The seventh shot A detective story
with a kindly nod.
“D’you know,” he remarked, in a low tone, “that Jap is just as keen to
help Barrison as we are. You’ll find when we start out after him he
won’t let himself be left behind.”
Tony turned to scowl at him in bewilderment.
“When ‘we’ start out after him!” he repeated. “You aren’t expecting to
spring anything of that sort, are you?”
Willie Coster looked at him a moment only. Then his small, pinched face
blazed suddenly into fiery red.
“Say,” he snapped, “do you think you’re the only he-man on the
premises? And do you suppose that no one else is capable of a friendly
feeling for Barrison, and a natural wish to help him out of a mess,
except just your blessed self? Because, if that’s what you think, you
forget it—quick!”
Tony felt abject, and would have apologized, too, but a snorting arose
in the street below them, and Tara announced the taxi which, in some
inscrutable way, he had maneuvered there in more than record time.
Tony recalled what Willie Coster had said.
“Tara,” he said abruptly, “you are fond of Mr. Barrison, I know.”
“Yes, sir,” Tara said.
“We think Mr. Barrison is in danger. We are going to see what we can do
for him. Now remember, there isn’t a reason in the world why you should
come too, only——”
The Jap spoke in his elaborately polite way:
“Honorably pardon, sir! There is reason.”
“But——” Tony was beginning, but he never finished. He saw the reason too
plainly. Tara, like himself and like Willie, was too fond of Barrison
to stay away. That was reason enough.
“All right, Tara, you come along!” he said, turning away. And his voice
might have been a bit husky.
“Where, first?” said Coster, as they entered the taxicab. And there
were three of them, too!
Tony gave the name of the hotel where Miss Templeton lived, which was
not so far away. Once there, he left his companions in the taxi and
went up alone to interview the lady. In his hand, tightly crumpled
with the vehemence of his intense feeling, he kept the telegram which
had come for Jim Barrison, signed with her initials.
He penciled a note to Miss Templeton which made her send for him as
soon as she received it.
They knew each other, but she was so excited that she did hardly more
than acknowledge his hasty bow.
“Mr. Clay,” she exclaimed, “what does it all mean? I know you would
not have sent me this message without a reason! You say: ‘Mr. Barrison
is in grave danger because of you. Will you help me to save him?’”
She confronted Tony with pale cheeks and wide eyes. “Now, Mr. Clay,
you know that such a thing is impossible! How could Mr. Barrison be
in danger on my account without my knowing it? And I swear to you
that I can think of nothing in all the world which could subject him
to danger—because of me! Nevertheless, I cannot let a thing like this
go—no woman could! If there is danger to Mr. Barrison, I should know
it! If it is, in some way, connected with me, I should know it all the
more, and care about it all the more! What is it?” Suddenly she dropped
the rather haughty air which she had assumed and clasped her hands like
a frightened child. “Oh, Mr. Clay, you know that I would do anything to
help him! What is it? What is it?”
By way of answer, Tony handed her the telegram.
After she had read it, she held it in rigid fingers for a moment; it
seemed they were not able to drop it. She looked at Tony Clay.
“And, receiving this,” she murmured faintly, “he—went?”
“He went,” answered the young man, “so fast that we could not stop him;
though I, for one, suspected something shady, and had warned him he
must be on his guard.”
It is probable that in all his life Tony Clay never understood the
look that flamed in the woman’s face before him now. In that strange
combination of emotions was pain and fear, but there was also joy and
triumph.
“So he cared like that!” she murmured.
And then, before Tony Clay could even be sure that she had uttered the
words, she had changed again to a practical and utilitarian person. She
seized a long raincoat from the back of a chair and said immediately:
“I am ready. Shall we go?”
Tony glowered at her. Another one? Aloud he remarked:
“If you will merely testify that you did not send that telegram——”
She looked as though she would have liked to slap him in her
exasperation.
“Of course I didn’t!” she raged. “But what has that to do with this
situation? I thought you said he was—in danger?”
“I am afraid he is. Very well, ma’am; if you must come, you must. We
have rather a larger crowd than I had expected at first.”
It was impossible for him to avoid an injured tone.
However they felt about it, Miss Templeton went with them. When the
light of passing street lamps fell upon her face, it had the look of an
avenging angel.
On the way, she insisted that Tony should tell them what had made him
suspicious as to danger awaiting Barrison that night. And after a
little hesitation he told—this:
“You know Jim had put me onto the Legaye end of the case—had suggested
my talking to the maid, and all that. Well, I did it, and, as a matter
of fact, I got in deeper than I expected to.” He looked at each of
them defiantly, but no one seemed disposed to sit in judgment, so he
continued: “Maria—she’s quite a nice girl, too, and don’t let anybody
forget it—told me to-day that her lady was terrifically upset about
something.”
“When was that?” demanded Coster.
“Late in the afternoon, just before I came to dinner—to the dinner that
didn’t come off. Jim and I parted when he took a ride in Miss Legaye’s
taxi, and he left me to come on to join him alone.”
“Did you come straight on?”
“Yes,” said Tony, “I did. But something happened on the way, and that
has given me the clew to—to—what’s taking us out here.”
“Well, tell it, for Heaven’s sake!”
“Well, it seems,” said Tony unwillingly, yet with the evident
realization that he was doing the right thing, “it seems that Miss
Legaye was in the habit of going shopping with her maid—Maria—and of
dropping her when she was tired—I mean when Miss Legaye was tired, not
Maria—and leaving her to come on with packages and so on. She had done
that to-day. Just after she and Jim Barrison had gone on, I met Maria,
and I stayed with her, too”—defiantly—“until after the time I should
have been at Jim’s rooms!”
“Not very long, was it?”
“Not more than half an hour, I’m sure.”
“And in that time, what could have happened that——”
“Nothing happened. Nothing could have happened. It was only that—that——”
Tony swallowed hard, and then went on courageously: “She asked me when
her mistress had gone home, and I told her just a few minutes before.
Then she said she must telephone her, if we were to have a moment
together. She said that she could easily make out an excuse. And,
though I had no—no particular interest in Maria,” faltered poor Tony
unhappily, “I couldn’t see what I could do to get out of that! And—and
she did telephone, and when she came back from telephoning,” he said,
speaking carefully, and evidently trying his best to make the thing
sound as commonplace as possible, “she told me that her mistress had
just come in, and that she was so excited she could scarcely speak,
and she wanted Maria at once, and that she had told Maria that if ever
she had cared anything about her, she must be prepared to stand by
her now—and to hurry—hurry—hurry—hurry! That’s what poor Maria kept
repeating to herself. And that’s what I had in my mind when I went into
Jim’s rooms, for it was the last thing in my mind.
“I was afraid then and there of Miss Legaye’s doing something—queer—but
before I had a chance to tell Jim what I thought—that message came, and
he was off!”
Almost directly they were at Ferrati’s and confronting Ferrati himself,
who looked alarmed at the sight of these visitors.
It required small astuteness to see that his party was an unexpected
one, and that the unexpectedness was only rivaled by the lack of
welcome.
Finding that ordinary and moderately courteous inquiries were only met
with extreme haziness of perception, Tony saw that he would have to
push his way in.
He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Willie Coster expected
the same result; also that Tara looked mildly pleased. Doubtless he
was pondering enjoyably upon jujutsu and what it could accomplish.
Considered collectively, the party was not one to be ignored.
As though to put an exclamation point after the sound sense of the
rest, Miss Templeton, who had been extremely quiet through it all,
suddenly drew out a revolver from the pocket of her raincoat. Tony
thrilled, for it was the one that he had seen her buy.
“Before we fight our way in,” she said amiably enough, “suppose we try
just walking in? I don’t believe that these poor creatures will make
much trouble.”
She smiled, not too pleasantly, at the poor creatures.
But they did!
They made so much trouble that it took the lot of them fifteen minutes
to get to that dark inner room where Jim Barrison was imprisoned. By
that time Lowry and three good men had arrived in a racing car, and
by the same time, Tony Clay had been put out of business by two of
Ferrati’s “huskies.”
“Never mind about me!” he had implored them. “Get Jim out!”
They did. And they found Jim blinking at them out of that awesome
darkness, holding Kitty in an iron grip. He was rather white, but he
tried to smile.
“Suppose you take her?” was his first utterance. “She’s one handful.”
Kitty, once in the hands of the officers, shrugged her shoulders and
changed her tune.
“What a lot of fools you are!” she exclaimed contemptuously. “You had
the clew in your hands a dozen times over! It was only to-day that this
fellow got onto it, though, and so”—again she shrugged her shoulders—“I
had to finish him, if I could, hadn’t I?”
CHAPTER XXXII
THE LOST CLEW
Ferrati was the selfsame man who had first induced Kitty to run away
from her home, her father, and her sister. As she had progressed, she
had grown away from him and his evil influences; but, as often happens
in a situation of this sort, when she found herself in trouble of a
criminal nature, she had gravitated most naturally back to the man who,
she was sure, could help her out of her problem.
Face to face with each other in the inspector’s own office, neither
Kitty nor Ferrati had the nerve to hold out; between them, as a matter
of fact, they cleared up sundry police mysteries which had worried the
heads and irritated the underlings for months past.
The trap set for Jim Barrison elucidated a good many mysteries and
showed the way in which several rich men had disappeared from the face
of the earth. The trapdoor was not in any sense a secret one; it had
been seen by half a dozen policemen during the energetic investigations
of Ferrati and his establishment which had gone on from time to time
ever since it had become generally known that men who subsequently
disappeared had been “last seen dining at Ferrati’s.” But the
explanation had been so simple and there had been so little attempt,
seemingly, at subterfuge or evasion, that the law had been put off the
scent so far as that trapdoor was concerned.
The room in which it was situated was a kind of pantry, and directly
under it was a part of the cellar. Like many restaurant keepers, he had
bought an old country house and made it over into a resort. Thrifty
Italian that he was, he had made as few and as inexpensive alterations
as possible in the actual structure of the building, and had found it
cheaper to put in a trapdoor and a ladder than to build a complete
staircase reaching to his cellar. This was the explanation that he gave
the police, and it was probably true, and was assuredly logical.