In And Out Part 35

"Then it might be said that this comes from her cousin--er--Aimee Fourier. That sounds rather well for a name?"

"Great, Wilkins!" said Mary.

"And it might further be said that this cousin, a person perhaps in the trade of making gowns and the like, since I believe that such use these trunks quite a bit--it might be said that the cousin, having no further use for this trunk, is sending it to your maid, miss."

Sheer admiration shone in Mary's visible eye.

"Wilkins, you're a jewel!" said its owner. "Where are we now?"

"On West End Avenue, miss, within a block or two of your home."

Mary disappeared.

"Shut the trunk, Wilkins," her voice said softly, "We're safe!"

She, who had suffered so many shocks since last night, seemed a.s.sured that at last all was well; and as a matter of fact Wilkins felt much the same about the whole affair. He gazed placidly at the sign on the corner and, closing the trunk, leaned forward to the driver.

"The big limestone place over there, I think it is," said he. "Go to the side gate, old chap."

Seconds only, and they rolled to a standstill at the curb. Anthony's priceless personal servant lifted out his burden and set it on the sidewalk with no effort at all.

"Wait a bit and take me back," he smiled at the driver, as he started for the handsome black iron gate in the cream-colored brick wall that shut the Dalton back yard from the pa.s.sing throng. There was a little electric push beside it, and Wilkins, having laid a finger on it, waited serenely.

Offhand, it seemed to him, he had saved the day for Anthony Fry. A smaller, weaker man must have pa.s.sed up the job of carrying out the trunk single-handed. Yes, he had saved the day and, also offhand, the saving should be worth about twenty dollars when he returned to Anthony and reported. Or possibly, considering the really horrible features of the case as Wilkins understood them, even fifty dollars.

That was not too much. In fact, the more he thought of it, the more Wilkins felt that his return would be marked by the sight of a crisp yellow note from Anthony's prim, well-stocked wallet. Thirty-two of this should go into the black-and-white pin-checked suit he had been considering enviously in a Broadway window for nearly a month; ten more should go into Wilkins's savings-bank account, which was quite a tidy affair; and he thought that the other eight might as well be sent to his nephew, who was working his way through a veterinary college in Indiana.

And here the houseman opened the door and looked at Wilkins; and Wilkins picking up his trunk, stepped through and into the back yard, and then, the door of the bas.e.m.e.nt laundry being open, into the laundry itself.

Only the under-laundress was present, which caused him to stiffen as he said coldly:

"For Felice!"

"The--the poor young lady's maid!" said the laundress, with a sudden snivel.

"I'll take it to her room," Wilkins said. "Where will that be, and where will I find the young woman herself?"

The under-laundress dried her eyes on one corner of her ap.r.o.n.

"I dunno about Felice," she said uncertainly. "Mebbe Mr. Bates--oh, here comes Mr. Bates now."

Round, red, highly perturbed, the Dalton butler bustled into the laundry and looked Wilkins up and down.

"Trunk for the master?" he asked crisply.

"For Felice, the young lady's maid, as I understand," Wilkins said quietly. "Where shall I find her? It's for herself."

His calm and superior smile warned Bates not to question an affair that could not possibly concern him--yet the warning missed Bates somehow. He looked sharply at Wilkins and laughed.

"You'll not find her here!" said he.

"I mean Felice, the maid of----"

"I know the one you mean," Bates said briefly. "She's not here and she'll not be here again! She's been dismissed!"

"What?" said Wilkins.

Bates looked him over sternly, as if to suggest that if he happened to be a friend of Felice he had pa.s.sed beneath contempt.

"She's _went_!" Bates said sourly. "This here house is no place for young Frenchies that wanders the streets at night, believe me. She sneaked in--I dunno what hour this early morning, and she was able to give no account at all of where she'd been. There wasn't no further questions asked; she went, bag and baggage!"

One of those mental clouds which had been troubling Anthony since last night came now to engulf the complacent Wilkins. He looked at Bates, as if refusing to believe a word of it. He looked at the trunk and his expression was a study.

"Well, as to where this young person has gone," Wilkins said. "You see, this trunk being, as it were, her personal property, I've been asked to see that she gets it herself and----"

"Where she's gone is no concern of ours. We don't know and we don't want to know!" said Mr. Bates. "The hussy went without a character and that's all we can tell you about her. And this here house is too full of trouble for me to be bothering with you about her trunk," concluded Mr.

Bates. "Anything belonging to her gets out!"

"Out!" Wilkins muttered.

"Out!" said Mr. Bates, and pointed at the door.

Let us not forget what Anthony altogether forgot, to wit: the sinister warning of Hobart Hitchin in regard to shipping boxes, trunks or other containers that might well have held a dismembered body.

For one of Hitchin's strange temperament and habits of thought, his own apartment could not have been situated more happily, if an affair of this kind were to involve Anthony Fry.

Room for room, the home of the prosperous crime-student was directly below that of Anthony; they used the same dumbwaiter, and they were served by the same service elevator, so that if Hitchin had so elected he could even have inspected the meals that went to Anthony's table.

Still more, they were in the old wing of the Lasande, where the rooms are larger, but where the floors--laid long before the days of sound-proof concrete filling--permit the unduly inquisitive to hear much of what goes on above and below.

According to his own reasoning, Hitchin had struck upon the investigation of his whole lifetime. Surely as he wore spectacles, murder had been done in the flat of the impeccable Anthony Fry.

What the motive could possibly be, Hobart Hitchin could only guess, as he had already guessed; but it was a fact that he had been suspicious ever since Anthony's appearance last night with the slim boy of the heavy storm coat and the down-pulled cap. These, failing to harmonize with anything that went in and out of the Lasande ordinarily, had tw.a.n.ged every responsive string in Hitchin's consciousness, and not by any manner of means had the strings ceased tw.a.n.ging after his unusual interview with Anthony.

Hence, having returned to his own flat, he waited tense and expectant.

With straining ears he heard the coming of Beatrice Boller and the subsequent excitement, and to him her peculiar cries signified another friend of David Prentiss's who had come suddenly upon the grisly thing that had once been the young boy.

And now those processes of deductive reasoning which are used so successfully in fiction and so infrequently in real life, informed Hobart Hitchin that the crime's next step was almost at hand. Accustomed to murder or otherwise, an intelligent man like Anthony Fry would risk no more of these disturbances; whatever his original plans, he would seek very shortly to get the body out of the Lasande--hardly in grips, Hitchin fancied, probably not in a packing case, rather in that reliable actor in so many sensational murders, a trunk.

Here, on the floor above him, some one moved and b.u.mped what was unquestionably a hollow, empty trunk!

As the veteran fireman responds to the gong, so did the brain of Hobart Hitchin respond to that b.u.mp! Fifteen seconds and he had visualized the whole of the next step; the trunk to the freight elevator, thence to the street, thence to the waiting motor express wagon, thence--

Again, after a time, came the b.u.mp, indicating that the trunk was in the living-room now--and then, absolutely true to the hypothesis, Anthony's door opened and the b.u.mps went to the hall, while the freight elevator came up the shaft!

The brief-case containing the trousers of David Prentiss had not left Hobart Hitchin's cold hand. It did not leave now as, s.n.a.t.c.hing a hat, he sped down the back stairs of the Lasande--a proceeding likely to save five seconds at least when one considered the slow response of the elevators--cut through the second floor and came down to the side entrance, just beyond the office and the desk.

There was a taxicab as usual at the curb just here. Without leaving the vestibule, Hobart Hitchin signaled it to wait for him; and then, ever so charily, he thrust forward his eagle eyes and directed their merciless beam through the side panel of the gla.s.s. Hobart Hitchin all but lost his self-control and laughed excitedly, for there, just down the block, Anthony's personal servant was lugging a wardrobe trunk to the curb.