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The man in gray protested with head and gesture and voice that this was not so. But his eyes were sheepish.
Alec Rush laughed harshly again and said, “No matter. I ain't sensitive about it. I can talk about politics, and being made the goat, and all that, but the records show the Board of Police Commissioners gave me the air for a list of crimes that would stretch from here to Canton Hollow. All right, sir! I'll take your job. It sounds phony, but maybe it ain't. It'll cost you fifteen a day and expenses.”
“I can see that it sounds peculiar,” the younger man assured the detective, “but you'll find that it's quite all right. You'll want a retainer, of course.”
“Yes, say fifty.”
The man in gray took five new ten-dollar bills from a pigskin billfold and put them on the desk. With a thick pen Alec Rush began to make muddy ink-marks on a receipt blank.
“Your name?” he asked.
“I would rather not. I'm not to appear in it, you know. My name would not be of importance, would it?”
Alec Rush put down his pen and frowned at his client.
“Now! Now!” he grumbled good-naturedly. “How am I going to do business with a man like you?”
The man in gray was sorry, even apologetic, but he was stubborn in his reticence. He would not give his name. Alec Rush growled and complained, but pocketed the five ten-dollar bills.
“It's in your favor, maybe,” the detective admitted as he surrendered, “though it ain't to your credit. But if you were off-color I guess you'd have sense enough to fake a name. Now this young woman —who is she?”
“Mrs. Hubert Landow.”
"Well, well, we've got a name at last! And where does Mrs. Landow live?”
“On Charles-Street Avenue,” the man in gray said, and gave a number.
“Her description?”
“She is twenty-two or —three years old, rather tall, slender in an athletic way, with auburn hair, blue eyes and very white skin.”
“And her husband? You know him?”
“I have seen him. He is about my age—thirty—but larger than I, a tall, broad-shouldered man of the clean-cut blond type.”
“And your mystery man? What does he look like?”
“He's quite young, not more than twenty-two at the most, and not very large—medium size, perhaps, or a little under. He's very dark, with high cheekbones and a large nose. High, straight shoulders, too, but not broad. He walks with small, almost mincing, steps.”
“Clothes?”
“He was wearing a brown suit and a tan cap when I saw him on Fayette Street yesterday afternoon. I suppose he wore the same last night, but I'm not positive.”
“I suppose you'll drop in here for my reports,” the detective wound up, “since I won't know where to send them to you?”
“Yes.” The man in gray stood up and held out his hand.
“I'm very grateful to you for undertaking this, Mr. Rush.”
Alec Rush said that was all right. They shook hands, and the man in gray went out.
The ugly man waited until his client had had time to turn off into the corridor that led to the elevators. Then the detective said, “Now, Mr. Man!” got up from his chair, took his hat from the clothes-tree in the corner, locked his office door behind him, and ran down the back stairs.
He ran with the deceptive heavy agility of a bear. There was something bear-like, too, in the looseness with which his blue suit hung on his stout body, and in the set of his heavy shoulders—sloping, limber-jointed shoulders whose droop concealed much of their bulk.
He gained the ground floor in time to see the gray back of his client issuing into the street. In his wake Alec Rush sauntered. Two blocks, a turn to the left, another block and a turn to the right. The man in gray went into the office of a trust company that occupied the ground floor of a large office building.
The rest was the mere turning of a hand. Half a dollar to a porter: the man in gray was Ralph Millar, assistant cashier.
Darkness was settling in Charles-Street Avenue when Alec Rush, in a modest black coupe, drove past the address Ralph Millar had given him. The house was large in the dusk, spaced from its fellows as from the paving by moderate expanses of fenced lawn.
Alec Rush drove on, turned to the left at the first crossing, again to the left at the next, and at the next. For half an hour he guided his car along a many-angled turning and returning route until, when finally he stopped beside the curb at some distance from, but within sight of, the Landow house, he had driven through every piece of thoroughfare in the vicinity of that house.
He had not seen Millar's dark, high-shouldered young man.
Lights burned brightly in Charles-Street Avenue, and the night traffic began to purr southward into the city. Alec Rush's heavy body slumped against the wheel of his coupe while he filled its interior with pungent fog from a black cigar, and held patient, bloodshot eyes on what he could see of the Landow residence.
Three-quarters of an hour passed, and there was motion in the house. A limousine left the garage in the rear for the front door. A man and a woman, faintly distinguishable at that distance, left the house for the limousine. The limousine moved out into the cityward current. The third car behind it was Alec Rush's modest coupe.
Except for a perilous moment at North Avenue, when the interfering cross-stream of traffic threatened to separate him from his quarry, Alec Rush followed the limousine without difficulty. In front of a Howard Street theatre it discharged its freight: a youngish man and a young woman, both tall, evening-clad, and assuringly in agreement with the descriptions the detective had got from his client.
The Landows went into the already dark theatre while Alec Rush was buying his ticket. In the light of the first intermission he discovered them again. Leaving his seat for the rear of the auditorium, he found an angle —from which he could study them for the remaining five minutes of illumination.
Hubert Landow's head was rather small for his stature, and the blond hair with which it was covered threatened each moment to escape from its imposed smoothness into ; crisp curls. His face, healthily ruddy, was handsome in al muscular, very masculine way, not indicative of any great mental nimbleness. His wife had that beauty which needs no cataloguing. However, her hair was auburn, her eyes blue, her skin white, and she looked a year or two older than the maximum twenty-three Millar had allowed her.
While the intermission lasted Hubert Landow talked to his wife eagerly, and his bright eyes were the eyes of a lover. Alec Rush could not see Mrs. Landow's eyes. He saw her replying now and again to her husband's words. Her profile showed no answering eagerness. She did not show she was bored.
Midway the last act, Alec Rush left the theatre to maneuver his coupe into a handy position from which to cover the Landows' departure. But their limousine did not pick them up when they left the theatre. They turned down Howard Street afoot, going to a rather garish second-class restaurant, where an abbreviated orchestra succeeded by main strength in concealing its smallness from the ear.
His coupe conveniently parked, Alec Rush found a table from which he could watch his subjects without being himself noticeable. Husband still wooed wife with incessant, eager talking. Wife was listless, polite, unkindled. Neither more than touched the food before them. They danced once, the woman's face as little touched by immediate interest as when she listened to her husband's words. A beautiful face, but empty.
The minute hand of Alec Rush's nickel-plated watch had scarcely begun its last climb of the day from where VI is inferred to XII when the Landows left the restaurant. The limousine—against its side a young Norfolk-jacketed Negro smoking—was two doors away. It bore them back to their house. The detective having seen them into the house, having seen the limousine into the garage, drove his coupe again around and around through the neighboring thoroughfares. And saw nothing of Millar's dark young man.
Then Alec Rush went home and to bed. At eight o'clock the next morning ugly man and modest coupe were stationary in Charles-Street Avenue again. Male Charles-Street Avenue went with the sun on its left toward its offices. As the morning aged and the shadows grew shorter and thicker, so, generally, did the individuals who composed this morning procession. Eight-o'clock was frequently young and slender and brisk, Eight-thirty less so, Nine still less, and rear-guard Ten-o'clock was preponderantly neither young nor slender, and more often sluggish than brisk.
Into this rear guard, though physically he belonged to no later period than eight-thirty, a blue roadster carried Hubert Landow. His broad shoulders were blue-coated, his blond hair gray-capped, and he was alone in the roadster. With a glance around to make sure Millar's dark young man was not in sight, Alec Rush turned his coupe in the blue car's wake.
They rode swiftly into the city, down into its financial center, where Hubert Landow deserted his roadster before a Redwood Street stockbroker's office. The morning had become noon before Landow was in the street again, turning his roadster northward.
When shadowed and shadower came to rest again they were in Mount Royal Avenue. Landow got out of his car and strode briskly into a large apartment building. A block distant, Alec Rush lighted a black cigar and sat still in his coupe. Half an hour passed. Alec Rush turned his head and sank his gold teeth deep into his cigar.
Scarcely twenty feet behind the coupe, in the doorway of a garage, a dark young man with high cheek-bones, high, straight shoulders, loitered. His nose was large. His suit was brown, as were the eyes with which he seemed to pay no especial attention to anything through the thin blue drift of smoke from the tip of a drooping cigarette.
Alec Rush took his cigar from his mouth to examine it, took a knife from his pocket to trim the bitten end, restored cigar to mouth and knife to pocket, and thereafter was as indifferent to all Mount Royal Avenue as the dark youth behind him. The one drowsed in his doorway. The other dozed in his car. And the afternoon crawled past one o'clock, past one-thirty.
Hubert Landow came out of the apartment building, vanished swiftly in his blue roadster. His going stirred neither of the motionless men, scarcely their eyes. Not until another fifteen minutes had gone did either of them move.
Then the dark youth left his doorway. He moved without haste, up the street, with short, almost mincing, steps. The back of Alec Rush's black-derbied head was to the youth when he passed the coupe, which may have been chance, for none could have said that the ugly man had so much as glanced at the other since his first sight of him. The dark young man let his eyes rest on the detective's back without interest as he passed. He went on up the street toward the apartment building Landow had visited, up its steps and out of sight into it.
When the dark young matt had disappeared, Alec Rush threw away his cigar, stretched, yawned, and awakened the coupe's engine. Four blocks and two turnings from Mount Royal Avenue, he got out of the automobile, leaving it locked and empty in front of a gray stone church. He walked back to Mount Royal Avenue, to halt on a corner two blocks above his earlier position.
He had another half-hour of waiting before the dark young man appeared. Alec Rush was buying a cigar in a glass-fronted cigar store when the other passed. The young man boarded a street car at North Avenue and found a seat. The detective boarded the same car at the next corner and stood on the rear platform. Warned by an indicative forward hitching of the young man's shoulders and head, Alec Rush was the first passenger off the car at Madison Avenue, and the first aboard a southbound car there. And again, he was off first at Franklin Street.
The dark youth went straight to a rooming-house in this street, while the detective came to rest beside the window of a corner drug store specializing in theatrical make-up. There he loafed until half-past three. When the dark young man came into the street again it was to walk—Alec Rush behind him—to Eutaw Street, board a car, and ride to Camden Station.
There, in the waiting-room, the dark young man met a young woman who frowned and asked:
“Where in the hell have you been at?”
Passing them, the detective heard the petulant greeting, but the young man's reply was pitched too low for him to catch, nor did he hear anything else the young woman said. They talked for perhaps ten minutes, standing together in a deserted end of the waiting-room, so that Alec Rush could not have approached them without making himself conspicuous.
The young woman seemed to be impatient, urgent. The young man seemed to explain, to reassure. Now and then he gestured with the ugly, deft hands of a skilled mechanic. His companion became more agreeable. She was short, square, as if carved economically from a cube. Consistently, her nose also was short and her chin square. She had, on the whole, now that her earlier displeasure was passing, a merry face, a pert, pugnacious, rich-blooded face that advertised inexhaustible vitality. That advertisement was in every feature, from the live ends of her cut brown hair to the earth-gripping pose of her feet on the cement flooring. Her clothes were dark, quiet, expensive, but none too gracefully worn, hanging just the least bit bunchily here and there on her sturdy body.
Nodding vigorously several times, the young man at length tapped his cap-visor with two careless fingers and went out into the street. Alec Rush let him depart unshadowed. But when, walking slowly out to the iron train-shed gates, along them to the baggage window, thence to the street door, the young woman passed out of the station, the ugly man was behind her. He was still behind her when she joined the four o'clock shopping crowd at Lexington Street.
The young woman shopped with the whole-hearted air of one with nothing else on her mind. In the second department store she visited, Alec Rush left her looking at a display of laces while he moved as swiftly and directly as intervening shoppers would permit toward a tall, thick-shouldered, gray-haired woman in black, who seemed to be waiting for someone near the foot of a flight of stairs.
“Hello, Alec!” she said when he touched her arm, and her humorous eyes actually looked with pleasure at his uncouth face. “What are you doing in my territory?”
“Got a booster for you,” he mumbled. “The chunky girl in blue at the lace counter. Make her?” The store detective looked and nodded. “Yes.Thanks, Alec.You're sure she's boosting, of course?”
“Now, Minnie!” he complained, his rasping voice throttled down to a metallic growl. “Would I be giving you a bum rumble? She went south with a couple of silk pieces, and it's more than likely she's got herself some lace by now.”
“Um-hmm,” said Minnie. “Well, when she sticks her foot on the sidewalk, I'll be with her.”
Alec Rush put his hand on the store detective's arm again.
“I want a line on her,” he said. “What do you say we tail her around and see what she's up to before we knock her over?”
“If it doesn't take all day,” the woman agreed. And when the chunky girl in blue presently left the lace counter and the store, the detectives followed, into another store, ranging too far behind her to see any thieving she might have done, content to keep her under surveillance. From this last store their prey went down to where Pratt Street was dingiest, into a dingy three-story house of furnished flats.
Two blocks away a policeman was turning a corner.
“Take a plant on the joint while I.get the copper,” Alex Rush ordered.
When he returned with the policeman the store detective was waiting in the vestibule.
“Second floor,” she said.
Behind her the house's street door stood open to show a dark hallway and the foot of a tattered-carpeted flight of steps. Into this dismal hallway appeared a slovenly thin woman in rumpled gray cotton, saying whiningly as she came forward, “What do you want? I keep a respectable house, I'll have you understand, and I —”
“Chunky, dark-eyed girl living here,” Alec Rush croaked. “Second floor. Take us up.”
The woman's scrawny face sprang into startled lines, faded eyes wide, as if mistaking the harshness of the detective's voice for the harshness of great emotion.
“Why—why—” she stammered, and then remembered the first principle of shady rooming-house management —never to stand in the way of the police. “I'll take you up,” she agreed, and, hitching her wrinkled skirt in one hand, led the way up the stairs.
Her sharp fingers tapped on a door near the head of the stairs.
“Who's that?” a casually curt feminine voice asked.
“Landlady.”
The chunky girl in blue, without her hat now, opened the door. Alec Rush moved a big foot forward to hold it open, while the landlady said, “This is her,” the policeman said, “You'll have to come along,” and Minnie said, “Dearie, we want to come in and talk to you.”
“My God!” exclaimed the girl. “There'd be just as much sense to it if you'd all jumped out at me and yelled
'Boo!'”
“This ain't any way,” Alec Rush rasped, moving forward, grinning his hideous friendly grin. “Let's go in where we can talk it over.”
Merely by moving his loose-jointed bulk a step this way, a half-step that, turning his ugly face on this one and that one, he herded the little group as he wished, sending the landlady discontentedly away, marshaling the others into the girl's rooms.
“Remember, I got no idea what this is all about,” said the girl when they were in her living-room, a narrow room where blue fought with red without ever compromising on purple. “I'm easy to get along with, and if you think this is a nice place to talk about whatever you want to talk about, go ahead! But if you're counting on me talking, too, you'd better smart me up.”
“Boosting, dearie,” Minnie said, leaning forward to pat the girl's arm. “I'm at Goodbody's.”
“You think I've been shoplifting? Is that the idea?”
“Yeah. Exactly. Uh-huh. That's what.” Alec Rush left her no doubt on the point.
The girl narrowed her eyes, puckered her red mouth, squinted sidewise at the ugly man.
“It's all right with me,” she announced, “so long as Goodbody's hanging the rap on me—somebody I can sue for a million when it flops. I've got nothing to say. Take me for my ride.”
“You'll get your ride, sister,” the ugly man rasped good-naturedly. “Nobody's going to beat you out of it. But do you mind if I look around your place a little first?”
“Got anything with a judge's name on it that says you can?”
“No.”
“Then you don't get a peep!”
Alec Rush chuckled, thrust his hands into his trouser pockets, and began to wander through the rooms, of which there were three. Presently he came out of the bedroom carrying a photograph in a silver frame.
“Who's this?” he asked the girl.
“Try and find out!”
“I am trying,” he lied.
“You big bum!” said she. “You couldn't find water in the ocean!”
Alec Rush laughed with coarse heartiness. He could afford to. The photograph in his hand was of Hubert Landow.
Twilight was around the gray stone church when the owner of the deserted coupe returned to it. The chunky girl—Polly Vanness was the name she had given—had been booked and lodged in a cell in the Southwestern Police Station. Quantities of stolen goods had been found in her flat. Her harvest of that afternoon was still on her person when Minnie and a police matron searched her. She had refused to talk. The detective had said nothing to her about his knowledge of the photograph's subject, or of her meeting in the railroad station with the dark young man. Nothing found in her rooms threw any light on either of these things.
Having eaten his evening meal before coming back to his car, Alec Rush now drove out to Charles-Street Avenue. Lights glowed normally in the Landow house when he passed it. A little beyond it he turned his coupe so that it pointed toward the city, and brought it to rest in a tree-darkened curbside spot within sight of the house.
The night went along and no one left or entered the
Landow house. „ '' '
Finger nails clicked on the coupe's glass door. A man stood there. Nothing could be said of him in the darkness except that he was not large, and that to have escaped the detective's notice until now he must have stealthily stalked the car from the rear.
Alec Rush put out a hand and the door swung open.
“Got a match?” the man asked.
The detective hesitated, said, “Yeah,” and held out a box.
A match scraped and flared into a dark young face: large nose, high cheekbones: the young man Alec Rush had shadowed that afternoon.
But recognition, when it was voiced, was voiced by the dark young man.
“I thought it was you,” he said simply as he applied the flaming match to his cigarette. “Maybe you don't know me, but I knew you when you were on the force.”
The ex-detective-sergeant gave no meaning at all to a husky “Yeah.”
“I thought it was you in the heap on Mount Royal this afternoon, but I couldn't make sure,” the young man continued, entering the coupe, sitting beside the detective, closing the door. “Scuttle Zeipp's me. I ain't as well known as Napoleon, so if you've never heard of me there's no hard feelings.”
“Yeah.”
“That's the stuff! When you once think up a good answer, stick to it.” Scuttle Zeipp's face was a sudden bronze mask in the glow of his cigarette. “The same answer'll do for my next question. You're interested in these here Landows? Yeah,” he added in hoarse mimicry of the de^ tective's voice.
Another inhalation lighted his face, and his words came smokily out as the glow faded.
“You ought to want to know what I'm doing hanging around 'em. I ain't tight. I'll tell you. I've been slipped half a grand to bump off the girl—twice. How do you like that?”
“I hear you,” said Alec Rush. “But anybody can talk that knows the words.”
“Talk? Sure it's talk,” Zeipp admitted cheerfully. “But so's it talk when the judge says 'hanged by the neck until dead and may God have mercy on your soul!' Lots of things are talk, but that don't always keep 'em from being real.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, brother, yeah! Now listen to this: it's one for the cuff. A certain party comes to me a couple of days ago with a knock-down from a party that knows me. See? This certain party asks me what I want to bump off a broad. I thought a grand would be right, and said so. Too stiff. We come together on five hundred. I got two-fifty down and get the rest when the Landow twist is cold. Not so bad for a soft trick—a slug through the side of a car—huh?”
“Well, what are you waiting for?” the detective asked. “You want to make it a fancy caper—kill her on her birthday or a legal holiday?”
Scuttle Zeipp smacked his lips and poked the detective's chest with a finger in the dark.
“Not any, brother! I'm thinking way ahead of you! Listen to this: I pocket my two-fifty advance and come up here to give the ground a good casing, not \vanting to lam into anything I didn't know was here. While I'm poking around, I run into another party that's poking around. This second party gives me a tumble, I talk smart, and bingo! First thing you know she's propositioning me. What do you guess? She wants to know what I want to bump off a broad! Is it the same one she wants stopped? I hope to tell you it is!
“I ain't so silly! I get my hands on another two hundred and fifty berries, with that much more coming when I put over the fast one. Now do you think I'm going to do anything to that Landow baby? You're dumb if you do. She's my meal ticket. If she lives till I pop her, she'll be older than either you or the bay. I've got five hundred out of her so far. What's the matter with sticking around and waiting for more customers that don't like her? If two of 'em want to buy her out of the world, why not more? The answer is, 'Yeah!' And on top of that, here you are snooping around her. Now there it is, brother, for you to look at and taste and smell.”
Silence held for several minutes, in the darkness of the coupe's interior, and then the detective's harsh voice put a skeptical question:
“And who are these certain parties that want her out of the way?”
“Be yourself!” Scuttle Zeipp admonished him. “I'm lay-ing down on 'em, right enough, but I ain't feeding 'em to you.”
“What are you giving me all this for then?”
“What for? Because you're in on the lay somewhere. Crossing each other, neither of us can make a thin dimmer. If we don't hook up we'll just ruin the racket for each other. I've already made half a grand off this Landow. That's mine, but there's more to be picked up by a couple of J men that know what they're doing. All right. I'm offering to throw in with you on a two-way cut of whatever else we can get. But my parties are out! I don't mind throwing them down, but I ain't rat enough to put the finger on them for you.”
Alec Rush grunted and croaked another dubious inquiry.
“How come you trust me so much, Scuttle?”
The hired killer laughed knowingly.
“Why not? You're a right guy. You can see a profit when it's showed to you. They didn't chuck you off the force for forgetting to hang up your stocking. Besides, suppose you want to double-cross me, what can you do? You can't prove anything. I told you I didn't mean the woman any harm. I ain't even packing a gun. But all that's the bunk. You're a wise head. You know what's what. Me and you, Alec, we can get plenty!”
Silence again, until the detective spoke slowly, thoughtfully.
“The first thing would be to get a line on the reasons your parties want the girl put out. Got anything on that?”
“Not a whisper.”
“Both of 'em women, I take it.”
Scuttle Zeipp hesitated.
“Yes,” he admitted. “But don't be asking me anything about 'em. In the first place, I don't know anything, and in the second, I wouldn't tip their mitts if I did.”
“Yeah,” the detective croaked, as if he quite understood his companion's perverted idea of loyalty. “Now if they're women, the chances are the racket hangs on a man. What do you think of Landow? He's a pretty lad.”
Scuttle Zeipp leaned over to put his finger against the detective's chest again.
“You've got it, Alec! That could be it, damned if it couldn't!”
“Yeah,” Alec Rush agreed, fumbling with the levers of his car. “We'll get away from here and stay away until I look into him.”
At Franklin Street, half a block from the rooming-house into which he had shadowed the young man that afternoon, the detective stopped his coupe.
“You want to drop out here?” he asked.
Scuttle Zeipp looked sidewise, speculatively, into the elder man's ugly face.
“It'll do,” the young man said, “but you're a damned good guesser, just the same.” He stopped with a hand on the door. “It's a go, is it, Alec? Fifty-fifty?”
“I wouldn't say so,” Alec Rush grinned at him with hideous good-nature. “You're not a bad lad, Scuttle, and if there's any gravy you'll get yours, but don't count on me mobbing up with you.”
Zeipp's eyes jerked to slits, his lips snarled back from yellow teeth that were set edge to edge.
“You sell me out, you damned gorilla, and I'll—” He laughed the threat out of being, his dark face young and careless again. “Have it your own way, Alec. I didn't make no mistake when I throwed in with you. What you say goes.”
“Yeah,” the ugly man agreed. “Lay off that joint out there until I tell you. Maybe you'd better drop in to see me tomorrow. The phone book'll tell you where my office is. So long, kid.”
“So long, Alec.”
In the morning Alec Rush set about investigating Hubert Landow. First he went to the City Hall, where he examined the gray books in which marriage licenses are indexed. Hubert Britman Landow and Sara Falsoner had been married six months before, he learned.
The bride's maiden name thickened the red in the detective's bloodshot eyes. Air hissed sharply from his flattened nostrils. “Yeah! Yeah!” he said to himself, so rasp-ingly that a lawyer's skinny clerk, fiddling with other records at his elbow, looked frightenedly at him and edged a little away.
From the City Hall, Alec Rush carried the bride's name to two newspaper offices, where, after studying the files, he bought an armful of six-months-old papers. He took the papers to his office, spread them on his desk, and attacked them with a pair of shears. When the last one had been cut and thrown aside, there remained on his desk a thick sheaf of clippings.
Arranging his clippings in chronological order, Alec Rush lighted a black cigar, put his elbows on the desk, his ugly head between his palms, and began to read a story with which newspaper-reading Baltimore had been familiar half a year before.
Purged of irrelevancies and earlier digressions, the story was essentially this:
Jerome Falsoner, aged forty-five, was a bachelor who lived alone in a flat in Cathedral Street, on an income more than sufficient for his comfort. He was a tall man, but of delicate physique, the result, it may have been, of excessive indulgence in pleasure on a constitution none too strong in the beginning. He was well known, at least by sight, to all night-living Baltimoreans, and to those who frequented race-track, gambling-house, and the furtive cockpits that now and then materialize for a few brief hours in the forty miles of country that lie between Baltimore and Washington.
One Fanny Kidd, coming as was her custom at ten o'clock one morning to “do” Jerome Falsoner's rooms, found him lying on his back in his living-room, staring with dead eyes at a spot on the ceiling, a bright spot that was reflected sunlight—reflected from the metal hilt of his paper-knife, which protruded from his chest.
Police investigation established four facts:
First, Jerome Falsoner had been dead for fourteen hours when Fanny Kidd found him, which placed his murder at about eight o'clock the previous evening.
Second, the last persons known to have seen him alive were a woman named Madeline Boudin, with whom he had been intimate, and three of her friends. They had seen him, alive, at some time between seven-thirty and eight o'clock, or less than half an hour before his death. They had been driving down to a cottage on the Severn River, and Madeline Boudin had told the others she wanted to see Falsoner before she went. The others had remained in their car while she rang the bell. Jerome Falsoner opened the street door and she went in. Ten minutes later she came out and rejoined her friends. Jerome Falsoner came to the door with her, waving a hand at one of the men in the car —a Frederick Stoner, who knew Falsoner '•slightly, and who was connected with the district attorney's office. Two women, talking on the steps of a house across the street, had also seen Falsoner, and had seen Madeline Boudin and her friends drive away.
Third, Jerome Falsoner's heir and only near relative was his niece, Sara Falsoner, who, by some vagary of chance, was marrying Hubert Landow at the very hour that Fanny Kidd was finding her employer's dead body. Niece and uncle had seldom seen one another. The niece—for police suspicion settled on her for a short space—was definitely proved to have been at home, in her apartment in Carey Street, from six o'clock the evening of the murder until eight-thirty the next morning. Her husband, her fiance then, had been there with her from six until eleven that evening. Prior to her marriage, the girl had been employed as stenographer by the same trust company that employed Ralph Millar.
Fourth, Jerome Falsoner, who had not the most even of dispositions, had quarreled with an Icelander named Einer Jokumsson in a gambling-house two days before he was murdered. Jokumsson had threatened him. Jokumsson—a short, heavily built man, dark-haired, dark-eyed—had vanished from his hotel, leaving his bags there, the day the body was found, and had not been seen since.
The last of these clippings carefully read, Alec Rush rocked back in his chair and made a thoughtful monster's face at the.ceiling. Presently he leaned forward again to look into —the telephone directory, and to call the number of Ralph Millar's trust company. But when he got his number he changed his mind.
“Never mind,” he said into the instrument, and called a number that was Goodbody's. Minnie, when she came to the telephone, told him that Polly Vanness had been identified as one Polly Bangs, arrested in Milwaukee two years ago for shoplifting, and given a two-year sentence. Minnie also said that Polly Bangs had been released on bail early that morning.
Alec Rush pushed back the telephone and looked through his clippings again until he found the address of Madeline Boudin, the woman who had visited Falsoner so soon before his death. It was a Madison Avenue number. Thither his coupe carried the detective.
No, Miss Boudin did not live there. Yes, she had lived there, but had moved four months ago. Perhaps Mrs. Blender, on the third floor, would know where she lived now. Mrs. Blender did not know. She knew Miss Boudin had moved to an apartment-house in Garrison Avenue, but did not think she was living there now. At the Garrison Avenue house: Miss Boudin had moved away a month and a half ago—somewhere in Mount Royal Avenue, perhaps. The number was not known.
The coupe carried its ugly owner to Mount Royal Avenue, to the apartment building he had seen first Hubert Landow and then Scuttle Zeipp visit the previous day. At the manager's office he made inquiries about a Walter Boyden, who was thought to live there. Walter Boyden was not known to the manager. There was a Miss Boudin in 604, but her name was B-o-u-d-i-n, and she lived alone.
Alec Rush left the building and got in his car again. He screwed up his savage red eyes, nodded his head in a satisfied way, and with one finger described a small circle in the air. Then he returned to his office.
Calling the trust company's number again, he gave Ralph Millar's name, and presently was speaking to the assistant cashier.
“This is Rush. Can you come up to the office right away?”
“What's that? Certainly. But how—how—? Yes, I'll be up in a minute.”
None of the surprise that had been in Millar's telephone voice was apparent when he reached the detective's office. He asked no questions concerning the detective's knowledge of his identity. In brown today, he was as neatly inconspicuous as he had been yesterday in gray.
“Come in,” the ugly man welcomed him. “Sit down. I've got to have some more facts, Mr. Millar.”
Millar's thin mouth tightened and his brows drew together with obstinate reticence.
“I thought we settled that point, Rush. I told you —”
Alec Rush frowned at his client with jovial, though frightful exasperation.
“I know what you told me,” he interrupted. “But that was then and this is now. The thing's coming unwound on rne, and I can see just enough to get myself tangled up if I don't watch Harvey. I found your mysterious man, talked to him. He was following Mrs. Landow, right enough. According to the way he tells it, he's been hired to kill her.”
Millar leaped from his chair to lean over the yellow desk, his face close to the detective's.
“My God, Rush, what are you saying? To kill her?”
“Now, now! Take it easy. He's not going to kill her. I don't think he ever meant to. But he claims he was hired to do it.”
“You've arrested him? You've found the man who hired him?”
The detective squinted up his bloodshot eyes and studied the younger man's passionate face.
“As a matter of fact,” he croaked calmly when he had finished his examination, “I haven't done either of those things. She's in no danger just now. Maybe the lad was stringing me, maybe he wasn't, but either way he wouldn't have spilled it to me if he meant to do anything. And when it comes right down to it, Mr. Millar, do you want him arrested?”
“Yes! That is—” Millar stepped back from the desk, sagged limply down on the chair again, and put shaking hands over his face. “My God, Rush, I don't know!” he gasped.
“Exactly,” said Alec Rush. “Now here it is. Mrs. Landow was Jerome Falsoner's niece and heir. She worked for your trust company. She married Landow the morning her uncle was found dead. Yesterday Landow visited the building where Madeline Boudin lives. She was the last person known to have been in Falsoner's rooms before he was killed. But her alibi seems to be as air-tight as the Landows'. The man who claims he was hired to kill Mrs. Landow also visited Madeline Boudin's building yesterday. I saw him go in. I saw him meet another woman. A shoplifter, the second one. In her rooms I found a photograph of Hubert Landow. Your dark man claims he was hired twice to kill Mrs. Landow—by two women neither knowing the other had hired him. He won't tell me who they are, but he doesn't have to.”
The hoarse voice stopped and Alec Rush waited for Millar to speak. But Millar was for the time without a voice. His eyes were wide and despairingly empty. Alec Rush raised one big hand, folded it into a fist that was almost perfectly spherical, and thumped his desk softly.
“There it is, Mr. Millar,” he rasped. “A pretty tangle. If you'll tell me what you know, we'll get it straightened out, never fear. If you don't—I'm out!”
Now Millar found words, however jumbled.
“You couldn't, Rush! You can't desert me —us —her!
It's not—You're not —” But Alec Rush shook his ugly pear-shaped head with slow emphasis.
“There's murder in this and the Lord knows what all. I've got no liking for a blindfolded game. How do I know what you're up to? You can tell me what you know—everything—or you can find yourself another detective.
That's flat.”
Ralph Millar's fingers picked at each other, his teeth pulled at his lips, his harassed eyes pleaded with the detective.
“You can't, Rush,” he begged. “She's still in danger. Even if you are right about that man not attacking her, she's not safe. The women who hired him can hire another. You've got to protect her, Rush.”
“Yeah? Then you've got to talk.”
“I've got to —? Yes, I'll talk, Rush. I'll tell you anything you ask. But there's really nothing—or almost nothing—I know beyond what you've already learned.”
“She worked for your trust company?”
“Yes, in my department.”
“Left there to be married?”
“Yes. That is—No, Rush, the truth is she was discharged. It was an outrage, but —”
“When was this?”
“It was the day before the—before she was married.”
“Tell me about it.”
“She had—I'll have to explain her situation to you first, Rush. She is an orphan. Her father, Ben Falsoner, had been wild in his youth—and perhaps not only in his youth—as I believe all the Falsoners have been. However, he had quarreled with his father—old Howard Falsoner—and the old man had cut him out of the will. But not altogether out. The old man hoped Ben would mend his ways, and he didn't mean to leave him with nothing in that event. Unfortunately he trusted it to his other son, Jerome.
“Old Howard Falsoner left a will whereby the income from his estate was to go to Jerome during Jerome's life. Jerome was to provide for his brother Ben as he saw fit. That is, he had an absolutely free hand. He could divide the income equally with his brother, or he could give him a pittance, or he could give him nothing, as Ben's conduct deserved. On Jerome's death the estate was to be divided equally among the old man's grandchildren.
“In theory, that was a fairly sensible arrangement, but not in practice—not in Jerome Falsoner's hands. You didn't know him? Well, he was the last man you'd ever trust with a thing of that sort. He exercised his power to the utmost. Ben Falsoner never got a cent from him. Three years ago Ben died, and so the girl, his only daughter, stepped into his position in relation to her grandfather's money. Her mother was already dead. Jerome Falsoner never paid her a cent.
“That was her situation when she came to the trust company two years ago. It wasn't a happy one. She had at least a touch of the Falsoner recklessness and extravagance. There she was: heiress to some two million dollars—for Jerome had never married and she was the only grandchild—but without any present income at all, except her salary, which was by no means a large one.
“She got in debt. I suppose she tried to economize at times, but there was always that two million dollars ahead to make scrimping doubly distasteful. Finally, the trust company officials heard of her indebtedness. A collector or two came to the office, in fact. Since she was employed in my department, I had the disagreeable duty of warning her. She promised to pay her debts and contract no more, and I suppose she did try, but she wasn't very successful. Our officials are old-fashioned, ultra-conservative. I did everything I could to save her, but it was no good. They simply would not have an employee who was heels over head in debt.”
Millar paused a moment, looked miserably at the floor, and went on: “I had the disagreeable task of telling her her services were no longer needed. I tried to—It was awfully unpleasant. That was the day before she married Landow. It —” he paused and, as if he could think of nothing else to say, repeated, “Yes, it was the day before she married I Landow,” and fell to staring miserably at the floor again.
Alec Rush, who had sat as still through the recital of f this history as a carven monster on an old church, now leaned over his desk and put a husky question:
“And who is this Hubert Landow? What is he?”
Ralph Millar shook his downcast head.
“I don't know him. I've seen him. I know nothing of him.”
“Mrs. Landow ever speak of him? I mean when she was in the trust company?”
“It's likely, but I don't remember.”
“So you didn't know what to make of it when you heard she'd married him?”
The younger man looked up with frightened brown eyes.
“What are you getting at, Rush? You don't think—Yes, ,as you say, I was surprised. What are you getting at?”
“The marriage license,” the detective said, ignoring his client's repeated question, “was issued to Landow four days before the wedding-day, four days before Jerome Falsoner's body was found.”
Millar chewed a finger nail and shook his head hopelessly.
“I don't know what you're getting at,” he mumbled :around the finger. “The whole thing is bewildering.”
“Isn't it a fact, Mr. Millar,” the detective's voice filled the office with hoarse insistence, “that you were on more friendly terms with Sara Falsoner than with anyone else in the trust company?”
The younger man raised his head and looked Alec Rush in the eye —held his gaze with brown eyes that were doggedly level.
“The fact is,” he said quietly, “that I asked Sara Falsoner to marry me the day she left.”
“Yeah. And she —?”
“And she —I suppose it was my fault. I was clumsy, crude, whatever you like. God knows what she thought—that I was asking her to marry me out of pity, that I was trying to force her into marriage by discharging her when I knew she was over her head in debt! She might have thought anything. Anyhow, it was—it was disagreeable.”
Alec Rush laughed harshly again and said, “No matter. I ain't sensitive about it. I can talk about politics, and being made the goat, and all that, but the records show the Board of Police Commissioners gave me the air for a list of crimes that would stretch from here to Canton Hollow. All right, sir! I'll take your job. It sounds phony, but maybe it ain't. It'll cost you fifteen a day and expenses.”
“I can see that it sounds peculiar,” the younger man assured the detective, “but you'll find that it's quite all right. You'll want a retainer, of course.”
“Yes, say fifty.”
The man in gray took five new ten-dollar bills from a pigskin billfold and put them on the desk. With a thick pen Alec Rush began to make muddy ink-marks on a receipt blank.
“Your name?” he asked.
“I would rather not. I'm not to appear in it, you know. My name would not be of importance, would it?”
Alec Rush put down his pen and frowned at his client.
“Now! Now!” he grumbled good-naturedly. “How am I going to do business with a man like you?”
The man in gray was sorry, even apologetic, but he was stubborn in his reticence. He would not give his name. Alec Rush growled and complained, but pocketed the five ten-dollar bills.
“It's in your favor, maybe,” the detective admitted as he surrendered, “though it ain't to your credit. But if you were off-color I guess you'd have sense enough to fake a name. Now this young woman —who is she?”
“Mrs. Hubert Landow.”
"Well, well, we've got a name at last! And where does Mrs. Landow live?”
“On Charles-Street Avenue,” the man in gray said, and gave a number.
“Her description?”
“She is twenty-two or —three years old, rather tall, slender in an athletic way, with auburn hair, blue eyes and very white skin.”
“And her husband? You know him?”
“I have seen him. He is about my age—thirty—but larger than I, a tall, broad-shouldered man of the clean-cut blond type.”
“And your mystery man? What does he look like?”
“He's quite young, not more than twenty-two at the most, and not very large—medium size, perhaps, or a little under. He's very dark, with high cheekbones and a large nose. High, straight shoulders, too, but not broad. He walks with small, almost mincing, steps.”
“Clothes?”
“He was wearing a brown suit and a tan cap when I saw him on Fayette Street yesterday afternoon. I suppose he wore the same last night, but I'm not positive.”
“I suppose you'll drop in here for my reports,” the detective wound up, “since I won't know where to send them to you?”
“Yes.” The man in gray stood up and held out his hand.
“I'm very grateful to you for undertaking this, Mr. Rush.”
Alec Rush said that was all right. They shook hands, and the man in gray went out.
The ugly man waited until his client had had time to turn off into the corridor that led to the elevators. Then the detective said, “Now, Mr. Man!” got up from his chair, took his hat from the clothes-tree in the corner, locked his office door behind him, and ran down the back stairs.
He ran with the deceptive heavy agility of a bear. There was something bear-like, too, in the looseness with which his blue suit hung on his stout body, and in the set of his heavy shoulders—sloping, limber-jointed shoulders whose droop concealed much of their bulk.
He gained the ground floor in time to see the gray back of his client issuing into the street. In his wake Alec Rush sauntered. Two blocks, a turn to the left, another block and a turn to the right. The man in gray went into the office of a trust company that occupied the ground floor of a large office building.
The rest was the mere turning of a hand. Half a dollar to a porter: the man in gray was Ralph Millar, assistant cashier.
Darkness was settling in Charles-Street Avenue when Alec Rush, in a modest black coupe, drove past the address Ralph Millar had given him. The house was large in the dusk, spaced from its fellows as from the paving by moderate expanses of fenced lawn.
Alec Rush drove on, turned to the left at the first crossing, again to the left at the next, and at the next. For half an hour he guided his car along a many-angled turning and returning route until, when finally he stopped beside the curb at some distance from, but within sight of, the Landow house, he had driven through every piece of thoroughfare in the vicinity of that house.
He had not seen Millar's dark, high-shouldered young man.
Lights burned brightly in Charles-Street Avenue, and the night traffic began to purr southward into the city. Alec Rush's heavy body slumped against the wheel of his coupe while he filled its interior with pungent fog from a black cigar, and held patient, bloodshot eyes on what he could see of the Landow residence.
Three-quarters of an hour passed, and there was motion in the house. A limousine left the garage in the rear for the front door. A man and a woman, faintly distinguishable at that distance, left the house for the limousine. The limousine moved out into the cityward current. The third car behind it was Alec Rush's modest coupe.
Except for a perilous moment at North Avenue, when the interfering cross-stream of traffic threatened to separate him from his quarry, Alec Rush followed the limousine without difficulty. In front of a Howard Street theatre it discharged its freight: a youngish man and a young woman, both tall, evening-clad, and assuringly in agreement with the descriptions the detective had got from his client.
The Landows went into the already dark theatre while Alec Rush was buying his ticket. In the light of the first intermission he discovered them again. Leaving his seat for the rear of the auditorium, he found an angle —from which he could study them for the remaining five minutes of illumination.
Hubert Landow's head was rather small for his stature, and the blond hair with which it was covered threatened each moment to escape from its imposed smoothness into ; crisp curls. His face, healthily ruddy, was handsome in al muscular, very masculine way, not indicative of any great mental nimbleness. His wife had that beauty which needs no cataloguing. However, her hair was auburn, her eyes blue, her skin white, and she looked a year or two older than the maximum twenty-three Millar had allowed her.
While the intermission lasted Hubert Landow talked to his wife eagerly, and his bright eyes were the eyes of a lover. Alec Rush could not see Mrs. Landow's eyes. He saw her replying now and again to her husband's words. Her profile showed no answering eagerness. She did not show she was bored.
Midway the last act, Alec Rush left the theatre to maneuver his coupe into a handy position from which to cover the Landows' departure. But their limousine did not pick them up when they left the theatre. They turned down Howard Street afoot, going to a rather garish second-class restaurant, where an abbreviated orchestra succeeded by main strength in concealing its smallness from the ear.
His coupe conveniently parked, Alec Rush found a table from which he could watch his subjects without being himself noticeable. Husband still wooed wife with incessant, eager talking. Wife was listless, polite, unkindled. Neither more than touched the food before them. They danced once, the woman's face as little touched by immediate interest as when she listened to her husband's words. A beautiful face, but empty.
The minute hand of Alec Rush's nickel-plated watch had scarcely begun its last climb of the day from where VI is inferred to XII when the Landows left the restaurant. The limousine—against its side a young Norfolk-jacketed Negro smoking—was two doors away. It bore them back to their house. The detective having seen them into the house, having seen the limousine into the garage, drove his coupe again around and around through the neighboring thoroughfares. And saw nothing of Millar's dark young man.
Then Alec Rush went home and to bed. At eight o'clock the next morning ugly man and modest coupe were stationary in Charles-Street Avenue again. Male Charles-Street Avenue went with the sun on its left toward its offices. As the morning aged and the shadows grew shorter and thicker, so, generally, did the individuals who composed this morning procession. Eight-o'clock was frequently young and slender and brisk, Eight-thirty less so, Nine still less, and rear-guard Ten-o'clock was preponderantly neither young nor slender, and more often sluggish than brisk.
Into this rear guard, though physically he belonged to no later period than eight-thirty, a blue roadster carried Hubert Landow. His broad shoulders were blue-coated, his blond hair gray-capped, and he was alone in the roadster. With a glance around to make sure Millar's dark young man was not in sight, Alec Rush turned his coupe in the blue car's wake.
They rode swiftly into the city, down into its financial center, where Hubert Landow deserted his roadster before a Redwood Street stockbroker's office. The morning had become noon before Landow was in the street again, turning his roadster northward.
When shadowed and shadower came to rest again they were in Mount Royal Avenue. Landow got out of his car and strode briskly into a large apartment building. A block distant, Alec Rush lighted a black cigar and sat still in his coupe. Half an hour passed. Alec Rush turned his head and sank his gold teeth deep into his cigar.
Scarcely twenty feet behind the coupe, in the doorway of a garage, a dark young man with high cheek-bones, high, straight shoulders, loitered. His nose was large. His suit was brown, as were the eyes with which he seemed to pay no especial attention to anything through the thin blue drift of smoke from the tip of a drooping cigarette.
Alec Rush took his cigar from his mouth to examine it, took a knife from his pocket to trim the bitten end, restored cigar to mouth and knife to pocket, and thereafter was as indifferent to all Mount Royal Avenue as the dark youth behind him. The one drowsed in his doorway. The other dozed in his car. And the afternoon crawled past one o'clock, past one-thirty.
Hubert Landow came out of the apartment building, vanished swiftly in his blue roadster. His going stirred neither of the motionless men, scarcely their eyes. Not until another fifteen minutes had gone did either of them move.
Then the dark youth left his doorway. He moved without haste, up the street, with short, almost mincing, steps. The back of Alec Rush's black-derbied head was to the youth when he passed the coupe, which may have been chance, for none could have said that the ugly man had so much as glanced at the other since his first sight of him. The dark young man let his eyes rest on the detective's back without interest as he passed. He went on up the street toward the apartment building Landow had visited, up its steps and out of sight into it.
When the dark young matt had disappeared, Alec Rush threw away his cigar, stretched, yawned, and awakened the coupe's engine. Four blocks and two turnings from Mount Royal Avenue, he got out of the automobile, leaving it locked and empty in front of a gray stone church. He walked back to Mount Royal Avenue, to halt on a corner two blocks above his earlier position.
He had another half-hour of waiting before the dark young man appeared. Alec Rush was buying a cigar in a glass-fronted cigar store when the other passed. The young man boarded a street car at North Avenue and found a seat. The detective boarded the same car at the next corner and stood on the rear platform. Warned by an indicative forward hitching of the young man's shoulders and head, Alec Rush was the first passenger off the car at Madison Avenue, and the first aboard a southbound car there. And again, he was off first at Franklin Street.
The dark youth went straight to a rooming-house in this street, while the detective came to rest beside the window of a corner drug store specializing in theatrical make-up. There he loafed until half-past three. When the dark young man came into the street again it was to walk—Alec Rush behind him—to Eutaw Street, board a car, and ride to Camden Station.
There, in the waiting-room, the dark young man met a young woman who frowned and asked:
“Where in the hell have you been at?”
Passing them, the detective heard the petulant greeting, but the young man's reply was pitched too low for him to catch, nor did he hear anything else the young woman said. They talked for perhaps ten minutes, standing together in a deserted end of the waiting-room, so that Alec Rush could not have approached them without making himself conspicuous.
The young woman seemed to be impatient, urgent. The young man seemed to explain, to reassure. Now and then he gestured with the ugly, deft hands of a skilled mechanic. His companion became more agreeable. She was short, square, as if carved economically from a cube. Consistently, her nose also was short and her chin square. She had, on the whole, now that her earlier displeasure was passing, a merry face, a pert, pugnacious, rich-blooded face that advertised inexhaustible vitality. That advertisement was in every feature, from the live ends of her cut brown hair to the earth-gripping pose of her feet on the cement flooring. Her clothes were dark, quiet, expensive, but none too gracefully worn, hanging just the least bit bunchily here and there on her sturdy body.
Nodding vigorously several times, the young man at length tapped his cap-visor with two careless fingers and went out into the street. Alec Rush let him depart unshadowed. But when, walking slowly out to the iron train-shed gates, along them to the baggage window, thence to the street door, the young woman passed out of the station, the ugly man was behind her. He was still behind her when she joined the four o'clock shopping crowd at Lexington Street.
The young woman shopped with the whole-hearted air of one with nothing else on her mind. In the second department store she visited, Alec Rush left her looking at a display of laces while he moved as swiftly and directly as intervening shoppers would permit toward a tall, thick-shouldered, gray-haired woman in black, who seemed to be waiting for someone near the foot of a flight of stairs.
“Hello, Alec!” she said when he touched her arm, and her humorous eyes actually looked with pleasure at his uncouth face. “What are you doing in my territory?”
“Got a booster for you,” he mumbled. “The chunky girl in blue at the lace counter. Make her?” The store detective looked and nodded. “Yes.Thanks, Alec.You're sure she's boosting, of course?”
“Now, Minnie!” he complained, his rasping voice throttled down to a metallic growl. “Would I be giving you a bum rumble? She went south with a couple of silk pieces, and it's more than likely she's got herself some lace by now.”
“Um-hmm,” said Minnie. “Well, when she sticks her foot on the sidewalk, I'll be with her.”
Alec Rush put his hand on the store detective's arm again.
“I want a line on her,” he said. “What do you say we tail her around and see what she's up to before we knock her over?”
“If it doesn't take all day,” the woman agreed. And when the chunky girl in blue presently left the lace counter and the store, the detectives followed, into another store, ranging too far behind her to see any thieving she might have done, content to keep her under surveillance. From this last store their prey went down to where Pratt Street was dingiest, into a dingy three-story house of furnished flats.
Two blocks away a policeman was turning a corner.
“Take a plant on the joint while I.get the copper,” Alex Rush ordered.
When he returned with the policeman the store detective was waiting in the vestibule.
“Second floor,” she said.
Behind her the house's street door stood open to show a dark hallway and the foot of a tattered-carpeted flight of steps. Into this dismal hallway appeared a slovenly thin woman in rumpled gray cotton, saying whiningly as she came forward, “What do you want? I keep a respectable house, I'll have you understand, and I —”
“Chunky, dark-eyed girl living here,” Alec Rush croaked. “Second floor. Take us up.”
The woman's scrawny face sprang into startled lines, faded eyes wide, as if mistaking the harshness of the detective's voice for the harshness of great emotion.
“Why—why—” she stammered, and then remembered the first principle of shady rooming-house management —never to stand in the way of the police. “I'll take you up,” she agreed, and, hitching her wrinkled skirt in one hand, led the way up the stairs.
Her sharp fingers tapped on a door near the head of the stairs.
“Who's that?” a casually curt feminine voice asked.
“Landlady.”
The chunky girl in blue, without her hat now, opened the door. Alec Rush moved a big foot forward to hold it open, while the landlady said, “This is her,” the policeman said, “You'll have to come along,” and Minnie said, “Dearie, we want to come in and talk to you.”
“My God!” exclaimed the girl. “There'd be just as much sense to it if you'd all jumped out at me and yelled
'Boo!'”
“This ain't any way,” Alec Rush rasped, moving forward, grinning his hideous friendly grin. “Let's go in where we can talk it over.”
Merely by moving his loose-jointed bulk a step this way, a half-step that, turning his ugly face on this one and that one, he herded the little group as he wished, sending the landlady discontentedly away, marshaling the others into the girl's rooms.
“Remember, I got no idea what this is all about,” said the girl when they were in her living-room, a narrow room where blue fought with red without ever compromising on purple. “I'm easy to get along with, and if you think this is a nice place to talk about whatever you want to talk about, go ahead! But if you're counting on me talking, too, you'd better smart me up.”
“Boosting, dearie,” Minnie said, leaning forward to pat the girl's arm. “I'm at Goodbody's.”
“You think I've been shoplifting? Is that the idea?”
“Yeah. Exactly. Uh-huh. That's what.” Alec Rush left her no doubt on the point.
The girl narrowed her eyes, puckered her red mouth, squinted sidewise at the ugly man.
“It's all right with me,” she announced, “so long as Goodbody's hanging the rap on me—somebody I can sue for a million when it flops. I've got nothing to say. Take me for my ride.”
“You'll get your ride, sister,” the ugly man rasped good-naturedly. “Nobody's going to beat you out of it. But do you mind if I look around your place a little first?”
“Got anything with a judge's name on it that says you can?”
“No.”
“Then you don't get a peep!”
Alec Rush chuckled, thrust his hands into his trouser pockets, and began to wander through the rooms, of which there were three. Presently he came out of the bedroom carrying a photograph in a silver frame.
“Who's this?” he asked the girl.
“Try and find out!”
“I am trying,” he lied.
“You big bum!” said she. “You couldn't find water in the ocean!”
Alec Rush laughed with coarse heartiness. He could afford to. The photograph in his hand was of Hubert Landow.
Twilight was around the gray stone church when the owner of the deserted coupe returned to it. The chunky girl—Polly Vanness was the name she had given—had been booked and lodged in a cell in the Southwestern Police Station. Quantities of stolen goods had been found in her flat. Her harvest of that afternoon was still on her person when Minnie and a police matron searched her. She had refused to talk. The detective had said nothing to her about his knowledge of the photograph's subject, or of her meeting in the railroad station with the dark young man. Nothing found in her rooms threw any light on either of these things.
Having eaten his evening meal before coming back to his car, Alec Rush now drove out to Charles-Street Avenue. Lights glowed normally in the Landow house when he passed it. A little beyond it he turned his coupe so that it pointed toward the city, and brought it to rest in a tree-darkened curbside spot within sight of the house.
The night went along and no one left or entered the
Landow house. „ '' '
Finger nails clicked on the coupe's glass door. A man stood there. Nothing could be said of him in the darkness except that he was not large, and that to have escaped the detective's notice until now he must have stealthily stalked the car from the rear.
Alec Rush put out a hand and the door swung open.
“Got a match?” the man asked.
The detective hesitated, said, “Yeah,” and held out a box.
A match scraped and flared into a dark young face: large nose, high cheekbones: the young man Alec Rush had shadowed that afternoon.
But recognition, when it was voiced, was voiced by the dark young man.
“I thought it was you,” he said simply as he applied the flaming match to his cigarette. “Maybe you don't know me, but I knew you when you were on the force.”
The ex-detective-sergeant gave no meaning at all to a husky “Yeah.”
“I thought it was you in the heap on Mount Royal this afternoon, but I couldn't make sure,” the young man continued, entering the coupe, sitting beside the detective, closing the door. “Scuttle Zeipp's me. I ain't as well known as Napoleon, so if you've never heard of me there's no hard feelings.”
“Yeah.”
“That's the stuff! When you once think up a good answer, stick to it.” Scuttle Zeipp's face was a sudden bronze mask in the glow of his cigarette. “The same answer'll do for my next question. You're interested in these here Landows? Yeah,” he added in hoarse mimicry of the de^ tective's voice.
Another inhalation lighted his face, and his words came smokily out as the glow faded.
“You ought to want to know what I'm doing hanging around 'em. I ain't tight. I'll tell you. I've been slipped half a grand to bump off the girl—twice. How do you like that?”
“I hear you,” said Alec Rush. “But anybody can talk that knows the words.”
“Talk? Sure it's talk,” Zeipp admitted cheerfully. “But so's it talk when the judge says 'hanged by the neck until dead and may God have mercy on your soul!' Lots of things are talk, but that don't always keep 'em from being real.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, brother, yeah! Now listen to this: it's one for the cuff. A certain party comes to me a couple of days ago with a knock-down from a party that knows me. See? This certain party asks me what I want to bump off a broad. I thought a grand would be right, and said so. Too stiff. We come together on five hundred. I got two-fifty down and get the rest when the Landow twist is cold. Not so bad for a soft trick—a slug through the side of a car—huh?”
“Well, what are you waiting for?” the detective asked. “You want to make it a fancy caper—kill her on her birthday or a legal holiday?”
Scuttle Zeipp smacked his lips and poked the detective's chest with a finger in the dark.
“Not any, brother! I'm thinking way ahead of you! Listen to this: I pocket my two-fifty advance and come up here to give the ground a good casing, not \vanting to lam into anything I didn't know was here. While I'm poking around, I run into another party that's poking around. This second party gives me a tumble, I talk smart, and bingo! First thing you know she's propositioning me. What do you guess? She wants to know what I want to bump off a broad! Is it the same one she wants stopped? I hope to tell you it is!
“I ain't so silly! I get my hands on another two hundred and fifty berries, with that much more coming when I put over the fast one. Now do you think I'm going to do anything to that Landow baby? You're dumb if you do. She's my meal ticket. If she lives till I pop her, she'll be older than either you or the bay. I've got five hundred out of her so far. What's the matter with sticking around and waiting for more customers that don't like her? If two of 'em want to buy her out of the world, why not more? The answer is, 'Yeah!' And on top of that, here you are snooping around her. Now there it is, brother, for you to look at and taste and smell.”
Silence held for several minutes, in the darkness of the coupe's interior, and then the detective's harsh voice put a skeptical question:
“And who are these certain parties that want her out of the way?”
“Be yourself!” Scuttle Zeipp admonished him. “I'm lay-ing down on 'em, right enough, but I ain't feeding 'em to you.”
“What are you giving me all this for then?”
“What for? Because you're in on the lay somewhere. Crossing each other, neither of us can make a thin dimmer. If we don't hook up we'll just ruin the racket for each other. I've already made half a grand off this Landow. That's mine, but there's more to be picked up by a couple of J men that know what they're doing. All right. I'm offering to throw in with you on a two-way cut of whatever else we can get. But my parties are out! I don't mind throwing them down, but I ain't rat enough to put the finger on them for you.”
Alec Rush grunted and croaked another dubious inquiry.
“How come you trust me so much, Scuttle?”
The hired killer laughed knowingly.
“Why not? You're a right guy. You can see a profit when it's showed to you. They didn't chuck you off the force for forgetting to hang up your stocking. Besides, suppose you want to double-cross me, what can you do? You can't prove anything. I told you I didn't mean the woman any harm. I ain't even packing a gun. But all that's the bunk. You're a wise head. You know what's what. Me and you, Alec, we can get plenty!”
Silence again, until the detective spoke slowly, thoughtfully.
“The first thing would be to get a line on the reasons your parties want the girl put out. Got anything on that?”
“Not a whisper.”
“Both of 'em women, I take it.”
Scuttle Zeipp hesitated.
“Yes,” he admitted. “But don't be asking me anything about 'em. In the first place, I don't know anything, and in the second, I wouldn't tip their mitts if I did.”
“Yeah,” the detective croaked, as if he quite understood his companion's perverted idea of loyalty. “Now if they're women, the chances are the racket hangs on a man. What do you think of Landow? He's a pretty lad.”
Scuttle Zeipp leaned over to put his finger against the detective's chest again.
“You've got it, Alec! That could be it, damned if it couldn't!”
“Yeah,” Alec Rush agreed, fumbling with the levers of his car. “We'll get away from here and stay away until I look into him.”
At Franklin Street, half a block from the rooming-house into which he had shadowed the young man that afternoon, the detective stopped his coupe.
“You want to drop out here?” he asked.
Scuttle Zeipp looked sidewise, speculatively, into the elder man's ugly face.
“It'll do,” the young man said, “but you're a damned good guesser, just the same.” He stopped with a hand on the door. “It's a go, is it, Alec? Fifty-fifty?”
“I wouldn't say so,” Alec Rush grinned at him with hideous good-nature. “You're not a bad lad, Scuttle, and if there's any gravy you'll get yours, but don't count on me mobbing up with you.”
Zeipp's eyes jerked to slits, his lips snarled back from yellow teeth that were set edge to edge.
“You sell me out, you damned gorilla, and I'll—” He laughed the threat out of being, his dark face young and careless again. “Have it your own way, Alec. I didn't make no mistake when I throwed in with you. What you say goes.”
“Yeah,” the ugly man agreed. “Lay off that joint out there until I tell you. Maybe you'd better drop in to see me tomorrow. The phone book'll tell you where my office is. So long, kid.”
“So long, Alec.”
In the morning Alec Rush set about investigating Hubert Landow. First he went to the City Hall, where he examined the gray books in which marriage licenses are indexed. Hubert Britman Landow and Sara Falsoner had been married six months before, he learned.
The bride's maiden name thickened the red in the detective's bloodshot eyes. Air hissed sharply from his flattened nostrils. “Yeah! Yeah!” he said to himself, so rasp-ingly that a lawyer's skinny clerk, fiddling with other records at his elbow, looked frightenedly at him and edged a little away.
From the City Hall, Alec Rush carried the bride's name to two newspaper offices, where, after studying the files, he bought an armful of six-months-old papers. He took the papers to his office, spread them on his desk, and attacked them with a pair of shears. When the last one had been cut and thrown aside, there remained on his desk a thick sheaf of clippings.
Arranging his clippings in chronological order, Alec Rush lighted a black cigar, put his elbows on the desk, his ugly head between his palms, and began to read a story with which newspaper-reading Baltimore had been familiar half a year before.
Purged of irrelevancies and earlier digressions, the story was essentially this:
Jerome Falsoner, aged forty-five, was a bachelor who lived alone in a flat in Cathedral Street, on an income more than sufficient for his comfort. He was a tall man, but of delicate physique, the result, it may have been, of excessive indulgence in pleasure on a constitution none too strong in the beginning. He was well known, at least by sight, to all night-living Baltimoreans, and to those who frequented race-track, gambling-house, and the furtive cockpits that now and then materialize for a few brief hours in the forty miles of country that lie between Baltimore and Washington.
One Fanny Kidd, coming as was her custom at ten o'clock one morning to “do” Jerome Falsoner's rooms, found him lying on his back in his living-room, staring with dead eyes at a spot on the ceiling, a bright spot that was reflected sunlight—reflected from the metal hilt of his paper-knife, which protruded from his chest.
Police investigation established four facts:
First, Jerome Falsoner had been dead for fourteen hours when Fanny Kidd found him, which placed his murder at about eight o'clock the previous evening.
Second, the last persons known to have seen him alive were a woman named Madeline Boudin, with whom he had been intimate, and three of her friends. They had seen him, alive, at some time between seven-thirty and eight o'clock, or less than half an hour before his death. They had been driving down to a cottage on the Severn River, and Madeline Boudin had told the others she wanted to see Falsoner before she went. The others had remained in their car while she rang the bell. Jerome Falsoner opened the street door and she went in. Ten minutes later she came out and rejoined her friends. Jerome Falsoner came to the door with her, waving a hand at one of the men in the car —a Frederick Stoner, who knew Falsoner '•slightly, and who was connected with the district attorney's office. Two women, talking on the steps of a house across the street, had also seen Falsoner, and had seen Madeline Boudin and her friends drive away.
Third, Jerome Falsoner's heir and only near relative was his niece, Sara Falsoner, who, by some vagary of chance, was marrying Hubert Landow at the very hour that Fanny Kidd was finding her employer's dead body. Niece and uncle had seldom seen one another. The niece—for police suspicion settled on her for a short space—was definitely proved to have been at home, in her apartment in Carey Street, from six o'clock the evening of the murder until eight-thirty the next morning. Her husband, her fiance then, had been there with her from six until eleven that evening. Prior to her marriage, the girl had been employed as stenographer by the same trust company that employed Ralph Millar.
Fourth, Jerome Falsoner, who had not the most even of dispositions, had quarreled with an Icelander named Einer Jokumsson in a gambling-house two days before he was murdered. Jokumsson had threatened him. Jokumsson—a short, heavily built man, dark-haired, dark-eyed—had vanished from his hotel, leaving his bags there, the day the body was found, and had not been seen since.
The last of these clippings carefully read, Alec Rush rocked back in his chair and made a thoughtful monster's face at the.ceiling. Presently he leaned forward again to look into —the telephone directory, and to call the number of Ralph Millar's trust company. But when he got his number he changed his mind.
“Never mind,” he said into the instrument, and called a number that was Goodbody's. Minnie, when she came to the telephone, told him that Polly Vanness had been identified as one Polly Bangs, arrested in Milwaukee two years ago for shoplifting, and given a two-year sentence. Minnie also said that Polly Bangs had been released on bail early that morning.
Alec Rush pushed back the telephone and looked through his clippings again until he found the address of Madeline Boudin, the woman who had visited Falsoner so soon before his death. It was a Madison Avenue number. Thither his coupe carried the detective.
No, Miss Boudin did not live there. Yes, she had lived there, but had moved four months ago. Perhaps Mrs. Blender, on the third floor, would know where she lived now. Mrs. Blender did not know. She knew Miss Boudin had moved to an apartment-house in Garrison Avenue, but did not think she was living there now. At the Garrison Avenue house: Miss Boudin had moved away a month and a half ago—somewhere in Mount Royal Avenue, perhaps. The number was not known.
The coupe carried its ugly owner to Mount Royal Avenue, to the apartment building he had seen first Hubert Landow and then Scuttle Zeipp visit the previous day. At the manager's office he made inquiries about a Walter Boyden, who was thought to live there. Walter Boyden was not known to the manager. There was a Miss Boudin in 604, but her name was B-o-u-d-i-n, and she lived alone.
Alec Rush left the building and got in his car again. He screwed up his savage red eyes, nodded his head in a satisfied way, and with one finger described a small circle in the air. Then he returned to his office.
Calling the trust company's number again, he gave Ralph Millar's name, and presently was speaking to the assistant cashier.
“This is Rush. Can you come up to the office right away?”
“What's that? Certainly. But how—how—? Yes, I'll be up in a minute.”
None of the surprise that had been in Millar's telephone voice was apparent when he reached the detective's office. He asked no questions concerning the detective's knowledge of his identity. In brown today, he was as neatly inconspicuous as he had been yesterday in gray.
“Come in,” the ugly man welcomed him. “Sit down. I've got to have some more facts, Mr. Millar.”
Millar's thin mouth tightened and his brows drew together with obstinate reticence.
“I thought we settled that point, Rush. I told you —”
Alec Rush frowned at his client with jovial, though frightful exasperation.
“I know what you told me,” he interrupted. “But that was then and this is now. The thing's coming unwound on rne, and I can see just enough to get myself tangled up if I don't watch Harvey. I found your mysterious man, talked to him. He was following Mrs. Landow, right enough. According to the way he tells it, he's been hired to kill her.”
Millar leaped from his chair to lean over the yellow desk, his face close to the detective's.
“My God, Rush, what are you saying? To kill her?”
“Now, now! Take it easy. He's not going to kill her. I don't think he ever meant to. But he claims he was hired to do it.”
“You've arrested him? You've found the man who hired him?”
The detective squinted up his bloodshot eyes and studied the younger man's passionate face.
“As a matter of fact,” he croaked calmly when he had finished his examination, “I haven't done either of those things. She's in no danger just now. Maybe the lad was stringing me, maybe he wasn't, but either way he wouldn't have spilled it to me if he meant to do anything. And when it comes right down to it, Mr. Millar, do you want him arrested?”
“Yes! That is—” Millar stepped back from the desk, sagged limply down on the chair again, and put shaking hands over his face. “My God, Rush, I don't know!” he gasped.
“Exactly,” said Alec Rush. “Now here it is. Mrs. Landow was Jerome Falsoner's niece and heir. She worked for your trust company. She married Landow the morning her uncle was found dead. Yesterday Landow visited the building where Madeline Boudin lives. She was the last person known to have been in Falsoner's rooms before he was killed. But her alibi seems to be as air-tight as the Landows'. The man who claims he was hired to kill Mrs. Landow also visited Madeline Boudin's building yesterday. I saw him go in. I saw him meet another woman. A shoplifter, the second one. In her rooms I found a photograph of Hubert Landow. Your dark man claims he was hired twice to kill Mrs. Landow—by two women neither knowing the other had hired him. He won't tell me who they are, but he doesn't have to.”
The hoarse voice stopped and Alec Rush waited for Millar to speak. But Millar was for the time without a voice. His eyes were wide and despairingly empty. Alec Rush raised one big hand, folded it into a fist that was almost perfectly spherical, and thumped his desk softly.
“There it is, Mr. Millar,” he rasped. “A pretty tangle. If you'll tell me what you know, we'll get it straightened out, never fear. If you don't—I'm out!”
Now Millar found words, however jumbled.
“You couldn't, Rush! You can't desert me —us —her!
It's not—You're not —” But Alec Rush shook his ugly pear-shaped head with slow emphasis.
“There's murder in this and the Lord knows what all. I've got no liking for a blindfolded game. How do I know what you're up to? You can tell me what you know—everything—or you can find yourself another detective.
That's flat.”
Ralph Millar's fingers picked at each other, his teeth pulled at his lips, his harassed eyes pleaded with the detective.
“You can't, Rush,” he begged. “She's still in danger. Even if you are right about that man not attacking her, she's not safe. The women who hired him can hire another. You've got to protect her, Rush.”
“Yeah? Then you've got to talk.”
“I've got to —? Yes, I'll talk, Rush. I'll tell you anything you ask. But there's really nothing—or almost nothing—I know beyond what you've already learned.”
“She worked for your trust company?”
“Yes, in my department.”
“Left there to be married?”
“Yes. That is—No, Rush, the truth is she was discharged. It was an outrage, but —”
“When was this?”
“It was the day before the—before she was married.”
“Tell me about it.”
“She had—I'll have to explain her situation to you first, Rush. She is an orphan. Her father, Ben Falsoner, had been wild in his youth—and perhaps not only in his youth—as I believe all the Falsoners have been. However, he had quarreled with his father—old Howard Falsoner—and the old man had cut him out of the will. But not altogether out. The old man hoped Ben would mend his ways, and he didn't mean to leave him with nothing in that event. Unfortunately he trusted it to his other son, Jerome.
“Old Howard Falsoner left a will whereby the income from his estate was to go to Jerome during Jerome's life. Jerome was to provide for his brother Ben as he saw fit. That is, he had an absolutely free hand. He could divide the income equally with his brother, or he could give him a pittance, or he could give him nothing, as Ben's conduct deserved. On Jerome's death the estate was to be divided equally among the old man's grandchildren.
“In theory, that was a fairly sensible arrangement, but not in practice—not in Jerome Falsoner's hands. You didn't know him? Well, he was the last man you'd ever trust with a thing of that sort. He exercised his power to the utmost. Ben Falsoner never got a cent from him. Three years ago Ben died, and so the girl, his only daughter, stepped into his position in relation to her grandfather's money. Her mother was already dead. Jerome Falsoner never paid her a cent.
“That was her situation when she came to the trust company two years ago. It wasn't a happy one. She had at least a touch of the Falsoner recklessness and extravagance. There she was: heiress to some two million dollars—for Jerome had never married and she was the only grandchild—but without any present income at all, except her salary, which was by no means a large one.
“She got in debt. I suppose she tried to economize at times, but there was always that two million dollars ahead to make scrimping doubly distasteful. Finally, the trust company officials heard of her indebtedness. A collector or two came to the office, in fact. Since she was employed in my department, I had the disagreeable duty of warning her. She promised to pay her debts and contract no more, and I suppose she did try, but she wasn't very successful. Our officials are old-fashioned, ultra-conservative. I did everything I could to save her, but it was no good. They simply would not have an employee who was heels over head in debt.”
Millar paused a moment, looked miserably at the floor, and went on: “I had the disagreeable task of telling her her services were no longer needed. I tried to—It was awfully unpleasant. That was the day before she married Landow. It —” he paused and, as if he could think of nothing else to say, repeated, “Yes, it was the day before she married I Landow,” and fell to staring miserably at the floor again.
Alec Rush, who had sat as still through the recital of f this history as a carven monster on an old church, now leaned over his desk and put a husky question:
“And who is this Hubert Landow? What is he?”
Ralph Millar shook his downcast head.
“I don't know him. I've seen him. I know nothing of him.”
“Mrs. Landow ever speak of him? I mean when she was in the trust company?”
“It's likely, but I don't remember.”
“So you didn't know what to make of it when you heard she'd married him?”
The younger man looked up with frightened brown eyes.
“What are you getting at, Rush? You don't think—Yes, ,as you say, I was surprised. What are you getting at?”
“The marriage license,” the detective said, ignoring his client's repeated question, “was issued to Landow four days before the wedding-day, four days before Jerome Falsoner's body was found.”
Millar chewed a finger nail and shook his head hopelessly.
“I don't know what you're getting at,” he mumbled :around the finger. “The whole thing is bewildering.”
“Isn't it a fact, Mr. Millar,” the detective's voice filled the office with hoarse insistence, “that you were on more friendly terms with Sara Falsoner than with anyone else in the trust company?”
The younger man raised his head and looked Alec Rush in the eye —held his gaze with brown eyes that were doggedly level.
“The fact is,” he said quietly, “that I asked Sara Falsoner to marry me the day she left.”
“Yeah. And she —?”
“And she —I suppose it was my fault. I was clumsy, crude, whatever you like. God knows what she thought—that I was asking her to marry me out of pity, that I was trying to force her into marriage by discharging her when I knew she was over her head in debt! She might have thought anything. Anyhow, it was—it was disagreeable.”