The Mystery & Suspense Novella

by Fletcher Flora

  CHAPTER IV

  In a Paris hotel, Brad Langdon stared at the message an orderly had just handed him. It was the following night. “Spot near Bricon bombed this afternoon. Proof positive of girl’s guilt. Intelligence division instructed to place her under arrest at once. Higgins.”

  Langdon leaped for the door. “Damn her!” he gritted savagely. “Then she did send Rocky to his death! If he hadn’t had her brassiere on his strut, the Boche wouldn’t have ganged him!”

  He sped out into the night. A dilapidated Paris taxi honked dolefully by. He hailed it, launched himself into the vehicle. “Rue Champon—vite!” he roared to the ancient and grizzled cabby. Then he added the address of the house where Jeanne d’Albert lived.

  The cab lurched forward. Eight minutes later it drew up at the curb before Jeanne d’Albert’s house. Brad Langdon sprang out, tossed a fistful of change at the cabby. He lunged up the steps of the house and pounded his fist against the door.

  After a long wait, the portal opened. Langdon stared into the dark, liquid eyes of Jeanne d’Albert—dark eyes that widened in abrupt astonishment.

  “You—Monsieur l’Americaine!” she gasped.

  Brad forced a tender smile to his grim lips. “Oui,” he answered gently. “You are—surprised to see me?”

  Her mouth suddenly opened in a wanton, provocative smile. Her heavy lashes lowered. “Not surprised, chéri. Happy—very happy!” she breathed. “You will come in?”

  He followed her into the house, into that room where he had once spent the night with her. There was a light burning now, and he could see the masked bewilderment in her enigmatic eyes as she turned toward him, touched his arm. “You are safe, chéri?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Oui. But I had one close call. I was forced down behind the Boche lines. Another member of my flight landed and picked me up.” He grinned. “The talisman you gave me brought me good luck. It saved my life.” Then he frowned regretfully. “Unfortunately, I lost it. It remained on my smashed ship.”

  She drew a deep breath. Then she approached him. Her warm arms went about his neck. “It does not matter, beloved. I shall give you another in its place—” she whispered.

  “Now? Right away?”

  She flushed. She took his hand, pressed it against her swelling breast. “I—I have none on, as you see, chéri. But wait here. I will don one. Then you shall have the pleasure of removing it from—from my—breasts, with your own tender hands…”

  She turned and left him. She was gone for a long while. Then, at last, she came back into the room. She was smiling wickedly, guiltily.

  He stepped toward her, masking the blazing hate in his eyes. He knew why she had been gone so long. She had prepared a message in invisible ink, written it on the brassiere she now wore. She intended that he take it, place it on his ship as a talisman—a token that would send him crashing to his death.

  His hands went to her blouse, ripped it open. The girl gasped as his hard fingers scraped the resilient firmness of her breasts under the silken brassiere. “Chéri—you are rough—you hurt me!” she cried out.

  He yanked the brassiere from her body. Then, in one swift motion, he stuffed the lingerie into his tunic—and withdrew his service automatic. He trained it at her naked left breast. “You lousy spy!” he snarled. “You killed my brother! And now—”

  She backed away from him, white-faced. Her red mouth opened. A wild cry escaped her lips. “Anton! Anton! Schnell!” she screamed. Her use of the German word was her confession of guilt.

  Brad Langdon whirled in his tracks as he heard running footsteps behind him. A burly, hulking figure of a man was at the doorway of the room. He leaped at the American. “Schweinhund!” he snarled gutturally as he sprang.

  Brad Langdon squeezed the trigger of his automatic. As he fired, the girl launched herself at him from behind, knocking his arm aside. His shot went wild. Then her accomplice was upon him. The two men locked in vicious embrace.

  Langdon felt a knee jam into his groin, and he doubled over as pain shot through every fiber of his being. Hard fists smashed against his face, blinding him. He staggered clear. Then, like an uncoiled spring, he plunged forward. He raised the butt of his automatic, brought it crashing down against his antagonist’s close-cropped, Teutonic head. The man grunted and pitched face-downward to the floor.

  Brad Langdon pivoted. The dark-eyed girl was upon him, clawing, scratching, biting. He raised his hand and struck her across the face. She swayed, and the marks of his hard fingers were like blood on her pale cheek. He leaped for her, grabbed her. Her naked breasts were flattened against his chest. She struggled with insane fury in his smothering grasp. Her left hand snaked downward toward her thigh. She snatched up her skirt, grabbed at a venomous little automatic holstered against her leg. She jammed it into Brad Langdon’s ribs. “Now, pig-dog!” she hissed…

  The room’s door crashed inward with a splintering of smashed wood. A man’s voice said, “Drop that—unless you’d rather die now instead of before a firing-squad!”

  The girl gasped. She pushed free of Brad Langdon. He turned—and stared at two grim-faced officers of the American intelligence service!

  One of the men stepped forward, wrenched the tiny automatic from the girl’s suddenly nerveless hand. Then he smiled grimly at Brad Langdon. “Looks like we just got here in time, Lieutenant.”

  Langdon nodded. He gestured toward the man on the floor—the man he had felled. “You got here just in time,” he answered. “And there’s another candidate for your firing-squad.”

  He turned and walked unsteadily out of the room, out of the house. A deep sigh issued from his battered lips. Then, very gently, he smiled. “I’ve avenged you, Rocky, old kid!” he whispered toward the winking stars overhead.

  CINDERELLA’S SLIPPER, by Hugh C. Weir

  Originally published in Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective, 1914.

  CHAPTER I

  Raymond Rennick might have been going to his wedding instead of to his death.

  Spick and span in a new spring suit, he paused just outside the broad, arched gates of the Duffield estate and drew his silver cigarette case from his pocket. A self-satisfied smile flashed across his face as he struck a match and inhaled the fragrant odour of the tobacco. It was good tobacco, very good tobacco—and Senator Duffield’s private secretary was something of a judge!

  For a moment Rennick lingered. It was a day to banish uncomfortable thoughts, to smooth the rough edges of a man’s problems—and burdens. As the secretary glanced up at the soft blue sky, the reflection swept his mind that his own future was as free from clouds. It was a pleasing reflection. Perhaps the cigarette, perhaps the day helped to deepen it as he swung almost jauntily up the winding driveway toward the square, white house commanding the terraced lawn beyond.

  Just ahead of him a maple tree, standing alone, rustled gaily in its spring foliage like a woman calling attention to her new finery. It was all so fresh and beautiful and innocent! Rennick felt a tingling thrill in his blood. Unconsciously he tossed away his cigarette. He reached the rustling maple and passed it…

  From behind the gnarled trunk, a shadow darted. A figure sprang at his shoulders, with the long blade of a dagger awkwardly poised. There was a flash of steel in the sunlight…

  It was perhaps ten minutes later that they found him. He had fallen face downward at the edge of the driveway, with his body half across the velvet green of the grass. A thin thread of red, creeping from the wound in his breast, was losing itself in the sod.

  One hand was doubled, as in a desperate effort at defense. His glasses were twisted under his shoulders. Death must have been nearly instantaneous. The dagger had reached his heart at the first thrust. One might have fancied an expression of overpowering amazement in the staring eyes. That was all. The weapon had caught him squarely on the left side. He had evidently whirled toward the assassin almos
t at the instant of the blow.

  Whether in the second left him of life he had recognized his assailant, and the recognition had made his death-blow the quicker and the surer, were questions that only deepened the horror of the noon-day crime.

  As though to emphasize the hour, the mahogany clock in Senator Duffield’s library rang out its twelve monotonous chimes as John Dorrence, his valet, beat sharply on the door. The echo of the nervous tattoo was lost in an unanswering silence. Dorrence repeated his knock before he brought an impatient response from beyond the panels.

  “Can you come, sir?” the valet burst out. “Something awful has happened, sir. It’s, it’s—”

  The door was flung open. A ruddy-faced man with thick, white hair and grizzled moustache, and the hints of a nervous temperament showing in his eyes and voice, sprang into the hall. Somebody once remarked that Senator Duffield was Mark Twain’s double. The Senator took the comparison as a compliment, perhaps because it was a woman who made it.

  Dorrence seized his master by the sleeve, which loss of dignity did more to impress the Senator with the gravity of the situation than all of the servant’s excitable words.

  “Mr. Rennick, sir, has been stabbed, sir, on the lawn, and Miss Beth, sir—”

  Senator Duffield staggered against the wall. The valet’s alarm swerved to another channel.

  “Shall I get the brandy, sir?”

  “Brandy?” the Senator repeated vaguely. The next instant, as though grasping the situation anew, he sprang down the hall with the skirts of his frock coat flapping against his knees. At the door of the veranda, he whirled.

  “Get the doctor on the phone, Dorrence—Redfield, if Scott is out. Let him know it’s a matter of minutes! And, Dorrence—”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Tell the telephone girl that, if this leaks to the newspapers, I will have the whole office discharged!”

  A shifting group on the edge of the lawn, with that strange sense of awkwardness which sudden death brings, showed the scene of the tragedy.

  The circle fell back as the Senator’s figure appeared. On the grass, Rennick’s body still lay where it had fallen—suggesting a skater who has ignominiously collapsed on the ice rather than a man stabbed to the heart. The group had been wondering at the fact in whispered monosyllables.

  A kneeling girl was bending over the secretary’s body. It was not until Senator Duffield had spoken her name twice that she glanced up. In her eyes was a grief so wild that for a moment he was held dumb.

  “Come, Beth,” he said, gently, “this is no place for you.”

  At once the white-faced girl became the central figure of the situation. If she heard him, she gave no sign. The Senator caught her shoulder and pushed her slowly away. One of the woman-servants took her arm. Curiously enough, the two were the only members of the family that had been called to the scene.

  The Senator swung on the group, with a return of his aggressiveness.

  “Some one, who can talk fast and to the point, tell me the story. Burke, you have a ready tongue. How did it happen?”

  The groom—a much-tanned young fellow in his early twenties—touched his cap.

  “I don’t know, sir. No one knows. Mr. Rennick was lying here, stabbed, when we found him. He was already dead.”

  “But surely there was some cry, some sound of a scuffle?”

  The groom shook his head. “If there was, sir, none of us heard it. We all liked Mr. Rennick, sir. I would have gone through fire and water if he needed my help. If there had been an outcry loud enough to reach the stable, I would have been there on the jump!”

  “Do you mean to tell me that Rennick could have been struck down in the midst of fifteen or twenty people with no one the wiser? It’s ridiculous, impossible!”

  Burke squared his shoulders, with an almost unconscious suggestion of dignity.

  “I am telling you the truth, sir!”

  The Senator’s glance dropped to his secretary’s body and he looked up with a shudder. Then, as though with an effort, his eyes returned to the huddled form, and he stood staring down at the dead man, with a frown knitting his brow. Once he jerked his head toward the gardener with the curt question, “Who found him?”

  Jenkins shambled forward uneasily. “I did, sir. I hope you don’t think I disturbed the body?”

  The Senator shrugged his shoulders impatiently. He did not raise his head again until the sound of a motor in the driveway broke the tension. The surgeon had arrived. Almost at the same moment there was a cry from Jenkins.

  The gardener stood perhaps a half a dozen yards from the body, staring at an object hidden in the grass at his feet. He stooped and raised it. It was a woman’s slipper!

  As a turn of his head showed him the eyes of the group turned in his direction, he walked across to Senator Duffield, holding his find at arm’s length, as though its dainty outlines might conceal an adder’s nest.

  The slipper was of black suede, high-heeled and slender, tied with a broad, black ribbon. One end of the ribbon was broken and stained as though it had tripped its owner. On the thin sole were cakes of the peculiar red clay of the driveway.

  It might have been unconscious magnetism that caused the Senator suddenly to turn his eyes in the direction of his daughter. She was swaying on the arm of the servant.

  Throwing off the support of the woman, she took two quick steps forward, with her hand flung out as though to tear the slipper from him. And then, without a word, she fell prone on the grass.

  CHAPTER II

  The telephone in my room must have been jangling a full moment before I struggled out of my sleep and raised myself to my elbow. It was with a feeling of distinct rebellion that I slipped into my kimono and slippers and shuffled across to the sputtering instrument in the corner. From eight in the morning until eight in the evening, I had been on racking duty in the Farragut poison trial, and the belated report of the wrangling jury, at an hour which made any sort of a meal impossible until after ten, had left me worn out physically and mentally. I glanced at my watch as I snapped the receiver to my ear. It lacked barely fifteen minutes of midnight. An unearthly hour to call a woman out of bed, even if she is past the age of sentimental dreams!

  “Well?” I growled.

  A laugh answered me at the other end of the wire. I would have flung the receiver back to the hook and myself back to bed had I not recognized the tones. There is only one person in the world, excepting the tyrant at our city editor’s desk, who would arouse me at midnight. But I had thought this person separated from me by twelve hundred miles of ocean.

  “Madelyn Mack!” I gasped.

  The laughter ceased. “Madelyn Mack it is!” came back the answer, now reduced to a tone of decorous gravity. “Pardon my merriment, Nora. The mental picture of your huddled form—”

  “But I thought you in Jamaica!” I broke in, now thoroughly awake.

  “I was—until Saturday. Our steamer came out of quarantine at four o’clock this afternoon. As it develops, I reached here at the psychological moment.”

  I kicked a rocker to my side and dropped into it with a rueful glance at the rumpled sheets of the bed. With Madelyn Mack at the telephone at midnight, only one conclusion was possible; and such a conclusion shattered all thought of sleep.

  “Have you read the evening dispatches from Boston, Nora?”

  “I have read nothing—except the report of the Farragut jury!” I returned crisply. “Why?”

  “If you had, you would perhaps divine the reason of my call. I have been retained in the Rennick murder case. I am taking the one-thirty sleeper for Boston. I secured our berths just before I telephoned.”

  “Our berths!”

  “I am taking you with me. Now that you are up, you may as well dress and ring for a taxicab. I will meet you at the Roanoke hotel.”

  “But,” I protest
ed, “don’t you think—”

  “Very well, if you don’t care to go! That settles it!”

  “Oh, I will be there!” I said with an air of resignation. “Ten minutes to dress, and fifteen minutes for the taxi!”

  “I will add five minutes for incidentals,” Madelyn replied and hung up the receiver.

  The elevator boy at “The Occident,” where I had my modest apartment, had become accustomed to the strange hours and strange visitors of a newspaper woman during my three years’ residence. He opened the door with a grin of sympathy as the car reached my floor. As though to give more active expression to his feelings he caught up my bag and gave it a place of honour on his own stool.

  “Going far?” he queried as I alighted at the main corridor.

  “I may be back in twenty-four hours and I may not be back for twenty-four days,” I answered cautiously—I knew Madelyn Mack!

  As I waited for the whir of the taxicab, I appropriated the evening paper on the night clerk’s desk. The Rennick murder case had been given a three-column head on the front page. If I had not been so absorbed in the Farragut trial, it could not have escaped me. I had not finished the headlines, however, when the taxi, with a promptness almost uncanny, rumbled up to the curb.

  I threw myself back against the cushions, switched on the electric light, and spread my paper over my knee, as the chauffeur turned off toward Fifth Avenue. The story was well written and had made much of a few facts. Trust my newspaper instinct to know that! I had expected a fantastic puzzle—when it could spur Madelyn into action within six hours after her landing—but I was hardly anticipating a problem such as I could read between rather than in the lines of type before me. Long before the “Roanoke” loomed into view, I had forgotten my lost sleep.

  The identity of Raymond Rennick’s assassin was as baffling as in the first moments of the discovery of the tragedy. There had been no arrests—nor hint of any. From the moment when the secretary had turned into the gate of the Duffield yard until the finding of his body, all trace of his movements had been lost as effectually as though the darkness of midnight had enveloped him, instead of the sunlight of noon. More than ten minutes could not have elapsed between his entrance into the grounds and the discovery of his murder—perhaps not more than five—but they had been sufficient for the assassin to effect a complete escape.