Lady in Peril

by Ben Ames Williams

  They found Clint there; but he had no new “word from Clara, so they settled themselves to wait in a momentary expectation of the girl’s appearance. But for a long while she did not come, and the hours dragged. Clint suggested three-handed bridge, but Inspector Tope knew nothing of the game. So Miss Moss and Clint began to teach him backgammon, and the old man showed a shrewd appreciation of the strategy and tactics of this pastime, combining discreet retreat with bold audacity so well that he began to win an occasional game from them by and by.

  The evening slipped away, and eleven struck, and twelve. Clint became increasingly restless; and even Miss Moss began to be in some degree uneasy. Tope was outwardly serene; yet his composure was only superficial. He thought Clara might have met some mischance; he wondered whether Mat Hews were with her; and he was conscious that the hour was late, and that Miss Moss might be wishing he would go home. Yet he waited stubbornly; and when at about a quarter of one they heard a faint tap at the door, he knew a vast relief. He and Miss Moss were on their feet upon the instant; but Clint was at the door before them, swung it wide.

  Clara, and young Hews, came darting in; they were laughing softly together; they looked back over their shoulders; they spoke in gay whispers, hands entwined.

  “H-sh!” Clara bade them. “We sneaked in! There was a great big policeman watching outside to nab me!”

  Tope looked at Miss Moss, and he saw tears in her eyes. Then Clara saw these tears too, and she was suddenly contrite, and she fled to the older woman, caught her close.

  “Darling!” she cried. “Did you worry terribly? I’m sorry. I really am.”

  Miss Moss smiled mistily. “Sorry nonsense!” she retorted. “You’re the least sorry-looking young people I ever saw in my life! Both of you, happy as clams!”

  “Clams?” Clara protested, shuddering with mirth. “I’m not a clam. Nor Mat!” She reached behind her, hooked her hand through Mat’s arm, drew him forward. “Look at him, darling,” she commanded. “Clint, you too.” She even included Inspector Tope. “And you! You’re a nice old thing. Don’t you think he’s nice, too?”

  Mat grinned in a vast discomfort; and Miss Moss turned to him.

  “My dear,” she said understandingly, “I always liked you. Here!” She rose on tiptoe to kiss him.

  And Clint stared at one of them and the other. “Say, what’s it all about?” he protested; and then he laughed aloud and clapped Mat Hews on the shoulder.

  “Done it?” he cried.

  “Done it,” Clara told them jubilantly. “This morning, early. In the most darling little town. An old minister with lovely whiskers, and a hired man and the minister’s wife. She gave us griddle cakes for breakfast. And we drove home slowly, through the snow.”

  Mat said soberly: “I wanted you there, Miss Moss. And Clint too! But—it seemed like the thing to do; the thing for us to do.”

  Clara cried: “It was all perfectly thrilling from the start!” And Miss Moss said smilingly:

  “We don’t know anything at all, remember. Start at the beginning, dear!”

  Clara looked at Mat with dancing eyes. “Well, the beginning was a fearful row!” she confessed, laughing at the memory. “You see, Mat had found his pistol in Lola’s dressing room; and he knew I’d taken it, and he thought of course I killed Doctor Canter . . .”

  Mat protested gravely: “I thought you were a darned little fool for taking the gun, and lying to Hagan, and going to Lola’s dressing room to quarrel some more with Canter!”

  “Well anyway,” Clara insisted, “he took me into his dressing room to scold me, and I was furious with him; and then he started to climb out of the window . . .”

  “I wanted to get rid of that gun.” Mat explained. “Before they found it and hooked it up with Clara.”

  “But we weren’t nearly through with our fight.” Clara took up the tale. “So when he jumped out of the window I jumped after him; and when he climbed into his car, so did I. And he tried to put me out, and I raged at him, and we had a frightful row, and he was driving like mad all the time. And then all of a sudden we made up . . .” Her eyes turned to Mat. “And after that,” she said softly, “everything was beautiful! And coming home was so darned exciting; with policemen everywhere. There was one out front here! We had to sneak in through the alley and the cellar to get here at all. Came up in the freight elevator!”

  “Why not the regular elevator, or the stairs?” Miss Moss asked, for the sake of watching the girl’s happy countenance.

  “Well, the freight elevator was already down there, with a light on, and the door open,” Clara told them. She laughed at the recollection. “We had a time with it. Mat couldn’t start it; and then he couldn’t stop it. If this hadn’t been the very top floor, we couldn’t have stopped; but it wouldn’t go any higher!”

  Miss Moss said then, smilingly: “Clara, I don’t blame you for running away with this young man—so long as you’re back again. But dear, we want to find out some things from you.”

  Clara’s eyes clouded. “I suppose so,” she agreed. “Even Mat cross-examined me!” She looked at him in a gay reproach.

  “I sure was dumb,” said the young man regretfully. Inspector Tope spoke for the first time. “You can’t be blamed much, Hews,” he said. “You knew enough to make anyone—think just what you thought. Only I wouldn’t have had the nerve to wipe out her finger prints, in the dressing room I”

  Mat stared at him; but Clara whispered: “Did you, Mat? Did you do that? You didn’t tell me! Darling!” She was a moment silent; and her eyes communed with his. She said then to them all:

  “But I didn’t have the gun! I had laid it down on the props table in the wings. I meant to give it back to Mat when he came off; but I forgot to look for it again!”

  “You did go to speak to Doctor Canter?” Miss Moss asked.

  “Yes,” she assented reluctantly. “Yes, I . . .”

  But they were interrupted by a sharp, broken knock on the door; a knock that was somehow eloquent of frantic haste. It was Inspector Tope this time who opened, while the others stood paralyzed.

  He opened the door and a woman came stumbling in; a woman in her nightdress, with staring, tear-dimmed eyes, and cheeks streaked with tears, and scant brown hair of a dingy, lifeless hue. A woman shuddering with racking fears. She stumbled past Inspector Tope, into this room . . .

  And it was only when her back was turned that he realized she wore over her nightgown a negligee of metal cloth, bright as silver. This was Lola Cyr!

  She was no beauty now; a distracted woman, nothing more. Her dull brown hair hung in a thin braid a few inches down her back. She looked to right and left; and she asked sharply:

  “Is Walter here?”

  . Hammond was not here; so much was palpable. Their silence answered her.

  She cried: “I don’t know where he is! I’m afraid!”

  Miss Moss drew near her, touched her arm reassuringly. “What is it?” she asked. “Tell us, please.”

  “I thought he’d gone to bed long ago,” the woman whispered. “Annette was rubbing me. I went into his room, and he was gone; and the elevator man says he didn’t go down. I thought he might be here!”

  And she added hopelessly: “He was undressed! His clothes are there! Where has he gone?”

  Clint protested: “He couldn’t get out, any other way except the elevator!”

  But Inspector Tope moved nearer. “You stay here,” he told the trembling woman gently. He spoke to Miss Moss and Clara: “You folks take care of her. We’ll find him!” And he summoned Clint and young Mat Hews with his eyes. They stepped out into the hall. He spoke to Mat.

  “You said the freight elevator was down in the cellar,” he reminded that young man. “Where is it now? He might have gone that way!”

  “I’ll show you,” Mat answered. “But—what was Hammond doing with her? That’s Lola Cyr! Say, she’s not bald at all, is she? Not even beautiful!”

  “They’re married! She loves him!” Top
e spoke sharply. “And—the man was afraid of death today! Hurry, son.”

  So Mat was silenced, and these three moved swiftly down the hall. They stepped into the freight elevator and descended; they emerged into the dark cavern of the cellar.

  Here were long shadowed corridors flanked by boarded cubbies in which lodgers might store their trunks or extra furniture. At the end of the passage on the right, a single light glowed dimly. Tope hesitated.

  “Was the outside door unlocked?” he asked Mat. “How did you get in?”

  “Unlocked, yes,” said young Hews. “But shut!”

  “Hammond wouldn’t go out in his pyjamas,” Tope considered. “Let’s look around, see if he’s here!”

  So they began a methodic search of the cellar. They found the switchboard and turned on every light. Inspector Tope walked ahead; the two younger men moved furtively upon his heels, their nerves drawn tight.

  They found Walter Hammond in one of the coal bins. This was a huge concrete vault, the floor sloping downward toward the door at which they entered. A naked bulb hung from the ceiling to illumine the place. In its further end, a heap of fine coal, half a dozen tons or so, reflected the light in faint gleaming points. Halfway from the door to this mound of coal, Hammond lay.

  Tope bade the others wait in the door; he approached the man, knelt beside him, struck a match.

  Hammond was in his pyjamas and dressing gown, the garments he had worn that morning when Tope and Howell called upon him. His hands were black with coal dust. He was all begrimed with it. He sprawled on his back and he was dead. A wadded blanket lay beside him on the black floor.

  Tope saw that one of the bullets had passed through the man’s wrist, as though Hammond had flung out his hand to ward off the death he saw imminent. The bullet had smashed his watch; the hands had stopped at twenty-two minutes of one.

  The Inspector, kneeling there, looked at his own watch. It was now just past one o’clock. He remembered that at about twenty-two minutes of one, Clara and Mat Hews must have been in this cellar on their way upstairs; and for a moment as he crouched above the murdered man, Tope felt himself unutterably weary and old.

  9

  INSPECTOR TOPE could act quickly when there was need of quick action; but also he could wait to set his thoughts in order. He did so now. By the watch on Hammond’s wrist, the man had been shot at twenty-two minutes of one. Mat and Clara, on their own statement, had beep here in the cellar at about that time. Tope estimated that they had been upstairs perhaps fifteen minutes before Lola knocked on the door; it might have required another five minutes for the Inspector and Mat and Clint to come down and search, and find Hammond here . . . And it was now five minutes past one. Then twenty-five minutes ago, Mat and Clara must have been about entering the cellar.

  But Tope returned to sanity again, even while he stayed kneeling beside the dead man, his back turned toward the doorway where Clint and Mat stood watching. Murder was not in these youngsters. He remembered how their eyes shone when they came into the room upstairs; he remembered their bright cheeks, and quick laughter, and gay mirthful tones. Not they.

  Then Clint asked, behind him, in a husky voice: “Is he dead?”

  Tope nodded. “Wait,” he muttered. He was thinking, still. Perhaps they had come through the cellar while the slayer still lurked in some shadow here. They might even have heard the shot. He asked:

  “Mat? You hear anything when you were down here? See anyone? How long were you here?”

  Mat said quickly: “No. Not a soul. Not even in the alley. We went from the outer door straight through to the elevator; saw the door open, and the light on, and went straight through. No, we didn’t hear a thing!”

  “Hear anything while you were still outside, before you came in?” Tope insisted.

  “No.”

  Yet the night was still, the air unstirring. On such a night sounds carry far. Strange that they had not heard the shot, even in the alley; strange that no one on the first floor had heard. The Inspector’s glance cast to and fro; and he saw the crumpled blanket tossed beside the body on the concrete floor.

  He touched the blanket gingerly with his forefinger, opening the folds, careful not to disturb it too much; and so he found at last that which he had counted on discovering. A small, charred hole; a smut of burned powder. The murderer had muffled his gun in this blanket before he fired, to deaden the sound.

  Tope looked at the dead man intently. One bullet had struck his wrist, on the inner side, and smashed through between the bones and battered the wrist watch into shapelessness. That was the ball, Tope judged, which had hit Hammond in the face. The wound was there. But another had pierced his chest; and there were faint powder marks upon his bright pyjamas. And the Inspector tilted back on his heels to consider these matters. The first shot had been fired then from a little distance, through Hammond’s upflung wrist, into his face. That would have stunned him, perhaps killed him, at least knocked him down. The second shot was at close range; a mercy stroke to the wounded man.

  Yet there was something here that offended the Inspector’s instinct for the fitness and symmetry of things. He could not set his finger on the point which puzzled him; nevertheless it remained lurking in his mind.

  But in the meantime, there was a punctilio to be observed. Tope rose and backed carefully out of the vaulted concrete chamber in which Hammond lay. There might be other footprints in the coal dust here, of some significance. He backed to the door, and the younger men drew aside to let him through, and he saw their white faces, saw their eyeballs gleam in the naked light.

  Clint whispered: “What do you make of it, Inspector?”

  But Tope wagged his head. “Not time to think about that, yet,” he returned. He spoke to these youngsters with authority. “Clint, you go out and find a policeman. Bring him here. Tell him I’m here and I’m notifying Headquarters, so he needn’t stop to phone.”

  “Right,” Clint assented briskly; he turned away.

  And Tope said to young Hews: “Son, you stay here, by the door.”

  “All right, sir,” Hews agreed. “But—shouldn’t someone take word upstairs?”

  “I’ll go up with you presently,” Tope told him. “You wait now.”

  So Hews waited; and the Inspector went searching for a phone. He set about this like a man who knew his ground; and he smiled grimly, remembering how he knew where now to look for what he sought. Peace in his character of Burke had lived in this basement, in a room off the furnace room; and Tope guessed that there must be in this room a telephone. Else how could Miss Moss have warned Peace that the time had come for him to flee?

  He found the room, he found the telephone, he called Headquarters to report what had happened here. And: “Tell Hagan,” he directed, “that this hooks up with the Canter case. He’ll want to come.”

  Having done this, he turned his attention to the room in which he stood. It was disused now, he remembered. Michelsen had told them the day before that the janitor who took Burke’s job slept at home. Tope saw a bed, a table, some books and magazines, a chair or two. The bed was disordered where a blanket had been torn away. That would be the blanket which lay now on the floor beside the dead man.

  There was a window which opened into a sunken area off the alley, and Tope found this window unlatched, and he opened it to look out. But there were no traces in the smooth snow. The murderer, Tope reflected, had had no need to use this method of entrance, since the alley door was, according to Mat, unlocked.

  And he wondered suddenly whether the killer were gone; and he stood still a moment at the thought. He was not a fearful man, yet there were fears in him now. This individual with whom they had to deal, Peace or some other, possessed a cool ferocity not easily to be turned aside. To have killed once is to acquire a sort of immunity; when your own life is already forfeit, to kill and kill again does not increase the penalty of capture. Doctor Canter was dead, and Hammond was dead; and unless the killer were laid promptly by the heels, others
well might die. If the man had even minor reasons for another killing, he need not now hesitate through any fear of punishment. Only the risk of detection could deter him.

  But this same fear of capture might prompt him to kill again, in a sort of self-defense. Suppose he were somewhere here; hidden, watching, waiting to escape . . . Tope moved briskly out into the furnace room again; he crossed to where young Hews stood by the entrance to that coal bin where the body lay, and he felt something like relief to find the youngster safe and sound.

  “All right?” he asked. “See anyone? Hear anyone?”

  Hews shook his head. “I’d like to go upstairs, sir,” he urged. “They’ll be frantic.”

  “In a minute,” Tope promised. “Wait till Clint comes.”

  Mat fretted at the delay; but they had not long to wait before Clint returned with an officer. He was unknown to Tope, but he had heard the Inspector’s name. Tope told him briefly:

  “The body’s in there! Walter Hammond, the actor. He’s been playing in that gangster thing at the Booth. I’ve telephoned Headquarters. Hagan must be on the way.”

  “Right, Inspector,” the policeman agreed.

  Tope explained: “Everything’s just the way it was.” He pointed to the floor. “Tell Hagan those are my tracks, in the coal dust. I walked in to look at him, and backed out. He may find other tracks besides mine.”

  “You find anything?”

  Tope hesitated. “I looked around,” he confessed. “Hagan may want to talk to me. Tell him I’m upstairs, Apartment 14-A.” And he added: “I’ll see to it there’s someone to let him in when he comes.”

  The younger man saluted; and Tope, with Clint and young Hews at his heels, found the stairs that led up to the first floor. They discovered the elevator man asleep in a chair at the telephone switchboard, since this was during the small hours of the night also in his charge. They roused him and bade him watch for Hagan’s coming, and then Tope and the others stepped into the elevator and the man ran them to the fourteenth floor. In the corridor outside the door of the apartment, Tope warned the younger men to let him do the talking. Then he knocked, and Miss Moss opened the door.