CHAPTER IX

A SUDDEN DISAPPEARANCE

“What is it, Larry?” asked his mother, seeing a sudden change come over his face as he read the brief note. “What is it? Bad news? Has anything happened?”

The young reporter came to a quick decision. On no account must his mother know of the threat that had been made against him. She worried enough, as it was, over the dangers to which he was exposed on his various assignments. Dangers there were, sometimes imagined, but, often enough, sufficiently real to make even Larry himself wonder, at times, whether “the game was worth the candle.”

“Larry, what is it?” she asked again, as he paused before replying.

“Oh, nothing,” he answered as carelessly as he could.

“But I’m sure it’s something!” she insisted. “A note left in that peculiar way--a messenger afraid of being seen, and then, the way you act. It must be something.”

Larry laughed, though he did not feel at all gay at that moment.

“It’s just about an assignment, mother,” he said. “A new sort of clew--at least I hope it will be. It isn’t worth bothering about. Nothing at all to worry over. Let’s get to bed, it’s late. We had a very nice time, Molly and I--the show was very good,” and then, as if to prove what he said about the strange note being of no account, Larry crumpled it up as though to toss it aside. But he did not. Instead, he put it carefully in his pocket, crumpled as it was. He had an idea that he might trace where it came from, if he had time.

“There, that’s disposed of,” he remarked, with a forced note of cheerfulness in his voice. “To bed, mother.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed yourself, Larry,” she remarked. “Molly is a very nice girl. Lucy likes her very much,” for Molly Mason had called on Larry’s sister several times, and the two girls had become good friends.

In the solitude of his own room, Larry took out the anonymous letter again, carefully smoothed out the wrinkles and creases, and looked at it carefully.

“It’s going to be mighty hard to trace that,” he reasoned. “It’s on plain paper, not even a water-mark in it, and it might have been written on almost any typewriter. If I had the time, or if it was worth it, I might find out what kind of a machine had been used, but I don’t believe I will.”

Larry recalled a number of cases, where, in the courts, certain disputed typewriting had been proved to have been done on a particular machine. More than this the very machine had been located, due to certain peculiarities, or defects, in the individual letters.

But, as the young reporter looked closely at the note, he could discover no faint marks, or breaks, in the type that might serve as a clew.

“I’d need a microscope to do it, anyhow,” he said to himself. “And then it would be too much of a task to hunt all over New York for the machine on which this was written.

“One thing I can do, though, and I will. I’ll learn if Parloti has a typewriter, and I’ll try to get a sample of the kind of work it does, for I suspect that he, or some of his tools, sent this. The chase is getting too hot for Mr. Parloti. He’s beginning to feel the pressure.

“I wonder, after all, if he’s the guilty one. His staying here, after all the hue and cry, shows that he has nerve, if nothing else. He wants me to stop hounding him, does he? Well, I’ll put the screws on all the harder, and I’ll have Nyler do the same thing.”

Larry put his resolution into effect the next day. He showed the threatening note to his detective friend, who agreed with him that it would hardly be worth while to look for the writer, unless the clews pointed strongly to Parloti.

Larry used the note as the basis for a story, reproducing it in big type in the _Leader_, and giving a humorous turn to it, so that his mother would not worry. In fact he laughed at the threat, and practically invited the kidnappers to come and get him.

“By Jove! Everything seems to come Larry’s way!” complained Peter Manton, when he saw the latest “scoop” his rival had secured, through the receipt of the note.

“Well, I wish something would come _your_ way once in a while,” suggested the city editor of the _Scorcher_, who did not relish having his paper beaten so often. “Why can’t you write a note to yourself, drop it in the box, and play it up for a sensation?” he asked. “We might have a story then.”

“It wouldn’t do, after this one,” said Peter. “Everyone would guess that it was faked. Besides, I haven’t gotten after Parloti the way Larry has.”

“Well, why haven’t you?”

“Because I don’t believe he took the boy.”

“You don’t? Who do you think did?”

“I’m blessed if I know,” and Peter scratched his head in perplexity.

“Well, if I called myself a newspaper reporter I’d get a story once in a while!” exclaimed the city editor, in disgust. “Otherwise you might as well go back to the real estate business,” for Peter had tried that, after having been a reporter for a while, but the call of the ink and the presses had been too much for him, and he had gone back to his desk and typewriter. “Get a story!” exclaimed the editor.

“I’ll try,” promised Peter, but he did not have much hope of success.

In the meanwhile Larry “put the screws” on Parloti. He kept after him closer than ever, and besides Nyler, several other detectives “shadowed” him more closely than before. Parloti’s life was made miserable.

It became known that he was a sort of gentleman adventurer, with no particular trade or calling, living on his wits, principally, and on a small income from property in Italy. He was well educated, and spoke English almost perfectly. He had been decorated several times, and, had he chosen to live a more usual sort of life, might have done well. But he was too much a soldier of fortune to do this.

Larry worked night and day seeking for clews, not only for the missing boy, but for some trace of the person who had written him the threatening letter. On the latter, however, he failed. Larry interviewed the janitor of the apartment house where he and his mother lived, but the man had seen nothing of the messenger who had left the note, and had so silently disappeared afterward.

“He must have come in with a false key,” the janitor said, “for the door is kept locked at night.”

“Whoever it was went to a lot of trouble,” remarked the young reporter, “for he could just as well have mailed me the letter to my home, or at the office, and I wouldn’t have had so much chance of finding out where it came from as though he left it. He took a chance on being caught.”

“But he wasn’t,” said the janitor.

“No, worse luck, he wasn’t,” agreed Larry grimly.

So close a watch was kept on Parloti that it was believed he could hold no communication with his two tools, as Larry called them, without the fact being known to the police. The suspected man was under surveillance night and day, but nothing developed.

“I can’t understand it,” said Larry, much puzzled, when two weeks had passed, and no trace of Lorenzo had been found.

“The same here,” grumbled Detective Nyler. “I never saw a case that was so plain on the face of it, and yet was so puzzling when you come to work it out. Think of it--a boy in plain sight of his mother in a theater one minute, and the next he disappears as if by magic. And, mind you, not a soul seems to have noticed which way he went, or what became of him after he left the wings for a moment.

“And then this Parloti. I’ve tried every way I know to tangle him up, and trip him, but he just goes on staying at his hotel as if he never had a thought of kidnapping the boy, though he practically threatened to do so.”

“It is queer,” admitted the young reporter. “I’m going to have another talk with him. Madame Androletti is wasting away from grief, and maybe if I put it to him strongly enough he’ll weaken and give himself away.”

“I doubt it, but you can try,” suggested the detective with a shrug of his shoulders.

“It might be a good plan to have Madame Androletti see him herself,” went on Larry. “That would bring him around, if anything would, I should think, to have him see the way she takes it. I’m going to try.”

But that plan failed, though not for want of trying. The singer did indeed visit the man suspected, and though he received her courteously, he denied knowing anything of the matter. He even said he would help her if he could, but this was not believed, for there was that old feud between the two, and the singer did not trust him.

Nor was Larry any more successful. He made what he declared was his last appeal to Parloti, begging him to tell his tools, who had the boy, to name the price of ransom, and end the widow’s suspense.

“It is of no use, Señor Dexter!” exclaimed the Italian fiercely. “I will not receive you again, nor talk to you. I have not the boy, I never had him--nor have my ‘tools,’ as you call them. It is useless to persecute me further. I can tell you nothing. I will tell you nothing. Leave me alone, or----”

“You’ll write more threatening letters, I suppose,” said Larry boldly.

“No, señor!” cried the man. “I never wrote you any letter, nor did I tell any one to. We of the Parloti race do not threaten--we _act_!” and there was that in his voice, and in the sinister look he cast at the young reporter, to show that he meant what he said. But Larry was not afraid.

The days dragged on, and there was no news. Larry was at his wits’ ends for clews, and for news to print about the case. Most of the other papers had dropped the kidnapping story, or, at best, used only a few lines concerning it. But Larry would not give up. Nor did the police, for it was rather a reflection on them that, under their very noses, a boy had been kidnapped and they could not get a clew to him.

“Well, anything new to-day?” asked Larry of Detective Nyler, when on a visit to police headquarters one afternoon.

“There sure is,” was the unexpected answer.

“You don’t mean to say you’ve gotten something out of Parloti?” exclaimed the young reporter.

“No, and none of us will for a long time, I fancy. He’s skipped out.”

“What! Gone!” gasped Larry.

“That’s it, and he went suddenly, too, last night. I was watching the hotel off and on. I saw him come in, and go up to his room. He didn’t know me, for I had on a new disguise. I was an old newspaper man.”

“Newspaper man?”

“Yes, one who sells ’em, not the kind that gets the items,” explained the detective, with a smile. “Well, as I said, Parloti came in, and went up to his room, but he never came down again.”

“Never came down again? You don’t mean he’s dead; do you?”

“Not a bit of it. He skipped out. Went down the fire-escape, which is just outside his window. Larry, he’s given us the slip.”

“Then he’s guilty after all!” cried the young reporter. “He’s fooled us completely. He played us for amateur detectives. He stayed here long enough to make it look as if he wasn’t the man we wanted, and then, when he gets a chance, and suspicion is beginning to weaken, he lights out.”

“It looks so,” admitted Nyler.

Larry started to leave the room.

“Where are you going?” asked the detective.

“I’m going to the hotel where Parloti used to stay, and see if I can pick up any clews in his apartment.”

“Good. I’ll go with you!”