Lady in Peril

by Ben Ames Williams

  She swung back to them. “There . . .”

  Clint, watching the Inspector, saw the old man’s faint confusion; and he said reassuringly: “Clara will chatter you black in the face, but she’s a nice kid, Inspector. Don’t let her rattle you. Of course, we’re all anxious to have you come along, if you can!”

  Inspector Tope looked at Miss Moss, almost appealingly. The old man did want to come along. There was something friendly and wholly delightful about these young folk; something deeply reassuring in the older woman. He would be sorry not to see them all again. He looked at Miss Moss as though for permission; and he asked at last doubtfully: “Do you agree with all these plans, ma’am?”

  She said immediately: “Yes; I do hope you can join us.”

  “Why, I’d like to,” he answered instantly.

  And Clara cried: “But it’s all arranged! I’ll have to go home first. Clint, will you drive me out? And we’ll meet at six. Miss Moss, are you ready to go home?”

  Miss Moss said evasively: “I’ve half an hour here, still. Some small matters . . . The Inspector and I . . .”

  “Don’t let him escape!” Clara urged. “I’m leaving him in your hands. Clint, we’ve got to race. Till six, then. Goodbye, everybody.”

  So she and Clint departed, and it was as though a summer breeze blew out of the dingy offices when they were gone, and left a musty silence behind. Old Beede had already hung up his black alpaca coat and his eye shade, and packed up his ledgers and taken himself away. Miss Moss and the Inspector were left alone.

  The Inspector stayed, because there was still a question in his mind. The old man had an instinct, long developed, upon which he had learned to rely. Great surgeons have a similar gift, born of experience. They may know a thing without being able to say how they know. Here are two persons deathly ill; the surgeon looks upon one and says: “He will get better.” And of the other: “He will die!” He can give no clear and cogent reason for the differences in his opinion; yet his judgment will prove accurate, all the same. It was so with Tope. Without knowing how he knew certain things, he nevertheless knew them certainly enough.

  Thus now he knew, without knowing how, that this matter was not ended. Peace was gone, and barring the chance that Dave Howell might overtake his quarry, the incident was closed. Yet Tope was sure that there was more to come. He sought now, in a groping fashion, to discover some fact which would justify his premonition; which would serve to support the conviction that rested as yet upon instinct alone. When Clint and Clara had disappeared, the old man said: “They’re fine children.” He added, half to himself: “It’s hard to believe a girl like that would get mixed up in—the sort of thing you mentioned.”

  She explained carefully: “Clara is enthusiastic, ebullient, and—young. Also, I think she had quarrelled with Mat Hews at the time, wanted to punish him. They’re devoted, you know!” The Inspector smiled; and she continued: “The thing was not serious, except for its consequences. Clara went with the man to an Inn in the mountains for dinner, and bad weather caught them, and snow made the roads impassable, so that they had to stay overnight. Some other woman followed him up there in spite of the snow, and tried to shoot him; and the whole affair found its way into the papers, and the man told a reporter that their trip into the mountains was Clara’s suggestion!” She hesitated, said precisely: “I believe he resented the fact that Clara had rebuffed him. This was his gesture of revenge!”

  “Nice fellow!” Tope commented in a dry tone.

  “So Mat thrashed him rather thoroughly,” Miss Moss explained. “And Clint started home to kill him. He might have done so—but for this other thing.”

  Tope nodded, and he rose. Yet he hesitated, conscious that there was something elusive in the background of his mind. He said awkwardly:

  “I’d like to fetch you, later, if I may.”

  “I’ll come with the children,” she assured him, smiling. “You mustn’t take Clara’s jokes too seriously, Inspector!” He chuckled. “Why, ma’am,” he declared, “that was my own idea! But if there’s no need . . .” He turned toward the door; but halfway across the room he paused, and he came back toward her. He stood looking down at her, assorting his impressions, till she asked at last:

  “What is it, Inspector?”

  Tope said carefully: “I just remembered! Before she came, a while ago, we were talking about Peace, and how he could fake that scar, and the crippled foot, and I told you his doctor was a friend of his by the name of Canter. And you kind of jumped, as if you’d heard of Doctor Canter. And then Miss Jervis came in, before I could ask you . . .” Miss Moss was like stone; and he spoke directly. “Had you, ma’am?” he asked. “Had you heard of him?”

  For a long moment she did not reply. But she said at last, as though this coincidence could puzzle her: “Yes! I had forgotten he was Mr. Peace’s doctor until you spoke of it; but he was the man who—was involved with Clara, in California!”

  Tope wiped his mouth with his hand. His head wagged almost contentedly; he nodded with a cheerful relief. “Ma’am,” he said, “that’s fine!”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  He hesitated. “I don’t want to scare you,” he told her. “I guess you don’t scare easy. But an old fire horse can hear a bell a long ways. I’ve had an itching feeling that this business wasn’t done; and I didn’t know why. I don’t know now! But this Doctor Canter has been in it twice already; and I’m guessing he’ll turn up again! It kind of relieves me. It makes things fit, someway!”

  She asked gravely: “What do you mean? How?”

  Tope shook his head. “I don’t know, ma’am. I said I’m guessing; but it’s not even a guess. Just a—feeling!” He looked toward the door through which Clint and Clara had gone. “I don’t know anything,” he said in a perturbed tone. “But if you’ll let me, till the whole book’s closed, I’d like mightily to stand by!”

  She did not answer, and he urged: “It’s them I’m thinking of. You mind if I stay around?”

  “I wish you would,” she said then slowly. “I’ve been—alone—taking care of them, so long.”

  4

  WHEN Inspector Tope left Miss Moss at the offices of the Jervis Trust, he went directly back to his own room; and his thoughts were intent upon these children, and upon Miss • Moss who tended them. The old man had an audacity of his own; he could recognize and appreciate this quality in others. This woman, hiding the still passion of her devotion beneath an exterior like iron, willing to flout the law and put her own liberty at stake for the sake of the children she loved, appealed to him with an astonishing intensity. She was so calm and so serene; yet beneath the mirror surface which she wore such turbulent currents flowed . . .

  He chose to walk home, striding down Tremont Street at that characteristic gait, his hands swinging, the palms forward; and he smiled at his thoughts, and his eyes were beaming. It was one of those warm winter evenings when spring seems not far away. The dusky sky was a pale and pulsing blue, delicate and warm; the street lights were yellow jewels gleaming in the still lingering light of day.

  He was thinking of Miss Moss, but not at all of Peace; so when he saw, a block ahead of him, looming bulkily among the scattered pedestrians, the heavy figure of Dave Howell, he had a guilty impulse to turn aside and avoid the other man. For Dave, after all, was intent on finding Peace, and Miss Moss had let the embezzler get away, and Tope approved her courses. But before he could escape, he and the other man came face to face; and Dave said morosely:

  “Hello, Inspector!”

  Tope smiled amiably. “Hello, Dave,” he returned. “Got Peace already, have you?”

  Howell shook his head. “But he can’t get away,” he said. “I know what he looks like, now. Thin, and gray hair, and a scrubby beard. And no more limp than a fish!”

  “He’d change that,” Tope suggested. “He probably had a room in a boarding house somewhere. He’d go there and change his clothes, change his looks. Peace won’t leave town yet!”


  “What’s to keep him?” Howell objected; and Tope said thoughtfully:

  “He’ll be watching his back track to find out whether you’re hot on the trail. Michelsen heard from him since he left, has he?”

  “I haven’t seen Michelsen.”

  “Let’s find out,” Tope proposed; and they turned into the subway station to a telephone. Howell called Michelsen; and when he came out of the booth, his eyes were bright.

  “You’re six jumps ahead of a kangaroo, old man,” he said admiringly. “Burke—that’s Peace—did telephone Michelsen, half an hour ago, asking if anyone had come to look for him. The Swede told him I’d been there. I’ll trace the call . . .”

  Tope wagged his head. “Don’t waste your time,” he urged, frowning with a slow perplexity.

  Howell made an explosive sound: “What do you want me to do; stand here and watch the crowd go by?”

  Tope was thinking aloud. “Peace is a gamester, Dave,” he said. “He’s playing a game right now, for the fun of it. You ever play hide-and-seek when you were young? Remember how when you got a good hiding place, and they didn’t find you, you stood it as long as you could, and then you’d give some sign? Whistle, or hoot, or something? At first you wanted not to be found; but there wasn’t any fun in that if they never looked in your direction at all. Peace is going to be in that frame of mind pretty soon, wanting you to look right in his direction without seeing him!”

  And he considered; and Howell asked angrily: “What good does that do me?”

  “It’s just like hide-and-seek,” Tope insisted. “If the boy who was It didn’t find you, you were always itching to give him a signal. And if you were It and couldn’t find anyone, the best way was to get out of sight yourself, and wait till someone stuck out his head to see where you were. You might try that. Keep out of sight till he thinks you’ve gone away!” But these psychological abstractions were beyond the comprehension of big Dave Howell. He said as much. “The only way I know to hunt for a man is to hunt for him,” he insisted angrily; and he asked: “Had dinner? Where you bound now?”

  Tope chuckled. “I’m stepping out, Dave,” he confessed. “I went back to the Jervis Trust after you phoned me. Did you know young Clint is home, and his sister too? That was Clint we saw up there, in Randall’s place. He’s gone to work for a living. I’m having dinner with them all tonight.”

  “The kid’s home?” Howell exclaimed. “Those wild cubs!”

  “They’re taming down,” Tope assured him. “Miss Moss has a head on her shoulders. She’ll handle them yet—if they don’t have too much money for a while.”

  And he went on, willing in fairness to give Dave a chance to guess the truth: “I don’t think she’s sorry Peace got away.

  I believe she thinks they’re better off without the money. She’s mothered them since they were babies! You know the way a spinster will take another woman’s children into her heart, make them her own.”

  “I guess they’ll take the money if we find it, just the same,” Howell said grimly.

  Tope assented. “Yes.” His eyes clouded. “And that might be bad!” He looked at Howell, and he added slowly: “I’ve one of my hunches, Dave. This show isn’t over. There’s trouble coming still.”

  “There’s always trouble,” Dave agreed, “when four hundred thousand dollars gets out of the pasture, till it’s back behind the bars again.”

  And after another word or two, they parted and Tope went on toward the room that was his home. He had still half an hour or so before the rendezvous at the Touraine; he shaved and changed. Evening clothes, it occurred to him, might be the order of the day; but the old man was not used to such regalia. He had tails packed away in camphor; he took the garments out, examined the yellowed vest, the tawny linen. But he decided in the end he were better advised to attempt nothing he could not perform. He put on a light gray suit, relatively new; and he brushed his shoes, and he had an impulse—which amused him—to buy a flower for his buttonhole. At a quarter before six, feeling as starched and uncomfortable as a boy on Sunday morning, he descended to the street and turned toward the hotel.

  The Touraine grill is just below the street level, reached by elevator from the lobby or by stairs from the street. Tope descended the stairs into the corridor where coats were hung on a long rack, and cigars and cigarettes and magazines were dispensed from a convenient counter. He surrendered his coat and hat to the woman in black with a white apron who was in attendance there, and bought an evening paper and sat down to read it with the slow attention the columns of the press could always command from him; and then two young people came down in the elevator and looked up and down the corridor, and stood talking together in low tones, laughing now and then.

  He recognized them readily enough; Mat Hews and Kay Ransom. Young Hews, he thought, was not by any stretch of the term handsome; his countenance had a battered appearance, and he was lean and only moderately tall. But his eyes were gay and his mouth was firm. Kay was shorter than he, black-haired, pretty in that colorful fashion which so soon surrenders to encroaching years. When the sparkle of youth should have departed from her eyes, she would not draw a second glance from passers-by; but just now she was vivacious, charming. He watched them over his paper covertly; he heard a word or two of their casual conversation. And then Clint and Clara Jervis and Miss Moss came down the stairs together, and Mat and Kay moved quickly to meet them, and the four young people talked all at once, so that Tope had time for a moment’s absurd fear that they had forgotten him before Clara discovered him sitting here behind his paper, and came swiftly across the corridor, exclaiming:

  “Inspector! Waiting long? Clint’s always ten minutes late. Come and meet Mat and Kay.”

  She was so young, he had a sudden rueful pity for her. Youth knows so little what to expect from life. It is as well for mankind, he thought, not to know the future; the weight of all the mishaps to come, if they could be foreseen, would crush even the bright valor of youth. He remembered, as he crossed toward where the others stood, that dim certainty he knew a while ago that this business of Peace was not yet done; and then Mat Hews gripped his hand, and Kay Ransom cried:

  “A policeman? A murder man? Inspector, I’m thrilled!”

  Then Miss Moss came to stand beside him, and he found this woman like an anchorage, calm and secure. She was at his left at the round table, Kay Ransom on his right. Clara and Mat were side by side and the Inspector saw that they were at first absorbed in one another, their voices low, their eyes joined in a warm glance.

  He had expected to sustain a sort of catechism from these youngsters; he had even prepared a tale or two to tell them. But almost from the first Kay and Mat talked shop, and the others were content to listen while their swift tongues ran. Their work, he saw, possessed them completely.

  Mat remembered at last to ask politely:

  “You’ve seen the show, Inspector?” And when Tope nodded: “Hammond is great, don’t you think?”

  “I thought he was afraid,” said Tope, rather surprised at his own words. He had not been conscious of thinking Hammond was afraid; yet in retrospect now he realized that this was in fact the case. The man, who played the part of a saturnine and dauntless criminal, had in fact worn the impalpable aura of some secret fear.

  Mat assented reflectively: “That’s so! I hadn’t thought, but it is so!”

  And Kay Ransom said with a relish: “Of course he is! You remember, when that Mrs. Dillaway died they almost indicted him, and for years and years he couldn’t get any parts at all. I suppose he’s always expecting something like that again.”

  And she talked on, and Mat put in a word now and then, and Clara too. The company had been organized in California; Clara herself had watched their first rehearsals. She knew the whole cast almost as well as Kay did. And Tope, listening, learned many things of no least importance. He heard how Hammond had built up his part, constantly adding or eliding lines, forever trying new bits of business; he heard how Mat h
ad by accident discovered an effective gesture which he used in the murder scene; he heard how seriously Madison, the stage manager, took the fact that he was Hammond’s understudy; he heard Kay’s boast that it was she who had suggested the most effective business in the play, as a result of which Lola Cyr now calmly powdered her nose in that hideous moment when behind her the machine guns were chopping down four men. And the old Inspector learned that Max Urbin, who played opposite Hammond, was afraid of his wife, a withered little woman who came to the theatre for every performance to make jealously sure that he exchanged no word with Lola Cyr, or Kay. And Hammond had a new valet who was desperately in love with Lola’s middle-aged French maid and trailed her hopelessly. And Lola Cyr had a new man on the string, Kay cried; but Mat Hews interrupted her in a fashion Tope thought abrupt.

  He wondered if these others thought so too, but if they did, they gave no sign.

  “Hammond is mad about her, Kay,” Mat insisted curtly, and Kay met his eyes, and said then:

  “Of course. All men are! She’s mysterious, no end, my dear! She makes a fetish of it. It’s good publicity for her, of course; but she certainly puts on a show. I’ll hand it to her. No address, no phone, comes and goes alone. Even her makeup stuff all has the labels scraped off, so you can’t find out what kind of cream she uses, or perfume. She says her private life is her own business!” The girl was suddenly a mimic, her voice a deep, throaty murmur. “Upon the stage,

  I belong to the world, but once the curtain falls, I belong to myself alone.”

  Clint drawled in an amused tone: “I wonder! They say otherwise.”

  “Oh, she’s got the name all right,” Kay agreed. “Whether she’s got the game too, I don’t know. She doesn’t deny it! In fact, she hints at it all the time. I’ve talked to her.” She became Lola again, her tones vibrating, almost masculine.