GERTIE
When the inspector had left them McCarty and Dennis mounted to the
apartment above and together looked over the bank-book and check-book
appropriated from beneath the rug in Hughes’ room.
The first showed a regular deposit of one hundred and fifty dollars on
the first of every month with varying sums between, ranging from twenty
to just under a hundred, but balanced it invariably revealed only a
comparatively small amount on hand.
“If the one hundred and fifty means his wages, he got mighty high
ones,” Dennis remarked. “Still, Orbit looks like the kind who’d pay
anything if he was suited and he said Hughes was a perfect valet,
if you remember. The money deposited during the month might be his
winnings at the races or cards and he was a lucky son-of-a-gun, but he
seems to have lived up to nearly every cent.”
“Or lost it back again,” suggested McCarty. “Let’s have a look at the
check-book.”
The stubs in the latter were not illuminating, for the dead man had
evidently evolved a method of his own for noting those to whom he
assigned checks and only hieroglyphics designated them. Laying aside
this disappointing record McCarty turned to the little pile of letters
which he had taken from the drawer of Hughes’ dresser and passed a
handful to his companion.
“Here, Denny, sort these,” he directed. “You can tell by the writing if
not by the names signed to them. If they’re love letters from women the
more fools they, and ’tis no time to be squeamish!”
For a brief space there was silence, except for the rustle of paper and
an occasional shocked exclamation from the scandalized Dennis, but at
last he glanced up with a look of wonderment and exclaimed:
“Don’t it beat hell how much alike they are, all of them?”
“Who are?” McCarty asked absently.
“Women!” Dennis waved a huge paw in a vaguely comprehensive gesture.
“American or foreign,—and you can tell the last by the strange words
they put in when they can’t think of the English of them,—they all
begin writing to him as if they was doing him a favor, the scoundrel!
After a bit they start bossing him, and nagging and fault-finding, then
they throw a bluff at ‘good-by forever,’ and the last of it’s always
the same; begging him to come back! ’Tis well for us, Mac, that we’ve
steered clear of them, for the both of us would have been wax in their
hands!”
“Speak for yourself!” McCarty retorted. “No living woman could make a
mark of me, though I’m giving none a chance! ’Tis funny they’d fall for
a beefy, middle-aged guy like that, though, with the little mean eyes
of him and the bald spot and all!”
“There’s no telling what they’ll take to!” asserted Dennis darkly.
“There’s only one sensible female in the lot here; this one signing
herself ‘Truda.’ She tells him kind but firm to stop writing to her or
it’ll bring trouble to the two of them and it’s all damn’ foolishness,
anyway.”
“She said that?” demanded McCarty.
“Not in those words, maybe; I’ve put it shorter and better than
she does,” Dennis admitted modestly. “It looks as if she goes out
sick-nursing or something, but she’s a married woman, all right.”
“‘Married?’” McCarty dropped the letter he had just taken up. “‘Truda’
might stand for ‘Gertrude,’ and ‘Gertie’ is short for the same name. I
wonder now could she be ‘Gertie’?”
“And who in the world is Gertie?” Dennis stared. “Have you been holding
out on me, Mac?”
“I have not. Snape told the inspector this morning that Hughes was
crazy over some married woman named Gertie, but that’s all he knew
about her. Read the letters, Denny.”
“There’s only two of them.” Dennis spread out the thin, double sheet
of folded note-paper. “Listen, then: this is the first, for ’tis dated
August twenty-second.—‘Dear friend Alfred. I was surprised and very
pleased with the so pretty flowers you send to me, but please, you
should not do it any more. I no longer am a girl, that I could accept
such things and also he would be so angry to know. He is still there
but you have not seen him for some days because the old gentleman of
whom he takes care has been much worser. To me he has not come, even,
but soon he will and my lady always talks to him when she is well
enough, she takes interest for him to learn English more quicker. I got
fear she speaks to him of the pretty flowers, for I tell her they come
from him, and so it makes troubles for you and me, the both. Because of
that, though I thank you for the so kind thought, I ask that you send
no more. Your very true friend, Truda.’”
“Humph! Truda ain’t so strong on the English herself, is she?” McCarty
remarked. “Sounds like a Dutch girl to me, or one of those squareheads.
I wonder where her husband could be working that Hughes expected to see
him? Anyway, it’s him and not her does the sick-nursing, Denny.”
“The both of them do!” Dennis declared. “Wait’ll you hear the second
letter.—‘Dear friend. I could not meet you as you wish for my lady is
not so well and I do not leave her bed, but also I would not. It is
much silliness that you write me and you should not do it again once.
You are making yourself amused with me and I got anger you should keep
sending the letters I do not want and that could harm us both yet. He
is not stupid and mild like you think. Nothing he says but much he
thinks, and then it comes out and terrible is it. So you will not write
again, nor try that I should see you. Your friend, Truda.’”
“She’s Dutch, all right, and level-headed. Hughes must have had the
fine opinion of himself as a lady-killer, to be chasing after a
respectable married woman that wanted nothing to do with the likes
of him!” McCarty snorted. “I’ll bet Snape knows who she is and the
husband, too, only he’s scared to speak now.”
“Mac, do you mind what Orbit told us about that Calabar bean being used
as a medicine? Besides a doctor, who’d know more about medicines and
poisons and such than a trained nurse?” Dennis’ leathery countenance
was flushed with sudden excitement. “Hughes thought Truda’s husband
was a dull-witted lout, with no more spirit than a sick cat, but _she_
says he’s terrible when he gets going, and she’d ought to know! What
if he got on to them letters and being a foreigner with little or no
English—!”
“Denny!” McCarty gazed wide-eyed at his confrère. “By the powers, I
wonder if you’ve hit it! If Snape’s held anything back he’ll come
across with it now! Are you sure there are no more ‘Truda’ letters
except the two?”
“Not here, but you’ve not gone through all yours yet.” Dennis reminded
him.
McCarty fell upon the few that remained and running hastily over them
seized on one with an exclamation of satisfaction. It died upon his
lips as he ran his eye down the page and then glanced up at Dennis’
tense face.
“Listen you to this!” he said impressively. “’Tis short but tells more
than the other two put together.—‘Friend Alfred Hughes. To you I have
tried to be kind but it is not good. Now I say that if you should write
again I shall tell it to my husband that you are made to stop. He knows
already you bother me, but comes any more letters and he will the
street go over to make of you sausage meat. It is enough. Truda L.’—And
’tis dated just four days ago! Do you get it, Denny?”
“Only that the husband works near, but we learned that much before—”
“‘Near?’” McCarty interrupted. “He’s across the street! Didn’t Sloane
say his old father was an invalid with a male nurse that was a Swede
and spoke little English? Come on! It’s back we’ll be going to the New
Queen’s Mall!”
Dennis was overwhelmed with the importance of their discovery and
ventured only one question when they stood again at the entrance gate.
“How’ll we start in on him?”
“On who?”
“The Swede at Sloane’s. We’ll have to find out first if his last name
begins with ‘L.’”
“I’m not going near him, not till I’ve found and talked to this Truda.
It’s Snape I’m after and I’ll be leaving you outside the gate, Denny,
for maybe you’ll be scraping acquaintance with him to-morrow, after
all.”
Bill Jennings admitted him and stopped for a word with Dennis, while
McCarty went quickly to the Bellamy house and rang the bell. The door
was opened promptly by a tall, slenderly erect man of thirty-five or
a trifle more, with the strongly marked features and intelligent,
self-contained expression of an actor. The slight puffiness about
the slate-gray eyes and fine lines at the corners of his mouth were
the only evidences of the possible dissipation of which the watchman
Jennings had spoken. He waited with an aloof but courteous air of
inquiry to learn the visitor’s errand.
“You’re the butler here? Snape is your name?”
“Yes, sir,” the man replied with no hint of surprise in his tone but
his eyes narrowed and a certain touch of deference vanished from his
manner.
“I’m a special deputy, headquarters.” McCarty showed the old badge
which he had resurrected just before leaving his rooms with Dennis.
“Inspector Druet thought you forgot one or two things this morning that
you might have had time to remember by now. Where can we talk private?”
Snape hesitated for a minute and then stepped aside for McCarty to
enter.
“Come this way.” He closed the door, and, turning, started down the
hall toward the rear, with McCarty at his heels. The butler led his
unwelcome guest through a door opening into the domestic quarters
of the establishment and to a plainly but comfortably appointed
dining-room where he motioned to a chair at the table and seated
himself in another opposite.
“What can I do for you?” His tone was brisk but not truculent, and
McCarty, too, came to the point without preamble.
“You can tell me the address where Truda’s working now, taking care of
the sick woman.”
“‘Truda?’” Snape frowned, as though perplexed, and McCarty assumed an
air of impatience.
“Oh, you know her! ‘Gertie,’ Hughes may have called her to you, but
Truda is the name she signs to her letters and she mentions you in
them.”
“Me?” Snape smiled incredulously. “There’s a mistake somewhere. I don’t
know any one by either name.”
“You spoke of her first to the inspector this morning.”
“I said Hughes had mentioned a girl named Gertie that he was taken
with, in a manner of speaking, but I didn’t know anything more about
her except just the name, though from what he said I had a notion
that she was a married party.” Snape coughed discreetly. “I told
the inspector Hughes and I had a bit of diversion together now and
then, but nothing to do with women. He was always running after one
or another of them and I never paid much attention to what he told
me about them, but in the case of this ‘Gertie’ he did say there was
somebody in the way, and I supposed he meant a husband.”
“You know well there was a husband and you’d not need the strength of
a child to throw a stone right now and hit him!” McCarty retorted.
“She’s respectable, with no use for Hughes and his nonsense, and it was
to save her trouble, since he’s dead and out of it, that I came to
you for her address instead of going across the street and giving her
away to the man she’s married to. Of course, if you can’t recall Hughes
mentioning it to you I’ve no choice.”
He made as if to rise and Snape wet his thin lips nervously.
“I have my place to consider.” There was a slight whine in his tone.
“How do I know that the ‘Truda’ you speak of is the same—!”
“Come across if you’re going to!” McCarty interrupted with the harsh,
commanding bark of the old days. “You know damn’ well that if I go over
to the Sloanes’ and tell her husband ’twas you first wised us up that
Hughes and his wife—”
“I never said Otto Lindholm’s wife was the woman Hughes was taken
with!” A sullen note had replaced the whine. “I said it was somebody
named ‘Gertie’ and there could be a million Gerties! The one he knew
might be companion to an invalid up on the Drive; a Mrs. Cochrane, who
has a private house in the neighborhood of Eightieth Street, somewhere,
but it’s not for me to say. Hughes talked about so many—”
He paused with a shrug and McCarty asked quickly:
“When was the last time you saw Otto Lindholm?”
“The night before last—Thursday,—about eleven o’clock. We met at the
east gate coming in.”
“What did he have to say to you?”
“Nothing much. He’s too thick-headed to learn English and he don’t say
two words to anybody.” Snape spoke with lazy contempt, but there was an
undercurrent of antagonism which McCarty recognized.
“He had a few words with you, though, didn’t he? What are you and him
on bad terms about?”
“I don’t even know him, except to nod to when we meet!” Snape
disclaimed. “He’s a surly customer and never had any use for Hughes
even before—”
He checked himself but it was too late.
“Before Thursday night, eh? So Hughes was with you when you met outside
the gate?” McCarty pounced on him like a flash. “What passed between
the three of you? I want every word.”
“Oh, well, Lindholm just said ‘hello’ to me and then he stepped up to
Hughes and growled something about letting his wife alone or he’d fix
him. That’s all I know, I can’t repeat his lingo. Hughes blustered it
out and Lindholm went on in ahead of us muttering to himself, when Dave
Hollis opened the gate. I didn’t want to say anything about it, because
of getting the woman into trouble, but what’s all this got to do with
Hughes’ death?” The gray eyes lighted shrewdly. “You fellows think
there was something wrong or you wouldn’t be raising all this row over
it. Nobody had it in for him bad enough to do him any hurt, and the
papers said nothing about his having been beat up! You don’t think he
was murdered, do you?”
The amused insolence in the man’s voice was only slightly veiled.
McCarty concluded that if he were putting it on he was indeed a smooth
proposition, as the inspector had said.
“Nobody beat him up.” He ignored the final question. “Do you know any
of the other help over at the Sloanes’?”
“Only John Platt, the butler, but he’s old and hardly leaves the
house.” Snape had risen with alacrity, but as he showed McCarty to the
front door he added anxiously: “I never even saw the Lindholm woman but
once, and I don’t know what you want her for, but I hope you won’t
say that I tipped you off about her! I don’t want to get in any mix-up
with that Swede husband of hers and it would be as much as my place is
worth, if I was thought to have made trouble in the Mall here!”
On the sidewalk before the house McCarty found an exceedingly pretty
young girl in the picturesque dress of the typical French bonne,
guiding the steps of a tiny, toddling baby. The child was dimpling and
gurgling with mischief. Snatching suddenly at her nurse’s handbag she
tossed it as far out on the sidewalk as she could. McCarty retrieved
and returned it with a bow.
“_Merci, monsieur_,” the girl said gravely, but her dark eyes too
danced with laughter. “She is a very naughty, bad baby that I have
here, is it not so?”
The last observation was evidently intended for her charge, but McCarty
replied gallantly:
“’Twas a pleasure, miss! Sure, at that age they’re all full of the—of
life. It’s Mrs. Bellamy’s little girl, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Monsieur.” Her eyes were serious now and there was a note of
reserve in her soft voice. “Come, _ma petite_. We shall go in now.”
Dennis was waiting patiently and evinced considerable interest in the
brief tête-à-tête he had just witnessed, but McCarty was not in a mood
to be treated with levity.
“She’s a pretty girl and a polite one, but well you know I’ve no eye
for them!” he disclaimed. “I’ll be taking you now to call on another,
though, that’ll maybe give us some real dope.”
“It’s Truda!” exulted Dennis. “You’ve made him come across with her
address! Did you get anything else out of him, Mac?”
“Only that there was bad blood between her husband, that nurses at the
Sloanes’, and Hughes.” McCarty repeated the tale of the encounter and
his companion’s face expressed satisfaction.
“’Twill be him, all right!” he predicted sagely. “Them silent,
slow-thinking fellows are the worst! Where’d he get hold of that
Calabar bean stuff and how’d he slip it to Hughes?”
“And why didn’t I go and pinch him right off the bat instead of taking
this little trip?” McCarty supplemented sarcastically, as they boarded
an uptown car. “There’s more than him and that wall-eyed Chink that had
it in for Hughes, but we’ll see what his wife has to say.”
A telephone book, in a drugstore on Eightieth Street, vouchsafed them
the house number of the only Cochranes on Riverside Drive. They found
the place to be a small, solidly built residence of gray stone with
potted evergreens flanking the turn of the steps to the entrance door.
A trim little maid with a coquettishly frilled apron admitted them to
a foyer, arranged informally as a library or den, with seats built in
at either side of the empty hearth and books ranged along the opposite
wall behind a long table. There she left them and presently slow, soft
footsteps sounded on the stairs and another woman appeared.
She was thirty or thereabout, with thick braids of coarse, pale-gold
hair wound around a small, shapely head, and a face whose perfect
features would have rendered it beautiful had it been lighted with
intelligence; but the great blue eyes were dull and bovine, and,
although the rich color came and went in her cheeks, there was no hint
of expression beyond vaguely bewildered inquiry as she bowed.
“I am Mrs. Lindholm. The maid say that you wish to see me.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Dennis was gaping in flagrant admiration at the vision,
but McCarty stepped forward. “We’ve come to return something that
belongs to you.”
He handed her the first two letters which she had written to the dead
man and watched her face as she recognized them. A shadow of dismay
darkened her eyes and a little frown gathered above them.
“Oh, for why did he keep them?” Her tone was distressed but without
agitation. “Such a nuisance as he was, poor man! Where did you get
these?”
“Amongst his things.” McCarty drew a step nearer. “You know he is dead
then?”
“Alfred Hughes? Yes, this morning in the papers I see it. So sudden it
was! You are his friends, maybe?” She folded the letters and slipped
them into the belt of her starched, white nurse’s uniform. “Sit down,
please. I cannot long stay away from my patient.”
“We’re taking charge of Alfred Hughes’ belongings and arranging with
Mr. Orbit for the funeral.” McCarty explained speciously, as they
complied. “You and him were good friends, weren’t you?”
Truda Lindholm shook her blonde head slowly.
“No. I meet him by accident when I go to see my husband, who works
across the street from Mr. Orbit’s, and then he waits for me two—three
times. If you have read these letters you must know he gets a
foolishness in his mind to make a flirtation with me, but it did not
please me. He is gone now, poor soul, and so we do not talk about that,
no?”
“But you did talk about it, didn’t you, Mrs. Lindholm?” asked McCarty.
“You told your husband?”
“Oh, yes, it is right that I tell _him_.” Her eyes opened wider, but
there was no trace of confusion in her tone. “Already I told him that
Alfred Hughes followed me, and once he and that friend of his who works
next door, they want I should go to a dance with them. Such a nonsense,
a married woman! I think it is joost silly but Otto is angry and so I
do not tell him any more.”
She spoke with the naïve candor of a child. McCarty continued:
“You did tell him when Hughes wouldn’t stop writing to you, though.
When did you see your husband last, Mrs. Lindholm? Thursday evening,
was it?”
“Thursday, yes. It is then I tell him. I am tired that I should be
bothered and I think he shall speak to Alfred Hughes, but now I am
sorry.”
“Why?” Dennis found his voice all at once, and the woman turned a
glance of calm wonder upon him.
“That my Otto should be for nothing worried? So much to heart he takes
things, and now it makes no difference. You do not think, please, that
I am without feeling about the so unfortunate death of your friend. It
makes me shocked and sad to read of it, but death is always sad. Thank
you much for my letters, it was a foolishness that they were not sooner
destroyed.—And now I must go to Mrs. Cochrane. You will excuse me?”
She rose, and Dennis and McCarty followed suit, but the latter shook
his head.
“Just a minute, ma’am. Was it here you saw your husband on Thursday?”
“Yes, he came to see me. But what is this? Why do you ask?” Surprise
raised her rather flat tones a note or two.
“Because I want to know just what passed between you two about our
friend Alfred Hughes.” McCarty responded doggedly. “Have you heard from
your husband since?”
“He telephoned to me yesterday.” The color ebbed slowly from her
cheeks, then swept back in a deep flood and she clasped her hands. “Oh,
do you mean that there was trouble between them? A quarrel? Ach, such
a pity! Otto comes to me about nine o’clock Thursday night. Two days
before I have still another letter received from your friend asking
that I should meet him and I am angry; I write to him that I shall tell
my husband and so I do when he comes, for I still got anger. Otto, he
gets a worser mad on and he wants he should go then to Alfred Hughes,
but I say to wait, maybe comes no more letters and then there is no
troubles. From Bavaria I come but my husband is Swedish and such a
temper he has! Sometimes I think I do not know him and six years I am
married already! We say no more of Alfred Hughes and I think Otto has
forgotten—did he go yet and make bad friends with him?”
“I guess they had some words, ma’am, but it don’t matter now as you
say.” McCarty was watching her with a feeling of growing wonder on his
own account. Could the woman be as stupid as she seemed? Hughes had
evidently been less than nothing to her, she was apparently devoted to
her husband and still—in McCarty’s own mental phraseology—giving him a
blacker eye every time she opened her mouth.
“But it is bad luck that one should be unfriends with the dead!” She
shook her head and made a little clucking noise with her teeth. “The
fault is mine that I should so quickly have spoken, for Alfred Hughes
got only the foolishness in his head to make a joke; not a bad man was
he!”
“Well, it’s done with now and that’s the end of it.” McCarty signaled
to his colleague with a quick glance. “We won’t be keeping you any
longer from your patient. Is it a very hard case you’ve got?”
“It is the nerves and heart.” A still gentler note crept into the dull
tones. “Mrs. Cochrane has got much sorrow; her little boy she has lost
less than a month ago.”
“Too bad!” McCarty sympathized absent-mindedly. “What did he die of?”
“Of tetanus.”
Dennis started.
“Is it catching?” he asked nervously. “Could you get it after?”
A little smile dimpled Truda Lindholm’s smooth cheek.
“Oh, no. Comes it from the scratch of a rusty nail, sometimes, and
causes the jaws to set rigid, to lock.”
“Lockjaw!” Dennis stared for a moment and then his own lower jaw
snapped. “Come along, Mac! There’s a date we’ll be missing!”