“Who?” asked Cynthia very low.
“Figure it out for yourself. Emmett Gundy, for instance.”
“Emmett has an alibi.”
“Quite so,” said Lee dryly, “but in the business of investigating crime you learn to distrust alibis. There is nothing to support Emmett’s alibi but the word of Miss Kip.”
“You surely don’t think that Louella could have had a hand in …”
“In murder?” put in Lee. “Certainly not. But she is a soft and gentle woman, and completely infatuated with Emmett. He may have forced her to lie for him.”
“He had no motive,” said Cynthia.
“None that we know of,” agreed Lee, ” unless the sheer hatred of an envious and disappointed man for one who had out-stripped him was a sufficient motive.”
“Dad has been supporting him.”
“All right. Put it down in Emmett’s favour that he had no known motive. Next we must consider Siebert Ackroyd.”
Cynthia flushed painfully. “Lee, it could not have been Siebert,” she murmured. “It could not have been!”
“How do you know?”
“My heart tells me so.”
“My dear, the heart is not a reliable guide in such matters. I must go by logic.”
“What have you got against Siebert?”
“He is only a possibility. He was raging against Gavin last night, and there are three hours of his time that he can’t account for. That’s all.”
“Mack Townley is a much more likely person.”
“True. Mack is a man of unbridled passions. He made threats against Gavin. He was obviously beside himself with rage last night. What is more, he lied to me about his movements after leaving here. To-day his actions and his appearance were highly suspicious.”
“There is also his wife’s accusation.”
“I don’t attach much weight to that. A hysterical woman is capable of making such a charge without any evidence. I believe she was surmising just as we are.”
“One can surmise the truth, Lee.”
“Surely. But it’s not evidence.”
“Mack Townley is rich. He can suppress unfavourable evidence and produce false evidence in his own favour.”
“I have it in mind, my dear.”
When he undressed for bed, sleep was still far from Lee’s eyes. He was in Gavin’s bare bedroom-Gavin favoured a Spartan simplicity in his sleeping arrangements, and a sense of his lost friend was strong with Lee; Gavin’s droll smile; his rather slow and quizzical manner of speaking; the suggestion of sadness in his eyes though he was the most serene of men, and quick to laughter. Lee remembered his first sight of Gavin, a long-legged youth on the campus, with eyes that saw what they looked at. For Lee, Gavin had never changed; always the youth of twenty.
Realising that he must have some sleep in order to cope with the next day’s work, Lee swallowed one of the barbital tablets that he kept by him for such an emergency. He got into bed and slowly sank into unconsciousness.
He found himself struggling from under a load of sleep with terror in his heart. Something dreadful had penetrated to his consciousness. He threw his legs out of bed and thrust his feet in slippers. He ran out of his room and across the hall that separated him from Cynthia’s room. Her door was open. He felt for the light switch and turned it. Her bed was empty. Running blindly through the corridor, he stumbled over her body lying on the floor of the foyer. He found the lights and, dropping beside her, gathered her in his arms.
She had fainted. She came to her senses in his arms and clung to him like a child. “O, Lee! There was somebody here!”
“Perhaps you had a dream,” he said soothingly.
“No, Lee! I heard him. And then I saw him. I called for you, and then like a fool I fainted. I ought to have caught him and held him.”
“Where was he?”
Cynthia pointed to the sunroom.
Lee, half believing it to be a hallucination, turned on lights in the sunroom. There lay a flowerpot smashed on the tile floor; the garden door was standing open. “I had left my door open,” Cynthia went on; “I heard something out in the middle of the apartment.”
“Why didn’t you call me then?”
“I thought I might be mistaken. I went out into the foyer. He was in the studio then. I could see the faint reflections of a flashlight in there. He came out. He had turned out his light. Just a shadow of a man. It was then that I called you. He dashed out through the sunroom. That’s all I can remember.”
Returning to his room. Lee threw on a warm dressing-gown, and snatched up gun and flashlight. Cynthia insisted on accompanying him into the garden, and he could not prevent her. The key to the garden door was hanging in its usual place beside the doorframe. There was a second key sticking in the lock of the door. Lee took the key and closed the door so that the intruder could not slip back into the apartment while he was looking for him in the garden.
Ten minutes search satisfied him that the man was no longer there. “Where could he have gone?” murmured Cynthia. “We are two hundred feet above the street.”
“Either he flew away,” said Lee dryly, “or he climbed the wall to the adjoining building. I favour the latter explanation.”
They returned to the apartment. Any further sleep that night was out of the question. “Could it have been Hillman?” suggested Cynthia.
“Hillman had the run of the apartment all day, and he’s coming back in the morning. Why should he sneak in in the middle of the night?”
“No, it was not Hillman,” she said. “A heavy, hulking figure, with stooped shoulders and a strange skull cap pulled close over his head.” She shivered. “Somewhere I have seen such a figure, but I can’t remember … I can’t remember.”
“What kind of a building is it next door?” said Lee. “I never happened to notice.”
“An office building.”
“It’s four o’clock. Such a building would be locked up at this hour. I don’t see how anybody could get in.”
“Then what do you think?”
“I think that he had been waiting out in the garden all evening for a chance to come in. Perhaps he didn’t know that anybody would be sleeping in the apartment to-night until he got on the roof and saw the lights.”
Cynthia shivered. “He’s been watching me all evening then.”
“My first job is to discover what he was after,” said Lee. “Yesterday I made a complete mental inventory of the contents of the studio. I ought to be able to tell if anything has been taken.”
Like an experienced hound Lee nosed about the big room, subjecting every inch of it to examination, while Cynthia huddled in an easy-chair watching him. The drawers of the big desk, the cupboards, the bookshelves, he omitted nothing. It was full daylight before he came to an end, and threw up his hands in defeat. “Nothing is missing. So far as I can tell everything in the room is exactly as it was yesterday.”
Soon afterwards Hillman arrived. He was calmer today; better able to meet their eyes. It was impossible to believe that he could have been the early morning intruder.
When they had eaten breakfast Lee obstinately renewed his search of the studio. “The explanation must be here,” he insisted.
In the end he came to Cynthia with a little ornamental wooden box in his hand. It contained a set of carved ivory chessmen. “You have found something?” she said anxiously. “Yes,” he said, “but it only deepens the mystery. Gavin’s set of chessmen has been taken away and another left in its place. The thief put the new ones in the old box. That’s why I didn’t discover the substitution before.”
“The clicking of the pieces was the first sound that I heard,” murmured Cynthia.
“These are similar to the others,” Lee went on, “but the design of each piece is a little different. Notice that the castle is shorter and thicker through; the head of the knight more skilfully carved. I should never have discovered the substitution had I not been so familiar with the old set.”
“It
was the murderer!”
“So it would seem. Nobody else would have taken such a risk.”
“What could he have wanted them for?”
“God knows, my dear! There is no mystery about Gavin’s chessmen. He’s had the set for twenty-five years. I remember well when he bought it. It cost fifteen dollars. That was a big sum for a college boy to lay out. Gavin had become crazy about the game. He undertook to teach me, but I had not patience enough to make a good player. We will have to find the missing chessmen before we can hope to discover why they were taken.”
WHEN Hillman next had occasion to enter the studio, the chessmen were lying exposed on a table. Cynthia watched the servant’s face. “Hillman, Mr. Dordress was a great chess-player, wasn’t he?” asked Lee.
“Yes, sir,” he answered readily. “Mr. Dordress was very partial to the game.”
“With whom did he play?”
“Lately he had been complaining that he had nobody to play with, sir.”
“And before that?”
“He used to play with Mr. Siebert Ackroyd, sir.”
Cynthia paled. “Mr. Ackroyd used to drop in evenings,” Hillman went on. “Mr. Dordress said he had the makings of an A1 player. But he hasn’t been for some time past.”
“Anybody else?” asked Lee.
“Miss Garrett, sir. Mr. Dordress taught her the game several years ago. I fancy she wasn’t a very good player. Mr. Dordress would give her a handicap and then beat her. They used to play in the late afternoons or on Sunday evenings.”
“Anybody else?”
“Not that I can recollect, sir.”
“How about Mr. Gundy?”
“I don’t know. I have never seen him play with Mr. Dordress.”
“Or Mr. Townley?”
“No, sir. Mr. Townley was too full of business. He never dropped it just to pass the time with Mr. Dnrdrcss. He always had business.”
“Are these the chessmen that Mr. Dordress ordinarily played with?” asked Lee.
“Why yes, sir. He never owned but the one set.”
“All right, thank you, Hillman. That’s all now.”
The servant cast a glance of sharp curiosity at the little ivory figures. “Excuse me, sir, but have you learned anything from these?”
“Nothing,” said Lee?”
When he had gone out Cynthia said: “The chessmen meant nothing to him.”
“That is obvious,” said Lee.
“O, dear!” she complained, “everything we have learned to-day seems to cancel out everything we learned yesterday. Can you see any light?”
“A crack or two,” he answered, smiling. “It is possible that the principal in this affair employed several agents to carry out his plan …”
“Or her plan,” murmured Cynthia. “It has already been suggested that there were two such agents; there may have been more. Perhaps no one of these agents was informed of what the others were up to.”
They went out into the roof garden to see what further clues daylight might reveal. A dull rumble of traffic arose from the street below, punctuated by the occasional squawk of a motor horn. Except for the evergreen hedges the garden wore the bleak dress of winter. The gravel paths revealed no trace of footsteps. In a broad box of earth outside the window of Cynthia’s room, Lee found the print of a big hand. It had been encased in a glove. “He was leaning forward here to peep between the slats of the Venetian blinds,” said Lee.
Cynthia shivered.
Lee covered the hand-print. Later in the day he took a cast of it with plaster of paris. In order to reach the box the man had had to force his way through the growing evergreens. Lee, examining them through a magnifying glass, carefully collected some woollen hairs clinging to the spiny foliage.
All along the back of the garden ran the wall of the adjoining building, some fifteen feet higher than the garden. Gavin had covered it with a wooden lattice over which vines might be trained in summer. Lee said the man could not have climbed down and climbed back by the lattice. The interstices were too small to provide a toe hold. “Very likely he used a rope ladder,” said Lee. “The supports of the tank on the roof next door would provide a convenient place to tie his ladder.” Lee was presently able to point out the exact spot where the man had come down and gone back again. The painted lattice showed scuff marks. “The rope ladder,” said Lee, “would have a tendency to throw him against the lattice, especially if he was in a hurry.”
Back in the house, Lee put the hairs he had picked up under a microscope. After examination he said: “It was a cheap material that contained wool and jute. Light brown or yellowish in colour.”
“A yellow overcoat!” murmured Cynthia, staring. “Now I remember, Lee. As I stood on the corner Sunday night a man wearing a strange-looking yellow overcoat passed me. He had a leather helmet drawn over his head… . Lee! … Lee! That was the man who broke in here last night. That was my father’s murderer I … O, God! Lee, he must have been on his way to kill him then!”
“Would you know him if you saw him?”
“O, Heavens, yes! Every detail of his appearance seems to be etched on my brain!”
Lee, feeling that he had reached a point where he required the assistance of the police, drove down to Headquarters to talk to Inspector Loasby, the chief of the detective force. Cynthia went to her work at the New York Hospital. Lee’s relations with the police were peculiar. On several occasions be had given Loasby valuable help, and the latter was presumably grateful. When a case broke. Lee had always retired gracefully and let Loasby take the credit. The Inspector could not understand Lee’s desire to be known as an author rather than a detective. Privately, he considered Lee a bit cracked.
Loasby was a handsome man and a first-rate detective officer in the modern scientific manner. Perhaps he lacked something of imagination, but Lee considered that just as well in a public official. At Headquarters Lee found him up to his neck in the detail of the day’s business, but Loasby, knowing that Lee was no trifler, put everything aside to listen to his story. Lee did not feel that it was incumbent on him to tell Loasby all he surmised, but he gave him the facts. When he came to an end the Inspector’s jaw was hanging down. “Good God, Mappin, there’s dynamite in this case! Gavin Dordress, Gail Garrett, Mack Townley, Bea Ellerman. What a bunch of headliners! We’ll have to be damn’ careful before we move!”
“Are you telling me?” said Lee.
Loasby agreed that it would be better for the police to take no official cognizance of the case until Lee had secured more evidence. In the meantime Loasby put the resources of the department at Lee’s disposal, and Lee, on his part, agreed to keep the Inspector fully informed.
Lee’s first request was for a search to be made for the missing set of chessmen. He described the ivory figures and asked (a) that the catch basins of the sewers in the vicinity of Gavin Dordress’ apartment be cleaned out; (b) that the employees of the Department of Sanitation be instructed to watch for the chessmen in all receptacles of rubbish and garbage that were put out to be emptied; (c) that a description of the chessmen be broadcast to all policemen on patrol, and that the pawnshops be searched. Lee also handed to the Inspector the key he had found in the garden door of the penthouse. It was to be photographed and a circular printed and sent to every locksmith in the city with the object of learning who had made such a key.
Returning up-town, Lee visited the tall, narrow office building next door to the apartment house. Before making his presence known, he went up to the top floor, where he found a flight of stairs leading up. At the top was a door opening on the roof, furnished with an ordinary spring lock. By pressing down the catch on the lock, anybody could go out on the roof and return whenever he had a mind to. The roof offered no distinctive features. On the base of the iron standard supporting the water tank, Lee could distinguish marks where a rope or rope ladder had been tied.
He looked up the Superintendent of the building. Posing as a private detective, Lee said: “The apartment of the late
Mr. Dordress was entered last night. Apparently the thief lowered himself from the roof of your building.”
“What did he get?”
“Nothing. He was scared off.”
The Superintendent told Lee that his building was kept open until 11.30 to suit the convenience of a School of Telegraphy on the top floor, which conducted classes every night of the week. There were two sessions: 7 to 9 and 9 to 11. The School was closed about 11.30 and the elevator man went home at the same time. Thereafter the outer door of the building was locked. There was a watchman who was required to visit every floor of the building four times between midnight and 8 am.
The Superintendent admitted that it would be possible for anybody who was familiar with the movements of the watchman to slip past him on his rounds. In fact, the watchman had reported on Monday morning, and again this morning (Tuesday), that he had found the front door of the building unlocked after he had locked it. For the coming night, a second man had been engaged to sit in the entrance hall while the other was making his rounds. “He’s hardly likely to come back again,” said Lee dryly. “Best to say nothing about this for the present.”
“You bet your life,” said the Superintendent. “I don’t want any unfavourable publicity for my building.”
The night elevator boy came on duty in the middle of the afternoon, and Lee returned later, to talk to him. He was a keen boy, immediately interested when Lee questioned him. Feeling his way from question to question, Lee finally got this story out of him. “Last Wednesday or Thursday, I can’t be sure, I carried a funny-looking guy up to the Telegraph School. I marked him particular, he was such a dumb, foreign-looking cluck; most of the students up there are smart young American fellows. The first time he come he only stayed a few minutes and I took him down again. He come back Sunday night about a quarter to eleven. I told him the school would be closing in a few minutes, but he said he only wanted to register, and there was time enough for that. So I took him up.”
ALM02 The Death of a Celebrity Page 10