“They have such boxes in fifty places around town,” said Loasby, scowling.
“They are all put out by the same company. Phone quick to the head office and ask where box number 415 is. Arrange to have a watch put on it.”
Riordan did the telephoning. “Pennsylvania Terminal,” he reported. “Come on!” said Lee, making for the door.
Loasby and Riordan followed. “It he’s lost the key,” Loasby grumbled, ” he won’t go back to the box.”
“Man,” said Lee, “with a general alarm out for him, if his other clothes are in that box, it’s a matter of life and death for him to get them.”
In a red police car with blue searchlight and screaming siren, they made the Pennsylvania Terminal in nine minutes. In the local office of the checking company they were faced by a frightened manager. “You’re too late,” he stammered. “He’s been and got his things. “I’m sorry! … I didn’t know he was wanted.”
Lee clenched his teeth together and silently cursed their ill luck. “What sort of man?” demanded the Inspector.
The manager repeated the too-familiar description of the man in the yellow overcoat. “He said he had lost his key,” he went on. “He was in a hurry to catch a train. He described everything that was in the box, and offered to pay for a new lock. So I opened the box for him. That is our rule.”
“What was in it?” asked Lee.
“A yellow gladstone bag, sir, considerably scuffed and worn. It contained a black vicuna overcoat, a black soft hat rolled up, a blue cheviot suit, black shoes and socks, a white shirt that had been worn, with collar attached, a blue tie, a tin box …”
“What was in the box?”
“I didn’t ask him to open it.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Less than half an hour, sir.”
“Didn’t strike you as strange,” said the Inspector sternly, ” that a man looking like that should have such fine clothes in his bag?”
“I thought they were his Sunday clothes, Inspector.”
“You should …”
Lee shut Loasby off. “I know why he chose the Pennsylvania station to check his things. Downstairs they have rooms for the convenience of travellers who may wish to change their clothes. He may still be there. Come on!”
Lee, Loasby and Riordan hastened to the stairway on the North side of the concourse and ran down. The spotless glass-tiled lavatory opened off the basement corridor. It was lined down to the far end with a row of little dressing-rooms, each having a mahogany door with a slot machine in the lock to receive dimes. Halfway down the long row there was an arched opening leading to another division of the lavatory. The attendant of the place was standing near the entrance. Loasby gave him a brief flash of the gold badge. “Have you seen a man in here during the last half hour wearing a yellowish kind of overcoat?” he asked in a low voice.
The man shook his head. “I got to watch the nickel side, too, Inspector. I don’t see them all.”
“This was an unusual looking man, a hulking fellow, stoop-shouldered; wore a leather helmet pulled down close over his head, thick spectacles; was carrying an old gladstone bag.”
“Yeah, I seen such a one,” said the man suddenly. “Here, on the dime side. He went into a box halfway down. It would be number nine, ten or eleven. For all I know he’s still there.”
Before the attendant had finished speaking, a door in the middle of the long row silently opened, and like a shadow, a tall man slipped across the narrow space and through the opening into the other side of the lavatory. He kept his head turned from them, and they could not see his face. Black hat, black overcoat now, but the anxiety to escape observation gave him away. “There he goes!” cried the Inspector.
He and Riordan instinctively sprang forward to look in the box he had just vacated. Lee, figuring that the man would have to come out into the corridor through the next opening, turned in the other direction to head him off. “Stop that man!” roared Loasby to those beyond.
Lee collided with the running man in the next opening to the corridor. The man was holding an arm over his face. He charged full tilt into Lee, sending him sprawling on his back in the corridor while he sprang for the stairs. When Lee got his breath, the man was disappearing around the top of the stairs. Lee added his voice to the bellowing Inspector. “Stop that man!” A whole row of bootblacks stopped work and leaped up the stairs, brushes and rags in hand. The customers climbed out of the chairs and followed. Up above the cry was taken up: “Stop that man!”
When Lee reached the great concourse above, he had another glimpse of the man as he headed obliquely across for the doors leading to the outer concourse. He was slimmer than Lee expected, and not stoop-shouldered at all. Desperation was lending him the speed of a deer. A door obediently opened for him and he disappeared through it. The cries were echoing from end to end of the vast hall: “Stop that man!” Men came running from every direction to join the chase. The crowd got tangled up in the mechanical doors and the fugitive gained on them.
When Lee reached the outer concourse, the man had almost got to the Thirty-first Street side of the building. Men directly in his path scuttled out of the way, and fell in at a safe distance behind him. The crowd was roaring. The fugitive was clever enough not to spring up the wide stairs to the street where he would certainly have been caught. Running under the stairway, he plunged down the steps leading to the mezzanine corridor that bisects the huge building from side to side. This is the busiest part of the terminal, with crowds pouring up from the train platforms below, another crowd waiting to meet friends and more hundreds passing to and from the subway and the taxi landings.
This huddle of people instinctively parted to let the running man through, and none dared lay hands on him. The great crowd that pursued him could not get through the crowd that already choked the corridor and the man gained steadily. His progress was punctuated by the sharp screams of the women he hustled. Running alongside Lee, the face of the dignified Inspector had become purple. “If you catch him it means promotion,” he shouted to Riordan, and put out a hand to stop Lee. “Let the young men run,” he panted. “This is no work for us!”
“I’m not done yet,” said Lee. He ran on, leaving Loasby.
Midway through the corridor, there was a side corridor leading in the direction of the subway station a block away. The fugitive had passed out of hearing and the pursuers halted irresolutely. Some said he had headed for the subway, others said straight ahead. The main body decided for the subway and started charging through the tiled corridor. It he had gone that way, they would catch him on the platform. Lee thought, and he, Riordan and a few others kept on towards the Thirty-third Street side where the taxis waited. This part of the mezzanine was less crowded at the moment.
While they were still fifty yards away, through the glass of the doors leading to the taxi platform, they saw their man getting into a cab. “Stop that man!” they yelled, but the taxi-driver either could not or did not want to hear, and the cab whirled out of sight into the ramp leading to the street. They piled into the next cab. They found the first cab stopped at the head of the ramp by a red light. Coming up behind it, they leaped out, each with a gun in hand. But the cab ahead was empty. “The so-and-so jumped out and run down Eighth Avenue,” said the driver disgustedly. “I couldn’t leave my cab.”
In the crowded sidewalk of Eighth Avenue there was no sign of their man. “He’s smart enough to have run back into the station,” muttered Lee. Turning in through the Eighth Avenue entrance of the terminal, they stood for a moment at the top of the great stairway, searching the outer concourse. He was not to be seen. Half a dozen of the train gates were open, and there were doors everywhere to the telephone room, the main concourse, the different waiting-rooms. An ordinary looking man in black hat and overcoat, it was child’s play for him to lose himself in that labyrinth. “He has diddled us,” growled Lee.
LEE and Riordan joined Inspector Loasby in the police substation attached
to the Terminal. Loasby had the gladstone bag found in the dressing-room. He had taken all the usual measures. There were already twenty detectives in the station and more on the way. The half dozen trains then ready to depart were held until they could be searched, and men were placed at every exit from the huge building. Telegrams were dispatched to all stations down the line. While they awaited the result, Lee and the Inspector snatched a hasty and gloomy meal at the lunch counter. They were not much surprised to learn when they had finished that the fugitive had made a clean getaway. Loasby prepared to return to Headquarters. “I’d be glad to have you with me,” he said to Lee. “I’m organising a search that will comb this town with fine teeth. Two heads are better than one.”
“All right,” said Lee. “Let me telephone home first.”
Jermyn told him over the wire that Miss Cynthia was all right. Miss Fanny was with her. He had served their dinner and they had eaten well. Nobody had called at the apartment. “Any telephone calls?”
“One, sir. About fifteen minutes ago a man called up. He wouldn’t give his name. Said his initials were R.F.S and that you would know him. The voice was unfamiliar to me.”
“That’s all right,” said Lee; ” a new man that I have working for me. What did he want?”
“Wanted to get in touch with you, sir. Said he had secured an important piece of evidence that he must put in your hands to-night. I suggested that he come to the apartment, but he said he had a man under observation and he couldn’t take the time to come up here. But he said he was close to your office, and if you were going to be there any time this evening, he could run over with it. He said he’d call up the office at intervals to see if you were there.”
Lee’s glum face lightened a little. An important piece of evidence! This R. F. S was a first-rate operative. “All right,” he said to Jermyn. “I’ll go right over there and wait an hour for a call. If he should call you again, tell him I’m there. He’ll find the door of the building locked, but there’s a bell which rings in the hall. I’ll come down and let him in.”
To Loasby, Lee said: “I’ve got to go over to my office for an hour. One of the operatives is coming in. He says he has something. I’ll see you later.”
“Okay,” said Loasby.
Lee took a taxi for his office. He rented a suite in an old brownstone dwelling in the Murray Hill section of Madison Avenue, that had been converted into business offices. Strictly speaking, Lee was only an amateur criminologist, but he paid the rent of this place rather than have queer and unsavoury characters come to his apartment. He could afford it. His quarters consisted of a large room across the front of the second floor and two little rooms opening off it.
The building was locked up when he got there. Nobody stayed in it at night. As he let himself into the dark stair hall the thought flitted across his mind: Maybe I’m foolish to come here alone at night. He thrust it away. Nonsense! I’m safely locked in here. If anybody rings the bell I can look out of the window to make sure it’s the man I want to see before I go down. I’m armed, and I have the telephone. What could happen to me? And anyhow the murderer is not going to try on anything else to-night after the scare we gave him in the station!
Switching on a light in the lower hall, he climbed the old stairs with their elaborate carved balustrade, and let himself into the front office above. He switched on the lights and pulled down the blinds. Lee had installed opaque blinds on the windows because when he had to work late at night he didn’t want to advertise the fact to the street. He hung his coat and hat on a tree in the corner and switched on the telephone extension so that he could take any call that might come on his own desk.
Lee’s little private office opened off the big room at the back. It was windowless, but had its door on the corridor, so that Lee could slip out that way it there were callers in the front room that he did not care to see. This door had a spring lock; also it had a black shade drawn down over the glass so Lee’s light would not shine in the corridor. Opposite the corridor door was a third door leading to a little room corresponding to Lee’s, where Fanny carried her work when she wished to be undisturbed. This door was usually kept shut but was not locked. Lee naturally left the door between the front office and his own room open when he passed through it. He turned on a desk light and lit a cigar. On his desk, where Fanny had left them, lay the newly-arrived proofs and the typescript of his forthcoming book entitled Murder Without Reason. It included half a dozen fantastic homicide cases that he had dug up. He sat down at his desk and pushed the proofs aside while he waited for his telephone call. He had a more pressing case on his mind now.
He drew on his cigar and allowed the smoke to escape slowly. The events of the day forced him to take a new view of the matter. Up until now he had had it at the back of his mind that the murderer of Gavin Dordress was a hired killer. His recent acts suggested that he was the sole head and front of the affair; a man who worked alone; of all types of criminal the most difficult to run down. He appeared to be rendered desperate by the failure of his schemes. Either that or he was an out and out madman. Lee scowled. What could a logical mind do with a madman? A new theory began to form in his mind, but he had no evidence to support it. He glanced wistfully at the telephone. If the operative on the trail of the old typewriter had really turned up something, perhaps they could take the murderer in flank. Why didn’t the fellow call up?
It was as quiet as a burial vault in the empty house. The windows were closed and the noises from the street came in faintly. There is almost no traffic in that part of Madison Avenue after nightfall; occasionally Lee heard the purr of a taxicab and at longer intervals a motor-bus rumbled past the house. From farther away came the dull vibration of the Third Avenue El. There are no theatres or night resorts within hailing distance of respectable Murray Hill.
Suddenly a cold fear struck into Lee’s breast. He had heard no distinct sound, but a sixth sense told him that there was somebody in the front room. “Who’s there?” he said sharply. No answer came. Only a silence so intense that it seemed to breathe. He jumped up to go in, but thinking better of it, switched off the light on his desk. Instantly an unseen hand switched off the lights in the front room, plunging the whole suite in darkness. Lee inwardly cursed the black window shades then. He thrust a hand in his pocket only to remember that he had dropped his gun in his overcoat pocket when he came out into Eighth Avenue. He crouched behind his desk, sweating profusely. Fool! Fool! Fool! he thought. The eminent criminologist is nicely trapped!
When his eyes became more accustomed to the darkness, he perceived that there was a little light striking into the front room through the thick glass of the corridor door. There was no shade on this door. He had left a light burning in the entrance hall of the house, but there was no light on the landing outside his suite. The light was very faint, but sufficient to reveal anybody who might try to steal into his office from in front. Lee was very sure that the man in front could not see him.
Keeping his eye on the door his hand stole up to the French telephone on his desk, and silently lifted the instrument. The instant he put the receiver to his ear he realised that the line was dead. There was no response from the operator; the wires had been cut. Lee put the instrument back on his desk. It made a little rap on the wood, and in the front room a man softly chuckled. Lee shivered at the sound.
If the man was lying in wait for him just outside the door, there was a possibility that he could creep around through Fanny’s room and take him in the rear. He could retrieve his gun on the way. Breathing with open mouth to make no sound, he started creeping on hands and knees towards the closed door. The ten feet was like a journey of ten miles, an inch at a time, and a pause to listen. Arriving at the door, he had a still more difficult task to open it without giving warning.
It finally swung in silently, and he dropped to hands and knees again. He was familiar with the position of every object in Fanny’s little room. The door into the front room was standing open. Just outside i
t stood a hat tree. When Lee stuck his head into the front room he glimpsed against the faint light coming in from the corridor, a shadowy form crouching outside the door of his private office. On the other side of Lee hung his overcoat. He softly felt for the pockets-to find them empty. The man had been before him there. Lee retreated into Fanny’s office trembling violently. It was the man’s more than human daring that cut the ground from under his feet. Thus to brave him on Lee’s own ground!
He got a grip on himself, and started creeping back to his own office, meaning to try to escape through the door into the corridor. Suddenly the top light flared on in his room. The man had been feeling around the edge of the door for the switch. Lee snatched up a book from Fanny’s desk and flung it at the light. His aim was true; the lamp exploded, and the little room was plunged in darkness again.
Lee went in there, closing the door after him. None too soon, for the light blazed on in Fanny’s room behind him. Lee flung himself on the corridor door, but he was unable to open it. The key had been turned in the ordinary lock, and taken away. At that moment the man in Fanny’s room swung a chair and smashed the glass in the door. Lee sprang into the front room and turning about, got the corridor door open and slammed it behind him.
He heard the man coming. He realised in a flash that he could not hope to get down the hall and down the lighted stairs without receiving a bullet in his back, and he turned up the stairs. Rounding the corner, he lay down flat on the steps, holding his breath. The heavy ornamental balustrade kept any light from falling on him. The man came charging out of the front room. He had a handkerchief tied around the lower part of his face, and a gun in his hand. As he ran he drew a second gun. He paused at the head of the stairs.
Getting to his feet, Lee made a dash back into the front room. He slammed the door and, turning the key in the ordinary lock, threw it away. He heard the man coming and knew he would only have a second or two. Running obliquely across the room, he flung up the outside window of the four. At the same moment the glass of the corridor door crashed and the man put his hand in to feel for the latch. But he could not open the door; he was still held up for a few seconds.
ALM02 The Death of a Celebrity Page 18