How Many Cards?/Chapter 14

N their way to breakfast the next morning McCarty bought a sheaf of newspapers and when the modest little restaurant was reached he handed all but one of them to his companion.

"Here, Denny. Have a look at what the boys say about the release of Hill. I'll bet they've put up a howl you could hear in the next world if so be you were there."

"Which I'm not yet, but there's no telling after to-night," Dennis said darkly. "You'd no call to be letting me in for another dose of the black art of that Terhune!—Have you no interest yourself in the news of the day?"

"I'm looking for a certain ad.," McCarty replied. "Here it is! 'Lost. On Thursday night, black Russian sable scarf, five skins, private seal engraved on small gold clasp. Liberal reward. Address X, Daily Bulletin.'"

"Whatever—?" Dennis gave a little start. "Oh, I remember! And is 'X' Mrs. Kip?"

"No. 'Tis me," said McCarty modestly. "After I 'phoned you last night to meet me for dinner I stopped at the Bulletin office and put that in; I'd like to see Mrs. Kip's face if she reads it!—But what's the matter with your own? You look as if something had bit you!"

"Mac!" The newspaper shook in Dennis' excited hand. "What was it that you heard Ford say to his wife in the hall yesterday?—That he was 'done for,' wasn't it?"

"Yes. What—?"

"Well, I guess he was, all right! Give a look at that!"

Dennis passed over the paper and McCarty read in flaring headlines:

"Failure on Stock Exchange. Lonsdale Ford & Company Go to Wall. Many Small Investors and Speculators Hard Hit in Crash."

Below in smaller type appeared the story in detail, but McCarty merely glanced through it. He was working against time now; against the time when the inspector's dragnet might bring in the girl, Ilsa, or he might tire of waiting and arraign Hill formally before a Magistrate on a murder charge. A sudden inspiration had come to the ex-roundsman and characteristically he determined to put it at once to the test.

"So that was what Ford meant," McCarty commented. "Come on, let's order; I'll go over and have a little interview with him before he leaves the house. I'm thinking he'll be more ready to talk now that it's all come out than he was yesterday."

They ate a quick breakfast and McCarty left Dennis to proceed to the fire house with the understanding that the latter was to call for him at his rooms at eight that night. In the crosstown car he studied the Bulletin once more, but not for the satisfaction of rereading his advertisement; the reproduction of a photograph on the second page had caught his eye.

It was that of a broad-shouldered man of about forty, undeniably handsome at a casual glance, although closer inspection revealed a slight but telltale fullness of the lips and heaviness of jowl, and the eyes with their almost feminine sweep of lashes did not seem to meet the gaze quite squarely. There were incipient pouches beneath them, too, and the smile which was intended to be dashing held the suggestion of a leer. Under the picture was the name "Eugene Christopher Creveling."

Where had he seen that face before? He had known it on sight for that of the man stretched upon the floor of the study two nights ago, and yet McCarty felt a peculiar, haunting sense of familiarity as of a living presence. Creveling's picture had appeared in the newspapers frequently enough in connection with various escapades in the old days, but it was not that. He could associate no sound of a voice in connection with the face in his memory, recall no details, but he knew that somewhere quite lately he had seen that man alive.

He was still pondering over it when he reached the St. Maur Apartments.

"Mr. and Mrs. Ford ain't here, suh. They done gone away; went last night," the saddle-colored switchboard operator told him.

McCarty smiled.

"No, they didn't," he said with easy assurance. "I know all about Mr. Ford's trouble and I'm not here to bother him. He'll see me, all right. Just say Mr. McCarty wants a word with him."

The boy hesitated, but the note of authority as well as confidence which rang in the ex-roundsman's tones impressed him, and reluctantly he obeyed. There was a moment of evident indecision at the other end of the wire and then he turned a relieved face to the visitor.

"You can go right up, suh. I didn't know—I had orders not to announce nobody and Mr. Ford is a mighty positive gentleman!"

"I know him!" McCarty grinned as he thought of his reception on the previous day. "He's out of luck just now and his bark is worse than his bite."

The same servant admitted him as on the day before, but the smile was gone from his Asiatic countenance, and although the drawing-room presented as bravely luxurious an air, there was an atmosphere of forlorn bravado about it which permeated even McCarty's matter-of-fact sensibilities.

"Well, what can I do for you now?" A toneless, indescribably weary voice spoke just behind him and McCarty wheeled, an uncontrollable gasp escaping him as his eyes met those of Lonsdale Ford. Could this broken creature with his twisted, bitter, tragic smile be the same man who had so coolly and arrogantly ordered him from his presence on the previous day?

"Mr. Ford! I—I hope you'll not think I'd have intruded on you now if I could have helped it, sir, but we're still working on the Creveling matter and I've got to obey orders."

"Oh, that's all right, my man. One thing more or less doesn't make any difference now." Ford motioned toward a chair and then sank into another opposite, as though his legs would no longer support him, yet he added with a touch of the old savageness in his tone: "I didn't shoot Creveling, if it will do you any good to know it, but I wish I had, and then put a bullet through my own brain! He's dead, but he was a damned cur! The papers are saying a lot of rotten things about me this morning; that I played my customers for suckers and God knows what else, but if I was as white-livered as he I'd go and jump off the nearest dock!"

"I've heard that intimated by more than you, Mr. Ford. We never had the least thought of you being guilty, but we think there's some information it's in your power to give us that'll maybe help a lot." McCarty paused. "Of course, if you don't care to give it we can't compel you now—"

"Oh, I'll give it, fast enough!" Ford's harsh, dry laughter rang out and then was as quickly suppressed. "I don't know whether it will help you or not, for I haven't the slightest idea who killed Creveling, but I'll give you all the information you want about the whole rotten bunch of them! I kept my mouth shut yesterday because I had a sort of forlorn hope that they'd be white enough to tide me over even after Creveling himself had welched, but when Cutter threw me down cold I made up my mind that I'd show them all up and I will! They got the money—my own, not my customers', but if I'd had it yet I could have weathered the storm. I wouldn't kick if the game had been straight; I'm not a poor loser, but I'm convinced it was crooked and I've been made the sucker. God! Even a card sharp will stake you to cigarette money after he's stripped you of your roll!"

"Game?" McCarty repeated, a light beginning to glimmer through his consciousness.

"Of course. I was on my way to being a rich man even in these skyrocketing days, but it's all gone over that green table of Cutter's, damn him!" Ford stopped abruptly and the rage in his face gave way to a look of sly derision. "You fellows at headquarters are mighty smart but you didn't know that the biggest games in the city are pulled off and have been for years in that respectable looking house of his down on the Avenue! He is nothing more nor less than a professional gambler, only he does things on a scale that's never been known before even in the Big Town."

A gambler! The connecting link at last! It was the gambling fever, the lure of chance which held this strangely assorted group of people together. More potent than drink or drugs, it had bound them in an association of silence for mutual protection, and drawn gentleman and cad, aristocrat and upstart into a degenerating democracy!—But why hadn't he guessed?

Then the memory of a chance remark of Dennis' on the previous evening returned to make his chagrin complete. When he told his friend what he had learned from Miss Frost about the Kip woman and how she had been broke one day and flush the next Dennis remarked: "Like a gambler!" Even then he had not tumbled to the truth!

It all seemed so obvious now in the light of this revelation! Those two dissipated rounders, Waverly and Creveling, seeking to stimulate their jaded senses with the excitement of the game; this money-mad Ford, to whom all of life had been a gamble; John Cavanaugh O'Rourke, with the hot, reckless, sport-loving blood of his forebears in his veins, and Cutter sitting cold and inscrutable in the midst of them! But what of the women? Where did they figure in this scheme of things?

"I'm not yellow!" Ford went on. "I wouldn't cry 'crooked!' just because I'd been stung, but looking back now I can see how I was played, like a trout in a stream, and they're doing the same thing to O'Rourke. They'll clean him and his wife, too, before they're through—Cutter and Waverly, and Creveling was helping it along when he got his! He stood in, and I was just beginning to see it; that's why I went to him first when I saw what was coming. I wasn't a beggar, I only wanted a loan of some of my own back and Creveling had got most of it. He understood, he knew I was on to the game and he told me he'd see me through; made an appointment with me for Thursday and then at the last minute took back his word, welched! He thought he could bluff me, but I'd have gone back yesterday and gotten it from him somehow, only somebody else got to him first, with a .44!"

McCarty was scarcely listening. "They'll clean him and his wife, too!" were the last words which had pounded themselves into his brain.

"Do you mean that Lady Mar—that Mrs. O'Rourke plays, too? That Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Creveling and Mrs. Waverly have been going up against a game like that?"

Ford laughed again, mirthlessly.

"They're worse than we are! Not that my wife is an inveterate gambler; as a matter of fact the poor kid hasn't any card sense at all and doesn't even care for it. She only piked along because I—I compelled her to."

"You?"

Ford nodded.

"Oh, I admit I've been a fool in more ways than one, but I'm coming clean to you now for I want you to understand the situation and fix Cutter and his outfit!" he declared frankly. "I was making money and we were happy enough a few years ago with our own jolly little crowd, but when I bought my seat on the Exchange Mrs. Ford got ambitious socially. She met Mrs. Creveling at some charity affair and got in with her, and Creveling introduced me to Cutter. That was the beginning of it, and I don't mind telling you that I encouraged Mrs. Ford to travel with that bunch; I thought I'd get in myself through them with big moneyed interests and I didn't realize I was practically using my own wife as a capper, the way Cutter is using Mrs. Baillie Kip. She's just a kind of a grown-up little girl, my wife is; she loves to spend money and be taken up by the swell people and she never can realize that there might be another motive behind the flattery of other men, rotters like Cutter. He made a sort of play for her a year or so ago and she came to me like a big kid and told me; I let him know where he got off and after that she wasn't bothered, but they had it in for me. You see the game now, don't you, McCarty?"

McCarty nodded slowly in his turn and his expression was very grim, but he waited without speaking.

"Mrs. Creveling and Mrs. Waverly are different; they belong by right of birth and their old, withered family trees. They don't have to struggle to get anywhere and in another way they are just as jaded as their husbands. They've exhausted every allowable means of amusing themselves and they turned to the game for what excitement they could get out of it, and it got them—the fascination, I mean. You've seen them, of course?"

"Yes, sir."

"They're both beauties; Mrs. Creveling in a cold, aloof sort of way and Mrs. Waverly is a devilish, snaky vamp. Both mighty attractive and each a different type; get me?"

"You mean that Cutter is using them both as steerers, too?" McCarty's honest tones were filled with shocked amazement. "Ladies like them, with positions in the highest society and more money than they can spend!"

"Oh, without their knowledge, of course, but their husbands stood in with Cutter. I know, because they were constantly at his house, at the so-called little intimate dinners and afternoon musicales he was supposed to give, but which really masked the games which went on day and night. The rest of us were rank outsiders asked only on certain specified nights; only the Crevelings and the Waverlys met all the different exclusive little groups that gathered there. That is the secret of Cutter's success and his immunity. You don't think he made his millions out of just our set, do you? He kept his crowds separate, with those exceptions, and only catered to people who could no more afford the scandal and notoriety of a raid than he could. More than one poor devil has lost his last dollar and shot himself in that room that looks like a conservatory at the back of Cutter's house, and I'll wager that more money has changed hands there in any given length of time than at Monte Carlo for the same period! But no scandal has ever attached to Cutter, his system was too perfect for that; the poor devils who did themselves in were spirited home and the papers made a big fuss later over their deaths from accident or appendicitis operations, or some such lie. Of course their families were as eager to conceal the truth as Cutter; that's where he played safe. The worst part of it is that he is a real aristocrat, if there is such a thing in this country; his family is one of the oldest and he has always kept his social position impregnable, though I understand he inherited nothing but the house and some rotten ancestor's gambling instinct! People don't dare squeal on him for he has clients and victims among the connections of every prominent family in the country. He thought I wouldn't dare, either, but I've got nothing to lose now."

"I wonder he didn't take that into consideration," McCarty remarked. "You say he refused to let you have a loan to tide you over when he knew it meant ruin to you."

Ford colored painfully.

"There was a personal matter involved and it warped his judgment, I guess," he mumbled. "My wife, you know."

"I see." McCarty strove to make his voice sympathetic, but he was filled with loathing for the unprincipled weakling before him. He'd borrow money, if he could, from a man who had insulted his wife and if he couldn't, sell him out! The ex-roundsman's foot tingled to administer a kick to the cowardly sneak, but he must learn more. "If Mrs. Waverly and Mrs. Creveling played just because they were bored and Mrs. Ford because you wanted her to, why did Mrs. Kip and—and Mrs. O'Rourke sit in the game?"

"Oh, Connie Kip is a born adventuress; a professional gambler in a way, like Cutter," replied Ford carelessly. "She's too shrewd to jeopardize the social position she has wormed herself into by any indiscreet flirtation, but the cards are her means of a livelihood and I could swear I've caught her cheating more than once though if Cutter knows it he doesn't mind her counting herself in on his graft for she's popular and useful to him as a steerer. It is through her that he gets his clutches on the young asses in society with more money than brains."

"Was she at Cutter's on Thursday evening?" asked McCarty suddenly.

"No, only the O'Rourkes. We expected Creveling but he 'phoned that he couldn't make it so we had a five-handed game; tame enough, too, with neither Creveling nor Waverly there. They were the plungers, and helping along Cutter's fleecing of O'Rourke, I suspect. I might have warned him, I suppose, but I had my own fish to fry in trying to win my money back from them or get a loan, and then misery loves company, you know!"

"But Mrs. O'Rourke?" persisted McCarty. "What possessed her to play?"

"For the same reason that her husband did: a sheer love of the game," responded Ford with an odd note of respectful admiration in his tone. "She's a thoroughgoing sportswoman, and I hear she came from a long line of hard riding, heavy drinking, devil-may-care Irish nobility who would have staked all they had any day on the turn of a card. For all she's so utterly feminine, she's the gamest loser I ever saw for a woman or man either, and there isn't another in the crowd who can touch her for looks and brains and charm, but she's such a clean sport herself that I don't suppose she has an inkling there is anything crooked about the whole outfit."

McCarty rose. He felt suddenly stifled and as though his breakfast had not agreed with him. This cheap renegade might be useful to him in the future, and his native caution warned him to go before he expressed himself openly. Not for the life of him could he listen to another word concerning the Lady Peggy, even in praise, from such lips.

"Thank you, sir. I guess you've told me all I need to know to work on now and I won't pester you any longer. I won't give you away, but there'll be no more fleecing of Mr. O'Rourke nor any one else, I can promise you that."

"I don't give a damn about that, I'm done!" Ford followed him to the door. "Creveling got his, although I don't know from what particular motive, of many possible ones that his murderer might have had. Waverly won't last long at the pace he is traveling, but Cutter is the man I want to see shown up; he'd rather be shot, any day, than have that happen, for he's got a certain pride of a sort. I'm dead sorry that you can't hang the murder on him, for thieves fall out, you know, but we'd have to help prove his alibi unless we perjured ourselves and there were the O'Rourkes, anyway. Nail him for running a crooked game and I'll be your star witness!"

McCarty breathed deeply when he reached the street once more, as though to clear his lungs from a fetid atmosphere, but he felt that he had accomplished more in the past hour than at any time since he had undertaken the case. He was on the inside now, looking out, and although he had learned nothing which pointed to the actual solution of the crime there was a chance that the right thread was in his hands at last.

During his interview with the bankrupt broker an idea had come to him which completely revolutionized his earlier plan of procedure and he lost no time in finding a telephone booth and calling up headquarters. His later decision had not been brought about by anything he had learned from Ford, nor was it connected with Nicholas Cutter and his sub rosa profession; it was the alternate thread in the tangle which might lead to the truth.

Inspector Druet was already at his desk and informed him that Yost reported no trace of the missing Hildreth woman, and Martin, when he was relieved at the Creveling house, said that Hill had betrayed neither protest nor surprise at finding himself under guard, nor had he made the least move to escape espionage. The report of the chief medical examiner on the autopsy had come in also, and he had reversed the opinion of his assistant; Creveling could not have killed himself. It had been murder.

"Perhaps it's just as well, sir." McCarty's tone was humble. "I—I've changed my mind, thinking over the dope you've got against Hill, and moreover I've dug up a few things this morning that look like they might make the case complete."

"I thought so!" the inspector laughed jubilantly. "Good old Mac! You're not afraid to admit you've made a mistake, are you?"

"No, sir," McCarty responded slyly. "Not being regularly connected with the force any longer, promotion don't bother me and there's nothing to hold me back when I'm in the wrong from saying so, and starting over. I've been thinking that as long as you've got the dragnet out after that Hildreth woman and the stations and ferries and roads watched so that she can't make her getaway from the city, we're bound to land her in time and there's no use in waiting for her to try to get in touch with Hill before we run him in again. I think I've got a way to make him talk after a day or two in the Tombs, but I'd like to make the arrest myself."

"Go to it!" the inspector said heartily. "Your mind was so set on it that he wasn't guilty, I thought I'd give you a few days to find out that you were barking up the wrong tree, but the Hildreth woman is too clever by half to give herself away by trying to communicate with him. Come down here and I'll have a warrant ready for you."

"Couldn't you send it up to me at the Creveling house?" McCarty asked. "I'm on my way there now, sir, and I don't want to lose any time."

"All right. I'll have it there in half an hour." Inspector Druet added: "Have you seen anything of Terhune?"

"Yes, sir. He broke into my rooms last night and Denny and me found him sitting there as calm as you please when we came up from headquarters!" McCarty almost choked over the recollection. "He's invited us both to one of his séances to-night."

"I'll see you there, then." The inspector laughed once more. "He has the case all doped out to suit himself, I suppose, but he wouldn't condescend to take me into his confidence. It won't matter to us, Mac, for if he's hit on the truth we'll have the bird safely caged beforehand. Do you want us to keep the news of Hill's rearrest out of the papers?"

"No, but leave that to me, sir. I want to give a young friend of mine, Jimmie Ballard of the Bulletin, a beat for the first evening edition; after that they can all go to it, and welcome, the more publicity the better. It's only that Jimmie's done me a good turn in the shape of information now and again and I'd like to put something his way.'"

"It's all in your hands, Mac, so long as there isn't any slip in getting Hill under lock and key. One of the boys will be at the house with the warrant almost as soon as you are."

But McCarty did not at first turn his steps in the direction of the Creveling house. Instead he took a downtown Third Avenue car and alighted at the scene of the Hildreth woman's escape on the previous night. The stout young operative from the detective bureau who had relieved Yost was seated in the kitchen, where the broken door and smashed flower pots still bore mute evidence of siege and flight. It was evident, too, from a hasty glance around the few barely furnished rooms of the little flat that Yost and the policeman on the beat had made an even more thorough search of the premises for possible clews than McCarty and Dennis had done.

Every drawer and box and receptacle of any sort had been thrown open and its contents scattered far and wide; even the bed had been ripped apart and the cheap upholstery of the parlor suite was cut and slashed to ribbons, undoubtedly in a search for the stolen emeralds. McCarty looked everywhere but that which he himself conscientiously sought was not forthcoming—a gilt-edged pack of playing cards with their backs printed in rich colors and gold.

Half an hour later, accompanied with obvious reluctance by another man, he presented himself at the Creveling house and was admitted by Rollins, who eyed his companion somewhat uneasily before he spoke.

"Good morning, sir. There's a—a person waiting 'ere for you. 'E said as 'ow you'd be along presently."

"That's all right; I'll see him in a minute. How is Mrs. Creveling?"

"Better, sir, the doctor says, but resting. Mrs. Waverly and Mr. Alexander are upstairs with 'er."

"I don't want to bother any of them," McCarty said hastily. "My business is with the valet, Frank Hill. "Will you ask him to come here?"

"Very good, sir."

When the butler had departed upon his errand McCarty turned to his companion.

"Go into the breakfast room, there, but leave the door ajar. Listen to everything that is said and when I call you, come out. Understand?"

"Yes." The man moved over to the door indicated, shaking his head disapprovingly as he went. "I don't like this business! It don't seem fair to me, even if this fellow has done what you say he has. It's a dirty trick!"

As he disappeared a fourth man slid around from an angle of the stairs where he had evidently been waiting.

"Here, Mac. Here's the warrant the Old Man sent up; want me to stay and serve it for you?"

"No. Give it to me, Hecker, but you'd better wait with Yost. Go upstairs and bring him. down to the back hall as soon as I get into talk with Hill, and when I serve him you can do the rest."

The man withdrew and McCarty pocketed the warrant as Hill, pale and worn but quite composed, appeared on the stairs.

"Good morning, sir. You wanted to speak to me?"

"Yes. Hill, what did you do when you were released from the station house last night?"

"I came straight back here, sir. I—I hadn't been given any notice and I am still in service, for Mrs. Creveling is keeping me on, at least till things are straightened out, sir." His tone was respectful but indifferent as though the reply were a superfluous one.

"You've been here ever since; in the house, I mean?"

"Of course, sir." This time he spoke with mild surprise.

"Where do you stay on your time off, Hill?"

"I sleep here, sir; I haven't any place of my own. I've been right with Mr. Creveling all these years."

"Do you ever travel under any other name than the one you're known by here?"

"Of course not!" There was just the proper touch of scandalized indignation in his voice at the question.

"Do you know a woman who calls herself 'Hildreth'?'" McCarty shot the name at him and for a moment the man's pale eyelids quivered, but he gave no other sign.

"No, sir. I never heard of her, sir."

"Then you didn't know that that is an alias of Ilsa Helwig's, the housemaid who stole Mrs. Creveling's emeralds and jumped her bail?"

"No, sir. Is it, indeed?"

"It is," responded McCarty grimly. "And I suppose you're not stuck on her? You're not known as 'Mr. Hildreth' down in the neighborhood where she lived before we arrested her again last night? You didn't leave this house last night between eleven and twelve by shinning over the back fences and go down there, only to run into a dick from headquarters who was trailing you and get scared off before ever you had a chance to see her?"

"I—I did not." The shot had told and at McCarty's mendacious statement of the woman's arrest Hill had visibly winced. "I don't know what you are talking about. I never heard of any woman named 'Hildreth,' and I wasn't out of the house last night."

"Mr. Udell!" McCarty raised his voice firmly and the shrinking figure of the night clerk from the Third Avenue drugstore appeared in the door of the breakfast room. "Who is this man?"

"It's Mr. Hildreth, sir," he stammered.

"You'd swear to it?"

"I'd have to, sir, it's the truth.—Oh, Mr. Hildreth, I hope you'll realize I'm not doing this of my own accord! I hated to come and give you away like this—!"

"What have you to say, Hill?" McCarty cut the druggist's lamentations abruptly short.

Hill drew himself up, and staring straight into Udell's eyes he said distinctly:

"Nothing, sir. I never saw this man before in all my life." Then all at once he began to tremble uncontrollably. "I haven't seen Ilsa Helwig since she was taken away from here under arrest! I don't know any one down on Third Avenue, I've never been there—!"

"Then how did you know this man came from there? I haven't said anything about Third Avenue! How did you know it was near there the Hildreth woman lived?—You're under arrest, Hill, for the murder of Eugene Creveling!"