On Monday a stranger reached the city whose arrival was a blow to the investigation. He came from Portland, Maine, he asserted, and within half an hour of his arrival the hotel reporters were reading his neat signature on the Marlborough register: “Adrian Bluefield”; with a fine Dickensian flourish under both names.
Mr. Bluefield was fat and a bit pompous. His jowls, white and heavy, overlay the edges of his soft collar and lent him a pleasantly Falstaffian appearance, dispelled by the hardness of his little eyes, which were lost in rolls of surrounding tissue. It was as if another and larger face lay behind the one immediately visible. The features, however, seemed to be those of an ancient medal, struck to commemorate his triumphal progress through time. He was immensely affable.
Yes, he admitted, he was the only brother of the murdered Amos. A sad, a very sad affair!
Mr. Bluefield smoked cigars in an amber holder. His finger nails glistened as he raised the toy to his lips. He had no doubt, he declared, that his brother had died of a heart seizure and that the notice posted upon his door had been his own grim jest. Realizing his condition, Amos Bluefield had paid a last visit to his famous establishment, made his preparations for death, hung the waxen dummy upon a hook in the closet, and calmly seated himself in the window.
“A last grim jest,” he repeated, shaking his great head thoughtfully.
Amos, he asserted, had been a fellow of considerable humor. He had always resented the almost sacrosanct atmosphere of the shop. He had carried on the tradition of his father, however, until there seemed no longer any reason for so doing.
“I knew, of course,” he added, “that Amos’s heart was bad. He knew it himself.”
Realizing that he, Adrian Bluefield, the brother and only heir, would at once dispose of the famous business—as he fully intended to do—Amos had determined to advertise his retirement in a fashion that would at the same time advertise his disgust. It was a fashion that he, Adrian, although profoundly shocked by the event, understood and, in a way, appreciated. A last grim jest.
“Amos, I happen to know,” said Adrian Bluefield, “was heartily sick of Bluefield, Incorporated. He often told me so.”
It was not a particularly plausible story. It suggested principally that Adrian Bluefield would be glad to come into his inheritance, get rid of it for cash, and return to Portland as rapidly as possible.
A reporter, greatly wondering, ventured a question.
“Gaunt!”
The sudden cry was almost a scream. With an effort Mr. Bluefield recovered himself.
“Why, no,” he said, “I must confess I have not heard of what you call the Gaunt episode. I have seen no newspaper since I left Portland. I have the morning papers here—” he indicated a heap upon a chair beside the door—“but I have not yet had a minute to glance at them. Gaunt? Gaunt? I know that name.”
With portentous calm he listened to the story of the second death. He began to walk about the room, at first slowly, then with increasing speed. It was obvious that this new development had shaken him; obvious too that it was really new. Incredible as it had at first seemed, the man had really had no word of the murder of Hubert Gaunt. The tidings had struck him suddenly with a force that could only be conjectured.
He paused in his march around the room.
“Then it was murder,” he said. “Poor Amos! It was from him that I heard the name you have just mentioned. I have had several letters, only recently, I recall, in which this Gaunt is spoken of. Amos had lent him money—a considerable sum, I believe. It was for old times’ sake. They were at school together, I think. A gambler, was he? But he needn’t have murdered Amos. I am sure my brother was not pressing him. Amos didn’t need the money. And now Gaunt is dead, too! Suicide, of course. The same fantastic turn of mind is evident in both cases.”
Again he was thoughtful.
“Well, gentlemen, I am sorry, in a way, that he killed himself afterward. I should have liked to send him to the Chair. As it is, I suppose there is nothing for it but to accept the unhappy facts. My poor brother!”
A reporter ventured a suggestion.
“No, no,” said Adrian Bluefield. “I see no reason for reopening the inquest. What does it matter, after all, what means was employed? Gaunt is dead. My brother is dead. Nothing can bring them back for explanation or for punishment. No doubt the inquest upon this fellow Gaunt will disclose the means. Some subtle poison, no doubt. Dreadful! And my poor brother, there in his own window! You know, of course, how he hated publicity, how he shunned it in his lifetime.”
He bowed his head and shook it slowly from side to side.
“Naturally, I shall be here for several days,” he continued more briskly. “I shall await the report of the inquest upon Gaunt. We shall probably hold my brother’s funeral to-morrow. At some quiet chapel, I think, and quite privately. I shall retain a lawyer to look after the property until it can be disposed of. My own interests, in the East, of course, make it impossible for me to carry on a business here; and, anyway—” he smiled a trifle deprecatingly—“I am afraid I am not cut out for a shopkeeper.”
He had not seen his brother for some years, he explained, but a warm bond always had existed between them.
“Thank you very much, gentlemen,” he said. “I shall visit the police, of course, sometime during the day. Perhaps they will come to see me. Not that there is anything I can tell them. But I must see an attorney first. I can’t have this inquest reopened, as you tell me there is some talk of doing. It would serve no useful purpose, and I must return shortly to Portland.”
He passed around a box of excellent cigars and watched his visitors depart.
“Certainly a grand guy,” observed one of the reporters, entering the elevator. “He doesn’t care a thing about the money he’s going to get. Just thinking of his poor brother!”
Whereupon two other newspaper hounds laughed raucously and vulgarly.
They smoked their cigars, nevertheless, and found them none the worse for their contact with a Bluefield.
The police, however, welcomed Adrian Bluefield with open arms. Nothing is more annoying than an unsolved mystery in which the public and the press happen to be interested. When it is a fantastic affair, and the clues are slim, a matter-of-fact brother from the East is little less than a godsend. Adrian Bluefield’s statement that he could furnish letters from his brother in which Gaunt was actually mentioned as being in the haberdasher’s debt was almost too good to be true.
In justice to the police it must be said that the idea that Gaunt had murdered Bluefield and then killed himself had already been given consideration. On the face of things it was not a bad theory. Adrian Bluefield’s acceptance of it was all that was necessary to make it the only possible theory.
By the same token, it was no longer imperative that the Gaunt mystery should be unduly pushed. Gaunt—obviously a ne’er-do-well—had owed Bluefield money which he had been unable to repay; there had been a meeting between the two, and a scene, as a result of which Bluefield had been—very cleverly—abolished. But Gaunt was too dead for punishment, and there was no one else to punish. Quod erat demonstrandum, as Euclid remarked.
To be sure, the inquest on Gaunt would have to go ahead, and it might develop something significant. If it did, the mystery of the manner of death would be solved, and the newspapers would have a story. That was all. If it did not, what did it particularly matter? Nobody had come forward to worry about Gaunt.
Nevertheless, the autopsy on the corpse of Hubert Gaunt was as careful as a clever young coroner’s physician could make it—hurried by the very nature of his profession, in a city like Chicago. It resulted precisely as had the autopsy on the body of Amos Bluefield. It had no result whatever.
“Yes,” said Adrian Bluefield, when he had heard the verdict. “Yes, yes! A very dangerous man, I should imagine, this Gaunt.” He shook his head slowly from side to side. “Perhaps it is as well that he is out of the way. With his curious knowledge of God-knows-what, he might have been a tremendous menace even to the police. I regret that my brother should have had to be his victim, but at least the murderer is dead.”
He announced that his brother’s funeral would be held the following afternoon—Tuesday—in the stained-glass chapel at Hillcrest, and that only friends would be present.
On the same day, at approximately the same hour, the body of Hubert Gaunt was buried in the potters’ field.
The same leaden sky looked down upon both spectacles. Slate gray and slate blue.
It had been raining, off and on, for a number of days.