The Fourth King

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  Lionel’s face flushed. “Art,” he said bitterly, “pays nobody anything. Only the fellow who’s pushed to the front — who marries the daughter of an editor and gets on the covers of the big magazines is made. You may have the genius of the king of artists, and suffer for ever in obscurity.” He rose. “Let’s repair to the library. I’ll show you some of my drawings.”

  He led the way back to the library, and pulling out a big leather-bound portfolio, exhibited to Folwell a number of huge drawings, some in pencil, some in crayon, and among them two or three water colours. Jason Folwell’s mother had been an artist; from her he had inherited a sense of art, without the ability to execute it. One look, and he knew that Lionel Pettibone was not only little and mean, according to both the laws of physiognomy and the latter’s own conversation at the supper-table, but a confirmed egotist as well about his own talents. Execution was poor, faulty; form was exaggerated, as Folwell’s own mechanical drawing-board experience told him; colour was atrocious. Lionel Pettibone was a flivver — and could not see it. But Folwell was too tactful to make any such comments as this.

  “Well,” he said at length, “those are very interesting,” as in truth they were! “I suppose, of course, that influence does count something in art.”

  “You bet your sweet life it does,” returned that young man quickly. “It counts everything.” He sat for a long two minutes slumped in his chair, evidently steeped in reflections of his own unhappy fate. At last his face grew cheerful, and he gave Folwell a broad wink. “Let’s forget it,” he said. “I’ve got a pleasant little surprise.” And without any more ado he pulled from his hip pocket a flask containing some amber fluid. “Have a snifter,” he said grandiloquently, proffering it to Folwell. “It’s the genuine old devil, cornered in a bottle!”

  “No, thanks,” said Folwell, waving it away. “I manage to get along without the stuff.” He watched curiously as Lionel raised the flask to his lips and took a good long swig, the liquid gurgling down his throat. “What do you have to pay for good liquor these days, anyway? I’ve heard that since your Jones Law, tacking a five-year penalty on bootlegging was passed, the price was ‘way up.”

  A wink greeted him from the tiny eye of his host. “Say — believe me or not — I get all of this stuff I want, and at a dollar a pint. Can you beat it? The old man’s got a good bit stored away downstairs — but he’s too stingy to let me have a lick of it. Joke of it is that he goes down and examines his own stock every week to see whether I’m into it — which I’m not.” He took another stiff drink from the flask before stowing it away in his hip pocket. He leaned back in his chair and lighted another cigarette. “Say,” he said, “we were talking at the supper table about something, and I note that you haven’t answered my question. Does the old man actually pull down any shekels out of that shebang of his down there?”

  “Well,” replied Folwell, shifting uneasily in his chair, “I think he makes good money, but I haven’t any exact method of knowing how much he makes. You know your father handles a great deal of stock-selling, and a great many moves on various promotional propositions. I’m familiar only with the mechanical phase of the company.” He paused. “It seems to me I heard him say you were a twenty-five per cent. stockholder in the corporation.”

  Lionel laughed a hard, mirthless laugh. “Yes. Mother’s money fitted him up in that office down there, and bought him a few propositions to lead off with. I’m a stockholder, all right, by inheritance from my mother, but the twenty-five per cent. is only a joke. Dividends — not a smell! Father hogs everything in salary to himself, slips me ten bones per week, and tells me to run along when I want to know something about the actual earnings of the business. However, my financial affairs won’t be of interest to him nor his to me soon, for when Roslyn and I are married I’ll be in on old Jacob Van Etten’s art business, and placing my own stuff where the public will know it.”

  To himself, Folwell wondered how long, if Lionel Pettibone ever started to make expensive reproductions of his own paintings, and to execute his own ideas on artistic frames and novelties, the business of old Jacob Van Etten would prosper. He very much had his doubts as to whether Lionel Pettibone was going to revolutionize an old standard art business that reached from coast to coast. But he made no comment aloud.

  Lionel had by this time imbibed his third drink from the flask in his pocket, and was getting a trifle thick-tongued.

  “Shee on th’ wall there, ol’ man, is ze lady. She’s m’ million-dollar girl. How you lik’ her — eh?”

  Folwell turned and surveyed the picture of Lionel’s fiancée, Roslyn Van Etten. She was a blonde, Dutch-girl type, with yellow hair, wide-open, china-blue eyes, and a stolid-looking, emotionless face more or less devoid of intellectual qualities; yet, nevertheless, the face of a matronly, faithful girl who would like to have a husband of whom she could be proud and little flaxen-haired children around her knee. Beautiful she was, beyond doubt, yet to Jason Folwell, with all her comeliness, not nearly to be compared with Avery Reardon, with her more delicate and warm, vital, personality.

  “I like her very well,” was his only comment.

  “Sho’ you don’ know how much money ol’ man makes, eh?” said Lionel, thick-tonguedly, evidently shifting the conversation back again to the man whom his mother had married. “It’s a damn shame, thaz wha’ it is. Twenny-fi’ per cen’ stock — and worth nothin'. However, ol’ lady fell f’r him — handsome pers’asive devil he is — nearly as handsome as me, I’ll tell worl' — and twenny-fi’ per cen’ stock jus’ li’l’ compliment to ol’ lady, I guess. Me, I don’t worry. I’ll be marryin’ m’ million-dollar girl soon.”

  “Heavens!” thought Folwell. “How could a girl like Roslyn Van Etten fall for such a dissolute, egotistic, shallow-minded cad as Lionel Pettibone?” But this, after all, he reflected, was one of the mysteries that were to be found in Nature’s mating process. The unlike qualities must join, that new varieties of personality might be produced. This way had it always been — and this way must it ever be.

  When bedtime came, instead of Lionel escorting his guest to a room, it was his guest who had to call Jinny, the old maid, help his host to his room and assist in putting him to bed, for Lionel, on his flask of whisky, was so far gone that he could not even undress himself. And it was Jinny herself, after the operation, who conducted Folwell to the blue-papered guest-room on the second floor off the hall, and showed him where to sleep.

  Alone in the beautifully furnished room, Folwell drew aside the window shade an inch or two and peered out. The window fronted on a large side lawn. Nothing was close to it; no tree, no roof of any out-building by which a prowler bent on mischief could reach it. The dull patter of rain could be heard on the carpet of grass outside, and far off, near the street, an arc light gleamed brightly, As he turned from the shade to sit on the edge of the bed and unlace his shoes, he reflected as he heard the rain suddenly speed up for a second, that it was on such nights as this that the Star of the Night had thus far seen fit to search out his victims.

  He was tired, dog-tired. Undressing, he placed his revolver beneath his pillow. He closed the transom of the room, locked the door and bolted it as well on the inside with a sliding bolt he found there. The upper sash of the window he lowered perhaps six inches. Then, finishing the operation, he snapped out the light and jumped into bed, quite convinced that he lay in a fort as impregnable as the one J. Hamilton Eaves had chosen for this first night.

  He fell asleep within a few minutes, but awoke during the night several times. Everything was all right, however. At times as he lay staring at the flickering lights made on the ceiling by the arc light on the bordering street, he felt as though the whole affair were a huge fraud of some sort, engendered by circumstance, conscience, and fear on the part of the selected victims. At length he awoke with a start, to find the morning sun streaming into the room, and a clock downstairs told him the hour was six. He rose and dressed, and when breakfast was called found hims
elf seated across the table from a much seedy-looking worldling, clad in silk pyjamas, smoking the inevitable cigarette held in a hand that shook visibly, and yawning openly over the toast and eggs.

  To rebind his face and head in the surgical gauze which he had removed the night before, was an easy feat, and he found the garage open and the car in readiness for him. It was exactly seven-thirty by his watch, that, all dressed up again in J. Hamilton Eaves’s outer habiliments, he drove down the driveway into the bright morning sunlight that splashed upon Clarkson Court, and in toward the city, the great beehive of activity, machines filled with people hurrying to the great treadmill passing him and receding from him on either side. Reaching the Monroe Street garage, he ran the car into the exact place from which he had taken it the night before, and made his way leisurely on foot around to the Temple of Commerce Building.

  He took the elevator this morning, and going down the second floor corridor, fitted his key in the lock of the door. At first he wondered if he would come upon his employer, sleeping peacefully, alarm-clockless, in the curtained office, his cherubic face to the ceiling, unaware that a new day had come. Or would the hard, damp cot have proved too much for a morning siesta, and would he be up, washed, dressing and working away at his desk like a Trojan in the bright morning sunlight.

  But when Folwell opened the door a strange sight greeted his eyes. The shades of the entire office were down, as they had been the night before. The door of the private office was open. The electric lights in that room were on, bright, focussing downward. But the sight upon which they focussed was the body of J. Hamilton Eaves, seated calmly in his swivel-chair, and protruding from the fleshy part of his back the handle of an ugly-looking black claspknife. And the figure never moved by the fraction of an inch!

  Folwell realized the whole thing in a second.

  The Star of the Night had come — intricate plans and elaborate deception notwithstanding — and had struck his fourth successful blow!

  CHAPTER VII

  THE CLUE OF THE MINT

  IT seemed to Jason Folwell that he stood in that doorway for a full twenty minutes, instead of a bare fifteen seconds, trying to assure himself that what he saw was not the product of a disordered imagination. When long afterward he lived over the scene in retrospect he remembered how unnatural the whole thing seemed; the body slumped in the chair; the electric lights; the double shades of thick black felt in each window, each in its duplex steel-lined slots on either side, and each fastened tightly in the patented contrivance at the sill itself; and even the portable desk telephones in the inner and outer offices standing like solemn diminutive monuments, shrouded as they were in their grey silk bags which Eaves had had made to drop over them before the sweepers came each night to raise a haze of dust.

  At last he managed to stride forward, automatically closing the door behind him. With one hand on the revolver in his hip pocket, he advanced cautiously across the intervening office space and into the brightly lighted private room. But there was no need for this wariness, for with the exception of himself and the quiet, calm body, sitting there in the swivel chair, there was no other creature present.

  He stood for several seconds gazing down at the body, which held on its face a look of pain — dazzling pain which must have frozen on it as the knife sunk itself treacherously into the soft flesh of his back and, presumably into his heart. The fingers were clasped in a death grip around the handles of the chair, and the white teeth showed gleamingly as though death had intercepted a deep groan emanating from Eaves lips. A glance over the desk showed Folwell a few papers scattered around, an open fountain pen lying there. There was no sign of the canvas camp cot having even been unfolded. The empty milk bottle, washed at the faucet, stood in the corner of the room. When the blow had been struck Eaves had been working at his desk, unconscious that the fate he was trying to dodge was at his heels. Folwell’s half-consumed bag of peppermints, whose location he had described as he parted with Eaves the night before, now stood near the latter’s bronze inkwell, with but a few left in it, and standing almost in front of the body was the dictatograph on its rolling rubber wheels upon which it had been drawn over from the wall.

  To stand aimlessly here, however, in the shadow of murder was the height of folly, and Folwell at once stepped into the outer office to notify the police. For the space of several seconds he fumbled at the grey silk bag, which was dropped over the ‘phone — the “night-caps,” as old Fisher facetiously termed them — and stripping it off, raised the receiver, and, as rapidly as he could, dialed Chicago’s police exchange — Police 1313. But he sniffed as, letter by letter and digit by digit, he swiftly whirled out the significant combination P-O-L-1-3-1-3 on the automatic dial affixed to the base of the instrument. For the unmistakable odour of peppermint, trapped in the rubber cone-shaped transmitter, came forth to his nostrils. So J. Hamilton Eaves, after all his careful preparations to outwit his fate, had answered the ’phone and had betrayed himself with his own voice. Yet how had the mysterious Star of the Night — specialist in murder who was not only one hundred per cent. efficient in his results, but quite businesslike in his methods — known which ‘phone to ring on? Or had he tried them both?

  At Folwell’s request he was put into communication with central detective headquarters almost in the twinkling of an eye, and a voice with a burr in it — a Scotch burr — responded.

  “Yes,” it said grouchily, “what is it you want? Inspector McIlroy speaking.”

  “This is Jason T. Folwell, an employee of the National Industrial Securities Company in the Temple of Commerce Building. Mr. J. Hamilton Eaves, the president, has been murdered in the night, and his body is sitting in the office here in his swivel chair. Better send over men at once.”

  The voice on the other end of the wire became suddenly alive.

  “Murdered, eh? Eaves. The Temple of Commerce Building.” He turned to another man at his elbow and talked rapidly for the fraction of a minute. “All right. Disturb nothing till we get there.” And he hung up.

  After the connection was disestablished Folwell strolled back again to the dead man, who still sat, grinning as if in severe pain. Slowly unwrapping from his own face the gauze which had proved to be such a useless means of camouflage, he pondered over the sight in front of him. With his face once more clear again, and the roll deposited on the top of Eaves’s desk, he reached out a hand very gingerly and touched the handle of the ugly-looking black weapon plunged into the dead man’s back, and saw by the slight lateral motion that it was a gigantic clasp knife whose blade folded away into the handle when not in use. From this his mind strayed again to the fact of the peppermint odour, trapped in the transmitter of the outer ‘phone. Somehow, it troubled him, puzzled him. Had Eaves really been called? Or had he perhaps been the caller? But if he had done the calling, why had he gone clear to the outer room? Almost mechanically he leaned forward, past the dictatograph, whose position he did not alter in the least, and gently withdrew from the ‘phone on Eaves’s desk the remaining silk “nightcap.” No odour of peppermint was present there. Eaves had used the outer ‘phone only. Hence the party who had called him had known, at least, that the National Industrial Securities Company, whose number was Central 9661, and J. Hamilton Eaves, whose number was Central 9660, were one and the same office and were, in fact, one and the same individual.

  As he carefully replaced upon the ‘phone the slender silk bag, Folwell heard in the outer hallway the sound of shuffling feet, followed by a none too gentle pounding upon the door. Going to the door, he opened it. On the threshold stood a ruddy-faced man of about fifty, whose iron-grey hair dropped low on his temples. He wore a faded police sergeant’s cap and a faded blue coat with regulation buttons on it. At one side of him was a tall, slender man with narrow black eyebrows and wide-open black eyes: at the other a little, stocky, bullet-headed individual whose eyes, crinkled into tiny, divergent creases at the outer corners, were like gimlet points boring through the open doorway.
And each carried the unmistakable earmarks of the plain-clothes man.

  “There he is, all right,” said the man in the blue coat, evidently the official. “Come in, boys.” He turned and surveyed Folwell searchingly as he thrust his way in. “Your name is — ”

  “Folwell. Jason T. Folwell,” said Folwell, quite oblivious for the second to the fact that he was dressed in the outer apparel, well known as it was, of J. Hamilton Eaves, who now sat dead not twenty-five feet away.

  The three men, without any further ado, pushed their way into the tiny private office, Folwell following, where he stood by the wall, silent, grave, waiting to answer any questions. The man in the blue coat, with his index finger, felt at once the handle of the knife, trying it in several directions.

  “A beautiful blow,” he commented drily, the Scotch burr rising to his tongue. “A blow that would have struck down an ox if delivered with the fist.” He glanced around the room, at the tightly drawn shades, the lights burning, and stared curiously at the tiny silk cap over the desk ‘phone. Then he turned to Folwell.

  “Now for you,” he said gruffly. “Give us all the information you’ve got on this thing.”

  Folwell cleared this throat. “I can tell you in a hundred words. Folwell, Jason T. Folwell, is my name. Originally from London, at present working here in Chicago. This man is J. Hamilton Eaves, president and virtually owner of the company whose name is on the door. I was employed by Mr. Eaves as his mechanical expert in his promotional work on industrial devices. His life was threatened by a letter a week ago, ordering him to close up his business within a week, or follow a certain three men in his special field who he believed emphatically were murdered.”

  “What three men?” queried the man in the blue coat abruptly.

  “Perry L. Paddon, Maurice L. Rothblume, and Johnstone Lee, all in business on La Salle Street here,” replied Folwell.