In the absence of Anger, it occurred to the detective, his best bet might well be Kimbark himself. There was jealousy between the Kimbarks and the Van Peters, and little love lost.
Should he take Ghost into his confidence? For the time being, he decided against it.
“A curious matter has come up,” he told the surprised Kimbark. “I’ll be frank with you, Mr. Kimbark. We’ve had our eye on you, sir, for some time. There’s been gossip, you know—nasty stuff! I hate to mention it—which made us think we knew your motive. Well, motives are tricky things. Just a little change in the point of view, and the same motive will do for another man. Ain’t it the truth? Frankly, what I want is some information about this Anthony Van Peters.”
He crossed his plump legs comfortably, gazed guilelessly about the Kimbark living room, and brought his glance back to Howland Kimbark.
“About Van Peter!” Kimbark was astonished.
“He’s no great friend of yours, I know; but people in your set hear all about each other. The less friendly they are the more they hear, sometimes.”
“I suppose this is all right,” observed the bewildered Kimbark. “Probably I just don’t understand. Exactly what is it that you want to know?”
“I’ll tell you. Between ourselves, information has come to us which leads us to believe this Mr. Van Peters knows more about the murder of Stephen Garment than he has told. He is distinctly in a hole, to put it bluntly. In a nutshell, if there was a first-class motive hanging around, we’d just about be ready to take him in.”
“Van Peter!” Kimbark could not believe his ears. Surely it was not this that Ghost had been hinting at, when he had said he knew the murderer. Was it possible that he and the amateur could have been talking at such amazing crosspurposes? “You’re telling me,” he questioned harshly, “that you believe Van Peter may have killed Garment?”
“And I’m asking you, as a police officer in search of information, if you can give us any reason why he might have done it.”
“Great God!” commented Kimbark, almost piously. “You are as crazy as a loon!”
Cicotte’s red neck became redder. “That may be,” he retorted stiffly, “but I think I know my business. I’ve had some experience in it, after all. All I’ve done is ask you a civil question.”
For the first time Kimbark smiled. “So you have,” he murmured. “Permit me, then, to answer it.” His voice rose stridently. “If I had the information you are requesting, I’d see you damned before I’d give it to you. Is that clear enough?” Then his voice swiftly sank to the sardonic murmur with which it had begun. “Happily, I have nothing of the sort, so it is unnecessary for me to be rude.”
The burly detective had bounded to his feet. His smouldering coffee-coloured eyes gleamed evilly.
“Very well,” he snapped. “That’s your answer. And here’s mine. You’re not out of the woods yourself yet, Mr. Howland Kimbark! Just a little more and I’d be ready to snap the bracelets on you. You’re a smart bunch, all right, you society people, but you don’t know everything. It might pay you to keep a civil tongue in your head. And remember this: One word out of you to anybody else about what I’ve said here to-day, and you’ll wish you’d stayed in Cuba. Is that clear?”
“Oh, you make yourself very clear indeed.”
“Not a word—do you hear?”
“I imagine they can hear you over in the next block. Do you mind going now?”
“I’m going,” said Detective-Sergeant Cicotte, as if the words were a threat. He strode angrily to the door and, with some difficulty, let himself out.
Kimbark watched him from the window. After a moment he turned away and sought the telephone. In a few minutes he was repeating all that had occurred to Walter Ghost. When he had finished, “What should I have done?” he asked.
Ghost’s voice was troubled. “It sounds like a mess,” he answered. “Of course there was nothing for you to do but what you did, short of telling all you know. What under the canopy,” he asked irritably, “can he have turned up about Van Peter?”
“I can’t imagine. Unless it’s something Anger has revealed. After all—I hate to speak of it, but the fact is, the rumours about Mrs. Kimbark were almost certainly circulated by Lillian Van Peter. She also knew Garment. And how much Anger actually knows about Garment’s affairs is still a mystery. He’s always been so cautious.”
“Anger is still in the East, isn’t he?” asked Ghost. “No, it isn’t Anger. It’s got to be Spessifer. Cicotte was playing with the same notion the night of the crime. I’ll talk with him and find out what he knows. If Van Peter is arrested it will bring matters to a head with a vengeance. There’ll be nothing left except for the real murderer to come forward.”
“I suppose not,” agreed Kimbark, distressed. “Unless Van Peter should be acquitted!” he added hopefully.
“Perhaps,” said Ghost dryly. “But if Spessifer has been brow-beaten into a falsehood, it will be a clear-cut case and no appeal. I’m glad you called me up. I’ll look up Cicotte right away.”
Why the devil couldn’t Cicotte wait?
Ghost was seriously annoyed with the plump detective. Granted that Spessifer, either in good faith or to save his neck, had remembered or invented something that seemed to place the guilt on Van Peter, it was an absurd business to try to rush a new solution. It was even more absurd, the amateur reflected whimsically, but with a rueful smile, for Cicotte to act so promptly on his own initiative, without consulting Walter Ghost. He had fatuously supposed the official detective to be quite satisfied with his Kimbark suspicions and blind to every other consideration.
He telephoned the Detective Bureau, learned that Cicotte was expected shortly to be in, and taxied to headquarters to await his coming. The conversation between them was brief and pointed.
Cicotte, to do him justice, was already ashamed of his blow-up before Kimbark. He had intended to be subtle in his inquiries, but had counted too much on the horseman’s known antipathy to Van Peter. The whole episode, with its unfortunate conclusion, now troubled his professional conscience. Even more, it troubled his vanity. He was rather glad to see Ghost, and lost no time in revealing everything that had passed between himself and Kimbark.
Ghost, listening to the story for the second time, did not think it necessary to reveal that it was repetition.
“M-m-m-m,” he commented reflectively, when the secret had been revealed. “So that’s the driver’s story, now! Well, I’m sorry you exploded it to Kimbark.”
Detective-Sergeant Cicotte was sorry himself, he allowed it to be known. He wished, indeed, that he had taken Ghost with him to conduct the conversation. However, he had not told Kimbark everything. He had only revealed that suspicion had been turned upon Van Peter.
“Look here, Cicotte,” said Ghost briskly. “There may be something in all this, and there may not. Frankly, I think there isn't. Van Peter’s action at the cab window—which I don’t doubt for a minute—was natural enough, after all; and it isn’t easy to stab a man through a stiff shirt bosom with your left hand. I’ve never tried it, but I feel that way about it. If Van Peter turns out to be left-handed, I confess your case becomes stronger. You say you wish you had left the investigation to me. Very well, I’ll undertake it now. Are you agreed?”
Detective-Sergeant Cicotte was not only agreed but delighted. “Couldn’t we take it on together?” he wanted to know.
“We could,” said Ghost, “but there’s another job for you. I think you’ll like it better. Would you care to lay your hands on the man who killed the girl at Amersham?”
“Well—yes,” admitted Cicotte, with only an instant’s hesitation.
“You’ve got him,” said Ghost. “His name is Harry Blonde. You know him as ‘Sherlock Holmes.’ Let me tell you why I think so.”
He gave the astonished detective a swift account of the former yacht steward, of the stolen photograph, and of all that he had deduced therefrom.
“Am I right?”
Cico
tte was enthusiastic. “I’ll say you’re right! Yea bo! That bird’s as good as cooked right now.” His admiration was genuine and sincere.
“Your job, I take it,” continued Ghost, “is to communicate with New York and get the ‘missing persons’ bureau busy about Madeline Darrow. The body must be proved to be hers. She may have been known as Mrs. Harry Blonde. Somewhere there must be a record of her. You’ll know how to go about it.”
“Leave it to me,” said Cicotte, with a grin. He saw some kudos for himself in this affair, whatever the Garment mystery might develop. Ghost was inflexibly opposed to personal publicity.
“That’s all, then,” said Ghost, “and I’ll get busy on the other matter.”
Greatly relieved, he left the Detective Bureau and made his way along a filthy street to the nearest cab stand. When he had seated himself upon the cushions, he looked at some notes he had made upon an envelope, and gave the driver a number on the boulevard. Matters were coming to a head, and there were still a number of inquiries to be made. First and foremost, there was Miss Susan Bland, playwright for children, and reputed to be the mistress of a financier. Miss Susan Bland, who had drunk deeply of Kimbark’s whisky, in the Kimbark library, on the night of Garment’s murder.
Mollock had found her empty flask upon the lawn the morning after. It was a little point, an almost trivial point, and yet a point not without a certain conceivable significance.
He rang the doorbell on her private panel, when the apartment lift had carried him to her floor, then noted how the voices stopped speaking in the room beyond. There had been a man’s voice speaking, and a woman’s.
“My name is Ghost,” said Walter Ghost politely, “representing, at the moment, the Chicago police department. You are Miss Bland, I think? I’m sorry, but it’s still this vexatious Garment matter. Do you mind if I ask you some probably silly questions?”
Her eyes stared back at him boldly, a hostile question in them.
Quite suddenly the man beyond came forward and stood beside her in the doorway. He was a man of medium height, but of considerable weight; a man slightly tanned by recent tropic suns.
“Ghost!” he echoed, with a smile of disbelief; and then he put a question mark behind the name: “Ghost? Are you, by any chance, a friend of Dunstan Mollock’s?”
“I am that very Ghost,” the amateur replied.
Miss Bland laughed suddenly a throaty, trilling laugh. “‘Save me, and hover o’er me with your wings, you heavenly guards!’” she quoted swiftly. “‘What would your gracious figure?’ Do excuse me, Mr. Ghost, but the lines immediately follow the instruction ‘Enter Ghost.’ Will you come in?”
“Thank you,” said Ghost. “Something whispers that this gentleman is Allan Dromgoole.” He stepped inside. “Shall I reply, Miss Bland, in the Ghost’s very words? ‘This visitation is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose!’ The temptation to do so is, naturally, very strong.”
“’Pon honour,” observed the children’s playwright, with a gleam of her white teeth, “you are apter at retort than Allan here. We have heard so much of you, indirectly, from your friend Mollock that you have become a sort of fabulous monster.”
“I am a myth,” admitted Ghost. “Mollock invented me for purposes of his own. Indirectly, you say?”
“Through his friend Anger,” Dromgoole explained. “We talked a bit about you on the yacht. For that matter, I believe Mollock threatened us with you, at the dock, when we returned. At least he said that you were on the job.”
“And therefore the case was all but at an end,” added Ghost, smiling. “Mollock’s reports of me are greatly exaggerated, I am afraid. Here I am, indeed, soliciting information and assistance.”
The apartment was small and picturesquely untidy; the diggings of a literary woman.
“Do sit down, Mr. Ghost,” invited its inhabitant. “It’s really a pleasure to receive you. I’m frantic with curiosity about my ‘blunted purpose.’”
“Ah,” said Ghost, smiling again and sitting, “I may, of course, be wrong about that. It was really just a shot in the dark. But the notion has occurred to me that you and Mr. Dromgoole have opinions of your own about this mysterious case, and that from time to time you have tried your brains at the game of solution. On board the yacht, shall we say? With Steward Johnson’s code messages as counters?”
Dromgoole, after a startled glance at Miss Bland, burst into a roar of laughter. “Mv hands are up, Ghost,” he said. “I don’t know how you found it out, but it’s the truth. Did Johnson tell you?”
“I haven’t seen Johnson, who is still in New York, as far as I have information,” replied Ghost. “No, he naturally reported everything to Cicotte, his superior, and—also naturally—I came to know what Cicotte knew. I was better able, perhaps, to visualize the situation. He thought you were collecting the messages for Kimbark.”
“And you that I was collecting them for Miss Bland?”
“Merely that you were both interested in what was going forward. I imagined you as bending your heads together, when no one was about, trying to find the key to Cicotte’s cipher.”
“And discovering nothing,” retorted Dromgoole, laughing shortly.
Behind her dainty spectacles, Miss Bland’s malicious eyes were puzzled. “Still I don’t understand,” she cried. “Why should you have assumed that Allan—Mr. Dromgoole—was bringing them to me?”
Ghost spread his hands in good-humoured disclaimer of any cleverness. “As I say, it was a shot in the dark. Mr. Dromgoole was obviously interested, and deeply so, or he would not have agreed to purchase Johnson’s integrity. After Johnson had landed on the wireless operator. Shall I speak frankly of yourself, Miss Bland?”
“Please do!” she urged, faintly sardonic.
“You were the last person in the Kimbark library that night, I had been told. Mollock, I must confess, was my informant. You had all been drinking Kimbark’s whisky, and criticizing Stephen Garment, after the proper fashion of such groups. When the others left, at word of Garment’s coming, you remained behind.”
“To finish up the bottle,” cried Miss Bland eagerly. “Oh, I do hope Mr. Mollock told you that!”
Ghost laughed. “Well, yes, he told me that. I was just coming to it. The next morning, that same Mollock, investigating on the lawn, found the empty flask where you had—er—chucked it from the window. No reason at all, you understand, why you should not have chucked it! I argued, however, that in order to chuck it properly it was necessary for you to leave your comfortable chair, move to the open window, and for a moment at least look out upon the lawn.”
Miss Susan Bland was suddenly very silent.
“Mr. Ghost,” she observed, after a moment, and there was reluctant admiration in her voice, “you are altogether too damned clever! You are, in fact, beginning to be terrifying.”
“You saw something on the lawn,” suggested Ghost relentlessly. “Not necessarily, I admit; but it is my idea that you did. Something that made you wonder. Something that, later, when it was known what had happened to Stephen Garment, made you wonder even more. Something that you confided, afterward—perhaps upon the voyage?— to Mr. Dromgoole. Something that alarmed you both and made it seem a wise precaution to know what messages were passing between Cicotte and his assistant. How did you discover, by the way, that Johnson was a detective?”
“I heard Cicotte urging Curly to let him put a detective on the yacht,” admitted Dromgoole. “It happened at the train, when we were leaving for the East to make the cruise. Naturally I looked around me for the detective after the cruise had started; and he wasn’t hard to find.”
“I see. And about the thing you saw upon the lawn, Miss Bland! I am right, am I not?”
“What are your plans?” she asked abruptly. “What do you intend to do?”
The question gave Ghost pause. But he answered frankly, after a moment’s thought: “I don’t quite know. You may be sure of one thing: no innocent person is going to be made to suffer through me.
I’m not an official detective. I shall tell Cicotte exactly what I choose to tell him. If for any reason I decide to tell him nothing, I shall simply drop out of the case and let him blunder ahead in his own way. The trouble is, he’s dropped Kimbark, now, and is after Van Peter.”
“His first idea,” said Dromgoole. “My God! Van Peter! Back to his first love. Well, he won’t get far in that direction.”
“Perhaps not,” agreed Ghost; “but he is likely to be embarrassing unless he is stopped.”
Miss Bland drew a long, determined breath. “I think,” she said, “we had better tell Mr. Ghost everything we know. This business is getting a bit too complicated, Allan, for you and me to handle.”
Suddenly she shot a challenge at him.
“But I suppose you already know what I saw!”
Ghost had anticipated that. “I think, if you don’t mind,” he replied, smiling, “I had rather that you told me.”
Her eyes fell before his.
“You’re right, of course,” she said, a little sullenly. “Whom else would we be protecting? Little Betty, of course.”
In all his life Ghost had never been so taken aback by a simple human speech. It was with the utmost difficulty that he controlled his features and his nerves.
After a gruesome silence, in which he fought to steel his voice, he spoke.
“Of course,” he observed easily. “And precisely what was she doing when you saw her, Miss Bland?”
“When I saw her,” said Susan Bland, “she was just climbing back over the side balcony, from the lawn.”
“When I saw her,” said Dromgoole, “she was just jumping over, and starting hot-foot for the front of the house—a few minutes before.”
Chapter Sixteen
Roaring eastward in a fast train, toward New York, it occurred to Ghost that matters were shaping themselves with unnecessary haste.
He hated rush. In spite of the almost chaotic variety of his interests, his was a tidy mind and an ordered existence. He was willing enough, when occasion demanded, to seize a toothbrush and a comb and go speeding to the world’s end on a mission that excited him; but his preference was for less hurried enterprises.
The End of Mr. Garment Page 17
