Unseen Hands/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV
WHAT RANNIE KNEW
IN the gray of dawn two dirty, bedraggled, unshaven figures trailed up the wide, low stairs at Police Headquarters and presented themselves before Captain Lewis.
"Well, of all the Odell! Where have you been? Miller, why didn't you come back to report? This is a h—l of a note!" The captain, worn from his night-long vigil, blustered to mask his relief. "If this is the way you conduct a case. Sergeant"—
"It isn't," Odell replied wearily. "Miller and I have been personally conducted for the last thirty-six hours; tied up in an old boathouse on the shore at Windermere, Connecticut, after being held up and blackjacked by a couple of crooks hired by Sims, Farley Drew's man."
He made a detailed report; and at its conclusion the chief issued some hurried orders, and then turned to Miller.
"Did you recognize the man who brought you your food; the one who the Sergeant says was called Pete?"
"No, Captain. It was pretty dark under that boathouse in spite of the sun shining outside, and I couldn't place his voice. Volkert can identify him, though, if Tony has skipped out by the time the boys get there."
"Tony won't do much skipping if he's sleeping off a whiskey-and-laudanum jag," the captain reported grimly. I'm going to 'phone the sheriff at Windermere to hold him for us. How far is that boathouse from the village?"
"About a mile and a half," Odell responded. "The sheriff may know whose it is if you tell him that there is a canoe stored there named the 'Midinette.' It took us nearly an hour to wake up the fellow at the garage; but when we succeeded he brought us into the city in good time. Here's the rest of the money I took from Pete's body, and the pistol."
As he laid them upon the desk the chief took up the receiver and put in a call for Windermere, then turned once more to the detective with a quizzical light in his keen eyes.
"Well, I suppose all you want now is to get a bath and then sleep the clock around," he remarked.
"No, sir," replied Odell doggedly, although his head was swimming from fatigue. "I want to clean up and get back on the job as fast as I can. Have there been any fresh developments?"
"A few. Want Miller any longer?"
"Not now. I may need him to-night, though."
"All right." Captain Lewis nodded to the subordinate. "You're off duty until six, Miller. Report then if you think you can get about the streets without being kidnapped."
Miller, flushing at the implied rebuke in the chief's heavy attempt at a jest, withdrew; and as the door closed after him Odell asked eagerly:
"Did you get anything further out of Peters?"
"No. After I got through with him yesterday morning he was like a squeezed orange; but beyond what he told you about that voice that he heard, his mind is only a blank of bewilderment and a kind of superstitious terror. The queer thing about it is that he is back at his old job, after all." The chief leaned forward in his chair. "I had to let him go, of course; we hadn't a thing to hold him on, and he said he was going back to his sister's; but I put a man on him anyway, so that we could get him if we needed him again. He didn't even want to go to the Meade house for his things, and wouldn't until I told him that we had it guarded inside and out; yet when he got there he stayed; told Taylor that Miss Meade wanted him to, and he thought it was his duty. Funny what an influence that quiet little old maid seems to have on everybody."
Odell looked up at the last observation.
"Miss Meade? She seems to be the least considered of anyone in the household."
"Yet she is running them all now in an unobtrusive way. Porter and Kelly and Smith all tell me the same. I took a run up there myself yesterday afternoon and had a talk with her. She seems quite crushed by the evidence of the attempts on the lives of her nephew and her brother-in-law; and I don't think she believes for a minute that there was anything questionable about the death of the other boy and of her sister. Lorne himself is much better and wants to see you. He sent Titheredge down here for you; but I told him that you were working on the case and might not show up for several days."
"And Gene; did he return to the house the night before last? Is Porter still on the job?"
"Yes, but the kid has turned sulky; shut himself up in his room and wouldn't talk to anybody. Smith sent in his report late last night."
"Smith?" In the stress of swift-moving events Odell had not thought of the plainclothesman whom he had detailed to watch the maneuvers of the temperamental elder daughter of the house. "What did he have to say?"
The chief grinned.
"She's a clever little girl, that Miss Cissie. Slipped out of the house yesterday morning about ten o'clock and went to the Fitz-Maurice Hotel. Smith was right behind her, and he heard her ask the girl at the telephone exchange for York 7087, which happens to be the number of Farley Drew's private wire. Smith got into the next booth and heard her end of the conversation. She kept insisting on seeing Drew, and she wasn't satisfied with the excuses she got; for she flounced out of the booth in a temper and taking a taxi at the hotel entrance drove straight to the Bellemonde Annex.
"At the desk there they told her the same story that Miller got from Sims the other night and that I guess she had just received herself over the telephone. Smith says that she was white with rage when she came out; but for all that she must have had her wits about her, for she saw and recognized him."
Captain Lewis paused with a chuckle, and the detective demanded:
"What did she do then?"
"Led him about the town by the nose! He says no old-timer could have pulled any cleverer stunts than she did to throw him off the track; changed cabs half a dozen times, dodged in and out of department stores and hotels, and zigzagged from one side of the city to the other, doubling on her own trail all the time. And where do you think she wound up? At a dingy little second-rate apartment-house west of the park; a walk-up, with letter-boxes and bells in the vestibule!"
"Did Smith find out what she was doing there? Whom she was calling on?"
"The party she was looking for was gone. Smith saw her read over the names on both sides of the vestibule two or three times; and when she came out she looked discouraged. The janitor was sweeping the sidewalk, and she stopped to speak to him for a minute; so after she had got in her taxi Smith went up to him, slipped him a buck and asked him whom the young lady had been looking for. He said it was one of the tenants who had gone away sick eight or nine months before, a Mrs. Gael."
"Gael," Odell repeated. "That's the name of the woman whose husband divorced her and brought in Drew as co-respondent."
So little Miss Chalmers was not so unsophisticated as she had seemed. Her desire to see Drew must have been desperate indeed to have led her to cast aside all ordinary conventions and seek him at the home of the woman whom he had discarded.
"Exactly," the chief responded dryly. "She didn't know where else to look for him apparently, for she went straight home from there; and Smith says that she had a scene with her aunt which reduced the poor woman to tears, and then locked herself in her room. So much for his report. Taylor searched Gene's room night before last when he beat it to keep his date with Drew, but he didn't find anything except clothes and stuff for out-door sports; skates and tennis-rackets and polo and golf and hockey sticks. He went through Miss Meade's room yesterday morning and the one her sister used to occupy, but found nothing suspicious in either of them, of course. He won't have an opportunity to get into Lorne's room for some time to come, and the younger son, the hunchback, is still sick; but I left Taylor on the job on the chance that you would turn up to-day and might need him. The outside men report nothing doing."
"And Kelly?" The detective, in mentally gathering up the loose threads of his investigation at the point where his abduction had interrupted it, recalled the fourth man, to whom he had assigned the task of searching for the tools with which the picture-wire had been severed and the top step of the stairs sawed through. "Hasn't he sent in any report yet?"
"Only these." The chief swung about in his chair and took from the floor, where they had rested against the wall unnoticed by Odell, a long, heavy steel saw and a file with an electric attachment. "Are they the tools you were after?"
The detective reached forward and examined them eagerly.
"Good work!" he exclaimed. "Where did Kelly find them?"
"In the last place he would have thought to search for them; the open tool chest in the cellar. He says he passed them up a dozen times that first day; looked straight at them and never even saw them! It took a cool head, that, to leave them out in plain view on the chance that they wouldn't be noticed among the other tools."
"The obscurity of the obvious!" Odell smiled slyly. "Remember what I said to you the other day about the secondary mind, Captain? This is clear evidence of it; and it will be no small help, I can tell you, in tracing the culprit, although I've known from the first that no ordinary mentality was back of this series of crimes, in spite of the strange element of carelessness which enters into each episode of it. The first instinct of the ordinary criminal would have been to secrete these tools in as out-of-the-way a place as their size would permit; but if he were a degree higher in intelligence he would realize that such a spot would be the first in which they would be searched for, and the next step in his reasoning would be that if they were left in plain view with others of their kind which were in occasional legitimate use in the household they would be overlooked."
"Sure; that's what I said." The chief moved impatiently in his chair. "They are what you were after, all right. Kelly asked Peters last night if there were any electrical carpentering tools in the house or a big saw, and he says that the butler's surprise looked like the real thing to him. Peters told him they'd never had any use for a big saw, and he had apparently never heard of electrical tools."
Odell laid the file and saw back on the table.
"It is too bad they have been handled so much," he remarked. "Your finger-prints and mine and two or three more are all superimposed on them."
"That doesn't matter," the chief grunted. "Look at your hands."
"Phew! Oil, eh?" Odell pulled a grimy handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his fingers. "I commandeered this from the garage man; those rascals up there stripped me clean. Did Kelly upset an oil-can in the tool-chest?"
"No. He said all the other things in it were rusty from disuse. Your secondary-minded murderer must have cleaned these carefully with oil to remove his own finger-prints before putting them with the others."
Odell shook his head.
"I don't get it," he admitted. "The combination of foresight and ingenuity together with rank carelessness in detail stumps me. It must be that there are two of them working together, or rather one carrying out the instructions of another and doing it in a bungling fashion. The method of work suggests two distinct personalities, and yet I cannot point to even one possible suspect now."
As the chief opened his lips to reply the telephone rang and he took up the receiver.
"Windermere? Sheriff Higgins speaking? … This is Police Headquarters, New York. … Yes, Captain Lewis, Homicide Bureau. Get out as quick as you can to a boat-house on the shore of the Sound about a mile and a half from your village. … No, I can't tell you on whose place it is, but there's a canoe stored there with the name 'Midinette' painted on it. You'll find a dead man sitting in a chair, and another sleeping off a jag. Hold him for me on a charge of—What's that? … What? … Nothing left? … No trace of the bodies? … You're sure it's the right place? … Yes, 'Midinette.' … The Osgood Praye estate. … Thanks, Sheriff. My men are on the way out to you now, and I will appreciate it if you will give them all particulars."
He hung up the receiver slowly and turned to Odell.
"That boathouse burned down to the concrete piles last night an hour after you and Miller made your escape," he said soberly. "When the village fire-department got there they found nothing left but a mass of charred timbers washing around between the piles and no trace of the bodies."
"The lamp!" Odell ejaculated. "There wasn't enough oil in it to last more than an hour longer, at most. Tony must have waked up and lurched against it, for there wasn't any wind to blow it over. Gad! what a death for him!"
An hour later, after making himself presentable and with the data which the chief had given him carefully catalogued in his mind, the detective set out for the Meade house. His first intention was to see Gene and force from him an explanation of that note which Drew had made an excuse for the interview in the room back of the shop, and he anticipated that the explanation would merely confirm his own later suspicion; but that would be as so much dead wood out of his path.
He had interviewed neither Lorne nor his youngest step-daughter as yet, and if they could furnish him with no clue the process of elimination was all that was left to him. The chief was even now honeycombing the city for Drew, but his apprehension was a matter of relative unimportance to Odell; he was too deeply engrossed in the problem which the recent events in the Meade house presented to give a thought to personal reprisal for his abduction; and he no longer believed that Farley Drew had any hand in the series of crimes he was investigating.
Peters, looking slightly better than at their last meeting, opened the door to him, and Miss Meade met him with outstretched hand in the hall.
"Oh, Sergeant Odell, I'm so glad that you have come!"
There were tired lines under her eyes. "Mr. Lorne looked for you eagerly yesterday, and I—we were all anxious to see you."
"You have something to tell me, Miss Meade?"
"Unfortunately, no. We are all as much in the dark as before; but the suspense is horrible! It has been a comfort to know that your men were here to protect the children."
"The children alone, Miss Meade? The next blow might have fallen on you; have you thought of that?" he asked her quietly.
She shook her head.
"I thought only of the others. It doesn't matter about me; you see, I—I have no fear. But tell me, have you discovered anything, Sergeant Odell? Although I shrank at first from a knowledge of the truth I feel now that any awakening, no matter how bitter and soul-crushing, would be far better than this nightmare in which we are all living. Please be frank with me; I must know."
"My dear Miss Meade, when I have any news you may rest assured that you shall be the first to hear it," he replied gently.
"Will you go up to my brother-in-law now? He has been asking for you ever since he woke up." She paused and then added: "But you look very tired, Sergeant Odell; may I not first offer you a cup of coffee?"
He shook his head smilingly.
"Thank you, no. I breakfasted early. I will interview Mr. Lorne presently, but first I should like to see Taylor, one of my operatives here; may he be sent for, please?"
Taylor came to him in the library, and at his entrance Odell noted the look of grim satisfaction upon his face.
"Good morning, Sergeant. Have you seen the chief?"
Odell nodded.
"Just came from him. He said that you succeeded in searching Miss Meade's room and her sister's, but you found no opportunity to get into the one occupied by the younger Chalmers boy."
"I did this morning, not an hour ago. He kept to his room all day yesterday, but to-day he went down to breakfast, and that was my chance," Taylor replied eagerly. "I didn't find anything in his room except clothes and books; there wasn't so much as a single letter lying around, and his fountain pen looked as if it hadn't been used for months.
"I reckon he doesn't do much but read, for I never saw so many books in my life outside of a library; they're overflowing the bookcases and piled up in the corners of the room, and a lot of them are on medical subjects. There were a couple of extra braces, too, for his back; and the shelves and cabinet in his private bathroom were stacked with medicine-bottles.
"I was in there giving them the once over when he came up from breakfast, and I swung the door quick within an inch of closing just as he opened the other door leading from the hall, for I'd heard that high whining voice of his, and I knew he wasn't alone. I only caught the end of a sentence first:—'only keep you a minute.' Then a woman's voice said quietly: 'Yes, sir.' It was that maid Gerda, and she spoke in a kind of a hushed way as if she were waiting for something to fall.
"‘I've known for the last month'—young Chalmers finished with something so low I couldn't hear; but the woman gave a sharp little cry and then tried to cover it up by a bluff. 'I don't know what you mean, sir! I—I never heard'—
"He laughed that sneering laugh of his and interrupted her. 'I caught you listening at the head of the stairs one day and saw the expression on your face as you looked down at him. You looked as though you could kill him then. I'm not going to give you away; don't be afraid of that. Life and death are nothing to me, and I wouldn't ring the curtain down on this little melodrama for worlds. It amuses me immensely.'
"She lost all her deference then and snapped out at him. 'You—you're not human!' He only laughed at her again and said, 'Possibly not, but I don't want the fun spoiled. That's why I asked you to step in here for a moment; I wanted to warn you that the young man from Headquarters is no fool, and your English is altogether too good for a lady's maid. Better cultivate Jane a bit even if it does go against the grain, and copy her speech the next time he interviews you. That's all.'
"I tried to get a look at them through the crack in the door, but they weren't on a line with it; and the woman didn't reply for a full minute. When she did it was with all the old deference and a little bit added, as if she were mocking him. 'Very good, sir. Thank you, sir.' And with that she was gone.
"I was afraid he would come into the bathroom and catch me; but he walked up and down for a little, chuckling to himself, and then turned and left the room, and I heard him going down the front stairs, which were mended yesterday. That was my cue, and I beat it."
"You're quite sure of that conversation word for word, Taylor?" Odell asked.
"Word for word, Sergeant. Whoever the woman is, young Chalmers has her number."