“THE BURNISHED PIPE”
“A circus girl, was she? And somebody tried to get her with a revolver last spring! It looks like there was going to be no end to the new things cropping up all the time,” Denny remarked later. “You never had a case to equal this in the old days on the force, Mac. I’ll bet Terhune never saw the beat of it, either!”
“True for you! When I went to him after leaving you this morning he had it all cut and dried that Foxe was the guilty one, but he changed his mind when he saw how the two of them took the news of whom the dead girl really was.”
“And they wouldn’t give in that they’d an idea who the murderer could be?”
McCarty shook his head and took a fresh grip upon the cigar in the corner of his mouth.
“They would not. For two hours and more he hammered at them, first threatening and then persuading, but they stuck to the lie in a dogged kind of a way, although they knew right enough that we were on to them.”
“But why?” Denny exclaimed. “That’s what gets me. If they know, and they were true friends of the girl, why would they want to shield the man that killed her? You’d think they’d be ready to fly at his throat.”
“They don’t want to shield him, you can be sure of that,” responded McCarty. “They’ll be two thankful people the day we lay our hands on him, but they don’t dare open their lips. They know that after killing the girl he’ll be desperate and stop at nothing, and they’re in deadly fear of him. ’Tis that shut their mouths. If he could get into a flat that was bolted and chained up, once, he can do it again, and they’ve no mind to turn informers and wake up some morning dead themselves.”
“So that’s it!” Dennis’s hand fell heavily on his knee. “By golly, I’d like to know how he ever did get in! It begins to look as if he flew in, like the girl said to you, Mac.”
“What do you say if we go over and have another look at the Glamorgan?” McCarty rose. “It’s early, not three yet. The coast is clear, for Grafton Foxe and his wife have gone to a hotel, the same as Mrs. Doremus. Mrs. Foxe said she couldn’t stay another hour in that room where Ivy Collins was killed, with the very window staring her in the face. You can’t blame her, but I guess that’s not the only reason. They’re running as much from fear of the living as thought of the dead. It’ll do no harm to look over the ground again, and I’ve a mind to examine those locks and bolts myself.”
“I’m with you.” Dennis knocked the ashes from his pipe and stuck it in his pocket. “I thought we were pretty good, in my line of work, at breaking into places that was closed tight, but this fellow must be a bird.”
“Not one that can fly, though,” McCarty remarked, as they started across town. “If he can find a way to get in, we ought to be able to do the same thing, but it’s got me guessing.”
“And what does Terhune think about it, now?”
“He’s hotfoot after the truth of that shooting in the circus last spring, and he’s sending a couple of men out West on the midnight train to follow up the show and get the particulars. I don’t know but he’s right, at that. If somebody tried to get her once and failed, they might try it again, but the heart of them must be black with hate.”
“People in a circus are all like one big family,” Dennis observed. “They’ll scrap among themselves, but they’ll stand together against outside interference. Terhune’s men will have long, slow work cut out for them, I’m thinking.”
“If he can’t induce that Foxe couple to talk, there’s nothing for him to do but try to trace back through the girl’s history for a clue to some one who had reason to wish her dead,” returned McCarty. “He won’t believe there’s anything in what she tried to say to me. I’d like to find that young fellow who helped me carry her in, I can tell you that. I can’t get him out of my head, and the way he looked when I saw him in the crowd outside the Quimby house on the day of the funeral.”
“The fellow with the funny, long face and big flapping ears like a clown? I remember your telling me of him.” Dennis suddenly seized his friend in a dexterous grasp, and swung him out of the path of a passing motor. “Do you want to get run down, entirely? Stopping in the middle of the street and staring like a rube!”
McCarty was indeed staring as if a light had dawned upon him, and now he chuckled softly, ignoring the rebuke.
“Denny, our friend Terhune is welcome to all his little registering and charting machines as long as I have you along with me. When it comes to hitting the bull’s-eye blindfolded, you beat any fancy shot going!”
“And what is it now?” demanded his friend. “I’ve no notion at all of what you’re getting at, but mind where you’re going or you’ll land in a hospital!”
They reached their destination, but McCarty walked past the entrance.
“Come on a bit till I show you something,” he said. “Between the Glamorgan, here, and this apartment house next door there’s a narrow space, a kind of a court, like. No one could have come over the roofs, because the Glamorgan is only eight stories high, and the next building is twelve.”
“There are windows in both buildings opening on the court, though, and they’re level with each other on every floor,” Dennis commented. “A fellow that was spry enough could easy jump from one to the other. That’s what you’re getting at, isn’t it? Even so, he’d not land in Foxe’s apartment, but in one of those smaller ones on the side of this house, and he had no accomplice in the building, had he?”
“None that’s been doped out, yet,” replied McCarty, “and if he had, that wouldn’t give us a hint as to how he got in the apartment where he did the murder. I just wanted you to get an idea of the outside surroundings of the house.”
“What joins it around on the avenue side?” Dennis asked.
“Another apartment even higher than this one. We’ll have a look up on the roof when we get through inside.”
“Say, how did Quimby get out that night?” Dennis paused on the steps. “I know he hid till after you and the inspector had gone, but I thought the house was under surveillance by that time, and every outlet watched. Nobody saw him go, did they?”
“No, but he told me last night. He stayed under cover till three o’clock in the morning, and then the superintendent sneaked him through the coal cellar to a little door connecting the building with the one back of it. ’Tis what you might call a lively house, with tenants that keep all hours, and no one remarked him walking out of the entrance at that time of night. Both that and the Glamorgan used to be owned and run by the same person, that’s why the door is there.”
“Did his stepdaughter seem scared of Quimby still? I’ll bet he could have killed her, himself, all over again,” remarked Dennis as they entered.
“Not she! Her fighting blood is up, and besides her husband can protect her now that the whole story is out. Quimby wouldn’t dare take a chance on putting anything over since we’re on to his scheme, but Terhune made sure of it by telling him he’d be put under arrest the minute a move was made against her. I was for putting him away last night, but she wouldn’t hear of it. For the sake of her mother’s memory she is going to let him pay back what he can without disgrace. She’s a fine girl.”
The Foxes’ apartment was in even more wild disorder than on McCarty’s visit of the morning. It was as if its occupants had fled in the face of a threatened catastrophe, seizing what lay nearest to their hands and flinging the rest about in a frenzy. Only the room of the tragedy had been straightened and rearranged; the papers and trash had disappeared and the shades were decently lowered. The adjoining bedroom, too, which had been the dead girl’s, was in order and seemed already, in spite of its flaunting draperies and bright colors, to wear an air of desolation.
“And this is where she was killed.” Dennis was standing before the window in the library.
“Yes. When the man appeared, Marion Rowntree shrank back in the little three-cornered place by the piano, like this—” McCarty endeavored to suit the action to the word, but finding that his girth did not lend itself to an illustration, he stepped aside hastily lest he evoke critical comment. “You remember when she told us first on the train coming back from Chicago, I asked her which way he went, but she’d been too overcome with the horror of it to notice. She said he just appeared from nowhere, like, and then vanished again. I don’t get it at all.”
“He must have gone through the archway into the parlor, and down the hall,” Dennis hazarded. “Come till we look at the doors.”
They examined them both thoroughly, experimenting with the locks and chain, but could come to only one conclusion. If Ivy Collins had fastened them, as Marion Rowntree was prepared to swear, no human agency could have opened them from the outside.
Returning once more to the library, Dennis threw up the windows and looked out, but no jutting cornice or ledge ran beneath and there was no foothold where a man, be he ever so agile, could have clung.
“Unless he was hiding in the flat all the time in spite of her searching, I give it up,” declared McCarty. “The two fireplaces are fakes, with no chimney he could have squeezed down, and a man can’t pass through solid walls. Denny, where’ve you got to?”
But Dennis did not reply. He was hanging perilously out of the air-shaft window in the bedroom, craning his neck upward, and his whole body quivered with excitement like a pointer with his quarry. He drew back at last, dusting his hands upon his trousers, and turned to McCarty with an odd gleaming in his eyes.
“You said something awhile back about going up on the roof,” he said, his voice shaking with an effort to speak calmly. “I’d like to have a look up there right now.”
“What is it?” McCarty asked curiously. “Have you got an idea about it, Denny? You don’t think he came in that window!”
“Never mind what I think!” Dennis started headlong for the door. “I want to see that roof!”
They ascended quickly and Dennis was through the trap-door and out like a cat without waiting for his bulkier companion. He was already at the air-shaft opening when McCarty clambered out upon the roof and he knelt by the extreme edge, waving frantically.
McCarty hastened panting to him, but all he saw were two stout pipes which lay across the top of the shaft bisecting it, and ran along to a leader at the cornice. He drew back, shivering, from the brink of the well-like opening.
“Come away from the edge of that, Denny!” he growled. “’Tis a wonder you’re not killed a dozen times a day, with the risks you run!”
“Do you see that?” Dennis pointed triumphantly to one of the conduits. “See the wide shiny mark on that pipe?”
“I do!” His friend’s excitement was communicating itself to McCarty, and he dropped down on all fours as near the opening as he dared. “It looks as if it had been rubbed up and polished.”
“That’s just what happened! And it’s a rope rubbing around it that burnished it, Mac! A rope with a weight swinging on the end of it—the weight of the man that let himself down to that bedroom window and evened his score with Ivy Collins!”
“Holy Saint Patrick!” McCarty sat back on his heels and stared at Dennis. “Would it bear the weight of him, do you think?”
“It’s strong enough to hold up three of him!” declared the other. “Them two are water pipes and there’s no soft lead in them, and no joints over the shaft.”
“’Twould be a damn’ nervy stunt!” McCarty muttered. “It would not. Any fellow with his muscles developed and limber could do it. ’Tis nothing to what we’re ready to do at any fire. If I had a rope handy, I’d show you this minute. Mac, that’s how the fellow did the trick! And he needn’t have come up here on the roof at all. Lean forward and look, you’ll not be toppling over while I’m here.
“He could have reached out of any of those windows near the top of the shaft, thrown the loose end of a rope over the pipe, caught it and hauled it around till the ends were hanging even, and then let himself down hand over hand, holding on to the two of them together.”
“And back the same way?” McCarty’s voice was filled with awe.
“Sure! When he come up again, and got level with the window he wanted to get in, he’d swing himself till he could drop in over the sill, and then letting go of one strand of the rope he’d haul on the other and pull it back from over the pipe. He could roll the whole thing up and take it away with him. ’Twould not have to be a hawser, you know; a rope as big as your thumb will hold a man’s weight, and he had it doubled between his hands.
“That’s how he done it, Mac, as sure as you’re alive, for if he had worked from up here, and just given the rope a turn around the pipe, it would not leave a wide smudged mark like that. Look! You can see other streaks not so bright where he pitched the rope along to get it near the middle. And the streaks are only over toward that side of the pipe; there are none from the middle to this end at all. He flung the rope up from one of the windows on that side.”
“They’re the small apartments, the ones marked ‘B’ on every floor.” McCarty rose heavily and dusted his knees. “Denny, I believe you’ve struck it! That’s how the murderin’ devil got in, but who in the world would have thought it? Come on till we have a look at those flats, and see can we find a trace of him.”
“I thought you and the inspector went through them all the night of the murder,” remarked Dennis as they made their way toward the trap-door.
“We did,” McCarty admitted. “But it was the old story of seeing what we were looking for, and being blind to the rest. We expected nothing, and we found it. About how far down would he be flinging the rope from, Denny?”
“The nearer the top, the more likely,” Dennis averred. “’Twould be an impossibility from more than three floors down, and that would be taking an awful chance of the rope twisting, and hitting one of the windows on the other side.”
“I’ve the memorandum still that the hall-boy give me the night of the murder, with the names of the tenants and the flats they occupy.” McCarty felt rapidly through his pockets. “Here it is. Third floor down, being the sixth from the street, would be Baxter’s They’re the two old cranks with asthma, that threatened to write to the newspapers complaining about our waking them up. Neither of them could throw a ball of cord over a gate. The next flat above is closed for the summer, and the top is occupied by a family named Armitage; consumptive-looking mother and two daughters. Let’s try the empty flat first.”
Descending the stairs, they halted on the seventh floor and McCarty opened the door of apartment “B” with the pass-key obtained earlier from the superintendent.
Within all seemed orderly and wore the appearance of having been undisturbed for many weeks, the shades lowered carefully, and the furniture covered with linen. Like that of the pseudo Mr. Antonio, it was a four-room apartment, the hall running toward the street front, with two windows opening on the air-shaft on the right, the dining-room and kitchen on the left whose respective windows opened on the five-foot court which separated the Glamorgan from the next house. The living-room and bedroom were at the front facing the street, the former being divided only by the intervening wall from the room corresponding in size and location with the one below in which the tragedy had taken place.
“Go slow, Denny!” cautioned McCarty. “The dust is thick, and there might be tracks.”
“There are, but not in the dust!” Dennis proclaimed. He had halted at the first air-shaft window nearest the door, and raising it, was examining the sill. “Look here, will you? Some one’s had a clothesline or pulley across the air-shaft at one time or another. This hook is old and rusty now, ’twould not bear the weight of a cat, but look what’s caught on it.”
He turned, and held out a frayed strand of shining yellow manila.
“Maybe ’tis a bit of clothesline left,” McCarty suggested slowly.
“Clothesline nothing!” retorted the other in disdain. “Ain’t I after telling you that hook hasn’t been used for years, maybe? This rope is new! It caught on the hook when he jerked it in! Don’t get too close, Mac, for I’m keeping my sleeve from touching the sill. There’s a kind of smudge in the dust on it inside here—now, see it?”
“I do, but even Terhune with his little spyglass couldn’t make much out of it. ’Tis like the pads of an elephant, Denny. There’s no print of a boot here, if that’s what your aiming at.”
“I’m not!” cried Dennis disgustedly. “If you think any man is going to try a stunt like that with his boots on, to say nothing of the clatter he’d raise jumping in the other windows down-stairs, you’re a bigger fool than even I thought you! ’Tis his stockinged feet, and unless I’m a liar here are more tracks of them on the oilcloth of the kitchen.”
He had crossed the narrow hall at a bound and was pointing excitedly to the floor. Surveyed at an oblique angle, the oiled surface gave forth a chain of crossed and recrossed narrow elongated blurs at irregular intervals, the whole forming a broken line from the door to the window opening on the narrow court.
“You’re right, Denny!” shouted McCarty, convinced at length. “Neither the inspector nor me went in there at all and as far as I know Terhune hasn’t poked his nose in this flat; anyway, if he did ’twas not without his shoes. The fellow got in that window from the house next door! There’s just one thing puzzles me, though.”
“What?” Dennis was flushed with victory. “’Tis as plain as the nose on your face, to me.”
“This as “This flat was closed up, and the kitchen window shut and maybe bolted. I’m not saying he couldn’t have opened it from the outside with a little jockeying, but he’d have to stand on the sill to do it. It seems to me ’twould be too close a calculation for a fellow to take a five-foot jump and be able to count on landing on a three-inch strip of brick sill on his toes without missing it entirely and falling or else going too far and crashing through the window.”
“No more he did! The window is closed, but not locked. Look!” Dennis opened it and paused with an unconsciously dramatic gesture. On the sill, where it had been wedged beneath the window frame, was a long splinter, and in the slanting ray of lingering sunlight, they saw tiny flecks of paint upon it.
“He put a board across and crept from the other house!” exclaimed McCarty. “What’s that in the room over there?”
“A painter’s scaffold!”
With one accord they turned and made their way quickly from the apartment and down to the street. McCarty was breathing hard with excitement, but Dennis was calm, although his flush had deepened and his eyes shone.
They encountered an elderly janitor in the house next door, and learning that the seventh-floor apartment on the side was vacant and in the hands of decorators, they promptly voiced an enthusiastic desire to see it.
The janitor was unimpressed by their appearance, and evidently did not welcome this intrusion on his Sabbath leisure, but he ushered them nevertheless to their goal, and listlessly waited outside the door.
Dennis, with a practical calculation of distances, made straightway for the room in which they had seen the painter’s scaffold. Its window was partly raised to allow the odor of varnish to escape and several stout boards leaned against a closet door.
But McCarty and his companion scarcely noticed them, for on the fresh gray wall-paper beside the window frame was the silhouette of a large, dusty hand and beneath it on the base board, where the drying varnish had held it unmistakably clear, was the imprint of a carelessly dropped boot.
They looked at each other in triumph.
“You’ve done it, Denny!” McCarty’s voice had sunk to a piercing whisper. “You’ve called his game! ’Tis Terhune should be taking lessons from you, for you’re wasting your time in the fire department. You’ve stepped in at the last minute and landed on the truth!”