The Fourth King

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  “Well — that lets the wind out of that theory all right. It sure closes the chapter.” He paused. “Now can I speak to one of the two men Eaves called in?”

  McIlroy surveyed him for such a long time that he grew fidgety.

  “Sure you’re not trying to cook up some kind of a defence?” he questioned suspiciously.

  “What defence would there be in having a list of the items I’m accused of stealing?”

  McIlroy uncrossed his legs. “Well — I see no har-rm.” He consulted a worn leather book on his desk. “The men that were sent over that morning that Eaves called were Lyons and Cassidy, according to Lanson’s entries here.” He thought. “Let’s see. ‘Tis Lyons that would have taken down the facts.” He pressed a button. A blue-coated man appeared in a door to the left of the one by which Folwell had entered. “Send in Lyons.” He rose and buttoned up his coat. “I’m going out for my lunch. Ask what you will.”

  He had not clapped his hat over his head before a big, broad-shouldered man with steel-blue eyes and black eyelashes came in. He was clad in plain clothes. “Want to see me, Chief?” he asked.

  McIlroy flicked a careless thumb toward Folwell sitting in front of his desk. “I’m just going out to lunch. The young man over there wants to find out what Eaves claimed was stolen. Folwell’s his name. I guess you’ll know who he is. Give him what he wants to know. Probably he knows already; on the other hand, maybe he doesn’t.” And buttoning the last button on his coat, he was gone.

  Lyons dropped down into his chief’s swivel chair. His face was less stern than that of the grizzled Scotsman who presided over the destinies of that department; his voice was slightly more pleasant. “You want to know the exact items that Eaves claimed were stolen, eh?”

  Folwell nodded. “I want all the details — just as he gave them to you the morning you and your friend came up to the office.”

  Lyons had fumbled in his pocket and now produced a small brown leather note-book, with a much chewed pencil stub hanging from it by a piece of dirty string. He opened it, turned over a few leaves, and squinted down at it. “Well,” he pronounced finally, “Eaves said that the thing stolen was a large envelope which he’d made specially from a discarded drawing paper he found in the waste-basket — a drawing of the Judson — ”

  “The Judson Tolliver two-colour fountain pen,” interrupted Folwell. “Yes, go ahead. I made up a drawing for him of some pen barrel designs for the proposed advertising booklet, but we decided to scrap the ideas, and I tossed the sheet of paper into his waste-basket.”

  “Well,” continued Lyons, “inside this special envelope was twenty-one U.S. Steel stock certificates, par value $100 apiece, numbered — he thought — either in the 4,000's or the 5,000's somewhere; two City of Denver four per cents., a $1,000 and a $500 one, numbers not known; and three Oregon Falls Lighting and Power Company Bonds, $500 each, numbers not recorded, all stuff that he’d taken in on kerb tradings in exchange for stuff handed in by customers of his own promotions. The sum total of the certificates was $5,100. And with ‘em was a typewritten paper — an option on the promotion of this two-colour fountain pen which expired in another twenty-four hours.”

  Folwell was busy all this while, jotting down every detail in his own note-book. “I had thought,” he said regretfully, “that I might get the numbers of the bonds, and trace them up some way — I didn’t know exactly how. But with no numbers known, there’s little chance.”

  Lyons shook his head. “No.” He gazed curiously at the younger man. “But I thought you signed a confession, according to the newspapers. Eaves told us it was either you or the girl. As for himself, he was so exasperated at losing that fountain pen option it was pretty certain to both Cassidy and myself that it wasn’t him. Now do you mean to say that the girl did it, and you signed the confession?”

  Folwell saw that he was on dangerous ground. “No, I don’t mean anything of the kind.” He put his note-book away. “Thanks very much, Mr. Lyons. It’s rather a pleasant sensation to find someone around here who doesn’t treat me like a criminal.” He paused. “One more thing before I go. I wonder if you can see your way clear to give me a permit to look at the body of Roslyn Van Etten.”

  “Roslyn Van Etten!” snapped Lyons, suddenly galvanized into attention. “What do you know about that drowning case, Folwell?”

  Folwell gave a short laugh. “Unfortunately, I happen to know that the young lady supposed to have fallen or been pushed from the City of Duluth is very much alive and well in Chicago. I understand, as well, that you people want to keep this fact quiet for a few days. Now, I’m quite able to keep things quiet myself, only I’d like to have a look at the Van Etten’s girl’s body, considering that I’m mixed up in this whole Eaves case and everything connected with it.”

  Lyons regarded him searchingly under closely-knit brows. “So you’ll keep your mouth shut, will you, Folwell?”

  “Certainly.”

  The big plain-clothes man drummed with his fingers on the desk for the fraction of a minute. Then he picked up a pad lying near McIlroy’s ‘phone and wrote out a few words in pencil on the top sheet. He tore it off and handed it to Folwell. “This will admit you. However, I will say that if you weren’t in the know on things, I wouldn’t let you go rubbering around there. She’s in McKinnon’s morgue on Wacker Drive just west of Wabath. And be sure you ask to see the body of Avery Reardon — not Roslyn Van Etten.” Folwell, folding up the brief note, arose. “And remember, Folwell, no talking to anybody.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Folwell. “You’ve been decent to me, and I’m not altogether a renegade myself, don’t you know.” And he left, Lyons raising his corpulent frame from the swivel chair to go back to his own desk in the adjoining room, regarding Folwell curiously from the doorway as the latter departed.

  • • •

  Outside, with the information he had sought now in his pocket, itemized and described even to the details of the discarded drawing from which the envelope had been made, he paused on the corner of 11th Street, a bare hundred feet under the thundering Elevated Rapid-Transit Road. The compelling curiosity to see the body of the girl who had met the fate which, if premeditated, might well have been the fate of Avery Reardon, was as strong as when he had first boldly forced a permit from the discomfited Lyons; so he lost no time in boarding a North State Street car in the direction of Wacker Drive. Dismounting there and walking eastward on that wide thoroughfare whose one side was composed of brand new skyscrapers, and whose other side was but an open concrete-and-stone embankment which looked ever down on the brackish-green waters of a river even as did that famous other embankment far across the seas, he found himself wondering how Lionel Pettibone would take the crushing news that his million-dollar girl was gone; the information which for some crafty hidden purposes of the police was to be concealed from all but immediate relatives of the parties concerned for seventy-two hours.

  Arriving at the mortuary, he was careful enough, in presenting his pass, to ask to see the body of Avery Reardon. He was conducted into the cool, dank and poorly lighted basement, and the morgue attendant, clad in his tattered vest and chewing busily away at a quid of tobacco, took from one of the cold, silent bodies on the marble slabs a sheet. True enough, Folwell could see, as he gazed down, the thin face — framed in water-soaked, yellow hair — that peered up was that of the blonde girl whose plump visage adorned the library in Lionel’s home, but he could hardly repress a shock at the sight of the vacant blue eyes staring upward. Those wide-open eyes on this dead girl were not normal to death, he knew instinctively; and the sight of them carried his mind straight to the picture he had formed of the man, Perry Paddon, who had gone over the Quincy Street draw in his car, and had been found floating with his own orbs in much the same condition. He continued to stare at the body for a few minutes, and then, nodding to the morgue keeper, withdrew to the clean, clear air outside.

  His mind was busily intent on those staring eyes. Was there a real and def
inite connection, somehow, between all these people who had died by the hand of the Star of the Night, and this girl as well? Was McIlroy right in surmising that there was somewhere a “greatest common divisor?” Was the Star of the Night a dread thing with agents who could work miles apart, one of these agents right now on the passenger list of the City of Duluth? Was it Roslyn Van Etten who was scheduled to be pushed to her death, or was it Avery Reardon? Was the removal of the fiancée of the son of the marked Eaves the additional blow intended by the man or men who had tried to drive Eaves out of business, or was the silencing of Eaves’s stenographer the desideratum?

  He shook his head. It was all too perplexing a tangle of motiveless acts, as well as mysterious methods, shrouded in the death of the staring eyes. But the mysteriousness of the thing was attractive, fascinating, compelling, and Folwell, who had himself been an unfortunate victim of the whole case, decided on the spot to look into the affair a bit further. Perhaps he could find the clue that would lead to the “greatest common divisor.” Who could tell?

  And thus it was that, after consulting a telephone directory, he was soon making his way over to the apartment formerly occupied by Johnstone Lee, once of the Temple of Commerce Building.

  The number given in the directory was on South Park Avenue, a rather pretentious boulevard situated half-way between the South Side Elevated Rapid Transit Road and Lake Michigan. The structure at this number was a beautiful cream-coloured court building, containing perhaps a score of flats, and Folwell could surmise by his eastward progress from the Rapid Transit structure that the gradual outward flow of the negro district must some day bring down the values of what were still de luxe apartments, high-priced and kept up in the best of condition. The name chiselled in the stone arch above the court was “The Bellingham Arms,” and to the left of the left wing were a dozen or more little private cement garages with red-tiled roofs, evidently for the convenience of the tenants in The Bellingham Arms.

  In the entrance of the left wing which fronted on the street itself, he rang the bell, which still bore the name of Johnstone Lee, and was answered by the clicking sound which meant that the inner vestibule door was unlatched. He ascended the carpeted stairs, to find in the doorway of the apartment a woman of perhaps forty years of age, whose face bore traces of a Southern type of beauty that suggested somehow the pictures one sees of the “befo’ de wah” belle!

  “I beg your pardon for intruding upon you,” Folwell began, hat in hand. “Folwell is my name — Jason T. Folwell. I presume you are related to Mr. Johnstone Lee. Now, I am rather interested in this tangle of cases, involving the deaths of various of the stockbrokers on LaSalle Street. And I wondered if you could give me any detailed information about Mr. Lee’s death.”

  “Only what I gave youah depahtment yesterday mohnin',” she said graciously, evidently mistaking him for a member of the police department. Then she added naively: “Except that I have found the deck of cards which he received, and which I have been hunting foh. They wah back of the clock on his bedroom wall. Won’t you step in?”

  At her evident mistake in his connection with things, it had been on Folwell’s lips to correct her. But on second thought he throttled the intention in short order, and instead closed those same lips and said nothing. After all, he himself had been badly singed by this whole affair, and he found himself able to decide with little effort that his rights were as great as those of the police with respect to gazing upon any of the exhibits unearthed in the investigation directed toward finding daylight in the mystery killings.

  He followed her into a sunny drawing-room, fronting the street. It was a combination library and parlour, furnished in most magnificent style, with polished mahogany hand-carved table, great gold book rests in the shape of solemn Sphinxes, foreign weapons that defied description, African war shields, Japanese tapestries, Chinese musical instruments — a room that, somehow, Folwell felt was used in bygone days to entertain and overawe gullible suckers who had money and impress them at the same time with the wide world experience and knowledge of its owner.

  They seated themselves.

  “As I have said, Mr. Folwell,” began the woman with the Southern accent, unfolding a graceful ivory fan, “we found my brothah, Mr. Lee, in the vestibule downstayhs wheh he had collapsed. We called a doctah, but Mr. Lee nevah spoke again. He died at midnight.”

  “Ptomaine poisoning, the doctor called it, I believe?” queried Folwell. He paused. “Did Mr. Lee take his meals out often?”

  She nodded. “Indeed, yes. Mr. Lee was a man who ate heah, theah and everywheah. One night he would dine at a sandwich cah — anothah night at his club. Wheah he ate that night, I do not know.”

  “Nor even whether he ate at all, I daresay,” put in Folwell. He thought for a second. “Just what did he think of the threat he received?”

  “He paid no attention to it,” Miss Lee responded. “He was vehy busy on a new Mexican silvah mine promotion, and he considahed as well that it was only a joke played upon him by some membahs of the stock-dealing fraternity on LaSalle Street.”

  “Now will you let me have a look at that deck of cards he received, and also the cardboard case it came in?”

  She rose. “Indeed, you may have it if you can use it in any way.” She stepped into a tiny room off the parlour and quickly returned, bearing in her jewelled hand the usual form of a thin, glazed cardboard box which opens from the end.

  Folwell took it from her and inspected it on all sides. One side bore upon it a short, square label cut from thick paper and pasted upon the glazed surface, bearing the name Johnstone Lee, and his address in the Temple of Commerce Building. That and no more. A ten-cent stamp in the upper right-hand corner of the same side was cancelled, and at the ends of the box there were traces of the red sealing-wax which had kept snug and tight the string which had bound it. He turned his attention to the cards within. He dumped them out and sorted them over on a small taborette which stood at his elbow. They were shy by two kings. And reason enough, Johnstone Lee had been the third. That had been his warning, symbolic indeed, yet intelligible enough had he had the good sense to look into it. But he had not heeded it. Folwell looked up at Miss Lee.

  “What became of the original letter of threats?” he asked.

  “He toh’ it up and threw it away,” she answered him. “Only the deck of cahds did he bring home, thinking he might play some game with it. Rathah an economical thing fo’ a man as well off as he to do, but he was always doing odd things of that natcha — spending huge sums foolishly and saving small trifles in othah ways.”

  Folwell turned his attention once more to the label on the cardbox. The address was stamped, as was Eaves’s missive according to his description of it to Folwell, in red rubber-stamped capitals. They were not of a characteristic shape or type face, but evidently made with a cheap child’s set or else a set used to stamp home laundry linen. But something about the tiny square of paper seemed to interest him.

  Suddenly he turned to the woman. “Might I have a bowl of very warm water, Miss Lee?”

  “Certainly.” She pushed a button in the wall. A coloured maid appeared. “Bring a bowl of wahm water, Lucy, not too hot.”

  Nothing was said until the white-capped maid appeared a moment later carrying a blue Chinese bowl from the surface of which the slightest hint of vapour ascended. She set it upon a thick asbestos plaque on the small taborette, and Folwell, transferring it to his lap, deliberately dropped into it the whole glazed cardbox. Miss Lee watched him curiously, even deferentially, as laymen watch the police doing some great detective feat.

  The stamp was the first to detach itself, fluttering to the top of the warm water. Suddenly the tiny square of label began to uncurl from the box, and at once Folwell withdrew the whole thing dripping from the water.

  Seizing the uncurled edge, he pulled very gently. Bit by bit the label drew away, clear and clean where the paste which held it down had softened and dissolved. On the back of the label were some
undecipherable curlycues, curves, and angles made with india ink, for they had not even blurred with the action of the warm water.

  The curlycue in the left-hand corner was part of what appeared to be a drawing of a fancy gold pen point, and underneath it was the portion of what might easily be the outline of a chased clasp. In the lower right-hand corner was the edge of what could plainly be seen to be an octagonal barrel of some sort.

  Folwell did not need to stare very closely at these fractional parts of drawings to recognize them, for at his first glance he knew them, knew every tiny curve and angle visible — knew that they had come from no other draughting pen than his own. They were fragments of the proposed styles for the Judson Tolliver two-colour fountain pen.

  They were part of the discarded drawing which Eaves had used to make an envelope to contain his stocks and bonds.

  To Folwell’s mind, the oscillating compass needle of fact suddenly flung itself into a straight, straight line with the poles of truth. Find the person who had stolen those bonds in the envelope which had contained them, and the man who had made the label from that same envelope to paste on the deck of cards was located at last. And that man was the person who had killed, either through himself or his agents, by devilish ingenuity or daring, four men — if not four men and a girl.

  CHAPTER XIII

  WHERE THE TRAIL ENDED

  IT required not a minute for Folwell, staring down at the label in his fingers, to realize that he had stumbled upon a fact of supreme significance, both in the quadruple or quintuple deaths and in the unfortunate complication of his own affairs. And it took, also, not a few more seconds for him to realize that, proof as it was as to the mutual identity of thief and murderer, it was no clue whatsoever to the personal identity.

  He collected his wits together with an effort, and looked up at Miss Lee. “I will take this along, Miss Lee, if you have no objections. I will give you a receipt for it.”