Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories

by Beach, Rex Ellingwood

  When he finally reached The Intelligencer editorial-rooms, Burns rounded on him angrily.

  "For the love of Mike! Are you here again?" he demanded.

  "I thought you might like to have some space work—"

  "By heavens! You're persistent."

  "Yes."

  "We editors are an unfeeling lot, aren't we?" the fat young man inquired. "No temperament, no appreciation." He laughed noiselessly.

  "Give me a job," Anderson cried, his voice breaking huskily. "I'll make good. I'll do anything."

  "How long do you intend to keep bothering me?" questioned Burns.

  Anderson's cheeks were blue and the backs of his legs were trembling from weakness, but he repeated, stolidly: "Give me a job. I—I won't bother you after that. I'll make good, see if I don't."

  "You think well of yourself, don't you?"

  "If you thought half as well of me as I do," Paul assured him, "I'd be your star reporter."

  "Star hell!" testily cried the editor. "We haven't got such a thing. They don't know they're alive, except on pay-day. Look at this blond girl at the Morgue—they've wasted two weeks on that case." He paused suddenly, then his soft lips spread, showing his sharp, white teeth. Modifying his tone, he continued: "Say, I rather like you, Anderson, you're such a blamed nuisance. You've half convinced me that you're a genius."

  The younger man's hunger, which had given up in despair, raised its head and bit into his vitals sharply.

  "Maybe I—"

  "I've a notion to give you a chance."

  "That's all I want," the caller quavered, in a panic. "Just give me a toe-hold, that's all," His voice broke in spite of his effort to hold it steady. Burns wasn't a bad sort, after all; just grouchy and irritable. Perhaps this was merely his way.

  Burns continued: "Well, I will give you an assignment, a good assignment, too, and if you cover it I'll put you on permanently. I'll do more than that, I'll pay you what we pay our best man, if you make good. That's fair, isn't it?"

  He smiled benignly, and the soon-to-be reporter's wits went capering off in a hysterical stampede. Anderson felt the desire to wring the fellow's hand.

  "All that counts in this office is efficiency," the latter went on. "We play no favorites. When a man delivers the goods we boost him; when he fails we fire him. There's no sentiment here, and I hold my job merely because I'm the best man in the shop. Can you go to work to-night?"

  "Why—why—yes, sir!"

  "Very well. That's the spirit I like. You can take your time on the story, and you needn't come back till you bring it."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Now pay attention, here it is. About two weeks ago a blond girl committed suicide in a Main Street boarding-house. The body's down at the Morgue now. Find out who she is." He turned back to his desk and began to work.

  The hungry youth behind him experienced a sudden sinking at the stomach. All at once he became hopelessly empty and friendless, and he felt his knees urging him to sit down. He next became conscious that the shoulders of Mr. Burns were shaking a bit, as if he had encountered a piece of rare humor. After an instant, when Anderson made no move to go, the man at the desk wheeled about, exposing a bloated countenance purple with suppressed enjoyment.

  "What's the matter?" he giggled. "Don't you want the job? I can't tell you any more about the girl; that's all we know. The rest is up to you. You'll find out everything, won't you? Please do, for your own sake and the sake of The Intelligencer. Yes, yes, I'm sure you will, because you're a good newspaper man—you told me so yourself." His appreciation of the jest threatened to strangle him.

  "Mr. Burns," began the other, "I—I'm up against it. I guess you don't know it, but I'm hungry. I haven't eaten for three days."

  At this the editor became positively apoplectic.

  "Oh yes—yes, I do!" He nodded vigorously. "You show it in your face. That's why I went out of my way to help you. He! He! He! Now you run along and get me the girl's name and address while I finish this proof. Then come back and have supper with me at the Press Club." Again he chortled and snickered, whereupon something sullen and fierce awoke in young Anderson. He knew of a way to get food and a bed and a place to work even if it would only last thirty days, for he judged Burns was the kind of man who would yell for the police in case of an assault. Paul would have welcomed the prospect of prison fare, but he reasoned that it would be an incomplete satisfaction merely to mash the pudgy face of Mr. Burns and hear him clamor. What he wanted at this moment was a job; Burns's beating could hold over. This suicide case had baffled the pick of Buffalo's trained reporters; it had foiled the best efforts of her police; nevertheless, this fat-paunched fellow had baited a starving man by offering him the assignment. It was impossible; it was a cruel joke, and yet—there might be a chance of success. Even while he was debating the point he heard himself say:

  "Very well, Mr. Burns. If you want her name I'll get it for you."

  He crammed his hat down over his ears and walked out, leaving the astonished editor gazing after him with open mouth.

  Anderson's first impulse had been merely to get out of Burns's office, out of sight of that grinning satyr, and never to come back, but before he had reached the street he had decided that it was as well to starve striving as with folded hands. After all, the dead girl had a name.

  Instead of leaving the building, he went to the files of the paper and, turning back, uncovered the original story, which he cut out with his pen-knife, folded up, and placed in his pocket. This done, he sought the lobby of a near-by hotel, found a seat near a radiator, and proceeded to read the clipping carefully.

  It was a meager story, but it contained facts and was free from the confusion and distortions of the later accounts, which was precisely what he wished to guard against. Late one afternoon, so the story went, the girl had rented a room in a Main Street boarding-house, had eaten supper and retired. At eleven o'clock the next day, when she did not respond to a knock on her door, the room had been broken into and she had been found dead, with an empty morphine-bottle on the bureau. That was all. There were absolutely no clues to the girl's identity, for the closest scrutiny failed to discover a mark on her clothing or any personal articles which could be traced. She had possessed no luggage, save a little hand-satchel or shopping-bag containing a few coins. One fact alone stood out in the whole affair. She had paid for her room with a two-dollar Canadian bill, but this faint clue had been followed with no result. No one knew the girl; she had walked out of nowhere and had disappeared into impenetrable mystery. Those were the facts in the case, and they were sufficiently limited to baffle the best efforts of Buffalo's trained detective force.

  It would seem that there can be no human creature so obscure as to have neither relatives, friends, nor acquaintances, and yet this appeared to be the case, for a full description of this girl had been blazoned in the papers of every large city, had been exposed in countless country post-offices, and conveyed to the police of every city of the States and Canada. It was as if the mysterious occupant of the Morgue had been born of the winter wind on that fateful evening two weeks before. The country had been dragged by a net of publicity, that marvelous, fine-meshed fabric from which no living man is small or shrewd enough to escape, and still the sad, white face at the Morgue continued to smile out from its halo of gold as if in gentle mockery.

  For a long time Paul Anderson sat staring into the realms of speculation, his lips white with hunger, his cheeks hollow and feverish from the battle he had waged. His power of exclusion was strong, therefore he lost himself to his surroundings. Finally, however, he roused himself from his abstraction and realized the irony of this situation. He, the weakest, the most inexperienced of all the men who had tried, had been set to solve this mystery, and starvation was to be the fruit of his failure.

  He saw that it had begun to snow outside. In the lobby it was warm and bright and vivid with jostling life; the music of a stringed orchestra somewhere back of him was calling well-dresse
d men and women in to dinner. All of them seemed happy, hopeful, purposeful. He noted, furthermore, that three days without food makes a man cold, even in a warm place, and light-headed, too. The north wind had bitten him cruelly as he crossed the street, and now as he peered out of the plate-glass windows the night seemed to hold other lurking horrors besides. His want was like a burden, and he shuddered weakly, hesitating to venture out where the wind could harry him. It was a great temptation to remain here where there was warmth and laughter and life; nevertheless, he rose and slunk shivering out into the darkness, then laid a course toward the Morgue.

  While Anderson trod the snowy streets a slack-jowled editor sat at supper with some friends at the Press Club, eating and drinking heartily, as is the custom of newspaper men let down for a moment from the strain of their work. He had told a story, and his caustic way of telling it had amused his hearers, for each and every one of them remembered the shabby applicant for work, and all of them had wasted baffling hours on the mystery of this girl with the golden hair.

  "I guess I put a crimp in him," giggled Mr. Burns. "I gave him a chance to show those talents he recommends so highly."

  "The Morgue, on a night like this, is a pretty dismal place for a hungry man," said one of the others. "It's none too cheerful in the daytime."

  The others agreed, and Burns wabbled anew in his chair in appreciation of his humor.

  Young Anderson had never seen a morgue, and to-night, owing to his condition, his dread of it was child-like. It seemed as if this particular charnel-house harbored some grisly thing which stood between him and food and warmth and hope; the nearer he drew to it the greater grew his dread. A discourteous man, shrunken as if from the chill of the place, was hunched up in front of a glowing stove. He greeted Anderson sourly:

  "Out into that courtyard; turn to the left—second door," he directed.

  "She's in the third compartment."

  Anderson lacked courage to ask the fellow to come along, but stumbled out into a snow-filled areaway lighted by a swinging incandescent which danced to the swirling eddies.

  Compartment! He supposed bodies were kept upon slabs or tables, or something like that. He had steeled himself to see rows of unspeakable sights, played upon by dripping water, but he found nothing of the sort.

  The second door opened into a room which he discovered was colder than the night outside, evidently the result of artificial refrigeration. He was relieved to find the place utterly bare except for a sort of car or truck which ran around the room on a track beneath a row of square doors. These doors evidently opened into the compartments alluded to by the keeper.

  Which compartment had the fellow said? Paul abruptly discovered that he was rattled, terribly rattled, and he turned back out of the place. He paused shortly, however, and took hold of himself.

  "Now, now!" he said, aloud. "You're a bum reporter, my boy." An instant later he forced himself to jerk open the first door at his hand.

  For what seemed a full minute he stared into the cavern, as if petrified, then he closed the door softly. Sweat had started from his every pore. Alone once more in the great room, he stood shivering. "God!" he muttered. This was newspaper training indeed.

  He remembered now having read, several days before, about an Italian laborer who had been crushed by a falling column. To one unaccustomed to death in any form that object, head-on in the obscurity of the compartment, had been a trying sight. He began to wonder if it were really cold or stiflingly hot.

  The boy ground his teeth and flung open the next door, slamming it hurriedly again to blot out what it exposed. Why didn't they keep them covered? Why didn't they show a card outside? Must he examine every grisly corpse upon the premises?

  He stepped to the third door and wrenched it open. He knew the girl at once by her wealth of yellow hair and the beauty of her still, white face. There was no horror here, no ghastly sight to weaken a man's muscles and sicken his stomach; only a tired girl asleep. Anderson felt a great pity as he wheeled the truck opposite the door and reverently drew out the slab on which the body lay. He gazed upon her intently for some time. She was not at all as he had pictured her, and yet there could be no mistake. He took the printed description from his pocket and reread it carefully, comparing it point by point. When he had finished he found that it was a composite word photograph, vaguely like and yet totally unlike the person it was intended to portray, and so lacking in character that no one knowing the original intimately would have been likely to recognize her from it.

  So that was why no word had come in answer to all this newspaper publicity. After all, this case might not be so difficult as it had seemed; for the first time the dispirited youth felt a faint glow of encouragement. He began to formulate a plan.

  Hurriedly he fumbled for his note-book, and there, in that house of death, with his paper propped against the wall, he wrote a two-hundred-word description; a description so photographically exact that to this day it is preserved in the Buffalo police archives as a perfect model.

  He replaced the body in its resting-place and went out. There was no chill in him now, no stumbling nor weakness of any sort. He had found a starting-point, had uncovered what all those trained newspaper men had missed, and he felt that he had a chance to win.

  Twenty minutes later Burns, who had just come in from supper, turned back from his desk with annoyance and challenge in his little, narrow eyes.

  "Well?"

  "I think I've got her, Mr. Burns."

  "Nonsense!"

  "Anyhow, I've got a description that her father or her mother or her friends can recognize. The one you and the other papers printed disguised her so that nobody could tell who she was—it might have covered a hundred girls."

  Rapidly, and without noting the editor's growing impatience, Paul read the two descriptions, then ran on, breathlessly:

  "All we have to do is print ten or twenty thousand of these and mail them out with the morning edition—separate sheets, posters, you understand?—so they can be nailed up in every post-office within two hundred miles. Send some to the police of all the cities, and we'll have a flash in twenty-four hours."

  Burns made no comment for a moment. Instead, he looked the young man over angrily from his eager face to his unblacked shoes. His silence, his stare, were eloquent.

  "Why? Why not?" Anderson demanded, querulously. "I tell you this description isn't right. It—it's nothing like her, nothing at all."

  "Say! I thought I'd seen the last of you," growled the corpulent man.

  "Aren't you on to yourself yet?"

  "Do you—mean that your talk this evening don't go?" Paul demanded, quietly. "Do you mean to say you won't even give me the chance you promised?"

  "No! I don't mean that. What I said goes, all right, but I told you to identify this girl. I didn't agree to do it. What d'you think this paper is, anyhow? We want stories in this office. We don't care who or what this girl is unless there's a story in her. We're not running a job-print shop nor a mail-order business to identify strayed females. Twenty thousand posters! Bah! And say—don't you know that no two men can write similar descriptions of anybody or anything? What's the difference whether her hair is burnished gold or 'raw gold' or her eyes bluish gray instead of grayish blue? Rats! Beat it!"

  "But I tell you—"

  "What's her name? Where does she live? What killed her? That's what I want to know. I'd look fine, wouldn't I, circularizing a dead story? Wouldn't that be a laugh on me? No, Mr. Anderson, author, artist, and playwright, I'm getting damned tired of being pestered by you, and you needn't come back here until you bring the goods. Do I make myself plain?"

  It was anger which cut short the younger man's reply. On account of petty economy, for fear of ridicule, this editor refused to relieve some withered old woman, some bent and worried old man, who might be, who probably were, waiting, waiting, waiting in some out-of-the-way village. So Anderson reflected. Because there might not be a story in it this girl would go to the Pott
er's Field and her people would never know. And yet, by Heaven, they would know! Something told him there was a story back of this girl's death, and he swore to get it. With a mighty effort he swallowed his chagrin and, disregarding the insult to himself, replied:

  "Very well. I've got you this time."

  "Humph!" Burns grunted, viciously.

  "I don't know how I'll turn the trick, but I'll turn it." For the second time that evening he left the office with his jaws set stubbornly.

  Paul Anderson walked straight to his boarding-house and bearded his landlady. "I've got a job," said he.

  "I'm very glad," the lady told him, honestly enough. "I feared you were going to move out."

  "Yes!" he repeated. "I've got a job that carries the highest salary on the paper. You remember the yellow-haired girl who killed herself awhile ago?" he asked.

  "Indeed I do. Everybody knows about that case."

  "Well, it got too tough for the police and the other reporters, so they turned it over to me. It's a bully assignment, and my pay starts when I solve the mystery. Now I'm starved; I wish you'd rustle me some grub."

  "But, Mr. Anderson, you're bill for this week? You know I get paid in—"

  "Tut, tut! You know how newspapers are. They don't pay in advance, and

  I can't pay you until they pay me. You'll probably have to wait until

  Saturday, for I'm a little out of practice on detective stuff. But

  I'll have this thing cleared up by then. You don't appreciate—you

  can't appreciate—what a corking assignment it is."

  Anderson had a peculiarly engaging smile, and five minutes later he was wrecking the pantry of all the edibles his fellow-boarders had overlooked, the while his landlady told him her life's history, wept over the memory of her departed husband, and confessed that she hoped to get out of the boarding-house business some time.

  A good night's sleep and a hearty breakfast put the young man in fine fettle, and about ten o'clock he repaired to a certain rooming-house on Main Street, the number of which he obtained from the clipping in his pocket.