Death Wears a Mask

by Thérèse Benson

  “Well, I wish we could turn him up. I can think of a lot of things I’d like to ask Mr. Oliver,” Dolan growled, and once again Sam was reminded of the old game of Twenty Questions.

  “Do you mind stopping at Miss Ruland’s with me?” This was a change of subject without intentional avoidance. “She said she wanted to see me urgently.”

  Dolan was flattered by this invitation. He had greatly admired both Mrs. Harris and Miss Ruland.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t like to feel that I was buttin’ in on a lady,” he said, bashfully, “and I ain’t dressed for company. I’ve got an awful old necktie on.”

  “You’re just as well dressed as I am,” Sam reassured him, “and I’ll guarantee Miss Ruland will be glad to see you. I know she liked you. We’ll stop in at the Gotham and then go on to Mrs. Thorne’s apartment. Maybe Miss Ruland will Want to go there with us.”

  “In a Police Department car?” Dolan was shocked, whether because he saw the fair fame of the Department sullied by being used as the conveyance for an actress or on Miss Ruland’s account, Sam did not inquire.

  “On foot, man. It’s only a step from her hotel.”

  At the desk they were told that Miss Ruland expected Mr. Mellon. He was to go right up.

  “Telephone that Mr. Dolan is with me,” he ordered, purposely suppressing Dolan’s hard-won title out of regard for the feelings of the clerk, and Dolan gave him a sour look as they entered the elevator.

  “What did you have to do that for?” he demanded.

  “I didn’t have to,” Sam replied. “I only concluded that as you admire Miss Ruland, you would prefer to do the correct thing when calling on her and that is to announce your coming.”

  “Oh!” said Dolan, his expression that of one grappling unsuccessfully with an abstruse social problem. Then the fifth floor was reached and Mary opened the door for them.

  Miss Ruland was awaiting them in her little sitting-room and greeted both of them cordially.

  “You wanted to see me?” Sam suggested.

  ‘“Yes,” Alix nodded. “I promised Gorman to ask for Hugh Oliver’s present address, but I’m hoping against hope that you don’t know it.” She included both men in this, and it was Dolan who answered her.

  “Then you have your wish, Miss Ruland. He’s gone from his apartment at the Ritz and they say both there and at his Clubs that they have no forwarding address. I think it’s the truth. They showed me a pile of letters as high as that,” he measured off fifteen inches with his hands, “that they’re waiting to send to him.”

  “What does Gorman want him for, Alix?” Sam inquired. He was pretty sure he knew, but wished to verify his assumption.

  “It’s the play, of course. He had an answer to his cable. There it is. You can read it.” She motioned to the bit of tinted paper lying on the table.

  SOLD TO OLIVER FOR CONSUELA THORNE REGRET YOU WERE TOO LATE RULAND IDEAL FOR PART HOW ABOUT SUPREME MOMENT FOR HER

  MARSDEN

  Sam and Dolan read it and it was again thrown on the table.

  “Knowing that Hugh Oliver has no use for it now, Gorman wants to buy it from him. I have no doubt he also calculates on getting a bargain.”

  (And Connie not yet in her grave. Surely Broadway had the coldest blood in the world.)

  “How do you mean buy it from him, Miss Ruland?” It was Dolan, exploring new fields, who asked the question. “Does a man buy a play outright? I thought the author usually got a sort of rake-off.”

  “Usually he does,” Alix conceded. “It’s customary for a manager to pay so much down for an option, which must be exerted within a certain time. Then, when the play is put on, the author gets a royalty on each seat sold. In this case the author, who is a Hungarian, and the translator, an Englishman, are at daggers drawn. If the agent secured the consent of one to an arrangement, the other at once automatically demanded something different. So he tried to find a purchaser to buy the American rights outright. It was there Gorman balked. It was a lot of money to part with all at once. Only when Hugh Oliver stepped in and accepted the offer, he began to see he had lost the chance of a lifetime to make a fortune. I’m not claiming that the theater isn’t a queer business. One can’t be absolutely sure that a European hit will click here, but truly this is a remarkable play, as near a certainty as I can imagine.”

  “And you want it,” Sam said, coldly. “There we can’t help you. We know nothing of the whereabouts of Hugh Oliver.”

  “Sam!” Alix exclaimed. “How could you think such a thing? I can’t act in that play now. Why, it was poor, poor Connie’s!” Tears sprang to her eyes and she turned her head away, outraged at his suspicion. “How could I bear to learn the part?” she gulped, strangling a sob.

  (Surely Broadway’s heart was the warmest to be found anywhere.)

  “Forgive me, Alix. I ought to have known you better.” Sam’s apology was entirely sincere.

  “It’s all right”—the tears still stood in her eyes—“you understand now; but how am I ever going to make Gorman see it? He’s coming here this afternoon about half-past four.

  I suppose you’re too busy to drop in and back me up?”

  “I’m never too busy if you want me, Alix,” Sam returned, ignoring Dolan’s presence. “I’ll be here. Now we’ve got to go over to! speak to Aimée. Lou tells me that that ring—the big emerald, I mean—has disappeared.”

  Alix was surprised out of all caution.

  “Why, she was wearing it when I saw her——”

  Sam, acutely conscious of where this admission might lead if he did not succeed in heading it off, cut in on what she was saying:

  “I know. I’ve just been telling Inspector Dolan that it was almost as much part of her as her Titian hair. We were all used to seeing it and it was so conspicuous that it would have been missed at once. Perhaps, when we find it, we will have a solution of the whole mystery.”

  “I suppose the thief will certainly try to sell it,” Alix speculated.

  “The guy that swiped that didn’t freeze on to it because it was pretty,” Dolan declared, robustly. “I’m glad it’s gone. It’s the first good news I’ve had in this case. Sooner or later it’s going to lead us to the murderer.”

  “Isn’t it dreadful how the thought of murder has become a commonplace to us?” Alix murmured. “A few days ago it was just a word in a mystery play or in some brutal tale of criminality in the daily papers. Now it has invaded our own little circle, and I don’t think the world will ever seem as safe or as sweet again.”

  “You mustn’t let yourself grow morbid over this, Alix,” Sam got up to go. “Inspector Dolan is probably right in saying that the ring will lead us out of the maze; and once we know the criminal, we will all feel a lessening of the present strain.”

  “That’s right, Miss Ruland,” Inspector Dolan added his meed of comfort. “You’ll be easier in your mind again once we have our prisoner behind the bars. That’ll mean it’s finished business and you can forget all about it.”

  They took their leave, and going down in the elevator Dolan turned to Sam.

  “I ain’t blamin’ you. She’s a lovely lady.”

  Sam was startled. Did this mean that the Inspector had understood his calculated interruption?

  “You aren’t blaming me for what?” he asked.

  “I ain’t blamin’ you for thinking she’s a lovely lady,” Dolan answered. “I ain’t so innocent I can’t see that.” Evidently that word “innocent” had cut deeply.

  They stepped into the Police Department car, although the distance was so short it was hardly worthwhile to ride, and had not gone halfway when Sam grasped Dolan’s arm.

  “Those legs I” he gasped. “Do you see that sawed-off man walking away from us? I can’t be mistaken. That’s Hugh Oliver.”

  On the instant Dolan sprang into action. Leaning forward, he spoke to the driver.

  “Draw up to the curb and stop, but keep your engine running. That man in the brown overcoat is our meat. We don’t want
to pass him and we don’t mean that he shall get away from us.”

  “Do you know what I think,” said Sam, in a deadly tone. “I think he’s going to call at Mrs. Thorne’s.”

  “He wouldn’t have the nerve—“ Dolan began, then he swore under his breath. “By God, he is I He’s on her step now.”

  “He won’t get in,” Sam reminded him.

  “Not unless he has friends among the other tenants,” Dolan amended. “Come on. I’m going to see to this.”

  Sam followed him, and queerly enough it was at this instant that Aimée’s assertion came into his mind.

  “Hold hard a minute, Inspector,” he said. “I’ve just remembered something. Mrs. Thorne’s maid insisted that no matter how things looked, that man was deeply in love with her mistress. I confess that what he did in sending that letter to the papers didn’t bear that out, but don’t let’s begin by being too hard on the chap. If he cared anything at all for her, he’s in a tough spot.”

  “I’ll spot him!” Dolan grunted as they neared the step where Oliver was parleying with the policeman on guard.

  “I don’t care who you was a friend of,” the officer was saying, clearly. “Nobody gets in here without a special permit. And say, if you’re such a pal of the C’missioner’s, here he is now. You can sing your little song to him.”

  Chapter XVI

  At the policeman’s words Oliver whirled on his heels, presenting a ravaged face to the inspection of the two men who stood on the step below him.

  He was so short that his head was only on the level of Inspector Dolan’s, and Sam, still looking down on him, thought that never had he seen such a change in a human countenance, and was correspondingly softened.

  Clearly Aimée was right. Hugh Oliver had loved Consuela Thorne. It was indeed a crushed and broken-hearted man who fronted them, not defiantly as one conscious of having inflicted an injury and regardless of it, but as a humble suppliant. Even Dolan, who had no way of measuring the change in him, was silenced temporarily by his first words.

  “Mr. Mellon, thank God you’re here. You are Police Commissioner now, aren’t you? You will tell this man he can’t keep me out. I have a right to be here. He must let me go in to Connie.”

  Sam looked at Dolan interrogatively, who shook his head in an emphatic negative.

  “I can’t give such an order without asking you a few questions first,” he then said. His tone was not unfriendly, for who could be hard on one so broken? But he was not letting his sentimental sympathy run away with him. “We have a car here. Suppose we go and sit in it while we talk? We’ll have privacy there.” Docilely Oliver followed them across the pavement, murmuring to himself the while like a broken-hearted child: “But I want to go to Connie—to Connie——”

  Once established in the automobile, Dolan, who had pulled down one of the small seats and sat facing the other two, could contain himself no longer.

  “After that pretty piece you sent to the papers, what rights do you think you have?” Oliver stared at him as if he had not seen him before. Then his lids drooped over his eyes with an effect of unutterable fatigue.

  “I hoped it might save her life. Otherwise it was of no consequence. I told Connie that I should he obliged to do it if she persisted in sending out an announcement of our engagement. She understood the risk, but she was always willful. You know how willful she was, Mellon.”

  “Yes, she was headstrong——”

  “And fearless. That was her fatal trait,” Oliver supplemented, wringing his hands together desperately. “I tried my best, yet I couldn’t get her to believe me. She knew what I thought and couldn’t bring herself to credit the reality of the danger. I even suspected sometimes that she relished the thrill in the possibility that there might be something in it.”

  “Danger? What danger are you talking about?” Dolan growled.

  “The danger of—of death.” Oliver brought out the word with difficulty, his voice hardly raised above a whisper. “I warned her, and I sent that contradiction; but I was too late. Too late. Too late.” The repetition took of the dolour of a knell. Even Dolan was impressed, and when he spoke again it was more gently.

  “Then you knew she was threatened?”

  “I knew she would be if she made our engagement public. I wanted her to marry me privately. I thought, I still think, that, once we were married, I could assure her safety. Connie laughed at my reasoning.”

  “Well, if you know so much, you can tell us who killed her and how it was done,” Dolan purred, his voice fairly silky in its smoothness. “It’ll help us a lot to know that.”

  “Oh, I expected to have to tell you,” Oliver explained, wearily. “That’s one of the things that brought me back here. I was afraid some harmless person might be accused. It seemed to me that under the circumstances it might be easier to hang the crime on some one who was innocent than it would be afterward to prove that he didn’t do it.”

  Considering the evidence that might be thought to implicate Harvey Thorne or himself, not to mention the others unknowingly involved, Sam agreed heartily, if silently, with this dictum.

  “You’re quite right, Oliver,” he said. “Take your time over it. Tell us in the way least painful to you. Inspector Dolan and I are bound to see that the guilty one is punished——”

  “No!” Oliver interjected, almost with violence. “There will be no punishment in this case. Not at the hands of the law.”

  “Tell your story, Mr. Oliver. The C’missioner an’ me ain’t so good at solving riddles,” Dolan suggested, to add, grimly: “We’ll be responsible for the legal end o’ the matter.”

  “Perhaps you won’t credit it any more than Connie did,” he murmured. “Anyhow, I’ll have to go back into my family history to try to make you understand. You’ll have patience, I hope...My mother was born in the purple, so to speak, in a state where the people could recite their pedigrees (and their horses’ pedigrees) for ten generations. My father was a remarkable man, a genius in his way, but from the day she married him her name was erased from the family records. Wiped out, as if she had never been born. I don’t suppose any of us can measure the humiliation—the disgrace—this was in her eyes. I know I can’t. After my father’s death she centered her hopes on me. I’ve tried to assume the sort of position she wanted for me because she wanted it; but the importance she attached to such things was beyond my comprehension. Understand, she asked nothing for herself. When my father died, her life was ended; but for me her ambition was boundless. Marriage, which had deprived her of her birthright, was to set me back on the throne. She watched over my social contacts, dictated what invitations I was to accept, what cliques I must cultivate, what clubs I should join. Ample money made most of this easy.”

  “I wonder she did not wish you to marry a title,” Sam said.

  “At one time she had that idea. She actually went to Europe and looked the possible candidates over. Her conclusion was that even in cases of international marriage based on real affection, an American gained only an anomalous position, the suspicion that such matches were entered into for revenue only being too deeply rooted to combat. No, I was to marry an American of birth and breeding. One whose family pedigree could challenge her own.”

  “I see. Connie didn’t fill the bill.”

  “She didn’t, and I knew she didn’t. I could make no such claim for her. And I was anxious that my mother should not hear of our connection until it was too late for her to attempt to interfere. That, perhaps, was a mistake on my part. Had I told her of our acquaintance her antagonism might not have been roused as it was. But for some time (I’m now thirty-three) she had been growing uneasy about my failure to marry. She had interfered more than once when she fancied I was paying too much attention to a girl she considered undesirable, by calling on me to escort her to some resort at a distance. Evidently she had other sources of information about me than my letters. I didn’t mind. I always told myself that when the time came that I wanted to marry, I could coax h
er around. After all, I was all she had in the world.”

  “Was money her hold over you?” Sam asked.

  “Money?” Oliver started as if he had been talking to himself and was surprised to find that he was not alone. Then he resumed his story, speaking in a flat and toneless voice: “No. We are independent of each other as far as money goes. Her hold on me consisted solely of affection. Mine for her, hers for me. But let me get on with this. My feelings don’t matter. She sent for me while I was at the Hot Springs this autumn. She had heard of my devotion to Connie and such a match would have been the wreck of all her hopes. Her son marry a divorcée without a background! She could conjure up nothing worse...Like a fool, I refused to go to her. The first rebellion of my life...This must sound to you trivial—unbelievable——”

  “No,” Sam returned, “not in view of what followed. Go on.”

  “Well, as I wouldn’t go to her, she came to find me. Not to the same hotel. She summoned me to meet her at her inn. She was not there, and I waited, on fire with impatience to have our scene over with and hurry back to Connie. Every minute away from her was a minute wasted. My mother had been cunning. By sending for me, she had got me out of the way and herself had driven to call on Mrs. Thorne. Their interview must have been a bit of ironic comedy, for she set the key of their conversation by immediately offering to buy Connie off! Connie, who had so far never flattered me by taking my pleadings seriously.” He turned to Sam and went on, addressing him directly: “You who knew her can imagine the imp of mischief that entered into Connie after such an offer. She undoubtedly gave a fine performance of the conscienceless little gold-digger. She flaunted that huge emerald she always wore in a way to convince my mother that it was a gift from me, from whom in reality she had consistently refused to accept more than flowers. She confessed afterwards that she had been outrageous. ‘But she was worse than I was, Hugh. I stopped short of insulting her. And now I mean to marry you, just to get even with her.’ That is the way we became engaged.”