Against such a background of cacophony and color, Mrs. Carrington, knee-deep in cats, had given the first account of her loss to Ray Schindler, who was also knee-deep in cats and under minute investigation by that father of all detectives, a monkey.
According to Mrs. Carrington, she had that morning given her jewels the thorough cleaning they required every few months. She had washed them in soap and warm water and vinegar and dipped them in alcohol, then spread them out across a towel and left them to dry on her dressing table for an hour.
She had spent that hour downstairs in dusting and straightening things. Then she returned to put her jewelry away. When she got there, the towel was bare and all her dear jewels were gone.
In a frenzy of alarm, she had telephoned her husband. He had hurried home and joined her in a vain search, then notified the police and the insurance company. Immediately an insurance executive had visited the house, but had been so baffled that he engaged Ray Schindler to investigate the evaporation of the gems.
When Ray had heard Mrs. Carrington’s story, he made the routine patrol of the house. Though many of the windows were open, they were all fitted with screens so newly painted that any attempt to force one of them open would have left an impression. Ray’s careful inspection showed that they had not been touched by any second-story worker, even if one could have ventured to climb up to the windows in broad daylight in full view of neighbors and passers-by. A woman who sat sewing at a window on the other side of the garden said she had seen nobody there.
A stroll around the gardens revealed no sign that a ladder had rested on the soft ground. So burglary was ruled out.
Next came the possibility of sneak-thievery. Rut Mrs. Carrington assured Ray that she always kept the front door bolted. She said she had opened it at nine o’clock that morning to take in some mail, and bolted it again. An hour later she had begun cleaning her jewelry.
The back door was kept locked and was furthermore under the eye of the cook, who was a good deal of middle-aged German matron in a highly bellicose mood when Ray interviewed her. The most amiable of cooks is not hospitable when her castle is invaded, and Frau Bechtel’s kitchen had been raided too often already. She had been cross-examined by the frantic Mrs. Carrington, by her suspicious husband, by the cynical police, by the more cynical insurance executive—and now by a detective, yet!
Mrs. Bechtel conceded that she had let in a grocery boy; but, when Ray asked if she had let him out of her sight, she snapped:
“You mean maybe, did I send him up the beckstairs to steal the choolery? My answer is Nein! Nein! Nein! Nobody goes the beckstairs up!”
Ray retreated in good order and began a thorough search of the house. The police had already gone over it with a fine-tooth comb, but Ray had learned that second combings are often successful. In this case they were not.
He called his office and instructed one of his operatives to investigate that grocery boy, while two others called on everybody in the block to learn if anyone had noticed any strange loiterer about the place.
A day and a half of thorough work merely provided the grocery boy with a good character and an alibi. The neighbors reported nothing unusual.
On retiring from the kitchen, Ray had asked Mrs. Carrington if she had any suspicions of the cook. Her denial was so faltering that Ray pressed the question and learned that the cook had a young son, who was permitted to lunch now and then with his mother in the kitchen. But Mrs. Carrington was quite sure that he had not visited the house that day, though she admitted that the cook had begged her not to mention the boy to the police.
This gave Ray an important lead, and he had the lad hunted up and brought in to his office. The young fellow was overgrown and truculent, but Ray soon had him frightened and submissive. He was, however, a complete disappointment. Not only did he insist that he had not been near the house, and had not left the school grounds all day, but his teachers and a number of his fellow-students confirmed his story beyond further question.
The next day Ray had gone back to Mrs. Carrington and found her haggard and worn from lack of sleep. This was puzzling since her jewels were not irreplaceable heirlooms, and their loss would be almost entirely reimbursed by the insurance company.
Everything pointed to an inside job. Since the wife was admittedly alone in the house, she was logically guilty. Her emotional panic emphasized the suspicion.
In the normal program of procedure, Ray insinuated that someone might have visited the house whose name Mrs. Carrington was withholding. This threw her almost into hysterics. She repeated that nobody had called except the postman and the grocery boy, and the cook, who came in of mornings and went home of nights.
In spite of itself, Ray’s mind resisted the manifest evidence that the woman herself had made off with the jewels, and was only pretending that they were stolen in order to collect the insurance. That sort of thing is only too commonplace an experience with insurance companies, but it seemed unlikely here.
Mrs. Carrington’s torments of uncontrollable fear were very touching and pitiable; yet what else could they mean but guilt?
The third day Ray took one of his best men on what he calls “one of those drab, dogged hunts that can sometimes make a detective’s day a plain hell of boredom.” They split the neighborhood into two parts, and each of them set about visiting every single business establishment, however small, within half a mile of the Carrington home. Everywhere they asked if the Carringtons were known or dealt with, and if any messenger or repairman had been sent to the house on the day of the jewels’ disappearance.
That old system of “Thorough, Thorough!” was rewarded with a startling and undreamable disclosure. The operative brought in not one word of helpful information; but Ray had an astonishing bit of luck. It seemed foolish to waste time investigating a telegraph office; but wishing to omit nothing he went in and repeated his dreary query. At the name of the woman, the manager brightened:
“Oh, yes, Mrs. Carrington is a valued customer. Only last Tuesday morning she telephoned me to send her a messenger boy to take a sealed package to the postoffice and register it. The boy called. She gave him the package and he did as he was told.”
This jolted Ray out of his boredom and confirmed his rule not to be influenced by a pretty woman’s copious tears and fears.
He persuaded the manager to look into the records and he learned both the size of the package and the address in Kansas City to which it was sent—and on the very morning she reported the robbery! The package was just about the size required to hold Mrs. Carrington’s missing jewels. The addressee was a woman.
Ray almost staggered out of the office, and hurried to the insurance office where he reported what he had turned up. Norman Morey, the insurance executive who had called him into the case, gave him the accolade of a cuff on the shoulder and the warm testimonial: “One of these days, my boy, if you don t watch out you will be a real detective—a genuine slouch-hound. You have already earned the company forty thousand dollars. I’ll call up the husband and tell him what you’ve told me and ask him to withdraw his claim.”
He reached for the telephone, but Ray put out a hand to check him:
“Give me a day or two more, Norman. I want to learn more from Kansas City. I want to call up my correspondent there and have his bureau look into the woman and her probable boy friend, and also search the pawnshops. They might recover the jewels and, in any case, turn up enough evidence to scare off a law suit.”
“All right, my lad,” said Morey. “I’ll keep my mouth shut till you tell me to open it. But you look to me like a man who has gone soft-headed over a pretty dame.”
“I admit she’s got me worried,” Ray confessed. “I can neither believe her nor disbelieve her. I’d like to turn her in for holding out this fact on me, and fooling me with her baby stare, and yet I can’t help feeling there’s something more here than meets the eye.”
He telephoned his man in Kansas City and set the wheels of inquiry rolling ther
e, then made his way again to Brooklyn.
Deeply humiliated at being so easily fooled by the light that lies in woman’s eyes and lies and lies; and feeling more like a rank amateur than a professional sleuth, Ray slunk back to the menagerie and made his way through the uproar of the birds and cats and the monkey to Mrs. Carrington, who had made a monkey of him.
Seeing the ominous ice in his eyes she waited for the blow to fall. As gently as he could he reproached her for lying to him and concealing the fact that she had called a messenger and sent a sealed and registered parcel to Kansas City. This was a thunderbolt to her. She went into a paroxysm of weeping; but Ray watched her with the cold anger of one who had been duped once and would not be again.
She was cried out before he could even get her to listen to his advice. He warned her that she could be arrested and jailed for the attempt to defraud the insurance company; but if she would make a frank confession and persuade her husband to drop the claim, Ray thought he could persuade the company to forget the matter.
The mere mention of her husband threw her into a renewed and more complete panic. She took her oath that the jewels were stolen, and that they were not in the package she had sent to Kansas City. But when Ray asked what the package actually contained she blenched with guilt and trembled with shame, yet hysterically refused to tell him.
It was then that she sobbed:
“If my husband learns of this, my life will be ruined. And I’ll kill myself.”
The pitiful frenzy of her appeal almost shattered Ray’s conviction of her guilt and his wrath at her deception. But he told her that he was helpless. The insurance company already knew the truth. It would, of course, refuse to pay out forty thousand dollars to protect her. Her husband would inevitably persist in his demand. The company would inevitably explain its reasons for the refusal. It would have to tell him about the registered parcel.
Now it was the woman who grew calm and icy. But what she said was:
“Then I’ll take poison.”
It was Ray’s turn to get on his knees, figuratively at least. He implored her to let him help her. He begged her to tell him what was in the package, so that he could devise some protection for her. She refused with a grim calm, and his repeated prayers were unavailing.
At last he left her. He hated the profession that had led him into revealing such a tragedy, and he felt that, though he had entered the case to look for a thief, he was leaving it perhaps as the slayer of a beautiful creature who, for some unimaginable reason, preferred death to the revelation of what could only be proof of her lies and her guilt.
He went back to his office, and reached there just in time to receive a call from Kansas City, from the private detective he had called into the case. William Furlong had handled several cases for Ray in his earlier days as manager of the New York office of the William J. Burns detective bureau. Ray had found Furlong completely reliable and efficient, and he was already able to furnish Ray with the fruits of a long and anxious day and night of research in the slums of Kansas City. He gave the mystery a new and more startling twist. He said:
“That address you gave me is in the red light district. And the girl the parcel was addressed to is a—a streetwalker.”
As if this were not earthquake enough, Furlong told the shaken Ray that the Kansas City strumpet had been receiving just such a parcel every six months from Mrs. Carrington.
This was completely maddening. The exquisite Mrs. Carrington could not have been sending her jewels to a Kansas City prostitute every six months. What had she been sending?
There was more to come, and worse. Furlong went on to say that the girl was being kept by a bad boy named Dwyer. Or, rather, she seemed to be keeping the fellow, who had an ugly police record as a procurer, a pimp.
“And every time that package comes from Brooklyn,” Furlong said, “the girls at that address say that Dwyer dolls himself up in expensive new clothes and throws a party.”
Feeling a grave need for an ice-cap and something to steady his battered nerves, Ray made his way to Norman Morey to report progress—but what progress!
It was all plain as day to Morey. Mrs. Carrington had been sending her jewelry in installments to her girl friend, who gave them to her boy friend, who pawned them and bought himself glad rags. When the last of her jewels had given out, Mrs. Carrington had cooked up the robbery story in the hope of getting forty thousand dollars more so that she could continue her payments to her girl friend. Just what hold the girl and her boy friend had over Mrs. Carrington must be dirty business; but it was none of the insurance company’s. This was Morey’s conclusion.
When Ray dolefully reiterated that Mrs. Carrington had taken her oath that she had sent no jewels to Kansas City—Morey said—and said it to Raymond C. Schindler of all people on earth:
“My boy, when you’ve had a little more experience with life and livers you won’t be so innocent and so gullible. It’s an unfortunate fact that a man cannot believe everything every pretty woman tells him. Wait till her husband hears of this!”
Ray faltered. “But if he does, she swears she’ll kill herself.”
Morey laughed him to scorn:
“Are you such a softie that you fall for the oldest bluff in history? Forget it, son. You’ve finished the case for us, and earned your fee for once. Send me your bill and go on home.”
Ray merely oozed out of the office. He was torn between remorse for what he had done, and terror for what might yet come of his hateful meddling. The thought of that sweet woman in such an agony of fear that she would kill herself to be rid of it, was unbearable.
He was no longer working for the insurance company. He was on his own now. He let his conscience be his guide. He went back to the woman.
What followed was one of those everlastingly renewed proofs that truth is stranger than fiction. In fact, if any fiction-fumbler, in desperation for money or under the influence of foolish water or hasheesh, had been insane enough to cook up such a solution for a Whodunit, he would have been thrown out of the Mystery Writers’ Guild and flung into an asylum.
When Ray rang that Brooklyn door bell, and his sad eyes met Mrs. Carrington’s sadder eyes, she knew that something was wronger than ever. She took him up to her room, where the piercing shrieks of the parrots and the fluting of the canaries were muffled. But the monkey came along.
Mrs. Carrington sank into a chair and faced Ray with the look of a doomed woman awaiting her death warrant. That sub-human imp of a simian leapt to her shoulders and tried to snatch the bright buttons off her blouse, till even she thrust him away. Then he began to pester Ray, who did not need that extra torment or the temptation to throw the sharp-toothed devil downstairs. Brushing the little monster away as best he could, Ray told Mrs. Carrington all that he had learned from Furlong and had reported to the insurance man.
There was no panic left in Mrs. Carrington. She was drained of expression. She mumbled:
“It’s all over, then. You know everything. And my husband will know it soon.”
Ray was now a private citizen, and he could afford the luxury of being himself instead of a bloodhound. He said:
“Your husband doesn’t have to know. If you would tell me the whole story, maybe I could find a way out for you. I’d be glad to. But you won’t let me help you!”
And then she told him the whole story:
“It’s not easy,” she began, “but I’d like to get it off my mind before I— You’ve been very kind and I have no one else to confide in. Perhaps you will tell my husband—afterward. It may help him in his grief, and ease the shock and convince him that I really did love him all the while.”
She spoke almost as if she were already dead. To Ray it was like reading the posthumous memoirs of someone.
“I come of a good and respectable family in a small Missouri town. I had the usual girlhood—school, Sunday school, picnics, prayer meetings, the love affairs that kids have, then a serious one. When I was twenty, I became engaged to a young
fellow working in a bank. To be near him and help him, I learned bookkeeping and took a job in the same bank.
“I didn’t know it, of course, but my lover, my future husband, kept giving me false bookkeeping entries to make. I trusted him and entered them with no inkling of suspicion. One day the police came in and arrested him as an embezzler. And they took me along. He was tried, found guilty and sent away to the penitentiary. I came near following him, for they accused me of being his accomplice. But somehow the jury believed in my ignorance and I was acquitted.
“It was a frightful experience, of course, and I was so wretched that I could not bear to go on living in the town. So I went to Kansas City and took a course in a business college. While I was studying there in the depths of gloom, a gay young man named Dwyer began to pay attentions to me. He taught me how to laugh again and—if you can help it, you might leave out this part of it when you tell my poor husband. Well, I was young and desperate, and he was handsome and clever and we became engaged to be married. And then—well—I—he—well, anyway, in the intimacy of being engaged, he—oh, what’s the use of blaming him for my own fault! I gave in to his demands and we were man and wife before the ceremony—which he kept putting off for lack of money.
“When my landlady grew suspicious of the hours we kept, he took me to what he said was the home of a woman who would keep me till the wedding took place.
“I didn’t know much, but I was so puzzled by the strange boarders and the goings-on that at last he told me the place was a bawdy house.
“What a hopeless little fool I was then, even for one so young. My first lover was an embezzler and they put him in the penitentiary. My second was a—don’t they call such a man a procurer’? Well, whatever he was, he told me that he had no money and we would have no money unless I earned it for him by entertaining—he called them ‘customers’ And he said he could bring me rich men about town and we could shake them down for a lot of money.
The Complete Detective Page 7