VANISHING LADY: THE SHADOW AT THE DANCE
The countryside slept vigorously and an hour's exhaustive inquiry
gleaned but the one circumstance--the search party itself discovered,
pinned to the first door they came to, a note informing the neighbor he
might have the livestock in lieu of certain debts. It had not been there
when the man had closed his house at nine o'clock. This limitation of
time was their sole reward, unless they counted the talk of an old
farmer, after the sheriff, promising to drop the detectives at Riley's,
had gone on to his post-office. The farmer said that hours ago, when
he'd been ever so long in bed and asleep, he thought he heard somebody
hollerin' an' bangin' on his door. Kind o' half dreamed it. Kind o' half
fancied it was a woman's voice. Storm was so bad he warn't sure. It was
with this pale fancy to keep them company that Herrick and Stanley let
out their car along the road again, this time in a dryly nipping air and
under a troubled, scudding moon.
From that desert purity and freedom of cold space Riley's accosted them
like Babylon. It was one blare and glare of hot lights and jigging
music; colored globes over the gates, colored lanterns in the garden;
along the driveway the blazing headlights of continually arriving and
departing motor cars that hissed and shrieked and shuddered; on the
veranda, where the tables indeed were nearly deserted, fur-coated men
stood smoking huge cigars and women with complexions artificially secure
against the wind passed in and out; their solitaire earrings pushed
forward beyond the streaming scarlet or purple of the veils that bound
their heads. The change of atmosphere warmed Herrick with that
unreasonable anger which the young feel against those who do not suffer
when they suffer.
He followed Stanley Ingham morosely through the hubbub and felt no
fitting gratitude for the table miraculously provided with a fortifying
meal, since Thompson, the chief detective, had not yet been able to get
Kane upon the 'phone. The cabman was upstairs under guard of the others,
babbling some trash about having taken the lady to the Amsterdam hotel
and left her there. The thick smoke, the smell of wine and food and
abominable coffee, the clatter of cheap china, the banging of the music
and the motions of the "trotting" dancers in street dress, the cries of
acquaintances urging them to new contortions, disgusted Herrick and set
an edge upon the iron of his self-contempt. The woman calling and
knocking in the night confronted him like a ghost, in the rank profusion
and fever of that place. He, to eat and drink and wile away the time;
what was _she_ doing? Was that she who had begged in vain for shelter,
beaten by the wind and drenched by the storm, and with God knew what
terrors in her heart! Out of her pale face, with the rain upon it, her
eyes besought him.
Stanley, anxious, but waving a cigar, for at twenty an adventure is
still an adventure, commented, "Say, old man, you want to relax! I could
let things wear on me, too, if I wanted to!--What are those?"--For the
detective having again fidgetted to the 'phone, Herrick had shaken out
upon the table-cloth the handful of torn scraps from the waste-paper
basket.
They were in the same handwriting as the interrupted note, but much more
hurried and scrawled on cheap pad paper as if to a more intimate
associate. Only six of them were of appreciable size and these came to
Herrick's hand in this order--
This time get rid of her.
I say. She but she can't g
real dau mother
et rid do the way
een any
She can but
mebbe
of she's got to
ain't ever b
ghter to me
At the phrase "get rid of her" Stanley quailed. But what the words
brought clearest to Herrick's mind was a small, spare face in its gray
frame bent above its game of solitaire. Without help from the law could
he make her speak? He heard Stanley saying, "How did Chris ever get
mixed up with this lot? What kind of hold _can_ they have on her?"
"Sssh!'" he said, dropping his handkerchief over the scraps. The
detective was returning.
Thompson sat down at their table, baulked and restive, and Herrick, a
hundred times more so, was reduced to scowling at their surroundings.
Near him sat a wrinkled, enameled, fluffy mite stubbing out her
cigarette as she giggled at a masculine bulk whose face Herrick could
not see. Dark and handsome as it vaguely promised to be this did not
account for a curiosity which Herrick somehow at once felt to see it;
but between them reared a gorged Amazon with a high bust and a coiffure
of corrugated brass. The band struck up again, this time to a music-hall
ditty, so that the customers kept their seats. But the hired singers
were straining their poor voices above the tumult and some musicians
blacked up as negroes joined in the chorus, performing shuffles as they
walked up and down and slapping steps with a dreary, noisy simulation of
irrepressible glee; infected by this whirl of gaiety the Amazon frisked
back from the little dyed man to whom she had been bending and gave
Herrick a clear view of a portly seigneur with a close beard. Instinct
had not misled his curiosity; the portly seigneur was his old
acquaintance, Signor Emile Gabrielli.
He could not have told why this struck him as portentous. The men smiled
and bowed. Then Gabrielli bowed to Stanley. "Didn't you know?" Stanley
asked. "He brought us letters--this is his first visit. He's going to do
our Italian correspondence."
It was the more remarkable that there should be, in Signor Gabrielli's
honeyed civility, a kind of chill. Then Herrick remembered that he, at
least, was a marked man and that his old suspicion of shady corners in
the lawyer's experience had been partly due to that gentleman's extreme
dislike of being "mixed up" in things. Henrietta Deutch could also have
borne witness to that characteristic! Far from advancing toward their
old familiarity the signor began to round up his innocent flock and
insinuate it mildly from Herrick's polluted neighborhood. And though
this splendor retreated Herrick did not regret being left alone, as if
beside the dear ghost with the rain upon its face!
But there was a singular beating at his heart, a feeling that he was
plucking at a veil which he longed and feared to raise. Yet that at some
other time he had raised it and lived through a shock upon the threshold
of which he stood again. It was already time for another dance and the
groups about the tables rose to their feet. Herrick had a moment's
vision, fever keen, of the room's arrested motion. Even the Gabrielli
party paused in the doorway; Herrick was moved by an uncontrollable
impulse to follow and accost the Italian and oddly impelled by his
excitement Stanley, too, rose to his feet; all round them the couples
clasped each other; the musicians lifted their bows; after ten minutes'
enforced repose the whole world seemed to hang in expectation of the
maxixe. When, just ahead of the orchestra, from somewhere outside,
beyond, above, into that instant's perfect silence there thrilled forth
the voice of a single instrument; the full-tongued call of a piano,
leaping, swelling, swaying into the march from Faust!
A gasp of amazement, a prickle, a shudder, ran over the skin of that
susceptible assembly. It was a tune, just then, so well advertised! They
recovered themselves with amused, scared smiles, awaiting some jest in
the sequel. The piano stopped with a wild crash. Instantly, from the
front courtyard where the motors waited, a bomb of oaths, cries and
movement burst upon the night. The sound of men jumping and running,
exclaiming, stumbling, swearing, of people bounding up the steps, of the
hall filled with astonished, excited questioners merged with one phrase
growing over, topping all the others--"The shadow! It's the shadow! The
shadow on the blind!"
Amazement, bewilderment, incredulity, obstructed the story which Herrick
traced to a knot of chauffeurs. "Yes--up there! The third window! Look,
it's dark--they've turned out the lights!" As Stanley, Herrick and
Thompson ran to the second story the legend still beat about their ears.
"It had its back to the window--it threw out its right arm--"
The door of the room was thrown open. The proprietor's wife, shaken with
hysterical laughter, ushered in the crowd. She was a flushed, stout
woman in the gaudiest of kimonos, larger than the fat man in the
driving-coat to whom she appealed. "My brother here 's from Mizzouri and
I was just showing him how the shadow must have done--you can't earn any
reward's round here! Anyhow, you don't suppose that hussy spends all her
time giving signals for murders, do you?"--"But the shadow was so slim!"
somebody said, as Mrs. Riley scornfully assisted Thompson in his
researches. These coming to nothing the young men were powerless to
refuse going oil to Benning's Point and telephoning from there--Thompson
had begun to be suspicious of this exchange.
They had gone perhaps a mile, moving slowly, watchful of the leaves in
every bush, and Herrick was remounting from the examination of a false
alarm when they heard a hail in their rear and beheld approaching
through the moonlight a hatless figure on a motorcycle.
The elderly cousin of Joe Patrick, whom they had not seen since he first
welcomed them, bore down upon them in timid and disheveled haste.--"Yis,
sor. I tried to see y' alone, sor, but yeh were gone. 'T is the reward,
sor; I'd not be sharin' it with the policeman an' him takin' th' whole
of it, not a doubt! An' impidence, beside, they do always give yeh! But
a gintleman, sor, I don't mind tellin' him; if yeh 'll exscuse me sayin'
so, Mrs. Riley's a liar!"
Not that he really knew anything. "No more than yirselves! But the
piana, sor! It stands there fer the upstairs dances, an' her not knowin'
wan note from another!--An' what's more, comin' down the back stairs
from that same room wid the dhirty dishes, what did I see standin' at
the back door but a car like yer own--only still as death an' no lights
in its head! Wasn't that a queer thing, now? An' it gone whin I rode
out."
What was that?--down the road which crossed theirs, where they had just
reconnoitered for a sound! Nothing but their distorted fancy, their
roused longing! "An' all I can tell surely, sor, is that awhile back,
whin Riley sinds me upstairs with a bite o' supper for Mrs. Riley's
brother that's just come in, barrin' the long drink, stheamin' hot,
'twas chicken an' like that yeh'd give to a lady. He has his own room,
has the brother, but 'twas to hers I took the thray. An' though I saw
no wan an' I heard no wan, yit sure there was some wan beyond Riley she
was yellin' at an' him prayin' her 'Hoosh! Hoosh!' as I come to the
door!"
"Did you hear anything of what she was saying?"
"Just the wan thing, sor, an' you'll remimber 'twas me told yeh. She
said, 'I'll thank yeh to hand over that diamond necklace!'"
There was something there! They could not hear, but they could somehow
feel from far behind them a stealthy purring. They turned; no lamp nor
headlight but their own was anywhere to be seen. The second and less
traveled road crossed theirs just above them at a narrow angle; but it,
too, lay untenanted, not a breath quivering on the stillness. They saw
themselves quite alone beneath the moon, breathing a night silence
drenched with coldest sweetness; the last words rang in their blood with
an accent that could not leave them wholly sober; they were, perhaps, a
little "fey." At any rate, it was by an impulse with which reason had
nothing to do that, as the old waiter continued--"'Twas for her, surely,
they'd have that dark car waitin'!" Herrick held up a warning hand. The
waiter hushed himself, stricken, and huddled in against their car;
Herrick bent forward in a passionate readiness, and from far in the
rear, but nearing swifter than the flight of time, along the
intersecting road came the tremulous vibration of a second automobile.