The Fourth King

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  She shook her head, but her eyes grew big and she rested them uneasily on his face. Unconsciously she stopped rocking.

  “Well — neither did I,” he said abruptly. He leaned forward. He told her of Eaves’s interview with him, of the facts brought out, of his own counter-accusation to Eaves that the promoter himself had stolen the stock certificates for some hidden reason, and Eaves’s rather conclusive proof that the inability to seize the promotion rights of the valuable Judson Tolliver two-colour fountain pen through the loss of the option was sufficient evidence that he would not burglarize his own safe. Concluding, he said: “And so, dear, when I was face to face with the knowledge that either you or I had abstracted Eaves’s bonds, I could not bear to have you taken to the police station and put through any brutal cross-questioning. They would have found out within two hours that Mrs. Sarah Hepburn was your mother. Eaves would have recognized the name at once as that of the woman who had been bilked by him on American Airplane Stabilizer stock. Your working in that office over a period of all those months without ever having mentioned this salient fact would have been damning in the eyes of Eaves, and equally so in the eyes of the police. They might have succeeded in sending you to prison. I do not condemn you an iota for yielding to impulse and taking his stocks, his bonds, or his whole office or everything in it. I question the wisdom of it, however. At any rate, dear,” his hand closed on hers, “when I was confronted with the chance of stopping any further dangerous investigation of you and yours by signing the confession myself, just to protect him, as he claims, until he gives me the opportunity of earning back the paper, I signed up in a big hurry. Now we — at least you, honey girl — are safe.”

  She gazed at him for a long, long minute, and in her eyes were tenderness and solicitude, pride and love combined. At last she spoke.

  “Jason, you have done a truly noble thing in signing a confession just to save me. I can’t fully grasp the thing yet — since you and I only had the combinations of both the inner and outer vault doors, and Eaves himself would not sacrifice that option which he prized so highly just to throw suspicion on one or the other of us. But I have a suspicion of my own that I want to set forth.” She paused. “I dare say that the temptation and the justification to steal back from him part of what he has stolen from my mother would be great — but it was not I who carried off his bonds. Jason, Jason, why, oh, why did you sign that confession? Do you realize that you have put yourself absolutely in the power of J. Hamilton Eaves?”

  CHAPTER IV

  “NO NOTORIETY”

  FOLWELL gazed at the girl as she spoke. Then he answered her quickly, wonderingly.

  “Thank God,” he exclaimed, “that it was not you. You cannot dream how bad I felt about it.” He paused. “But about this suspicion you have of the truth of the matter. What is it? Do you know something?”

  She stepped over to the couch and got a paper which, by the headlines, Folwell could see was the paper of that morning. She turned to an inside page, talking as she searched for something.

  “Day before yesterday, Jason, during lunch hour, while Mr. Eaves was out, and in fact nobody was in the office but myself, a rather jaunty-looking telephone repairman came to try and locate the trouble on Mr. Eaves’s special ‘phone in the inner office. That instrument — Central 9660 — is in perfect working order except that it will not ring. It will carry outgoing calls but not ingoing ones, whereas the one in our outer office — the Central 9661 — is quite satisfactory. All right. So much for that. The telephone repairman had been inside the private office for perhaps fifteen minutes when I told him that I was going downstairs to the cafeteria for my lunch. As there was nothing in either office that any one would care to steal, I didn’t have any compunction about leaving him alone. Well — the downstairs cafeteria was so crowded that I gave up my idea for the time, and, coming back upstairs within ten minutes of the time I had left, I walked quietly in the office and over to the door of the private room belonging to Mr. Eaves. The repairman had his kit of tools all bundled up, and he was leaning over the vault slowly turning the knob of the outer door. When he saw me he straightened up guiltily, looked a bit disconcerted, but seemed to throw off his confusion quickly. All the explanation he made was: ‘That’s quite a beautiful vault you people have installed there. Used to work for the company that later put this out. The Patterson two-door chilled-steel safety vault, Model H, they call it.’ He picked up his tools, said something about hoping to locate the trouble after lunch that day, and left the office.

  “But he didn’t return that afternoon — which is characteristic of telephone repairmen in general, however. I promptly forgot the whole incident till what you just now told me combined itself strangely with an item I read in the morning paper to-day.” She handed him the paper unfolded to an inside page where far down near the bottom was a tiny news article, hardly more than an inch or two in length, and with a single brief caption.

  Folwell took it and read it through in the space of a fraction of a minute. It told simply that Al Penroy, a former safe expert and burglar, recently escaped from the Joliet penitentiary, had been located by the police working under another name for the Chicago Telephone Company as a repairman and trouble locater. It told, furthermore, that he had been seized the night before, but had broken away from the two detectives sent to take him, and, hopping on a fast-moving street car in the middle of the block, had made a second successful getaway from the law.

  Folwell looked up with a far-away stare in his eyes. “Well,” he commented with a puzzled shrug of his shoulders, “it — it looks mighty much as though one Al Penroy may be the cause of our sudden complication. True, the repairman might have just been a cheeky workman who was curious enough to twirl the combination dial, and on the other hand — ” He stopped. He shook his head. “Well — all I can say is that this item and your story throw a possible faint light on matters.”

  For a while the two sat and talked over the affair, and at the conclusion Folwell looked at his watch and arose. “I’m going back to Eaves’s office now, to try and ascertain what is to come out of this thing. As for your coming down there to tell Eaves of what you saw regarding the telephone repairman, don’t delay your trip. Your passage is bought and paid for, and more important yet, this is the last boat of the season. And there’s no reason at all why you should change your whole plans on account of me.” He opened his arms and she crept into them. “Good-bye, honey-girl. I can’t help but feel that there must somehow be a solution regarding your mother’s lost money — that at the same time will be our solution, too. As for this bond loss of Eaves’s, I’ll simply wait and see what this afternoon brings forth.” He kissed her and she clung to him.

  Once outside on a Clark Street car going back to the office a peculiar plan began to formulate itself in his mind. That the Folwell-Schierling Rotogravure Disk must some day be worth an appreciable amount of money he had no doubt whatsoever. This being so, what was to prevent his paying a broker the sum of nineteen thousand five hundred of his own earnings and having the latter go to Mrs. Sarah Hepburn and buy back from her the worthless American Airplane Stabilizer stock on the pretext that a pool was being formed and that the stock was needed? But his optimism contracted suddenly and his face grew long as he thought of the duration of time in which, in the usual course of such things, the profits from his half of the Folwell-Schierling disk would amount to any such sum as this. A year — two years — perhaps three years, or even five years!

  He arrived back at Eaves’s offices at two o’clock. A light fall rain was dropping, a chill that presaged the coming of winter was in the damp air, and the skies were dark and overcast with clouds. The electric lights in the offices were on full blast, and Eaves was sitting in his private room leaning back in his swivel chair, gazing out at dark, grey LaSalle Street, as Folwell hung his hat on one of the coat hooks and made his way into his employer’s sanctum.

  “I’m back, Mr. Eaves,” he announced briefly. “And with somethi
ng to tell you.”

  Eaves got up, closed the door and came back to his swivel chair.

  “What is it?” he inquired brusquely, his thumbs in his vest pockets.

  Whereupon Folwell told him of Avery Reardon’s story concerning the telephone repairman, and also of the tiny item in that morning’s paper. Eaves, however, was manifestly impatient, and incredulous in addition.

  “Rot!” he snorted. “That little vault with its double doors is absolutely proof against the entrance of anybody who doesn’t know the two combinations. Never was a thief yet who could get in a safe by the methods of O. Henry fiction. We three agreed on a combination for each of the two doors, and we three learned it together. Come, Jason, after admitting that you abstracted the stuff why try to crawfish out of it?”

  Folwell’s voice was hard and metallic.

  “All right,” he said curtly. “I admit I signed a confession. But don’t lose sight of the fact that just because a man signs a confession it doesn’t mean for a certainty that he’s guilty. Lots of queer things in this world, you know.”

  “And don’t you lose sight of the fact, Jason,” warned J. Hamilton Eaves angrily, pointing one pudgy forefinger at the red, black, and gold ornamental vault door back of them, “that I have your confession locked safe and sound in that steel receptacle now — with both combinations changed and in my possession alone. That’s the way I should have protected my bonds in the first place.”

  There was a long sullen pause between the two men, in which neither made any attempt to speak. From outside in the glass-walled room off the main office came the faint sounds of Eaves’s two stock salesmen, Beebe and Meier, calling up the thousands of names on the Chicago “sucker lists.” Finally Folwell broke the silence.

  “Well, you’ve got my confession all right. I’ve also got your promise — and from what I’ve seen of you in these months you keep your word — that you had a proposition by which that confession was to go back into my hands and the whole affair was to be called quits by a receipt in full. Of course when the thing is quits, my resignation takes effect also, as I’ve decided to cast out for a new business anchorage.”

  “We’ll decide that when the time comes,” pronounced Eaves confidently. “Even though you have done me a dirty trick, Jason, you’re an A. No. I good man in mechanics and engineering. As for my proposition, I stand ready with it, exactly as I said I would. You help me out by a piece of good nerve and youth now, and the thing, I tell you, is quits. I’m no welsher.”

  He paused for a moment.

  “Well, let’s hop to the facts.” He turned his chair so that it faced Folwell more directly. “Jason, somewhere around the first week in August — to give you these facts chronologically — Perry L. Paddon, promoter of Florida grape-fruit farms, received through the mails a deck of playing cards, about one of the four kings in which had been painted in ink a band of black, together with some presumably rubber-stamped words to the effect that he, too, would be draped in black unless he closed up his business within a week.” Eaves paused. “Now Perry Paddon was one of thirteen men named in a certain alleged exposé in Riswold’s Magazine — now defunct — which you may never have seen. Each of these thirteen men was branded a ‘crooked king of Chicago finance.’ All right for that. I might so much as say to you that Perry L. Paddon went over the open Quincy Street draw in his automobile one rainy night — the tenth of August, to be exact — at around six o’clock, and was found a couple of hours later floating with his eyes wide open, staring. Ever hear of the significance of staring eyes on a dead man, Jason? Well, it means death that’s dropped swiftly on him. Now, whether Paddon was killed somewhere and placed in that automobile next to his murderer, who stepped out on the bridge approach, leaving the car full on, we’ll never know. Nor will we know whether heart disease got him. One thing is certain: Paddon was one of the best auto drivers in the country and could handle any car in any kind of a situation. An open draw wouldn’t have confused him.

  “So much for that,” continued Eaves after a brief pause. “Let’s pass on to Maurice L. Rothblume. Rothblume was a Jewish promoter and broker along certain lines here on LaSalle Street. He had been named in the Riswold Magazine article. Rothblume, some time in August, received in the mails a deck of cards with one king missing, and a threat, advising him to close out his business within a week. Now, the absence of the king from the deck was evidently to impress upon his mind that one of the thirteen men named as ‘kings’ had passed out rather mysteriously and expeditiously. Anyway, Rothblume never closed out his business, and to-day he’s lying in a grave somewhere near Chicago, for he was found dying in Tower Square, over on the North Side, one rainy night in late August — the twenty-first, in fact — where he had gone on foot to look at a piece of property he owned on Tower Court. He left a widow and a daughter. What was the cause of his death? The ambulance surgeon said apoplexy.

  “Now, Johnstone Lee, a promoter,” continued Eaves, “received the third summons. A deck of cards with two kings missing came to him in the mails some few weeks prior to a week ago, according to the mail carrier of this building. That would make it, on a guess, around September first. Like the others, he evidently considered it a joke; thought some of the boys were having a little fun with him. In fact, his sister says he was peeved at ‘em because they sent him a deck he couldn’t use. Of course he didn’t close up his business in response to a joke letter — and, lo and behold! — Johnstone Lee died a short time ago — on the night of September nine, a rainy night — perhaps a week or more after his time expired, at the apartment where he lived with his sister, from a mysterious set of symptoms which the doctor dubiously called ‘ptomaine poisoning.’ He had collapsed in the vestibule of the apartment building, and never talked again after he was found.”

  “And Johnstone Lee,” put in Folwell, “was also one of the thirteen ‘crooked kings’ mentioned in the Riswold Magazine article?”

  “Precisely,” said Eaves.

  He paused for a long moment, drumming nervously on his desk.

  “Jason, exactly one week ago to-day I received a deck of cards, with a rubber-stamped warning giving me one week — and one week only — to close down my business. It was signed in stamped letters, ‘Star of the Night,’ and, together with the deck of cards, it’s locked up safe and snug in my safe there.” He paused. “Three of the kings in that deck were missing. If the mail carrier hadn’t dropped a sort of clue in my mind I might not have investigated as I did, but I did so with the result that I found that each of the ‘kings’ that received the summons has died quickly, surely and mysteriously. That’s the whole ugly story. That’s the point that my proposition hinges about. My week expires to-night. I have not closed up my business nor has it been expedient for me to do so. I am on the verge of making good money on a number of whirlwind propositions that I have slowly worked up — so much money is in sight, in fact, that the fifty-one hundred dollars I have lost isn’t of much account in comparison. Now, have you any questions to ask?”

  “Yes. This one. You were named in the Riswold Magazine exposé together with the others?”

  “I was not!” declared Eaves vehemently. “This is the odd feature of it. If an individual or society who calls himself or itself ‘Star of the Night’ started out either to frighten or to war against the thirteen ‘kings’ they have suddenly laid off the original thirteen and have hopped over to me for some unaccountable reason. In other words, I have been chosen to be King No. 4.”

  Folwell nodded slowly. “Did you ever figure in any newspaper or magazine publicity of any sort?”

  Eaves shook his head emphatically. “Not a line has ever been printed about me. Newspapers and I have fought shy of each other — at least I have steered clear of them. They can ruin a business like this, which rests on the confidence of its clients.”

  “Do you look upon the thing as all as a mere coincidence?”

  “Not by a great deal,” declared Eaves. “The circumstances surrounding the rece
ipt of each warning, and the death following it within a week or ten days, are not to be explained coincidentally for a minute. Somebody — some one is out to get each and every one of the thirteen kings.”

  “Plus one extra,” commented Folwell dryly.

  Eaves bit his lip uneasily. “Yes — one extra.”

  Folwell screwed up his forehead a moment. Then he asked one more question. “I have paid careful attention to your story. I note that each man met his death on a rainy night. How do you account for that?”

  “That,” said Eaves, “is the one tiny coincidence in the case. It’s quite obvious that an assassin — crude or clever — doesn’t need weather conditions to help him strike.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” said the younger man. “I’m willing to agree with you in refusing to regard the deaths as coincidences, but when I accept it as due to a human agency, then I’m not wholly willing to put down the fact of the rainy night in each case as being a thing of chance.”

  A long pause followed. Then Eaves asked:

  “Well, what do you think about it — now that you’ve asked your questions?”

  “Have you notified the police?”

  Eaves shook his head.

  “I think, then,” pronounced Folwell quietly, “that you are bereft of your senses not to have done so. That’s my opinion in a nutshell. If things are as you describe, there is a dangerous paranoiac or crank or band of men or something that is working out some devilish plan. Do you want to fight the forces of darkness all alone?”

  “As for notifying the police,” sneered Eaves, “I have as much desire for notoriety as a hen for water. The cursed Riswold Magazine story was bad enough for the promotion game, even though it didn’t touch yours truly — and it’s getting dead now — ancient history. Can you see how the whole mysterious case’ would be slopped all over the front pages of all the papers if I took these details over to the police? Why — say! — they’d probably even reproduce the Riswold article itself in toto, enlarge on the facts brought out in it, and play up in three-inch type that J. Hamilton Eaves, not of the thirteen kings at all, is nevertheless the next king scheduled for death. Not on your life! It isn’t even certain that putting the police on the thing would circumvent the sender or senders of the warnings if the latter intend at least to attempt to get me. But one thing is sure: If any of this sort of publicity tacks itself on me, my business irons are lying in a cold fire — a fire of ashes for J. H. Eaves, Esquire.”