A young fellow with blond hair, in his shirtsleeves, came forth from the warehouse.
“Crafting, do you remember anything about this order here?”
Crafting looked over his superior’s shoulder. “Yes,” he nodded. “That was the order that we could fill all but the one piece — the X-1887 — which we had to order from the Cleveland branch.”
“What sort of man called for it?” said Folwell, speaking with as much authoritativeness as he could.
“A man of about forty or maybe forty-five,” Crafting answered, “very dark in complexion, and needing a shave, as I remember him. He was very put out because I did not have the order complete, and because I couldn’t tell him when the missing part would be in from the Cleveland plant.”
“Any clue to his address?” said Folwell. He wondered how soon these people would come to the end of their information, but the font seemed uncloseable.
“Um,” Crafting thought. He pulled from his hip pocket a cheap notebook. “The best I was able to do for him,” he recounted, “was to promise to send out the missing piece when it got here, and asked him if his name and address was in the telephone book. He seemed put out at my mention of the telephone book, too. Told me to send it out by a boy when it got here, and to have it delivered after business hours. And I took down the number.” He riffled over the leaves. “Yep, here it is: 1124 Hickory Avenue.”
“Eleven twenty-four Hickory Avenue,” repeated Folwell, his heart leaping with exultation. “Did you later send the piece out?”
“Yes. It came in three days afterwards, and Johnny Ross took it out as a ‘special’ on his way home one night.”
“Thank you,” said Folwell. “I’ll have the cheque back again now, if you please.”
Brownell, obviously puzzled and slightly overawed at this authoritative young man who conducted his investigations like a detective, handed back the slip of paper. “Nothing much wrong, is there?” he ventured.
Folwell shrugged his shoulders. “I can’t tell you yet,” was his reply. “But we’ll have more to do with you later.” And leaving the two men staring at each other, he went down to the street again.
Now his heart beat fiercely in triumph. Bit by bit the whole thing was forming itself into a damning chain — against someone. Lionel Pettibone had received the cheque from his father, legitimately enough, to be sure, and had endorsed it. Someone had stamped” Pay to the order of A. Wohlkamp and Company” in the blank space above, in order to avoid having his own name appear in the transaction for which it was subsequently used, but the operation had been slightly betrayed by the fact that there was just barely insufficient space above the endorsement to hold that stamped notice. This seemed to rule out Lionel. But who was the man who had stamped those two lines at the top of the cheque and used it in payment for an order of chemical glassware? Whoever he was, he was the selfsame individual who had managed to open a double-doored safe and extract from it a packet of bonds totalling $5,100. And he was likewise the man who had sent the “death letters” to the three “kings” and to Eaves, who was not, and never had been, of the “kings.” As to the order for which the cheque had been used in payment, its very nature cast a sinister suggestion of scientific cunning in keeping with the rest of the facts.
It was now nearly four in the afternoon. He could waste no more time speculating here. The first thing to do was to find 1124, Hickory Avenue, and investigate it to the last detail, for five o’clock would see the daylight verging into darkness. This was no longer summer.
Since he had lived in this huge American metropolis, this greatest of all railroad centres in the world, he had applied himself diligently to learning as much as possible the myriad streets, the byways and strange corners that comprised its 450 solid square miles of area, ranging from its countless foreign sections, its “black belts,” its Chinatown, to its aristocratic purlieus such as its “Gold Coast” along the lake. And although many a night he had pored over street guides, as well as maps, big and little, his eyes had never, so far as he remembered, come to rest upon a street bearing the name Hickory Avenue. In fact, he had to enter a drug store where he saw street guides for sale, and at the expense of twenty-five cents add still one more to his voluminous collection, to ascertain the location of Hickory Avenue. In short order, however, he learned that it was over on the city’s North Side, not a great distance from the junction of Chicago Avenue and Halsted Street. He boarded a State Street car forthwith, and transferring at Chicago Avenue, rode clear to Halsted. Here he found himself not in a neighbourhood of residences, but on a viaduct over a great region filled with gas tanks, rushing steam cars and a smoking engine round house.
This time consulting the map of his street guide, he saw that Hickory Avenue was several irregular blocks in length, and appeared to be on a small strip of land encased by two dividing sub-branches of the wide north branch of the Chicago river, which again joined, and, of a sudden, it dawned on him: Hickory Avenue was on Goose Island — that strange anomaly — an island, goose-shaped at that, within a city!
Now he had his bearings. A walk of a block north brought him to a bridge, across which he tramped, seeing the north branch itself of the Chicago river, iridescent with the acrid smelling oil on its surface, split into two complete rivers, which he saw from the map joined again a mile farther on. Moreover, the map told him in a footnote that Goose island was one of Chicago’s minor Russian settlements, peopled chiefly by foundry and tannery workers, and the fetid smell of the tanneries, the lilac flames of the foundries spouting smoke and gases into the air, and the gas tanks away off in all directions showed Folwell that he was in the most picturesque, perhaps, or at least dilapidated, section which the city had to offer.
He might have been literally stepping from Blooms-bury, with its polished doorknobs, through Aldgate into Whitechapel, so violent was the change that he found on Goose Island with respect to the regions on all sides of it. The street filled with rickety houses along which he walked, soon provided a lamp-post whose blue enamel sign showed it to be named after the river division to the left — North Branch Street. It was nothing but a road. There were no sidewalks at either side; only cinder paths. Dilapidated wooden coal yards, lumber yards and gravel pits met one’s gaze in every direction. A few steps farther on, and the street became the proud bearer of a spur railroad track bearing lonesome looking box cars whose loose doors rattled in the breezes. One or two saloons with unpronounceable names above their swinging doors showed that to the poor Europeans inhabiting that region, the prohibition concoction, near-beer, was preferable at least to no-beer! Shaky lampposts loomed up at intervals bearing blue enamelled signs which proclaimed streets where streets were not, and a peep into the parlours of the few houses showed no signs of man’s modern boons — gas or electricity; only the glimpse of red quilts, and coal-oil lamps standing on tables in the windows.
Folwell had to cut across a great tangle of freight cars, and skirt a lonely-looking warehouse to get out on Hickory Avenue. He wondered, when he reached it, why the man who had given it its appellation had not called it “Boulevard,” and thus completed the ironical joke. It was but a great sun-baked flat, fronted on one side by frame houses, on the other by rows and rows of box cars standing on a quadruple spur. A mass of dirty-faced, ragged children played in one small patch of yellow, late fall grass, held to the spot as flies are held to a pool of sticky syrup. The houses to the left were even more unsubstantial, more ancient, than those of North Branch Street, their paint of former years either gone or peeling off in great scabs. A few skinny chickens scratched dolefully around among the gravel under the box cars. Here and there a European-looking man, clad in flannel shirt and carrying a tin dinner-pail, swung along to his cottage. But for the most part the street was deserted, except for the children. And everywhere the stinking, pungent smell that came from the tanneries over to the west of the island.
Folwell soon stood at number 1124, gazing at it. It was like the rest, a two-storey and base
ment house built undoubtedly long before that great Chicago fire of which he had heard stories, and which was said to have been cheated of this island by the encircling ribbons of water. A gaunt and broken-down garbage wagon, left to bleach and disintegrate like a skeleton, lay overturned a hundred feet in front of it. The tattered front shades of both storeys were drawn. Whereupon he wondered whether to try and have a look at the occupant, or whether to inquire at the houses to the left and right. After all, he decided, it was simple enough to make an inquiry for a fictitious name, as a collector or agent seeking some one; and this he prepared to do. Up to the wooden steps he walked, and rang the old rusty bell. He heard it jangling, jangling, jangling, but no answer. Again he rang. No answer. A third time. And he came slowly down the stairs.
A ragged urchin, speaking some foreign tongue to a youngster at his side, yelled at Folwell in English.
“ ‘At guy ain’t never home, mister.”
“Who lives here, son?” asked Folwell, tossing the boy a dime.
“Andrev Michaelovitch,” rattled the boy, grabbing up the dime, which he hugged tightly in his dirty fist. He became suddenly awestruck. “My old man plays cards with him on Sundays, sometimes.”
“What does he do?” asked Folwell.
“He don’t work in the tanneries like my old man,” the boy replied. “Fixes auty — auty — autymobiles an’ washes ‘em in a place downtown — way over there. His boss is named Johnston.” A wavering forefinger indicated the big heart of the city, the skyscraper tops, the smoke-filled sky of the big beehive.
Folwell’s face suddenly lighted up. “All right, sonny. Much obliged. Run along and play.” And he was quickly walking away from the spot. Suddenly he came to another saloon which tottered crazily against a more stalwart cottage to its right. And, gazing in, he saw that like most Chicago “pubs” of former days it possessed a booth telephone, perhaps on the theory of those once “wet” times, more than a decade gone, that men of both high and low degree must talk to their better halves in private and give unto them certain plausible excuses for non-arrival home.
He went in, knowing now exactly what he was going to do. Ordering a glass of the cereal beverage, served by a fat bartender with a mournful mien, he gulped it down and then went into the booth. At once he looked up three addresses, jotting down the telephone numbers on his cuff. One by one he called them up. He talked over the wire to a number of people, asking questions, but proffering nothing. The whole inquiry took him a full twenty minutes, and at last he emerged perspiring from the booth just as the red glow to the west of Goose Island disappeared and dusk dropped down on the whole bleak region. He felt strangely overawed by his discoveries.
From his conversation with three different people, by name Miss Annabelle Lee, Miss Leah Rothblume, and Charles Gorin, a valet at the Sportsmen’s Club, who had been in a position to know the affairs of Johnstone Lee, Maurice Rothblume, and Perry L. Paddon, he had found that each of these men had kept his car in Johnston’s Loop garage, just off an active corner of LaSalle, Chicago’s street of finance. Here, too, was where J. Hamilton Eaves had kept his own machine. And here it was that the Star of the Night, this Russian experimenter in chemistry and high-priced glassware, this recipient of cheques made out to Lionel Pettibone, worked in the humble position of mechanic and car washer!
CHAPTER XIV
“TRUTH AND TRUTH ONLY!”
THAT he was now able to lead the police straight to the murderer of Eaves, Paddon, Rothblume and Lee, Folwell had no doubt whatever. And that Paddon, Rothblume, and Lee had met death foully, rather than through respective agencies of accident, apoplexy and food poisoning, was now a fact beyond dispute. Each had owned a car and had used Johnston’s Loop garage as a repository for it during the day. Each had received the cryptic yet clear warning. Each, including Eaves as well, had met his death, quick and sure in all four cases, with mysteriousness added to the first three. Those who had failed to heed their warning had been dispatched safely and expeditiously. And Eaves, who had tried so carefully to outwit the self-styled Star of the Night, who had gone to such infinite pains to circumvent him, had been killed equally as surely by the quick, swift blow that proved a dramatic variant on the preceding perplexing deaths.
But matters were far from being wholly clear. What did Lionel Pettibone have to do with all this? Was he, by any possibility, hand in hand with the plot to murder his own stepfather? And the girl — Roslyn Van Etten? Beyond doubt Lionel could not be part of a scheme which was to cost the life of his heiress-fiancée. And yet — Folwell shook his head. He had so much — so much that was vital — and yet not that tiny link that would complete the case. One thing was certain. He had done this much on his own initiative and astuteness. He would complete his investigations to the last iota before turning over his information to the police. In simpler language, he knew that his next step was Clarkson Court and Lionel. Then the police. And with tight-set lips he set off northward on Hickory Avenue, till he struck the steel tracks of the Division Street car line cutting across Goose Island.
It was six-ten and dark when he reached Clarkson Court by a roundabout route. Up the steps he went, and gave the bell a good long ring. The old housekeeper, Jinny, answered it.
“Lionel in?” he asked curtly.
“In the library,” the old woman said. “Will you step in the hall while I call him.”
He waited in the hall, leaning against the banisters of the stairway leading upstairs, his hands thrust into his pockets, his foot tapping the floor impatiently. The old woman had disappeared into the rear of the house.
“Oh,” was Lionel’s remark when he saw his visitor standing under the hall chandelier. “So you’ve come with the money, eh? Well, that’s good.” His tone was insolent.
“I’d like to see you privately for a few minutes,” was Folwell’s only reply.
“Step in,” said the other brusquely. And he held open the library door.
Folwell stepped inside, tossed his hat on a near-by table, and waited until young Pettibone came inside.
“Now close that door,” he directed pointedly.
Lionel’s face paled a bit. “I won’t do any such thing,” he began, defiantly.
“Close — that — door!” thundered Folwell, rising from the chair he had dropped into. “Close it and close it quick — unless you want some of your private affairs to be aired before your servant.”
For one minute Lionel stared at him speechlessly, and then, as though driven by a personality more compelling and dominating than his own, closed the door slowly and reluctantly. “Well — what do you want?” he asked sullenly.” Better be careful what you pull off around here. Why — why are you insulting me and bullyragging me in my own house?”
Folwell snapped open his watch, looked at the time, and closed it again. Then he looked up.
“Lionel,” he said calmly, “in about thirty minutes I expect to be at the Central Detective Bureau with information which will lead to the arrest of the man who killed your father, and also three other LaSalle Street brokers here in Chicago. That man is one with whom you have had dealings. Financial dealings, too. When he is arrested you are going to be called in to explain to the last detail your relationship with him, and, in fact, to show that you yourself are not accessory either before or after the crime. That man’s name is Andrev Michaelovitch. He lives on Goose Island.”
Lionel Pettibone’s face, at the close of this declaration, was a study of profound despair and dumbfoundment. He rose to his feet in perturbation. “Michaelovitch — killed my father — murderer — ” he stuttered. His voice died away. “Folwell — what do you mean, man? Speak. What — what do you know of my dealings with Michaelovitch?”
Folwell thought hard before replying. He wondered whether, now that he had sprung the bomb under Eaves’s stepson, he should leave forthwith and let the police handle the rest of the case; or whether he should probe on by himself in this bewildering affair. He decided to do the latter, then let McIlroy a
nd his men finish the job. At length he spoke.
“I happen to know,” he pronounced casually, “that Michaelovitch has been receiving money from you. In fact, my friend, I have the very cheque you gave him. Incidentally he is car washer and mechanic in the garage in which your father and all these other unfortunate brokers that died mysteriously kept their cars. I know these things, and I also know a few more which I won’t take up your time with. And now that you know just what salient facts are in my possession, I’m going to call the police and let them get a full confession of your” — he pointed his finger straight at the cringing figure across from him — “your connection with the whole thing.” He nodded his head to the telephone and fumbled in his pocket for a coin. “Is that an unlimited service ‘phone, or a nickel instrument?”
“Wait!” said Lionel Pettibone. “Wait! For God’s sake, Folwell, hold back a minute. Wait. No, don’t ‘phone. Here, let — let us talk this thing over first. Folwell, can’t — can’t you keep me out of this in some way? If this thing gets out — if I am dragged to the detective bureau — I don’t know yet just how much you’ve got to the bottom of — it means the end of — oh, God! — the Van Etten girl. My millon-dollar girl. Folwell, Folwell, let us come to a bargain of some sort.”
Folwell caught himself sharply at the younger man’s mention of Roslyn Van Etten. True enough, he reflected, the concealment by the detective bureau heads of the fact that Roslyn Van Etten was dead, rather than Avery Reardon as reported, was keeping Lionel in ignorance as well as the public; keeping him in ignorance that his millon-dollar romance was bursted. And now, in the belief, for some reason, that that same romance was threatened, he was bargaining, pleading, importuning. The opportunity of a lifetime to right injustice, to supplant the result of criminal avariciousness with restitution, suddenly presented itself to Folwell’s vision, and he did not miss grasping at it.
The Fourth King Page 16
