MOLLY TELLS THE STORY
Friday night I brought the information from Troop in to Mr. Whitney, and
knew then for the first time why he wanted it.
Gee, it was an awful thought!
As I sat there between him and Mr. George—Jack Reddy went away, I don’t
know why—with neither of them saying a word, I saw, like it was a
vision, the Harland case spreading out black and dreadful. It made me
think of ink spilled on a map, running slow but sure over places that
were bright and clean, trickling away in directions no one ever thought
it would take.
I left soon after Jack, as I could see they wanted to get rid of me.
Before I went the old man said to try and get a line on the Whitehalls’
servant—I might work it through Iola—and find out what time Miss
Whitehall came home the night of January fifteenth. If I couldn’t manage
it I was to let him know and it could be passed on to O’Mally, but he
thought I had the best chances. That, as far as he knew now, was the
last he’d need of me. My work at the Black Eagle was done. The next day
would be my last one there. Say nothing to anyone about it—simply drop
out. The reappearance of Miss McCalmont was his affair.
In the next twenty-four hours things came swift, as they do in these
cases. You’ll have a long spell with the wires dead, then suddenly
they’ll begin to hum. And you’ve got to be ready when it happens—jump
quick as lightning. I learned that in the Hesketh case.
The first chance came that night, was sitting in the parlor when I
reached home—Iola! She had the hope of a new job—a good one—and wanted a
recommendation letter from Miss Whitehall, and naturally, being Iola,
couldn’t go unless I came along and held the sponge.
It was so pat you’d think fate had fixed it, and it worked out as pat as
it began. While Iola was in the parlor getting her letter I stayed in
the kitchen—very meek and humble—and when the servant came back—Delia
was her name—started in to help her with the dishes. We grew neighborly
over the work, she washing and I wiping, and what was more natural than
that we’d work around to the affairs of the ladies. They’d lost all
their money and Delia was going to leave. How did that happen now? Sure,
it’s the feller that killed himself done it—didn’t I know? I only had to
let her talk, she was the flannel-mouth Irish kind. Here are the facts
as they went in to Whitney & Whitney the next day.
Miss Whitehall was generally very punctual, always getting home about
half-past six. On the night of January fifteenth she didn’t get back
till a quarter to eight. Such a delay was evidently not expected as Mrs.
Whitehall became extremely nervous, couldn’t keep still or settle to
anything. At a quarter to eight, hearing the key inserted in the door,
Delia had gone into the hall, and seen Miss Whitehall enter. She was
very pale and agitated. Delia had never seen her look so upset. She
walked up the passage, met her mother and without a word they went into
a bedroom and shut the door.
At dinner she ate nothing and hardly spoke at all—looked and acted as if
she was sick. The next morning when she read of the Harland suicide in
the paper she nearly fainted, and after that was in bed for three days,
prostrated by the shock, she told Delia.
I guessed this would be my last piece of work on the Harland case and I
wasn’t sorry. There was an awfulness coming over it that was too much
for me. But it wasn’t, not by a long shot. I was in deeper than I knew,
so deep—but that comes later. I’ll go on now to tell what happened that
last night I was in the Black Eagle Building.
It was coming on for closing time and I was making ready to go. I’d
cleared up all my little belongings, and was standing by the switchboard
pressing the tray cloth careful into my satchel, when I heard a step
stop at the door and a cheerful voice sing out:
"Just in the nick of time. Spreading her wings ready for flight."
There in the doorway, filling it up with his big shape, was Tony Ford.
For the first moment I got a sort of setback. Mightn’t anyone—thinking
of home and husband and finding yourself face to face with a gunman?
With one hand still in the satchel I stood eyeing him, not a word out of
me, solemn as a tombstone. It didn’t phaze him a bit. Teetering from his
heels to his toes, a grin on him like the slit in a post box, he stood
there as calm as if he’d never come nearer murder than to spell it in
the fourth grade.
"It just came to me a few moments ago—as I was passing by here—that the
prettiest and smartest hello girl in New York mightn’t have gone home
yet," he said.
Now if you’re experienced about men—and take it from me hello girls
_are_—you never believe a word a chap like Tony Ford hands out. But
hearing those words and looking at his broad, conceited face, it came to
me that these were true. He’d been passing, suddenly thought of me, and
dropped in to see if I was there.
"Well," I answered, "here I am. What of it?"
"First of it," he said, "is how long are you going to be there?"
"Till I get this satchel closed," I said and pressing hard on the catch
it snapped shut.
"And second of it," he went on, "is where are you going afterward?"
My first thought was I was going to get away from _him_ as fast as the
Interborough System could take me—and then I had a second thought. Why
had Tony Ford dropped in so opportune at my closing hour? To ask me to
dinner. And why couldn’t I, hired to do work for Whitney & Whitney, do a
little extra for good measure? I knew they wanted to hear Ford’s own
account of what he did the evening of January fifteenth, but that they
couldn’t get it. What was the matter with me, Molly Babbitts, getting it
for them?
It flashed into my head like lightning and it didn’t flash out again.
Frightened? Not a bit! Keyed up though—like your blood begins to run
quick. I’d taken some risky dares in my time but it was a new one on me
to dine with a murderer. But honest, besides the pleasure of doing
something for the old man, there was a creepy sort of thrill about it
that strung up my nerves and made me feel like I was going to shoot
Niagara in a barrel.
"Going home, eh?" said he. "It’s a long, cold ride home."
"That’s the first truth you’ve said," I answered. "And for showing me
you can do it I’ll offer you my grateful thanks."
I began to put on my gloves, he standing in the doorway watching.
"To break the journey with a little bit of dinner might be a good idea."
"It might," I said, "if anybody had it."
"I have it. I’ve had it all day."
"What’s the good of having it if you haven’t got the price." I picked up
my satchel and looked cool and pitying at him. "Unless you’re
calculating to take me to the bread line."
"There you wrong me," he answered. "Nothing but the best for you," and
putting his hand into his vest pocket he drew out a roll of bills,
folding them back one by one and giving each a name, "Canvas back,
terrapin, champagne, oyster crabs, alligator pears, anything the lady
calls for."
Those greenbacks, flirted over so carelessly by his strong, brown
fingers, gave me the horrors. Blood money! I drew back. If he hadn’t
been blocking up the entrance, I think I’d have quit it and made a break
for the open. He glanced up and saw my face, and I guess it looked
queer.
"What are you staring so for? They’re not counterfeit."
The feeling passed, and anyway I couldn’t get out without squeezing by
him and I didn’t want to touch him any more than I would a spider.
"I was calculating how much of it I could eat," I said. "My folks don’t
like me to dine out so when I do I try to catch up with all the times
I’ve refused."
"Come along then," he said, stepping back from the doorway. "I know a
bully little joint not far from here. You can catch up there if you’ve
been refusing dinners since the first telephone was installed."
So off we trotted into the night, I and the murderer!
Can you see into my mind—it was boiling with thoughts like a Hammam bath
with steam? What would Soapy say? He’d be raging, but after all he
couldn’t do anything more than rage. You can’t divorce a woman for
dining with a murderer, especially if she only does it once. Mr.
Whitney’d be all right. If I got what I intended to get he’d pass me
compliments that would take O’Mally’s pride down several pegs. As for
myself—Tony Ford wouldn’t want to murder me. There was nothing in it,
and judging by the pleasant things he said as we walked to the
restaurant, you’d think to keep me alive and well was the dearest wish
of his heart.
The restaurant was one of those quiet foreign ones, in an old dwelling
house, sandwiched in among shops and offices. It was a decent place—I’d
been there for lunch with Iola—in the daytime full of business people,
and at night having the sort of crowd that gathers where boarding houses
and downtown apartments and hotels for foreigners give up their dead.
We found a table in a corner of the front room, with the wall to one
side of us and the long curtains of the window behind me. There were a
lot of people and a few waiters, one of whom Mr. Ford summoned with a
haughty jerk of his head. Then he sprawled grandly in his chair with
menus and wine lists, telling the waiter how to serve things that were
hot and ice things that were cold till you’d suppose he’d been a chef
along with all his other jobs. He put on a great deal of side, like he
was a cattle king from Chicago trying to impress a Pilgrim Father from
Boston. The only way it impressed me was to make me think a gunman with
blood on his soul wasn’t so different from an innocent clerk with
nothing to trouble him but the bill at the end.
As he was doing this I took off my veil and gloves, careful to pull off
my wedding ring—I wasn’t going to have that sidetracking him—and
thinking how I’d begin.
We were through the soup and on the fish when I decided the time was
ripe to ring the bell and start. I did it quietly:
"I guess you’ve got a new place?"
"No, I’m still one of the unemployed. Don’t I act like it?" He smiled, a
patronizing smirk, pleased he’d got the hello girl guessing.
"You act to me like the young millionaire cutting his teeth on
Broadway."
He lifted his glass of white wine and sipped it:
"I inherited some money this winter from an uncle up-state. You’re not
drinking your wine. Don’t you like it?"
In his tone, and a shifting of his eyes to the next table, I caught a
suggestion of something not easy, put on. Maybe if you hadn’t known what
I did you wouldn’t have noticed what was plain to me—he didn’t like the
subject.
"No, I never touch wine," I answered. "I don’t want to speak unfeelingly
but it was mighty convenient your uncle died just as your business
failed. Wasn’t it too bad about Miss Whitehall?"
"Very unfortunate, poor girl. Bad for me but worse for her."
"She had no idea it was coming, I suppose?"
He looked up sudden and sharp:
"_What_ was coming?"
His small gray eyes sent a glance piercing into mine, full of a quick,
arrested attention.
"Why—why—the ruin of Mr. Harland."
"Oh, _that_," he was easy again, "I thought you meant the suicide. I
don’t know whether she knew or not. Waiter"—he turned and made one of
those grandstand plays to the waiter—"take this away and bring on the
next."
"She’d have known that night as soon as she heard he was dead but I
guess she was so paralyzed she didn’t think of herself."
"I don’t know what she thought of. She wasn’t in the office."
I dropped my eyes to my plate. Eliza crossing on the ice didn’t have
anything over me in the way she picked her steps.
"Oh, she’d gone before it happened?"
"Yes. I left early myself that night—before she did. I was halfway home
when I remembered some papers I’d said I’d go over and had to hike back
for them. She was gone when I got there. And just think how gruesome it
was, when I was going down in the elevator Harland jumped, struck the
street a few minutes before I reached the bottom."
Could you beat it! Knowing what had been done in that closed office,
knowing what was going to be done while he was sliding down from story
to story and then getting it off that way, as smooth as cream. A sick
feeling rose up inside me. I wanted to get away from him and see an
honest face and feel the cold, fresh air. Dining with a gunman wasn’t as
easy as I’d thought.
Tony Ford, leaning across his plate, tapped on the cloth with his knife
handle to emphasize his words:
"He must have been up that side corridor waiting. When he heard the gate
shut and the car go down, he came out, walked to the hall window and
jumped. Ugh!" he gave a wriggling movement with his broad shoulders.
"_That_ takes nerve!"
I suppose sometimes in crowds you pass murderers, but you don’t know
them for what they are. Probably never again if I lived to be a hundred,
would I sit this way, not only conversing with one, but conversing about
his crime. It wasn’t what you’d look back on afterward as one of the
happy memories of your life, but it was a red-letter experience. I had a
vision of telling my grandchildren how once, when I was young, I talked
with one of the blackest criminals of his day on the subject of the deed
he’d helped commit.
"It’s a fortunate thing he left no family." It was something to say, and
I had to keep him moving along the same line. "You’d suppose he’d have
married again, being wealthy and handsome."
Mr. Ford, who was lighting a cigarette, smiled to himself and said: "So
you would."
"And I guess he could have had his pick. Maybe he cared for someone who
didn’t reciprocate."
He threw away the match and lolled back in his chair.
"Maybe," he said with a meaning secret air.
It wouldn’t have taken a girl just landed at Ellis Island to see that he
wanted to be questioned. It was out on him like a rash. So not to
disappoint him and also being curious I asked:
"_Was_ he in love with someone?"
He said nothing but blew a smoke ring into the air, staring at it as it
floated away. I waited while he blew another ring, the look on his face
as conscious as an actor’s when he has the middle of the stage. Then he
spoke in a weighty tone:
"Harland was in love—madly in love."
This was news to me. I hadn’t looked for it and I didn’t know where it
might lead. I didn’t have to hide my interest; he expected it, was
gratified when he saw me open-mouthed. But he had to do a little more
acting, and tapping on his wine glass with his forefinger said languid
to the waiter:
"Fill it up—the lady won’t take any." Then, his eyes following the smoke
rings—"Nobody had an idea of it—nobody but me. I knew Harland better
than many who considered themselves his friends."
"_You_ knew him," it came out of me before I thought, or I’d never have
put the accent on the "you" that way.
"I knew him well. He’d—er—taken rather a fancy to me."
I couldn’t say anything—the man he’d killed! Fortunately he didn’t
notice me. The wine he’d taken was beginning to make him less sharp. Not
that he was under the influence, but he was not so clear-headed and his
natural vanity was coming up plainer every minute. He went on:
"I met him quite casually in the Black Eagle Building and then—well,
something about me attracted him. Anyway we grew friendly—and—er—that’s
how I stumbled on his secret."
"His love?"
He inclined his head majestically:
"You can see how it was possible when I tell you the lady was Miss
Whitehall."
Believe _me_ I got a thrill! There was a second when I had to bite on my
under lip to keep an exclamation from bursting out. _This_ was
something, something that no one had had a suspicion of, something that
might lead—I couldn’t follow it then—that time, what I had to do was to
find out everything he knew.
"Are you sure?" I breathed out incredulous.
"Perfectly. He was daffy about her."
"You just guessed it?"
He suddenly wheeled in his chair and looked at me, with that same
piercing, almost fierce look I’d seen before. The wine he’d been
drinking showed red in his face, and in his manner there was a roughness
that was new.
"Of course I guessed it. A man like Harland doesn’t go round _telling_
you he’s in love. But I’m a pretty sharp chap. Many things don’t escape
me. He didn’t have to tell me. I was on the spot and I _saw_."
Why didn’t Iola see? She was on the spot too and when it came to romance
no man that breathes has anything on Iola. I ventured as carefully as if
I was walking on the subway tracks, and didn’t know which was the third
rail.
"He tried to keep it a secret?"
"Oh, he tried and I guess he did except from little Tony."
"What did she feel—Miss Whitehall—about him?"
"Not the way he did."
"Perhaps there was someone else?"
A meaning look came over his face and he said softly:
"Perhaps there was."
"Who?"
I don’t know whether it was an interest that stole into my voice without
my knowledge or some instinct that warned him, but suddenly he pulled
himself up. The lounging swagger dropped from him, and he gave me a look
from under his eyebrows, sullen and questioning. Then like a big animal,
restless and uneasy, he glanced over the littered-up table, pushing his
napkin in among the glasses and muttering something about the wine. I
didn’t want him to know I was watching and hunted in my lap for my
gloves. But to say I was keen isn’t the word, for I could see into him
as if his chest was plate glass and what I saw was that he was scared
he’d said too much.
"How should I know?" he suddenly exclaimed, as if there’d been no pause.
"I don’t know anything about Miss Whitehall. Just happening to be round
in the office I caught on to Harland’s infatuation. Anyone would. She
may have a dozen strings to her bow for all I know or care." He gave me
an investigating look—how was I taking it?—and I smiled innocently back.
That reassured him and he twisted round in his chair, snapping his
fingers at the waiter, "Here, lively—my bill. Don’t keep us waiting all
night."
The waiter who’d been hovering round watching us eating through those
layers of food darted off like a dog freed from the leash. Mr. Ford
subsided back into his chair. He was more at ease, but not all right yet
as his words proved.
"Don’t you go quoting me, now, as having said anything about Harland and
Miss Whitehall. He’s in his grave, poor chap, and I don’t like to figure
as having talked over his private affairs. Doesn’t look well, you know."
"Sure," I said comfortably. "I’m on."
My gloves were buttoned and my veil down. Mr. Ford, leaning his elbows
on the table, was looking at me with what he thought was a romantic
gaze, long and deep. In my opinion he looked like a fool—men mostly do
when they’re trying to be sentimental on a heavy meal. But I wasn’t
worrying about that. What was engaging me was how I could shake him
without telling him who I was or where I lived. In the first excitement
of corralling him I’d never thought of it. Now the result of my rash act
was upon me. If you ever dine with a murderer, take my advice—when you
start in lay your pipes for getting out.
As we waited for that bill I was as uncomfortable as if I had to pay it.
Suppose I couldn’t escape and he followed me home? Babbitts would be
like the mad elephant in the Zoo, and from what I knew of Tony Ford he
might draw a pistol and make me a widow.
"Have you enjoyed your dinner, little one?" said he, soft and slushy.
"Fine!" I answered, pulling my coat off the chair back.
"We’ve got to be good friends, haven’t we?"
"Pals," I said.
"Don’t you think we know each other well enough for you to tell me your
name?"
"They say there’s a great charm about the unknown," I answered. "And I
want to be as charming as it’s possible with the restrictions nature’s
put upon me."
"You don’t need any extra trimmings," said he. "You might as well tell
me, for I can always find out at the Black Eagle Building."
Could he? I was Miss Morgenthau there, and today was positively my last
appearance. If I could get away from him now I was safe from his ever
finding me.
The waiter brought the bill with murmurings that it was to be paid at
the desk. We rose, Mr. Ford feeling in his pocket, the waiter trying to
look listless, as if money was no treat to him. I moved across the room
and reconnoitered. The desk, with a fat gray-haired woman sitting behind
it, was close by the door that led into the hall. Several people were
out there putting on coats and hats and jabbering together in a foreign
lingo. I sauntered carelessly through the doorway, seeing, out of the
tail of my eye, Mr. Ford put down a twenty-dollar bill on the counter.
The gray-haired woman began to pull out little drawers and make change.
One of the people in the hall opened the front door and they began
filing out. I went with them, slow on their heels at first, then fast,
dodging between them, then like a streak down the steps to the sidewalk
and up the street.
It was an awful place to hide in—all lights and show windows; a fish
might as well try to conceal itself in a parlor aquarium. There wasn’t a
niche that you could have squeezed a cat into and I _had_ to get
somewhere. Suddenly I saw a narrow flight of stairs with a large set of
teeth hanging over them and up that I went, stumbling on my skirt till I
reached a landing and flattened back against the dentist’s door. It was
locked or I would have gone in, so scared I was of that man—gone in, and
if the price of concealment had been a set of false teeth I make no
doubt I’d have ordered them.
[Illustration: _It was locked or I would have gone in._]
After a while I ventured down, took a look out and stole away, dodging
along dark side streets and round corners with my muff up against my
face, till I struck a cab stand. Not a word came out of me till I was
safe inside a taxi, and then I almost whispered my address to the
chauffeur.
As we sped along I quieted down and began to think—going over what he’d
said, connecting things up. And as I thought, bouncing round in that
empty vehicle like one small pea in a pod that was too big, I saw it
plainer and plainer, as if one veil after another was being lifted.
Harland was in love with her—she’d not gone down in the elevator—she’d
stayed there! she’d been there! She’d—
We went over a chuck hole and I bounced up nearly to the roof, but the
smothered cry that came from me wasn’t because of that. It was because I
_saw_—the whole thing was as clear as daylight. _She’d_ been the lure
that brought him to the Azalea Woods Estates, _she’d_ been the person
that kept him in the front office while Barker came down from the story
above!