Part 6

"Well: if you want to know, I guess you owe it mainly to forgetting to lock your door when you crashed in last night." Crane sat down and favoured Lanyard with a quizzical stare, caressing lean jaws with bony fingers. "I knocked till I was tired, then tried the door, feeling pretty sure you were at home, because I could see by the transom you had all the lights going full blast. So I just naturally walked in and found you practically a total loss. You were cold sober when I saw you at two o'clock, but you sure did manage to collect a skinful between then and the time you turned in, whenever that was."

"To the best of my knowledge, not much after three."

"Blessed if I see how you managed it. Mind telling? I don't like to seem nosey, but this record you're claiming for the standing broad jag in one hour flat has got me guessing. Didn't know you went in much for that sort of thing."

"No more do I," Lanyard protested. "That is to say, I never did before and never will again, Heaven helping me to avoid further entanglements with temperance drinks."

"That what you call 'em?"

"I mean, the sort of drinks one's friends serve in these Prohibition times. I hesitate to ask you to believe that the ruin you see before you was wrought by one small glass of champagne at the Clique last night, followed by a single Scotch and soda at Mrs. McFee's."

"From the funny things I've seen bootliquor do in the last few months," Crane replied--"some of 'em not so darned funny, at that--I'm ready to believe anything you want to blame on it. What bothers me now, is you getting such stuff at Mrs. Folliott McFee's. That little lady is well enough fixed to keep her cellar stocked with the best. However," he reconsidered, "I guess she must've got it from her friend Morphew. She's been training considerably with him and his gang of late; and I wouldn't put it past that bird to poison his best friend for a profit of a few dollars a case."

"We see Mr. Morphew with the same eyes, you and I."

Lanyard wanted very much to question Crane for information concerning Mr. Hugh Morphew, but felt much too listless just then. Another time would do as well, when his mental processes had somewhat recuperated.

"So you were at Mrs. McFee's last night, were you?"

"Naturally, I had to see her home," Lanyard replied. "She asked me in to have that drink; and a little later the Delorme woman dropped in with a hyena who calls himself Pagan--daresay you know who I mean"--Crane nodded--"to make sure Mrs. McFee had come to no harm. You see, we were all guests of Morphew's at the Clique when you raided the place. But I presume that's no news . . ."

"You're wrong, then. Morphew and his lot got away clean. We couldn't find hair nor hide of him or any of the parties you've named. They must have beaten it by some secret passage while the lights were on the blink."

Liane and Pagan, then, had lied about being turned back from the roof. Not that it mattered . . .

"How'd you get on with the pretty McFee?" Crane was pursuing with an interest too elaborately casual.

"Well enough, thanks. She seems a nice little thing if a thought flighty."

"Flighty's the word. I guess you haven't known her long."

"Only met her last night, a few minutes before the raid."

"Nice place she's got . . ."

"Nice enough," Lanyard assented languidly.

"Get much of a show to look around while you were there?"

Lanyard opened his eyes. "You're not asking these questions for conversation's sake."

"You're dead right I'm not," Crane drawled, stroking his jaws. "Guess I may as well break it to you. Mrs. McFee reported this morning, her house had been broken into last night, some time between three o'clock and daylight, her safe opened--little tin box she keeps in her boodwah--and the pick of her jewels looted."

"So!" said Lanyard--"it's to that I owe this honour."

"You've had such a lot of experience in that line, I thought maybe you wouldn't mind giving me a few tips . . ."

Lanyard lounged back in his chair again, tolerantly smiling.

"Why trifle with the truth to spare my feelings?"

"Well!" Crane uncomfortably conceded--"I don't mind telling you, the job had all the ear-marks of one of the Lone Wolf's."

"Indeed?"

"The bird that opened that box did it painlessly, like you always used to, going on all I've heard--just talked to the works till the safe lay down and rolled over with all four paws in the air. Of course, he didn't leave any finger-marks. He got in by way of an extension at the back of the house: there's a French window opens onto it from the study. He didn't even need to jimmy that, though Mrs. McFee and the servants can't explain how it come to be open. In fact, the butler swears he latched it himself before he went to bed. Looks like somebody must have fixed it . . ."

"Somebody who, like your obedient servant, had plenty of opportunity."

"You got the idea."

"In short," said Lanyard, "what you are delicately trying to convey is that you'd be obliged if I'd come along quietly."

"No," Crane surprisingly answered: "nothing like that."

"Not--?" Lanyard persisted, in an unbelieving stare.

"No. . . . I'll admit, I looked you up today with a divided mind. I couldn't somehow believe it of you. On the other hand, I've been fooled by a lot of human nature in my time. But you put in an alibi, even before you came to, sound enough to satisfy me. Maybe I'm wrong about you, Lanyard, maybe you're as crooked as a Revenue inspector; but nothing will ever make me believe you pulled that job and then pickled yourself to celebrate, or that the Lone Wolf ever went home after cracking a box and crawled into the hay leaving his front door unlocked. Not only that, but just to make sure, in a perfectly friendly way, I frisked your pockets and searched these rooms high and low before I woke you up. You've got a good right to be sore, if it hits you that way; but I figured it was my duty as a friend as well as an officer of the law."

"On the contrary," Lanyard sincerely assured him, "I am appreciative and grateful, glad to be cleared in your sight, even more glad to be cleared in my own."

"In your own?" Crane repeated in perplexity. "What d'you think you mean by that?"

"I'm glad I do not have to wonder if possibly I did this thing in my sleep, so to speak."

"Quit your kidding!" Crane got up with a laugh. "I've got to be getting along now, oughtn't to have lost as much time as I have."

"I shall miss your soothing presence. But I am sure you understand that there are times, and this is one of them, when one would rather be alone."

"You said it."

"You will pardon my not rising to see you to the door?"

"Stay right where you are. I'll drop in again, some time this evening, maybe, to see how you are."

"Do. There are many things I want to consult you about when I feel better able."

"Well: if anything gets in my way and I don't show up like I said . . ." Crane fished out a card from a worn wallet and placed it on the mantelpiece of the old-fashioned marble fireplace: "There's my name and number. Give me a ring any time you feel like it, and I'll blow you to a dinner with, maybe, something on the side whose kick isn't quite as deadly as a Georgia mule's."

For upwards of an hour after the detective had taken himself off, Lanyard lingered on in the easy chair, listlessly reviewing his memories of the previous night, memories comfortably clear-cut up to a certain stage . . .

After all, he were an ingrate to complain, surely he had no excuse for considering himself in disgrace with fortune, who had come thus far through this conjuncture retaining the confidence of Crane, but best of all his own!

He counted himself happy indeed--for all the malaise from which he still suffered and which only time and heroic measures in the way of exercise would do away with altogether--that Crane's investigation, while he lay senseless, had resolved every question that might otherwise have perturbed his secret mind. It was grateful to be spared the torment that, but for this exoneration, must have been his, the fear that he might himself, without his knowledge, have proved there was support in fact for the theory of criminal psychology which Pagan had advanced, the theory that it was well within the compass of possibility for a man in his plight, in sore financial straits and subconsciously tempted beyond his strength, to commit a theft while in a phase of auto-hypnosis coupled with amnesia, a condition comparable with somnambulism . . .

Otherwise his affairs, as Lanyard saw them, had come suddenly to a precarious pass.

In spite of the fact that he knew his intelligence would need some time to recover its accustomed competence, he entertained no slightest doubt but that he would be tomorrow, as he was today, convinced that the abstraction of the McFee jewels had been merely the first move in a campaign shrewdly planned to bring him to Morphew's terms.

His defiance of that one had not been tardy of result: the enemy had not only accepted his declaration of war, he had committed the first overt act.

Lanyard's temper hardened. If Morphew wanted war, he should have his fill . . .

But if war it must be, this was no time to waste in inaction: the enemy was already in the field and taking the offensive, while he lay resting.

Rising, Lanyard bestirred himself to set his house in order.

When he had shaved and dressed and dosed himself with stabilizing draughts of black coffee, he began to collect the clothes he had worn overnight, all of which would require the attentions of a valet before they would be again presentable. Rain had defaced the gloss of his topper beyond repair but by the hatter's iron. His trousers were damp and wrinkled bags of black stuff splashed to the knees with mud.

Over these stains Lanyard frowned. Impossible to understand how he had managed to come by the worst of them, even taking into account the condition in which he had traversed Fifth Avenue during the storm. The marks of that thin black ooze which accumulates on asphaltum explained themselves. But there were others inexplicable, and on his patent leather boots as well, smears and crusts of ochre mud which he could hardly have accumulated without wandering into broken ground, such as was not to be found on Fifth avenue at any point within the bounds of his besotted promenade.

But he distinctly recollected noticing an excavation behind the residence of Folly McFee. . . .

With a worried shake of his head that cost him several stabs of anguish, Lanyard folded and laid aside the trousers, and returned to the sitting-room to get his dress-coat.

As he took this up something in one of the coat-tail pockets struck against a leg of the table with a muffled but clashing thump.

By his own account, Crane had already rummaged the pockets of the garment, but conceivably the coat-tail pockets he had overlooked, who was better acquainted with dress clothes of American tailoring, from which such conveniences are commonly omitted. Lanyard's clothes, however, had been built in London; and to the British tailor coat-tail pockets are as an article of faith.

An exploring hand brought forth a little packet knotted in a handkerchief, one of his own.

Lanyard surmised its contents before he had succeeded in loosing the knots.

With a sense of sickness, he stood staring down at the stolen jewels of Folly McFee.

VII

In sequel the life of Michael Lanyard knew some of its busiest moments, his modest lodgings were the stage of a scene of rare animation whose solitary actor figured as the restless axis of a whirlwind of garments. Then the air, clearing, disclosed the man decently clad for the street and stowing away in a safe pocket his unchancy treasure-trove.

Thus far he had gone about doing what he had to do automatically in a measure, as one will in times of extremity, putting off against an hour more opportune, when he might bring a clearer head to bear upon the business, too, the deliberate study which his troubles needed. Enough now to know the longer he delayed where he was, the more immediate his peril of suffering a second domiciliary visit by the police; who on this new occasion, beyond much doubt, would be represented by agents less kindly biassed than Crane, more skeptical and thoroughgoing in the matter of searching for Folly McFee's emeralds. It remained for Lanyard to prove appreciation of this fleeting smile of fortune by turning to good account the slender chance it granted to work out his salvation in his own time and way.

One detail, however, he dared not slight, though it cost minutes each more precious than the last: Lanyard left behind him shoes and trousers from which every lingering suspicion of mud had been erased.

Some two hours later, after a tedious tale of twists and turns in the labyrinth of New York's several transportation systems, he left a train at the Mount Vernon terminal of the subway extension, and addressed himself to the tramp back to New York.

The sky was bright, the Indian Summer sunlight kind, the air inspiriting. By the time Lanyard had stretched his legs over a mile or two of by-roads--chosen for the long and lonely perspectives which enabled him to make sure he travelled with no other shadow than his own--he began to feel once more competent to ponder his fix and plot a way out.

No easy task: the problem posed by the fact that he had somehow, at some time in the course of the preceding night, unwittingly come into possession of stolen property, seemed open to solution only on one of two hypotheses, antagonistic, and neither at a glance more likely than the other. Failing his ability to turn up proof that another hand had rifled the McFee safe and secreted its loot in his coat while he slept, Lanyard would have to become reconciled to the belief that he himself had stolen the jewels while in a phase of submerged consciousness. Distasteful as was the bare suggestion, and human though the temptation was to adopt the more grateful theory and guide himself thereby, he still could not but doubt: the other was all too possibly the true explanation.

One thing at least he might take for granted, that the drink Pagan had brought him was drugged. But here again the lane of likelihood developed a confounding fork: Who could say whether the drug had been added to the drink by Pagan, or whether the whiskey itself had been one of those deadly synthetic concoctions with which that bastard offspring of Prohibition, the bootlegging industry, had flooded the land?

If it were the whiskey that Lanyard had to blame, Pagan, too, and Folly McFee and Liane Delorme must have suffered as severely, Liane even more, since she had made away with two drinks to Lanyard's one. . . . A simple matter to find out the truth, if one only knew the woman's address; but she had neglected to say where she was stopping, and other than those whom under the circumstances he would hardly care to consult, Lanyard could think of nobody who would be likely to know.

And even though investigation might prove that nobody else had been so punished, and thus satisfy Lanyard that his drink alone had maliciously been doctored, such knowledge would not necessarily lead him nearer to the facts of the robbery. Comfortable though it was to impute to Pagan the mischief with the whiskey, and assume that its object had been to throw Lanyard into coma and thus render it feasible to enter his rooms without his knowledge, smear yellow mud on his clothing and plant the plunder in his pocket, still it remained possible that the arch-intelligence which had decreed the administration of the drug, whether Morphew's or another's, had reckoned with even more diabolical cunning upon its breaking down those inhibitions which honour and faith and a good intent had imposed upon a nature perhaps--and for all Lanyard could assert to the contrary--irreclaimably a thief's.

Hashish was reputed to work like that, to act upon its victims precisely as an acid eats away lacquer, stripping off layer by layer the most stubborn crust of honour and habit ever indurated by conscience and civilized convention, baring at last the primitive beast that lurks in every man.

No matter: though the identity of the thief must be a riddle still, to learn the truth about the whiskey would resolve the primary doubts that were harassing Lanyard and leave him better advised concerning what further steps would be required to clear up the mystery altogether. To this end the one thing now distinctly indicated was the need for action prompt, direct, and drastic.

Lanyard had not forgotten that appointment for the following afternoon which he must be able to keep with a clear mind and a clean heart, unapprehensive of any sort of interference.

He began to foresee a programme for the intervening night tolerably long and arduous. He had to hit upon some way to disembarrass himself of the emeralds that would clear him of all suspicion of ever having had anything to do with them. He had further to acquit or convict Pagan of tampering with his drink--and in the event of the conviction which he anticipated with entire confidence, to invent and enforce some means of persuading Pagan and his lot that Michael Lanyard was a good man to let alone.

Now dusk was closing down upon the world in shade on shade of lilac, violet and blue, through which, moment by moment, the lights of the outlying city were blowing their blossoms of silver and gold. Directly ahead of Lanyard the electric sign of a roadhouse exploded its soundless salvo against the sky; and thus reminded that he needed food, who had so much to do ere dawn, he entered the place and dined with a frugality considerate of digestive powers sadly out of kilter. Then in the dark of the young night he resumed his walk, and between nine and half-past might have been (only that he took good care not to be) seen at pause on the Lexington avenue corner of the block in which Folly McFee dwelt, quietly reconnoitering the approach to her residence.

The house stood on the north side of the street, nearer Lexington avenue than Park, and with windows diffusing a dim glow through discreet draperies presented to the beholder the demure face that suited an establishment whose youthful chatelaine sported a sobriquet so apt and alluring.

Observers less interested than Lanyard was then have been known feelingly to comment upon the impish trick houses frequently practice of keeping their own counsel: the shrewdest reader of façades would have gathered nothing informing from the aspect worn that night by the dwelling of Folly McFee, no clue as to whether its pretty resident were at home, or, if at home, alone . . .

Lanyard hazarded a saunter past on the sidewalk opposite. Under more direct scrutiny the house remained as little communicative, the only profit he had of the maneuvre was the assurance that nobody was skulking in any of the areaways over across from it, on the watch for the likes of himself. But then there was no conceivable reason why anybody should be; not even his most impassioned ill-wisher, much less an unimaginative police force, could have been expected to divine that any attraction could possibly draw this putative criminal back to haunt the scene of his alleged crime.

Lanyard nevertheless, on gaining the Park avenue corner, merely crossed the street and continued his stroll through the next to the north, passing on the way the gaping foundation pit observed the night before from the windows of Folly's study, a survey of which from this new angle confirmed his belief that the thief need not have found it difficult to make his way into the backyard and swarm up to the roof of the extension. On the other hand, this aspect of the premises afforded Lanyard no least twinge of guilty reminiscence. Another circumstance that proved nothing; if his personal acquaintance with downright drunkenness was limited, he knew too well that it was quite possible for one to drink oneself into a state of alcoholic insanity and retain, on coming out of it, no memory of one's performances while in that condition.

Circumnavigation of the block having brought him again into the street upon which the McFee residence faced, but this time on its northern sidewalk, Lanyard's pace slackened; and idlest insouciance masked the surge of acute interest in him when, at twenty paces' distance, he saw the iron gate to its service entrance swing open and a maid emerge and make briskly off toward Park avenue--a tidy figure in black dress, white apron and cap, taking letters to post at the corner letter-box in time for the last collection.

Another freak of friendly fortune? or one of ill-favoured fate? The thing was too confoundedly well-timed, the invitation of that unguarded entrance too tempting. Indeed, when it occurred to Lanyard that his action might have been considered a thought precipitate, it was too late to turn back, he had already slipped into the service hallway and restored the door to the position, half on the latch, in which the woman had left it. To change his mind now and retreat would be to court her attention, who would already be on her way back from the corner.

The hallway was long, narrow, dimly lighted. At its far end a stairway led down to kitchen offices. Midway, a swing-door communicated with the main body of the house. Through this Lanyard had no choice but to dart, reckless of what might await him on its far side: to linger where he was meant immediate discovery . . . and the emeralds on his person!

The swing-door gave into a butler's pantry, at the moment empty, where another opened into the dining-room and a third to the main hallway. Stacks of dishes in the pantry sink, no less than a clash of cheerful voices in the room adjoining, with Folly's rippling laughter clearly recognizable, told of a dinner party still in progress. The other living-rooms, then, ought to be untenanted. The butler due to pop back from the dining-room at any instant, Lanyard passed on to the entrance-hall, and experienced a relief, on finding it deserted, that betrayed an old hand sorely out of practice: the day had been when he could have taken far more desperate chances without a tremor.

Even so, he wasted no gestures. To go the way he meant to go, he had the dining-room door to pass, the risk to run of being seen. He edged to a point whence Folly's back was visible, and the butler, a decent, plodding, British body, taking himself off with an emptied decanter. He disappeared; and the pantry-door was heard to buffet the air. Lanyard waited a minute, then coolly ran--or, rather, stumped--the risk of the open door, trusting, if noticed by any of the diners, to pass as the butler with some business in the front part of the house. To the best of his observation his audacity served: the dinner-party seemed to be finding itself much too amusing to have attention to spare for matters of domestic routine. But one swift glance askance noted that Folly was entertaining only Pagan, Liane Delorme, and Mallison.

So much for Lanyard's solemn sermon on the dangers of questionable associations!

But could one fairly have expected anything better, when Folly had been given, subsequently, every reason to believe she had entertained in that overnight moralist a felon unawares? This, presumably, was her way of consoling herself for having been so shamefully taken in: as gay a partie carrée as heart could wish, figuratively making merry on the very coffin-lid of Folly's most recent bereavement . . .