machine came to a stop almost where we sat. The chauffeur’s face was
pale, extraordinarily pale, it appeared to me; as he stopped his
machine and shut down the gears, there was a perceptible evidence of
nervousness in his manner that was possibly entirely natural in view of
the shocking happening of a few hours before that had taken the life of
his young mistress.
The first to leave the motor was a trim, well-groomed young man,
whom we at once recognised, from the descriptions we had heard, as
Macondray. As he held the door open for the other two persons to leave
the machine, he removed his hat, holding it in his hand.
Simultaneously our eyes rested on his uncovered hair.
His hair, if anything, was a shade more auburn than that of the
chauffeur! His swollen eyes and pale face were natural under the
circumstances, with his marriage hopes thus painfully blasted. They
walked within, and Lanagan said:
“Come on. We’ll get first crack at this fellow anyhow. Let’s meet him
back at the garage in the rear.”
We had started to walk back to the garage as the chauffeur cranked his
machine when from the same low window Leslie and Brady stepped alertly.
Leslie held up his hand to the chauffeur. The two officers were beside
him in a moment. I knew what was coming even before they laid a hand
on him. I had seen too many arrests made not to know what was meant
by that brusque, cool manner, that quick step, that wary eye even
before there came that familiar terse, short snap of the professional
thief-taker:
“_We want you!_”
“The maid has spilled!” was Lanagan’s ejaculation as we stepped up to
the trio. Leslie could not forbear a pleased lighting of the eyes as he
glanced at Lanagan.
“What have you got, Chief?” asked Lanagan easily.
“The maid, Marie, broke down and admitted that she let this man Martin
into the house and into the girl’s room at the girl’s orders at 8.30
o’clock. Possibly ten minutes later, she says, she heard the shot. When
she could summon courage to go to her mistress’s room she found her
lying on the floor dead, the revolver in her hand. What have you to
say, Martin?”
“Nothing, sir,” said Martin levelly. “I have nothing at all to say,
sir.”
He was a man of about thirty. Lanagan’s subsequent investigations
disclosed that he had been with the Hemingways for many years, formerly
working as a stable boy. When automobiles came into vogue, he had taken
a place as chauffeur. He was a probation court boy when the Hemingways
took him into their employ and “made a man of him,” as he used to
express it.
“Nothing?” snapped Leslie. “Well, we’ll see. I guess we’ll take him in,
Brady, and give him the dark cell.”
Leslie swung on his heel, and Brady, giving the chauffeur only time
enough to run his machine to the garage, took him to the city prison
and locked him up. But first I had noticed Lanagan pick up Martin’s cap
from the seat of the machine while the brief conference was going on
and deftly extract something from it. The “something” proved later to
be one or two of Martin’s red hairs.
Other newspaper men emerging from the house had been informed by Leslie
of the arrest. It was 11.30 o’clock by that time, and, with the arrest
of Martin as their sensation, the morning paper men of one accord
shoaled back to their offices. Leslie turned whatever ends might come
up over to Wilson, with instructions to keep an eye on the maid,
Marie, and went back to headquarters satisfied that if Martin was not
the murderer he at least could clear up the mystery. Lanagan started
back with the rest, but dropped off the car unobserved and returned
to the house. He was not yet satisfied that all that the inmates knew
there had been told.
“You go in and write the story,” he had told me. “That chauffeur isn’t
the type who is rendezvousing with the daughter of the house; and she
isn’t the type to engage in an alliance with a chauffeur. There is a
nigger in this woodpile some place--and a red-headed nigger at that. Go
off with your story if you don’t hear from me by press time, but keep
my red hairs out of your story unless you hear from me further.”
I had gathered in my camera man and artist and hurried back to the
office to write a story that I knew would be exactly similar in its
facts with those in the other morning papers, leading off naturally
with the arrest of the chauffeur.
There were still quite a number of relatives and family friends at
the house when Lanagan returned. The reception hall was brilliantly
lighted, and he hung up his hat. As he did so he examined Macondray’s
topcoat carefully and quickly. On the collar was one hair. It was
tucked away, labeled, in a separate package in the pocketbook.
He went to the room of the murder to find Wilson there “sweating”
Macondray. The broker was bent over a table, sobbing. The
intermittent, hysterical cries of the mother, hoarser and fainter as
exhaustion came upon her, still punctuated the air. Wilson was reading
a letter. He passed it to Lanagan.
Lanagan read, then, a startling few lines written by Miss Hemingway
the day before to Macondray, breaking their engagement with the single
explanation: _I love another. You surely could not want to marry a
woman who had discovered she loved another._
Lanagan passed the letter back. He was anxious to make a microscopic
examination of the hair, but he wanted also to put Macondray through a
mill. He signalled Wilson to “jam,” and the detective touched Macondray
on the shoulder.
“Get together,” he said brusquely. “We want you to answer a few
questions.”
“We aren’t getting any place in this fashion,” added Lanagan curtly.
“Tell me, Macondray, when did you get that letter?”
Macondray straightened up, wiping his eyes.
“This afternoon at 5 o’clock,” he said.
“When did you see Miss Hemingway last?”
There was a long pause while Macondray gazed fixedly first at Lanagan
and then at Wilson, as though trying to read their minds to learn what
they knew.
“Because you did see her after the letter, you know,” said Lanagan
quietly. It was entirely a random shot, but it went home. Macondray
studied the matter over again for some moments.
“Well,” he said at last slowly, “I suppose it is best that I tell all I
know. I saw her last--at half-past eight o’clock to-night.”
His head dropped to his breast and dry sobs shook him again for a
minute.
“But as to her death I can offer no explanation. Only--you have Martin
in custody, and I saw Martin in her room at that time. My God!” he
burst out, “that Elvira could have sunk so low! A menial, a lackey--a
chauffeur!”
“We don’t want a dissertation on caste,” said Lanagan with cold
brutality. “What we want of you, Macondray, either here or at the
city prison--” Macondray started, realising for the first time that
suspicion was pointing his way--“is a simple statement of how you
happened to see Miss Hemingway in this room with Martin and what
happened after that?”
“I received her note by messenger at five o’clock. At half-past seven
I called, but she was not in. I wanted a personal explanation. I
called again in an hour. She was home, Marie said, and had gone to her
room for the night and under no circumstances was to be disturbed. I
determined to see her at any cost. I knew the position of her room
here, fronting on the veranda. I went from the house by the front door
and walked around here to the lawn. I intended only to attract her
attention by throwing a pebble against the window and compelling her
to speak with me. But while I stood there on the lawn, searching for
a pebble, an automobile drove slowly down Buchanan Street and stopped
just beyond the Hemingway drive behind the pepper tree. There were two
men in it. One remained while the other, whom I recognised as Martin,
came to the house, entering by the kitchen door. Of course, then I
would not risk attracting Elvira’s attention.
“While I was just turning to go, Elvira’s curtain suddenly was raised,
and I saw her peering out down Buchanan Street toward the place where
the motor car was. Just when that tableau was being presented her
chamber door opened quickly, and Martin entered. She seemed to be glad
to see him, and extended both her hands to him.
“I could witness no more. It broke my heart. Sick and miserable that I
had discovered so fine a girl, the girl whom I loved sincerely, in a
meeting with her chauffeur, I turned and came away. That is all I know.
Later I received a telephone message of the tragedy. They sent the car
for me. I could not understand it then; I cannot now.”
He was sobbing again with his arms on the table.
Wilson stepped over to him.
“Brace up,” he said shortly, “I want you to come with me. The chief
will want to keep you where he can see you for a day or two.” His
heavy hand descended professionally upon Macondray’s shoulder. But
Lanagan interrupted.
“Not a chance, Jim,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t want to
interfere with your duty, but I believe that chap is telling the truth
absolutely. What we want to do now is to clear up the mystery of the
man in the automobile. Martin must be made to talk. And, by the way,
have you come across any red-haired people in this case outside Martin
and Macondray? It struck me as a good little feature story. Here’s a
red-haired chauffeur and a red-haired fiancée. It’s a combination that
don’t often occur.”
“Humph,” replied Wilson. “That’s curious. The chief and I only saw Mrs.
Hemingway for a moment, she was so unstrung, but she most certainly has
the finest head of red hair for a woman of forty-four or five you want
to see. Seems to be her own, too. Funny proposition, the three of them
at that.”
Lanagan was staring, for once taken completely by surprise, so pat did
the circumstance fit his theories. He glanced at his watch. His eyes
were dancing with excitement. “That will be all, Mr. Macondray, unless
Wilson wants you for anything,” he said. Wilson said he was through,
and Macondray left the room. “Now, Jim, let’s see Marie again. I’m
collecting red hair; it’s a fad I have acquired, and I want one or two
of Mrs. Hemingway’s.”
“I was never more serious in my life,” said Wilson, summoning the maid.
He sent her for a brush containing combings of her mistress’s hair. She
asked no questions, but did as ordered. The maid acted like a person in
a trance.
“Holding up to a certain point, and then she will drop like a plummet,”
thought Lanagan, then aloud: “I guess we are all through here, Jim,
except one last fling with the mother.”
But there was no “last fling” with the mother. She had been given a
hypodermic, the nurse said, and was sleeping.
From a neighbourhood bar Wilson telephoned to Leslie, still waiting
at police headquarters to get a last word from his men. The detective
was still half decided to lock up both Marie and Macondray, but Leslie
said no. Lanagan had borrowed Wilson’s magnifying glass and had spread
out upon the bar the different pieces of red hair. He was so deeply
engrossed in making comparisons that he failed to follow the startling
one-sided conversation going on between Wilson and the chief. Wilson
whirled around from the receiver as Lanagan, profoundly stirred,
carefully tucked away his collection.
“A child could see it,” he muttered to himself as Wilson called out:
“Martin has spilled! Says he tricked the maid, who, by the way, is in
love with him, into letting him into Elvira’s room. There he declared
his love for her, demanded that she fly with him, and when she refused
seized up the family revolver and shot her down, maddened by her
command that he realise his place and return to the stables where he
belonged. He escaped through the window after placing the revolver in
her hand. They are going to book him now for murder.”
Lanagan took a long time to digest this bit of surprising information.
He made no comment other than to say:
“You’re through for the night now, aren’t you, Jim? With Leslie
vouching for Martin as the man?”
“Yes,” replied Jim, “and now I’m off.”
A moment after he had been left alone Lanagan had Leslie on the
telephone.
“Chief? Lanagan. Hop into your car and meet me at Farrelly’s. Bring
Martin along. It’s quarter to one. Make time. And this is something
absolutely between you and me; me and the _Enquirer_. Scoot now, Chief.
I’ve something to interest you.”
Since the incident in the room earlier in the evening Leslie had been
restless about Lanagan. Within ten minutes the police automobile
stopped at Farrelly’s. Leslie and Brady, with Martin walking between
them, entered.
Lanagan quickly led the way to the side room.
One grimed incandescent lit the room pallidly. Around a beer-stained
table the four men sat, Martin farthest from the door. Lanagan’s eyes
were fairly snapping as he opened his pocketbook and spread it out upon
the table. From it he extracted his little papers, each containing
a piece or two of red hair. He laid each separate hair slowly,
deliberately, before them all upon the table. Martin was watching the
performance with eyes that glistened in the intensity of his interest.
Equally absorbed were Leslie and Brady. Deliberately, precisely,
Lanagan laid out the hairs--two from the brush of Mrs. Hemingway, one
from the coat collar of Macondray, two from Martin’s cap, and the two
short bits from the bracelet of Elvira.
Leslie had understood the pantomime the moment Lanagan opened his
pocketbook and disclosed the collection of hair. He knew what it was
now that he had overlooked; and, chagrined but alert, he watched each
move that Lanagan made, for the solution had not yet come. Was it to be
Martin? Leslie hoped professionally, for the sake of his reputation,
that it would be.
“Martin,” said Lanagan, flashing the word out like a dirk might flash
in the sun, “what did Mrs. Hemingway ever do to earn your loyalty--even
to death?”
Martin paled, visibly, even beneath the sick light of the weak
incandescent.
“She has been very good to me, sir. She took me out of the court’s
custody and gave me a good home and a good salary. She made a man of me
when I might have become a jailbird. She has been a good mistress, sir.”
“Yes, a good mistress,” came through Lanagan’s teeth. “You’re loyal.
The type of loyal retainer. You’re not the type that falls in love with
the daughter of the house. You never loved Elvira; you never murdered
Elvira; and you are concealing now the name of the murderer, telling a
poor weak lie that could not have stood at the outside for twenty-four
hours! _Who killed Elvira?_”
Lanagan had arisen and glowered above the ashen Martin. Leslie was
leaning forward, his eyes, gimletlike, boring into Martin’s. Brady
swung around, too, to face him, caught as well under the spell of
fierce magnetism of the newspaper man.
“_Tell me_,” Lanagan snarled, “_who was in that automobile with you
last night_?”
Martin’s heavy lips dropped apart while he continued to stare
affrightedly upon the newspaper man.
“_The mother of that girl found you in Elvira’s room with her, making
preparations for flight with whoever was in that machine!_
“I will tell you,” continued Lanagan, hammering each word home; “I will
tell you who killed Elvira Hemingway!” He leaned swiftly across the
table, bending down and breathing a word into the ear of Martin. The
effect was electrical.
“No! No! No--no--no! It was I, I tell you; I and no other! I shot her
in my fit of madness!”
He collapsed suddenly, his head sinking on his breast, still gasping
huskily forth his protestations.
“Look here, then,” said Lanagan. He held Brady’s magnifying glass over
the hair--over the two hairs from the bracelet and then over the other
specimens. The difference in the texture of the hair and a difference
in colour were apparent under the microscope even in the ill-lighted
room. That one of the three specimens was similar hair to that from
the bracelet was apparent almost to the naked eye. Leslie’s face grew
grave. Brady had absolute unbelief written in his eyes. Martin took one
peering look furtively.
“That hair,” said Lanagan, indicating, “came from Elvira Hemingway’s
bracelet. It lodged there in her last struggle with whoever killed her.
This is your hair, Martin; compare it. This is Macondray’s; compare it.
This is from the mother’s head; compare it. A red-haired person killed
Elvira. It was not you--it was not--”
But Martin had sunk his head into his arms on the table with a groan.
Lanagan waited; Leslie waited; Brady waited--experts all at the third
degree. Mind was mauling matter--and mind was winning.
“It was not you,” continued Lanagan pitilessly as Martin lifted his
haggard face with the look of pleading of an animal in his eyes. “It
was not you--”
“_But it was not she--not my mistress! It was me! Me!_” The last words
were a shriek; but the tax on his self-control had been too great. He
fainted.
They threw water on Martin then and forced whiskey down his throat. He
came to, staring in confusion from one face to the other.
“You have admitted the mother shot her own child,” said Lanagan
rapidly, giving Martin no opportunity to recover his composure. “Now
tell us the circumstances of this unnatural crime.”
Martin’s breakdown was complete.
Elvira Hemingway, practically forced into an engagement with Macondray
largely through propinquity--he was her brother’s partner and a regular
family guest--and through the wishes of her mother, inordinately
ambitious socially to ally her daughter with the Macondrays, had
finally jilted Macondray for a struggling young doctor, Stanton, a
classmate at college. They were to have eloped, so greatly did the girl
dread the scene that she knew would follow when her mother learned
of her dismissal of Macondray. Martin, loyal, as he had said, to his
mistress, but still more so to the daughter of the house, was party to
the elopement. He had come to her room by prearrangement to help her
out with a grip or two in order that no suspicion would attach should
she be discovered in the room, on the porch, or crossing the lawn. The
machine--the same that Macondray saw--was waiting at the pepper tree.
But while Martin was in the room the mother, on some slight errand,
had unexpectedly gone to her daughter’s room.
There she found her daughter fully attired, the French window wide
open, and caught a flashing glimpse of a figure disappearing through
the French window, that she recognised as Martin. At first flush she
accepted the incident as an interrupted rendezvous of some sort between
her daughter and her chauffeur, and one hot word of charge had brought
a swift retort from the daughter, and a quarrel had arisen.
Martin, sneaking back to report progress in the room to Stanton,
heard the rising voices in anger, and learned enough to know that the
girl, under stress of her excitement, had revealed the plan for the
elopement. He counselled with Stanton, and both agreed that Stanton
had best retire and await developments, Martin to keep Stanton posted
by telephone. In the grief and excitement of the final tragedy he did
not do so, and the lover, worn by a sleepless night, received his great
blow when he opened his morning paper. But this is not a tale of love
or lovers, except insofar as they concern the solution of a crime, and
Stanton therefore, with his blighted life, passes out of the story.
Martin, determined to intercede in hope of softening the lot of the
daughter, taking all blame to himself as the messenger of the secret
lovers, hurried then, back to the house.
Some primal strain of vulgarity, some poignant pang of disappointed
motherly ambitions, or possibly some pang of personal ambitions
thwarted, led to the utterance of one malediction sharper than all the
others by the mother. In a moment of sudden hysteria the old-fashioned
revolver that had been on her mantelpiece for years had been seized by
the daughter in a wild threat of suicide.
The mother seized her wrist. A violent physical struggle for the weapon
followed. This was occurring just as Martin was making his way back
through the house to the room, taking along with him the maid, Marie,
huddled, frightened, against the hall wall at sound of the unseemly
family quarrel.
There was a flash and a report in his very eyes as Martin opened the
door. The revolver, he said, was unmistakably in the mother’s hands;
but whether the discharge was accidental or intentional in heat of
passion, Martin could not say.
And that angle of the story never was cleared up.
The mother had swooned. When it was clear to the frightened servants
that the girl was dead, they had carried the mother to her room.
The plan of the two was quickly formed. In their clumsy way they
concluded it would be best for all concerned if the revolver should be
placed in the girl’s hand to indicate suicide. Martin placed it there,
while Marie laboured with the hysterical mother, trying to instil in
her mind, in which the entire terrible scene was a whirl, the idea
that Elvira had, in fact, committed suicide.
As for the confession:
“I feel I was to blame in a way, sir,” concluded Martin, wiping his
eyes. “After all I would have been a jailbird anyway if she hadn’t
saved me, most like. I thought I could protect her, too, sir, by
confessing. I supposed if I said I committed the murder that would
settle it.”
Lanagan glanced at his watch. It was half-past one.
“There’s one more move yet, Chief,” he said, “and I go to press in
thirty minutes.”
In a moment or two they had all reached the Hemingway home again,
surprised to find it brilliantly lighted. Servants were running about
frantically. An excited voice was at the telephone as the quartet
walked through the door. It was the butler.
“Hurry! Hurry!” he was crying. “Hemingway’s! Pacific Avenue! For God’s
sake hurry!”
“What is it?” demanded Lanagan.
“Carbolic, I think,” replied the butler. “She escaped from the nurse
and got to the bathroom. She had been raving for an hour entirely out
of her head crying to Elvira to forgive her--that she--” he stopped
suddenly, his lips coming together in a taut line. “Another loyal
family retainer,” thought Lanagan as he and the chief exchanged quick
glances. “Only this one can keep his secret for all of me.”
They hurried to render first aid, but one look convinced the reporter
and the policeman, used to deaths in violent form, that the troubled
and frightfully burdened mother’s soul had gone to a higher court for
judgment.
Lanagan raced back downstairs for the telephone. It was five minutes to
two. By the accident of being on the ground he would have at least that
tremendous exclusive of the mother’s suicide.
And that--good story as it was--was all the _Enquirer_ printed, for it
was all that I finally got from Lanagan just before the clock struck
two.
Leslie, standing by the telephone, said, tentatively and curiously,
when the receiver was hung up:
“What about the real story? Saving that for to-morrow?”
“No, Chief,” drawled Lanagan, full brother in the Fourth Estate. “No,
Chief, that’s _all_ the story. She’s dead, isn’t she? They have had
about enough trouble, this family.”
V
THE AMBASSADOR’S STICK-PIN
V
THE AMBASSADOR’S STICK-PIN
The manner of Lanagan’s acquiring the Ambassador’s stick-pin is
nearly, if not quite, as interesting as the matter of his losing it.
His possession of the pin was simple enough when one understands the
chromatic ways of a police reporter’s daily routine: and Jack Lanagan
was the “star” police reporter of the city. The surrender of the pin is
as easily understood, when one comes to learn something of the devious
paths the police reporter is sometimes called on to follow, and the
curious and startling situations into which they sometimes lead.
Thus, when Lanagan, drifting indolently with the matinée throngs down
Powell street, stopped to hold confab with “Kid” Monahan, that now
retired King of the pickpockets, it was natural enough that he should
remark on a stick-pin of odd design that replaced the accustomed
three-carat in the “King’s” silk cravat. Gentry who lived by their wits
and other people’s wealth, affect stones of much size. Some policemen
wear them, too.
It was natural enough, that the “King,” proverbially generous, noticing
the glance of interest, should say, “Here, wear it,” and with a motion
as quick and as deft as a hummingbird’s flit, transfer the pin from
his tie to that of the newspaper man.
It was then for Lanagan to observe, dryly: