CLIFFORD’S NEW ASSIGNMENT
When Clifford left her, though still amazed at the task she had set
him, he was more occupied with a new possibility--Life worked so
strangely!--that had come upon him during their talk. Had Mary, through
her scheming to achieve worldly place and fortune by means of Jack,
come by slow degrees and perhaps unknown to herself to have a real
responsibility toward Jack? And if so, how would she react under that
responsibility if ever a crisis should arise?
At once Clifford began work upon this strange assignment. And at
once this assignment, strange as it was to start with, took on an
even stranger twist--though this new turn was not at once definitely
apparent.
Clifford was curious concerning Jack in his new rôle as a business man;
and half an hour after leaving Mary he was shown into an office in a
large suite down in the financial district. Jack sprung up eagerly from
a littered desk.
“Hello, Bob! Say, this is great, your dropping in on me like this--a
regular relief expedition to a strayed North-Pole-hunting outfit! Only,
as a financier, I’m no Commodore Peary; I’m in the Dr. Cook class.”
Clifford returned the smile of the pleasant, almost boyish face. “How
goes the work, Jack?”
The young fellow made a grimace at the papers on his desk. “They’ve
turned over a one-cylinder mining proposition to me to handle. Oh, ye
gods! Bob--has science yet discovered an anti-toxin for work?”
“Then you’re getting tired of it?” Clifford asked, studying him keenly.
“Tired, you bet!--and also tangled. But I’m going to stick it out.” He
lowered his voice: “You know, it’s all Mary’s doing, my starting to
toil in this old foundry. She said I had to make good--and you can just
bet I am going to make good!”
Clifford nodded. “It’s great stuff; hang on with all your teeth. But
you can’t be on the job all the time. Suppose we have dinner together
this evening and then see a show?”
“Sorry, Bob, but I’m dated up with dad to-night. If you’ll make it
to-morrow evening, though, you’re on.”
“All right. Say we meet at seven in the Gold Room at the Grantham.”
It was so agreed. Clifford left Jack with one dominant impression: at
least this phase of Mary’s scheme was visibly succeeding--Jack, whom
no one had ever been able to get to go to work before, seemed tightly
anchored to his job.
The next evening Clifford was at a table in the Grantham at seven.
He waited until eight--untroubled--but Jack did not appear and no
message came from him. It puzzled him somewhat, but provoked him more.
But, remembering his promise to Mary, he swallowed his resentment and
the next afternoon he called Jack up at the Morton offices. He was
informed that Jack had not come down at all the day previous, nor had
he appeared this day.
Clifford began to think. That same afternoon, at six-thirty, which he
had learned was the elder Morton’s cocktail-time, he wandered into the
lounge of the Biltmore bar. Here he found Mr. Morton, and casually he
inquired for Jack.
“I was afraid the boy wouldn’t stick,” said the handsome, middle-aged
man of the world, “and now I’ve had proof of it. Here’s a telegram I
received from him this afternoon, filed on board the Canadian Express,
saying he’d suddenly decided to run away for a bit of shooting. Just
like him, to disappear without a word’s notice.”
Clifford read the telegram, and returned it to the Western financier;
and after a few commonplace remarks he walked away with a casual air.
But within his calm exterior he was seething with suspicions, ideas,
questions. He dropped into a chair in the wide corridor, and eyes
fixed on an evening paper, he rapidly studied this new situation. That
telegram was a fake. Jack Morton, however irresponsible, would never
so behave while he felt as he did toward Mary Regan. Jack Morton had
disappeared, and some will other than his own had controlled his
disappearance.
Who had brought about this disappearance? If there was a plot here,
just what was the plot?--and what its purpose? Was Jack himself the
victim primarily aimed at?--his father?--Mary?--some other person?
Into his mind there flashed something Mary had spoken of: that menacing
demand of Peter Loveman, coupled with Loveman’s jovial declaration that
his threat had been only a joke. Was that shrewd, far-scheming lawyer
behind the disappearance of Jack? And if so, what was his ultimate
object?--what was his present plan?
A new idea occurred to Clifford. A minute later he was in a telephone
booth talking to Mary.
“What have you heard from Jack since I saw you?”
“Not a word.” There was concern in her voice. “He always telephones me
two or three times a day.”
“And you’ve had no telegram?”
“No.”
“There’s nothing to worry about,”--and Clifford told her of the
telegram Jack’s father had received.
“But why shouldn’t he have telegraphed me, too?” she demanded.
“You know Jack is inclined to be careless, even with the people he
likes best,” he assured her. He gave her no hint of his suspicions;
already it was part of his vaguely forming counter-plan that Mary must
be kept from guessing what he suspected.
He hung up and returned to his chair. He had picked up one
point--perhaps. The fact that Mary had received no telegram, did it
not signify that the person behind the scheme, whoever the person was,
while wishing to reassure Mr. Morton, desired to disturb Mary? Might it
not be an essential part of the scheme that Mary should be disturbed?
It seemed possible.
Sitting there in the corridor, Clifford had still another idea--and
during the days that followed it became the backbone of his plan. Here
was mystery enough: the sudden disappearance of Jack in a manner so in
keeping with his known character as to cause no public commotion. But
he now saw this case as a double case. He was going to try to clear
up Jack’s disappearance, yes; but though professionally the solution
of that disappearance was his chief interest, as a man he was more
interested in Mary Regan--for though he knew her so well, she was to
him still the supreme mystery. He was going to do all he could do, yes;
but he decided that he was going to keep himself in the background of
this new development of affairs, and direct the action, or leave it to
its own direction, so that whatever situation arose, Mary would have to
face it squarely and alone. He was going to force a show-down of Mary’s
real nature--to make Life test her. That was his second, and dominant,
task.
The search for Jack Morton was the foundation for this second task,
and Clifford sensed Loveman to be his best lead. That night, with all
the appearance of merely killing time, Clifford sat at a little table
in the Gold Room at the Grantham. But while he dawdled, he slipped an
occasional glance across the big glittering room at the small round
table known as “Mr. Loveman’s table.” The table was as yet empty:
Clifford did not wonder at this--the hour was only eleven, this was the
opening of a new play, and Loveman was an habitual first-nighter.
Presently a hand fell on Clifford’s shoulder. “Hello, Bob,--what’s
wrong with the world?”
Clifford looked up. Beside him was the plump, smartly dressed person of
Peter Loveman, smiling amiably.
“Nothing much is wrong, Loveman,--except most of my war-babies have
whooping-cough.”
“Buck up, old scout, and come over to my table, and let me buy you some
bubble-water.”
“Can’t, thank you. I’m waiting for a party.” And then Clifford, with
seeming carelessness, but watching Loveman all the while, played a
bold card: “What d’you think--I was to have had supper here with Jack
Morton. And I just learned from his father that the young scamp has
gone to Canada on a shooting trip.”
Loveman showed a mild surprise; in him the stage had lost an admirable
actor. “You don’t say! I hadn’t heard that.”
“His father showed me Jack’s telegram. Jack might at least have sent me
word before this,” said Clifford.
“Just like Jack: a good fellow, but you can’t count on him.” Loveman’s
voice lowered. “I wonder if our common friend, Mary Regan, has heard
anything from him.”
“Not unless he thinks a lot more of her than he does of me,” Clifford
grumbled.
“Queer situation there, isn’t it?” mused Loveman. “Wouldn’t be
surprised if he had treated her the same as he has you.” The lawyer’s
tone became humorously lugubrious. “Well, we all have our troubles.
Here’s that little Nina Cordova. After I’ve said a fond, swift, and
eternal farewell to twenty thousand dollars backing her in that awful
frost ‘Orange Blossoms’--honest, a guinea-hen that’d half-swallowed an
open safety-pin would pull out its hair and eat bichloride if it had a
voice like Nina’s--here’s Nina begging me to back her in a new piece
that’s a crippled and half-witted twin to ‘Orange Blossoms.’ Can you
beat it! And yet I suppose I’ll come across. That’s just the sort of
sucker game I always fall for.”
With a gesture of mock despair, the little lawyer--true lover of
the best in music and the arts, and patron of the worst--crossed to
his table. Clifford knew that Loveman, as well as himself, had been
fencing. He wondered whether he had made Loveman believe that he
believed in Jack’s northern trip, and that he was unconcerned about
Jack and Mary. He thought he had.
Clifford, alert for every possible clue, managed to keep an eye on
Loveman’s table. Presently he saw a lithe, handsome young man in
close conversation with Loveman. It was Hilton, whom from a previous
experience he knew to be a suave adventurer in this brilliant
border-world wherein smart fashion and glossed scoundrelism mix in
easy fellowship. So then Hilton and Loveman, for mutual advantage, had
adjusted the financial _contretemps_ which had risen when their plans
had crossed that afternoon at the Mordona. This undoubtedly meant that
something was brewing. Clifford would have given his balance at the
bank and all he could have borrowed there, to have known the exact
substance of their talk.
After a few minutes Hilton nodded as if some point had been settled,
and with the grace of the professional dancer, crossed the great room
and went out. Clifford’s first impulse was to follow him, but he
thought better of it and kept his place. He had his recompense, for a
little later the dainty Nina Cordova entered with an escort. Soon, as
if by the ordinary drifting of after-midnight merry-makers, she, too,
was conversing with Peter Loveman.
Again Clifford would have been glad to trade his cash and credit that
he might hear. He knew that this girlish-looking creature had been
privately fitted into more than one of Loveman’s adroit plans of this
pleasure world; and he remembered, too, that less than a year before
there had been the beginning of an affair between Jack and Nina--that
she, with fame glittering before her excited vision, had dropped Jack
for what she always spoke of as “her art”; and he guessed that now,
having been pushed by managerial enterprise beyond her meager merits as
a singer in musical comedy, and having toppled ingloriously from her
lofty dreams, she might have quite other plans.
If there was a plot, could Nina be in it? And if she was in it, what
was her part? And if Hilton was in it, what was that gentleman’s rôle?
Nina and Loveman went off together toward three o’clock. Clifford,
alive with suspicion, followed in a taxi--only to see Nina set down at
her hotel, and see Loveman drive straight to his apartment house and
enter. Clifford watched the windows of the lawyer’s studio apartment,
wondering if any person had been waiting within to consult with
Loveman; but promptly at four o’clock--Loveman’s regular hour for going
to bed--the studio windows darkened.
Clifford had learned nothing that was definite. But he had the sense,
the result of long experience, that he was on the trail of the parties
chiefly concerned, and that he was close upon something big--though
that something was provokingly intangible and elusive.
There was but one way to handle so obscure a situation: that was by
an intensive study of every possibility, and the next day Clifford
began upon this slow, cautious programme. Loveman’s telephone wires had
already been tapped by the Police Department. Clifford now took the
vacant apartment above Loveman’s and secretly installed a dictagraph
in the big studio which served Loveman as a library. Always there were
ears at these wires; and with the help of four of Commissioner Thorne’s
best plain-clothes men, Clifford tried to keep every movement of the
suspects covered. Also he enlisted the aid of Uncle George, in whose
ears the secret doings of Broadway were somehow mysteriously published.
Loveman came and went about his business and pleasures, apparently
as usual; Hilton was not seen again; Nina Cordova was seen only two
other times; and once, for a few minutes in the Claridge restaurant,
Clifford saw another woman with Loveman--one Nan Burdette, who had had
a meteoric career in New York’s pleasure life, and about whom Clifford
had heard a thing or two not at all to that young woman’s credit. And
though she never knew it, Clifford personally kept a watch over Mary
Regan. Some way, he felt sure, Mary was involved in this.
Also as part of this plan of studying all possibly related
circumstances, Clifford scrutinized every available item of the pasts
of Hilton and Nan Burdette and Nina Cordova.
But for all his own effort and the efforts of those helping him,
Clifford still had little more than suspicion to explain the
disappearance of Jack Morton. Jack could not have vanished more clearly
had gravitation become suddenly invalidated and had he been shot off
into space in the night.
Clifford kept doggedly at his method. It was all slow work, painstaking
work, and tedious, tiring, undramatic work--as all good police work
is and necessarily must be, except for now and then a turn of luck,
a moment of inspiration. But after the fifth day following Jack’s
disappearance a change was noticeable: from the various sources of
information which Clifford had set to work, little details began to
be accumulated--bits of action that had been seen, fragments of talk
overheard by the patient listeners on the wires. His accumulation of
tiny facts increased rapidly; and fitting the fragments together he
began to perceive the outlines of a plan, though as yet he had no
proof--a plan which, if he was conjecturing truly, was a typical case
of how clever powers may operate through and behind the brilliant
activities of Big Pleasure--of how such powers may subtly twist persons
to their own ends, the person never guessing what has really happened.
On the seventh day there came to him another fragment which made him
see his conjecture as an even stronger possibility, which made him feel
that this hidden plan was drawing toward its climax--and which caused
him hastily to send off the following note to Mary:--
If you wish me to help you, then you must take no action without
first referring it to me. And if any person asks you to do any
particular thing, I want you to learn all the details of any proposed
plan and then tell me, before you give your answer. You can invent
plausible excuses for any delay.
The next day proved how correct had been the reasoning that had
prompted the sending of this note, for in the afternoon he had a
message that Mary wished to see him at once. He hurried to her
apartment, quickened with suspense.
“Mr. Loveman has found that I am staying here,” she began.
“I knew that. He was bound to find you sooner or later. Has he asked
for anything?”
“He has invited me out for the evening.”
“You are to go with him alone?”
“So he said.”
“You learned definitely where he was going to take you?”
“Yes. To dinner at the Ritz--to a play at the Empire Theater--to supper
at Delmonico’s--then dancing at that new café, Le Minuit. Shall I
accept?”
Clifford thought rapidly. “Certainly.”
“What do you think is in his mind?”
“Merely to entertain you,”--though Clifford did not believe his own
words,--“to try to reëstablish himself in good standing with you.”
“Then how should I behave?”
“Just have as good a time as you can.”
Clifford was cool enough until he was out of her presence; then
feverishly he considered what she had told him. Whatever this
subterranean affair might be, if this invitation had any part in it,
he reasoned that nothing would happen at such discreet places of
entertainment as the Ritz-Carlton, the Empire Theater, or Delmonico’s.
Instinctively he knew that the design would unfold itself, if it were
to be unfolded that evening, at Le Minuit, an establishment which
had just then caught the errant fancy of some of the smarter social
set, and naturally, therefore, of members of the smarter set of the
demi-world and underworld.
His business, therefore, was to be at Le Minuit.