CHAPTER XVIIICHECKMATE!
McCartyleft the Parsons house a few minutes later, his mind a chaos of conflicting impressions. With the sonorous, dignified tones still ringing upon his ear and the deeply concerned gaze yet seemingly bent upon him Benjamin Parsons appeared the epitome of rectitude and righteousness, but had he been as certain of Porter’s innocence as he claimed, and was he as ignorant of where he had gone?
He crossed the street to Orbit’s house and glanced again into the court between that and Goddard’s. Max was still there, but he had lain down as though exhausted and his ribs, glistening with the rain, showed pitifully gaunt. Why didn’t they take the poor fellow in? McCarty stopped and spoke coaxingly to him. The dog slowly rolled his lack-luster eyes upon him but made no other response.
For a long minute McCarty stood thoughtfully regarding the dog. When, at last, he continued on his way there was a curiously absent look upon his face.
Ching Lee admitted him and took him to the library where he had first been received. A small fire of some strange, peat-like fuel was burning on the hearth, sending out iridescent flames and a faint pervasive odor as of sandalwood, and before it Orbit was seated, with a stout, florid man in tweeds.
“Good-morning, McCarty. I rather thought that you or the inspector would look in on me this morning.” Orbit turned to his guest. “Sir Philip, this is Deputy McCarty, the official who is working with Inspector Druet on the investigation into this hideous mystery.”
Sir Philip Devereux nodded to the ex-roundsman cordially.
“Shocking affair, this! Shocking!” he commented. “Here for a little private chat with Mr. Orbit, what? I’ll leave you—”
“No, don’t go, Sir Philip!” Orbit demurred smilingly. “You know all the circumstances and McCarty and I haven’t anything private to discuss. I hope he’s brought me some news!—You heard about what happened to me the other night?”
“I did that,” McCarty nodded. “What do you think ’twas done for, if nothing was taken?”
“Haven’t the remotest idea.—Sit down here by the fire, man, you’re soaked through!” Orbit added hospitably. “I’ll have Ching Lee bring you a touch of something from my private stock—?”
“No, thank you, Mr. Orbit; I’ve a twinge of the gout now and then, though you mightn’t think it,” McCarty explained speciously. “I just dropped by to see if you’d thought of anything to add to what you told the inspector about the chloroforming?”
“Nothing. The whole thing happened so quickly and the impressions left on my mind were so vague, that I am afraid I can be of little use to you. One thing seems certain; the fellow didn’t intend me to die from the effect of it, since he stopped to open the windows and throw away the cloth he had used to anæsthetize me!” Orbit shrugged. “The incident is absolutely inexplicableexcept on the supposition that his only intention was to terrorize me, and that is really too absurd to consider.”
“It was an outrage!” declared Sir Philip suddenly. “Damme, it passes belief! The chap must be a fiend—or mad! What object could he have in doing Hughes in? I say, there was a valet for you!—Then the girl, too! That poison gas theory seems to be rot to me, too utterly impossible with you there in the room, but the girl is dead, isn’t she? There you are!”
He leaned back in his chair and puffed thoughtfully at his cigar. His host turned to McCarty with a faint hint of amusement in his eyes but it was quickly overshadowed by sadness again.
“The girl is dead, poor creature, and I cannot help feeling that the blame in some way rests at my door, for I invited her in. However her death was brought about the child escaped, though; we have that to be thankful for! We are none of us safe here on the Mall while the murderer is free to come and go in our houses at will, killing with impunity whenever the horrible impulse comes to him! I was reluctant to offer my hospitality to Sir Philip under these harrowing circumstances but he expressed himself as willing to abide by the consequences.”
“Ripping experience!” the baronet nodded again. “Sorry I’m sailing to-morrow! Like nothing better than to stop and see it through!—Old chap over the way was robbed the same night, I hear; any clues left there, McCarty?”
There was no hint of sarcasm in his tone but McCarty flushed darkly, then he darted a quick glance at the questioner and a slow smile dawned. The Britisher was trying to get his goat!
“Yes, sir, the same as here,” he replied. “Mr. Orbit, you’ve that chloroform bottle? The inspector says ’twas found on a stand beside your bed.”
“Ching Lee has it, I believe; would you like to see it?” He rang the bell without waiting for a reply. “The cloth used was a towel from my own bathroom; it’s evident that the fellow was familiar with the house and knew his way about; but how he got in that side door leading from the card-room, if Ching Lee really bolted it as usual the night before—? Oh, Ching Lee?”
The butler had appeared silently in the doorway and now Orbit addressed him in a rapid patter of Chinese. Ching Lee, as impassive and wooden of countenance now as before the tragedy, bowed and departed, and McCarty turned once more to Orbit.
“What time was it, as near as you can figure, that you were doped?”
“I should say, around two o’clock in the morning, perhaps a trifle before. Sir Philip and I sat up till after midnight playing chess, and when I retired I tried for more than an hour to sleep before I took a bromide. Things grew hazy after that and I don’t know how long I dozed before I was conscious of some one in the room.”
“You got no whiff of anything else before the chloroform hit you?” McCarty asked. “No smell of a pipe or cigar if the guy was a smoker, maybe?”
“I smoke so constantly myself that I would scarcely have noticed it even if there had been time and I were fully awake.” Orbit raised his brows. “You smoke yourself, McCarty; could you have detected it?”
“Sure,” McCarty stated the fact modestly. “I’ve not the nose Denny has, but ’tis easy to tell the smell of acigar from a pipe, even if it’s only hanging about the clothes of a person; a rich, full-flavored cigar with a body to it leaves a scent that a man will travel with, whether he gets it himself or not.”
“‘Denny?’” Orbit repeated. “Oh, you mean your associate, Riordan? Yes, I remember he detected the odor of that small blaze here a week ago, when the monkey upset the cigar lighter in my room. Odd faculty, that, eh, Sir Philip?”
“Jolly, I fancy. I only wish I had it!” Sir Philip chuckled. “My man makes away with my cigars at a shockin’ rate but I never can catch him at it. I say, no one’s disturbed our board, have they?”
“Indeed, no,” Orbit replied. “I gave strict orders and we can finish the set to-night.—Sir Philip held the amateur chess championship for Great Britain for five years.”
He added this to McCarty and then turned as Ching Lee appeared again and spoke to him once more in his native tongue. The butler advanced and placed in McCarty’s hands the bottle he had seen in Orbit’s room two nights before.
“Has it been uncorked, do you know, since ’twas found beside you?” McCarty regarded the contents critically, removed the cork himself for a cautious whiff. Hurriedly replacing it, he handed the bottle back to Ching Lee and rose.
“I don’t think so,” Orbit whipped out his handkerchief and pressed it to his nose. “I am susceptible tothatodor, at any rate, since Wednesday night!—Sorry not to be of any greater help to you. I shall depend on you and the inspector to keep me informed of any developments that may arise.”
As McCarty trudged through the driving rain toward the east gate once more, he shook his head. Come night, it would be a week since Hughes had been done to death, and the end was not yet clear!
He made his way to the lunchroom on Third Avenue which he and Dennis had previously visited and in deference to the day ordered fried oysters. They were long in coming and he rested his elbows wearily on the table. Was he getting too old for the game, after all? In days gone by, when he was in harness, he’d have got to the truth long since. It had been a dog’s life in more ways than one, yet he regretted more than ever that he had left it and grown rusty....
All at once he straightened in his chair and sat staring at the cynical warning to “watch your hat and coat” on the wall before him as if the legend were wholly unfamiliar to him. The belated appearance of the waitress with the oysters roused him from his stupor and he rose hurriedly.
“Don’t want ’em!” he muttered thickly. “Gimme the check; I got to beat it!”
Spilling a dime onto the table he took the slip of pasteboard, paid for his untouched food at the cashier’s desk and went out as one in a dream. Once around the corner he seemed galvanized into life and set off briskly enough for the subway.
Twenty minutes later he presented himself at headquarters and after being closeted with the chief of the detective bureau for some little time he departed, armed with certain credentials for the main office of the telephone company.
There he spent a long and seemingly unproductive hour going over the calls from the Gotham exchange,which included the New Queen’s Mall, for the previous Tuesday.
Over Goddard’s private wire had gone numerous messages before Trafford had called Blaisdell’s studio; and in the late afternoon, when Horace’s continued absence had caused alarm, there were fully a score of numbers registered before Goddard himself had summoned McCarty.
Orbit’s telephone, too, had been busy, with the caterer, decorator, florist and a musical agency, in connection with the function of the afternoon. Three messages to the coal dealer and innumerable others followed, presumably sent by guests until the evening was far advanced.
Only four calls had been sent from the Bellamy house and they appeared to have been made by the lady herself, for they were to modiste, hairdresser, perfumer and a prominent department store.
Parsons’ telephone had been connected with a foreign consulate, several charitable societies and a banking house, while the Sloane household had communicated with Doctor Allonby, a drug store, an agency for male nurses, the office number of a noted financier, and several residence numbers of equally well-known persons.
McCarty copied one or two numbers from each list and sallied forth to verify them, but, although the afternoon was long, twilight had not yet come when he returned to his rooms and entered cautiously.
They had not been intruded upon on this occasion, but he remained only long enough to secure the page torn from the encyclopædia and then slipped out again through the teeming rain to the fire house which domiciled engine company 023.
Dennis was matching nickels with Mike in the dormitory and reaping a rich harvest, but he hastily promised the loser his revenge later and slid down the pole to join McCarty.
“I’ve looked for you all afternoon!” he declared reproachfully, adding: “You’ve news! I can see it in the eye of you and I might have known something would start whilst I was out of it!”
“There’s nothing new,” McCarty responded quietly. “I’ve a queer notion in my head, but it’s too sickening to spring even after all we know has happened, till I get hold of something to back it up. Parsons ’phoned for me this morning—the old gentleman himself—and told me the truth about what was missing since Wednesday night, which was no news. He said it was clever, the way you’d disconnected the inside alarm arrangement—”
“Me!” Dennis’ leathery countenance blanched. “’Tis what I get for letting you lead me into breaking the law! Now I’ll get thrown out of the department and pinched, and Molly will change the baby’s name—!”
“Oh, Parsons did not know ’twas you, Denny, he just said it had been cleverly done,” McCarty hastened to explain. “I sprung it on him about Porter and Radley and asked him what would he do if a fellow escaped that he thought was innocent and came to him and he spoke up quick that he’d turn him over to the authorities anyway; ’twould be his higher duty to our social fabric, whatever that is.”
“It would, would it!” Dennis ejaculated in fine scorn. “The social fabric could go to blazes for all of me, but I’d stick to a pal, innocent or no! Howsomever, I’ve not the grand, cold-blooded principles of him!—You know the poor devil’s been caught, crazier than a loon?”
McCarty nodded.
“Porter knows it, too; he’s beaten it for fear he’ll be sent up for hiding him.” He finished his account of the morning’s interview and then drew the torn page from his pocket. “There’s more to this thing about the Calabar bean that I didn’t read you, Denny, so I brought it around and maybe ’twill give us an idea.—Listen: ‘Calabar Bean. Ordeal Nut. The seed of Physostigma ven-en-osum, a twining, half shrubby plant, native of Africa.’”
“What of it?” Dennis was frankly bored. “How is that going to help?”
“Wait a bit.—‘The kernel is hard and white, and yields its virtue to alcohol and less perfectly to water.—’”
“I’ll bet it does, or they’d never have got it down Hughes, if what we’ve heard of his habits is straight!” interrupted Dennis, his interest once more aroused. “There you’ve got it, Mac! Find the last one he took a drink with and you’ll have the guy that croaked him!”
“That’s not all,” McCarty began again. “‘The beans are reddish, gray, or’—um—‘Kidney-shaped, and about the size’—never mind that!—‘Care should be taken to avoid spontaneous—’”
“Did you trail around here in all the rain to give me a botany lesson?” Dennis demanded indignantly. “’Tis not from any book you’ll be learning the truth! I was that upset last night, what with the revolver shot and all, that I never thought to ask you, but what did the old guy you know uptown say about that bu’sted blue balloon? Could he make out from the way it was rotting before our eyes the kind of gas there was in it?”
McCarty hesitated and then said slowly:
“Denny, you’ll mind the other night after we hadexamined it I put it in a cracker box while we went for a bite to eat and when we came home you saw me hunting around for something?”
“You were trying to whistle, too!” Dennis nodded. “That always means you think you’re putting something over! What was it?”
“I was hunting for that cracker box. I knew the minute we came back into the room somebody’d been there, for there was the stale smell of a heavy cigar on the air, not as if he’d been smoking right then, but the scent of it was strong on him as he passed through the place; when I found the box missing I knew what he’d come for.”
“Think of that now! Do you know what it means, Mac? The murderer knew you and not the medical examiner’s assistant had taken it from the conservatory! I wonder if he followed us from then on? The sight of us parading through the streets with all them balloons would have told him we were on, if he wasn’t blind!” Dennis grinned. “Leave the medical examiner find out what kind of gas was it; we know how ’twas give to her, though not what busted the balloon right in her face nor how the gas got in it! The notion come to me that ’twas not meant to kill Lucette, anyway.”
“Not kill her!” exclaimed McCarty. “The first whiff of it must have knocked her cold!”
“But what if it was intended for the baby and not for her?” Dennis lowered his voice. “What if the murderer has a craze for killing children? I’ve heard tell of such things and so have you! Suppose Hughes was poisoned by mistake in the first place for Ching Lee, so that little Fu Moy wouldn’t be protected. Then Horace was takenaway and maybe killed and the Bellamy baby was next on the list—!”
“Denny, you’re running wild!” McCarty interrupted in his turn. “The murderer’s brain has got a twist to it, but he’s not as crazy as all that. Baby-killers are just stupid, low brutes without the shrewdness or knowledge to plan such crimes as we’re up against now. We’re fighting a mind, not a fist with a knife or a club in it!”
“So you’ve been saying!” Dennis retorted disgustedly. “That comes of those books you’ve been reading! Whilst you’ve been figuring out his ancestors and the blood that’s in him to decide is he in the ‘Born’ or ‘Habit’ class, like that Diagnostic book of yours has it, he’s been having an Old Home Week in the Mall, kidnapping and killing right and left! ’Twill be a week to-night—!”
McCarty beat a hasty retreat and took his solitary way to the restaurant, where he ate a hearty dinner to make up for the deferred lunch. Then he returned to the Mall, to prowl about like an unquiet if somewhat too material ghost. The rain had stopped at last and although the sky was still partially overcast the glimmer of a few stars gave promise of a clear dawn. Lights were brilliant in the Sloane, Parsons and Orbit residences, but low in Goddard’s and Mrs. Bellamy’s, where the lady had been in a hysterical state since the murder of her baby’s nurse.
Yost had been relieved from his post at the mortuary to take the place of the night watchman, and McCarty walked up and down with him for more than an hour, discussing the strange chain of tragedies. All at once, as they passed the court next to the Goddard house, he heard a low, coaxing masculine voice and came uponTrafford bending over something which lay in the shadows.
“Come on, old fellow!” the tutor was saying. “Come along in the house like a good boy! Horace isn’t here, Max, it’s no good waiting—!”
“’Tis a strange acting dog and no mistake, Trafford,” McCarty remarked.
The tutor looked up.
“He’s grieving himself to death,” he said. “He hasn’t touched a morsel of food since Tuesday, though we’ve tempted him with everything, and he is so weak he can scarcely stand, but he waits about out here all the time for Horace to come home. I’ve got to get him in now if I have to carry him!”
At this juncture, however, Max rose languidly to his feet and began sniffing at McCarty’s boots, whining softly.
“’Tis like he was trying to talk!” the latter exclaimed.
“I wish he could, if he knows anything!” Trafford replied sadly. “If Horace isn’t found soon his mother will lose her mind! McCarty, can’t you people do anything? Even to know the—the worst would be better than this horrible uncertainty and suspense!”
“The lad’s disappearance is not the half of what we’re up against, Trafford,” McCarty reminded him. “We’re doing everything mortal to find him and soon, maybe to-morrow, we’re going to take a big chance.”
He watched while the tutor led the dog into the house and then shaking his head he proceeded to Orbit’s and rang the bell. It was little Fu Moy, resplendent in his embroidered serving jacket, who opened the door and without announcing him, beckoned and preceded him to the library, where the last interview had taken place.
The room was in deep shadow save for the glow from the hearth and a single broad beam from a bridge lamp which played down upon a chessboard laid out on a small table. At opposite sides of it two silent, intent figures sat as immovably as graven images. If they were aware of McCarty’s appearance they made no sign.
Were they hypnotized, or something? The two of them couldn’t be asleep, sitting bolt upright like that! McCarty waited a good five minutes and then advanced slowly into the room but still they appeared oblivious.
Orbit was sitting forward, his eyes glued on the board, his hands clasped and elbows resting on the arms of the chair but the florid-faced Englishman appeared to be gazing off into space with the intent yet absent look of one absorbed in profound concentration.
Then slowly Orbit’s right hand disengaged itself from the other and he moved a figure upon the board, his hand almost mechanically seeking its former position.
A little smile twitched at the corners of Sir Philip’s mouth and with a swift intake of his breath he moved, sweeping from the board the figure of shining white with which Orbit had just played. The latter instantly lifted his head and raised his eyes to the high, beamed ceiling. With the slight gesture the first sound broke the stillness, as a muffled, barely audible exclamation came from Sir Philip’s throat.
Orbit made one more move and then glanced in amused commiseration at his friend.
“Checkmate, Sir Philip! I shall give you your revenge in London next season!”
“I say! That was damned clever! Led me right into ambush, what? I wish some of the masters could haveseen it!—Oh, there you are, McCarty! Are you a chess player, by any chance?”
“No, sir.” McCarty advanced a step farther. “Mr. Orbit, Fu Moy showed me straight in and I waited so as not to disturb you.”
“That’s all right!” Orbit nodded pleasantly. “Our game is over.—You have news for me?”
“Of a sort. You recall saying on Wednesday that you thanked heaven the Bellamy baby was old enough to talk?”
“Yes!” Orbit responded eagerly. “I have tried several times to see Mrs. Bellamy and little Maude, but the mother is still almost overcome by the narrow escape of her child and will not permit her out of her sight for a moment, while she herself is too prostrated to see any one.”
“The little one talked to me the other day,” McCarty vouchsafed.
“She did? Why didn’t you tell me?” Orbit pushed back his chair and rose. “Did she see any one, hear anything? Tell me, for God’s sake! This may be most important!”
His fine eyes had lighted and the latent excitement seemed to have communicated itself to his guest for Sir Philip also rose.
“No, sir. She knew no more than you or I, but she kept asking for her balloon. It seems Lucette had bought it for her off a wop by the gate just before you invited them in; ’twas a blue one, the baby said, and she was persistent about it, but I recall seeing no toy balloon in that conservatory.—Did you?”
“No.” Orbit shook his head. “I really don’t know, though; I didn’t notice particularly. Surely it couldn’thave had anything to do with the case, though!—What is it, Fu Moy?”
The little coffee boy spoke rapidly in Chinese and after a moment Orbit turned with a gesture which included Sir Philip and McCarty.
“I am wanted on the telephone. You will excuse me?”
When he had left the room the Englishman glanced again at the chessboard with the self-centered absorption of the enthusiast.
“Too bad you didn’t understand that play! Dash it all! Very clever! On the twenty-first move, his Knight captured my pawn. Check. I moved the King to the Queen’s square. By Jove, he moved the Queen to Bishop’s sixth. Check. I captured his Queen with my Knight and then Orbit moved his Bishop to King’s seventh. Checkmate! Devilish trick, I should say. Really, McCarty, he had served me with what is known in chess parlance as ‘The Immortal Partie!’”
“‘Checkmate,’” repeated McCarty slowly. “That means calling the turn, then, blocking every play; not winning anything yourself but keeping the other fellow from moving! ’Tis a poor sort of victory, to my mind, but better than getting wiped off the board, and the secret of it is—looking ahead!”