MCCARTY'S SÉANCE
The bachelor quarters over the antique shop presented a strange and
unwonted aspect that evening. The sooty hearth had been scrubbed until
it shone, cigar boxes, stray matches, newspapers and the usual litter
to be found in the wake of the undomesticated male had miraculously
disappeared and an unnatural and self-conscious state of cleanliness
and order prevailed.
McCarty, too, seemed abnormally solemn as he greeted Inspector Druet
and ushered his two assistants into the small inner bedroom.
"You'll wait here, boys," he announced. "No smoking, mind, for there'll
be a lady present and besides I don't want the rest of them that's
coming to know you're here till I give the word, but when I do, look
sharp!"
"You've got everything arranged?" the Inspector asked in a hurried
undertone.
McCarty nodded.
"There'll be no hitch. I'm only asking one thing of you, sir; don't
interrupt me no matter what I say, and for the love of God, don't
contradict me! I'll be using your name pretty free, but you'll see
in the end that 'twas right and proper I should if you've only the
patience to wait for it."
"I'll give you your head, Mac," promised the Inspector. "I wish you
would put me wise as to what is coming off, but I'll have to take your
word for it that you know what you're about. Are you sure the man we're
after will show up?"
A knock upon the door prevented McCarty's immediate reply and he
ushered in a tall woman dressed in black, whose features were all but
concealed by a heavy veil.
"Good-evening, ma'am." There was an exaggeration of deference in
McCarty's manner as he motioned toward the inner room. "I'll ask you
to sit in here, please, with these two gentlemen. You've got it all
straight about your part of it?"
He added the last in a lowered tone, and the woman nodded and throwing
back her veil revealed a face unknown to the Inspector; a face wherein
bold, black eyes snapped resolutely and grim lines about the compressed
lips left no doubt as to the stern import of her errand.
Martin and Yost rose respectfully as she entered the inner room, but
she ignored their presence and seated herself just beyond the range of
vision from the doorway.
"Who is she, Mac?" the Inspector urged. "You'll tell me that much, at
least!"
"Whist, now!" McCarty cautioned. "There's someone else coming up the
stairs."
The door leading to the hall opened slowly and Dennis Riordan craned
his neck through the aperture.
"Is it all right?" he demanded in a sepulchral whisper.
"Sure! Come in, Denny." McCarty bustled forward. "Sit you down over
there by the window and mind you don't let a peep out of you, no matter
what happens."
"But where is she?" Dennis gazed about him in bewilderment. "I could
have sworn I saw a woman coming in here; a woman with a long, black
veil!"
"You'll be seeing more than that before the night's over!" retorted
McCarty impatiently.
The arrival of Vivaseur and Calvin Norwood, the former frankly curious,
the latter laboring under an agitation which he strove in vain to
conceal, precluded further talk, and Dennis subsided. The newcomers
were scarcely seated when Wade Terhune accompanied by his client Oliver
Jarvis appeared upon the scene.
McCarty had arranged the chairs so that they formed a rough semi-circle
facing the bedroom door and now he stepped before it and cleared his
throat.
"You all know that I've no longer any regular connection with the
police department," he began, "but now and again when Inspector Druet
needs me I go back as a special officer on his staff. I've been working
on this investigation with him and he wants me to tell you what
progress we've made. That's right, isn't it, sir?"
He appealed to the Inspector and the latter nodded speechlessly in
confirmation.
"To do that I'll have to go back a good bit and I'll ask you to bear
with me, for it's all a part of the story. A matter of eleven years
ago, in nineteen-six in a convent away down south on the Mississippi
River, there was a young girl of sixteen or thereabouts who fell
in love with a man she flirted with over the wall. He was a dark,
handsome fellow calling himself Leon Hoguet and he'd come ashore from
a grand yacht anchored just off the bank. One night the girl ran away
and married him, but he turned out to be a roystering blackguard and
deserted her in less than three months."
Oliver Jarvis uttered a sharp exclamation beneath his breath and the
others stared, spell-bound, but McCarty continued as though unconscious
of the impression his opening words had created.
"The girl went back heart-broken to her guardian in New Orleans and
he took her in and hid the scandal of it. He tried unsuccessfully to
find the scoundrel but the girl must have known where to reach him,
for between then and spring she wrote him at least two letters. The
first was just a poor, pitiful cry to him to come back to the little
wife he had deserted, but she must have learned something of his true
character in the meantime for the second letter threatened that if he
had deceived her she would follow him to the ends of the earth, and she
kept her word.
"Leon Hoguet had sold his yacht to a wealthy planter and skipped, but
up in New York that spring a man named Leonidas Hoyos bought another
one and went in for some gay times."
It was the Inspector's turn to start, but McCarty paid him no heed.
"Now, this Hoyos had appeared first in New York the summer before from
nobody knew where, and making a killing in Wall Street he cut quite a
swath. During the month that Hoguet was courting the little convent
girl Hoyos was absent from the city and for the next three months he
showed up only on flying trips but after that he came back for good.
"I don't know how the girl down south found out that Hoyos and Hoguet
were the same, but I suspect it was through a discharged valet he'd
beaten up; the stewardess on the second yacht, _The Muette_, heard
him swear to get even. Anyhow, one night in May--the twenty-sixth, it
was--when _The Muette_ was lying off in the Hudson the girl came on
board. Hoyos was evidently expecting to see someone else entirely for
when he came into the saloon where he'd directed his guest was to be
shown and found out who it was he took good care that none of the crew
or the help should get a sight of her face.
"They had high words but no one could hear what was said then. They
stayed shut up in the saloon and they never touched the food that had
been laid out for them, but from the empty bottles scattered around
Hoyos must have tanked up on enough champagne to float the whole boat.
Later, going on toward midnight, the quarrel broke out again louder
than before, the girl crying fit to kill herself and the man shouting
and swearing like the brute he was.
"The stewardess on board had her own reasons for hating Hoyos and when
she heard the girl's sobs she felt sorry for her, and crept up and
listened at the door.
"The girl was pleading first to be taken back, and the stewardess said
'twould have moved the heart of a stone, but he just sneered at her and
cursed and finally she demanded her rights as his wife. Then he up and
told her where she got off, the blackhearted devil! He'd married other
women before her, two or three of them under as many different names,
and she had no more legal claim on him than a stranger.
"The girl screamed once and then was quiet and the stewardess thought
she must have fainted. After a time she heard Hoyos advising the girl
in a cold, sneering way to go back where she came from and not stir up
a scandal that would only bring disgrace on herself. All of a sudden he
stopped in the middle of a sentence, there was a scuffle and the crack
of a revolver.
"The stewardess near fainted, herself, outside the door but the next
thing she heard a kind of a choking cry from Hoyos and two heavy
splashes in the water."
He paused as Oliver Jarvis with a groan buried his face in his hands.
Norwood clutched the arms of his chair and even Vivaseur's ruddy face
had paled slightly, while a frown of discomfiture had gathered on Wade
Terhune's brow.
"If you remember the Hoyos case you all know what happened; how weeks
later a mutilated body was fished out of the river and identified as
Hoyos' through his clothes and the jewelry with his initials on it.
The girl was supposed to have been drowned for no trace was found of
her and no one knew who she was.
"Because she hated Hoyos so and sympathized with the girl, the
stewardess never told what she'd overheard and right after the shooting
she remembered a wallet with a couple of letters in it that was in a
desk in his cabin. She'd taken a peep at them and was afraid they might
help in the girl's conviction if she was caught, so before the police
boat came she took the wallet and hid it among her things.
"The girl wasn't drowned, however; she got safe ashore and although
the Inspector hasn't been able to prove it yet, he's got an idea how
it happened, for it is on the records in Hoboken that about that time
a barge captain was arrested trying to dispose of a ruby ring worth
thousands. He swore that it had been given to his wife by an old woman,
richly dressed, that they pulled out of the river on the night of June
first and that in return they provided her with dry clothes and money
for a railway journey. The police couldn't prove him a liar for he and
his wife and the crew had the description of the old lady down so pat
they never suspected 'twas the girl from _The Muette_ that was being
shielded, nor that the date of the rescue had been changed.
"She got back to New Orleans and after a terrible, long sickness she
shut herself up in her guardian's house like a hermit for a matter of
two or three years. But she was young and the horror of it wore off and
after a while she began to care for somebody else, a rich New Yorker
that was down there on a visit. To be fair to her, she wanted to tell
him the truth but her guardian forbade it--she'd sworn to him that
Hoguet was dead but told him no more--and she married the Northerner
without saying a word of the past.
"You all know who I'm talking about, but I'll have to use names now to
keep from balling up the story, though I don't like to. Last Christmas
Mrs. Jarvis received a gift of a big cake with 'Noel' on it in sugar;
she didn't know who sent it but she nearly passed away, for she knew
that someone from out of the past had spotted her and her secret would
never be safe again. Three months afterwards she received an unsigned
note made by spelling out words in macaroni letters pasted on paper,
saying: 'All is known. Pay or I tell. First warning.'
"She got twenty thousand of her own money from her husband and waited,
and around the beginning of the last week in May she got another note
that told her to put five thousand dollars under the rose bush in the
yard on the night of the twenty-sixth, calling attention to the date.
It was the anniversary of that night on _The Muette_. I guess she must
have done it, for two weeks later she got the third and last of the
macaroni warnings. It ordered her to put a thousand dollars under the
bush on the twenty-sixth of each month or everything would be told.
"I don't know--I mean the Inspector hasn't found out yet--how it came
about, but the blackmailing must have stopped along in October for only
nine thousand is gone out of the twenty, and Mrs. Jarvis planning to go
abroad looks as though she thought herself out of danger."
McCarty paused again, but not a sound broke the tense stillness of the
listening group, and after a moment he went on in a change of tone:
"I've got to go back now to the stewardess. She had kept the wallet
with those letters in it all these years; in fact, it had been in a
storage warehouse in a trunk with a lot of other old stuff belonging
to her, and she'd almost forgotten that she had them until about a
month ago. Then she came across them just when she was out of a job and
in desperate straits for money. She had heard of Mr. Norwood and his
museum, and that he paid big prices for relics of crime, and the idea
came to her to sell him the letters. She didn't think that after so
many years had passed the identity of the young girl could be proved
from them, and she'd not be hurting anybody.
"Mr. Norwood bought them from her three days before the murder and
told all about them at the dinner at Mr. Jarvis' house on Wednesday
night. Mrs. Jarvis was near crazy, for she knew that at any time Mr.
Norwood might discover by accident that they were in her handwriting
and it would be all up with her. She made up her mind that she'd have
to get those letters and on the Friday afternoon she got rid of all
her servants, put on the little dark dress with the veil around her
head, and started out through the yards for the museum. She would have
a clear field, for she had persuaded Mr. Norwood to visit his friend
the professor and he'd told her the butler would be out. I guess she
didn't figure much on Captain Marchal disturbing her, on account of
his blindness, and the cook and housemaid wouldn't see her, with the
kitchen shades drawn and the lights turned on.
"There was no way Mrs. Jarvis could get into the museum except by
climbing the ladder and forcing one of the windows, and she remembered
that Mr. Norwood was a shark--begging his pardon!--on finger prints,
so she decided to take a pair of her husband's old motor gloves with
her and put them on. In her hurry, however, she only grabbed up one and
that she dropped on the ladder. She knew where Mr. Norwood had likely
put the wallet, in the tall cabinet where he kept most of his papers
and documents relating to crime.
"She got in the museum, all right, and it's my belief that she had
the wallet in her hands when she heard someone at the door, and turned
to come face to face with the man she thought had died by her hand ten
years before; Leonidas Hoyos himself, in the flesh!"