The End of Mr. Garment Page 6

  Miss Birdflight laughed. “Not exactly. We closed in Chicago last night,” she explained. “Didn’t you notice?”

  “You mean you’re out of a job?” He sat down in the chair beside her and, since she was already smoking, lighted a cigarette himself.

  “With summer coming on, I can’t say that I mind.” And, lying glibly, after a moment she continued: “Taylor’s reviving Crichton in the fall, and I’m to have a part.”

  “Jolly,” said Mollock. “It’s Dhu’s favourite play—but it dates horribly, don’t you think?”

  “We’ll all date, quite soon enough,” observed Miss Birdflight grimly. It was her greatest terror. “How is she?”

  “Dhu? Very well indeed, thank you! Or was at last reports. She’s thinking of dashing off a play herself in odd moments this summer. Something very Russian and depressing, I believe.”

  “Cheers!” said Miss Birdflight, without enthusiasm. She leaned nearer to him. “Notice the young man in horn spectacles, across the aisle. He came in just after you did. I think he recognizes me. He is ready to fall down and worship at the slightest provocation.”

  Mollock considered the youth through a fog of tobacco smoke. He seemed a singularly unattractive specimen. “I think his mother was scared by a turtle,” he replied critically.

  Miss Birdflight suppressed a scream of delight.

  “Don’t!” she begged, her handkerchief against her lips. “Look! There’s a chair on the platform— two chairs. Let’s grab them.”

  They grabbed the chairs on the rear platform and watched the receding landscape of Illinois. The beat of flying wheels was rhythmic and soothing. It made conversation possible, yet kept it from the ears of others. Miss Birdflight leaned closer to her companion.

  “Tell me, Duns,” she murmured, “what has happened in that Garment case? There’s simply nothing in the papers. Having been in at the death, as it were, I’m naturally curious.”

  “Rumours are rife,” asserted Mollock solemnly. “Everybody suspects everybody else—and whom Cicotte suspects, nobody knows. Possibly me.”

  She smiled faintly. “It wasn’t Mr. Van Peter— or that nice Mr. Anger,” she said, and added decisively: “I think it was that brute of a taxi man.”

  Mollock chuckled. “He was a bit dirty and unshaven,” he admitted; “but should we hold that against him? So are many poets and essayists who have never even considered murder.”

  “Have Mr. Charlesworth’s movements been traced?”

  “I believe they have. On the night of the murder, after packing off Garment and Anger to the Kimbarks—as he thought—he attended a quiet party with friends of his own, on the south side of the city.”

  “The other side of town, you mean,” commented the actress. Then she brightened. “Still, he might have hired someone to do it. That taxi driver even.”

  “I suppose he might,” agreed Mollock, “but it only makes it harder. This Spessifer—the driver— was apparently picked up in the street, outside of Van Peter’s place. To assume that he was coasting around there, on orders, waiting for that particular call, is to assume a great deal, don’t you think? It would involve a knowledge on Charlesworth’s part of Garment’s intention to stop off at Van Peter’s—a purely fortuitous incident, in actuality.”

  “It could have been figured out,” said Miss Birdflight. She snuggled against his arm confidingly and rather alarmed him. “What does Mr. Anger think?”

  Mollock spread his hands with a little difficulty. He didn’t mind lying, and he lied easily. “He doesn’t know what to think—so he tells me. I agree with you that Anger didn’t do it; and since it was not Anger, it follows that it was not Van Peter— who was with Anger when Garment was tumbled into the cab.”

  After all, he reflected, it was not his business to discredit the Kimbarks. Actresses were gossipy creatures, and this one was particularly loose-tongued and curious. Attractive, however. And shrewder than he had supposed. Her interest in Charlesworth proved that. He had turned his own mind in that direction a number of times. No proof, of course—really not a shadow of suspicion. Nevertheless Charlesworth might well be the dark horse in the race. He was almost suspiciously offstage. But for that matter, so were some millions of other inhabitants of the world.

  “So that actually nothing has happened!”

  “Nothing,” said Mollock. “The inquest has been continued, the witnesses dismissed, I am on my way to New York—in charming company—and Anger has accepted an invitation from the Van Peters to accompany them on a Caribbean cruise. The body of Stephen Garment, embalmed and hermetically sealed, will be returned ultimately, no doubt, to its native soil and there will be articles in the papers. Sic transit gloria mundi!”

  “Which means?”

  “Everything’s lovely. God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world.”

  “How nice!” said Miss Birdflight, on a note of pensive sarcasm. “Will somebody accompany Mr. Mollock on the oboe?” She leaned still closer against him and turned her face a little upward. “I think you ought to kiss me, Duns. Nobody’s looking.”

  “It’s been on my mind for years,” said Mollock. “One of these days I’m going to do it.”

  They disembarked in New York, in the morning, and went their ways with mutual disrespect, faintly tinged with amusement. Each thought the other excellent company, although slightly insane.

  The horn-spectacled young man looked after them both for a moment, then decided to obey his orders. He adjusted his soft hat, lighted a cigarette, and with practised ease took up the broad and candid trail of Dunstan Mollock. A taxi at this juncture might have complicated matters, but the fictioneer put him to no such trouble. Handing his checks to a solicitous baggage man, Mollock sought a telephone booth, talked for a few minutes with his own apartment, then set off with long strides toward the tall buildings of Fifth Avenue.

  His wife, he had been informed, was out. He was only faintly annoyed. After all, he had not sent word that he was coming; and there were a number of matters on his mind.

  His pursuer followed leisurely in his wake.

  On the avenue the novelist turned northward for a few blocks and at length entered the doorway of one of the tall buildings.

  “Charlesworth,” he muttered, standing in front of the directory board, or, as he had once called it, the table of contents.

  An elevator was just leaving. The horn-spectacled youth timed it neatly and turned his back upon the door. Mollock made it by the skin of his teeth. It was a close shave for both of them.

  “Fifteen,” said the story writer; and in the depths of the car the younger man smiled happily.

  The lift soared and stopped. The gates crashed open and crashed shut again. “Sixteen,” said the young man with horn spectacles.

  He left the car in haste and plunged down the staircase to the lower floor. Mollock, in all probability, he reflected, would already have disappeared, in which case he would have to await his reappearance. He emerged, breathless, in the marble corridor and made the first turn at random, to the right. Then, as rapidly as he had moved forward, he sped back to the concealment of the staircase door.

  Halfway along the lateral corridor a door had opened and Mollock had appeared, his hand upon the knob.

  The story writer’s footsteps sounded hollowly along the passage. He turned the corner hurriedly and stood before the elevators. His thumb jabbed impatiently at the nipple of the bell. He was obviously in a hurry. The concealed watcher reached a hard decision.

  Then again the elevator doors crashed open and crashed shut, leaving the pursuer in possession of the premises.

  “Damn!” said the horn-spectacled youth earnestly.

  But he walked swiftly to the door that Mollock had just left and read the name upon its ground-glass panel:

  CHARLESWORTH & CHARLESWORTH

  Underneath he read the further legend:

  Literary Agents

  London and New York

  The suite was of some dimensions,
and he strolled about for a few moments before its several doors and windows. In a room with a door marked “Private” two persons were talking—a man and a woman—but it was impossible to catch their words. He retreated to the elevators.

  Once more in the lower lobby, he took stock of the situation and decided that, after all, he had not been such an ass. It was unlikely that Mollock would have two visits of importance to make, so promptly after his arrival. What puzzled him was the extreme brevity of this first one. The novelist had simply popped in and then popped out again. The significance of such an action seemed patent, but what was the significance?

  He turned casually and beheld the elegant figure of Dunstan Mollock in the doorway of the building.

  Lord, what a bull to have made! But it was just possible that he had not been seen—that, seen, he had not been recognized. Already his back was to the novelist and he was walking rapidly toward the cigar stand at the rear. After a moment he turned and looked back. Mollock was standing idly where he had left him. Apparently he had not moved.

  Quite suddenly it flashed over the puzzled youth why the fellow was waiting. He was waiting for someone to appear—for an elevator to disgorge an expected figure upon the lobby pavement.

  Some dozens of busy citizens were moving in the lobby. They formed a shifting human screen between the young man at the cigar stand and the novelist in the doorway. Now a new group was adding itself to the collection—the contents of a car that had just descended. Mollock was moving backward instead of forward—out of the doorway—into the street—out of sight, by Jove, around the corner of the entrance pillars!

  The horn-spectacled youth plunged after him, mingling with the crowd. He trod furtively behind a woman whose fine proportions offered a temporary concealment to his own slight frame.

  But again quick panic seized him, jostling toward the door. Those swinging hips before him were familiar. Begad, they were even memorable, for they belonged to the woman of the train!

  He stepped backward onto the feet of the man behind him, murmured an apology, and tacked swiftly to the left, bringing up against the wall. The woman of the train! A roll of exulting drums sounded in his ears, and flags waved against the horizon. This was the answer to the puzzle. And it was Aubrey McDaniel’s lucky day. A good reporter in Chicago was a good reporter in New York or in the Belgian Congo. Don’t cheer, boys, the poor devils are dying. Lafayette, we are here! And see what the lads in the back room will have.

  “What ho, my hearties!” said young Mr. McDaniel, just under his breath. Then, once more vastly pleased with himself, he shook his wits together and allowed the actress to precede him through the door. There was a dozen feet between them when he debouched upon the pavement and waited for the next cue from his beneficent “control.”

  Would Mollock join or follow her? Had the novelist fled the Charlesworth anteroom to conceal his knowledge of her presence or was it all a part of some predetermined plan? Certain it was to young Mr. McDaniel that in some fashion these two were in collaboration.

  But Dunstan Mollock did neither. Instead, he watched Miss Birdflight stroll away in the avenue called Fifth until she was lost to sight in the moving throngs. Then with a little smile and a slight lifting of one shoulder he turned eastward in one of the Forties, swinging his stick as he progressed.

  “Now that,” observed Mollock to himself, as he considered the adventure, “was a very funny thing. What the devil, I wonder, has she to do with Charlesworth or Charlesworth to do with her? I thought she was unusually pertinacious in the train. And is the old pirate in town at all, I wonder? I wish I’d stopped, at least, to ask. I must certainly see Walter this evening and tell him the whole story.”

  He lengthened his stride and set off with great vigour for his own apartment at the Wyoming Arms, while half a block behind him trailed young Mr. McDaniel of Chicago, one of the most tireless and impersonal of that city’s bloodhounds.

  For in strictest confidence Detective-Sergeant Bernard Cicotte—known to the reporters as Barney—had whispered to young Mr. McDaniel the story of Mollock’s extraordinary prediction in the Kimbark library; and in the strictest confidence young Mr. McDaniel had whispered the story to his superiors. There were other angles to the case, of course, but none more sensational in prospect; and in any event these were being adequately covered by the wily Cicotte. The detective was very friendly to the press and at all times willing to be of service—although he had no notion that Mollock had committed the crime, or in fact knew anything about it.

  Aubrey McDaniel, noting the number of the novelist’s hotel upon his scratch pad, together with its name, decided that he had played in luck. On an impulse, he stepped forward and presented his card to the flunkey at the door:

  AUBREY MCDANIEL

  The Chicago Daylight

  “Please see that that is delivered to Mr. Mollock at once,” he commanded.

  But the gorgeous automaton was unimpressed. “Have you an appointment?” he asked. “I’m sorry, but Mr. Mollock has just returned from Chicago, and has left word that he is not to be disturbed.”

  “Well, pin it on his coat tail to-morrow,” said young Mr. McDaniel easily. “I’ll be around to see him in the morning.”

  On the whole, he concluded, it had been a sufficiently auspicious beginning. The old luck was still with him. Old Lady Luck!

  “Horseshoes, Grandma!” he observed aloud, in the idiomatic jargon of his craft. “Horseshoes!”

  And by a remarkable coincidence, at almost the same instant, near the town of Amersham, only forty miles removed from the Grand Central Terminal, an elderly animal belonging to a farmer of the vicinity actually cast a shoe into a neighbouring ravine.

  The farmer, a certain Lillibridge, hearing the shoe sing as it crossed the road, stopped his horse and wagon and took after it. But the ravine, deep with sodden leaves and earth, after a hard winter, offered seasonal difficulties. The shoe seemed reluctant to appear. Then all thought of it was forgotten as the probing Lillibridge came suddenly upon what once had been the body of a woman and fled, horror-stricken, to the roadway.

  Walter Ghost, reading the account of the gruesome discovery in the newspapers that evening, was mildly annoyed by the ringing of his doorbell at an hour when he liked to be alone.

  But it was only Mollock—good old Mollock— come to talk with him about the murder in Chicago.

  Chapter Six

  Not that Ghost was a detective. Heaven forbid! as he would himself have said. Do detectives read the latest books concurrently with all that is fine and old in letters? Do they speak a dozen languages with ease, including the Scandinavian, and make shift to mutter in a dozen more? Do they collect books and pictures and ancient manuscripts, and journey from New York to the Canaries to verify the configuration of an island? Do they write footnotes to the great of earth, whereby the great of earth are made to blush and stammer and prepare a second volume? Are they interested in asteroids? Campanology? The summit of Roraima?

  Some of them, to be sure, have a vestigial knowledge of cipher. Ghost’s was unorthodox and profound.

  But once tagged with the epithet, it is difficult to shake it off. One’s friends are responsible. To Mollock, Ghost was as satisfactory a detective as he could have invented for himself, and it was a high tribute. But he was more than that, even to Mollock. He was a sort of genial monster, a great human being, a man like Shakespeare, a grand guy.

  It was possible, however, to be annoyed with Ghost, and Mollock—after some minutes of conversation—was annoyed.

  “Hang it, Walter,” he complained, “you are sometimes very exasperating. I bring you details of one of the most sensational mysteries of the decade, and you prattle like a child of this commonplace affair at Amersham.”

  His friend’s curiously ugly face crinkled and became singularly attractive.

  “My dear Duns,” said Walter Ghost, “it is in all probability the Garment mystery that is the more commonplace of the two. Fascinating as it is, supe
rficially, it is fascinating principally because of the celebrity of the victim—and, of course, the dramatic circumstance of his arrival in the taxicab. The crime was bold, but relatively undistinguished. A knife thrust through the heart! The premeditation suggested—although it is a pity the weapon was not found—seems somehow less impressive than it might have been. There were shrewder and far safer ways to murder a notorious novelist; although few, I grant you, with such possibilities for publicity. Garment’s friends are known. Probably his enemies are known. His movements are—God help us!—matters of public moment. A clever investigator would solve the mystery of his murder in very short order.”

  He lifted a protesting hand. “Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that I believe this Spessifer did it, for I don’t. But considering the distinction of the visitor, and the row that was sure to be raised about his death, I think a greater ingenuity might have been shown. Unless, indeed, the murderer was actually courting discovery. Eh? In effect, daring the friends of Garment to name him?”

  He reached for the newspaper. “Now in this humbler effort there is evidence of a much finer hand. Some thought was given to the murder of this woman at Amersham. No effort was spared to make it a perfect crime. The murderer, I think it can be shown, erred in being overly conscientious. His superb endeavour to make it look like suicide—”

  Mollock’s eyebrows had pushed up. “You mean, you think it wasn’t suicide?”

  “I’m reasonably sure it wasn’t. Not that it’s any of my business; and if the authorities persist in regarding it as suicide, I certainly shall not try to put them right. I have an excellent civic conscience, up to a point, but when it comes to playing detective in public—actually applying for the job!—well, I won’t do it. I’ve done it twice now,1 with moderate success, and my laurels suffice. I have other work to do. But here, in the library, merely talking about it, the problem is of some interest.”

  “Why don’t you think it’s suicide?” asked Mollock curiously.