FREDERICK IRVING ANDERSON (1877–1947), the creator of Sophie Lang, the charming and creative jewel thief, has been largely forgotten by modern readers, having produced two books about farming and only three books of mystery and crime; many additional stories were published only in magazines, mainly The Saturday Evening Post, and never collected in book form.
Perhaps his best-known character is the delightful young woman who appeared in the single volume The Notorious Sophie Lang (1925), a thief of such daring and unmatched success that she is often regarded as a legend who doesn’t actually exist. Much of Sophie Lang’s fame derives from a series of 1930s Paramount films recounting her adventures. She was portrayed by Gertrude Michael in all three.
In The Notorious Sophie Lang (1934), the police use a French thief to capture her, but she and the thief fall in love and escape. In The Return of Sophie Lang (1936), which also starred Ray Milland, the reformed adventuress is on an ocean liner traveling to the United States with her elderly benefactress when she recognizes a “distinguished” fellow passenger; he is actually a jewel thief planning to involve Sophie in the disappearance of a diamond on which he has set his sights. The final film in the series, Sophie Lang Goes West (1937), which also stars Lee Bowman and Buster Crabbe, recounts Lang’s predicament when she evades the police by boarding a train to California. It is not long before she becomes involved with fellow travelers, including a brash but charming Hollywood press agent and a desperate sultan who hopes the valuable gem he is carrying will be stolen. Curiously, although the films had some success, the only volume of Sophie’s adventures was never published in America.
Anderson’s other two mystery collections were Adventures of the Infallible Godahl (1914) and The Book of Murder (1930), selected by Ellery Queen as one of the 106 greatest collections of mystery stories ever published. Deputy Parr, who is outwitted by Godahl in one book and Sophie Lang in another, again has his hands full with assorted crooks in the third and last of Anderson’s fiction works.
“The Signed Masterpiece” was first published in the McClure’s June/July 1921 issue; it was first collected in The Notorious Sophie Lang (London, Heinemann, 1925).
NUMBER 142, on the south side of the street, was an English basement dwelling of that commodious Van Bibber era of yesterday when Manhattan was still a native island and its inhabitants retained elbow room and a sense of substantial living. Most of the town had taken the hint and moved north, but Number 142 and a few other stalwarts with shiny plate-glass windows, scoured doorsteps and pull-bells still held their ground, with supercilious apartment houses and gilt hotels jostling them on all sides.
Number 142 was occupied by the widow of Amos P. Huntington. The departed, a drab, inoffensive little person, had only once achieved newspaper notoriety, when he blew himself into eternity while compounding synthetic rubber. The relict was a little Dresden china affair; as evidence of her quality she drove a smart plum-coloured brougham drawn by a smarter pair of roached hackneys of a water too luxurious for this day and age; on the box sat a coachman and footman in plum-colour, two stern middle-aged males, close-shaven and showing that curious prison pallor acquired by upper servants who spend most of their days in the semi-obscurity of old-fashioned basements.
This former fashionable section had begun its migration north some years before. One by one the brownstone residences on the north side that faced Number 142 and its few companions had been converted into red-brick stables with sharp roofs, cottage windows, and wide doorways. For a brief period the ancien régime had inhaled the fumes of ammonia and horse liniment and witnessed the capers of a superior class of equines that were led off to the Park afternoons by cockney grooms, to rack and amble for the benefit of the digestions of over-fed masters and mistresses.
Then the superior horses disappeared and in their stead came superior artists who raised north lights over the old hay-lofts, filled the air with the odours of turpentine and wet clay, and for the most part dined unromantically in a pastry-shop around the corner. Then the city, like a rank forest encroaching on a forsaken meadow, wiped the artists and their studios out of the picture, and set up in their place unsightly garages and machine shops for sick motors. The sunny side of the street became slippery with grease from leaky oil pans, the air thick with the odour of gas and rubber. At the curb at all hours of the day and far into the night diseased insides of broken-down automobiles strewed the side-walks, while the begrimed mechanics tinkered and tested. Through all these vicissitudes the old guard hung on grimly, Number 142 and its companions, by protest, seeming to grow more immaculate. Mrs. Huntington, in addition to these aggressions on her domestic peace, had suffered the further indignity of being dragged from her sheltered grief into open court by the insurance guarantors of her departed husband, who maintained that anyone so temerarious as to tamper with synthetic rubber could have but one motive—suicide. Twice the little widow had won the sympathy of the jury, who in two suits had awarded her the full amount of her claim, a quarter of a million dollars.
Directly across the street, in Number 143, was a machine shop which in grime, odour, and noisy clamour differed in no respects from its neighbours. An observant person might have noted, with some stirring of curiosity, that all of its mechanics were young, stood six feet, and weighed 185 pounds. Unknown and unsuspected, Number 143 was of the police; it was one of that series of carefully masked deadfalls which that arch man-hunter, Deputy Parr of Headquarters, had planted in unexpected corners throughout the city. Crime is sporadic; nevertheless it is also regional and vocational. Here through his minions he eavesdropped on the night-birds indigenous to Automobile Alley. In Broad Street he maintained a bucket shop, manned with mammoth messenger boys and clerks; in Maiden Lane a platinum refinery, whose wrinkled old alchemist could tell him at a moment’s notice the chemical signature of any batch of platinum in existence; in Fourth Avenue he had a two-by-four office among the brokers of raw silk, a commodity that attracts thieves as honey does flies; and in Central Park West he conducted, under an able lieutenant, a spook parlour for table-tilting and slate-writing, where occasionally a wire got through from the other shore. Many a poor wight languishing behind bars wondered, but would never know, how he had come so summarily to his doom. It was simple enough, merely getting acquainted and being neighbourly.
At ten of an early winter morning a car of some consequence came to a jerking, sputtering stop, sighed, and died at the curb in front of Number 142. The driver, a man of six feet, weighing 185 pounds, got down, opened the hood, and stood regarding his ailing motor with the forlorn look of a medico whose patient had gone beyond his skill. A red-headed mechanic, six feet of height, 185 pounds of weight, came out. He evinced sympathetic interest and put his head under the hood.
“The Chief,” said the driver, bending down and speaking in the mechanic’s ear, “wants a report on Number 142.”
The mechanic re-connected a high-tension wire with a spark plug terminal, thus restoring the consequential motor to its full faculties, should an emergency arise. He tore a blue ticket in two along the line of perforation, handed one half to the driver with the remark, “No tickee—no washee!” and tied the other half by a stout cord to the windshield of the automobile. The chauffeur strolled away to a back-room haunt of chauffeurs and mechanics, and whiled away a few hours getting acquainted. The mechanic pretended to resume tinkering, meantime studying out of the tail of his eye that respectable domicile opposite, Number 142, vaguely speculating on what turn of the weathercock had brought the Dresden china widow under the surveillance of the police.
An hour later Mrs. Amos P. Huntington descended the steps and entered her brougham. She had small feet encased in trim high boots which she displayed by a modishly short skirt; her complexion was very white, her eyes hazel, and her hair of that peculiar shade of mahogany which can be retained only by unremitting attention; she was in full mourning, of a rich correctness that suggested one of those fashionable specialty shops in the next block just off the avenue which devote themselves exclusively to the millinery of grief. Her footman wrapped her in moleskin and mounted the box; her mincing pair moved off in perfect step as if in time to the tinkle of some antique gavotte. At this moment the red-headed mechanic, scratching his auburn thatch with a grim set of fingers, seemed to come to the decision that a trial run was necessary. He started his hypochondriac motor and rolled along in the wake of the plum-coloured brougham, bending a sympathetic ear to catch some symptomatic murmur from the engine.
At Columbus Circle, that eternal whirligig of traffic, the traffic signal fell against the plum-coloured brougham and the horses came to a stop, snorting motors on all sides instantly piling up with the fecundity of a log jam. A man in a brown derby on the sidewalk had his attention arrested by the flapping of the blue ticket of the motor behind the brougham. He halted at the curb, and casually catching the eye of the red-headed mechanic, he took off his brown derby, though it was freezing weather, and mopped his forehead. The red-headed mechanic answered by blowing his nose in a red bandana; and turning, he stared stupidly at the plum-coloured brougham. The traffic sluice was opened, the jam started to move; and the red-headed mechanic now lost interest in the plum-coloured brougham. He turned east and in ten minutes was back at his machine shop.
“Does anyone follow, William?” asked the Dresden china widow in her speaking-tube.
“No, ma’am,” responded William the footman, speaking out of the corner of his mouth, without moving his lips, into the receiver at his shoulder. “There was one,” he added encouragingly. “The mechanic opposite—but he turned off.”
Mrs. Huntington did not permit herself to be lulled by a sense of security. For a long period the gracious lady of Number 142 had never driven out without inquiring sooner or later, “Does anyone follow, William?” It might have intimated a vanity or a fear. There had been occasions which seemed to the capable William to hold forth a promise. But these promises were never fulfilled. Always the particular person or vehicle that had attracted the suspicious scrutiny of William would be lost in the ceaseless traffic of the city streets, much as the red-headed mechanic, who had momentarily aroused William’s interest, was now lost.
That afternoon two studious young men called at Number 142 to test the electric meter. This task, having to do with slide rules and logarithmic calculations and shiny instruments, was spread out on the basement stairway with the interested servants watching now and then, and obligingly handing the two scientists, by request, tools whose nickel-plated surfaces had been especially prepared for finger-prints. The next day telephone linemen asked for and received permission to pass through the house to the roof to untangle some wires. An inspector for the Water Department, a most entertaining fellow, looked over the taps for leaks. Some dispute having arisen in an obscure quarter as to the encroachment on the building line of this row of houses, a young man must enter and open every window from the inside, to measure the protruding sills with a rule. Once when he was leaning far out of the drawing-room window he asked politely over his shoulder would Mrs. Huntington please pass him his magnifying glass, which the little widow did graciously, picking it up quite unconsciously in the hand which held her lace handkerchief. In departing he offered her his fountain pen to sign his call slip, but not seeing his gesture, she used her own pen instead. There were other callers at the basement door, all civil, and, to the outward eye at least, simple. By the end of the week a complete dossier of Number 142 was in the hands of Mr. Parr. It had to do with the mistress and her ménage, down to microscopic details. If she had nursed a fancied sense of sanctified privacy, she must have been horror-stricken to know how easy it had been for Parr’s camera-eyed sleuths to turn Number 142 inside out and upside down. In the preparation of the report, in only one point had they failed—they carried away nothing bearing the imprint of the pink finger-tips of the pathetic widow herself, although her household had been most obliging in this respect. The magnifying glass, when developed in Centre Street Headquarters, yielded only a hazy replica of her dainty kerchief.
“I know it is the fashion,” said Deputy Parr, settling himself in his favourite elbow-chair by Oliver Armiston’s desk, “to assign us cops the rôle of solid ivory in modern detective drama. A thick cop always makes a hit!” He shot a venomous gleam at Oliver, who, running his fingers through his single grey lock, looked up from his work but did not deign to reply. “Some bright young man,” went on Mr. Parr ponderously, “might make a name for himself by endowing one of us with a glimmer of brains.” He selected a cigar for himself from the paste-board box by Oliver’s elbow. “I realize,” he said, nipping off the tip with his finger-nails, “that there is a popular prejudice against it. But it could be done—it could be done.” He struck a match with a single magic twist in the air, applied the light, and drew a few meditative puffs, eyeing Oliver through half-closed lids.
Armiston, the extinct author, was merely another phase of Deputy Parr’s amazing versatility. For the most part Parr practised logic, not intuition. Through long experience of the habits and resorts of the creatures he hunted, he set his traps in what he knew to be good game country. Then he retired to wait for some prowling creature to spring them. But occasionally his traps yawned empty, not so much as the snap of a dry twig rewarded his longest vigil along well-proved runways. Then, like his prototype, the savage hunter, Parr would withdraw stealthily to consult his Medicine. Armiston occupied this position. Armiston had been a weaver of tall tales, thrillers. On one occasion he had been too realistic; a cunning thief had actually dramatized Oliver’s fiction as fact, with murder as its outcome. The ensuing sensation had driven the hectic author into retirement. Here the argus-eyed Deputy found him. If fiction could be done into fact, then why not fact into fiction? So reasoned the deputy of police.
His method was direct but subtle. An insoluble mystery or a hesitating dénouement aroused the dormant faculties of the extinct author as the clang of a gong revives the pensioned fire horse. Parr would dress the stage for Oliver with characters and scenery, ring up the curtain on a frozen plot—and in his most ingratiating manner invite Armiston to “go to it.” The results had occasionally been startling. They always, to the matter-of-fact policeman, bordered on the mystic. Oliver’s imagination, once touched off, had an uncanny fecundity.
Now the deputy, with the sigh of too much girth, picked up his left foot encased in a Number 12 boot, and deposited it on his right knee; he tapped the sole significantly, it was a new sole, a very slab of a sole, spiked into place, designed for wear, not stealth.
“It cost me two seventy-five,” he said lugubriously. “It used to cost fifty cents. Even the price of detecting crime has gone up. Sole leather!” he exclaimed with some vehemence, “that’s what achieves results in my business. Whenever I take on a new man, I look at his feet, not his head.”
He paused. Oliver by continued silence seemed to reserve judgment.
“As a matter of fact,” said Parr confidentially, “we don’t detect crime. Crime detects itself.”
“It’s too bad the perpetrators aren’t so obliging,” put in Oliver.
“But, my dear fellow, they are! That’s just the point!” said Parr expansively.
“They detect themselves?”
“Oh, absolutely, inevitably. That is—eventually. The element of time enters, of course. We simply wait,” explained the policeman blandly. “Sooner or later every crook revisits his usual haunts. I have a man sitting on the doorstep waiting for him.” Parr smiled childishly.
“You must admit it, it requires some intelligence on your part to pick the right doorstep,” said Armiston.
“Not at all!” retorted Parr. “That’s the least of our worries. They give us the address!” He chuckled. Armiston returned to his ciphering. He had the hurt air of a too credulous child who has been imposed on.
“Every dog has its flea,” said Parr, nodding solemnly at the fat Buddha in the corner of the study. “Every crook has his squealer. I have never known it fail, Oliver. If I ever caught up with the squeals that fall on my desk every morning I would close shop and call it a day.” He added gruffly: “I haven’t had a day off in twenty years. Failures? We have no failures. Unfinished business, yes. Sooner or later somebody blabs—blabs to me! That’s what I am here for.” He jabbed his chest fiercely. “Let me illustrate,” he went on gravely. “Did you ever hear of Sophie Lang? I suspect not.” He smiled oddly. “The public never hears of successful crooks. It is only when they fail, when we catch them, that they become notorious. Sophie has yet to stub her toe.”
Armiston shook his head; the name meant nothing to him. But it had a tang, either in its accidental combination of letters, or in the way Parr pronounced it, that suggested inherent possibilities. The man-hunter became mellow in a reminiscent mood.
“We used to have a habit of assigning our bright young men to the Sophie Lang case. It was like sending a machinist’s apprentice for a left-handed monkey wrench, or a quart of auger holes.” He laughed. “So far as my bright young men are concerned, she was only a rumour.”
“Oh, a legendary crook! I say, that’s beautiful!” exclaimed Armiston.
“Legendary is right,” assented the deputy, snapping his jaws shut. “None of us ever saw her. We knew her only by her works. When we came a cropper we’d say ‘That’s Sophie.’ When something particularly slick was turned, Sophie again! We used to say that Sophie signed her serious work, like any other artist. Well, finally,” said Parr, thrusting his hands into his pockets and stretching luxuriously, “we filed Sophie away as ‘unfinished business.’ ”
He fixed his fierce little eyes on Armiston and waited. Oliver too waited.
“Sophie has turned up,” said Parr softly.
“In bracelets?” ejaculated Armiston.
“Not yet. But soon!”
“A squeal?”
“Certainly! What else? Haven’t I been telling you?”
“But who—who squealed?”
Parr assumed a hurt look.
“ ‘Who?’ ” he replied. “How the devil do I know? What the devil do I care? An anonymous letter,” he grunted. “They drop on my desk like the gentle dew from heaven. If they stopped coming I’d be out of a job. As it is,” he added, with a queer smile, “I am assigning myself, in my old age, to the Sophie Lang case. Do you get the humour of that, Oliver? But this time she is more than a rumour. Sophie is”—he paused for effect—“Sophie is Mrs. Huntington.”
“The widow—the insurance widow?”
Parr nodded slowly, his eyes gleaming.
Armiston eased himself back in his chair and said disgustedly: “You don’t believe that, Parr?”
“I am certain of it.”
“I’ve been meeting her around for several years, among the very best people. She’s—she’s eminently respectable,” protested Oliver.
“Sophie would be,” said Parr, chuckling.
Armiston found Parr’s complacency irritating.
“Is there anything definite to suggest Sophie?” he demanded.
“There is that quarter of a million dollars,” chuckled Parr.
“Forget your feet, Parr,” said Oliver sarcastically. Then suddenly, with sudden inspiration: “Has she signed it? You say, she does, or did.”
“There isn’t a flaw in her case,” said Parr. “That’s her usual signature. Limpid. She has beaten the insurance company twice, your sheltered little widow. They put the burden of proof on her. It wasn’t any burden—for Sophie!” He guffawed. “She hasn’t got the boodle yet—they are marking time for another appeal. They will only get themselves disliked, for picking on a poor helpless female. Helpless female is good!” and Parr fairly shook with mirth.
“Have you looked her up?” demanded Armiston.
“Naturally. Everybody has looked her up. Clean slate! Too clean! That’s Sophie. Sophie doesn’t react to the ordinary methods,” the deputy said. “That’s why I have come to you. I thought maybe you would like to undertake a little psychic research.”
Lowering his voice instinctively with a cautious look around for eavesdroppers, the deputy explained how he had been prying into the sanctified privacy of the insurance widow during the past week—with no results. Except for the one negative fact that the pathetic widow had avoided leaving the imprints of her pink finger-tips on his carefully prepared instruments, the record was blank. Parr volunteered the further information that he had just entered a new line of business—window cleaning. One of his best operatives was weekly polishing Number 142. Then there was the red-headed mechanic, and—unknown to the latter—two casual loafers haunting the block. Sophie’s time was pretty well accounted for.
“What’s her line, Parr?” asked Armiston when Parr finished.
“Anything. Sophie isn’t squeamish,” said Parr. He added with a vacant stare: “I’ve got a paper-weight in my museum collection with some human hair on it—and some finger-marks. I have always thought I would like to see Sophie’s finger-prints.”
He arose and began buttoning his coat, looking down on Armiston, smiling.
“There are a certain number of obvious things I might point out to you,” he said. “But I won’t. They might obstruct the psychic machinery.” He had his little laugh.
There was a full silence. The fire crackled on the hearth, the grandfather clock at the head of the room was emphasizing the passage of time, with dull sedate thuds. Suddenly, as if to recall the two men, it began to intone the hour. Towards the end of its count of noon, a little gilt magpie of a clock on the mantel woke up and joined in briskly. The deputy looked at his watch; and from his watch to Armiston, whom he regarded with a pleased smile. Oliver was brushing his white lock with contemplative fingers. Helping himself to a fresh cigar, the deputy took his departure.
“Does anyone follow, William?”
The sheltered widow smiled almost wistfully as she whispered the inquiry through the speaking-tube.
“The mechanic from across the street, ma’am,” replied William out of the corner of his mouth without moving his lips. The faithful sentry added that the red-headed mechanic was on foot this time. “Now he passes under the red cigar sign.”
“Drive slowly,” commanded the bereaved woman. “Don’t hurry him.”
But the red-headed mechanic, who of course had no suspicion that he was the object of so much thoughtfulness on the part of his widow, straightway began to lag; he discovered an interest in window shopping, particularly in those windows displaying tires of renovated rubber, of which there were many in this neighbourhood. Shortly he seemed to find what he sought, for he entered a shop—and that was the last of him for this time. But that same afternoon when she was about to turn into the avenue—at that misty hour of winter twilight when the street lamps awake with sickly blinks, and gorgeous limousines, whose interiors present charming Rodney groups of women and children, moved hub to hub in opposing tides—she picked him up again in her busybody mirror. Mrs. Huntington’s pair had come to a prancing stop at the avenue corner ready for their cue to join the ceremonial procession, when the red-headed mechanic, exercising another sick car, pulled up behind, his bumper grazing milady’s wheel felloes. In the mirror the cut of his jib fairly screamed his origin and purpose to the experienced eyes of the widow. Police? No doubt of it! Now, abruptly, the avenue stream broke in two at the traffic signal, opening the sluices for the cross current. William whirled his whip, his stylish pair danced on their tender toes and slowly wheeled into their place in the parade. The flutter of the motor sounded behind.
“Careful, William—pocket him!” cautioned the lady.
“He’s gone, ma’am—gone ’cross town,” said the disconsolate William.
Now suddenly Sophie Lang became all alert. Like a wily fox that has been idly scratching fleas waiting for the hunt to come within mouthing distance again, Sophie instinctively gathered her faculties, aware of a pleasing thrill. Figuratively she nosed the air to catch the tell-tale taint; figuratively she cocked an ear for the distant song of the pack. It had been a long wait, this last one, for the bay of the hounds, years of ennui and respectability, shared with a colourless husband. Husbands merely as such did not appeal to Sophie.
“Did you see him pass the ‘office,’ William?”
William had not detected anything.
Undoubtedly the “office”—she had unconsciously dropped into the argot of her craft—had been passed. It was not coincidence that her red-headed mechanic had found an errand to take him in her direction whenever she drove out these last few days; nor had it been coincidence that he lost interest in her before they had gone half a mile through the teeming streets. They were hunting her in relays! Sophie preened herself. This was genuine subtlety on the part of the police. It was her due; her dignity demanded it. She laughed softly, almost the first genuine revelation of amusement she had permitted herself since her widowhood. Instantly she closed her pretty lips over her pretty teeth again. Out of the corners of her long eyes she examined her neighbours in the procession. Among them she knew must be one tied to her heels like a noonday shadow. But the faces she looked into were blankly anonymous. She tried her bag of tricks one by one; like the wily fox, doubling, back-tracking, side-stepping, taking to earth, to water, to fallen timber. But with no results—except certainty! When finally that afternoon she returned to her domicile by devious ways, her red-headed mechanic was tinkering with still another sick motor at the curb in front of his shop; he did not even raise his eyes when her brougham drove up and drove away.
From that moment Mrs. Amos P. Huntington gradually faded out of the picture. The outer semblance of that quondam widow remained—her clothes, her speech, her aspect of grief; but beneath it all was Sophie. She watched with bead-like eyes. For several days she devoted her talents to catching her red-headed mechanic in the act of passing her bodily to the tender mercies of his relay. But never did she surprise the actual moment. This was finesse. Maybe it was the great Parr himself! She thrilled for an instant on this note. Then she decided on a stroke wholly characteristic.
When William had tucked her in among her moleskins he crossed to the red-headed man and, with that curious condescension upper servants bestow on mere artizans, informed him that his mistress would have speech with him.
“What is your name?” she asked, when the red-headed man stood respectfully, cap in hand, at her carriage door.
“Hanrahan, ma’am—John Hanrahan,” he replied.
“I have had my eyes on you for some time, John, without your suspecting it,” said she kindly. She had her eyes on him at that moment; and as he met them he had the startling impression that he and she understood each other perfectly. The impression was fugitive.
“You are to enter my service,” she informed him, with a large air of conferring an inestimable favour; and without awaiting an answer she informed John that he was to go with William to bring home a new car which she named—she was giving up her pair because the pavements were too hard on their feet. William was instructed to take John to the tailor and have him outfitted. All this with a gracious smile while she complimented John on the way he carried himself—John’s particular uprightness was the regulation product of the police gymnasium. The widow spoke in a little thread of a voice, which broke here and there, when she would close her eyes with a sigh. If the red-headed man had been a thousand devils he could not have refused so pathetic a figure. But the element of humour in the transaction was the ultimate appeal.
A few days later Parr himself, held up by one of his own regal traffic cops at a busy corner, had the grim satisfaction of seeing Sophie taking his red-headed mechanic out for an airing. The new car itself was quite as perfect in its way as had been her prancing pair—a town car imported from France, where they do themselves well in such things.
The motor occupied a glistening bandbox up forward. Sophie was enclosed in a gorgeous candybox away aft. The red-headed mechanic was exposed to the world and the weather as the only living thing abroad, perched on a slender capstan of a seat rising out of the bare deck amidships. She was making a Roman holiday of her prize. Parr could not repress a chuckle. It was so like Sophie!
The Dresden china widow—or what remained of her for popular consumption—did not vary her surface routine by a jot. At home and abroad her shuttle-like eyes were always moving slowly back and forth under the screen of her long lashes. Before many days had passed she had isolated her red-headed mechanic’s pack brothers. One was a man with a brown derby who always chewed a cold cigar. The other was a frayed taxi-driver with a moth-eaten beard who had a stand just off the avenue. She never hurried them, never lost them; she nursed them as tenderly as she did her man on the box. They were merely the hounds following blindly. It was the huntsman behind whom she must uncover. She examined bolts, bars, locks, window ledges, painted surfaces for tell-tale marks. In the act of crossing her boudoir she would pause, only her eyes moving, her senses alert and as receptive as if in the very cloister of her retreat she had already half-uncovered the thing that lurked and would strike when the time came. She knew the tricks and pace of her pursuers, and she timed her wits and pace to theirs.
Her telephone she handled with the utmost delicacy—they had tapped that, of course. Whenever she used it, she would set it down softly, then instantly pick it up again and listen, for minutes on end. It was filled with voices, disembodied, inarticulate, and far-off, that swirled and eddied through the ceaseless river of speech. Nothing there—it required exquisite patience. And then one day as she eavesdropped, under her very elbow someone yawned incautiously, groaned lazily, “Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” Sophie showed herself her little white teeth in the mirror that looked down on her eavesdropping. Her nimble mind drew a picture: it would be a big bare room with a lazy man in a blue uniform, with receivers strapped to his ears, seated at a desk. And this police ear grafted to her wire would always be open and attentive.
Once Sophie was rewarded by hearing a door open in that vague room. Again she caught the tread of feet; then the murmur of hushed voices. But it was the ticking of a clock—two of them, in fact—that pleased her most of all. How like a stupid cop, to lie in wait breathless at the mouthpiece of a telephone, with a blatant clock at his elbow. Sophie giggled. While she crouched up wind, watching those who watched her, she savoured the old intoxication of the game rising in her blood. This was réclame! She had had enough of stodgy respectability. After she had executed her last great coup Sophie had solemnly assured herself she would go out to grass for the remainder of her days. She had devoted years to this end. And yet, at the first fillip to the vanity of her legendary aloofness—Sophie, the uncaught!—she was off again.
Meantime our friend Mr. Parr, who had assigned himself, in his mature age, to the Sophie Lang case, was gloomy and bad company. The end of the fourth week found him scowling. There was the daily harvest of squeals falling on his desk. Betrayed crooks, with bracelets on, came home to roost as inevitably as raindrops trickle back to the ocean. But, just as all the rivers flow into the sea and yet the sea is not full, so Parr was conscious of an aching void. He had the uncomfortable sensation of being laughed at.
“The damned thing is frozen—solid!” he muttered, settling himself heavily in his favourite elbow-chair by Armiston’s desk.
Armiston said nothing. It wasn’t frozen to him. It was merely that the element of time had entered in. This yarn had “written” itself, as he would say professionally. He had merely brushed the tips of his clairvoyant fingers across the oracular keys of his faithful typewriter, and the congealed action which Parr had laid at the feet of his Medicine had straightway come to life, started to move. It had developed the impetus of the inevitable. He had written Finis and locked his typewriter and packed for Lakewood. Then he waited for his friend Parr to call on him.
Leaning back in his chair Oliver idly tinkered with some electrical indicating instrument. The grandfather clock ticked, the fire crackled, and the deputy scowled misanthropically at the fat Buddha in the corner. Silence did not embarrass Oliver. In fact it was his observation that if silence were maintained long enough, the other fellow would say something interesting. Parr seemed tongue-tied. As if tired of waiting for animate things to take the initiative, the needle of the instrument Oliver held in his hand made a spontaneous gesture. It swung over to the middle of a calibrated arc—and stayed there, as if intent on something. Armiston with a yawn set the thing down and presently picked up the telephone. He rested on one elbow watching his friend Parr while he waited.
“Rotten service!” he mumbled after a long wait. Parr nodded gloomily.
“Parr,” said Oliver abruptly, over the top of the telephone, “have you made any effort to find the husband? He is the one that squealed, of course. I suppose the poor devil got tired hiding out.”
The effect of these words, or rather of this act, on the deputy of police was electric. He reached out with one gorilla-like hand and snatched the telephone from Oliver’s grasp. The loose receiver cluttered to the floor, and Parr picked it up and replaced it. He glared at Armiston.
“Was she on there?” he demanded threateningly.
“Certainly,” said Oliver easily.
He pointed to the electric needle that still trembled over the middle of the card. That tell-tale needle gave warning every time the receiver was lifted off its hook in Number 142. To the two watchers at that moment, that tremulous needle personified the woman herself, the eavesdropper, probably at that instant cocking her pretty head with the swift movement of a startled doe.
“So you tip her off—under my nose, eh? Eh?” snarled Parr.
The sudden brainstorm that evoked these words gave him a look ape-like in its ferocity. His huge hands clamped themselves on the extinct author’s shoulder. Oliver could almost feel the bones crunch. He gritted his teeth, but continued to watch the spying needle on his desk. It was the needle itself at this juncture that came to the rescue. Abruptly, as if released by an unseen force, it flopped back to zero, nothing, on the calibrated scale. It was as significant as the snap of a dry twig. The lurker was withdrawing, on tiptoe.
For another instant Parr sat there glaring into Oliver’s eyes. Then as if he too were in the grip of some unseen force, the deputy jammed his hat down on his ears, turned up his collar and rushed from the room as if the very devil were prodding him on.
While the Lakewood train was picking its way across the drawbridges that span the estuaries of Newark Bay, the Dresden china widow was rolling over hill and dale through the bleak fawn-colour of the winter landscape to Byam, a little lake among the hills where her stylish hackneys were acquiring a winter coat and new hoofs in drowsy ease. On the spur of the moment this morning she had thought of her beloved horses with a tinge of self-accusation. It was honest John Hanrahan, the red-headed mechanic, who as usual conducted her. Some distance behind, coming into sight now and again as her car topped a rise, followed the man in the brown derby, only for this occasion he had discarded his derby for a cap, thrown away his cold cigar, and acquired a moustache.
Life had become a bed of thorns for the red-headed mechanic. Perched out there in the open where the widow could watch him breathe wasn’t his idea of being a detective; and so little had transpired in these four weeks that he was beginning to have grave doubts of the infallibility of his great Chief. But ahead of him this morning was a taste of paradise. Arriving at the farm, he went over his car, like a good mechanic, while he waited to take the widow back to town. This done, he entered the kitchen to get warm. Settling himself in a gloomy corner by the stove, he waited, sourly meditating on life. There entered a pert little French maid, a round pink person of Chippendale pattern, on high heels, which gave to her walk the tilt of a Gallic poodle. She caught the reflection of herself in a mirror—a pier-glass that had obviously been banished from above—and before the astonished eyes of John, she began to rehearse those very arts of coquetry which he in his ignorance had always supposed to be spontaneous, when exercised on helpless males.
In the act, she caught sight of him. She was not at all abashed. Indeed, quite the contrary. She tripped daintily over to him, sat down on the edge of his bench and indicated with a propelling shove that he was to move over—not too much. She folded her hands primly on her little lace apron, regarded him under her lashes; a dimple appeared on the apple-tinted cheek she presented to his gaze. Then, in the sudden effulgence of being well met, they both fixed their eyes on the wood-box and sighed happily.
An hour later, when his lady upstairs called for her motor, the red-headed mechanic—city bred—had changed his ideas about the attractions of the country.
It was the little maid who handed his lady into the car. The lady had found some fresh sweet grief here among the bucolic penates of her departed spouse, and she was crying and blowing her nose under her veil. As the pert maid handed her in, the maid boldly—behind the weeping lady’s shoulder—pressed a tiny hand in John’s ample paw. The motor rounded the drive, and as it passed the gate city-ward, the maid rising on tiptoe tossed a kiss to the moon-struck sleuth.
In West Broadway, among the spaghetti factories, the junk-shops, and the holes in walls where artificial flowers grow, the windows are always dingy, their ledges covered with a thick fall of grime. The Elevated trains growl all day and night, peering in, as they pass, on the upper floors where life is frankly uncurtained. The air is full of the aroma of roasting coffee from the warehouses near-by, and the sour smell of glue from the piano factories.
A man in a seamy uniform and a brass-bound cap, with a number that proclaimed him an Elevated motorman, examined doorway after doorway, always with a glance at the upper windows, as he picked his way up the street. Finally he came to a halt at a broken-down stoop, and ascending three rickety steps he rang a bell. In response there appeared, after a wait, a capacious Sicilian woman with a baby squatting on one hip. She could understand nothing; with a twitch of a shoulder and an upturning movement of one hand, she conferred upon him the freedom of the house. Indeed there was nothing worth stealing. The motorman ascended a creaking flight of stairs, and on the first landing, after some hesitation, picked out a door towards the front of the house and rapped sharply. He listened in open-mouthed concern. Then he rapped again and again, louder, and louder. Doors above him opened and shut; tousled heads peered down on him over the banisters. But the door stared at him blankly.
He retraced his steps to the street, walked briskly north a block, then turned and walked as briskly in the other direction. At a corner he sighted a policeman sampling the wares of a fruit vendor. The motorman whispered to the policeman.
“What’s that?” demanded the policeman, bending his head. He gave more careful heed to the motorman’s rapid flow of words. Together they crossed the street swiftly. Their unusual pace attracted a crowd. Before they had gone a block their followers were looking at each other expectantly. Many halted and turned to watch. So slight an incident as a policeman moving faster than his wont will rivet the attention of the casuals of such a street.
“There!” said the motorman, bringing the policeman to a halt. He pointed through the lattices of the Elevated structure. “I think that man is dead. He has been sitting in that window for thirty-six hours. At first,” he said, in the tone of one speaking of a long time ago, “he was reading a newspaper. But not lately.”
He went on to explain that he had passed and repassed that face in the window on his day and night shift, at the controller of his train—until finally it got on his nerves so he had to come on foot to see what was up. He added that he hadn’t been able to sleep last night for seeing that face, and—— The policeman, businesslike, pushed his way through the halted traffic and stamped up the stairs. The crowd banked against the door like a swarm of bees. He put his shoulder to the door above and it fell with a weak, splintering smash.
The man was dead—quite. The officer threw up a smeared window and blew his whistle, paying no more heed to the man in the chair. Shortly, other policemen appeared, running, and buffeted lanes through the rising throng below. A little while later a black wagon backed up to the door and carried away the man in the chair covered with a horse blanket. Another wagon bore off the fat Sicilian woman and her baby, and several other terrified denizens of the house. They said he had been a lodger for some months, a poor man. Oh, yes, very poor! It was his habit to sit in that window by the hour, by the day sometimes. Had he any friends come to see him? Who could say? The whole world might pass up and down that dingy staircase without question. The wagons moved off; in a moment the crowd was fluid again; in five minutes it was all forgotten.
In a pawnshop, any pawnshop, timorous clients are apt to be made more timid by the stare of a six-foot man, 185 pounds, who lounges at one end of the counter idly puffing a cigar, and watching, as they beg and haggle. Well they may be: it is one of Parr’s invincibles.
In the little building on the river front at the foot of East 26th Street, where black wagons drive up at all hours of the day and night, to deposit burdens covered with horse blankets, just such a man stands, smoking the same cigar, quite as idly, and quite as languidly interested as his brothers in the pawnshops. Dead souls come here; they must be inspected, suspected, like any object offered in pawn. Distraught people come here, anxious mothers, brothers, next friends, seeking. An attendant pulls out drawer after drawer for their inspection. Sometimes a shriek, heard in the street, tells the hangers-on that a quest has ended. Outside undertakers, like flies, flock about them when they emerge.
A stocky man, evidently a mason who had come directly from his work, was whispering to the attendant, trembling. They all whisper and tremble when they come here. The attendant knew the world only as fearful people who whispered and trembled. The attendant listened and nodded. He knew—yes, it was here; he hauled out a drawer. The mason inclined his head, brushing his eyes with a plaster-stained hand. His brother, he said. The attendant made a grimace over a shoulder; and the man with the cigar approached, eyeing the mason with a bleary look. He took out a note-book and they talked in low tones, the policeman making entries as the other answered.
“You will have to be corroborated, of course,” said the policeman, not unkindly. “Anyone could come here and pick what they wanted, otherwise.”
“But why?” ejaculated the mason, horrified at the idea of anyone having use for a dead body and going to the city morgue to pick out one to his liking. The policeman said he couldn’t say why—it had been done, and they must be careful. The mason produced his union card and other credentials to establish his identity.
Outside the tip had gone forth. The grisly hangers-on lay in wait for him, and he gruffly selected one, who led him triumphantly to his near-by store. The next day a little funeral party departed from that side street “parlour” with what pomp the poor can give to their dead. There were four carriages, three of them empty, the blinds drawn and, in the first the only mourner, the mason. Drivers in battered silk hats urged decrepit black nags to a sharp trot over the bridge and far away. The service of the obscure dead must move at a sharp trot—there are hundreds between sunsets.
On their return, the policeman with the cigar met the foremost carriage—there were some papers to sign for the records. When the mason stepped down he looked up and saw the porticoed door of a big building, with massive towers and turrets of red brick and terra-cotta. He drew back involuntarily; but the man with the cigar had a double twist on his coat-sleeve.
“Come along quietly, and don’t start anything,” he said amiably, and led the mourner up the stone steps, down the corridor, and into a big room in which sat a man at a desk. The door closed behind him. The man at the desk was Parr, deputy commissioner of police.
“Ha, ha! At last! Well, how did it go?” asked Parr, looking up.
The mason crouched like an animal, one hand stealing behind him to try the door. He straightened up, breathing hard.
“Sophie almost got away with it,” said Parr. “Knocking the old duffer off like that, with arsenic in his dope! And turning the stiff over to us, to hand out to the first comer that identified it! You thought you weren’t even taking a chance, didn’t you, William?”
It was William, the footman—William re-drawn, some lines erased, as plausible as a raised cheque, nevertheless, it was William. He swallowed hard.
“Come over here. I want a good look at you,” commanded Parr.
The man obeyed sullenly. Parr pointed to a glass paper-weight on his desk. “Did you ever see that before? Answer me!” he bawled, with sudden ferocity. William looked from Parr to the paper-weight, and back again, but maintained silence.
“What did Amos P. Huntington call himself ten years ago, when he left his finger-prints on that paper-weight, in the Park Place murder?”
Parr referred to a crime that had gone down in the annals as a celebrated mystery. It was a mystery no more. The obscure man who was found dead in his chair in West Broadway had the same finger-prints. That was why the man with the cigar had been so polite to the mason when he called on his sad errand. William did not answer. His eyes roved round the room, avoiding the one thing he feared.
“What did you blow up in your rubber plant, William?” asked Parr. “Was it a basket of cats—or dogs—or did you borrow another of your brothers from East Twenty-sixth Street? Sophie put the remains through the crematory so fast we didn’t have a look-in.”
Parr laughed. So did William. By that laugh Parr knew that questions were useless. At that moment the door opened and Oliver Armiston came in, back from Lakewood, in picturesque polo cloak and cap, swinging a stick.
“Take him downstairs!” growled Parr to an attendant. “Charge him with—charge him with complicity in the murder of John Doe, alias Amos P. Huntington.”
Armiston dropped his stick with a clatter and started back with such a genuine movement of amazement that the policeman who was ushering him in actually grabbed him, thinking him the murderer.
“No! No! Not that one! This one!” said Parr. Parr’s eyes twinkled.
When William had been taken away, he said to Oliver with some relish: “As a matter of fact, Oliver, you ought to be downstairs on that charge!”
“But how—what—I got your wire. I came right in. Is there—did she——”
“Certainly,” responded Parr, nodding. “You are a wonder, Oliver!” Parr rubbed his hands comfortably. “What put it into your head to start Sophie after her husband? Don’t tell me you didn’t,” said the deputy, as Armiston tried to break in with a word. “I heard you! You knew she was listening in, on the telephone, the other day, in your study, when you told me in a loud voice to go out and find her husband—that he had squealed on her. Squealed on her!” cried Parr. “On the level, Oliver, I could have strangled you at that moment. I thought you were squealing on me. Then it all came over me—just like that!” and he snapped his fingers to indicate the suddenness of light. He pounded Oliver on one knee. “You’ve got the goods! You’re all right, Oliver.”
“Well, it was the obvious thing to do, of course,” agreed Oliver, now preening himself. “I knew you couldn’t find him. I knew the only way was to scare her into starting after him herself. Then you could trail along behind. It was—it made a very good ending of the story, I thought,” said Oliver, rubbing his hands. “Your men trailed her, of course?”
“Well, as a matter of fact,” said Parr weakly, “she got the jump on us. You know Sophie! So we just sat back and waited.”
“Waited?” ejaculated Armiston, his jaw dropping.
“Oh, Sophie did her part—she produced him all right,” said Parr. “Dead!” he added grimly. He related swiftly how the bogus Amos P. Huntington, who had been blown up by synthetic rubber and cremated, in the end came to his death and burial in so obscure a manner that the police would never have known who he was, except for one thing that Sophie overlooked.
“My window washer,” said Parr, “he’s a wonder, too. He managed to borrow a razor, among other personal effects of Amos P. Huntington. Sophie had packed it away in a box. We found finger-prints on it that corresponded to that,” he said, pointing at the glass paper-weight, grisly souvenir of the famous Park Place mystery. “When his dead body turned up, with the same finger-prints, the rest was simple enough. We merely sat on the doorstep and waited.” And Parr, who had complacently compassed the murder of a murderer, by neglecting to follow Sophie too closely, leaned back in his chair smiling in a grim way. “Oh, they all come to pot sooner or later,” he said, in his philosophic mood again.
“But—Sophie——”
“Oh, she is on her way down-town now,” said Parr. “Sit still. You will see her.”
The Dresden china widow, an hour before, had set out on her afternoon drive to air her red-headed mechanic. At Forty-second Street a policeman said gruffly, “Drive up to the curb, young fellow,” and the red-headed mechanic had obeyed with alacrity, not knowing at the moment if he was wanted for some infraction of the traffic rules, or by his Chief. “Let me have your keys,” commanded the traffic policeman. He took the proffered keys and calmly locked the door of the candy-box tonneau. Sophie could not escape now, except by smashing glass. “Take her to Headquarters!” commanded the traffic man, who had his instructions.
While Parr and Oliver sat talking, Sophie was announced. A graceful little woman clothed in a cloud of black entered, weeping, and sniffling in her handkerchief under her veil.
“Lift up the curtain, Sophie,” said Parr, with a full breath of elation. “This is where you stop for the night, Sophie.”
She lifted the veil, disclosing a tear-stained face pathetically pretty. Parr, with an oath, lifted himself out of his chair. His hands strained at the arms till the veins stood out like whipcords. He stared like a wooden man.
“What’s the joke, Hanrahan?” he bawled at the red-headed mechanic.
“Joke, sir? Joke!” protested Hanrahan.
“Look at her, you fool!” snarled the deputy, coming out from behind his desk. “Look what you have brought here—this rag doll done up in crêpe.”
The lady here burst into a torrent of words.
“I not understand!” she wailed, in French accents. “I am Madam ’Untington maid! She move—I come to town—three—four days—to make ready! She move. This afternoon I go out—to get littl’ air! The policeman—he lock me in! Oh, he lock me in! I scream! I cry! I knock the window! I come here! This man he say ‘don’t start nothings—’ ”
But Hanrahan was holding his head. He was reviving that episode in the kitchen that made the country seem so attractive to him a few days gone by. If this was the maid, who then was that piece of pert prettiness with whom he had philandered?
“Where did you get those clothes?” demanded Parr roughly.
“Madam—she give them to me—she no want them any more—my ’usband, he is dead—Il est mort!”
“Take her away!” roared Parr.
“What is the charge?” asked the meek Hanrahan.
“Oh, anything—anything,” snarled Parr, “to keep it out of the papers! You a detective! You on the Sophie Lang case! Oh dear, oh dear!”
When the door closed on the two figures it was Armiston who broke the painful silence.
“After all,” he said dreamily, fingering his grey lock, “it was a signed masterpiece! Eh, Parr?”
That was the end of the Sophie Lang case. There were loose ends of course, such as William, and the maid, and the jettisoned quarter of a million dollars. The underlings proved to be very faithful ignorant tools of the lady, who took their medicine, slight doses, maintaining to the end their lack of knowledge of such a purely legendary person as Sophie Lang.