MIDNIGHT MARAUDERS
The litter of wrecked balloons was cleared away and the one which had
changed color with such sinister significance was carefully deposited
in an empty tin cracker box. With pipe and cigar alight Dennis and
McCarty were discussing the latest development, their fatigue forgotten
in their renewed zeal.
“There’s an old guy I know living far uptown that’s a wizard about
chemistry,” McCarty observed, neglecting to mention that the “wizard”
had an interesting police record. “I’ll take the box with what’s left
of that blue balloon in it up to him, come morning, but we’ll not
breathe a word of it to another living soul! ’Tis somebody on the Mall
or with easy access to it that’s walking around with two murders and
a disappearance on the conscience of him, maybe giving us fair words
every day and the grand laugh behind our backs. We don’t know who it is
and till we do we’ll be telling nothing to any of them.”
“True for you!” Dennis nodded. “I’m thinking, though, ’tis on the north
side of the street you’ll find your man, Mac, for everything that’s
happened hit the three households on the south side; Orbit’s valet and
Goddard’s son and now Mrs. Bellamy’s nurse-girl. The only two houses
opposite that are occupied, since the Burminsters are still away, are
Five and Seven—the Sloanes’ and the Parsons’. We’ll not be forgetting
that Swede Otto who beat it away from the Sloanes’ at the first alarm
and we’ve not so much as crossed the doorsill there yet. Then there’s
the Parsons, too. They hold themselves better than their neighbors and
have them that are next to royalty, no less, for company and still and
all they have an ex-convict and suspected poisoner at that to buttle
for them. If I was that ambassador I’d have thought twice before I
stayed to lunch!”
“They’ve a houseful of crooks, ‘ex’ or no,” McCarty asserted, regarding
his cigar thoughtfully. “I got Porter right, but ’twas the inspector
first gave me the wire without knowing it when he said the housemaid
and page boy looked familiar, as if he’d seen them somewhere before
but couldn’t place them. Where would he have seen them, if ’twas not
at headquarters or on trial? André put the last touch to it this
afternoon, though.”
“Orbit’s cook?”
“He did that. Do you mind when I asked him if he knew the cook over at
Parsons’ he said it was a ‘she,’ a great big woman with three moles
on her cheek? Jennie Malone shoved about twenty thousand dollars’
worth of the queer in the best stores of the city for the Carpenter
counterfeiting gang before she was pinched. She’d never have been
caught at all if it hadn’t been for those three moles that gave her
away. Ever since André tipped me off I’ve been asking myself what was
the rest of that household like, and did they have more reasons than
one for keeping the neighbors at arm’s length?”
Dennis sat forward suddenly and took his pipe from his mouth.
“Do you mean the Parsonses themselves are not on the level?” he
demanded. “The old gentleman, with his grand charities and his pious
talk, the old maid sister and the young niece? Do you think the old
gentleman is cracked, maybe, and turned murderer wholesale? Is it him
that’s planted a hotbed of crime right there in the Mall?”
“Somebody has,” McCarty shrugged. “Of course the two murders happened
in Orbit’s house, if ’twas there Hughes got his dose of Calabar bean,
and the Goddard kid disappeared from next door—”
Dennis snorted.
“Would Orbit be killing the valet that give him perfect service all
these years till he can’t so much as put on his own shirt for himself,
no less murdering a nurse-girl, and running off with a boy? None in
the Bellamy household could have had a hand in Lucette’s death and it
stands to reason Goddard didn’t kidnap his own son! Orbit’s likely to
be under fire now and come in for a lot of notoriety and maybe—well,
there’s others under that roof besides himself!”
“I’ve been turning that over in my mind, too.” McCarty took a last
pull at his cigar and laid the stub in the tray. “We’ve put in this
evening so far breaking balloons and that’s about all we’ve been doing
since first this case started; opening up one gas-bag after another
and getting nothing but empty air! I’d like a chance to go through the
Parsons house and Orbit’s too, with no one the wiser, and if you were
not such a clumsy, heavy-footed galoot, Denny, we’d be paying them a
little visit to-night without leaving our cards.”
“‘Clumsy,’ is it!” Dennis repeated indignantly. “Me that’s been scaling
walls and ladders since you tramped your first beat! We’ve broke in an
empty house there in broad day and we can get in the others at night
just as easy, in spite of what newfangled burglar alarms they may
have. I’m on to most of them through fighting fires, thanks be! Since
the first night we went through those gates I’ve felt in the soul of
me that sooner or later we’d be marauding in there like a couple of
second-story workers and now it’s come! If instead of Parsons and his
convicts it should be one of those Frenchmen or the Chink in Orbit’s
house, we’ll spot him!”
“The first thing we spot will be the restaurant around the corner. ’Tis
near ten o’clock and we’ve had no dinner,” McCarty rejoined. “We won’t
be showing up near the Mall till midnight or after and we’ve a lot to
plan first.”
Their meal finished they returned again to the rooms. McCarty paused
for a moment in the doorway of the living-room, a peculiar expression
crossing his face.
“Sit you down and light your pipe, Denny.” He threw open the closet
door as he spoke. “I’ll be with you in a minute. Now where—?”
He left the closet and went into the bedroom. Dennis paused in the
act of tamping his pipe to listen open-mouthed, for an unaccustomed
sound came to his ears. McCarty was whistling, wheezily and off-key,
but there was something oddly reminiscent in the simple, insistently
reiterated measure; moreover McCarty never indulged in that or any
other form of melodious expression unless in a blatant attempt at
dissimulation. What was he doing, anyway, that he didn’t want his own
pal to get on to? He’d opened and shut the door of his clothes-closet
and now he was in the bathroom, still trying to whistle that funny
little tune, almost like the ones Molly’s kid learned at the
kindergarten!
Dennis returned to his pipe, as McCarty reëntered the room.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked.
McCarty reddened.
“I did not, but no matter,” he replied shortly. “I unearthed an old kit
of burglars’ tools that I took once off of Black Matt, that’ll maybe
come in handy and here’s a revolver for you.”
“I’ve no use for it!” remarked Dennis hastily, regarding the weapon
with small favor. “Something short and hefty is more in my line, with
no trigger to go off unexpected and send me to the chair!”
“Do you think I’d trust you with it if it was loaded?” his host
retorted. “’Tis only to throw a bluff if we’re cornered. We’ll be
wearing handkerchiefs over our faces like movie burglars, for whatever
comes we don’t want to be recognized. It don’t matter what tracks we
leave behind us as long as we get clear ourselves so we’ll take these
nippers to cut every wire we see.”
“And to-morrow there’ll be a new job for us, tracking our own selves!”
Dennis grinned, and then his face sobered. “We’ve the hardest job on
our hands that ever we tackled, Mac, with this inhuman devil to lay
low!”
“I’ve a creepy feeling that there’s more than him at work.” McCarty
dropped the tools he had been sorting and stared reflectively into
space. “I don’t know how to put it, but it seems as if there was
something powerful and as evil as a spirit from Hell itself that’s
helping the wretch in his destruction! He’s getting bolder, Denny,
he’ll over-reach himself yet. If we could figure who’s to be the next
we could close in on him!”
“’Tis too deep for me.” Dennis shook his head. “Is there a glass-cutter
and a lump of putty in that layout?”
For more than an hour they discussed the forthcoming adventure. At
midnight they left the apartment and took a roundabout way across town
to the New Queen’s Mall. Waiting until Dave Hollis, the night watchman,
had strolled to the other end of the block, they let themselves in
at the west gate and slipped into the court between the Burminster
mansion and the Sloanes’ smaller residence next door. The original plan
had been to visit Orbit’s house first, but a light still glowed from
the lower floor, indicating that the host and his guest, Sir Philip
Devereux, had not yet retired. The Parsons establishment, however, was
decorously dark, and they proceeded to its rear. There they paused to
adjust handkerchiefs over the lower part of their faces and Dennis
took stock of the situation. There was no moon and even the stars were
partly obscured by scudding clouds, while the rising wind that swirled
through the alley-like spaces between the houses betokened a coming
storm.
“’Tis the equinox, no less, that’s on the way!” Dennis shivered more
from nervousness than chill and his voice came in a muffled whisper
from beneath the handkerchief. The flashlight in his hand wavered as
he directed its ray against the house wall. “Look at that, now! If the
old gentleman keeps any valuables here he must think that the crooks
under his roof are enough protection from them outside, for he’s still
depending on the old Kip electric system, that a babe in arms could
disconnect!... Get you to the mouth of the alley, Mac, and keep an eye
out for the watchman.”
McCarty obeyed. When, after an interval during which Hollis had passed
twice, he heard a cautious hiss behind him and returned, it was to
observe loose wires dangling innocuously from the wall and a yawning
aperture in one of the windows where Dennis had removed a whole pane
of glass.
“I made a good job of it,” the latter whispered complacently. “The
telephone is cut, too, and the inside burglar attachment. The old
gentleman’s not such a fool after all, for he’s got an installation
that once set would warn him if a window or outside door was touched,
but I put it out of business. Take off your shoes like I did and then
come on; I’ve fixed the catch already.”
He raised the window inch by inch while McCarty removed his shoes, tied
the laces together and hung them about his neck. Then Dennis crawled
over the sill, drew his bulkier companion in after him and flashed his
light quickly about.
“There’s the door. You said not to bother with any rooms downstairs
except the old gentleman’s private study or sitting-room if he’s got
one, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I can see the foot of the back stairs at the end of this hall, so
shut off that light!” McCarty whispered in response. “You’re breathing
loud enough to wake the dead!”
They fumbled their way to the stairs and up. The silence was oppressive
and to the amateur house-breakers it seemed to hold an ever-increasing
menace. They padded along in their stockinged feet through the wide
hall, pausing at each doorway as McCarty directed his own electric
torch within, but only stately drawing-rooms and a dining-hall huge
enough for a banquet met their gaze.
“Wouldn’t you think he’d buy more furniture?” McCarty forgot their
equivocal situation for the moment as he gazed disparagingly down a
long portrait gallery, where Cavalier and Puritan forebears of the
Parsons family looked down upon a few chairs placed at wide intervals
against the wall. “There are not seats enough in all the parlors to
hold a decent funeral and what there is is old and dull like the junk
in Girard’s antique shop!”
“Maybe ’tis worth as much and more,” Dennis suggested sagely. “I’m not
facing jail this minute, though, for a chance to look at it!—There’s a
smaller room beyond that might be the old gentleman’s study.”
He had guessed truly, though the apartment in which they found
themselves more closely resembled a business office. A roll-top desk, a
swivel chair, filing cases and a solidly compact safe met their gaze;
the rugs, the upholstered furniture and tall bookcases which completed
the appointments formed merely an incongruous background.
“Unless you’re up in safe-blowing, which I doubt, I don’t see as this
room is going to tell us anything!” Dennis remarked. “Them keys that
you stuffed your pockets with will do no good.”
“Won’t they?” McCarty chuckled grimly and strode toward the nearest
filing case. “Hold your light steady, Denny; fireproof this thing may
be, but all the sections of it open with the one lock and I could pick
it with a buttonhook!”
The lock confirmed his opinion by yielding to the third key tried, and
the various sections filled with an orderly arrangement of ledgers and
documents were at their disposal.
“Look at the fine, neat writing of him.” Dennis was rummaging in the
topmost one. “What’s this? ’Tis a lot of typed stuff with his own notes
on the margin and headed: ‘Report. Chris Porter, 1913-1920.’ He’s wrote
under it: ‘Reasonable doubt. Pardon essential’; then, ‘Pardon granted,
help needed.’”
“Give it to me!” McCarty demanded. “Are there any more like it? These
ledgers have nothing in them but notes on charity cases.”
“Here’s another; something about a reformatory, and in his own writing:
‘Weak not vicious. Useful if right influence.’ It’s headed: ‘Danny
Sayre, 17.’—This one is about that Jennie Malone—”
“Let me have them all!” McCarty interrupted. “Don’t you see what they
are? The criminal records of all the hired help! Take the next section,
after.”
A pause broken only by the rustling of papers ensued and then Dennis
exclaimed in an awestruck whisper:
“Mac! Here’s a lot of notes about ways of killing, all mixed up with
religion, and—and among ’em’s poison gas! Fluorine, hydrogen and
H_{2}F_{2}—!”
“Grab it!” McCarty hastily thrust the documents he had been examining
into his pockets and closed the filing case. “Grab all the notes and
come along; we’ll need look no further in this house!”
Yet on the way to the door he paused and ran the pin-point of light
along the rows of books in their towering cases. They appeared to be
volumes of reference on widely diversified subjects, from hygiene and
sanitation to law and religion; all were arranged in meticulous order,
save on a lower shelf where the huge tomes of an encyclopædia had been
stacked helter-skelter. One volume, that labeled: “Bronze—Cephalaspis,”
protruded from the row as though too hastily replaced and McCarty
stooped on a sudden impulse and drew it out. The morocco covers fell
apart and the book opened midway, where a thin, silvery, leaf-shaped
object had been inserted as a mark.
At a muttered injunction Dennis held his light trained upon it and
McCarty’s eyes traveled down the page then stopped and for a long
minute there was no sound except their mingled breaths. Then the latter
whispered:
“Listen, Denny; here’s a queer one!—‘It is used in the form of an
emulsion by the natives of Africa, as an ordeal when persons are
suspected of witchcraft. It is believed that if the suspect vomits it
he is innocent; if it is retained and death occurs, he is guilty.’”
“A mighty sensible arrangement, considering!” Dennis commented. “If
he’s guilty, and I’d not put witchcraft past them heathen, they’re
saved the bother and expense of an execution!... But what in the name
of common sense has it got to do with what’s been going on here in the
Mall?”
“Nothing.” McCarty tore out the page, wrapped it about the leaf-like
bookmark and pocketed it. “Nothing whatever, except that the stuff they
make the suspects take is Calabar bean!”
He replaced the mutilated volume and they stole from the room, making
their way down the stairs and back to the open window, through which
they had entered. The silence was unbroken and when they had crawled
through the aperture and out into the wind-swept court McCarty leaned
against the wall balancing himself precariously on one foot as he drew
on a shoe, while Dennis softly closed the window.
“We’ll not be breaking into Orbit’s?” the latter asked, as he followed
his companion’s example. “Them notes about poison gas, the marked
page telling of Calabar bean, and the life history of the crooks he
surrounds himself with—if Benjamin Parsons isn’t the man we’re looking
for I’ll eat my hat!”
“Then maybe you’d better be working up an appetite against the
future!” suggested McCarty dryly. “There’s no more proof against him
than there was against that Otto Lindholm and if the lights are out
over at Orbit’s I’m going to take a chance!”
The miniature palace across the way was in total darkness, but its
marble front gleamed whitely in the faint glimmer of starlight before a
wind-driven cloud obscured them again. Once more escaping the vigilance
of the night watchman they crossed the street and passed down the
opening next to the Goddard house where the glow from all the upper
windows bore mute testimony once more to the sustained anxiety and
heartbreaking suspense within.
McCarty halted his companion before the little side door.
“I’ll wait here while you go around back and cut any wires you find,”
he directed. “The bulge of the conservatory hides me from the street
and ’tis not likely any of the Goddard household will be looking out
their windows. What with the murder and then company and all, Ching Lee
may have forgot to fasten this door proper on the inside, and we can
force it easier than the iron grill outside the rear windows. Don’t be
all night, Denny!”
Dennis glanced rather dubiously up at the next house, then out to the
sidewalk, but he hurried away without a word and McCarty took out his
keys and waited.
The strangely coincidental facts he had unearthed in Benjamin Parsons’
study gave him much food for reflection, but long experience made him
more wary of jumping to conclusions than his optimistic colleague.
Parsons was known as an eminent and practical philanthropist; what if
he’d taken those ex-convicts into his home to reform them at first
hand? It would be natural enough for him to keep reports on their past
records. Calabar bean had been prominently mentioned in the papers in
connection with the murder of his neighbor’s valet; mightn’t he have
been interested sufficiently to look it up as a rarity? The notes on
poison gas “mixed up with religion” were more difficult to explain,
but then only Dennis had seen them yet and—where the devil was Denny,
anyway?
McCarty craned his neck to stare into the darkness toward the rear but
no deeper shadow moved and no sound came to him but the moaning swish
of the wind. Denny had maybe found a burglar alarm that it wasn’t so
easy to put out of business!
Hollis pounded heavily past on the sidewalk, then returned and went
on again and still there was no sign of his erstwhile companion. All
at once the bolts of the door against which he leaned were drawn back
and McCarty had barely time to spring aside and flatten himself in the
corner of the out-curving glass conservatory wall when the door itself
swung inward.
He held his breath but no one appeared. At last a low hiss assailed his
ears.
“’Tis you!” Mingled relief and exasperation lent emphasis to his
whispered ejaculation. “For what did you play such a damn fool trick? I
near landed on the flat of my back—”
“Forget it!” Denny interrupted with unaccustomed tone. “Come on in
before the watchman passes again! You’d never have got past these
bolts only I found a way in through the little pantry ventilator; you
couldn’t have squeezed through it in a year!—Now, which way? Is it up
to the floor where the Frenchmen and them two heathen sleep that we’ll
be going? Nobody’s stirring.”
He had closed the door and noiselessly shot the bolt. McCarty responded:
“I want to make sure; Orbit said he wasn’t a good sleeper, you’ll
remember, and if he could rest easy in his bed this night, with that
poor girl murdered under his roof not so many hours past, he’s not the
man I took him for! We’ll go up the back stairs and then sneak along
the hall to his door. Thanks be, we know the lay of this house!”
They crept silently through the card-room and past the pantries to the
back stairs, where they stopped and removed their shoes again before
venturing upward. No faintest ray of light shone from under any door
on the floor above, but from behind one on the left deep and regular
stertorous sounds denoted that one at least of the household, doubtless
the distinguished arrival of the previous evening, slumbered, unhaunted
by morbid visions.
Before the door of Orbit’s own bedroom they halted but no sound came
from within and at length McCarty motioned to his companion and tiptoed
into the sitting-room adjoining.
“You’ve been in that bedroom before.” His lips barely formed the words
close to Dennis’ ear. “You’ll know how the furniture’s placed, so as
not to fall over it. Go in and see is he asleep; I’ve our story all
fixed if he should jump you.”
“I’ve not!” Dennis retorted in palpable reluctance. “Moreover there’s a
queer, sweetish smell on the air; don’t you get it? If he or anything
else in there jumps me I hope you’ll get busy first and explain
afterwards!”
He left McCarty’s side and the latter heard his feet pad softly off
toward the connecting door between the rooms. A pause ensued, then
came the footsteps again but fainter now. After a moment a low light
flashed. It wavered, steadied, went out suddenly and a dull thud came
to McCarty’s ears as the electric torch itself struck the thick pile
of the rug. He started forward as Dennis’ low, shaking voice was borne
upon the silence.
“For the love of the saints, come here, Mac! Somebody’s been before
us!”