else, or any other kind of a woman—but that fine,
high-spirited creature! A group of men trying to make a fool of
her—beastly! Why had I said I’d do it—and why the devil had she got
mixed up in such an ugly business?
A servant opened the door and showed me up a hall into the parlor. She
was there sitting at a desk littered with papers, and rose with a faint
surprised smile when she saw me. As we sat down and I made my apologies
for intruding, I had a chance to observe her and was struck by the
change in her. It was less than a year since we’d last met and she
looked singularly different. Handsome of course—she’d always be that—but
another kind of woman. At first I thought it was because she was paler
and thinner—she’d been a radiant, blooming Amazon in the country—but
after a few minutes I saw it was something—how can I express it?—more of
the spirit than the body. The joyousness and gayety had gone out of her,
and the spontaneity—I noticed that especially. I could feel constraint
in her composure as if she was on her dignity.
As I explained my mission—I couldn’t say much, and felt beastly
uncomfortable while I was doing it—she listened with an expressionless,
polite attention. When I had finished she made no comment, merely saying
she would be only too happy to do anything for Mr. Whitney, then passed
on to her own affairs, mentioning the failure of the Azalea Woods
Estates and that she thought she and her mother would return to the
country. I was on the verge of offering to finance her in a new deal and
then remembered I was there as an emissary, not as a friend. It rattled
me and the rattling wasn’t helped when I met her eyes, brown and soft,
but with something scrutinizing and watchful under their velvety
darkness.
I stayed longer than I meant to—longer than I needed to. Some way or
other our talk shifted round to Azalea and Longwood, to Firehill and the
people we knew all through there. I forgot about the matter I’d come on,
and she brightened up too and there was a gleam of the girl I’d met a
year ago. But when I rose to leave the other woman was back, the
reserved, poised woman who seemed shut in a shell of conventional
politeness. She said she’d come that afternoon about five—she had work
to do that would keep her till then. In the doorway she suddenly smiled
and held out her hand. The feel of it, soft and warm, was in mine when I
got out into the street.
I went back to the office feeling meaner than a yellow dog. Thank Heaven
I’d not have to do _that_ again. They’d get all they could out of her,
and that would be the last time Whitney & Whitney would want to see her.
Later on, in a week or two maybe, I could call on her again. The ice was
broken, and anyway I didn’t see but what it was my duty. Someone ought
to help her to get on her feet again and as she’d no man in her own
family the least I could do was to offer my services.
At five the chief, George and I were waiting for her. She was a little
late and as she came in I noticed that she had more color than she’d had
in the morning. She looked splendid, in a dark fur coat and some kind of
a close-fitting hat with her black hair curling out below the edge. Her
manner was cool and tranquil, not a hint about her of surprise or
uneasiness, only that heightened color which I set down to the hurry
she’d been in getting there.
The chief was as gracious as if he’d been welcoming her as a guest in
his house—full of apologies, waving her to an armchair, suggesting she
take off her coat as the room was warm. No outsider would ever have
guessed what was going on in that astute and subtle mind. A feeling of
indignant pity rose in me—she seemed so unsuspecting. But—No; it’s
better for me to describe the scene as it occurred, to try and make you
see it as I did.
When the necessary politenesses were disposed of, the old man, very
delicately, with all his tact and finesse, started on the frame-up. He
did it admirably, finishing on a sort of confidential note. As the
attorney for the Copper Pool group, it would facilitate matters if he
knew of all Barker’s activities; any information, the slightest, would
be helpful.
She answered readily, without surprise, almost as if she might have
heard the story before.
"You’ve been misinformed, Mr. Whitney. Mr. Barker had no interest in the
Azalea Woods Estates. He had nothing to do with it."
The old man pursed out his lips and raised his brows:
"I see, one of those groundless rumors that gather about a sensational
event. It probably started from the fact, mentioned in the papers, that
Barker was in your office that afternoon."
"Probably. He came to see me about a house he was going to build in the
tract. Of course that’s all ended in nothing now."
He looked at her from under his bushy brows, a kind, fatherly glance:
"I was very sorry to hear, Miss Whitehall, that you were one of the
sufferers in this double disaster we are trying to settle."
"Oh, I!" she gave a slight shrug of her shoulders. "I’m wiped out."
"Tch!" he shook his head frowning and resentful. "These men can knife
each other—pirates in a buccaneer warfare—but when it comes to dragging
down women I’d like to see them all strung up."
Her eyes gave a flash. It was like a spark struck from a flint, there
and then gone. As if it had surprised her, and she was determined to
guard against its return, the calm of her face intensified into an
almost mask-like quiet. She answered softly:
"I can’t go so far as that, Mr. Whitney. I’m sure there’s some
explanation—as to Mr. Barker, I mean."
"I hope so," said the chief, "for your sake if for no other. I hope
he’ll come back and make the restitution he owes his associates and
discharge that obligation about the house and lot."
He looked at her smiling, a rallying smile that said as plain as words,
he knew such hopes to be groundless. She did not smile back, simply
raised her eyebrows and gave a slight nod. George, who was facing her,
leaned forward and said as if he had just met her at a pink tea and was
being gallantly sympathetic:
"It was rather hard on you, Miss Whitehall, having those two men in your
place that day. The press must have made your life a burden."
"It wasn’t so bad. Some reporters called me up but when they found how
little I knew they left me alone. I hadn’t anything exciting to say.
Both interviews were nothing but business."
"But let me ask you a question—not for publication this time, just as a
thing I’m curious about. It was only a few hours after you saw him that
Harland killed himself. Wasn’t there anything unusual in his manner,
anything to suggest that he was not himself?"
She looked down at the purse she was holding in her lap, and said
slowly, clasping and unclasping the catch:
"I didn’t notice anything—unless perhaps he was a little irritable and
nervous. I certainly never would have thought he was in the state of a
man contemplating suicide."
"And you would have known," said the chief. He turned to George in
explanation. "As Harland’s partner, Miss Whitehall would have known him
well enough to notice any marked change in him."
I was watching her closely and as the glances of the two men met I saw
uneasiness well up through the quietude of her face. Then for the first
time I suspected that she was not as composed as she seemed. Her words
confirmed the suspicion, they came quickly in hurried denial:
"No—I didn’t know him well. I saw him very seldom. We were not in the
least—what—what you’d call friends or even close acquaintances. It was
all purely business."
The chief nodded, a slight, Mandarin-like teetering of his head, which
gave the impression of a polite agreement in a matter that didn’t
interest him.
"Purely business," he murmured, then again turned to George. "What Miss
Whitehall says would bear out the general idea that it was that last
interview which drove Harland to desperation."
As they spoke she looked from one to the other, a glance that passed
over both faces as quick as a lightning flash. Before they could turn,
it was gone and her eyes had a dense, dead look as if she had dropped
some inner veil over them. Then I _knew_ that the brain behind that
smooth white forehead was something more than alert, it was on its
guard, wary and watchful.
The knowledge made me suddenly speak. I wanted to see, I had to see, if
that careful control would hold under a direct question about her lover.
"How about Barker? How did _he_ act when you saw him that afternoon?"
She shifted slightly to see me better.
"Oh, perfectly naturally. There was nothing in the least unusual about
him."
"Barker was a man of iron," said the chief. "His mental disturbances
didn’t show on the outside. Besides," he gave a wave of his hand toward
her—"this young lady knew him only slightly." He turned quickly to her,
"I’m right, am I not?"
"Perfectly," she fixed her eyes on him and kept them there, black and
unfathomable. "My acquaintance with him was simply that of an agent with
a customer."
For a moment I couldn’t look at her; I got up and going to the window
fumbled with the blind. The man she’d tried to run away with—and telling
her lie with that smooth steadiness! It was only love could give such
nerve. Behind me I heard the old man’s voice:
"A horrible affair. It was fortunate for you you escaped the sight of
it."
"Ah—" it was a sound of shuddering protest—"_that_ would have been too
much. I knew nothing of it till I saw the papers the next morning. It
made me ill—I was at home for several days."
"Well," said he, "I’m in hopes we’re going to straighten things out
before long."
I turned from the window and moved back, wondering what he was going to
say. She was looking again at her purse, snapping and unsnapping the
clasp.
"How can you do that?" she asked.
"Haven’t you read in the papers that Barker’s been seen in
Philadelphia?"
"Ah yes," she murmured, her glance still on the purse. "But nobody’s
found him yet."
"Give us time—give us time. These vanishing gentlemen like a change of
air. They don’t stay long under our hospitable flag. Their goal is
Canada."
For a moment she had no reply. You could see it, you could see the
effort with which she held her statue-calm pose, but a deep breath
lifted her breast and the edge of her teeth showed on her underlip.
"Canada," said the old man with a comfortable roll in his big chair, "is
our modern American equivalent of the medieval sanctuary."
She’d got her nerve back—I never saw such grit. She gave him a smile,
not jolly like his, but defiant.
"Of course," she said, "a sort of Cave of Adullum." Then she rose and
looking at him from under her eyelids added, "But if a man’s clever
enough to get to the Cave of Adullum I should think he’d be too clever
to stay there."
She turned and took her coat from the chair back. George made a jump to
help her and the old man heaved himself up, breaking out with renewed
apologies for the trouble he’d given her. They were like people
separating after a social function, he bland and courteous, she gracious
and deprecating.
"If I could be of any service to you I’d be only too glad. But"—she gave
that little shrug of her shoulders—"I’m so unimportant. A poor working
woman whose orbit happened by chance to cross those of two great
luminaries."
"There’s nothing for anybody to do but us," said George, standing behind
her and holding out her coat. "And we’ll do it. You’ll see some morning
in the paper that we’ve got our hands on Barker—the high-class sneak."
He and his father worked so well together that he told me afterward he
knew the old man would be watching her. He was and so was I, and at
those words I saw the rich color spread to her forehead and again that
flash, like a leap of flame, shine in her eyes. She knew it too and
dropped her lids over it, but the color she couldn’t control and it
glowed in crimson on her cheeks as she answered with a sort of soft
tolerance:
"Oh, Mr. Whitney, hunting criminals has made you unjust." Then as the
coat slipped on she flashed a look at him over her shoulder, "But I
don’t think it’s real! The profession requires a pose."
George was quite bowled over. He had no answer and she knew it, turning
from him with a smile and moving toward the door. Halfway there the old
man stopped her.
"Oh, by the way—one thing more that nearly slipped my memory. You no
doubt saw in the papers that Harland is supposed to have spent the
half-hour before he jumped, in the corridor of your floor. Did you see
him there—as you left, I mean?"
"I?" she raised her eyebrows in artless, surprised query. "No, I’d gone
before he came down. I left about six, or maybe a little before."
"Um!" he nodded. "You were probably in the elevator."
"Yes, probably—" her purse dropped from her hand to the floor. We all
started forward to pick it up but she was too quick for us and had it
before any of us could reach it. As she righted herself from the sudden
stoop her face was deeply flushed. "Yes, of course, I must have been in
the elevator," she finished with a slight gasp as if the quick movement
had impeded her breathing.
"I see, of course," agreed the chief moving beside her to the door. "It
merely interested me as a student of morbid psychology. I’d like to have
known how a man of Harland’s type looked, moved, comported himself,
while such a struggle went on in his mind."
At the door there were general good-byes, a very cordial parting all
round. I slipped out behind her to escort her through the hall to the
elevator. As we brushed along side by side she said nothing and
glimpsing down at her face, I saw it set in a still
pondering—sphinx-like it seemed to me.
Waiting for the car I said a few civil commonplaces to which she made
short conventional answers. Biting her lip, her eyes on the ground, she
looked preoccupied, impatient, I thought, for the car to come. I wanted
to ask her if I could see her again, but I didn’t dare, she seemed so
indifferent, so shut away in her own brooding. But when she entered the
elevator and the gate shut, I saw her through the grill-work, looking at
me from behind that iron barrier, and the sight stirred me like a hand
clasped on my heart.
It wasn’t only the expression of her face, which was sad, almost tragic,
but it was a strange and eerie suggestion that it was like a face
looking through the bars of a prison. The thought haunted me as I walked
back.
In the office George and the chief were talking over the interview.
They’d noted every tone of her voice, every change of her color. That
she’d lied had not surprised them. She had had to lie.
"Must love the old rascal to death," George commented.
The chief rose lumberingly and moved to his cigar box on the
mantelpiece.
"I understand now why Barker—who never was known to care for a
woman—finally fell. She’s a splendid creature—brains and beauty."
"Both to burn," George agreed. "You couldn’t get much out of her."
"All I wanted just now," said his father, striking a match, "the rest’ll
come in time."
I was just going to ask him what more he expected, when a clerk opened
the door and said:
"Mrs. Babbitts is outside to see Mr. Whitney."
The chief squared round like a flash, the lit match dropping to the
hearth. His face, usually heavy and stolid, lit into an almost avid
eagerness.
"Show her in," he ordered and the clerk disappeared.
"What are you expecting to get from Molly?" George asked. "Isn’t she
finished?"
"Not quite." The old man’s eyes were on the door, his cigar unlit in his
hand. I hadn’t often seen him so openly on the qui vive. "Molly’s had
further orders."
"What?"
"You’ll see," was the answer.
Molly entered with the cold of the night still around her. Her long coat
was buttoned wrong, her hat on one side. Haste was written all over her,
haste and that bright-eyed, jubilant exhilaration that took possession
of her when things were moving her way. She was like a little game dog
on the scent, and I’d often heard the old man say she’d make the best
woman detective he’d ever known. He was awfully fond of her, and took a
sort of paternal pride in her nerve and cleverness, just as he did in
George’s.
"Well, Molly," he said—"got that stuff for me?"
She nodded, her little body seeming to radiate a quivering energy:
"Today at the lunch hour. I came the minute I got off."
"Go ahead. I said not to tell anybody till you told me first. Well,
you’re going to tell me first now."
Standing by the table, her eyes bright on the old man, she said slowly
and clearly:
"Troop says he never took Miss Whitehall down from her offices on the
night of January the fifteenth."
George gave a smothered ejaculation and started forward. I was
transfixed—not believing my ears. Only the chief looked unmoved, leaning
against the mantelpiece, holding Molly’s glance with his.
"Go on," he growled.
"He says that he was there later than usual, until eight, because of the
accident and the other car being broken. Before that he took down the
two Azalea Woods Estates clerks, Iola Barry and Tony Ford, but not Miss
Whitehall. After the accident he ran out into the street, and when he
came back the people were on every landing ringing the bells and wild
because the elevator didn’t come. He went up and took them off, but Miss
Whitehall wasn’t among them. He said that he’d heard some of them got
tired of waiting and went by the stairs."
"He thought Miss Whitehall went that way?"
"Yes, it was the only way she could have gone. He supposed she’d got
impatient or hysterical and just rushed pell-mell down."
"Did Troop or anyone else see her in the lower hall or leaving the
building?"
"No, I questioned him careful about that. He thought she’d seen the
excitement on Broadway and run down and maybe met someone who’d told her
what had happened. And not wanting to get in it she’d gone out the side
door. Anyway he said she wasn’t in the ground floor hall, or out in the
street with the others or he’d have seen her."
There was a pause. In that pause—like figures in a picture—I saw George,
amazed, petrified, staring at his father, Molly looking from one to the
other, and the chief with his brows low down and his head drooped,
gazing at the fire. In a moment they would burst into speech—the speech
that was withheld while that astounding revelation found acceptance in
their minds.
To hear what they said—to listen to what I couldn’t believe and yet
couldn’t contradict—was more than I could stand just then. Without a
word, unnoticed by any of them, I slipped out, fled down the hall, into
the elevator and out to the street.
It was cold, a sharp, frosty night, with a few stars shining in the
deep-blue sky. Dark masses of men flowed out of the doors of skyscrapers
and drained away down the subway entrances. I jostled through them,
elbowing them right and left, instinctively turning my face uptown, deaf
to the curses that followed me, blind to the lights that stretched in a
spangled vista in front.
What did it mean? What _could_ it mean? I’d understood the lie about
Barker but now those other lies! She had said she went down about six,
in the elevator. I’d heard her, there was no getting away from it. Was
_that_ the reason the old man had wanted to see her? Suddenly I saw
again his look of hungry expectation when Molly was announced, and with
a stifled sound, I stopped short. As lightning plays upon a dark
landscape, for a moment showing it plain, I had a clear glimpse of the
line of thought he’d been pursuing. The horror of it held me rooted
there, rigid as a dead man, in the midst of the hurrying crowd.
Incredible—hideous—unbelievable! Association with criminals had warped
and diseased his judgment. And then like a sinister shadow, creeping on
me dark and ominous, rose the memory of her guarded face, the flame of
color she couldn’t hide, the dropped purse. I started out again,
fighting the shadow, but all I had to fight with was my belief in her.
She couldn’t—it was impossible, I’d die swearing it. And battering
against that belief, came questions, insistent, maddening. Why couldn’t
she speak out? Why didn’t she admit the truth—say that Barker was her
lover and have done with it? Why had she lied—about him, about the time
she left, about everything she could have frankly admitted, if—if—— When
I got there I could go no farther. Cursing under my breath I forged
along, the air ice-cold on the sweat that was damp on my forehead.
CHAPTER X
MOLLY TELLS THE STORY
Friday night I brought the information from Troop in to Mr. Whitney, and
knew then for the first time why he wanted it.
Gee, it was an awful thought!
As I sat there between him and Mr. George—Jack Reddy went away, I don’t
know why—with neither of them saying a word, I saw, like it was a
vision, the Harland case spreading out black and dreadful. It made me
think of ink spilled on a map, running slow but sure over places that
were bright and clean, trickling away in directions no one ever thought
it would take.
I left soon after Jack, as I could see they wanted to get rid of me.
Before I went the old man said to try and get a line on the Whitehalls’
servant—I might work it through Iola—and find out what time Miss
Whitehall came home the night of January fifteenth. If I couldn’t manage
it I was to let him know and it could be passed on to O’Mally, but he
thought I had the best chances. That, as far as he knew now, was the
last he’d need of me. My work at the Black Eagle was done. The next day
would be my last one there. Say nothing to anyone about it—simply drop
out. The reappearance of Miss McCalmont was his affair.
In the next twenty-four hours things came swift, as they do in these
cases. You’ll have a long spell with the wires dead, then suddenly
they’ll begin to hum. And you’ve got to be ready when it happens—jump
quick as lightning. I learned that in the Hesketh case.
The first chance came that night, was sitting in the parlor when I
reached home—Iola! She had the hope of a new job—a good one—and wanted a
recommendation letter from Miss Whitehall, and naturally, being Iola,
couldn’t go unless I came along and held the sponge.
It was so pat you’d think fate had fixed it, and it worked out as pat as
it began. While Iola was in the parlor getting her letter I stayed in
the kitchen—very meek and humble—and when the servant came back—Delia
was her name—started in to help her with the dishes. We grew neighborly
over the work, she washing and I wiping, and what was more natural than
that we’d work around to the affairs of the ladies. They’d lost all
their money and Delia was going to leave. How did that happen now? Sure,
it’s the feller that killed himself done it—didn’t I know? I only had to
let her talk, she was the flannel-mouth Irish kind. Here are the facts
as they went in to Whitney & Whitney the next day.
Miss Whitehall was generally very punctual, always getting home about
half-past six. On the night of January fifteenth she didn’t get back
till a quarter to eight. Such a delay was evidently not expected as Mrs.
Whitehall became extremely nervous, couldn’t keep still or settle to
anything. At a quarter to eight, hearing the key inserted in the door,
Delia had gone into the hall, and seen Miss Whitehall enter. She was
very pale and agitated. Delia had never seen her look so upset. She
walked up the passage, met her mother and without a word they went into
a bedroom and shut the door.
At dinner she ate nothing and hardly spoke at all—looked and acted as if
she was sick. The next morning when she read of the Harland suicide in
the paper she nearly fainted, and after that was in bed for three days,
prostrated by the shock, she told Delia.
I guessed this would be my last piece of work on the Harland case and I
wasn’t sorry. There was an awfulness coming over it that was too much
for me. But it wasn’t, not by a long shot. I was in deeper than I knew,
so deep—but that comes later. I’ll go on now to tell what happened that
last night I was in the Black Eagle Building.
It was coming on for closing time and I was making ready to go. I’d
cleared up all my little belongings, and was standing by the switchboard
pressing the tray cloth careful into my satchel, when I heard a step
stop at the door and a cheerful voice sing out:
"Just in the nick of time. Spreading her wings ready for flight."
There in the doorway, filling it up with his big shape, was Tony Ford.
For the first moment I got a sort of setback. Mightn’t anyone—thinking
of home and husband and finding yourself face to face with a gunman?
With one hand still in the satchel I stood eyeing him, not a word out of
me, solemn as a tombstone. It didn’t phaze him a bit. Teetering from his
heels to his toes, a grin on him like the slit in a post box, he stood
there as calm as if he’d never come nearer murder than to spell it in
the fourth grade.
"It just came to me a few moments ago—as I was passing by here—that the
prettiest and smartest hello girl in New York mightn’t have gone home
yet," he said.
Now if you’re experienced about men—and take it from me hello girls
_are_—you never believe a word a chap like Tony Ford hands out. But
hearing those words and looking at his broad, conceited face, it came to
me that these were true. He’d been passing, suddenly thought of me, and
dropped in to see if I was there.
"Well," I answered, "here I am. What of it?"
"First of it," he said, "is how long are you going to be there?"
"Till I get this satchel closed," I said and pressing hard on the catch
it snapped shut.
"And second of it," he went on, "is where are you going afterward?"
My first thought was I was going to get away from _him_ as fast as the
Interborough System could take me—and then I had a second thought. Why
had Tony Ford dropped in so opportune at my closing hour? To ask me to
dinner. And why couldn’t I, hired to do work for Whitney & Whitney, do a
little extra for good measure? I knew they wanted to hear Ford’s own
account of what he did the evening of January fifteenth, but that they
couldn’t get it. What was the matter with me, Molly Babbitts, getting it
for them?
It flashed into my head like lightning and it didn’t flash out again.
Frightened? Not a bit! Keyed up though—like your blood begins to run
quick. I’d taken some risky dares in my time but it was a new one on me
to dine with a murderer. But honest, besides the pleasure of doing
something for the old man, there was a creepy sort of thrill about it
that strung up my nerves and made me feel like I was going to shoot
Niagara in a barrel.
"Going home, eh?" said he. "It’s a long, cold ride home."
"That’s the first truth you’ve said," I answered. "And for showing me
you can do it I’ll offer you my grateful thanks."
I began to put on my gloves, he standing in the doorway watching.
"To break the journey with a little bit of dinner might be a good idea."
"It might," I said, "if anybody had it."
"I have it. I’ve had it all day."
"What’s the good of having it if you haven’t got the price." I picked up
my satchel and looked cool and pitying at him. "Unless you’re
calculating to take me to the bread line."
"There you wrong me," he answered. "Nothing but the best for you," and
putting his hand into his vest pocket he drew out a roll of bills,
folding them back one by one and giving each a name, "Canvas back,
terrapin, champagne, oyster crabs, alligator pears, anything the lady
calls for."
Those greenbacks, flirted over so carelessly by his strong, brown
fingers, gave me the horrors. Blood money! I drew back. If he hadn’t
been blocking up the entrance, I think I’d have quit it and made a break
for the open. He glanced up and saw my face, and I guess it looked
queer.
"What are you staring so for? They’re not counterfeit."
The feeling passed, and anyway I couldn’t get out without squeezing by
him and I didn’t want to touch him any more than I would a spider.
"I was calculating how much of it I could eat," I said. "My folks don’t
like me to dine out so when I do I try to catch up with all the times
I’ve refused."
"Come along then," he said, stepping back from the doorway. "I know a
bully little joint not far from here. You can catch up there if you’ve
been refusing dinners since the first telephone was installed."
So off we trotted into the night, I and the murderer!
Can you see into my mind—it was boiling with thoughts like a Hammam bath
with steam? What would Soapy say? He’d be raging, but after all he
couldn’t do anything more than rage. You can’t divorce a woman for
dining with a murderer, especially if she only does it once. Mr.
Whitney’d be all right. If I got what I intended to get he’d pass me
compliments that would take O’Mally’s pride down several pegs. As for
myself—Tony Ford wouldn’t want to murder me. There was nothing in it,
and judging by the pleasant things he said as we walked to the
restaurant, you’d think to keep me alive and well was the dearest wish
of his heart.
The restaurant was one of those quiet foreign ones, in an old dwelling
house, sandwiched in among shops and offices. It was a decent place—I’d
been there for lunch with Iola—in the daytime full of business people,
and at night having the sort of crowd that gathers where boarding houses
and downtown apartments and hotels for foreigners give up their dead.
We found a table in a corner of the front room, with the wall to one
side of us and the long curtains of the window behind me. There were a
lot of people and a few waiters, one of whom Mr. Ford summoned with a
haughty jerk of his head. Then he sprawled grandly in his chair with
menus and wine lists, telling the waiter how to serve things that were
hot and ice things that were cold till you’d suppose he’d been a chef
along with all his other jobs. He put on a great deal of side, like he
was a cattle king from Chicago trying to impress a Pilgrim Father from
Boston. The only way it impressed me was to make me think a gunman with
blood on his soul wasn’t so different from an innocent clerk with
nothing to trouble him but the bill at the end.
As he was doing this I took off my veil and gloves, careful to pull off
my wedding ring—I wasn’t going to have that sidetracking him—and
thinking how I’d begin.
We were through the soup and on the fish when I decided the time was
ripe to ring the bell and start. I did it quietly:
"I guess you’ve got a new place?"
"No, I’m still one of the unemployed. Don’t I act like it?" He smiled, a
patronizing smirk, pleased he’d got the hello girl guessing.
"You act to me like the young millionaire cutting his teeth on
Broadway."
He lifted his glass of white wine and sipped it:
"I inherited some money this winter from an uncle up-state. You’re not
drinking your wine. Don’t you like it?"
In his tone, and a shifting of his eyes to the next table, I caught a
suggestion of something not easy, put on. Maybe if you hadn’t known what
I did you wouldn’t have noticed what was plain to me—he didn’t like the
subject.
"No, I never touch wine," I answered. "I don’t want to speak unfeelingly
but it was mighty convenient your uncle died just as your business
failed. Wasn’t it too bad about Miss Whitehall?"
"Very unfortunate, poor girl. Bad for me but worse for her."
"She had no idea it was coming, I suppose?"
He looked up sudden and sharp:
"_What_ was coming?"
His small gray eyes sent a glance piercing into mine, full of a quick,
arrested attention.
"Why—why—the ruin of Mr. Harland."
"Oh, _that_," he was easy again, "I thought you meant the suicide. I
don’t know whether she knew or not. Waiter"—he turned and made one of
those grandstand plays to the waiter—"take this away and bring on the
next."
"She’d have known that night as soon as she heard he was dead but I
guess she was so paralyzed she didn’t think of herself."
"I don’t know what she thought of. She wasn’t in the office."
I dropped my eyes to my plate. Eliza crossing on the ice didn’t have
anything over me in the way she picked her steps.
"Oh, she’d gone before it happened?"
"Yes. I left early myself that night—before she did. I was halfway home
when I remembered some papers I’d said I’d go over and had to hike back
for them. She was gone when I got there. And just think how gruesome it
was, when I was going down in the elevator Harland jumped, struck the
street a few minutes before I reached the bottom."
Could you beat it! Knowing what had been done in that closed office,
knowing what was going to be done while he was sliding down from story
to story and then getting it off that way, as smooth as cream. A sick
feeling rose up inside me. I wanted to get away from him and see an
honest face and feel the cold, fresh air. Dining with a gunman wasn’t as
easy as I’d thought.
Tony Ford, leaning across his plate, tapped on the cloth with his knife
handle to emphasize his words:
"He must have been up that side corridor waiting. When he heard the gate
shut and the car go down, he came out, walked to the hall window and
jumped. Ugh!" he gave a wriggling movement with his broad shoulders.
"_That_ takes nerve!"
I suppose sometimes in crowds you pass murderers, but you don’t know
them for what they are. Probably never again if I lived to be a hundred,
would I sit this way, not only conversing with one, but conversing about
his crime. It wasn’t what you’d look back on afterward as one of the
happy memories of your life, but it was a red-letter experience. I had a
vision of telling my grandchildren how once, when I was young, I talked
with one of the blackest criminals of his day on the subject of the deed
he’d helped commit.
"It’s a fortunate thing he left no family." It was something to say, and
I had to keep him moving along the same line. "You’d suppose he’d have
married again, being wealthy and handsome."
Mr. Ford, who was lighting a cigarette, smiled to himself and said: "So
you would."
"And I guess he could have had his pick. Maybe he cared for someone who
didn’t reciprocate."
He threw away the match and lolled back in his chair.
"Maybe," he said with a meaning secret air.
It wouldn’t have taken a girl just landed at Ellis Island to see that he
wanted to be questioned. It was out on him like a rash. So not to
disappoint him and also being curious I asked:
"_Was_ he in love with someone?"
He said nothing but blew a smoke ring into the air, staring at it as it
floated away. I waited while he blew another ring, the look on his face
as conscious as an actor’s when he has the middle of the stage. Then he
spoke in a weighty tone:
"Harland was in love—madly in love."
This was news to me. I hadn’t looked for it and I didn’t know where it
might lead. I didn’t have to hide my interest; he expected it, was
gratified when he saw me open-mouthed. But he had to do a little more
acting, and tapping on his wine glass with his forefinger said languid
to the waiter:
"Fill it up—the lady won’t take any." Then, his eyes following the smoke
rings—"Nobody had an idea of it—nobody but me. I knew Harland better
than many who considered themselves his friends."
"_You_ knew him," it came out of me before I thought, or I’d never have
put the accent on the "you" that way.
"I knew him well. He’d—er—taken rather a fancy to me."
I couldn’t say anything—the man he’d killed! Fortunately he didn’t
notice me. The wine he’d taken was beginning to make him less sharp. Not
that he was under the influence, but he was not so clear-headed and his
natural vanity was coming up plainer every minute. He went on:
"I met him quite casually in the Black Eagle Building and then—well,
something about me attracted him. Anyway we grew friendly—and—er—that’s
how I stumbled on his secret."
"His love?"
He inclined his head majestically:
"You can see how it was possible when I tell you the lady was Miss
Whitehall."
Believe _me_ I got a thrill! There was a second when I had to bite on my
under lip to keep an exclamation from bursting out. _This_ was
something, something that no one had had a suspicion of, something that
might lead—I couldn’t follow it then—that time, what I had to do was to
find out everything he knew.
"Are you sure?" I breathed out incredulous.
"Perfectly. He was daffy about her."
"You just guessed it?"
He suddenly wheeled in his chair and looked at me, with that same
piercing, almost fierce look I’d seen before. The wine he’d been
drinking showed red in his face, and in his manner there was a roughness
that was new.
"Of course I guessed it. A man like Harland doesn’t go round _telling_
you he’s in love. But I’m a pretty sharp chap. Many things don’t escape
me. He didn’t have to tell me. I was on the spot and I _saw_."
Why didn’t Iola see? She was on the spot too and when it came to romance
no man that breathes has anything on Iola. I ventured as carefully as if
I was walking on the subway tracks, and didn’t know which was the third
rail.
"He tried to keep it a secret?"
"Oh, he tried and I guess he did except from little Tony."
"What did she feel—Miss Whitehall—about him?"
"Not the way he did."
"Perhaps there was someone else?"
A meaning look came over his face and he said softly:
"Perhaps there was."
"Who?"
I don’t know whether it was an interest that stole into my voice without
my knowledge or some instinct that warned him, but suddenly he pulled
himself up. The lounging swagger dropped from him, and he gave me a look
from under his eyebrows, sullen and questioning. Then like a big animal,
restless and uneasy, he glanced over the littered-up table, pushing his
napkin in among the glasses and muttering something about the wine. I
didn’t want him to know I was watching and hunted in my lap for my
gloves. But to say I was keen isn’t the word, for I could see into him
as if his chest was plate glass and what I saw was that he was scared
he’d said too much.
"How should I know?" he suddenly exclaimed, as if there’d been no pause.
"I don’t know anything about Miss Whitehall. Just happening to be round
in the office I caught on to Harland’s infatuation. Anyone would. She
may have a dozen strings to her bow for all I know or care." He gave me
an investigating look—how was I taking it?—and I smiled innocently back.
That reassured him and he twisted round in his chair, snapping his
fingers at the waiter, "Here, lively—my bill. Don’t keep us waiting all
night."
The waiter who’d been hovering round watching us eating through those
layers of food darted off like a dog freed from the leash. Mr. Ford
subsided back into his chair. He was more at ease, but not all right yet
as his words proved.
"Don’t you go quoting me, now, as having said anything about Harland and
Miss Whitehall. He’s in his grave, poor chap, and I don’t like to figure
as having talked over his private affairs. Doesn’t look well, you know."
"Sure," I said comfortably. "I’m on."
My gloves were buttoned and my veil down. Mr. Ford, leaning his elbows
on the table, was looking at me with what he thought was a romantic
gaze, long and deep. In my opinion he looked like a fool—men mostly do
when they’re trying to be sentimental on a heavy meal. But I wasn’t
worrying about that. What was engaging me was how I could shake him
without telling him who I was or where I lived. In the first excitement
of corralling him I’d never thought of it. Now the result of my rash act
was upon me. If you ever dine with a murderer, take my advice—when you
start in lay your pipes for getting out.
As we waited for that bill I was as uncomfortable as if I had to pay it.
Suppose I couldn’t escape and he followed me home? Babbitts would be
like the mad elephant in the Zoo, and from what I knew of Tony Ford he
might draw a pistol and make me a widow.
"Have you enjoyed your dinner, little one?" said he, soft and slushy.
"Fine!" I answered, pulling my coat off the chair back.
"We’ve got to be good friends, haven’t we?"
"Pals," I said.
"Don’t you think we know each other well enough for you to tell me your
name?"
"They say there’s a great charm about the unknown," I answered. "And I
want to be as charming as it’s possible with the restrictions nature’s
put upon me."
"You don’t need any extra trimmings," said he. "You might as well tell
me, for I can always find out at the Black Eagle Building."
Could he? I was Miss Morgenthau there, and today was positively my last
appearance. If I could get away from him now I was safe from his ever
finding me.
The waiter brought the bill with murmurings that it was to be paid at
the desk. We rose, Mr. Ford feeling in his pocket, the waiter trying to
look listless, as if money was no treat to him. I moved across the room
and reconnoitered. The desk, with a fat gray-haired woman sitting behind
it, was close by the door that led into the hall. Several people were
out there putting on coats and hats and jabbering together in a foreign
lingo. I sauntered carelessly through the doorway, seeing, out of the
tail of my eye, Mr. Ford put down a twenty-dollar bill on the counter.
The gray-haired woman began to pull out little drawers and make change.
One of the people in the hall opened the front door and they began
filing out. I went with them, slow on their heels at first, then fast,
dodging between them, then like a streak down the steps to the sidewalk
and up the street.
It was an awful place to hide in—all lights and show windows; a fish
might as well try to conceal itself in a parlor aquarium. There wasn’t a
niche that you could have squeezed a cat into and I _had_ to get
somewhere. Suddenly I saw a narrow flight of stairs with a large set of
teeth hanging over them and up that I went, stumbling on my skirt till I
reached a landing and flattened back against the dentist’s door. It was
locked or I would have gone in, so scared I was of that man—gone in, and
if the price of concealment had been a set of false teeth I make no
doubt I’d have ordered them.
[Illustration: _It was locked or I would have gone in._]
After a while I ventured down, took a look out and stole away, dodging
along dark side streets and round corners with my muff up against my
face, till I struck a cab stand. Not a word came out of me till I was
safe inside a taxi, and then I almost whispered my address to the
chauffeur.
As we sped along I quieted down and began to think—going over what he’d
said, connecting things up. And as I thought, bouncing round in that
empty vehicle like one small pea in a pod that was too big, I saw it
plainer and plainer, as if one veil after another was being lifted.
Harland was in love with her—she’d not gone down in the elevator—she’d
stayed there! she’d been there! She’d—
We went over a chuck hole and I bounced up nearly to the roof, but the
smothered cry that came from me wasn’t because of that. It was because I
_saw_—the whole thing was as clear as daylight. _She’d_ been the lure
that brought him to the Azalea Woods Estates, _she’d_ been the person
that kept him in the front office while Barker came down from the story
above!
CHAPTER XI
JACK TELLS THE STORY
The account of Molly’s dinner with Tony Ford was given Sunday morning by
Molly herself to George and the chief in the Whitney home. I went there
in the afternoon—dread of possible developments drew me like a
magnet—and heard the news. It was more ominous than even I, steeled and
primed for ill tidings, had expected. I didn’t say much. There was no
use in showing my disbelief; besides if they suspected its strength
there was a possibility of their confidence being withheld from me. I
had to hear everything, be familiar with every strand in the net they
were weaving round the woman of whose guilt they were now certain.
George was going to call somewhere on Fifth Avenue, and I walked up with
him, for the pleasure of his company he supposed, in reality to hear in
detail how he and the chief had pieced into logical sequence the broken
bits of information.
"Roughly speaking," he said, "it’s this way: Barker was the brains of
the combination, Ford and Miss Whitehall the instruments he used. Ford
did the killing and was paid. Miss Whitehall’s part, which was puzzling
before, is now clear. She takes her place as The Woman in the Case, the
spider that decoyed the fly into the web."
He paused for me to answer, but I could say nothing.
"It was one of the most ingenious plots I’ve ever come up against. A
master mind conceived it and must have been days perfecting it. Think of
the skill with which every detail was developed, and those two
alibis—Ford’s and Barker’s. How carefully they were carried out. That
afternoon visit of Harland to Miss Whitehall was planned. Barker
followed it and heard that all was ready—the trap set and the quarry
coming. Then he went up to the floor above establishing his presence
there, and knowing, when Harland left, that the girl was waiting below
to meet and hold him in the front room.
"Then comes Tony Ford, finds Harland and Miss Whitehall, apologizes and
goes through to the private office where Barker is lying low. That the
murder was committed there is proved by the two blood spots. Ford
established his alibi by leaving; Barker’s is already established—he is
in the room above unable to get out without being seen. Even if a crime
_had_ been discovered, they were both as safe from suspicion as if
they’d been in their own homes.
"Miss Whitehall and Barker stay in the Azalea Woods Estates office till
the excitement in the street subsides. They’re perfectly safe there; the
police, when they come, are going to go to the floor above. When the
crowd disperses they leave by the service stairs, she first, Barker a
short while afterward. The building and the street are deserted, but
even if he _is_ seen, nobody knows enough at that time to question his
movements. After that it all goes without a hitch, even the arrest of
the chauffeur was all to the good, as it delayed the search for two
days.
"When it’s known that he has voluntarily disappeared, what’s the
explanation? He’s welched on his associates and found it best to take to
the tall timber. At this moment he’s probably congratulating himself on
his success. There’s just one thing that, so far, he hasn’t been able to
accomplish—get his girl."
I walked along, not answering. It was pretty sickening to hear how
straight they had it. But there was one weak spot; at least I thought it
was weak.
"Just why do you think a girl like Miss Whitehall—a woman without a spot
or stain on her—would lend herself to an affair like that?"
"Perfectly simple," he answered. "She expects to marry Barker. Whether
she loves him or his money, her actions prove that she is ready to join
him whenever he sends for her—ready to do what he tells her. He’s a
tremendous personality, stronger than she, and he’s bent her to his
will."
"Oh, rot!" I said. "You can’t bend a perfectly straight woman to help in
such a crime unless she’s bent that way by nature, and _she_ isn’t."
He grinned in a complacent, maddening way.
"I guess Barker could. He’s as subtle as the serpent in Eden. Besides,
how can you be so sure what kind of a girl she is? Who knows anything of
these Whitehalls? They came from the West two years ago and settled on a
farm—quiet, ladylike women—but not a soul has any real information about
them or their antecedents. And _they_ haven’t given out much. They’ve
been curiously secretive all along the line. I’m not saying the girl’s a
natural born criminal—she doesn’t look the part—but you’ll have to admit
her speech and her actions are not those of a simple-minded rustic
beauty. In my opinion she’s fallen under Barker’s spell, and he’s molded
her to his purpose. _He’s_ the one, _he’s_ the brain. She and Ford were
only the two hands."
We’d reached the place he was bound for, and I was glad to break away. I
wanted to think, and the more I thought the more wild and fantastic and
incredible it seemed. A week ago a girl like any other girl, and today
suspected of complicity in a primitively savage crime. I thought of the
case they were building up against her and I thought of her in her room
that morning, and it seemed the maddest nightmare. Then her face that
day in the Whitney office rose on my memory, the stealthily watching
eyes with their leaping fires, the equivocations, the lies! I walked for
the rest of the afternoon, miles, somewhere out in the country. My brain
was dried like a sponge in the sun as I came home—I couldn’t get
anywhere, couldn’t get beyond that fundamental conviction that it wasn’t
true. I think if she’d confessed it with her own lips I’d have gone on
persisting she was innocent.
Two days after that a chain of events began that put an end to all
inaction and plunged the Harland case deeper than ever into sinister
mystery. I will write them down in the order in which they occurred.
The first was on Tuesday—the Tuesday night following Molly’s dinner with
Tony Ford. That night an unknown man attacked Ford in his room, leaving
him for dead.
For some years Ford had lived in a lodging house on the East Side near
Stuyvesant Park. The place was decent and quiet, run by a widow and her
daughter, the inmates of a shabby-genteel class—rather an odd place for
a man of Ford’s proclivities to house himself. It was one of those
old-fashioned, brown-stone fronts, set back from the street behind a
little square of garden, a short flagged path leading to the front door.
On the evening of the attack Ford had come in about half-past eight,
and, after a few words with his landlady, who was sitting in the
reception room, had gone upstairs. A little after ten, as they were
closing up for the night, there was a ring at the bell and the door was
opened by the servant, a Swede. The widow was as economical with her gas
as lodging-house keepers usually are, and the Swede said she could only
dimly see the figure of a man in the vestibule. He asked for Mr. Anthony
Ford, and she told him Mr. Ford was in and directed him to a room on the
third floor back. Without more words he entered and went up the stairs.
After locking the door she followed him, being on her way to bed. When
she reached the third floor he was standing at Ford’s door, and, as she
ascended to the fourth, she heard his knock and Ford’s voice from the
inside call out, "Hello, who’s that?"
When the police asked her about the man’s appearance her description was
meager. He had worn the collar of his overcoat turned up and kept on his
hat. All that she could make out in the brief moment when he crossed the
hall to the stairs was that his eyes looked bright and dark, that he
wore glasses, and that he had a large aquiline nose. She thought he had
a white mustache, but on this point was uncertain, as the upturned
collar hid the lower part of his face.
Babbitts, who reported the affair for the _Dispatch_ and for the Whitney
office on the side, questioned the girl carefully. She was stupid, not
long landed, and could only be sure of the nose and the glasses. But one
thing he elicited from her was an important touch in this impressionist
picture—the man was small. When he passed her in the hall she noticed
that he was not so tall as she was, and he moved quickly and lightly as
he went up the stairs.
On the third floor front were two rooms, one vacant, one occupied by a
boy named Salinger, a clerk in a near-by publishing house. Salinger came
in at half-past ten, and as he passed Ford’s door heard in the room
men’s voices, one loud, one low. A sentence in the raised voice—it did
not sound like Ford’s—caught his ear. The tone denoted anger, likewise
the words: "I’ve come for something more than talk. I’ve had enough of
that."
Knowing Ford was out of work he supposed he was having a row with a dun,
and passed on to his own room, where he went to bed and read a novel. He
was so engrossed in this that he said he would not have heard anyone
come or go in the hall, but the landlady, who with her daughter occupied
the parlor on the ground floor, at a little before eleven heard steps
descending the stairs and the front door open and close.
It wasn’t till nearly two in the morning that Salinger was wakened by a
feeble knocking. He jumped up, and before he could reach the door heard
a heavy fall in the passage. There, prostrate by the sill, lay Ford,
unconscious, his head laid open by a deep wound.
Salinger dragged him back to his room, then roused the landlady, who
sent for a doctor. He told Babbitts that the place gave no evidence of a
struggle, the droplight was burning, a chair drawn close to it, and a
book lying face down on the table as if Ford had been reading when the
stranger interrupted him. On the floor near a desk standing between the
two windows, a trickle of blood showed where Ford had fallen, suggesting
that the attack had been made from behind as he stood over the desk. The
doctor pronounced the injury serious. The blow had been delivered on the
back of the head, and Ford’s condition was critical.
When the police turned up they could find nothing to give them a clue to
the assailant—no finger prints, no foot marks, no weapon or implement.
Ford had been stricken down by one violent blow, falling on him suddenly
and evidently unexpectedly. He was taken to the hospital, unconscious,
no one knowing whether he would die before they could get a statement
out of him.
The cause of the assault was at first puzzling. Robbery seemed
improbable, as a man in Ford’s position was not likely to have much
money and as his gold watch and chain were found in full view on the
table. But when the first excitement quieted down one of the women in
the house came forward with the story that a few days before Ford had
told her he had recently been left a legacy by an uncle up-state, and in
proof of his newly acquired wealth had shown her two fifty-dollar bills.
This put a different face on the matter. If Ford had carried such sums
on him, it was probable the fact had become known and burglary been the
motive of the attack.
The police looked over the papers in his wallet and desk but found
nothing that threw any light on the mystery. Babbitts was present at
this search and found three letters—tossed aside by the city detectives
as having no bearing on the subject—that he knew must be seen by Whitney
& Whitney. He and the precinct captain had hobnobbed together over many
cases, and a few sentences in the hall resulted in the transfer of the
papers to Babbitts’ breast pocket with a promise to return them the next
day.
I’ll give you these letters later on—when we pored over them in the old
man’s private office.
In the hospital Ford came back to consciousness long enough to make an
ante-mortem statement. It was short and explicit, satisfying the
authorities, who didn’t know that the victim hi
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