The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

by Achmed Abdullah

  “Disguise and change of name,” said Ogilvie, a little disappointed. “But nothing new—it really only corroborates my theory that Spencer is scared clear out of his wits.”

  “Yes,” agreed the police commissioner, “but Miller also did a bit of cabling over to London—to Scotland Yard.”

  “What results?”

  “He found out how Martyn Spencer made his money,” said the police commissioner with pompous impressiveness.

  Ogilvie laughed. “Why,” he said, “I know how he made it.”

  “Oh—you do—you—”

  “Yes,” Ogilvie cut the other’s words short.

  “How?” asked Gadsby with satanic suavity. “Let’s hear how clever you are.”

  “I am not clever. I only know that two and two makes four—and, at times, five,” he said. “And chiefly in detective work—naturally so. For, since crimes are an extraordinary, and not an ordinary, thing, one must apply extraordinary, and not ordinary, logic and arithmetic.”

  “After which philosophic interjection—”

  “After which philosophic interjection,” said Ogilvie with a laugh, “I rise to maintain that Spencer, since he left New York, did a heap of traveling in the wilder places of the Earth—Africa, Central Asia, Western China, South America, certain regions of Russia. Why there? Because, since he was out after new, exotic, and expensive minerals difficult to obtain, he specialized in mineral regions that had not yet been exploited. Why did he need those minerals? Because the gentlemen of the Benefactors Club needed them for their new inventions, discoveries, and devices. So he kicked around a whole lot and bought up mining claims and concessions. Often he had to use a great deal of pull—pull which, on the other hand, cost him a great deal of money. With West African chiefs, for instance, and Manchu mandarins and Tartar Khans—and—oh, yes—” smiling reminiscently—“Russian grand duchesses who, if extra well paid, extra well bribed, might throw in a priceless sable coat as a commission. Isn’t that so?”

  “Absolutely!” admitted the other just a little grudgingly. “But I fail to see how—”

  “I repeat,” said Ogilvie, “that two and two make five—and occasionally seven!”

  “Don’t be so supercilious!”

  “Really, Bob, I didn’t mean to be. Let’s get back to Martyn Spencer. He was well paid for these voyages and these mining claims he accumulated the world over—by whom do you think?”

  “Chester?”

  “Move to the head of the class, sonny! By the millionaire who did not see fit to contribute to the war charities, but who, according to his own light, is quite a public benefactor. But Martyn Spencer was not rich. You see, you can work out your liver, but you simply can’t become really rich on a straight salary—until rather more recently. Am I still right, old man?”

  “Quite. That’s what they cabled to Miller from Scotland Yard.” Something like admiration had crept into Gadsby’s accents.

  “Perhaps,” continued Ogilvie, “our friend only started making real money during the last year or eighteen months. Then he made it hand over fist.”

  “How?”

  “By selling the foreign rights to various patents which were registered in his name.”

  “What patents?” asked the police commissioner.

  “Oh—for instance. Doctor McGrath’s pulmotor and the Clapperton automatic cream separator and the Fischer piston pump. He either sold them for cash or took a certain amount in the stock of the new foreign corporations founded for the exploitation of these various patents and devices.”

  “Perfectly correct,” admitted Gadsby, consulting a London cable which Miller had decoded and read:

  Martyn Spencer, chairman of the board of directors of Pulmotor Limited, Rhizopodin Produce Limited, Clapperton—

  “Cream Separator Limited,” interrupted Ogilvie, “and a few more Limited!”

  To the other’s question if he thought that the Benefactors Club, angry at having been cheated, had tried to frame up Martyn Spencer, getting Ogilvie into the trap by mistake, the latter replied that it was something like it, but not exactly so.

  “That’s just what Martyn Spencer thought,” he added, “and I have an idea, yet to be proved, that he was a fool for thinking so, a fool for running away scared to death, when all he had to do was to keep his nerve and stand pat, when all he needed was a little knowledge of applied psychology. You see, it is clear that these people did not know him by sight, isn’t it?”

  “Quite,” said the police commissioner, “or they would not have mistaken you for him.”

  “Yes. I imagine the club has a number of foreign members and corresponding members in Europe.”

  “Indeed,” agreed Gadsby, consulting the cables from Scotland Yard. “There are half a dozen belonging to it in London—”

  “And doubtless in Paris and Rome and other parts of the world. Spencer, though an American, joined abroad. It’s easy enough to figure out how. He must have made some small invention. He was poor then. His family, fine old American stock, knows the Chesters. Followed a correspondence between him and Audley Chester, the financial backer of the club. Gradually the correspondence became more intimate. Eventually Chester made him a proposition, and Spencer accepted it and joined. Then, when the club needed a man to pick up mining claims for them here and there, they naturally thought of Spencer. He proved clever and valuable, until in the course of time he became their confidential man, all the foreign rights to the patents being registered in his name. Spencer kicked about from pillar to post these last years, without coming home; and these people never went abroad, because they were too poor and too much wrapped up in their Utopian dreams.”

  “Utopian?” echoed the police commissioner.

  “Exactly! I’ll explain all that presently—after I’ve made quite, quite sure—with the help of—”

  “Who?”

  “Marie Dillon, I guess. I’ll tell you later. Let’s get back to Spencer. He and the members of his club here in New York never saw each other, that’s quite clear, isn’t it?”

  “I guess so. But why did he return? Homesickness?”

  “Not a bit of it. Indirect, upside down, negative, vicarious fear!”

  “I don’t get you!”

  “Listen, Bob!” Ogilvie went on, “When Spencer first decided to use these patents for the benefit of his own pocketbook—well, he just did it. He was money mad—he made up his mind—and that’s all there was to it! He expected a big row, perhaps a civil or criminal action. He had prepared for these eventualities, had retained beforehand the best legal talent in New York and Europe, felt quite safe. But the members of the Benefactors Club did—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, Bob! And that’s what first made him afraid.”

  “Why should it?” asked the police commissioner.

  “Because Spencer knew them. He knew what sort of people they were—idealists, terribly sincere, of single-track minds—and they did nothing. And, I repeat, he became frightened, nervous, uneasy. Do you know the old adage about the murderer who always returns to the scene of his crime? I guess it applies in Spencer’s case, too. He grew more and more fidgety as the club remained silent, and so he decided to come to New York, perhaps to force their hand, to brazen it out, or to get it over with, once and for all. And still, even after he returned here, the club did nothing. They surrounded Spencer with a wall of complete, inhuman silence and inaction, and he became more and more uneasy—he imagined that this wall of silence would presently topple over and crush him. Then, one day—perhaps the very day I called on him or a few days before—he received a notification from the club to come to No. 17.

  “By this time he was absolutely scared stiff. He imagined that they would either kill him or make such a scene that somebody would lose his head; in the latter case he thought there would be a fight, he would find himself in a minority of one, battling for his life, and then in self-defense, but with a number of witnesses to deny it, he would draw a weapon. This part of
his reasoning—”

  “If he reasoned that way,” sardonically interrupted the other.

  “This part of his reasoning,” Ogilvie continued, unheeding, “was remarkably lucid. You see, Spencer is no fool.”

  “If he isn’t, why did he go to No. 17—make up his mind to go there at all?” demanded the police commissioner.

  “Because he was getting crazy with that complicated and illogical emotion called fear. Because he had arrived at that stage where he preferred anything, even death, to waiting for something to happen. All right. I dropped in on him. We talked. He saw that I was stone-broke. Right then, suddenly, he decided not to go, but to send me instead. He must have reasoned very quickly, must have said to himself that the only thing for him to do, now that the club was on his trail and had sent him notification to appear at their meeting, was to disappear under a different name, and there was that Liverpool freighter in port which doubtless belonged to him.

  “He argued that the club members would pounce upon me quickly and kill me before I had a chance to explain that they were making a mistake, that I was not he, but an innocent party. Or, if they gave me time to explain, he thought they would calmly point at the club badge—which must have been fastened to the nether side of the lapel of the fur coat, remember—might even point at the sable-lined ulster itself, a quite extraordinary and priceless garment of whose acquisition by Spencer, in the course of some mining deal with the grand duchess, they may have heard—yes—they would have pointed at the club badge and discounted my denial that I was Spencer by a sudden desire on my part to bluff them, to fool them, to get away with a whole skin. Finally, he reasoned, if they did believe me, it would take a long time before they did. Either way, by the time I was killed, or got into the pickle into which I actually did get, or even persuaded them they had made a mistake, he would have escaped. Incidentally let’s give the devil his due. He tried to be decent. He warned me against carrying a gun. But, not sure if I would take his advice, he sent that thumping big check to Marie in case she needed money for herself or me.

  “At all events, as to the club members, he underestimated their intelligence, or he overestimated their brutality—it comes to the same thing. I repeat, all he needed was a little knowledge of applied psychology—”

  Ogilvie interrupted himself.

  He said that terribly idealistic people—and in his own mind he was convinced that those of No. 17 belonged in that category, from the hunchback down to the check boy and the brown-eyed girl—were also, when occasion seemed to warrant it, terribly cruel and shrewd and vindictive. It was as if, he added, the Creator did not want human virtues to run to extremes, for fear that they might run amuck. “Nature,” he said, “always tries to strike a logical balance between good and bad. If we let our virtues overwhelm us we cease to feel sympathy and pity and tolerance for others less virtuous than ourselves. No, no, Bob,” as the other made an impatient exclamation, “I’m not shooting off at a tangent. I am just trying to show you what a confounded fool Martyn Spencer was for being afraid.”

  “Seems to me, the way it panned out, that he had mighty good cause to be afraid,” replied the other. “I agree with you that excessive goodness often leads to cruelty. Aristotle was right, virtue is the mean between two extremes. Witness the cruelty of the medieval reformers.”

  “But you must not forget that these people at No. 17 are removed from sixteenth-century fanatics by several hundred years of human development—call it increased moral weakness, if you prefer. They are men of the twentieth century who have forgotten the clean, fearless brutalities of the Middle Ages. When their slightly hectic, idealistic virtues turned into the gall of hatred through another’s—Spencer’s guilt—they were weak enough or careful enough—it comes to the same thing—to stop short of murder. You see, they might have killed Spencer, but they didn’t. So why, logically, should I assume that they killed Clafflin?”

  “Well—if you didn’t kill him, and if they didn’t, who did, for the love of Mike?”

  “Must, necessarily, anybody have killed him?” came Ogilvie’s counter query.

  “You don’t mean to say suicide?” asked the police commissioner.

  “I don’t indeed!”

  “Or accident?”

  “Nor accident!”

  “Well, what other possibility—”

  “Beg pardon,” interrupted Tompkins, who had come in. “Miss Dillon to see Mr. Ogilvie.”

  CHAPTER VII.

  “NEITHER BY MURDER, SUICIDE, NOR ACCIDENT.”

  Directly on the butler’s heels Marie Dillon entered.

  “Oh—Blaine! Blaine, dear!”

  She threw herself into Ogilvie’s arms and held him tight, quite disregarding the presence of the police commissioner, who after a moment or two, when a discreet, twice repeated cough had seemed to have made no impression on the girl, moved in the direction of the door with a rambled word that he hated to be in the way.

  She turned. “Please, Mr. Gadsby,” she said, “forgive me, won’t you?” She smiled, and he smiled back at her.

  “There is nothing to forgive, Miss Dillon,” he replied, “except that instead of falling in love with a perfectly proper and perfectly respectable police commissioner—”

  “She wastes her young affections on a reckless idiot who is going to become said police commissioner’s chief assistant and confidential clerk,” Ogilvie interrupted.

  The girl laughed and kissed Ogilvie again.

  She was small and strong, with russet, short-cut hair. You could tell by looking at her rather large, firm, well-shaped hands, her short, softly curved nose, and the straight black eyebrows which divided her gray eyes from the broad, low forehead that she had imagination and claims to independent ideas.

  “Have you any influence over Blaine?” asked Gadsby in a martyred voice.

  “How?”

  “To make him less fresh!”

  “I’ll try to,” she said, “after we’re married.”

  The next moment she was serious and turned to Ogilvie. “Blaine,” she said, “I did what you asked me to do last night over the telephone.”

  “Already?”

  “Yes, dear. I got up early.”

  “Succeed?”

  “I guess so,” she replied.

  And, in answer to Gadsby’s questions, Ogilvie explained that he had telephoned to Marie Dillon last night, after he had hunted through the two volumes on forgotten and not yet discovered inventions.

  “I hesitated a long time,” he said, “between the absolute, fool-proof gyroscope, the tempering of copper, and a self-adjusting linotype machine. Finally I decided that no woman takes an interest in that sort of thing, and that it might make the whole thing look fishy. Woman, I thought, housewifely duties—sewing machine! And so, in my poor male brain, I studied it, I decided that what the world needs is a new device which will sew on trouser buttons by a simple twist of the wrist—something like that. I wrote it all down—a lot of stuff—enough to fool a chap who isn’t an engineer, but only a rich visionary—prompted Marie across the wires, and she went there this morning—didn’t you, honey?”

  “Yes,” replied the girl.

  “Went where?” asked the exasperated police commissioner.

  “Where do you think? To Audley Chester! To whom else?”

  It appeared that the Chesters and the Dillons were old friends, as were the Chesters and the Dillons’ cousins, Martyn Spencer’s family. And so, asked Ogilvie, wasn’t it perfectly natural that Marie Dillon, being poor, should go to her family’s rich friend, Audley Chester, to ask him for advice and help with that marvelous invention of hers; and too, perhaps, though without saying so since she was not supposed to be familiar with Chester’s connection with the Benefactors Club, indirectly, by mental suggestion, get the idea into Chester’s brain that, as a budding inventress, she might be promising material for a member of the club which, added Ogilvie, had at least one other woman member—the brown-eyed Slav girl who presided over the ha
t rack at No. 17?

  “Good heavens, man!” exclaimed Gadsby. “You certainly drew a long bow! How did you imagine you’d get away with it? Didn’t you consider that Chester, chiefly since the Clafflin murder, might suspect a trap?”

  “Not in the least,” replied Ogilvie. “Marie and I talked it all out over the telephone last night, point for point, logically and psychologically. We figured out the exact part she was going to play. An idealistic young enthusiast—can’t you see her, with those wide gray eyes of hers? All for giving the benefit of her brain, her work, her invention, to the public, the world at large, long-suffering, long-overcharged humanity—and not so as to line her own pockets with gold! You see, these last forty-eight hours I’ve been considering what sort of people the gentry at No. 17 are—chiefly Audley Chester. So I couldn’t very well go wrong, could I?”

  “And you didn’t,” said Marie Dillon, “Chester was awfully kind and considerate and patient. He listened to me. Told me he would be glad to back me financially if my invention turned out feasible, that he knew very little, though, about mechanical details, and would therefore find me some expert engineers and skilled mechanics to go over my plans, report on them, and help me, if practicable, with working them out and perfecting them—”

  “Don’t you see, Bob?” interrupted Ogilvie. “That’s where the club members come in.”

  “Yes, yes,” came the other’s slightly impatient rejoinder. “You needn’t cross all the t’s nor dot all the i’s. Once in a while, when a thing is as plain as a pikestaff, I can see it—even though I am only the police commissioner.”

  “Stop your quarreling, both you children!” said the girl. “Chester was delighted when I told him that I wanted to give my idea to the world, that I did not wish for any personal remuneration—”