CHAPTER XITHE CLOSED HOUSE
“A finemess you made of that!” McCarty remarked disgustedly when the door of Mrs. Goddard’s dressing-room had closed behind them, shutting in her husband and the maid. “Just when we were on the point of getting at the truth, too!”
“Truth, is it?” Dennis retorted. “I suppose you mean you’d have been finding out what the crazy guy expected to find in the boy’s pockets!”
“No, I know that already!” McCarty emitted a grim chuckle. “’Twill keep, though, for we’ve got quick work ahead of us now and the inspector must have been waiting this long while.”
“You can shoot yourself down in that birdcage if you’ve a mind to, but my own legs will carry me!” Dennis eyed the elevator door, cunningly concealed in the high oak paneling of the hall, with a hostile glare. Then he added sarcastically: “I’ve no doubt but that, by the new book learning you’ve got lately, you know who the guy was, too, and where he came from and how he got out, through solid walls and barred gates! Education is a grand thing, but where is Horace? Answer me that!”
“If we’re not able to answer that soon, Denny, I’m thinking it would be best left unanswered forever, for the sake of that woman back there.” McCarty spoke with deep earnestness. “There’s a feeling in me that we’vesomething working against us more than human, something worse than lightning or the plague, even! If we could only see our way clear to the black heart of it!”
They went down the stairs together, to find the inspector and Martin awaiting them with Trafford, who appeared crushed from the gruelling half hour through which he had passed.
McCarty addressed him first, with a mere nod to his superior.
“Trafford, why didn’t you tell me about the man who grabbed the lad in the alley not two weeks ago?”
“Mr. Goddard forbade me,” the wretched young man stammered, then drew himself up with a vain assumption of dignity. “Since it has nothing to do with the case—”
“We’re the best judges of that!” McCarty waved him away peremptorily. “Tell Mr. Goddard we’ll see him later.... Now, inspector, before we talk, if you’ll follow a suggestion of mine just once more, there’s a train Martin will be after catching and he’ll have to hustle to do it.”
The inspector eyed him keenly for a moment and then nodded.
“Go to it,” he said briefly. “Get the instructions, Martin.”
McCarty drew the young operative aside and after a brief interchange of words the latter took his departure. Then the inspector motioned the other two into the library and closed the door.
“Now I want an explanation of this!” he announced, in a tone which took McCarty swiftly back to the old days. “Why didn’t you report to me at once when you learned what had happened? What have you two beendoing since? I made you deputies, but by the Lord I didn’t appoint you chiefs!”
McCarty told him in detail of their activities during the night and added frankly:
“I didn’t report, inspector, because I wanted a few hours’ the start of you, and that’s the truth. So far, I’ve only done what I think you would have, yourself, but I’m working from an angle of my own that you’d not have taken. I’ve sent Martin just now to Ellenville, to find out if this Blaisdell has heard anything of the lad, but that’s only routine; the real job is here in the Mall, even if Horace turns up dead or alive somewhere else.”
“What’s this angle of yours on the case?” the inspector demanded curtly. “What did Goddard forbid that tutor mentioning and why?”
McCarty described the interview with Mrs. Goddard and the inspector listened attentively, asking when he had finished:
“What do you propose to do? Put the screws on Goddard to find out why he kept that back? He can’t be a party to the kidnapping of his own son!”
“No, but he thinks he knows who the fellow was, and that he’ll hear from him or them back of him soon with a view to ransom; he’s ready to offer fifty or a hundred thousand reward, whenever you give the word. Until he does hear from him, though, he can’t be sure what happened to the lad and that’s why he’s anxious. His wife don’t know anything about this private opinion of his, of course, and naturally she’s half-crazed,” McCarty summed up as though his process of deduction was equally clear to his two companions. “We’ll leave him worry awhile, for ’tis my opinion he’s mistaken entirely. I want a look now inside that empty house next to the Parsons’across the street and there’s no time to wait for red tape to get permission.”
“The Quentin house, that’s been closed all these years?” The inspector looked fixedly at him and Dennis gaped. “You think the fellow might have hidden there after letting the little boy go? Come on, we’ll take a chance.”
A huge dark blue limousine of impressive aspect was just drawing up before Number Seven as they emerged from the Goddard house and crossed the street. At sight of the distinguished, gray-bearded man who alighted and went up the steps the inspector halted with an exclamation.
“Do you know who that is, Mac? The ambassador to whom the mayor gave the keys of the city only yesterday down at City Hall! If he comes himself to call on the Parsons family they’re of more importance even than I thought!”
“And ’tis small wonder they don’t bother to associate with the rest on the block, millionaires or no,” McCarty commented, eyeing the equipage with vast respect as they passed. “You said the old gentleman was—?”
He paused suddenly and Dennis’ eyes followed his to the great entrance doors which were closing slowly behind the aristocratic back of the ambassador. There was just a glimpse of a thin, sallow-faced manservant in black, who appeared to sweep the trio with a curiously penetrating gaze and then the scene was shut out.
McCarty seemed to have lost interest in the question he was about to ask and they went on in silence to the narrow, paved court between the Parsons residence and the vast, rambling pile of brownstone next door.
“Let’s go up here and see if the rear is open for the length of the block, the way it is on the other side of thestreet,” McCarty suggested. “There’s Parsons’ side door, the one Horace said the man disappeared into; it’s pretty deep, you see, deep enough for him to have just stepped into the embrasure and been hid in the shadows of late afternoon without actually going through the door itself, though I don’t say he didn’t, at that!”
“’Tis likely a nut that’d go around grabbing children and searching their pockets would be let into the Parsons’!” Dennis exclaimed in fine scorn. “Unless the boy made the whole thing up for a sensation, the way some kids do, how’d the man get in and out of the block? The house on this side looks to be boarded up, as tight as a drum.”
They reached the rear and found the open court which extended along behind the houses, to be even wider than that on the south side of the street, the back wall higher and devoid of a single vine. The silent Quentin house presented as blank an aspect as from the front, its sealed windows and barred doors staring like blind eyes in the sunlight. The inspector shook his head.
“No one has entered here in months; years maybe,” he remarked. “The padlocks are so rusted on those board doors that they would have to be broken and the boards themselves are weatherbeaten and rotting. I’m surprised they’d let the place get into such a condition, even though it is in litigation.... What are you doing, Riordan?”
The house, being the corner one, was built around in an ell on the Madison Avenue side and in the right angle formed by its two walls a leader descended from the roof. Dennis was examining and testing it speculatively. At the inspector’s question he turned.
“Do you mind, sir, ’twas a wide shiny mark burnished on a pipe running across the top of an air-shaft thatshowed Mac and me how a murderer had swung himself down on a rope and in at a window, in the first case ever he butted in on after he left the Force?” he asked. “This rain-pipe looks to be too frail to bear the weight of a cat, but ’tis not a cat rubbed the rust off here, and here, so it shines like new tin! I put on a clean shirt yesterday, more’s the pity, but hold my coat and hat, Mac.”
“Mind or you’ll break your neck!” McCarty warned, forgetful of his friend’s calling, as he complied. Dennis scorned to reply but swarmed up the straining, creaking leader to the second floor, swinging out to land lightly and sure-footedly on the broad sill of a window two feet away. The leader, released suddenly from his weight, tore loose from its fastening and canted crazily against the angle of the wall, shaking and clattering, and McCarty exclaimed:
“You’ll not be coming down the way you went up!”
“True for you!” Dennis sang out with a note of rising excitement. “I’ll be coming down the way the last guy did who lit here, and that’s by the inside! Wait you there for me.”
He had been examining the sill upon which he stood and the boards which covered the window, pressing experimentally upon the latter. Suddenly one of them gave way, forced inward with an accompanying crash of glass.
“Now you’ve done it!” McCarty observed superfluously. “Look out there is not more than us waiting for you inside!”
“I’ve my flashlight, thanks be, and my two fists,” Dennis responded. “That board wasn’t tight; the nails had just been stuck back in the holes. Here goes another!”
With the rending of wood the second followed the firstand with a third which he wrenched loose Dennis smashed in the fragments of glass which still clung to the sash, then wriggled lithely through the aperture and disappeared. McCarty drew a long breath and turned to his former superior.
“I’d like to be following him,” he said wistfully. “If so be some guy is hiding in there—the same one that grabbed the lad—he’ll be desperate enough to kill, and Denny’s too slow-thinking and slow-moving to take care of himself! I’m heftier than him and ’tis long since I did any shinnying, but maybe that pipe would hold me after all!”
“A man with four medals from the fire department for meritorious conduct and conspicuous bravery doesn’t need a nursemaid, Mac!” the inspector responded with a laugh. “Personally, I don’t believe any one’s been in there for months before him but—what’s that?”
“That” was a sudden subdued commotion within, a long-sustained clatter followed by a reverberating thud and then a silence ominous in its intensity.
“I knew it!” McCarty dropped the hat and coat and made for the wooden barrier that sealed the main back door. “I’m going in if I break the whole damn’ place down! Denny! Denny! I’m coming!”
His reassuring roar was lost in the mighty smash of his fist on the rotting boards but after the first blow the inspector reached him and dragged him back.
“Have you taken leave of your senses?” the latter demanded. “You’ll have the whole block aroused to find us breaking and entering! Riordan’s all right!—There, I hear somebody moving about inside. Listen!”
McCarty waited, panting and tense, and faintly there came to his ears the sound as of stumbling footstepswithin and a scratching noise from a window at the left of the door which, being protected by an iron grill-work, had been left unboarded. A heavy green shade hung close against the inner side of the dirty windowpane, furrowed by many past rainstorms, and the stout bars seemed at a glance to be firmly imbedded in the broad stone sill but McCarty strode to them and began trying them one by one, while behind him the inspector drew his revolver and stood expectant.
“Look here, sir!” McCarty whispered. “’Tis fine burglar protection they’ve got in these houses! See how this bar slides up into its groove in the top of the casement, till you can pull it out below and down over the sill entirely? I’ll bet the next will work the same.—It does! If we’d taken the trouble to find this out at first—! Glory be, here’s Denny himself!”
The green shade had flown up and the face of Dennis appeared in a sickly yellow aura cast by his flashlight, but he promptly extinguished it and set to work on the catch of the window. As McCarty removed the fourth bar the sash opened upward and the two, who had meanwhile been exchanging grimaces pregnant with meaning gazed silently at each other for a full minute. Then McCarty found his voice.
“Where is he!” he demanded. “What did you do with him? We heard the row out here—!”
“There wasn’t any ‘him,’” Dennis interrupted sheepishly. “It was me, by myself. I came on the stairs unexpected-like and took the whole flight of them without even breaking my flashlight!—But come in, the both of you, and see what I found!”
McCarty scrambled over the sill and Inspector Druet, despite his added years, followed with the effortless easeof a boy. They found themselves in a large room bare of furniture but in the dust which lay like a heavy carpet upon the floor a meandering trail of footsteps, many times traversed, ran from the window by which they had entered to a connecting door opening into a laundry. Dusty finger-marks, with here and there the imprint of a whole hand, were plainly outlined on the white woodwork of the inner sill and below it greasy pieces of wrapping paper were scattered. In a corner two pitchers and several small tin cans were heaped.
“Some one has been camping out here, that’s evident,” the inspector remarked. “Getting his food handed in to him through that window, too!”
“And it wasn’t any ordinary bought stuff, the kind that comes ready fixed in stores.” McCarty was poking about in the papers. “Here’s the carcass of a whole chicken, pieces of fancy rolls and pastry and other stuff, but it’s all stale; it’s been here for four or five days, at least.”
“And there’s traces of coffee in those pitchers and cans, to say nothing of the wine bottles on that shelf!” Dennis pointed impatiently. “He’s been living on the fat of the land from one of the houses in this row and the nearer the likelier, even if it does happen to be occupied by the Parsons! Come upstairs till I show you more.”
The larger adjoining room had evidently been the laundry, for rows of enameled tubs and washing machines were ranged against the wall and dryers stood about, but all were covered with a thick blanket of dust. Dennis led the way through a series of kitchens and pantries, far more elaborate than those they had encountered in Orbit’s house, to the back stairs and up to the second floor rear, into the room with the broken window. All the way they had followed that zigzag trail of overlapping footstepsand here the floor was crossed and recrossed by a network of them. This apartment had evidently been one of the master bedrooms, for a well-appointed, marble-lined bath opened from it and heavy, old-fashioned furniture of richly carved mahogany was ranged with stiff precision about the room. A half-burned candle, shielded from the window by an old cardboard box-cover, stood on a side table together with a handful of matches and some cigarette stubs. McCarty pointed to it.
“He couldn’t live without a light but he hid it from the window and he didn’t dare carry it when he went down to get his food; that’s why those footprints ramble so, he was feeling his way in the dark. That bed looks as if it had been slept in, with all those old draperies piled on it, and what’s in that big pitcher on the bureau?”
“Water,” Dennis replied. “There’s still a little left, though you can see from the marks on the inside where it has dried down.”
“Evaporated?” The inspector nodded. “That would show, too, that whoever the fellow was he hadn’t used any of it for a few days at least.—Hello, what’s this?”
He had turned to the bathroom and after a moment he emerged from it holding a bright, new razor, a piece of soap and a very dirty Turkish towel.
“The water has been turned off in the pipes of course, but there is an empty bucket in there in which some must have been brought to him, and he seems to have had some regard to his personal appearance, at least. The Goddard boy said the man who had tackled him was rough-looking and unshaved, didn’t he?”
“When he tackled him, yes,” McCarty replied. “He had chance enough to clean up after, as soon as whoever was helping him to hide here brought him the things.”
“He did more than that!” Dennis declared. There was an unwonted flush on his leathery cheeks and his gray eyes were alight with excitement. “Why do you suppose he was hiding here, anyway? Why does anybody hide? If ’tis not to do something unlawful, couldn’t he have broken the law already and be hiding from it?”
“Denny!” McCarty breathed. “What are you getting at? You’ve found out something! Who is the man?”
“Who’s wanted now, Inspector?” Dennis asked. “Somebody that’s gentleman enough to keep shaved and clean in spite of everything, who’d appreciate good food and wine and the best in life, and yet was a convicted criminal for all that!”
“‘Convicted—!’” McCarty started forward. “An ex-crook, do you mean? How did you guess—?”
“‘Ex-crook,’ nothing!” retorted his confrère. “I’m not up in the latest of prison styles but if this ain’t a penitentiary get-up I’m an Orangeman!”
He flung open a closet door behind him, dived in and dragged forth in triumph a tell-tale suit of stained and ragged gray.
“Sing Sing!” exclaimed Inspector Druet. “Good Lord, Riordan, you’ve made a find!—Do you remember, Mac, that three men escaped last month? One was killed making his getaway and another caught and transferred to Dannemora, but the third of those that crashed out then is still at large and there’s a big reward out! Heaven knows how he managed to get into the Mall and why he should have come here, of all places, but I’ll stake my life that the man who has been hiding in this house is George Radley!”