Toward the Golden Age

by Ashley, Mike;

  “The man’s stomach is gone. Incidentally, they owe a week’s rent there, and she is living mostly on almonds now, too; so I guess the exchequer is pretty low. I didn’t suppose there were any more women left in the world like that. This girl, born of good family, daughter of a minister, takes up with that triple-stained murderer and sticks. She surely took that “honour and obey” in epic earnest if she married him; if not, why, the more credit to her for sticking…

  “It isn’t for us to judge, Norrie. Keep your eye glued to that hole while I go into the next room—I’ve rented this attic, by the way—and grind out copy.”

  It was four o’clock then; at nine Lanagan ceased writing. He had made in longhand 6,000 words of as clean-cut, brilliant a narrative story of its kind as, under similar pressure, has ever appeared in print. As in all of Lanagan’s stories, it was “the police” who had learned this and that. Lanagan has made several detective sergeants in his time.

  “Leslie will meet us here at one o’clock. We must keep the smash until two, fire the story at Sampson by telephone to lead off my stuff with; hold them in the room until three, and we beat the town again.”

  He hurried out to return in half an hour. He had telephoned to Sampson that the story would break about two o’clock and to hold the paper until he had heard from us; then he had sent his copy down by messenger boy and loaded up on a bundle of the choicest of the rank brand of Manilas he chose at times to affect. I noticed as he lit a match that his hands shook. I wanted him to lie down until one, but his only answer was to fix me with those eyes of his, glowing like a cat’s in the darkness (we were smoking with the lighted ends of our cigars held inside our hats, so careful was Lanagan lest any trace be given to the opposite room), and he laughed that curious laugh of his.

  “When this is over, Norrie,” he said, “I’ll sleep for a week. Half that $5,000 is mine; you and Leslie and the others can divide the rest.”

  Really, I saw Lanagan in my mind’s eye already snooping and prying around those Paris byways; it sounded too assured as he said it. I wondered whether I cared for blood money; figured that I would accept it, and began pleasantly in the gloom to spend my “bit” with much contentment. I concluded I would accompany Lanagan on that Paris trip.

  One o’clock came, and with it Leslie, Brady, Wilson and Maloney. Brady was put at the aperture. A faint light in the opposite room brought the two figures out into bold relief. The rest of us moved to the outer room, where the plainclothes men slipped their revolvers to their side coat pockets. I wished lonesomely that I had brought two and that I might feel braver, although I had as much chance of shooting a revolver with my left hand without disaster as of sailing an aeroplane with either. At that I believe I would have felt more in the picture with two.

  The plan was to pull a fire alarm, and as soon as the engines clattered into the street, scatter to the top story, rap on the door as if to warn the occupants, take them off their guard when the door was opened, and the thing was done. That programme was carried out. When the apparatus swung up from O’Farrell, filling the still night air with those strident bells of terror and alarm, we sped to the top floor and made the corridor.

  “Fire! Fire!”

  It was Brady’s hoarse voice; and even I thrilled, it was done so realistically. I, as the one most likely unknown to the pair, had been selected to take their door. I rapped loudly and shouted the alarm. Brady was on one side of me, Lanagan on the other. Wilson, Maloney, and the chief on either side again in the dark hall, flattened to the wall, guns drawn ready for the rush. The door opened six inches, a startled, wan face with lustrous blue eyes, shining vividly above deep circles of black, looked into mine through the aperture. Possibly something in my face, possibly native suspicion and fear, induced her to essay to slam the door. I pushed my shoulder to the door and shoved, Brady at one shoulder, Lanagan at the other. She gave back with one more wide-eyed look that went over my shoulder and caught the grey-bearded chief, known to her, huddled back for fear of that very thing.

  There came one shrill scream: “Harry! The police!” and she had turned and fled and we pushed in vain—the door was chained! One united crash again, the fastenings gave just as the slight figure, quicker than a shadow, had darted within the inner room and slammed the door shut in our faces. A bolt shot to place as a bullet from within tore through the panelling and clipped the rim of Brady’s hat, and that towering figure bore back out of range and swung us in a mass with him. Two more shots tore through and sprayed us with splinters. We flattened against the wall.

  “The jig is up, Short; you may as well come out.”

  It was Leslie, calm as if he were delivering orders to his chauffeur. A shot rewarded him, impinging perilously close to his shoulder. The man within was dying with the convict’s last desperate ambition to take a policeman with him. We dropped flat. There was a pause, while Brady and Leslie counselled in whispers whether to risk a rush. The silence became acute, punctuated now and then by whisperings from the inner room.

  It sounded as if she were pleading with him; his note of finality could not be mistaken, although the words were not heard. Another silence, and then to our straining ears, rising clearly above the din and clamour of doors below stairs opening and shutting, of shoutings and excited cries, came a trembling voice floating through the jagged holes of the inner door trembling with the strength or the ardour of a determination rather than any dread or fear:

  “Then, Harry, take me, too! Take me, too!”

  “No, Cecile, no!”

  There was silence again from within; and again that voice, now touched with pleading still more earnest:

  “It is only right, Harry dear; all that the world held I sacrificed for you. If you don’t take me, I will follow you!”

  Prolonged to acuteness became the silence again; the man’s voice, hoarse, gasping, finally came:

  “Pray, Cecile.”

  And again that voice, trembling, yet clear as the beautiful sweeping chords of a harp, came floating with the acrid revolver smoke through the jagged, ugly rents in the panelling, and seemed to flood the room with something almost like a visible radiance:

  “Our Father, who art in heaven!”

  I saw Maloney, his blue-nosed revolver in hand, half risen, make the sign of the adoration, touching his forehead and his chest with that grim muzzle. Leslie stood slowly upright, his massive head sunk into his breast. Lanagan breathed hard and deep. It was awesome; we were held in the spell of that strange and extraordinary occurrence. On that beautiful voice went to the end:

  “And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil. Amen.”

  “Amen!” echoed the murderer’s choking voice.

  “The door! To save her!”

  It was Leslie’s electric whisper, and at his signal we crashed with our united strength. With the crashing came two shots, and I caught Lanagan’s harsh curse at my ear and his swift mutter: “Too late!” The door gave.

  She knelt with her head fallen upon her clasped hands, just as she had knelt in that final prayer, beside the bed. He was lying back upon the pillow.

  There was no dry eye there. Veteran thief-takers, men who had stood with their backs to the wall and death baying them a score of times; men who would risk the billy or knife or gun as blithely as they would go to their morning meal; to whom suffering and violence and death were daily allotments, bowed themselves before the melancholy end of that misguided girl.

  Yet possibly, for her, it was better so.

  It was Lanagan’s voice that brought me back. Lanagan, answering the newspaper call, with the dominant newspaper demand still strong upon him and over him; Lanagan, quick with instinctive thought for the high-strung, chafing Sampson down at the Enquirer office and the press waiting for the release gong; Lanagan, the genius of his craft, asserting once again his incomparable newspaper superiority to me, still dreaming the precious seconds away at the pathetic fate of that poor piece of clay kneeling there; Lanagan, crisply as a colone
l in the field, snapped:

  “Scatter, Norrie, for a phone!”

  The Second Bullet

  Anna Katharine Green

  We close this anthology with two stories by Grand Dames of crime fiction. Anna Katharine Green (1846–1935) has been called the Mother of Detective Fiction, for her career extends way back to 1878, long before Sherlock Holmes, with The Leavenworth Case. This introduced us to police detective Ebenezer Gryce, a reliable, dogged officer with a degree of specialist knowledge including, like Sherlock Holmes, a knowledge of various types of ash. Gryce appeared in ten more novels and a handful of short stories. From That Affair Next Door (1897) he was sometimes helped by Amelia Butterworth, a spinster sleuth not unlike Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. The stories collected as The Golden Slipper, and Other Problems (1915) feature a young girl, Violet Strange, a society debutante who works secretly as a detective. These are strong stories, especially the following, which is particularly poignant, and show that Howard Haycraft’s belief that Golden Age stories had a stronger emphasis on character was already evident in the previous decade.

  “YOU must see her.”

  “No. No.”

  “She’s a most unhappy woman. Husband and child both taken from her in a moment; and now, all means of living as well, unless some happy thought of yours—some inspiration of your genius—shows us a way of re-establishing her claims to the policy voided by this cry of suicide.”

  But the small wise head of Violet Strange continued its slow shake of decided refusal.

  “I’m sorry,” she protested, “but it’s quite out of my province. I’m too young to meddle with so serious a matter.”

  “Not when you can save a bereaved woman the only possible compensation left her by untoward fate?”

  “Let the police try their hand at that.”

  “They have had no success with the case.”

  “Or you?”

  “Nor I either.”

  “And you expect—”

  “Yes, Miss Strange. I expect you to find the missing bullet which will settle the fact that murder and not suicide ended George Hammond’s life. If you cannot, then a long litigation awaits this poor widow, ending, as such litigation usually does, in favour of the stronger party. There’s the alternative. If you once saw her—”

  “But that’s what I’m not willing to do. If I once saw her I should yield to her importunities and attempt the seemingly impossible. My instincts bid me say no. Give me something easier.”

  “Easier things are not so remunerative. There’s money in this affair, if the insurance company is forced to pay up. I can offer you—”

  “What?”

  There was eagerness in the tone despite her effort at nonchalance. The other smiled imperceptibly, and briefly named the sum.

  It was larger than she had expected. This her visitor saw by the way her eyelids fell and the peculiar stillness which, for an instant, held her vivacity in check.

  “And you think I can earn that?”

  Her eyes were fixed on his in an eagerness as honest as it was unrestrained.

  He could hardly conceal his amazement; her desire was so evident and the cause of it so difficult to understand. He knew she wanted money—that was her avowed reason for entering into this uncongenial work. But to want it so much! He glanced at her person; it was simply clad but very expensively—how expensively it was his business to know. Then he took in the room in which they sat. Simplicity again, but the simplicity of high art—the drawing-room of one rich enough to indulge in the final luxury of a highly cultivated taste, viz.: unostentatious elegance and the subjection of each carefully chosen ornament to the general effect.

  What did this favoured child of fortune lack that she could be reached by such a plea, when her whole being revolted from the nature of the task he offered her? It was a question not new to him; but one he had never heard answered and was not likely to hear answered now. But the fact remained that the consent he had thought dependent upon sympathetic interest could be reached much more readily by the promise of large emolument—and he owned to a feeling of secret disappointment even while he recognized the value of the discovery.

  But his satisfaction in the latter, if satisfaction it were, was of very short duration. Almost immediately he observed a change in her. The sparkle which had shone in the eye whose depths he had never been able to penetrate, had dissipated itself in something like a tear and she spoke up in that vigorous tone no one but himself had ever heard, as she said:

  “No. The sum is a good one and I could use it; but I will not waste my energy on a case I do not believe in. The man shot himself. He was a speculator, and probably had good reason for his act. Even his wife acknowledges that he has lately had more losses than gains.”

  “See her. She has something to tell you which never got into the papers.”

  “You say that? You know that?”

  “On my honour, Miss Strange.”

  Violet pondered; then suddenly succumbed.

  “Let her come, then. Prompt to the hour. I will receive her at three. Later I have a tea and two party calls to make.”

  Her visitor rose to leave. He had been able to subdue all evidence of his extreme gratification, and now took on a formal air. In dismissing a guest, Miss Strange was invariably the society belle and that only. This he had come to recognize.

  The case (well known at the time) was, in the fewest possible words, as follows:

  On a sultry night in September, a young couple living in one of the large apartment houses in the extreme upper portion of Manhattan were so annoyed by the incessant crying of a child in the adjoining suite that they got up, he to smoke, and she to sit in the window for a possible breath of cool air. They were congratulating themselves upon the wisdom they had shown in thus giving up all thought of sleep—for the child’s crying had not ceased—when (it may have been two o’clock and it may have been a little later) there came from somewhere near, the sharp and somewhat peculiar detonation of a pistol-shot.

  He thought it came from above; she, from the rear, and they were staring at each other in the helpless wonder of the moment, when they were struck by the silence. The baby had ceased to cry. All was as still in the adjoining apartment as in their own—too still—much too still. Their mutual stare turned to one of horror. “It came from there!” whispered the wife. “Some accident has occurred to Mr. or Mrs. Hammond—we ought to go—”

  Her words—very tremulous ones—were broken by a shout from below. They were standing in their window and had evidently been seen by a passing policeman. “Anything wrong up there?” they heard him cry. Mr. Saunders immediately looked out. “Nothing wrong here,” he called down. (They were but two stories from the pavement.) “But I’m not so sure about the rear apartment. We thought we heard a shot. Hadn’t you better come up, officer? My wife is nervous about it. I’ll meet you at the stair-head and show you the way.”

  The officer nodded and stepped in. The young couple hastily donned some wraps, and, by the time he appeared on their floor, they were ready to accompany him.

  Meanwhile, no disturbance was apparent anywhere else in the house, until the policeman rang the bell of the Hammond apartment. Then, voices began to be heard, and doors to open above and below, but not the one before which the policeman stood.

  Another ring, and this time an insistent one;—and still no response. The officer’s hand was rising for the third time when there came a sound of fluttering from behind the panels against which he had laid his ear, and finally a choked voice uttering unintelligible words. Then a hand began to struggle with the lock, and the door, slowly opening, disclosed a woman clad in a hastily donned wrapper and giving every evidence of extreme fright.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, seeing only the compassionate faces of her neighbours. “You heard it, too! a pistol-shot from there—there—my husband’s room. I have not dared to go—I—I—O, have mercy and see if anything is wrong! It is so still—so still, and only a moment ago the ba
by was crying. Mrs. Saunders, Mrs. Saunders, why is it so still?”

  She had fallen into her neighbour’s arms. The hand with which she had pointed out a certain door had sunk to her side and she appeared to be on the verge of collapse.

  The officer eyed her sternly, while noting her appearance, which was that of a woman hastily risen from bed.

  “Where were you?” he asked. “Not with your husband and child, or you would know what had happened there.”

  “I was sleeping down the hall,” she managed to gasp out. “I’m not well—I—Oh, why do you all stand still and do nothing? My baby’s in there. Go! go!” and, with sudden energy, she sprang upright, her eyes wide open and burning, her small well featured face white as the linen she sought to hide.

  The officer demurred no longer. In another instant he was trying the door at which she was again pointing.

  It was locked.

  Glancing back at the woman, now cowering almost to the floor, he pounded at the door and asked the man inside to open.

  No answer came back.

  With a sharp turn he glanced again at the wife.

  “You say that your husband is in this room?”

  She nodded, gasping faintly, “And the child!”

  He turned back, listened, then beckoned to Mr. Saunders. “We shall have to break our way in,” said he. “Put your shoulder well to the door. Now!”

  The hinges of the door creaked; the lock gave way (this special officer weighed two hundred and seventy-five, as he found out, next day), and a prolonged and sweeping crash told the rest.

  Mrs. Hammond gave a low cry; and, straining forward from where she crouched in terror on the floor, searched the faces of the two men for some hint of what they saw in the dimly lighted space beyond. Something dreadful, something which made Mr. Saunders come rushing back with a shout:

  “Take her away! Take her to our apartment, Jennie. She must not see—”

  Not see! He realized the futility of his words as his gaze fell on the young woman who had risen up at his approach and now stood gazing at him without speech, without movement, but with a glare of terror in her eyes, which gave him his first realization of human misery.