eleven; so at ten that night, to make my plan sure, I took my roadster
up through Lincoln Park and then up Sheridan Road to the big, new home
of Win Scofield.
He’s had a new one for each new wife, each farther north by a mile or
so than the one just before; and as I went by them (the houses not the
wives, unless they happened to be in them) I checked up my count; four
before Shirley Fendon’s.
She’d worked old Win for a wide, low, long shack of stone with plenty
of plate glass and colored decoration; stunning probably was the word
for it. The expense was patent. I didn’t know then that title to land
and building was in Fred and Ken; they were simply letting Win live in
the house on an allowance which certainly must have been liberal.
The house had one front on the lake and another on the boulevard; and
at one end was a two-car garage. I parked my car below the house, went
by on foot and, looking into the garage, saw both cars within.
It was easy to see, under the half-raised shades and between the
curtains of the house, that the mistress of the mansion was at home.
VI
AND I FAIL TO PREVENT A BUMP-OFF.
Shirley was at her piano near a window facing the boulevard walk. As
the night was cool and therefore the window was down, I could not hear
what she played but her fingers moved over the keys and her red lips
parted and closed and her red head tossed with animation as she sang
her song.
She sang to no one; at least, no one but she was visible from the walk.
Surely it was a light, happy song which she sang as she tossed her head
and smiled. Her hair was bobbed and it flung like fine spun bronze
about her pretty ears. I thought that if I could paint, I’d take a try
at her just now with the soft pink light of her piano lamp upon her.
I’d paint her as Youth--Youth and something else. Youth Enchained!
No; that wouldn’t do. There should be something submissive, or at
least something pathetic about a young person enchained; and there
was nothing submissive about Shirley Fendon Scofield; and not the
slightest touch of pathos. Not at this moment, at least. Quite the
contrary.
I am not a fanciful or figurative man; I can watch symbolic dancing
from Pavlova and Ukrainsky up and down and, unless I hold my programme
in a good light, the performance never brings to me any pervading sense
of “Dawn” or “Death,” of “The Swan” or “Wild Pansies.” But that dance
of Shirley Scofield’s gave me a thrill.
It was a dance, almost, as she tossed and flung herself to the lilt of
the song I could not hear. Perhaps you say I took my thrill from the
programme which Jerry had furnished to me. Let it go at that; anyway, I
got it. Youth was set on snapping her chains to-night; and it was not
to be nice snapping. Not at all! Youth was wild, orgiastic, reckless
and bent on being free.
I thought her over while I stood out there after her dance was done
and she had disappeared. Beyond any doubt, she was Christina. For her
appearance to me in that room beside the river, she’d assumed yellow
hair and a different dress and changed several other things; yet I was
sure of her. I wondered what was her place in the plot afoot to-night.
I was looking in on a last act, I knew; the first had started long ago
when Win Scofield met her in some cabaret and she decided to marry him.
She might have been Keeban’s woman then, I thought; and he, hearing her
plan, had told her to go ahead. Or perhaps he had made the plan for
her, marking up Win Scofield on his board then; and to-night old Win’s
number had come to the top.
I went down the street to my car and started the engine and kept it
going to be ready while I watched. Ten minutes past eleven, I saw a
light in Win Scofield’s garage; a black car came out and a girl got
into it. I waited until it was in the street and then, stepping on my
gas, I charged up the road and gave that black car all I had.
It went into the curb and smashed a wheel and bent the axle too. I
wrecked my front, naturally. Shirley Scofield’s driver was out yelling
at me; he turned and opened the door of his car and switched on the
light and I saw Christina sitting in a corner. Youth snapping her
chains wasn’t there. A scared girl was, you’d think; but she wasn’t
scared. Not she! She was merely pretending to be frightened, while she
sat there mighty quiet and trying to size me up.
She was wondering whether I recognized her from that room by the river,
I thought; she must have been wondering several other things. For one,
how did I happen to run into her just at this moment? For another, how
much did I know?
One thing about me, I’m slow but I’m not expressive. I may be gradual
about getting a fact from somebody else but not many learn much from
me. In bridge, when I bid my hand, nobody’s sure whether I have the
cards or whether I’m just trying to force the other fellow up. To-night
I stepped up to the car as though I’d no idea who might be in it.
“I hope you’re not hurt?” I started; and then, “Why, isn’t it Mrs.
Scofield?”
She spoke my name; I said the obvious regrets and all that. She made
the ordinary replies.
“I was going down after Mr. Scofield,” she mentioned and she spoke to
the chauffeur who had come about beside me. “Thurston, if you’ll get
out the other car now.”
For a moment that stumped me; for if she was going to use another car,
I had to use another plan and I hadn’t another. My own machine, as I’ve
commented, was in no shape to respond to an encore on the act I’d just
finished. At this crisis, Thurston saved me.
“You’re all shook up, Mrs. Scofield,” he told her; and then I was sure,
as I’d suspected before, that he was in on her game. He knew that I
hadn’t just accidentally run him down; and he had different ideas about
the advisability of trying their old plan with the other car.
He was a thin, Cassius-looking driver of about thirty and of the sort
that smoke and dope, as well as think, too much. He was a smooth-shaven
chap and would be good looking if the bones of his cheeks were less
sharp.
“I’m all right, Thurston,” she assured him; but I saw she was thinking
things over and sparring for time.
“You’d better go back into the house and rest, Mrs. Scofield,” Thurston
suggested respectfully enough but strengthened the suggestion with a
jerk of his head which he supposed I didn’t see.
Cars were stopping all about us and people piling out and asking
questions and offering help and so on. Shirley took Thurston’s tip and
let him and me assist her across the street into her house.
She thanked me beautifully and tried at once to be rid of me; but
I said I’d stay awhile to make sure she suffered no bad effect from
my carelessness. So she gave up in a few minutes and telephoned her
husband, at his club, that she wasn’t coming down to-night and he’d
better take a taxi home. I waited till I was sure he’d started in that
taxi and then I left.
I’d done fairly well, I thought; I didn’t fool myself into feeling that
I’d seen old Win out of danger absolutely but I did feel sure that I’d
pried his demise out of the present into the future. What’s the phrase
that surgeons use? I’d considerably prolonged his life, I thought; and,
so thinking and fairly much pleased with my plan after all, I went to
bed and to sleep.
It was half-past four, as I learned after I got fully awake, when I was
roused by some one shaking me. It was father.
“Wake up, Stephen!” he was saying to me. “Wake up! The police are
here. They want to talk to you. Jerry has just shot and killed Winton
Scofield.”
I stumbled up, as you may imagine, with father’s words painting the
picture in my mind. Jerry was in that picture. Then I shook myself and
cast him out of the image and put Keeban, Harry Vine, in his place.
“When was it, father?” I asked.
“Less than an hour ago. The police roused your mother who woke me.”
He was in pajamas and dressing gown, was father, with bedroom slippers
on. He was tall and gray and gaunt-looking in the glow of my reading
lamp which he’d lit. He shook a little and bent a little more; he
believed that Jerry did it.
“Where was it?”
“Jerry killed him at home.”
“How?”
“He shot him, I said; he shot him down in cold blood.”
I began at this time to feel it; and what I felt was not that Jerry had
shot Win Scofield; no, not Jerry who’d grown up beside me as my brother
in this house. That duplicate of Jerry, whom I myself had mistaken
for Jerry when I found him in that basement room, that man and his
Christina, who then was with him, had “got” Win Scofield; and my rage
rose against her. She was his wife and, if she had not fired the shot,
she’d been in the plot. I thought how I had seen her last night singing
and exultant. I clenched my hands and shook.
My father was going on. “He was seen and recognized by three persons.
There’s no doubt about it at all.”
“Who saw him?” I said.
“Mrs. Scofield.”
I laughed at that and it must have seemed mad to father. “Who else?” I
asked him.
“The chauffeur.”
I laughed again.
“And the butler,” father finished.
I didn’t laugh at that. I hadn’t seen the butler but there was no
reason for believing he was not in the game.
“They got him,” I thought to myself. “They got old Win Scofield.”
His life was not an invaluable one, as perhaps you have gathered; but
that wasn’t the point with me. They--his wife and other people close
about him and upon whom he had a right to depend--had got him, and
certainly in some low, treacherous way. No wonder Jerry had warned me
to try and stop this; he’d told me he’d pick and choose, so when he
took the risk of warning, he’d warn against a more than ordinary crime.
“Jerry killed Winton Scofield,” my father repeated just then; and I
came back at him now, “He didn’t.”
I couldn’t tell him that Jerry had sent me to try to stop this murder.
I remembered in time that Jerry forbade me a word. There was no use
talking to father, anyway.
“Get some clothes on,” was all he said to me.
“Keeban did that!” I proclaimed; and father pulled up and faced me.
“There’s no Keeban; don’t let me hear you say that again. This family
faces the fact; Jerry’s gone to crime. We face it and we do not shirk
our responsibility. Come to yourself, Stephen. Jerry’s picture is in
police headquarters in every city east or west; New York, Philadelphia,
San Francisco, Minneapolis, Baltimore, every headquarters has reported
the same; they have no criminal in their galleries who would be taken
for Jerry. There’s never been a Keeban in crime; it’s Jerry.”
“Keeban, he goes by the name of Harry Vine,” I returned; “he’s not in
their galleries because he’s kept out of their hands. They’ve got to
catch a man before they can photograph him.”
My father gave me up. “Come talk to the police,” he said and stalked
from my room.
Downstairs I met Mullaney and a plain clothes man from the central
detective bureau who wanted to know how I happened to run into Mrs.
Scofield’s car at eleven in the evening.
I wanted to know something before I answered this; I wanted to know
that the witnesses, Shirley and Thurston and the butler, were being
held by the police.
All three were; so there could be no harm in keeping what I knew. You
can always tell what you’ve kept to yourself but never call back what
you’ve chattered. I thought, “When Jerry warned me of this murder, he
said ‘not a word to any one.’ If I say he warned me against Shirley,
and the news gets out, not only the police’ll be after him; the crowd
he trains with now will go for him and get him, surely.” So I said to
Mullaney about my collision with Shirley’s car, “You have the report on
that accident.”
“So you stick to it that ’twas an accident?”
I nodded.
“Then tell us, please, what was you doing up that way alone at that
time so that you had the little accident?”
I didn’t like his tone; I didn’t like it at all.
There was no possibility of my convincing him of the existence of
Keeban; and the impossibility of it only made me surer of Keeban,
just as it always did when I argued with father. You see at that time,
it was a matter of faith with me; and nothing feeds up faith like
antagonism. I was slow but also stubborn, as perhaps you’ve perceived.
These men were here because they were sure Jerry had shot down Winton
Scofield; Jerry’d been seen doing it. I wouldn’t believe that;
therefore I had to believe in Keeban.
“What are you getting at?” I asked Mullaney.
He changed his tone. “Our cards are face up on your table, Mr.
Fanneal,” he said, respectfully enough. “We’re not accusin’ you of any
doin’s; but we think you know more about him who was Jerry Fanneal than
you are telling us.”
“What do you think I know?”
“We figure that you thought he was up by Mr. Scofield’s big house last
night and that’s why you was there; we think you was lookin’ for him
when you bumped into Mrs. Scofield comin’ out.”
I could deny that directly and I did. “That’s wrong.”
“You didn’t know he was there or you didn’t expect him there?”
“No: that’s flat.”
“Where may he be now? Do you know that?”
“I do not.”
“That’s flat too, sir?”
“Absolutely.”
They gave me up after a while; and the reporters arrived, bringing
details not mentioned to me by Mullaney or his companion. The reporters
had to see all the Fanneal household and learn what we thought of Jerry
now; they wanted fresh pictures, previously unpublished, of Jerry and
of the rest of us; they had no doubt at all that Jerry had committed
the murder.
“Why would he?” I asked them.
“Why?” was exactly what they wished most to know. They asked, “When
Jerry was one of your family and before he ‘reverted,’ had he ever
quarrelled with or taken a particular dislike to Winton Scofield?”
They were all full of that “reversion” idea which they played up in
their papers.
I went to my office that morning, not with an intention of doing any
business but to wait by my private wire on which yesterday Jerry had
called me. Likely enough it was being watched this morning, I thought;
surely I was being watched as a natural consequence of the police
knowledge that I was loyal to Jerry. Every few minutes, on the office
wire, a newspaper or some friend or some crank was calling me; once
mother called me on the private line; but otherwise it was silent.
By midforenoon the newspapers were strewing all over the streets the
news that Jerry Fanneal, who had vanished since his attack upon Dorothy
Crewe, had reappeared in the rôle of murderer and shot down old Winton
Scofield, the recently rejuvenated. It gave them full flood tide for
all their sensation stuff with the sun of the new murder and the moon
of old scandals pulling the same way. Naturally they raked over the
robbery of Dorothy Crewe and the fate of old Win with his former wives.
You know those pages of pictures which every news sheet seems to have
these days,--three-quarters photographs of the people who stopped their
car on the railroad crossing, the lady who ate the poison and the lady
who sent it, the new back-stroke swimming champion and the tenor who
sang at the Auditorium. Well, the Fanneals and the Scofields, with
Win’s wives, pushed them all off the page that day; we had it solid.
When I looked at the picture of Win’s last wife, Shirley of the yellow
hair, knowing she was also Christina, you may imagine I had some
arguments with myself about staying silent.
A buyer was bothering me all through this time. I’d told the doorkeeper
and the telephone girl, “Turn off everybody you can.” But weak words
had taken no effect upon this gentleman who, by his own account, was
one Klangenberg, a keeper of a delicatessen on a fourth-rate street
off Larrabee. He demanded to see me personally about a claim over a
shipment of Hawaiian pineapple.
“He will see you, sir,” my office manager reported. “He says you
promised to see him.”
I shook my head.
“He says to say to you, sir, if you don’t remember,” my manager
continued, “that when you promised, he asked you about Smetsheen of
Minneapolis.”
I sat up at that; for Jerry was the one who had last asked me about
Smetsheen of Minneapolis. I went out to see Klangenberg, who was a
tall, phlegmatic Swede entirely positive on the subject of pineapple
and quite fluent about it until he had drawn me off alone with him.
Then he said, “‘Kidnapped’ and ‘Westward Ho’ says to Steve, ‘They
crossed us last night; but stick. Not a word; you can help and we’ll
get them. Stick, Steve.’”
That was all he would say; when I asked him anything more, he went back
to pineapple; he was a buyer again, seeking satisfaction on a claim.
This word, which surely was from Jerry, of course helped me to stick.
It meant to me that he’d tried to prevent the murder and, having been
“crossed” somewhere, had failed; but he counted on me to stick while he
kept after Keeban.
A few minutes later, Fred Scofield ’phoned me and asked me to come up
to his father’s place.
VII
I KEEP MY OWN COUNSEL.
When I arrived at the big gaudy house, where I had watched Shirley
singing last evening, the coroner’s men were filing out; they’d
completed their examination. Police were all about the doors, keeping
back a crowd; the officers passed me and Fred came down almost
immediately and took me into the long, gay room where Shirley had
played and sung.
The shades were drawn to-day but as they were white they let in plenty
of light; the glass doors to the hall were closed and so, though we
could talk without being heard, we could be seen from the hall and we
could see most of the lower part of the house and also the stairs.
Fred pointed first to a French window, which opened on the lawn upon
the lake side; it had been forced open and now was braced shut, with
the catch torn out, the screws hanging.
“Here’s where he came in,” Fred told me.
“Who?” I said.
“Jerry.”
“He was alone?”
“Nobody else was seen. Apparently he went first to the sideboard in the
dining room.” Fred gazed across the hall. “He made a noise there.”
When Fred stopped, I commented, “The papers say he made it
intentionally.”
Fred nodded. “He wasn’t after silver. That was simply a bluff. He
brought a bag with him and emptied two drawers into it. There it is.”
A canvas sack, like a mail pouch, lay in the corner and bulged half
full. I didn’t bother to examine it. I was trying to figure out Fred’s
attitude towards me: he wasn’t expressing much but keeping hold of
himself pretty firm.
“Jerry made the rattle with the silver,” Fred went on, “to draw father
downstairs. He did it.
“As father appeared on the landing, Jerry fired from here--from beside
this silk hanging. He fired twice; and neither before the shots nor
between them nor afterwards did Jerry make any attempt to hide, in
spite of the portière right there; and the light was on. He hit father
both times; and father’s pistol went off in his hand as he was falling;
father fired wild, undoubtedly, but in Jerry’s general direction.” Fred
showed the bullet hole near the door. “Jerry wasn’t hit; but he did a
complete job with his gun. He hit father first----”
I stopped Fred. “I know from the papers,” I said.
“Well, they had that right. Father lived about five minutes. He fell on
the landing and was dead before they carried him up.”
Fred’s voice cracked; and I put my hand on his arm without saying
anything. Old Win, if he had played the fool towards the end of his
life, at least had showed good nerve at the finish; and when everything
else was said, he was Fred’s father. When Fred was a boy, Winton
Scofield had been a good father; no one called him a fool then. Every
one knows the thousand touches of memories of fondness from a father;
and Fred was thinking of them.
He went on telling: “Shirley ran down to him as soon as he fell; she
must have been nearly behind him when he got the second bullet. She
wasn’t hurt but she certainly took a big chance to help father. Rowan
reached him maybe a minute later.”
“Rowan, the butler?” I said.
“That’s right.”
“How long has he been in your family?”
“I can’t remember when he hasn’t been.”
“He saw the actual shooting, as the papers say?”
“Not the firing of the shots. Father was down when Rowan arrived at the
top of the stairs; but Jerry wasn’t gone. Rowan saw him plainly. That’s
one of the surest things.”
“What is?”
“That Jerry showed himself; he made no effort either to hide when
father came down or to get away immediately afterwards.”
“Where was Thurston when he saw Jerry?”
“He’d just come in from the wing through that door.”
“He shot at Jerry, they say.”
“Yes; and missed. Jerry fired once at him and grazed him. Then Jerry
got out.”
Fred and I looked each other over. I was thinking, “Jerry didn’t do
that but it is no use telling you so.”
Fred said to me, “You ran into Shirley last night.”
I admitted it.
He went on. “After you’d had me to lunch to talk over father’s
affairs, Steve. I’ve not mentioned that to the reporters or even to the
police yet; but of course I’ve been thinking about it.”
“Mentioning it?” I said.
“I wanted this talk with you first, Steve. Why did you call me
yesterday and afterwards smash Shirley’s car? What did you know?”
I stared at him and shook my head.
“Yesterday at lunch,” Fred kept at me, “you asked me particularly about
father’s engagements for last night; you asked whether Shirley would
drive down to meet him. I told you she would.”
I had nothing to do but to nod at this.
Fred asked directly, “You smashed into her car to stop her?”
I stared at him and kept thinking of Jerry’s “Not a word to any one”
and the message Klangenberg brought me from “Kidnapped” and “Westward
Ho” which begged me “to stick.” Yet I had to say something here or I
might as well, since my actions already had spoken for me.
“Yes, Fred; I smashed into her to stop her from meeting your father.”
“I was sure of it. You had reason to think, yesterday, that something
was going to happen to him?”
There was nothing for it but another nod at this.
“Where did you get your reason?”
I might as well have told him; he told me that he knew I got it from
Jerry. He held the police theory with this variation; I had been having
some sort of communication with Jerry through which I had stumbled upon
the idea that something was going to happen to Winton Scofield. I had
got the notion that it was going to happen through his wife, and so, in
my stupid way, I’d driven up to the house deliberately to smash into
her car and scare her out of whatever plan she had in her mind.
Fred was emotionally worked up, of course, he believed that I meant
well by what I tried to do; he didn’t doubt I meant well now. He didn’t
blame me for having supposed when I found something was planned against
his father that Shirley was in it.
“That’s what I thought,” he told me, “when Rowan ’phoned me this
morning and got me out of bed to tell me, ‘Mr. Fred, your father’s
shot.’
“The family--Kenyon and I--always figured, naturally, that money was
what Shirley was after. That’s why we fixed his affairs so she could
never get much, even if father had wanted to give it to her. He didn’t
have it to give; we had him on an allowance. The only big sum she could
get in a lump was his life insurance, which he made over to her. He
carried it from the old days, nearly half a million.”
Here was some of the stuff I’d come for. All morning my mind had been
reaching for a motive, you see,--why old Win Scofield had found a place
on Keeban’s board and why his number had come to the top just now. Fred
talked on and made it perfectly plain to me.
While he talked, I put myself in Keeban’s place for a while and
tried to take things from his point of view. I went back a bit to do
this--back a few months to the time when old Win, divorced once more
and rejuvenated, had arrived again at the cabarets and resumed beau-ing
about with the girls. I thought that when Shirley--or Christina--had
met him, she talked him over with Keeban and they’d marked him down
between them for easy meat. She married him to get away with the big
money old Win was supposed to have but hadn’t; for Fred and Kenyon had
seen to that, as I’ve mentioned. Win took her to Paris and brought her
back to live with him on an allowance.
Maybe from the first she had had her eyes on the old man’s insurance;
but I didn’t think so. I thought, “She got into this marriage with an
idea of an easy get-away with a pile; and when Ken and Fred fooled her,
she decided to fool them; she saw Keeban again and they decided to get
that insurance money. But they had a big difficulty with that; they had
to do more than merely ‘croak’ old Win; they had to do it so Shirley
would not possibly be connected and so the insurance money would be
paid over to her and she could get away with it.”
There, surely, was a job for them when the family and friends thought
what they did of Shirley.