THE MAN IN THE CORNER
Dennis Riordan had scarcely settled himself in his customary chair before the fire-house that afternoon, and coaxed his pipe to draw properly, when ex-Roundsman McCarty made his appearance.
It was not the McCarty of the glad hand and the good word whom Dennis knew, however; it was a strange and stealthy McCarty, who walked with a cautious step which might have been termed mincing in a person of less bulk, and who glared balefully at the astonished object of his regard.
“There was a fire last night,” he announced weightily. “And you, that’s mostly as sure-footed as a cat, fell off a ladder or tripped over the hose. Also, you have had another row with your sister, and wrote to her to make it up. That’s all, I’m thinking, except that your month’s pay is running low, and your eyes are troubling you again.”
Dennis knocked his pipe against the arm of his chair and scuffed the glowing embers carefully out on the pavement.
“’Tis either rye or Irish,” he observed. “It’s Irish, I’ll bet. It used to get you this way years ago. You don’t happen to be under the impression that I’m Queen of the May, or anything like that?”
“I’m deducing,” McCarty returned with dignity. “And using the powers of my imagination.”
“You are that!” agreed the other emphatically. “My advice to you, my lad, is to go home and sleep it off. There’s been no fire, not even a false alarm, and I don’t know what the devil you mean about Molly, or my pay or my eyes and if it isn’t Irish whisky—which I’d like you to let me know where you can get a drop of the real thing now, with the war and all—you’d better keep out of the sun and not excite yourself.”
“Then I’ve not got the hang of it at all.” McCarty dropped crestfallen into the chair expectantly vacant beside his friend. “I told Mr. Terhune I wasn’t onto the trick.”
“Terhune!” Dennis straightened his chair with a clatter. “Ter—do you mean to say, Mac, you’ve been hobnobbing with the like of him?”
McCarty nodded.
“I was trying his method just now, but it don’t seem to work. You’ve got a bump on your forehead the size of an egg, and I deduced you’d tripped up at a fire. Molly does your mending for you except when the two of you have had a scrap, and I see there’s hole in your sock and a button gone off your vest; you never write a letter that you don’t try to blot it with your thumb, so I put two and two together and took a chance you’d written to her. When do you shave yourself except when your month’s pay is running low, and are you ever without a sporting extra in your hand unless your eyes are bothering you too much to read? It’s very simple.”
“It’s damn’ foolishness!” Dennis retorted, stung by the reference to his personal appearance. “I banged my forehead on a chair in a friendly shindy with Mike upstairs, Molly’s gone to the country with the baby, and I got the ink on my thumb writing a bank-deposit slip, so you needn’t be losing sleep over my month’s pay.
“Moreover, I got no paper for well I knew I’d have no chance to read it now, with you haverin’ around, and I cut myself shaving because Brian himself is sick, and I’ll not have that German feller there leaning over me with a razor and me with my two arms tied down under a towel—not after the views he’s heard me express about neutrality! And is that the way the celebrated Mr. Terhune works?”
“It is. Wait till you hear!”
He described his own experience of the morning, and Dennis listened gravely, his skepticism shaken.
“Did he tell you that you’ve the scar of Nick the Wop’s knife on your back or that you voted Republican once, being drunk?” he asked, with interest.
“He did not, but I’ve no doubt he would if I’d given him time,” responded McCarty solemnly. “He took me to the Glamorgan after, in a scooting devil of a car that’d give dust to your fire chief’s, and what he did there was fair amazing.”
His description of Wade Terhune’s accusation of Mrs. Doremus and her collapse left Dennis round-eyed and short of breath.
“She admitted it?” he gasped. “When she came to, she broke down and confessed?”
“Not so that you could notice it,” McCarty replied grimly. “The girl, Mary, brought her round with smelling salts, and she was thundering mad at first, then tried her long suit, hysterics. She said that whether George Allen had ever been her husband or not was no affair of Mr. Terhune’s; that the people in the house who said he’d called there before were mistaken; that he had left at ten o’clock, and she could prove it by Mary.
“Then she began laughing and crying, and declared she didn’t know what she’d said and wasn’t responsible; everybody had confused her so with questions and trying to trap her when she knew nothing whatever about the murder that it was a wonder she didn’t lose her mind. That was when Mary showed her claws.
“‘It doesn’t matter what you said, Mrs. Doremus,’ she butted in, respectful and as if she were soothing a child, but with a kind of meaning tone as though she might almost be coaching her. ‘You’re not under oath, and they can’t make you swear unless they bring some sort of a charge against you, and you know that’s impossible.’
“The girl shut up quick when Terhune told her, but what she’d said got to Mrs. Doremus all right, and from that minute on she was just acting, going off into worse hysterics if you so much as looked at her, let alone asked a question. Terhune saw there was no more to be got out of her then, and he let her go.”
“Go!” repeated Dennis, unable to keep silent longer. “When he had her in the hollow of his hand! What did he do that for?”
“Oh, she’ll not go far! She will have been shadowed from the time she sets foot out of the house, and the girl, too. Besides, she was sticking to her story that the man Allen left at ten, and nothing could shake her. If you want to know my opinion, I don’t think Terhune expected to break her down in that, I think he purposely told her what he knew and let her go to see what move she would make next, and maybe trace this man through her if she tried to communicate with him. It’s the girl, Mary, that’s got me going.”
“How? I’d say she was just one of them pert, impudent things that’s been over here long enough to think she’s as good as the next one, and if”—Dennis chose his words with unusual care—“if Mrs. Doremus is the kind of a lady I’m thinking, the girl could hardly be expected to keep her place.”
McCarty shook his head.
“There’s more than that back of it. She had a look like she was laughing in her sleeve at the two of us, and a kind of a way with her as if she knew just what she was doing because she’d been told how to act. If you ask me, I think she’s following instructions from somebody higher up—the man who was there that night.”
“How do you suppose Mr. Terhune found out all that about the Doremus woman, if it’s true, to say nothing of the rest
of it?”
“Sure, he told me. He’s trying to teach me his way of working, he says, but I’m too old a dog to be learning new tricks. After his first talk with her yesterday he looked up her record and found she’d come on from the West about five years ago, claiming to be a widow, and broke into some sort of society. She married this man Doremus, and a matter of two years ago he divorced her, a put-up job, according to her. Terhune wired to where she said she came from, traced back, and got the dope that her maiden name was Thompson, and she’d married and divorced this George Allen long before ever she hit New York.”
“She must want bygones to be bygones, to go giving him a fine dinner the other night,” observed Dennis. “From what you said of her, I should think she’d be the kind to hold it against you to her dying day, if you so much as trod on her skirt.”
McCarty eyed him significantly.
“Do you think if a man once got foot-loose from a woman like that he’d be after coming around again?” he demanded. “It is my belief that when Terhune faced her all of a sudden and asked her the name of the man who’d been there, and her not thinking till that minute it was known she’d not been alone; that she answered with the first name which came in her head so as not to give away the truth.
“The elevator-boys and the superintendent gave her the lie about his not having been there before, but they’d never heard his name, because he wasn’t announced over the ’phone, and he’s the only visitor of hers that wasn’t. She put it off on Allen because he’s away out West, or dead, maybe, and she had no idea her own record would be traced. She’s not clever, that Mrs. Doremus, but she’s as stubborn as a mule, and she has good reasons, whatever they are, for keeping the real man out of it. Unless she’s fool enough to try to get in touch with him and so give Terhune a hint, he’ll have to go after the other end of the string and locate Allen.”
“Much good it’ll do him if Allen’s not the man.” Dennis paused in refilling his pipe. “Was that just a wild guess of his that the fellow was there after the girl was killed, or did he know? It’s a fine joke on the inspector, and you, too, if he was there under your noses and you never spotted him!”
McCarty’s jaw set.
“’Twas not my investigation, I’ll be reminding you, Denny.”
“But you smelled the smoke of his cigar.”
“He might have gone before ten, for all that would matter. A cigar with the body to it that one had would leave the smell of it for hours with all those flimsy draperies around, especially as the windows were closed. Nobody saw him go out that night, and Terhune, with his spy-glass and his little measuring-stick, found out something mighty curious.”
“When he was snooping in the garbage?” A trace of skepticism had returned to Dennis’s voice.
“No. I’ve told you that the drawing-room in Mrs. Doremus’s apartment is on the corner, with the library opening out of it on the side street, but next the drawing room on the avenue side is the dining-room. It’s a kind of an old-fashioned house, the Glamorgan, with exposed radiators, and in that room there is one in the corner between the window looking on the avenue, and the folding-doors leading to the drawing-room.
“Catacornered across it is a great tall cut-glass closet, with just enough space for any one not too portly to squeeze in. Denny, somebody had squeezed in, and it was a tight fit, too, for they’d torn their dinner coat! Terhune found a bit of fine, black broadcloth hanging to the little valve near the top of the radiator on one side. And more than that.
“The closet in front of it is higher than your head, and glass all around, sides and back. There were marks on it—the print of a man’s fingers, and i one or two places of a whole hand where he’d pressed against it, pushing his way in and out. It seems that yesterday, after he’d talked to them, Terhune got Mrs. Doremus and Mary and the cook—who’d gone to-day—out of the way, and he went over that apartment inch by inch, until he came on that. He took impressions of those fingerprints, and if he ever gets hold of the man who stood there, he’ll know him.”
“Maybe it was the janitor, moving the glass closet to get at the radiator if it leaked,” suggested Dennis hopefully.
“Radiators don’t leak in July,” McCarty retorted. “Nor do janitors wear fine, black broadcloth coats at work, to say nothing of mother-of-pearl vest buttons.”
“Mother of what?”
“Pearl. Something like what you got to wear at Molly’s wedding, only real. Terhune found one under the glass closet, where the man had rasped it off him squeezing through, the same as he’d torn his coat in the back. He got it coming and going.”
It’s funny he wouldn’t have hid in a cupboard, where he’d have had room enough,” Dennis reflected.
“Afraid, maybe, we’d look there.”
“But wouldn’t he know he’d be seen behind that thing if it was all glass?”
“Not if you’d cast your eye over it once. It’s so full of junk it would dazzle you, with big platters tilted against the back and sides, filling up the space from one shelf to another. Besides, the light is low in the dining-room, just one center drop over the table.”
“And you’re thinking he was there putting it over on you and the inspector?”
“I don’t know what to think about that”, confessed McCarty frankly. “I’ve a mind to look up the inspector later. ’Twas him that first suggested getting Terhune on this job, too.”
“He’s a wonder, all right,” Dennis acknowledged. “I didn’t think much of his methods when you tried them on me, but you’ve got to hand it to him. He must be a great man.”
“And he’s having a great little time with his microscope and foot-rule, to say nothing of his psycho—whatever it is—reasoning.”
Something in McCarty’s tone made his friend look up swiftly.
“Well, he found out about the man in the corner, didn’t he?”
“He did, and it was good work. I’ve no doubt that if he goes through every apartment in the house the same way, he’ll find something in each one that the family are not advertising; things, maybe, just as queer as this. But that don’t say that any of them had a hand in murdering the girl.
“To my mind, there’s nothing in what he doped out in Mrs. Doremus’s apartment to connect her, or the man either, with the death. There’s nothing to show they even knew her, let alone a motive; and what would she be doing there, in the first place? The funeral is tomorrow, and the inquest the day after. Maybe Mrs. Doremus will talk then.”
Dennis’s sudden access of admiration for the genius of Wade Terhune, and his evident approbation at the ease with which the detective had discovered what the inspector had overlooked, jarred upon McCarty’s mood, and rankled in the face of his loyalty to his former superior. But Dennis was disposed to argue.
“I should think it was pretty clear that the two of them had something to do with what happened, from their actions. Why would Mrs. Doremus take so much trouble to keep him out of it, and lie and get in Dutch about it herself if they was as innocent as she makes out? And look at him! ’Tis not a parlor diversion, except for children, to go hiding behind furniture. You’re bound to admit that!”
“What if he was a prominent man—married, too, maybe—and couldn’t afford to have it known he was calling there, murder or no murder? If he was there when the girl fell past the window, as Mrs. Doremus said she did, he mightn’t want to take a chance on trying to walk out through the crowd he must have known would collect, and perhaps being stopped and questioned by the police. The fact that he never gave his name down-stairs when he came looks as if he was trying to keep his visits secret.”
“Say, Mac!” Dennis twisted abruptly about in his chair. “How did he get out, anyway? After, I mean. Wasn’t the house surrounded and watched?”
“It was, and there’s been men at both entrances ever since.” McCarty’s face was a study. “The inspector even had the roofs watched all night, until he made a second search in the morning into every hole and corner of the building from the cellar up. I never thought of that, Denny. I wonder if Terhune did? There’s one thing sure. If I was him, I’d keep an eye on the flat above, the one where that play-writer and his wife live. I’d get hold of the girl that went away and ask her a few questions, and I’d find out a little about Marion, Rowntree. A line on her friends, and what she’s been doing with herself lately, would come in handy.”
“You wouldn’t do much in twenty-four hours, would you?” asked Dennis with scorn. “Give him a chance, can’t you? It’s not for nothing he got his reputation. Sure, he did more in an hour, by your own account, than Inspector Druet in the whole night, and with the trail hot before him.”
“Well”—McCarty rose—“of course it’s nothing to me since I’m out of the game. There’s no denying he’s a smart man; but he’s as apt to make a mistake as the next one, being human. I’ve no powers of imagination, and no deduction, and my reasoning may be on the fritz; but I’ve got a plain, ordinary hunch, and that is that the couple on the fourth floor could tell him more about what happened than the fat little blonde woman, or her friend behind the glass closet. They were in Newark at the theater, with a grand little alibi all ready and working overtime; but I saw the looks that passed between them while the inspector was questioning them, and if they don’t actually know what took place that night, they could give a pretty shrewd guess.”
After supper that evening, McCarty followed the vague impulse of the afternoon and dropped in at headquarters. He found Inspector Druet alone at his desk in the little side office, going over a voluminous batch of typed notes.
“Well, Mac, they put one over on us.” The inspector smiled wearily. “I thought I’d pumped that little Doremus woman nearly dry, but she was too much for me. Even that girl of hers, Mary, gave us a stall about the voice down the air-shaft.”
“I don’t think so, sir.” McCarty sat in the chair indicated and laid his hat on the desk. “I think she was telling the truth there, all right; but what she heard has got no more to do with the murder than the man hiding in the corner as far as any evidence goes that Mr. Terhune has now, as I was saying to my friend Riordan this afternoon.”
“Terhune tells me you were with him when he faced Mrs. Doremus to-day.”
“Yes, sir.” McCarty paused, wondering uncomfortably if the detective had told of his suspicions which he had not communicated to the inspector. “He asked me to go along. The case has got me going, sir; that’s a fact. I can’t help turning it over in my mind and trying to dope it out myself.”
“I wish you could, Mac,” responded the inspector heartily. “If you want to know anything, fire away. We know you’ll keep any information you get safe from the newspaper boys, and that is what we want just now.”
“Sure I will!” McCarty moved his chair nearer. “I came trailing all the way down here to satisfy my curiosity about two other tenants—them on the fourth floor. Did you get a line on them, inspector?”
“Oh, yes; they’re straight enough! The young man, Antonio, is taking a summer course at the university, as he said. He seems to be quite a favorite with the others in his class, but he is intimate with no one. He registered up there as coming from San Francisco.
“The other two, Grafton Foxe and his wife, are on the level, too. They are well known in theatrical circles, especially vaudeville, and every one speaks well of them. We’ve wired out to the Chicago authorities to look up the girl, Ivy Collins, at that address on Leavitt Street and get her statement. That’s all we’ve got about any of them as yet. Mrs. Doremus’s record you heard from Terhune, I understand.”
McCarty nodded.
“Of course, you know she flew the coop—”
“She has taken a suite at the Hotel Lavenham, with Mary along as her personal maid,” the inspector interrupted. “We are taking no chances of losing sight of them.”
“That Mary acts queer to me,” McCarty remarked. “As if she might have some one back of her.”
“She has.” Inspector Druet leaned forward in his chair. “We got the office to-night to lay off of Mrs. Doremus, and it came from high up, too. There’s a strong influence at work for her somewhere.”
“I had an idea that might come,” McCarty grinned. “It’s more for the sake of the man, I’m thinking, than for her. So she’s to be dropped from the investigation, is she?”
“Not while Terhune’s in the game,” the inspector replied grimly. “It’s a good thing I had him retained on this, for we—well, it would have been healthier for us to take that hint. You know how it was yourself, Mac, when you were on the force. But Terhune is a free lance; he never takes a case unless he can have full swing, and he stops at nothing. This quiet word passed on down the line is like waving a red flag before a bull, to him. He won’t get off that trail now until he runs the man to earth.”