Part 4

The discovery was made by Lemuel Burkan, the watchman of the Heberworth Building, in which Beiner had his office. According to Burkan's statement, he has been in the habit of answering telephone calls for many of the tenants during their temporary absences. Last evening, at six-thirty, while making his first night-round of the building, Burkan heard the telephone ringing in Beiner's office. Although the light was on, the telephone was unanswered. Burkan unlocked the door to answer the call and take the message. He found Beiner lying upon the floor, the paper-knife driven into his chest.

Burkan did not lose his head, but answered the call. Frank Hildebloom, of the Rosebush Film Company, was on the wire. On being informed of the tragedy by the watchman, Hildebloom immediately came over to the dead man's office. To the police, who were immediately summoned by Burkan, Hildebloom stated that Beiner had telephoned him in the morning, stating that he wished to make an engagement for a young actress to make a film-test. Hildebloom was telephoning because the engagement was overdue and he could wait no longer. An old friend of the murdered man, he was overcome by the tragedy.

The police, investigating the murder, learned from the janitor of the adjoining building, the Bellwood, that he had seen a young woman emerge from a window on the fifth floor of the Heberworth Building at shortly before six o'clock yesterday. She had descended by the fire-escape to the fourth floor and climbed through a window there. The janitor, who is named Fred Garbey, said that, while the incident was unusual, he'd thought little of it. He gave a description of the young woman to the police, who express confidence in their ability to find her, and believe that she must be the same woman for whom Beiner had made the engagement with Hildebloom.

None of the dead man's friends who could be reached last night could advance any reason for the killing. Beiner was apparently rather popular in the profession, having a wide acquaintance.

There followed a brief _résumé_ of the dead man's career, but Clancy did not read it. She dropped the paper and again stared at the ceiling.

_She_ was the woman who had fled by the fire-escape from Beiner's office, for whom the engagement had been made with Hildebloom! And the police were looking for her!

Beiner had been murdered! She had not killed him, but--who had? And would the police believe her story? She'd heard of third degrees. Would they believe her? Her whole story--if she admitted having been in Beiner's office, she must admit her method of egress. That descent by the fire-escape would have to be explained. She would have to tell the police that Beiner had seized her, had held her. Having admitted that much to the police, would they believe the rest of her story?

She shook her head. Of course they wouldn't! Beiner had been killed with his own paper-knife. The police would believe that she had picked it up and used it in self-defense.

She became unnaturally calm. Of course, she was a girl; her story might win her acquittal, even though a jury were convinced that she was a murderess. She knew of dozens of cases that had filled the newspapers wherein women had been set free by sentimental juries.

But the disgrace! The waiting in jail! Some one else had entered Beiner's office, had, perhaps, found him still unconscious, and killed him. But would that some one come forward and admit his or her guilt to free Clancy Deane?

She laughed harshly at the mere thought. Everything pointed to her, Clancy Deane, as the murderess. Why, even at this very moment, the police might be down-stairs, making inquiries of Madame Napoli about her!

She leaped from the bed. She stared out the window at the tall buildings in Times Square. How harsh and forbidding they were! Yesterday they had been different, had suggested romance, because in them were people who, like herself, had come to New York to conquer it.

But to-day these stone walls suggested the stone walls of jails. Jails! She turned from the window, overwhelmed by the desire for instant flight. She must get away! In a veritable frenzy of fear, she began to pack her valise.

Midway in the packing, she paused. The physical labor of opening drawers, of taking dresses from the closet, had helped to clear her brain. And it was a straight-thinking brain, most of the time. It became keener now. She sat down on the floor and began to marshal the facts.

Only one person in the world knew that Florine Ladue and Clancy Deane were the same girl. That person was Fanchon DeLisle, and probably by this time Fanchon DeLisle had forgotten the card of introduction.

Morris Beiner had not mentioned to Hildebloom the name of Florine Ladue. Hildebloom could not tell the police to search for the bearer of that name. Fay Marston knew who Florine Ladue was, but Fay Marston didn't know that Florine had been intending to call on Morris Beiner. Nor did Madame Napoli or her daughter. Zenda and the members of his party had never heard Florine's last name, and while the discovery of that card of introduction in Morris Beiner's office _might_ lead the police to suspect that Florine Ladue had been the woman who descended the fire-escape, it couldn't be proved.

Then she shook her head. If the police found that card of introduction--and, of course, they would--they'd look up Florine Ladue. The elevator-boy in the Heberworth Building would probably identify her as a woman who had ridden in his car yesterday afternoon at five.

The first name would attract the attention of Zenda and his friends. Her acquaintance with Fay Marston and her card-sharp husband would come out. _She wasn't thinking clearly._ The affair at Zenda's was unimportant now. The only important thing in the world was the murder of Morris Beiner.

She got back to her first fact--only Fanchon DeLisle could know that Florine Ladue and Clancy Deane were the same person. If, then, Fanchon had forgotten that high-sounding name, had forgotten that she had given a card of introduction to Clancy-- What difference would it make if Fanchon had forgotten the incident of the card? The police would remind her of it, wouldn't they?

She put her palms to her eyes and rocked back and forth. She couldn't _think_! For five minutes she sat thus, pressing against her eyes, slowly, out of the reek of fearsome thoughts that crowded upon her brain, she resolved the salient one. Until Fanchon DeLisle told the police that Florine Ladue and Clancy Deane were one and the same persons, she was safe.

It would take time to locate Fanchon. Meanwhile, Clancy was safe. That is, unless the police began to look up the hotels to find Florine Ladue right away, without waiting to communicate with Fanchon. She leaped to her feet. She'd decided, several minutes ago, that that was exactly what the police would do. Therefore, she must get out of the Napoli.

Now, with definite action decided upon, Clancy could think straightly. She tilted her hat forward, so that it shielded her features, and descended from her room to the street. Yesterday afternoon she had noticed a telegraph office on Forty-second Street. To it she went now.

She wrote out a telegram: "Florine Ladue, Hotel Napoli, Forty-seventh Street, New York. Come home at once. Mother is ill." She signed it, "Mary."

The receiving clerk stared at her.

"You could walk up there in five minutes and save money," he said.

Clancy stared at him. The clerk lowered his eyes, and she walked out, feeling a bit triumphant, not at her poor victory over the clerk but because she had demonstrated to herself that she was mistress of herself.

Back in the Napoli, she packed her valise. She had almost finished when Paul, the 'bus-boy porter, knocked at her door. He gave her the telegram which she had written a little while ago.

Clancy, holding the door partly shut, so that he could not see her preparations for departure, read the wire. She gasped.

"Bad news, miss?" asked Paul.

"Oh, terrible!" she cried. "My mother is ill--I must go home--get me a taxi--tell Madame Napoli to make up my bill----"

The boy murmured something meant to be sympathetic, and disappeared down the hall. Five minutes later, Madame Napoli came wheezing up the stairs. She refused to permit Clancy to pack. Clancy was a good girl to worry so about her mother. She must sit still and drink the coffee that Paul was fetching. Madame Napoli would pack her bag. And _madame_ had sent for a taxi.

It was all very easy. Without arousing the slightest suspicion, Clancy left the Napoli.

She told the driver to take her to the Grand Central Station. There she checked her valise. For she was not running back to Zenith. No, indeed! She'd come to New York to succeed, and she _would_ succeed. Truth must prevail, and, sooner or later, the murderer of Morris Beiner would be apprehended. Then--Clancy would be free to go about the making of her career. But now, safety was her only thought. But safety in Zenith was not what she sought.

In the waiting-room she purchased a newspaper. She found a list of lodging-houses advertised there. Inquiry at the information-desk helped her to orientate herself. She wished to be settled some distance from Times Square. She learned that Washington Square was a couple of miles from the Napoli. Two miles seemed a long distance to Clancy.

She reacquired her valise, got another taxi, and shortly had engaged a room in the lodging-house of Mrs. Simon Gerand, on Washington Square South. Mrs. Gerand was not at all like Madame Napoli, save in one respect--she demanded her rent in advance. Clancy paid her. She noted that she had only seven dollars left in her purse. So, in her room, she took out her check-book and wrote her first check, payable to "self," for twenty-five dollars. She'd take a 'bus, one of those that she could see from her tiny room on the square below, ride to Forty-second Street, cross to the Thespian Bank. No, she wouldn't; she might be seen. She'd ask Mrs. Gerand to cash her check.

She sat suddenly down upon a shabby chair. She couldn't cash her check, for Florine Ladue could be traced through her bank-account as well as through any other way!

She rose and walked to the window. It was a different view from that which she had had at the Napoli. She might be in another country. Across the park stood solid-looking mansions that even the untutored eyes of Clancy knew were inhabited by a different class of people than lived at Mrs. Gerand's. The well-keptness of the houses reminded her of a well-dressed woman drawing aside her skirts as the wheel of a carriage, spattering mud, approached too closely. She did not know that an old-time aristocracy still held its ground on the north side of Washington Square, against the encroachments of a colony of immigrants from Italy, against the wave of a bohemia that, in recent years, had become fashionable.

Despite the chill of the winter day, scores of children of all ages played in the park. Some were shabby, tattered, children of the slums that lurked, though she did not yet know it, south of the square. Others were carefully dressed, guarded by uniformed nurses. These came from the mansions opposite, from the fashionable apartments on lower Fifth Avenue.

Girls in tams, accompanied by youths, carelessly though not too inexpensively dressed, sauntered across the park. They were bound for little coffee-houses, for strange little restaurants. They were of that literary and artistic and musical set which had found the neighborhood congenial for work and play.

But, to Clancy, they were all just people. And people made laws, which created policemen, who hunted girls who hadn't done anything.

She had come to New York to achieve success. Here, within forty-eight hours after her arrival, she had not only roused the suspicions of one of the biggest men in the profession which she had hoped to adopt but was wanted by the police on the charge of murder, and had only seven dollars in the world. She stared at the greasy wall-paper of her ill-kept room. Without friends, or money--in danger of arrest! And still she did not think of going to the police, of confessing to circumstances that really were innocent. She had not learned over-night. She was still young. She still believed in the efficacy of flight. Queerly, she thought of the young man who had taken her home from the Zendas' apartment in the runabout. She remembered not merely his blue, kindly eyes, and the cleft in his chin, and his bigness, but things about him that she had not known, at the time, that she had noticed--his firm mouth, his thick brown hair. And he'd had the kindest-seeming face she'd ever seen. The only really kind face she'd seen in New York. All the rest---- Clancy wept.

VI

Youth suffers more than age. No blow that comes to age can be more severe than the happening to a child which, to its elders, seems most trivial. Each passing year adds toughness to the human's spiritual skin. But with toughness comes loss of resiliency.

Clancy was neither seven nor seventy; she was twenty. She had not yet acquired spiritual toughness, nor had she lost childhood's resiliency. The blows that she had received in the forty-eight hours since she had arrived in New York--the loss, as she believed, of her hoped-for career, the fear of arrest on the hideous charge of murder, and, last, though by no means least, the inability to draw upon the funds that she had so proudly deposited in the Thespian Bank--all these were enough to bend her. But not to break!

Her tears finally ceased. She had thrown herself upon the bed with an abandon that would have made an observer of the throwing think her one entirely surrendered to despair. Yet, before this apparently desperate, hysterical hurling of her slim body upon a not too soft couch, Clancy had carefully removed her jacket and skirt. She was not unique in this regard for her apparel; she was simply a woman.

So, when, in the natural course of the passing hours, hunger attacked Clancy, and she rose from the narrow bed that Mrs. Gerand provided for the tenant of her "third-floor front" room, she had only to remove the traces of tears, "fix" her hair, and don her waist and skirt to be prepared to meet the public eye.

She had been lying down for hours, alternating between impulses toward panic and toward brazen defiance. She compromised, of course, as people always compromise upon impulses, by a happy medium. She would neither flee as far from New York as seven dollars would take her nor surrender to the searching police. She would do as she had intended to do when she came down, earlier in the day, to Washington Square. She would look for a job to-morrow, and as soon as she found one, she'd go to work at anything that would keep her alive until the police captured the murderer of Morris Beiner and rendered her free to resume her career. And just now she would eat.

It was already dark. Somehow, although she was positive that she could not have been traced to Washington Square, she had been timid about venturing out in the daylight. But that very darkness which brings disquiet to the normal person brought calmness and a sense of security to Clancy. For she was now a different person from the girl who had arrived in New York from Zenith two days before. She was now that social abnormality--a person sought by the officers of justice. Her innocence of any wrong-doing in no way restored her to normality.

So, instead of a frank-eyed girl, fresh from the damp breezes of Zenith, it was an almost furtive-eyed girl that entered the Trevor, shortly after six o'clock, and, carrying an evening paper that she had acquired at the news-stand, sat down at a table in the almost vacant dining-room. Her step was faltering and her glance wary. It is fear that changes character, not sin.

She had entered the down-stairs dining-room of the Trevor, that hotel which once catered to the French residents of New York, but that now is the most prominent resort of the Greenwich Village bohemian or near-bohemian. It held few guests now. It was the hour between tea and dinner.

Clancy looked hastily over the menu that the smiling, courteous captain of waiters handed her. With dismay, she saw that the Trevor charged prices that were staggering to a person with only seven dollars in the world. Nevertheless, the streak of stubbornness in Clancy made her fight down the impulse to leave the place. She would not confess, by implication, to any waiter that she had not money enough to eat in his restaurant.

So she ordered the cheapest things on the menu. A veal cutlet, breaded, cost ninety-five cents; a glass of milk, twenty; a baked potato, twenty-five; bread and butter, ten. One dollar and a half for a meal that could have been bought in Bangor for half the money.

The evening paper had a column, surmounted by a scare-head half a page wide, about the Beiner murder. Clancy shivered apprehensively. But there was nothing in the feverish, highly adjectived account to indicate that Florine Ladue had been identified as the woman for whom Beiner had made the engagement with Hildebloom, of the Rosebush studios. Clancy threw care from her shoulders. She would be cautious, yes; but fearful--no! This, after she had eaten a few mouthfuls of the veal cutlet and drunk half of her glass of milk. A full stomach brings courage.

She turned the pages of the newspaper and found the "Help Wanted" page. It was encouraging to note that scores of business firms needed stenographers. She folded the paper carefully for later study and resumed her dinner. Finished, finally, she reached for the paper. And, for the first time, she became conscious that a couple across the room was observing her closely.

Courage fled from her. A glimmering of what her position would continue to be until her relation to the Beiner murder was definitely and for all time settled flashed through her brain. She would be always afraid.

She had not paid her check. Otherwise, she would have fled the room. Then she stiffened, while, mechanically, she returned David Randall's bow.

What ill fate had sent her to this place? Then, as Randall, having flashed her a smile that showed a row of extremely white although rather large teeth, turned to the woman with whom he was dining, Clancy's courage raced back to her.

What on earth was there to be nervous about? Why should this young man, whose knowledge of her was confined to the fact that, two nights ago, he had conveyed her in his runabout from somewhere on Park Avenue to the Napoli, cause her alarm? She forced herself to glance again in Randall's direction.

But the woman interested Clancy more than the young man who had introduced himself two nights ago as David Randall. A blonde, with reddish brown hair, most carefully combed, with a slightly tilted nose and a mouth that turned up at the corners, she was, Clancy conceded, far above the average in good looks. She was dressed for the evening. Two days ago, Clancy would have thought that only a woman of loose morals would expose so much back. But an evening spent at the Château de la Reine had taught her that New York women exposed their backs, if the exposure were worth while. This one was. And the severe lines of her black gown set off the milky whiteness of her back.

Her eyes were envious as the woman, with a word to Randall, rose. She lowered them as the woman approached her table. Then she started and paled. For the woman had stopped before her.

"This is Sophie Carey," she said.

Clancy looked up at her blankly. Behind her blank expression, fear rioted. The other woman smiled down upon her.

"I have been dining," she said, "with a most impetuous young man. He has told me of a somewhat unconventional meeting with you, and he wishes me to expurgate from that meeting everything that is socially sinful. In other words, he pays me the doubtful compliment of thinking me aged enough to throw a halo of respectability about any action of his--or mine--or yours. Will you let me present him to you?"

Back in Zenith, no one had ever spoken to Clancy like this. She was suddenly a little girl. New York was big and menacing. This woman seemed friendly, gracious, charming. She had about her something that Clancy could not define, and which was cosmopolitanism, worldliness.

"Why--why--it's awfully kind of you----"

The woman turned. One hand rested on the table--her left hand. A wedding-ring was on it, and Clancy somehow felt relieved. With her right hand, Mrs. Carey beckoned Randall. He was on his feet and at Clancy's table in a moment.

"This," said Mrs. Carey, "is David Randall. He is twenty-nine years old; his father was for three terms congressman from Ohio. David is a broker; he was worth, the last time he looked at the ticker, four hundred and ninety thousand dollars. He plays a good game of golf and a poor game of tennis. He claims that he is a good shot, but he can't ride a horse. He _can_ run a motor-car, but he doesn't know anything about a catboat."

"I could teach him that," laughed Clancy. Mrs. Carey's nonsense put her at her ease. And all fear of Randall had vanished before he had reached the table. How _could_ he know anything of her and her connection with either Zenda or Beiner?

Randall held out a very large hand.

"You sail a boat, Miss--" He paused confusedly.

"Deane," said Clancy. She had thought, when she left Zenith, to have left forever behind her the name of Deane. Ladue was the name under which she had intended to climb the heights. "Yes, indeed, I can sail a boat."

"You'll teach me?" asked Randall.

Mrs. Carey laughed.

"Lovely weather for boating, David. Where do you do your sailing, Miss Deane?"

"Zenith Harbor. It's in Maine," said Clancy.

"But you don't live in Maine!" cried Randall.

Mrs. Carey laughed again.

"Don't be misled by his frank eyes and his general expression of innate nobility and manliness, Miss Deane. That agony in his voice, which has lured so many young girls to heartbreak, means nothing at all except that he probably had an Irish grandmother. He really isn't worried about your living in Maine. He feels that, no matter where you live, he can persuade you to move to New York. And I hope he can."

Her last five words were uttered with a cordiality that won Clancy's heart. And then she colored for having, even for the minutest fraction of a second, taken Mrs. Carey's words seriously. Was she, Clancy Deane, lacking in a sense of humor?

"Thank you," she said. Then, "I have an Irish grandfather myself," she added slyly.

Mrs. Carey's face assumed an expression of sorrow.

"Oh, David, David! When you picked up a lone and lorn young lady in your motor-car, mayhap you picked up revenge for a score of sad damsels who were happy till they met you." She smiled down at Clancy. "If the high gods of convention are wrathful at me, perhaps some other gods will forgive me. Anyway, I'm sure that David will. And perhaps, after you've had a cup of tea with me, you'll forgive me, too. For if you don't like David, you're sure to like me."

"I know that," said Clancy.

Indeed, she already liked Mrs. Carey. Perhaps the sight of the wedding-ring on Mrs. Carey's left hand made for part of the liking. Still, that was ridiculous. She hardly knew this Randall person.