Find the Clock

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  He shook his head, surprised. “No. Have you?”

  “Well,” she said, lowering her voice. “I heard something that would even make a story if it were true — but it’s sacred cow, and none of us would even dare touch it. Here it is. I heard from a friend higher up in this game than you or I that Reed Bardeen, the millionaire anarchist, has gained so much Call stock that there’s danger of his getting the paper, and ousting the Old Man. If that ever happened, we’d all be out of a job around here.”

  Darrell shook his head slowly. “Don’t put any credence in that report,” he advised her. “The Old Man has had a controlling interest here for years and years. Not likely that he’d ever be caught napping on stock ownership — caught a share or two shy of a majority interest. I don’t believe it. It would be a mighty bad thing if Reed Bardeen ever got hold of a big paper like the Call.” He shook his head again. “No, nothing to it, Sal.”

  “Well, maybe not,” said Sentimental Sal. “It’s just a rumor. Good night, Jeff. I’m going home.”

  He turned into the city room. Things were much quieter now. A number of the men had gone home. A couple were reading copy. Crosby still sat at the desk in the inside office looking over some long galley proofs. An incisive clicking emanating from Feldock’s typewriter on the mahogany desk, together with the workmanlike posture of that usually slothful-appearing individual dispelled any doubts as to his success in getting a live interview from the Heinemann girl at the Pennsylvania depot. With his natty coat off, flung loosely over his desk, his belted silk shirt exposed to the view of the rabble and the riffraff of the city room, a gold-tipped cigarette suspended from the corner of his lips, he leaned forward over his machine quite oblivious for once to all that went on about him.

  With a glance at his watch, Darrell dropped down in front of his own machine. In his terse, swift style, so faultless that it seldom required a single revision once the words were on the paper, he ran off a swift thousand-word account of the Foy murder. As a theory for the murder, he extended to the public Corrigan’s — and no other. The time was not yet ripe to reveal the hidden motives which linked together almost every side of the city. He painted a vivid picture of Napoleon Foy’s laundry and of the dead Chinaman himself, not omitting the dramatic little scene with its truly American pathos when Charley Yat Gong, the dead Oriental’s friend, was confronted by the knowledge of his friend’s death.

  He described the cockatoo, but of the clue he had found on the cockatoo’s beak he made no mention; the time was not ripe for that. Checking carefully over the interview with Gregson, the druggist, he then turned his copy in to Crosby, and stood near the desk while the latter ran his trained eyes over it.

  “Nothing there, I presume, that you’d want to run under Mr. Feldock’s name, Mr. Crosby?”

  Crosby covered the story quickly, riffling the four sheets of copy paper one by one. He shook his head. “No,” he replied. “It isn’t a big enough yarn to lead off the Feldock series on. I’m inclined to look at it exactly from Corrigan’s viewpoint. I had a hunch it would run just about this length; so I left just a bit over fourteen inches for it on the dummy. Good enough, eh? We’ll slide it through to the linotypes just as you’ve written it, Darrell. Now go home and get a good night’s rest. And wait — I’ll go along with you as far as the car. I’ve got to get home without any more delay.” He took up his hat, and snapped off the lights above his desk.

  “Darrell, take my advice and remain a humble reporter. An editor’s life is a dog’s life sometimes. Here I’m taking Smith’s trick, getting out of here ‘way beyond midnight every night this week, and have to be back bright and early to-morrow morning in order to have an interview with the Old Man on something. Sleep — I won’t any more than fall into it to-night before my wife will be shaking me in the morning. All right, let’s go.”

  As they left the office Crosby tossed Darrell’s copy over to one of the rewrite men, his initials and his O.K. sprawled large on its face, together with the significant word “rush.” Darrell, hat in hand, accompanied the managing editor as far as Feldock’s desk where he stood off politely to one side while Crosby touched the animated Westerner on the shoulder. The clicking stopped, and Feldock, cigarette in mouth, looked up.

  “I’m going on home now, Mr. Feldock,” said Crosby. “I’ve arranged with Tuohy, the composing-room foreman, to run your Heinemann girl interview without my O.K. Give it direct to him. I’ve left twelve inches for it, marked on the page three dummy with the word ‘Heinemann.’ Better keep it well within that length and in case you’re too close you’d better write it so that if he has any trouble in making up he can lop off the last one or two paragraphs.”

  “Exactly,” assented Feldock. “It won’t run beyond that, however.” He paused to light his cigarette which had gone out. And he was back, leaning over his machine again, oblivious to heaven, hell and managing editors alike.

  To the outside street Crosby accompanied Darrell. In the basement windows of the Call they could see the pressmen at work making the presses ready for the big run. The men parted, one going in one direction, the other the other. There were but a few stragglers on the streets at this early hour.

  “I hope that private story of yours is going well,” were Crosby’s last words. “I still think, my boy, that you’re going to spring a big yarn with which we can spread Feldock’s name clear across the front. You’ve done such things before, you know.”

  “Yes,” were Darrell’s last words as he turned to board a car. “I have done such things before! Good night, Mr. Crosby.” And twenty minutes later he was in bed and asleep.

  For a night worker in the newspaper game he rose early, the hands of the clock pointing to eight. But there was reason for his curtailment of his slumber, for this morning he intended to pay another visit to Independence Boulevard — to have a confidential talk with the occupant of apartment 2-L. But something happened that was to turn his footsteps toward the Loop instead of southwestward.

  On his way out to breakfast he bought a number of morning papers, finding that once more Inspector Notman’s friendliness to the Call had resulted in a scoop — such as it was. His was the only account of the Foy murder. Perched high in front of the lunch counter he proceeded, after finishing his breakfast, to run his eye over the rest of the day’s news before starting out for Independence Boulevard. But what he saw presently caused him to turn first red, then white, and his hand trembled with anger as he paid his check and took a car at once — to the Call office.

  Crosby, at this hour of the morning, was in his office precisely as he had stated he expected to be when they had parted company at around one o’clock in the morning. Darrell strode in, and unfolding his morning Call to page three, laid it on the managing editor’s desk.

  “I call that,” he said without any introductory explanations of his presence, “the trick of a cad — an unethical trick that no decent journalist would stoop to — and I’ve ridden down here this morning on my own time solely to protest good and vigorously.”

  He pointed his index finger at one of the longer paragraphs of Feldock’s interview with Theresa Heinemann at the Pennsylvania depot. It ran:

  Miss Heinemann proved also to be severely incensed at the inability of the Chicago police to capture the Blonde Beast, slayer of her sister in New York. She stated that she was confident that the escape of Von Tresseler, after being located in Chicago after his flight from the depot, was negotiated solely through the use of money, with which she had reason to know he was plentifully supplied. “The day before the murder of my sister,” she told the Call representative, “I was in Matilda’s apartment on One Hundred and Fifty-fourth Street, where she and Von Tresseler were having tea together. Von Tresseler displayed great cheerfulness of disposition, and boasted that only that day he had negotiated a successful deal of some sort which had netted him several thousand dollars. His elation at his own acumen was too marked and genuine to have been simulated. I have, ever since learning of Carl von
Tresseler’s escape in Chicago, inclined to no other theory than that he bought his freedom from the man or men who cornered him, rather than having outwitted his pursuers.”

  Crosby looked up from the offending paragraph. His countenance bore a rueful, pained look. He said nothing.

  “That paragraph is nothing else,” continued Darrell angrily, “than a covert attempt by a man who personally dislikes me to discredit me in this town, a mean advantage taken of your order to shoot the interview through to the linotypes as soon as it was written. You yourself, Mr. Crosby, would have eliminated that paragraph with its sinister suggestion. Mr. Crosby, every newspaper man in this town, every newspaper editor, every cub reporter, knows that it was Jeff Darrell who trapped the Blonde Beast in the North Star Hotel and lost him — and any suspicion which may have existed in any quarter that I got something out of it for letting him escape has been effectually silenced by the testimony of Gus Weigle in New York. Feldock had no right to allow such a paragraph to go through on a brother journalist — a brother journalist on the same paper as well — and the printing of it shows nothing else than petty spite. I protest against such methods. That’s all I’ll say.”

  Crosby sat at his desk, chewing thoughtfully on his pencil. He appeared unable to make any sort of a retort or defense of his star journalist from the Western coast. At length he ventured:

  “But, Darrell, of course the public knows nothing about the significance of this paragraph.”

  “To the devil with the public!” asseverated Darrell wrathfully, unconscious of the tenor of his words. “The whole reportorial and editorial world is reading that paragraph this morning, and everyone is thinking: ‘I wonder after all if there’s anything to those rumors that that fellow Darrell of the Call pulled a neat chunk of money out of Von Tresseler’s escape?’ Bah — that a journalist could slip over a petty trick like that on a co-worker.”

  Crosby shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

  “Well, Darrell, it’s in print now. So what can I do? I’m sorry if you feel that it reflects against you, but I can’t unprint it, can I? Of course I’d have deleted that paragraph if I’d remained down, and at that I think that Mr. Feldock merely forgot your connections with the Blonde Beast case for the time being. Remember, he hasn’t been working on Chicago stories for the last few years as the rest of us have. Try to forget it, Darrell. It’s done now.”

  “Yes, it’s done,” said Darrell, folding up his copy of the paper, “and so completely done that I’ve ridden down here to headquarters this morning to register my opinion about it. You know now what I think, anyway. Well, good morning, Mr. Crosby. I’ll be on duty at the usual time this afternoon.” And turning on his heel glumly he left the Call, congratulating himself that in his wrathful frame of mind at that moment Feldock was safely asleep at home and not within fist range of him.

  Once outside he proceeded without any further delay to Independence Boulevard, determined now to have that little confidential talk which had been effectually side-tracked for a while by his discovery of Feldock’s story. He reached the Bradbury at nine-thirty, and going straight upstairs to the apartment, knocked at the door. It was opened a minute later by the Negro girl who put her black finger to her lips and stepped outside, closing the door softly and nearly to behind her.

  “Ah don’ know whethah you kin see de lil missy or not, mister,” she said in response to his request for Miss Thorne. “She be’n in bad pain all de night, and vehy feberish. She done gone and go out on dat inju’ed foot o’ hers at around ten o’clock las’ night, an’ she not come back till round twelve. Den she come in one ob dem taximcabs, and de taximcab drivah done had to ca’y her up de stayahs. She been vehy sick, sah, and she jus’ manage to get asleep about dawn.”

  “Out last night!” ejaculated Darrell. His lips tightened. His heart turned suddenly to ice within him. The significance of that information fell upon him like a chill hand. “Out,” he repeated slowly. “Out — from ten till midnight?”

  “Yessah,” went on the black girl, “de missy done had me dress huh, an’ she done get up on dat po’ foot o’ hers, an’ she — sh!” She stopped short. She turned her head, placing her ear at the crack of the door. Then she pushed it open several inches behind her. The low voice of the girl within could be heard calling. “Snowwhite — where are you?”

  “Heah I is, missy — a-talkin’ to de gemmun what was heah yestiddy. He done wan’ to see you, but I tells him, missy, dat you is — ”

  “Let — let him come in, Snowwhite,” came from the living room at the end of the tiny hallway. Snowwhite apologetically stood aside. Darrell strode down the short hallway and into the living room, hearing the front door close behind him. He heard the colored girl’s voice as she craned her neck into the living room. “Missy, I go down now to de drug store and get dat liniament. I be back in ‘bout fi’ minutes.” And with the second closing of the front door Darrell stood alone in the room.

  He looked curiously, a pain in his heart, at the girl, who, dressed this time in an orange-colored peignoir, lay on the soft davenport which was now made up with sheets and pillows. A brown velvet hand bag lay on the end of the davenport’s rounded back nearest him. His eyes, resting momentarily upon it, could not mistake the shape of that velvet convexity which showed itself plainly through the soft folds — the shape of a revolver. He came forward a step or two nearer and laid his hand loosely upon it.

  But the pressure he exerted down upon it was in reality far from loose. And that pressure corroborated what his eyes had told him, for the palm of his hand detected the handle, the muzzle, the cylinder, of the revolver. He withdrew his hand and crossing the remaining space that intervened between them stood looking sadly down at her, her white face slightly flushed, her tangled black curls falling across the smooth, white forehead and temples, her red lips parted as though she were in pain.

  And at last he spoke.

  “Iris Shaftsbury,” he said quietly, “don’t you know that no insurance swindle of such a magnitude as you, John Cooper Jarndyce and those other people conceived has ever been successful? I don’t know how much you expected to realize between you — how many of you there were in this thing, this damnable conspiracy to defraud — but I do know the remainder of the details. Not only am I cognizant of the fact that John Cooper Jarndyce is alive, but I have seen with my own eyes what has been deposited out in Greenwood Cemetery as his body. I know the amount of his life insurance, the beneficiary, the amount of the premium and who paid that premium.” He shook his head in the bitterness of his soul. He leaned over her.

  “Iris Shaftsbury,” he said, “why in God’s name did you resort to such desperate measures as murder last night to get back that message — that incriminating piece of John Cooper Jarndyce’s own handwriting — that piece of writing which if not destroyed would ruin this whole swindling scheme?” There was a tremor in his voice. “Or — or did you shoot Napoleon Foy in self-defense, trying to bargain for that piece of white linen cloth?”

  He sighed a long, deep sigh. For as he gazed down into those great purple-velvet eyes which looked up at him full of pain and suffering, he longed to take her in his arms, to hold her so that her beating heart should beat against his own. For he knew now that this girl, beyond all doubt, had she been upright and honorable, scrupulous and good, was the one and only woman for whom he had searched fruitlessly through all the years of his life.

  CHAPTER XIV

  The Scorn in a Woman’s Eyes

  THE girl who lay cuddled in the depths of the davenport gazed up at Darrell with startled, frightened eyes. Once, twice, three times she opened her lips to speak, then closed them again. Darrell walked to the open window where he stood with his hands behind him, gazing unseeingly, bitterly, out upon the back alley and the unsightly telegraph pole with its iron spurs which stood but a few feet from the sill. Not once had she stirred, for he had been watching her reflection in the glass of the upper sash. At length her voice broke the tense silence of the
room.

  “Mr. Darrell.”

  He turned and strode back to the davenport. He looked down at her sadly, troubledly. He said nothing.

  “Mr. Darrell, will you tell me the full details of what you have just related?”

  He took out the morning Call from his pocket and handed it to her, folded open at the story he had written. “I am the author of that news story,” he said. “But I never dreamed as I went out upon it late last night that instead of you lying here in the Bradbury with your injured ankle, you too were out upon the streets of Chicago.”

  She read it through. Then she laid it to one side. Her chin in her cupped hand, she gazed away from him, out of the window.

  “Am — am I to be arrested?” she asked presently.

  He bit his lips. “How much longer do you think that this gruesome farce can go on — this farce in which John Cooper Jarndyce’s body in wax only lies out in the Jarndyce vault at Greenwood Cemetery? I cannot conspire to hide a great swindling scheme, a scheme which has now resulted in murder. Heaven knows I cannot, now that I know that the man I hate most in this world is mixed up in the scheme.” He leaned over her. “Iris Shaftsbury, in God’s name come clean with me. I am your friend. Give me the location of that Blonde Beast who is engineering this thing. Do that — do that — because — ” He could not frame the words he wanted to say.

  “The Blonde Beast,” she said slowly. Her eyes fell upon the newspaper. “Your so-called story says that the police know that a girl with brown eyes and black hair killed the Chinese. Then why Blonde Beast — I do not understand that.”

  He looked at her, wondering whether she were dissimulating, unable to fathom her. Women were the most subtle and keen criminals in the world, he knew full well.

  “My word ‘Blond’ does not refer to the woman in the case,” he said coldly. “It refers to some one else.”