“That’s all right, Mistah Folwell,” she acquiesced graciously.
He tore from his notebook a single sheet of paper, and receipted for one address label, describing the same briefly, and signing his name, Jason T. Folwell. “Now in the event any of the regular department drop around here,” he said, “just show them this receipt.” He held forth the pen and the label which he had just dried between the folds of his pocket handkerchief. “Now may I ask you to sign your initials upon the front of this label and also upon the reverse, in order that the thing may later be identified as the exact one which I took away from here; and will you also scan both sides, so that you yourself might identify them if necessary?”
Adjusting a pair of silk-hung eye-glasses upon her nose, giving her a most austere and pedantic appearance, Miss Lee inspected both sides, just a little bewilderedly. Then without a protest she initialed the front and likewise the back. Whereupon Folwell arose, and with a few parting words withdrew from the flat without once having to betray the fact that he was not of the official world of police investigation.
Downstairs he chuckled grimly. And he did even one more thing. He proceeded at once to the sunny street corner, where, holding the label in the bright sunlight, he inspected more closely something which had caught his eye during his last inspection in The Bellingham Arms. Correct he was! Each and every one of the three “E’s” in the name Johnstone Lee — three of them — and the five more “E’s” in the underlying line — 814 the Temple of Commerce Building — were not “E’s” at all. They had come from a set of stamping type from which the “E’s” had been lost, and were nothing else but “F’s” with a short thick line drawn out from the bottom with a pen dipped in red ink, thus converting them into “E’s.”
His smile of triumph suddenly changed to a frown of discontentment, as he slowly folded the precious bit of paper up after a second inspection, and deposited it carefully in his vest pocket. The rubber stamping, with the “F’s” converted into “E’s,” was even more of a clue to the murderer and thief than ever. But what a hopeless clue. There were probably fifty thousand stamping sets in Chicago, and even if the location of every one were known it would take six months to examine them all.
More and more, however, as he stood there reflecting upon the bond-stealing phase of the mystery, did it seem to him that it must be — beyond peradventure — some one in that office who had opened that safe. Even though Avery and Eaves — he knew he himself had always been careful — had claimed that they threw on the combinations only when alone, could it be possible that some one — old Fisher, for instance — might have tip-toed in and watched the process from behind? It seemed hardly possible that one could operate two dials and not know that some one else stood silently behind; and, remembering the position of the safe in the wall, facing the bright light from the windows, Folwell realized even more that his theory was untenable, since the least attempt of a person to stand silently behind anyone opening the safe must throw a black and betraying shadow on the field of operations. And yet — he felt, he sensed, he seemed almost to convince himself, that the knowledge of that combination must have been an attainment of some one on the inside of the office.
Nothing daunted, he determined upon an expedient. He possessed in his pocket not only the evidence that the murderer and thief owned a set of rubber-stamping type, but also the further means of identifying those rubber-stamped letters could he secure any more specimens of their handiwork. If this set had been utilized for the sinister purpose it had, was it not possible that it had also been used upon articles, or linen, owned by the guilty person?
A collar! A discarded soft shirt. A handkerchief. Possible — but not wholly probable. Possible enough to make it worth while looking into. That and no more. And Folwell’s mind reverted to old Fisher’s desk — the high book-keeping desk with the cover that raised up — and old Fisher’s soiled collars lying about in it!
It was lucky, he reflected, as he turned to the south-side branch of the Elevated Rapid Transit Road, that he had not been asked either by the police or by Lionel Pettibone to give up his key to the offices, for he still had it on his bunch of keys. And it was even more lucky, too, that it was still so close to Eaves’s death, for the offices must be silent, gravelike, without a worker in them.
Reaching the Rapid Transit line, he caught a Jackson Park express train back to the heart of the city. He dismounted at Adams Street, and cutting across on foot through the swarming business section, was soon entering the big doors of the Temple of Commerce Building. He proceeded across the white-tiled foyer, but stopped midway and crossed over to the fruit and magazine counter, where a white-haired, fat old lady with an enormous head and a plaid shawl over her shoulders sat placidly back of the counter. Stopping in front of the tempting array of fruit, he spoke.
“Well, Mary, I see old Mother England was well represented in to-day’s Press? For both you and I got into the papers, didn’t we?”
“Well, blime me, if it ain’t Mister Folwell from Mister Eaves’s orfices upstairs!” She shook her head “ ‘Twas a terrible thing, h’I'm thinking, warn’t it, Mister Folwell?”
He nodded. “Yes, it was.” He leaned across the counter. “They say in the papers, Mary, that you were on duty night before last till past ten o’clock.”
“Lor’ love me, Mister Folwell, Apple Mary never leaves this here stand ‘til nigh midnight. Hi ‘as to p’y the buildin’ too much rent for hit. An’ there’s so many clerks, Mister Folwell, what ‘as to work lyte, ye know, and they runs down and buys a bit o’ fruit for a snack, y’ know; h’and sometimes a magazine to read on the cars goin’ ‘ome.”
“I suppose now you know, Mary,” he proffered, “that the man you nodded to going out at seven o’clock that night wasn’t Eaves; that it was — er — well, myself, dressed up in Eaves’s clothing? But I dare say you’ve read the newspapers?”
“H’I've read ‘em, Mister Folwell, an’ h’l don’t believe nothin’ in ‘em, about you or nobody or no money what you stole. But you sure looked like Mister H’Eaves in the garments, sir. H’l was startled like, seeing yer fyce all done up in a rag. And h’l never knowed till next d’y that hit warn’t ‘im h’I'd nodded to.”
There was a pause. Then Folwell asked: “They tell in the papers that you say you saw most everybody who passed in and out of the building night before last. One paper also states that you remember one man in a raincoat that passed in between eight-thirty and nine-thirty somewhere — a man whom you never recall having seen before around here?”
She nodded vehemently. “H’l watches fyces most careful like, sir, bein’ as I ‘ave nothin’ to do here the livelong day. H’l h’always knows w’en I hain’t seen a fyce before. Yes — they was a man in a raincoat. Mebbe or mebbe not he was connected with the murder. The police says that they ‘ave checked up h’all the orfices what was working lyte that night, and nobody wearin’ a raincoat come hin on hany bus’ness.”
“What sort of man was he?” pursued Folwell.
She shook her head dismally, painfully. “The police ‘ave been after me, sir, till h’I've been nearly cryzy, arskin’ me them ‘ere questions. He — he was a man, h’all right. He — he wore a raincoat.”
“How old was he?”
She wrinkled up her old forehead.
“It hain’t like as what I can see ‘im now in me mind’s heys, ye know. I don’t know what he looked like, nor hanything; only that I hain’t seen ‘im before. A raincoat he wore, Mr. Folwell. I could pick ‘im out hin a minute from a hundred people.”
Folwell pursued the questioning further, as to other details of the rain-coated figure, and succeeded only in reaching a point of near exasperation at his failure to elicit any information of value. The ignorant old Cockney woman seemed utterly unable to make any description whatsoever, only harping again and again on the raincoat; and had he not known something of her quaint history, and of her childish simplicity of mind, he would almost have suspected that s
he was trying to shield someone. But had this been the case she would not even have mentioned “the rain-coated figure “to the police. At last he gave it up in despair, having obtained a composite picture of a man anywhere between twenty-eight and fifty, anywhere from four to six and a half feet, with all shades of complexion from blond to brunette, and built in various moulds, from that of a human beanpole to a Hercules, who walked in all gaits, from a steady, bold tread to a slinking glide. One thing was happily sure. The man, whoever he was, innocent of any complicity in the crime as he may well have been, wore a raincoat! Folwell began to experience a sentiment of pity for the police, who must undoubtedly have to quiz many a witness such as Apple Mary.
“Well, Mary,” he said, as he turned away from the stand, stifling with an effort his irritation at her stupidity, “you’re no genius for personal description. You run strongly to raincoats! But you’ve expressed a belief in my innocence, so I think I’ll have to overlook your shortcomings.”
Her smile was the smile of a sweet old lady, benign and simple once more, now that she was removed from a cumbersome intellectual problem.
“ ‘Tis no policeman I’ll myke,” she said coyly, “but does this man ever come by my stand to buy a magazine, ‘tis a policeman I will call. I never forget no fyce. Eleven hundred tenants are there in this buildin', Mr. Folwell, an’ Apple Mary knows ‘em all by fyce, an’ ‘arf of ‘em by nyme.” And this strange paradox turned to give a customer a red, shiny apple.
Folwell took the elevator to the second floor, still reflecting upon Apple Mary’s helplessness, and trying the door of the offices of the National Industrial Securities Company, fitted his key in the lock and entered.
The interior was gravelike, deserted. The shades were drawn partway. A well-defined film of dust had settled over everything, and now the handy Eaves coverslips for the ‘phones lay like discarded gloves crumpled and trod upon on the floor, after the voluminous police use of the instruments. And finding things thus politely deserted, Folwell determined on the spot to examine not only every possession that might still remain in Fisher’s book-keeper’s desk, but the contents as well of the mahogany desks of Beebe and Meier in the “sucker” room off the right doorway.
He lifted the lid of old Fisher’s old desk, and peeping from underneath a feather duster, discovered two soiled collars. A glance at them both, and he was doomed to disappointment, for unlike the fortunate detectives of fiction, he found on each only a hand-lettered T.F. in indelible ink as a laundry mark. That and nothing more. But having gone this far, surreptitiously, Folwell had less intention than ever of quitting.
Opening his own desk and piling his draughting instruments, T-square and triangles out on top so that, in case anyone came in, it would appear that he had come back to pack his own belongings, he made sure that the outer door was locked. Then he returned to Fisher’s desk. A glance over a number of leather-bound ledgers, the books of the different corporations in which Eaves had had a hand, showed nothing but the Spencerian handwriting of old Fisher, and his entries of figures on the debit and credit sides. A private notebook of Fisher again showed more writing, but not a sign of any rubber-stamped words or notations. The title pages of a couple of fiction books which Fisher must have brought down to the office to read during his lunch hour gave nothing of interest, and a drawing of something with levers and wheels — evidently Fisher, too, had caught the inventing fever! — betrayed not the sign of a rubber stamp.
From these things Folwell, like a bulldog in perseverance, determined to scrutinize, even though hastily, every scrap of paper in that desk in order to get nearer the mystery than he was, turned his attention to a bundle of cancelled cheques held together by a rubber band. Each cheque in the packet he could see was signed: Shanks Dictatograph Company, Marvin Beebe, Treasurer. As to the signature of Beebe, Eaves’s snivelling little hireling who “talked up” prospects on the telephone to earn a five per cent. commission on stock sales, Folwell knew full well Eaves’s practice of making his own employees function as directors and officials of the companies in which he had a hand. But Eaves it was who controlled every cheque signed.
He riffled them over, gazing at the backs, more as a matter of routine in his search, but when the last one flipped from the ball of his thumb he hastily riffled them over again, trying to locate one from which had come the flash of red-stamped words that had registered itself on his retina. He found it in short order. The bottom of the cheque held a few dated bank stamps, circular in shape. The words in red, at the top of the cheque, however, read:
PAY TO THE ORDER OF A. WOHLKAMP AND COMPANY.
The “E’s” of both “The” and “Order” were “F’s” made into “E’s” through the addition of a red ink line at the bottom of the letter!
The endorser was Lionel Pettibone. His signature was in black ink.
Hardly daring to breathe at his dumbfounding discovery, Folwell turned the cheque over in his mind. It was filled in for $50; it was made out to Lionel Pettibone at least six weeks before in Eaves’s indisputable flowing handwriting; and it was signed, as were the other cheques in the packet: Shanks Dictatograph Co., Inc., Marvin Beebe, Treasurer. In the lower left hand corner was the word “Commissions,” written also in Eaves’s handwriting. Standing with it in his fingers, Folwell found himself dimly recalling now that Eaves had said something a long while back about his stepson, Lionel, having sold a block of the Dictatograph stock to an old schoolmate of his whom he had interested, and that he had earned the first commissions he ever earned in his life, the usual five per cent., which would have gone to Beebe or Meier had they closed the sale.
He turned it slowly back and forth in his hand again, realizing that he held in his fingers a discovery of so great importance that everything thus far uncovered in the case was entirely overshadowed. But now, studying the stamped endorsement on the back, he became suddenly cognizant of a hitherto unnoticed feature.
The two red lines: “Pay to the order of A. Wohlkamp and Company” were so stamped that the bottom line just slightly overlapped the written signature of Lionel Pettibone, the black ink in places being just barely obscured by the red. It indicated in graphical language that the cheque had first been endorsed by Lionel Pettibone, a short distance down from the top, and that someone had — after that endorsement — stamped in the words that made the amount of the cheque payable to this A. Wohlkamp and Company.
To whom had Lionel Pettibone given that cheque?
Or had he lost it after endorsing it?
Or, confronted with it, would he claim to have lost it?
But if he did, there was still A. Wohlkamp and Company to fall back upon.
Who, then, were A. Wohlkamp and Company? This was the next step to be determined.
• • •
Folwell had enough for to-day. Hastily tossing back into his own desk his own things, and closing up Fisher’s desk, he clapped his hat on his head, slipped from the office and regained the street again. There in a drug store, he looked up in the directory the name A. Wohlkamp and Company and found the company’s address to be 115, North Wabash Avenue. It was only a matter of ten eager minutes’ walk to get him over to that thoroughfare, inundated by the roar of the Rapid Transit Loop road and filled with staid, conservative, old-fashioned business houses of the vintage of many decades back. The black and white index board in No. 115, North Wabash showed A. Wohlkamp and Company to have offices on the third floor.
So up the inner stairs he went, three at a time, so, impatient was he, so impossible was it for him to wait for the single lumbering elevator that droned away in its wire-encased shaft. And confronting the number shown on the index board he found the announcement:
A. WOHLKAMP AND COMPANY,
Chemists’ Glassware,
Copper and Steel Retorts,
Devices for Industrial Chemistry.
He opened the door and walked in. A business office opening into a warehouse off the side could be seen, the whole cut off from callers
by a low wooden railing. Close to the left of the railing was a wire-screened cashier’s desk. At once Folwell made his way over to the grated window and taking the cheque from his pocket held it out to the blonde girl back of it.
“Will you kindly tell me if this is your stamped endorsement?” he asked. He pointed to the one at the top.
She gazed down at it. She shook her head. “No, indeed. We have a special stamp of our own with those words. It is in script like the one bearing our firm name lower down on the cheque.”
“May I speak to your manager?”
“Mr. Brownell,” she called. “Will you step here, please?”
A baldheaded man wearing gold-rimmed glasses rose from a desk over near the window and came to the wooden railing. Folwell leaned up against it.
“I am trying to get some information through a cheque relative to a certain party.” He held forth the cheque. “This cheque is made out to you. Can you trace, through the date of the bank cancellation, the order for which it was used and the purchaser?”
“The purchaser,” said Brownell, bewilderedly, squinting down at the oblong of paper through his gold-rimmed spectacles, “has his name there.” He pointed to the signature of Lionel Pettibone.
“Then the address of the purchaser,” corrected Folwell hastily. “Any other details, too.”
Brownell squinted at him in alarm. “Is — is this cheque a forgery?” he said.
“No,” Folwell reassured him. “The cheque itself is perfectly good.”
Brownell appeared to be much relieved at this information. He stepped into the cashier’s cage and opening several books on the high desk, hummed a little tune while he turned over various pages of a ledger, and thumbed back through certain memoranda.” Oh, yes,” he said at length, “now I recall it perfectly.” He looked up from his book, over his spectacles.
“This cheque,” he said, was mailed in in payment of a telephone order for some fifteen or sixteen pieces of very rare chemical glassware, which was to be called for several days later.” He surveyed the books. “Crafting was the man who put up the order.” He called sharply: “Crafting?”
The Fourth King Page 15
