Find the Clock

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  “What do you make of him, Iris?” Darrell asked the girl quickly after the other’s departure.

  “I am convinced he has no knowledge of this affair — not even as much as we have,” was her prompt reply. “He is hit hard by the information, but he’s smarting under John’s opinion of him and is ready to show his cousin and all the rest of the world that he is not what we think he is. There are good, strong qualities in the Jarndyces — and they’re showing now in Catherwood.”

  “Yes, I agree with you,” said Darrell, relieved to know that his own opinion was corroborated by some one more closely related to the man in question. For a few moments he sat near her in silence. Then, suddenly aware that the sun had dropped below the roofs of the buildings visible through the window, he too glanced at his watch and replaced it hurriedly.

  “It’s up to me, too, to leave now,” he told her. “I’m going back now to the Call office and as soon as I report to my city editor and take care of a little financial transaction, I’m going to step back on this case and put my full time on it. I tell you there must be a clue somewhere by which we can trip up this gang. And I’ve got to collect my wits and dig it out some way.” He rose and then leaned over her.

  “And to-morrow morning I’m coming over here again — but with a good big diamond that’s been put away for several years waiting for a certain ideal being to come into my life. Until then — well — I suppose I can’t even kiss that ideal being good-by, because Sally Kope — Sentimental Sal, we call her — our society and rules-of-conduct conductor, says it isn’t proper at all!”

  She put her arms around his neck and drawing him down to her pressed a pair of warm lips against his own.

  “What do we care what your Sentimental Sally says?” she declared, smiling up at him. “When two people who have been looking throughout space and time for each other find each other, they become as engaged as any ring will ever make them. Don’t they, Jeffrey Darrell? Don’t they?”

  And his answering pressure on the soft lips was his full and sufficient acknowledgment of her delightful theory.

  The sun was below the western horizon as Darrell walked from the Bradbury, and boarded a car that would take him down town to the Call office. Affairs were humming in the city room as he strode in, and amidst the click of telegraph keys, the rattle of typewriters, and the buzz of voices he made his way straight into the office of Crosby.

  “I’m getting in a bit late,” he explained, going straight to the point, “but I’m working on a whopper of a story, Mr. Crosby. Unless I miss my guess, it’s the biggest crime story that has broken in several months. If it’s O.K. with you, I’m going right on ahead and work the thing out on the lines I’m now on. I’ll need all of to-night yet and perhaps to-morrow. I don’t know yet.”

  Crosby appeared pleased.

  “Go to it, Darrell. Just take your own time. Don’t worry about the office at all so long as you’ve got something under your hat. I tell you, Darrell, I want to lead off that Feldock series at the first possible opportunity.”

  “How is Honorable Sir Feldock, as our friend the Japanese schoolboy would say?” queried Darrell. There was a note of marked irony in his voice which was lost on Crosby.

  “He’s a bit impatient himself,” declared Crosby. “He’s a man used to be up and doing, and this inactivity — this lack of knowledge of Chicago — chafes him.” He changed the subject. “Do you need any money?”

  Darrell smiled. He did need some money. And that was exactly what he had come for. “I’ll take a week in advance and fifty on expenses if you can spare it.”

  Crosby turned to a pad on his desk and wrote out several cabalistic notations. He tore off the top sheet and handed it to Darrell.

  “Here you are, Darrell. Take it to the night cashier and get your money. And take whatever time you want on that story of yours.”

  With the order in his pocket Darrell lost no time in putting the city room behind him and starting out on his investigations.

  Logan Boulevard, on the West Side, his first stop, was a woodlandlike street, bushes and well-kept shrubbery along its inside strip, whirring automobiles speeding along the oiled macadam on either side. John Cooper Jarndyce’s bachelor bungalow proved to be a small, artistic habitation with a single floor topped by an attic room and showing evidences of a basement beneath; its windows bore green shutters that smacked of Greenwich Village, and a small covered stoop enveloped the doorway.

  Nobody was in evidence in the residences on either side. Darrell went up the short path and into the shadow of the covered stoop. A small white card was tacked over the push button. He struck a match and during the few seconds in which its flame flared up, he read the notice typewritten upon it:

  See Whitman, Payne & Company

  Attorneys

  First National Bank Building, for keys

  With a glance back of him at the sidewalk, Darrell inserted the key Catherwood had given him into the door and swung himself into the hallway. A pearl-tipped push button near the door reflected the rays of a boulevard light back of him, and so he snapped it on. Lights in a small living room to his left flared up immediately. It was furnished to represent a ship’s cabin, with hawsers in evidence, marlinespikes on the walls and even a great, polished steering wheel in the corner. On the walls were painted several realistic-appearing portholes, and the four powerful electric bulbs which lighted the room were concealed in four ship lanterns of hammered iron, equidistant from one another. With a long inspection of this unique interior — an interior the details of which could only have come from the bizarre mind of a John Cooper Jarndyce — Darrell snapped on the light in the hall, and reduced the front room once more to darkness. Then he made his way down a carpeted stair way to the basement.

  Here another hanging bulb provided a further source of illumination, and at the same time revealed an open door of what was undoubtedly originally intended as a convenient storeroom. Darrell stepped in and turned on the lights. The cameras and plates piled upon one shelf, and the thick layer of black felt tacked over the high window showed that the place had been used as a dark room.

  But some evidences of a change of utilization were present — evidences intelligible to Darrell with the facts already in his possession. Against one wall was a comfortable-looking metal army cot made up with sheets and blankets. On a shelf were piled a heap of canned goods consisting of such delicacies as chicken and lobster. Packages of crackers and cakes were heaped one on the other, guarded by toothsome-looking jars of preserves and jams. A two-hole gas burner in the corner bore a new blue-enameled coffee pot and a nearly full jar of coffee. A stack of books lay on the floor at the foot of the army cot.

  The place had been indeed equipped, as Iris had so aptly put it, for a human bear to hibernate in it for a goodly week or more. But there was no human bear. Instead there were several clods of dried mud over the threshold, the broken fragments of some photographic plates and a developing tray, a chair which had been crushed as though by the pressure of men’s bodies swaying in a mass against it. Just signs — just the broken twigs of strange trails of our civilization — but signs which Darrell, possessed not of the instinct of the aborigine, but of vital facts instead, could easily interpret as the evidences of a fierce but one-sided struggle in which John Cooper Jarndyce had been the loser.

  He snapped off the light and walked to the rear door of the basement. It was locked, but it led up, as he could see by peering out of its glassed panels, a short flight of stone steps, through a small dark yard with high board fences on either side, thence to an equally dark alley.

  The removal of John Cooper Jarndyce had been immeasurably simple. Brossmeier had come to the secret retreat with a rear-basement key given him by John Cooper Jarndyce. He had come as a friend — and at his shoulder had stalked silent helpers. And when the party had left they carried to a machine standing in the dark alley a bound-and-gagged burden whose wax replica had that day been successfully interred in a cemetery vault bef
ore the eyes of dozens of witnesses. And now the problem of where this party, not one of whose members could in all probability be located, had taken their burden confronted Darrell and defied a solution of itself.

  He wasted no more time in the bungalow, but let himself out in short order and was soon on Logan Boulevard again. He proceeded clear to its end — to Milwaukee Avenue, in fact — where he swung around the corner searching for the double numbers 2535-37.

  Two small adjoining stores, one bearing in its windows the spreading ferns that mark the establishment of the undertaker, the other remodeled into a chapel whose high-backed pews were visible from the sidewalk, indicated the site in which John Cooper Jarndyce’s friend had participated in a drama stranger than they dreamed. But the staid black-and-gold letters on the window now proclaimed to the passing world the imposing message conveyed by just two words:

  Thompson, Mortuarian

  underneath which, however, in much smaller gold letters, was the added explication:

  Successor to Harold Adelbert Bross

  Into the solemn-looking interior Darrell proceeded, dropping into a leather armchair at the side of a beautiful, polished-mahogany desk whose sole contents were two Egyptianlike stone jars, one on each end. A moment later he was confronting a dismal-appearing man in a black swallow-tail coat and black necktie, who appeared from a doorway at the side of the carpeted inclosure. The dismal-appearing individual proved to be Mr. Thompson himself, conductor of bodies to their last resting places.

  “I would like,” Darrell declared, “to obtain all the information you can give me about Bross, the man to whom you have succeeded.”

  Mr. Thompson, whether at disappointment due to the absence of business along his speciality, or whether at the all-embracing nature of the query put to him, proceeded to freeze up pronouncedly.

  “I am sorry,” he said, icicles in his voice, “but I can give no information to strangers about Mr. Bross.”

  Darrell smiled. Now to thaw those sharp-pointed icicles.

  “Mr. Thompson,” he began, “I am a reporter on the Call. I am sorry to say that something will have to appear in its columns within a day or two more about some dealings of your precedessor — dealings which were not quite according to the Hoyle of your and his profession. It would grieve me exceedingly, in writing up this little story, to cast an accidental oblique ray of notoriety upon his successor, who is no doubt running a most ethical business, and I would like to avoid altogether making any mention of the fact that Mr. Bross’ undertaking business is now being run by Mr. Thompson, mortuarian; in other words to connect up the name of a business man and — ”

  “And a rascal,” said Mr. Thompson fervently. “A rascal, I always figured him out to be.” He stroked his chin with a pudgy forefinger. “God forbid putting me in the paper if anything about Bross is to appear. It would cost me a heap of money. The public are peculiar where my line of work is concerned. Can I help you out, Mr. — er — ”

  “Darrell,” put in the newspaper reporter amusedly. People were strange creatures. Half the world, including one John Cooper Jarndyce, avidly sought notoriety at any price; the other half of the world, including Mr. Thompson, mortuarian, danced a conniption fit at the very thought of it.

  “Yes, you can help me out, I think, by answering just a few questions. First, have you any information which would enable me to locate Bross? Any clue to his whereabouts, in other words?”

  Mr. Thompson shook his head dolefully.

  “I am sorry to say that I haven’t the least clue I can give you. I bought him out complete here, even to his printing press and type which I hadn’t any use for. I paid cash for his equity in the establishment, assumed his lease on the place and a mortgage or two held by the American Undertaking Supply Company. Cash was the only thing he would listen to, for he told me he was going back to the old country.” He made an expressive gesture with his hands. “Which doesn’t mean that he went back, of course.”

  “This is a combined flat, morgue, store, and chapel, isn’t it?” queried Darrell. “You live upstairs, as did Bross, I presume?”

  Thompson nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “Did he take much luggage away with him?”

  “Only a valise,” said Mr. Thompson. “Burned everything in his flat in the way of papers. He traveled light, I’ll say, for one going over to Europe.”

  “Did you have any delay in getting possession here?”

  “That I did. I was supposed to take over the eslablishment on June first, but he held me up till the tenth of June on account of a funeral he expected to handle.”

  “I see.” Darrell pondered. “Had a printing press, you say? What became of that?”

  “I sold it up the street to a printer who can use it better than I. Bross printed his own literature. I don’t do business that way. I am a mortuarian, not a body-chasing undertaker.” Mr. Thompson was manifestly wrathy at the fact that his predecessor had pushed him uncomfortably close to the fires of some sort of publicity.

  Darrell looked about him. Then he rose. “Well, Mr. Thompson, much obliged. As far as my newspaper is concerned, your name won’t be mentioned in connection with Bross when this thing appears in print. Rest assured of that.” And with a brief leave-taking, in which he was conducted clear to the door and bowed out as though he were a millionaire customer, Darrell found himself once more under the street lights of Milwaukee Avenue.

  It was just as he had surmised, he reflected, as he walked back to the corner to take a car. Brossmeier after his last successful coup — the interment of the wax shell — had folded up his tents and silently stolen away. That he was still in Chicago, living anywhere from one block to ten miles from his old place of business under an assumed name, waiting for the culmination of the scheme and the division of the mysterious profits, was evidenced by the fact that his description tallied exactly with that of the man who had attempted early that morning to obtain the clock on Grady Court. But this was information of little value, for it did not in the least serve as a clue to where Brossmeier was hiding, where his nephew Von Tresseler was concealed, nor where John Cooper Jarndyce was held captive.

  It was nine o’clock when he ascended the steps of a dingy old building at the mouth of the LaSalle Street tunnel — a building which, in spite of its ancient architecture and general appearance of dilapidation, housed an important branch of the Chicago police department — the detective bureau. He proceeded not upstairs along its well-worn, wooden corridors to Frank Corrigan’s office, but went downstairs instead, to where two rows of cells divided by an electric-illumined, whitewashed passageway marked one, at least, of the Chicago ports of missing men. At the desk up front he stopped a second to speak to old Tom Ferguson, guardian of the cells now for many years back.

  “What’s doing in the case of those two Chinese, Tom?” he asked. “The suspects in the Foy killing — Yuan Gow and Charley Yat Gong?”

  The white-haired old man in the faded blue coat with its brass buttons shifted his corncob pipe.

  “Yuan Gow got a high-priced lawyer before noon to-day, Jeff, filed a writ of habeas corpus and got admitted to ten thousand dollars bail. He’s back on the job at his restaurant, I guess. Charley Yat Gong’s still locked up here.” He lowered his voice. “Frank, upstairs, doesn’t think we can hold him longer than to-morrow, for the Chinese society is getting things into motion now. There’s really no case against him, you know.”

  “Let me see him a while, Tom. I’m interested in that Foy killing.”

  Old Ferguson unhooked his ponderous bunch of keys, conducted Darrell past a gate into the whitewashed corridor and down it, unlocked the barred door of the farthest cell to the left, and relocked it after Darrell as soon as the reporter stepped inside. As his footsteps echoed back along the corridor Darrell surveyed the sad-looking Celestial who had been a friend, at least at one time, of Napoleon Foy’s, and who, slumped dolefully on the hard wooden bench, his chin in his hands, gazed wearily back at him through the thick lens
es which covered his slant brown eyes. Whereupon Darrell dropped down on the wooden bench next to the Chinese waiter.

  “Remember me, Charley?” he said cheerfully. “I was in Foy’s laundry last night when you and Yuan Gow were brought in to see his body.”

  The Chinaman peered closer at him in the subdued light coming from the bulbs in the outer corridor, but appeared not to recognize him.

  “You p’liceman?” he queried.

  “No, Charley. Newspaper man,” Darrell paused. He put a friendly hand on the Chinaman’s shoulder. “Charley, I know that you never killed Napoleon Foy — and I know who did do it. Now I want to ask you some questions.”

  “For w’y they k’ip me lock up here?” wailed Charley Yat Gong. “D’lunk man in restulant at time Foy Yi get kill. I work all time — bling him lots dishes — I never kill Foy Yi.” His voice grew suddenly terror-stricken “You think they hang me, eh?”