“Mind explaining?”
“Not a bit.” Ogilvie leaned forward in his chair. “There’s been a sudden and tremendous slump in business these last few months, hasn’t there?”
“Yes,” admitted the other rather sadly. “All my own investments—”
“Everything,” interrupted Ogilvie, “has come tumbling down like a house made of cards, and chiefly real estate. There has been no building going on in Manhattan for over three months, isn’t that right?”
“Perfectly. And—”
“Why, then, should Martyn Spencer—who is a business man, a mighty shrewd one and as rich as mud—take, for instance, that hundred thousand dollars he sent to Miss Dillon and the twenty thousand he slipped to me—sell at this moment, when prices are down to bed rock, instead of holding on and waiting for a rise? Furthermore, why does he, the wary, careful, farsighted financier, leave his local affairs in the hands of a recently hired office force and give his power of attorney to a youthful and recently acquired private secretary?”
“Well, why? What’s the answer?” asked Gadsby impatiently.
“Spencer got away in such a hurry that he didn’t care, hadn’t time to care, what happened to his business here. And, by the same token, it’s evident that he does not intend to return to New York. On the other hand, when he came here, he took a long lease on his office space and on his suite at the Hotel Stentorian—which proves that originally he did intend to make a lengthy stay, perhaps to settle here for good. Therefore, he made up his mind to leave in a hurry, regardless of everything except—”
“His safety?” interjected Gadsby.
“Exactly! Clue, eh?”
“Clue is right!” said the police commissioner, and turned to the next report, O’Neale’s, which dealt with the murdered man, Monro Clafflin, and his connection with Doctor McGrath.
O’Neale, too, had worked with efficiency and dispatch. Via the gliding gossip of the back stairs and the pantry and with the help of his honeyed Irish tongue, he had ascertained that Doctor McGrath—the same McGrath, he added incidentally, who had invented the famous McGrath pulmotor—had been Clafflin’s physician for a number of years, that practitioner and patient were intimate personal friends, that the latter had been suffering for a long time from a complication of organic diseases, and that—here O’Neale had attached a verbatim report by Miss Maisie Heinz, nurse—he had not been expected to live the year out. For the last eighteen months Clafflin had been in almost continuous pain. The report wound up:
For the last few weeks Mr. Clafflin appeared a little more cheerful. Once he mentioned to Josiah Higgins, his butler—whose verbatim report I attach—that there was a possibility of his recuperating, as Doctor McGrath had spoken to him about a remarkable young physician whom he wished to consult about the case. Last night Mr. Clafflin left in the doctor’s car, coughing badly and evidently in pain, but cheerful and laughing in spite of it. The butler overheard the last conversation between the two. “Monro, old man,” had said the doctor, “there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll be rid of your sufferings for good and all tonight!” “Rather quick cure?” Clafflin had replied, with a smile. “But possible!” had come the doctor’s final words.
The police commissioner put down the report, and Ogilvie looked up.
“Bob,” he said, “Doctor McGrath’s prophecy came true, didn’t it?”
“How so?”
“Well, Monro Clafflin did get rid of his sufferings for good and all last night, didn’t he? He died!”
“That’s one way of putting it,” said the police commissioner, and added that he had met O’Neale coming up the Avenue on his way home, and that the latter, in the meantime, had made further investigations about Doctor Hillyer McGrath.
“Did he find out anything interesting?” asked Ogilvie.
“No. He called on the doctor—under some professional pretext, sore throat or something like that—and found him at home. He tells me the doctor lives in an extremely modest little apartment and seems to be a poor man.”
“Funny!” commented Ogilvie.
“You mean—because Clafflin, his friend and patient, was rich?”
“No. But I would have imagined that the pulmotor he invented must have brought him in quite a lot of money.”
“Perhaps he didn’t have it patented,” said Gadsby, and turned to the next report.
Detectives Campbell and Wimpflinger had been sent to investigate the hunchback, as well as the five men whom Ogilvie had particularly noticed at No. 17 and with whom he had had the fight.
It was pithy and succinct, and read as follows:
1. Montross D. Clapperton. Studied in Boston, Paris, and Freiburg. Forty-three years of age. Excellent reputation. Quiet, kindly, charitable. Engineer by profession. Inventor of the Clapperton automatic cream separator and the Clapperton self-adjusting tube wrench. Lives alone, in a modest two-room flat, without servants.
2. Cornelius van Alstyne. College man. Twenty-four years of age. Good reputation in his neighborhood, except that his landlady and the small shops where he trades complain that he is very slow to pay. Chemist by profession. Was instrumental in separating and classifying a new metal, called rhizopodin, which may eventually revolutionize and cheapen the entire manufacture of electric globes.
3. Leopold Fischer. Studied at Berlin and Vienna, his native town. Thirty-nine years of age. Engineer by profession. Well liked by his neighbors, though he went into bankruptcy last year. Inventor of the Fischer piston pump, the Fischer water gauge, and said to be at work now on a new gyroscope.
4. Holister Welkin. Fifty-seven years of age. A native of England. Earlier life unknown. Came here twenty-odd years ago. Lives at Gordon Hotel, evidently in very straitened circumstances. Is a recluse, and nothing could be found out about him except that—according to the proprietor of a hardware store in his neighborhood—he was quite famous, twenty years ago, as the inventor of Welkin’s electric windlass.
5. Audley P. Chester. Sixty-four years of age. Belongs to the well-known Chester family of Portland, Maine. Very rich, though he lives in a modest hotel of the west forties. Is said to be a miser. The same Chester who was so viciously attacked a year or two ago by certain newspapers for his refusal to contribute to any of the war charities.
Gadsby folded the report and gave them to his friend.
“Here you have all of it.”
“What about the disk?” queried the other. “Did your assayer examine it?”
“Yes. It’s made of rhizopodin—”
“Oh, yes—that new metal, which our friend Van Alstyne of the green Norfolk and the buckskin spats separated. I might have known it. What about the other members of the club?”
“Oh, just a repetition of this special list. A few doctors and business men, but mostly engineers with a sprinkling of skilled mechanics.”
“All rather poor?” suggested Ogilvie.
“Yes, with the exception of Chester. And all have excellent reputations. We looked up the records as much as we could, and not a single one of them seems to have ever been convicted of a crime or a misdemeanor, not even suspected or accused. And here they go and commit murder and frame you up.”
He stopped, then continued:
“I wonder why they call that organization of theirs the Benefactors Club?”
“I don’t wonder,” replied Ogilvie. “I am beginning to understand.”
“Oh—sort of ghoulish self-irony, you mean?”
“Not a bit of it. They are quite sincere—quite, quite sincere! The Benefactors Club! The very name for it!”
“Why?” asked the police commissioner.
“I’ll tell you presently,” replied the other, and added with cool arrogance, “just as soon as I have cleared up the rest of the case.”
Gadsby gave a crooked smile. “The rest of the case?” he repeated in mockery.
“Exactly!”
“Pretty cocksure, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” said Ogilvie, “Fact is,
after I get out of this pickle—”
“If you get out of this pickle!”
“I repeat—after I get out of this pickle, I shall apply to you for a job with the detective force. My boy, I am finding no fault with your methods, your elaborate system—” He pointed at the voluminous reports.
“Thanks!” the police commissioner said dryly.
“But,” Ogilvie continued unabashed, “it takes a man like myself to use the information they contain, through a thing called applied psychology.”
“And which,” interjected the police commissioner, “might with equal truth be styled applied poetry.”
“By the way,” said the other, “do you happen to know anybody in Washington, in the patent office, some big bug, I mean?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know him well enough to get him on the long-distance telephone this time of night and have him look up certain records?”
“Well, yes. In my capacity as police commissioner I can cut a couple of miles of official red tape. Why do you ask?”
“Because I want you to get your Washington party on the wire as quickly as possible. And I want you to introduce me to him over the wires as your confidential assistant—which, I repeat, I am going to become as soon as I’m out of this mess.”
“More clues, I suppose?” asked Gadsby ironically.
“As right as rain!”
“But—in Washington?” queried Gadsby, seeing that his friend was serious.
“Yes. You see, I am curious to find out why all these people—” he pointed at the detectives’ reports—“are so poor in spite of all their inventions. I want to find out if all of them neglected taking out patents for their brain-children—if they are all plain fools or—”
“Or?”
“Idealists, Bob,” said Ogilvie; “members of the Benefactors Club!”
CHAPTER VI.
OGILVIE STATES HIS CASE.
It was nearly three hours later—night had dropped like a veil, secret, mystical, netted in the delicate silver mist of the drifting snowflakes and with the sleepy voice of the city whispering through the heave and sough of the wind—that Blaine Ogilvie, after three long-distance conversations with Washington, finally slammed back the receiver and announced triumphantly:
“That little matter is settled!”
He entered the next room.
“Good thing,” he said, “that Spencer slipped me that twenty thousand. Those toll charges to Washington are going to cost me a pretty penny.”
Then he noticed that Gadsby was fast asleep in his winged chair in front of the open fire, and shook him awake.
“Bob,” he said, “leave off sawing wood and listen to the words of Baruch, the son of the priest.”
“What is it?” asked the police commissioner, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.
“I have found out what I expected to find—”
“Namely?”
“That Doctor McGrath, Mr. Clapperton et alii are—”
“What?”
“Are not plain fools—unless you call idealists fools!”
“Would you mind being less philosophical and more explicit?” suggested Gadsby.
“That friend of yours at the patent office did a whole lot of tall hustling and doubtless disturbed the slumbers of half a dozen assorted Uncle Sam servants, working all of five hours a day and five days a week for thirty per of the taxpayers’ hard-earned simoleons, but he roused them. He hustled and made them do likewise. He looked up dusty files and ledgers and card indexes and cross-reference books and loose-leaved records—and—”
“For the love of Mike! Come to the point!” exclaimed the police commissioner, exasperated.
“I am at the point! They looked up the records of the patent office. Bob—it’s really tremendous news!”
“What, what?”
“Not one of the members of the Benefactors Club—neither McGrath nor Clapperton nor that green-tweed addict—failed to take out patents for their various inventions and discoveries. And they are all poor!”
“All except Chester.”
“Right,” agreed Ogilvie. “But he didn’t invent anything!”
“Don’t forget Martyn Spencer!”
“Who disappeared,” commented Ogilvie, “but who did belong to their club just the same.”
“I can’t make head or tail of what you are intending to prove. Blaine.”
“Intending to, did you say?” asked the other. “Boy, I have proved—”
“What?”
“That here is an organization of people who all have most excellent reputations—”
“Except, perhaps, Spencer—” suggested the police commissioner.
“Who disappeared. Let me resume. This organization is largely composed of engineers and mechanics, many of whom have invented extraordinary devices, others of whom have doubtless helped with the perfecting and working out of these inventions, still others of whom—here’s where I take a shot at the blue—are working at inventions and discoveries. They are not fools. But they seem to be idealists. For they have protected their brain-children by patents—by the way, Bob, it takes money to get the right, waterproof sort of patent—and they have not made money out of their inventions, since they are all poor.”
“Except two.”
“Exactly—Chester and Spencer! As to the latter, allow me to repeat that he disappeared suddenly, scared to death, sacrificing a mint of money in doing so, while the former—well, Bob, I have an idea on the subject and I am going to find out presently if I am right.”
The police commissioner lit a cigar.
“And still I fail to see,” he objected, “how all these undoubtedly very interesting details will help you sidestep the electric chair?”
“Don’t be so brutally realistic. Also, if you can’t see, I can—chiefly after you have called in some of our best New York physicians and have them make another autopsy of Monro Clafflin’s body.”
“What for? The man was shot. A bullet pierced his brain. There’s no doubt of it.”
Ogilvie smiled.
“Perfectly correct,” he admitted. “The man was shot—and a bullet did pierce his brain.”
“Then—”
“Just the same, please do what I tell you, do you mind?”
“Well, if you insist on being mysterious—”
“I don’t insist,” replied Ogilvie, “But, first of all, there are your professional limitations which would keep you from understanding anything new and a little unorthodox.”
“Thanks awfully!” came the dry rejoinder.
“Don’t mention it. Secondly, I am dog-tired. I am off to bed.” He rose, yawned, stretched himself, “Lend me a book, do you mind?”
The police commissioner crossed over to his bookshelves. “I don’t see,” he said, “how a man in your predicament can read frivolous French poetry. Why—it’s positively uncanny.”
“I’m not going to read any French poetry tonight,” replied Ogilvie. “You have quite a complete library, haven’t you?”
“Fairly representative.”
“I want you to find me a book—oh—a sort of encyclopedia, all about inventions and discoveries.”
“Going to join the Benefactors Club?”
“Possibly. I want a book about the inventions and devices people used to know centuries ago, but which have been forgotten—like the use of the pyramids and the tempering of copper and that sort of thing.”
“More clues?” came the ironic query as Gadsby hunted among the shelves.
“You’ve guessed it first time, old man.”
“Here’s the kind of book you mean, I suppose,” said Gadsby, taking out two volumes—“Forgotten Discoveries and Valuable Inventions Not Yet Made.”
“That’s the dope!” replied Ogilvie, taking both. “By the way, think it’ll be safe to telephone to Miss Dillon?”
“Quite. The police haven’t yet discovered that the escaped murderer’s name is Blaine Ogilvie and that he is engaged to her.
Feel in a sentimental mood and want to phone?”
“No—in a scientific mood.”
And he went upstairs to bed and read for a while. Finally he seemed to have found what he was after. For he made a note, called up Marie Dillon on the telephone which stood on his night table, talked for quite a while, then switched off the electric light and fell into dreamless, untroubled sleep.
* * * *
He came down to breakfast fairly late to find the police commissioner impatiently awaiting him. The latter looked up rather angrily as the other entered with a bright “Good morning!” For, like most men of average honesty and average dyspepsia, he had occasional, spasmodic attack of antagonism even against his best friends—chiefly before breakfast.
“Heavens!” he exclaimed. “I could hear you snore clear down here. Detective Sergeant Miller asked me if I had a walrus visiting me.”
“Oh! Has he been here?”
“Yes—confound his soul!” came the heated rejoinder. “He came an hour ago—before breakfast! Called me out of bed!”
“What did he want? Anything that bears on my case?”
“Yes. He found out quite a little more about Martyn Spencer.”
“Let’s hear it,” said Ogilvie, neatly slicing a muffin in two, buttering it generously, and commencing breakfast with a hearty appetite, which Gadsby seemed to take as a personal affront.
Detective Sergeant Miller was the old-fashioned policeman, the sort whose sources of information are diversified, patchy, and often—if the truth be told—slightly muddy. The tale he had told his chief, and which the latter was now relating to Blaine Ogilvie, was a mosaic gathered here and there, partly by bullying and partly by cajoling, from a number of people, including two taxi-cab drivers, a Sicilian fruit vender, a Russian cobbler in a cellar on Charles Street, the head waiter of a Broadway restaurant, three sardonic and elderly reporters, one youthful and enthusiastic cub reporter, and the intoxicated mate of a disreputable Liverpool tramp ship that had just docked, after a smelly and uneventful voyage out of some West African port. The sum total of this information was that a man, closely resembling Martyn Spencer, had been seen going up the gangplank of another, equally smelly and equally disreputable Liverpool freighter, outward bound, dressed in the rough clothes of a deep-sea sailor, that he had been greeted by the captain of the ship with: “So glad to see you, sir. Please, sir, won’t you—” And that he had interrupted roughly with; “Cut it out, you poor fool! I am Tom Higgins, able-bodied seaman, and that’s all you know—”
The Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 19
