The Black Eagle Mystery Part 26

"Suppose you tell us the whole thing, straight from the start. It'll be easier that way."

"Any way you want it," said Ford. "It's all the same to me. I first met Harland in the elevator some time in the end of November. Seeing me every day he spoke to me casually and civilly, as one man does to another. There was nothing more than that till Johnston Barker began coming to the Azalea Woods Estates, then, bit by bit, Harland grew more friendly. I'll admit I was flattered, a chap in my position doesn't usually get more than a pa.s.sing nod from a man in his. As he warmed up toward me, feeling his way with questions, I began to get a line on what he was after-he wanted a tab kept on Barker."

"Jealous?" O'Mally suggested.

"Desperately jealous. As soon as the thing opened up before me I saw how matters stood. He was secretly crazy about Miss Whitehall and was easy until Barker cut in, _then_ he got alarmed. Barker was a bigger man than he, and there was no doubt about it that she liked Barker. When he realized that he put it up to me straight. He'd sized me up pretty thoroughly by that time and knew that I'd-what's the use of mincing matters-do his dirty work for him."

O'Mally inclined his head as if he was too polite to contradict.

"He offered me good money and all I had to do was to watch her and Barker and report what I heard or saw. It was a cinch-I was on the spot, the only other person in the office a fool of a stenographer, a girl, who hardly counted."

"What was the result of your-er-investigations?"

"That Barker was in love with her too. He came often on a flimsy excuse that he wanted to build a house in the tract. She was friendly at first, then for a while very cold and haughty-as if they might have had a quarrel. Then they seemed to make that up, and get as thick as thieves."

"Did _she_ seem to care for Harland?"

"Not exactly-anyway not the way he did for her. She was always awfully nice to him-the few times he came into the office-gentle and sweet, but not the way she was with Barker. She was two different women to them-with Harland a sort of affable, gracious winner, but with Barker a girl with a man she's fond of, natural, glad to see him, no society stunts.

"A little before Christmas I caught on to the fact that she was receiving letters from Barker, and Harland offered me extra money if I'd get their contents. This wasn't so easy. Generally she took them away with her, but twice she left them on her desk. All I had to do then was to stay overtime and when she was gone, copy them. That way I got on to something that phazed us both-she and Barker were up to some scheme."

O'Mally moved slightly in his chair.

"Scheme?" he said-"What do you mean by scheme?"

"Something they were planning to do. After Christmas every time he'd come they'd go into the private office and talk there so low you couldn't catch a word. And the letters were all about it, but we couldn't get a line on what it was. I'll show them to you and you'll see for yourself. It got Harland wild, for though they weren't exactly love letters, they showed that she and Barker were close knit in some secret enterprise."

"Did you continue this work till the day of the suicide?"

"I did-to the night-to the time it happened. Harland was getting more and more worked up. I don't know whether it was the Barker-Whitehall business or his own financial worries, but I could see he was holding the lid on with difficulty. That day, January fifteenth, as you may remember, he was in her office and had a talk with her. As he went out I saw that he looked cheered-up, brisk and confident. Of course I've no idea what she said to him, but knowing the state he was in, I'll swear it was something that gave him hope. Yet a few hours after that he killed himself.

"Seeing him so heartened up and being curious myself, I decided to stay that evening and do a little quiet snooping among her papers. But she nearly blocked that game. She was in the habit of going between half-past five and six, leaving me to close up. That night she didn't do it, but hung about in the office, and after watching her for a few minutes I saw that she was on the jump-moving about, going from one desk to the other, glancing at the clock. Her manner made me certain that something was up-it was possible it had to do with the scheme she and Barker were hatching. I got the idea that I'd go and come back after a while, on the chance of stumbling on something that would be useful to my employer. I left her there and after loafing round for about half an hour returned. The office was dark and she'd gone. I lit up and looked over her desk in the Exhibit Room and a table in my room where she kept some papers, but found nothing. Then I thought I'd take a look into the private office but that door was locked."

"Ah, locked," said O'Mally, calm as a summer sea. "Was that her custom?"

"Not as far as I knew. I'd never found it locked before. It gave me an uneasy feeling for I thought she might have suspected what I was doing and turned the key against any invasion of her particular sanctum. She was no fool and might have caught on. So I fixed up the papers as I found them and left the office. You know what time _that_ was, or you do if you read of the Harland suicide. I've always supposed the poor chap was up that side corridor as I stood there waiting for the car."

Babbitts bent over his notebook scribbling-he had to hide his face. He told me he thought the expression on it of stunned, crestfallen blankness would have given him away to an idiot. Waiting with their ears stretched to hear a confession of murder-and _this_ was what they got!

And the man wasn't lying. Every word he'd said matched with the facts we'd been worming and digging to find. He couldn't possibly have known murder had been discovered-he hadn't any suspicion a murder had been committed. The great revelation, that was to have broken on the public with an explosion like a dynamite bomb, was that Tony Ford was Harland's paid spy.

"Well," he said, looking at O'Mally, "what have you got to say? Go ahead with it if it'll give you any satisfaction. Only you needn't waste your breath. I know, without being told, that it's a rotten, dirty business."

O'Mally, his face as red as the harvest moon, pulled at his mustache looking thoughtful. But, sore as he must have been-you'd have to know O'Mally to realize what his disappointment was-he answered cool and easy:

"I ain't got anything to say. It's not my job to train the young. You've told me what I wanted to know-that's all I'm here for."

Ford turned to Babbitts and asked him to get some letters off the table and then went on to O'Mally:

"How did you come to find it out?"

Babbitts, gathering up the letters, c.o.c.ked his head to listen, wondering how O'Mally was going to get out of it. But you couldn't phaze that veteran.

"Several ways-you see what we're after is Johnston Barker. It's the Copper Pool that owns us, and nosing round in our quiet little way we got on to the Barker-Whitehall affair and from that followed the scent to that legacy of yours. We didn't altogether believe in that uncle up-state-thought maybe he was Johnston Barker in private life, and that you might know something," he gave a lazy, good-humored laugh. "Got fooled all round. I don't mind telling you now that the way we happened on Sammis was pure accident. Thought he was Barker and had him shadowed.

He looked like enough to him to have been his brother."

"That's so," said Ford, as Babbitts handed him the letters, "especially with his hat on. I noticed it myself." He selected two papers from the bunch and handed them to O'Mally. "There-those are the letters I spoke of. This one," he flicked it across the counterpane, "is just a note from Harland making a date. I don't know how I happened to keep it."

They were the three letters Babbitts had taken after the attack, copies of which at that moment were lying in O'Mally's pocket.

It was not till they were out on the hospital steps that they dared to speak. O'Mally's face was a study, his mouth drooped down to his chin and his eyes dismal and despairing like he'd come from a tragedy.

"Well!" he said, "what do you make of that?"

"Zero!"

"Not a thing to do with it, hasn't a suspicion of it, no more involved in it than that sparrow there," he pointed to a sparrow that had lit on the step near-by. "I've had setbacks in my profession before-but this!"

He stopped, stuck his hands into his pockets and stared blankly at the sparrow.

"Well, if it lets him out," said Babbitts, "it tightens the cords round the other two."

"Um," agreed O'Mally, still gazing stonily at the sparrow, "that's what keeps your spirits up."

"With him eliminated the whole thing concentrates on her and Barker."

"It does, my son." O'Mally roused up and came out of his depression.

"Instead of a brain and a pair of hands as we've called it, it was a brain and one hand-the smart hand, the right. That was the woman."

He turned and began to descend the steps, taking Babbitts by the arm to draw him closer and speaking low:

"Do you see how it went? They were in the private office when Ford came back-she and Barker and the dead man. When they heard him come they switched off the light and locked the door-and, Great Scott, can you imagine how they felt! Shut in there in the dark with their victim, not knowing who Ford could be or what he was doing, listening to him rummaging round, his steps coming nearer, his hand on the doork.n.o.b! I'm too familiar with murder to see any terrors in it-but _that_ situation!

I've never known the beat of it in all my experience. Then when Ford goes-on his very heels-over and out with the thing they'd killed. And both of them back there again, or maybe stealing to the front windows and taking a look down at the crowd below."

They walked up the street arm in arm, talking in hushed voices. As he looked at the faces of the people that pa.s.sed the thought came to Babbitts that in a short time, maybe a few days, they'd be reading in the papers of the awful crime not one of them now had a suspicion of.

CHAPTER XV

MOLLY TELLS THE STORY

I heard all this late that night from Babbitts. But there was more to it than I've told in the last chapter, for after they left the hospital O'Mally and Babbitts went to the Whitney office and had a seance with the old man and Mr. George.

Though Ford had disappointed them his story had made the way clear for a decisive move. This was decided upon then and there. On Monday morning they would ask Miss Whitehall to come to Whitney & Whitney's and subject her to a real examination. If she maintained her pose of ignorance they would suddenly face her with their complete information. They felt tolerably certain this would be too much for her, secure in her belief that no murder had been suspected. Surprise and terror would seize her, even a hardened criminal, placed unexpectedly in such a position, was liable to break down.

The next day was Sunday. I'll not forget it in a hurry. Many a high pressure day I've had in my twenty-five years but none that had anything over that one. It was gray and overcast, clouds low down over the roofs which stretched away in a gray huddle of flat tops and slanting mansards and chimneys and clotheslines. Babbitts spent the morning on the davenport looking like he was in a boat floating through a sea of newspapers. I couldn't settle down to anything, thinking of what was going to happen the next morning, thinking of that girl, that beautiful girl, with her soul stained with crime, and wondering if she could feel the shadow that was falling across her.