Mollock, meanwhile, carrying on in New York, went down to meet the yacht. The Jezebel had moved rapidly. Under full steam pressure, she had come back from the Indies a great deal faster than she had gone there. Before the return voyage had ended, however, Curly Pope knew that the identification had been an error and that his wife was waiting for him in New York. Cicotte had humanely flashed the news by wireless, after verifying it himself.
The Chicago yachtsman had always been a man of spirit, who had passed reckless opinions on his sister-in-law’s children. On this occasion he had a number of vivid remarks to make about Mrs. Kingsley Duane herself.
Husband and wife were reunited on a pier at the yacht harbour, and both were unaffectedly moved by the meeting. Cynical photographers, however, recorded the event with their usual tranquillity. Among the reporters present was young Mr. McDaniel of the Chicago Daylight, ambitiously determined to interview everybody on the boat.
Mr. McDaniel was annoyed. Things had not happened as he had planned them. Catapulted into the East by Cicotte’s revelation of Mollock’s surprising prophecy, he had been vastly discouraged to encounter, a little later, the detective himself upon the scene—and apparently on the best of terms with the prophetic fictionist. Then the extraordinary Walter Ghost had entered the picture, and lo! the three of them—Ghost, Mollock, and the wily Cicotte—were suddenly as thick as thieves. Mr. McDaniel would have been very happy to believe the story writer guilty of the Garment murder had it been possible any longer to believe it; but that amazing hunch was beginning, he feared, to look a trifle sick.
Charlesworth, the literary agent—a sort of darkhorse choice for murderer—had told the reporter, politely, to go to grass; while Stella Birdflight, known only to McDaniel as “the woman of the train,” remained for him an unidentified mystery. This was a bit of bad luck for Aubrey, for Miss Birdflight had a story to spill and would not have hesitated to spill it. She would probably have demanded money, but there were quantities of that behind the activities of Aubrey McDaniel.
He had no idea that Cicotte had departed for Chicago.
Of Mollock he inquired, as one great writer to another: “What do you make of it all, Mr. Mollock?”
“All what?” asked Mollock, turning. “Oh, it’s you again! You are certainly the most fortuitous burglar in the business, aren’t you? Doesn’t it ever occur to you that you are butting in?”
Mr. McDaniel grinned. “I was very bashful as a child,” he observed.
“You got well over it,” said Mollock, with conviction. “Well, what can I do for you, no doubt?”
“I want a story. This Garment mystery has flopped like a trained seal. Where’s Cicotte? I thought he’d be here to meet the yacht.”
“He’s gone back to Chicago. No, he really has, McDaniel. I’m not joking.”
“Where’s Mr. Ghost then?”
“He also, as it happens, has gone to Chicago.”
Mr. McDaniel was alarmed. “With Cicotte?”
“I believe they did go on the same train, now that you ask,” admitted Mollock reflectively.
“Ow-oo!” howled young Mr. McDaniel. “Something’s happening in Chicago!”
“Then I can’t tell you what it is,” said Mollock. “I don’t know.”
“Did they leave in a hurry?”
“Well, they weren’t running—if that’s what you mean.”
Young Mr. McDaniel was greatly worried. “And I’m here,” he moaned, “listening to you tell about it! Look here, Mr. Mollock, be a sport! What took them to Chicago? Is it this Garment business or the other?—the woman, I mean!”
“H-m-m! It might be both, you know,” said Mollock cautiously. For the time being, at least, he was determined to shield Kimbark from this persistent leech.
The reporter nodded. “I know—the servants! That dress—eh? No, I don’t, either! What the deuce could a servant have had to do with Stephen Garment?”
Mollock was sympathetic. “It’s all Greek to me, too,” he confessed. “I’ll tell you this: Ghost did suggest that I ask the Popes about servants employed by them in recent years. But I’m bound to add that I don’t believe he thinks the Amersham case important.”
Young Mr. McDaniel was not impressed, either. “I’ve already asked Mrs. Pope about that dress,” he said. “It was hers, but she doesn’t know when or how she got rid of it. And that suicide note—now who stole that, more than a year ago?” He made a gesture of despair. “I’ve got to let the office know that Ghost and Cicotte are in Chicago,” he cried, and fled before the story writer could detain him.
Mollock and Harold Anger greeted each other like brothers who had been long separated by jail or distance.
“Betty,” cried the secretary hilariously, “you’ve met Mr. Mollock before, I think. Let me present him to you now as the author of our happiness. It was he who suggested the expedition upon which I had my first intoxicated glimpse of you. At the wedding he will give us a set of his immortal works, elaborately bound in full morocco.”
Miss Waterloo, covered with freckles and confusion, came forward and gave the novelist her hand.
“Then it’s all settled?” asked Mollock needlessly. “Well, I’m glad. Thus it is in fiction and in life. It happened much the same way with me, you know. An ocean voyage, a girl with light hair, and the deed was done. I congratulate you both.”
“What happened in your case, Mr. Mollock?” asked the girl with light hair. It was really red, however.
“I married her.”
“You’re not married!”
“Of course I’m married. Hasn’t Anger told you? I’ve been married for years and—months. Why not?”
She blushed, then answered him with her usual frankness: “You act less like a married man than anyone I have ever known.”
Mollock was reflective. “Do you know,” he observed, after an instant, “Mrs. Mollock tells me exactly the same thing! But then,” he added kindly, “you can’t have met so very many men, after all. It’s just as well.”
He paid his respects to the happily reunited Popes, bowed gallantly to the rest of the ladies, and shook hands with the rest of the men. Miss Maynard he had not met before, and he viewed her with interest.
“Listen, Curly,” he said, when he had taken Pope aside into one of the cabins. “Cicotte has gone back to Chicago, with my friend Ghost—a sort of highbrow Nick Carter—and I’m more or less in charge of things. I mean, if you or this spy of Cicotte’s—what’s his name? Johnson!—have anything to report, I’m the receptacle.”
But the yachtsman shook his head. “I have nothing to report. It wasn’t my job. Barney Cicotte tried to stick me with it, and I told him to go to hell. I don’t know what the Johnson reptile can have to say that he hasn’t already reported. He sent code messages off, somewhere, every night until we reached Havana. I’ll point him out to you. Isn’t it a lousy mess? But your friend Anger is a daisy.”
“So is the girl,” agreed Mollock. “Young, but docile and attractive. Who is the tenth member—Miss Maynard? I think I haven’t met her before.”
Pope laughed. “Friend of the Van Peters. Brought her along as a sort of companion for Anger. You see how that turned out! She’s a nice old girl, but she takes a lot of entertaining; and I’ve had to do the entertaining.”
“She looks a bit like Frederick the Great,” said Mollock critically. “Well, I suppose I had better look up this ‘Johnson reptile,’ as you call him. Will you come along and vouch for me?”
“I’d rather kick him in the pants,” growled Curly Pope. “Yes, I’ll tell him who you are. Ask him about his dealings with Dromgoole, if he doesn’t confess them. That’s the only thing I have to report—and Anger would tell you about it, if I didn’t.”
He gave the story writer an account of the experience outside the wireless room. Mollock was suitably impressed.
“And after that,” said Pope, “on the homeward trip, we discovered that Dromgoole was also bribing Johnson. A form of blackmail, I imagine—I suspect that Johnson caught him bribing the operator, and levied tribute.”
But the Johnson reptile had nothing to report, he said, that had not already been received by Cicotte, before he left New York. It occurred to the novelist that his own part, as resident member of the firm of Ghost, Mollock & Cicotte, had not been a highly important one. It seemed likely enough that Ghost had merely been kind—and desirous of going to Chicago alone. The steward had no objection, however, to repeating everything he had already forwarded to his superior.
They went ashore together. Mollock, listening to a racy account of the voyage, almost wished he had been a member of the party.
“As for these Kimbarks, Mr. Mollock,” observed the Johnson reptile, “Cicotte’s got the dope on them. They didn’t fool him for a minute. At the table, and when they were talking with the others, everything was nice as pie, but when they were alone together they weren’t always so sweet. Say, they don’t Mocha and Java worth a damn!”
“You mean they fought?” asked Mollock, interested.
“You couldn’t call it exactly fighting. It was more like snarling. Not all the time, you know. Sometimes she’d get soft and beg him to tell her the truth—and he’d sort of sneer and tell her to keep on guessing. It wasn’t easy to hear everything they said, and I didn’t hear everything; but I heard enough to know what it was all about.”
“What was it about?”
“She thinks he did the job. She was trying to make him tell her. Delilah stuff, eh? Maybe she’d have sold him out, if he had.”
“Of course, he never did confess?”
“Not him. Then there’d be times when they’d be like a couple of sucking doves, and talk about their second honeymoon. Probably to throw anybody off the scent that happened to be listening.”
Mollock was inclined to agree. It was Ghost’s own theory, he recalled, that Mrs. Kimbark thought her husband had committed the murder. But why didn’t the ass deny it, and shut her up?— whether or not he had!
“I suppose Cicotte sent you a wireless when this woman was found—up at Amersham?” he suggested.
“Didn’t hear of it till we got to Havana,” said the Johnson reptile. “He sent me word when Mrs. Pope turned up, though. I told Mr. Pope about that myself.”
“Well,” said Mollock briskly, “that seems to be the whole story, except as to Dromgoole. What about Dromgoole?”
“Dromgoole?”
“Sure—the fellow who paid you to shut up about the code stuff he was getting from the operator.”
The steward gave his inquisitor a long, appraising glance. “M-m-m,” he observed. “So you know about that! Who was it saw us—Anger or the captain?”
“Both of them.”
“They were spryer than I thought they were,” commented the Johnson reptile. “Or Dromgoole was an ass.”
“Probably Dromgoole was an ass,” said Mollock. “He rather struck me in that light.”
The steward-detective suddenly laughed. “And now, I suppose, you think I’ve been holding out on Cicotte! Well, I haven’t. Cicotte knows the whole story. I let him know the first time I caught Dromgoole with the operator—that was one message Dromgoole didn’t see! He didn’t see the reply, either. Cicotte said to show him everything—and take his money myself.”
It was Mollock’s turn to say “M-m-m.” After a moment he added: “I wonder why.”
“He couldn’t read ’em. Or if he could, he had to figure ’em for himself. I never told him the key.”
“Didn’t he ask for it?”
“He sure did; but I had my instructions about that. I told him: nothing doing! I’d take a chance on the code, I said—for a reasonable sum—but not on the key.”
“What was the sum?” asked Mollock, curious.
“Five dollars a message.”
The novelist laughed. “Nice profitable little voyage for you,” he commented. “I wonder whether the messages were worth that to Dromgoole! What does Cicotte think of him?”
“As to that, I don’t know. All I know is, I was told to keep an eye on Dromgoole, too.”
“Anything suspicious?”
“Nothing except his buying those messages. That’s suspicious enough, I guess.”
“And still you think that Cicotte is right in suspecting Kimbark!”
The Johnson reptile spread his hands. “I don’t know what Cicotte’s thinking about Dromgoole, but I’d make a little bet with anybody that his idea’s the same as mine. Dromgoole was getting those messages for Kimbark.”
“Ah,” said Mollock.
Well, it was a valid thought, he admitted to himself.
“But you never saw him give one to Kimbark? Never heard them talk about the messages when they were together?”
“Never did. And never saw one of them in Kimbark’s cabin, either. In Dromgoole’s they used to be all over the floor, in the morning.”
“The messages?”
“His tries at unravelling them. ‘Pop goes the wild goose’s gizzard,’ was one of them.” The Johnson reptile grinned.
“Good Lord!” said Mollock. “Was that the correct answer?”
“It was not.” The steward was emphatic. “He was a hundred miles away, that time.”
So Cicotte knew of the Dromgoole incident, reflected Mollock. That meant that Ghost, too, knew about it. Nothing, however, had been said to him —Dunstan Mollock—on the subject. His mind went back to the night of the murder. Suppose the Johnson reptile to be wrong about Dromgoole’s relation to Kimbark. Suppose Dromgoole, himself, for some unimaginable reason, to have murdered Garment. Was the deed possible? he wondered. Dromgoole had been in the library, that night. He had been almost insistent that the police be apprised of Garment’s continued absence.
Why?
In the light of later developments, a reason was imaginable. Had it been to surround himself with an aura of a certain righteousness? To give himself the character of a man prompt in his right thinking?
It was odd, certainly, how a man’s most innocent assertions at times took on a belated signifi cance.
On the other hand, supposing Dromgoole—that night—to have been the potential murderer: what if Kimbark had notified the police? That would not have been so good; a circumstance which Dromgoole would have been quick to apprehend. His remarks, therefore, might not, after all, have been fraught with the sinister hypocrisy that it was now possible to read into them.
When had Dromgoole left the library? By Jove! recalled the fictioneer, with a little thrill, he had left almost at the instant that Ronald Key had entered to tell Kimbark that Garment was coming up the drive!
Mollock’s memory was quite clear on the point, for he remembered that he had been talking nonsense with Betty Waterloo, and that Dromgoole had taken her away. Quite so! Just as Kimbark had entered the library! Why might not Dromgoole have had knowledge of what Kimbark was about to say? An intuitive knowledge, perhaps, if nothing else. Had he paused in the corridor to listen? Had he left Betty Waterloo, between the library and the living room, to go upon another errand?
They were all points that could be established. Betty Waterloo was in New York. She might still be upon the yacht. At any rate she and Anger were to lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Dunstan Mollock that afternoon.
“Cheers!” murmured Dunstan Mollock thoughtfully; and suddenly he remembered that he was supposed to ask the Popes about the maids and wenches of their establishment no longer in their service.
Annoyed, he returned to the yacht harbour to find that the party already had disbanded. The Van Peters, with Miss Maynard, were leaving for Chicago almost at once; the Kimbarks, with Anger and Miss Waterloo, were dining with the Popes that evening, and would depart the next morning. Dromgoole, who had literary connections in New York, had vanished. Mollock’s informant was Curly Pope, the only member of the group now left upon the yacht. He had remained behind to see that everything was shipshape, and shortly he was to join his wife at a hotel. The crew was still busy at its endless tasks.
Mollock explained the reason for his return.
“I see,” said Pope. “But Myra would know better than I. After all, we can’t have had so many maids within the last two years.” He chuckled: “Personally, I remember only the good-looking ones! There was one, a year or so ago, who was something of a prize winner. Don’t know what became of her.” For a moment he was thoughtful; then more soberly he continued: “But I’ll give you a better answer when I’ve seen the body. The police have asked me to look at it. Seems silly, since Myra has failed to identify it; but if they think there’s a chance, I’m willing to go to Amersham. Why don’t you come along?”
His voice became serious. “In fact, I want to see it. The whole thing bothers me. I’d like to know, Mollock, what damned woman has been lying around dead, all winter, in one of Myra’s dresses!”
Nine hundred miles away, in Chicago, there was a man who might have solved the mystery. He was at the moment lifting his arms above his head in response to Cicotte’s snarling invitation.