The House of Intrigue/Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I DON'T know how long it was afterward that I woke up. But gradually I became conscious of a very pleasant swaying and rocking motion. It seemed like being lulled on the topmost branches of a pine-tree waving in a sleepy evening breeze. It left me so contented that I was quite willing to lie there. Then the lazy whispering of pine branches merged into a louder sound, and one much more like the purring of machinery. So I finally decided to open my eyes and investigate.
It startled me a little to find that I could only half-way succeed in this effort. For one eye, I discovered, altogether refused to open. And that shook the last of the drowsiness out of me.
"Where am I?" I asked of nobody in particular, as I made an effort to sit up in the swaying leather seat into which I was wedged by means of three or four heavy sofa-pillows.
I could open one eye, but that was all. For across my other eye, I discovered, there was a linen bandage. And under this bandage, I further found, was a generous slice of raw beefsteak. But with that one good eye I was able to see that I was in an automobile and that this automobile was once more taking me down through the streets of what was unmistakably New York.
Bent over the wheel, close beside me, I could make out a clear-eyed and firm-lipped young woman. And my second blink at her convinced me of the fact that it was Clarissa Bartlett herself.
That made me sit up. It was not so easy as it sounds, for my head seemed to be the size of a Zeppelin and I could feel a distinct sense of burning under the sticky surface of the raw beefsteak.
The next thing that came to my attention was the fact that the girl driving the car wore a very familiar-looking coat of Hudson seal. The memory of where it had come from brought the past suddenly back to me.
"Feeling better?" asked the girl at the wheel. She seemed inclined, on the whole, to give me little attention. Things of more moment, it was plain, were occupying her mind.
"Yes," I told her. And I might have added that I was also feeling a little less superior. But instead of doing that I readjusted the slab of beefsteak over my blackened eye.
"Do you need anything?" was the next question from the young woman at the wheel.
"Another head," I grimly acknowledged.
We went on again in silence, for several blocks.
"Would you mind telling me just what happened back in that hall?" I finally asked. That question was prompted, I think, more by a desire to have her relate with her own lips the misdeeds of Michael O'Toole than by any mere desire for information.
"I'd rather not talk about it," was Clarissa Bartlett's very decided answer. But there were certain things which did not and could not escape my attention. She was with me, and not with her Michael. The earlier look of languor and revolt was no longer on her face. She was very pale, I could see, for she was a woman who'd had a sudden and vast awakening. And there was a newer note about her as she adroitly tooled her car down through the more crowded areas of Broadway, a note of decisiveness, a note of firm-lipped determination to face the worst that life might have in store for her. And it was a good deal of a change from what I had seen earlier in the day.
"Where are we going?" I asked, for I noticed that we were once more rounding Central Park.
"Home!" was the girl's brief reply.
"Why?" I inquired.
"We'll know that much earlier than you expect," announced Clarissa Bartlett. The next minute she had swung in beside the curb and brought the car to a stop. I glanced up, with my one good eye, at the limestone front of the house that towered beside us. I knew it at once. It was the house of intrigue which I had so hurriedly left the night before.
"Shall I come?" I asked the girl who was already getting down from the car-seat. For something about the newer demeanor of hers tended to leave me less self-assertive than I had been.
"Of course," was her curt reply as she stepped across the sidewalk. She passed within two feet of what I knew to be a plain-clothes man posted there. But she ignored him as completely as though he'd been a gargoyle, or a newel-post figure belonging to the limestone steps up which she was so purposefully striding.
I could see her finger play on the electric bell. It pressed again and again. It prodded there. It jiggled and danced and see-sawed. But it was several minutes before there was any response to that authoritative summons.
Then one of the heavy front doors opened, ever so little, and two timorous and quite colorless faces peered out through the aperture. And for the life of me I couldn't keep from laughing as I squinted up at those two apprehensive old faces. They made me think of a couple of white mice peering out between the bars of a cage. For I saw at a glance that it was old Ezra Bartlett and his brother Enoch. Those two old brothers, however, now looked more than worried. They looked unhappy and harried and altogether uncertain as to what new calamity was about to befall them. And I feel quite sure they would have slammed and locked that door in our faces, had not Clarissa Bartlett been a little too quick for them. She defeated that intention, as book agents do, by occupying the door-opening with her own slender body.
"Come on!" she commanded, with a motion over her shoulder to me, for she was already in through the door by this time and silently but deliberately defying any movement to close it.
I none too willingly followed her into that house of complicated uncertainties. She strode across the hall and opened a door on the right. Then she made a motion toward the two timorous-eyed old spirits hovering about in the shadowy background.
"I'd like the three of you to wait in here until I come down," she announced in what I was beginning to see might be called a constitutionally imperious manner.
She did not tarry for more. Things of moment, apparently, awaited her above stairs. And I could see my two old conspiratorial friends sidle silently into the room after me. We all sat down, watching the door.
It was old Ezra Bartlett who spoke first.
"You'd best beware of that young woman," he proclaimed in a venomous yet guarded whisper.
"Did you happen to be addressing me?" I inquired, attempting to fix him with a cold and haughty stare. But it's no easy thing to be cold and haughty when you've only got one eye.
"I tell you that woman's an impostor," hissed out the old man, anxiously watching the open door.
"And what do you two old blisters regard yourself as?" I coldly inquired.
"What does she say?" demanded old Brother Enoch, with one hand cupped behind his ear.
"She insinuates that we're a couple of impostors,"
Ezra Bartlett peevishly explained.
"Well, ain't we?" demanded the other.
But Brother Ezra ignored that interrogation.
"By gad, ma'am," he told me with unexpected heat, "if you don't see that you're being hoaxed, if you don't understand that you're being duped and deceived and made a Jumping-Jack of, you're a bigger fool than I took you for."
"And whom do you hold responsible for all this?" I calmly inquired.
"No one but that man Washburn!" was Ezra Bartlett's sibilant answer.
"And a pretty kettle of fish he's got us in for!" concurred Brother Enoch.
"Well, what do you intend doing about it?" I inquired.
My tranquillity seemed to exasperate Ezra Bartlett beyond all endurance.
"Do about it?" he piped, in an ecstasy of rage. "Do about it? I'll tell you what I'm going to do about it. If they don't let us out of here inside of half an hour, I'm going to burn this house down!"
Incendiarism seemed to be a sort of habit with the occupants of that incomprehensible mansion.
"I really wouldn't do that," I quietly explained to him. "For that's what the girl up-stairs tried to do. And it only ended in having 'em lock her up!"
"Well, they can't lock us up!" the old scoundrel announced with much vigor. "If anybody's going to get locked up for all this, it's that young Washburn!"
"But where is this man Washburn?" wearily demanded the other old scoundrel.
That question remained unanswered. For a woman had crossed the hall and stepped into the room. She wore the uniform of a trained nurse. And I could see at once that it was Alicia Ledwidge.
She stopped and stared at the three of us, with a look of wonder in her customarily tranquil eye. Then she stepped over to my side, stared at the bandage about my head, and slowly turned my face to the light so that she could see it better. Her look of wonder, I found, had deepened into one of indignation.
"Who did that?" she asked, still looking at the bit of beefsteak so neatly embedded in linen.
"Michael!" was my grim response, with an upward movement of the head. "Her Michael!"
She stood there for a moment or two, without speaking. But I could almost hear the wheels of her brain going round, like a watch with its case open.
"Does—does she know it?" the woman in the uniform finally asked.
"She ought to," I announced. "She saw it!"
I could perceive a slow change creep up over that intently studious face. The look of questioning uncertainty merged into one of deliverance, of relief, of gratitude.
"Thank God!" she devoutly and quite impersonally exclaimed.
I didn't altogether resent her spirit of gratitude. What I mostly resented was being the involuntary and casual instrument of it.
"I'm sorry I can't see things the way you do," I somewhat icily explained.
"No, of course you can't! But don't you understand how it's made her see things? How it has brought her light, when she was so blind, so terribly blind?"
"You mean opened her eyes by closing one of mine!" was my somewhat embittered comment.
But the abstracted gaze of the woman in the uniform continued to ignore me.
"What a beast!" she ruminated aloud, rolling the word triumphantly about her tongue, as though it were a chocolate-drop. "Oh, what a beast!"
And then, oddly enough, as though that mention of the beast had been able to conjure him up out of thin air, the subject of our conversation suddenly appeared in the doorway.
He appeared side by side with Copperhead Kate, and it wasn't until I swept them with a second glance that I discovered they were handcuffed together.
That enforced union, I could see, was as distasteful to Pinky McClone as it was to Copperhead Kate herself. But I no longer gave them much thought, for the next moment I saw that they were being herded into the room by Big Ben Locke himself.
"Sit down there!" was his curt command, as he pushed his two prisoners toward a Louis-Seize sofa of brocaded silk. And they sat down on that fragile-legged sofa, eying each other with open hostility.
Then the Chief seemed to see me for the first time.
"Hello, Baddie!" he said as easily as though he were accosting me over his office desk.
"Hello!" I guardedly replied, for at that particular moment there were quite a number of things worrying me. In the first place, I was wondering what had become of Wendy Washburn. And I was perplexed as to Bud and what could have happened to him. And I was further troubled by the thought that the black club-bag was still nowhere in sight.
"That's a great piece of work you've been doing for the office, Baddie," acknowledged the airily approving Big Ben, with a frown over his shoulder at the couple on the sofa, who were still jerking so fretfully at each other's clinking wrist-bones. They reminded me of twins in a nursery bed, accusing each other of trespass on private territory. And they looked as if they would gladly and readily have bitten each other's ears off.
"Whose office?" I inquired.
"Our office, of course!" was Big Ben's prompt retort. But I was thinking of other things.
"Where's Bud Griswold?" I demanded.
It wasn't Big Ben who answered that question, but Copperhead Kate herself.
"Oh, it's up to that king of snitches to keep himself safe," she announced with her mirthless cackle of a laugh that made me think of a guinea-hen. "You can bet he wasn't going to let anything interfere with his fade-away!"
"He's gone?" I gasped.
"Sure he's gone—gone where this bunch will never see him again. And what's more, he took your bag of junk with him. Trust Bud for that!"
I knew what this would mean. Bud had always been a "clean" worker. I remembered his method. He never left any loose trails. When he took gold, he always melted it down, no matter what it might lose in the process. And when it came to Tiffany ice he always picked the stones from their settings and disposed of them singly. That, in fact, was why he had always preferred ice. A pearl was always a pearl, and a diamond always a diamond. It could be deprived of its identity by removal from its setting, but its commercial value remained the same. And if Bud had carried off that club-bag it was only too plain that it was gone for good.
"Is this woman lying?" I asked Big Ben. And I could see the flash of hate from Copperhead Kate's pale green eyes as I put the question to him.
"That woman'd better keep her trap shut," was the answer of the Chief, ignoring both my question and his prisoner together.
"But what I want you to do, Baddie, is to get after this guy Griswold, and get after him right away. You know his tricks. And you know his trails. So the sooner you slip out on the job of rounding him up the better!"
I squinted up at Big Ben with my one good eye.
"Why should I go after Bud Griswold?" I demanded.
"Because I—because our office wants him rounded up," was the Chief's matter-of-fact reply.
"Well, what am I to you, or your office?" I inquired, remembering my last quarter of an hour in that same office.
"My dear girl, we're both going to forget about that little flare-up of yours," he condoningly announced.
"But I haven't forgotten about your little flare-up," I pointedly reminded him.
"But, good heavens, Baddie," he contended, with a great air of injured innocence, "you don't s'pose I was responsible for that, do you? Now that you know the lay of the land? Now that you see things straight?"
"That's just the trouble," I told him, "I haven't been able to see things straight!"
He looked at me with well-feigned astonishment, almost with impatience.
"Well, what happens to be stuck in your craw?" he inelegantly inquired.
There were a good many things stuck there, and I intended to let him know it.
"In the first place, whose house was that up the Hudson," I demanded, with a gesture of contempt toward the morose-eyed Michael, "where you gathered in this big-hearted wop with the East Fourteenth Street get-up?"
I had the satisfaction of seeing Pinky wince at that unflattering reference to his attire.
"That was Washburn's summer home!"
"Wendy Washburn's?" I demanded, with a gasp.
"Of course!" replied the Chief.
I let this sink in. Then I asked my next question.
"Then what was this crook McClone doing up at that house? And at this house, too?"
"Working a blackmail scheme for which he'll get about ten years," was the Chief's curt retort.
"Not on your life!" morosely yet vigorously interpolated Pinky, who, apparently, like so many of his kind, prided himself on nursing a working knowledge of the law.
"Then what brought this woman to this particular house to rob the wall-safe?" I inquired. And I could hear Copperhead Kate's snort of anger at my contemptuous phrase of "this woman."
"That," said Big Ben, "was what you'd call a coincidence, and nothing more. She and that jail-bird working-mate of hers got an inside tip that there was good pickings here—and she happened to sneak in when there was considerable else going on around the premises."
"Did that tip come from these two old weasels here?" I demanded, designating the two old uncles who sat so wistfully and yet so peevishly hunched up on the far side of the room.
"Hey?" cried Brother Enoch, with his hand behind his ear.
"What's that?" snapped out Brother Ezra, with war in his faded old eye.
"Those two old feebs!" was Big Ben's none too Mattering exclamation. "Hasn't it ever struck you that these two old ginks are a little nutty?"
It had not. But I found no chance to deny it, for that indirect accusation had brought Ezra Bartlett out of his chair like a hornet out of its nest.
"Nutty?" he piped in his shrill and tremulous falsetto of indignation. "We're no more nutty than you are. We may have been paid to come here and act the fool, but we didn't come here to be called crooks and accused of stealing out of wall-safes and killing young women! We—"
"The less you two old guys talk the better!" Big Ben Locke vigorously reminded him.
"But I've stood too much of this without talking, and now I'm going to have my say out. D'you understand? I'm going to say what I've got to say and I'm going—"
"Just a minute," I broke in, as soothingly as I could. "Who was it paid you for this work?"
"That man Washburn did," was the old weasel's retort.
I remembered what Clarissa Bartlett had told me, and once more I found considerable to think over.
"Then do you mean to say that Wendy Washburn also paid you to waylay me after leaving that office in the Asteroid Building?"
I could see Big Ben's eyes challenging the smaller man. But it was plain that he wasn't to be intimidated.
"He did."
"But how did you know I was going to be in that building, or at that office?"
Again Big Ben tried to silence the little old weasel. But things had gone too far for silence.
"I didn't know you were going to that office. I'd been posted outside of this man Locke's office and told to follow you."
"You'd been posted there?" I repeated, turning slowly about on Big Ben. "Then this old man knew I was going to bump into just what I did bump into, on that particular afternoon?" I demanded, facing the big detective.
Big Ben shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.
"What's the use o' messing around with small stuff like that," he demanded, "when we've got real trouble right here under our nose?"
"I want you to answer my question!"
"What question?" he equivocated.
"I want to know if you knew that just what happened in your office the other afternoon was going to happen?"
"Well, what about it?" he evaded.
"There's just one thing about it; if that whole thing was a frame-up, I want to understand just what it was for?"
Big Ben tried to brush me aside.
"Say, Baddie, you'll sure make one grand little sleuth, with that grand jury style o' yours!"
"What was it for?" I repeated.
My one good eye met both of his somewhat puzzled eyes. Then for an uncertain moment he looked back over his shoulder, toward the shadowy hall. Then he looked back at me.
"It was for the sake of your immortal soul," was his sudden and somewhat reminiscent answer. "And if that's not as clear as mud to you, you'd better ask young Washburn himself, for I see he's just coming in through that door!"