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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - "The Adventure of the Red Circle"

Geoffrey Chaucer - "The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems"

G.K. Chesterton - "The Ballad of the White Horse"

Charles Dickens - "Reprinted Pieces"

The Man in Lower Ten

M >> Mary Roberts Rinehart >> The Man in Lower Ten




I made no such admission, and she smiled mockingly.

"How flattering you are!" she said. "Very well. Now for the
premises. You take to Pittsburg four notes held by the Mechanics'
National Bank, to have Mr. Gilmore, who is ill, declare his
indorsement of them forged.

"On the journey back to Pittsburg two things happen to you: you lose
your clothing, your valise and your papers, including the notes, and
you are accused of murder. In fact, Mr. Blakeley, the circumstances
were most singular, and the evidence--well, almost conclusive."

I was completely at her mercy, but I gnawed my lip with irritation.

"Now for the bargain." She leaned over and lowered her voice. "A
fair exchange, you know. The minute you put those four notes in my
hand--that minute the blow to my head has caused complete
forgetfulness as to the events of that awful morning. I am the only
witness, and I will be silent. Do you understand? They will call
off their dogs."

My head was buzzing with the strangeness of the idea.

"But," I said, striving to gain time, "I haven't the notes. I can't
give you what I haven't got."

"You have had the case continued," she said sharply. "You expect
to find them. Another thing," she added slowly, watching my face,
"if you don't get them soon, Bronson will have them. They have been
offered to him already, but at a prohibitive price."

"But," I said, bewildered, "what is your object in coming to me? If
Bronson will get them anyhow--"

She shut her fan with a click and her face was not particularly
pleasant to look at.

"You are dense," she said insolently. "I want those papers--for
myself, not for Andy Bronson."

"Then the idea is," I said, ignoring her tone, "that you think you
have me in a hole, and that if I find those papers and give them to
you you will let me out. As I understand it, our friend Bronson,
under those circumstances, will also be in a hole."

She nodded.

"The notes would be of no use to you for a limited length of time,"
I went on, watching her narrowly. "If they are not turned over to
the state's attorney within a reasonable time there will have to be
a nolle pros--that is, the case will simply be dropped for lack
of evidence."

"A week would answer, I think," she said slowly. "You will do it,
then?"

I laughed, although I was not especially cheerful.

"No, I'll not do it. I expect to come across the notes any time
now, and I expect just as certainly to turn them over to the state's
attorney when I get them."

She got up suddenly, pushing her chair back with a noisy grating
sound that turned many eyes toward us.

"You're more of a fool than I thought you," she sneered, and left
me at the table.



CHAPTER XXI

Mc KNIGHT'S THEORY


I confess I was staggered. The people at the surrounding tables,
after glancing curiously in my direction, looked away again.

I got my hat and went out in a very uncomfortable frame of mind.
That she would inform the police at once of what she knew I never
doubted, unless possibly she would give a day or two's grace in
the hope that I would change my mind.

I reviewed the situation as I waited for a car. Two passed me
going in the opposite direction, and on the first one I saw Bronson,
his hat over his eyes, his arms folded, looking moodily ahead. Was
it imagination? or was the small man huddled in the corner of the
rear seat Hotchkiss?

As the car rolled on I found myself smiling. The alert little man
was for all the world like a terrier, ever on the scent, and scouring
about in every direction.

I found McKnight at the Incubator, with his coat off, working with
enthusiasm and a manicure file over the horn of his auto.

"It's the worst horn I ever ran across," he groaned, without looking
up, as I came in. "The blankety-blank thing won't blow."

He punched it savagely, finally eliciting a faint throaty croak.

"Sounds like croup," I suggested. "My sister-in-law uses camphor
and goose greese for it; or how about a spice poultice?"

But McKnight never sees any jokes but his own. He flung the horn
clattering into a corner, and collapsed sulkily into a chair.

"Now," I said, "if you're through manicuring that horn, I'll tell
you about my talk with the lady in black."

"What's wrong?" asked McKnight languidly. "Police watching her,
too?"

"Not exactly. The fact is, Rich, there's the mischief to pay."

Stogie came in, bringing a few additions to our comfort. When he
went out I told my story.

"You must remember," I said, "that I had seen this woman before the
morning of the wreck. She was buying her Pullman ticket when I did.
Then the next morning, when the murder was discovered, she grew
hysterical, and I gave her some whisky. The third and last time I
saw her, until to-night, was when she crouched beside the road,
after the wreck."

McKnight slid down in his chair until his weight rested on the small
of his back, and put his feet on the big reading table.

"It is rather a facer," he said. "It's really too good a situation
for a commonplace lawyer. It ought to be dramatized. You can't
agree, of course; and by refusing you run the chance of jail, at
least, and of having Alison brought into publicity, which is out of
the question. You say she was at the Pullman window when you were?"

"Yes; I bought her ticket for her. Gave her lower eleven."

"And you took ten?"

"Lower ten."

McKnight straightened up and looked at me.

"Then she thought you were in lower ten."

"I suppose she did, if she thought at all."

"But listen, man." McKnight was growing excited. "What do you
figure out of this? The Conway woman knows you have taken the
notes to Pittsburg. The probabilities are that she follows you
there, on the chance of an opportunity to get them, either for
Bronson or herself.

"Nothing doing during the trip over or during the day in Pittsburg;
but she learns the number of your berth as you buy it at the Pullman
ticket office in Pittsburg, and she thinks she sees her chance. No
one could have foreseen that that drunken fellow would have crawled
into your berth.

"Now, I figure it out this way: She wanted those notes desperately
--does still--not for Bronson, but to hold over his head for some
purpose. In the night, when everything is quiet, she slips behind
the curtains of lower ten, where the man's breathing shows he is
asleep. Didn't you say he snored?"

"He did!" I affirmed. "But I tell you--"

"Now keep still and listen. She gropes cautiously around in the
darkness, finally discovering the wallet under the pillow. Can't
you see it yourself?"

He was leaning forward, excitedly, and I could almost see the
gruesome tragedy he was depicting.

"She draws out the wallet. Then, perhaps she remembers the alligator
bag, and on the possibility that the notes are there, instead of in
the pocket-book, she gropes around for it. Suddenly, the man awakes
and clutches at the nearest object, perhaps her neck chain, which
breaks. She drops the pocket-book and tries to escape, but he has
caught her right hand.

"It is all in silence; the man is still stupidly drunk. But he
holds her in a tight grip. Then the tragedy. She must get away;
in a minute the car will be aroused. Such a woman, on such an
errand, does not go without some sort of a weapon, in this case a
dagger, which, unlike a revolver, is noiseless.

"With a quick thrust--she's a big woman and a bold one--she strikes.
Possibly Hotchkiss is right about the left-hand blow. Harrington may
have held her right hand, or perhaps she held the dirk in her left
hand as she groped with her right. Then, as the man falls back, and
his grasp relaxes, she straightens and attempts to get away. The
swaying of the car throws her almost into your berth, and, trembling
with terror, she crouches behind the curtains of lower ten until
everything is still. Then she goes noiselessly back to her berth."

I nodded.

"It seems to fit partly, at least," I said. "In the morning when
she found that the crime had been not only fruitless, but that she
had searched the wrong berth and killed the wrong man; when she saw
me emerge, unhurt, just as she was bracing herself for the discovery
of my dead body, then she went into hysterics. You remember, I gave
her some whisky.

"It really seems a tenable theory. But, like the Sullivan theory,
there are one or two things that don't agree with the rest. For one
thing, how did the remainder of that chain get into Alison West's
possession?"

"She may have picked it up on the floor."

"We'll admit that," I said; "and I'm sure I hope so. Then how did
the murdered man's pocket-book get into the sealskin bag? And the
dirk, how account for that, and the blood-stains?"

"Now what's the use," asked McKnight aggrievedly, "of my building
up beautiful theories for you to pull down? We'll take it to
Hotchkiss. Maybe he can tell from the blood-stains if the murderer's
finger nails were square or pointed."

"Hotchkiss is no fool," I said warmly. "Under all his theories
there's a good hard layer of common sense. And we must remember,
Rich, that neither of our theories includes the woman at Doctor
Van Kirk's hospital, that the charming picture you have just drawn
does not account for Alison West's connection with the case, or
for the bits of telegram in the Sullivan fellow's pajamas pocket.
You are like the man who put the clock together; you've got half
of the works left over."

"Oh, go home," said McKnight disgustedly. "I'm no Edgar Allan
Poe. What's the use of coming here and asking me things if you're
so particular?"

With one of his quick changes of mood, he picked up his guitar.

"Listen to this," he said. "It is a Hawaiian song about a fat
lady, oh, ignorant one! and how she fell off her mule."

But for all the lightness of the words, the voice that followed me
down the stairs was anything but cheery.

"There was a Kanaka in Balu did dwell,
Who had for his daughter a monstrous fat girl-

he sang in his clear tenor. I paused on the lower floor and
listened. He had stopped singing as abruptly as he had begun.



CHAPTER XXII

AT THE BOARDING-HOUSE


I had not been home for thirty-six hours, since the morning of the
preceding day. Johnson was not in sight, and I let myself in
quietly with my latchkey. It was almost midnight, and I had hardly
settled myself in the library when the bell rang and I was surprised
to find Hotchkiss, much out of breath, in the vestibule.

"Why, come in, Mr. Hotchkiss," I said. "I thought you were going
home to go to bed."

"So I was, so I was." He dropped into a chair beside my reading
lamp and mopped his face. "And here it is almost midnight, and
I'm wider awake than ever. I've seen Sullivan, Mr. Blakeley."

"You have!"

"I have," he said impressively.

"You were following Bronson at eight o'clock. Was that when it
happened?"

"Something of the sort. When I left you at the door of the
restaurant, I turned and almost ran into a plain clothes man from
the central office. I know him pretty well; once or twice he has
taken me with him on interesting bits of work. He knows my hobby."

"You know him, too, probably. It was the man Arnold, the detective
whom the state's attorney has had watching Bronson."

Johnson being otherwise occupied, I had asked for Arnold myself.

I nodded.

"Well, he stopped me at once; said he'd been on the fellow's tracks
since early morning and had had no time for luncheon. Bronson, it
seems, isn't eating much these days. I at once jotted down the fact,
because it argued that he was being bothered by the man with the
notes."

"It might point to other things," I suggested. "Indigestion, you
know."

Hotchkiss ignored me. "Well, Arnold had some reason for thinking
that Bronson would try to give him the slip that night, so he asked
me to stay around the private entrance there while he ran across
the Street and got something to eat. It seemed a fair presumption
that, as he had gone there with a lady, they would dine leisurely,
and Arnold would have plenty of time to get back."

"What about your own dinner?" I asked curiously.

"Sir," he said pompously, "I have given you a wrong estimate of
Wilson Budd Hotchkiss if you think that a question of dinner would
even obtrude itself on his mind at such a time as this."

He was a frail little man, and to-night he looked pale with heat
and over-exertion.

"Did you have any luncheon?" I asked.

He was somewhat embarrassed at that.

"I--really, Mr. Blakeley, the events of the day were so
engrossing--"

"Well," I said, "I'm not going to see you drop on the floor from
exhaustion. Just wait a minute."

I went back to the pantry, only to be confronted with rows of locked
doors and empty dishes. Downstairs, in the basement kitchen,
however, I found two unattractive looking cold chops, some dry bread
and a piece of cake, wrapped in a napkin, and from its surreptitious
and generally hang-dog appearance, destined for the coachman in the
stable at the rear. Trays there were none--everything but the
chairs and tables seemed under lock and key, and there was neither
napkin, knife nor fork to be found.

The luncheon was not attractive in appearance, but Hotchkiss ate
his cold chops and gnawed at the crusts as though he had been
famished, while he told his story.

"I had been there only a few minutes," he said, with a chop in one
hand and the cake in the other, "when Bronson rushed out and cut
across the street. He's a tall man, Mr. Blakeley, and I had had
work keeping close. It was a relief when he jumped on a passing
car, although being well behind, it was a hard run for me to catch
him. He had left the lady.

"Once on the car, we simply rode from one end of the line to the
other and back again. I suppose he was passing the time, for he
looked at his watch now and then, and when I did once get a look
at us face it made me--er--uncomfortable. He could have crushed
me like a fly, sir."

I had brought Mr. Hotchkiss a glass of wine, and he was looking
better. He stopped to finish it, declining with a wave of his
hand to have it refilled, and continued:

"About nine o'clock or a little later he got off somewhere near
Washington Circle. He went along one of the residence streets
there, turned to his left a square or two, and rang a bell. He
had been admitted when I got there, but I guessed from the
appearance of the place that it was a boarding-house.

"I waited a few minutes and rang the bell. When a maid answered it,
I asked for Mr. Sullivan. Of course there was no Mr. Sullivan there.

"I said I was sorry; that the man I was looking for was a new
boarder. She was sure there was no such boarder in the house; the
only new arrival was a man on the third floor--she thought his name
was Stuart.

"'My friend has a cousin by that name,' I said. 'I'll just go up
and see.'

"She wanted to show me up, but I said it was unnecessary. So after
telling me it was the bedroom and sitting-room on the third floor
front, I went up.

"I met a couple of men on the stairs, but neither of them paid any
attention to me. A boarding-house is the easiest place in the world
to enter."

"They're not always so easy to leave," I put in, to his evident
irritation.

"When I got to the third story, I took out a bunch of keys and
posted myself by a door near the ones the girl had indicated. I
could hear voices in one of the front rooms, but could not
understand what they said.

"There was no violent dispute, but a steady hum. Then Bronson
jerked the door open. If he had stepped into the hall he would
have seen me fitting a key into the door before me. But he spoke
before he came out.

"'You're acting like a maniac,' he said. 'You know I can get those
things some way; I'm not going to threaten you. It isn't necessary.
You know me.'

"'It would be no use,' the other man said. 'I tell you, I haven't
seen the notes for ten days.'

"'But you will,' Bronson said savagely. 'You're standing in your
own way, that's all. If you're holding out expecting me to raise
my figure, you're making a mistake. It's my last offer.'

"'I couldn't take it if it was for a million,' said the man inside
the room. 'I'd do it, I expect, if I could. The best of us have
our price.'

"Bronson slammed the door then, and flung past me down the hall.

"After a couple of minutes I knocked at the door, and a tall man
about your size, Mr. Blakeley, opened it. He was very blond, with
a smooth face and blue eyes--what I think you would call a handsome
man.

"'I beg your pardon for disturbing you,' I said. 'Can you tell me
which is Mr. Johnson's room? Mr. Francis Johnson?'

"'I can not say,' he replied civilly. 'I've only been here a few
days.'

"I thanked him and left, but I had had a good look at him, and I
think I'd know him readily any place."

I sat for a few minutes thinking it over. "But what did he mean by
saying he hadn't seen the notes for ten days? And why is Bronson
making the overtures?"

"I think he was lying," Hotchkiss reflected. "Bronson hasn't
reached his figure."

"It's a big advance, Mr. Hotchkiss, and I appreciate what you have
done more than I can tell you," I said. "And now, if you can
locate any of my property in this fellow's room, we'll send him up
for larceny, and at least have him where we can get at him. I'm
going to Cresson to-morrow, to try to trace him a little from there.
But I'll be back in a couple of days, and we'll begin to gather in
these scattered threads."

Hotchkiss rubbed his hands together delightedly.

"That's it," he said. "That's what we want to do, Mr. Blakeley.
We'll gather up the threads ourselves; if we let the police in too
soon, they'll tangle it up again. I'm not vindictive by nature; but
when a fellow like Sullivan not only commits a murder, but goes to
all sorts of trouble to put the burden of guilt on an innocent man
--I say hunt him down, sir!"

"You are convinced, of course, that Sullivan did it?"

"Who else?" He looked over his glasses at me with the air of a man
whose mental attitude is unassailable. "Well, listen to this," I
said.

Then I told him at length of my encounter with Bronson in the
restaurant, of the bargain proposed by Mrs. Conway, and finally of
McKnight's new theory. But, although he was impressed, he was far
from convinced.

"It's a very vivid piece of imagination," he said drily; "but while
it fits the evidence as far as it goes, it doesn't go far enough.
How about the stains in lower seven, the dirk, and the wallet?
Haven't we even got motive in that telegram from Bronson?"

"Yes," I admitted, "but that bit of chain--"

"Pooh," he said shortly. "Perhaps, like yourself, Sullivan wore
glasses with a chain. Our not finding them does not prove they did
not exist."

And there I made an error; half confidences are always mistakes. I
could not tell of the broken chain in Alison West's gold purse.

It was one o'clock when Hotchkiss finally left. We had by that time
arranged a definite course of action--Hotchkiss to search Sullivan's
rooms and if possible find evidence to have him held for larceny,
while I went to Cresson.

Strangely enough, however, when I entered the train the following
morning, Hotchkiss was already there. He had bought a new note-book,
and was sharpening a fresh pencil.

"I changed my plans, you see," he said, bustling his newspaper aside
for me. "It is no discredit to your intelligence, Mr. Blakeley, but
you lack the professional eye, the analytical mind. You legal
gentlemen call a spade a spade, although it may be a shovel."

"'A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And nothing more!'"

I quoted as the train pulled out.



CHAPTER XXIII

A NIGHT AT THE LAURELS


I slept most of the way to Cresson, to the disgust of the little
detective. Finally he struck up an acquaintance with a
kindly-faced old priest on his way home to his convent school,
armed with a roll of dance music and surreptitious bundles that
looked like boxes of candy. From scraps of conversation I gleaned
that there had been mysterious occurrences at the convent,--ending
in the theft of what the reverend father called vaguely, "a quantity
of undermuslins." I dropped asleep at that point, and when I roused
a few moments later, the conversation had progressed. Hotchkiss had
a diagram on an envelope.

"With this window bolted, and that one inaccessible, and if, as you
say, the--er--garments were in a tub here at X, then, as you hold
the key to the other door,--I think you said the convent dog did not
raise any disturbance? Pardon a personal question, but do you ever
walk in your sleep?"

The priest looked bewildered.

"I'll tell you what to do," Hotchkiss said cheerfully, leaning
forward, "look around a little yourself before you call in the
police. Somnambulism is a queer thing. It's a question whether
we are most ourselves sleeping or waking. Ever think of that?
Live a saintly life all day, prayers and matins and all that,
and the subconscious mind hikes you out of bed at night to steal
undermuslins! Subliminal theft, so to speak. Better examine
the roof."

I dozed again. When I wakened Hotchkiss sat alone, and the priest,
from a corner, was staring at him dazedly, over his breviary.

It was raining when we reached Cresson, a wind-driven rain that had
forced the agent at the newsstand to close himself in, and that beat
back from the rails in parallel lines of white spray. As he went up
the main street, Hotchkiss was cheerfully oblivious of the weather,
of the threatening dusk, of our generally draggled condition. My
draggled condition, I should say, for he improved every moment,
--his eyes brighter, his ruddy face ruddier, his collar newer and
glossier. Sometime, when it does not encircle the little man's
neck, I shall test that collar with a match.

I was growing steadily more depressed: I loathed my errand and its
necessity. I had always held that a man who played the spy on a
woman was beneath contempt. Then, I admit I was afraid of what I
might learn. For a time, however, this promised to be a negligible
quantity. The streets of the straggling little mountain town had
been clean-washed of humanity by the downpour. Windows and doors
were inhospitably shut, and from around an occasional drawn shade
came narrow strips of light that merely emphasized our gloom. When
Hotchkiss' umbrella turned inside out, I stopped.

"I don't know where you are going," I snarled, "I don't care. But
I'm going to get under cover inside of ten seconds. I'm not
amphibious."

I ducked into the next shelter, which happened to be the yawning
entrance to a livery stable, and shook myself, dog fashion.
Hotchkiss wiped his collar with his handkerchief. It emerged
gleaming and unwilted.

"This will do as well as any place," he said, raising his voice
above the rattle of the rain. "Got to make a beginning."

I sat down on the usual chair without a back, just inside the door,
and stared out at the darkening street. The whole affair had an
air of unreality. Now that I was there, I doubted the necessity,
or the value, of the journey. I was wet and uncomfortable. Around
me, with Cresson as a center, stretched an irregular circumference
of mountain, with possibly a ten-mile radius, and in it I was to
find the residence of a woman whose first name I did not know, and
a man who, so far, had been a purely chimerical person.

Hotchkiss had penetrated the steaming interior of the cave, and now
his voice, punctuated by the occasional thud of horses' hoofs, came
to me.

"Something light will do," he was saying. "A runabout, perhaps."
He came forward rubbing his hands, followed by a thin man in
overalls. "Mr. Peck says," he began,--"this is Mr. Peck of Peck
and Peck,--says that the place we are looking for is about seven
miles from the town. It's clearing, isn't it?"

"It is not," I returned savagely. "And we don't want a runabout,
Mr. Peck. What we require is hermetically sealed diving suit. I
suppose there isn't a machine to be had?" Mr. Peck gazed at me, in
silence: machine to him meant other things than motors. "Automobile,"
I supplemented. His face cleared.

"None but private affairs. I can give you a good buggy with a
rubber apron. Mike, is the doctor's horse in?"

I am still uncertain as to whether the raw-boned roan we took out
that night over the mountains was the doctor's horse or not. If it
was, the doctor may be a good doctor, but he doesn't know anything
about a horse. And furthermore, I hope he didn't need the beast
that miserable evening.

While they harnessed the horse, Hotchkiss told me what he had
learned.

"Six Curtises in the town and vicinity," he said. "Sort of family
name around here. One of them is telegraph operator at the station.
Person we are looking for is--was--a wealthy widow with a brother
named Sullivan! Both supposed to have been killed on the Flier."

"Her brother," I repeated stupidly.

"You see," Hotchkiss went on, "three people, in one party, took the
train here that night, Miss West, Mrs. Curtis and Sullivan. The two
women had the drawing-room, Sullivan had lower seven. What we want
to find out is just who these people were, where they came from, if
Bronson knew them, and how Miss West became entangled with them.
She may have married Sullivan, for one thing."

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