The Washington Square Enigma

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  “Courtenay, you have done me the greatest honor that a man can do — to give me the choice between being your wife for the rest of my days, knowing certain facts that are in my mind only, of all people in the world, and — ” She stopped. Harling could glimpse the slight shade of puzzlement that flashed over the face of the man across from her, and he knew that the girl was referring to the knowledge she had of the dust-imprinted hand. “Yes — this seems to be one of the decisive moments in my life — a moment when a girl who knows too well the police system of a great city — the effect on the minds of a murder jury of evidence such as you relate — a moment when I must decide whether to travel that road of notoriety, disgrace, perhaps conviction from one court to another or to enter a life of respectability and ease with one such as you — but on her own money!”

  She looked him squarely in the face, and her next declaration caused the fish-like eyes of the man across from her to drop.

  “Courtenay, I did not kill Samuel Bond. Down in your heart, you know that I didn’t. Never mind how I know it. It may be just instinct — it may be facts. But I am not going to lower myself by pleading with you, by even declaring my innocence to you. All I have to say,” she added, “is that what you propose is absolutely impossible; no argument could move me, change me, sway me, persuade me. If you have fallen so low that you could do as you say, then there is the telephone. Go ahead. I am waiting.”

  He leaned forward and his face was grim and set: “Think well, Trudel. It means ten minutes — the Bishop — and that is all. Think carefully what the other means. Think hard.” His voice rose shrilly: “I tell you I shall do as I say. You should know me well enough for that.”

  Her face became suddenly drawn and she shrank into her chair. “I have decided,” she said.

  He emitted a sickly, sneering laugh: “Very well. The law must have its way. Justice must be satisfied. I was a fool even to think of defeating the ends of justice.” He raised the telephone instrument from its cradle-base. The sound of a very vigorous dialing was the only thing that was audible. Then: “Superior 2871?” And then Harling could make out the indistinguishable but enthusiastic voice of a man answering. “Oh — this you, DeLysle? That’s fine, then. Saves time. Well, old man, you may call your station now and spill your information to the police. I have no wish after all to interfere. So go to it, boy, and a big story to you.” He paused: “Sure; ring ‘em now.”

  He said “Good-bye” and replaced the instrument. A few seconds later, he raised it again and dialed what presumably was the same number. The sharp buzz-buzz-buzz of a busy line was audible, and he held out the receiver so that its ominous sound could reach the ears of the girl across the table from him. “DeLysle,” he said bitterly, “is losing no time in slipping it to Chicago Avenue. No human being can get to that wedged dragon head now, my dear girl, with the bluecoats posted front and back.” He rose and bowed mockingly. “Good evening, my dear Miss Vanderhuyden. I am leaving now. I thank you for your kind attention to my little proposition and regret greatly that it has bored you.”

  He opened the door of the library; his footsteps sounded down the hall. A second later came the slam of the great front door. Harling peeped from back of the alcove portières. The girl had dropped her head to the table and was crying softly. He came out from his hiding place and stood in front of her.

  She looked up at him, and the big blue eyes were swimming in tears. “Everything,” she sobbed, “had to go wrong after all. To — to think — that Courtenay could stoop to such a thing — and he knows that I’m innocent. In fifteen minutes they will find that — that dragon head — the gold collar — and — and in an hour they will be up to this house. And after that — ” She dropped her head to her hands again, and cried softly.

  As for Harling, he thought hard and quickly. He thought of the exact distance between the Chicago Avenue Station and the house on Washington Square; of the few minutes’ possible delay before they should send out men to investigate this newspaper reporter’s scoop. He thought carefully of how far the Lake Shore Drive residence was from Washington Square. He thought of the bluecoats posted both front and back, and he thought of the days when he had been a track enthusiast in Frisco. Then he made up his mind with a sudden jerk, and glanced quickly toward the onyx clock, ticking away the precious, vital seconds.

  “Don’t cry,” he said to her softly, placing his hands clumsily on the girl’s yellow curls. “I am going back to that Washington Square house. I am going to get inside some way, even if they arrest me coming out. But before they get me, I shall have that dragon head where no living soul will ever find it.” His eyes fell on a steel paper knife, lying on the library table. He picked it up and dropped it in his pocket: “Quick! My hat! We haven’t a second to lose. My hat — but not the raincoat!”

  CHAPTER XXII

  ON THE ROOFS

  TRUDEL stared at Harling unbelievingly. “Oh, but you dare not — you cannot — ”

  “It is no time to argue,” he shot back quickly. “It can be done some way — somehow. Never mind about me. The main point is a hat. Please get it, Trud — Miss Vanderhuyden.”

  The girl gazed up at him for a second as if he had promised the impossible and as if she had some infinite belief that he could achieve it. Then she went out of the room and returned, bearing the raincoat and the soft, felt hat.

  “You had better not try,” she warned, despairingly. “The police are looking for you, too, and — ”

  But Harling never allowed her to finish her sentence, for he grasped the hat, and with a few long strides, had traversed the long hall and gone out of the front door, passing Santi just coming up the steps from his errand for Vandervoort.

  When he got outside, he paused uncertainly for a brief space of time, looking southward along Lake Shore Drive, with its brilliant, undulating row of flaming globe lights; then across the way at the dark, trotting path of cinders made by the park commissioners for the daily horseback ride of the élite of Lake Shore Drive. This decided him and he shot across the street.

  A moment later, his elbows were pressed tight to his chest, he was sunk in the crouch of the trained runner, and he was speeding along at a furious rate. This side of the street was quite deserted at this hour. To his left he could hear the dull wash of the lake against the breakwater; to his right an occasional automobile flashed by with its great eyes lighting up the oiled macadam pavement.

  Once a runner, clad only in sweater and shorts, passed him, going in the opposite direction; Harling smiled grimly to himself as the other waved a friendly hand toward him as a fellow-athlete. But this was lucky, he reflected, for any more pedestrians or automobiles, or even busses which he might encounter north of that point would not now think it strange that a runner should be practising out on the dark cinder path at a quarter to eight in the evening.

  In less than three minutes, Harling had reached Chestnut Street, as he perceived by the blue-enameled sign riveted to a corner light post. It was quite devoid of automobiles so he turned into the middle of it, and kept up his professional run at a rapid rate westward. In turn he flew past Rush Street, North State Street, Dearborn Avenue; a short distance beyond that, he glimpsed the electric-lighted sign in front of the garage from which, that afternoon, he had first seen Trudel’s coupé roll out.

  He slowed up his speed, panting appreciably, and with a quick glance across the narrow thoroughfare to see that the garage doors were closed and that no loungers were around them, he dived under a street light and into the dark court from which he had fled earlier in the day. At the end of the court he peeped cautiously down the long row of fences toward the house in which Bond’s body had been found.

  There, just as he had feared and just as Vandervoort had declared, a blue-coated policeman was leaning against the fence, not facing the house itself.

  Crouching, Harling dived across to the shadow of the fence and passed into the cluttered rear yard of the first deserted house in the row. When he had left the Va
nderhuyden residence, he had been quite in doubt as to how he was going to fulfill his rash resolve, but in running along, the crisp air had set his brain working, with the result that the solution had come to him in three words — a roof trapdoor.

  Every house in the whole dilapidated row, he saw, had fire escapes, but of that on the Bond house, one section had fallen off and the rest hung loosely from the brick walls. The ladder-like structure on the building in front of him, however, although rusty and antiquated, as he could see by the faint rays of the Chestnut Street light which illuminated the Bond house so brilliantly, seemed firm and strong. So, without much ado, he crawled up on the teetering roof of a small shed that hung over the kitchen door, and reached the bottom rung of the fire escape with his fingers.

  As he went up step by step he watched with his heart in his mouth the officer stationed far down — three hundred feet — along the rear fences. But the latter never turned once, only leaning hard against the fence and whistling softly to himself a tune which carried out on the clear, still night air.

  When Harling reached the roof, he heaved a sigh of relief. Hardly nine minutes, he estimated, had elapsed since he had flown from the Vanderhuyden residence, and his running and his climbing had quite winded him. He would have liked to lie there and get his breath, but he realized that every second was vital. So he scrambled over to a point on the roof halfway between the front and back, and in a crouching position, ran along on tiptoe on the gravel until he reached the Bond house, which he could determine by standing erect and peeping over the edge at the Chestnut Street light in line with it.

  It was no trouble to find the trapdoor, for the moon was just coming up over the houses to the east of him. He was at the square, boxlike structure in a minute, tugging with might and main. But to his chagrin it would not move. The irony of the situation was that, while everything about the house was in a state of utter dilapidation, the one thing necessary to his plan — the trapdoor — should be held fast and tight to the under roof by its rusty hook.

  There was no time to lose. Harling dropped to his hands and knees and crawled over to the rear edge of the roof, where he peered cautiously down at the back of the officer, still immobile, like a blue-clothed statue. The corner of a drain pipe, projecting upward to where once had been a zinc trough to catch the rain, loomed up ahead of him in silhouette. After a few seconds of quick, hard thinking, in which he pictured the boardless condition of the upper windows and the fact that the drain pipe ran close to one of those windows, he slid over, turned, wriggled and hung from the edge. An instant later he had transferred his grip to the rusty drain pipe.

  His back was now turned to the dangerous area. His heart was in his mouth and he expected any second to hear a shout and to know that the officer had turned and was contemplating his descent, splendidly illuminated by the Chestnut Street light. But pressing his knees to the pipe and clenching his hands on the rusty surface, he slid slowly, inch by inch, down a few feet until a window sill loomed suddenly up at his elbow.

  Immediately, he had one knee on the window sill, one hand on the rotten casing and in a jiffy he was in and panting on the dark floor of the room. He ventured to raise himself and peer over the edge of the sill, but the police officer, with his broad back to the fence, was still whistling away, quite unaware of the fact that an entrance had been made into a house which was guarded both front and rear.

  As Harling made his way down the creaking inside stairs on tiptoe, he bit his lips when he realized the peculiar position in which he had placed himself as to getting out. But that was not to be the immediate problem of his affairs. No doubt, after he had secured the incriminating dragon’s head, he could go up the drain pipe by a furious hand-over-hand effort and get back again on the roof, with the stolid officer still stationed at the fence. The main thing now, while men were doubtlessly hurrying from the Chicago Avenue Police Station, was to pry loose that green jade dragon’s head and to smuggle it out of sight.

  Harling turned in at the first floor, and groped his way into the room where the dead man had lain. Through the gaps in the boards of the front windows, enough light filtered in from the tall light posts in Washington Square across the way to enable him to see what he was doing. It was strangely quiet. Outside he could hear the footsteps of a passer-by approaching, then receding. He found the closet door, stepped inside, and drew it tightly shut.

  Then he struck a match. As the lighted splinter of wood flared up, he made a cursory examination of the piece of moldy carpet that filled one corner, of the dirty, cobwebby walls, and of the gaping cracks in the floor. Quickly he found what he was searching for — a point where one of the cracks held a jagged splinter of lathe, the same that Trudel had used on the spur of a moment and which Vandervoort’s reporter friend had suspiciously examined.

  In an instant, by means of the steel paper knife, he had pried the splinter of wood out. Then, with two furious jerks, the first of which broke off the point of the knife, and the second of which sent the wedged dragon’s head flying out of its prison like a miniature projectile, he had accomplished his task. Knife, dragon’s head and point of knife he dropped into his pocket. By means of a second match, he replaced the piece of lathe which had plugged the crack; then he dropped even the two match stubs into his pocket in order to remove all traces of his visit.

  He came quietly out of the closet and made his way on tiptoe over to the front windows where he peered out between the boards to see how well the front of the house was guarded from curiosity seekers. With satisfaction he saw that he had accomplished his feat just in time, for two broad-shouldered men — evidently plainclothesmen — and a smaller man with a camera in his hand, all smoking big cigars, had just finished chatting with the bluecoat stationed in front, and were turning up the front steps. Like a flash Harling sped from the window and into the back parlor. Here he cautiously peered forth from the gloom that enshrouded him. To his consternation, the bluecoat posted at the rear had changed his position entirely; he was now sitting on an ash barrel, gazing up absently at the whole illuminated rear of the house.

  And Harling, as he heard the slow tread of feet ascending the outer steps, realized suddenly that he had made himself a prisoner; that for the second time that day he had been caught in the same place.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  FROM BEHIND THE SKYLIGHT

  AS HARLING stood there in the darkness, hearing the ascending tread of the trio on the outside steps, there came suddenly to him like a flash in the night the remembrance of the trapdoor which had failed to serve him as a means of entrance. Knowing its approximate location from having been on the roof, he should be able to find it and undo the fastenings which held it tight.

  The footsteps were now on the top landing of the front steps of the house. Harling darted into the gloomy front hall, groped wildly for the rickety banister and went up the front stairs three at a time, the boards creaking in spite of the fact that he went on tiptoe. When he passed the first inner landing, the illumination from the street lights sprinkled over Washington Square failed to filter in on his path; he found his only guide was the rotten banister, since he dared not light a match.

  As the front door opened, he gazed down from his position well up beyond the first landing; he could see the bright flashes of several electric torches in the possession of the newcomers. For a second or two the torches continued to flash about the hallway; then, with more or less loud talking, the three men groped their way into the front room.

  As Harling followed the rotten railing to the top floor he found himself wondering what they would say when they pried up the piece of wood described by the newspaper reporter and found that the latter’s wonderful discovery — his clue to the murderer! — was no discovery at all; no clue whatever. In all likelihood they would consider the thing a figment of the reporter’s imagination, and the latter would be laughed at for all time. But better that, Harling reflected, than that Trudel Vanderhuyden should be drawn into notoriety.

/>   He had reached the top floor, now. The rear room which he had first entered was flooded with light from the same rays which bathed the whole rear of the building; but the tiny hallway which seemed to connect a front and rear stairway as well as a good many smaller rooms on that floor, was dark as pitch.

  He strove to recollect the distance of the trapdoor from the front roof edge; then he groped along until his hand touched a doorknob nearly that distance from the top of the stairway. In he went and struck a match. He found himself in what must have been a bathroom. A rickety ladder was nailed to the wall, and far above, he could make out the trapdoor and its rusty fastening.

  He went up the ladder carefully, trying each rung before he put his weight on it. At the top he braced himself, and with a mighty effort dislodged the rusted hook from its eye. Then, pressing with his head, he raised the trapdoor from its bed, dislodging an avalanche of gravel, and clambered out carefully onto the roof and under the dome of the sky once more.

  He replaced the trapdoor carefully over its bed and crawled over to the rear edge of the building. The officer was still seated on the ash barrel, gazing upward. Lucky for a certain man in a brown suit, Harling said to himself with a grimace, that that trapdoor had been in existence. He had gotten in with much difficulty, but getting out would have been an impossibility.

  He crawled along on hands and knees in order to regain the house whose rusty fire escape had provided the means of getting up to the whole series of connecting roofs. When he reached it, he first looked down to see that the coast was clear; then he glanced back. But that backward look caused him to rub his eyes.