Two Flights Up

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  “As well as could be expected,” said Margaret briefly, and picked up her work again. He stood inside the door, saying nothing, merely facing this new disappointment. “If she wakens before I go, will you tell her I’m here?” he said.

  “Oh! So you’re going again!” said Margaret bitterly. “Well, maybe it’s better. I must say you haven’t brought us any luck. Any of us. If you’d used some common sense—”

  Her resentment against him rose. She put down her work and got up, two bright spots of colour in her sallow cheeks.

  “I’ve lost my husband,” she told him, “and he’s lost the thing he cared for most in the world. More than he cared for me. His good name. I suppose you didn’t mean any harm, but God protect us from the blundering fools who wreck us and didn’t mean to.”

  She went out of the room, leaving him there, and he heard her go along the back passage. There followed the opening and closing of the door, and he knew that she had locked herself away from him.

  He squared his shoulders and went out into the hall. The detective was at the foot of the stairs, and with a gesture Warrington signalled that he was going on up. As he climbed, he heard the officer’s heavy deliberate tread behind him. It irritated nerves already strained to the utmost, and the search he made of Warrington’s room for a possible concealed weapon drove him almost to frenzy.

  “Oh, get the hell out of here and let me clean up!” he said. “I don’t own a gun, and I’m not going to jump out of a window.”

  Nevertheless, the detective stood by until he had seen him go into the bathroom and turn on the shower. Then he very deliberately locked him in, put the key in his pocket and started on certain investigations.

  He found the attic staircase without difficulty and climbed it with a certain caution; and once up, he stood in the semi-obscurity of the garret room and gave it a general survey. At first, however, it told him nothing. A blanket, lying carelessly on the floor, spoke of the last night’s tragedy, and a candlestick on a cedar chest, the candle burned to the socket. But there was nothing else.

  The detective resumed his noiseless whistling through his teeth. The usual litter of such places surrounded him, a broken chair or two, boxes and trunks. Nothing, apparently, to bring Mrs. Bayne up here at two in the morning from a sick-bed.

  Yet she had come. She had come up with a candle and set the candle on the chest there. Had she brought up the blanket also, or had they thrown it over her later? The place was cold. Damned cold.

  He picked up the blanket, and a small shining object fell to the floor and lay there in the dust. It was a silver nail file. He picked it up, and stood speculatively surveying it. So she’d brought up a nail file, too. That was queer. A nail file, at two in the morning!

  So far, from the time the stolen bond had made its appearance, the attention of the police had been directed solely toward locating the securities, and later on to locating Warrington. Holly’s story to the District Attorney had been strictly between the two of them. But naturally there had been considerable discussion as to where the securities had been hidden for the last ten years, to leap from obscurity into such glittering prominence.

  In the Kelsey Street house, undoubtedly, but where in the house?

  So now, with the file in his hand, his keen eyes began to search the room. Near the candle, probably. Something that had to be opened near the candle. There was a trunk there, but it was unlocked. He threw the lid back, and saw folded away in it old silk and satin gowns, and a bit of brocade. A heavy odour of camphor rose from it, and he closed the lid.

  “Wrong!” he said out loud. No nail file was needed to open that.

  He moved on, and a board slipped under his foot. Like a cat he was down on his knees, lighting a match. This was more like it. A file, of course, to lift the end of a board! And now again, a file to lift the end of a board. It came up in his hand. He lighted another match and, leaning over, proceeded carefully to examine the cavity beneath.

  He was still noiselessly whistling. …

  Later on, he took his prisoner down the stairs again. The house was very quiet. Holly still slept the sleep of exhaustion in her blue-and-white room, and Margaret was not visible.

  Warrington stopped on the second-floor landing, with a queer look on his face; then he drew himself up and went on down. In the lower hall the dog knew him and leaped at him joyfully. It was at once his hail and farewell.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  JAMES COX SAT IN the district attorney’s outer office. He had sat there, more or less, all day. Every now and then he paid a visit to the ice-water cooler in the hall, but he did not go out for food. He could not remember when he had eaten, and he did not care.

  The ignominy of his arrest for drunkenness and his reprimand that morning before a magistrate had hardly affected him. He had brushed it aside, already forgotten it. Since the morning of his arrest in the store, his single-tracked mind had been concentrated on one problem; the world that moved about him was one of shadowy figures, which went about on trivial matters, ate, drank, walked, ran, loved and perhaps grieved, but unimportantly.

  Thus it happened that he had brushed aside the minor incident of the night before. An event which would normally have stupefied him hardly entered the realm of his consciousness. He remembered, indeed, only vaguely any of the incidents leading up to it. He knew he must have walked most of the day, for his feet felt blistered; and he had a fairly clear recollection of making a decision to go back to Margaret, to seek comfort with her, even if she had lied to him.

  But when he had gone back, at six o’clock, the apartment was dark. There was no Margaret, no table laid with good honest linen, no odour of broiling chops and coffee, no anything.

  He had not even switched on the lights. He had simply turned and gone on out again.

  Sometime later—he had lost all count of time—he had been standing on one of the bridges. He didn’t remember which bridge. He was standing there thinking and looking over, and a policeman, after watching him awhile, told him to move on. Yes, he remembered that, for it must have been then that that fellow from the china department came along and took him by the arm.

  “You come with me, Cox,” he said. “You’re too much a man for that sort of thing. Come on, and we’ll have a drink.”

  They had gone somewhere. It was bright and warm, and he hadn’t eaten anything for a long time. He guessed he’d taken a lot of whisky, but he felt all right when he left. It hadn’t really hit him hard until he was almost home. Then it had got him in the legs.

  Well, maybe that could happen to anybody; he didn’t know, and he didn’t much care. He was going to see the District Attorney if he had to sit in that chair for a month.

  At four o’clock he was admitted to the inner office. Phelps had spent most of the day in court, and now he too was tired. He wanted to go home, and bathe and shave, and maybe after dinner listen to the radio and doze in his chair. His tone was impatient when he looked up and saw James.

  “All right, Cox,” he said. “Get to it quickly. I’ve had a hard day.”

  James remained standing. Now that his moment had come, he found difficulty in rising to it.

  “I’m a salaried man, Mr. District Attorney,” he said, thinking out his words. “Or I was. I suppose if I were what you’d call a gentleman, maybe I wouldn’t be doing what I am about to do, sir. It goes against the grain even with me.”

  The District Attorney smiled.

  “I’m a salaried man myself,” he said. “Let’s let that go just now. What is it you are about to do?”

  “I’m about to accuse a woman,” said James. “That’s a thing I’ve never done before in my life, and I hope to God I’ll never have to again. I accuse my wife’s sister, Tom Bayne’s wife, of knowing about that stuff in the house, and of taking a bond from it and selling it.”

  “And you also know she is dead and can’t defend herself,” said Phelps, with sudden sharpness. “Come, Cox! That won’t do unless you have proof.”

>   But James was staring at him with shocked, incredulous eyes.

  “Dead!” he said thickly. “Since when?”

  “Since last night.”

  James slowly lowered himself into a chair, and Phelps watched him.

  “See here,” he asked him, “haven’t you been home? Didn’t you know this?”

  “I haven’t been home,” said James with difficulty. “I walked the streets all yesterday, and last night I drank too much whisky and the police picked me up. And I came here from the hearing this morning. I’ve been here all day.”

  He got up and picked up his hat, now dirty and battered.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess I’ve gone the limit. I can’t accuse a dead woman. I didn’t like her, but she can rest in peace for all of me.”

  “I have an idea what you’ve come to say won’t disturb her,” said Phelps dryly. “You’ve made a statement. How do you propose to support it?”

  “I’m telling you. She took it. I knew it all along. My wife lied to me when she said it was the girl.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “How does any man know when his wife is lying to him? They thought I didn’t notice it, but I did. It was night before last, when the fellow who rooms there came in to see what all the trouble was about. My wife told me it was the girl who had found the suitcase and sold the bond, and he didn’t like that. He knew better. I saw him look at her.”

  “Why did your wife tell you that?”

  “I figure she knew, if it was the mother, I’d use that information.”

  “So you claim they were all protecting Mrs. Bayne?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “But why has Warrington kept his mouth shut, if that’s the case?”

  James looked up, candidly.

  “I suppose because he’s a gentleman. That’s what I meant before.”

  “Where do you get that idea?” Phelps asked shrewdly. “From your wife?” And when James made no reply: “How long have you known this Warrington?”

  “Never saw him but once before. He brought me a message from my wife. She wasn’t my wife then.”

  “Do you remember that date?”

  “I do,” said James sturdily. “If I’m wrong, you’ll find it on record at the station house in Number Three precinct. I hit a policeman that night.”

  The District Attorney sat at his desk for some time after James had gone out. Then he got his hat and coat, and on his way out he stopped in to see the chief of detectives.

  “I’ve got something I’d like done to-night, if possible,” he told him. “Tom Bayne is dying, and I’d like somebody to go to the pen and get a deposition from him. I want to know when his wife visited him last, and if he told her about the suitcase.”

  The chief smiled.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll send Lyell. But he told her, all right; I can tell you that now.”

  He opened the desk drawer and carefully brought out two small objects which he laid on the blotter.

  “Exhibits A and B,” he said genially. “Lyell took Warrington up this morning and learned Mrs. Bayne died in the attic. So he locked the fellow off somewhere and took a look around. He found the nail file on the floor; she’d lifted the boards with it. And under the boards, where she’d dropped it, the handkerchief.”

  “That doesn’t prove she’d used them, of course. Anybody else—”

  “Who? The girl? There was no one else in the house last night. And the girl hadn’t been up there for anything; she knew the suitcase was gone. She’d sent it out of the house. Everybody concerned knew that suitcase wasn’t there except this woman. And why did she go? She went because she needed more money. She’d lost a pocketbook yesterday with several hundred dollars in it, and she was up against it. And if you ask me where she got several hundred dollars to lose, I’ll tell you. She got it from Warrington when he sold that bond for her.”

  On his way out home in his car, the District Attorney thought it over. He was fairly sure now that he had been off on the wrong foot, and it annoyed him. But after a time, like poor Annie Bayne in her taxicab, he fell asleep. He had had a hard day.

  That evening, while he was sitting comfortably by the radio, not so much listening to it as using it as a musical accompaniment to a book he was reading, the telephone rang, and he yawned and answered it. It was Lyell on long distance. Tom Bayne was dead. He had passed away comfortably an hour or so ago, but before he had done so, he had made his statement.

  “Looks like we’ve been barking up the wrong tree,” was Lyell’s comment.

  “Yeah,” said Mr. Phelps, yawning, and hung up the receiver.

  He went back to his book and the radio, which was now singing, “Oh, Promise Me” in a throaty soprano. But before he settled down, he took an old envelope out of his pocket and wrote two words on it as a reminder for the next day.

  “Cox—Warrington.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  HOWARD WARRINGTON WAS RELEASED the next day. There were neither apologies nor explanations. Simply the closed hand of the law opened and released him. He was free.

  For all the change that the last forty-eight hours had made on the surface, they might never have been. The office greeted him with grins and cheerful badinage. Outside of that, so little had he counted there, his absence had been scarcely noted.

  “I’m just reporting,” he told Miss Sharp. “I can’t stay. There’s been a death in the family where I live.”

  “I thought you looked kinda shot,” said that young woman. “You just go along. I’ll fix it.”

  But as he started out she called him back. “Say, Mr. Baylie’s got that suit of yours. Do you want to take it along?”

  “I’ll get it to-morrow,” he told her, and made his escape. …

  So it happened that Warrington and James Cox, who had suffered most through her, helped to carry Annie Bayne to her quiet grave. And later they went back together to Kelsey Street, where the heavy odour of flowers still filled the air, and the rooms had been only hastily restored to their usual order.

  “I hope you’ll not hold against me what I said the other night,” said James.

  “You weren’t half as violent as I would have been under the circumstances,” Warrington assured him. And that was all.

  There was a family conference in the dining room that night, but Warrington was not a party to it. Only Holly could have brought him into it, and Holly was still dazed. He was not hurt; after all, what was he to them? For a little time he had been one of them, had lived and suffered with them; but now that was all over.

  By that small unconscious omission they put him where he knew he belonged, in his third-floor room again, in the household but not of it. And as time went on, and James made his genial efforts to draw him into the family circle, it was he who held off. If there was some pride in it at first, it became sheer self-defense later on.

  He could not see Holly in her black frocks, looking thin and white, without wanting to take her in his arms. And he would not do that; he would not drag her once more into poverty. She had had enough of that, and of the things it sometimes led to. She was comfortable now. Let her alone.

  Certainly she was comfortable. With the coming of James and Margaret to live in the old house, it began to take on a new if slightly vulgar vitality. The furnace roared under James’s mighty wielding of the shovel; lights blazed; and Warrington, putting his key into the lock, would be met sometimes by the smell of frying onions, and on passing the drawing-room door would find James there, in Mrs. Bayne’s old chair, his feet on what had been the tea table, and a cigar in his mouth.

  “Come in, Howard!” he would call genially. “Come in and make yourself at home. Shove that dog off, there. He’s too fat and lazy to move.”

  James secretly adored the dog.

  Warrington went in sometimes. If Holly was not there, he would even stay a little, listening to James talk and even putting in a word now and then himself. But occasionally Holly would be th
ere, very quiet and very conscious of him, and then he would take himself in hand and resolutely go upstairs. If James ever noticed this, he made no comment.

  James was very happy. He was enormously proud, of his wife, of Holly, and especially of the house. He would take the dog out for walks, and using that as an excuse, stand on the pavement and survey the building complacently, feet apart and head held high.

  Once Mrs. McCook found him on her side of the street, looking across.

  “Guess I’ll have to paint those shutters this spring,” he said. “Too good a house to let go.”

  “It’s a very handsome house,” said Mrs. McCook—and won him completely.

  He was constantly picking up bargains at the store and sending them home. And at last there came a truly great day, when he sent up a player-piano—twenty-five dollars a month on the installment plan. It came on Margaret’s birthday, and he kept her downtown that afternoon. When she came in, she went directly upstairs, and the first she knew of it was when the strains of some popular air arose to her overhead.

  “Mercy!” she said to Holly. “Who on earth ever let that hurdygurdy into the house?”

  After that, James spent a great deal of his leisure time at the piano, with a cigar in his mouth and his eyes peering at the punctured roll which was unwinding before him. He pumped vigorously with his feet, and the faster the time, the better he was pleased.

  “That’s got some go to it,” he would say.

  But one evening when he was playing some sentimental thing or other, and had a sore foot so that he had to play it softly, he looked up to hear Warrington closing the front door and to see tears in Holly’s eyes. That set him to thinking, and that night, while Margaret was brushing her hair, he spoke to her peevishly.

  “What’s the matter between Howard and Holly?” he demanded. “They’re like a pair of shuttlecocks! When one’s in, the other’s out! It isn’t natural. Have they quarreled about something?”

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “Well, I can’t make them out. If Holly isn’t crazy about him, after all he did for her! And as for him, where are his eyes, anyhow? I’ve a good notion to up and tell him.”