The Fourth King

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  The latter smiled wanly. Perhaps the time was not far distant when Avery Reardon’s testimony in court about the telephone repair-man, should Lionel Pettibone be persuaded to go ahead with this unwarranted prosecution, would cause a little surprise all round to the ever conviction-hungry police. And so he made no retort.

  “There’s nothing for me to say,” he repeated stubbornly. “I’m waiting now for my lawyer to get back to Chicago, and in good time we’ll try out the case in court if needs be. At any rate, not in a detective chief’s private office.”

  McIlroy appeared unruffled by the thrust. He examined some papers on his desk. “So Eaves knew, when he received the cards with the three kings missing, did he, that Paddon, Rothblume and Lee were murdered?”

  Folwell nodded. “Yes; by that fact plus the fact that Paddon, Rothblume, and Lee had been named in the thirteen kings in the Riswold Magazine’s exposé.”

  “But Eaves also knew that he wasn’t of the thirteen kings?”

  “Yes,” agreed Folwell. “That was precisely what puzzled him. If somebody was out to eliminate the men named in the Riswold article, why did they veer over to him?”

  “You say he’s never been named in any newspaper write-up?” queried McIlroy.

  “So he assured me when I asked the same question.”

  “Well, it’s a strange situation,” commented McIlroy perplexedly, partly in the direction of the reporters, “with the chief actors dead and buried, and their movements those nights all lost. Here on my desk is Dr. Thomas James’s death certificate in the case of Johnstone Lee. Ptomaine poisoning are the words he has filled in, and, like all the medicos, he is foxy enough to stand pat now, once having signed a statement to that effect. We find that he is a youngster — just out of college — called merely in an emergency — has a single out at Thirty-third Street and Cottage Grove. Tis no telling what he knows about symptoms, and on the other hand he may be a good man at that work. We know Lee received a threat and a deck of cards. We know he ate down town that night, according to Miss Annabelle Lee who just left here. And on the other hand the threat is destroyed and the cards are gone — at least she don’t know where he put them. Now, if Lee was poisoned by intent even, where did he eat? And even did we have the cards, is there any clue in ‘em?”

  He shuffled over the paper grumpily. “And Paddon. How was Paddon murdered? How are we to draw any conclusions about a man that skids over the Quincy Street draw on a rainy night in August? This is all we know about Paddon.

  “Rothblume? The cards again, all right, but not one left to work upon. The ambulance surgeon who picked him up at the edge of Tower Square called it apoplexy. ‘Tis nary an ambulance surgeon that knows beans, I have always found. You’ve just heard the testimony of Miss Leah Rothblume and Mrs. Rose Rothblume in this office. They know nothing about his movements that night of August 21, beyond the fact that he ‘phoned at six o’clock saying he would be home at ten. He was found lying near the west edge of Tower Square — three hundred feet or less away from some property he owned, and it’s supposed he walked over to that district after he had cleaned up some details at his office, to look it over. Was he followed? Who followed him? And are we to dig up these bodies at this date to analyse their stomachs and examine their skulls?” He shook his stocky head and relapsed, almost unconsciously, it seemed into his Scotch accent. “Gentlemen, I think our only chance to land this killer is on the Eaves case alone. Do we fail there, then do we fail on four murders instead of one.”

  “But the deck of cards and the threat that Eaves himself received,” put in one of the younger reporters, evidently wrapped up in McIlroy’s exposition of the importance of the present case in uncovering the three deaths which had preceded that of Eaves. “How about them?”

  McIlroy turned to Folwell. “You say he claimed to you that he sealed up both the threat and the cards, and locked them in the vault. Now that he’s changed the combination, what’s the chances of getting into the vault? The lad — his stepson — knows nothing about it.”

  Folwell shrugged his shoulders. “According to what he has told me of that vault, nobody could open the two doors without the combination. Dynamite or drilling, I venture, is the only way left now.”

  “I see,” McIlroy thought for a moment. “Now my man, understand your skirts are clean on the matter of Eave’s death — the lad says you were in the house all evening.” But on this theft you can answer the law.” He stared curiously at Folwell. “Don’t suppose you ever dreamed your employer would give you accidentally away, eh?”

  “I certainly never dreamed that what did happen ever would happen,” admitted the younger man guardedly. He wrinkled his brows. “What does Lionel Pettibone, his stepson, say about my arrest?”

  “The lad agreed to prosecute you to the limit, but he happens to have too much on his mind just now to discuss such things fully,” said McIlroy curtly. He turned to the reporters. “Well, boys, let’s crystallize and unify our theories on this affair and be done with it.” He nodded to the blue-uniformed guard who had brought Folwell up. “Take him downstairs.”

  On the way down through the corridors of the building, Folwell passed a newsboy. Groping in his pocket he succeeded in finding three pennies in a small-change pocket, which had been over-looked when he was searched. He lost no time in buying a noonday paper. This he took to his cell.

  The whole story of the murder was there, replete with photographs. It showed Eaves sitting in his swivel chair, and told of the condition of the office. It gave diagrams of every doorway, floor and window in the suite. It told also of Apple Mary Battersbee, the old English woman who kept the fruit and magazine stand in the foyer of the Temple of Commerce Building. Apple Mary had been sitting back of her stand all evening, to make the customary sales to clerks who were forced to work late in their offices. She testified that she had seen J. Hamilton Eaves leave for home at seven o’clock, his face done up in surgical gauze. Folwell remembered how she had stared and nodded to him, as he passed at that hour. Continuing with Apple Mary’s testimony, she had seen dozens of familiar faces passing in and out up until around eight o’clock, when the one elevator running late stopped for the night. Traffic through the doors had died down at about that hour. She remembered one man, whom she could not recall ever having seen before, pass into the foyer somewhere between eight-thirty and nine-thirty, and later pass out again. She didn’t seem to recall the exact time. She was looking at the pictures in a copy of The Illustrated London News. She could not describe the stranger very well. No, he wasn’t tall, nor was he short. He wasn’t blond and he wasn’t brunette. The age — she couldn’t guess. She was certain she would know him in an instant if she saw him again. He was dressed in a raincoat.

  But, to Folwell’s consternation, he found not only the entire letter taken from the Dictatograph, photographed and reproduced in half-tone, but interpreted and translated as well, giving his involvement in Eaves’s affairs; worse still, his own confession, signed and witnessed, reproduced in the same layout, and finally his photograph, which had been taken from his room by some enterprising reporter who had evidently got past his landlady, old Mrs. Peters, with her silver bowed spectacles.

  He crumpled up the paper fiercely and sat staring downward for a long time, his face burning in his hands. In the eyes of 3,000,000 Chicagoans, let alone every suburb around the great Middle West metropolis, he stood branded a self-confessed thief. What a horrible, horrible mess it was. Why in Heaven’s name had he ever allowed himself to be drawn into such things? But the mental picture of Avery Reardon, and her tender, big black eyes, made him suddenly straighten up and thrust forward his lower jaw with a determined jerk. After all, he had done it for her, and he would do it all over again. And it was she, in turn, he felt sure, who was to save him from any too serious results when the case actually came to trial, by her unshakable and highly significant story of the telephone repairman she had caught fumbling at the outer dial of Eaves’s vault.

  Thus he s
at all afternoon, at times pacing up and down, and at times sitting disconsolately on the hard, wood bench. And at last came Walter Treadway, Treadway himself, well groomed, grey sideburns, brown-tailored suit and brown derby, grey gloves and cane.

  “Well, my boy,” was Treadway’s greeting as soon as he was admitted to the cell and had dropped down on the wooden bench, “I read the whole smear in the papers to-day. Somehow I don’t — I can’t — believe it. If you took that money, you must have had justification for it. How about it?”

  “Walter,” said Folwell, “I swear to you that I signed that confession to protect someone very dear to me who I was absolutely certain was guilty. In doing so, I was merely acceding to Eaves’s whim that if he called off the police he would be protected by such a paper. But it was too late. Eaves had me. And when the opportunity was presented to me to get back both the paper and a receipt in full for the stolen bonds, I took big chances — the biggest in the world, as you can see after what happened last night — to undo my mistake.” Then he told Treadway of the article in the paper concerning Al Penroy, escaped burglar turned telephone repairman, and his later second escape, and ended up with Avery Reardon’s remarkable story concerning her finding the telephone repairman fumbling at the vault door after her absence from the office.

  “Well,” said the lawyer, glancing at his watch and rising, “the conjunction of those two pieces of testimony, even though the fumbling was merely that of a curious smart-aleck, could easily mean a split jury if we sprung it in the court-room out of a clear sky. Later, you and I will have to construct some sort of a satisfactory explanation so far as a jury is concerned as to why you signed a confession when you were innocent, even though we use the actual truth of the matter. Thank your stars that this fellow Al Penroy’s reputation as a safe expert is made. But thank your stars seven times over that Miss Reardon walked in that office in time to see what she did see. If you didn’t have her to fall back on, you would be in an ugly predicament. The police will induce young Pettibone to prosecute, all right. As for the trial, we’ll see that it’s put off till Miss Reardon’s return from Buffalo or Toronto or wherever she’s going, and then we’ll prepare our case in consultation together.”

  He rapped loudly for a turnkey, and when the latter come, Treadway paused at the door of the cell as it clanged to.

  “Now, I’m going to get an immediate private hearing before old Judge Henderson, who is delegated to fix bonds in criminal cases. The amount involved is fifty-one hundred dollars. We’ll not bother to mince matters or to haggle over the bond, lest Henderson holds over the hearing till to-morrow. Instead, we’ll simply offer to give bond for an amount alleged to have been stolen. In that way there’ll be no assistant State’s attorney sent to make a fight. Leave things to me and I’ll have you free by six o’clock to-night. Goodbye.”

  And sure enough, within a half hour Folwell found himself taken upstairs, whisked into an elevator, guided down a long corridor filled with empty courtrooms and into a private chamber that opened into the last of the row. He saw the confession he had signed inspected and read, he heard a few words from Treadway, and acknowledgment from a young cub who evidently worked in the interests of the Central Detective Bureau, and old Judge Henderson, with a few hems and haws fixed the bonds at fifty-one hundred dollars even. Treadway, true to his statement that he would arrange everything, had a little, stoop-shouldered, bald-headed man there who signed up the papers, and after an introduction and a goodbye all around, Folwell found himself once more able to breathe the breath of freedom. To his decidedly unlegal mind, the whole affair had savoured somehow of magic.

  They parted at the swinging doors of the building, and Folwell strolled out into the night air. Papers were still on the news stands, containing more news of the murder, as evidenced by their red headlines, and with some of the precious money restored to him by his release on bond, Folwell bought one. He jammed it into his pocket and lost no time in repairing back to the brick house where he roomed on little grass-grown tree-covered Rokeby Street, far up north. He passed no one in opening the door with his latchkey, for which he felt profoundly thankful. Inside his second-floor room he took off his collar and coat, sank into his rocker by the window with a sigh of relief, and proceeded to search for further details of Eaves’s murder.

  But there was scarcely more of material value than in the noon paper. The case appeared to be standing still. His disjointed answers to McIlroy’s questions of that noontime had been skilfully run together by some facile reporter into an alleged interview, which appeared embellished by an ornamental box around it. The opinions set forth by the paper in his hands were chiefly elaborations, and elaborations only, of those that Eaves himself had held. Paddon, Rothblume, and Lee had been murdered by some mysterious assassin who knew every step they took. Several additional hypotheses offered were thought provoking and convincing.

  The assassin, either disguised as a cripple or pretending to be an acquaintance, had flagged Paddon in his car that rainy night in August, had been picked up by the sportsman, had promptly and expeditiously and with a single blow slugged the latter on the open street, back of the rain-spattered and mist-covered car windows which were closed to cut off the rain from the car occupant, and had then stepped calmly out and let the dead man go over the open draw just as an ore boat was passing along the south branch of the river.

  As for Rothblume and Lee, the true causes of their deaths, from the hand of the same man, had been obscured by hasty and inefficient diagnoses by doctors called in a hurry. No means remained by which to check up the movements of those victims on the nights so long since passed.

  Eaves had tried to avoid his death in a most clever manner, but his assassin had either known all along his every step, or else, which was more simple, had located his voice by a telephone call at the National Industrial Securities Company, and had admitted himself noiselessly to Eaves’s office, as the latter thumped away at the Dictatograph, by a duplicate master key of the Temple of Commerce Building, which would not be over-difficult for a clever and dangerous man, intent on murder, to secure. A thousand scrubwomen, as many more porters, and as many sweepers, had possessed those master keys in days gone by.

  This far did the newspaper hypotheses go, and it was evident that the reporters who had clustered about Inspector McIlroy during that noontime session in his office had provided a few suggestions which the canny old Scotsman had probably been wary enough not to give out. The hateful layout containing the confession and the Dictatograph notes was reproduced again, and much space was used in describing how the bigger crime had accidentally caused a smaller one to be uncovered. And as Folwell, heartsick, turned the page over to get it from his sight, his eyes, running idly over the news of lesser importance on the inner page, suddenly stopped, riveted in their progress by a tiny item of nine lines.

  An inch in length it was, and it bore but one tiny head. But to Jason Folwell, seated in his front window it screamed forth as though printed in bright red, and in letters a foot high. It stated simply that the body of Avery Reardon, of 380 Wisconsin Street, had been found floating in the Chicago River that afternoon at two o’clock, and identified. From travelling papers in the dead girl’s handbag, clutched in her hand, and a wireless message to the City of Duluth, now in mid-lake, it was plain that she had either fallen or been deliberately hurled from the out-going vessel the night before as it steamed from the channel. And it also stated that when found, the victim’s eyes had been wide open, staring.

  Folwell rose to his feet, his fingers clutching the paper. His throat seemed to close up on him, and he seemed to be gasping, choking, strangling for air. “Merciful God,” he groaned, trying to force away the film that had dropped upon his dazed brain at the instant he had read the most horrible news he had ever read in his life. He dropped weakly, staring, into his chair, his legs unable to bear his weight. “Avery — dead — drowned — gone!” Feverishly he uncrumpled the paper and re-read the item with distended eyes.
It was no illusion. The paper fell from his fingers to the floor. He closed his eyes and sat back, slumped in his chair. A strange picture, for some reason, persisted in haunting him. He could see them lifting the body from the river. He could see the eyes staring. He could see Paddon, the victim of the Star of the Night, lifted from the same river, with the same staring eyes.

  Was Avery — Avery of the brown eyes — the victim of an accident? Or had the strange, vicious net spun by the Star of the Night dropped over even the innocent employees of the ill-fated Eaves company, and had she, too, met the death of the staring eyes?

  But of a sudden his composure snapped and he sank his head in his hands and wept like a baby.

  CHAPTER IX

  A PROBLEM IN ETHICS

  HOW he got through the night, the first night on which he read of Avery Reardon’s death, Jason Folwell never knew. For three long hours he sat by his window staring dazedly out at the street lights which seemed to blink up understandingly at him, and at the shadowy pictures of the young couples strolling along in the cool mid-fall air under the trees of Rokeby Street; but he saw nothing, realized nothing of his surroundings, knew only that the one woman in his life — the prize of his existence — had been snatched from him.

  He did not try to sleep. When the first shock of the terrible news had passed away, he walked up and down, up and down, under the hanging electric bulb in his room, till he had to compel himself by sheer will power to desist, knowing that it was one o’clock in the morning and that the two old people with whom he roomed must long since have gone to sleep. Sleep! Sleep, blessed sleep, of which there was to be none for him that night, and for perhaps many more nights.