The Big Book of Female Detectives

by The Big Book of Female Detectives (retail) (epub)

  “I don’t like to say too much before witnesses,” he continued, glancing pointedly at McRae and the two women, “but Morris ain’t no thief. He only took that stone as evidence. We know what you’re up to, and we want to make a deal with you. Can’t we talk this thing over in private? If anybody should be arrested, y’understand, and the story gets in the newspapers, we’d all be sunk! Ruined!”

  Elinor regarded him with a frosty smile.

  “Mr. Krantz,” she said, “before I talk to you about the diamond business, there’s another matter I want settled.

  “You accused this young lady—” she indicated Jane Pennington—“of stealing eight thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds from you. I lent her the money to make the loss good. Miss Pennington didn’t steal the stones. I think your son did. If he is ready to confess and return them to you, well and good. If not, he’ll be under arrest for burglary inside of two minutes. Is that clear?”

  With a look of fury Mr. Krantz turned on young Morris.

  “What you got to say for yourself, you?” he demanded, pointing a shaky forefinger.

  “Better say it quick, too,” Mr. Ashton added grimly. “If you know what’s good for you.” His clenched hands moved restlessly; he seemed to have difficulty in controlling them.

  For a moment young Krantz hesitated, his face green with fear. Then he slowly drew a leather wallet from his pocket and took from it a little package.

  “Here,” he muttered, thrusting the package into his father’s hand. “I—I found them on the floor.”

  “That clears Miss Pennington,” Elinor remarked pleasantly, turning to the elder Mr. Krantz, “and leaves you owing me eight thousand dollars.”

  “I’ll make out a check!” Mr. Krantz shouted, drawing a fountain pen from his pocket.

  “Fair enough,” Elinor told him. “And while you’re about it you might add a couple of thousand more to cover my loss on those diamonds I sold you, and another ten, say for laceration of Miss Pennington’s feelings. We’ll call it a wedding present. Yes—twenty in all. And don’t try to stop payment on the check tomorrow, either. If you do, your son goes to jail as sure as he’s a foot high.”

  Completely bewildered, Mr. Krantz made out the check, handed it over. Never in all his career had he been so much at sea. Still, he reflected, the eight thousand dollars was justly owing, since he now had the diamonds back, and what difference did a few additional thousands make, compared with the prospect of manufacturing diamonds by the million.

  “Now, miss,” he whispered eagerly, “let’s you and me talk a little business about them diamonds you made.”

  “Diamonds I made?” Elinor said, laughing. “I don’t admit making any diamonds.”

  “Of course you don’t, miss. I understand that. You couldn’t admit it. If you did, you’d never be able to sell another one. But between you and me—” he glanced pointedly at the stone Elinor still held in her hand—“you made that one all right, for Morris saw you do it.”

  “You’re mistaken, Mr. Krantz. This stone, as well as the other two I sold you, I bought from an importer down in Maiden Lane. I’m afraid your son didn’t understand what he saw at that laboratory last night. Mr. Ashton and I were making some experiments in criminal psychology. I never told you I could make diamonds. Must you really go?”

  Mr. Krantz essayed to speak, but at the sight of Elinor’s cool face, of Mr. Ashton’s grim one, his voice failed him. Supported by his son, by Mr. Stern, he sagged slowly across the living room and out into the hall. When the door had closed behind them Donald turned to Elinor with a queer smile.

  “Sometimes, Elinor,” he exclaimed, “I think you’re the devil.”

  “If I am,” she grinned, “I hope I’m a good little devil.”

  “I think she’s an angel,” Miss Pennington whispered, taking Elinor’s hand.

  “I know darned well she is,” said Ashton, and sweeping Jane into his arms, he kissed her quite shamelessly before them all.

  DETECTIVE: HILDA ADAMS

  LOCKED DOORS

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  AS THE CREATOR of what is generally known as the “Had-I-But-Known” school, Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958) regularly had her plucky heroines put themselves in situations from which they needed to be rescued. That school of detective story has often been parodied and maligned, but it was so well handled by Rinehart that she was, for decades, one of the most successful and beloved mystery writers in America, producing the first mystery novel ever to appear on the bestseller list, The Man in Lower Ten (1909). She had written it as a serial published in The All-Story Magazine (January–April 1906), which then published The Circular Staircase (November, December 1907, January–March 1908), which was then published in book form, a year before her first book, The Man in Lower Ten.

  Probably her most successful work, The Circular Staircase was adapted by Rinehart and Avery Hopwood for the stage as The Bat in 1920, by which time she had become the highest-paid writer in America. The book had already served as the basis for a silent film, The Circular Staircase (1915); the play, which had some differences from the novel, inspired more than one film, including the silent The Bat (1926) and a sound version titled The Bat Whispers (1930).

  Rinehart’s most famous character is Hilda Adams, whose propensity for getting involved in crimes and mysteries garners her the nickname “Miss Pinkerton” after Allan Pinkerton, the famous real-life detective. She is encouraged in her sleuthing endeavors by George Patton, a small-time country detective who goes on to become a police inspector. He is a recurring presence in the series and appears to be interested in deepening his relationship with the dedicated nurse; she calls it “nonsense,” though there are numerous hints that she welcomes the attention and returns some of the attraction. She overhears private conversations, listens to people who are sick or wounded and therefore not at their peak strength, and provides information to Patton. It is her stated conviction that she is betraying no trust and, since criminals act against society, society must use every means at its disposal to bring them to justice.

  “Locked Doors” was originally published in her short story collection Mary Roberts Rinehart Crime Book (New York, Farrar & Rinehart, 1925).

  Locked Doors

  MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

  CHAPTER I: DANGEROUS ASSIGNMENT

  “YOU PROMISED,” I reminded Mr. Patton, “to play with cards on the table.”

  “My dear young lady,” he replied, “I have no cards! I suspect a game, that’s all.”

  “Then—do you need me?”

  The detective bent forward, his arms on his desk, and looked me over carefully.

  “What sort of shape are you in? Tired?”

  “No.”

  “Nervous?”

  “Not enough to hurt.”

  “I want you to take another case, following a nurse who has gone to pieces,” he said, selecting his words carefully. “I don’t want to tell you a lot—I want you to go in with a fresh mind. It promises to be an extraordinary case.”

  “How long was the other nurse there?”

  “Four days.”

  “She went to pieces in four days!”

  “Well, she’s pretty much unstrung. The worst is, she hasn’t any real reason. A family chooses to live in an unusual manner, because they like it, or perhaps they’re afraid of something. The girl was, that’s sure. I had never seen her until this morning, a big, healthy-looking young woman; but she came in looking back over her shoulder as if she expected a knife in her back. She said she was a nurse from St. Luke’s and that she’d been on a case for four days. She’d left that morning after about three hours’ sleep in that time, being locked in a room most of the time, and having little but crackers and milk for food. She thought it was a case for the police.”

  “Who is ill in the house? Who was her patient?”

>   “There is no illness, I believe. The French governess had gone, and they wished the children competently cared for until they replaced her. That was the reason given her when she went. Afterward she—well, she was puzzled.”

  “How are you going to get me there?”

  He gathered acquiescence from my question and smiled approval.

  “Good girl!” he said. “Never mind how I’ll get you there. You are the most dependable woman I know.”

  “The most curious, perhaps?” I retorted. “Four days on the case, three hours’ sleep, locked in and yelling ‘Police!’ Is it out of town?”

  “No, in the heart of the city, on Beauregard Square. Can you get some St. Luke’s uniforms? They want another St. Luke’s nurse.”

  I said I could get the uniforms, and he wrote the address on a card.

  “Better arrive about five,” he said.

  “But—if they are not expecting me?”

  “They will be expecting you,” he replied enigmatically.

  “The doctor, if he’s a St. Luke’s man—”

  “There is no doctor.”

  It was six months since I had solved, or helped to solve, the mystery of the buckled bag for Mr. Patton. I had had other cases for him in the interval, cases where the police could not get close enough. As I said when I began this record of my crusade against crime and the criminal, a trained nurse gets under the very skin of the soul. She finds a mind surrendered, all the crooked little motives that have fired the guns of life revealed in their pitifulness.

  Gradually I had come to see that Mr. Patton’s point of view was right; that if the criminal uses every means against society, why not society against the criminal? At first I had used this as a flag of truce to my nurse’s ethical training; now I flaunted it, a mental and moral banner. The criminal against society, and I against the criminal! And, more than that, against misery, healing pain by augmenting it sometimes, but working like a surgeon, for good.

  I had had six cases in six months. Only in one had I failed to land my criminal, and that without any suspicion of my white uniform and rubber-soled shoes. Although I played a double game no patient of mine had suffered. I was a nurse first and a police agent second. If it was a question between turpentine compresses—stupes, professionally—and seeing what letters came in or went out of the house, the compress went on first, and cracking hot too. I am not boasting. That is my method, the only way I can work, and it speaks well for it that, as I say, only one man escaped arrest—an arson case where the factory owner hanged himself in the bathroom needle shower in the house he had bought with the insurance money, while I was fixing his breakfast tray. And even he might have been saved for justice had the cook not burned the toast and been obliged to make it fresh.

  I was no longer staying at a nurses’ home. I had taken a bachelor suite of three rooms and bath, comfortably downtown. I cooked my own breakfasts when I was off duty and I dined at a restaurant near. Luncheon I did not bother much about. Now and then Mr. Patton telephoned me and we lunched together in remote places where we would not be known. He would tell me of his cases and sometimes he asked my advice.

  I bought my uniforms that day and took them home in a taxicab. The dresses were blue, and over them for the street the St. Luke’s girls wear long cloaks, English fashion, of navy blue serge, and a blue bonnet with a white ruching and white lawn ties. I felt curious in it, but it was becoming and convenient. Certainly I looked professional.

  At three o’clock that afternoon a messenger brought a small box, registered. It contained a St. Luke’s badge of gold and blue enamel.

  At four o’clock my telephone rang. I was packing my suitcase according to the list I keep pasted in the lid. Under the list, which was of uniforms, aprons, thermometer, instruments, a nurse’s simple set of probe, forceps, and bandage scissors, was the word “box.” This always went in first—a wooden box with a lock, the key of which was round my neck. It contained skeleton keys, a small black revolver of which I was in deadly fear, a pair of handcuffs, a pocket flashlight, and my badge from the chief of police. I was examining the revolver nervously when the telephone rang, and I came within an ace of sending a bullet into the flat below.

  Did you ever notice how much you get out of a telephone voice? We can dissemble with our faces, but under stress the vocal cords seem to draw up tight and the voice comes thin and colorless. There’s a little woman in the flat beneath—the one I nearly bombarded—who sings like a bird at her piano half the day, scaling vocal heights that make me dizzy. Now and then she has a visitor, a nice young man, and she disgraces herself, flats F, fogs E even, finally takes cowardly refuge in a wretched mezzo-soprano and cries herself to sleep, doubtless, later on.

  The man who called me had the thin-drawn voice of extreme strain—a youngish voice.

  “Miss Adams,” he said, “this is Francis Reed speaking. I have called St. Luke’s and they referred me to you. Are you free to take a case this afternoon?”

  I fenced. I was trying to read the voice. “This afternoon?”

  “Well, before night anyhow; as—as early this evening as possible.”

  The voice was strained and tired, desperately tired. It was not peevish. It was even rather pleasant.

  “What is the case, Mr. Reed?”

  He hesitated. “It is not illness. It is merely—the governess has gone and there are two small children. We want someone to give her undivided attention to the children.”

  “I see.”

  “Are you a heavy sleeper, Miss Adams?”

  “A very light one.” I fancied he breathed freer.

  “I hope you are not tired from a previous case?” I was beginning to like the voice.

  “I’m quite fresh,” I replied almost gaily. “Even if I were not, I like children, especially well ones. I shan’t find looking after them very wearying, I’m sure.”

  Again the odd little pause. Then he gave me the address on Beauregard Square, and asked me to be sure not to be late. “I must warn you,” he added, “we are living in a sort of casual way. Our servants left us without warning. Mrs. Reed has been getting along as best she could. Most of our meals are being sent in.”

  I was thinking fast. No servants! A good many people think a trained nurse is a sort of upper servant. I’ve been in houses where they were amazed to discover that I was a college woman and, finding the two things irreconcilable, have openly accused me of having been driven to such a desperate course as a hospital training by an unfortunate love affair.

  “Of course you understand that I will look after the children to the best of my ability, but that I will not replace the servants.”

  I fancied he smiled grimly.

  “That of course. Will you ring twice when you come?”

  “Ring twice?”

  “The doorbell,” he replied impatiently.

  I said I would ring the doorbell twice.

  The young woman below was caroling gaily, ignorant of the six-barreled menace over her head. I knelt again by my suitcase, but packed little and thought a great deal. I was to arrive before dusk at a house where there were no servants and to ring the doorbell twice. I was to be a light sleeper, although I was to look after two healthy children. It was not much in itself, but, taken in connection with the previous nurse’s appeal to the police, it took on new possibilities.

  At six I started out to dinner. It was early spring and cold, but quite light. At the first corner I saw Mr. Patton waiting for a streetcar, and at his quick nod I saw I was to get in also. He did not pay my fare or speak to me. It was a part of the game that we were never seen together except at the remote restaurant I mentioned before. The car thinned out and I could watch him easily. Far downtown he alighted and so did I. The restaurant was near. I went in alone and sat down at a table in a recess, and very soon he joined me. We were
in the main dining-room but not of it, a sop at once to the conventions and to the necessity, where he was so well known, for caution.

  “I got a little information—on—the affair we were talking of,” he said as he sat down. “I’m not so sure I want you to take the case after all.”

  “Certainly I shall take it,” I retorted with some sharpness. “I’ve promised to go.”

  “Tut! I’m not going to send you into danger unnecessarily.”

  “I am not afraid.”

  “Exactly. A lot of generals were lost in the Civil War because they were not afraid and wanted to lead their troops instead of saving themselves and their expensive West Point training by sitting back in a safe spot and directing the fight. Any fool can run into danger. It takes intellect to keep out.”

  I felt my color rising indignantly. “Then you brought me here to tell me I am not to go?”

  “Will you let me read you two reports?”

  “You could have told me that at the corner!”

  “Will you let me read you two reports?”

  “If you don’t mind I’ll first order something to eat. I’m to be there before dark.”

  “Will you let me—”

  “I’m going, and you know I’m going. If you don’t want me to represent you I’ll go on my own. They want a nurse, and they’re in trouble.”

  I think he was really angry. I know I was. If there is anything that takes the very soul out of a woman, it is to be kept from doing a thing she has set her heart on, because some man thinks it dangerous. If she has any spirit, that rouses it.

  Mr. Patton quietly replaced the reports in his wallet and his wallet in the inside pocket of his coat, and fell to a judicial survey of the menu. But although he did not even glance at me he must have felt the determination in my face, for he ordered things that were quickly prepared and told the waiter to hurry.