In the first place, we didn’t want Shirley to have the money, half
a million for marrying father; then it was costing us over thirty
thousand a year to pay the premiums; and, also, we figured it might be
dangerous as a temptation.
“Not that we thought Shirley’d kill father directly, Steve; but
there’s many a way to shorten a man’s life, indirectly. Father
played he was young again. Well, all she’d have to do would be to
over-encourage him with her eye on that half million. Anyway, Ken and I
decided to stop paying the premiums on that insurance--save ourselves
about thirty thousand a year and make father a little safer.”
Of course, this told me why old Win’s number had jumped to the top
of the board just now; the sons were stopping his insurance. Fred
continued:
“But since the insurance was still in force, I couldn’t help thinking
of that when Rowan called me; I couldn’t help thinking Shirley was
mixed up in that murder. Then Rowan told me it was Jerry Fanneal who’d
shot father and I knew Shirley couldn’t have anything to do with it.”
Fred talked on; but I didn’t pay much attention for a few minutes; for
now I could see through the rest of Keeban’s scheme; I could see not
only why he had shot Win Scofield, but why he had done it himself and
why he had shown himself in the doing, making no attempt to hide.
For he wanted to be seen; he wanted to be identified, particularly by
Rowan. For Rowan would identify him, as Rowan did, for Jerry Fanneal;
and, so identified, no one would connect Shirley with the murder. Who
was Jerry Fanneal, in these days? A wild, irresponsible criminal, a
man from nowhere who had betrayed the breeding bestowed upon him and
had “reverted.” As he had attacked and robbed Dorothy Crewe, now he
had entered Win Scofield’s house and shot him either wantonly or for
some old, brooded-over pique; that was what the newspapers assumed and
the police and even Win Scofield’s sons who had most hated and doubted
Shirley.
Fred was feeling badly over how he’d ridiculed his father the last
time he’d talked with me and how he’d mistaken Shirley. “She was right
there beside father and she never thought of herself, Rowan says,” Fred
repeated to me. “She held him while he died and----”
“How’s she now?” I asked.
“Nearly collapsed. She gave her evidence to the police and afterwards
to the coroner. She’s in bed now.”
“Can I see her?”
“You?” said Fred. “Why?”
“She’s accused Jerry.”
“So has Rowan; why don’t you talk to him?”
“I will,” I said, “afterwards. Do you mind asking her if she’ll see me?”
He went up himself and came down with her excuses. But I had expected
them and I’d written on one of my cards “Bulls and Beefers”; just that
and I’d put it in an envelope unsealed. I knew Fred wouldn’t look in it
when he took it up to her.
“She’ll see you,” said Fred when he came down again.
VIII
A LADY DISCREDITS ME.
She was not in bed but was lying upon it in a negligee--a silk and
lace, pink and white creation which was originally no garment of grief.
She was pink and white herself, except for her bobbed hair of bronze
and for her big eyes which were blue. She displayed a good deal of
herself, especially the beauty of her bosom; she did this not with any
evident design of the moment but probably upon the general principle
that it was never a disadvantageous thing for her to do.
She was alone in the room when I entered and Fred Scofield, who came
up with me, dropped back at the door. She gazed at me, making hardly a
motion, and waited for me to open the meeting.
I did it formally, with that door open behind me; I said the stupid
tosh I felt expected to say.
“Shut the door and sit down,” said Shirley.
The first part was important, so I did it; then I strolled to the
foot of her bed and stood. She lay looking at me, one hand holding a
cigarette box which she tapped with her fingers; but she wasn’t smoking.
I was realizing I had never met up with a murderess before--at least
not with a girl who’d done her bit in a bump off for money.
Of course since I had, in my own right, a normal list of acquaintances
of fair size, I knew a woman or two who’d shot friend husband; but
the moving impulse was not financial. The widow--I mean the woman who
immediately made herself the widow--in one case happened upon husband
with another lady on the wrong landing; in the other case, she’d become
peeved about something purely private and so highly sensational when
sobbed out on the witness stand, and followed by an effective faint,
that the jury not only justified her but acquitted her with cheers.
The widow Scofield, lying here on the bed before me, failed to fall in
that same class in my mind. I doubted if she would in the emotions of
any jury; and some doubt of this nature seemed to flit across the eyes
of blue which kept watching me. She was gambling, if not with her life
itself, at least with her liberty for life; and her stake, if she won,
was the neat little sum of five hundred thousand dollars to enhance her
joys of freedom.
Elsewhere in this house the aged youth, her husband, lay dead; and
whatever was to happen, her chapter with him was concluded and she
could not contrive to conceal from me a certain relief at that.
Perhaps I imagined it, with my picture of her at her piano last night
still haunting my mind; yet I’m not imaginative. I felt her saying to
herself, as she gazed at me, “Well, whatever’s to come next, _that’s_
over. Twenty-two with sixty-seven, rejuvenated!”
She said aloud to me, “What did you mean by the words on your card?”
“If you don’t know,” I said, “why did you change your mind, after you
had the card, and send for me?”
She didn’t respond; she lay waiting, watchfully, and let me look her
over and think her over with all the deliberation I wanted. She seemed
to me not so slight as that Christina who’d met me at the river ledge
with Keeban; but I knew enough about the effect of negligee, and of a
figure loosed from a girdle, to allow for more fullness now. Her hair
was bronze; but yellow over that bronze would have been easy enough to
manage, especially in the dim light of that dock room. Her manner of
speech had changed; yet I was wholly sure she was Christina.
At the next moment, she admitted it. “I know what you meant, Steve,”
she said, speaking my name as she had in that room by the river. “You
think you have something on me, do you?”
“You’re Christina,” I said.
“Right! Call in my step-son Fred and whoever else you care to;
I’ve something to confess which I should have told the police this
morning--but I didn’t. Yet it didn’t hurt anything to hold it back.
Call him in!”
She sat straight and raised an arm and pointed to the door in some
cabaret imitation of a grand gesture. “Open the door,” she ordered me.
I opened it and went out and found Fred. “She’s something to say to
us,” I told him. I decided to include nobody else just then, though
there were police enough everywhere and all keen to listen. Fred and
I went into her room and closed the door. She motioned us to seats
beside the bed as though she might be Madame Récamier on her couch
receiving a couple of her lesser courtiers.
“Fred, I can tell more about the shooting last night; I’m going to do
it,” she said, looking at Fred, not at me. “You can decide how much
to give out to the police--to the ‘bulls,’” she added, deliberately
blunting her speech and gazing at me. She swung back to Fred.
“I come from the cabarets, you know; maybe you’ve thought sometimes
that I come from worse. Anyway, you treated me like you did.”
“I’m sorry,” said Fred and waited.
“That I didn’t come from worse wasn’t any fault of Jerry Fanneal. He
was hot after me--hot after me.”
Here was the start of a counter-attack on me; I felt it and demanded,
“When was that?”
“Oh, before I married; long before the big surprise to his swell
friends and family when he threw Dorothy Crewe into the street. He was
comin’ down to the cabarets for a long time. Didn’t you know it, Mr.
Steve Fanneal?”
“Yes;” I said. “Often I went with him.”
“But often not; isn’t that so? Tell the truth!” This was a straight
challenge.
“Sometimes not,” I granted.
“I guess not! Well, you should’ve seen some of those ‘sometimes.’ The
boy was crazy; I seen it!” In her excitement, she was forgetting her
“g’s” and the tenses she could speak correctly when she tried to; she
was a cabaret Récamier now. “Clean crazy. He kept it under when he was
back with his swells and you; but when he was down with us, he blew the
lid some distance off, I’m telling you. I made him crazier than most,
for he couldn’t get me. He thought I’d fall for money. Not me!
“I was glad to get married to a decent man, if he was a bit old; and
glad to get away, believe me! Then we made the mistake of comin’ back.
I didn’t want to, as you know; but the boys wanted father and me to cut
down expenses. So we had to come. Anyway, with me married and Jerry
mixed up with another skirt--and a swell one, too--I figured he’d
forget his old grief about me. But you know what he did to his lady
friend; well, when he’d made himself all lonely again, he seems to have
got me back on his busted brain. Anyway, he sent word to me to come
meet him.”
“How did he send word?” This was from me.
“Telephoned.”
“Why didn’t you inform the police?” That was another interjection of
mine; and she came back at me through the wide, wide opening I’d left
her. “Why didn’t you, when he slipped word to you to meet him?”
Fred failed to interrupt; he was too busy looking and listening. I
reserved my reply and she went on:
“He mentioned to me that, if I set a squeal, I’d hear from it; also
that I’d better meet him. He wanted money to get away. Of course he
couldn’t sell those Crewe diamonds at any sort of price now; there was
too much danger in handling them, with everybody watching for ’em; and
too much loss if he had ’em cut. He wanted cash money and he thought I
could bring it. Remember, a couple a weeks ago,” she said to Fred, “I
tried to get some considerable cash from you?”
Fred admitted that.
She said, “That was to give to Jerry Fanneal. I got afraid of him. I
wanted him to get out. When I couldn’t raise the cash, I said I’d help
him get it from his own family; and so I put up the talk for him to
Steve Fanneal.”
“What?” said Fred.
She had to tell him again and when she was through she referred Fred to
me. “Let him tell it now.”
She had me in the hole; and she knew it; and Fred saw it. I had no
chance at all of convincing Fred that the man I met with her was not
Jerry but Keeban. Here was she denying, like everyone else, that Keeban
could exist; here was she explaining how Jerry had come to do this
murder. I knew better than to try to tell my story.
Shirley carried on. “Jerry and I met him and he got the money. Ten
thousand in cash, wasn’t it?” she examined me. “If he denies it, Fred,
ask the teller in his bank--last week Thursday he got it.”
“Did you?” asked Fred.
“I did,” I said.
He nodded to Shirley. “Go on.”
“He gave it to Jerry to go away.”
“That’s right?” Fred asked me.
“That’s right,” I had to admit.
Shirley continued, “Then Jerry wanted me. He’s crazy, you see.
Sometimes he’s all right, like anybody else; then he’s like when he
took that necklace from Dorothy Crewe and tossed her into the street.
He said he’d get my husband and then me. Isn’t that true? Didn’t you
know Win was in danger?” Again she was at me.
“Yes; but----”
“But you tried to stop it, of course; with wonderful success! Well,
I’ve nothing on you there, I tried to stop it too!”
Then she broke into crying; and a great chance I had. There she was, a
girl all white and pink in her negligee; and tears, real tears! I got
out and was lucky to be able to get.
IX
I SEEK THE UNDERWORLD.
For sketching a situation, no one ever touched Shakespeare; and he has
a line which certainly described my state of dignity during the next
days. It’s in “Julius Cæsar”; Anthony has just been saying, in some
well chosen words which escape me for the moment, how important and
prominent a citizen Cæsar was before his last meeting with Brutus,
whereas afterwards there was “none so poor to do him reverence.”
That’s the description which struck me. Lord knows, I was no Cæsar, not
even in Chicago; so my fall was not so far, yet the reception at bottom
was much the same.
Of course, if you call the incorrigible habits of house servants
“reverence” I still had some from them; at least, they kept calling me
“sir” and “Mr. Stephen” and somebody sneaked in when nobody else was
looking, and turned down my bed, and Warner drew my bath and saw to my
shirts. Down at the office, Miss Severns continued to take my letters
in a resigned sort of way; but, in general, I was the joke of everybody
that knew I still believed in Jerry.
For a while the police watched me, on the theory that Jerry, after
having worked me for ten thousand following his attack on Dorothy
Crewe, would probably come back and get me to give him twenty now; but
he didn’t. So the “bulls” left me alone to go wandering off, as soon as
I dared, into the northwest morass of Chicago in search of Klangenberg.
I had that territory as part of my sales district in the days after
I had finished college, when father was starting me out in the bean
business.
Previously I had gathered, in a theoretical way, that people who went
to Princeton or elsewhere to college in the east, and their parents,
sisters and other relatives could not provide the number of appetites,
locally and in the surrounding States, to account for everything we
sold. Not at all; it was perfectly plain that we must sell to any
number of people of sorts one would never meet in the general round
of sleeping and breakfasting on Astor Street, driving to the office,
lunching at the club, and dining on the Drive and dancing at the
Casino. In fact, father took occasion to impress upon me that the
caviar and truffle trade of Fanneal and Company would barely pay club
dues; what bought motors and butlers and opera boxes was the business
in beans--plain baked beans, with or without tomato sauce. And the
habit of dinner dances, jaunts to England and the Continent had become
family pleasures to the Fanneals solely because a large proportion
of the populace living on streets which only by error would ever be
listed in mother’s address book had taken to the taste of our soups and
spaghetti in preference to the purées and macaroni put out under other
brands.
Naturally this started me out upon my first unconducted tour of the
tenement highways in a chastened and interested frame of mind.
My generation began growing up just in the ebb of the worst lot of
social bunk which ever spread over this nation. The last wave of the
muck which taught that, if anybody had a million, he took it from
the poor by some scheme of social pickpocketing was just subsiding.
Some of it splashed over my youthful boots; I remember, particularly,
a cheerful cartoon which the Bolshevists still brandish probably,
and which pictured a lot of us dancing on a ballroom floor which was
supported on the bent backs of bowed-over men, women and children. To
give it a dramatic touch, the muscular fist of a revolutionist below
had broken through the floor and thrust up into the ballroom to the
consternation of the degenerate dancers, meant to be us.
One thing is to be said for the experiments in Russia recently; they’ve
made that sort of tosh ridiculous; they’ve at least suggested, to the
brain open to any sort of observation, that the direction and the
judgment and the initiative exercised by a man who organizes and builds
up a business and keeps it going are in themselves productive factors
just as necessary as labor itself and entitled, fairly, to big reward.
Father always taught me that this was where we got ours; we earned
it. So when I explored Halsted Street, I did not suffer from any
parlor-socialist conviction of personal guilt for housing conditions
and juvenile delinquency simply because I was selling these people soup
at a profit, net to us, of seven eighths of a cent a can. Naturally I
took things as they were, thought about them as little as possible,
gave a little more to the United Charities and the Salvation Army, and
kept as far away as I could after my city salesman period was past.
Here I was going back again and with a decidedly new interest in these
streets of narrow, dingy, clapboard, three-story dwellings, of drab
and dun brick fronts, serving for a shop on the ground level and a
dozen tenements above; of “lofts” and ancient cottages--ancient for
Chicago--moved back, end to end, behind the buildings now holding the
edge of the sidewalk.
I came to a place where the street, following this generation’s level
of the city, stands above the ground of original days; the walks and
roadway are graded up, leaving the disconsolate, paint-specked homes
of the first customers of Fanneal and Company down on the dirt where
were thrown fifty years ago, as now, our empty cans and papers. The
land is so low that the street rises almost even with the second
floors; one has to descend rickety steps to reach the doors of gray,
ill-lit emporiums of every sort which witness, by their very being, to
the amazing force of the proclivity to patronize a neighbor. Half a
league from Marshall Field’s, preposterous, mediæval peddlers whined
under windows shut to the chill smokiness of December city haze; women
raised the sash and, after bargaining, bought. Half a block from a
motor factory, a blacksmith hand-pumped his bellows to blow coals into
heat for shoeing a huckster’s horse; fortune tellers beckoned and won
business.
I came upon Klangenberg’s and descended into an environment of
delicatessen where a madonna of the gray shawl--did Raphael or Leonardo
ever paint one; if they didn’t, it was because they didn’t see one--was
watching a patented pointer waver before the divisions of a cent on
the automatic calculator above the scale which weighed her purchase
of pig’s feet. A boy picked them up with unclean hands, wrapped them
untidily and made change, almost in one motion, on a register which
printed a receipt and said with flashing light, “come again; thank you.”
The place was heated by a stove before which sat a male model for
Rembrandt, if he wanted to paint the “Dyke-keeper” or somebody else
strong and dour looking who might wind himself in a muffler.
This was not Klangenberg; at least it was not the complainer about
pineapples who had spoken to me of “Kidnapped” and “Westward Ho.”
Accordingly, after the Madonna had climbed to the street, I asked the
boy for the proprietor.
The “dyke-keeper” turned about, as though his interest in me began with
my voice.
“Who wants to see him?” said the boy.
For the emergency--if you don’t feel there was one, it’s my failure to
give you the dyke-keeper--I improvised and benefited by borrowing from
Klangenberg himself.
“I’ve come to see him about his complaint on those pineapples,” I said.
“What pineapples?” the youth asked.
“I want to see him personally,” I replied. “Is he here?”
“Maybe,” said the boy and locked the cash register before vanishing
rearward. Once he reappeared, evidently to view me for the purpose of
checking up on my description; he said nothing but after another minute
he came back and told me, “He’ll see you day after to-morrow.”
“What time?” I said.
“This time will do.”
I thanked him, while he unlocked the cash register for the resumption
of business.
One matter was off my mind when I went away; this was my qualm as
to whether I ought to inform the police of Jerry’s connection with
Klangenberg. They would pick up mighty small change at that address, I
thought; and when I returned two days later, I was sure of it.
Though I entered the door at the precise time of my appointment,
neither the boy nor the dyke-keeper was there; a little girl of ten
years tended the cash register and piled the computing scales with
noodles. This child gave me no particular attention until she had
cleared the shop of customers, when she said, “That’s the door back
there.”
I went through it to an area between the shop and an old moved-over
frame building. Some one--I didn’t know who--relieved the child in the
shop, for she came out to me and led me through a shed where a horse
was stabled. We sidled about another shed and climbed a tunnel of
wooden stairs, built on the outside of a clapboard house, and roofed
and walled against the weather.
“That’s the door,” the child said, when we came to the top; obviously
she was speaking, as well as guiding, by instructions. She halted and
I went on and knocked at the door.
“Come in,” said Jerry’s voice; and I opened and found Jerry before me.
X
AND LEARN THE WAYS OF ITS LOGIC.
He had just risen from a bed upon which he had been seated,--a plain,
white, iron bed with a red quilt. He looked me over and, welcoming me,
waved me to a chair, a plain, wooden chair, not new.
The room was ordinary with striped, cheap paper on the walls; it had
a floor of soft wood with a circle of rag carpet; besides the bed and
chair, there was a washstand boasting of a bowl and pitcher. Altogether
these were the furnishings which a person reared on Astor Street knows
to exist but which he has seen only when he has happened to pass an
express wagon heaped with the effects of a Halsted Street moving or
when, detouring by some strange road, he comes upon the fruit of an
“eviction.”
By some amazing transmutation, the man before me fitted the furnishings
as he fitted the too “tailored” suit, too narrow in lapels, too belted
at the waist, too conspicuously “patch pocketed.” He wore a shirt of
too obvious silk and overdecorated shoes; and he wore them as if he had
been bred to aspire to them and to nothing else.
A look at him and I knew why the police, in all the time they had
searched since the robbery of Dorothy Crewe, had never picked him up.
They had been searching for an Astor Street resident in some such
garments as Jerry had worn by the river; they had expected him, when
casting off his accustomed clothes, to don rough, contrasting attire;
no one would have expected him to outdo, in his garb, himself as he had
appeared before. I, least of all.
Now I understood that this must be his costume when in daytime he had
to risk the streets; and I believed that a dozen detectives might meet
him, give another glance at his face, but after looking him over, they
would laugh at themselves for suspecting him. “Here’s a Halsted Street
flash,” they would say, “trying to make himself look like an Astor
Street swell. Jerry Fanneal, of Astor Street, would never do that.” An
officer, bringing in such a man, would make himself the smile of his
station.
You would think that I would have said to myself, “This is Keeban.”
But the fact was I didn’t suspect him; I was sure at once that he
was Jerry. Noticing him more closely, I observed that he had carried
his change of caste even into the cut of his hair. No longer was it
“feathered” in back in the manner of a University Club barber; he was
clipped and shaven on the neck with his hair thickening toward the top
till it became almost a tossing mane on the crown.
“This is your room, Jerry?” I said. I’d been wondering all the time
where and how he’d been living.
“Mine just now,” he replied, looking up and down me. His eyes seemed
to find satisfaction in the sight of me; but he did not give me his
hand; he did not come closer to me than ordinary nearness in the room
made inevitable. I realized that he was deliberately holding away from
me and I realized why. Here he was not only hiding from the police,
with his life hanging upon every risk of recognition, but here he was
also playing the part of Keeban; and he could enter no more deadly
undertaking than this of impersonating Keeban, Harry Vine, and going
out among Keeban’s people.
Of course he could have attained this perfection of nuance only through
constant keeping to it and he would be foolish to endanger it by
jumping in and out of character with each opening of his door.
“We can talk here?” I asked.
“What is it?”
It was so much, so many things, that I could lump them all only in the
obvious, emotional statement, “I’ve come to see you.”
“Why?”
Since he seemed to demand a practical reason, “Shirley Scofield is
being paid the insurance money to-day.”
He knew that. “Yes, she got a bunch of it this morning, some yesterday
and some a couple of days ago. That’s why you tried to look me up day
before yesterday, was it?”
“Partly,” I said.
“That’s all right about her getting the money.”
“You mean she wasn’t in the scheme to get the money?”