The Janney party left the office soon after Molly and Esther. They had
decided to stay at the St. Boniface hotel where rooms had already been
engaged, and, with Suzanne swathed in veils and clinging to her mother’s
arm, they were escorted to the elevator and cheered on their way by the
two Whitneys. When the car slid out of sight the father and the son went
back into the old man’s room.
It was now late afternoon, the sun, sinking in a fiery glow, glazed the
waters of the bay, seen from these high windows like a golden floor. The
day, which had opened fresh and cool, had grown unbearably hot; even
here, far above the street’s stifling level, the air was breathless. The
men, starting the electric fans, sat down to talk things over and wait.
For the machinery of "the move" spoken of by Wilbur Whitney already had
been set in motion.
Immediately after Esther’s telephone message O’Malley had been called up
and, with an assistant, dispatched to watch the Gayle Street house. As
Whitney had told his clients, the news of the child’s disappearance had
hardly surprised him. Chapman’s anger and threats portended some violent
action of reprisal, and, even as the lawyer had questioned what form it
might take, came the answer. Chapman had stolen his own child and had a
hiding place prepared and waiting for her reception. It was undoubtedly
only a temporary refuge, he would hardly keep her in such sordid
surroundings. The Whitneys saw it as a night’s bivouac before a longer
flight. And that flight would never take place; every exit was under
surveillance, there was no possibility of escape. The two men, smoking
tranquilly under the breath of the electric fans, were quietly
confident. They would bring Chapman’s vengeance to an abrupt end and
avert an ignominious family scandal. Meantime they awaited O’Malley—who
was to return to the office for George—and as they waited discussed the
kidnapping, knowledge supplemented by deductions.
When Chapman had decided on it he had instructed Esther, telling her to
inform him when the opportunity offered. This she could do by letter,
or, if time pressed, by telephone from a booth in the village. The trip
to New York had been planned several days in advance and he had been
advised of it, its details probably telephoned in the day before. He—or
some one in his pay—had driven the taxi. It had been stationed in the
rank near the house, where in the dead season there were few vehicles
and from whence the extra one needed by Suzanne would naturally be
taken. That Esther, with a long list of commissions to execute, should
leave the child in the cab was an entirely natural proceeding. Her
explanation of her subsequent actions was also disarmingly plausible,
and the minutes thus expended gave the time necessary for the driver to
make his get-away. Before she had acquainted Suzanne with the news, the
child was hidden in the room at 76 Gayle Street.
Whether the room was taken for this purpose was a question. If it was
then the idea had been in Chapman’s mind for weeks—it was the "coming
back" he had hinted at when he left Grasslands. If, however, it had been
hired as a place of rendezvous with his confederate, it had assisted
them in the carrying out of their plot—might indeed have suggested it.
For as a lair in which to lie low it offered every advantage—secluded,
inconspicuous, the rest of the floor untenanted. They could keep the
child there without rousing a suspicion, for if Chapman was with her—and
they took for granted that he was—she would be contented and make no
outcry. She loved him and was happy in his society.
"Poor devil!" growled the old man. "You can’t help being sorry for him,
even if he did do it to hit back. It’s his child and he’s fond of her."
George gave a short laugh:
"I fancy it’s more the hitting back than the fondness. Chapman’s not
shown up lately in a very sentimental light. It wouldn’t surprise me if
he’d ransom in the back of his mind. But we’ll put an end to his
ambitions or parental longings or whatever’s inspiring him." He looked
at his watch, then rose. "It’s a quarter past seven and O’Malley’s due
at the half hour. It’s understood we’re to bring the child here first?"
His father gave an assenting grunt and hitched his chair into the
current of air from the fan.
George turned on the lights, their tempered radiance flooding the room,
the windows starting out as black squares sewn with stars.
"I don’t quite see what I’m going to say to him," he muttered, a
sidelong eye on his father.
"Say nothing," came the answer. "Bring the child back here—that’s your
job. Leave him to me. Mrs. Janney and I’ll have it out with him when the
time comes."
On the tick of half-past seven O’Malley appeared. Trickles of
perspiration ran down his red face, and his collar was melted to a
sodden band.
"Gee," he panted as he ran a handkerchief round his neck, "it’s like a
Turkish bath down there in the street."
"Well," said George, impatient of all but the main issue, "is it all
right?"
"Yep—I’ve left two men in charge—every exit’s covered. And there’s only
one they could use—no way out back except over the fences and through
other houses."
"He could hardly tackle that with a child."
"He couldn’t tackle it alone and make it—not the way I’ve got things
fixed. And I’ve worked out our line of action; Stebbins relieved me at
half-past six and I went and had a séance with the janitor. Said I was
coming round later with a man who was looking for a room—the room I’d
been inquiring about. That’ll let us in quiet; right up to the top floor
and no questions asked."
"The only hitch possible can come from Chapman—he may be ugly and show
his teeth."
The old man answered:
"I guess he’ll be tractable. If he’s inclined to argue bring him along
with you. It’s after eight. I don’t want to sit here half the night. Get
busy and go."
O’Malley had a taxi waiting and they slid off up the deserted regions of
Broadway. After a few blocks they swerved to the left, plunging into a
congeries of mean streets where a network of fire-escapes encaged the
house fronts. The lights from small shops illumined the sidewalks, thick
with sauntering people. The taxi moved slowly, children darting from its
approach, swept round a corner and ran on through less animated lanes of
travel, upper windows bright, disheveled figures leaning on the sills,
vague groupings on front steps. At intervals, like the threatening voice
of some advancing monster, came the roar of the elevated trains,
sweeping across a vista with a rocking rush of light. O’Malley drew
himself to the edge of the sea and peered out ahead.
"We’re not far off now," he muttered. "We’ll stop at the corner of the
block—there’s a bookbinding place there that’s dark and quiet. If we go
to the door they might catch on, get panicky, and make a row."
At one end of the street’s length the lamp-spotted darkness of
Washington Square showed like a spangled curtain. The cab turned from it
and crossed a wide avenue over which the skeleton structure of the
elevated straddled like a vast centipede. Beyond stretched a darkling
perspective touched at recurring intervals with the white spheres of
lamps. It was a propitious time, the evening overflow dispersed, the
loneliness of the deep night hours, when a footfall echoes loud and a
solitary figure looms mysterious, not yet come.
The cab drew up at the curb by the shuttered face of the book bindery
and the man alighted. With a low command to the driver, O’Malley, George
beside him, walked up the block. From a shadowy doorway a figure
detached itself, slunk by them with a whispered hail and vanished.
Toward the street’s far end they stopped at a door level with the
sidewalk, and O’Malley, bending to scrutinize a line of push buttons,
pressed one.
"Is this the place?" George whispered, in startled revulsion.
"This is the place. And a good one for Price’s purpose as you’ll see
when you get in."
The young man noted the battered doorway, slightly out of plumb, then
stepped back and glanced at the façade. Many of the windows, uncurtained
and open, were lit up. Those of the top floor—dormers projecting from a
mansard roof—were dark. He was about to call O’Malley’s attention to
this, when the sounds of footsteps within the house checked him.
There was a rattling of locks and bolts and the door swung open
disclosing a man, grimy, old and bent, a lamp in his hand. He squinted
uncertainly at them, then growled irritably as he recognized O’Malley:
"Oh, it’s you. I thought you wasn’t comin’? If you’d been any later you
wouldn’t ’a got me up."
O’Malley explained that the gentleman was detained—couldn’t get away any
earlier, very sorry, but they’d be quick and make no noise—just wanted
to see the rooms and get out.
In single file, the janitor leading, they mounted the stairs. To the
aristocratic senses of George the place seemed abominable. The
staircase, narrow and without balustrade, ran up steeply between walls
once painted green, now blotched and smeared. At the end of the first
flight there was a small landing, a gas bracket holding aloft a tiny
point of flame. It was as hot as an oven, the stifling atmosphere
impregnated with mingled odors of cooking, stale cigar smoke, and the
mustiness of close, unaired spaces.
On the second landing one of the doors was open, affording a glimpse of
a squalid interior, and a man in his shirt sleeves bent over a table
writing. He did not look up as they creaked by. From somewhere near,
muffled by walls, came the thin, frail tinkling of guitar strings. As
they ascended the temperature grew higher, the air held in the low attic
story under the roof, baked to a sweltering heat. The janitor muttered
an excuse—the top floor being vacant the windows were kept shut—it would
be cool enough when they were opened.
He had gained the last landing, which broadened into a small square of
hall cut by three doors. As he turned to one on the left, O’Malley
slipped by him and drew away toward that on the right. There was a
moment of silence, broken by the clinking of the man’s keys. He had
trouble in finding the right one and set his lamp down on a chair, his
head bent over the bunch. George was aware of O’Malley’s figure casting
a huge wavering shadow up the wall, edging closer to the right hand
door.
The key was found and inserted in the lock and the janitor entered the
room, his lamp diffusing a yellow aura in the midst of which he moved, a
black, retreating shape. With his withdrawal the light in the hall,
furnished by a bead of gas, faded to a flickering obscurity. O’Malley’s
shadow disappeared, and George could see him as a formless oblong,
pressed against the panel. There was a moment of intense stillness, the
guitar tinkling faint as if coming through illimitable distances. The
detective’s voice rose in a whisper, vital and intimate, against the
music’s spectral thinness:
"Queer. There’s not a sound."
His hand stole to the handle, clasped it, turned it. Noiselessly the
door opened upon darkness into which he slipped equally noiseless.
That slow opening was so surprising, so dreamlike in its quality of the
totally unexpected, that George stood rooted. He stared at the square of
the door, waiting for voices, clamor, the anticipated in some form. Then
he saw the darkness pierced by the white ray of an electric torch and
heard a sound—a rumbled oath from O’Malley. It brought him to the
threshold. In the middle of the room, his torch sending its shaft over
walls and floor, stood the detective alone, his face, the light shining
upward on the chin and the tip of his nose, grotesque in its enraged
dismay.
"Not here—d——n them!" and his voice trailed off into furious curses.
"Gone?" The surprise had made George forgetful.
"Gone—no!" The man almost shouted in his anger. "How could they
go?—Didn’t I say every outlet was blocked. They ain’t been here. They
ain’t had her here. Get a match, light the gas—I got to see the place
anyway."
The torch’s ray had touched a gas fixture on the wall and hung steady
there. As the men fumbled for matches, the janitor came clumping across
the hall, calling in querulous protest:
"Say—how’d you get in there? That ain’t the place—it’s rented."
[Illustration: _His face was ludicrous in its enraged enmity_]
He stopped in the doorway, scowling at them under the glow of his upheld
lamp. A match sputtered over the gas and a flame burst up with a
whistling rush. In the combined illumination the room was revealed as
bleak and hideous, the walls with blistered paper peeling off in shreds,
the carpet worn in paths and patches, an iron bed, a bureau, by the one
window, a table. The janitor continuing his expostulations, O’Malley
turned on him and flashed his badge with a fierce:
"Shut up there. Keep still and get out. We’ve got a right here and if
you make any trouble you’ll hear from us."
The man shrank, scared.
"Police!" he faltered, then looking from one to the other. "But what
for? There’s no one here, there ain’t ever been any one—it’s took but
it’s been empty ever since."
O’Malley who had sent an exploring glance about him, made a dive for a
newspaper lying crumpled on the floor by the bed. One look at it, and he
was at the man’s side, shaking it in his face:
"What do you say to this? Yesterday’s—how’d it get here? Blew in through
the window maybe."
The janitor scanned the top of the page, then raised his eyes to the
watching faces. His fright had given place to bewilderment and he began
a stammering explanation—if any one had been there he’d never known it,
never seen no one come in or go out, never heard a sound from the
inside.
"Did you see any one—any one that isn’t a regular resident—come into the
house yesterday or to-day?" It was George’s question.
He didn’t know as he’d seen anybody—not to notice. The tenants had
friends, they was in and out all day and part of the night. And anyway
he wasn’t around much after he’d swept the halls and taken down the
pails. Yesterday and to-day he guessed he’d stayed in the basement most
of the time. If anybody had been in the room—and it looked like they
had—it was unbeknownst to him. The lady had the key; she could have come
in without him seeing; it wasn’t his business to keep tab on the
tenants. He showed a tendency to diverge to the subject of his duties
and George cut him off with a greenback pushed into his grimy claw and
an order to keep their visit secret.
Meantime O’Malley had started on an examination of the room. There was
more than the paper to prove the presence of a recent occupant. The bed
showed the imprint of a body; pillow and counterpane were indented by
the pressure of a recumbent form. On its foot lay a book, an unworn
copy, as if newly bought, of "The Forest Lovers." The table held an ink
bottle, the ink still moist round its uncorked mouth, some paper and
envelopes and a pen. There was a scattering of pins on the bureau, two
gilt hairpins and a black net veil, crumpled into a bunch. Pushed back
toward the mirror was the cover of the soap dish containing ashes and
the butts of four cigarettes.
O’Malley studied the bureau closely, ran the light of his torch back and
forth across it, shook out the veil, sniffed it, and put it and the two
hairpins carefully into his wallet. Then with the book and the paper in
his hand he straightened up, turned to George, and said:
"That about cleans it up. There’s nothing for it now but to go back."
The janitor, anxiously watchful, followed on their heels as they went
down the stairs. Their clattering descent was followed by the strains of
the guitar, thinly debonair and mocking as if exulting over their
discomfiture. In the street the same shape emerged from the shadows and
slouched toward them. A grunted phrase from O’Malley sent it drifting
away, spiritless and without response, like a lonely ghost come in timid
expectation and repelled by a rebuff.
O’Malley dropped into a corner of the taxi and as it glided off, said:
"That’s the last of 76 Gayle Street as far as they’re concerned."
"Why do you say that?"
In the darkness the detective permitted himself a sidelong glance of
scorn.
"You don’t leave the door unlocked in that sort of place unless you’re
done with it. They’ve got all they wanted out of it and quit."
"Abandoned it?"
"That’s right—made a neat, quiet get-away. They didn’t say they were
going, didn’t give up the key—it was on the inside of the door. Just
slid out and vanished."
"Some one was there yesterday."
"Um," O’Malley’s voice showed a pondering concentration of thought.
"Some one was lying on the bed reading; waiting or passing time."
"They couldn’t have been there to-day—before your men were on the job?"
O’Malley drew himself to the edge of the seat, his chest inflated with a
sudden breath:
"Why couldn’t they? Why couldn’t _that_ have been the rendezvous? Why
couldn’t she have lost the child down here on Gayle Street instead of
opposite Justin’s? Price was there beforehand: up she comes, tips him
off that the taxi’s in the street, sees him leave and goes herself,
across to Fifth Avenue where she picks up a cab. It’s safer than the
other way—no cops round, janitor in the basement, if she’s seen nothing
to be remarked—a lady known to have a room on the top floor." He brought
his fist down on his knee. "That’s what they did and it explains what’s
been puzzling me."
"What?"
"There was no dust on the top of the bureau; it had been wiped off
to-day. There was no dust on that veil; it hadn’t been there since
yesterday. A woman fixed herself at that glass not so long ago. Price
had a date with her to deliver the child and he was lying on the bed
reading while he waited. When he heard her he threw down the book, got
the good word and lit out. After he’d gone she took off her veil—what
for? To get her face up to show to Mrs. Price—whiten it, make it look
right for the news she was bringing. When she left she was made up for
the part she was to play. And I take my hat off to her, for she played
it like a star."