E. Hoffmann Price's Pierre d'Artois: Occult Detective & Associates

by E. Hoffmann Price

  “Good God! This is a damnable jest,” protested the president, white haired James Kent.

  Barrett’s smile convinced the directors that the story of the Dyak whose long bladed kampilan and short bladed dagger adorned the wall was unvarnished truth. Then, as his hand reached for the switch: “Did you gentlemen ever hear me jest? Will you, or will you not?”

  Barrett, towering over them in personality rather than stature, was compelling their belief, and goading them to desperation by the sheer force of his will.

  “Mr. Chairman,” said Taylor Hartley, “it sounds like a good way out for someone—if Barrett is right. Thus we’ll have no rumors of suicide, or other scandal to complete the ruin. I move that we accept, and pledge ourselves to secrecy.”

  “Second it,” faltered Benton, whose life was under the threatening shadow of the Square.

  It was so ordered.

  The lights snapped out. The shades had been drawn, and heavy drapes shrouded the windows, so that not a trace of light leaked in from without. The silent darkness was troubled by the breathing of those who for the first time felt the presence of death. They pictured the vengeful, panther-like Barrett smiling grimly in the blackness, and wondered whose life he held in his hand. None doubted any longer.

  “Forward, march!” commanded Barrett. And then, as they filed around the table, he spoke again: “I will count to five, and then I’ll snap on the lights as soon as I can reach the switch.”

  The phosphorescent glow of pill-box stared balefully from the darkness.

  “One…two…”

  Barrett’s words dropped like earth upon a coffin.

  “Three…”

  For a moment the ominous glow was obscured. The tension became unbearable. Each wondered whether it had actually been a hand—a confession of guilt—that had masked the phosphorescence. Each dreaded the eye of his fellows when at the fifth count the light would flash on. But that solemnly pronounced “five” was not spoken.

  A cry of pain and terror stabbed the murmur of hoarse breathing. Then a gurgling gasp, long drawn and agonized. A chair crashed, and then there was the chunk of a falling body. A moment later a switch clicked, and light flooded the room.

  Benton lay at the foot of the table. The hilt of a dagger—one of Barrett’s own weapons—projected from Benton’s chest. A red stream trickled across his expanse of shirt front, and a red froth was gathering on his lips.

  For a moment the directors regarded each other in voiceless horror. Even Barrett, the man hunter, had lost some of the tropic tan that had been burned into his lean cheeks by blazing, foreign suns. Then as one man they shifted their gaze toward the table.

  The pill-box was gone. Someone had accepted the offer of death—and had struck his farewell blow.

  “Christ,” muttered the chairman as Barrett leaped from his post at the wall switch and knelt beside Benton, “you were right! Unless someone was lurking behind that tapestry…”

  “Dead,” pronounced Barrett. He rose and regarded the survivors. Then, solemnly, “That capsule gives painless, instant death. And I am still offering the assassin his chance, as I promised.

  “Gentlemen, be pleased to remain while I call the police. And remember: not a word about that pill. The lights went out; someone who must have been hiding behind that tapestry snatched a dagger from the wall and got Benton. That, and no more. Do you get me?”

  And it was that, and no more, which the police investigation uncovered that night, despite the questioning, the vain search for fingerprints, and a study of charts which showed the positions, seated, of the members of the Board.

  “Barrett,” said John Dolan, Chief of Detectives, as he glanced over his tabulated data, “this is fishy from the ground up. You’re holding out.”

  Barrett nodded.

  “I am, John, and you’ll have to like it. This is a lot more than blackmail or extortion. And if you want to squash the Square, give me a free hand. You’ll never make it, looking for anarchists, or other organized criminals.”

  “Cough up!” demanded Dolan, his broad, red face becoming stern. “Friendship has its limits. You’re obstructing justice.”

  Barrett returned the glare, and shook his head.

  “You’re obstructing justice yourself. Give me a couple of days. A lot of depositors—men like yourself—have their last penny with us. If this story gets out, the bank, and working men’s money goes glimmering.

  “Will you play ball?”

  “Never saw an Irishman with more blarney,” growled Dolan. “I’ll play.”

  * * * *

  The following morning’s mail brought Davis Barrett the usual heap of letters. One, marked “personal,” was ominously familiar: while there was nothing striking about the size, shape, or texture of the envelope, the address, jammed into the lower right hand corner, with its letters so spaced as to make a perfect square, warned Barrett even before he broke the splash of black wax that secured the flap.

  The Square, so called from the arrangement of his letters of extortion, was striking at the heart of the enemy.

  Davis P. Barrett,

  4644 Saint Charles

  New Orleans, Louisiana.

  The message, like those received by the three deceased, was pointed:

  Go to Patio Moro tonight at nine o’clock sharp and wait at the third table on the right as you enter. Bring one hundred thousand dollars in new and unmarked thousand-dollar bills. At exactly nine fifteen put the money under the loose brick in the wall at the height of the table. Remain exactly five minutes, then leave. Be warned by the example of Benton and do not notify the police or trifle with THE SQUARE.

  Barrett scrutinized the note whose text, like the address, was carefully blocked off to make a perfect square in the lower corner of the sheet.

  “Even if he has three of us to his credit, that hocus-pocus is still a hell of a waste of time and paper,” muttered Barrett. “Probably no more finger prints or typewriter peculiarities than the others. But I guess his mind will be mathematically square to the last…”

  Barrett grinned sourly, then added, “Unless I trip him up before he gets me!”

  Whereupon Barrett took a cigar from the humidor on his desk, and settled down to sifting a collection of intangible clues which, by their nature, had not been accessible to the police. His reasoning involved an analysis of the circumstances and backgrounds of both the victims and the survivors. Barrett scrutinized the unaccountable recovery of a certain director from his 1929 losses; he sought the significance of a vote to approve an excessive loan to a cartage and warehousing company whose being bonded had little effect upon its activities; and he wondered at the revenue a member of the board received from sources as vague as they were inexhaustible. And finally, Barrett noted, each death had shifted the balance of power that existed between the survivors and their many interests.

  Barrett had with ample reason demanded that the chief of detectives stand clear and give him a chance for a solution that would have the minimum of publicity. He had suspected Benton of having written himself an extortion letter as a means of deflecting possible suspicion: but Benton’s death from a stab wound that could not possibly have been self-inflicted, forced a revision —though not the discarding—of his original theory.

  “The next time I buy an interest in a bank, I’ll be sure it’s not a madhouse I’m getting into!” he exclaimed wrathfully, as he looked up from his tabulated data and scrutinized the envelope which had contained the letter from the Square. He noted a detail that he had not thus far observed.

  “I’ll be double damned! Postmarked an hour before Benton was killed!”

  He knew now that the Square had been so certain of Benton’s death that the warning clause of Barrett’s letter had been drafted at least several hours before the fatal meeting of the preceding night.

  “And made a monkey of me, right u
nder my nose. Used a dagger from my own collection!”

  Barrett grimaced sourly, shook his head, and resumed his study. He made little progress, however, as his continued analysis was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. Taylor Hartley was on the wire.

  “…So the Square picked on you, eh?—Well, you should see what I got in the mail this morning.—Not notifying the police? Very good. Hartley. We’ll fight this out in private. Stick to your guns, and don’t let Dolan get a word out of you.—Suppose we deliver our ransoms together; we’re scheduled ten minutes apart.—Okay, Hartley, see you this evening.”

  Barrett’s face became long and thoughtful as he replaced the instrument.

  “Two warned at the same time. The Square is changing his system. A fellow so mathematically inclined—Squares and the like—must have cause for a change—”

  That evening, well ahead of the hour appointed for the payment of the hundred thousand dollar blackmail, Barrett called at Hartley’s residence. He found Hartley in his library, an austere hall that served as a depository of the first editions which Hartley had accumulated. Hartley rose from the desk at which he had been engaged in studies which even an extortion letter had not been able to disturb.

  “Paying off?” was Barrett’s first remark following the exchange of greetings.

  Hartley nodded and smiled cryptically.

  “About the most prudent thing to do. How about yourself?”

  Barrett took a packet of bills from his pocket and flipped them as he spoke. “Full count, brand new. But there are other ways of tricking this omnipotent Square. I might at the last minute change my mind and slip him a packet of cigar coupons!”

  Hartley pondered for a moment.

  “Maybe we could get away with that, and trap him before he could hit back.”

  Barrett followed Hartley to the paving.

  “Want to drive down with me?” asked Barrett, pausing at the curbing and gesturing toward his car, a glittering, black Hispano.

  “Thanks, no,” replied Hartley. “I have a bit of running around to do when we are through with this errand. I’ll meet you at Patio Moro.”

  Patio Moro is a courtyard in the Vieux Carré, or French Quarter of New Orleans, that section which lies erected by the Sieur de Bienville when he founded the city some two centuries ago. Patio Moro is literally a café: it is devoted exclusively to the serving of that chicory-tinctured, black coffee which in New Orleans is a ritual rather than a mere beverage.

  When Barrett’s Hispano drew up before the arched entrance of Patio Moro, he saw that Hartley’s car was already at the curbing.

  “Frost,” he said to the grim faced, sturdy man at the wheel, “I want you to do a bit of prowling while I’m inside. Do you understand all the details?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  And Barrett, as he strode down the vaulted passageway toward the dimness of the coffee court, knew that Frost, who had followed him on many a trail of adventure, would let little escape unnoticed.

  At a table which was nestled close to the ivy-clad wall, and half concealed by a cluster of bamboo, Barrett saw Hartley, who was abstractedly marking dots on a cube of sugar and apparently unperturbed by keeping a rendezvous with the Square. Hartley, glancing up, smiled somberly and then looked at his watch as Barrett seated himself.

  “In five minutes I am to put $100,000 into a crevice…”

  Barrett followed Hartley’s gesture and saw that one of the bricks of the old wall was loose, stripped of its mortar so that it could readily be lifted out with bare hands.

  “Then put the brick on top of the packet and wait,” he concluded.

  “The time stated in my note,” said Barrett, “is ten minutes later than yours. It seems that the Square will drag out your bundle to make room for mine. Got his nerve, lining us up two at a time!”

  Hartley nodded.

  “I wonder,” continued Barrett, “how he can get the money without being detected, and when the penalty would be exacted if we tried to trick him? Or is he depending on our being scared stiff by the deaths of Hobson, Cartier, and Benton?” He glanced about, noting the clumps of broad leaved plantains that occupied the corners of the court, and the iron railed balcony of the house whose rear commanded the rear wall of the patio.

  “He’d probably not shoot from ambush,” suggested Hartley. “If that’s what you had in mind. It would probably be something more daring. Look how the Square got Cartier: right on the steps of his own house, and…”

  “To say nothing of Benton,” added Barrett as he drew from his pocket a packet of notes which he laid on the table.

  “I’m first,” said Hartley, again glancing at his watch.

  Barrett stuffed the crisp, new bills back into his pocket, then shivered as he remarked, “The Square must be a weather prophet! So chilly this evening there’d be no other customers.”

  The dim, bluish globes, hung high overhead, cast a satanic twilight over the patio. Death brooded over the silence that was interrupted only by the distant rattle of the street car going up Royal Street. Even the sounds from the kitchen were a subdued murmur. Barrett shivered again, and this time not on account of the evening chill. He was thinking of the relentless doom that laid wiped out one third of the directors of the First Trust Bank, and pondering on the unseen Square who was watching them as they awaited the appointed moment.

  “Now,” muttered Hartley. “We’ll see.”

  A note of excitement had crept into his voice. He reached to the wall, plucked forth a brick—the brick—and laid into place a sheaf of bills.

  “Wait a second,” said Barrett as Hartley thrust the brick home. “Give me a look. I want to dope out this matter of the time between our deposits, when we might as well ante in together. Maybe…”

  “Better not,” counselled Hartley, shaking his head. “I’ve got an idea.”

  Barrett agreed, glanced at his watch.

  “One hundred thousand for the privilege of living! Well, I guess it’s worth it.”

  The succeeding minutes were interminable.

  “Two more to go,” observed Barrett. He noted that Hartley’s saturnine features had become tense from suppressed excitement. The long fingers drummed nervously on the table.

  A waiter approached. Barrett impatiently gestured for him to withdraw, but he did not heed.

  “Sorry, sir,” he apologized. “Gentleman out in front left this package and asked me to give it to Mr. Hartley, immediately. Seemed urgent.”

  “What did he look like?” demanded Barrett.

  The waiter’s description was so confused as to be worthless.

  “Oh, all right,” interrupted Hartley as he accepted the packet and handed the waiter a coin. “That’ll be all. Thank you.”

  Hartley’s dark brows rose to Gothic arches as he opened the parcel.

  “Good lord!” he exclaimed. “Look!”

  Barrett saw a bundle of paper cut to the size of bank notes, with a bill on top. A typewritten message accompanied it.

  “Your roll, eh?”

  “Yes. Returned with compliments and a warning,” said Hartley somberly as he handed Barrett the note. “I wanted to try him by giving him a dummy—well, I know now.”

  “Don’t try to trick us,” Barrett read. “You have just time to deliver the sum we demanded. Last chance. We are watching.”

  He scrutinized the note for a moment, then: “Good God! Collected and checked up, right before our eyes! Dammit, that’s impossible!”

  Barrett removed the brick and explored the vacancy with his fingers. He felt the edge of a slot at the back, that would make it possible for someone to have drawn the packet to the other side of the wall.

  “What are you going to do? Have you…”

  Hartley drew from his pocket another sheaf of bills. “This time,” he explained, “I’ll give him what he demanded. I�
��m taking no chances!”

  “Nor I either,” echoed Barrett. “I’m off the cigar coupon idea. And—well, it’s time for my contribution, so let’s pay off together.”

  Hartley thrust his packet of bills into the bottom of the opening, then, as Barrett followed suit, he replaced the brick.

  They sat in silence until Barrett, glancing at his watch, said, “Time’s up. I think I’ll risk a peep.”

  He withdrew the brick. Both packets were gone.

  “Slick! Too slick!” muttered Barrett. “I begin to see why he ordered us to wait. Let’s get out! This place gives me the creeps.”

  “Rather,” agreed Hartley as he led the way to the entrance.

  Frost was again at the wheel of the Hispano.

  “Back to the house,” directed Barrett. Then, with a gesture and a nod, he bade Hartley good night. They followed Hartley’s tail light until they reached the rear of Saint Louis Cathedral. There, in response to Barrett’s order, Frost pulled up at the curbing and stepped to the sidewalk.

  “All right, Frost, I’m leaving it to you,” was Barrett’s remark, as he took the wheel. “And I’ll be waiting for a call, unless I’m popped off.”

  He headed the Hispano uptown. As he crossed Canal Street, he smiled grimly and stroked the scar on his cheek.

  “This guess,” he muttered, “will finish the Square—or me!”

  Barrett, rational and logical as he claimed to be, worked more by intuition than he realized. Several escapes by the very narrowest of margins had taught him not to ignore premonitions.

  “A hunch,” he declared, “is better than good sense.”

  And thus, less than half a dozen blocks past Canal Street, when Barrett sensed imminent peril, he knew better than to deny his instincts.

  He glanced about him, and into the mirror, but saw no car following him, or paralleling him. He looked into the back of the Hispano to see that no one lurked, ready to strike him down. All was clear: yet the shadow of the Square hung over him.