Part 9

“I suppose you’ll have to have it all,” smiled Colton. “All right. Ten minutes’ intelligent conversation with the chauffeur before the fool detectives arrived gave me practically all of the information I needed. He told me of the theatre party with his wife and two eldest children. I was interested because they went to a famous Broadway children’s show, where the seat prices are high. The tickets had been given his wife by a rich woman who devoted her time to showing mothers how to care for their babies, and had taken an interest in his own. Of course, that told me immediately how the chauffeur had been gotten away while the car was fixed. Through his wife and tots was the only way he could be reached.

“Then I wanted to know if there was a good, quiet hotel near by. The woman must have taken quarters near his home to be on the watch for the opportunity to get acquainted with his wife and children. They are fairly well-to-do, and would resent the professional interference of a settlement worker. There was. A telephone call from MacLaren’s office while you and the others were outside with the police--with the description the chauffeur had given me--fixed her as a Mrs. Allen, a widow, who was spending her money and time on poor babies. She had been there two weeks. She wasn’t in when I called, but would be in the morning. See how clever. Not a breath of suspicion by telling them that she was going to leave. Did she have a habit of calling a special taxi? She did, from the Nelson House. It was easy to get a description of the chauffeur from the starter there. The calls had been made without any attempt at concealment; for who would connect a settlement worker in New York with the wife of a French count? The chauffeur had been employed a week. He was undoubtedly an American. The woman was French, though she spoke English perfectly. See how simple the possibilities are when the foolish impossibilities the police delight in are eliminated?

“Then the chauffeur’s recollection of the bearded man who had lifted Villers out of the car; his stilted way of speaking. I knew then that he, too, was a Frenchman, trying to hide it by repeating, slowly and carefully, without his usual accent, words he had learned by rote. Where had he been while the other two were making the arrangements? A man with the brains and knowledge to plan a crime like that couldn’t be common enough, even in appearance, to hide successfully for two weeks. I remembered the _Moravia_, due from Havre last night. What could be a greater alibi than that of a man who had been in the city but a few hours? But the fog must have caused him considerable anxiety. That’s why I went to see M‘Inness. I knew the name of the Manhattan Tug and Lighterage Company would still be in everybody’s mind. You know that Percy stepped in and sent that message on his own hook--at a hint from the count, of course, who was quick to see that that would cover his last possible connection. When I got him on the phone I learned of the count and his wife for the first time. Then I realized how infernally clever they were, and knew I’d have to act accordingly. The Englishman and the German also entered to complicate affairs. I didn’t know whether they were in it or not.”

“But the description you gave in MacLaren’s office,” interrupted Sydney. “It was wholly at variance with that of every one who had seen him. And the left-handed woman who placed the hypodermic?”

Colton laughed. “The first came from knowledge of human nature. If he was stout and full-bearded when he exposed himself before the eyes of several hundred persons, it was a moral certainty that he was neither, with the disguise off. He’d absolutely reverse it when he stepped into the taxi that was waiting around the corner after it had let him off in time to get the papers. The stitches in the cushions told me the other. They were too fine to have been made by a man. My fingers showed me that the needle had been thrust upward, instead of downward, as would have been the case with a right-handed person.”

“But the actual robbery?” insisted Sydney. “The man with the broken finger-nail? I paid particular attention at the dinner. All seemed perfect.”

“You are learning to observe,” smiled the blind man. “When my fingers brushed the coat-lining of the unconscious man they felt the torn threads of the caught finger-nail as it swept upward when he thrust his hand under the coat for the thick packet of papers. But the packet was evidently wedged, in some way, for it was necessary for him to thrust his whole hand down into the pocket. His thumb ring tore the lining slightly at the corner. These things could not be seen with the naked eye, but they could be felt with fingers trained to read handwriting by touching the reverse side of the paper, and feeling the indentations of the pencil.”

Sydney nodded understandingly. “Now if you’ll explain the diamond, and The Fee’s entrance?” he asked.

“Suggestion. Psychology,” declared Thornley Colton seriously. “The diamond held on my palm was primarily intended to find the man whose broken finger-nail had pulled the threads from the coat lining. Held on my palm, the man who picked it up must touch my flesh with his finger-nail. The count’s was cut to the quick; that of his thumb was long and tapering. Then the Englishman wanted to see it. I knew he wasn’t the man, therefore I caused the stampede to the after-deck with the promise of telling about the Villers murder to find out what he and his German friend really were. A quick touch in the crowd, as they came through the door, felt the heavy belt around the German’s waist. Smugglers!

“That was easy, merely an incident in the case. But the police seemed glad to get them. They were part of the long-sought band. So we’ll dismiss them. But their presence shows further cleverness on the part of the wily count in including them to divert suspicion if it became necessary. He probably knew their game, and would have used it to cover his, if he had to.

“My talk of the thumb-ringed pickpocket was intended to make the count suspicious of me. My reference to the light switch and the darkness were for the sole purpose of showing him how he could escape if it came to a show-down. My idiotic attempt to cover up what he, and others, supposed to be the only means I had of locating that switch was not intended to deceive them; it was intended to make them understand that I thought I was deceiving them. I knew the papers must be somewhere near; they planned to get away at midnight. But I couldn’t take a chance of arresting them, and then searching; for men clever enough to steal those papers would be clever enough to put them where no one could get them. Therefore the talk of the police search and the pulling of the switch to put out the lights.

“By that time they understood that the only thing they could do was get away. I’d stood watching them in silence long enough to let them see that the anchorage was deserted, and that they had a pretty fair chance of escaping. When the darkness came I knew one of them would take instant advantage of it, and get the papers if they weren’t already on his person. You didn’t give a thought to Clauson’s being absent when you toppled over his empty chair, as you saw The Fee with that fake bag bait. I did, and I knew the count would look at that bag as I intended he should. He wasn’t given an opportunity to see that Clauson had gone. He was told of the ready boat, given an opportunity to grab the bag from the boy’s hand. He called ‘Jean’ as a signal for Clauson to put out the lights. Jean wasn’t there, but the quick-witted countess was. Jean, of course, heard that call, and came running. I met him at the cabin-door, held him long enough to get the packet from his inside pocket. It was easy, for”--a whimsical-smile came to the thin lips--“I am quite at home in the darkness. It was done so quickly that the frightened Jean hardly knew it, I guess, and, of course, the count supposed the boy had gotten the data for me. Then the police stepped in, and we saw the spectacular play of the greatest crook I ever had the pleasure of meeting, while the countess struggled on the chair to escape. I’d put the papers under her for safe-keeping, and also because they wouldn’t go in my dinner-coat pocket.”

“Then,” puzzled Sydney, “the doctor who first attended Villers was--this count! But I can’t see why--he needed his bag?”

“Because he was a mighty clever man. He knew it would be easy to take a thick packet of papers from Villers’s pocket without being seen, but he also knew that it would be almost impossible to slip them into his own unobserved. Therefore the open doctor’s bag at his feet, where they could be dropped in an instant.”

“Papers worth a hundred million,” murmured Sydney Thames, almost in awe.

“And costing a single, human life,” digressed Thornley Colton wearily.

THE FOURTH PROBLEM

THE FLYING DEATH

I.

The last sobbing notes of the violin died away. Slowly, reverently, the girl lowered the bow and lifted her chin; the throat-filling hush wrought by the conjuring of her music became wild, unrestrained applause as the spell broke. The beating surges of sound from the gallery, the balcony, the floor seemed to frighten her a little; the frail body in its simple white frock shrank before it; but the girlish lips smiled bravely as she bowed her way to the wings.

Clamorous, insistent, the applause continued. She reappeared; silence came as she lifted the violin to her chin. The lilting fantasy of a folk-song rollicked from under the dancing bow. Once more came the enthusiastic outburst when she finished. She gestured her thanks, smiled an instant at the upper right-hand box, laughed and kissed her hand to the lone occupant of lower left and ran from the stage.

“Sheer genius, Sydney!” murmured Thornley Colton, in expression of the reverence good music always aroused in him; for music, to the blind man, held all the pleasures that painting, sculpture, and beautiful architecture hold for those whom God has given sight. Now his whole face, from the high forehead to the lean, cleft chin, was alight; even the sightless eyes seemed to shine behind the great blue circles of the smoked-glass, tortoise-shell-rimmed library spectacles that accentuated the striking whiteness of his face and hair.

“Wonderful!” breathlessly agreed the red-cheeked, black-haired Sydney Thames, secretary and constant companion of the blind man.

“It makes my woids muss up when I try to talk,” gulped The Fee, freckle-faced, red-haired, blue-eyed boy, who had become a member of the Colton household at the conclusion of a particularly baffling murder case. Thornley Colton laughed softly and pushed back his chair. Then real alarm came to the boy’s voice. “Gee, yuh ain’t goin’ now?” he pleaded. “They’s a coupla comedy acr’bats an’ a wop knife t’rower yet!”

“We’ll wait,” promised Colton, as he made room for a pale-faced young man who had just risen to hurry past him and out of the box.

The problemist moved his chair farther back, and whispered to Sydney. “Our friend who just left seems to be troubled with a mighty bad case of nerves,” he observed. “My cane could feel his chair trembling under him the whole time the girl was playing. He seemed to jump a foot when she left the stage that last time, and he’s been muttering under his breath ever since. What happened?”

“I’d say he was wildly in love with her, and madly jealous of some one else,” accounted Sydney. “She smiled up at him an instant after that last encore, but she immediately turned and kissed her hand to the man in the lower left-hand box. If ever black rage shone in a man’s face it was on that of our neighbour. He isn’t more than twenty-two or three, and he doesn’t look as if he had ever learned to curb a nasty temper.”

“He left as if he were going in search of some one’s heart blood,” smiled the blind man, leaning back in his chair.

One of the comedy acrobats had just succeeded in pushing the other from a high table, and was joyously dancing on his rubber stomach, to the great delight of The Fee, and some fourteen or fifteen hundred others.

“You don’t happen to know the occupant of lower left?” asked Colton. Somehow the thought of sordid jealousy of two men, and a girl whose witchery could produce such music, seemed to jar.

Sydney gazed covertly down at the occupant of lower left. He was a big-bodied man, and fat. There were fleshy pouches of good living and bad drinking under his eyes; but no dissipation could hide the iron will, the dominant arrogance the heavy chin showed. He sat back in the deep box, the black of his evening clothes verging into the black of the heavy velvet hangings that covered the wall behind him. The white expanse of shirt front contrasted strikingly with the sombre background; one white fist rested on the back of a gold chair.

“It’s James P. Cartwright, the theatrical manager!” returned Sydney suddenly. “Her manager!” he supplemented in sudden anger as he compared the innocent girlishness of the violinist and the coarse grossness of the recognized man in the box. Sydney Thames deified all women from afar, for he had forbidden himself the joys of propinquity, because he could never forget that he had no name but that of the English river on the banks of which Thornley Colton had found him, a bundle of dirty baby-clothes, years before.

“Cartwright has an unenviable reputation among his women of the stage,” muttered Colton. The smile was gone from the thin, expressive lips now. The rocking notes of the fantastic folk-song still haunted him; the sobbing cadence of the piece she had played before was in his mind: an omen of tragedy. A soul that could conjure music like that--and a Cartwright who, gossip said, demanded his price for others’ success!

The two comedy acrobats had disinterred themselves from an avalanche of chairs and a table; the first to his feet had been promptly knocked down by the other, and dragged off the stage by his heels, while The Fee and a few hundred others shouted and clapped their approval. A card announced Signor Delvetoi and his marvellous whirling knives.

Sydney, watching the occupant of the lower left, saw him take out a big watch impatiently, lean ponderously back in a chair, and summon an usher. The uniformed man came, listened a moment, nodded, and opened the door at the stage end of the box, to reappear a moment later and whisper his message, or news. Cartwright nodded, and turned his attention idly toward the stage, where the signor sent a whirling knife toward the high boards before which his yellow-haired partner had set a red apple swinging on a long string. The knife point thudded into the wood; the cut string parted, and the apple rolled to the stage floor.

“Gee, that’s some stunt!” ecstatically exclaimed The Fee, as he enthusiastically described the feat of the black-bearded signor to Colton.

A handful of playing cards flurried before the wooden stop. Three whirling knives shot across the whole length of the stage; three cards were pinned fast, and the assistant held them up triumphantly to show the pierced ace spots.

Cartwright inclined his head in a nod of grudging approval, then turned quickly as he heard the door that led back to the stage open. Sydney saw the girl who had played appear in her street clothes, a simple white shirt waist and dark skirt, her coat thrown over her arm. He gritted his teeth at the greeting she gave the theatrical manager, and as he saw the flush of happiness on the winsome face, while the thick lips of the man grinned as he took her coat. Cartwright jerked his thumb toward the stage where the dexterous signor had just succeeded in planting five knives in a black spot not bigger than a half dollar.

He pulled his chair close to that of the girl, and they sat talking; the girl with many pretty, unconscious gestures, the man listening, with a jerky nod now and then. They were in the rear of the box, not three feet from the heavy velvet hangings that covered the wall back of them. They could not be seen from the body of the theatre, but from the upper box opposite, where Sydney sat, everything in their box was visible.

Sydney interrupted The Fee’s excited description of the signor’s act long enough to tell the news to Colton; and he made no excuse for his spying. The blind man nodded grimly, and continued his patient listening to The Fee, who was having the time of his young life. The signor, in his suit of black silk and his black, pointed beard, had performed miracles with the whirling knives. Now the boy waited breathlessly for this last feat, because the soft music of the orchestra told him it would be the best of all. A huge frame was being lowered from the flies. The blond assistant stepped to the small shelf, thrust her hands through the leather loops, and stood against the golden back, arms spread wide, feet apart. The signor brought his table of glittering knives to the footlights; the frame and the assistant swung aloft. The lights went out. Darkness for a few brief seconds, then the calcium from the balcony outlined the suspended woman and the gold background.

“Ah!” The Fee’s gasp swelled a thousand others, as the knife shot into the calcium beam from the darkness below, whirled with a thousand silver fires, and buried its point in the wood, blade grazing the cheek of the woman. A few seconds of breathless suspense, and another followed, to graze the ear. Even Sydney forgot the man and girl in the box as he watched the whirling blades. The weirdness of the thing held him fascinated; the knives, hurled from the hands of the man who was invisible in the darkness below the single light beam, pinwheeled through the light to find their place unerringly.

Then something caused Sydney Thames to turn his eyes again to the lower box. At the instant a flash of lurid light leaped from the darkness, silhouetting with startling vividness the seated man and girl. The roar of a pistol came to his ears; and while the light cut the darkness he saw behind the seated man and girl the face of the youth who had been in the box with them; the man whose jealousy had been shown so plainly.

Pandemonium followed instantly. A chair crashed over in the darkness across the theatre; clear above the cries of the panic-stricken men and women came the scream of a man:

“My God! I didn’t do it! I didn’t! I didn’t!”

The scream stopped. “Lights!” frenziedly called some one from the darkness.

They came. In the box opposite, Sydney Thames saw Cartwright struggling with the man whose face he had seen so distinctly in the pistol’s flash. On the floor of the box, face downward, was the girl of the violin. Between her shoulders, on the white shirt waist, was a widening splotch of crimson.

II.

The girl was dead. The white-coated ambulance surgeon who examined her had shaken his head, and refused to take her in the ambulance. The morgue waggon had taken the body but a short time after the police reserves had beaten their way through a mob of thousands to arrest the white-faced, hysterical prisoner, who cried his innocence through lips battered by the fist of Cartwright.

In the precinct station the prisoner had collapsed, and Cartwright told his story. He had heard a slight noise, and swung around in his chair. At that instant came the flash of the pistol behind him. He heard the man drop it, and he leaped to grapple with him. Yes, he knew the prisoner; name was Nelson, a half-baked kid, who had bothered Miss Reynolds for months. Yes, this was Miss Reynolds’s first engagement; her first appearance on any stage. He was her manager. No, nothing else. Emphatically!

The prisoner, brought around roughly, swore that he was innocent. He had known Miss Reynolds for months, they had been friends in Europe. She had asked him to be present at her first appearance, and at the end of her act he had gone to meet her at the stage entrance. It was there that he was told that she had an engagement with Cartwright. That this made him wild with jealousy he admitted; he knew Cartwright by reputation, and Miss Reynolds was but a girl, innocent, unsophisticated.

He had walked around outside the theatre for about fifteen minutes, then he had decided to go to the box and demand an explanation. The theatre was in darkness for the knife-throwing act, but he knew his way. His hand had been on the black velvet hangings when he stopped. And the revolver flash had come _from the air_ not a foot ahead of him. No, he could not explain how the shot had been fired. No one could have moved from the spot where the pistol had been, _because the weapon dropped on his toe_!

He was taken away to a cell on a charge of murder.

Cartwright, leaving the station when the last of the curious crowd had drifted away, seemed to have aged ten years since the tragedy. He was haggard, the grim, hard smile that had been characteristic was gone, his big hands trembled. He tried in vain to get permission to remove the girl’s body from the morgue immediately. But the law demanded that the coroner see it first; and the official was out of town.

Cartwright remembered his political friends. He tried to locate a dozen over the telephone and failed. Then, by chance, he met the one man in the city who could help him; the one man among the four millions whom he could trust: Theodore Rogers, the theatrical lawyer, a friend for thirty years.

He tried to tell Rogers what he wanted, but his nervousness made his words a jumble.

“What is it, Jim? What’s the trouble?” Rogers shook him, and he looked into his eyes anxiously.

Cartwright told him of the shooting. “And, by God, Ted!” he finished passionately. “I won’t rest a minute till I see that devil in the electric chair! God! To kill a girl like that!”

The lawyer looked at him curiously. This was not the cool, suave Cartwright he had known so long.

Cartwright read the look on the lawyer’s face, and the thoughts behind it. “Not that! I swear it’s not that, Ted!” he choked.

“Come, have a drink,” pleaded Rogers, pulling him toward the lighted entrance of a rathskeller.

“With that girl on a slab in the morgue?”

“One drink,” insisted Rogers. “You are worse than useless this way. Come!”

He dragged Cartwright down the steps. The clock over the bar said half-past two, and the leather-seated booths were in darkness. But drinks could be had. The barman dozed, and the lone waiter yawned as he carried a tray toward the booths in the rear. Rogers led the theatrical man to a seat at the side of the room in front of the bar, ordered whisky, and waited patiently until Cartwright had gulped down the liquor.

“Now tell me about it, Jim,” demanded Rogers.

Cartwright, as near the end of the leather seat as he could get, glanced at the dark booths in the back, then turned and surveyed the front of the place. The rathskeller was empty, except for the dozing barman and the waiter, who had gone into one of the front booths to figure his day’s checks.

“Don’t think--what you’ve been thinking about me and that girl, Ted.” There was almost pathetic pleading in the manager’s voice; it was pitched so low that even the lawyer at the other side of the narrow table could scarcely hear. “She was--a daughter to me--the daughter of the only woman I ever loved.”

Rogers stared. This from the man Broadway thought it knew!

“Remember twenty years ago?” continued Cartwright, in that same low, pleading voice. “The girl I took away from Kelly, that drunken burlesque magician?”

The lawyer nodded, a look of understanding in his eyes.