The Crooked Lane

by Frances Noyes Hart

  “Ah, yes—Jerry Hardy,” murmured the young man from Vienna, his eyes on the curling gray wreaths. “Tess told me yesterday that he was in a really bad state, poor fellow. I was more sorry than I can say. It is a form of shell shock, as well as the actual war injuries?”

  “That, and a few other trifles,” remarked Dion, his charming Celtic face, with the color high on the cheekbones and the deep blue eyes that flickered so unexpectedly from mirth to melancholy, suddenly grim. “Didn’t Tess wax expansive on the subject?”

  “Hardly. I should imagine that expansiveness is not one of her besetting sins.”

  “You’d be right there,” commented Mallory, the mirth briefly replacing the melancholy. “Lord bless her lovely heart, she’s about as expansive as a locked steel trap! But I can’t for the life of me see any particular point in going in for mystery as far as Jerry’s concerned, poor lad.… He’s been taking drugs these three years past, and they’ve finally got him down—and out, too, if you’re asking me. I’m not the one that’s blaming him, mind you! If I’d had half the pains that were ripping him in two every hour that he breathed, I’d be putting hashish in my tea in the morning and opium in my coffee at night. And I’ll take my oath to heaven that he’s half killed himself trying to break off with the rotten stuff—like as not he’s killed himself entirely.”

  Mallory’s voice was so somber and bitter that Sheridan did not have to look to ascertain that the face was dark and bitter, too.

  “And it is at Dr. Byrd’s sanitarium at Stillhaven that he is trying to fight it out?” he asked, in a carefully expressionless voice.

  “Ah, Byrd!” The cold violence of the tone caused Sheridan to abandon his inspection of smoke wreaths abruptly. “There’s one that the devil will make short shrift of one of these fine nights! I’m making you a wager now that he and that cursed assistant of his would feed those poor souls poppies sooner than fast them. A sanitarium, is it? Well, then, I’ve seen joss houses that were decent hospitals.”

  “You mean that he actually peddles drugs to the poor devils under the cloak of curing them?”

  “Oh, well, I wouldn’t be putting it just that way in the public prints,” remarked Mallory with a brief glint of a smile. “Not so long as about the only law left that’s fashionable is the one on slander. I’ve not got a feather of proof on him, mind you. But my guess is as good as the next fellow’s, and mine is that he’s got his stool pigeons out among all the fine expensive snow-birds and hop-heads in these parts—and once he gets his claws into them, they never draw an easy breath again, the pitiful, luckless fools.”

  “You think that he simply gets them under his roof and then doles out their daily ration at his own price?”

  “Ah, now go a bit lighter and easier on what I think, will you?” remonstrated Mallory, with more irony than apprehension in his warmly colored voice. “Was it that that I said? You’re as good as building four damp stone walls around me this minute! No, he’s not as simple as that about it, worse luck. I think he goes about it by diminishing one of the dirty drugs and doing what he calls building up their threshold of resistance with another. I’d call it no better than putting two halters around the lost soul’s neck instead of one—but he has plenty of good fat books with little fine print in them to tell him and the rest of the world that he’s on the right track. I’m the lad that knows; didn’t he have Jerry reading them day and night before he got him where I couldn’t yank them out of his hands and throw him into his own bed? … Well, he’s in another bed now!”

  “All very neat and tidy,” commented Karl Sheridan in a voice that was far from congratulatory. “I gather, then, that corpses rather than cures are usually disgorged from the portals of the nursing home of the enterprising Dr. Byrd?”

  “I’d feel a dashed sight more comfortable if you weren’t so active when it comes to gathering things,” murmured his host, with a somewhat rueful twist to his smile. “He’s careful enough when it comes to corpses that lie down and stiffen out instead of trotting around and sniffing powders, let me tell you I When it begins to look too dangerous, he makes a dash for the scopolamine bottle.”

  “Scopolamine?”

  “Hyoscine hydrobromide, if you like it better. They’re identical, aren’t they?”

  “Quite.… And in the case of your friend Hardy, do you think that Byrd had reached the hyoscine stage?”

  “I think so, but I’m not taking any oath on it. There were two things that Jerry didn’t give me more than six words on a year, and one was drugs, and the other was Fay Stuart. But he surely had some of that hyoscine stuff about here for a while. I ran across two bottles of it out there in the closet where he keeps all those poisonous chemicals that he works with, when he’s experimenting on his new processes in etching, while I was getting some things together to send after him to Jack Byrd’s.”

  “They are still there?”

  Mallory narrowed blue eyes in intense concentration.

  “No, I’ll be hanged if they are! I was in there only yesterday piling up a lot of things that I didn’t want to have in your way, and I’m positive as Punch that they weren’t on that shelf. I have rather an extraordinary visual memory, and I can see the little empty space that they left between a bottle of silver nitrate and a tin can of cyanide that he kept there. He probably took them along with him when he left.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “A week or so—no, two weeks. I wasn’t here—down at Hot Springs on a house party, or he’d never have got off, let me tell you!”

  “Can you, by any chance, remember whether those bottles were of the same size, and whether their labels were identical?”

  Mallory lifted amused brows.

  “Good Lord, you have got faith in my powers of visualization, haven’t you? As a matter of fact, I don’t have to draw on it very heavily this time. One of the bottles was a little larger than the other, and Tess called my attention to the fact that the fiftieth-of-a-grain one was practically full to the cork, and the one with hundreths was half empty.”

  “Tess? Tess called your attention to it?”

  “Yes; she was helping me get his things off—he’d had a bad collapse at some party, and Byrd, devil take his soul, simply swept him off his feet and out to Baltimore. Tess was worried about him; she was awfully fond of him, you know, and he’d taken little more with him than slippers for his feet and a shirt for his back.”

  “And the hyoscine,” Karl Sheridan reminded him gently.

  “Right you are—and the hyoscine. I suppose he’d have hung onto that if he’d had the death rattle itself in his throat.”

  “Yes. That is entirely possible.… One fiftieth of a grain.… That is a very stiff dose, even if a man did not have a weak heart. For a man with one, it sounds close to suicidal.”

  “Does it? Well, evidently he thought so, too, as he’d decided to stick to the hundredth grains. Not that the fact that it was dangerous would have stopped him, poor lad I He’d been friend with danger for many a long day.… But doses and strengths are up your alley, not mine, my dear fellow I I’d never have so much as noticed the little brutes if it hadn’t been for Tess.”

  “Quite candidly, that memory of yours intrigues me!” murmured Sheridan pensively. “Something, now, surely made you identify scopolamine with hyoscine, and you tell me that it was not in your line? To the average layman, that identification would be black magic and Arabic.”

  “Still and all, it’s as simple as Christopher and his egg,” Dion Mallory assured him. “I had a sister that decided that the thing they called twilight sleep was the first good idea that anyone had had about producing a baby since Eve had Cain. She raced off to Germany to try it out, and while Sheila was blue in the face for the first week or so, she’s as pretty a creature today as you’d find between Dublin and San Francisco. There wasn’t anything that my sister didn’t ferret out about the stuff—from the fact that that poor little fright of a Crippen used it to kill his great, strapping, caterwaul
ing wife, down to the news that the flowers that it came from look as pretty as pictures against garden walls. It was she who told me how it and hyoscine were blood brothers.”

  “Exactly. It is incredible how these small far-away things tie in so close together, is it not?” inquired the young man from Vienna philosophically. “You will have another cigarette? I am joining you, as you see.… Three thousand miles away and many years ago your sister has a so small baby called Sheila—and poor little Harvey Crippen, of all the men in all the world, decides that hyoscine hydrobromide would be a very neat way to put someone out of it.… And now ten days ago you find that Jerry Hardy takes hyoscine. And two nights ago we find that Fay Stuart took far too much.… Which all goes to prove, I suppose, that this is a very small world indeed—and not a very pleasant one.”

  “Jerry?” Mallory, the cigarette poised between fingers suddenly tense, removed his feet from their cushioned ease with startling abruptness. “See here, my dear old fellow, exactly what are you driving at? Tess told me that you thought that Fay hadn’t precisely committed suicide; to use a few short, ugly words, you thought that someone had done her in—and quite frankly, I’m inclined to agree with you. I knew her very well indeed at one time—quite well enough to know the unholy horror that she had of death. But she also told me that you were extremely intelligent, and, quite without prejudice, your last two or three remarks lead me to doubt it! If you’re trying to put me in the box to prove that Jerry Hardy had anything in God’s world to do with Fay’s death, you’ll be finding me a far better witness for the defense than for the prosecution, and what’s more I’ll match wits with any insanity expert that you walk up to prove that you’re madder than any poor loon with straws stuck in his hair. Jerry was the only mortal in all Washington who couldn’t so much as say Fay’s name without drawing a halo behind her empty little yellow head.”

  “It was kind of Tess to think me a little intelligent,” said Karl Sheridan, in his most courteous and noncommittal voice. “And, if you will forgive me for saying so, it is also kind of you to think me a little stupid. I do not remember having so much as suggested that your good friend Jerry harmed even a hair of that poor child’s yellow head—though I confess that I would like very much to know whether he ever gave to her that large bottle with the fiftieth grains of hyoscine in it. I am not entirely satisfied, you see, that the contents of the bottle, marked one-hundredth grains found at her side would have killed her so quickly.”

  Mallory snapped the ash so violently off the tip of his cigarette that it flicked half across the room.

  “I can tell you now that he didn’t. What’s more, he’d have murdered anyone that did. He knew all about the properties of hyoscine, and the fact that she had a bad heart was common property.”

  “Was it, indeed? Well, then, that opens other vistas, does it not? … Mallory, have you any idea, I wonder, where the ineffable Dr. Byrd was around one Saturday night?”

  “Baltimore, probably,” said Dion Mallory briefly. “And he was there again at two o’clock yesterday afternoon. I’m afraid that we’ll have to count him out, agreeable as the prospect of hanging him higher than Haman would be.”

  “When I last saw him at the Temples’ somewhere around eleven,” remarked Sheridan thoughtfully, “he was heading straight for some kind of backgammon festivities with the child called Vicki. Nothing whatever was said about Baltimore.”

  “Well, something was done about it,” Mallory stated uncompromisingly. “He got back there Saturday night all right, unless half the staff of Stillhaven are out-and-out liars.… I thought it was all off with Vicki.”

  “He thought so, too, I believe,” said Sheridan more thoughtfully still. “Something occurred to alter his mind, possibly. Have you any idea what hour Dr. Byrd arrived at the sanitarium?”

  “Not the foggiest—except that it couldn’t have been as late as two, because it was around that time that they found poor old Hardy.”

  “Found him?”

  “Yes. Oh, God, I keep forgetting that you don’t know all this!” Mallory ran both fine, strong hands through the shining hair that clung as close to his skull as black water. “It’s your own fault for sounding so damnably omniscient.… I stopped by Stillhaven on the way back from New York Sunday to find out how the kid was getting on—I’ve been so infernally worried about him—and Byrd himself was there to inform me that I’d had excellent reason to be. It seems that Saturday night some time after dinner he went completely to pieces—literally off his nut—and kept yelling at them that he had to get to Washington. Of course they’d as soon have let him go to the moon, and they as good as told him so; he’s been in bed with fever and nausea and sinking spells for a good week, and even when he said he’d keep quiet if they’d let him telephone, no one was any too keen about it. Byrd had taken the phone out three or four days ago, because he used it all the time talking to Fay, and it simply wore him down—but it was one of those plug in and out things, and the attendant brought it back for him.”

  “And at what time was that?”

  “Around ten, I think they said.”

  “Was the attendant in the room when he telephoned?”

  “No. Jerry swore he wouldn’t telephone if anyone was there, but they were scared out of their shoes to leave him alone in the state he was in, so the attendant waited just outside the door.… He got the general drift of the telephone calls, if that’s what you want. He was trying to reach Washington and couldn’t get the number he was after. And then he tried someone in Valley Hunt.”

  “That,” Karl Sheridan assured him, “is precisely what I want.”

  “Well, they were both long-distance. The first one was for Washington, but Jerry lowered his voice, so the fellow outside didn’t get the number—not even the exchange. But it was obvious that he couldn’t get the number he was trying for, because in a minute or so he began to go straight cuckoo and yelled at the operator that it must answer—that it couldn’t be out of order—all that kind of lunacy. Then he piped down and gave another number—Valley Hunt something or other, and the attendant heard all that part quite clearly.”

  “And exactly what did he hear?”

  “Jerry was asking if Fay were still there, and then he said, ‘Gone over an hour? Then she must be home. Oh, God, why didn’t you stop her?’—and hung up before anyone could have possibly told him.”

  “The unfortunate Tappans, I gather,” murmured Karl Sheridan thoughtfully. “They must have had a busy evening at the telephone. Tess Stuart tried them, too, when she found that the Stuart telephone did not answer. It seems that Fay left some time before nine with a young person known as Kippy Todd.”

  “With Kippy, did she? Well, then, he probably came in with her for a nightcap, and she disconnected her phone. She has a way of doing that when she doesn’t want to be interrupted.”

  “Didn’t,” corrected Sheridan gently, as he reached for another cigarette. “She is no longer in danger of being interrupted.… But the possibility of young Mr. Todd going up with her certainly should give us pause for thought.… And after he discovered that she had left the Tappans’, what did Hardy do?”

  “Well, then, he started in all over again with the Washington business, and he was going it strong with the operator when the attendant outside got one of the assistant doctors to back him up, and they went in and yanked out the telephone by main force. The minute they did it, Jerry quieted down as suddenly as he’d started up; he let’em tuck him in and turn out the lights and give him his last shot for the day. It wasn’t till after ten-thirty that he called out to the attendant next to him that he still felt stark wide awake, but that he thought that if he could have some hot malted milk with sherry in it, it might do the trick.”

  “And the affable but misguided youth coöperated with him to the extent of going in search of it? Mallory, you both shatter and restore my faith in human nature!”

  “He went all right,” Mallory said grimly. “And you’ve obviously guessed the rest o
f it. When he came back ten minutes later, Jerry was clean gone—and so were a pair of trousers, an overcoat, some shoes, and about seventy dollars.”

  “Apparently they do not equip the sanitarium of Still-haven to cope with any whims that its patients may have as to leaving it.”

  “Apparently they don’t. It’s not a jail or an asylum, after all, and Jerry had been perfectly reasonable up to Saturday. He must have piled into his clothes like a flash and gone out of the window in another—at any rate, by the time they sent out the alarm, he’d got clear away. It was raining in Baltimore that night, and black as a hat, so they didn’t stand much chance of finding him unless they hit on just the direction that he was headed for. And they guessed wrong—twice.”

  “Just what, then, did they guess?”

  “Oh, just that they thought he might be heading for the nearest house with a telephone—and that was a quarter of a mile away; and then someone got the bright idea that he might be trying for a hitch hike or a bus into Washington, but that was off, too. They didn’t actually find him till close onto two in the morning, about a mile down a side road to the west of the sanitarium. God knows how long he’d been lying there.… He was soaked through and dead to the world.”

  “It was he who told you all this?”

  “Jerry? Well, hardly! I was only there for about twenty minutes, and all of the time he wasn’t in a rotten sort of stupor, he was yelling at anyone who came near him to get out of his sight—not to come near him—to keep clear of him if he didn’t want his neck broken.” Dion Mallory dropped his black head in his hands and said in a thick, bitter voice, “He yelled it at me.”

  “He was out of his head, of course.”

  “Yes. He was out of his head. That didn’t seem to make it much more tolerable, however.” He lifted his head, fixed his eyes on the stately little pendulum clock on the mantel, and rose to his feet with a motion of startling swiftness. “Good Lord—quarter-past ten! They’ll think I’m dead and buried.… I’ll be seeing you late this afternoon, then, shan’t I? And if you don’t mind my old rattle-trap, we’ll head out for Green Gardens together. Just ring for Timothy if you want anything, won’t you?”