CHAPTER XXXIII

More Hunters Enter the Chase

Carr Halsey, sitting on that cold jet-like wall bench, outside of that equally jet-like railing in the Ajax Electrical Manufacturing Company’s offices in the Cubist Building, began to fidget as he sat. Twice, at 6 or 7-minute intervals, he looked meaningfully at the tweed-bound watch on his wrist and at his second significant glance the little blonde girl who acted as watch-dog over the railing gate arose from her slender table.

“I’ll try Mr. Orski once more,” she said.

She went over to the door of the private once in which, fifteen minutes or more ago, Halsey had, at least by means a the pier glass in its corner, glimpsed the handsome bearded foreign-looking Russian on whom he had called somewhat anonymously for a little task of translating a few unintelligible Russian words graven crudely on a round, brassy medal. She tried the knob of the door gently. It turned, Halsey could see, but the door refused to open. Her face, looking back at him, showed her surprise. She returned to her table and stood thus, for a moment, reflecting puzzledly. Then she raised her gaze, “I’ll look in on him by way of the office adjoining his,” she told the lone caller. “In fact, I’ve a suspicion he’s stepped into that next office for a minute.”

So to the next private office adjoining she went, and opened the door with its ground glass pane. Her gaze, however, swept an apparently empty cubicle. And then, leaving the door open, she disappeared a moment. The shadow of the neat little figure fell, a second or so later, on the translucent panel of Orski’s office. Halsey watched with considerable interest. The barest fraction of a minute—and she had emerged through the very office to which, a few moments before, she had been unable to get entrance. He could see, through its now open door, that the swivel chair which had held Orski was empty. She did not return to her table, but crossed the open roomful of workers, all slaving with their noses close to their desks, and entered a further room or office through whose barely opened door the corner of a draughting table was visible. Halsey heard a few words being spoken, then she emerged and returned to her table.

“I’m very sorry,” she said apologetically, “but Mr. Orski has left the building. His hat is gone, you see. He evidently went around in back, and out by way of the draughting room, for the draughtsmen tell me he went through there five minutes or more ago. Evidently he remembered a forgotten appointment coming up somewhere, and could not wait a minute longer. Not for—for anybody.” She appeared to be a puzzled little girl. Then she brightened up. “At least,” she added cheerfully, “he’s read your note, for both the note and the brass thingamajig you sent in to him are gone. Could you come in again tomorrow?” She glanced back of her at a big telechron office clock whose hands pointed to 5:35. “I doubt very much that he’ll return tonight. We’re within nearly forty-five minutes of our closing hour—we’re on city schedule ‘C,’ you know—” She paused, and added, half explanatorily, “Mr. Orski’s such a busy man. Always—always on the move.”

Halsey rose. He was conscious of a decided measure of irritation at having his curiosity thwarted in this manner; but at the same time he was a little glad, since Orski’s abrupt departure with his property now gave him all the right in the world to return later and demand a personal interview. “I’ll be in again, then, in the morning,” he told the girl. “Although,” he added grumpily, “I’m not altogether an unbusy person myself. Maybe I can ring him up and—” He took out his notebook and pencil— “What’s Mr. Orski’s home telephone number?”

She smiled faintly. “I’m sure I don’t know,” she lied gracefully.

He smiled in return. “I get you. So be it!” And he turned on his heel and left the offices.

Downstairs, on the Rialto, he bought a damp paper off a newsstand. Whatever it had to tell about the crime in Bush Bourse was contained chiefly in its black headline, CHEMIST MURDERED ON NORTH SIDE, for the further explicating details of that headline were, at this early stage of affairs, all contained in a single two-column wide paragraph below the headline, set in the largest possible linotype, and leaded out painfully to cover as much space as possible. It recited but the bare meager facts, which a police-station leg man could have hastily phoned in to his city editor, although it did, to be sure, detail completely the remnants of that damning message concerning one, Clifford X. Hemingway, which lay scrawled out at the dead man’s very fingers, at the very tip of his nearly concealed gold pencil So sparse were the facts, indeed, particularly in view of all that he knew, that Halsey threw the paper away, and flagged a taxicab.

“The Chewing Gum Building,” he told the driver absentmindedly, and climbed in.

“Wrigley Buildin’?” asked the astute one. “O.K.!” And he was off.

But as they threaded their way along the Rialto with its countless theaters and innumerable huge overhanging signs which turned it into a sparkling fairyland of lights at night, Carr Halsey fell to pondering grumpily about Alexis Orski. “Confound him anyway!” he ruminated wrathfully. “Damned odd that he should pocket my property and leave. Wonder did he think I was going to sit and cool my heels—and chill all the rest of me as well—on that cold iceberg bench of his till he got back tomorrow? By Jehosephat, I’m more anxious than ever to meet the gentleman face to face and feel him out. And if he does come out flatfooted now for ‘Sportfellow’s’ actual name, I’ll give him a trumped-up one with no compunctions whatever. What’s the odds anyways I’ll be out of his office with the translation of the Russian characters before he can ever find that I’m Uncle Roger’s nephew and one of the very birds he’s trying to fleece. But by golly—he’s got my medal. That’s the rub! The crowning clue of that whole laboratory killing. Worth ten times—a hundred times more—than that mere heel-plate indentation, for that girl, whatever sort of a spy she is in this affair, couldn’t have been present when Wen Proctor was killed by Hemingway—or maybe by some unknown pal accompanying Hemingway—if Wen was killed at 2:41; she was sitting on my steps when I arrived there from Braisted’s impromptu television show just a minute or so after 2:30 today. No. That blue Japanese liquid they kept Wen from analyzing—and that brass medal—are the two big clues. And the medal now slipped out of my paws, for the time being. And Baxter—Baxter due at 8 tonight. That’s a bad break.”

And thus reflecting sourly on the decided change in the status of affairs provided by Orski blithely running off, he looked out a few minutes later to see his machine crossing the big Michigan Avenue fixed bridge, the river far below hemmed in on both sides with the great double-decked stone esplanades, Wacker Drive South on one side, and Wacker Drive North on the other. And a moment later he was dismounting in front of the tall, white enameled, fresco-bedizened building which had been such a sensation when it had been built, some 25 years before, out of, so it was said, the jaw movements of American stenographers. No longer, though, were corps of white-clad special artisans kept working daily on scaffoldings high up above the boulevard, swabbing down the white tilings, and now today the old office-building palace put up by the one-time Chewing Gum King looked decidedly yellowish as well as a bit greasy in the bargain.

An elevator took him far into the bowels of the earth, and presently he was writing his name, through an open metal wicket, on a register whose supporting ledge lay not far from a locked iron meshwork door which gave on to a decidedly damp steamy region of cocoanut-matted cement corridors. Business was not so brisk today he noted, as he wrote, for only a few names above his own be discovered his uncle’s angular jerky signature, with the time of his arrival—2:29—inserted after it in red ink by the cage clerk.

The place was beginning already to feel like a jungle in Borneo. In the small flimsy cubicle assigned to him, he stripped off his clothing as fast as possible, and shrouded only in a huge Turkish towel about his midriff, asked the first attendant he spied, not for the hot room, but for the room now being occupied by one Mr. Roger Halsey. “My uncle,” he explained. “He’s waiting my call.”

“Dis way, cull,” said the other, a cauliflower-eared fellow in striped blue bathing trunks. And a few minutes later Halsey was being ushered into a generously sized and very de luxe room, one of the expensive prodigalities the Palace Baths evidently provided, a chamber, indeed, which was far removed from being a mere follicle or cell composed of thin partition walls with a low iron meshwork roof, for it was made of real cement-covered walls which joined ceiling as well as floor, and joined each other in the bargain; a room, this one, in which two persons, or even more, could talk at ease. The attendant had already snapped on an overhanging light, revealing a palatial low Roman-like couch with carven stone legs, an ingeniously imitation waterproof “Oriental” rug of some sort, a stone table containing a phone and a pushbutton, and, on the couch itself, wrapped tightly in a striped blanket from head to foot—shrouded exactly like an Egyptian mummy—Roger Halsey himself, blinking upward at the lighted light.

“What the—” he started to ejaculate. Then seeing his nephew said: “Why—Carr—what you doing over here so soon? I told them you’d be wanting to see me later in the afternoon. But why so soon—and—what are you doing with your clothes all off?”

“Taking a Turkish bath, Uncle, and thereby dodging a halfdozen or more reporters till it’s time to see a certain specific reporter, Baxter by name. And,” he added, “it’s no longer afternoon. The shades of evening are beginning to gather.”

“Well I’ll be darned! Draw up that stone footstool, Carr, and tell me all the news. Babson gave me your cheering message and it actually lulled me to sleep.”

“I doubt it that’s what really did it, Uncle. What sent you into the land of Nod was an icy sheet wrapped around you, and a shroud of heat-insulating blankets atop that. I’d stack a cold pack any day against a vial of veronal.”

The attendant with the cauliflowered ears and striped trunks had vanished, closing the door gently behind him. Carr Halsey drew up the squat stone stool. He spoke in a low voice, for general prudence’s sake. “Well, Uncle, I suppose you’ve been wondering exactly what my good news was?”

“Indeed I have,” replied his uncle, dislodging a pair of skinny arms out of the tight mummy-like shroud. He stroked one side of his white mustache appraisingly, as though to make sure his treatment hadn’t caused it to vanish. “When Mr. Jones—yes, our Harvey Ellsworth Jones—dropped me off here from his car today after our long after-luncheon chat, I felt so worried that I half believed I was wasting my time even to try to take a treatment. But your news has made me feel like a new man. Or else the fine sleep I’ve just had. Anyway—” He broke off. “Well, Carr, tell me now what you have to tell me. Babson, hopping over here with that $2 taxi money you were so kind as to advance him, gave me the barest details only, and, then I sent him scuttling back to the office; he was beginning to melt a bit even as he stood here in his clothes. You and I don’t feel the mugginess, you see.”

“No, that’s true. But when Babson perspires, his collar won’t wilt! That’s one sure thing. The other sure thing, Uncle, is that that old celluloid neck-yoke of his will be in the Smithsonian Institute some day, mark my word!”

His uncle half smiled: “Be easy on Babson, Carr. He’s—he’s a fixture in our outfit.”

“A symbol of the magic lantern eras, eh, Uncle?”

“Perhaps—yes. Well, Carr, you seem to be in cheerful fettle. Everything must be shaping up wonderfully for us in some way.”

“It is, Uncle. Not only is it true what Babson conveyed to you—that by morning we have—or did then have—a possible way to reach our man directly, but subsequent developments mean that every man on the Chicago police force is looking for him tonight—and that we get first exclusive ‘in’ with him if and when they pick him up.” His face clouded up. “The miserably unhappy feature of it is, though, Uncle, that our getting to C.X.H.—yes, you know who I mean—eventuates solely out of the fact that I’ve now lost an old, old school friend.”

His uncle sat halfway up, face grave, leaning on one somewhat emaciated elbow: “Spill it all, Carr. Things have evidently been going on in that big sunny world upstairs above us.”

So Halsey, in a low guarded voice, related all the events of the day since, Japanese box under arm, he had left his uncle that morning, giving way to the wrathful waiting minority lady stockholder of American Projectiscope; in turn he described the contents of that Japanese box, the later visit of the Jap, Mr. T. Sumiko, to his Tower Court lodgings, the calling card the evasive Oriental had withdrawn on which to diagram roughly the label of that bottle, supposedly shipped to him 5 years before by his brother, and which calling card he had in turn left behind him, bearing on its reverse side the carefully printed out name of Clifford X. Hemingway. Then he detailed his visit to Braisted’s experimental quarters in the Electrical Temple, and both his viewing of that little conversational scene on the backstage of the Regent Theatre, London, as well as the glimpse he had caught in the hands of Sir Alfred Leets of a box almost identical with the one he had brought to Hall No. 457. He related the subsequent cabled reply from the British actor, disposing of the apparent mystery about that box, and carried his story rapidly up through the attempted near-assassination of Miss Loris by the portly German-speaking man in the gray Cyclops car, his own later discovery of Proctor’s body, the test tube of Mazoru-Ikeuna completely emptied, his finding of both heelplate indentation and Russian medal, and his bad luck with the latter important object. Indeed, he carried the entire story, fact by fact, up to where one, Carr Halsey, clad only in a huge Turkish towel, sat in a sultry atmosphere, atop a stone stool, not far from a powerful wall holding in the Chicago River, purling its way somewhere without. His uncle, head resting on hand, listened in rapt silence.

“And so, Carr,” he commented eagerly, “you’ve actually fixed it, then, with detective headquarters for us to be the first of any outsiders to see this Hemingway, the moment he’s captured?”

“I haven’t—no,” his nephew replied. “But Artemus Baxter—my friend—has. He states that Captain Duffy over there is definitely obligated to him on a matter of a little reward split that he helped Duffy, some time back, to get; and Duffy, he says, has given him outright assurance so far as you are concerned. Personally speaking though, Uncle, I don’t think it would be a half bad idea if we were to kick in with a little reward offer to spur on this fellow Hemingway’s associates, if he ever had any, or his landlady, if he roomed somewhere, to turn in information on him quick. And frankly, between you and me, I don’t think it would be so bad if we could slip this fellow Duffy, by way of Baxter, for instance, a little pourboire of—say—a few hundred dollars anyway. Gratitude talks, yes. But money talks a little more so! And Hemingway, after all, is our all—our everything. How do we stand so far as dealing out a little cash goes?”

His uncle frowned. “Gad, Carr, I don’t see my way clear to—to doing anything like that. Even a money tip for this Duffy—I couldn’t raise that tonight. The company’s a wee bit overdrawn at the bank now, and anything due us in the next few days is overshadowed by the notes the bank is holding against us. We’re—we’re—confound it, Carr, we’re terribly tight. I threw a chattel mortgage day before yesterday on all my house furnishings out there on Prairie Avenue, to meet the payroll alone. And I’ve had a mortgage loan on my home for months. I honestly don’t know where I could raise money to that extent—and Lord knows not tonight, anyway.”

“Nor I either,” admitted Carr Halsey, with a half-laugh. “Well, Uncle, Baxter seems to feel he’s got pretty good assurances out of the bureau head. So we’ll rest on that tonight. That murder unfortunately—or maybe fortunately—who knows!—broke just a little bit too late to make the thousands and thousands of outlying home newspaper deliveries. The morning paper deliveries will effect a far more perfect news coverage. But the news broadcasts will be blaring in one million Chicago homes tonight. Also, the occupants of perhaps a half-million Chicago homes may be out in full force, this fair eve in the merry month of Sol, autoing, swimming at the beaches, or God knows what. If nothing happens, however, before tomorrow morning, at 9 a.m., we see our Jap, and then we do get our first chance to find out once and for all where Clifford X. Hemingway is—or was!—when the Jap obtained that card from him.”

“But—but Carr,” put in Roger Halsey, passing a hand helplessly and confusedly over his forehead, “in view of the fact that Proctor’s murder is going to be detailed fully in all the late evening papers, as well as that piece of incriminating writing he left—”

Halsey raised a hand. “I know what’s faintly taking form in your mind, Uncle. And you want to suggest that the Jap will never show up again, eh?” He half shook his head. “I’m going to go into all those questions that are being born in your brain right this minute, but the only satisfying answer, right off the bat, to the question I just rendered myself, Uncle, is that I’ve got the bottle of Mazoru-Ikeuna! And as sure as the Lord put minnows in the ocean, that Jap or somebody back of him either wants that stuff—or else wants it out of my hands. So for the present then, until I outline a number of peculiar theories that are more than possible, —but which you don’t yet see—just presume that I shall have a visitor tomorrow morning at 9 o’clock.”

“And if that should turn out to be so, Carr, then it might mean that if Hemingway isn’t picked up tonight, you yourself may be the means of turning him over to the police?”

“Exactly. If we can get the real line on him from—or through, and unbeknown to—the Jap—and this will involve some careful planning between Baxter and myself tonight—then we won’t take chances with the police. Not at first, that is. I’ll have Baxter get a husky man from the Sun—one of those birds with a private star and a gun, who guard disputed newspaper stands—and we’ll take Hemingway ourselves—except that we shall hold private confab of a pseudo-commercial nature concerning the price asked for a certain 2 shares of stock before we journey bureauward. Said confab, whether it eventuate in a price of $18 or $18,000 for the stock, will be crystallized in an option, paid out of my pockets—a one-day option at $50 or so, is all we need, I take it, for once we’ve got the rights on the stock, and can deliver the Zell Process, the First National Bank I presume will take it up for us out of our $900,000 rights in that escrowed million. If not, any two-by-four bank in Chicago will be glad to do it. Am I right?” His uncle nodded. Whereupon the younger man added: “In any event, Uncle, we’re just seventy jumps ahead of the Orski crowd. And little they dream it, too.”

The older man was silent a moment, thoughtful.

“Carr,” he asked suddenly, “just what would you do if your plans for utilizing that Jap’s desire to get that liquid are successful—and Hemingway made that stock, or rather the option on it, the price of—well—his escape?”

Carr Halsey made a helpless gesture with his hands: “Uncle, don’t propound horrible ethical questions before they arise. In the first place, as I understand it, he doesn’t even dream he owns the stock. In the second, he wouldn’t have the least idea that the ancient junk—yes, Uncle, stock in a magic lantern company is junk today—was worth anything within a million miles of what it really is. In the third place he—” He broke off, shaking his head. “No, I tell you he won’t even attempt a bargain like that. He’ll be thinking of habeas corpuses, and a good criminal lawyer and something to pay him with. We’ll play as fair as we have to, and a little fairer, maybe. But we won’t get mushy. No! For after all—” Carr Halsey’s face darkened. “—if he killed Proctor—or if he’s merely involved in killing him, then—” He stopped significantly.

“Carr,” his uncle put in, “I want to propound one particular conundrum to you now that puzzles me deeply. To begin with first, however, I grant your proof, set forth by you a minute or so ago when you were describing all these events, that Proctor was murdered deliberately either to stop an analysis of that blue liquid, or else to stall off a report of its analysis that might already have been made, or thirdly, possibly, as a threat to you to cease all further efforts to learn what it’s composed of, or fourthly, out of an unexpected argument resulting from efforts along those lines. The mathematical certainty, as you outlined it, of some clique involved with the Mazoru-Ikeuna being fully on to the connection between it, Proctor and you, is too completely established by the fact that that Loris girl, who’s nothing but a spy of some sort, was in both his place today, and yours as well, of all the millions of places in Chicago. All right. In a minute I’m going to ask you a puzzling one: namely, to explain the coincidence that Proctor should have known enough about his unknown assailant—or assailants—to write the name of one on the floor. In other words, how—”

Carr Halsey raised a hand. “No coincidence at all, when you hear what I have to offer further on that point. I’ll give you a mighty good explanation as to that. Several, in fact! But go ahead.”

“Well, ahead of that query, comes first the more logical initial query: exactly how did they get on to the triple connection between you, Proctor and the blue liquid? Granting that a confederate of the Jap followed you today, were you easily followable? How’d you travel today to get to Bush Bourse? And how could they know that, once inside Bush Bourse, you went to Proctor’s place with it?”

“One question at a time, Uncle. One at a time! I’m not one-hundred-percent certain by any means that it was a confederate of the Jap who followed me. I’d just as soon believe that he was being followed himself—and may have been followed for some days, so far as anybody knows. Don’t forget about that big boy with the square-cut brown goatee who kicked my landlady’s estimable pussy-cat down the front steps and then proceeded to crack Miss Loris a nasty one across the side of her head, after he saw that that bottle of Mazoru-Ikeuna was standing on my front table and that my room was apparently unoccupied. We don’t know who’s playing with whom, nor who against whom, nor doublecrossing whom, in this game. But about your first question. I’ll say I was followable, Uncle! I went to Bush Bourse, when I did so, as openly as the devil. I could have been dogged, so far as that goes, straight from the express auction itself—although it’s true that I left my address there, and my trail may have started entirely with my recorded address. That’s how the Jap explains his coming to Tower Court, anyway. But about that blazing trail of mine. First, I carried the Jap box openly under my arm to your Lindbergh Building—and out again, a while later, openly to my studio in the Majestic Theatre Building. The box marked me pretty plainly all the way, I’d venture. I emerged a while later from the Majestic Theatre Building, without it, however, and openly went home by the State Street subway, transferring eastward to the Chicago Avenue surface car. After this Sumiko called and went—and by golly he went, Uncle, for I saw him climb painfully aboard a westbound Chicago Avenue surface car, cane and all—I left the house and couldn’t find a cab; so took the State Street subway down again to Monroe Street—my studio, that is. I had to wait a couple of minutes on the platform, and plenty of passengers straggled in behind me while I waited. When I got the box again downtown, I couldn’t find a cab right at hand, and so walked west along Monroe Street to Clark Street, and there boarded a Clark Street subway train northward, where I got off six or seven minutes later and went into Bush Bourse. Now about your last question. The elevator boy in Bush Bourse mentioned, at the time we were standing around Proctor’s body, that Proctor was the only chemist in the building. He said, in fact, that on the Diptych—that’s just a fool fancy word, Uncle, for foyer directory!—that on the Diptych Proctor was listed both under his own name, alphabetically, that is, and under the ‘CHEMISTS’ classification of tenants, except that Proctor was the only chemist in the place. I took occasion, just the same, to look into that when I went out, after departing that scene of death. It’s correct—exactly as the boy says.” Carr Halsey paused a second, marshaling his thoughts. “Now granting that I was followed from Monroe Street to Bush Bourse today, with that boxed bottle under my arm, the indisputable inference by anybody following me, and in the ‘know’ of things would be that I wasn’t taking that stuff so hot-footedly to a dance school, a voice instructress, nor a real estate office! But to a chemist. And that being so, the chemist would be Proctor and nobody else. At least in that building!”

“Well, that’s clear enough. Now for my conundrum! How on earth do you account then, Carr, for the coincidence that Proctor should know enough about his assailant to write out his name and some facts about him? Answer that one, boy, if you can.”

“I can give a number of hypotheses,” said his nephew promptly, but troubledly, “but that’s only what each one can be for the moment. We know definitely, of course, that Clifford X. Hemingway, ex-University of Wisconsin student, is in some way connected with the Jap’s end of the outfit trying to recover that supply of Mazoru-Ikeuna. The Jap had Hemingway’s card, didn’t he? Yes. The card ties ’em together damningly. One thing, I’ll admit, however, worries me just a little bit, every now and then; it’s that they may have planted that information at Wen’s fingertips. Yes, Uncle, that writing. No, I’m not reminiscent of his handwriting from so far back as college days. If they did plant it, however, they would have been sure to stick the ‘X’ in it to make it unmistakably the Clifford X. Hemingway. Still, they smudged it all partly off. And yet again—that’s just the thing that would be a sort of crowning touch, wouldn’t it?” He paused. “Purely academic, all this, of course. For us, Uncle. We want Hemingway and a certain million dollar sale of our Zell Process. He will ultimately have to account for his connection with all affairs—all by himself. Whether he’s directly involved, or whether he’s the victim of a plant. So be it! But again about these hypotheses. Since we know Hemingway is connected with the Jap or the latter’s outfit, he may have been indeed the one delegated to go to the laboratory, and may have been fatuous enough to think he could induce Proctor to spill the sample of Mazoru-Ikeuna in the sink, and render me a fake report of some sort. And I know Wen only too well! He’d have played one naughty game of poker, I’m telling you, Uncle. He’d have pretended to play in with the fixer—or fixers, as the case may be—till he’d got something concrete or damning out of them; he’d have smoothly jimmied a more or less guileless white man like Hemingway—never a Jap, I’ll grant—into putting a lot of cards face up on the table. Then he’d have given ’em a—a—a belly laugh. Exactly that, Uncle. A belly laugh! They’d have figured then that they would have had to kill him just to stop his mouth alone, let alone his chemical manipulations. And that’s why they might have come back and smudged out anything he’d have written. Partially out, anyway. For they didn’t do exactly the best job in the world on that smudging. Now if you want a few more or less untenable hypotheses, one would be that they handed him some verbal bunk and somehow used the Clifford X. Hemingway name in it. Again, that he might even have recognized his visitor—or one of them—Proctor did go about town a bit, you know: he did get to meet a fair number of people. But that’s as far as I can hypothesize, Uncle. It’s all pretty badly obscured as yet. We may narrow things down a bit when the Municipal Crime Laboratory checks that handwriting with Proctor’s records, as it would do as a matter of mere criminological routine. I hope it checks; otherwise the official chase for Clifford X. Hemingway might die down a bit if the writing involving him were found to be a plant. The Mazoru-Ikeuna affair is, as I say, badly obscured as yet. That girl—spy, as she undoubtedly is, bless her histrionic and charming pretty little misguided soul!—knocked out for the moment by a dirty murderous clip on the head by that German speaking gazabo with the square-cut goatee who says ‘presto melto’ and makes huge Cyclops cars vanish. Proctor himself murdered, his lips stopped entirely, and presumably knowing something as he died that the police ought to have—else it wouldn’t have been smudged out, would it?”

His uncle shook his own head helplessly.

“However,” said Carr Halsey triumphantly, “I’ve got the blue liquid from which the fatal—for hell, Uncle, I call it fatal!—sample was drawn.”

“Well you just look out, boy, that they don’t try to get you.”

“Not worried, Uncle. My having the liquid put away nicey-nice protects me equally nicey-nice. What they expect to do is to walk off with it in the morning, thinking I’m too dumb to guess why Wen was murdered. And their reasoning is fair enough, too, I’ll admit. For, to tell you the truth, Uncle, if that girl’s trail hadn’t shown in both places—and if that Jap hadn’t inadvertently used the back of that Hemingway card to draw me that Mazoru-Ikeuna label—I wouldn’t have had the least inkling of the real state of affairs. The Jap’s slip—and somebody’s girl spy’s step into a piece of soft refractory furnace lining—has jerked a whole handful of cards out of their hands. That is—hm—” Carr Halsey broke off, scratching his head. “Yes,” he added, half-abstractedly, “that’s just what’s worrying me again now: whether they could have planted that information about a white man at Wen’s fingertips to steer me, and all the rest of the investigators, off the real underlying—well—Oriental reasons! Still again—they smudged it off. Just partly, though. Yet again—that would be the crowning touch, wouldn’t it?” He shook his head. “Too deep. Too deep—as yet.”

Both men were silent a second. Then his uncle shifted the conversation a bit to a slightly more pleasant subject.

“And so, Carr, you actually tried to meet Orski face to face?” He broke into a half-chuckle, obviously in spite of himself.

“Yes, I did. But he ran out on me! Discourteous devil, I must say. He might have had the decency to leave my property behind. Well, he doesn’t know it’s an exhibit in a murder case—so I’ll be seeing him, as the saying goes, tomorrow morning. I’d be calling him up tonight for that translation if they weren’t so confoundedly tight over at the Ajax Company as to his residential whereabouts, and phone number.”

“Well, now your uncle becomes of some assistance in this murder case! In fact, you’ve come to just the right person to help you get that translation tonight. You’re out of luck, Carr, so far as taking it somewhere else far translation goes. For you it’s got to be Orski now, and no one else. Now I think I told you how, up to some time ago at least, we had access to a little leak in his offices—yes, the red-haired Flower sisters. One was then working for him, and her sister had previously worked for us, and was friendly to us. Well, we got various bits of vital information most of which I detailed to you this morning, but we got lots of information also that we didn’t need. Such as, for instance, that Orski lives in Greenwood Manor, at 5533 Greenwood Avenue. He has a rich exotically furnished 8-room apartment, full of divans and weird opium pipes—no, he’s not a drug addict, Carr—he just surrounds himself with the sensual atmosphere of the Far East. Russian samovars galore; rich ikons on the wall; rugs an inch thick. Silken draperies. Regular sensuist he is. Has plenty of women in for little dinners and tête-à-têtes—and the younger they are, the better he likes ’em, so I understand. For a while, at least. He doesn’t realize it, of course, but he pays for all the love and affection he gets from ’em—certainly from the young ones. He doesn’t like servants about him; so a cleaning woman comes in two mornings a week to keep his place shipshape, and he retains one serving man to stay on the premises all the time. A general serving man, that is, who fills his every need—combination butler, valet and messenger, you might say—and who can prepare a most dazzling dinner as well. And oh yes—his phone number you said? Private, of course. Unlisted. It’s Hyde Park 54321.”

“Five-four-three-two-one, eh?” echoed Carr Halsey. “That’s an easy one. About as easy as any I ever encountered—unless it be my own present phone. For which thank the Lord! I see no paper around this Roman chamber to write on; and if I send out for an attendant to bring me an indelible pencil, and write the number on myself, I’ll only be sweating it off in a few minutes. Well, I won’t have to rack my brains to remember five-four-three-two-one, nor an exchange that takes its name from fashionable Hyde Park. I’ll be ringing him this evening, and I’ll keep on doing so, even to waking him out of a sound sleep if he gets between covers—between rings! I’ll probably even—”

But at this juncture of the low-voiced conversation the door of the room opened, and a sunny haired, ox-muscled German came in, a tall fellow with honest open face and black curly hair over his chest. A newspaper was under his arm.

“How you vass gettin’ along, Meester Halzey? You hat a goot sleeb, eh?”

“The best ever, Gus. I feel a thousand percent refreshed. What’s that you got there?”

“Der ladest editions of der baper, Meester Halzey. Der Star. Choost vass brung ofer from Olt Loop by der night cage-man vot iss com’ on now by duty. I t’ink you like to haf him to read.”

“Is it later than the 8th edition?” spoke up Carr Halsey quickly, from his stool. “What’s the headline? Chemist Murdered on North Side?”

Gus examined the paper punctiliously. “No, der nint’ edition. She sais, ‘Bo-leece Search for Pesty—no, Pestle—Slay-er.’”

“Thanks. That’s a later one than I’ve read. Give it over here, will you?”

Gus, catching the older man’s assenting nod, handed it to the younger.

Roger Halsey was speaking: “Carr, what time was it that Pr—er—the chap on the North Side was killed?”

“Two forty-one,” replied Carr Halsey casually, as one discussing a purely impersonal news event.

The older man looked at the Turkish bath rubber. “Gus, wasn’t it mighty, mighty close to that time when I had that peculiar presentiment? Yes, those queer feelings I had. Tell my nephew here all about it.”

“Hm.” Gus cleared his throat. “Vell, I vass unlocking der door of dis room for Mr. Halzey to enter. I alvays led him do his untressing here—unt put hees glothes avay mineself. She vass exact’ tventy minutes to dree by der elegdric glock in der corridor outside. Meester Halzey he sais to me, he sais: ‘Kus, I feel like I am going into a undertakin’ shamber ven you dake me into diss stone room, mit stone furniture unt a stone couch. For vy not get a marble slab, Kus, unt be done mit it.’ ‘Be glat, Meester Halzey,’ I sais, ‘dot you ain’t rilly goink into no room like dot. Blenty beoples gotta go into rooms chust like dot tonide. For beoples iss dying all ofer Cheecago deez afternoon. Beoples iss dying efen dis ferry minute, only for to go in rooms like a real untertager’s mork tonight.’ Sais he: ‘Right dees minute, Kus?’ Unt I sais: ‘Chess, right dees minute. Somebody die efery minute.’ Unt he sais, ‘It giv’ me der creep, Kus, to t’ink dot right deez minute somebody iss dying. I vant to choke for air.’ Unt I sais, ‘Come out from it, Meester Halzey. You vant for qviet prain—so you can catch goot sleeb.’” Gus solicitously tucked in a dislodged blanket corner at the foot of his mummified client. “Vell, I mage myself sgarce. I got some odder chentlemens to roll up.” And he was gone.

Halsey moved his stone stool closer to the older man, and eagerly opened out the newspaper so that both could see. As Gus had painfully interpreted, the big display line spread across the top of the page was:

POLICE SEARCH FOR PESTLE SLAYER!

and the subhead beneath amplified it further by the information:

Expect to Have Him Within Custody Within 12 Hours.

There appeared to be a far more extended story this time, but the story proclaimed itself, at the most superficial glance, to consist of nothing but words, words, words—to be but an artful expansion of that single nicely-leaded two-column paragraph which had been carried in the previous edition; words, indeed, which had been spun forth, hammered out, thrown in, dished up, and splashed upon it, by unparsimonious re-write men pounding out their paragraphs on electric typewriters while the next-previous edition was being loaded onto the waiting news wagons. But what caused Carr Halsey, who, at this rate of turning sparse details into lines of print, knew that he held enough facts locked in his brain to make a full front page story, to wrinkle up his brow, were two further accretions to the account of the murder of Wendell Proctor by pestle. One was a large three-column-wide bust photograph centered directly under the sub-head of the newspaper. It showed a youngish sort of man, with stocky powerful shoulders that had become just a bit stooped, with blondish sort of hair, square hornshell glasses hemming in a pair of somewhat calculatingly appraising eyes which looked as though they could grasp the entire elements of a situation in a trice, and a pronounced cleft in his fairly square-cut chin as well as a vertical semi-cleft at the end of his nose. While the chin itself was thrust forward with pronounced belligerency, there was about the lips a peculiarly striking weakness of some sort—a hint, perhaps, of a slumbering emotional nature which could in an instant fan into action the combativeness of that chin, or which could with equal misjudgment allow its owner to dream away countless priceless minutes required for action, an artlessness too, perhaps, about those lips, that would make their owner the sure victim of a cunning bewildering argument, of a skillful piece of verbal chicanery. The face of one who could as easily be a powerful implement to do things on his own behalf, as to be a tool to do preposterous things for others. A face behind which lurked the super-sensitiveness from which paranoiacs are sometimes made. A peculiar face, beyond all doubt, bewilderingly replete with conflicting characteristics which might baffle the best of physiognomists. Beneath it was a title in black capital letters, and below that title an explanatory caption, and still underneath that in turn, in small bold-face capitals, a notice emphasized with a small pointing black “printers’ hand.” All in all they announced:

CLIFFORD X. HEMINGWAY

Wanted by the police in brutal pestle murder.

IF YOU SEE THIS MAN OR KNOW THIS MAN YOU MAY EARN $1,000.

SEE OFFER IN ADJOINING COLUMN.

And in that adjoining column, boxed about with a highly ornamental border consisting of bold-face dollar signs ending in each corner with tiny printer’s-case stock bags of gold, was the announcement:

$2000 REWARD!!!!

($1000 To Any Citizen Within or Outside of Chicago. $1000 For Any Detective or Police Worker!)

There has been deposited with the police by a public-spirited citizen, a retired merchant who is interested in purging Chicago of crime, and who wishes to remain anonymous, two cash rewards, one of $1000 for any man, woman or child turning in information to the police by which the killer of W. E. Proctor, Bush Bourse chemist, may be arrested and convicted of first or second-degree murder, or manslaughter; and an equal amount to any detective, policeman or police squad who takes this person into custody. The man now wanted by the police, and evidence against whom is being worked up by the Municipal Crime Laboratory, is shown in the adjoining portrait. If you know him, or see him, notify immediately any agent of the law. It may mean one thousand dollars in your pocket!

Both men looked up from the paper at the same moment. The older of the two was the first to speak: “By Jehosephat, Carr, somebody puts up the money to catch our man for us! Can you beat that for luck?”

Carr Halsey wrinkled up his forehead troubledly. “You don’t suppose, Uncle, the Orski crowd—”

The older man shook his head: “I don’t see how, Carr. There’s scarcely enough time elapsed yet for them to know hardly anything about it. News broadcasts aren’t blaring in busy offices, you know. Indeed, a concrete offer like this, already in print, would presuppose their having known of that murder almost the very second the first tidings about it tumbled on the nearest newsstand in Old Loop—and to have dispensed with any pow-wows about it and to have worked like chain lightning. No, Carr, some moral-minded but slightly soft retired business man has sometime back indicated to the police a willingness to kick in with reward money, and the police phoned him pronto and gave him first chance to do so. He’s a Jewish gentleman, too, by the way. And unequivocally not Orski.”

“How do you make that out, Uncle Jewish—and not Russian?”

“Well, note how cautiously the reward’s been framed. Payable only if the suspect in question is arrested and convicted of first, or second degree murder—or manslaughter. All evidence, up to this moment, is that Hemingway did that murder. Orski himself plays, in whatever he does, with a lavish hand. He’s not interested in the killing—he would be interested only in dragging Hemingway forth where he could talk business with him. With Orski, I tell you, Carr—and I know his psychology from A to Izzard—it would be, now that the search becomes an open, official thing, and not a private matter between our two companies, a smash-bang clear-cut reward for Hemingway. There’s a cunning, cautious, involuntary Hebrew note back of that reward—the shrewd fixing of it so that everybody in Chicago will hunt the closest logical suspect down, and begin at once; but that the donor won’t have to pay up unless the police and state’s attorney do their subsequent parts successfully.”

“Hm! Don’t be so categorical, Uncle, on your racial psychology. On the basis you outline, it looks just as much as though a fellow named Sandy MacTavish framed the reward! Also, didn’t you tell me Orski had a Jewish lieutenant? Levenson—wasn’t that his name? Orski might have instructed him to shoot the works, and the Levenson henchman might have wangled in a bit of his own natural cautiousness in the offer. Well, let it ride. All we can do, in view of the anonymity of it. Baxter and I may be the ones to pluck off that reward. And our friendly newspaper detective may grab off the police share. My half would make good chewing gum money added to my part of our Zell killing. It’s even possible, don’t forget, that that Jap may pluck it off himself. Whosever game Hemingway was lured into playing, or overplaying as it seems he may have done here, he may be cast aside now like a broken reed—that is, cast aside into the hungry lap of the detective bureau! Depends altogether, of course, on how much he might know. About God knows what! But as to that Jap Sumiko, he’s not a bird in himself who reads American papers, if I know anything about people, and badly twisted English to boot; and by his own admission he tunes in on no American radio broadcasting. Well, everything comes in time—and so will tomorrow morning and its 9 bells. But what puzzles me, Uncle, is how the devil the Star got that photo?”

His uncle screwed up his eyes. Then he pointed to an infinitesimally fine line of print, almost microscopic in comparison to the well-rounded print in which the Star was set, situated on the upper left-hand edge of the photograph. “Look up there on left top, Mr. Newspaperman, who looks far down below to the right where the ordinary credit line would run—and sees nothing! Says: ‘M. Matson Photo, Madison, Wisconsin.’”

Carr Halsey nodded sheepishly. “That’s one on me, all right. Slap bang sling-’em-in yellow journalism make-up. Wonder they didn’t get the photo itself upside down.” He frowned, and shook his head. “Not time enough, though, to get such a clear photo here all the way from Mad—”

“Carr, you may know all there is to know about fisticuffs and polo, cricket and handball, but you’re not up at all on the latest opto-electrical devices. That picture could have been telephotoed directly into the Star office from Madison, Wisconsin, squarely onto a 75-line screen halftone plate, all in the space of 7 minutes.”

“Oh, yes? Then how’d the police—or the Star office—know that Clifford X. Hemingway hailed last from Madison, Wisconsin? In other words, that he’d been a recent student at the ‘U’ there? Answer me that one? It looks sinister to me.”

“Well, don’t let it. When I arranged with the Star’s radio station to put my call for recent Wisconsin-U graduates on the ether, I had to name the exact man I was trying to connect with in order to establish that it wasn’t some kind of a fraudulent swindle ad, or a fake promotion project. I did so—to the station director himself only. That stuff, they assured me, however, is kept inviolable, in the secret files. But you know yourself it’s not secret, in case hot news breaks on the paper itself. The radio director, viewing the earliest stuff sent over to him by the news department to put on the news broadcast, recognized the name. Having some special inside info on it, he shot the tip back to the news editor; the latter saw the chance for a pictorial beat, called Wisconsin-U by long distance, got shunted to the town photographer, and inside of ten minutes was having a telephotoed photo laid down on his half-tone plate.”

“I pass, Uncle. You’re the champion explainer away of lugubrious suspicions. So I’ll say no more. After all, I want to believe what I want to believe, just like everybody else.”

“Let’s not worry about it. You’ve fixed things with this Duffy. The Star was first paper to get anything by which to hand the city the face of our man. The rest of the papers will follow suit, naturally. Everything’s working hunky-dory, I think. With Duffy fixed, the more the papers can print about Hemingway and on him, the better it suits me. When they get him, I get to him, and we win on that Zell sale. I don’t want to cheat you out of your chewing gum money tomorrow, but I say God speed the police—tonight.”

“But be thankful, just the same, that there’s a 9 a.m. tomorrow as an anchor to windward,” grumbled Carr Halsey. He was pointing now at a short paragraph in the news-story itself. “Yours truly, you’ll note, has his name duly emblazoned in the story,” he commented. “See? I’m mentioned as discoverer of the body. They put me down as a journalist. Fair enough. I hope I am.”

For a brief few minutes more they sat and talked. Roger Halsey was unduly cheerful now. At length the younger man arose. “Well, Uncle, I mustn’t forget I’ve an appointment with Old Sleuth himself at 8 bells. Yes, Artemus Baxter. And I think by the time I get back to Tower Court I will have been away long enough to have dodged a half hundred reporters who may wish fifty words or so apiece from the fellow who found Proctor’s body—but who will have darned slight hope of getting it if they know I’m a Sun man. I’m going to soak in a little of the dry-heat now, in view of the fact that I’ve peeled myself down to bare essentials far this long talk with you; then grab a cold shower, dash out for a bite, and then home. Now do you know where to get me?”

“That’s just what I don’t. What’s your phone number?” Roger Halsey reached forth a hand to the pushbutton on the stone table, as though to summon Gus to bring a pencil and paper. But Carr Halsey raised a restraining hand of his own.

“Never mind paper and pencil, Uncle. You won’t need ’em for the number I’m going to give you!” He paused. “As to phones—that is, at Tower Court—I’m theoretically available on two. You’re to call neither, though. I distrust that Orski bunch. I think they’re a gang of wire tappers, to tell you the truth. The one number which you’re not to call is, of course, the phone in the outermost hall of 810½ Tower Court. It’s entered in the directory under the name of Mehitable Morely. Shun it, Uncle. Shun it entirely. The other number, not yet printed up in the latest directory, but listed under my name and available from ‘Information,’ is the personal phone I keep in my room. Should you ring that, however, it would only buzz monotonously in your ear forever and forever, amen.”

“Why—how is that, Carr? How in the devil will I get in touch with you if I have to?”

“By ringing the phone that I have got in my room. You see, Uncle, we never understand the beneficence of all noumena that lie behind a given cosmic phenomenon. A number of folks at 810½ have private phones in their rooms—cheap enough these days, you must admit. And our black slavey, Chloe, slightly less than two weeks ago, gave some very bum instructions to a telephone transfer man sent out to shift instruments—or rather circuits. She got some idea into her black head from something she heard me say that I was moving upstairs to take possession of a room occupied by a very estimable Armenian gentleman, a Mr. Hondersarian, and that he in turn was moving down into mine, whereas the true facts of the matter were that Mr. Hondersarian was taking a smaller room for a week, then leaving for New York to live, and I had merely given vent to a few encomiums concerning the more copious light flooding his original salon! The error was typically Chloe-ish, however, and not at all surprising. Although being from the South, she ought to have known I’d never have left my woodburning fireplace that I’ve attained by Herculean efforts, to say the least, around there. And she should have—but to go on with my story, Uncle, which waxeth unseeming long, I fear, but is essential, mayhap, since the ghost of that Orski crowd of wire-tappers hovers too much over the scene to suit me. At any rate, Chloe handed the telephone transfer man the customary wrong instructions, and on the local terminal box in the basement he shifted the circuits in accordance with her benighted psychology, and in turn changed the number labels in the bases of the instruments in question. When I discovered it that night, I just decided to let it stand. For the time being, anyway. Had too many friends, as it was, bothering the devil out of me for this, that, and the other triviality—and particularly too large a proportion trying to make touches. I thought I’d wear ’em out for a month or so and discourage ’em! Well, Uncle, the fallacious transfer of those instruments, or rather the mere circuits thereof, constitutes the ‘cosmic phenomenon’ to which I allude; the ‘noumena,’ or hidden cosmic attributes, consist of the fact that some fine day, further along the time axis of the space-time continuum, events would make it advisable for me to talk much, perhaps, and freely, perhaps—quite unheard by any Orskish phonic experts. If and possibly! Any tap-in, therefore, outside of the telephone exchange, or even at the exchange itself, on the personal phone circuit of Carr Halsey of 810½ Tower Court—namely Tower 82716—will be rewarded only by periodical empty buzzes of friends ringing me up to go gallivanting—or to borrow money. Fact, because I investigated this morning when I got back from my North Woods vacation, and found Mr. Hondersarian left, his former salon still vacant, and a telephone call to my old Tower 82716 shows that the instrument in it is receiving incoming calls. Besides all of which, I received about that time, on the phone in my own room, a call in broken Armenian for the gentleman himself. All of which means, Uncle, that anybody who might really and sincerely want to ring me—as for instance yourself—will kindly call Tower two-two-two-two-two. Yes, believe it or not! Only number in Chicago that’s easier than Orski’s to remember! That’s why you need no paper and pencil, Uncle. If you can’t remember it, just stutter it. Still better, if you forget it, pretend you’re an old-fashioned railway train whistling for a cross-roads station. If Mr. Hondersarian had stayed put, he could have sold that number for a fortune one of these days. So all’s clear, I hope. If you do call me though, Uncle, try to call me from next door to your place, or a drugstore. I have a profound fear that you, out there on Prairie Avenue, are going to be tapped in on. Likely in the exchange itself, too. If I call anyone else in Chicago I’ll talk quite freely from my toot-a-toot-toot instrument. If I call you, I’ll probably speak a little cryptically. For instance: if I say anything about an ‘Arabella Brown,’ that Arabella Brown means Orski. Got that? Yes. And if I say to you, ‘Did you see by the papers, Uncle, that a chap named Hemingway is mixed up in that murder case?’ that means—”

“What?” His uncle regarded him wide-eyed.

“That means lope northward for the detective bureau in a cab at once. It means in actuality that the word has come to me via Baxter over toot-a-toot-toot that Hemingway is actually in custody. We too will be starting southward at the same time.”

His uncle nodded. “I get you, boy. I guess you’re right about that crowd being wire tappers—specially after what you say they did today on those several downtown circuits. So I’ll call you, if I do, from my neighbor’s house to the south, the Reverend P. P. Meadowlane. And I’ll be probably awake all night waiting any rings from you. In fact, I’m departing for home myself now in just the shake of a lamb’s tail.”

“I’ll leave you then. So long, Uncle.”

And Carr Halsey was soon reclining on one of a row of sheeted couches in a hot room, the outermost one of an elaborate series of torrid chambers connected to each other through open arched doorways, and cunningly piped with batteries of gilded overhead steampipes so that the temperature became steadily higher as one graduated thermally from one room in the series to the next in line. A few grumpy-looking customers of the Palace Baths, clad in sheets, surveyed him from the inner depths like strange Martian figures of some calorific underworld, but he proceeded no further than Stage No. 1. Fifteen minutes of it, then a cold shower, and with a hasty donning of his clothes he was out of the place.

Outside a dirty dusk had descended on the city. So somber a twilight, indeed, that the water flowing in the river far below the small Wrigley Esplanade was ink-like, broken only by shiny ripples reflecting the myriad lights from a small excursion steamer moored just west of the high fixed bridge. He went into the old Wrigley Building’s ultra-modern “Circularity Cafe” on the main floor, where the great circular terraced food platform, with its thousands of viands continuously replenished by white-capped serving men ascending with new supplies from the first basement in small compact elevators working ingeniously in the very open middle of the big disk, revolved slowly and steadily within its surrounding periphery of two hundred fixed stools; and unlike many other customers tonight who, eating in Circularity Cafe on the famous well-known basis of “all one can eat for 39 cents” fished steaming steaks from the steak plateau of the carnivoral segment as the gigantic annular table moved majestically ’round and ’round, dined on a caviar sandwich and a ready-made pot of modern mint-flavored tea. And receiving with his change a memorial stick of chewing gum, bearing the face of once-famous old Bill Wrigley, he was out on Wrigley Esplanade once more.

Now outside, it was another measure darker. He signaled another cab, with glowing headlights, but although it was nearing 8 o’clock in the evening, he ordered the driver to take him, not home to Tower Court, but to the Chicago Avenue police station instead. They reached it in less than ten minutes. “Wait here,” he told the cabman. And went up the worn stone steps, their deep concavities limned faintly in the two glowing purple bulbs that marked the old building’s civic status as a place of inquisition—and detention.

He made his way diffidently through the first red-painted doorway he found off the ancient soft-wood floored corridor that led to a half-darkened police court at the further end, filled with now faintly illuminated high-backed empty pews. The iron-grated partition at one end of the narrow high-ceilinged room he entered, whitewashed on all of its walls and containing but a single hard-looking red bench, if one overlooked the manifold stained cuspidors, standing each in a little heap of sawdust tossed on the splintered old floor, proclaimed that here reigned the crowned head of the Chicago Avenue police district, at least till perhaps midnight tonight. In fact, the grizzled old police captain, with enormous graying eyebrows as big as mustaches, who sat in front of the booking ledger, under a single bright shaded incandescent, a battery of phones at his left wrist, stared frozenly at Halsey from under the very crown of his kinghood, a battered antique gold-braided blue hat, as the younger man stepped uneasily up to the shiny worn shelf which carried the ledger. Outside of the two of them, the place appeared devoid, this evening, of the usual coterie of complaint makers and onlookers that clutter up the postern of justice in a police station.

Halsey cleared his throat once or twice apprehensively, and spoke.

“Don’t—don’t want to see me about anything, do you, Captain?” he ventured, half quizzically, half disquietedly.

“An’ wha’reen shoold Ah be wantin’ to see ye aboot anythin’?” growled the old police head. “An’ is it Big Shot himself, or wan of his lootinyants ye think ye ar-r-re?”

“And if I was, Captain,” laughed Halsey, with a bit of a hollow tone, however, to his laugh, “you wouldn’t want to see me at all. No, Carr Halsey is my name. I’m the fellow who discovered that body over there in Bush Bourse today.”

“An’ wher’ th’ hell ’ave ye been keepin’ yersil’?” snapped the old Scotsman. “Ah’ve had no less than foor-r men over to yer place. Ah’ve been wantin’ to have a few wurr-r-ds wi’ ye fur th’ last twa hoors.”

“Been taking a Turkish bath,” replied Halsey blithely. “And here I am. And a waiting cab ticking away outside.”

“Oootside, is it?” the old Scotsman roared, apoplectically red. “An’ Ah’ve a nootion to lock ye oop a coople hours an’ leave it tick ye broke. Hr-r-rmph! Well, we’ll see w’at we’ll be doin’ wi’ ye.”

He reached over a hairy speckled hand and raised one of the several instruments that cluttered the shine-worn ledge over which he presided.

“Gi’ me Line Foor-r-ty.” He looked off unseeingly into space. Then spoke suddenly into the transmitter. “Rexfor-r-rd, is it? MacCar-rtney at Chicago Av’noo speakin’. Th’ lad wha’ foond tha’ chemist’s body today is here. Mes, Halsey. Carr-r-r Halsey. Jus’ come oot o’ his dreams, I’m thinkin’. Shall Ah ha’ th’ bracelets poot on him and lock him oop f’r—f’r a lesson?”

A squeaking in the instrument. He shoved it over gloweringly. “’Tis Inspector Rexfor-rd of th’ Booreau wishes a wurr-d or twa wi’ ye.”

Halsey took the phone.

“Are you Carr Halsey?”

“Yes.”

“Rexford of the detective bureau speaking. The inspector who co-ordinates the various findings of the municipal crime laboratory upstairs. Got anything further to add to the data you gave Officer Burch of Chicago Avenue station today?”

Halsey grimaced involuntarily in the transmitter. He had more than any man in Chicago to add—if he wanted to! However—

“Nothing to add, Inspector. Unless perhaps things come up later. Anything you want to ask me, perhaps?”

“Well, let’s see.” Inspector Rexford was evidently consulting some sort of half-finished report. “What led you to run into Mr. Proctor’s place late today?”

Halsey frowned. “May I ask if I’m a suspect in this case? I touched nothing in that laboratory with my hands. I—”

“We know you didn’t. None of your ten finger prints tally within a million miles of those we’ve got.”

Halsey raised his brows. “Where—where did you get my prints?” he asked weakly.

Rexford laughed dryly. He evidently liked to bewilder laymen a bit. “You’re registered at the Sun as being subject to military call on the Militia Reserve. So we got the Armory, and the night record clerk sent us over your full identification card, finger prints and all.”

“Oh—I see!” Halsey collected his scattered wits. “You were asking what led me to run up to Proctor’s. Well, he was to make a simple chemical analysis for me—a mere friendly matter—I knew him in college—and he suggested that I return—later in the day.”

“Know any of his people?”

“None, I’m sorry to say.”

“Ever hear him speak of a Hemingway?”

“No, most decidedly no. However—um—er—I hadn’t seen him for six months. As it was, I had to look him up this morning in the phone book to find where he was located at present.”

“I see. Now just a minute. Let me look over this card. Oh yes—you say you saw Proctor yourself scrub off his mortar and pestle with soap and water, and rinse them off with hot water?”

“Yes. In the sink. He used his rubber gloves.”

“He certainly must have,” said the other brusquely. “For none of his prints are on either article! Um. Let’s see now.” He paused. “Well, I guess that’s all. Come to the Municipal Crime Laboratory any time tonight or in the morning, and go to the Alibi Smashing Depart—er—excuse me, please, I’m talking detective bureau lingo. Go to the Chronological Division—or Division B, and sign an affidavit that the chemist’s clock was exactly correct with those half-noon whistles. Give them an affidavit, also, that the mortar and pestle were cleaned off during the time you were there, and in the way you describe, so that the chronological men can localize the time of the appearance of certain prints that they have. And so long as you’re there, run into the Dactyloscopic Division further up the hall—Division L—and give them another set of your own fingerprints so that they can return that Militia Reserve card to where it belongs.”

“Gladly.”

“That’s all then.” And Rexford hung up.

Halsey returned the instrument. “Well, they don’t want me for anything,” he said exultantly.

“Then get th’ hell oot o’ here,” roared the old Scotsman, brandishing a brass paper weight melodramatically, “an’—an’—an’ quit suppor-r-rtin’ rascally cab drivers. It fair kills me thinkin’ of a cab teeckin’ away good dimes in—in times like this!”

So Halsey, with a grin, turned on his heel. His last look at the old Scotsman showed the latter gazing after him with sorrowful mien, deep anguish in his bleary gray eyes. He regained the street and climbed back into his cab. He dismissed it at the Chicago Avenue corner of Tower Court, for he knew that his side of the narrow street, at this hour, would contain its usual complement of solidly banked cars belonging, for the most part, to members of the towering Physicians’ and Surgeons’ Club at the further end of the short block. Above him in the dark sky, as he made his way on foot to Number 810½, circled slowly the great moving beam of blue-white light from Edison Memorial Beacon, atop the needle-like tower arising from the roof of the new “888 Building,” at 888 North Michigan Avenue, a block and a half northward and a block eastward, that stupendous battery of millions of concentrated candlepower which only four years ago had supplanted its weaker and outmoded predecessor, the Palm Olive Building beacon erected eleven years before. Its slanting golden-orange fixed beam, packed with infra-red rays which could pierce the thickest fog, and tilted downward at a slight angle, ending, as Halsey knew, on the great infra-red reflectors held in fixed position at the Central Air Field far to the west, seemed more tonight like a russet Jacob’s Ladder from higher space than a gigantic pointer to guide even the most drunken of aerolists to a safe landing ground: while its super-powerful blue-white beam, packed even more densely with infra-red rays, sweeping slowly and majestically in an ever horizontal circle, consuming one full minute for every revolution, placing its brilliant rays on airplanes a hundred miles away, over land or lake, and marking Chicago, air-rail-and-bus center of the entire midwest, seemed more like a gigantic finger searching, ever searching.

As he neared Number 810½, a small car, coming from the opposite direction, wheedled its way up to the curbing in front of his rooming-house, between two parked automobiles. It was an Edselette chaseabout, its low hung lights, perforated disc wheels, and oddly curved engine hood pronouncing it plainly to be this odd and very cheap automobile product of the last 5 years. A long-legged figure, by adding a foot to the one foot which appeared to be riding lazily all the while on the open running hoard, was clambering leisurely out. Halsey recognized it at once and increased his speed. For the figure was Artemus Baxter himself.