The seventh shot A detective story
Willie, getting to his feet with surprising steadiness, and carefully
corking his precious bottle. “But he’s never given any of that stuff to
the press agent, and I’ve a notion he doesn’t want it made public. I
don’t know why, but I’m pretty sure he has some reason for keeping it
dark. Now you know as much about it as I do, and I’d never have told
you as much as that if I hadn’t started in here!”
While he was wrapping up his bottle, with a painstaking deliberation
which was, as yet, almost the only sign of what he had drunk, Barrison
drew the little pistol from his pocket and laid it on the table. It
was almost a toy, and mounted in silver gilt, a foolish-looking thing
to have done such deadly harm. The letter was in heavy raised gold, a
thick, squarely printed M. In the rays of the student lamp it glittered
merrily, like the decoration on some frivolous trinket.
“Hello!” said Willie Coster, looking dully at it from the other side of
the table. “So that’s the gun that did it? Let’s see the letter.” He
swayed forward to look closer.
“It’s an M,” said Barrison.
“You’re looking at it upside down,” said Willie; “or else it’s you
that’s drunk and not me. That’s a W, man, a W! Good night!”
He ambled toward the door, bearing his package clasped to his breast,
and disappeared.
Barrison seized the pistol and turned it around. Willie was right. The
initial, seen so, was W!
CHAPTER XIV
A TIP—AND AN INVITATION
Jim Barrison had scarcely grasped this fact when the telephone rang.
In the dead silence of that hour, half after two in the morning, the
shrill tinkle had a startling effect. Barrison, his fatigue forgotten,
sprang to the instrument.
It was Tony Clay’s voice that came to him. “I want to come up for a
minute.”
“Oh, confound you!” ejaculated the detective irritably. “What do you
want at this hour? I’ll have to come down and let you in; the place is
closed.”
“I know it is. That’s why I’m calling up. I’m in the drug store at the
corner, and I’ll be there as soon as you can get downstairs. All right?”
“I suppose so. But I’d like to wring your neck!”
“Welcome to try, old man, just a bit later. So long!”
Barrison hung up, and tramped downstairs with suppressed profanity on
his tongue, to let Tony in at the front door of the apartment house
where he roomed. The younger man was already waiting on the steps,
dripping wet, but whistling softly, rather off the key.
“Come in, you blamed night owl!” growled Barrison, under his breath.
“Don’t slam the door. And if you haven’t something worth while to tell
me, after routing me out like this, I’ll wake Tara and give him full
permission to jujutsu you into Bellevue! Come on, and stop whistling.”
Upstairs, Tony demanded Scotch and cigarettes, and took off his wet
coat.
“Heavens! Does that mean you’re intending to _stay_?”
“Not permanently,” Tony reassured him soothingly. “I do manage to
arrive at inconvenient times, don’t I?”
“You do, you do! Now what is it?”
“Well,” said Tony, settling himself in the chair recently vacated by
Willie Coster. “I’ve been calling on Miss Templeton.”
Barrison was conscious of a queer little thrill, not entirely
unpleasant. Truth to tell, he had not been able to dismiss a certain
vision from his mind, through all his practice and professional
occupations. He could see it now, all in a moment, gold hair,
dark-fringed eyes, marble-white throat and arms, and a mouth that could
soften and droop like a child’s at the most unexpected moments.
“She’s out of the case, I suppose you know,” he said shortly. “Go
ahead, though.”
“You see,” said Tony, “when you pitched into me like that about her
giving me the slip, I was sort of sore, but I knew you were right, too.
So I gave you the slip, in my turn, and chased over to her hotel. I
wasn’t at all sure she’d see me, but I thought I’d try it on anyhow,
and she sent down word I was to come up. She wore a kimono thing, and
looked like an angel——” He paused in fatuous reflection.
“Get on, you young fool!”
Barrison’s tone was the sharper because he himself admired Miss
Templeton rather more than was wholly consistent with the traditions of
a cold-blooded detective.
So Tony went on: “She seemed to know that there had been something
wrong at the theater; that impressed me at once. The moment I came into
the room, she said: ‘Something has happened to him?’ I told her about
it, and she just sat for a moment or two looking straight in front of
her. She looked—strange, and awfully white and tired and—sort of young.
After a while she said: ‘Thank Heaven it wasn’t I’—just that way. Then
she asked some questions——”
“What sort of questions?” interrupted Barrison, who was looking at the
floor, and had let his cigarette go out.
“Oh, the usual thing: Who was behind at the time, and whether any one
was suspected, and—she made rather a point of this—where Miss Legaye
was when it happened.”
“I know; she’s always harped on that.” Barrison frowned impatiently,
yet he was thinking as hard as he knew how to think. “Anything else,
Tony?”
“Yes; she asked me to give you this.”
Tony took a small unsealed envelope out of his waistcoat pocket and
handed it over. “She said it was important,” he added; “that’s why I
insisted on coming in to-night.”
Barrison read his note, and then looked up. “Do you know what this is?”
he said.
The boy flushed indignantly. “Good heavens, Jim!” he exclaimed. “You
don’t suppose I read other people’s letters? She just gave it to me to
bring, and I brought it, that’s all.”
Barrison smiled at him, with a warm feeling round his heart. “That’s
all right, Tony,” he said kindly, “and you’re all right, too! You’d
better look at it.” He held it out.
Tony shook his head. “If there’s anything in it you want to tell me,
fire ahead!” he said stoutly. “I—I haven’t any particular reason for
seeing it, you know.”
Barrison understood him, and smiled again. “I’ll read it to you, then,”
he said, and read:
“MY DEAR MR. BARRISON: I have just heard, though scarcely with
surprise, I admit, of Mr. Mortimer’s death. It has shocked me very
much, I find, even though it was the sort of tragedy that was bound
to come sooner or later. I cannot pretend complete indifference to
it, nor yet indifference to the conviction of his murderer. I am
going to assume that you really want any sort of help, from any
source, in solving this mystery. Though you refused to help me once,
I am ready to help you now in whatever way I can, and I believe that
my help may be worth more than you are now prepared to see. I knew
Alan Mortimer rather well; it is possible that I can throw light
upon certain phases in his life of which you are still ignorant. I
promise nothing, for I do not yet know how valuable my testimony
may prove. But—will you lunch with me at one o’clock to-morrow—or,
rather, to-day—at my hotel? And meanwhile, if you will forgive me for
reiterating the suspicion I once suggested to you, you can hardly
do better than look up Miss Kitty Legaye, and get her views on the
murder. Far be it for me to suggest a course of action to an expert
detective like yourself, but—if Miss Legaye left the theater early,
she would hardly be likely to learn of the tragedy until she got
the morning papers. Don’t you think that it would be interesting to
forestall them, and yourself be the one to break the news to her?
Just suppose that you found it was not precisely ‘news’ after all!
“If I do not hear from you, I shall expect you for luncheon at one.
Sincerely yours,
“GRACE TEMPLETON.”
Jim Barrison automatically registered the fact that the writing was not
that of the threatening letters, and sat still staring at the sheet
after he had read it aloud. His brain was in a whirl of excitement. The
words which he had just read seemed, in the very utterance of them, to
have taken on a vitality, a meaning, that they had not had in the first
place.
One could read such a communication in more ways than one; at
present he could read it only as a curious and inscrutable message,
or inspiration. He could not have said just why it seemed to him so
important, so imperative. He only knew that the phrases of it, simple
as they were, seemed to fill the room and echo from wall to wall.
Miss Templeton herself might have stood before him; he might have been
listening to her voice.
Tony Clay, poor lad, was looking troubled, huddled there in the big
chair on the other side of the table. He had forgotten to finish his
whisky and soda, and was staring at Barrison in a queer, uncomfortable
way.
“I say, Jim!” he burst out at last, desperate through his shyness.
“You’re looking not a bit like yourself. What’s the matter? That note
doesn’t sound so very important, now I hear it, and yet, to look at
you, one would say you’d received a message from the tomb.”
Barrison laughed. “I haven’t!” he said lightly. “But I have received a
tip. Just a plain, ordinary, every-day sort of tip! And I’m going to
follow it, too! How much sleep do you need, Tony?”
Tony considered. “Four will do me,” he said judicially.
“You’ll get five. It’s three o’clock now. At eight you’ll be ready for
business; at eight thirty we’ll be at Miss Kitty Legaye’s door. It may
be a pipe dream, but I’ve taken kindly to the notion of announcing the
news of Mortimer’s death in person! Now tumble in on that couch there,
and don’t dare to speak again until eight in the morning!”
As he fell asleep, he was still repeating the pregnant words: “Just
suppose that you found it was not precisely ‘news’ after all!”
CHAPTER XV
A MORNING CALL
Miss Legaye lived at a very smart little hotel near Fifth Avenue.
It was not one of the strictly “theatrical” hostelries, since Kitty
had always had leanings toward social correctness. But the house was
patronized by so many actresses of exactly the same predilections
that it could not help being run with an indulgent and sagacious
understanding of their tastes and peculiarities, and might almost as
well have been one of the just-off-Broadway variety.
When Barrison and Tony Clay presented themselves at the “Golden Arms”
at twenty minutes after eight in the morning, they found the hotel
barely awake. The clerk who had just come on duty at the desk eyed
them with surliness and distaste. The very electric lights, turned on
perforce, because of the outrageous dinginess of the morning, seemed to
glare at them with disfavor. Bell boys looked unrelentingly cross; a
messenger boy was making his exit with as much dripping and mud as he
could; and a departing patron appeared to be becoming quarrelsome over
a fifteen-cent overcharge.
“Well?” demanded the clerk. He looked frankly ugly; ugly in temper as
well as in features. He could see that they were not incoming guests,
for they had no luggage; and it was too early for callers of any
reputable type. He put them down as a breed suspicious, being unknown,
of neither fish nor fowl variety. “_Well?_” he repeated urgently.
Barrison produced a card. “We would like to see Miss Legaye,” he
suggested pleasantly.
As he put down the slip of pasteboard on the desk counter, his quick
eyes noted a bell boy standing at the news stand, taking over an armful
of assorted morning papers. Obviously, the lad was just going up to
leave them at the doors of the guests; they would have to work quickly,
he and Tony, if they were to get ahead of them.
“Miss Legaye,” repeated the clerk. “Miss Legaye. Are you guys dippy?
Miss Legaye always leaves word that she ain’t at home to no one till
after twelve o’clock. Now beat it!”