CHAPTER VIDEADLOCK
Dennishad scarcely departed on his errand when the inspector and Orbit came down the stairs together and the latter remarked to McCarty:
“You didn’t tell me Hughes had been poisoned!”
“No, sir,” McCarty agreed. “’Twas not for me to say: I told you I’d no message for you about the body but you’d hear from the inspector. There’s no chance he could have took that Calabar bean powder—I disremember its other name,—by mistake, is there? Would it be lying around the house here for any purpose?”
“Hardly!” Orbit smiled. “I have read of its use as a cure for lockjaw and an antidote for some other poison—strychnine, I believe,—but one would not find it in an ordinary, normal household!—You’ll let me know, inspector, if I can do anything to further your investigation?”
The inspector promised, somewhat superfluously, and as they descended the steps he observed to his companion:
“It’s a damn funny case, Mac! The Bellamy woman’s butler is a smooth proposition, but as far as I could make out he came clean; he’s been playing the races with Hughes in a poolroom down on Thirtieth and gambling in a joint over on the East Side, and Hughes was stuck on some new Jane named ‘Gertie.’ Snape thinks she’s a married woman, though he never saw her nor heardher last name, and she doesn’t belong on this block. He wasn’t with Hughes last night and didn’t even know he’d gone out.”
“Did you see anybody else in that house?” asked McCarty.
“Only a mighty pretty nursemaid going out with a baby. Did you have any luck at Orbit’s?”
“Not much,” McCarty responded guardedly. “I’ll tell you later if you’ll drop around to my rooms. I want to have another talk with the stout, bald little guy next door here, Goddard.”
“All right. I think we’re wasting our time, though, here in the Mall. If we can trace Hughes’ movements from the minute he passed out of that gate there until he fell dying in front of you, we’ll nail the fellow who slipped him that Calabar bean; there won’t be much to this case, Mac.”
McCarty watched the inspector cross the street to the stately old entrance to Number Seven and then proceeded to the corner house and rang the bell. An elderly butler, with the pallor of a long lifetime of indoor service admitted him, shaking his head dubiously. It was some little time before Eustace Goddard appeared.
“’Pon my soul, you fellows are persistent!” His blue eyes twinkled with lively curiosity as he spoke. “Never knew of such a fuss being made over the death of a servant before! I suppose you’ve come to question mine?”
“After a bit,” McCarty smiled grimly. “Servant or no, we’re bound to make a fuss, as you call it, when it’s a case of murder.”
“What? You don’t say so!” Goddard ran his hand over the fringe of sandy hair adorning his bald pate. “Devil of a thing for Orbit, the notoriety and all!Can’t see why he kept the fellow; I never did like his looks!—But who killed him?”
“That’s what we’re asking!” McCarty retorted. “First of all we’ve got to fix the time he left the house. Did you see him when you went there to dinner last night?”
“No. It was about quarter past eight and just beginning to rain when I went next door. Ching Lee admitted me and I found Orbit in the library; the Sloanes came a few minutes later and we four went in to dinner and then played a rubber or two of bridge. I’ve never seen Orbit in better form; he’s a splendid player but last night his game was extraordinary and we had a rattling good time until you fellows showed up!”
“You weren’t playing cards when we got there,” McCarty suggested.
“No, we’d finished and gone into the conservatory. Orbit was at the organ; you must have heard him.” Goddard spoke in short, jerky sentences as though out of breath and a deeper flush had mounted in his ruddy cheeks. “Don’t pretend to know much about music myself but Orbit can make those pipes talk and I never heard him play as he did last night! His own composition, too; he’s a genius!”
“You’ve known him long?”
“God bless me, yes! He was my idol when I was a little boy and he a big one, home from school for the holidays. Then came the university and after that he traveled for some years, returning only at his father’s sudden death. He brought Hughes back with him then.” Goddard checked himself as though recalled all at once to a consciousness of his visitor’s identity. “About last night, though, I saw none of the servants except Ching Lee and Fu Moy.”
“Have those two been with Orbit a long while?”
“Ching Lee has; little Fu Moy only appeared a year or so ago. But Orbit himself can tell you—”
“You visit in there a lot, don’t you?” McCarty interrupted.
“Naturally, when Mr. Orbit is in residence.” A shade of stiffness had manifested itself in the genial, garrulous tones. “He frequently closed the house and went away for long trips, although not of late years!”
“Then you must have seen a good deal of Hughes,” persisted the interrogator.
Goddard shook his head decisively and his small, reddish mustache seemed to fairly bristle.
“As I told you last night I have hardly addressed the fellow half a dozen times in my life. He was self-effacing, like any other well-trained servant; you’d scarcely know he was there. Then, too, I never had much occasion to see him, for though such old friends Orbit and I have not been on an intimate footing; Mrs. Goddard and I dine there or I run over for an evening of bridge now and then, that’s about the extent of our intercourse.”
“Oh, Dad!” The clear, treble voice which McCarty had already heard sounded from the hall and the red-haired, delicate-looking boy appeared in the doorway. “Dad, that old Hughes is dead! Now he’ll never be horrid to Max any more when he follows me over to Mr. Orbit’s!”
“Run away, Horace!” Goddard ordered peremptorily. “Dad’s busy—!”
“So Hughes was horrid to Max, was he?” McCarty interrupted with the broad, ingratiating smile which always won juvenile confidence. “And who is Max, my lad?”
“My police dog. Hughes was afraid of him, and that’s why he tried to kick him out. It’s lucky Mr. Orbit didn’t see him; he never lets anything be hurt—”
The boy was replying courteously, in simple friendliness, when his father interrupted:
“Horace, it’s time you got ready for lunch. Look at your hands!”
“That’s paint, Dad; it won’t come off, but I’ll try again.” He nodded, his wistful, sensitive face breaking into a smile and then went off down the hall while Goddard remarked:
“That boy of mine is crazy to be an artist and he runs next door now and then to see Orbit’s paintings. Never took much stock in that sort of thing myself. Sorry I can’t give you any further information about that valet, but I don’t see why you should come to me, anyway!”
“Well, you’ve got the finest house on the block, except the closed-up one just over the way, and I supposed you’d know the folks that live in the others,” McCarty explained. “Does any of them do anything but clip coupons?”
“We all know each other, of course.” There was a softened note of genial patronage in his tone. “I don’t know what it can have to do with your investigation but we’re none of us what you would probably call the ‘idle rich.’ I manage several estates for relatives besides my own, Burminster over there works harder than any of his clerks, looking after his enormous holdings, Gardner Sloane—whom you met last night—is a prominent banker, Benjamin Parsons a philanthropist and Mrs. Bellamy’s late husband was a broker. Orbit doesn’t go in for finance, his money is all soundly invested, and Idon’t believe he touches half his income, but his contributions to art and science and literature have been almost incalculable.”
“Have they, so!” interjected McCarty, considerably impressed. “And are the Burminsters and the Parsons friends of Orbit, too?”
“The Burminsters, yes, but when I said we all knew each other here in the Mall I spoke generally. The Parsons are comparative strangers to all of us, although they have been here for two generations—no, three—Benjamin Parsons’ young niece makes the third. No one here between these gates knows them.”
“What’s wrong with them?” McCarty demanded, adding with a very sober countenance: “Wasn’t there time in the two generations to get acquainted?”
Goddard shrugged.
“Not in their estimation, evidently. From the beginning they held themselves aloof and made it plain that they wanted no social intercourse with the rest of us here; they live in a world of their own and for years none of us has tried to invade it. Orbit’s newer than they—his father bought that house next door within my memory,—but he’s a different sort.”
“Yet you’re not intimate with him, you tell me. Who are his close friends, informal-like? You’d know that, being his neighbor.”
“I know nothing at all about Orbit’s friends, and I fail to see what they’d have to do with his valet’s murder!” Goddard flared out. “I’ve been pretty patient with you, but this is a confounded impertinence! Why don’t you look up the associates of the fellow himself and not annoy us with such an affair? He was killed miles away from here in some vile slum, as I understand it; it’s insufferablethat Orbit’s neighbors should be dragged into your investigation!”
“Well, I’ll be annoying you no longer just now,” McCarty responded equably as he rose. “I’ll just have a word with your help to put in my report, though, before I go.”
Neither the butler nor the cook had any information of value to offer, however, and the maids employed upstairs gave equally valueless testimony. All had known Hughes by sight for years and had spoken to him occasionally in casual greeting but it was plain that they had not approved of him and were not particularly interested in his death.
“And them living next door to him for twenty years and more! ’Tis not in nature!” Dennis exclaimed, an hour later, when he and McCarty met by prearrangement at a modest East Side lunchroom and the latter disgustedly voiced his opinion of the apathetic Goddard staff. “There’s no woman too old to be curious about a neighbor’s sudden death, if it’s only for the gossip of it! You didn’t let on ’twas poison got him?”
“I did not! I told Goddard himself it was murder but he thinks somebody killed Hughes down there in what he calls a ‘vile slum.’” McCarty paused to give their order to the slatternly waitress and then leaning his elbows on the table he asked eagerly: “What did you find out in the old precinct? Did you see Mike Taggart or Terry?”
“The both of them!” It was Dennis’ turn to evince disgust. “Conceited young pups they are, the day! Terry’s clean forgot he put Hughes down as an ordinary alcoholic case and Mike that he misread the tag on the key-ring, but they were having the laugh on you for seeinga man die of poison under your nose and not getting wise! They didn’t laugh much, though, after I began asking about the old chop suey joints and Chink laundries!”
“So you spilled it, after all!” McCarty accused indignantly. “I might have known you would!”
“I spilled nothing but what I was told,” retorted Dennis, with an underlying hint of dogged satisfaction in his tone. “’Twas not my fault they guessed, dumb as they are! They took it all in till I sprung that and even then Terry began telling me there was a laundry around the corner and a chop suey joint back on the next block but Mike broke in and asked me what the hell I was getting at; what did I know about the Chink that had been hanging around there not an hour before, and what in blazes you were up to now? Man, dear, ’twould have done your heart good to see the faces on them! I said you were foreclosing a mortgage out at Homevale, and ’twas themselves had spoke of the guy being poisoned, not me, and what Chink were they talking about? There was no fooling them then, though, they were wise, but Terry told me about the tall Chinaman with a face like a graven image who used good plain English even if he did sing it, and I knew it was Ching Lee, all right!”
“What about him?” McCarty demanded: “If he went to the station-house asking about Hughes when ’twas not even in the morning papers that the body’d been identified ’tis a wonder they didn’t run him in on general principles!”
“Ching Lee is not that foolish!” Dennis lowered the knife, upon the end of which he had balanced a section of ham. “He told them he’d heard two other Chinks in that chop suey joint where he had his breakfast talkingabout one of their own countrymen who had fallen down dead in front of the station-house last night, and though the proprietor of the restaurant had said it was a white man, American, who had died, he had come there to make sure, being anxious about his brother.—Seems brother was to have met him the night before but didn’t show up, or some such stall, and that he had a weak heart. Anyway, them two bright lads fell for it, told him the guy that croaked was white and I misdoubt but they let drop a hint that it was more than heart disease killed him. ’Twas only when I come around with my questions they began to see that maybe they’d pulled a bloomer.—Where the devil and all is our coffee?”
The coffee appeared and when they had finished it McCarty asked:
“What did you do then? You’ve not been all this long while kidding the boys at the house!”
“I have not,” Dennis admitted with some complacency. “I left them looking like they’d got a comic valentine, and having time yet on my hands before I was to meet you I took a roundabout way to that chop suey joint, got a table hid behind the proprietor’s desk and ordered some heathenish mess. The proprietor’s a jolly, fat old Chink and I was trying to think up some way of bringing Ching Lee into our talk when who should come strolling in but Terry in plain clothes! He was off duty, of course, but he could not leave the matter be. The minute the old Chink lamped him he drew down his eyelids like the hood of an owl and pretended he couldn’t understand English, but I was watching his face and I got wise that he knew Ching Lee all right! I could have laughed, thinking how he’d been jabbering to me but he fooled Terry and the lunkhead went away at last without even catching sightof me behind the desk!—Give me that check and let’s beat it.”
They left the lunchroom and started westward again, McCarty seemingly lost in his own thoughts, until Dennis observed with a touch of impatience:
“I don’t get the meaning of it at all! We know Ching Lee was ready to knife Hughes only yesterday and if he did slip that Calabar bean into his food the while him and Fu Moy was alone in their dining-room and then heard later from us that it had worked all right, you’d think he would just sit tight and wait for what was coming next instead of trailing down to the station-house to make himself conspicuous! Wasn’t he the one that identified the body to us as being Hughes’, and wouldn’t he figger Terry and Mike would have been told of who the dead guy was, even if it hadn’t come out in the morning papers? If he wanted to know whether the autopsy’d showed poison or not he’d only have had to wait for the next edition! Yet, when you had that hunch ’twas there he’d gone this morning you must have doped out that he had some good reason for it; what put the notion in your head to send me down there, Mac?”
But McCarty made strange answer.
“If he’d been in a hurry to get there he’d have took the subway over here.” They were crossing Lexington Avenue, proceeding toward the Park. “Even if he’d walked it all the way he would have got down to the waterfront before nine, providing he took the most direct route, unless he stopped somewhere. He was in a hurry when he left the house but that might have been because of the storm coming; he was in no hurry to get where we found him, for all he was trying to run when he fell. Now what—?”
His voice trailed away into silence and his companion shrugged in exasperation.
“’Tis like talking to the empty air to ask you a civil question these days, what with your new learning, but if you’re asking me one, and it’s about Hughes last night, I’ll remind you of what you said coming over in the taxi; that maybe he wasn’t bound for anywhere in particular but just wandering along, crazed by delirium and suffering. According to what the inspector told us concerning the action of that Calabar bean, he must have been in fierce pain before paralysis set in the lungs of him. It might have been then he stopped somewhere, though he could have been staggering and lurching around the streets for hours between the New Queen’s Mall and the waterfront.”
McCarty shook his head.
“If you’ll call to mind, too, Denny, the inspector said the effect of the poison wouldn’t be felt for maybe a couple of hours, the amount he’d took of it. It come on him sudden, and that when he was near the old precinct, and it worked quick to the end. I’m not making little of the inspector’s power of persuasion but I wish we’d had the first shot at that Snape!—Look here, how much have you got on you?”
“Nine dollars and sixty-two cents.” Dennis replied with the promptitude of certainty but he eyed the questioner askance.
“I’ll get fifty for you before night. Thanks be, that sporting butler of Mrs. Bellamy’s has never laid eyes on either of us, and you’ve the luck of Old Nick with the cards! Come evening, you’ll be—”
“Come six o’clock this night I’ll be on duty for twenty-four solid hours, if you’ll remember!” Dennis interrupted,regretfully but firmly. “If you were fixing for me to sit in a little game with Snape after scraping acquaintance with him, to find out maybe what the inspector overlooked I’d like nothing better, and I misdoubt but that if you take it on instead you’ll be losing the clothes off your back! Could you not let it go till to-morrow night?”
The note of solicitude in his tone was lost upon McCarty in whose bosom the aspersion cast upon his poker ability rankled.
“If I’m losing the last stitch on me ’twill not be through playing close to my chest, like some!” he asserted darkly. “I was going back through the gate to have another talk with the Sloanes, if so be I’d find them in this time of day, but they’ll keep, and I’ve a check-book and some letters in my pocket that may give us as good a line on Hughes as Snape himself could; besides, the inspector’ll be dropping in for the good word. Come on till we hop a bus up to the cross-town.”
Arriving before the entrance which led to McCarty’s rooms they were astonished to see the door of the antique shop beside it open and the inspector himself emerge.
“Where have you two been?” he asked sharply. “I haven’t time to go upstairs but unlock the door, Mac, and we’ll step inside. Your friend Ballard of the ‘Bulletin’ has been hanging around; how in hell did he know you were in on this Hughes case?”
McCarty considerately forebore to glance at Dennis’ chagrined countenance as he swung the door wide, but it was obvious to his own mind that the ubiquitous reporter must have been in touch with Mike or Terry at the station-house since his loyal but bungling assistant’s visit of the morning.
“I don’t know, sir,” he replied innocently. “I’ve notlaid eyes on Jimmie this long while.—But what’s up? I left you heading for Parsons’ house; did you get any dope from the old man about the hat, maybe?”
“How did you know he was old?” Inspector Druet countered.
“Goddard was after telling me he was a philanthropist and youth don’t turn to charity, as a rule,” observed McCarty. “Moreover he’s got a grown niece, and they’ve small use for any of their neighbors in spite of the millions around them.”
“So I gathered,” remarked the inspector dryly. “Parsons is a fine-looking old man with a face like a saint and a voice like a preacher, but he’s stern and unbending as a ramrod! He could not recognize the hat and he knew no one in the New Queen’s Mall; his sister took no interest in society, his niece had her own friends beyond the gates and he himself was engrossed in affairs which required all his time and attention. I figured the old gentleman would thaw when I said every one knew of the great good he’d done with his model tenements and playgrounds, and free hospital and shelters, but he shut me up as though I’d made a break and told me he was only a steward. He undoubtedly had seen the man, Hughes, if he’d been employed for twenty years or more in a house across the way, but he didn’t recognize him and he’d never heard his name. Death by violence was a very dreadful thing and he only regretted his inability to aid the cause of justice.”
“Was it the bunk, do you think, inspector?” Dennis asked. “Him talking like a book and all?”
The inspector shook his head.
“He’s an old-fashioned gentleman, Riordan, the kind you don’t often see nowadays, and his charities speak forthemselves for all that he doesn’t celebrate them with a brass band. But it brought me no nearer to getting a line on Hughes, nor did the talk I had with his servants; they’re not allowed to associate with any others on the block and had never talked to Hughes though they knew him by sight. There was one queer thing about that interview, though; I could swear that I’d seen one or two of them before but I couldn’t place them.”
“So you drew a blank in the Parsons house?” McCarty commented. “So did I at the Goddard’s and as Denny says, ’tis not natural. The neighbors’ help may not have liked Hughes, or be scared now of mixing up in this mess, but they’re bound to have known him in all these years, whether they admit it or not.”
“Then you have no sign of a clue?” The inspector’s face lengthened. “If we don’t clean this case up in record time the papers will let out a roar that we’re lying down on the job because Hughes wasn’t a person of prominence, and with election so near the commissioner’ll be up on his toes to show results. It’s of more importance now for us to find out who killed that valet than if he were a king!”