American Sherlocks

by Nick Rennison

  The slipper was of black suede, high-heeled and slender, tied with a broad, black ribbon. One end of the ribbon was broken and stained as though it had tripped its owner. On the thin sole were cakes of the peculiar red clay of the driveway.

  It might have been unconscious magnetism that caused the Senator suddenly to turn his eyes in the direction of his daughter. She was swaying on the arm of the servant.

  Throwing off the support of the woman, she took two quick steps forward, with her hand flung out as though to tear the slipper from him. And then, without a word, she fell prone on the grass.

  II

  The telephone in my room must have been jangling a full moment before I struggled out of my sleep and raised myself to my elbow. It was with a feeling of distinct rebellion that I slipped into my kimono and slippers and shuffled across to the sputtering instrument in the corner. From eight in the morning until eight in the evening, I had been on racking duty in the Farragut poison trial, and the belated report of the wrangling jury, at an hour which made any sort of a meal impossible until after ten, had left me worn out physically and mentally. I glanced at my watch as I snapped the receiver to my ear. It lacked barely fifteen minutes of midnight. An unearthly hour to call a woman out of bed, even if she is past the age of sentimental dreams! ‘Well?’ I growled.

  A laugh answered me at the other end of the wire. I would have flung the receiver back to the hook and myself back to bed had I not recognized the tones. There is only one person in the world, except the tyrant at our city editor’s desk, who would arouse me at midnight. But I had thought this person separated from me by twelve hundred miles of ocean.

  ‘Madelyn Mack!’ I gasped.

  The laughter ceased. ‘Madelyn Mack it is!’ came back the answer, now reduced to a tone of decorous gravity. ‘Pardon my merriment, Nora. The mental picture of your huddled form –’

  ‘But I thought you in Jamaica!’ I broke in, now thoroughly awake.

  ‘I was – until Saturday. Our steamer came out of quarantine at four o’clock this afternoon. As it develops, I reached here at the psychological moment.’

  I kicked a rocker to my side and dropped into it with a rueful glance at the rumpled sheets of the bed. With Madelyn Mack at the telephone at midnight, only one conclusion was possible; and such a conclusion shattered all thought of sleep.

  ‘Have you read the evening dispatches from Boston, Nora?’

  ‘I have read nothing – except the report of the Farragut jury!’ I returned crisply. ‘Why?’

  ‘If you had, you would perhaps divine the reason of my call. I have been retained in the Rennick murder case. I’m taking the one-thirty sleeper for Boston. I secured our berths just before I telephoned.’

  ‘Our berths!’

  ‘I am taking you with me. Now that you are up, you may as well dress and ring for a taxicab. I will meet you at the Roanoke hotel.’

  ‘But,’ I protested, ‘don’t you think –’

  ‘Very well, if you don’t care to go! That settles it!’

  ‘Oh, I will be there!’ I said with an air of resignation. ‘Ten minutes to dress, and fifteen minutes for the taxi!’

  ‘I will add five minutes for incidentals,’ Madelyn replied and hung up the receiver.

  The elevator boy at ‘The Occident,’ where I had my modest apartment, had become accustomed to the strange hours and strange visitors of a newspaper woman during my three years’ residence. He opened the door with a grin of sympathy as the car reached my floor. As though to give more active expression to his feelings he caught up my bag and gave it a place of honour on his own stool.

  ‘Going far?’ he queried as I alighted at the main corridor.

  ‘I may be back in twenty-four hours and I may not be back for twenty-four days,’ I answered cautiously – I knew Madelyn Mack!

  As I waited for the whir of the taxicab, I appropriated the evening paper on the night clerk’s desk. The Rennick murder case had been given a three-column head on the front page. If I had not been so absorbed in the Farragut trial, it could not have escaped me. I had not finished the headlines, however, when the taxi, with a promptness almost uncanny, rumbled up to the curb.

  I threw myself back against the cushions, switched on the electric light, and spread my paper over my knee, as the chauffeur turned off toward Fifth Avenue. The story was well written and had made much of a few facts. Trust my newspaper instinct to know that! I had expected a fantastic puzzle – when it could spur Madelyn into action within six hours after her landing – but I was hardly anticipating a problem such as I could read between rather than in the lines of type before me. Long before the ‘Roanoke’ loomed into view, I had forgotten my lost sleep.

  The identity of Raymond Rennick’s assassin was as baffling as in the first moments of the discovery of the tragedy. There had been no arrests – nor hint of any. From the moment when the secretary had turned into the gate of the Duffield yard until the finding of his body, all trace of his movements had been lost as effectually as though the darkness of midnight had enveloped him, instead of the sunlight of noon. More than ten minutes could not have elapsed between his entrance into the grounds and the discovery of his murder – perhaps not more than five – but they had been sufficient for the assassin to effect a complete escape.

  There was not even the shadow of a motive. Raymond Rennick was one of those few men who seemed to be without an enemy. In an official capacity, his conduct was without a blemish. In a social capacity, he was admittedly one of the most popular men in Brookline – among both sexes. Rumour had it, apparently on unquestioned authority, that the announcement of his engagement to Beth Duffield was to have been an event of the early summer. This fact was in my mind as I stared out into the darkness.

  On a sudden impulse, I opened the paper again. From an inside page the latest photograph of the Senator’s daughter, taken at a fashionable Boston studio, smiled up at me. It was an excellent likeness as I remembered her at the inaugural ball the year before – a wisp of a girl, with a mass of black hair, which served to emphasize her frailness. I studied the picture with a frown. There was a sense of familiarity in its outlines, which certainly our casual meeting could not explain. Then, abruptly, my thoughts flashed back to the crowded court room of the afternoon – and I remembered.

  In the prisoner’s dock I saw again the figure of Beatrice Farragut, slender, fragile, her white face, her sombre gown, her eyes fixed like those of a frightened lamb on the jury which was to give her life – or death.

  ‘She poison her husband?’ had buzzed the whispered comments at my shoulders during the weary weeks of the trial. ‘She couldn’t harm a butterfly!’ Like a mocking echo, the tones of the foreman had sounded the answering verdict of murder – in the first degree. And in New York this meant –

  Why had Beatrice Farragut suggested Beth Duffield? Or was it Beth Duffield who had suggested – I crumpled the paper into a heap and tossed it from the window in disgust at my morbid imagination. B-u-r-r-h! And yet they say that a New York newspaper woman has no nerves!

  A voice hailed us from the darkness and a white-gowned figure sprang out on to the walk. As the chauffeur brought the machine to a halt, Madelyn Mack caught my hands.

  Her next two actions were thoroughly characteristic.

  Whirling to the driver, she demanded shortly, ‘How soon can you make the Grand Central Station?’

  The man hesitated. ‘Can you give me twenty minutes?’

  ‘Just! We will leave here at one sharp. You will wait, please!’

  Having thus disposed of the chauffeur – Madelyn never gave a thought to the matter of expense! – she seized my arm and pushed me through the entrance of the ‘Roanoke’ as nonchalantly as though we had parted six hours before instead of six weeks.

  ‘I hope you enjoyed Jamaica?’ I ventured.

  ‘Did you read the evening papers on the way
over?’ she returned as easily as though I had not spoken.

  ‘One,’ I answered shortly. Madelyn’s habit of ignoring my queries grated most uncomfortably at times.

  ‘Then you know what has been published concerning the case?’

  I nodded. ‘I imagine that you can add considerable.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I know less than the reporters!’ Madelyn threw open the door of her room. ‘You have interviewed Senator Duffield on several occasions, have you not, Nora?’

  ‘You might say on several delicate occasions if you cared to!’

  ‘You can tell me then whether the Senator is in the habit of polishing his glasses when he is in a nervous mood?’

  A rather superior smile flashed over my face. ‘I assure you that Senator Duffield never wears glasses on any occasion!’

  Something like a chuckle came from Madelyn.

  ‘Perhaps you can do as well on another question. You will observe in these newspapers four different photographs of the murdered secretary. Naturally, they bear many points of similarity – they were all taken in the last three years – but they contain one feature in common which puzzles me. Does it impress you in the same way?’

  I glanced at the group of photographs doubtfully. Three of them were obviously newspaper ‘snap-shots,’ taken of the secretary while in the company of Senator Duffield. The fourth was a reproduction showing a conventional cabinet photograph. They showed a clean-shaven, well-built young man of thirty or thereabouts; tall, and I should say inclined to athletics. I turned from the newspapers to Madelyn with a shrug.

  ‘I am afraid I don’t quite follow you,’ I admitted ruefully. ‘There is nothing at all out of the ordinary in any of them that I can catch.’

  Madelyn carefully clipped the pictures and placed them under the front cover of her black morocco note-book. As she did so, a clock chimed the hour of one. We both pushed back our chairs.

  As we stepped into the taxicab, Madelyn tapped my arm. ‘I wonder if Raymond Rennick polished his glasses when he was nervous?’ she asked musingly.

  III

  Boston, from the viewpoint of the South Station at half past seven in the morning, suggests to me a rheumatic individual climbing stiffly out of bed. Boston distinctly resents anything happening before noon. I’ll wager that nearly every important event that she has contributed to history occurred after lunch-time!

  If Madelyn Mack had expected to have to find her way to the Duffield home without a guide, she was pleasantly disappointed. No less a person than the Senator himself was waiting for us at the train-gate – a somewhat dishevelled Senator, it must be confessed, with the stubble of a day-old beard showing eloquently how his peace of mind and the routine of his habits had been shattered. As he shook hands with us he made an obvious attempt to recover something of his ease of manner.

  ‘I trust that you had a pleasant night’s rest,’ he ventured, as he led the way across the station to his automobile.

  ‘Much pleasanter than you had, I fear,’ replied Madelyn.

  The Senator sighed. ‘As a matter of fact, I found sleep hopeless; I spent most of the night with my cigar. The suggestion of meeting your train came as a really welcome relief.’

  As we stepped into the waiting motor, a leather-lunged newsboy thrust a bundle of heavy-typed papers into our faces. The Senator whirled with a curt dismissal on his tongue when Madelyn thrust a coin toward the lad and swept a handful of flapping papers into her lap.

  ‘There is absolutely nothing new in the case, Miss Mack, I assure you,’ the Senator said impatiently. ‘The reporters have pestered me like so many leeches. The sight of a headline makes me shiver.’

  Madelyn bent over her papers without comment. As I settled into the seat by her side, however, and the machine whirled around the corner, I saw that she was not even making a pretence of reading. I watched her with a frown as she turned the pages. There was no question of her interest, but it was not the type that held her attention. I doubted if she was perusing a line of the closely-set columns. It was not until she reached the last paper that I solved the mystery. It was the illustrations that she was studying!

  When she finished the heap of papers, she began slowly and even more thoughtfully to go through them again. Now I saw that she was pondering the various photographs of Senator Duffield’s family that the newspapers had published. I turned away from her bent form and tapping finger, but there was a magnetism in her abstraction that forced my eyes back to her in spite of myself. As my gaze returned to her, she thrust her gloved hand into the recesses of her bag and drew out her black morocco notebook. From its pages she selected the four newspaper pictures of the murdered secretary that she had offered me the night before. With a twinkle of satisfaction she grouped them about a large, black-bordered picture which stared up at her from the printed page in her lap.

  Our ride to the Duffield gate was not a long one. In fact I was so absorbed by my furtive study of Madelyn Mack that I was startled when the chauffeur slackened his speed, and I realized from a straightening of the Senator’s bent shoulders that we were nearing our destination.

  At the edge of the driveway, a quietly dressed man in a grey suit, who was strolling carelessly back and forth from the gate to the house, eyed us curiously as we passed, and touched his hat to the Senator. I knew at once he was a detective. (Trust a newspaper woman to ‘spot’ a plain-clothes man, even if he has left his police uniform at home!) Madelyn did not look up and the Senator made no comment.

  As we stepped from the machine, a tall girl with severe, almost classical features and a profusion of nut-brown hair which fell away from her forehead without even the suggestion of a ripple, was awaiting us. ‘My daughter, Maria,’ Senator Duffield announced formally.

  Madelyn stepped forward with extended hand. It was evident that Miss Duffield had intended only a brief nod. For an instant she hesitated, with a barely perceptible flush. Then her fingers dropped limply into Madelyn Mack’s palm. (I chuckled inwardly at the ill grace with which she did it!)

  ‘This must be a most trying occasion for you,’ Madelyn said with a note of sympathy in her voice, which made me stare. Effusiveness of any kind was so foreign to her nature that I frowned as we followed our host into the wide front drawing room. As we entered by one door, a black-gowned, white-haired woman, evidently Mrs Duffield, entered by the opposite door.

  In spite of the reserve of the society leader, whose sway might be said to extend to three cities, she darted an appealing glance at Madelyn Mack that melted much of the newspaper cynicism with which I was prepared to greet her. Madelyn crossed the room to her side and spoke a low sentence, that I did not catch, as she took her hand. I found myself again wondering at her unwonted friendliness. She was obviously exerting herself to gain the good will of the Duffield household. Why?

  A trim maid, who stared at us as though we were museum freaks, conducted us to our rooms – adjoining apartments at the front of the third floor. The identity of Madelyn Mack had already been noised through the house, and I caught a saucer-eyed glance from a second servant as we passed down the corridor. If the atmosphere of suppressed curiosity was embarrassing my companion, however, she gave no sign of the fact. Indeed, we had hardly time to remove our hats when the breakfast gong rang.

  The family was assembling in the old-fashioned dining room when we entered. In addition to the members of the domestic circle whom I have already indicated, my attention was at once caught by two figures who entered just before us. One was a young woman whom it did not need a second glance to tell me was Beth Duffield. Her white face and swollen eyes were evidence enough of her overwrought condition, and I caught myself speculating why she had left her room.

  Her companion was a tall, slender young fellow with just the faintest trace of a stoop in his shoulders. As he turned toward us, I saw a handsome though self-indulgent face, to a close observer suggesting evidence o
f more dissipation than was good for its owner. And, if the newspaper stories of the doings of Fletcher Duffield were true, the facial index was a true one – if I remember rightly, Senator Duffield’s son more than once had made prim old Boston town rub her spectacled eyes at the tales of his escapades!

  Fletcher Duffield bowed rather abstractedly as he was presented to us, but during the eggs and chops he brightened visibly, and put several curious questions to Madelyn as to her methods of work, which enlivened what otherwise would have been a rather dull half-hour.

  As the strokes of nine rang through the room, my companion pushed her chair back.

  ‘What time is the coroner’s inquest, Senator?’

  Mr Duffield raised his eyebrows at the change in her attitude. ‘It is scheduled for eleven o’clock.’

  ‘And when do you expect Inspector Taylor of headquarters?’

  ‘In the course of an hour, I should say, perhaps less. His man, Martin, has been here since yesterday afternoon – you probably saw him as we drove into the yard. I can telephone Mr Taylor, if you wish to see him sooner.’

  ‘That will hardly be necessary, thank you.’

  Madelyn walked across to the window. For a moment she stood peering out on to the lawn. Then she stooped, and her hand fumbled with the catch. The window swung open with the noiselessness of well-oiled hinges, and she stepped out on to the verandah, without so much as a glance at the group about the table.

  I think the Senator and I rose from our chairs at the same instant. When we reached the window, Madelyn was half across the lawn. Perhaps twenty yards ahead of her towered a huge maple, rustling in the early morning breeze.

  I realized that this was the spot where Raymond Rennick had met his death.

  In spite of his nervousness, Senator Duffield did not forget his old-fashioned courtliness, which I believe had become second nature to him. Stepping aside with a slight bow, he held the window open for me, following at my shoulder. As we reached the lawn, I saw that the scene of the murder was in plain view from at least one of the principal rooms of the Duffield home.