Munsey's Magazine/Volume 86/Issue 4/The Unwritten Story/Chapter 2
II
Spurred by a lively and growing curiosity, Wyatt pondered his story. Wyatt wrote “specials” and occasional exposés and news features, not because he urgently had to, but because he liked to. A benevolent uncle's will had permitted him bachelor rooms in Trinity Court, also a very reputable-appearing roadster and a decent amount of leisure; but still, week by week, he turned out much copy. If writing is in a man's blood, what uncle's will ever shall eradicate it?
Wyatt's present objective was Newspaper Row, where he sought his good friend John Lomax, who had charge of the Boston Messenger's “bone yard.”
This bone yard—otherwise bone orchard, morgue, graveyard, or obit department— was on the fourth floor. Wyatt reached it through an overworked and feverish room where men in shirt sleeves were giving ear to chattering telegraphs, pounding the incredibly infirm typewriters that exist in all newspaper offices, or hastening about with agitation and profanity. Many cigarettes defied signs that threatened with instant discharge any employee who smoked such.
“Hey, John! Open your squirrel cage and let a nut in!”
“Hello there, Wy!” Lomax swung the wire-netted door. “What you want now?”
“Dope. I'm a fiend!” Wyatt entered the long and extraordinary cluttered room. “Give me a shot!”
“Who on? What about?” asked Lomax. This Lomax was a slow, drawling fellow, with only a remnant of curly gray hair. Bare-armed, round-shouldered, wearing a greasy green shade over his eyes, he seemed as dry as the innumerable clippings that bulged his files and pigeonholes. “Who's the story for?”
“You—when I get it.”
“Tt had better be, or you'd better clear out!”
“Oh, you'll get it, O. K.! | I want the dope on the aristocratic old boy that lives at 42 A Beacon. Something doing there. Shoot me the whole works.”
Lomax's brow knit in a web of wrinkles.
“Dead, or what?”
“No, not dead; but I figure he's getting into a jam that 'll nick his roll a few. By the way, dig me up something on Professor Maximilian Veazie, who runs a spiritualist game down Washington Street, below Dover.”
“Oh, Veazie! I don't need to scratch up anything on that baby! He's an all-round, smooth con artist. Been a fake charity grafter in New York, sold oil stocks and gold mines to ministers and orphans, worked the Isle of Pines racket for a while, had a whirl at the de luxe book racket, and—”
“That's good enough! How about the old boy he's hooking in now?”
“I know him, too—Elijah Damascus Lockwood—hell of a queer name, but no queerer than the old fellow himself. Money, too—no end. So Veazie's getting his hooks into old man Lockwood, eh? Coming up in the world, the professor is!”
John Lomax climbed ladders that moved on metal tracks, and found bulging brown paper envelopes, while Wyatt sat down to relight his pipe and blow smoke into the already thick air.
An odd place, the bone yard! From the ceiling, crossed by sprinkler pipes and electric wires, depended lights with green tin shades. Long bookcases groaned under the weight of innumerable reference books from many lands. Filing cabinets exuded data. Thousands of cubby-holes overflowed with the records of men, women, events. Dust hung tenuously in the electric-lighted atmosphere, mingled with a smell of printer's ink. Huge wastebaskets sagged with discarded papers and photographs.
On broad and dirty tables piles of copy paper lay amid rubber stamps, paste pots, scissors, and soft-leaded pencils. Overloaded wire spindles hung against the walls, whereon articles and clippings were impaled. Papers marked to be cut were piled in heaps. Boxes of metal—-stripped cuts and photo-engravings—stood ponderously under shelves. Maps and charts jostled card catalogues, rolls of fire hose, and stereotype mats.
From without, the telegraphs and typewriters steadily clattered; and, forming a contrabass to all, from lower regions came a muffled roaring of presses that shuddered the blurred air and kept the building vibrant. A brain for the whole great organism of the Messenger—its memory, its eyes, its nerves of contact with the past—this room intrigued the imagination and set it marveling.
Lomax presently gave Wyatt two dusty envelopes.
“Here's your dope, old man!”
But now a woman reporter was knocking for admission—a bobbed-haired woman with a vivid crimson hat, a blue-striped dress, and a wrist watch. Wyatt, a little cynical about women, smiled at her flashiness as she demanded:
“Oh, Mr. Lomax, please get me some clips on Jerry McCabe, that's an old dear!”
“Wait a minute, sister! The paper won't die if you don't have Jerry this very second!”
“Lomey, somethin' on that Terezzi murder!” cried a lean fellow with gleaming spectacles,
Lomax had hardly begun filling these orders when a hard-shaven young man bustled in with—
“There's an A. P. flash that Sir Lionel Harbrace has just kicked off. Gimme clips, photo, and obit, and make it snappy!”
“Damn Sir Lionel!” growled Lomax. “We had a flash page on him two months ago—all the stuff in type—and then we killed it because his bum heart didn't kill him. Now that everything's distributed, he up and croaks. What the hell kind of a way is that to do? I'm asking you!”
While Lomax toiled and swore, Wyatt began getting a line on the aristocratic old Elijah Damascus Lockwood.
With close attention he studied the data under the conelike drench of light from a slow-swinging incandescent. 'The glare revealed him as a well set-up fellow of perhaps six-and-twenty, with a vigorously molded head, straight brown hair, penetrant eyes, and a firm mouth—a sophisticated-appearing young man, without illusions, yet not untinged with humor.
Methodically he went over the Veazie “dope,” and then that pertaining to Lockwood. He studied the photographs—there were but three—and made a few notes; but for the most part he let the information sink into his active brain, without writing. He tilted back, blew smoke at a buzzing electric fan, and fell to musing.
John Lomax, having recorded the material he had just given out, slouched into a chair and lighted a cigarette.
“Must be a damned small man we can't dig up here,” he smiled. “Here's where their sins do worse than find 'em out—they find 'em in! Got a good line on that old bird, haven't we?”
“Fair; but the pictures are punk.”
“Can't help it. Lockwood's camera shy. Odd stick! Gone to seed in the attic. A has-been. Rotten with money, though. A recluse, with only two or three friends. Singular habits. Sometimes sits up all night, reading. Lives all alone in that big barn of a house, with only a housekeeper and a maid and a chauffeur.”
“Drives, eh?”
“Oh, yes—he's quite a baby for gas.” Lomax shot smoke into the dim air. “Used to be a live-wire traveler and explorer, and Still likes to gad about.”
“Explorer, eh?” asked Wyatt. “Yes, so I see by this clip. Something of an archeologist, too, in his day.”
“Yes—quite a pioneer at Carthage, and all that. He used to do a lot of African stuff. It was good, too, for that day—the eighties. Orientalist—Egyptologist—a bug on all those languages and things; but that's a devil of a long time ago.”
“What's this about his losing his wife and daughter?”
“Wife cashed in at Alexandria. It tells about it in that other clip—the long one,” Lomax expounded, inhaling smoke. “That's what put the old Loy on Queer Street, losing her and the kid—that, and getting a slash over the nut with an Arab scimitar.”
“Sounds interesting!”
“Yeh, not a bad story. His mental radio has been playing mostly all static ever since. He's a credulous old bird. Been gypped a few times already. It's a wonder he hasn't been shaken down proper, long ago.”
“I should say so! Reckon Veazie 'll attend to that part. But this daughter stuff, now?”
“Barbary pirates, or something like that. It tells in the clipping, only you're too blamed lazy to read it. You want me to do all the work! They boarded his yacht, somewhere along by Tangier, bashed everybody, spattered gore all over the shop, looted the boat, and grabbed off the girl. Some little afternoon party! The old boy lost his wife, kid, crew, records, curios, and rea-son, all inside of about a month, on the coast of Africa. That's more than forty years ago, but he's still on the hunt.”
“What for? His brains?”
“No, guess not,” judged Lomax. “He's got some o' them back by now—though, as I say, he's a bit blooey in his vacuum tubes at times. It's the girl he's still after.”
“Whew!” whistled the other. “The plot thickens!”
“If he's cuddling up to Veazie, I should say so, and then some! The prof will sure put the trimming tools to him, before he's through! What's your game, Wyatt? Going to try and head him off?”
“And spoil a first-rate, corking story? Not a chance in the world, old man! Not—a—chance!”