The Red Ledger

by Frank L. Packard

  Charlebois paused, and his steel-blue eyes softened for an instant as they played over the strong, cleancut face, and the broad-shouldered, athletic frame of the younger man.

  Stranway, all attention now, his head a little forward, leaned on the arm of his chair.

  "I do not know of any crime of recent years," said Charlebois, almost musingly, "that at the time it was committed caused such wide-spread interest and, indeed, such intense partisanship, as this one of which Wilfred Marlin was convicted; and this partisanship was due, no doubt, to the intangible air of mystery that surrounded the crime, in spite of the fact that the jury on their first ballot and within ten minutes after they retired from the courtroom found the prisoner guilty. Briefly, the facts are these. During the night of the eighteenth of October, two years ago, the Conway National Bank at Parker's Landing was—but do you know the town, my boy?"

  "Yes, I think I do." Stranway nodded. "About twenty miles up the Hudson on the East shore, isn't it? I've motored by it several times."

  The little old gentleman bobbed his head.

  "That is well," he said, "for your knowledge of the road will likely be very useful to you before many hours are past. But to resume: The Conway National Bank was robbed of the sum of one hundred and eighty-nine thousand dollars in cash, which——"

  "That's a good deal for a small country bank to be carrying in its vaults, isn't it?" interrupted Stranway quietly.

  "Yes," agreed Charlebois; "but it was just one hundred and fifty thousand more than was usually carried. The extra amount was to take care of the redemption of an issue of County bonds maturing the next day. There was no immediate clue to the thief. The vault was wrecked with nitro-glycerine, and by the time the townspeople, awakened by the explosion, had hurried to the scene half-dressed, the thief and the funds had disappeared. The town was in a furore, but the excitement was to reach a still greater height. The next night Doctor Hebron H. Kearn was murdered in his consulting room."

  "Yes," said Stranway, "I remember that; but nothing of the details apart from the garbled account in this morning's paper."

  "It is a strange case," said Charlebois musingly again, as, leaning his elbows on the pages of the Red Ledger, he cupped his chin in his hands. "A strange, strange case! Doctor Kearn was a young man of not more than thirty. He had been practising in Parker's Landing then for some three years. He lived alone with an elderly housekeeper. If he had any relatives, they must have been distant ones for they do not appear in the case; at any rate, he was known to be an orphan. The house he lived in was a small wooden-frame affair on a side street, and to this he had had a one-story addition built on, consisting of two rooms which he used as reception and consulting rooms for his patients—these had their own entrance from the street. The body was discovered on the floor of the rear room, the consulting room—but not until the next noon, when Mrs. MacPherson, the housekeeper, found him."

  "That's rather queer!" commented Stranway. "She must have known the first thing in the morning that he hadn't slept in the house that night."

  "No," Charlebois answered; "it was natural enough. She thought nothing of it, as the doctor was frequently called on cases that kept him out all night. The body had been atrociously mutilated about the face to such an extent that it was scarcely recognisable. It was battered and gashed as though some one had beaten at it in a frenzy of ungovernable passion. Indeed, the question of identity might easily have been in dispute had it not been for the strong presumptive evidence furnished by the surroundings themselves, the clothes, belongings, and, principally, a lance wound, bandaged, on the left wrist of the body—an accident Doctor Kearn was known to have suffered several days before.

  "We come now to the evidence. The blows had evidently been struck with a bricklayer's hammer. I need hardly describe what that is to you—a short-handled instrument readily carried in the overalls' pocket; its head like an ordinary hammer, except that the curved section, instead of being divided into prongs, is in one piece and very much broader and longer, and is used for cutting and splitting the bricks. This, blood-stained, was found beneath the doctor's desk, and was readily identified. It belonged to Wilfred Marlin who, as the papers will have reminded you, was a bricklayer. Mrs. MacPherson swore that, as she was preparing to retire, she saw and recognised Marlin, whom she had known all her life, standing under the street lamp before the house, and afterward saw him go to the door of the doctor's office entrance and ring the bell. She swore that the doctor himself admitted Marlin, and that shortly afterward she heard the sound of angry voices as though a violent quarrel were in progress. She listened for some ten minutes, until a passer-by, evidently attracted by the quarrel, went up to the door and rang the bell. The door was opened, the passer-by, apparently reassured, went away again, and after that there was silence. Mrs. MacPherson then retired. The person whom she described as having rung the bell, corroborated her testimony in court, adding that he saw Marlin in his overalls standing in the reception room.

  "But the most damning evidence was yet to come. Doctor Kearn was a man who kept a diary—a habit which most people lose after a certain age, but which clings to some through life. It was an ordinary diary filled with short personal observations and notes of daily happenings. Under the date of the day following the bank robber, was the entry: 'The bank here was looted last night. What shall I do? God knows I have reason enough to be morally certain that it was a man named Marlin—and yet, if after all, I am wrong, and should tell what I know, I would be ruining an innocent man's life. What shall I do?'"

  "Marlin was immediately arrested, his house was searched, and five one-thousand-dollar bills, which from their denomination furnished prima facie evidence that they were part of the bank's stolen funds, were found concealed in an old cigar box on a shelf in his woodshed. No trace was ever discovered of any portion of the remainder of the money that had been taken from the vaults, and——"

  "And in the face of this," Stranway ejaculated impulsively, "some people, you yourself, perhaps, believed him to be——"

  "One point more," Charlebois interposed quietly, "and we are through with the case as presented by the prosecution. Marlin, it was established by incontrovertible evidence, was a man of hot-headed, violent and passionate disposition—quick to quarrel, and in a quarrel was the stamp of man who would lose control over himself and might, in rage, go to any length."

  "Yes," said Stranway again; "and in the face of this how could any one believe him innocent? And yet they did, according to the papers, and as you yourself have said."

  It was a moment before Charlebois answered.

  "I do not know why, my boy," he said at last. "That is really one of the strangest features connected with the case. I do not know. Perhaps it was the man's straightforward attitude, perhaps it was the record of a clean life before, perhaps it was his strange story that held in it everything but the single shred of evidence on which his lawyers could build a defence, perhaps it was his helplessness—perhaps it was all these combined."

  "But you," Stranway probed, "do you believe him to be innocent?"

  "Yes," said the little old gentleman slowly. "Yes; I believe he is innocent. At times I must confess that logic and reason have given rise to serious doubts; but I have believed in him for the reasons that I have mentioned—and for another. Marlin admitted that he had been in the doctor's reception room that night as the witnesses had testified, and he admitted that they had had hot words together; but he swore that there had been no fight, that he had neither touched nor struck the doctor, and that he had not had his hammer with him, that he had left it in the woodshed with the rest of his tools. Asked why he had not removed his overalls, he said that his supper was ready for him when he returned from work that evening, and he had not taken them off as he had some jobs to do around the house afterward. He admitted that it was his habit to carry the hammer with the handle stuck in the side leg-pocket of his overalls, but he positively maintained that he did not have it with him when he went t
o Dr. Kearn's. You will see, however, that his assertion, in the eyes of the jury, counted for but very little."

  Charlebois rose abruptly from his chair, clasped his hands at the back of his red velvet smoking jacket and began to pace up and down the room.

  Intently, Stranway's eyes followed the other. What was coming? Keen-brained, tenacious, knowing no obstacles, stern, implacable, inexorable where occasion required, tender-hearted as a woman, chivalrous, kindly, gentle where his wondrous depth of sympathy was touched, the little old gentleman always fascinated him, commanding daily an increased respect that was ever drawing the bond of affection between them tighter.

  Charlebois stopped before Stranway's chair suddenly.

  "What do you make of this?" he demanded incisively. "Marlin said he went to Dr. Kearn's that night, waiting however until an hour when all the patients would have gone, to accuse the doctor of having robbed the bank and to force the other to return the money."

  "What do I make out of it?" responded Stranway dryly. "Well, I should say he would have done better to have kept his mouth closed. To accuse a dead man who had acted so decently in respect of his own suspicions doesn't show Marlin up any too well! Dr. Kearn, from the records in his diary, must have been possessed of a high moral sense of responsibility——"

  "Then how about Marlin in the same respect?" inquired Charlebois quickly. "Marlin said he had been out late at a friend's house on the night of the robbery, and when near the bank heard the explosion and started to run toward it. Just as he got there he saw Dr. Kearn running from the rear of the bank with a satchel in his hand. All the next day Marlin said he did not know what to do, or what move to make. You see, like the doctor in his statement, he felt he might be wrong. And then finally he decided to have it out with the doctor himself."

  Stranway shook his head.

  "It's too thin," he said decisively. "Why—but, good heavens, what's the use! It's open and shut! Part of the money in his possession—the hammer that killed the doctor—everything. Why, even accepting his own statement for a moment, it only makes out a still blacker case against him. Instead of killing the doctor to keep the doctor from exposing him, it could be argued that he killed Kearn to get the money he said Kearn had stolen from the bank. What possible reason, unless he is a fool, could he have for making such a statement?"

  "The prosecution was sarcastically emphatic on that point," said Charlebois.

  "I should imagine it would be," returned Stranway. "That's it exactly! What possible reason could he have for saying such a thing?"

  "None," said Charlebois simply. "None—unless it were the truth. And this is my other reason for believing in him—his very ingenuousness."

  "Truth!" exclaimed Stranway. "But it is impossible! They could not both be telling the truth, and——"

  "Why not?" interrupted Charlebois gently. "If Marlin saw Dr. Kearn running near the bank at the time of the robbery and jumped to the conclusion that Dr. Kearn was involved in it, is it not quite as logical, and even more so, that Dr. Kearn saw Marlin and formed the same conclusion in reference to Marlin that Marlin entertained toward him—and both be honest in their beliefs?"

  "But the satchel, then, that Marlin claims he saw Dr. Kearn carrying?" said Stranway quickly.

  "The doctor's medical handbag," supplied Charlebois. "Why not?"

  Stranway jerked himself forward in his chair and stared at Charlebois.

  "Then what does it mean?" he burst out. "Each accused the other, some of the money is found in Marlin's possession, the doctor is murdered and the straightest kind of evidence points to Marlin as the murderer. If both were innocent of the robbery, what, in God's name, does it mean?"

  "Did I not tell you," said Charlebois softly, "that it was a strange, strange case? As you have said, Marlin's statement did him perhaps more harm than good at the trial, and the evidence against him was so conclusive that his lawyers were obliged to grasp, like drowning men at straws, at the only fighting point that was left open to them. It developed at the autopsy that the deceased had a heart affection. The defence tried to establish the fact that the blows in themselves would not have caused death had it not been for this. They put medical witnesses on the stand to support their point, and, of course, the prosecution put on an equal number of men equally high in their profession to rebut it—and that, the last and, indeed, the only line of defence, fell through and collapsed. After that, on every technicality that could be raised the case has been carried from court to court in appeal until finally it reached the governor, who but yesterday refused to interfere. That is the situation we are facing at this moment."

  Stranway drew the newspaper from his pocket, unfolded it, found the last paragraph of the "story" and handed it to the little old gentleman.

  "And according to that," he said, "the trial and appeals have cost a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, which the paper hints pretty broadly accounts for a large share of the missing money, and also claims that this theory has weighed heavily against Marlin in the petition for clemency presented to the governor."

  Charlebois waved the paper away as he seated himself again at the desk.

  "I have read it," he said. "It is malicious. It had neither weight nor significance with the executive head of this state—I was in conference with Governor Henderson yesterday. As for the amount"—Charlebois smiled whimsically and spread out his hands—"it is, strange to say, since it appears in that sheet, not exaggerated. Listen, my boy. It was during those years of my destitution, that period of my life during which all the accounts in the Red Ledger originated, that, in a little town not far from here, I knocked one night at the door of a young couple, humble people, who had just been married. I was an utter stranger to them. I was without a penny, very hungry, and very despondent. The wife, she was a black-haired, sparkling-eyed, happy girl then, gave me food and listened to my story, and then with ready sympathy talked to me until her happy courage revived my own; while the husband, a rough, good-hearted man, stood by and listened, nodding his head approvingly as she spoke. When I went away that night, the husband walked with me to the door, clapped me encouragingly on the shoulder and slipped a fifty-cent piece into my hand. To-day, in that same town, the black-haired, happy girl is a grey-haired, broken-hearted, sorrowful woman bending beneath a load of bitter agony too great to bear; to-day, that husband waits the call of death in a murderer's cell; and I—the one with whom they shared their happiness and their home that night—am here." There was a quiver in Charlebois' rich, full tones, and his eyes, suddenly dimmed, dropped to the pages of the Red Ledger before him. "I, of course, was the one who spent that money which is now being held against him as further evidence of his guilt."

  "I might have known!" said Stranway in a low voice. "Yes, I understand."

  "The record of it is here"—Charlebois spoke after an instant's silence, and his hand swept the page with a quick, gliding motion—"but the account, in spite of all my efforts, is still unbalanced, and the time now is very short—it is the last day of grace."

  "You spoke," said Stranway, "of a hope that still remains, which——"

  "I pray God it may not be ill-founded," the little old gentleman broke in earnestly. "I come to that now; and I must dismiss it in as few words as possible for there is work, as I have said, for you to do, work that I do not wish to entrust to anyone else, since our final plans, under existing conditions, will have to be made so much upon the spur of the moment that it may even devolve upon you to make entirely new plans of your own at the last instant—that is why I have brought you back, my boy. But to the point: There is one thing I have not mentioned in connection with the trial. I can hardly call it evidence, for while it was brought out at the trial it was given no prominence whatever. It was this. Dr. Kearn's evening consultation hours were from seven until eight—the last patient left, and this was established, at half-past eight. At nine o'clock, a townsman, passing the doctor's house, saw a man in a checked suit, who, he was positive, was a stranger in
the town, go up to the doctor's door, ring the bell and enter the reception room. No trace of this stranger could be discovered afterward."

  "But that was a full hour before Marlin went to the doctor's," objected Stranway. "The doctor was alive and well then; and, according to Marlin himself, who said the doctor was alone when he got there, the stranger, whoever he was, must have gone. I can't see that it has any bearing whatever on the case. The stranger might easily have been, say, a travelling man, who came in by trolley or train, and, perhaps, not feeling well, consulted the first doctor whose sign he came across."

  "Yes," said Charlebois, and the tassel of his skull-cap bobbed in acquiescence with the motion of his head. "Precisely so. That was exactly the attitude toward it at the trial—it was, and naturally so, I must confess, treated as extraneous. Yet for two years my search for that stranger in the checked suit has never faltered; day and night in all that time the organisation has been at work, and with every resource at my command I have tried to find him."

  "Tried to find him!" echoed Stranway in genuine astonishment. "Why? Have you any reason to believe that he is at the bottom of it?"

  Charlebois smiled a little wanly.

  "Only a hope," he admitted; "a hope arrived at solely by the process of elimination. There was absolutely no other clue, no other effort that could be made on Marlin's behalf. It was that—or nothing. That—or remain passive; for I felt that the appeals in the long run would be fruitless."

  "And this man in the checked suit," Stranway asked excitedly, "have you found him?"

  "Yes," said Charlebois; "we have found him. I will not go into the details of that two years' search; of clues picked up, lost, recovered, and lost again—we have neither the time, nor is it vital to what is before us. We found him finally a month ago in Paris."

  "Ah!" exclaimed Stranway eagerly. "And what does he say?"

  "That," said Charlebois, "is exactly what we are about to make an effort to find out." The little old gentleman raised his hand as Stranway was about to speak. "Just a moment, my boy, I know what you are going to say; but if he is the guilty man, or has guilty knowledge of the crime, it would have been fatal to put him in any way upon his guard while abroad. He had to be here where we could put him to the test. We have succeeded, but with desperately little time to spare, in luring him into a voyage across the ocean; it is not so simple, however, if he is in any way guilty, to induce him to make the trip of twenty miles from New York to Parker's Landing—which is the task I have reserved for you. He is to arrive this morning from Cherbourg. The vessel is docking now, and as soon as the passengers are through the customs, I shall have news of where you will find him."