CHAPTER LVIII

The Card That Traveled in a Circle

He regarded her troubledly in turn. He wondered what she was going to say—when she should learn a lot of things she did not know. Then he spoke:

“Well—you know—you know I spoke about needing—your brother’s stock?”

“Oh—I see!” she said, relieved. “And you’ve been trying to get in touch with him through personal ads in the papers about the stock? Yes, I see.” She smiled. And was silent a moment. Then she went on.

“Well, as to the Clumps having no radio—that is something that would have pleased Cliff greatly. In fact, as I recall it, that was one reason why he took the room. He has, as I have said, a ‘blind spot’ for music. Music actually pains him. He dislikes intensely the continual influx of music that is always pouring in on other people’s radios. He—but I was speaking about the Clumps.”

“Yes,” echoed Halsey. “The Clumps! What on earth did these two illiterates from Kentucky do to amuse themselves, outside of playing Sooey Sooey Old Cat?”

“Well, for one thing,” she said, “Cliff wrote me that they had rented about a thousand reels of old tattered movie film—you know—the old-time silent films. They had a dilapidated projection machine, and gave themselves long picture shows every night—sometimes matinees, too!—and cooking great kettles of what Cliff called ‘percabbage an’ streaker meat,’ while they hilariously guffawed at Charlie Chaplin and wept copiously, both of them, at the affairs of a little tiny-tot actor called Jackie Coogan who, so I read recently, just had his fifth child born to him last month. And they—I’m speaking of the Clumps again!—moonshined a bit in the bargain too, using corn, so as to have plenty of liquor for themselves to drink.”

“Golly—having a swell time in Chicago, weren’t they?” said Halsey, amusedly shaking his head. “But those last letters of yours to—to Clifford? Did they come back to you?”

“Not at first,” the girl replied. “They remained unanswered, and then suddenly they all came back in a bunch. I was helping old Daddy Acres, our postmaster, by unpacking the mail bag and distributing the mail into the Post Office boxes that day in Eden—otherwise he might have seen the returned letters and figured that I had a new sweetheart named—named Clifford Hemingway, and it might have gone all over the town. But as it was, the bunch of letters, tied up together, came back—into my own hands only. All the letters had just the illiterate word ‘Gon’ written on them in pencil, and as near as I could figure it, it meant ‘Gone.’ But where had he gone? That was the question.

“That was about ten days ago. I waited a few more days. Still no letter from my brother. Now I did begin to wonder seriously if something had happened to him. So I wrote to this McCollum myself—and so that he would bc able to answer me in that small town under the name Loris Hangless, I had, much as I disliked to resort to such subterfuges, to say that that was my married name. I asked for any news or information about my brother, Clifford Hemingway, who, I told him, I understood had been negotiating with him about a chemical process. I addressed the letter plainly, requesting the Chicago Post Office to use directory service and to return it in three days if the addressee were not located. The letter did not come back, though; and neither did I receive any answer whatever from the man McCollum. He must have been, as I figure it now, very angry. I wrote again—and again no reply. Sulking still, as I figure now. And then, thinking of that secret process that Cliff and Cliff alone knew, I commenced to realize for the first time in my life that his fears about possible forcible detention or kidnapping—of even being killed in cold blood—might be well founded. It had never struck me in that light before, as it apparently had him. And so I decided to come up to Chicago and try and locate Clifford myself.”

“You arrived,” put in Halsey, “and visited McCollum’s offices, I suppose, as soon as business hours opened. What, exactly—what did he tell you?”

“Well,” the girl replied, “I left Eden just shortly before midnight Tuesday—the only possible train connections, you see—and did not get into Chicago yesterday till 9:30 in the morning; so I could not exactly visit McCollum’s offices at the very beginning of business hours. But I got there at 10 o’clock—or a few minutes after—for to tell you the truth, Carr, I haven’t got money to pay for taxicabs—and so I had to take street cars from your gigantic passenger station on Randolph Street to the Old Colony Building. But even though it was after 10, he was not down yet. There was only a little office girl—a tiny innocent-looking little thing—who appeared to answer the phone and take care of visitors. He had a sort of suite of rooms, with an inside private office for himself, and an outside anteroom for any caller to sit in; the office girl sat there, too, at her little desk. I remained a brief while, and, since he still didn’t show up, I wrote out my brother’s name, Clifford X. Hemingway, on a blank calling card that I took from my purse—naturally I didn’t bring any of Clifford’s old printed cards with the name John Hangless III on them; I just had to make one on the spot, with my fountain pen—and gave it to the girl, telling her to hand it to Mr. McCollum when he came in and tell him that the sister of the party whose name was written on the card was in the city and wanted to know the whereabouts of her brother at once, and anything whatever he could tell her about him. I told her I would probably be at the Y.W.C.A., under the name under which I had written him—but if not, would ’phone in my address. Then I left the Old Colony Building.” She paused, and stared puzzledly, bewilderedly at him. “And that very same card—”

“Yes, I know,” he admitted grimly. “That card was the same one I dropped on the floor when I rented you this room here and was fumbling for something to write you out a receipt on. In a few minutes I’ll explain all that. At least why I had it. It must look to you very much as though I’m mixed up with Carleton McCollum myself. But such isn’t the case, at that.” He paused. “But let me hear the rest of your story first.”

“Well,” she went on, “after I left the Old Colony Building I decided naturally next to go to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Cal Clump. As I said before, I didn’t have so much money that I could go taxi traveling; so I took a street car that was pointed out to me as the proper car to take to get to Carlisle Place, where Clifford had lived. If I had been properly instructed, as I learned afterward, I would have taken a—a Douglas Park elevated train, and gotten there much sooner. However, I found the place where the Clumps resided. A cute modern bungalow, set in a row of cottages. They were playing, as you might imagine—at least I guess they were—Sooey Sooey Old Cat, and Mr. Clump evidently didn’t trust Mrs. Clump, for he brought all his cards to the door stuck in various pockets of his hickory shirt, and I think he was cheating her a bit, as well, for I saw one protruding ever so slightly from the top of his high rawhide boots. But it proved almost hopeless to try and get any information. Being unable to read a note I wrote them, and unable to hear, as well, they were cut apart from me a thousand miles. At length after much gesticulation on both sides, Mr. Clump pointed madly at an urchin playing far down the street, a block or so, and made motions for me to bring him. I went and accosted the boy. Asked him who he was. After a number of adroit questions, I found that he had been, some time back, a little deaf-and-dumb boy who had gone to the deaf-mute school and had learned to talk on his fingers. But he had been dumb only—not deaf—and his dumbness had been corrected, a year ago, by an operation. He said he knew ‘them there Clumps’ and charged 10 cents for translating. So I gave him a dime, and he trotted back to Mr. Clump’s place with me.

“By dint of much talking on my part, and much finger work on the little lad’s part, I finally elicited the fact that my brother had, indeed, left them a little over 2 weeks before; they had simply found his few clothes and his small portable radio, packed and gone, and his key on the bureau, while they were down at your famous Whaleorium—at least that’s what the boy called it—in Grant Park, looking at the collection of living whales. They—Carr, have you really got such a thing here in Chicago?”

“Yes indeed,” he told her. “It’s known, though, as the Aquamammalorium—and not exactly what the little boy called it. It was built, so far as I recall it, sometime in 1938, and one of our ex-presidents, a man named Herbert Hoover, is the superintendent and managing director of it—a more or less honorary position, to some extent. There are over thirty different species of whales in it—all in a single gigantic steel-braced glass tank—the goose-beaked whale—the porpoise whale—the arctic whale, and so on. When they all start flopping on the same day, it makes a roar and a din so great that you can hear it far over in Old Loop. In fact, a prominent lawyer in Old Loop, by name J. Ivings Pierce, actually sued to abolish the Aquamammalorium on the plea that the hubbub made at times by the whales rendered the establishment a public nuisance, but lost the suit because the superintendent, this Hoover, testified that he himself, personally, could not hear any of the uproar. And so we have our Aquamammalorium today. And—but go on with your story. We’re getting off the track. So Mr. and Mrs. Clump had been down at the Aquamammalorium on the day that Clifford’s clothes and all had been moved out?”

“Yes. Well, I asked them then, if anyone else had made any inquiries.

“Yes, they said. One man. A dark man, with gold teeth. Very dark. Like he might have been a Turk or an East Indian, they said. Which the boy angrily corroborated, for he had done the translating—and had gotten a lead dime for his trouble.”

“Hm,” said Halsey. “That, of course, was some emissary sent by McCollum. Some Mexican from South Chicago. Perhaps the indefatigable Weeping Louis himself, about whom I hear so much. And which is all Greek to you, Loris, isn’t it? Never mind.” He paused a second, thinking. “So McCollum was still hoping to interest the flown bird, and knew all the time where he lived. He—do you think, Loris, that your brother fled to avoid McCollum?”

“No, I do not,” she replied. “He would have assuredly written me had he done so.”

He nodded. “All right. Then go on, if you will. And give me the approximate times—that is, if you can—of your various arrivals and departures around the city.”

“Well, I rode back to your downtown district. This time I took the Elevated Road. My next logical place of investigation, so far as I could see, was, naturally, this Wendell Proctor with whom he had made an acquaintance—and whom he felt was the most likely person to help him manufacture his Hemingite, or to get it promoted. Whether they had actually come together on the proposition or not, much less even discussed it, I of course had no way of knowing. Well, I found in the telephone book where Mr. Proctor’s place of business was, and took a street car there. It was in a curious old building, with a huge four-faced clock in a turret rising above its corner—high above the street—a building called Bush Bourse. It—but then, of course, if you know Mr. Proctor, you know his place, I presume. And since you have asked about the times of my arrivals, I can only say that it was somewhere around 1 o’clock then, as near as I could know or judge, for my wrist watch, my one reliable source of information, has been out of commission a long time now—and—and I haven’t felt able to afford to have it fixed. So I can’t swear as to the infallibility of any clocks. The Chicago Avenue face of the big four-faced clock towering above Bush Bourse said it was a few minutes to 1, and I remember wondering if it were correct, and if Chicago always came back from its lunch promptly at 1. There was also another clock—a cuckoo clock—that I had occasion to glance at later, in the laboratory itself, but again I have no way of certifying as to its veracity. Both clocks could have been a half-hour wrong, so far as I might know. They—but about my arrival at Bush Bourse. There were two elevators in the place. Both were out of commission. And I had to tramp up the whole five flights to Mr. Proctor’s laboratory.”

“And did you—or did you not—catch Proctor?” Halsey asked. “For if you called there at around one o’clock—more or less—yesterday, Loris, you called there after no one else but myself had left. Proctor, as I happen to know, was getting ready himself to leave very shortly. In fact, that second elevator broke down just prior to his coming downstairs, and he told the boy whom he found phoning in the main floor foyer that he had left his laboratory open so that a couple of demijohns of sulphuric acid could be delivered. That puts his departure and your arrival after the second elevator broke down. And—” It was on his lips to tell her then and there that Proctor had been murdered, but he decided to withhold that feature for a short while yet.

She obviously sensed, however, now, that something was very much amiss: “Why—is there anything wrong—concerning Mr. Proctor? Has—has he disappeared?”

“Somewhat,” he told her vaguely. “Well—yes. He—but did you find him?”

“No, I did not. His laboratory was open, but he wasn’t there. Not even a hat was in evidence. I took a chair and waited and waited—and still he did not come.”

“Did you by any chance see a mortar and pestle standing. there—on his workshelf?”

“Yes, I did notice it. Against the light from his windows. It reminded me of old Uncle Peddy’s drugstore back home in Eden, and that I—I owed him 75 cents for face powder.”

“But you didn’t touch it?” he said, with a half-smile. “I’m telling you—not asking you.”

“No, of course I didn’t touch it. But how do you know?” she asked bewilderedly.

“Because your fing—oh, by the way, did you once burn the tip, or ball, of your right index finger?”

“Why yes,” she said wonderingly. “When I was a little girl. A little boy pushed me, while we were watching the horseshoer in the Eden blacksmith shop. Which is an Edselette repair shop today, of course! I tripped, and fell against a white-hot horseshoe. Before I could extricate myself, I had burned the fingertip badly. I was permitted, as a reward, to see Willie Evans whipped for it. Except that—” She paused. “Except that I—I got soft-hearted at the last moment—and got the whipping called off.”

“You would,” Halsey remarked admiringly.

“But why,” she inquired, “do you ask—about my fingertip? And this touching of—of the mortar and pestle?”

“Well,” stammered Halsey—and he must not distract her mind until everything had been gotten from her, “the nurse—I guess it was—mentioned your fingertip.” A faint snore-like sound from the other side of the folding doors announced that his equivocation was safe. “That was all. Forgive me—always leading you off—onto by-paths. The mortar has nothing to do—with anything.” Which, he reflected to himself, was more than the truth—since the pestle was the instrument really involved. “But about your visit to that laboratory. Go on.”

“Well, I got tired of sitting on the chair,” the girl stated. “That cuckoo clock on the wall of the laboratory was ticking away—it was getting to be nearly half-past one by it—presuming that it was correct. And still nobody came. So I got up and walked around a bit. Stared at a peculiar electric—” She stopped.

“Furnace,” he said grimly. “With gobs of paste around and about it on the floor. Paste that was beginning to harden even then. But go on.”

“Well, I walked around and looked at most everything. So different, I saw, from a high school lab. And shortly I saw a test tube—such a big thick test tube, too!—very businesslike, it was—not like the ones in school—half full of a bright blue liquid, not so far, in fact, from that mortar and pestle of which you speak. It was in a wooden holder. And clipped to the edge of it was a clip of paper bearing my brother’s initials—just ‘C.H.’—and an address, 810½ Tower Court. I suddenly perceived that Mr. Proctor was doing something for—or perhaps just concerning—my brother, and knew him so well that he had just jotted Clifford’s initials down instead of writing my brother’s name out as he would have done, no doubt, with an official client, And I perceived that at last I had, for some reason, located Cliff. That was all I wanted. I decided that it was more than possible that this Mr. Proctor might not return for several hours, and so I left, determined to find Tower Court and investigate for myself why Clifford was living there. I tramped down the long flights again, and a man outside, on the street, told me that Tower Court was only five blocks east of Bush Bourse. But when I got there—or should I now say here?—and found Number 810½—once again, the same old story! Everywhere I went, just as in everything I had done, I seemed to be utterly balked, thwarted, chiefly, of course, by lack of response. Mr. McCollum had not answered my letters; neither had he been in when I called. Mr. Proctor had not been in either. And here, at Number 810½ Tower Court, no one came to the door at all when I rang the bell. I really commenced to wonder at that point, Carr, if Fate was deliberately and coolly trying to circumvent me. And I was so tired that I sat down on the bench and waited for someone, anyone, to come. And I just decided, while I sat there, and my eyes rested on that room-to-rent sign in the upper part of the doorway, to engage a room in this place and not to take any further chances whatsoever of having people tell me lies or refuse me information or claim they knew nothing. Which latter would surely be the case if Clifford had, by any chance, taken another name—and that idea, I confess, had been occurring to me: that he had—perhaps to avoid McCollum—or for some other reason. I hardly knew what. Except that if he had taken another name, any inquiries here about him, under the name ‘Clifford Hemingway,’ were bound to bring down suspicions of various sorts on his head—in this place. And I decided, as I say, to engage that room—or any room. And if Clifford were living here—either under his own name or any other—and wasn’t letting anyone but Mr. Proctor know about it—I intended to find it out for myself; for, once on the inside, I would soon learn the truth as to why Clifford’s own sister couldn’t even see him. And—well—you know the rest.”

“Mrs. Morely told you, I understand, when you called her upstairs here tonight, after you had become yourself again, that there was no Clifford Hemingway in this house—nor anybody who tallied even remotely with the description you gave her?” She nodded, and there was a bitterly disappointed look in her face as she did. “For the ‘C.H.,’” Halsey went on, “which you saw clipped to that test tube of blue liquid were the initials of one, Carr Halsey, myself—and not Clifford Hemingway at all. Which you’ve probably begun to guess, by this time. But, enough for that. Just two more things I want to know now: First, what happened here yesterday just prior to the instant when the stranger at the door knocked you senseless; second, tell me of the interview with the detective tonight.”

“Well, after you went away yesterday, shortly after inducting me into this beautiful room, and I had unpacked part of my bag, and distributed the things in the bureau drawers, and got more or less settled down in my new quarters, fully expecting to surprise my own brother that night, a long ring came at the doorbell. Since it was repeated again and again, and there seemed to be no one here to answer it, I finally went to the front door myself. A big pursy-looking dark-complexioned man with a brown beard and mustache stood there. He seemed very polite and courteous, if not suave. He said that his name was Rudolph Schmidt, that he was a gentleman’s tailor from around on Pearson Street, and had been instructed to call for a green suit he had made for the gentleman in the front room, for altering. He said he would go right in and get it, that he knew the suit. I told him, however, that no one was home but myself in the entire house, and that because I had just moved in I could not very well allow one stranger to go into another person’s room. I asked him if he would not come back in the evening. Then he told me, in his thick voice, that the suit positively had to be worn that evening. But I wasn’t letting myself in for any mixups, concerning other people’s possessions. I told him that doubtlessly the occupant of the room would come back later, and I would tell him and have him bring the suit over to the tailor shop himself. That appeared more or less to balk him. He seemed to hesitate a long, long second, as though thinking, weighing, comparing a thousand things, each with the other; then he reached into his back pocket, jerked his hand out—lunged at me lightninglike with something in it—and it seemed as though a great shower of light splashed over me, followed by blackness and sleepiness that lasted for a long, long time. Towards the latter part of my stupor—for that’s what the nurse says it has amounted to—a sort of confusion of lights and low voices took the place of the blackness, and when I finally came to—suddenly, it seemed—I found myself in bed here, and Miss Kinneally standing over me. Mrs. Morely came up a short while later, when I asked for her, and when I questioned her I found that there was no one in the house by the name of Clifford Hemingway, and no one even resembling the description I gave to her. And she said, moreover, that everybody who lived here had been here now for three or more months. Then I got a bit excited, I fear, especially when I learned that more than 24 hours had drained away. And a few minutes later a detective stopped in from some nearby police station to make inquiry as to how I was getting along, and so, while Miss Kinneally ran next door or up the street somewheres, I told him the whole story about my brother, about his being mixed up with this Carleton McCollum in the Old Colony Building, and how McCollum had refused to answer both of my letters. And how Clifford had vanished from his quarters on Douglas Park. Detective Grant—that was his name—studied a long while at my story. Then he looked at me and said, ‘Miss Hemingway, in view of certain things that have occurred here in Chicago, the facts you have told me tonight are highly significant—in some way, as yet unknown. This is a matter either for the Chicago detective bureau—or perhaps for the Federal authorities—and I’ve got to definitely make up my mind which, in the next few minutes while I get to a phone outside. In any event, this man McCollum must be investigated.’ He would not reveal why it was so important, but taking down all the data I had rendered him, particularly the fact that McCollum lived at the end of a road called Keegan—or Keegan’s—Road, on the other side of a town called Riverside, left in a hurry, and Miss Kinneally came back at that moment and made me comfortable.” She stopped. “Now I’ve told everything—so now won’t you tell something?”

Halsey leaned back in his chair. “It’s all very, very plain now,” he declared to her. “As to the card you left at this McCollum’s offices, I can only partly explain that matter at present. There has been a Japanese associated in some peculiar way with McCollum at that Keegan’s Road home of his. This card of yours somehow got into the Jap’s possession, and he used it to write out a rough description of some property—a certain blue dye—belonging to him, which was in my possession. At any rate, he left it here yesterday, and you saw it again after you had come from Bush Bourse and were renting this room here, and I dropped it. It was a strange mechanism, a traveling around a circle of a thing and a person, in two opposite directions, which brought you face to face with the identical card you had left at McCollum’s once earlier in the day. I don’t wonder you looked at me in the utterly astonished way you did—and I?—alas, I concluded afterwards, when other things too had developed, that it was the text of a certain label, penciled on the side uppermost when you handed the card back to me, that was the thing that—that—that—well knocked you for a row, as they say. In plain language, I concluded later that you were a charming young lady spy, sent to get your hands on this blue dye, and that you had at that moment discovered who in the place had it. Wurra! Wurra!” He shook his head. “And what would you say if I were to tell you that ’twas no one other than your good friend McCollum himself who struck you down?”

“It—was?” she echoed. “Why—why—how—”

“Don’t try to figure it out,” he warned her hastily. “You just got in the way of a train—on another track. Same railroad system—or it eventually all became an interlocked railroad system—but another track, then, at least. That’s all.”

He was silent a moment. He saw that she was groping fearfully, horribly, trying somehow to coordinate these bewildering things into some sort of a rational pattern. And he saw plainly that he must now enlighten her fully, if only to stop her futile and endless cudgeling of her own brain. He spoke:

“Well, Loris, do you think you are recovered enough to hear news that’s—well, a little disturbing?”

She nodded, manifestly frightened now: “Yes. I can stand it. Better to have it now—than for me to worry all night. What—what is it?”

So he told her briefly of his own connection with matters. With regards to the exact manner in which her brother was the key to the defeat of Orski and the Ajax Electrical Company’s snatching of the entire Zell sale, he put his cards completely and fully on the table, for he perceived now that she knew no more than he about where Clifford Hemingway could be found. He detailed quite frankly as to how he owned $90,000 in that sale—dependent, however, wholly on the sale going through—and under the conditions of the escroll as then held by the First National Bank. He explained to her at last how the blue Japanese dye had entered into her affairs, at least with respect to the fact that Proctor, whom she had wanted so badly to see, had been murdered in his laboratory; and from these things it did not take him long to go on to the gunfight out at Keegan’s Road that night, and the rescue of himself and his friend by the Federal forces as a result of her story to Luke Grant, the North Central plainclothesman who had had a brother in the Federal Department.

“Now,” he finished, “a few things are plain—and a few things are still as mysterious as ever. Proctor was murdered after he got back from his lunch and was about to start in on the analysis of my sample of the Mazoru-Ikeuna—or the supposed Mazoru-Ikeuna!—which he never got to. Last of all, your McCollum is one August Frantzius, a brother, or rather half-brother, of the Revolutionary Mexican chieftain, Cifuentes, posing as a particular kind of a promoter in order to get military secrets—if possible, that is—to aid his brother’s side in the big struggle down there, and to cover up, generally, or camouflage, his various activities. Likewise, Loris, there is no doubt that your brother’s explosive, Hemingite—98-percent efficient as compared with nitro-cellulose, and made solely from sugar!—would be a Godsend to those Revolutionists in their present crisis. For they’ve got the sugar—two million tons of it. As for the two ingredients used to make the Hemingite they are, as you say, fully recoverable after the process is completed. And the Revolutionary territory doubtlessly contains a dozen now idle chemical laboratories and plants. Last but not least, the Revolutionists have taken—and hold fast today—a whole arms factory, with tons and tons of empty shells, grenades, bombs, rifle cartridges, anti-aircraft projectiles, and Lord knows what else, all turned out—but with nothing to put into them, so badly are these insurrectionists hedged about. Indeed, now that Cifuentes’ opponent Almedo is to be recognized, and the embargos taken off—which helps only Almedo—your brother’s secret can win a draw for the Revolutionists, or at least can enable them to hold out till the next Mexican elections, where they can skin out of the whole mess, and probably jingle some Mexican silver in their pockets to boot. Considering all the things that happened tonight, McCollum-Frantzius has gotten hold of your brother’s formula—except that for some reason your brother has thrown it into some form where it can’t be decoded, at least McCollum wasn’t in a position to decode it. This is all very puzzling. It devolves upon things that happened after and since your brother pulled out from McCollum altogether. But if he got your brother’s secret—he must—he must know—where your brother is! That’s darned perfect logic, I think. Yet what factor there is about the blue liquid, Mazoru-Ikeuna, that would have made his brother ‘Bloody Juan’ president of Mexico—gad, what a puzzler! And for the Jap to have been the owner of it! And for it to have caused McCollum to commit murder—for undoubtedly, Loris, he killed Proctor in cold blood with that pestle.”

“But,” she said desperately, “according to what you’ve told me, there were two who could have killed Proctor. Two who handled that pestle. Two—who will both perhaps not be able to prove that—that they did not. Clifford is terribly hot tempered. I don’t know what has taken place between him—and Mr. Proctor. How do we know that he himself didn’t commit that murder? The statement left by the dying man certainly indicates the possibility of that. And another thing: Cliff is a fellow who reads newspapers, no matter where he is; and tunes in eagerly on radio-news broadcasts. He always carried with him a portable Multi-Mu radio, and used it much and frequently—that is, for most everything but music. He told me once that he felt that Uncle Abner was more than likely some day to leave his property to him. Surely he would have seen that big story about Uncle Abner’s dramatic death in the Sunday papers—and he would have communicated with Sheridan, Wyoming. Which he hasn’t. Surely he would see—and hear—all these efforts being made to get to him, first by your uncle and this Orski, and now by the police. But, Carr, the fact that he does not come forth indicates plainly either that he is dead—or else that he dare not, for the reason that he ended Proctor’s life fear some reason.”

She paused.

“And either way—things are not very nice for me—are they?”