The End of Mr. Garment

by Vincent Starrett

  “He thought it possible—yes, sir.”

  “I’ve forgotten your name, I think. What is it?”

  “Allison, sir,” responded Ghost, who knew the butler’s name very well.

  “All right, Allison, you can go back to your duties, whatever they are. I merely want to glance over the house again—to clear up some doubts that are in my mind.” He smiled a hard smile. “I won’t be troublesome and make work for the servants.”

  Ghost bowed and turned away. Were his legs and back as correct as he could wish them to be? He strove to lend them a butlerish appearance as he made his way to the kitchen. He heard the stranger turn into the living room, and on a pretext himself turned back to have another word.

  The intruder was standing in the exact centre of the large chamber, revolving slowly upon his heel. His likeness to Cicotte was certainly amazing.

  “You’ll let me know when you are through, sir, I hope?” said Ghost’s voice in the doorway.

  The impostor spun sharply toward the sound. He seemed annoyed. But his reply was good-humoured and without suspicion.

  “Yes, yes,” he smiled, a bit impatiently. “I’ll let you know. Here’s something for yourself, Allison.”

  It seemed obvious to him why the servant had returned.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Walter Ghost, accepting the half-dollar pressed into his palm.

  On his second trip he reached the kitchen, where Cicotte with great difficulty was holding himself in.

  “Well?” questioned the detective eagerly.

  “He’s an impostor, of course,” smiled Ghost.

  “Good God! Did you doubt it?”

  Ghost’s smile widened. “I had to be sure, hadn’t I? But I’m sure—don’t worry about that. Keep your voice down, Cicotte. Look here, I’ve been bribed with half a dollar!”

  “Who is he?” demanded the detective. “What does he want? What’s his idea going around made up to look like me?”

  “I don’t know. He pretends that he wants to look over the house. I suppose he’s looking for something—perhaps the same thing we are looking for.”

  Cicotte sat down abruptly and after a moment as abruptly rose. He paced the floor of the kitchen angrily. “But why?” he asked. “I don’t get it at all, Mr. Ghost. Who does he represent?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ghost again; “but I feel, Cicotte, that this is the turning point of our case. Do keep your voice down or we’ll have him on our backs! The question is: What’s to be done? Shall we let him finish his search, then fall upon him and ascertain what he has found?”

  The plump detective was worried. “Hang it,” he complained, “if we wait for him to finish, he may walk out on us.” He was boiling with suppressed indignation at the audacity of the impersonator, and anxious to come to grips with him.

  “He may try,” admitted Ghost, “although he’s promised to let me know when he is through. He supposes me to be the butler. Of course we dare not risk an escape.”

  Cicotte heartily agreed. “Confound it, Mr. Ghost,” he said, with reluctant admiration, “you are as cool about all this as if it happened every morning!”

  “I was never more puzzled in my life,” confessed Ghost earnestly. “I haven’t the faintest notion who this fellow may be. Or, if I have, it’s so remote that I wouldn’t whisper it in a crowd.”

  “He could be the murderer himself,” muttered Cicotte, expressing his secret thought.

  “I know,” said Ghost. “He could be just that. He knows the Kimbarks are away. He’s after something. If he is one of the original guests, you should be able to recognize him. Is there one of them who might, without difficulty, make up to resemble you?”

  The worried detective knotted his brows in thought. “No,” he replied, “not without difficulty. Except maybe that writer fellow with the funny name—Dromgoole. He ran a bit to flesh, and wore a kind of a moustache. But—damn it!—Drom-goole’s on the yacht!”

  He made a sudden gesture that might have been a sign to posterity or a surrender of all his privileges. “Do you realize what this means to me? I'm in charge of this case, Mr. Ghost. I'm to blame if anything goes wrong. And beyond that door, somewhere—in this house—there’s a man who may be the murderer of Stephen Garment! Made up to look like me! Do you wonder—”

  “I don’t wonder at all,” said Ghost soothingly. “I think you are showing remarkable restraint, as a matter of fact. I shouldn’t blame you a particle if you decided not to risk this wait.”

  He was thoughtful for an instant. “Why should you, after all? If this fellow knows where the knife is hidden—supposing that to be what he’s after— he must have it by this time. If he doesn’t know— if he’s just blindly looking—well, we are as likely to find it in his absence.”

  The detective reached a profane decision. “I’m going to get him, Mr. Ghost—now!”

  “Good enough,” said Ghost. “I’ll go with you, of course.”

  But Cicotte was already half through the swinging door, his service revolver in his hand. Ghost hastened after him along the hall.…

  The impostor now was in a room upstairs. They could hear his light footsteps on the flooring, when he left the borders of the rug. Little sounds…little creakings…stealthy as a housebreaker at midnight.…

  It was a piquant situation. The surprise of the impostor, Ghost fancied, could have been equalled only by Cicotte’s own when he glanced from the curtained window and saw his double coming up the drive. It was a situation that was almost epic, by Jove! and he, Walter Ghost, was happy to have been on hand to witness its outcome.

  The oddities of life appealed to Ghost—even such dangerous oddities as this one.

  To Cicotte, a man of more imagination than most of his profession, the episode seemed charged with a sort of fantastic horror. There was something terrifying and absurd in thus threatening the extinction of this simulacrum of himself. By God, it was almost like suicide!

  But of all this nothing showed in the malicious, coffee-coloured eyes of the detective.

  With his weapon murderously displayed, he repeated his snarling, ironic command:

  “Stick ’em up—Cicotte!”

  Chapter Eleven

  Mollock, meanwhile, carrying on in New York, went down to meet the yacht. The Jezebel had moved rapidly. Under full steam pressure, she had come back from the Indies a great deal faster than she had gone there. Before the return voyage had ended, however, Curly Pope knew that the identification had been an error and that his wife was waiting for him in New York. Cicotte had humanely flashed the news by wireless, after verifying it himself.

  The Chicago yachtsman had always been a man of spirit, who had passed reckless opinions on his sister-in-law’s children. On this occasion he had a number of vivid remarks to make about Mrs. Kingsley Duane herself.

  Husband and wife were reunited on a pier at the yacht harbour, and both were unaffectedly moved by the meeting. Cynical photographers, however, recorded the event with their usual tranquillity. Among the reporters present was young Mr. McDaniel of the Chicago Daylight, ambitiously determined to interview everybody on the boat.

  Mr. McDaniel was annoyed. Things had not happened as he had planned them. Catapulted into the East by Cicotte’s revelation of Mollock’s surprising prophecy, he had been vastly discouraged to encounter, a little later, the detective himself upon the scene—and apparently on the best of terms with the prophetic fictionist. Then the extraordinary Walter Ghost had entered the picture, and lo! the three of them—Ghost, Mollock, and the wily Cicotte—were suddenly as thick as thieves. Mr. McDaniel would have been very happy to believe the story writer guilty of the Garment murder had it been possible any longer to believe it; but that amazing hunch was beginning, he feared, to look a trifle sick.

  Charlesworth, the literary agent—a sort of darkhorse choice for murderer—had told the reporter, politely, to go to grass; while Stella Birdflight, known only to McDaniel as “the woman of the train,” remained for him an unidentif
ied mystery. This was a bit of bad luck for Aubrey, for Miss Birdflight had a story to spill and would not have hesitated to spill it. She would probably have demanded money, but there were quantities of that behind the activities of Aubrey McDaniel.

  He had no idea that Cicotte had departed for Chicago.

  Of Mollock he inquired, as one great writer to another: “What do you make of it all, Mr. Mollock?”

  “All what?” asked Mollock, turning. “Oh, it’s you again! You are certainly the most fortuitous burglar in the business, aren’t you? Doesn’t it ever occur to you that you are butting in?”

  Mr. McDaniel grinned. “I was very bashful as a child,” he observed.

  “You got well over it,” said Mollock, with conviction. “Well, what can I do for you, no doubt?”

  “I want a story. This Garment mystery has flopped like a trained seal. Where’s Cicotte? I thought he’d be here to meet the yacht.”

  “He’s gone back to Chicago. No, he really has, McDaniel. I’m not joking.”

  “Where’s Mr. Ghost then?”

  “He also, as it happens, has gone to Chicago.”

  Mr. McDaniel was alarmed. “With Cicotte?”

  “I believe they did go on the same train, now that you ask,” admitted Mollock reflectively.

  “Ow-oo!” howled young Mr. McDaniel. “Something’s happening in Chicago!”

  “Then I can’t tell you what it is,” said Mollock. “I don’t know.”

  “Did they leave in a hurry?”

  “Well, they weren’t running—if that’s what you mean.”

  Young Mr. McDaniel was greatly worried. “And I’m here,” he moaned, “listening to you tell about it! Look here, Mr. Mollock, be a sport! What took them to Chicago? Is it this Garment business or the other?—the woman, I mean!”

  “H-m-m! It might be both, you know,” said Mollock cautiously. For the time being, at least, he was determined to shield Kimbark from this persistent leech.

  The reporter nodded. “I know—the servants! That dress—eh? No, I don’t, either! What the deuce could a servant have had to do with Stephen Garment?”

  Mollock was sympathetic. “It’s all Greek to me, too,” he confessed. “I’ll tell you this: Ghost did suggest that I ask the Popes about servants employed by them in recent years. But I’m bound to add that I don’t believe he thinks the Amersham case important.”

  Young Mr. McDaniel was not impressed, either. “I’ve already asked Mrs. Pope about that dress,” he said. “It was hers, but she doesn’t know when or how she got rid of it. And that suicide note—now who stole that, more than a year ago?” He made a gesture of despair. “I’ve got to let the office know that Ghost and Cicotte are in Chicago,” he cried, and fled before the story writer could detain him.

  Mollock and Harold Anger greeted each other like brothers who had been long separated by jail or distance.

  “Betty,” cried the secretary hilariously, “you’ve met Mr. Mollock before, I think. Let me present him to you now as the author of our happiness. It was he who suggested the expedition upon which I had my first intoxicated glimpse of you. At the wedding he will give us a set of his immortal works, elaborately bound in full morocco.”

  Miss Waterloo, covered with freckles and confusion, came forward and gave the novelist her hand.

  “Then it’s all settled?” asked Mollock needlessly. “Well, I’m glad. Thus it is in fiction and in life. It happened much the same way with me, you know. An ocean voyage, a girl with light hair, and the deed was done. I congratulate you both.”

  “What happened in your case, Mr. Mollock?” asked the girl with light hair. It was really red, however.

  “I married her.”

  “You’re not married!”

  “Of course I’m married. Hasn’t Anger told you? I’ve been married for years and—months. Why not?”

  She blushed, then answered him with her usual frankness: “You act less like a married man than anyone I have ever known.”

  Mollock was reflective. “Do you know,” he observed, after an instant, “Mrs. Mollock tells me exactly the same thing! But then,” he added kindly, “you can’t have met so very many men, after all. It’s just as well.”

  He paid his respects to the happily reunited Popes, bowed gallantly to the rest of the ladies, and shook hands with the rest of the men. Miss Maynard he had not met before, and he viewed her with interest.

  “Listen, Curly,” he said, when he had taken Pope aside into one of the cabins. “Cicotte has gone back to Chicago, with my friend Ghost—a sort of highbrow Nick Carter—and I’m more or less in charge of things. I mean, if you or this spy of Cicotte’s—what’s his name? Johnson!—have anything to report, I’m the receptacle.”

  But the yachtsman shook his head. “I have nothing to report. It wasn’t my job. Barney Cicotte tried to stick me with it, and I told him to go to hell. I don’t know what the Johnson reptile can have to say that he hasn’t already reported. He sent code messages off, somewhere, every night until we reached Havana. I’ll point him out to you. Isn’t it a lousy mess? But your friend Anger is a daisy.”

  “So is the girl,” agreed Mollock. “Young, but docile and attractive. Who is the tenth member—Miss Maynard? I think I haven’t met her before.”

  Pope laughed. “Friend of the Van Peters. Brought her along as a sort of companion for Anger. You see how that turned out! She’s a nice old girl, but she takes a lot of entertaining; and I’ve had to do the entertaining.”

  “She looks a bit like Frederick the Great,” said Mollock critically. “Well, I suppose I had better look up this ‘Johnson reptile,’ as you call him. Will you come along and vouch for me?”

  “I’d rather kick him in the pants,” growled Curly Pope. “Yes, I’ll tell him who you are. Ask him about his dealings with Dromgoole, if he doesn’t confess them. That’s the only thing I have to report—and Anger would tell you about it, if I didn’t.”

  He gave the story writer an account of the experience outside the wireless room. Mollock was suitably impressed.

  “And after that,” said Pope, “on the homeward trip, we discovered that Dromgoole was also bribing Johnson. A form of blackmail, I imagine—I suspect that Johnson caught him bribing the operator, and levied tribute.”

  But the Johnson reptile had nothing to report, he said, that had not already been received by Cicotte, before he left New York. It occurred to the novelist that his own part, as resident member of the firm of Ghost, Mollock & Cicotte, had not been a highly important one. It seemed likely enough that Ghost had merely been kind—and desirous of going to Chicago alone. The steward had no objection, however, to repeating everything he had already forwarded to his superior.

  They went ashore together. Mollock, listening to a racy account of the voyage, almost wished he had been a member of the party.

  “As for these Kimbarks, Mr. Mollock,” observed the Johnson reptile, “Cicotte’s got the dope on them. They didn’t fool him for a minute. At the table, and when they were talking with the others, everything was nice as pie, but when they were alone together they weren’t always so sweet. Say, they don’t Mocha and Java worth a damn!”

  “You mean they fought?” asked Mollock, interested.

  “You couldn’t call it exactly fighting. It was more like snarling. Not all the time, you know. Sometimes she’d get soft and beg him to tell her the truth—and he’d sort of sneer and tell her to keep on guessing. It wasn’t easy to hear everything they said, and I didn’t hear everything; but I heard enough to know what it was all about.”

  “What was it about?”

  “She thinks he did the job. She was trying to make him tell her. Delilah stuff, eh? Maybe she’d have sold him out, if he had.”

  “Of course, he never did confess?”

  “Not him. Then there’d be times when they’d be like a couple of sucking doves, and talk about their second honeymoon. Probably to throw anybody off the scent that happened to be listening.”

  Molloc
k was inclined to agree. It was Ghost’s own theory, he recalled, that Mrs. Kimbark thought her husband had committed the murder. But why didn’t the ass deny it, and shut her up?— whether or not he had!

  “I suppose Cicotte sent you a wireless when this woman was found—up at Amersham?” he suggested.

  “Didn’t hear of it till we got to Havana,” said the Johnson reptile. “He sent me word when Mrs. Pope turned up, though. I told Mr. Pope about that myself.”

  “Well,” said Mollock briskly, “that seems to be the whole story, except as to Dromgoole. What about Dromgoole?”

  “Dromgoole?”

  “Sure—the fellow who paid you to shut up about the code stuff he was getting from the operator.”

  The steward gave his inquisitor a long, appraising glance. “M-m-m,” he observed. “So you know about that! Who was it saw us—Anger or the captain?”

  “Both of them.”

  “They were spryer than I thought they were,” commented the Johnson reptile. “Or Dromgoole was an ass.”

  “Probably Dromgoole was an ass,” said Mollock. “He rather struck me in that light.”

  The steward-detective suddenly laughed. “And now, I suppose, you think I’ve been holding out on Cicotte! Well, I haven’t. Cicotte knows the whole story. I let him know the first time I caught Dromgoole with the operator—that was one message Dromgoole didn’t see! He didn’t see the reply, either. Cicotte said to show him everything—and take his money myself.”

  It was Mollock’s turn to say “M-m-m.” After a moment he added: “I wonder why.”

  “He couldn’t read ’em. Or if he could, he had to figure ’em for himself. I never told him the key.”

  “Didn’t he ask for it?”

  “He sure did; but I had my instructions about that. I told him: nothing doing! I’d take a chance on the code, I said—for a reasonable sum—but not on the key.”

  “What was the sum?” asked Mollock, curious.

  “Five dollars a message.”

  The novelist laughed. “Nice profitable little voyage for you,” he commented. “I wonder whether the messages were worth that to Dromgoole! What does Cicotte think of him?”