One Wonderful Night: A Romance of New York
"Then it is directly beneath mine?"
"Yes, sir. He must have heard us breaking open your door."
"I beg your pardon. Heard what?"
"We committed some minor offenses with regard to your property during
your absence," said Steingall, "but they were of slight account as
compared with your own extravagances. Let me warn you not to say too
much before de Courtois. Even taking your version of events, Mr.
Curtis, Lord Valletort will probably raise a wasps' nest about your
ears in the morning."
"But why _break open_ the door? Surely, there was a pass key----"
"Sh-s-sh! Here we are!"
Steingall tapped lightly on a panel of 505, and the four listened
silently for any response. None came--that is, there was nothing which
could be recognized as the sound of a voice or of human movement inside
the room. Nevertheless, they fancied they heard something, and the
detective knocked again, somewhat more insistently. Now they were
intent for the slightest noise behind that closed door, and they caught
a subdued groan or whine, followed by the metallic creak of a bed-frame.
At that instant a chamber-maid hurried up.
"I was just going to 'phone the office," she said to the clerk. "A
little while ago I tried to enter that room, but my key would not turn
in the lock."
"Did you hear anyone stirring within?" asked the clerk.
"No, sir. I knocked, and there was no answer."
"Listen now, then."
A third time did Steingall rap on the door, and the strange whine was
repeated, while there could be no question that a bed was being dragged
or shoved to and fro on a carpeted floor.
"My land!" whispered the girl in an awed tone. "There's something
wrong in there!"
"Let me try your key," said the clerk. He rattled the master-key in
the keyhole, but with no avail.
"I suppose it acts all right in every other lock?" he growled.
"Oh, yes, sir. I've been using it all the evening."
"Someone has tampered with the lock from the outside," he said
savagely. "There is nothing for it but to send for the engineer.
Before we're through with this business we'll pull the d--d hotel to
pieces. A nice reputation the place will get if all this door-forcing
appears in the papers to-morrow."
Certainly the clerk was to be pitied. Never before had the decorum of
the Central Hotel been so outraged. Its air of smug respectability
seemed to have vanished. Even to the clerk's own disturbed imagination
the establishment had suddenly grown raffish, and its dingy paint and
drab upholstery resembled the make-up and cloak of a scowling tragedian.
A strong-armed workman came joyously. He had already figured as a
personage below stairs, because of his earlier experiences, and it was
a cheering thing to be called on twice in one night to participate in a
mystery which was undoubtedly connected with the murder in the street.
Before adopting more strenuous methods he inserted a piece of strong
wire into the keyhole, thinking to pick the lock by that means; but he
soon desisted.
"Some joker has been at that game before me," he announced. "A chunk
of wire has been forced in there after the door was locked."
"From the outside?" inquired Steingall.
"Yes, sir. These locks work by a key only from without. There is a
handle inside. . . . Well, here goes!"
A few blows with a sharp chisel soon cut away sufficient of the frame
to allow the door to be forced open. On this occasion, there being no
wedge in the center, it was not necessary to attack the hinges, and,
once the lock was freed, the door swung back readily into the interior
darkness.
The engineer, remembering his needless alarm at falling head foremost
into Curtis's room, went forward boldly enough now, and paid for his
temerity. He was so anxious to be the first to discover whatever
horror existed there that he made for the center of the apartment
without waiting to turn on the light, and, as a consequence, when he
stumbled over something which he knew was a human body, and was greeted
with a subdued though savage whine, he was even more frightened than
before.
But no one was concerned about him or his feelings when Steingall
touched an electric switch and revealed a bound and gagged man fastened
to a leg of the bed. At first, owing to the extraordinary posture of
the body, it was feared that another tragedy had been enacted. The
victim of an uncanny outrage was lying on his side, and his arms and
legs were roughly but skillfully tied with a stout rope in such wise
that he resembled a fowl trussed for the oven. After securing him in
this fashion, his assailants had fastened the ends of the rope to the
iron frame of the bed, and his only possible movement was an
ignominious half roll, back and forth, in a space of less than eight
inches. This maneuver he had evidently been engaged in as soon as he
heard voices and knocking outside, but he had been gagged with such
brutal efficacy that his sole effort at speech was a species of whinny
through his nose.
The detective's knife speedily liberated him; when he was lifted from
the floor and laid gently on the bed, he remained there, quite
speechless and overcome.
Steingall turned to the agitated chambermaid, whose eyes were round
with terror, and who would certainly have alarmed the hotel with her
screams had she come upon the occupant of the room in the course of her
rounds.
"Bring a glass of hot milk, as quickly as you can," he said, and the
girl sped away to the service telephone.
"Wouldn't brandy be better?" inquired Devar.
"No. Milk is the most soothing liquid in a case like this. The man's
jaws are sore and aching. Probably, too, he is faint from fright and
want of food. If we can get him to sip some milk he will be able to
tell us, perhaps, just what has happened."
While they awaited the return of the chamber-maid, the party of
rescuers gazed curiously at the prostrate figure on the bed. They saw
a small, slight, neatly built man, attired in evening dress, whose
sallow face was in harmony with a shock of black hair. A large and
somewhat vicious mouth was partly concealed by a heavy black mustache,
and the long-fingered, nervous hands were sure tokens of the artistic
temperament. There could be no manner of doubt that this hapless
individual was Jean de Courtois. He looked exactly what he was, a
French musician, while initials on his boxes, and a number of letters
on the dressing-table, all testified to his identity.
Curtis, Devar, and the hotel clerk seemed to be more interested in the
appearance of the half-insensible de Courtois than Steingall. He gave
him one penetrating glance, and would have known the man again after
ten years had they been parted that instant; but, if he favored the
Frenchman with scant attention, he made no scruples about examining the
documents on the table, though his first care was to thank the workman,
and send him from the room.
"Now," he muttered to the others in a low tone, "leave the questioning
to me, and mention no names."
He picked up a Marconigram lying among the letters, and read it.
Without a word, but smiling slightly, he handed it unobtrusively to
Curtis. It bore that day's date, and the decoded time of delivery was
4 P.M.
"Arriving to-night," it ran. "Coming direct Fifty-Ninth Street.
Expect us there about eight-thirty."
Curtis smiled, too. He grasped the detective's unspoken thought.
Steingall had as good as said that the message bore out Curtis's
counter charge against Count Vassilan and the Earl of Valletort of
conspiring with de Courtois himself to defeat Lady Hermione's marriage
project. Indeed, before replacing the slip of paper on the table, the
detective produced a note-book, and entered therein particulars which
would secure proof of the Marconigram's origin if necessary.
The maid hurried in with the milk, and Steingall, who had covered more
ground among the Frenchman's correspondence than the others gave him
credit for, now acted as nurse. With some difficulty he succeeded in
persuading the stricken man on the bed to relax his firmly closed jaws
and endeavor to swallow the fluid. It was a tedious business, but
progress became more rapid when de Courtois realized that he was in the
hands of those who meant well by him. It was noticeable, too, as his
senses returned and the panic glare left his eyes, that his expression
changed from one of abject fear to a lowering look of suspicious
uncertainty. He peered at Steingall and the hotel clerk many times,
but gave Curtis and Devar only a perfunctory glance. Oddly enough, the
fact that the two latter were in evening dress seemed to reassure him,
and it became evident later that the presence of the clerk led him to
regard these strangers as guests in the hotel who had been attracted to
his room by the mere accident of propinquity.
His first intelligible words, uttered in broken English, were:
"Vat time ees eet?"
"Ten-thirty," said Steingall.
"_Ah, cre nom d'un nom_! I haf to go, queek!"
"Where to?"
"No mattaire. I tank you all to-morrow. I explain eferyting den.
Now, I go."
"You had better stay where you are, Monsieur de Courtois," said
Steingall in French. "Milord Valletort and Count Vassilan have
arrived. I have seen them, and nothing more can be done with respect
to their affair tonight. I am the chief of the New York Detective
Bureau, and I want you to tell me how you came to be in the state in
which you were found."
But de Courtois was regaining his wits rapidly, and the clarifying of
his senses rendered him obviously unwilling to give any information as
to the cause of his own plight. Nor would he speak French. For some
reason, probably because of a permissible vagueness in statements
couched in a foreign tongue, he insisted on using English.
"Eef you haf seen my frien's you tell me vare I fin' dem. I come your
office to-morrow, an' make ze complete explanation," he said.
"I must trouble you to-night, please," insisted Steingall quietly.
"You don't understand what has occurred while you were fastened up
here. You know Mr. Henry R. Hunter?"
"Yes, yes. I know heem."
"Well, he was stabbed while alighting from an automobile outside this
hotel shortly before eight o'clock, and I imagine he was coming to see
you."
"Stabbed! Did zey keel heem?"
"Yes. Now, tell me who 'they' were."
Monsieur Jean de Courtois was taken instantly and violently ill. He
dropped back on the bed, from which he had risen valiantly in his
eagerness to be stirring, and faintly proclaimed his inability to grasp
what the detective was saying.
"Ah, _Grand Dieu_!" he murmured. "I am eel; fetch a doctaire. My
brain, eet ees, vat you say, _etourdi_."
"You will soon recover from your illness. Come, now, pull yourself
together, and tell me who the men were who tied you up, and why, if you
can give a reason."
The Frenchman shut his eyes, and groaned.
"I am stranjare here, Monsieur le Commissaire," he said brokenly. "I
know no ones, nodings. Milor' Valletort, he ees acquaint. Send for
heem, and bring ze doctaire."
"Don't you understand that your friend, Mr. Hunter, the journalist who
was helping you in the matter of Lady Hermione Grandison's marriage,
has been murdered?"
The other men in the room caught a new quality in Steingall's voice.
Contempt, disgust, utter disdain of a type of rascal whom he would
prefer to deal with most fittingly by kicking him, were revealed in
each syllable; but Jean de Courtois was apparently deaf to the mean
opinion his conduct was inducing among those who had extricated him
from a disagreeable if not actually dangerous predicament. He squirmed
convulsively, and half sobbed his inability to realize the true nature
of anything that had happened either to himself or to any other person.