The Black Eagle Mystery Part 5

"A great deal stranger if they had," cut in Jones, "considering there was no one there to see. It was after six-the offices were empty."

They had the laugh on Yerrington who muttered balefully, dipping into his gla.s.s.

"It fits in with the character of Harland," I said, "the stuff in the papers, all you hear about him. He was an intellect first-cool, resolute, hard as a stone. That kind of man doesn't act on impulse. As Mrs. Babbitts says, he probably paced up and down the empty corridor with his vision ranging over the situation, arguing it out with himself and deciding death was the best way. Then up with the window and out."

"Do you suppose Mr. Barker had any idea he was going to do it when he left?" Molly asked.

Babbitts laughed.

"Ask us an easier one, Molly."

Jaspar answered her, looking musingly at the smoke of his cigarette.

"I guess Barker wasn't bothering much about anybody just then. His own get-away was occupying _his_ thoughts."

"You're confident he's lit out?" said Jones.

"What else? Why, if he wasn't lying low in that back room, didn't he come out when he heard Miss Franks' screams? Why hasn't he showed up since? Where is he? That idea they've got in his office that he may have had aphasia or been kidnapped is all tommyrot. They've got to say something and they say that. The time was ripe for his disappearance and things worked out right for him to make it then and there. If he didn't slip out while Miss Franks and Jerome were at the hall window, he did it after they'd gone down. It was nearly an hour before the police went up.

He could have taken his time, quietly descended the side stairs and picked up his auto which was waiting in some place he'd designated."

"That's the dope," said Babbitts. "And it won't be many more 'sleeps,'

as the Indians say, before that car is run to earth. You can't hide a man and a French limousine for long."

He was right. Johnston Barker's car was located the next day and the public knew that the head of the Copper Pool had disappeared by design and intention. His clerks and friends who had desperately suggested loss of memory, kidnapping, accident, were silenced. Their protesting voices died before evidence that was conclusive. Judge for yourself.

On the morning of January the eighteenth, Heney, the chauffeur, turned up in the Newark court, telling a story that bore the stamp of truth. At five o'clock on the day of the suicide he had received a phone message in the garage from Barker. This message instructed him to take the limousine that evening at 8.15 to the corner of Twenty-second Street and Ninth Avenue. There he was to wait for his employer, but not in any ordinary way. The directions were explicit and, in the light of subsequent events, illuminating. He was not to stop but to move about the locality, watching for Barker. When he saw him he was to run along the curb, slowing down sufficiently for the older man to enter the car.

From there he was to proceed to the Jersey Ferry, cross and continue on to Elizabeth. The objective point in Elizabeth was the railway depot, but instead of going straight to it, the car was to stop at the foot of the embankment on the Pennsylvania side, where Barker would alight.

Further instructions were that Heney was to mention the matter to no one, and if asked on the following day of Barker's whereabouts, deny all knowledge of it. Pay for his discretion was promised.

Heney said he was astonished, as he had been in Barker's employment two years and never piloted the magnate on any such mysterious enterprise.

But he did what he was told, sure of his money and trusting in his boss.

At the corner of the two streets he saw no one, looped the block, and on his return made out a figure moving toward him that slowed up as he came in sight. He ran closer and by the light of a lamp recognized Barker; and skirted the curb as he'd been ordered. With a nod and glance at him, Barker opened the car door and entered.

The run to Elizabeth was made without incident. Heney stopped the car at the Pennsylvania side of the culvert, above which the station lights shone. Barker alighted and with a short "Good night" mounted the steps to the depot.

On the way home, going at high speed, Heney, rounding a corner, ran into a wagon and found himself face to face with a pair of angry farmers.

They haled him before a magistrate to whom he gave a false name, representing himself as a chauffeur joy-riding in a borrowed car. He told this lie hoping to be able to hush the matter up the next day.

When he read of his boss' disappearance in the papers he was uneasy, knowing discovery could not be long postponed. The number of the car-overlooked in the rush of bigger matters-was made public in the evening papers of the seventeenth. Then he knew the game was up, admitted his deception and the ident.i.ty of his employer.

Inquiries at the Elizabeth depot confirmed his story. The Jersey Central and Pennsylvania tracks run side by side through the station. At nine-thirty on the night of January fifteenth the ticket agent of the Pennsylvania Line remembered selling a Philadelphia ticket to a man answering the description of Barker. He did not see this man board the train, being busy at the time in his office. None of the train officials had any recollection of such a pa.s.senger, but as the coaches were full, the coming and going of people continuous, he might easily have been overlooked.

After this there was no more doubt as to Barker's flight. The papers announced it to an amazed public, shaken to its core by the downfall of one of its financial giants. The collapse of the Copper Pool was complete and Wall Street rocked in the last throes of panic. From the wreckage the voices of victims called down curses on the traitor, the man who had planned the ruin of his a.s.sociates and got away with it.

They congregated in the Whitney office where the air was sulphurous with their fury. And from the Whitney office the Whitney detectives, Jerry O'Mally at their head, slipped away to Philadelphia, with their noses to the trail. With his picture on the front page of every paper in the country it would be hard for Barker to elude them, but he had three days' start, and, as O'Mally summed it up, "It has only taken seven to make the world."

CHAPTER IV

MOLLY TELLS THE STORY

The day after the Harland inquest I meant to go down and see Iola and find out if she'd heard anything from Miss Whitehall. But that day I got sidetracked some way or other and the next it rained.

Usually I don't mind rain, but this was the real wet, straight kind that would get in at you if you wore a diver's suit. As I stood at the parlor window, looking down at the street all pools and puddles, with the walls shining under a thin glaze of water, and the umbrellas like wet, black mushrooms, I got faint-hearted. I could just as well phone, and if anything had transpired (it was the business I was uneasy about) go down and help Iola through the fit of blind staggers she'd be bound to have.

So presently it was:

"h.e.l.lo, Iola, I was coming down today but it's too moistuous."

Then Iola's voice, sort of groaning:

"Oh, Molly, is that you? I _do_ wish it had been fine and you'd have come."

"Why-anything wrong?"

"Oh, yes, everything. Miss Whitehall isn't back yet, and Mr. Ford's hardly been in at all and has such a gloom on him you wouldn't know him, and I'm awful discouraged."

"Have you tried to see Miss Whitehall?"

"No, I can't seem to get up enough s.p.u.n.k."

"Why don't you phone her?"

"Well, I don't know, I'm sort of scared of what I'll hear. I thought I'd better sit around and wait, and then I thought I ought to find out, and between the two-Oh, dear, _what's the use_!"

That was just like Iola. The only way you can be sure she's got a mind at all is the trouble she has making it up. If it's true that men like the helpless kind she ought to have a string of lovers as long as the line at the box office when Caruso sings _Pagliacci_. I wonder _I_ ever got married!

"Tell you what, girlie," I said, "you come up tonight and dine with me.

Himself is going to be late and we two bandits will steal out after dinner and make a raid on Miss Whitehall's."

Even then she hung back. I had to coax and urge and it was only me promising I'd see her through and if necessary ask the questions, made her finally agree.

The rain held on all day and it was teeming when we started out. Miss Whitehall's flat was on the other side of town-the East Sixties-and we had to go round the Park, crowding on and off cars, fighting our way through packs of people, Iola clawing at my back and catching her umbrella in men's hats and women's hair till you'd think she did it on purpose. When we got to the street we turned east, walking from Madison Avenue over Park with its great huge apartment houses, and then on a ways-not far, but far enough to make you feel Miss Whitehall's home wasn't as stylishly located as her office. Iola was that nervous I was afraid she'd forget the number, but we found it, on a corner over a drug store, where there were large, gla.s.sy bottles in the window and advertis.e.m.e.nts of ladies offering pills and candy with such glad, inviting smiles you'd know it was damaged stock.

The entrance was round on the side, and as we stood in the vestibule, dimly lit, with a line of letter boxes on each side, I couldn't help but whisper:

"You'd never think from her offices she'd live over a store."

And Iola answered, pushing the b.u.t.ton under a letter box marked "Mrs.

Serena Whitehall."

"It's a shock to me. I'd no more connect her with a push-b.u.t.ton than I would you with a gla.s.s-topped entrance and a man in knee pants."

The door clicked and we went up the stairs, one feeble little electric bulb furnishing the light. There was a smell in the air like one of the tenants had had lamb stew for dinner and another was smoking the kind of cigar that tells you it's strong and hearty half a block off. The first-floor landing was hers-a card in a frame by the door told us so-and we pressed on the bell, hearing it give a loud, whirring ring inside.