THE ATTITUDE OF STEPHEN QUIMBY
McCarty gaped in genuine amazement at the departing figure of his informant. That the woman who had met her death at his feet the night before was a person of a superior class, he had taken for granted from a casual inspection of her general appearance, but that she should prove to be of such prominence and wealth was utterly beyond his conception.
He had heard of Stephen Quimby, of course. The banker’s astuteness and masterly generalship had averted a spectacular run on the institution of which he was president at a time of panic and chaos some years before, and he had been more or less in the public eye as one of the municipality’s financial advisers ever since. There was something else, too, some sport with which he had identified himself notably in an amateur way, but for the moment McCarty could not recall its nature.
His memory instantly supplied a vivid picture of the man himself, however. He had once seen the president of the Tradesman and Artisan’s Bank in court testifying against a defaulter, and his personality had made a distinct impression.
He was well over the average height, lean and wiry, with a thin-lipped, smooth-shaven face and dark hair just graying at the temples. But it was not so much his physical appearance which gave weight and importance to the personal effect he created; it was the suggestion of quiet, relentless force and indomitable will in his bearing and manner.
Of his family life and social side McCarty, of course, knew nothing, but if he were indeed the stepfather of the young victim of last night’s tragedy—
McCarty’s train of thought was checked by a swift flash of memory. Her stepfather! The words overheard through the air-shaft by the maid, Mary, assumed a significance in direct bearing on the case for the first time in McCarty’s mind. Unlike the inspector, he had not attributed much importance to the girl’s statement, partly because in itself it denoted no relation with the tragedy, but more because of a belief that she was trying in sheer morbid hunger for sensation, to thrust herself into the limelight. Now it struck him with the augmented force of compulsory recognition. It might still prove to be a coincidence, but the chances against that outweighed its serious consideration.
At that moment it was borne in upon him that a confused babel of intermingling cries was resounding in the street below, and as he started for the window, one hoarse voice detached itself from the rest.
“Extra! All about the murder in the Glamorgan! Body identified. Heiress slain! Extra!”
Hastening downstairs, he seized a paper from the nearest boy. The owner of the antique-shop called him from the doorway, but giving no heed, he returned to his rooms and locked himself in.
As before picture stared out at him from the front page of the paper, but this time it was that of a sweet-faced young girl with a soft, wistful mouth, straight delicate brows and thoughtful eyes.
For some minutes he sat gazing back at it, trying to reconcile it with the poor bruised face which lingered so clearly in his memory. With the distortion of mortal agony smoothed away and perhaps a little less weight, she might have been very like her photograph, but he concluded that it had in all probability been taken at a somewhat earlier period.
The text amplified the reporter’s announcement elaborately and McCarty perused it with absorbed interest.
Marion Rowntree was twenty years old and had resided with her stepfather, Stephen Quimby, her nine-year-old stepbrother, Stephen, Jr., and her aunt, Miss Pauline Beckwith, who, since the death of her mother six years before, had been mistress of the banker’s town and country establishments.
Mr. Quimby and Miss Beckwith had appeared at the morgue at an early hour, identified the body, and arranged for its removal. They had appeared overcome by grief and refused to make any statement, but in a later conference with police officials it was understood that Mr. Quimby professed complete ignorance of his daughter’s whereabouts on the previous evening, declared that to his knowledge she was unacquainted with any one residing in the Glamorgan apartment house, and could assign no reason for her presence there.
He refused to credit the statement of the hall-boy, Alfred Griggs, that she had called there on a previous. occasion to look at apartments, asserting that she could have had no possible intention of leaving her own home and acquiring a separate establishment, and should such a thought have been hers, her station in society would have led her to seek a more pretentious habitation than the Glamorgan offered.
Miss Beckwith was in a state of extreme prostration, and could not be interrogated. Then followed an account of Marion Rowntree’s life, the schools she had attended, and her social activities, together with a hint at two separate romances in which she had figured, each of which had abruptly terminated before any formal announcement of an engagement was made.
The article concluded with a resume of Stephen Quimby’s career, and in the final paragraph there was an allusion which brought McCarty to his feet.
Mr. Quimby had been an ardent devotee of aviation since its first inception in America, and had taken many prizes in amateur events both here and abroad before the war. His skill and daring were proverbial, and he maintained several aeroplanes with elaborately equipped hangars and a retinue of mechanicians on Long Island.
The flying man!
Could it be mere coincidence again? If so, it denoted a marvelous concurrence of events which over-stepped the bounds of the credible. McCarty paced his room in a fever of conjecture.
It was in vain that he strove to remind himself of his own negative position in the affair. He was no longer an officer of the law but a private citizen, in no way connected with the mystery or its investigation save as a bystander whom chance had made a witness of the initial catastrophe.
He had far better be out at Homevale Park, where his bit of money was invested, collecting his modest rents and discounting the complaints of his tenants, than tramping up and down here, addling his brains with a problem that was distinctly up to the service he had long quitted.
But such specious self-reminder was futile. The problem was there, a concrete puzzle for any man to solve for his own satisfaction; somewhere there was a skulking criminal to be brought to justice, and in McCarty’s eyes glowed the old light which had made him the terror of malefactors in days gone by. He was in this thing from the start, as Inspector Druet had said, and in it he would stay until he had seen it through.
Seizing his hat, he locked the door behind him, and again evading his neighbor of the antique-shop, he hurried to the nearest elevated station. He meant to get a detailed account of that scene at the morgue in the early morning hours, and Bill Gerahty was an old and cordial friend.
Daily epilogues of sordid tragedy had tended to dull the sympathies of the morgue-keeper, but his sense of the dramatic which is inherent in the sons of his nationality was acutely developed. Moreover, he took a certain grim pride in the event; it was long since his grewsome hostelry had harbored so distinguished a guest.
“True for you, Mac!” he seconded his visitor’s opening remark. “It was a hell of a job, whoever pulled it. I wish you could have seen the two that come for her. Swells they were, as I could tell the minute I clapped an eye on them, to say nothin’ of the automobile as big as a hearse, but I never thought they’d turn out to be who they was! Well, well, them up in high life gets a jolt now and then the same as the rest of us!”
McCarty, who was not in a mood for philosophizing, brought him artfully to the point.
“You saw them yourself, then? I thought maybe Higgins was on when they came. The papers had no mention of you.”
“Sure, they didn’t!” acquiesced Bill bitterly. “If it wasn’t for me, some of them newspaper boys would starve to death, or have to get out and hunt a real job. But do I ever get a bit of credit? I do not! They’ve been pesterin’ the life out of me for the last three hours or more, but I knew how it would be, and ’tis precious little satisfaction they got. There’s more to this case, Mac, that you’d be thinkin’. You can take it from me.”
“It’s the devil’s own riddle, and that’s a fact,” McCarty agreed. “It was me that she almost landed on, you know, when she fell out of the window, and the inspector kept me with him when he went over the house. Nobody seems to know anything about it. Have a smoke, Bill?”
The morgue-keeper, who had been tentatively fingering the pocket where his pipe reposed-they were in the outer office—gravely accepted a cigar, and biting off the end, chewed it with gusto.
“You ought to have been here,” he remarked. “’Twould have been worth your while to see them two. I had her all put away in her drawer—she couldn’t have been more smashed up if she had been in a pulp-mill—and her clothes all ticketed, when first of all along came Yost.
“The inspector had sent him down to keep an eye on any one who might come to inquire. He had another look at her, and turned over her things, and then he came back in here and waited. I was busy—a floater had just been brought in and a wop came looking for his brother—but after, I sat down with him and ’twas he told me about you gettin’ mixed up in this.
“Well, ’twas past six, and the sun shinin’, when a powerful big car came drivin’ up and out got Mr. Quimby and the lady. Martin, of the inspector’s staff, was with them, but they didn’t pay no attention to him. It seemed as if they’d forgotten he was with them, entirely, but him and Yost got together and trailed along.
“They come into the office here, and the lady threw back a heavy veil she’d got on, and grabbed the rail at the top of the desk as if she was goin’ to fall down the next minute. She was as white as paper, and her chin was workin’. She tried to speak, but not a word would come, and while she was flutterin’ and gaspin’, the gentleman broke in:
“‘A man from the police has come to my house, and tells me that my daughter met with an accident.’ He was as pale as the lady, but his jaw was stickin’ out firm, and his voice was very quiet: ‘He tells me that she is here. I am Stephen Quimby. Has the body of a young woman been brought in to-night, a young woman—?’
“‘Oh, God!’ says the lady, interruptin’ him; not cryin’, but as if she was talkin’ to herself. ‘Oh, God!’
“‘Pauline!’ He turns to her. ‘How was Marion dressed? Describe the gown that is missing, that the detective says is on the body they found.’
“His voice wasn’t bullyin’ or harsh, but I could get the command in it, and she cringed as if he’d struck her with a whip.
“‘It was black-and-white striped silk,’ she says. ‘Very soft, and the hat had a rose-lined brim and a black lace veil appliqué—’ somethin’—‘with butterflies. The shoes were low white ones, with a narrow black piping and French heels. Oh, Stephen!’ she breaks off. ‘I can’t go on! It’s too horrible! Too impossible!’
“‘You needn’t, ma’am,’ I says. ‘At least, not if she had a scar across her ribs on the left side. I guess I’ve got what you’re lookin’ for.’”
He paused, spat out the fragment of tobacco and lighted the cigar.
“How did they take it?” asked McCarty.
“Like no one else ever I see, and I’ve been here a long time.” Bill puffed luxuriously and leaned back in his chair.
“There’s some that goes down in a dead faint, and some that shrieks and carries on over the body, till it’s all you can do to get them away from it, and some that won’t even look. That is, at first. They just can’t bring themselves to give up the last chance, I suppose, that maybe it ain’t the one they’re huntin’ for, but they all do come around to it, sooner or later. There’s a kind of a fascination about it, I’m thinkin’, like the wax-works in the Chamber of Horrors. Even when they’re certain, one way or the other, from the clothes and the description, they’ll take a peep. All but them two this morning.”
“What!” exclaimed McCarty. “Do you mean they never looked at the body at all—not once?”
“They did not. They looked at the clothes, and the lady broke down and cried fit to kill herself, but Mr. Quimby was as steady as a rock, though his face turned kind of gray. When I started to pull out the slab the lady screamed out no, that she couldn’t stand. It Mr. Quimby started to persuade her, but I guess he thought better of it, for he stopped all of a sudden and stood quiet awhile. Then he led her out to the automobile and come back alone, and I had the surprise of my life. He wouldn’t see the corpse, either.”
“But why?” McCarty’s jaw dropped.
“You can search me, Mac, I’m givin’ it to you straight. He’d been so calm and sort of hard through it all, that I thought he’d be the last to turn squeamish, but give her a look he would not. It was almost as if he didn’t want to face her, dead or alive. He said it wasn’t necessary, that the identification was complete and there wasn’t any doubt in the world but that it was his daughter.
“I stared at him, with the eyes of me all poppin’ out, and all at once he put his hand up over his eyes, but when he took it away there wasn’t tear. He said he would make arrangements at once to have the body re moved, and he put a bill in my hand—though you can keep that under your belt, Mac!—his own hand was as cold as ice when it touched mine, but he held his head high as he waved Yost and Martin aside and walked out to the car.”
“I’d like to have another look at the body myself, Bill,” observed McCarty after a pause. “Is it here yet?”
“It is not. The undertaker called for it within the hour, and the clothes was carried along, too. I’ve seen many that could take misfortune bravely without going to pieces until afterward, maybe, but none with the ease of that man Quimby, without even battin’ an eye. I don’t say he mightn’t have been grievin’ inside, and too proud to show it, but he acted as if nothin’, not even this, could feaze him—as if he was stronger than anything that could come to him in this world.”
“She wasn’t his own daughter, at that,” McCarty observed. “Just a stepdaughter.”
“I know. I got an extra a few minutes before you came. Did you read what he told the inspector, after?”
McCarty nodded.
“Well, if you ask me, I don’t believe it,” declared Bill, flatly. “All that professin’ and denyin’, I mean. I’ve got a hunch he knows more than he’s tellin’, at any rate about why she went there last night, and the other time, too, for that matter. He may be a great man and all that, like the paper says, but you can take it from me, he’s a smooth customer.”
“Bill, you’re getting to be a regular old woman with your fancies.” McCarty rose. “You’ll be saying he murdered her himself next.”
“I would not put it past him,” the other remarked. “Though that’s neither here nor there. He’s got somethin’ up his sleeve that he’s keepin ’ to himself, and it’ll take more than the inspector to get it out of him. He took it too quiet; it ain’t in reason. Mac, would you see a daughter of yours, or a stepdaughter either, murdered in cold blood and stand around like a graven image after? You would not! You’d raise hell till you found the one that did it, and when you got through with him there’d be no call for anybody but the coroner!”
“Maybe, but I’m not a prominent banker with a position to keep up before the world and the Lord knows what kind of a secret to hide. I’m speaking no harm of the dead, but if Mr. Quimby does know more than he admits, perhaps there’s a good reason for him not to take the newspapers and the public into his confidence. There’ll be notoriety enough as it is, before this case is finished.”
At this juncture the door was timidly pushed open and a bent little figure entered, clad in rusty black. As Bill Gerahty rose she lifted a pair of faded eyes, eloquent with a question she could not utter.
“No, ma’am,” Bill said wearily, but with strange gentleness. “No one’s here like what you described to me. Now if you’ll just take heart to yourself, ma’am, you’ll find in the end no harm’s come to the lad—”
McCarty made his way out and tramped across to the subway. An idea had come to him which he meant to put in immediate execution. He alighted from the train at the station nearest to the scene of the previous night’s event, and circling the block, was soon retracing his steps of twelve hours before.
He noticed that there was a narrow court between the Glamorgan and the next apartment building, as the hall-boy had shown on his diagram, but on this occasion it was the opposite side of the street which engaged his attention.
To his disappointment he saw that the building across the way, whose windows looked directly into those of the Glamorgan, was still a mere shell in the course of construction, and a broad sign on its front announced that it would be ready for occupancy by the first of October. It was much larger than its neighbor opposite, extending almost to the middle of the block, and next to it the line of apartments was broken by a garage. It seemed almost hopeless that any one in the houses still further along to the west could have witnessed the tragedy, but on a bare chance he tried the building on the other side of the garage.
An irate janitor drove him forth.
“Himmel! Vot iss diss, more policers? Von hundert times alretty I haff said it, we don’t know nodings und we don’t vant to! Respeckitable peoples you should ask it about murders und such? Verdampt, bummerlei!”
Muttering darkly to himself, McCarty beat a retreat. As he neared the corner of the Drive he glanced back. A trim-looking nurse was easing a resplendent baby carriage down the steps of the Glamorgan and evidently in violent altercation with the hall-boy who stood in the doorway. McCarty crossed the street and strolled back toward her.
It is sad to record, but as he approached, he deliberately gave her what he would have termed “the eye.” Her cheeks were still flushed from her late encounter, but McCarty was a personable-looking man and she dimpled.
“A fine child you have there, miss,” he observed diplomatically, raising his hat.
The girl giggled.
“He’s cross to-day. He had a bad night, with all the excitement and getting woke up by the police. And then those fresh hall-boys everlastingly trying to make me take him and his fine carriage down in the dirty old freight elevator! I just gave that one a piece of my mind!”
So this was the child of the Fentons, on the top floor! McCarty fell into step beside the nurse.
“It’s fine and cool over on the Drive,” he suggested tentatively.
“I’m taking him there for a breath of air.” The girl tossed her head and smiled up at him.
“Did you say the police woke him up?” McCarty’s tone was blandly surprised. “Was there trouble in your house?”
“There was—murder.” Her own voice lowered, and she glanced half-fearfully over her shoulder. “Didn’t you read about it in the papers? A woman was killed, flung out of a window!”
“To be sure I did, but I never thought of it being that house. You must have been scared to death.”
“I was when they told us. We didn’t know anything about it until the police came to our door, and ’twas Mr. Fenton that talked to them. But that isn’t the worst of it. I know something myself, but I’m afraid to tell, for fear of the police asking me a lot of questions, to say nothing of losing my place.”
McCarty beamed upon her.
“You know something?” he repeated. “And what might that be? Oh, you needn’t mind me! I’m not on the force.”
“Well, I feel as though I should burst if I don’t tell somebody!” the girl exclaimed in a little gush of confidence. “The papers said nobody knew how she got in the building or when, but I do. As least, I met her on the stairs and talked to her. It must have been her, poor thing, from the description of her clothes.”
“You did? And what time was this?”
“A little after ten. I got let out till half-past nine, but I went to a movie and was late, so I sneaked up the front stairs. I had a key to the apartment and I knew Mr. and Mrs. Fenton would be in bed early, for they’d been out till all hours the night before. I was afraid if I came up the back way the cook would tell on me. The stairs wind around the elevator shaft and I came up behind the lady right near the third floor.
“She turned as quick as a flash and then she got very white and sat down on the step. I asked if she felt sick, but she said no, that I’d startled her, but she would be all right in a minute. I didn’t dare wait, being late as I said, so I went on and left her there, but I heard the rustle of her dress as she stood up again before I’d fairly turned the corner. It came to me afterwards, when I learned what had happened, that she sat down there to make me pass her, so I shouldn’t see what apartment she was going to.”
“Wasn’t there a hall-boy on duty? It’s queer he didn’t see her come in.”
“He didn’t see me either, and for a very good reason. He was sound asleep with his head down on the switch-board!”