“Very likely, I should say. Here’s the situation in a nutshell, and you must carry instructions to Ashenhurst. Jordan is the man—Bert Jordan. I’m convinced of that. That is, he’s the fugitive statue! With the aid of a theatrical friend of mine, I ran down the ‘family’; and the fact is, Bert’s missing! I let it be known that I wanted to hire the whole outfit for a street carnival in Aurora, and said I wanted them all to leave town tonight. Couldn’t be done; they couldn’t locate Bert! Tomorrow night, maybe—they weren’t sure. I think they were sore at Bert, for they wanted the engagement; and I think they don’t know just what he’s up to. I said I’d see them again tomorrow.
“Well, Bert will run tonight, as usual, at midnight; that’s a certainty. That’s where Ashenhurst comes in. I’ll see him before he starts, but you must prepare him. The minute he sees Jordan coming, he is to leave the room, run downstairs after him, and follow him down the street. I think Jordan will give battle, and Ashenhurst must be prepared to defend himself. Jordan may be very ugly. Anyway, there’ll be a couple of plain-clothes men hidden away nearby, and at the proper moment they’ll nab Jordan. If possible, though, I want to know where he goes, for I think he turns in some place in the block, as you once suggested.”
“Where will you be all this time?” I pertinently asked, for by now it was obvious that Lavender’s role was to be cast elsewhere.
“I’ll be in Ashenhurst’s rooms, and so will you. You go to Ashenhurst now, with my instructions. Get into the house quietly; it may be watched. We’ve worked so quickly, though, that I think we have aroused no suspicion. I’ll follow you in a little while, and I, too, must get in without being seen. I could tell you all this later, I suppose; but it may be close to midnight before I can risk entering the house.”
“One question, Jimmie,” I said. “Why is Ashenhurst to run out while we stay behind in the room?”
“Well,” smiled Lavender grimly, “I want it to be supposed that when Ashenhurst runs out, his room is empty.”
“Oh!” I said, suddenly enlightened. “The principal—”
“Is the man I want. Exactly!”
“I see—I think I do! Then the statue—Jordan—was to attract attention?”
“Quite so, and to draw Ashenhurst from his room. That was the ultimate design. It might never have worked, or it might have worked wrong—as it did, by Jove!—but that was the plan. If it had failed, I suppose some other plan would have been worked out.”
“And what is in Ashenhurst’s room?”
“Hanged if I know,” said Lavender. “Whatever it is, somebody wants it pretty badly, don’t you think? And I know, at last, who Mr. Somebody is. I’ll introduce you to him in a little while. Now hurry along, and don’t be seen entering the house. And not a sound, after you have entered, from either of you!”
Well, the affair was getting warm! And something told me that we were all in for a lively evening.
I left the park in leisurely fashion, and plunged into the inky depths of Cambridge Court. Not a soul was in the block as far as could be seen. The trio of sickly street lamps, long distances apart, blinked sadly in the blackness. I passed the first one hastily; the next was in the center of the block opposite Ashenhurst’s room, but on the far side of the street. I approached cautiously, but without ostentatious secrecy, and quietly climbed the stairs of the objective dwelling. The door was unlocked, and I entered without ceremony, climbing stairs again to Ashenhurst’s room so softly that when I had closed his door behind me the student had his first knowledge of my approach.
The room, as usual, was in darkness save for the blaze of light from the electric lamp upon the table. This gleamed on one wall, and was faintly reflected on the window; but the corners of the room were black. I motioned Ashenhurst to silence, and whispered his instructions. He nodded understandingly—relieved, I think, that shortly the whole matter would be ended. A glance at the clock showed three hours before midnight, and another intolerable wait was before us.
At ten o’clock, Ashenhurst snapped off his light at the switch, and the remainder of the vigil was kept in darkness. At eleven, the door creaked gently, and through the blackness Jimmie Lavender came to our side.
“All well,” he whispered. “Our men are placed, and there ought to be no hitch. You understand your part, Ashenhurst?”
“Every comma,” said the long student, in the same tone, “except this damned silence, Mr. Lavender. It gets on my nerves.”
“Sorry,” Lavender whispered back, “but it can’t be helped. The danger is from within the house. I thought you had guessed that. You may smoke if you like.”
We felt better when we had all lighted cigars. The room seemed less black, the silence less profound. So another hour passed away and midnight was upon us.
“Ready!” murmured Lavender. “Stand by the window, Ashenhurst; let yourself be seen. When he passes, rush for the door, with some noise, and downstairs after him. Don’t upset the neighborhood, but don’t be afraid of a little noise. I want it perfectly evident that you are leaving the house.”
Ashenhurst followed instructions without an error. The stone faun held no terror for any of us now, and the patter of racing feet in the outside darkness only told us that the moment for action had come. Ashenhurst, leaning far out of the window, cried out once as the white figure shot past, then jumped for the door and pelted down the stairs in the darkness. I moved toward the window, but Lavender’s hand restrained me.
“Careful!” he sharply whispered. “The trouble begins now—and I don’t know where it will come from!”
Almost as he spoke, there sounded beyond the door a light thudding of feet; then the door creaked and swung inward and a long beam of white light cut a rib-bony path across the carpet. It was followed by the dark figure of a man, holding an electric torch, who, with a swift lithe bound, sprang to a corner of the room and stooped to the boards. It had all happened so quickly that for a moment I was breathless; then as I was about to spring upon the intruder, Lavender’s restraining hand again fell upon my arm. There followed a moment of tense and painful silence, then a crackling sound as of splintering wood, and the heavy breathing of the man in the corner. He was working furiously in the patch of light thrown by his torch, and once, as he half-turned, the gleam fell across a hard, seamed face and an eye that glittered like that of a madman. Save for his asthmatic breathing, and the occasional crackling of wood, the room was heavy with silence.
Our time had come. Lavender’s hand was taken from my arm. Then his voice, swift and hard, and icy as a mountain stream, cut through the chamber.
“Hands up, Wilcox! Quick!” And to me, “Lights, Gilly!”
But as I sprang for the electric lamp, the intruder, ignoring the command and the leveled revolver which he knew lay back of it, flung himself forward in the darkness in the direction of Lavender’s voice. Instantly, I, too, jumped into action, and more by luck than design, blundered at once into the man called Wilcox. In an instant the fight of my life was on.
We met with a shock that was terrific, and clung like tigers. The fellow had a grasp like an animal; against it my own proved powerless. A chair crashed over, and we began to whirl. We whirled until I thought my wits were deserting me. Up and down the room we thrashed, colliding with everything, unmindful of bumps and bruises; and all without a sound from either of us. Inextricably mixed as we were, Lavender could do nothing but encourage me with his voice. My hands tried desperately to work themselves upward to the throat of the man who was crushing me, but I was a child in his grasp. The constant pressure and the wild, whirling waltz had stolen my breath. I felt myself slipping—giving.
At that instant, Lavender, who had discovered the lights, out at the switch, flooded the room with light from every bulb; and at the same instant we crashed into the center table. The impact broke my opponent’s grasp; he sprang back, then leaped for the door. Two seconds later the fight was over, and the man called Wilcox was helpless on the floor. Lavender, cool and collected, ha
d greeted the fellow’s spring with a straight right, shot forward with all the force of the trained back and loins that lay behind it. The blow was terrific, and the man dropped as if he had been pole-axed.
Lavender stooped and studied the hard face for a moment, almost with pity. Then I heard the clink of handcuffs, and with a little shrug my friend rose to his feet.
“Bernard Wilcox,” he said laconically. “Paroled convict—used to occupy this room. Planted his loot here and went to jail. Came back for it tonight.”
He added with a grin, “R. I. P.” Then lighted a cigar and dropped into a chair to await the coming of Ashenhurst.
V
Twenty minutes later, Mr. Oakley Ashenhurst, wearing a highly decorative black eye and a wide smile, tramped upstairs at the head of an extraordinary procession. After him there entered the room two husky detectives, half-carrying between them what had once been the celebrated Bert Jordan of the “Famous Jordan Family,” and behind them stalked a tall, uniformed officer in whom I recognized Captain D’Arcy of the Lincoln Park station. Bringing up the rear was a motley of half-gowned, bathrobed citizens and citizenesses, among whom were the shrinking figures of old Mr. and Mrs. Harden and the two other roomers, elderly women with their hair in curl-papers. It was a sight to move the gods to laughter, and Lavender and I, being essentially human, lay back and laughed. D’Arcy, too, wore a broad grin.
“Got him, I see,” said the police captain, with a nod to the prostrate Wilcox. He stooped over the man on the floor. “Yep, it’s Wilcox!”
Bernard Wilcox, who had recovered his senses, glowered back with evil eyes.
“And you, I see, have Jordan,” said Lavender pleasantly. “The others, I suppose, escaped?”
“Yes,” answered D’Arcy with a frown. “Big auto all ready to pick up Jordan, over in the next block. He had to run through a passage to get to it, and they may have seen us nail Jordan in the passage; I don’t know. Anyway, all we saw when we got over there was a trail of dust and sound.”
“Unimportant,” said Lavender, “although you’ll probably get them through Jordan. Our statue doesn’t seem as lively a cricket as he was a little while ago.”
All eyes were turned back to the amazing figure of Bert Jordan of the “Famous Jordan Family.” He was an astonishing spectacle. From neck to ankle he was encased in dull white fleshings, above which his white, painted face, like that of a clown, now registered profound depression. His hair, elaborately whitened and held in place by a white net, had been curled in neat horns on his brow and temples, but at the moment it was much disordered. On his feet were white gloves of the sort worn by fashionable bathers in the sands of expensive bathing beaches. But the celebrated Bert Jordan had lost much of his “white” in his tussle with Ashenhurst and the police, and he now presented a very lugubrious appearance. I felt sorry for the fellow, and I think Lavender did, too.
“Want to talk, Jordan?” inquired Lavender. “Might as well, you know.”
Jordan grinned sheepishly. “Sure, I’ll talk,” he said, “What d’ya want to know?”
“What did you soak Mr. Ashenhurst for?”
“Dough!” replied Mr. Jordan promptly. “Plenty of dough!”
“So I should imagine. Mr. Wilcox foot the bill?”
“Whatever his name is,” said Jordan.
“He’s a liar!” asserted Wilcox, from the floor, with a string of oaths.
“Well, I’ll talk,” said Lavender. “I’m not a liar. There are some things I want to know. You were out of a job, Jordan, and you met this fellow Wilcox. He offered you a job. Good money in it. You fell for it. But how did you happen to run across Wilcox?”
“Met him in the park up here, one day—near that damn fountain!”
“I see! Of course, that would do it. I ought to have thought of that. Did you know Wilcox before that?”
“He used to be in a circus where I was,” said Jordan, “but his name wasn’t Wilcox then. It was Brown.”
“You’re a liar!” declared Wilcox savagely.
“Hm-m!” grunted Lavender, “That pretty nearly tells me all I need to know. The statue, of course, suggested this crazy scheme to get Ashenhurst out of his room some night. Wilcox knew you were in the statue line, as it were, and so was born the great idea. He suggested it, of course?”
“Sure,” said Jordan. “He said he wanted to get some guy’s goat, and when the guy ran out at me, I was to beat him up, toss him into the auto and take him off somewhere overnight.”
“You had no objections, I suppose?”
“Well,” hedged the circus performer, “I was pretty broke, and I needed the dough. But I didn’t like his dam fool scheme. I told him I’d go up and drag the guy out, if he wanted me to; or throw stones at his window until he chased me. I didn’t want to dress up. It seemed kinda foolish to me.”
“Quite right,” smiled Lavender. “And what do you think of Wilcox—or Brown—now, Mr. Jordan?”
Jordan looked suddenly significant. He turned his eyes on the recumbent Wilcox, almost stealthily. Then he looked at the police captain, and finally back at Lavender. After these elaborate preparations, he raised his forefinger and touched his temple, where a white curl now hung limply.
“I think he’s coo-coo!” he said.
“Excellent,” said Lavender. “So do I! I think, Captain, we shall have to make things as easy as possible for Mr. Jordan, who is, after all, only an erring person of temperament. If your men will remove both of these gentlemen now, we’ll let these good folks go to bed, and I’ll have a chat with you about this case.”
When the prisoners had been removed, and the oaths of Bernard Wilcox had died away in the distance, Lavender resumed his tale.
“Jordan is perfectly right, of course,” he said. “Wilcox is a bit touched. Nobody but a lunatic would have suggested such a scheme to get a man out of his room. The meeting with Jordan gave him the idea, no doubt; that and the proximity. of the statue.”
He turned suddenly to Mrs. Harden, whose attire now had been augmented by a huge shawl,
“Did you recognize this man Wilcox, Mrs. Harden?” he asked.
“Yes, sir, I did! He’s the man upstairs they call Pomeroy!”
“Pomeroy, eh? It had to be either Pomeroy or Peterson. I wasn’t able to see either of them, and so I couldn’t be sure. You see, Gilly, five years ago, before Mrs. Harden had this flat, this Wilcox-or Pomeroy—or Brown—or whatever his real name is-occupied the room now occupied by our friend Ashenhurst. He roomed with a very decent family named Dickson, but he himself was a clever thief. In time, he was caught and sent to Joliet for a stretch. He had planted some of his loot in this room, however; when, not long ago, he was released on parole, he came back here to get it. He couldn’t get the same room, but he was lucky enough to get a room upstairs, and there he laid his plans to get down here and recover the stuff he had planted.
“I suppose he did a lot of thinking about it, while he was tucked away down in Joliet, and after a while he became—shall we say, a bit obsessed? Once located upstairs—he had a room at the back, I believe—his problem was to get into Ashenhurst’s room some time when Ashenhurst was out. It would seem at first glance to be an easy enough problem, but as it turned out it was a hard one. For one reason and another, he couldn’t gain access, and, finally he hit upon this mad scheme to force Ashenhurst out. I saw D’Arcy today, and he was able to give me some information that fitted in with my preconceived idea of things.
“It was obvious from the first that Jordan’s amazing performance was to draw attention to himself, and after a bit it became equally obvious that he was trying to lure Ashenhurst from the house. But why? So that he, or somebody else, could get into Ashenhurst’s room. I preferred to believe it was somebody else—that Jordan was only a subordinate. This turned, out to be correct, for Jordan now has no idea what Wilcox wanted in this room. It was necessary to find a trace of somebody who for some years had been absent from society, who had occupied this room—at least,
this house. D’Arcy remembered a number of men who might answer, among them Wilcox. I looked them all up in the police records, and Wilcox was the man. Under that name he had once been known to live at this address. He had lived here at the time he was sent to Joliet. And when I learned that recently he had been paroled, the whole case was clear. I knew that Bernard Wilcox was somewhere in or near this house, and that Jordan was his agent. I’m hanged if I know whether Wilcox’s scheme to draw Ashenhurst out was a stupid one or a very clever one. Its very madness bothered me, and kept me from guessing the motive earlier than I did.”
D’Arcy, who had listened with many approving nods, now cleared his throat.
“And exactly what did Wilcox want here?” he asked. “Where is this loot, Lavender?”
Lavender rose to his feet and strode over to the corner of the room in which the convict had been at work.
“It is under this splintered board,” he said. “As you represent authority here tonight, suppose you investigate.”
The police captain was beside him at a bound. “By jigger!” he exclaimed, and fell furiously to work.
With a resounding crack the board at length came up—and neatly packed beneath it, in the narrow groove, lay little packages of bills and papers, and a bag of jewels, that cleared the mystery of a dozen unsolved robberies.
When the captain, with many eulogies and handclasps, had departed with his treasure, I turned with a broad grin to Jimmie Lavender, and found him grinning at me. The Hardens, who still remained, looked mystified, and Ashenhurst alternately puffed at his cigar and stroked his battered eye.
“There is one question, Jimmie,” I began; but he took the words away from me.
“That you don’t find an answer to! Neither do I! Gilly, and you, Ashenhurst, and you, too, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Harden—you have seen me turn over two prisoners and a young fortune to the police. You have seen me do things that no doubt appear very clever. Yes, I am a very clever young man! And from first to last there has been one thing I didn’t know, and don’t know now. It has bothered me more than any one detail I have ever encountered; and there seems to be no answer. This case is ended—the men are locked up, or will be shortly—and I know that my reasoning throughout has been accurate and justified. But I’m hanged if I’m not still bothered by that one question. Tell them what it is, Gilly!”
Adventure Tales, Volume 6 Page 3