The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  "It's Rowe," he said confidently. "You can see his hand in it right through. I was put on the Benson kidnapping case, you remember, the boy who was kept for three months in a deserted lumber camp in the mountains? Well, sir, every person in the Benson house swore that youngster was in bed at midnight, when the house was closed for the night. Every door and window bolted in the morning, and the boy gone. When we found Rowe--after the mother had put on mourning--and found the kid, ten pounds heavier than he had been before he was abducted, and strutting around like a turkey cock, Rowe told us that he and the boy took in the theater that night, and were there for the first act. How did he do it? He offered to take the boy to the show if he would pretend to go to bed, and then slide down a porch pillar and meet him. The boy didn't want to go home when we found him."

  "There can't be any mistake about the time in this case," I commented. "I saw her myself after eleven, and said good night."

  The Eagle man consulted his note-book. "Oh, yes," he asked; "did she have a diagonal cut across her cheek?"

  "No," I said for the second time.

  My next visitor was a cabman. On the night in question he had taken a small and a very nervous old woman to the Omega ferry. She appeared excited and almost forgot to pay him. She carried a small satchel, and wore a black veil. What did she look like? She had gray hair, and she seemed to have a scar on her face that drew the corner of her mouth.

  At ten o'clock I telephoned Burton: "For Heaven's sake," I said, "if anybody has lost a little old lady in a black dress, wearing a black veil, carrying a satchel, and with a scar diagonally across her cheek from her eye to her mouth, I can tell them all about her, and where she is now."

  "That's funny," he said. "We're stirring up the pool and bringing up things we didn't expect. The police have been looking for that woman quietly for a week: she's the widow of a coal baron, and her son-in-law's under suspicion of making away with her."

  "Well, he didn't," I affirmed. "She committed suicide from an Omega ferry boat and she's at the morgue this morning."

  "Bully," he returned. "Keep on; you'll get lots of clues, and remember one will be right."

  It was not until noon, however, that anything concrete developed. In the two hours between, I had interviewed seven more people. I had followed the depressing last hours of the coal baron's widow, and jumped with her, mentally, into the black river that night. I had learned of a small fairish-haired girl who had tried to buy cyanide of potassium at three drug-stores on the same street, and of a tall, light woman who had taken a room for three days at a hotel and was apparently demented.

  At twelve, however, my reward came. Two men walked in, almost at the same time: one was a motorman, in his official clothes, brass buttons and patches around the pockets. The other was a taxicab driver. Both had the uncertain gait of men who by occupation are unused to anything stationary under them, and each eyed the other suspiciously.

  The motorman claimed priority by a nose, so I took him first into my private office. His story, shorn of his own opinions at the time and later, was as follows:

  On the night in question, Thursday of the week before, he took his car out of the barn for the eleven o'clock run. Barney was his conductor. They went from the barn, at Hays Street, down-town, and then started out for Wynton. The controller blew out, and two or three things went wrong: all told they lost forty minutes. They got to Wynton at five minutes after two; their time there was one-twenty-five.

  The car went to the bad again at Wynton, and he and Barney tinkered with it until two-forty. They got it in shape to go back to the barn, but that was all. Just as they were ready to start, a passenger got on, a woman, alone: a small woman with a brown veil. She wore a black dress or a suit--he was vague about everything but the color, and he noticed her especially because she was fidgety and excited. Half a block farther a man boarded the car, and sat across from the woman. Barney said afterward that the man tried twice to speak to the woman, but she looked away each time. No, he hadn't heard what he said.

  The man got out when the car went into the barn, but the woman stayed on. He and Barney got another car and took it out, and the woman went with them. She made a complete round trip this time, going out to Wynton and back to the end of the line down-town. It was just daylight when she got off at last, at First and Day Streets.

  Asked if he had thought at the time that the veiled woman was young or old, he said he had thought she was probably middle-aged. Very young or very old women would not put in the night riding in a street-car. Yes, he had had men who rode around a couple of times at night, mostly to sober up before they went home. But he never saw a woman do it before.

  I took his name and address and thanked him The chauffeur came next, and his story was equally pertinent.

  On the night of the previous Thursday he had been engaged to take a sick woman from a downtown hotel to a house at Bellwood. The woman's husband was with her, and they went slowly to avoid jolting. It was after twelve when he drove away from the house and started home. At a corner--he did not know the names of the streets--a woman hailed the cab and asked him if he belonged in Bellwood or was going to the city. She had missed the last train. When he told her he was going into town, she promptly engaged him, and showed him where to wait for her, a narrow road off the main street.

  "I waited an hour," he finished, "before she came; I dropped to sleep or I would have gone without her. About half-past one she came along, and a gentleman with her. He put her in the cab, and I took her to the city. When I saw in the paper that a lady had disappeared from Bellwood that night, I knew right off that it was my party."

  "Would you know the man again?"

  "I would know his voice, I expect, sir; I could not see much: he wore a slouch hat and had a traveling-bag of some kind."

  "What did he say to the woman?" I asked.

  "He didn't say much. Before he closed the door, he said, 'You have put me in a terrible position,' or something like that. From the traveling-bag and all, I thought perhaps it was an elopement, and the lady had decided to throw him down."

  "Was it a young woman or an old one," I asked again. This time the cabby's tone was assured.

  "Young," he asserted, "slim and quick: dressed in black, with a black veil. Soft voice. She got out at Market Square, and I have an idea she took a cross-town car there."

  "I hardly think it was Miss Maitland," I said. "She was past sixty, and besides--I don't think she went that way. Still it is worth following up. Is that all?"

  He fumbled in his pocket, and after a minute brought up a small black pocket-book and held it out to me. It was the small coin purse out of a leather hand-bag.

  "She dropped this in the cab, sir," he said. "I took it home to the missus--not knowing what else to do with it. It had no money in it--only that bit of paper."

  I opened the purse and took out a small white card, without engraving. On it was written in a pencil the figures:

  C 1122

  CHAPTER XVII

  HIS SECOND WIFE

  WHEN the cabman had gone, I sat down and tried to think things out. As I have said many times in the course of this narrative, I lack imagination: moreover, a long experience of witnesses in court had taught me the unreliability of average observation. The very fact that two men swore to having taken solitary women away from Bellwood that night, made me doubt if either one had really seen the missing woman.

  Of the two stories, the taxicab driver's was the more probable, as far as Miss Jane was concerned. Knowing her child-like nature, her timidity, her shrinking and shamefaced fear of the dark, it was almost incredible that she would walk the three miles to Wynton, voluntarily, and from there lose herself in the city. Besides, such an explanation would not fit the blood-stains, or the fact that she had gone, as far as we could find out, in her night-clothes.

  Still--she had left the village that night, either by cab or on foot. If the driver had been correct in his time, however, the taxicab was almost eliminated; he said the
woman got into the cab at one-thirty. It was between one-thirty and one-forty-five when Margery heard the footsteps in the attic.

  I think for the first time it came to me, that day, that there was at least a possibility that Miss Jane had not been attacked, robbed or injured: that she had left home voluntarily, under stress of great excitement. But if she had, why? The mystery was hardly less for being stripped of its gruesome details. Nothing in my knowledge of the missing woman gave me a clue. I had a vague hope that, if she had gone voluntarily, she would see the newspapers and let us know where she was.

  To my list of exhibits I added the purse with its inclosure. The secret drawer of my desk now contained, besides the purse, the slip marked eleven twenty-two that had been pinned to Fleming's pillow; the similar scrap found over Miss Jane's mantel; the pearl I had found on the floor of the closet, and the cyanide, which, as well as the bullet, Burton had given me. Add to these the still tender place on my head where Wardrop had almost brained me with a chair, and a blue ankle, now becoming spotted with yellow, where I had fallen down the dumbwaiter, and my list of visible reminders of the double mystery grew to eight.

  I was not proud of the part I had played. So far, I had blundered, it seemed to me, at every point where a blunder was possible. I had fallen over folding chairs and down a shaft; I had been a half-hour too late to save Allan Fleming; I had been up and awake, and Miss Jane had got out of the house under my very nose. Last, and by no means least, I had waited thirty-five years to find the right woman, and when I found her, some one else had won her. I was in the depths that day when Burton came in.

  He walked into the office jauntily and presented Miss Grant with a club sandwich neatly done up in waxed paper. Then he came into my private room and closed the door behind him.

  "Avaunt, dull care!" he exclaimed, taking in my dejected attitude and exhibits on the desk at a glance. "Look up and grin, my friend." He had his hands behind him.

  "Don't be a fool," I snapped. "I'll not grin unless I feel like it."

  "Grin, darn you," he said, and put something on the desk in front of me. It was a Russia leather bag.

  "The leather bag!" he pointed proudly.

  "Where did you get it?" I exclaimed, incredulous. Burton fumbled with the lock while he explained.

  "It was found in Boston," he said. "How do you open the thing, anyhow?"

  It was not locked, and I got it open in a minute. As I had expected, it was empty.

  "Then--perhaps Wardrop was telling the truth," I exclaimed. "By Jove, Burton, he was robbed by the woman in the cab, and he can't tell about her on account of Miss Fleming! She made a haul, for certain."

  I told him then of the two women who had left Bellwood on the night of Miss Jane's disappearance, and showed him the purse and its inclosure. The C puzzled him as it had me. "It might be anything," he said as he gave it back, "from a book, chapter and verse in the Bible to a prescription for rheumatism at a drug-store. As to the lady in the cab, I think perhaps you are right," he said, examining the interior of the bag, where Wardrop's name in ink told its story. "Of course, we have only Wardrop's word that he brought the bag to Bellwood; if we grant that we can grant the rest--that he was robbed, that the thief emptied the bag, and either took it or shipped it to Boston."

  "How on earth did you get it?"

  "It was a coincidence. There have been a shrewd lot of baggage thieves in two or three eastern cities lately, mostly Boston. The method, the police say, was something like this--one of them, the chief of the gang, would get a wagon, dress like an expressman and go round the depots looking at baggage. He would make a mental note of the numbers, go away and forge a check to match, and secure the pieces he had taken a fancy to. Then he merely drove around to headquarters, and the trunk was rifled. The police got on, raided the place, and found, among others our Russia leather bag. It was shipped back, empty, to the address inside, at Bellwood."

  "At Bellwood? Then how--"

  "It came while I was lunching with Miss Letitia," he said easily. "We're very chummy--thick as thieves. What I want to know is"--disregarding my astonishment--"where is the hundred thousand?"

  "Find the woman."

  "Did you ever hear of Anderson, the nerve specialist?" he asked, without apparent relevancy.

  "I have been thinking of him," I answered. "If we could get Wardrop there, on some plausible excuse, it would take Anderson about ten minutes with his instruments and experimental psychology, to know everything Wardrop ever forgot."

  "I'll go on one condition," Burton said, preparing to leave. "I'll promise to get Wardrop and have him on the spot at two o'clock to-morrow, if you'll promise me one thing: if Anderson fixes me with his eye, and I begin to look dotty and tell about my past life, I want you to take me by the flap of my ear and lead me gently home."

  "I promise," I said, and Burton left.

  The recovery of the bag was only one of the many astonishing things that happened that day and the following night. Hawes, who knew little of what it all meant, and disapproved a great deal, ended that afternoon by locking himself, blinking furiously, in his private office. To Hawes any practice that was not lucrative was bad practice. About four o'clock, when I had shut myself away from the crowd in the outer office, and was letting Miss Grant take their depositions as to when and where they had seen a little old lady, probably demented, wandering around the streets, a woman came who refused to be turned away.

  "Young woman," I heard her say, speaking to Miss Grant, "he may have important business, but I guess mine's just a little more so."

  I interfered then, and let her come in. She was a woman of medium height, quietly dressed, and fairly handsome. My first impression was favorable; she moved with a certain dignity, and she was not laced, crimped or made up. I am more sophisticated now; The Lady Who Tells Me Things says that the respectable women nowadays, out-rouge, out-crimp and out-lace the unrespectable.

  However, the illusion was gone the moment she began to speak. Her voice was heavy, throaty, expressionless. She threw it like a weapon: I am perfectly honest in saying that for a moment the surprise of her voice outweighed the remarkable thing she was saying.

  "I am Mrs. Allan Fleming," she said, with a certain husky defiance.

  "I beg your pardon," I said, after a minute. "You mean--the Allan Fleming who has just died?"

  She nodded. I could see she was unable, just then, to speak. She had nerved herself to the interview, but it was evident that there was a real grief. She fumbled for a black-bordered handkerchief, and her throat worked convulsively. I saw now that she was in mourning.

  "Do you mean," I asked incredulously, "that Mr. Fleming married a second time?"

  "He married me three years ago, in Plattsburg. I came from there last night. I--couldn't leave before."

  "Does Miss Fleming know about this second marriage?"

  "No. Nobody knew about it. I have had to put up with a great deal, Mr. Knox. It's a hard thing for a woman to know that people are talking about her, and all the time she's married as tight as ring and book can do it."

  "I suppose," I hazarded, "if that is the case, you have come about the estate."

  "Estate!" Her tone was scornful. "I guess I'll take what's coming to me, as far as that goes--and it won't be much. No, I came to ask what they mean by saying Allan Fleming killed himself."

  "Don't you think he did?"

  "I know he did not," she said tensely. "Not only that: I know who did it. It was Schwartz--Henry Schwartz."

  "Schwartz! But what on earth--"

  "You don't know Schwartz," she said grimly. "I was married to him for fifteen years. I took him when he had a saloon in the Fifth Ward, at Plattsburg. The next year he was alderman: I didn't expect in those days to see him riding around in an automobile--not but what he was making money--Henry Schwartz is a money-maker. That's why he's boss of the state now."

  "And you divorced him?"

  "He was a brute," she said vindictively. "He wanted me to go back to him,
and I told him I would rather die. I took a big house, and kept bachelor suites for gentlemen. Mr. Fleming lived there, and--he married me three years ago. He and Schwartz had to stand together, but they hated each other."

  "Schwartz?" I meditated. "Do you happen to know if Senator Schwartz was in Plattsburg at the time of the mur--of Mr. Fleming's death?"

  "He was here in Manchester."

  "He had threatened Mr. Fleming's life?"

  "He had already tried to kill him, the day we were married. He stabbed him twice, but not deep enough."

  I looked at her in wonder. For this woman, not extraordinarily handsome, two men had fought and one had died--according to her story.

  "I can prove everything I say," she went on rapidly. "I have letters from Mr. Fleming telling me what to do in case he was shot down; I have papers--canceled notes--that would put Schwartz in the penitentiary--that is," she said cunningly, "I did have them. Mr. Fleming took them away."

  "Aren't you afraid for yourself?" I asked.

  "Yes, I'm afraid--afraid he'll get me back yet. It would please him to see me crawl back on my knees."

  "But--he can not force you to go back to him."

  "Yes, he can," she shivered. From which I knew she had told me only a part of her story.

  After all she had nothing more to tell. Fleming had been shot; Schwartz had been in the city about the Borough Bank; he had threatened Fleming before, but a political peace had been patched; Schwartz knew the White Cat. That was all.

  Before she left she told me something I had not known.

  "I know a lot about inside politics," she said, as she got up. "I have seen the state divided up with the roast at my table, and served around with the dessert, and I can tell you something you don't know about your White Cat. :A back staircase leads to one of the up-stairs rooms, and shuts off with a locked door. It opens below, out a side entrance, not supposed to be used. Only a few know of it. Henry Butler was found dead at the foot of that staircase."

  "He shot himself, didn't he?"

  "The police said so," she replied, with her grim smile. "There is such a thing as murdering a man by driving him to suicide."