It was more difficult to leave Ferroni's than it had been to enter it.
It was Clancy's first experience in a restaurant that, she assumed--and
correctly enough--was a fashionable one. And it was not merely the
paying of the obsequious waiter that flustered Clancy. She felt like a
wallflower at a college dance. Conscious that her clothing was not
modish, she had slipped timidly across the room to join Grannis. Now,
having tipped the waiter, she must walk lonesomely across the room to
the door, certain that everyone present was sneering inwardly at the
girl whose cavalier had deserted her.
For Clancy was like most other girls--a mixture of timidity and conceit.
She knew that she was beautiful; likewise, she knew that she was ugly.
With a man along, admiration springing from his eyes--Clancy felt
assured. Alone, running the gantlet of observation--she felt
hobbledehoyish, deserted.
As a matter of fact, people _were_ looking at her. Neither the cheap hat
nor her demoded coiffure could hide the satiny luster of her black hair.
Embarrassment lent added brilliance to her wonderful skin, and the
awkwardness that self-consciousness always brings in its train could not
rob her walk of its lissom grace. She almost ran the last few steps of
her journey across the room, and seeing a flight of stairs directly
before her, hastened down them, not waiting for the elevator.
She walked rapidly the few steps from the entrance to Ferroni's to
Fifth Avenue, then turned south. The winter twilight, which is
practically no twilight at all, had ended. The darkness brought security
to Clancy. Also the chill air brought coolness to a forehead that had
been flushed by youth's petty alarms.
It did more than that; it gave her perspective. She laughed, a somewhat
cynical note in her mirth, which Zenith had never heard from the pretty
lips of Clancy Deane. With a charge of murder in prospect, she had let
herself be concerned over such matters as the fit of a skirt, the
thickness of the soles of her shoes, the casual opinions of staring
persons whom she probably would never see again, much less know.
She had placed Grannis's thousand-dollar bill in her pocketbook. She
clasped the receptacle tightly as she crossed Forty-second Street,
battling, upon the sidewalks and curbs, with the throng of commuters
headed for the Grand Central Station. For a moment she was occupied in
making her way through it, but another block down the avenue brought her
to a backwater in the six-o'clock throng. She sauntered more slowly now,
after the fashion of people who are engaged in thought.
Her instinct had been correct--Grannis was dishonest. His gift of a
thousand dollars proved that. But why the gift? He knew, of course, that
she was aware of his partnership with Zenda. His statement that he
didn't want Zenda to know that he had seen her had been proof of his
assumption of her knowledge of the partnership that existed between
himself and the famous director. Then why did he dare do something that
indicated disloyalty to his associate?
Why hadn't she made him take the money back? He had every right to
assume that she was as dishonest as she seemed. She had permitted him to
leave without protest. Further, with the five-dollar bill that he had
put upon the table, she had paid the check. She made a mental note of
the amount of the bill. Three dollars; and she had given the waiter
fifty cents. One dollar and seventy-five cents, then--an exact half of
the bill she owed to Grannis. She wouldn't let such a man buy her tea.
Also, the change from the five-dollar bill, one dollar and a half. Three
dollars and a quarter in all. Plus, of course, the thousand.
She felt tears, vexatious tears, in her eyes. She was in a mood when it
would have been easy for her to slap a man's face. She had never done
such a thing in her life--at least, not since a little child, and then it
had been the face of a boy, not a man. But now, once again, minor things
assumed the ascendency in her thoughts.
For even Grannis's attempt to bribe her--that was what it was--was a
minor matter compared to the Beiner murder. She wondered what the
evening papers would have to say further about that mystery.
A newsboy crying an extra at Thirty-fourth Street sold her a paper. She
wanted to open it at once, but, somehow, she feared that reading a
newspaper on a cold wintry evening would be most conspicuous on Fifth
Avenue.
Even when she had secured a seat on a down-town 'bus, she was half
afraid to open the paper. But, considering that practically everyone
else in the vehicle was reading, she might safely open hers.
She found what she was looking for without difficulty. Her eyes were
keen and the name "Beiner" leaped at her from an inside page. But the
reporters had discovered nothing new to add to the morning account. A
theory, half-heartedly advanced by the police, that possibly Beiner had
killed himself was contradicted by the findings of the coroner, but if
the police had any inkling as to the identity of the murderer, they had
not confided in the reporters.
That was all. She began to feel justified in her course. To have gone to
the police would have meant, even though the police had believed her
story, scandal of the most hideous sort. She would have been compelled
to tell that Beiner had embraced her, had tried to kiss, had-- She
remembered the look in the murdered man's eyes, and blushed hotly at the
recollection. She would never have been able to hold her head up again.
For she knew that the uncharitable world always says, when a man has
insulted a woman, "Well, she must have done _something herself_ to make
him act that way."
But now she supposed, optimistically, that there must have been, in
Beiner's desk, scores of letters and cards of introduction. Why on earth
should she have worried herself by thinking that Fanchon DeLisle's card
of introduction would have assumed any importance to the police? No
matter what investigation the police set on foot, it would hardly be
based on the fact that they had found Fanchon's card.
So then, as she had avoided discovery by the mere fact of not having
gone to the police, and had thus avoided scandal, and as there was no
prospect of discovery, she could congratulate herself on having shown
good sense. That she had lost a matter of six hundred and fifty dollars,
deposited in the Thespian Bank, was nothing. A good name is worth
considerably more than that. Further, she might reasonably dare to
withdraw that money--what of it she needed, at any rate--from the bank
now. If the police had not by this time discovered the connection
between Fanchon's card of introduction and the woman who had been
observed upon the fire-escape of the Heberworth Building, they surely
never would discover it.
The pocketbook in her hand no longer burned her. There was now no
question about her returning Grannis's bribe. In fact, there never had
been any question of this. But Clancy was one of those singularly honest
persons who are given to self-analysis. Few of us are willing to do
that, and still fewer are capable of doing it.
She wondered if it would not be best to do now what she should have done
last Tuesday morning. If she went to Zenda and told him what Fay Marston
had said to her, she would be doing Zenda a great favor. She was human.
She could not keep from her thoughts the possibility of Zenda's
returning that favor. And the only return of that favor for which she
would ask, the only one that she'd accept, would be an opportunity in
the films. The career which she had come to New York to adopt, and which
rude chance had torn away from her, was capable of restoration now.
She had fled from Zenda's apartment because scandal had frightened her.
The presence of a graver scandal had almost obliterated her fear of the
first. She'd go to Zenda, tell him that his partner was deceiving him,
plotting against him.
She could hardly wait to take off her coat when she reached her room in
Mrs. Gerund's lodging-house. Using some of the note-paper that sold in
Zenith as the last word in quiet luxury, she wrote to Zenda:
MY DEAR MR. ZENDA: I was frightened Monday night at your apartment,
and so I ran away. But to-day Mr. Grannis saw me and talked to me
and gave me a thousand dollars. He said that Mr. Weber could not
return to New York while there was any real evidence against him,
and that, as I had been told by Miss Marston that she was really
Mr. Weber's wife and that she helped him in his card-cheating, I
must keep my mouth shut. He said that he didn't want you to know
that he had met me. I think you ought to know that Mr. Grannis is
on Mr. Weber's side, and if you wish me to, I will call and tell
you all that I know.
Yours truly,
CLANCY DEANE.
In the telephone book down-stairs, under "Zenda Films," she found the
address of his office on West Forty-fifth Street, and addressed the
letter there.
Then she wrote to Grannis. She enclosed the thousand-dollar bill that he
had given her. Her letter was a model of simplicity.