JACK TELLS THE STORY
With the fitting of the murder on Johnston Barker, the office of Whitney
& Whitney drew in its breath, took a cinch in its belt, and went at the
work with a quiet, deadly zest. It was the most sensational and one of
the biggest cases that had ever come their way. No one on the inside
could have failed to feel the thrill of it, the horror of the crime, and
the excitement of the subterranean chase for the criminal.
I was as keen as the rest of them, but there was one feature of the
secret investigations that I detested—the dragging in of Carol
Whitehall’s name. It couldn’t be helped. The affair had taken place in
her offices, but it was hateful to me to hear her mentioned in our
conferences, even though it was merely as an outside figure, a person as
ignorant of the true state of the case as Troop or Mrs. Hansen.
The tapped phone message and the subsequent trip to Rochester had given
me no end of a jar. Up till then I couldn’t imagine her as caring for
Barker. Everybody admitted that his private life had been beyond
reproach—entirely free from entanglements with women—but even so I
couldn’t picture the girl I’d met in New Jersey in love with him. He was
between fifty and sixty, more than twice her age. George said it was his
money, but George has lived among the fashionable rich, women who’d
marry an octogenarian for a house on Fifth Avenue and a string of
pearls. I would have staked my last dollar she wasn’t that kind—proud
and pure as Diana, only giving herself where her heart went first.
But if it had been hard to imagine her as fond of Barker the magnate,
what was it now when he was Barker the murderer? It made me sick. All I
could hope for was that we’d get him and save the unfortunate girl by
showing her what he was. And while we were doing this it was up to us to
keep her out of it, shield her and protect her in every possible way.
She was a lady, the kind of woman that every man wants to keep aloof
from anything sordid and brutal.
I was thinking this one morning, a few days after our last séance, on my
way to the office. I had been detained on work uptown and was late,
entering upon a conference of the chief, George and O’Mally. When I
heard what they’d been evolving, I didn’t show the expected enthusiasm.
Miss Whitehall was to be asked to come to Whitney & Whitney’s that
afternoon, the hope being to trap or beguile her into some information
about Barker’s whereabouts. It was the chief’s plan—a poor one, I
thought, and said so—but he was as enigmatic as usual, remarking that
whether it succeeded or not, he wanted to see her. It didn’t add to my
good humor to hear that, as I knew the girl, they’d selected me for
their messenger.
Not being able to strike straight at their subject they’d framed up a
story, one that would give them scope for questions and be a
sufficiently plausible excuse to get her there. It seemed to me absurd,
but the old man was satisfied with it. Everybody now knew that Harland
had been her silent partner. Their story was that they’d heard Barker
was also in the enterprise, she’d had a double backing, his visits to
her office gave color to the rumor, and so forth and so on. I left the
office while they were conning it over.
As I mounted the stairs to her apartment I felt a good deal of a cad. If
it had been anyone else, or any other kind of a woman—but that fine,
high-spirited creature! A group of men trying to make a fool of
her—beastly! Why had I said I’d do it—and why the devil had she got
mixed up in such an ugly business?
A servant opened the door and showed me up a hall into the parlor. She
was there sitting at a desk littered with papers, and rose with a faint
surprised smile when she saw me. As we sat down and I made my apologies
for intruding, I had a chance to observe her and was struck by the
change in her. It was less than a year since we’d last met and she
looked singularly different. Handsome of course—she’d always be that—but
another kind of woman. At first I thought it was because she was paler
and thinner—she’d been a radiant, blooming Amazon in the country—but
after a few minutes I saw it was something—how can I express it?—more of
the spirit than the body. The joyousness and gayety had gone out of her,
and the spontaneity—I noticed that especially. I could feel constraint
in her composure as if she was on her dignity.
As I explained my mission—I couldn’t say much, and felt beastly
uncomfortable while I was doing it—she listened with an expressionless,
polite attention. When I had finished she made no comment, merely saying
she would be only too happy to do anything for Mr. Whitney, then passed
on to her own affairs, mentioning the failure of the Azalea Woods
Estates and that she thought she and her mother would return to the
country. I was on the verge of offering to finance her in a new deal and
then remembered I was there as an emissary, not as a friend. It rattled
me and the rattling wasn’t helped when I met her eyes, brown and soft,
but with something scrutinizing and watchful under their velvety
darkness.
I stayed longer than I meant to—longer than I needed to. Some way or
other our talk shifted round to Azalea and Longwood, to Firehill and the
people we knew all through there. I forgot about the matter I’d come on,
and she brightened up too and there was a gleam of the girl I’d met a
year ago. But when I rose to leave the other woman was back, the
reserved, poised woman who seemed shut in a shell of conventional
politeness. She said she’d come that afternoon about five—she had work
to do that would keep her till then. In the doorway she suddenly smiled
and held out her hand. The feel of it, soft and warm, was in mine when I
got out into the street.
I went back to the office feeling meaner than a yellow dog. Thank Heaven
I’d not have to do _that_ again. They’d get all they could out of her,
and that would be the last time Whitney & Whitney would want to see her.
Later on, in a week or two maybe, I could call on her again. The ice was
broken, and anyway I didn’t see but what it was my duty. Someone ought
to help her to get on her feet again and as she’d no man in her own
family the least I could do was to offer my services.
At five the chief, George and I were waiting for her. She was a little
late and as she came in I noticed that she had more color than she’d had
in the morning. She looked splendid, in a dark fur coat and some kind of
a close-fitting hat with her black hair curling out below the edge. Her
manner was cool and tranquil, not a hint about her of surprise or
uneasiness, only that heightened color which I set down to the hurry
she’d been in getting there.
The chief was as gracious as if he’d been welcoming her as a guest in
his house—full of apologies, waving her to an armchair, suggesting she
take off her coat as the room was warm. No outsider would ever have
guessed what was going on in that astute and subtle mind. A feeling of
indignant pity rose in me—she seemed so unsuspecting. But—No; it’s
better for me to describe the scene as it occurred, to try and make you
see it as I did.
When the necessary politenesses were disposed of, the old man, very
delicately, with all his tact and finesse, started on the frame-up. He
did it admirably, finishing on a sort of confidential note. As the
attorney for the Copper Pool group, it would facilitate matters if he
knew of all Barker’s activities; any information, the slightest, would
be helpful.
She answered readily, without surprise, almost as if she might have
heard the story before.
"You’ve been misinformed, Mr. Whitney. Mr. Barker had no interest in the
Azalea Woods Estates. He had nothing to do with it."
The old man pursed out his lips and raised his brows:
"I see, one of those groundless rumors that gather about a sensational
event. It probably started from the fact, mentioned in the papers, that
Barker was in your office that afternoon."
"Probably. He came to see me about a house he was going to build in the
tract. Of course that’s all ended in nothing now."
He looked at her from under his bushy brows, a kind, fatherly glance:
"I was very sorry to hear, Miss Whitehall, that you were one of the
sufferers in this double disaster we are trying to settle."
"Oh, I!" she gave a slight shrug of her shoulders. "I’m wiped out."
"Tch!" he shook his head frowning and resentful. "These men can knife
each other—pirates in a buccaneer warfare—but when it comes to dragging
down women I’d like to see them all strung up."
Her eyes gave a flash. It was like a spark struck from a flint, there
and then gone. As if it had surprised her, and she was determined to
guard against its return, the calm of her face intensified into an
almost mask-like quiet. She answered softly:
"I can’t go so far as that, Mr. Whitney. I’m sure there’s some
explanation—as to Mr. Barker, I mean."
"I hope so," said the chief, "for your sake if for no other. I hope
he’ll come back and make the restitution he owes his associates and
discharge that obligation about the house and lot."
He looked at her smiling, a rallying smile that said as plain as words,
he knew such hopes to be groundless. She did not smile back, simply
raised her eyebrows and gave a slight nod. George, who was facing her,
leaned forward and said as if he had just met her at a pink tea and was
being gallantly sympathetic:
"It was rather hard on you, Miss Whitehall, having those two men in your
place that day. The press must have made your life a burden."
"It wasn’t so bad. Some reporters called me up but when they found how
little I knew they left me alone. I hadn’t anything exciting to say.
Both interviews were nothing but business."
"But let me ask you a question—not for publication this time, just as a
thing I’m curious about. It was only a few hours after you saw him that
Harland killed himself. Wasn’t there anything unusual in his manner,
anything to suggest that he was not himself?"
She looked down at the purse she was holding in her lap, and said
slowly, clasping and unclasping the catch:
"I didn’t notice anything—unless perhaps he was a little irritable and
nervous. I certainly never would have thought he was in the state of a
man contemplating suicide."
"And you would have known," said the chief. He turned to George in
explanation. "As Harland’s partner, Miss Whitehall would have known him
well enough to notice any marked change in him."
I was watching her closely and as the glances of the two men met I saw
uneasiness well up through the quietude of her face. Then for the first
time I suspected that she was not as composed as she seemed. Her words
confirmed the suspicion, they came quickly in hurried denial:
"No—I didn’t know him well. I saw him very seldom. We were not in the
least—what—what you’d call friends or even close acquaintances. It was
all purely business."
The chief nodded, a slight, Mandarin-like teetering of his head, which
gave the impression of a polite agreement in a matter that didn’t
interest him.
"Purely business," he murmured, then again turned to George. "What Miss
Whitehall says would bear out the general idea that it was that last
interview which drove Harland to desperation."
As they spoke she looked from one to the other, a glance that passed
over both faces as quick as a lightning flash. Before they could turn,
it was gone and her eyes had a dense, dead look as if she had dropped
some inner veil over them. Then I _knew_ that the brain behind that
smooth white forehead was something more than alert, it was on its
guard, wary and watchful.
The knowledge made me suddenly speak. I wanted to see, I had to see, if
that careful control would hold under a direct question about her lover.
"How about Barker? How did _he_ act when you saw him that afternoon?"
She shifted slightly to see me better.
"Oh, perfectly naturally. There was nothing in the least unusual about
him."
"Barker was a man of iron," said the chief. "His mental disturbances
didn’t show on the outside. Besides," he gave a wave of his hand toward
her—"this young lady knew him only slightly." He turned quickly to her,
"I’m right, am I not?"
"Perfectly," she fixed her eyes on him and kept them there, black and
unfathomable. "My acquaintance with him was simply that of an agent with
a customer."
For a moment I couldn’t look at her; I got up and going to the window
fumbled with the blind. The man she’d tried to run away with—and telling
her lie with that smooth steadiness! It was only love could give such
nerve. Behind me I heard the old man’s voice:
"A horrible affair. It was fortunate for you you escaped the sight of
it."
"Ah—" it was a sound of shuddering protest—"_that_ would have been too
much. I knew nothing of it till I saw the papers the next morning. It
made me ill—I was at home for several days."
"Well," said he, "I’m in hopes we’re going to straighten things out
before long."
I turned from the window and moved back, wondering what he was going to
say. She was looking again at her purse, snapping and unsnapping the
clasp.
"How can you do that?" she asked.
"Haven’t you read in the papers that Barker’s been seen in
Philadelphia?"
"Ah yes," she murmured, her glance still on the purse. "But nobody’s
found him yet."
"Give us time—give us time. These vanishing gentlemen like a change of
air. They don’t stay long under our hospitable flag. Their goal is
Canada."
For a moment she had no reply. You could see it, you could see the
effort with which she held her statue-calm pose, but a deep breath
lifted her breast and the edge of her teeth showed on her underlip.
"Canada," said the old man with a comfortable roll in his big chair, "is
our modern American equivalent of the medieval sanctuary."
She’d got her nerve back—I never saw such grit. She gave him a smile,
not jolly like his, but defiant.
"Of course," she said, "a sort of Cave of Adullum." Then she rose and
looking at him from under her eyelids added, "But if a man’s clever
enough to get to the Cave of Adullum I should think he’d be too clever
to stay there."
She turned and took her coat from the chair back. George made a jump to
help her and the old man heaved himself up, breaking out with renewed
apologies for the trouble he’d given her. They were like people
separating after a social function, he bland and courteous, she gracious
and deprecating.
"If I could be of any service to you I’d be only too glad. But"—she gave
that little shrug of her shoulders—"I’m so unimportant. A poor working
woman whose orbit happened by chance to cross those of two great
luminaries."
"There’s nothing for anybody to do but us," said George, standing behind
her and holding out her coat. "And we’ll do it. You’ll see some morning
in the paper that we’ve got our hands on Barker—the high-class sneak."
He and his father worked so well together that he told me afterward he
knew the old man would be watching her. He was and so was I, and at
those words I saw the rich color spread to her forehead and again that
flash, like a leap of flame, shine in her eyes. She knew it too and
dropped her lids over it, but the color she couldn’t control and it
glowed in crimson on her cheeks as she answered with a sort of soft
tolerance:
"Oh, Mr. Whitney, hunting criminals has made you unjust." Then as the
coat slipped on she flashed a look at him over her shoulder, "But I
don’t think it’s real! The profession requires a pose."
George was quite bowled over. He had no answer and she knew it, turning
from him with a smile and moving toward the door. Halfway there the old
man stopped her.
"Oh, by the way—one thing more that nearly slipped my memory. You no
doubt saw in the papers that Harland is supposed to have spent the
half-hour before he jumped, in the corridor of your floor. Did you see
him there—as you left, I mean?"
"I?" she raised her eyebrows in artless, surprised query. "No, I’d gone
before he came down. I left about six, or maybe a little before."
"Um!" he nodded. "You were probably in the elevator."
"Yes, probably—" her purse dropped from her hand to the floor. We all
started forward to pick it up but she was too quick for us and had it
before any of us could reach it. As she righted herself from the sudden
stoop her face was deeply flushed. "Yes, of course, I must have been in
the elevator," she finished with a slight gasp as if the quick movement
had impeded her breathing.
"I see, of course," agreed the chief moving beside her to the door. "It
merely interested me as a student of morbid psychology. I’d like to have
known how a man of Harland’s type looked, moved, comported himself,
while such a struggle went on in his mind."
At the door there were general good-byes, a very cordial parting all
round. I slipped out behind her to escort her through the hall to the
elevator. As we brushed along side by side she said nothing and
glimpsing down at her face, I saw it set in a still
pondering—sphinx-like it seemed to me.
Waiting for the car I said a few civil commonplaces to which she made
short conventional answers. Biting her lip, her eyes on the ground, she
looked preoccupied, impatient, I thought, for the car to come. I wanted
to ask her if I could see her again, but I didn’t dare, she seemed so
indifferent, so shut away in her own brooding. But when she entered the
elevator and the gate shut, I saw her through the grill-work, looking at
me from behind that iron barrier, and the sight stirred me like a hand
clasped on my heart.
It wasn’t only the expression of her face, which was sad, almost tragic,
but it was a strange and eerie suggestion that it was like a face
looking through the bars of a prison. The thought haunted me as I walked
back.
In the office George and the chief were talking over the interview.
They’d noted every tone of her voice, every change of her color. That
she’d lied had not surprised them. She had had to lie.
"Must love the old rascal to death," George commented.
The chief rose lumberingly and moved to his cigar box on the
mantelpiece.
"I understand now why Barker—who never was known to care for a
woman—finally fell. She’s a splendid creature—brains and beauty."
"Both to burn," George agreed. "You couldn’t get much out of her."
"All I wanted just now," said his father, striking a match, "the rest’ll
come in time."
I was just going to ask him what more he expected, when a clerk opened
the door and said:
"Mrs. Babbitts is outside to see Mr. Whitney."
The chief squared round like a flash, the lit match dropping to the
hearth. His face, usually heavy and stolid, lit into an almost avid
eagerness.
"Show her in," he ordered and the clerk disappeared.
"What are you expecting to get from Molly?" George asked. "Isn’t she
finished?"
"Not quite." The old man’s eyes were on the door, his cigar unlit in his
hand. I hadn’t often seen him so openly on the qui vive. "Molly’s had
further orders."
"What?"
"You’ll see," was the answer.
Molly entered with the cold of the night still around her. Her long coat
was buttoned wrong, her hat on one side. Haste was written all over her,
haste and that bright-eyed, jubilant exhilaration that took possession
of her when things were moving her way. She was like a little game dog
on the scent, and I’d often heard the old man say she’d make the best
woman detective he’d ever known. He was awfully fond of her, and took a
sort of paternal pride in her nerve and cleverness, just as he did in
George’s.
"Well, Molly," he said—"got that stuff for me?"
She nodded, her little body seeming to radiate a quivering energy:
"Today at the lunch hour. I came the minute I got off."
"Go ahead. I said not to tell anybody till you told me first. Well,
you’re going to tell me first now."
Standing by the table, her eyes bright on the old man, she said slowly
and clearly:
"Troop says he never took Miss Whitehall down from her offices on the
night of January the fifteenth."
George gave a smothered ejaculation and started forward. I was
transfixed—not believing my ears. Only the chief looked unmoved, leaning
against the mantelpiece, holding Molly’s glance with his.
"Go on," he growled.
"He says that he was there later than usual, until eight, because of the
accident and the other car being broken. Before that he took down the
two Azalea Woods Estates clerks, Iola Barry and Tony Ford, but not Miss
Whitehall. After the accident he ran out into the street, and when he
came back the people were on every landing ringing the bells and wild
because the elevator didn’t come. He went up and took them off, but Miss
Whitehall wasn’t among them. He said that he’d heard some of them got
tired of waiting and went by the stairs."
"He thought Miss Whitehall went that way?"
"Yes, it was the only way she could have gone. He supposed she’d got
impatient or hysterical and just rushed pell-mell down."
"Did Troop or anyone else see her in the lower hall or leaving the
building?"
"No, I questioned him careful about that. He thought she’d seen the
excitement on Broadway and run down and maybe met someone who’d told her
what had happened. And not wanting to get in it she’d gone out the side
door. Anyway he said she wasn’t in the ground floor hall, or out in the
street with the others or he’d have seen her."
There was a pause. In that pause—like figures in a picture—I saw George,
amazed, petrified, staring at his father, Molly looking from one to the
other, and the chief with his brows low down and his head drooped,
gazing at the fire. In a moment they would burst into speech—the speech
that was withheld while that astounding revelation found acceptance in
their minds.
To hear what they said—to listen to what I couldn’t believe and yet
couldn’t contradict—was more than I could stand just then. Without a
word, unnoticed by any of them, I slipped out, fled down the hall, into
the elevator and out to the street.
It was cold, a sharp, frosty night, with a few stars shining in the
deep-blue sky. Dark masses of men flowed out of the doors of skyscrapers
and drained away down the subway entrances. I jostled through them,
elbowing them right and left, instinctively turning my face uptown, deaf
to the curses that followed me, blind to the lights that stretched in a
spangled vista in front.
What did it mean? What _could_ it mean? I’d understood the lie about
Barker but now those other lies! She had said she went down about six,
in the elevator. I’d heard her, there was no getting away from it. Was
_that_ the reason the old man had wanted to see her? Suddenly I saw
again his look of hungry expectation when Molly was announced, and with
a stifled sound, I stopped short. As lightning plays upon a dark
landscape, for a moment showing it plain, I had a clear glimpse of the
line of thought he’d been pursuing. The horror of it held me rooted
there, rigid as a dead man, in the midst of the hurrying crowd.
Incredible—hideous—unbelievable! Association with criminals had warped
and diseased his judgment. And then like a sinister shadow, creeping on
me dark and ominous, rose the memory of her guarded face, the flame of
color she couldn’t hide, the dropped purse. I started out again,
fighting the shadow, but all I had to fight with was my belief in her.
She couldn’t—it was impossible, I’d die swearing it. And battering
against that belief, came questions, insistent, maddening. Why couldn’t
she speak out? Why didn’t she admit the truth—say that Barker was her
lover and have done with it? Why had she lied—about him, about the time
she left, about everything she could have frankly admitted, if—if—— When
I got there I could go no farther. Cursing under my breath I forged
along, the air ice-cold on the sweat that was damp on my forehead.