CHAPTER XVMIDNIGHT MARAUDERS
Thelitter of wrecked balloons was cleared away and the one which had changed color with such sinister significance was carefully deposited in an empty tin cracker box. With pipe and cigar alight Dennis and McCarty were discussing the latest development, their fatigue forgotten in their renewed zeal.
“There’s an old guy I know living far uptown that’s a wizard about chemistry,” McCarty observed, neglecting to mention that the “wizard” had an interesting police record. “I’ll take the box with what’s left of that blue balloon in it up to him, come morning, but we’ll not breathe a word of it to another living soul! ’Tis somebody on the Mall or with easy access to it that’s walking around with two murders and a disappearance on the conscience of him, maybe giving us fair words every day and the grand laugh behind our backs. We don’t know who it is and till we do we’ll be telling nothing to any of them.”
“True for you!” Dennis nodded. “I’m thinking, though, ’tis on the north side of the street you’ll find your man, Mac, for everything that’s happened hit the three households on the south side; Orbit’s valet and Goddard’s son and now Mrs. Bellamy’s nurse-girl. The only two houses opposite that are occupied, since the Burminsters are still away, are Five and Seven—the Sloanes’ and theParsons’. We’ll not be forgetting that Swede Otto who beat it away from the Sloanes’ at the first alarm and we’ve not so much as crossed the doorsill there yet. Then there’s the Parsons, too. They hold themselves better than their neighbors and have them that are next to royalty, no less, for company and still and all they have an ex-convict and suspected poisoner at that to buttle for them. If I was that ambassador I’d have thought twice before I stayed to lunch!”
“They’ve a houseful of crooks, ‘ex’ or no,” McCarty asserted, regarding his cigar thoughtfully. “I got Porter right, but ’twas the inspector first gave me the wire without knowing it when he said the housemaid and page boy looked familiar, as if he’d seen them somewhere before but couldn’t place them. Where would he have seen them, if ’twas not at headquarters or on trial? André put the last touch to it this afternoon, though.”
“Orbit’s cook?”
“He did that. Do you mind when I asked him if he knew the cook over at Parsons’ he said it was a ‘she,’ a great big woman with three moles on her cheek? Jennie Malone shoved about twenty thousand dollars’ worth of the queer in the best stores of the city for the Carpenter counterfeiting gang before she was pinched. She’d never have been caught at all if it hadn’t been for those three moles that gave her away. Ever since André tipped me off I’ve been asking myself what was the rest of that household like, and did they have more reasons than one for keeping the neighbors at arm’s length?”
Dennis sat forward suddenly and took his pipe from his mouth.
“Do you mean the Parsonses themselves are not on the level?” he demanded. “The old gentleman, with hisgrand charities and his pious talk, the old maid sister and the young niece? Do you think the old gentleman is cracked, maybe, and turned murderer wholesale? Is it him that’s planted a hotbed of crime right there in the Mall?”
“Somebody has,” McCarty shrugged. “Of course the two murders happened in Orbit’s house, if ’twas there Hughes got his dose of Calabar bean, and the Goddard kid disappeared from next door—”
Dennis snorted.
“Would Orbit be killing the valet that give him perfect service all these years till he can’t so much as put on his own shirt for himself, no less murdering a nurse-girl, and running off with a boy? None in the Bellamy household could have had a hand in Lucette’s death and it stands to reason Goddard didn’t kidnap his own son! Orbit’s likely to be under fire now and come in for a lot of notoriety and maybe—well, there’s others under that roof besides himself!”
“I’ve been turning that over in my mind, too.” McCarty took a last pull at his cigar and laid the stub in the tray. “We’ve put in this evening so far breaking balloons and that’s about all we’ve been doing since first this case started; opening up one gas-bag after another and getting nothing but empty air! I’d like a chance to go through the Parsons house and Orbit’s too, with no one the wiser, and if you were not such a clumsy, heavy-footed galoot, Denny, we’d be paying them a little visit to-night without leaving our cards.”
“‘Clumsy,’ is it!” Dennis repeated indignantly. “Me that’s been scaling walls and ladders since you tramped your first beat! We’ve broke in an empty house there in broad day and we can get in the others at night just aseasy, in spite of what newfangled burglar alarms they may have. I’m on to most of them through fighting fires, thanks be! Since the first night we went through those gates I’ve felt in the soul of me that sooner or later we’d be marauding in there like a couple of second-story workers and now it’s come! If instead of Parsons and his convicts it should be one of those Frenchmen or the Chink in Orbit’s house, we’ll spot him!”
“The first thing we spot will be the restaurant around the corner. ’Tis near ten o’clock and we’ve had no dinner,” McCarty rejoined. “We won’t be showing up near the Mall till midnight or after and we’ve a lot to plan first.”
Their meal finished they returned again to the rooms. McCarty paused for a moment in the doorway of the living-room, a peculiar expression crossing his face.
“Sit you down and light your pipe, Denny.” He threw open the closet door as he spoke. “I’ll be with you in a minute. Now where—?”
He left the closet and went into the bedroom. Dennis paused in the act of tamping his pipe to listen open-mouthed, for an unaccustomed sound came to his ears. McCarty was whistling, wheezily and off-key, but there was something oddly reminiscent in the simple, insistently reiterated measure; moreover McCarty never indulged in that or any other form of melodious expression unless in a blatant attempt at dissimulation. What was he doing, anyway, that he didn’t want his own pal to get on to? He’d opened and shut the door of his clothes-closet and now he was in the bathroom, still trying to whistle that funny little tune, almost like the ones Molly’s kid learned at the kindergarten!
Dennis returned to his pipe, as McCarty reëntered the room.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked.
McCarty reddened.
“I did not, but no matter,” he replied shortly. “I unearthed an old kit of burglars’ tools that I took once off of Black Matt, that’ll maybe come in handy and here’s a revolver for you.”
“I’ve no use for it!” remarked Dennis hastily, regarding the weapon with small favor. “Something short and hefty is more in my line, with no trigger to go off unexpected and send me to the chair!”
“Do you think I’d trust you with it if it was loaded?” his host retorted. “’Tis only to throw a bluff if we’re cornered. We’ll be wearing handkerchiefs over our faces like movie burglars, for whatever comes we don’t want to be recognized. It don’t matter what tracks we leave behind us as long as we get clear ourselves so we’ll take these nippers to cut every wire we see.”
“And to-morrow there’ll be a new job for us, tracking our own selves!” Dennis grinned, and then his face sobered. “We’ve the hardest job on our hands that ever we tackled, Mac, with this inhuman devil to lay low!”
“I’ve a creepy feeling that there’s more than him at work.” McCarty dropped the tools he had been sorting and stared reflectively into space. “I don’t know how to put it, but it seems as if there was something powerful and as evil as a spirit from Hell itself that’s helping the wretch in his destruction! He’s getting bolder, Denny, he’ll over-reach himself yet. If we could figure who’s to be the next we could close in on him!”
“’Tis too deep for me.” Dennis shook his head. “Is there a glass-cutter and a lump of putty in that layout?”
For more than an hour they discussed the forthcoming adventure. At midnight they left the apartment and took a roundabout way across town to the New Queen’s Mall. Waiting until Dave Hollis, the night watchman, had strolled to the other end of the block, they let themselves in at the west gate and slipped into the court between the Burminster mansion and the Sloanes’ smaller residence next door. The original plan had been to visit Orbit’s house first, but a light still glowed from the lower floor, indicating that the host and his guest, Sir Philip Devereux, had not yet retired. The Parsons establishment, however, was decorously dark, and they proceeded to its rear. There they paused to adjust handkerchiefs over the lower part of their faces and Dennis took stock of the situation. There was no moon and even the stars were partly obscured by scudding clouds, while the rising wind that swirled through the alley-like spaces between the houses betokened a coming storm.
“’Tis the equinox, no less, that’s on the way!” Dennis shivered more from nervousness than chill and his voice came in a muffled whisper from beneath the handkerchief. The flashlight in his hand wavered as he directed its ray against the house wall. “Look at that, now! If the old gentleman keeps any valuables here he must think that the crooks under his roof are enough protection from them outside, for he’s still depending on the old Kip electric system, that a babe in arms could disconnect!... Get you to the mouth of the alley, Mac, and keep an eye out for the watchman.”
McCarty obeyed. When, after an interval during which Hollis had passed twice, he heard a cautious hiss behind him and returned, it was to observe loose wires dangling innocuously from the wall and a yawning aperturein one of the windows where Dennis had removed a whole pane of glass.
“I made a good job of it,” the latter whispered complacently. “The telephone is cut, too, and the inside burglar attachment. The old gentleman’s not such a fool after all, for he’s got an installation that once set would warn him if a window or outside door was touched, but I put it out of business. Take off your shoes like I did and then come on; I’ve fixed the catch already.”
He raised the window inch by inch while McCarty removed his shoes, tied the laces together and hung them about his neck. Then Dennis crawled over the sill, drew his bulkier companion in after him and flashed his light quickly about.
“There’s the door. You said not to bother with any rooms downstairs except the old gentleman’s private study or sitting-room if he’s got one, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I can see the foot of the back stairs at the end of this hall, so shut off that light!” McCarty whispered in response. “You’re breathing loud enough to wake the dead!”
They fumbled their way to the stairs and up. The silence was oppressive and to the amateur house-breakers it seemed to hold an ever-increasing menace. They padded along in their stockinged feet through the wide hall, pausing at each doorway as McCarty directed his own electric torch within, but only stately drawing-rooms and a dining-hall huge enough for a banquet met their gaze.
“Wouldn’t you think he’d buy more furniture?” McCarty forgot their equivocal situation for the moment as he gazed disparagingly down a long portrait gallery, where Cavalier and Puritan forebears of the Parsonsfamily looked down upon a few chairs placed at wide intervals against the wall. “There are not seats enough in all the parlors to hold a decent funeral and what there is is old and dull like the junk in Girard’s antique shop!”
“Maybe ’tis worth as much and more,” Dennis suggested sagely. “I’m not facing jail this minute, though, for a chance to look at it!—There’s a smaller room beyond that might be the old gentleman’s study.”
He had guessed truly, though the apartment in which they found themselves more closely resembled a business office. A roll-top desk, a swivel chair, filing cases and a solidly compact safe met their gaze; the rugs, the upholstered furniture and tall bookcases which completed the appointments formed merely an incongruous background.
“Unless you’re up in safe-blowing, which I doubt, I don’t see as this room is going to tell us anything!” Dennis remarked. “Them keys that you stuffed your pockets with will do no good.”
“Won’t they?” McCarty chuckled grimly and strode toward the nearest filing case. “Hold your light steady, Denny; fireproof this thing may be, but all the sections of it open with the one lock and I could pick it with a buttonhook!”
The lock confirmed his opinion by yielding to the third key tried, and the various sections filled with an orderly arrangement of ledgers and documents were at their disposal.
“Look at the fine, neat writing of him.” Dennis was rummaging in the topmost one. “What’s this? ’Tis a lot of typed stuff with his own notes on the margin and headed: ‘Report. Chris Porter, 1913-1920.’ He’s wrote under it: ‘Reasonable doubt. Pardon essential’; then, ‘Pardon granted, help needed.’”
“Give it to me!” McCarty demanded. “Are there any more like it? These ledgers have nothing in them but notes on charity cases.”
“Here’s another; something about a reformatory, and in his own writing: ‘Weak not vicious. Useful if right influence.’ It’s headed: ‘Danny Sayre, 17.’—This one is about that Jennie Malone—”
“Let me have them all!” McCarty interrupted. “Don’t you see what they are? The criminal records of all the hired help! Take the next section, after.”
A pause broken only by the rustling of papers ensued and then Dennis exclaimed in an awestruck whisper:
“Mac! Here’s a lot of notes about ways of killing, all mixed up with religion, and—and among ’em’s poison gas! Fluorine, hydrogen and H2F2—!”
“Grab it!” McCarty hastily thrust the documents he had been examining into his pockets and closed the filing case. “Grab all the notes and come along; we’ll need look no further in this house!”
Yet on the way to the door he paused and ran the pin-point of light along the rows of books in their towering cases. They appeared to be volumes of reference on widely diversified subjects, from hygiene and sanitation to law and religion; all were arranged in meticulous order, save on a lower shelf where the huge tomes of an encyclopædia had been stacked helter-skelter. One volume, that labeled: “Bronze—Cephalaspis,” protruded from the row as though too hastily replaced and McCarty stooped on a sudden impulse and drew it out. The morocco covers fell apart and the book opened midway, where a thin, silvery, leaf-shaped object had been inserted as a mark.
At a muttered injunction Dennis held his light trainedupon it and McCarty’s eyes traveled down the page then stopped and for a long minute there was no sound except their mingled breaths. Then the latter whispered:
“Listen, Denny; here’s a queer one!—‘It is used in the form of an emulsion by the natives of Africa, as an ordeal when persons are suspected of witchcraft. It is believed that if the suspect vomits it he is innocent; if it is retained and death occurs, he is guilty.’”
“A mighty sensible arrangement, considering!” Dennis commented. “If he’s guilty, and I’d not put witchcraft past them heathen, they’re saved the bother and expense of an execution!... But what in the name of common sense has it got to do with what’s been going on here in the Mall?”
“Nothing.” McCarty tore out the page, wrapped it about the leaf-like bookmark and pocketed it. “Nothing whatever, except that the stuff they make the suspects take is Calabar bean!”
He replaced the mutilated volume and they stole from the room, making their way down the stairs and back to the open window, through which they had entered. The silence was unbroken and when they had crawled through the aperture and out into the wind-swept court McCarty leaned against the wall balancing himself precariously on one foot as he drew on a shoe, while Dennis softly closed the window.
“We’ll not be breaking into Orbit’s?” the latter asked, as he followed his companion’s example. “Them notes about poison gas, the marked page telling of Calabar bean, and the life history of the crooks he surrounds himself with—if Benjamin Parsons isn’t the man we’re looking for I’ll eat my hat!”
“Then maybe you’d better be working up an appetiteagainst the future!” suggested McCarty dryly. “There’s no more proof against him than there was against that Otto Lindholm and if the lights are out over at Orbit’s I’m going to take a chance!”
The miniature palace across the way was in total darkness, but its marble front gleamed whitely in the faint glimmer of starlight before a wind-driven cloud obscured them again. Once more escaping the vigilance of the night watchman they crossed the street and passed down the opening next to the Goddard house where the glow from all the upper windows bore mute testimony once more to the sustained anxiety and heartbreaking suspense within.
McCarty halted his companion before the little side door.
“I’ll wait here while you go around back and cut any wires you find,” he directed. “The bulge of the conservatory hides me from the street and ’tis not likely any of the Goddard household will be looking out their windows. What with the murder and then company and all, Ching Lee may have forgot to fasten this door proper on the inside, and we can force it easier than the iron grill outside the rear windows. Don’t be all night, Denny!”
Dennis glanced rather dubiously up at the next house, then out to the sidewalk, but he hurried away without a word and McCarty took out his keys and waited.
The strangely coincidental facts he had unearthed in Benjamin Parsons’ study gave him much food for reflection, but long experience made him more wary of jumping to conclusions than his optimistic colleague. Parsons was known as an eminent and practical philanthropist; what if he’d taken those ex-convicts into hishome to reform them at first hand? It would be natural enough for him to keep reports on their past records. Calabar bean had been prominently mentioned in the papers in connection with the murder of his neighbor’s valet; mightn’t he have been interested sufficiently to look it up as a rarity? The notes on poison gas “mixed up with religion” were more difficult to explain, but then only Dennis had seen them yet and—where the devil was Denny, anyway?
McCarty craned his neck to stare into the darkness toward the rear but no deeper shadow moved and no sound came to him but the moaning swish of the wind. Denny had maybe found a burglar alarm that it wasn’t so easy to put out of business!
Hollis pounded heavily past on the sidewalk, then returned and went on again and still there was no sign of his erstwhile companion. All at once the bolts of the door against which he leaned were drawn back and McCarty had barely time to spring aside and flatten himself in the corner of the out-curving glass conservatory wall when the door itself swung inward.
He held his breath but no one appeared. At last a low hiss assailed his ears.
“’Tis you!” Mingled relief and exasperation lent emphasis to his whispered ejaculation. “For what did you play such a damn fool trick? I near landed on the flat of my back—”
“Forget it!” Denny interrupted with unaccustomed tone. “Come on in before the watchman passes again! You’d never have got past these bolts only I found a way in through the little pantry ventilator; you couldn’t have squeezed through it in a year!—Now, which way? Is it up to the floor where the Frenchmen and them twoheathen sleep that we’ll be going? Nobody’s stirring.”
He had closed the door and noiselessly shot the bolt. McCarty responded:
“I want to make sure; Orbit said he wasn’t a good sleeper, you’ll remember, and if he could rest easy in his bed this night, with that poor girl murdered under his roof not so many hours past, he’s not the man I took him for! We’ll go up the back stairs and then sneak along the hall to his door. Thanks be, we know the lay of this house!”
They crept silently through the card-room and past the pantries to the back stairs, where they stopped and removed their shoes again before venturing upward. No faintest ray of light shone from under any door on the floor above, but from behind one on the left deep and regular stertorous sounds denoted that one at least of the household, doubtless the distinguished arrival of the previous evening, slumbered, unhaunted by morbid visions.
Before the door of Orbit’s own bedroom they halted but no sound came from within and at length McCarty motioned to his companion and tiptoed into the sitting-room adjoining.
“You’ve been in that bedroom before.” His lips barely formed the words close to Dennis’ ear. “You’ll know how the furniture’s placed, so as not to fall over it. Go in and see is he asleep; I’ve our story all fixed if he should jump you.”
“I’ve not!” Dennis retorted in palpable reluctance. “Moreover there’s a queer, sweetish smell on the air; don’t you get it? If he or anything else in there jumps me I hope you’ll get busy first and explain afterwards!”
He left McCarty’s side and the latter heard his feet pad softly off toward the connecting door between therooms. A pause ensued, then came the footsteps again but fainter now. After a moment a low light flashed. It wavered, steadied, went out suddenly and a dull thud came to McCarty’s ears as the electric torch itself struck the thick pile of the rug. He started forward as Dennis’ low, shaking voice was borne upon the silence.
“For the love of the saints, come here, Mac! Somebody’s been before us!”