The show, meanwhile, had started again. A minor star, hastily imported from New York, had mastered Lear’s part in an incredibly short time. Once more the doors of the Alhambra were flung open and the public rushed in. It was a master stroke. Lines of law-abiding citizens stood before the box office. The queues extended into the street, crossed the alley, and turned the corner. If ever there had been any doubt as to the success of the piece, there was doubt no longer. Lear’s murder had advertised it to the ends of the country. Simple souls believed, perhaps, that a new star was to be murdered every night. After the first performance dramatic critics observed profanely, among themselves, that the wrong star had been assassinated. In the business office there was some talk of changing the name of the piece from Green Terror to Dead Man Inside.
An additional popular feature was the continuation in the part of Mrs. Caldwell of Doris Carvel, widow of the murdered Lear. The actress herself asserted, ruefully enough, that until matters had been adjusted, her husband’s estate settled, and the mystery of his death solved, she would have to remain in Chicago anyway, and it was necessary to make a living. Widows do not enter hurriedly into their inheritances where a police activity has clouded the issue of death.
Wherefore Miss Carvel played nightly, for a time, in Green Terror, and the public waited patiently for her to crack.
She never cracked. She was a bit nervous, however, the first night of the new dispensation. It was thought that she swayed slightly at the second “Sh-h!”
Suddenly it became necessary to find a new stage detective and a new Mrs. Caldwell. With a bang, the morning newspapers “broke” the story. Clay Ridinghood, playing the part of the detective Halleck, had been seized at his hotel, late the night before.
The charge was not specifically the murder of Patrick Lear. It was freely hinted, however, that the dapper young man was supposed to have had advance knowledge of that event. Mrs. Lear—or Miss Carvel—was also an object of suspicion. While not technically under arrest, she was being carefully guarded at her hotel.
Kelly and Sheets were responsible. Trailing the actor and Miss Carvel, who had been seen together frequently, after the murder, the detectives had interrupted a passionate love scene, not upon the stage. The scene, in point of fact, was a private booth in a notorious night club. Kelly—or Sheets—or perhaps both of them—had heard enough to convince them that, whoever had killed Patrick Lear, Doris Carvel and Clay Ridinghood were very glad he had been killed.
Later, an interview was given by Miss Carvel to a silky youth from one of the smaller journals which caused the gloating public further to erect its pointed ears.
“Yes, I’m glad he’s dead!” she had cried defiantly. “Why shouldn’t I be? He was a beast. I hated him. I was his wife when it suited him— that was all. He had a public of girls—flappers. They adored him. Two generations of them adored him. Once I adored him myself. He said that knowledge of his marriage would kill him with his public. My God! He was forty-three and getting bald! He painted and powdered like a woman. Trying to stay young—for his public! To the public he was charming and romantic. To me he was a brute. We occupied different rooms at the hotel. Nobody knew we were married. He wouldn’t permit it. I could tell you of his cruelties—I could send a message to the girls who keep his picture on their dressers …”
And a great deal more to the same effect.
“Ridinghood! Yes, Ridinghood did know we were married. I told him so myself. He pitied me. If he could, he would have married me. But he didn’t kill Pat Lear. He would have killed him if I had asked him to. But he didn’t do it. He couldn’t have done it. He was on the stage when it happened. Everybody knows that. A whole theaterful of people know it. They saw us, talking together there—speaking our lines …
“But I’m glad he’s dead. I’m free now!”
And so on. It was a vigorous piece of denunciation, and it carried a certain conviction. The trouble was, however, Ridinghood could have killed Lear, in spite of the theaterful of people. Nobody knew just when Lear died. He simply had not responded to his cue. For all anybody knew to the contrary he might have been sitting dead in his dressing room for half an hour before the performance began. With caution, Ridinghood might have entered the room a minute after two o’clock, killed his man, and left the room, all without being seen. Nobody was bothering much about either of them. Everybody had his own work to do, his own preparations to make. Lear was a solitary and eccentric person, and Stanley Moore could not be everywhere at once.
What Ridinghood could have had to do with the murders of Bluefield and Gaunt could only be conjectured. He was free, of course, after the evening performances. Bluefield and Gaunt almost certainly had been killed at night—Bluefield on a Thursday, Gaunt late the night following.
What Bluefield and Gaunt had had to do with Lear perhaps remained to be seen. The shrouds of all three, so to call them, had been ticketed by the same hand. Somewhere a start had to be made, and there was valid reason to hold Ridinghood on a suspicion, at least, of complicity. Quite possibly, as a matter of argument, three men had committed the murders, not one; but if Ridinghood had killed Lear it stood to reason that he had knowledge of the other murders. And if Ridinghood had killed Lear he might conceivably have killed Bluefield and Gaunt.
Thus the police mind, functioning slowly, but with a certain muddled clarity. Miss Carvel, of course, had denied flatly ever having heard of Bluefield and Gaunt. So had Ridinghood.
The energetic Kelly and Sheets also had found a weapon that might have answered. It was among the stage properties at the theater, and no effort had been made to conceal it. Some sort of a carpenter’s tool—long, slender, and with a stout wooden handle—a finely tempered boring instrument. Appealing to Rainfall, the police learned that such a weapon might very well have been the one used by the murderer. It was not large, therefore it could easily have been carried. Wiped on a piece of waste, and the waste destroyed, there would be no way, except in theory, to connect the thing with the murder.
There was no waste to be found answering the proper description, and such garments of Ridinghood’s as could be unearthed at his hotel betrayed no signs of a bloody concealment. But, as Rainfall had pointed out, there would not of necessity have been any blood spilled.
“And, by George!” exclaimed the doctor, “there was a blind diagnosis that went right with a vengeance! I told you, Saxon, the police would grab Ridinghood sooner or later. But I thought I was just being clever when I said it.”
They were dining together, which was a habit when the physician happened to be in the Loop.
Howard Saxon nodded. “I thought of that when I read about the arrest,” he said. “I wonder what Mr. Ghost thinks of this latest development.”
“Ghost?” echoed the physician. “Have you been in touch with him since he left the hospital? Do you know, I miss the beggar, although I suppose he’s glad enough to be away from me. Is he back at his maps?”
“He’s gone to stay with Professor Moment—the old geezer whose daughter is supposed to have seen the man who killed Bluefield. They’re old friends, it seems. I wanted him to come and stay with me, but he refused. Maybe he’s interested in the girl.”
“I can’t imagine it,” said Rainfall. “Ghost isn’t a marrying man. And the girl, I believe, is just a kid—but a good-looking one, if her photographs do her justice.”
“Or if they don’t,” grinned Saxon.
“Well, I’m glad he’s there. If that girl had seen just a scrap more than she did see I wouldn’t give a nickel for her life. As it is, she may be in danger. More than likely that’s why Ghost went there.”
“I knew the professor at college,” remarked Saxon. “I wouldn’t trust him to protect anybody, as far as I could see him. He’s a rabbit!”
The doctor laughed. “Is he? Well, Ghost, I should say, is a horse—or rabbit—of another color. I have a lot of respect for that astonishing citizen.”
“You may find yourself in danger before you get through, Rainfall,” suggested the newspaper man. “You haven’t been exactly idle in this case, you know.”
Rainfall smiled wickedly. “I haven’t done anything,” he said; “but I wish somebody would try to ‘get’ me! I haven’t had any real excitement since the war. The new generation looks at the old doctor pityingly, Howard—observing his thinning hair and his pathetic little limp. But there’s life in the old dog yet! Alas, I am forty-two years of age,” he added quizzically. “That seems pretty ancient to a spry youth like yourself, I suppose.”
“I feel ninety-eight at seven o’clock every morning,” responded Saxon. “But, joking aside, you might be, you know!”
“Forty-two? I ami Word of honor.”
“In danger,” said Saxon. “You are known to have been a friend of Lear’s, and God knows what that might mean to the man who killed him. He doesn’t know what Lear may have told you. Also, it was you who showed up the ways and means of murder, so to speak; and in the papers, to-day, you are quoted as identifying a certain weapon found in the theater.”
“I didn’t identify it. How could I? I said it might have been the one.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“It’s nothing of the sort,” said Rainfall. “But,” he added, flexing his strong surgeon’s fingers, “I certainly hope somebody will have a try at me. Boy, I’d love it!”
“Get a tank of tear gas ready,” advised the newspaper man. “You may need it.”
“No such luck. Don’t do any worrying about me, Howard—if you are worrying, which I doubt. I’m out of the picture.”
That night, however, John Rainfall received a start.
As he entered the door of his apartment in East Division Street, a little square of paper looked up at him from the threshold, across which, beneath the door, it had been partially pushed. He picked it up, closed the door, and in the same movement snapped on the lights in the hallway. His hand dropped to his side pocket, where he carried a small automatic pistol, removed each evening from the side pocket of his automobile.
There was no sound in the old-fashioned flat save the loud ticking of the clock upon the wall.
He reached a hand around the corner of another door and flooded the sitting room with light. Carefully, his right hand still in his pocket, he progressed from room to room, and in each he snapped on a blaze of electricity. With infinite caution, he poked into every corner that might harbor a man or a machine.
The tour was a slow one and fraught with a certain tension. He trod softly, and at closet doors he removed the pistol from his pocket.
But the apartment was empty of peril.
Returning at length to the sitting room, at the front, he read again the words blocked upon the square of paper. The window shades were already down.
And a little sketch, so badly done that Rainfall had some difficulty in making it out. It looked like an eagle sitting on the corner of a box.
At last it dawned upon him that it was a plume—a black plume—and that the box was intended to be the corner of a hearse.