Lady in Peril

by Ben Ames Williams

  Miss Moss made no comment on this; and Tope sat silent for a moment, looking at his hands where they rested on his knees. He remarked as though to himself: “I suppose you didn’t have anything to do with handling the stocks and so on.”

  She shook her head: “No. The real estate was my particular province.”

  So Tope rose a little wearily; and he picked up his hat from her desk and turned it in his hands. “Well, thank you, ma’am,” he said. He hesitated, faced her again. “What did you say was the name of the superintendent up there?” he asked.

  “Michelsen,” she repeated.

  “Know him by sight, do you?”

  “Certainly. He comes in here once a month to get the payroll for the building.”

  Tope wiped his mouth with his hand: “So the janitor, and the rest of them, they don’t have to come in.”

  “Oh, no!” she assured him.

  “But you hired this Burke? This janitor?”

  She hesitated. “Why—yes, in a way,” she confessed at last in a still tone.

  Tope nodded, and he thanked her again. “Well, Dave, I guess we might as well go along,” he decided; and Inspector Howell rose. There was in his bearing disappointment, but no surprise at their failure here. The two men moved together toward the door.

  But at the door Tope stopped and turned to loot back at Miss Moss with a deep attention. She had not moved; she still sat at her desk, watching them. Her countenance was in shadow so that he could not see the expression in her eyes.

  Yet he was an observant man. There was something in the very set of her head and the posture of her shoulders as she sat there silhouetted against the light which seemed to him eloquent. He had an impression that she was like a runner, waiting for the gun.

  And there was fear in her. He wished, absurdly, to go back and somehow comfort the woman sitting so alertly there.

  3

  WHEN they left the offices of the Jervis Trust, the old man and Inspector Howell took a taxicab; and Howell gave the driver the address of Tope’s lodgings on Boylston Street. On the way, Dave asked a question or two; but Tope did not answer him. The Inspector sat silent, frowning as though in some deep perplexity; and when they came to their destination, his silence still persisted.

  They alighted, and Howell paid the driver, and they went up the single flight of stairs in silence and Tope unlocked his door.

  Within the room, Tope sat down in his great chair again, and Howell asked: “Well, did you get anything?”

  But Tope made a sound which was neither assent nor negation; and Howell contented himself with waiting for a while. He crossed to the windows and stood looking down into the street; and Tope sat still, his lips moving faintly, nodding now and then as though he tallied off certain considerations in his mind.

  By and by Howell turned to watch him. The old man was like a bland Buddha there, only his head moving now and then; and Howell’s nerves were raw from the long strain of failure. Irritation grew in him; Tope seemed so nearly asleep. Howell rated his own folly in supposing for a moment that he might find any help or hint of counsel here. He moved at last in a sore impatience, crossed the room and laid his hand upon the door.

  Then Tope did speak. He seemed to rouse; and he asked mildly: “Where you going, Dave?”

  “Hit the sidewalks,” Howell said angrily. “Keep moving. What else is there to do?”

  “Why, you might as well go get Peace, I guess,” Tope told him, almost regretfully; and Howell stared at him. He gripped the knob on the door as though for support, and there was an eager haste dawning in his eyes.

  “Go get him?” he repeated. “Go where?”

  “Go where he is,” Tope replied, smiling faintly. The old man was still young enough to have an almost childish satisfaction in the miracles he sometimes did perform. “Go where he is, Dave. That’s the best place to go, it looks to me!”

  “You know where he is?” Howell cried; and Tope said: “It wouldn’t surprise me if I did.”

  “Then come on!” Howell cried. “Let’s go!”

  But Tope sat still. “I don’t figure it’s any of my business,” he remarked, half to himself. “I’m not a policeman any more. Maybe this isn’t my business at all.” Howell protested in a furious impatience, but Tope shook his head. “I’m not going,” he decided. “You can go!”

  “Go where?” Howell cried. “Hurry, man!”

  “There’s no hurry,” Tope assured him. “He’ll wait. He’s been there two months. He won’t run away.”

  Howell came striding toward him, trembling with impatience. “All right,” he assented. “What’s the answer? Where is he? How do you know?”

  Tope hesitated; he sighed at last, and he said almost reluctantly: “Why, Dave, I always did play my hunches hard. This is a hunch, that’s all. Maybe I’m wrong. I haven’t checked up on it; haven’t seen him. But Miss Moss told you where he is. Without meaning to.”

  “I didn’t hear her,” Howell insisted. “Where do you think he is? How do you know so much, old man?”

  The Inspector chuckled in a dry mirth. “Reminds me of when I was a boy,” he remarked. “My father had a horse—we lived in a little town up-State—and one day the horse got out of the pasture and got lost and we couldn’t find him. There was an old fellow named Ahab something; and he found the horse and brought him home. Father asked how he did it, and Ahab said: ‘Waal, I set and figgered whur I’d have put for if I was a hoss, and I did, and he wuz.’ ”

  But Howell exploded: “What’s that got to do with Peace?”

  So Tope told him patiently: “Here’s the way I see it, Dave. I started wondering how I’d go about it to disappear. And it struck me, by and by, that nobody ever sees much of a janitor. How many times did you ever see one, Dave? Take it in a big building, no one ever goes down cellar unless the janitor doesn’t answer the telephone when you want some steam . . .”

  Howell cried: “You mean to say . . .”

  “I’ve a notion,” said Tope carefully, “that Peace made up his mind to what he was going to do, two or three years ago. I guess he figured the whole thing. But he had sense; and he knew that if he just grabbed the money and ran, someone would nab him, sure. Some sort of disguise, or impersonation or something is likely to figure in any big fraud or embezzlement, Dave. You know that. So Peace would plan on a disguise. Put it’s hard to put on a false beard and make it look natural. So Peace might play the game with reverse English. He’d disguise himself first, so that what you thought he looked like wasn’t what he really looked like at all. You think Peace was a fat little black-haired man with a limp. Well, my guess is his hair wasn’t black. He’d dyed it for years, or he wore a wig. And I guess he didn’t have to limp. A man gets used to a foot cut off that way, so he walks natural enough. And he could take the fat off in a month or so, if he wanted to; if there was some place he could hide out while he was doing it. He’d need to be out of sight for a spell, while he was getting thin again.”

  He hesitated, added then: “So I figure that when he got ready, he fired the janitor and went down cellar and took on his job!”

  Howell ejaculated: “Are you just guessing, Tope? You know anything about it at all?”

  And Tope said almost irritably: “I’m guessing, if you want it that way. Call it a guess, or a hunch, or anything you want. I know this Burke, this new janitor, has been losing weight ever since he took the job.”

  “How do you know?”

  Tope exclaimed: “Man, I’ve been nosing around for two weeks now! When you quit showing up here, I asked Hagan one night; and he told me what was on your mind. I never could keep my finger out of a pie, Dave. That’s why I sent for you. Why I told Harquail to see you . . .”

  Howell said thoughtfully: “I’ll grab him! But what about the money, Tope? Where’s he put that? Any idea at all?”

  Tope was silent for a long moment; he said at last: “I don’t know. I had it all figured out, before I saw Miss Moss. It looked to me she must be in on it. But
now I don’t know. She’s all right, I’d say.”

  “Sure,” Dave agreed in a heedless haste. “I told you that!” He pounded on his knee. “He’s been right under my nose, all this time!” he cried, and he gripped Tope’s arm. “Man, I hand it to you!” he exclaimed.

  Tope nodded indifferently. “All right,” he said. “But Dave—who’s that young fellow took Randall’s place in the Trust office?”

  “What difference does that make?” Howell exploded. He swung toward the door. “I’m going along!” he cried. “I’ll bring Peace in to see you half an hour from now!” There was a great exultation in the man. He slammed the door behind him; Tope heard his feet pounding down the stairs.

  The old man left behind here returned to his thoughts again. This matter had seemed to Dave Howell simple enough, when once Tope made it clear; but Dave was only interested in results. Tope found in it much to perplex him still. There were, or seemed to him to be, many questions that must still be answered. If Miss Moss were as good a business woman as she appeared to be, how was it possible that she had not detected the thefts in time to prevent them? If Peace and Burke, the new janitor, were in fact the same, how could she have failed to recognize Peace in Burke when the latter came to ask her for this job?

  Before he saw the woman, Tope had been ready to believe in her complicity; but he was not thus ready now. Something intangible and hard to define had passed between him and Miss Moss while they talked together this afternoon; and the old man was conscious of it, without understanding, what it was.

  There dwelt in him nowadays so often a deep loneliness; the men he had known were so apt to treat him as one outside their lives; the world in which he had borne a part permitted him that part no more. Yet strangely, when he spoke to Miss Moss, he was not lonely. He had expected from Howell’s description to find in her a woman hard and shrewd and calculating; instead she seemed to him quite otherwise.

  Wise, yes; and steady, and firm, and brave. Yet curiously tender, too. And he had thought he saw in her something like a sudden fear—not on her own account at all.

  He reflected that matters turned so often thus contrariwise. Your advance estimates of a person were so apt to be overturned when you met that person face to face. With a complete inconsequence, Tope decided that the Jervis children, for all their ill repute, might prove to be fine wholesome youngsters if you knew them well. Then his thoughts turned back to Miss Moss again.

  His own hard common sense told him insistently that she could not have been wholly blind to Peace’s design; yet he was equally sure that to be faithless to her trust was not in her. And for half an hour after Howell left him, he tried to read this riddle. He remembered her every glance and intonation; how when she came in the door her eyes touched the young man who had first greeted them; how that pulse stirred in her throat when she saw them standing there. She must have guessed why they had come . . .Yet how steady she was, and serene, while he had questioned her. Courage dwelt in her, then, and wisdom; and Tope thought there might also abide in her a valorous audacity, a recklessness of consequence.

  But nothing sinister or dark. Of this he was sure. Yet the facts, so far as he could perceive them, were eloquent against her; he could read no other meaning into them. She must have guessed Peace’s purpose; she must answer to the accusation of complicity.

  The old Inspector, waiting for news from Dave Howell, confessed these things to himself. Nevertheless, he decided, what she had done was not his affair. He was no longer a sworn officer of the law; there was no obligation on him to punish evil doers. If Howell did not perceive that she must be guilty too, Tope would not enlighten him. Not if the money were recovered, Peace laid securely by the heels . . .

  Then the ’phone rang, and Dave was on the wire, full of exasperation, full of baffled rage.

  “Tope?” he shouted. “It was him! But he’s gone! An hour ago. Quit the job and left. But I’ll have him inside twenty-four hours.”

  Tope stood rigidly attentive. “Gone?” he repeated in a flat tone.

  “He lived here,” Howell explained. “Had a room in the basement. But he’d been sick, lost a lot of weight. He told Michelsen today that he couldn’t stand the work any longer. Quit. Walked out. But I’ll get him now . . .”

  And Tope heard the receiver clash down on the hook; and he stayed there, very still, and there was trouble in his eyes.

  For Miss Moss, he perceived quite clearly, must have sent the man some word, warned him away. But if that were so, then there was an alliance between these two . . . She was corrupt, dishonest after all!

  It was incredible, outside all human sense and nature! Tope could not accept the thing as it lay; yet there was no escape for him. He crossed the room and sat down heavily in his chair, and he was suddenly tired and old. Until today he had never seen Miss Moss, had never even heard her name. Yet now when she was discovered as a thief—or the partner of a thief—the very world turned black before his eyes!

  He fought against belief; and when his own hard sense forced him to believe, he began to grope in his thoughts for some explanation that would plead for her. But it was a long time before he found at last a possibility.

  At the thought, he came to his feet; he crossed to the telephone to test this new hypothesis. Yet with his hand upon the instrument he paused. Suppose this explanation he suspected were not true; suppose she were in fact as guilty as she seemed!

  He shook his head. No matter what the pain, he could not rest without knowing. He lifted the receiver, and gave the number of the Jervis Trust offices, and he licked his lips with a nervousness strange to see in this man. A masculine voice answered, and Tope began to perspire faintly. He had to swallow hard before he could speak. He asked then:

  “Jervis Trust?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’d like to speak to Clint Jervis.”

  “This is he,” said the voice at the other end of the wire. “Who is speaking?”

  But the old Inspector gently broke the connection; he put the telephone aside and stood smiling, with a light of contented comprehension in his eyes. He could understand, now. The world was well again.

  Yet there was a measure of vanity in the old man; he was not willing that Miss Moss should think he had been befooled ! Also, there were other reasons not clear even to himself why he wished to see this woman again. He put on his hat and coat and went downstairs and hailed a taxicab and gave the driver the address of the Jervis Trust office, on Tremont Row.

  While the cab picked its way through traffic, the Inspector had a sudden sense that he was embarked upon an expedition whose eventual consequences he could not foresee. But he put the thought aside as lacking all foundation. Not even his keen senses could smell out a murder still a dozen hours away . . .

  There was never any mystery about Inspector Tope’s ability to solve the most obscure enigma. He was a simple and straightforward man, who happened to have the trick of perceiving the obvious, and fastening upon it, and refusing to be shaken from his hold. He could, and upon occasion did, display a vast patience, and a bold audacity, and a tireless acceptance of facts as facts, regardless of how ridiculous or incredible they might seem. But this was all. He would himself have told you that there was no particular skill involved in his exploits; that any man might have done the same.

  Nevertheless the Inspector had enjoyed his preeminence; for like anyone else, he had his vanity. Also, though he was the mildest man in the world, he could be relentless too. Once the chase was up, he was like a good sight hound which will never yield nor waver. So he had not been used to failure; and this vanishing of Clarence Peace at the very moment of prospective capture might be called failure, and so might have been disquieting. But Tope’s interest, even before he sent Howell to apprehend the defaulter, had shifted from Peace to Miss Moss. Tope thought he could judge a man—or a woman; and he had judged her and found her loyal, and devoted to the trust she served. Yet it was certain in his mind that she knew where Peace was hiding; i
t was certain, when Peace escaped, that she had warned the man in time for him to get away.

  And at first this hurt and shocked Tope deeply; till he began to guess her underlying motive. When he now set out to see her again, he told himself that he did so only in order to con fir pi that conjecture; yet there was more than this. He wished to see Miss Moss again—for whatever reason! Without knowing why, without seeking to define his own desires, he yet wished to see her.

  Just now as he rode toward the Trust offices, he recalled her as she had been an hour or so ago; and he understood that she must have been in a trembling terror then. Yet she had held herself so steadily, her front was brave and firm. He knew a strange, protective tenderness toward this woman he had not seen till today; he wished to help her and comfort her and to defend her against the world.

  For she might need defending, if Dave Howell learned that it was she who sent word to Peace to make haste away. Dave was a bulldog not easily to be robbed of his prey.

  Tope had no proof that she had warned Peace; he had only certainty. Proof is doubtful and can be overthrown; but when a man has a certainty in his own mind, even though he can not prove what he believes, he is nevertheless armored against all contingencies. Tope more than once in his professional career had become certain of the guilt of an individual, had directed his actions as though that certainty were capable of proof. And chance or circumstance had somehow come to fight for him, to make good his cause.

  So now he was certain; so now he came back to the Jervis Trust to see Miss Moss again!

  When he opened once more the door of the single big room which served the Trust as an office, all here was as it had been before, with old Beede at his stool, and Miss Moss at her desk, and the young man whom Tope had liked a while ago poring through a heap of leases from the files.

  Tope stood for a moment in the open doorway, and his glance rested speculatively upon Beede yonder. The man was spare and stooped and gray; he bore the marks of years, years spent at his ledgers here. The Inspector was a surprisingly imaginative man; and it occurred to him that in Beede a fierce loyalty might dwell. Such old men, bound all their lives to one service, are sometimes capable of devoted and audacious actions. Tope wondered what Beede would say—or do—if he should confront some day this Clarence Peace who had looted the Trust which Beede served.