The Gray Mask Part 41

"If only things hadn't gone wrong at the last minute!" Nora cried. "If only I might have taken the bomb and talked to the man who brought it!

Even with the others! For it's clear those fellows will give nothing away now. We can blame poor Marvin that I never had a chance."

"What do you mean?" Garth asked. "You haven't told us what happened when I left you by the west door."

"You remember we had got Marvin on a sofa in the hall," Nora answered.

"He must have seen you close the door when you went in the library to warn Alsop and the others, because from my hiding place I saw him get up, and, with no appearance of an injured man, sneak along the wall to the stairs. I followed him up, and, Jim, I found him on the floor in his room again, but this time he didn't hear me, and he was talking. Then I saw his whole game. There was a dictaphone hidden beneath the bed with which he had probably communicated with those outside the house for days. We had stopped him the first time when he had just learned of my intended masquerade. Don't you see? He had to tell them that. We caught him, and he scratched himself to throw us off the track with the details of another case like Brown's. Now I heard him tell everything--just what I was to do, and that Alsop and the others were in the library. I ran downstairs, but when I reached the lower hall I saw him coming after me.

So I said I had changed my mind, that I was afraid, that I wanted only to leave the house. I went to the kitchen and slipped out, intending to get to you, Jim, with my information. But I knew these men were in the grounds, and I had to go carefully. When I crept up to the library window I thought I saw you. Then the telephone bell rang, and I couldn't make you hear."

"Of course," Garth said, "Marvin, coming down, had seen that the library door was open, and that there was no longer a light there. It was too late to use the dictaphone again, but he knew he must change his instructions and tell them not to waste the bomb in the library. So he threw on his disguise and rushed to the west door as he had originally planned, in too much of a hurry to dream such a mistake could happen. I suppose he got past while I was at the window."

"Marvin," the inspector mused, "was just the man for them. Probably full of wild-eyed ideas, and feeling a divine call to help smash Alsop. I hold no brief for that millionaire. I understand he had to work, like most everybody else, for what he's got, and maybe that's the reason he can't understand these new social notions. And far be it from me to say anything about Marvin's grand thoughts, although it may be his share in this affair was made worth his while. My part in life is to see that the law's kept, and I guess without the law there wouldn't be anything much worth while for anybody to fight over. These rough boys had certainly fixed Marvin to help them break the law into little bits of pieces. So maybe he deserves just what he got. Alsop tells me he didn't trust any of his employes with his schemes for putting a stop to socialistic movements in his concerns, and that's where the big hitch came. Marvin, whenever he knew there were private papers in the house, was always searching. He had a key to Alsop's door. He used that old ghost story, and dressed himself up in case any of the servants should see him. Their fright would give him time to cover himself. When Alsop did catch him he came across with the terrible experiences he had had himself with the veiled woman. Ought to have got on to him before."

"It wasn't easy to suspect him," Nora said, "particularly after we had seen the housekeeper's curiosity, and had found him, apparently unconscious, in his room. He was really too frightened at the flat, and we might have suspected when Jim heard those directions at the shop.

Such luck as that doesn't often happen. It's easily explained now. The time it took you, Jim, to go to the hospital and to visit the shop was just the time he needed to return to Wall Street with Mr. Alsop, make some excuse, and get into the shop by a back way to receive his new orders. It was simple enough."

The inspector grunted.

"If we saw all the simple things there'd be no need for detectives."

He commenced to cough with a persistent vehemence.

"Take me home, Nora," he groaned. "Back to the fireplace and the flannel for the old man. You're always right, Nora. Isn't she always right, Garth?"

But Garth, recalling that moment before Nora and he had entered the Alsop house, shook his head. Nora must have seen and understood, for she laughed lightly.

"Maybe she is," Garth said thoughtfully, "but sometimes I wonder."

CHAPTER XVI

A NOTE FROM THE DEAD

Alsop was around the next day, loud with generosity, and anxious to give Garth the only form of reward he could understand--large sums of money.

Garth, however, didn't care for the man. He preferred to keep their relations on a purely business basis.

"I only did my duty, Mr. Alsop," he said. "Some day I may break away from here and start an office of my own. In that case, if you cared to mention me to your friends I would feel I had been well repaid."

"Maybe you were a little too proud, Garth," the inspector grunted afterwards.

Nora, however, when she heard of it, said simply, "Jim, you did perfectly right. If you had taken money from that man he'd have believed he owned you body and soul."

"When you two combine against me I've nothing more to say," the inspector grinned.

Garth knew that the old man watched, with something like anxiety himself, the progress of his and Nora's friendship. The detective had long since made up his mind not to speak to the inspector on that subject until he had received some definite encouragement from the girl.

The inspector himself brought up the matter about this time. Probably the impulse came from the trial of Slim and George which began and threatened, in spite of its clear evidence, to drag through several weeks.

It would be necessary, of course, for both Garth and Nora to testify sooner or later. So they rehea.r.s.ed all the incidents of that night when Garth had worn the grey mask. After this exercise one evening the inspector followed Garth to the hall.

"I don't want my girl to become morbid, Jim."

Garth nodded.

"You mean Kridel?"

"You've said it," the big man answered with an attempt at a whisper.

"I've thought that maybe you and Nora--See here, Jim, I wouldn't mind a bit. You see Nora's mother was Italian. I don't altogether understand her, but I know it isn't natural for her to mourn for this fellow forever, and I mean, if you and she ever hit it off, I won't forbid the banns. Only maybe you'll let me live with you now and then. You don't know what that girl means to me, Jim; but I want to make her happy, and I believe you're the one, for a blind, deaf, and dumb man could see you are in love with her."

Garth laughed, not altogether comfortably.

"It's up to Nora, chief, but I don't see how I can ever get along without her."

It wasn't often that the inspector had used Garth's first name. It seemed to bring the detective closer to his goal. During the daytime at headquarters, however, their relations were scarcely altered. Garth often suffered from lack of work there, probably because the inspector didn't care to send him out on unimportant matters that the least imaginative of his men could handle. When he had to a.s.sign him to an unpromising task, either to spare him too prolonged idleness, or because no other detective was available, the big man always a.s.sumed an apologetic air. It was so when he started him on the mystifying Taylor case.

"Nothing doing these days," he grumbled. "City must be turning pure, Garth. Anyway I got to give it something for its money. Run up and take a look at this suicide. Seems Taylor was a recluse. Alone with his mother-in-law and the servants. Wife's in California. Suppose you had other plans, but I don't see why the city should pay you to talk moonshine to Nora."

He grinned understandingly, encouragingly.

So the detective nodded, strolled up town, and with a bored air stepped into that curious house.

Garth for a long time stared at the pallid features of the dead man.

Abruptly his interest quickened. Between the thumb and forefinger of the clenched left hand, which drooped from the side of the bed, a speck of white protruded. The detective stooped swiftly. The hand, he saw, secreted a rough sheet of paper. He drew it free, smoothed the crumpled surface, and with a vast incredulity read the line scrawled across it in pencil.

"Don't think it's suicide. I've been killed--"

There was no more. Until that moment Garth had conceived no doubt of the man's self-destruction. The bullet had entered the left side of the breast. The revolver lay on the counterpane within an inch of the right hand whose fingers remained crooked. The position of the body did not suggest the reception or the resistance of an attack. In the room no souvenir of struggle survived.

Here was this amazing message from the dead man. Its wording, indeed, offered the irrational impression of having been written after death.

Garth thought rapidly. Granted its accusation, the note must have been scrawled between the firing of the shot and the moment of Taylor's death. But a murderer, arranging this appearance of suicide, would have given Taylor no opportunity. On the other hand, the theory that Taylor had written the note before killing himself, perhaps to direct suspicion to some innocent person, broke down before the brief wording, its patent incompleteness. One possibility remained. Garth could imagine no motive, but another person might have prepared the strange message.

A number of books littered the reading table at the side of the bed.

Garth examined them eagerly. He found a blank page torn from one--the sheet which Taylor had clenched in his fingers. In another was Taylor's signature. When Garth had compared it with the message on the crumpled paper no doubt remained. Taylor himself had written those obscure and provocative words.

Garth found the pencil on the floor beneath the bed, as if it had rolled there when Taylor had dropped it. The place at the moment had nothing else to offer him beyond an abnormally large array in the bath room of bottles containing for the most part stimulants and sedatives. They merely strengthened, by suggesting that Taylor was an invalid, his appearance of suicide.

The coroner and Taylor's doctor, who came together, only added to the puzzle. The coroner declared unreservedly for suicide, and, in reply to Garth's anxious question, swore that no measurable time could have elapsed between the firing of the shot, which had pierced the heart, and Taylor's death. The physician was satisfied even after Garth confidentially had shown him the note.

"Mr. Taylor," he said then, "understood he had an incurable trouble.

Every one knows that his wife, whom he worshipped, had practically left him by going to California for so long. It may have appealed to a grim sense of humour, not unusual with chronic invalids, to puzzle us with that absurdly worded note. I might tell you, too, that Mr. Taylor for some time had had a fear that he might go out of his head. Perpetually he questioned me about insanity, and wanted to know what treatment I would give him if his mind went."

Garth, however, when they had left, went to the library on the lower floor and telephoned headquarters. The inspector agreed that the case held a mystery which must be solved.

Garth walked to the embrasure of a high colonial window. The early winter night was already thick above the world. The huge room was too dark. There was a morbid feeling about the house. He had noticed that coming in, for the place had offered him one of those contrasts familiar to New York, where some antique street cars still rattle over sonorous subways. The Taylor home was a large, colonial frame farmhouse which had eventually been crowded by the modern and extravagant dwellings of a fashionable up-town district. In spite of its generous furnishings it projected even to this successful and materialistic detective a heavy air of the past, melancholy and disturbing.