In other parts of the city other newsboys were similarly advertising their profession. Out of the jumble of sounds thus broadcast there emerged a name, upon hearing which interested persons purchased copies of the extra edition.
“Arrest of Adrian Bluefield” was the legend across the top half of one of them. It was followed by half a column of type chronicling the event.
Bluefield, it appeared, had been found in lodgings so close to a north side police station that he might have put his head out of a window and watched the squad-room patrolmen at their pinochle. A very jolly dodge indeed—to hide next door to a police station. The public laughed heartily.
Howard Saxon, who, as an employee of a newspaper, received the several editions of his own journal in advance of the man in the street, also was cynically amused.
“Another fairy story exploded,” he commented to an assistant, when the extra edition had been dropped upon his desk. “It is a popular notion among writers of detective fiction that the safest place for a criminal to hide is under the police chief’s bed—the last place anybody would think of looking for him, eh? Like the story of the Jew who wanted to be buried in a Catholic cemetery so the devil couldn’t find him. Or was it the other way round?”
He continued to read the account of the capture.
There was little else of interest, however. Bluefield was not actually under arrest, in spite of the headlines. He was in custody—a distinction with a slight difference in law and no difference whatever to Adrian Bluefield. He was being held, unbooked and incommunicado, at the station near which he had established his headquarters.
His assertions were profane and added nothing to the solution of the mystery. He was himself, Adrian Bluefield, he insisted; he had done no wrong, and, what was more, the police had better have a care what they were doing.
He had been apprehended the night before. A detective, leaving the north side station on an assignment, had seen him entering the lodging house and had recognized him from photographs published in the newspapers the day of his arrival.
But had there been an arrival? It seemed to the police more likely that the man called Bluefield was a Chicago product who had been stricken with a great idea. Yet surely he had known a great deal about Amos Bluefield. Had he been an associate?
He might even, it was privately conceded, have been the murderer of the haberdasher.
Groups of experienced detectives passed through the room in which the suspect was being interrogated the morning after his capture. None of them ever had seen the man before. His photograph was not in the “gallery.” He had all the known facts of Amos Bluefield’s life at his finger tips. It was admitted that there was even a slight resemblance between the dead man and the living claimant.
“Still,” as Rainfall observed to Saxon, when the latter had called him on the telephone to report the latest news, “all fat men look alike. After a fashion, anyway. A sort of family resemblance. They have protuberances in common.”
Rainfall had been puzzled by the case of Adrian Bluefield for some time. Anticipating Ghost and the police, he had privately doubted the identity of the stout man from the beginning. He had found no valid reason for assailing Bluefield in public, however, and as a consequence he had said nothing. The man’s arrest interested him deeply, and he found himself wondering, a bit fantastically, if there could be any connection between Adrian Bluefield and the murdered Greene.
The doctor, in fact, agreed with Ghost, although they had not talked it over, that Greene was definitely out of the picture. The island seeker’s “men of forty” theory had impressed Rainfall profoundly, in spite of the flaws he had indicated that it contained. The psychology of imitative murder was perfectly well known to him, and he, also, had been inclined to lay the death of Greene to this curious homicidal simianism.
With the sudden Bluefield notion in his head, and a pipe between his teeth, John Rainfall turned the entire situation over afresh.
He had heard from Saxon of Ghost’s extraordinary performance with a Ouija board, and later of the amateur’s departure for the East. For Walsingham in Connecticut! How under the sun had Ghost pitched upon Walsingham? But, of course, he had been simply looking into Who’s Who, and the Connecticut township was the scene of Lear’s early studies.
Time and again Ghost had insisted that the solution lay elsewhere and in another day. Now he had gone East to demonstrate it. That much was clear enough; but Ghost was not the man to act hastily or without excellent reason. Had he found a genuine clue, the doctor wondered, or was he merely in search of clues that might exist?
The board, it occurred to Rainfall, was merely a bit of Ghostian melodrama to explain the amateur’s hurried departure. Or was the Connecticut journey, perhaps, just a fiction intended to conceal another activity?
Other questions came to the doctor as he smoked. What was Ghost’s notion of the Greene affair? He had probably investigated it. And about Adrian Bluefield? Bluefield, to be sure, had been taken after Ghost’s departure—or, rather, announcement of the capture had been made too late for Ghost to hear it. He would hear of it en route, however, in all probability. Certainly he would hear of it when he reached his destination, for the clever amateur would not fail to keep open his line of communication.
Rainfall refilled his pipe. Smoking was a privilege allowed him, in his own quarters, even at the Gatacre Memorial.
Bluefield’s game, of course, if he were not a brother of the haberdasher, was obvious. He was a smooth crook endeavoring to get possession of a valuable estate. Was it conceivable that, for some purpose of his own, he had wished to complicate the earlier issues by a little murder on the side?
Unwittingly treading in the footsteps of Ghost, the doctor took some time from his duties to visit the morgue and have a look at Ellis Greene. It was a workmanlike job that Greene’s murderer had done, he was forced to admit. The newspaper excerpt bothered him, too, as it had bothered Ghost. Was it possible that Greene and Aye had been in some manner associated? What in the world, he wondered, had liquor to do with Ellis Greene?
An idea struck him with some force. What if he, John Rainfall, in the absence of Ghost, were to be able to prove Bluefield the murderer of Greene! The trail seemed reasonably fresh, and the theory was attractive. And if Bluefield could be shown to have murdered Greene—what followed?
John Rainfall, Detective! He laughed a bit sardonically. What idiocy was he contemplating now?
Ridiculous! Greene was still definitely outside the picture, a victim of circumstance and suggestion. Bluefield was an oily scamp halted in an effort for a fortune. And John Rainfall was still a physician with duties to his fellow men.
At the hospital he learned that Saxon had called a second time.
Developments? Perhaps there had been word from Ghost.
He called the Evening Telegram and in a moment was listening to the latest tidings from the scene of action.
“Bluefield has confessed,” said the sporting editor, with the satisfaction of a man possessed of private information. “I thought you’d like to know.”
“Confessed!” Rainfall was staggered. “Confessed to what? Do you mean to say that Bluefield murdered Ellis Greene?”
“To his identity,” said Saxon. “He still denies that he murdered anybody, but from the looks of things he’s in a bad hole. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that he’d murdered Amos—and Lear, too. Just possibly, his brother.”
“His brother!”
“His name is Gaunt,” explained the sporting editor of the Telegram, “and he’s a brother of the man who was found on the statue—Hubert Gaunt. He knew about Bluefield from his brother, instead of the other way round—if you know what I mean. Just trying to make a little easy money, he says. He confessed when the police accused him of murdering Amos. I think, myself, that he murdered everybody, including Lincoln and Mary, Queen of Scots.”
Rainfall was still incredulous, but his mind functioned quickly and clearly. “I think Ghost ought to hear of this, Saxon,” he said. “It may help him. It may even change his plans.”
“Right,” agreed Saxon briskly. “I’ve already sent him a wire. If anything else happens, I’ll give you a ring.”
“If anything else happens,” said Rainfall ironically, “give me ether.”