Lady in Peril

by Ben Ames Williams

  The little man smiled. “I was Mr. Hammond’s valet,” he explained. “He discharged me yesterday, but he told me you wished a valet. I am open for engagements, sir.”

  Tope wagged his head. “Pshaw!” he protested in a good-humored tone. “If a man says a fool thing, it sure does get around! No, I was just talking to hear myself talk, I’m afraid.”

  Mayhew frowned regretfully. “That is a disappointment!” he confessed; and Tope, more attentive than he seemed, sensed the deep excitement in the man. “A severe disappointment!” he repeated. “When my landlady told me that you came to my boarding house last night, so late, I thought surely you had come to offer me a place!”

  Tope looked at him with a mild blue eye. He was ready now.

  “You came in such haste, so soon as you knew Mr. Hammond was dead,” said Mayhew in a silky tone. And suddenly there was a pistol in his hand. It was level upon Inspector Tope.

  “I cannot stand disappointment,” said Mayhew very gently. “And I do not like talkative, inquisitive old men, Inspector. Forgive my harsh measures; but if you permit . . .” The weapon moved a fraction of an inch as his muscles tightened; and then behind him someone said:

  “Good morning, Mr. Peace!”

  The man leaped back and whirled, to see Miss Moss yonder. Tope, with a speed astonishing in one so old and round, was after him. The gun spat venomously; and then Tope’s weight bore him down. The gun cracked again, and Inspector Tope wrenched the smaller man’s arm, and the gun clattered against the bricks of the hearth. Then a heel struck upward shrewdly, so that Tope gasped, and for an instant did release his hold. Mayhew was free, was at the door, was through . . .

  Tope after him! His dressing gown tangled about his legs. He fell, and scrambled up again. Yet in a moment more, for all his unseemly garb, he would have been down the stairs and out upon the street in hot pursuit; but he looked back. And then he turned back, Mayhew all forgotten now.

  For Miss Moss lay on her face across the floor.

  10

  INSPECTOR TOPE sprang to Miss Moss, and he lifted her in his arms, turned her awkwardly. She lay on her face; he raised her to a sitting posture, supporting her shoulders with his right arm. He was surprised to find how small she was, how slender, how slight her weight; and he was surprised too by her softness. The Inspector had grappled men in his time; he was accustomed to the solid feel of masculine flesh. But by this soft fragility which he felt now, he was curiously moved and pitiful.

  Her cheeks were drained white; she had fainted. And he remembered her prescription for Lola Cyr the night before, so he lifted her incontinently across his knees, himself sitting straight-legged on the floor, in such a way that her head was lower than her body. At the same time he sought for any sign of a wound. There was none upon her head or throat that he could see; but he did discover a small rent in the shoulder of her coat; and when he turned the coat back and stripped the sleeve away, he found a moist dark stain upon the fabric there.

  He gripped her arm and moved it slightly, to discover whether the bullet had struck the bone; and when he did so, Miss Moss opened her eyes and looked up at him in a still bewilderment. He burned with a fierce embarrassment, like a child caught in the jam pot. He had always a certain sense of the ridiculous; and certainly this posture in which they found themselves was absurd enough. The plump old man sitting straight-legged on the floor; the woman full-length across his knees. He saw that she had opened her eyes, and he stammered something; and she closed her eyes again and whispered a word he could not hear. He said earnestly:

  “It’s all right, ma’am, he’s gone!”

  She was silent as though she had fainted again; but he saw that her color did return. She reached for his hand suddenly, and struggled to sit up. He helped her. She sat up on his lap, and rubbed her eyes with her left hand, clinging to his shoulder with her right.

  “Got away?” she asked in a hoarse voice.

  “It’s all right, ma’am,” he repeated. “We’ll get him!”

  “I’m a little—sick,” she confessed, and seemed to wilt against his shoulder.

  “He shot you! Just a nick in your arm. Not bad at all. There . . .” And Inspector Tope patted her reassuringly with his pudgy hand.

  Without lifting her head she opened her eyes, and saw his dressing gown under her cheek. She looked up then, realizing where she was; and she cried:

  “Mercy! We can’t sit here!”

  “Plenty of time to get him,” Inspector Tope urged; but she laughed, and tried to scramble to her feet.

  “I mean, on your lap! On the floor! It’s not decent, Inspector,” she protested, in a deep amusement.

  “Why, ma’am,” he said, with sudden courage, “it seemed all right to me. I kind of liked it. I did.” He was up with her, holding her lest even now she totter and fall.

  “In a chair, perhaps,” she confessed, still smiling. “But not on the floor!”

  He understood that she was laughing at him, or with him; he said seriously:

  “You let me look at your shoulder, ma’am. Or would I call a doctor in? Maybe better that, I guess.”

  “I’m all right now,” she assured him. “Let me see! It hurts!” she admitted, as she slipped off her coat; surrendering it to him. She opened the throat of her gown; she made him look to see whether the bullet had emerged at the back of her shoulder. It had, they found, no more than ploughed the skin below her shoulder, between arm and side.

  “I’d better get a doctor,” he insisted.

  She was consenting when the telephone rang to startle them again. He lifted the receiver, and Dave Howell spoke to him. Tope listened, answered; and he told Howell briefly what had happened here.

  While he did so, Miss Moss moved away; she went into the bathroom, and when he finished, she called to him: “Have you iodine, some disinfectant?”

  “Not a thing, ma’am! Only whiskey!”

  “That will do,” she agreed. He fetched the bottle, handed it through the door to her. And she asked:

  “Is Inspector Howell coming? I thought you said so.”

  “Yes, right away. And he’s getting Hagan. It’s just a question of catching Mayhew, now. Peace, that is to say.”

  “Never mind a doctor. I can fix this myself, I’m sure,” she decided. She was in the bathroom, beyond his sight as he stood outside. “Have you some big, soft handkerchiefs?”

  He had, and brought them. He heard her make a little whistling sound as the alcohol bit at her wound. Later, she was forced to appeal to him for help in securing the bandage. He had no safety pins, so had to knot the ends; and she felt his trembling confusion, and asked laughingly:

  “Why is it a man never has pins handy? They’re always useful. Suppose you lose a button, Inspector, unexpectedly?” He said: “Is that too tight?” She reassured him. “Then I guess it’ll hold,” he suggested, and backed out of the bathroom with a great relief. When she reappeared to join him, her garments were all in order again. Then Howell and Hagan came pounding up the stairs, and another, Doctor Gero:

  Hagan explained: “You said she was hurt!” He looked at Miss Moss. “So I fetched Doc along.”

  “A very small hurt,” Miss Moss assured him. But Tope urged:

  “You’d better let the Doctor look at you, ma’am.”

  So these two disappeared together; and Howell and Tope and Hagan considered what was now to do. Hagan said honestly: “I didn’t have a notion, Tope. Never thought of this Mayhew at all. I couldn’t see anything in it but the girl, Miss Jervis. I never can see but one thing at a time!”

  But Tope confessed: “I wasn’t much ahead of you; and I’d been working on it before Canter ever was killed, so I had a start! I thought it must be Peace, but I didn’t know where Peace was.” He looked toward the bathroom door. “Till she said last night that Hammond’s watch might be wrong, I didn’t get on the Mayhew track at all.”

  And he added: “When I did, I’d ought to have got action quick. But I knew he wouldn’t run away
.” And he said soberly: “He came to kill me this morning, you know. He’d found out I went to his boarding house last night. I guess he figured I was hot on his trail. The man’s blood-crazy. Miss Moss spoke to him, just before he pulled on me. That’s what gave me a break. But he’ll shoot, when we come up with him.”

  “I’ve got the town covered,” Hagan said. “He can’t move far without running into someone. His boarding house . . .”

  “He won’t go back there,” Tope pointed out. “Mind you, this man can fix himself so you don’t know him. The chance is he’s got another room somewhere else. He’s there now, changing himself over, changing his looks around!”

  Miss Moss and Doctor Gero returned to them; and Hagan insisted: “We’re bound to get him!”

  But Howell said hopelessly: “I’ve been after him for over two months, now.”

  Doctor Gero spoke to Tope: “You told me this morning that there were four hundred thousand reasons why he wouldn’t run away.”

  And Howell lifted his head in a quick attention; and Tope nodded.

  “Yes,” he said. “He stole that much from the Jervis Trust two months ago. He hid out long enough to grow a beard, change his looks. We found out where he was; but he ducked, broke the trail again. But if he’d had the money with him, he’d have left town then. It’s somewhere—I’m guessing, but this is a good guess—it’s somewhere where he can’t get it yet. That’s where we’ll find him.”

  “Would he hide it where he couldn’t get at it easy?” Hagan objected.

  Tope hesitated; but Miss Moss suggested: “Something unexpected may have happened to prevent him. Else why did he kill Doctor Canter? And Hammond?”

  Hagan looked at Tope to answer; and the older man said reflectively: “Why, ma’am, you know we figured Canter was. blackmailing him. Canter was in on this whole scheme from the first. Peace paid him once; but then he paid him some more the year after. That has the look of blackmail, to me, and Peace would get tired of that. And the reason he killed Hammond . . .”

  Miss Moss interrupted suddenly. “I know!” she exclaimed. “I’d forgotten, because it didn’t seem to matter, but since Mayhew was Peace . . . Mrs. Hammond—that’s Lola Cyr—told me this morning that Mayhew made love to her yesterday. He asked her to leave Hammond and run away with him. She told her husband. I expect that was why Hammond and Mayhew quarrelled, at the theatre last night.”

  Hagan ejaculated: “What a man!”

  “He’s crazy,” Tope commented. “Money-crazy, and woman-crazy, and blood-crazy. Then he killed Hammond to get this woman!”

  They were an instant silent, considering this. But Miss Moss objected:

  “Why would he take Hammond down cellar to kill him? And if he didn’t take him down, how did he know Hammond would be down there? And if he took him down, how did he make Hammond go?” No one answered, and she said in a deep curiosity: “Why should Hammond go down cellar in his pyjamas, at that time of night?”

  And Tope, at that, laughed aloud: a swift, mirthful chuckle. “Boys, we’re blind!” he told them. “Blind, and deaf and dumb!” He looked toward Miss Moss proudly. “She’ll see it in a minute!” he predicted. “When she knows what you know, Hagan; you and Doctor Gero and me. She’ll see!”

  “What’s that?” Hagan asked. “What are you talking about?”

  And for answer Tope spoke to Doctor Gero: “Hammond clean, Doctor?”

  “No,” Gero confessed. “He couldn’t be, sprawling on that floor. He was covered with coal dust.”

  “Was he dirty all over?”

  “Why, all down his back, and his hands and arms.”

  “You mean, his clothes?”

  “No. No, his hands, too. There was coal dust ground into them. Under his finger nails?”

  Tope swung expectantly to Miss Moss, and they were all silent, watching her. After a moment she smiled, and spoke in some confusion.

  “You mean, what do I think?” she asked. And she said: “Why, I should think Mr. Hammond must have been digging with his hands in the pile of coal!”

  Tope banged his fist into his palm. “He and Peace quarrelled over the woman!” he cried exultantly. “But Hammond had helped Peace to hide out, ever since he disappeared, and he rated a cut of the money. He asked for his share, and Peace told him it was buried in the coal down cellar! Told him to come downstairs that night for his split.” Hagan ejaculated: “Buried in the coal? You think . . .”

  Miss Moss said swiftly: “I remember something! Just after Mr. Peace disappeared, the Estate had a chance to buy a lot of steam coal cheap, and we filled the bins. Mr. Peace couldn’t have foreseen that. But the new coal would bury the money clear out of reach, till the coal was used.” She looked toward Inspector Tope. “And Michelsen telephoned that we’ll soon need more coal, while you were in the office yesterday, so the bins must be low!”

  “Then it’s still there!” Tope exclaimed.

  “Unless he got it last night after he killed Hammond,” Hagan interjected.

  “No!” Tope insisted. “He wouldn’t take time. He’d be afraid the first shot had been heard. He took a chance on the second shot, for the sake of an alibi; then he got out of there. There’s a lot of coal in that bin still. Take some time to dig into it! I say it’s still there!”

  Hagan turned sharply to the telephone. “We’ll see!” he cried.

  But Tope caught his arm. “No. He’ll come for it!” he insisted. “That’s where we’ll grab the man!”

  And while they listened, in the end assentingly, he told them all his plan . . .”

  The basement of the apartment building in which Miss Moss dwelt was divided into two parts by a wide corridor which extended from the alley door to the freight elevator. On one side of this corridor there were, arranged in blocks, a number of boarded compartments for the storage of baggage and unwanted furniture. There was one of these compartments for each tenant; the whole number was impressive; they made a sort of labyrinth of wooden walls, extending not quite to the ceiling of the cellar.

  On the other side of the central corridor were concentrated the heating and other service units. Beginning just beside the doorway into the alley there was a storage space, enclosed; then the small room in which Peace, during his service as a janitor, had lodged. Beyond this again there were three coal bins side by side; each one a concrete vault of considerable proportions, with concrete walls and roof and floor. The floor sloped somewhat toward the furnace room, into which each of these vaults opened. There was another, smaller bin, on the street side of the cellar, in which coal for the hot water heaters was stored; and alongside this bin, a laundry and drying room were provided for the weekly use of tenants.

  A narrow hall led off the main corridor passing between this laundry and the room Peace once occupied, and so came to the furnace room itself. The furnace room was of some extent, with heating units, hot water boilers, fuse boxes, electric refrigeration machines and other apparatus arranged in orderly pattern about the outer walls. There were steel tracks set in the concrete floor, on which a small car ran; and this car, loaded with coal at the bins, could be wheeled readily to the furnaces as desired.

  On the evening after that morning when Mayhew came to kill Inspector Tope, the janitor who had succeeded Burke filled the hoppers with coal at eight o’clock so that the automatic feeders would keep the fires supported for the night; then he departed. At about the same time, a patrol wagon picked up the two patrolmen who all this day had stood guard in front of the building; and it rounded the block to collect two others, posted at either end of the alley in the rear. It then clanged away toward the police station, and the neighborhood resumed its normal aspect.

  In the basement itself, a single bulb burned in the main corridor, halfway from the alley door to the freight elevator. This bulb was cobwebbed and dingy; the light it shed was dim and uncertain. There was no other illumination than this; it served poorly, and in the shadows it was worse than no light at all.

  The basement was dim a
nd silent; but there were sounds in this gray silence. Occasionally one of the refrigerating motors whirred for a while; occasionally the automatic feeders on the furnaces did their appointed task; occasionally there was a gurgling of steam in the water tanks or the clicking of a meter in one of the long rows upon the wall. Sometimes faint sounds emerged from the labyrinth of storage cubbyholes, as though mice, or rats, were busy there.

  If there had been anyone to listen for sounds in this noisy silence, the time must have seemed to him to drag interminably. From eight o’clock in the evening till half after one at night is in fact a very long time, unless you are sleeping. And even to a sleeper, if he be a man rather old and rather tired, who sleeps uncomfortably with his back propped against a concrete wall and his legs cramped against the rear end of a warm furnace, it may still seem long if he wakes from his slumbers now and then.

  Sometimes, when he thus awoke, Inspector Tope began to think he must have been mistaken. Yet for all his doubts, he waited as patiently as he could, comforted by the thought that the others here must be as uncomfortable as he. And at a little after half-past one, he knew his waiting had not been vain; for a faint, cool current of night air came trickling across the floor to touch his legs. There was a window open somewhere, or a door!

  Until now, the night had seemed full of silence; but now when one wished to hear, there were so many small sounds to confuse the ears. But by and by the Inspector did distinguish the soft, sibilant whisper of sliding coal; of fine coal sliding down to fill a cavity in the flank of the pile. And later this sound was repeated, and still later it was repeated again.

  When presently the old man looked at his wrist watch, careful to keep the luminous dial concealed, he saw that it was more than half an hour since he first felt that trickle of cold night air. Later, it was near an hour!

  And then, abruptly and without any warning, the lights came crashing on. The sudden illumination had the effect of cymbals, of a hideous din. It could set a man’s heart pounding dreadfully. Inspector Tope was sick with it; there was a moment when he could not move.