by Howard Mason
“Are you the manager of Parradine Block?” Mallory demanded.
“Why, yes. What’s wrong?”
“Where is Room One-five-one of this entire outfit?”
“Room One-five-one? Well, of course you mean Apartment 15-1.”
“Okay. How do we reach it?”
“Why, you go around to 189th Street, to the entrance marked No. 15—and Apartment No. 1 would be the apartment first on the left—but wait—say—is your name Mallory?”
“Yes, yes, why?”
“Why, that apartment was moved into today by a man who said his brother was a police sergeant around here: James L. Mallory.”
Mallory’s face fell. “Jim! So—so that’s where he moved to? Well, that’s out, unless—but see here—I didn’t ask you about apartments—I asked about rooms—Room 151—where is it?”
“Oh, room? Well, it’s only the suites and so forth in the tower that have actual room numbers. But—151? Well, there are no rooms at all on the tower’s first floor, let alone a 51st room!”
“No Room 151? How about, then, a Room 1 on—well, haven’t you even a 15th floor?”
“We-ell, yes—there’s a 15th floor—though no 16th. For the 15th is the very top of the tower. And—but of course—there being one room to it, that room would be, wouldn’t it, technically—Room 151? But you must be following up some error, Sergeant—whatever you are following up—for that’s not a regulation room at all. It’s only a—”
“Come on!” Mallory was already saying impatiently to his men. And out they were going.
They were up-street within 10 more seconds.
And passing into the tessellated lobby of Parradine Tower.
It was devoid of people tonight, and only one elevator of the 3 was in operation. Its operator lounged on his high stool.
Into it the party shoved.
“We want to go to Room 151—or rather, the 15th floor, since there’s only one room on it.”
The elevator man was making no attempt either to close the door of the cage, or to press a button on his automatic stop rack.
“No can do, Chief,” was his only explanation.
“No can do?” grunted Mallory. “Stop your damned nonsense, and yank us up there fast, or—”
But the other was pointing to his automatic stop board. “I tell you, Chief, I can’t take you there, because this machine doesn’t go any further than the 12th. See?”
“No further than the—what the hell is this 15th story room, anyway?”
“It’s the control room, Chief, for the marquee sign. And is under the sole management of our chief electrician, Mr. Rocco. Only he is permitted to have the key, and only he, so far’s that goes, has ever got the key! Besides, you can’t get to that particular room without going through the special electrical materials room under it—and through Mr. Rocco’s quarters, in turn, below that. To each of which rooms also he’s got the key. So how you can ever get up there to the topmost one without Mr. Rocc—but what—what didja want to go up to the control room for, if I may ask?”
But at this juncture, from somewhere around the bank of elevators—perhaps because of having just descended the stairway on foot from the 2nd floor—came a man in one of whose hands was a wire-cutters, and in the other an electrical coil of some sort. He was dark of skin, black of hair, with cold black eyes and a scar on his cheek. He was at the open elevator door.
“Pardon me, folks—ah, Sergeant Mallory, if I’m not mistaken! Watch your step, Sarge! That poker game going on in Room 506 is headed by Bennie Kondrolle, brother of the ward committeem—”
“Bennie Kondrolle?” grunted the sergeant. “I’m not here pulling Bennie Kondrolle.”
Mr. Rocco’s hands had dropped. “Not raiding—”
“No. We’d been talking about the control room.”
“Oh—the control ro—but what’s wrong? Anything wrong in the theatre?”
“Some of your marquee lights are out,” returned Mallory, gazing at the other suspiciously.
“You don’t say? Well, thanks for telling me. I’ll fix that in short order.”
Mallory turned to the two rearmost of his men.
“Harfy—both of you boys—you ride up to 506, anyway, and warn Bennie that the D.A. is putting heat on tonight. Come back to the station after you do.”
“All—all right, Chief,” said Harfy Hagerup, a bit puzzledly.
Mallory and the two others stepped out.
Rocco, who had stowed away his wire-cutters and coil in a side coat pocket, stepped in.
“On second thought,” said Mallory, now completely on the outside, with his two men, “we’ll go on up with you, Mr. Rocco, and watch you. I’d like for the 3 boys here at my elbow to see how that light flash stuff is done.”
The man with the dark skin, now in the elevator, seemed startled.
“I’m—I’m sorry, Sarge,” he said coldly, “but that’s against the rules. Mr. Parradine’s very special orders himself. Nobody but the chief electrician allowed in that room.”
“Yeah? Well, Mr. Parradine isn’t in a position to give orders these days, so I’m giving ’em. In fact, you’re not going up there at all this trip. And we are! So are you going to hand over the 3 keys we’ll need, or must we—”
“A’right!” The snarl had come from Rocco. “You asked f’r it.” His hand had come out from a hip pocket. A black automatic in it. But that, of course, was quite as far as it got. For the two men who had been neatly left in that elevator did the precise job which it appeared they had been left there to do—if necessary! They grabbed Rocco each side so tightly that he was literally held in a human vise; indeed, Hagerup was twisting the hand that held the revolver. It clattered to the floor. Hagerup kicked it expeditiously out of the cage. Mallory picked it up.
“You—you bastards’ll get broke on this,” Rocco was screaming. “I know big Jim Cuccini. He’ll have your stars as sure as—”
“Shut up!” snapped Mallory. He was contemplating, in fact, a bunch of 3 Yale keys which Hagerup had ruthlessly fished out of Rocco’s trousers pocket.
“That must be them,” Mallory grumbled. And turned to the operator. “Take us—us who are out here—to the 12th floor, anyway. And you, Harfy—and you, Tute—stay in the lobby here—and hold this odd actor tight till we get back. After which—All right—” this as Rocco was dragged out of the car, and Mallory and the two men with him tumbled in to fill it—“let’s go!”
Chapter XXVIII
POST-MORTEM
A compact little assemblage of individuals sat in the green-carpeted private office of Sergeant Mallory.
Mallory sat at his polished mahogany flat-top desk, with his swivel chair turned about to face two persons who sat atop a hastily drawn-over leather-upholstered settee—Gilbert Parradine, smiling wanly in spite of his shavelessness and soiled wrinkled clothes, and a beautiful blonde woman of 32 or so, clad in Parisian-like black velvet street gown and black velvet toque—a blonde woman with delicately cut face, from the ears of which swung quaint Russian-like silver earrings, and who fearfully held one of Parradine’s hands in her ringed fingers.
Against the side wall, facing the one window looking out on Upper Broadway, sat Hagerup, stupefiedly fingering a check for $5000, the ink on which was scarcely dry, particularly that in its signature which read “Gilbert Parradine.” A like check, except that it was for $1000 only, lay on Mallory’s desk slide, and there was little doubt that, of a certain four men outside that room who at that moment were examining still like checks, also for $1000 each, sent out by a secretary, all, without exception, must have had on their faces the identical stupefied look that was on Hagerup’s.
Mallory was embarrassedly ignoring his check; was, indeed, reading from a wire that had just been brought in by the very secretary who had taken out those checks.
“Yes, Mr. Parr
adine,” the police sergeant was saying, “this case is closed now, all right, all right! For this wire from Chicago says they have stopped the ransom payment just in time, as it appears. And with those two men who were lounging in Rocco’s quarters when we walked in, with drawn guns, squawking the way they are, even to the names of those Chicago rats and with your info on your double—the whole gang may be said to have been rounded up.”
Muriel Ordway was speaking now.
“I’m—I’m so happy, Gilbert! Not just alone because Mr. Hagerup over there acted as he did—and immediately!—when he glimpsed that marquee tonight. But because I passed the book on to Rocco successfully before the news of your kidnapping broke.”
“How was that?” Parradine asked, a bit bewilderedly. “And how comes it, darling, that you’re not in London?”
“It is just,” she explained, “that I received the book that afternoon, as you forecast I might, but from the hands of a young lady who called on me in person—a young lady living uptown—a relative of some man who had had it—and because of my being about to leave that night, I got it to Rocco at once. Exactly as per your instructions, you know? But just as I was about to board the Clipper that night around midnight, the newsboys started to call out about your kidnapping in Chicago. So-o I immediately canceled the trip—and, by cable, my London appearance.”
“And if,” nodded Parradine, “my kidnapping had broken before you passed the book—”
“I would,” she said slowly, “have held on to it forever as perhaps the last memento of you I would ever have.”
A momentary silence followed. And then the sergeant spoke.
“Well, Mr. Parradine, I think I’d better let you go home now. For you do look a bit tuckered out, to say the least! And—just as you’ve asked me to do—I’ll do all the talking to the reporters for you. For it’s only a question of about 30 minutes, now, at the most, before they’ll all be up here in droves. For silently as we worked tonight, the story must have leaked out by now. If for no other reason than that those fellows you gave a thousand dollars apiece to out there tonight, are even now calling up their relatives—and some of their relatives, in turn, calling the newspapers—after which, the deluge! Not poor Hagerup over there—no!—he won’t call anybody up—he won’t come out of his daze, I think, for a month. Not even to attend a wrestling match—wrestling happening to be his bug! But before I do let you and Miss Ordway out of here—and, for safety’s sake, the back way—I want to say that that was an amazing idea you had tonight—amazing! To tear pages out of that lone, single book you had—fold them into long 1-inch-wide strips—and poke them through the iron-webbed grating till their ends lay between where certain copper fingertips came together, after which—” But here Mallory scratched his head.
“Something puzzles you, eh?” queried Parradine amusedly. “Meaning, perhaps, how I knew which pair was for which letter? Oh, Rocco always used to fix up a guide for himself, in case of circuit trouble, by pencilling the letter lightly on the panel above the moving finger that was to flash it. By pencilling up, in fact, at least 3 announcements, in advance. What I mean is, he would slither through, at an hour when the board was dead and cut off from all power, between grating and contacts—oh yes, there was quite a clearance—all of 10 inches—so that a man could pass in, and clean or sandpaper any of the contact points that might have gotten too oxidized—10 full inches at least—don’t forget that I had to hold my paper strips in the tips of my long index and third fingers here, and insert strip and fingers all the way in and through an interstice, in order to lay the opposite end of that strip between moving finger and fixed finger; and Rocco, being a thin man, from chest front to backbone, that 10-inch space was more than ample to do anyth—
“Anyway,” Parradine broke off, “he would slither through, as I say, at an hour when the board was dead and cut off from all power, between grating and contacts, and transfer the letters of at least 3 announcements, from a pencilled layout given him by the theatre manager, onto the panel. When he’d get done, all the top letters would correspond to one full program announcement—the middle ones to another—the bottom ones to a third. He had done all this for the present Broome Sherwood program before I was ever even locked in there. There were 3 sets of letters there tonight, to be sure; but after I’d gotten that look at the marquee, and realized that it was the Sherwood program running, I could see that the middle letters of each trio were the ones for me to follow. Indeed, to check to a 100-percent certainty that nothing was out of step, I climbed once more up on the window ledge and checked the flash of a single letter downstairs with the movement of one single switch contact. Came down, and examined it. Found it ‘okay.’ And then—”
Parradine paused.
“And so,” he finished, “there should be no puzzlement left now; for even you, Sergeant Mallory, I daresay, know enough about simple circuits to know that two copper fingertips, clenching a strip of paper tightly between them, can’t make a circuit. Since—
“But oh,” he broke off, “I think I get you now—you mean, maybe, why the imprisoned paper-ends didn’t get released, and the folded strips flutter to the floor, when the movable copper fingers would all fly up again, at the end of each announcement? We-ell, those movable copper fingers never flew up again! You see, Sergeant, I happened to know a few elemental things about how my board worked. Including the quite simple fact that each of the individual circuits which operated the electromagnets which drew those movable fingers all up—when, you understand, the automatic relay closed all those circuits simultaneously—included the very copper fingers themselves whose tips supposedly were then lying in contact. Except that those tips weren’t! Don’t query me why. The inventor, one August Schürdein, would best know why. My guess, however, is that he wanted any pair of fingertips which were failing to make contact because, say, an unlucky fly had gotten crushed between, to make a permanently unlighted letter on the marquee so that the outside theatre employees could note it and the electrician could fix it pronto.”
“Well,” said Mallory, scratching his head again, “that really wasn’t what I had in mind, when I said it was an amazing idea you had. What I meant was the idea you had that by cutting out some of the letters from that whole advertising set-up, you could still have a set-up of letters that—that would make a message—a message which would be spelled out and which would stand complete, too, but which would lead to your rescue. That’s the amazing id— But what—whatever gave you that idea—when you had been up there in that control room for so many days—hadn’t even tried it?”
“Well,” returned Parradine gravely, “when I got the news on that little radio tonight that the ransom money was to be passed in one hour and 50 minutes, I—well, I opened up that Chinese wisdom book for the last time, to read—to keep from going stark crazy—and almost the 4th aphorism that hit my eye—on that particular page—one which is credited as being one of the possibly apocryphal sayings of Mencius—meaning that if it was not written by Mencius, around 300 B.C., or so, then it was written by his chief disciple Hwang Lo—however, that aphorism, from ’way back when science was in its infancy, sprang out at me—completely illuminated my problem—showed me the way!”
“Just what I’ve been trying to convey,” retorted Parradine. “And as you yourself have stated it. It said that there were all sorts and kinds of possible messages, advertising or otherwise, which could be sent forth from a motion picture theatre marquee if one could but kill off, here and there, a few of the contact points on the Schürdein dashboard which operated it.”
“Now, now, Mr. Parradine,” grunted Mallory, “don’t try to kid a poor police official. For the Ancient Chinese knew nothing about contact points on a—a Schürdein motion picture theatre marquee dashboard—nor about letters in advertising messages—nor even letters, so far as that goes, since they used hier’glyphics—nor advertising, for they didn’t advertise. So what could that aphorism have sa
id?”
“Well,” explained Gilbert Parradine, “it said what I stated it said, only in a graver and more beautiful way. It said—” But from his hip pocket Parradine drew the perspiration-damp folded page on which that precious aphorism had lain—that aphorism with its wisdom out of the day of 300 B.C., whether Mencius had written it, or Hwang Lo had done so. And, while all in the little room listened, including Hagerup with mouth open, Parradine, slowly, read it aloud:
“‘What if the stars do ever and ever fall from the sky? New and more interesting constellations will but therefore evolve!’”
The thoughtful silence that followed, on the part of all in the room, was broken by no less than Detective Harfy Hagerup, who had come back to life—a practical detective again!
“But see here, Mr. Parradine,” he asked pointedly. “With all respeck to this Chinky wisdom, it seems to me—darned if it don’t—that you played in a—a lot of luck tonight. For one thing, whoever wrote that piece you just spieled—whether ’twas Mencius or Hwang Lo—didn’t know what comets were—though they were stars!—but let that pass. The real piece of luck seems to me—well, as man to man, Mr. Parradine, and speakin’ in plain straight English, what would you have did now if, f’r instance, your theaytre had been showin’ Rita Hayworth tonight in—say—‘Confession’—and your news-feature fillum had been, say, the fillums of them two Polish wrestlers, ‘Gorilla’ Karlowski and ‘Strangler’ Cherwinski—and—and your three shows tonight had been scheduled for 7:20, 9:34, and 10:59. What would you have did then?”
“Well, Hagerup,” laughed Parradine, “answering you as man to man—not, however, in straight English, but in the language of the Ancient Chinese of the Middle Kingdom—“‘dun’t esk!”’
THE GIRL WHO HAD TO DIE, by By Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
Copyright © 1940 Elisabeth Sanxay Holding.
CHAPTER ONE
“I’m going to be murdered,” she said in her muffled, sad little voice.
Killian sat on the foot of his deck chair beside her, hands clasped between his knees, his neat, dark head bent, no expression at all on his face. He could not help hearing her; but he did not have to answer, and he did not have to look at her.
