"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.
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."
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."
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.
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?"
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!