CHAPTER XVIA QUESTION ANSWERED
Foran instant McCarty’s stout legs wabbled beneath him, then he drew himself together and pressing the button of his own flashlight he strode over the sill.
A strange scene presented itself to his staring eyes. Dennis was clinging weakly to an upright post at the foot of the heavily carved bed upon which Orbit was lying. His firmly molded chin was relaxed and the sunken, closed eyes were mere blotches of shadow in the grayish pallor of his face. The pajama jacket was open at his throat and his arms were flung above his head as though helplessness had come upon him in the effort to protect himself from an attack. As he noted these things McCarty became aware of the pungent, sweetish odor that assailed his own nostrils.
“Chloroform!” he gasped, pointing to a small bottle which stood upon the bedstand. “Isn’t that a towel on the pillow beside his head? Throw it into the corner, Denny, and then get back into the other room, quick!”
Galvanized into life Dennis obeyed, retrieving his flashlight as he went. McCarty waited only long enough to open the two windows wide before rejoining him.
“Aren’t we going to raise an alarm?” Dennis demanded excitedly, but McCarty lowered his own voice to a whisper once more.
“We are not, to get ourselves accused! We’re going to beat it out the way we came as fast as the Lord’ll let us. Don’t open your mouth again till we get beyond the gates! Sure, the devil himself is let loose!”
Down the stairs they went, through the pantries and lower front hall to the card-room. The distance seemed interminable and every footstep resounded maddeningly in their nerve-shaken ears, but they did not pause until they reached the little side door and Dennis had shot the bolts back.
“Wait till we put on our shoes again,” McCarty admonished. “There’s no room to do it out in that alley and we’re safe enough now, but hurry!”
Shod once more, they stole out, closing the door noiselessly behind them. The watchman had passed on in the direction of the east gate and they sped to the opposite one, passing through it just before he turned.
All desire for speech seemed to have left Dennis and they walked northward for several blocks before McCarty broke the silence.
“I suppose you think ’twas queer we didn’t take that heaven-sent opportunity to search the house without Orbit, at least, to interrupt us, Denny, but there was no telling how long he’d been under that chloroform nor when he’d come out of it, and we could not say we’d scared away whoever did it to him or we would not have sneaked in ourselves.”
“How do you know he wasn’t dead?” Dennis’ tone held a volume of reproach.
“I saw the chest of him rise and fall regular with his breathing, and a whiff like that could not put him out for the count!” McCarty declared impatiently. “Didn’t I open the windows on him myself, and tell you to takeaway the towel that must have slipped down from off his face?”
“’Twas still damp with that stuff!” Dennis muttered with a shudder.
“And chloroform evaporates quicker than anything else I know!” exclaimed his companion. “That shows it must have been given to him the minute, almost, before we went upstairs! The sitting-room looked all right to me; did you happen to notice whether anything was upset or not where he was?”
“I did not!” Dennis averred. “I’d the shock of my life when my light flashed over his face! If he’s found dead come morning I’ll feel as if I’d murdered him myself and not a wink will I sleep nor a free breath will I draw till I know he’s all right!”
But when McCarty’s rooms were reached again and the desultory discussion was renewed it was Dennis himself in whom exhausted nature first was revealed and he sank deeply into healthy slumber. His host, however, sat hunched in his armchair till dawn, smoking innumerable cigars and staring through narrowed eyes into the turbid atmosphere of the familiar room as though he beheld strange and evil things.
Finally he stretched himself out wearily beside Dennis and dropped into an uneasy slumber, to be awakened by the sharp ringing of the telephone. When he turned from it, after receiving the frenzied message, it was to find his guest draped in his own shabby bathrobe, waiting with morbid expectancy for the news.
“Is Orbit dead—?”
“He is not! He’s got the inspector fair wild with his tale of being drugged in the night and on top of it oldBenjamin Parsons reports a robbery! Both the watchmen are fired temporarily and lads from headquarters put in their place,” McCarty retorted succinctly. “It’s a nice, peaceful day you’ll be having of it at the fire house while I face the music!”
Dennis gulped with relief.
“Was anything took from Orbit’s house, did the inspector say?”
“He’d no time, but I’m thinking he’ll be on his way here as soon as he can pacify the two latest victims of outrage there in the Mall. Moreover, if you’re going to stop for Brian to shave you after breakfast, it will be a miracle that you’re not late for duty!”
Dennis disappeared promptly into the bathroom and McCarty gathered up the documents and the page torn from the encyclopædia purloined from the Parsons house, and stowed them carefully away before making his own hasty toilet. They ate a sketchy breakfast together at the accustomed restaurant and then separated, McCarty returning to his rooms with a sheaf of newspapers to await the coming of his superior.
From the front page of the first paper the pictured face of Horace Goddard stared out at him, big-eyed and wistfully alert, and the caption beneath announced that Mr. Eustace Goddard offered twenty-five thousand dollars’ reward for information which would lead to the recovery of his son. A second article, brief but placed in significant juxtaposition to it, declared that no further progress had been made in the investigation into the death of the valet, Alfred Hughes, who had succumbed to the effects of the little-known poison physostigmine soon after leaving the residence of his employer Mr. Henry Orbitin the New Queen’s Mall six days before, but the authorities expected to make an important arrest in connection with it in the immediate future.
Inspector Druet’s impatient ring brought McCarty quickly to his feet and as the former sprang up the stairs he flung open the living-room door.
“Mac, what the devil have you been doing?”
“Me, inspector?” McCarty’s face was a study, but he had misunderstood.
“Yes! Why weren’t you on the job? They’ve raised hell in the Mall last night while I was chasing up some false clues about the Goddard case and I haven’t laid eyes on you since the medical examiner’s assistant arrived at Orbit’s yesterday!”
“I’ve been getting a bit of sleep, this morning,” McCarty replied evasively. “Did you see Parsons? You told me he’d been robbed,—did he say what was stole from him?”
“No. That’s the queer part of it. When he phoned to headquarters he was anxious to talk but as soon as I got to his house he began to hedge. A whole pane had been removed from one of the rear windows, and the telephone and Kip alarm system wires were cut, but he couldn’t show me that anything in his study had been disturbed, and although he insisted that some documents had been stolen from his filing case he would tell me nothing about them except that some were notes for a book he was writing and the rest of a highly personal nature.”
“If ’twas nothing of money value I’d not be bothering about it,” McCarty suggested hurriedly. “He got off light, considering what’s happened at other houses on that block.—Look at Orbit! Wasn’t he drugged besides,to say nothing of the murder committed there?”
“Yes, but nothing was stolen from him. He tells me he took a bromide to try to sleep, for the shock of the girl’s death in the afternoon had about made him go to pieces. He was just dozing off when he thought he heard something in the room. He couldn’t be sure and before he could make a move a towel was clapped over his face; the next thing he knew he woke up mighty sick. He would have thought the whole thing was a nightmare, only there was the towel saturated with chloroform in a corner of the room, the bottle itself on a stand beside his bed and the windows open wider than he had left them. The rest of the household, including Sir Philip Devereux and his valet, Harry Blake, weren’t even disturbed. There’s no sign of how the burglar got in, except that the side door opening from the card-room was found unbolted this morning, though Ching Lee swears he fastened it as usual last night, and the telephone wires outside the house were cut, just as Parsons’ were.”
“Well, if Orbit has recovered and nothing was taken there’s been small harm done there, either,” McCarty commented, adding: “Is Sir Philip going to stay on at Orbit’s?”
“He sails Saturday. I should think he’d find Orbit’s kind of hospitality a little strenuous, although he seems to be a fine old sport!—Mac, what are we to do? I’m about at the end of my rope, and though the happenings last night don’t mean actual tragedy they show how little the scoundrels back of these crimes are afraid of being found out!”
In the clear morning light the inspector’s face seemed to have aged years and McCarty’s heart smote him.
“Oh, I don’t know, sir,” he said. “If just papers thatwere useful to no one but himself were taken from Parsons and nothing at all from Orbit maybe some one just pulled off those two stunts to throw you off the track of the two murders and the kid’s disappearance.—Have you heard from Martin?”
“He’s back and Blaisdell the artist came with him. Blaisdell’s at Goddard’s now, offering whatever help he can give, but he hasn’t seen Horace since the boy came to his studio to bid him good-by; I talked to him and I’d swear he’s on the level. It’s the most infernal mystery—!”
“Has the autopsy been performed yet on that girl Lucette?” McCarty’s tones had lowered.
“Just an hour ago. Mac, it’s got the whole medical bureau going! The examiner agrees with Dr. Allonby, but he can’t go any further! The kind of gas that was used is a new one on them, deadlier than any sort the war produced and they’ve sent to Washington to find out if anything is known of it there.—Thanks.” Inspector Druet accepted the cigar which the other proffered and after it was alight he added: “Fluorine gas is one of its component parts—”
“Fluorine!” McCarty paused, with the match halfway to his own cigar.
“Yes, but there are other properties with it; fluorine burns, you know, but there was no trace of that on the girl’s face, although her lungs were seared. How it was ever forced on her is beyond me, and the Chief is raging like a caged bear!” He shook his head dejectedly. “If we don’t show results mighty soon I’m due for a transfer and that means the beginning of the end; but I don’t feel that so keenly as I do my sense of failure! I had a chance for quick action when that valet was poisoned,but now that little boy and the fine young French girl—God, it seems as though I had been criminally negligent!”
“Not a bit of it, inspector!” McCarty exclaimed earnestly. “It’s just like I was saying to Denny; we’re up against the worst case and the cleverest murdering devil in the history of the department and we’ll not be laying him by the heels by working along behind him. It’s from what he’s going to pull in the future that we’ll get him, and then only through out-guessing him. Who’ll be the next? That’s the question we’ve got to answer.”
When, after threshing the situation over thoroughly once more, the inspector finally took his departure, McCarty put in a long hour studying the papers taken from Parsons’ filing case. The collection of reports, evidently transcriptions from court and police records, besides the names of Jennie Malone, Chris Porter and the boy Danny Sayre, comprised those of Bert Ferris, Hannah Cray and Bessie Dillon. Ferris had been convicted of insurance fraud, but Parsons had annotated the report: “Great provocation through need for dependents.” Hannah Cray was a shoplifter and Bessie Dillon a confidence worker and after the names of both women had been written: “Reform assured.”
The manuscript proved to be a compilation of scattered and disconnected notes, relative to various methods employed in modern warfare, together with lengthy diatribes against the sin of organized killing. McCarty had little patience to peruse it. The references to fluorine gas gave merely the formula and effect.
Without glancing again at the article on Calabar bean, McCarty put the torn page away with the other papers but slipped the odd, silvery bookmark in his pocket. Aviolent rainstorm was raging and taking a stout umbrella he clapped on his hat, locked the door behind him and descended to the street. Here he was pounced upon by a young man with a shock of very red hair, who had been lying in wait for him in Monsieur Girard’s shop doorway.
“Hey, Mac, got you at last! What brought Inspector Druet to you so early this morning? Anything new turned up in that merry little three-ring circus of crime that is giving a continuous performance under your noses over at the New Queen’s Mall?”
The taunt was a shrewdly calculated one, but McCarty grinned affably.
“I see yourBulletinthis morning has only the story of the girl’s death yesterday afternoon, Jimmie; that’s old stuff, now.”
Jimmie Ballard opened his eyes and ducked confidentially under the shelter of McCarty’s umbrella.
“For the love of Pete, has there been more doing?” he gasped. “Come across, Mac! You know I’m always ready to do you a good turn! What’s up now?”
“We-ell,” McCarty assumed an air of troubled indecision. “Of course there’s no one between those gates would breathe a word of it to you newspaper guys and if I was to tell you about the two robberies it might get back to me. Not being regularly on the Force any more I’d not want the inspector to think—”
“Two robberies!” Jimmie’s eyes shone. “Pretty! Mac, let me get the story through to the shop and we’ll have an ‘extra’ out in half an hour! I’ll keep you out of it, I swear—!”
“All right, then, if you’ll do something for me after,” McCarty suddenly reached into his pocket and drew outParsons’ bookmark. “Find out what the devil is this made of and ’phone me at my rooms to-night; mind you don’t mention it in your story or never another tip will you get from me!—Now, here’s what happened....”
He repeated briefly the inspector’s version of the incidents of the previous night and then, well satisfied, he continued on his way. It led him on a long and diversified path through that day’s storm; to headquarters, the Public Library, the city’s mortuary and the laboratories of the university. For the first time since the inception of the strangely complex case he steered clear of the Mall and it was not until darkness had fallen that he returned to his rooms, rain-soaked and weary.
Inside the living-room he felt mechanically for the light switch in the wall, but the button clicked futilely. At the same moment he lifted his nose in the air and sniffed sharply.
Some one had been in his rooms again! His lights had been tampered with, for they were on the same current as the house next door and a ray from there was even now streaking faintly across the air-shaft past his bedroom window. Moreover there’d been nothing wrong with his switch the night before! Was somebody waiting for him?
Aware that the feeble gas jet in the hall below was yet strong enough to silhouette him vaguely in its glimmering half-light, he pulled the door shut behind him and whipped out his revolver.
“Is anybody here?” His bull-throated demand cut the silence. “Come on, you white-livered son-of-a-gun, and I’ll give you the fight of your life!”
He waited, his ears strained to catch the slightest sound, but none came; no stir of a foot, no whisper ofbreathing broke the utter stillness in which the echo of his voice had died away and after a minute that seemed ages long doubt changed to certainty.
Somebody had been there and gone; but had he gone far? What had been done in his rooms that he was not meant to see? What had the intruder left behind him for McCarty to blunder into in the darkness? Had a trap been set for him under his own roof?
McCarty pressed his lips grimly together, his square jaw outthrust. Keeping his revolver still cocked and ready in his right hand he reached behind him with the other and propped his umbrella against the wall. Then half-stooping he advanced a step straight before him in the direction of the fireplace. With infinite caution and the delicacy of one in a maze of live wires his left hand groped about in the pitch blackness surrounding him, but it encountered only empty air. He took another step forward, then another....
At last! At the height of about his middle from the floor his fingers touched a fine cord drawn straight across his path, so taut that it vibrated like a harp-string beneath a contact as light as a mere breath! Running his fingers along it with the light touch of a drifting feather he moved to the left until the cord made a sharp turn around the corner of his heavy desk. Once more he started forward. Now he was facing again toward the fireplace but the left side of it, and his guiding line was rising! It must be at the height of the mantel now, he must almost have reached the shelf itself!
Moving even more cautiously, inch by inch, his fingers traveling with still greater delicacy, he followed the cord to the corner of the mantel. There his hand came in contact with what appeared to be a pulley, rigged ingeniouslyover the clamp of a portable lamp bracket which had never been fastened there before.
If the cord were broken something on the other end of that pulley running under the mantel would drop; and then what would happen? Would the house be blown to bits in the explosion of some infernal machine, or something fall on him from above? It had obviously been intended that he should break that string; but why had it been taken for granted that finding his lights out of commission he would walk straight forward from the doorway, instead of perhaps around the wall—?
His matches, of course! He wouldn’t be supposed to stop and fumble in his clothes for any he might be carrying when a whole box of them were where he always kept them there on the mantel before him! ’Twas from the mantel itself, then, or just under it, that trouble could be looked for, if the weight on the other end of that pulley dropped, and that trouble would occur somewhere in a line with the doorway!
Shifting his revolver to his left hand McCarty felt with the right for the weight dangling from the end of the pulley. His compressed lips widened at the corners in a grim smile as he followed it up again and along under the edge of the mantel until his fingers met the cold ring of a revolver muzzle.
So that was the answer! When the weight dropped, that cord, as fine and strong as fishline, which he could feel wound around the trigger, would snap back and from that muzzle would streak forth a death message, certain and sure!
But not while McCarty knew it! Dropping his own revolver into his pocket he swiftly and skilfully disengaged the cord from about the trigger of the other anddrew it from the cradle of wire which had been strung over two nails driven into the underside of the mantel-shelf. Placing it upon the mantel within easy reach he found it but the work of a moment to jerk down the lamp bracket and its improvised pulley, break and haul in the cord and throw the whole mechanical device into the empty fireplace.
Then another thought came to him. Suppose the party who had planned that little surprise for him were waiting about in the immediate vicinity, near enough to have seen him come in, close enough at hand to hear the anticipated report? Wouldn’t he be likely to come then to see the result for himself? Wouldn’t that be his next logical move?
His next move! Since he entered the room McCarty had been too busy to wonder why this reception had been arranged for him, but now a light broke over his mind and he all but chuckled aloud. He’d been asking himself and Denny a question for the last twenty-four hours and now by the Lord it was answered for him!
But why should his enemy be disappointed? Why shouldn’t he hear that shot after all, and in coming to investigate, reveal his own identity? There was nothing above the ceiling but the loft and nothing above that again but the roof and the clouds that were pouring down rain that minute! With a sudden impulse McCarty seized the revolver from the mantel, aimed it straight up into the air and fired, then jumped nimbly aside, crouching behind the great armchair.
The echo of the shot had scarcely died away when there came a terrific banging upon the entrance door below and this time a hoarse chuckle did force its way from McCarty’s throat.
That was the game, was it?—To pretend he was just passing and raise all the hell he could getting in, so as to attract attention to the fact that he came after the shot was fired? Let him bang away and break the door down! The one who’d come up those stairs would be the one who had rigged up that murder machine!
The banging gave place to a moment of silence and then came a mighty crash, followed by another and another, till at length the door fell inward with a snap of the lock and a rending jar, and some one sobbing harshly, chokingly, came bounding and scrambling up the stairs, preceded by a wildly darting flashlight which played under the living-room door. Then that door also was flung wide, the light swept about and a broken voice in the throes of mental agony howled dolorously:
“Mac! For the love of God, what’s happened to you!”
McCarty came out sheepishly from behind the chair.
“I’ve been handling revolvers since first I went on the cops, Denny, with never a mischance, but when the lights went out on me just now all of a sudden whilst I was cleaning this I’ll be damned if it didn’t go off in my hand!”