“How is it known,” she asked with a nervous laugh, “that the woman who killed Foy had brown eyes and black hair? Because — because of the druggist’s description?”
He nodded. “And because,” he added slowly, “on the beak of the cockatoo in that back room — that vicious cockatoo who strikes at any head which comes near him — was the one black hair which corroborates the druggist. I found it. I have it. The police know nothing of it — yet!”
Her eyes widened. “You mean to tell me, Mr. Darrell, that you and you alone found a hair on the cockatoo’s beak?”
He nodded. “A part of one, and several fragments which the sharp edges of the beak snipped off. But short as they are, they are sufficient to tell the tale.” His eyes roved momentarily to the velvet bag with the revolver delineated in its folds. Then he removed them as from an unpleasant sight. His heart was heavy within him.
A pause ensued. Then she spoke.
“Mr. Darrell, you have evidently investigated a good deal about John Cooper Jarndyce. Now let me ask you a question or two. Has any effort been made by — let us say — Iris Shaftsbury — to collect that fifty thousand dollars insurance?”
“Not yet,” retorted the man. “For some reason, not yet. Perhaps the plan includes first getting away with the body in the vault — dynamiting it possibly — destroying the evidence of fraud. Perhaps — well — perhaps it’s a case of lost nerve. But there has been no effort made, I will admit, to collect the policy.”
“I will admit that my name is Iris Shaftsbury. But if I were involved in a swindle, would I not try to reap my profits?”
“Not necessarily,” Darrell replied stubbornly. “Not if there were internal dissension among the conspirators. Not if you lost your nerve. Nor can you deny that you knew that that message from John Cooper Jarndyce reposed in this hand-carved Chinese cabinet belonging to Napoleon Foy, for with your own lips you twice repeated this data when I gave it to you yesterday.” He paused. “Nor can you deny that that piece of John Cooper Jarndyce’s handwriting, even though made on cloth, would be almost proof in a court of law that he was still alive. In other words, it was fatal to the success of this big swindle.”
“Yes,” she said slowly, “I admit that all you state is true — only too true.” She reflected a moment. Then she looked up at him. “Mr. Darrell, several years ago there was an account in the papers about the murder of a prominent young girl in Boston, and how in her fingers was found clutched a strand of black hair. They arrested her fiancé who had black hair. But when they examined under a microscope the hair found in the girl’s fingers, they found it to be several times as thick as that which belonged to her lover.” She stopped.
“Yes, go on,” he urged.
“Which meant that it was Chinese hair. Being a mere man, you probably do not know that no American woman can successfully use switches and wigs made of dyed and bleached Chinese hair. It is not fine and silky enough — although only in large masses is this evident, and only by putting individual hairs under the microscope can the reason be determined. Anyway, they found that this girl had been teaching in a Chinese mission; they located a Chinese who had been infatuated with her. They were able to establish that he had followed her and killed her. He confessed.” She turned her big eyes upon him. In them was a peculiar scornfulness.
“You have been writing up and investigating a case involving a dead Chinese and two other living Chinamen. You have a hair of the alleged murderess. Yet I wonder if you have even yet taken the trouble to examine that hair under a microscope?”
The scorn in her eyes increased.
“Mr. Darrell,” she continued, fumbling among her jet tresses and plucking here and there a hair from her head, “let me give you a little assistance in your detective work. Here are hairs — several of them — taken in front of your own eyes from several places in my head. Suppose you compare them, their shades as well as their diameters, with the specimens you now have, under a microscope. And then suppose you come back here and apologize to me for your words of the past five minutes — for your suspicions.” She held out the silky filaments and as in a daze he took them from her fingers. “Then you — ”
But her words were broken off by Snowwhite, returning to the apartment. She called to the Negro maid. The girl entered, a parcel in her hand. “Snowwhite, show Mr. Darrell out, please.” And her voice had become the voice of an imperial Southern queen.
“As soon as you are quite satisfied,” she said disdainfully, “that you wish to place me under arrest, return with necessary police officers. But first may I advise — just as a layman who reads only the papers and not as a detective — that you investigate your own clues a little further.”
Darrell reddened under the irony of her words. Either he had made the faux pas of his life, or else he was dealing with a girl who knew facts about that murder of which he himself was ignorant. Her dismissal of him was specific, final; and he bowed and turned on his heel. A moment later he was out in the hall.
But Iris Shaftsbury, be she tool or brains of the plot, be she innocent or guilty of murder, was right. That much was certain. He had not investigated his clue as he should have done. And the knowledge of it, coming to him as it had, caused him to feel strangely rebuked. He walked along outside, lost in his own chagrin, and at length he came to a drug store. Going inside he called up central detective headquarters. In spite of the fact that the day was still young, he got Corrigan himself on the wire.
“Frank,” he asked, “are you quite sure about the alibi of that chink, Charley Yat Gong? This is Jeff Darrell speaking. I recall Yuan Gow saying that one drunken customer was in the restaurant at eleven o’clock, the hour Foy was shot. Was the customer sober enough to vouch for the alibi when Burns went back with Yuan and Gong?”
Corrigan’s voice boomed back in the receiver.
“You must have a second sight, Darrell,” he said. “As for the drunken customer who was there with some woman, they took a chance when Yuan Gow and Charley Yat Gong were taken over to Foy’s laundry, and beat it without paying their check. That is to say, Darrell, if there really were any two such customers there. At any rate, when Burns got back with the two Chinese, all he found was the cook standing over his chop-suey pot and the restaurant empty.”
“So now you don’t actually know whether Charley Yat Gong was in the restaurant at eleven o’clock or not, eh?” was Darrell’s query.
“Exactly. Burns took ‘em from there down to headquarters and locked ‘em up last night,” Corrigan returned, “but I didn’t know it myself till it was too late to give you anything for your paper.”
Darrell thanked him and hung up. The possibility so scornfully suggested to him by the girl upon whom he had just centered his suspicions, now loomed up as a more logical one than before. If by any chance the fragment of hair found matted to the cockatoo’s beak should prove to be several times thicker than the ones just given him in the apartment back on Independence Boulevard —
His heart leaped in him with a strange gladness. Perhaps — He stopped. He stood in front of a doctor’s office. It was a pretentious residence of gray stone, with bay windows of beautifully curved glass. A bronze sign bore the name, Nathaniel Whitlock, M.D. About the place was an atmosphere that proclaimed a doctor who stood high in his profession. And this being so, he was probably equipped with all the tools of his calling. Only for a few seconds did Darrell hesitate. Then he turned up the steps and rang the bell. A maid answered the door.
“Is Doctor Whitlock in?” Darrell asked.
She motioned him to step in. A professional-looking man with smooth face containing kindly gray eyes, came into the room. Darrell rose.
“Doctor Whitlock, Jeffrey Darrell is my name. I am a reporter on the Call, working on a rather intricate case over in this part of the city. I happened to see your sign and took a chance that you would have a microscope and a measuring screen of some sort by which I could measure the diameter of a very minute object. Have I taken too great
a liberty? Could you help me out?”
“Gladly, Mr. Darrell,” said the medical man. “I’ve read some of your interesting news articles in the Call.” He motioned to a small laboratory off the hall, its white-enameled door standing ajar. “Just step in there, Mr. Darrell. Know how to use a microscope, do you?” Darrell nodded.
It was fully fifteen minutes later when Darrell emerged from the tiny laboratory, and he was just in time to see the doctor personally bow out a patient who drove away in a carriage. The medical man came over to Darrell.
“Find out all you wanted, Mr. Darrell,” he asked cordially.
“Far, far more than I expected when I came in,” Darrell replied. And his words were indeed truth. He held out his hand. “Doctor Whitlock, thank you very, very much for the use of your instruments and paraphernalia. If you’ll watch the columns of the Call — under the name, however, of Mr. Marvin Feldock who will handle feature stories in the future — you will see the results of my little investigation to-day.” And after a word or two further, he parted from the physician and was back in the sunlight again.
He turned his footsteps immediately back the way he had come — to the Bradbury. “She must have been in that Chinese laundry last night,” he said to himself as he walked along. “She must have gone there to get that incriminating message away from Foy — yet she was not the one who stepped away from the cabinet and was nicked by the cockatoo. Thank God for that! It means that another hand than hers probably shot Foy down in cold blood. It was a mighty good thing that she turned me away from her apartment with the caustic advice she gave me. And poor Charley Yat Gong locked up as a suspect at detective headquarters.” Darrell shook his head. “And to think that neither Charley Yat Gong nor Iris Shaftsbury are guilty of Foy’s murder. Some story. Some story!”
Arriving at the Bradbury for the second time that morning, he again made his way to the second floor and down the long hall which led to the little apartment which was playing such a mysterious part in affairs. Reaching the narrow, gloomy corridor which led off the hall for a distance of ten feet or so, he traversed it and knocked lightly on the left of the two doors at its end. There was no answer. He knocked again, louder this time. No answer. He wrinkled up his forehead. Was he to be barred from the apartment from now on?
He listened. Now he thought he detected a low, moaning noise. He strained his ears. There it was again — or was it an illusion of his senses? For a second or so he felt sure he heard it, then he felt equally certain that he was mistaken. But at length he was certain. He placed his hand on the knob of the door. It turned in his hand. The door opened. He remembered now that the Negro maid, when she had gone to get a liniment, had fixed the spring latch. The button controlling it had never been pushed back in its place. He closed the door to behind him guardedly, but without hesitation, the moaning noise now plainer in his ears, he proceeded through the short hallway, past the tiny telephone stand, and into the big living room. And there he found himself facing a strange, strange sight.
Iris Shaftsbury still lay upon the davenport. But she lay on one side this time, her limbs and ankles tightly tied with a thin, whip-like cord, her hands likewise bound behind her back, her mouth covered with a gag evidently torn from the sheets which made up the davenport. The Negro maid was nowhere to be seen, but the moans coming from the tiny closet at one side of the in-a-door bed showed only too plainly where she had been placed for safe-keeping.
And, standing upon the polished mahogany table which was drawn up to the wall directly beneath the circular wall safe, not five feet to the right of Darrell, at his feet an electric drill connected by a green-silk cord to the central electric fixture in the room, was a man over whose entire head had been drawn a tight-fitting bag of black silk, with holes for the eyes and mouth, and a drawstring which covered his collar.
He wore a shiny, blue serge suit and a blue flannel shirt. From one pocket dangled the peak of a brown woolen cap. But the chief element of his appearance was the long, blue-steel gun which he held in his right hand, pointed unwaveringly toward Darrell in the doorway.
And Darrell!
He did not utter a word. He did not need to. For he knew only too well that the time had come when he was to place his own hands far above his head and join the silent occupants of that room. And even as he pondered with sluggish brain upon this subtle point, he became aware that his subconscious self had acted for him. His arms were erect in the air with both hands open — and palms outward 1
CHAPTER XV
The Man in the Black Hood
A MOMENT of intense silence had followed Darrell’s entrance into the tableau. Then it was broken by the cat-like descent of the hooded man to the floor, where, with his eyes and his gun still trained on Darrell, he crossed the floor backward and snapping the key in the closet of the in-a-door bed swung open the door.
Not once had the direction of that blue-steel gun wavered, not once had those eyes framed back of the holes in the bag removed themselves from the menace caused by the reporter’s entrance.
“Come out, nigger!” Those were the first words he spoke. They came forth in a strange, frog-like croak, a hollow voice that seemed to rumble from out of his body rather than out of his throat. “Step, you black devil.”
Snowwhite, trembling in every fiber, came out. Her eyes protruded in terror from her head, and her hands hung impotently at a point halfway between her hips and her woolly cranium.
“Take those lengths of cord,” croaked the voice again, “and tie that man hand and foot. Feet together. Hands together. Step, you black devil, or I’ll kill you.” The horrible croak died away. The masked intruder crossed the room with light tread to the point where he had been standing when Darrell walked innocently in on affairs. The blue-steel gun was still pointed at Darrell — but the index finger of the hand which did not hold it pointed to the door of the in-a-door bed across the room. The directions were unmistakable. Without further explanation Darrell crossed the room, hands still extended upward.
The Negro girl appeared suddenly galvanized into action. She reached down upon the rug and picked up a coil of whip-like cord. “Oh, marser, I done got to do what I done to de missy. Fo’ God, marser, I — I cain’t he’p it. He kill me. I done gotter tie you, else I be shot. I — ”
“Silence,” came the sepulchral, frog-like voice across the room. “Get busy. Lie down on your face, you with the blue eyes.”
Darrell knew only too well when he was the under dog in a situation, but he knew also that the under dog sometimes becomes the upper dog. Without endeavoring in any way to dispute the menace of that vicious revolver he lay down on his face. Behind him he felt the colored girl tying first his wrists cruelly, then his ankles. He heard her voice quavering in spite of her silence, he felt her hands tremble, but those black digits, strong from housework, tied knots that cut him grievously. It was plain that the girl feared for her life. “I — I done tie him,’ Darrell heard her say. Then he heard the masked man cross the floor and felt the latter trying the knots with the point of his foot. “Get in that closet, you black devil. Get!”
A silence. Then Darrell, his face still pointed floor-ward, heard the closet door close, the click of the key in the lock. Silence, then the sound of cloth ripping. A moment later ruthless fingers stuffed a wad of sheeting in his mouth, and followed it by a tight roll wound several times around his head and knotted by firm, strong hands. Then a patting of each of his pockets as in a search for firearms. Then once again that hateful, croaking, unnatural voice: “On your back now like a turtle,” followed by a toe which rolled Darrell over like a log.
Now on his back, powerless as he was, he could at least see about him. The tightly knotted cords cut him painfully; he could feel the obstruction to his circulation. But this could not endure for good. He waited patiently, even curiously. Indeed, it was a strange, strange medley of things into which he had been precipitated when Chi Tsung Liang had sent Mo Kee for him in order that he could receive the story of the h
andkerchief message.
From where he lay on the floor he could see the girl, her eyes half closed in fear, on the davenport, her own wrists knotted cruelly behind her, her lower limbs tied with the same whip-like cord. How unnecessary the latter, Darrell found himself reflecting. With her ankle sprained as it was — and resprained last night — she was powerless so far as locomotion went.
Thence his eyes, rolling in his head, fell naturally enough upon that valuable Gubbio plate which still stood upon the mantel of the room. But now it stood, so far as he was concerned, upside down! And upside down, at this moment, even his thoughts appeared to be. Strangely, he found himself unable to dismiss from his mind that mere piece of valuable pottery. Only yesterday was it — or had it been a year ago! — when he had sat in that same room alongside the girl with the velvet eyes, jokingly discussing with her the Gubbio’s known valuation of twenty-five hundred dollars as a perfect specimen — the lesser valuation of nine hundred dollars of one of its triplet brothers who had been broken and reconstructed? Was it here that he had smilingly told her that if she ever broke it it would constitute a sixteen-hundred-dollar crash; here where she had laughed at his sally — and here that both of them lay now, trussed up like mummies, forced impotently to witness what was beyond doubt an act in the Jarndyce drama played out before their very eyes?
It all seemed hazily doubtful to Darrell, writhing slightly now and again under his painful bonds. But of a sudden his odd confusion of mind cleared, as his eyes, leaving the Gubbio plate, roved again to the davenport across the room and fell upon the brown velvet bag which still lay loosely across its back — the velvet bag through which only that morning he had felt the full outlines of a revolver. If only he could make his freedom and that revolver there —
And the man whose head was shrouded in the black hood. What of him in the meanwhile? With a final cautious survey of his two captives, each of them neatly and effectually fettered, he had turned with calm insolence and, without so much as a backward glance, had leaped cat-like once more to the mahogany table, had picked up the heavy drill, and, snapping on a button in its handle, commenced to drill away at the combination dial of the wall safe. It gave forth a smooth not unpleasant, humming sound, and bits of metal and steel dust flew from its rapidly revolving point. Once, twice, its manipulator glanced back of him to see that all was quiet — and finding that this was indeed the status of affairs, proceeded to lend his concentration to his task.
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