The Whisper on the Stair/Chapter 2
Val’s apartment was in one of the big, expensive, gold plated rabbit warrens which have recently sprung up on Fifth Avenue in the early seventies, opposite Central Park. Coöperative apartment houses, they are called. You pay enough money for a fair sized country estate for the privilege of occupying an apartment for which you have to pay, in addition, a monthly rental that sounds more like a telephone number than a rental amount.
In this apartment was to be found Chong Low, a wizard Chinese cook of bland features and wonderful powers—powers that Savarin himself would not have despised. Here also was to be found Eddie Hughes, Val’s man, who could handle a gun as well as a tailor’s iron, and was equally willing to handle either for his employer. He was a small chap with muscles of chilled steel and the lithe speed of a mountain lion. He smoked when he desired, and he drank, in moderation when he wished, indulging in the former through the simple expedient of taking what smoking material he wished out of the humidors of his employer—and in the latter, similarly, from out the bounty provided in the cellarettes of his employer. Of all of which Val was cognizant; he had given Eddie permission to do this, saying that he would rather have him take these things with his permission than steal them without his permission.
“Tell Chong I’ll eat at seven-thirty—alone,” directed Val. Eddie Hughes touched a match to the dried twigs in the huge living room fireplace, and turned to go. It was early fall and the ruddy glow of the fire, which leaped up instantaneously in the fireplace, was pleasant and comfortable, even in competition with the ample steam sent up from below.
Val seated himself in the big, overstuffed chair that faced the flames and proceeded to inspect his bargain. He loosened the strap that bound the books, and they toppled over in a little heap at his feet.
A cursory examination showed Val nothing remarkable about the books. The bindings were not such as to interest him, and the books themselves were mostly of a mid-Victorian period, with the green silk covers that were such an obsession during that time. There were three or four Dickens, a bit of Thackeray, one Matthew Arnold, and so on.
There was not a name plate in any of the books, though he found a bit of comment here and there, written marginally in a fine, childish hand. The last book he picked up was a King James bible. Here he had better luck. On the fly leaf was the inscription
This Holy Bible is the Property
of
Jessica Pomeroy
in the same fine, round hand as the marginal notes.
“Jessica . . .” he mused before his fire. “Jessica . . .” he repeated to himself. “A name that connotes something—green fields and all that sort of thing, eh?” The name was connoting more to him at the moment—dimples, flushed velvety cheeks, a skin you love to touch, it fits well around the neck, alone at last, till death do you part, Mrs. Valentine Morley⸺
“Snap out of it!” he commanded himself suddenly, smiling into the fire. “Life isn’t like that, you old fool. You don’t see a girl for one minute one day and marry her the next. Things don’t go as speedily as all that. And yet, those eyelashes! Like deep fringes over a midnight pool⸺”
“Dinner’s ready, sir,” announced Eddie.
In solitary state he made his way into the dining room and seated himself at the table. He attacked his grapefruit. Jessica⸺ There was something about the name he liked instinctively. Even if the name had not been associated with⸺ but then, he found he could no longer dissociate the name from the girl in the book shop.
“Eddie,” he said to his man, “beautiful woman is Nature’s noblest work, eh?”
“Yes, sir. So I have been led to believe, sir.”
“Man is a lonely animal, without woman, isn’t he?”
“Yes, sir; so I have been informed, sir,” replied the impassive Eddie, removing the grapefruit.
“You have—er—never engaged in—er—matrimony, Eddie?”
“No, sir; I think not, sir.”
“Very good, Eddie,” replied his employer.
Why should such a girl want two dollars and thirteen cents? Val gave it up. And yet, if she was in trouble—and anybody who needed two thirteen must be in trouble, Val conceived that it was up to him to give her a lift out of it. Of course, he said to himself, he would go out of his way to help everybody who was in trouble, regardless of how beautiful she was, but—her hair was sort of copper, you know, burnished copper like the old copper pots Grandma Morley used to have. And there had seemed to be lots of it, coils and masses and waves, tumbled and heaped and⸺
“Will you have your coffee here, sir?” asked Eddie.
“Er—yes, surely.”
To-morrow he would go ahunting Jessica Pomeroy—surely, she should not be so hard to find. It was not an ordinary name. She wouldn’t have that, of course. He could go no further into the matter of the books to-night, owing to an appointment for the evening.
It was after one o’clock when he returned, admitted by the apparently sleepless Eddie.
“Go to bed, Eddie,” he said. “Nothing to do till to-morrow.”
“Very good, sir,” replied Eddie, going to his room.
The little pile of books on the floor of the living room reminded him of the riddle of Jessica Pomeroy. Perhaps there was something in them he had overlooked—an address somewhere, perhaps, or . . . He paused in hesitation for a moment.
On an impulse, he gathered up the books and took them to his bedroom with him, to look them over as he lay in bed.
By the light of his bedside lamp he went over each of the books carefully. Nothing. No trace of the identity of the girl with copper hair. He stifled a yawn politely, in deference to the fact that he was, in a way, communicating with a girl—the first one who had interested him since he had returned from France. The last book he picked up was the bible.
“Jessica Pomeroy,” he recited, looking at the schoolgirl hand. “I wonder . . . he went off into an abstracted lapse. At the head of his table, perhaps, the glint of the shaded lights playing on that hair, the mouth and eyes smiling at him . . . absentmindedly, he thumbed the pages. A glint of yellow and green caught his eye in the pages.
Instantly he was wide awake, interested, turning the pages one by one to find the one so decorated as to stand out from the others. He found the page finally, drawing out from between pages one hundred and ninety nine and two hundred a yellow and green paper, which he examined with interest, giving vent to a long, low whistle of astonishment.
There came a knock on his door, and he started.
“Did you call, sir?” came the voice of Eddie.
“No, go to bed,” he answered, and he heard the patter of retreating footsteps. He turned his attention again to the slip of paper in his hand.
It was a United States Treasury note for ten thousand dollars.