“Thereupon the three young gentlemen who rejoiced in the names of Handsome Harry, Gentleman Jim and Lefty Louis set upon him with brass knuckles and blackjacks. When they were finished with him he was entirely wrecked.”
“Did the girl tell you this? I never heard anyone was prosecuted for his murder.”
“But no. The gentlemen involved made themselves scarce, and either through loyalty or fear of reprisal the girls refused to implicate them. Their story was that they and the young Stoneman had been innocently drinking when three strange hoodlums rushed in and assaulted him, apparently for no reason.”
“I should think she’d be afraid to tell you this, even now,” I objected. “Gangland has a way of dealing with informers.”
“Quite yes, but in this instance there is little fear. Gentleman Jim and Handsome Harry met their several deaths some years ago in a gang battle; Lefty Louis recently went to his reward in the tuberculosis ward of a state prison. So of all those witnessing or taking part in l’affaire Stoneman only this Cook woman remains. You will see her tonight at the lecture.”
I laughed outright. “A discourse on the secret charms and spells of Cornelius Agrippa seems the least likely place to meet a superannuated trull.”
Nevertheless, she will be there. I have made sure of it. Today I took her to the shops and bought her everything that she needed, including several drinks, a manicure and a fresh hair-bleach. She was pathetically grateful, and will be more grateful still for the fee I have promised her if she acts and speaks exactly as I have instructed her.”
A NEAT PLACARD ANNOUNCED THE lecture when we arrived at Sawyer Hall, but it appeared that Dr. Bradley-Stoker would not have a large house. The ticket seller yawned in his booth and the doorman had no duties to perform. When we went in we found we had the little auditorium to ourselves except for a fat man and a woman muffled to the ears in a fur-collared coat. For half an hour we sat there, then an usher stepped out on the stage and announced Dr. Bradley-Stoker had been called out of town on urgent business. Accordingly there would be no lecture, and our money would be refunded to us at the box office.
The fat man was before us at the window, and what little of him I could see I disliked instinctively. When he turned his face it seemed to me his puffy red cheeks threatened to engulf his little eyes completely. It was a face like that of some sleek, sleepy cat, more animal than human.
The woman crowded on our heels, and indignation fairly exuded from her. “It’s an imposition,” she told no one in particular in a sharp, strident voice, “bringing us out on a night like this for nothing!”
As she voiced her protest Jules de Grandin gave a start of surprise and then turned toward her. “Why, Mademoiselle Nellie!” he exclaimed. “This is indeed a pleasure. May I present my friend Dr. Trowbridge? Friend Trowbridge, this is Mademoiselle Nellie Cook.”
With the quick suspicion of a wink at me he continued, keeping his voice up, “I did not know that you were interested in Cornelius Agrippa, Mademoiselle.” The quick flick of his eyes bade me take notice of the fat man at the ticket seller’s window.
I turned my head a little and was aware of a sharp feeling of revulsion. The man was regarding us with a cold, steady look, the sort of look a cat might have before a mouse-hole, and at the woman’s reply I could see a sudden gleam in his dull eyes, as if their lead had been scratched to malicious brightness.
“I surely am interested,” she was assuring de Grandin, and she, too, spoke much louder than seemed necessary. “Why, they say he had some sort of charm by which he could make stone images come to life and do whatever he commanded them. That’s what I wanted to hear about particularly tonight. You know—” there was a sharp catch in her voice, as though her breath had halted momentarily—“I can’t get it out of my head that poor Sally and Mae and Lucy were not killed by some fiend as the papers seem to think, but—” her voice sank to a sharp whisper that could have been heard in a boiler shop—“but by an animated statue, Doctor!”
WE DROVE A BLOCK or two in silence, then: “Well, did I put it over all right, sir?” she asked de Grandin. “I gave the act all I had.”
“You did it excellently, Mademoiselle,” he replied. “Here is your promised reward.” A bill changed hands, and, “Where can we put you down?” he asked.
“Any place where I can get a drink. Ugh! When I think of how that little fat guy looked at me I feel cold right down to my toes and need a good, stiff snifter.”
The little Frenchman nodded sympathetically. “I quite agree, Mademoiselle. And I suggest that you stay indoors till the new moon appears, also.”
“I’ll think about it,” she returned with a laugh as she climbed down from the car, “but after a girl’s just finished a college course she wants to get out under the bright lights, you know. G’night, sir, and thanks.”
“Now what the deuce is all this nonsense?” I demanded as we turned toward home. “I don’t believe there was a lecture scheduled for tonight at all, and—”
“My perspicacious, good Friend Trowbridge,” he broke in with a chuckle. “Of course there was not! The learned Dr. Bradley-Stoker exists in my mind and nowhere else. I hired the hall, I put the notice in le Journal, I hired the usher to make the announcement—”
“Of all the silly, childish charades!” I exclaimed. “Whatever were you thinking of to play a prank like that?”
“It was no prank, my friend,” be answered soberly. “It was a stratagem of war, and it was most successful. We know now who our foeman is, and we can make plans for his defeat.”
“I’m hanged if I understand.”
“Very well. Consider: The things which Mademoiselle Nellie told me today gave me the clue. Perhaps it was not likely, but it was entirely possible that these women’s deaths had some connection with the killing of the young Stoneman. The fountain was unveiled a year ago, I understand. At that time the Jukes girl and her three companions were ‘in college’ as they call it. That is to say, they were in jail for vagrancy, shoplifting and similar petty crimes. Very well. A month ago the Jukes woman was released. True to the customs of her kind, she went at once to her old neighborhood and—voilà, she was killed. By all accounts she did not die pleasantly.”
“Then the Mahoney baggage comes from the jail. She, too, went back to her old haunts and—you have read the coroner’s report in her case.”
“The Ebbert girl was discharged from prison two weeks ago. Like the other two she goes back to her old associates, like the other two she dies, but this time someone sees the killer at his work. You comprehend?”
“I certainly do not.”
He breathed a sigh of exasperation, then, patiently: “Four women are suspected of complicity in the killing of a young man. The young man’s father has a statuary group erected as a memorial—in a low, unfashionable part of town, by the way—and as the women, then incarcerated, are released they meet a death much like that of the young man.
“Our young Policeman Flannigan swears he saw a marble statue kill the Ebbert girl.
“Now, arranging for the lecture by the mythical Dr. Bradley-Stoker was not all I did this afternoon. By no means. I read and reread certain of Cornelius Agrippa’s charms and spells. By the use of certain magic formulae the magus claimed to be able to vivify marble statues, and make them do his will for good or ill, but only at the dark or in the waning of the moon, and only at the midnight hour between Saturday—the old Sabbath—and Sunday, the new day of worship.
“So I arrange this wholly false lecture, and arrange to have the Cook woman come to it, and to say certain things in the hearing of one I am convinced will also be there. It all transpired as I planned, my friend.”
“See here,” I demanded as we turned in my driveway, “was that evil-looking little fat man just ahead of us at the box office—”
“Of course,” he anticipated my question. “Who else could it be but Monsieur Joseph Stoneman, father of the killed young man and donor of that statuary group to this fair city?”
THE NIGHT WAS COLD with a cruel, penetrating chill that gnawed at our bones like a starved wolf. A gray rain slashed against the flat fronts of the grimy tenements in Tunnell Street, as halfway down the slattern row of shabby houses a door opened for a moment on the storm, showed a fuzzy square of faint light, then closed with a bang.
Muffled to the ears in a raincoat, Nellie Cook slipped from the house, paused a moment on the worn doorstep, then stepped out into the flooding street. For a moment she pressed close against the house front, seeming to hold her breath and listen. She cast a quick glance up and down the street and, keeping to the shadows, crept down the sidewalk. Frightened though she obviously was, I noticed that she walked with shortened, gliding steps and provocatively swaying hips.
For several days de Grandin had been coaching her, schooling her in her entrance, directing where she was to walk, regulating the speed of her movements. Now she was letter-perfect in the rôle, and, the dress rehearsals having been concluded, we were ready for the performance. Since we had met her in the lobby of the lecture hall the new moon had gone through its phases, and we had reached another dark period. The storm had kept the usual crowd of Saturday night revelers indoors, and as the girl emerged from the house the gong in the clock tower of St. Dominic’s Church, six blocks away, boomed the first deep, resounding stroke of midnight.
Beside me in the doorway huddled Jules de Grandin. His face seemed pinched with cold, but the twitching of his little blond mustache and the intermittent quiver of his lips was purely the result of nervous tension, I knew.
He and Hiji had been deep in consultation all afternoon, and shortly before dinner the Englishman had made a hurried trip to New York, returning somewhere about nine with a small paper parcel which he handled with extreme tenderness. Now he and Costello were ensconced in a doorway at the far end of the block, and all of us watched Nellie as she walked slowly through the pelting rain.
A street light’s haze revealed the pale blur of her face as she passed under it. I knew that it was sharp and unintelligent, with hard, malicious eyes and only feeble traces of the common prettiness it once had, but in the distance, softened by the rain-filtered lamp rays, it looked fragile and appealing, and clearly terror-ridden.
She paused a moment underneath the light, looked backward fearfully, then went on toward the farther corner.
“This is so utterly inane!” I grumbled as a drop of water from the doorway’s lintel fell like an icicle down the upturned collar of my raincoat. “We’ll get nothing but pneumonia for our pains, and—”
“Zut! Quiet, my friend,” warned de Grandin in a sharp whisper. “We are not here for pleasure, I assure you, and—ah, barbe d’un bouc vert, behold him!”
Something sounded on the flagstone walk almost beside us, dully, heavily, like stone striking stone. Clump—thump, thump—clump! and walking like a robot, yet with speed almost equal to a run, a white shape passed us.
A cold as hard and dull as death itself seemed added to the chill of the rain-drenched night air, and I felt the breath catch in my throat like a hard, solid ball.
Agleam with rain, and moving with a stride as purposeful as Fate, yet with no play of flexing muscles showing under its white surface, a graven image—a white marble statue—passed us in the wake of the retreating girl.
“Hola!” shouted de Grandin, leaping out into the rain and struggling with some object in his trench coat pocket. “Hola, M’sieur le Statuaire! Halte la!”
The moving marble horror gave no sign of hearing, but heavily, yet swiftly, with the surety of inexorable Nemesis, made toward the woman.
Now we saw it fully revealed in the fuzzy glow of the street lamp. There was no expression in its carven features. Calm and composed and utterly oblivious of everything around them, its marble eyes stared straight ahead.
The woman heard the pounding of the marble feet and turned for a swift glance across her shoulder. Her scream was something horrible to hear. A bubbling, frothing, mounting geyser of sheer terror, winding upward, growing shrill and shriller till it seemed to pierce our eardrums like a probing needle.
She reeled blindly in midstep, clutching at the rain-flogged empty air with fingers gone as stiff as rigor mortis, then, seeming to realize that if she fainted she was lost, she gathered skirts and raincoat up above her knees and darted like an arrow from a bow toward the cross street.
The stone pursuer broke into a run. Not the heavy, clumsy jog-trot that might have been expected from an automaton, but the lithe, swift racing of a trained athlete, every step instinct with grace and only the hard thudding of its stone feet on the stone sidewalk to make us know it was an animated rock, not flesh and blood, that rushed through the downpouring tempest.
There was no doubt of the result. Before she’d traversed fifty steps the terror-stricken woman stumbled and fell to her knees, and for a moment as she turned toward her pursuer we saw her face like one of those old Grecian horror masks, mouth squared in agony of terror, eyes almost forcing from their sockets, cheeks gone a sort of dreadful, deathly gray despite the daubs of paint on them.
Costello’s burly form came cannoning from the doorway where he hid. “Stand back, ye murderin’ haythin!” he roared, raised his service pistol and let fly a stream of bullets at the charging marble horror.
The thing paid no more heed to them than it did to the pelting rain drops. We heard the spat of lead on stone, the screaming whine of a bullet as it ricocheted, but on the statue ran, its carved feet drumming on the flagstones of the walk.
“Duck, Sergeant!” we heard Hiji shout as he leaped past Costello, shoved him aside and faced the onrushing stone monster.
We saw him balance on his sound foot, raise his maimed leg almost waist-high, press something hard against his thigh, then bend forward as he hurled a missile, putting every ounce of weight and strength behind it.
The roar was utterly deafening, and the burst of sudden fire that came with it was blinding as the dazzling blaze of a flashbulb. I could feel the force of detonation beating on me like a dozen fists as it was echoed back from the house fronts.
For a long moment everything was dark, then as my eyes regained their vision, I saw a heap of marble debris on the sidewalk forty feet or so away, smashed white stone that seemed strangely like a corpse dismembered by some hideous force, here a marble hand, and there a bit of what had been an arm or leg or torso. Almost at my feet a calm, serene white marble face stared up into the pelting rain, and I had a quick qualm of wonder that it did not close its lids against the battering drops.
“Bingo!” I heard Hiji call. “Got him square amidships with the first throw, Frenchy. Jolly lucky that I did, too, or you and Trowbridge would be in the happy huntin’ grounds by now.”
“Mon brave, mon superb, my infinitely splendid Hiji!” de Grandin cried delightedly. “You are, as you have said, a marvel!”
“Who said that? Not I. You do all the boastin’ around here, you little devil!”
“No matter, there is glory enough for all,” the little Frenchman returned. “What though it was the agile brain of Jules de Grandin that conceived the plan of shattering him to pieces with a hand grenade because he could not be stopped with bullets? It was the fine, strong arm and fine, true, accurate aim of Hiji that gave him the coup de grâce. But certainly!
“Now,” practically, he added, “let us see to these ones.”
Costello had been knocked unconscious by the detonation of the bomb, but his loss of consciousness was short-lived, for even as we bent above him he shook himself like a dog emerging from the water. “Howly Mither!” he exclaimed. “What wuz it? Wuz I kilt entirely?”
“Mais non, mon sergent, you are very much alive,” denied de Grandin with a laugh. “You were struck senseless for a little so short time, but now you are all right. Of course. Give him to drink from your flask, Hiji,” he added as he ran to help me with the swooning woman.
As far as I could find she had no injury of any kind. No broken bones, no
cuts, no wounds. Apparently unconsciousness had been induced by fright alone.
I took her head in the bend of my elbow and held my flask beneath her nose, letting the fumes of the brandy act as a restorative. In the weak light from the street lamp, with the rain upon her face, she looked almost pretty. The long, dark, heavily mascaraed lashes lay in half moons on her cheeks, the wilful, childish mouth was relaxed and robbed of its petulance and cynicism. The tendrils of bright hair that slipped beneath the brim of her storm hat seemed really golden, not the result of a skillful bleaching.
“Gimme!” she roused as the scent of the brandy reached through her unconsciousness, grasped the flask in both hands and drank greedily. “Gosh!” she let her breath out with a gulping sigh and drank again, then drew her hand across her mouth, leaving a bright stain of carmine lipstick on it. “That was sumpin’, wasn’t it?”
“It was, indeed, ma belle,” de Grandin agreed as he rose from his knees beside her. “It was indubitably something.”
He looked at her a long minute, then: “What is it you would want, my little one? If you will say the word I shall be glad to find employment for you, or defray expenses of your schooling while you prepare yourself for a position. You have courage and resourcefulness, and could go far—”
“Yeah, far as the nearest gin-mill,” she interrupted. “It’s no dice, Doc. You can comb an’ brush her all you want, an’ tie a ribbon round her neck an’ call her all the pet names that you know, but an alley cat is still an alley cat, an’ sooner or later she’ll go back to her alley. I’m no good an’ never was. I know it an’ you know it. Me take a job? That’s a big laugh! You know I couldn’t hold one twenty minutes.”
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