Chapter XVIII.The Girl in the Watch CaseStorm received the news with outward composure, feigning a natural irritation at being aroused from sleep to mask the chaos of his thoughts, and cut George off as soon as he was able to stem the tide of his volubility. Then, throwing a bathrobe about his shoulders, he stumbled to the hall door and opened it. His own morning paper lay on the mat, and even before he picked it up the staring headlines met his eye.“$112,000 Missing. Trusted Employee Of Mid-Eastern Disappears With Huge Sum In Cash”.He shut the door and sinking into the nearest chair read on absorbedly:“John M. Horton, pay clerk for the Mid-Eastern Consolidated Coal Corporation, disappeared on the sixth inst. with a black leather handbag in his possession containing the total sum of $112,552.84 which he had just drawn from the Mid-Eastern Trust Company’s Poughkeepsie branch. He was last seen boarding a train in the latter city at four-forty P. M. for New York en route to Altoona, Pa., and the alarm was not sent out until late yesterday afternoon. Representatives of the Mid-Eastern C. C. C. who have been interviewed loyally declare their faith in the missing man and assert that he must have met with foul play. When last seen ‘Jack’ Horton, as he is known, wore a dark green felt hat, black overcoat, blue serge suit and low tan shoes. He is about forty years of age——”Storm’s eyes traveled on to the last line of the personal description and the few meager details added, and the paper dropped from his listless fingers. This was a contingency which he had not forseen. He had taken it for granted that the body would be discovered and identified before the Mid-Eastern people would have time to take alarm and send out tracers after the missing man.To his mind in its warped state came no reminder of his own treachery, no thought of the hospitality betrayed, the blow struck in the dark from behind. He felt no animosity toward Horton; he had killed him because the latter stood between him and the money he coveted. It had been a necessary, even a brilliant stroke, and he felt no remorse for the dead.But suppose Horton’s body were not found? An aspersion of theft might logically follow in the course of time, but it could not harm him now, and that solution would end any local search. It might be as well, after all . . .As he dressed a vague desire came over him to revisit the scene of that sudden, crafty blow. It could do no harm to stroll up along that path and just glance over the wall. No suspicion could be attached to him for that if the body were found later, and he longed to see for himself if no trace of it could be discerned from above.Then he thrust that trend of thought from him in a wave of horror. Great heavens, was he going mad? Murderers had been known to haunt the scenes of their crimes; that was the way in which they were frequently caught! He must avoid that spot as he would the plague! Yet the vague, terrifying sensation of being drawn toward it persisted, and in sheer desperation he fled downtown earlier than was his wont and plunged feverishly into the business of the day. It had a steadying effect upon his nerves, and when noon came he had quite recovered command of himself.George telephoned again, asking him to lunch, but he pleaded another engagement. If he had to listen to old George’s theories and speculations it would madden him, and he wanted to have himself well in hand for his visit to Police Headquarters with Millard.As the hour drew near his keen anticipation mounted. Millard had said that there was nothing very big on, but that was yesterday; the disappearance of a man with a hundred thousand dollars in his possession would be a sensation even in the manifold events of so huge a city, and he was eager to hear what view had been taken of the case by the authorities. As on the previous afternoon, he purchased the earliest editions of the evening papers; but although they contained lengthy accounts of the Mid-Eastern affair, no mention was made of the discovery of a dead man near the Drive.Millard was bubbling with enthusiasm when they met.“Come along!” he said gaily. “Shouldn’t be surprised if we heard something about this Horton affair. You read of it, of course?”Storm pondered. It was far from his intention to draw any possible limelight on himself, yet if his companion ran into George the latter would be sure to mention that Horton was an old friend of them both, and Millard might think it strange that he had made no reference to it.“Yes.” He nodded carelessly. “Rather a shock, too. There was a chap in our freshman class at college of that name. Holworthy thinks it may be the same fellow, but I doubt it. We lost track of him years ago, anyway.”“They’ll get him,” Millard asserted with conviction. “He won’t get far, even with that bank-roll. I tell you, I wouldn’t steal a pewter golf cup—and that’s the nearest thing to temptation of that sort that I can imagine—with that organization down here after me!”At Headquarters, while Millard searched for the official who was to be their guide, Storm gazed reflectively at the ornate brass plate let into the wall on which were inscribed the names of the former Chiefs and Commissioners. Each had held his own pet theories of the detection of crime, each had had his widely published successes, his obscure failures, and each of them in turn had passed on and out of the office. He could have faced them all just as he was about to face their successor, and he could have beaten them at their own game! Surely no other man in the world with such a secret as he carried would have had the supreme audacity to enter this building on so innocent an errand and converse calmly with the very men who would be hot upon his trail if they knew! It was immense!Millard returned with a secretary of the Commissioner, and they were conducted through the small octagonal anteroom to the inner sanctum of the great man himself. The latter greeted them with brisk geniality, and during the brief talk which followed the introduction, Storm studied him blandly. He was a comparatively young man, not much older than Storm himself, with a pleasant, mildly intelligent face and frank, terse manner. He might have been a mere broker or bank official, courteous but pressed for time, Storm reflected contemptuously; a business man in a political job! What had he to fear from an organization with such a man at its head?His eyes wandered to the tall glass cases which lined one wall. The shelves were filled with a miscellaneous collection of small objects; pistols and revolvers of every caliber and pattern, ugly looking bludgeons and sawed-off lengths of lead pipe swathed in frayed, stained cloth and various small phials half-filled with tablets and liquids of ominous color. As Storm stared idly at the curious collection, his eye was caught by a strangely incongruous object on one of the lower shelves. It was a pale blue satin slipper, absurdly small, inconsequentially gay and flippant among its grim neighbors, lying on its side with the narrow sole and heel turned toward him as though its wearer had kicked it carelessly aside. Then he saw that imbedded in the heel was an odd sliver of steel like a coarse needle on a strong, slender, curved wire, and he started involuntarily.The Chatsworth case! Less than a year before, the city had resounded with the sensational death without apparent cause of the beautiful Mrs. Chatsworth. Then that infinitesimal wound had been discovered upon her heel, the subtle poison traced and the secret spring in the slipper revealed. Storm remembered vaguely that the Commissioner himself was said to have taken a hand in the work of the Homicide Bureau, and that a timely suggestion of his had much to do with the solution of the affair.The insolently gay little slipper seemed all at once more sinister than the grimmest of the weapons which flanked it, and Storm’s eyes were still fastened upon it when he became aware that the Commissioner was addressing him.“It’s the wickedest of the lot, Mr. Storm, isn’t it? It looks strangely out of place there at the first glance—just a bit of woman’s finery among those crime relics; and yet it is the most deadly weapon of them all.”Storm turned to the other in surprise. Could he have uttered his thoughts aloud?“I—er, I didn’t——” he began, but the Commissioner smiled.“It was a simple matter to follow your trend of thought, Mr. Storm. You were surprised at seeing such a thing there, naturally; then you noticed the needle on the spring and recalled the case which put the dainty, innocent little slipper in a different light to you. It was an extraordinary case, too much so for the ingenious gentleman who conceived it to have hoped for success. Its bizarre, unusual features rendered it all the more simple to solve. The casual, unpremeditated cases are the ones which give us the most trouble because as a rule they leave fewer clues. The man who plans a crime most carefully is bound to over-reach himself in some particular, but the one who picks up a weapon lying innocently or accidentally to his hand, strikes with it and lays it down again, is the man who gives us the longest run.”Storm could feel the blood ebbing from his face. Could this genial, smiling person be reading his mind, probing to the depths of the secret he guarded; or was he merely voicing his own favorite theory? At any rate, Storm realized that his previously formed opinion of the Commissioner was undergoing a swift reversal.He murmured a polite phrase or two of interest, and the Commissioner said:“I wish I had time to tell you the history of even a few of the things there, for each is a relic of some case celebrated in the annals of the Department. However, I suppose you gentlemen would like to have a look at the Homicide Bureau and the Bureau of Missing Persons; they are usually the most interesting departments to outsiders. My secretary will introduce you.”He took leave of them with hearty cordiality, and once outside the anteroom Storm smiled quietly to himself. The Commissioner’s unique collection lacked two specimens which might have graced it: a certain golf club known as a driver, and a cane with a wickedly heavy head. But the Commissioner, astute as he was, would never miss them! His theory was all very well in its way, Storm conceded, but it did not go quite far enough. What of the man who did not over-reach himself; the man who perfected his coup in advance and left no clues whatever behind? All unconsciously the Commissioner had been lauding Storm’s own achievements, and his sense of elation heightened.“Nothing doing in the Homicide Bureau this afternoon that would interest you, I am afraid,” the secretary announced. “We’ll try the Bureau of Missing Persons; there is usually something going on there.”He led them down the wide stairs and along the echoing corridor to a door at the left, and Storm saw a large room divided by a rail and subdivided again at the end by partitions forming two smaller offices. An older man with a delicate, high-bred, sensitive face came forward, and as he was presented to the Captain, Storm watched the latter’s quick changes of expression with something of the contempt with which he had at first discounted the Commissioner’s frank, genial manner. This man, he reflected, might have been a scholar or priest; a father confessor, but surely not an analyst of human nature; a pedant, not a person of quick decision and unerring action. Pah! The Captain would be a mere tool in his hands; he could deceive him, trick him, beat him at his own game as easily as he had tricked the Greenlea officials and the simple-minded, guileless community out there.He had already beaten him! Storm smiled again at the thought. The Captain must be combing the country now for a man whose body had lain exposed more than thirty-six hours within the limits of the city, and Storm alone knew where! One word from him would set that quiet office in a furore! And this was the man who had located the supposed Du Chainat on board theAlsace! Du Chainat must have been more of a bungler than Storm had believed!While the secretary was explaining the object of their visit, Millard drew Storm through the opened door of one of the inner offices and pointed out the swinging files of photographs which stood out from the wall.“Unidentified dead,” he remarked pompously with the assurance of a privileged visitor. “Morgue cases and Potter’s Field, you know, mostly derelicts. Dreadful looking lot, aren’t they?”Storm shuddered in spite of himself. The relaxed faces leering maudlinly or with jaw wide in a seeming snarl stared fixedly at him with a look of supreme sophistication, and his own eyes dropped before them. To his super-sensitized imagination they seemed to be crying mutely in a silent chorus: “We know!” Jack Horton knew, also!“Horrible!” Storm ejaculated in answer to his companion’s comment. “Millard I believe you are an inherent ghoul! You’ve been coming here gloating over these wretched things and regaling the country club with a nice lot of cheery anecdotes, haven’t you? I’ll wager half the members have taken to drink!”Millard laughed and turned as the Captain entered.“Not as bad as all that!” he disclaimed, adding to the official; “I suppose you’re all working over time on that Horton case that the papers were full of this morning; chap who disappeared with the payroll of the Mid-Eastern coal people. My friend here knows him.”“You do?” The voice which had greeted them so gently took on in the instant a keen, knife-like edge, and the paternal, rather dreamy eyes narrowed in swift focus like the lens of a camera. Storm felt himself flush beneath the gaze, and he could have annihilated the garrulous Millard.“To be perfectly frank, sir, I don’t know.” His tone was disarmingly candid. “When Mr. Millard spoke of the case I mentioned the fact that there was a chap in my class at Elmhaven of that name. He only stayed for one term and I shouldn’t know him now if I met him, I’m afraid. That was twenty years ago.”He smiled deprecatingly, but the steady glance of the Captain did not waver. “You haven’t seen him since?”“No.” Then, realizing the inevitable question to follow, he volunteered: “The last I heard of our Jack Horton, and then most indirectly, was that he held some sort of minor position in a bank in Chicago. I’m inclined to doubt that this is the same fellow.”The Captain’s face softened, and he said, with a swift return of his old genial manner:“Twenty years can change a man, Mr. Storm. It is the same Jack Horton, I am afraid. We have his record and he attended college at Elmhaven at the time you mention. But it is not certain that he absconded, you know; if it were, the case would not be up to this department. He is merely officially ‘missing’ as yet.”“With a hundred thousand in cash!” Millard smirked. “Not much danger of his having suffered an attack of aphasia, is there, Captain? By Jove, if I had that much money about me, I might forget my own name myself!”The typewriters clicking behind the rail in the outer office ceased all at once as the door leading to the corridor opened slowly, and a girl appeared, hesitating on the threshold. She was an undeniably pretty little girl despite the fact that her eyes were reddened and swollen, but her light summer frock was oddly out of place in that grim setting. She peered slowly about until her eyes caught the Captain’s, and rested there.“Is this,” she began in a high, strained voice, “is this the place where they find people who have disappeared?”“We try to.” The Captain’s tone had mellowed and a persuasive, paternal note crept into it. “Tell me for whom you are looking.”He seated himself at his desk, motioning her to a chair beside it, and drew a blank form toward him. Millard was staring in goggle-eyed interest, and Storm stared also, but from far different motives. Where had he seen that pretty, piquant, slightly sullen face before?As for the girl, she stood undecidedly, twisting the chain of her platinum mesh bag between her hands.At length she burst forth half-confidentially, half-shyly:“For—for Mr. Horton! Oh, you must know who I mean! Mr. John Horton, the paymaster of the Mid-Eastern Consolidated Coal Corporation. The papers say this morning that he has disappeared, but it cannot be true! I was told that if I came here——”The girl in Horton’s watch case! Storm drew a sharp, quick breath and did not need Millard’s nudge to rivet his attention. The girl! He had not calculated upon her taking a possible hand in the game.At a sign from Captain Nairn the stenographers had filed into the second of the inner offices, and to all appearance he and his client were alone.“Who are you, my dear?” His fatherly tones showed no indication of change or added interest.The girl hesitated again.“I’m just a—a friend, but I felt that I had to come to you. If Jack has really disappeared, you know what terrible things will be said about him soon, since he had all that money in his possession. If he hasn’t returned to the colliery it is because something frightful must have happened to him. He must have been set upon by thieves; killed, or hurt and perhaps held prisoner somewhere! Oh, if you don’t find him——!”“Your name, please?” A note of sternness crept into the Captain’s tones.“I am Eugenia Saulsbury.” A little quick color came and went in the girl’s cheeks, but she held her head proudly erect.“You reside here in New York?”“No. I am visiting an old friend of my mother, Mrs. Van Alen on Madison Avenue, but I live with my father near Bethlehem in Pennsylvania. He will be annoyed, I am afraid, that I have courted publicity in coming to you like this, but he—he thought a great deal of Jack, and I know he will back up any investigation to find him to the limit of his resources.” She paused. “I—I have thought of hiring the best private detectives I could find—I wired Daddy so—but I felt that I simply had to come to you, too! I do not believe that Jack ever reached the city.”“Why not, Miss Saulsbury?” The stern note quickened to imperative demand.“Because if he had I am sure he would have made an attempt to communicate with me.” She sank into a chair and fumbled in her bag for her handkerchief, her eyes blinded by sudden tears. “He—I—you see, we—we were very good friends! I know that he is honorable to a fault, and something dreadful must have happened if he cannot be found! You are the head of this bureau, are you not?”“I am Captain Nairn,” the official nodded gravely. “Have you any reason for thinking that he met with foul play other than the fact of his disappearance, Miss Saulsbury? Do you know of any enemies——?”“A hundred thousand dollars in cash would invite the enmity of a great many people if they knew it was in your possession, wouldn’t it?” she observed, with unconscious cynicism. “Jack was always armed when he had the company’s payroll in charge, but I warned him that he was too confident, too sure of his ability to protect it. You see, Captain Nairn, he would never believe any evil of anybody; that was one of the strongest traits in his character. He has had some narrow escapes before, but they were from rough characters down in the mountains. If he took that train at Poughkeepsie, as they say, he must be somewhere between there and here, and if he is not dead, he is badly hurt and unable to communicate with his friends. Please, please lose no time in finding him!”“If what you think proves to be the case he will undoubtedly be discovered,” the Captain began soothingly, but the girl interrupted, wringing her hands.“Every hour, every minute counts, not only if he is hurt physically, but to save him from mental torture! If he is lying injured and helpless somewhere and thinking that people may consider him dishonest, he will be suffering more from that than from what may have been done to him, and the thought is driving me mad! It would be better, almost, to know the—the worst!”The telephone shrilled once at the Captain’s elbow and he picked up the receiver and listened. His face, which Storm had thought mobile, had become a mere expressionless mask. The girl was dabbing at her eyes, but her tears had ceased and her small chin came out indomitably.Captain Nairn uttered the one word “Right!” in reply to the communication which had come to him, then hung up the receiver and turned once more to his visitor. —“Miss Saulsbury, no effort will be spared to find your friend, you may be sure of that.”“But you—you believe he hasn’t taken that money, don’t you? You’ll find out if he has been hurt or imprisoned somewhere?” She had taken his assurance as a dismissal and, rising, held out her hand in appeal.The Captain shook it gravely.“We will do our best to find him, Miss Saulsbury, dead or alive.”When she had withdrawn and the clicking of her small shoes diminished in the corridor outside, Millard stepped forward.“That was mighty interesting, Captain! Don’t mind our listening! So that little lady was in love with Horton, eh? Saulsbury—from Bethlehem! She must be the daughter of ‘Big Jim’ Saulsbury, of International Steel! Do you think she was trying to—er, stall?”“No.” The Captain shook his head. “Her motive was honest and straightforward enough, I think. She made only one misstatement, or attempt at evasion.”“What was that?”Storm drew closer to catch the reply.“That she intended to put the case in the hands of private detectives; she has already done so.—At eleven o’clock this morning, to be exact. You see, gentlemen, her house has been watched since midnight and she has been under surveillance every moment. We could take no chances, and in cases of this sort we look first for the woman!”
Storm received the news with outward composure, feigning a natural irritation at being aroused from sleep to mask the chaos of his thoughts, and cut George off as soon as he was able to stem the tide of his volubility. Then, throwing a bathrobe about his shoulders, he stumbled to the hall door and opened it. His own morning paper lay on the mat, and even before he picked it up the staring headlines met his eye.
“$112,000 Missing. Trusted Employee Of Mid-Eastern Disappears With Huge Sum In Cash”.
He shut the door and sinking into the nearest chair read on absorbedly:
“John M. Horton, pay clerk for the Mid-Eastern Consolidated Coal Corporation, disappeared on the sixth inst. with a black leather handbag in his possession containing the total sum of $112,552.84 which he had just drawn from the Mid-Eastern Trust Company’s Poughkeepsie branch. He was last seen boarding a train in the latter city at four-forty P. M. for New York en route to Altoona, Pa., and the alarm was not sent out until late yesterday afternoon. Representatives of the Mid-Eastern C. C. C. who have been interviewed loyally declare their faith in the missing man and assert that he must have met with foul play. When last seen ‘Jack’ Horton, as he is known, wore a dark green felt hat, black overcoat, blue serge suit and low tan shoes. He is about forty years of age——”
Storm’s eyes traveled on to the last line of the personal description and the few meager details added, and the paper dropped from his listless fingers. This was a contingency which he had not forseen. He had taken it for granted that the body would be discovered and identified before the Mid-Eastern people would have time to take alarm and send out tracers after the missing man.
To his mind in its warped state came no reminder of his own treachery, no thought of the hospitality betrayed, the blow struck in the dark from behind. He felt no animosity toward Horton; he had killed him because the latter stood between him and the money he coveted. It had been a necessary, even a brilliant stroke, and he felt no remorse for the dead.
But suppose Horton’s body were not found? An aspersion of theft might logically follow in the course of time, but it could not harm him now, and that solution would end any local search. It might be as well, after all . . .
As he dressed a vague desire came over him to revisit the scene of that sudden, crafty blow. It could do no harm to stroll up along that path and just glance over the wall. No suspicion could be attached to him for that if the body were found later, and he longed to see for himself if no trace of it could be discerned from above.
Then he thrust that trend of thought from him in a wave of horror. Great heavens, was he going mad? Murderers had been known to haunt the scenes of their crimes; that was the way in which they were frequently caught! He must avoid that spot as he would the plague! Yet the vague, terrifying sensation of being drawn toward it persisted, and in sheer desperation he fled downtown earlier than was his wont and plunged feverishly into the business of the day. It had a steadying effect upon his nerves, and when noon came he had quite recovered command of himself.
George telephoned again, asking him to lunch, but he pleaded another engagement. If he had to listen to old George’s theories and speculations it would madden him, and he wanted to have himself well in hand for his visit to Police Headquarters with Millard.
As the hour drew near his keen anticipation mounted. Millard had said that there was nothing very big on, but that was yesterday; the disappearance of a man with a hundred thousand dollars in his possession would be a sensation even in the manifold events of so huge a city, and he was eager to hear what view had been taken of the case by the authorities. As on the previous afternoon, he purchased the earliest editions of the evening papers; but although they contained lengthy accounts of the Mid-Eastern affair, no mention was made of the discovery of a dead man near the Drive.
Millard was bubbling with enthusiasm when they met.
“Come along!” he said gaily. “Shouldn’t be surprised if we heard something about this Horton affair. You read of it, of course?”
Storm pondered. It was far from his intention to draw any possible limelight on himself, yet if his companion ran into George the latter would be sure to mention that Horton was an old friend of them both, and Millard might think it strange that he had made no reference to it.
“Yes.” He nodded carelessly. “Rather a shock, too. There was a chap in our freshman class at college of that name. Holworthy thinks it may be the same fellow, but I doubt it. We lost track of him years ago, anyway.”
“They’ll get him,” Millard asserted with conviction. “He won’t get far, even with that bank-roll. I tell you, I wouldn’t steal a pewter golf cup—and that’s the nearest thing to temptation of that sort that I can imagine—with that organization down here after me!”
At Headquarters, while Millard searched for the official who was to be their guide, Storm gazed reflectively at the ornate brass plate let into the wall on which were inscribed the names of the former Chiefs and Commissioners. Each had held his own pet theories of the detection of crime, each had had his widely published successes, his obscure failures, and each of them in turn had passed on and out of the office. He could have faced them all just as he was about to face their successor, and he could have beaten them at their own game! Surely no other man in the world with such a secret as he carried would have had the supreme audacity to enter this building on so innocent an errand and converse calmly with the very men who would be hot upon his trail if they knew! It was immense!
Millard returned with a secretary of the Commissioner, and they were conducted through the small octagonal anteroom to the inner sanctum of the great man himself. The latter greeted them with brisk geniality, and during the brief talk which followed the introduction, Storm studied him blandly. He was a comparatively young man, not much older than Storm himself, with a pleasant, mildly intelligent face and frank, terse manner. He might have been a mere broker or bank official, courteous but pressed for time, Storm reflected contemptuously; a business man in a political job! What had he to fear from an organization with such a man at its head?
His eyes wandered to the tall glass cases which lined one wall. The shelves were filled with a miscellaneous collection of small objects; pistols and revolvers of every caliber and pattern, ugly looking bludgeons and sawed-off lengths of lead pipe swathed in frayed, stained cloth and various small phials half-filled with tablets and liquids of ominous color. As Storm stared idly at the curious collection, his eye was caught by a strangely incongruous object on one of the lower shelves. It was a pale blue satin slipper, absurdly small, inconsequentially gay and flippant among its grim neighbors, lying on its side with the narrow sole and heel turned toward him as though its wearer had kicked it carelessly aside. Then he saw that imbedded in the heel was an odd sliver of steel like a coarse needle on a strong, slender, curved wire, and he started involuntarily.
The Chatsworth case! Less than a year before, the city had resounded with the sensational death without apparent cause of the beautiful Mrs. Chatsworth. Then that infinitesimal wound had been discovered upon her heel, the subtle poison traced and the secret spring in the slipper revealed. Storm remembered vaguely that the Commissioner himself was said to have taken a hand in the work of the Homicide Bureau, and that a timely suggestion of his had much to do with the solution of the affair.
The insolently gay little slipper seemed all at once more sinister than the grimmest of the weapons which flanked it, and Storm’s eyes were still fastened upon it when he became aware that the Commissioner was addressing him.
“It’s the wickedest of the lot, Mr. Storm, isn’t it? It looks strangely out of place there at the first glance—just a bit of woman’s finery among those crime relics; and yet it is the most deadly weapon of them all.”
Storm turned to the other in surprise. Could he have uttered his thoughts aloud?
“I—er, I didn’t——” he began, but the Commissioner smiled.
“It was a simple matter to follow your trend of thought, Mr. Storm. You were surprised at seeing such a thing there, naturally; then you noticed the needle on the spring and recalled the case which put the dainty, innocent little slipper in a different light to you. It was an extraordinary case, too much so for the ingenious gentleman who conceived it to have hoped for success. Its bizarre, unusual features rendered it all the more simple to solve. The casual, unpremeditated cases are the ones which give us the most trouble because as a rule they leave fewer clues. The man who plans a crime most carefully is bound to over-reach himself in some particular, but the one who picks up a weapon lying innocently or accidentally to his hand, strikes with it and lays it down again, is the man who gives us the longest run.”
Storm could feel the blood ebbing from his face. Could this genial, smiling person be reading his mind, probing to the depths of the secret he guarded; or was he merely voicing his own favorite theory? At any rate, Storm realized that his previously formed opinion of the Commissioner was undergoing a swift reversal.
He murmured a polite phrase or two of interest, and the Commissioner said:
“I wish I had time to tell you the history of even a few of the things there, for each is a relic of some case celebrated in the annals of the Department. However, I suppose you gentlemen would like to have a look at the Homicide Bureau and the Bureau of Missing Persons; they are usually the most interesting departments to outsiders. My secretary will introduce you.”
He took leave of them with hearty cordiality, and once outside the anteroom Storm smiled quietly to himself. The Commissioner’s unique collection lacked two specimens which might have graced it: a certain golf club known as a driver, and a cane with a wickedly heavy head. But the Commissioner, astute as he was, would never miss them! His theory was all very well in its way, Storm conceded, but it did not go quite far enough. What of the man who did not over-reach himself; the man who perfected his coup in advance and left no clues whatever behind? All unconsciously the Commissioner had been lauding Storm’s own achievements, and his sense of elation heightened.
“Nothing doing in the Homicide Bureau this afternoon that would interest you, I am afraid,” the secretary announced. “We’ll try the Bureau of Missing Persons; there is usually something going on there.”
He led them down the wide stairs and along the echoing corridor to a door at the left, and Storm saw a large room divided by a rail and subdivided again at the end by partitions forming two smaller offices. An older man with a delicate, high-bred, sensitive face came forward, and as he was presented to the Captain, Storm watched the latter’s quick changes of expression with something of the contempt with which he had at first discounted the Commissioner’s frank, genial manner. This man, he reflected, might have been a scholar or priest; a father confessor, but surely not an analyst of human nature; a pedant, not a person of quick decision and unerring action. Pah! The Captain would be a mere tool in his hands; he could deceive him, trick him, beat him at his own game as easily as he had tricked the Greenlea officials and the simple-minded, guileless community out there.
He had already beaten him! Storm smiled again at the thought. The Captain must be combing the country now for a man whose body had lain exposed more than thirty-six hours within the limits of the city, and Storm alone knew where! One word from him would set that quiet office in a furore! And this was the man who had located the supposed Du Chainat on board theAlsace! Du Chainat must have been more of a bungler than Storm had believed!
While the secretary was explaining the object of their visit, Millard drew Storm through the opened door of one of the inner offices and pointed out the swinging files of photographs which stood out from the wall.
“Unidentified dead,” he remarked pompously with the assurance of a privileged visitor. “Morgue cases and Potter’s Field, you know, mostly derelicts. Dreadful looking lot, aren’t they?”
Storm shuddered in spite of himself. The relaxed faces leering maudlinly or with jaw wide in a seeming snarl stared fixedly at him with a look of supreme sophistication, and his own eyes dropped before them. To his super-sensitized imagination they seemed to be crying mutely in a silent chorus: “We know!” Jack Horton knew, also!
“Horrible!” Storm ejaculated in answer to his companion’s comment. “Millard I believe you are an inherent ghoul! You’ve been coming here gloating over these wretched things and regaling the country club with a nice lot of cheery anecdotes, haven’t you? I’ll wager half the members have taken to drink!”
Millard laughed and turned as the Captain entered.
“Not as bad as all that!” he disclaimed, adding to the official; “I suppose you’re all working over time on that Horton case that the papers were full of this morning; chap who disappeared with the payroll of the Mid-Eastern coal people. My friend here knows him.”
“You do?” The voice which had greeted them so gently took on in the instant a keen, knife-like edge, and the paternal, rather dreamy eyes narrowed in swift focus like the lens of a camera. Storm felt himself flush beneath the gaze, and he could have annihilated the garrulous Millard.
“To be perfectly frank, sir, I don’t know.” His tone was disarmingly candid. “When Mr. Millard spoke of the case I mentioned the fact that there was a chap in my class at Elmhaven of that name. He only stayed for one term and I shouldn’t know him now if I met him, I’m afraid. That was twenty years ago.”
He smiled deprecatingly, but the steady glance of the Captain did not waver. “You haven’t seen him since?”
“No.” Then, realizing the inevitable question to follow, he volunteered: “The last I heard of our Jack Horton, and then most indirectly, was that he held some sort of minor position in a bank in Chicago. I’m inclined to doubt that this is the same fellow.”
The Captain’s face softened, and he said, with a swift return of his old genial manner:
“Twenty years can change a man, Mr. Storm. It is the same Jack Horton, I am afraid. We have his record and he attended college at Elmhaven at the time you mention. But it is not certain that he absconded, you know; if it were, the case would not be up to this department. He is merely officially ‘missing’ as yet.”
“With a hundred thousand in cash!” Millard smirked. “Not much danger of his having suffered an attack of aphasia, is there, Captain? By Jove, if I had that much money about me, I might forget my own name myself!”
The typewriters clicking behind the rail in the outer office ceased all at once as the door leading to the corridor opened slowly, and a girl appeared, hesitating on the threshold. She was an undeniably pretty little girl despite the fact that her eyes were reddened and swollen, but her light summer frock was oddly out of place in that grim setting. She peered slowly about until her eyes caught the Captain’s, and rested there.
“Is this,” she began in a high, strained voice, “is this the place where they find people who have disappeared?”
“We try to.” The Captain’s tone had mellowed and a persuasive, paternal note crept into it. “Tell me for whom you are looking.”
He seated himself at his desk, motioning her to a chair beside it, and drew a blank form toward him. Millard was staring in goggle-eyed interest, and Storm stared also, but from far different motives. Where had he seen that pretty, piquant, slightly sullen face before?
As for the girl, she stood undecidedly, twisting the chain of her platinum mesh bag between her hands.
At length she burst forth half-confidentially, half-shyly:
“For—for Mr. Horton! Oh, you must know who I mean! Mr. John Horton, the paymaster of the Mid-Eastern Consolidated Coal Corporation. The papers say this morning that he has disappeared, but it cannot be true! I was told that if I came here——”
The girl in Horton’s watch case! Storm drew a sharp, quick breath and did not need Millard’s nudge to rivet his attention. The girl! He had not calculated upon her taking a possible hand in the game.
At a sign from Captain Nairn the stenographers had filed into the second of the inner offices, and to all appearance he and his client were alone.
“Who are you, my dear?” His fatherly tones showed no indication of change or added interest.
The girl hesitated again.
“I’m just a—a friend, but I felt that I had to come to you. If Jack has really disappeared, you know what terrible things will be said about him soon, since he had all that money in his possession. If he hasn’t returned to the colliery it is because something frightful must have happened to him. He must have been set upon by thieves; killed, or hurt and perhaps held prisoner somewhere! Oh, if you don’t find him——!”
“Your name, please?” A note of sternness crept into the Captain’s tones.
“I am Eugenia Saulsbury.” A little quick color came and went in the girl’s cheeks, but she held her head proudly erect.
“You reside here in New York?”
“No. I am visiting an old friend of my mother, Mrs. Van Alen on Madison Avenue, but I live with my father near Bethlehem in Pennsylvania. He will be annoyed, I am afraid, that I have courted publicity in coming to you like this, but he—he thought a great deal of Jack, and I know he will back up any investigation to find him to the limit of his resources.” She paused. “I—I have thought of hiring the best private detectives I could find—I wired Daddy so—but I felt that I simply had to come to you, too! I do not believe that Jack ever reached the city.”
“Why not, Miss Saulsbury?” The stern note quickened to imperative demand.
“Because if he had I am sure he would have made an attempt to communicate with me.” She sank into a chair and fumbled in her bag for her handkerchief, her eyes blinded by sudden tears. “He—I—you see, we—we were very good friends! I know that he is honorable to a fault, and something dreadful must have happened if he cannot be found! You are the head of this bureau, are you not?”
“I am Captain Nairn,” the official nodded gravely. “Have you any reason for thinking that he met with foul play other than the fact of his disappearance, Miss Saulsbury? Do you know of any enemies——?”
“A hundred thousand dollars in cash would invite the enmity of a great many people if they knew it was in your possession, wouldn’t it?” she observed, with unconscious cynicism. “Jack was always armed when he had the company’s payroll in charge, but I warned him that he was too confident, too sure of his ability to protect it. You see, Captain Nairn, he would never believe any evil of anybody; that was one of the strongest traits in his character. He has had some narrow escapes before, but they were from rough characters down in the mountains. If he took that train at Poughkeepsie, as they say, he must be somewhere between there and here, and if he is not dead, he is badly hurt and unable to communicate with his friends. Please, please lose no time in finding him!”
“If what you think proves to be the case he will undoubtedly be discovered,” the Captain began soothingly, but the girl interrupted, wringing her hands.
“Every hour, every minute counts, not only if he is hurt physically, but to save him from mental torture! If he is lying injured and helpless somewhere and thinking that people may consider him dishonest, he will be suffering more from that than from what may have been done to him, and the thought is driving me mad! It would be better, almost, to know the—the worst!”
The telephone shrilled once at the Captain’s elbow and he picked up the receiver and listened. His face, which Storm had thought mobile, had become a mere expressionless mask. The girl was dabbing at her eyes, but her tears had ceased and her small chin came out indomitably.
Captain Nairn uttered the one word “Right!” in reply to the communication which had come to him, then hung up the receiver and turned once more to his visitor. —
“Miss Saulsbury, no effort will be spared to find your friend, you may be sure of that.”
“But you—you believe he hasn’t taken that money, don’t you? You’ll find out if he has been hurt or imprisoned somewhere?” She had taken his assurance as a dismissal and, rising, held out her hand in appeal.
The Captain shook it gravely.
“We will do our best to find him, Miss Saulsbury, dead or alive.”
When she had withdrawn and the clicking of her small shoes diminished in the corridor outside, Millard stepped forward.
“That was mighty interesting, Captain! Don’t mind our listening! So that little lady was in love with Horton, eh? Saulsbury—from Bethlehem! She must be the daughter of ‘Big Jim’ Saulsbury, of International Steel! Do you think she was trying to—er, stall?”
“No.” The Captain shook his head. “Her motive was honest and straightforward enough, I think. She made only one misstatement, or attempt at evasion.”
“What was that?”
Storm drew closer to catch the reply.
“That she intended to put the case in the hands of private detectives; she has already done so.—At eleven o’clock this morning, to be exact. You see, gentlemen, her house has been watched since midnight and she has been under surveillance every moment. We could take no chances, and in cases of this sort we look first for the woman!”