by Joan Sanger
He had voiced precisely what everyone present was feeling. You could see it in the lessening tension at the table. The whole thing was too monstrous and absurd. I began to feel a dim regret for my own haphazard association in the muddle. After all, just where did Pete get off to....?
But Alcott’s jaw was set. “Perhaps you’d better take me seriously, Judge Lamar.”
The judge’s face darkened with good old-fashioned wrath.
“And can you tell us why, if Mr. Wyndham was aware of all this, he should have neglected to bring these facts to light at once. There’s young Ford over there who would have snapped at them. Wouldn’t you Hughie?”
“Quite true,” Alcott interrupted in a low voice, never even giving Ford a chance to answer, “but suppose Wyndham had no time to do so. Suppose he learned those facts only on the afternoon of his last appearance?”
Again the Judge laughed, the cool, easy laugh of one who feels himself as impregnable as Gibralter. I thought his bearing was superb; I was wishing I might borrow a little of it when I came to facing Gerraghty as I knew I would be doing in the not too distant future.
“I presume Mr. Meenan and I took a few drinks too many, and with the fumes of liquor still in our heads decided to take Stephen Wyndham into our confidence. Well, you can tell it to the Jury, young man. I’m through.” Judge Lamar turned aside in obvious disgust.
“Not that story exactly!” Alcott persisted in his tense, low tone. “But I’ll tell one that is equally strange.” He took from his pocket a cablegram which he laid down coolly on the table. “This cable is the answer to your boast that I talk nonsense when I say that George Meenan was quietly murdered in his New York apartment. As for the rest....” He paused and I noticed his eyes fixed Lamar with a cold, steady look. “Men are often overheard in the lockers of their Golf Clubs, Judge Lamar. And when they think themselves alone they are sometimes, perchance, a trifle indiscreet.”
Judge Lamar eyed Alcott sharply.
Pete was standing tall and erect at the moment. A strange light gleamed in his eye. In the fitful shadows of that hotel-room he looked curiously impressive and awesome, like some self-appointed instrument of wrath.
“You’ll have a hard time proving that to a court,” Lamar said with sudden asperity.
Very quietly, I saw Alcott lean across the table toward him.
“Do you really think so?” he said in a queer voice, looking the Judge straight in the eye. An odd smile played over his lips, but there was no answering smile in his cold, clear blue eyes.
Suddenly Lamar drew back. The cold imprint of terror was on his face. “Good God ..!” he ejaculated slowly. In a flash, his hand shot out and grasped the narrow gleaming stiletto which still lay where Alcott had tossed it down before him. In another instant he had thrown his compact weight against the table, knocking it, and along with it our cards, our cash, our candle to the floor in another pandemonium of darkness.
I shall never forget those ensuing minutes. Somewhere near me, I heard the two men wrestling in deadly earnest. Panting, lunging, scraping, falling, rearing, clutching, scuffling, gasping. Bodies interlocked, knocking over furniture, curses, cuffs, the stench of sweat and fresh blood. Two desperate men battling for dear life. Why? Wherefore? It was beyond me.
I tried to throw my weight between them. Instead, I knocked over Ford, I think. And instantly two other men hurled themselves upon us, thinking our quarrel was the deadly one, I suppose. It was all a mess. Chairs overturning, doors opening, calls of police from the outside, the hammering of their clubs upon the door, then as they came in the welcome white flash of their searchlights probing, here and there, everywhere through the darkness. There was a moment’s blank silence. Then all at once, we realized in surprise there was no sign of Judge Lamar or Pete Alcott.
“Good God! ... where have they gone?”
Someone jabbed his finger toward the still open door that led to the room that had once been Ford’s. I remembered in dismay that Alcott had failed to shut that door during his graphic reconstruction of the crime.
Now, through it, we crowded pell mell, like a herd of stampeding cattle. Again the police lights pierced the blackness, their beams stabbing at the walls, the floor, the ceilings. But they revealed only emptiness, complete and undisturbed.
We stared at each other like fools. We gazed about us like lunatics. The hall door stood open. “Try the corridor!” “The baths!” “The other room!”
We rushed here and there about the suite like a pack of maniacs. Then from somewhere, outside in the hallway, came the short agonized cry of a man in pain.
I think I’ll never forget that particular cry. To the end of my days, it will come back to disturb the quiet of campfires, and the peace of lonely grey dawns. It was a sound that stopped the heart. It curdled the blood. In its tone was peril and darkness and need.
But where? Where? We looked everywhere for that cry. We pounded doors. We searched passageways. To me, that quest seemed to last not for minutes, but weeks, months, years, through all eternity. Yes, through worlds without end. It was maddening.
Then suddenly, Miguel struck the right scent. The large storeroom across the corridor from Ford’s room! He had left the door wide open when he had gone to get the candle for me. Now the door was locked. He tried his passkey, to no avail. The cupboard key was obviously on the inside. At a word from the police captain, Miguel and the aide began removing the door from its hinges. And so at length, under the harsh glare of police lights, we found ourselves gazing down on the prostrate, unconscious form of Judge Sanfred Lamar. And I turned aside.
For the face of Lynn’s uncle looked gruesome and terrible. Not like one who had died and gone simply to Hell, but rather like one who had reached its nethermost rung before death had ever intervened. The right hand, stained with blood, was clutched tightly against his heart. His left still lay clenched as though in pain.
The Captain bent forward and examined the body more closely. He spoke quickly, in Spanish, to his companion. In another instant, they were prying Lamar’s blood-stained fingers loose from their grasp and revealing, to our amazed eyes, the handle of the little stiletto where he had thrust it into his flesh.
And still I couldn’t grasp it. Lamar who had so calmly and defiantly accepted every situation? Lamar at the end of the strength? Lamar plunged into that abyss of stark desperation where man and his reason are together overthrown?
I heard the police captain saying in English:
“From the position of the Señor’s hand, and the direction of that knife in the body, it would appear a clear case of suicide.”
The scratching of a pencil. The police aide was making notations.
“Also that store-room door—locked on the inside.”
But the evidence was obvious.
“Now gentlemen, what can you tell us?”
A babble of ready tongues. And still the essential fact took an endless time crawling through my brain. Suicide! Lynn’s uncle!
I saw someone pick up Alcott’s discarded cable-gram and read it aloud. The words sounded a mile off.
PETER ALCOTT
HAVANA POST
HAVANA.
M’S BODY EXHUMED BY COURT ORDER YESTERDAY STOP MEDICAL EXAMINATION SHOWS DISTINCT TRACES OF POISON IN STOMACH STOP INVESTIGATION KEPT QUIET FOR PRESENT STOP so THERE WAS SOMETHING ROTTEN IN DENMARK
BILLY
How the chain of Lamar’s evil-doing clanked even at the moment of his death.
Then someone was saying, “Where’s the other fellow?”
The police captain nodded. “Si! Si! That would be well.”
He gave orders to his aide to make a thorough search for Alcott. Everyone joined in that quest. That is, everyone except Ford, who, after satisfying the Captain’s questions, excused himself abruptly on some airy pretext of an appointment.
That hunt was thorough. The lights were on by now and we looked everywhere for my missing friend. Literally, high and low.
At last we fou
nd a night watchman who told us that a man following Pete’s description had passed out the rear door sometime earlier. Dimly, as one in a dream, I perceived that Alcott must have taken his departure immediately following Lamar’s suicide, before we had ever reached the store-room door or the service stairs.
The police captain shrugged temperamentally. “Ah, well ... we need little more for our record than that locked door and a few of these gentlemen.”
Yes, all very well for the police to be philosophical. But where, and why the devil had Pete gone?
Chapter XXVII THE REAL BLOW
I SETTLED my account at the hotel desk, sent a cursory statement of Lamar’s suicide back to Tim Gerraghty as a sort of peace offering, and left the Sevilla Biltmore in a kind of daze. As I swung down the Paseo de Marti, I asked myself a dozen times if I had by chance dreamed the whole series of events. It was not simply that the facts had developed so differently from what I’d expected. As a newspaperman I was used to surprises. But this!
An intolerable sense of fatigue weighed me down, a dull heavy feeling under the influence of which I forgot all the horror, consternation and gloom I’d felt for Lamar’s end; I forgot the ripping story Alcott and I had at last succeeded in landing; I forgot everything except a deep regret that our coup should have ended by bringing this tragedy to Lynn’s door.
I was aware I must see Lynn without delay. I knew it was up to me to do what little I could to take the edge off this blow for her. With that thought in mind, I pushed along the street, looking about for a cab.
The night was damp and torrid. The moon on the gulf in the distance seemed sinking beneath its own weight of silver. Mournfully my footsteps re-echoed through the silent streets. But of all this I was aware only as one in a dream. The sad rhythm of my thoughts held me. Lynn! What was I going to tell her? The only decent part of the rotten mess was that Lamar had had the decency to stick a knife into himself.
“Your uncle Fred ... not quite what we’ve thought him ... that Wyndham mess of last year.... Something to do with those Schmidt racketeers.... Anything in the world that I can do.... Darling, please don’t worry.”
But I knew she was too clever not to. In an instant she’d see the whole baleful cataclysm of scandal that would be let loose. And that I should have had a hand in plunging her into this crucible of trouble. That was the thought that stuck and pinched and tormented me.
In desperation I tried to occupy my thoughts. Mechanically, I counted the masts of the fishing boats which I could see in the harbor. I counted lamp posts. I watched my shadow shorten abruptly, then lengthen to monstrous size as I passed each successive street lamp. But none of this soothed or lulled me. Lynn! Lynn! Damn my luck! Fate plays us scurvy tricks now and then!
At length I succeeded in finding a taxi. I gave the sleepy driver the number of Lamar’s residence. “Drive like hell,” I said to him. Now that the moment was at hand, I wanted to get it over with as swiftly as possible.
The moon had disappeared by the time we turned up the now familiar Vedado driveway. In front of me, the Lamar house loomed dark and silent! Paying the driver off, I sprang across to the entrance and rang the bell.
After what seemed an interminable time the door was opened by a sleepy butler, his white uniform only half buttoned over his still protruding night shirt.
“I would like to see Miss Lynn Dawson at once.”
He looked at me in surprise and rubbed his eyes.
“Miss Dawson!” I repeated more sharply. “It’s very important. You’ll have to wake her.”
“But she’s gone, Señor!” he said stupidly.
“Gone where?”
“I don’t know. She go away yesterday morning. She do not say where.”
“Oh, that’s impossible,” I said foolishly.
But the fellow was obdurate.
“Yes, Señor. She come down sudden with all her baggage. She tell me to call a cab. That is all I know, Señor.”
“Was anyone ill?”
The man shook his head. It was obvious he was as much at sea as I.
In sudden desperation I asked him to get me a drink. I felt in bad need of one.
And while he fumbled with the decanters and glasses, I walked to the mantel and pressed my forehead against its cool marble surface. “Think, old boy,” I said patronizingly to myself. “It’s the best thing you can do now!”
But my head refused to work. The past weary days were too much with me. Instead, I stared stupidly before me.
How long I’d been staring thus I hardly know. But suddenly I was aware of an envelope at the other end of the mantel. At first it seemed more of a phantom than a reality. “Mr. John D. Ellis.” Then I recognized the handwriting as Lynn’s.
“You didn’t mention a letter!” I said brusquely, as the fellow crossed to me, a tray with a glass and Bacardi in his outstretched hand.
“Miss Dawson say I should deliver it to the gentleman in the morning.”
“Well, I’ll take it now.”
The fellow watched me with sudden interest.
I tore the note open.
Johnny dear,
This is goodbye! Something’s come up unexpectedly. Perhaps we stayed out dancing too long last night—but anyhow, those hours were wonderful and I’ll think back on them many times, I know.
As to what came later, I can say nothing. Only Johnny, believe me, it’s a ghastly mess.
I’m getting away, as quickly and as far as I can.
The chances are we won’t meet again, at any rate not for a long, long time. Think of me kindly once in a while.
Lynn
So this was the end. I gulped down my Bacardi in a wave of pity for myself, for Lynn, for half the mad world.
But mostly for Lynn, poor girl!
That she had suspected her uncle’s guilt I could plainly see. But how? Could it have been that she found the clue in that well-thumbed volume of Macchiavelli’s Prince that I’d remarked on just yesterday? I wondered. Could it have been that she had come upon her uncle the night before stealing back into the house after his miserable attempt upon Watts, his manner as suave as ever, his smile as broad, his still warm revolver concealed in his pocket?
Well. God alone knew, though maybe Alcott would have another good hunch. Yes, Peter Alcott, of course! He had enough to explain to me anyhow. I poured myself another glass of Bacardi and sick at heart, I turned out into the night to find him.
Chapter XXVIII EXIT—A SLEUTH
I TRAMPED back to my hotel through the sultry night. I’d hoped exercise and exhausting fatigue would lay the ghost of the night’s tragedy. But to my dismay, I found ghosts aren’t shaken so readily. Step by step, Lamar and Lynn stuck to me, haunting, mocking or wistful. There was no eluding them. After a while, heavy-hearted and weary, I gave up the attempt. I grew used to my strange companions; Lynn, I decided I’d keep by me always, as a lone sentimental indulgence. As for Lamar?
The tangled facts were slowly taking form. Realistic and clear headed again, I knew we had the scoop of a life time. The newspaperman in me was boiling up, spilling over. Well, we’d covered our story and we’d covered it goddamn right. And what a story! An outstanding Judge with a life enmeshed in crooked underworld dealings! The wanton sacrifice of one of America’s young sporting idols! The murder of a backstage political boss! The stern but visible justice of Lamar’s end. And over and behind it all the long shadow of the Schmidt corruption. The dark menace of the racketeer in our very courts. There’d be a hullaballoo. It made me almost homesick for the old news factory. I could hear Gerraghty barking out orders. “Tear out the front page! Something big!” I could see the banner headlines and the rumpus. And to think the old Globe would break with the story and break exclusively. Jesus, I could almost sniff the clean inky smell of that first edition.
And still there were questions, dozens of them that kept rearing their heads, demanding notice. A mass of things, churning in my consciousness, driving me forward with wild impatience.
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nbsp; By the time I reached our tumble-down hotel I’d come to the pitch where I wanted nothing so much in the world as the sight of Alcott’s battered old mug, and the sound of him saying, “Y’know, I just had a hunch ...!” And the second thing I wanted was a clear open wire to the New York Globe. My spirit seemed bottled within me. I cleared the garden in a half dozen strides, hastened irresistibly by the streak of yellow light I saw shining from under the drawn shade of our room. I pushed at the door, but it did not give. Then in what for me was an unparalleled surge of decent feeling, I remembered that Alcott hadn’t slept for a couple of days himself, and taking my key from my pocket, I unlocked the door as quietly as I could and tiptoed into the room.
But I could have saved myself the trouble. There was no prone figure of Alcott snoring peacefully in his bed. There was no sound of Alcott splashing contentedly in his bath. In fact, there was no evidence of Alcott anywhere at all. Somewhat taken back, ridiculously disappointed, I stared around me.
The room was in wild disorder. Bureau drawers stood open. The closet door yawned cavernous and wide. In the upset, I recognized a few of my own things strewn casually over the floor and the furniture. Mentally I swore at Pete for his cheerful impudence.
Then suddenly something struck me with peculiar force, riveting my attention, shaking me out of all minor annoyance. It was the absence of Pete’s shaving set from its accustomed place on the bureau. Good Lord! And his grip from where it used to stand under the bed. I dashed to the closet and stared in. Gone were the now familiar, but still hideous orange pajamas. Gone the array of cheap haberdashery and worse suits and shirts. I yanked out bureau drawers, I peered into the bath. Gone was every shoe, every sock, every sign, every vestige of Peter Alcott.
Dazed and unbelieving. I sat down by the side of the bed. This was the last straw. Confronted by the final riddle of this abandoned room my spirits sank, bedraggled, exhausted. On the table nearby my old black memo book caught my eye, a doleful reminder of more sanguine hours. Dully I wondered how the blamed thing ever got there and then I realized that in the day’s mad rush I had forgotten to put it into my pocket. Now it seemed, along with myself, a sad relic of all this insane adventure.