The Stolen War Secret/Chapter 1

T WAS during the dark days at the beginning of our recent unpleasantness with Mexico that Craig Kennedy and I dropped in one evening at the new Vanderveer Hotel to glance at the ticker to see how affairs were going.

We were bending over the tape, oblivious to everything else about us, when we felt a hand on each of our shoulders.

“We’ve just had a most remarkable tragedy right here in the hotel,” a voice whispered. “Are you busy tonight, Kennedy?”

Craig and I turned simultaneously and found Michael McBride, the house-detective of the hotel, an old friend of ours some years before in the city detective-bureau.

McBride was evidently making a great effort to appear calm, but it was very apparent that something had completely upset him.

“How’s that?” asked Kennedy shaking hands.

McBride gave a hasty glance about and edged us over into a quiet corner away from the ticker.

“Why,” he replied in an undertone, “we’ve just discovered one of our guests—a Madame Valcour—in her room—dead!”

“Dead?” repeated Kennedy in amazement.

“Yes—the most incomprehensible thing you can imagine. Come upstairs with me, before the coroner gets here,” he urged. “I’d like you to see the case, Kennedy, before he musses things up.”

We followed the house-detective to the tenth floor. As we left the elevator he nodded to the young woman floor-clerk who led the way down the thickly carpeted hall. She stopped at a door, and through the transom overhead we could see that the room was dimly lighted. She opened the door and we caught a glimpse of a sumptuously furnished suite.

On the snowy white bed, in all her cold, stony beauty, lay the beautiful Madame Valcour, fully dressed in the latest of Parisian creations, perfect from her hat which breathed of the Rue de la Paix to her dainty tango-slippers peeping from a loosely draped skirt which accentuated rather than concealed her exquisite form.

She was a striking woman, dark of hair and skin. In life she must have been sensuously attractive. But now her face was drawn and contorted with a ghastly look.

There she lay, alone, in an elegantly appointed room of an exclusive hotel. Only a few feet away were hundreds of gay guests chatting and laughing, with no idea of the terrible tragedy so near them.

In the comer of the room I could see her maid sobbing hysterically.

“Oh—niña—niña,” cried the maid, whose name I learned afterward was Juanita. “She was muy simpatica—muy simpatica.”

“‘Niña,’” remarked Kennedy to us in an undertone, “means ‘little girl,’ the familiar term for mistress. As for ‘muy simpatica,’ it means, literally, ‘very sympathetic,’ but really can not be done justice to in English. It is that charming characteristic of personal attractiveness, the result of a sweet disposition.”

He looked down keenly at the woman before us.

“I can well imagine that she had it, that she was muy simpatica."

While Craig was taking in the situation, I turned to McBride and asked—

“Who was Madame Valcour—where did she come from?”

“You haven’t heard of her?” he repeated. "Well—I’m not surprised after all. Really I can’t say I know much about her myself—except that she was a beauty and attracted everybody’s attention here at the hotel. Among other things, she was a friend of Colonel Sinclair, I believe. You know him, don’t you—the retired army-engineer— interested in Mexican mines and railroads, and a whole lot of things? Oh, you’ve seen his name in the newspapers often enough. Lately, you know, he has been experimenting with air-ships for the army—has a big estate out on Long Island.”

Kennedy nodded.

“Rather a remarkable chap, I’ve heard.”

“I don’t know whether you know it or not,” continued McBride, “but we seem to have quite a colony of Mexican refugees here at the Vanderveer. She seemed to be one of them—at least she seemed to know them all. I think she was a Frenchwoman. At least, you know how all the Latin-Americans seem naturally to gravitate to Paris and how friendly the French are toward them.”

“How did you come to discover her?” asked Kennedy, bending over her again. “She couldn’t have been dead very long.”

“Well—she came into the hotel during the dinner-hour. As nearly as I can find out, the elevator boy, who seems to have been the only person who observed her closely, says that she acted as if she were dazed.

“They tell me her maid was out at the time. But about half an hour after Madame came in, there was a call for her over the telephone. The operator got no answer from her room, although the boy had seen her go up and the young lady who is floor-clerk on the tenth floor said she had not gone out.”

“Did the person on the telephone leave any message—give any name?” asked Craig.

“Yes. It was a man who seemed to be very much excited—said that it was Señor Morelos—just Senor Morelos—she would know.”

“What then?”

“Why, when he found he couldn’t get her, he rang off. A few minutes later her maid Juanita came in. The moment she opened the door with her key, she gave a scream and fainted.”

“Suicide?” I ventured under my breath to Kennedy, as McBride paused.

Craig said nothing. He was making a careful examination of both the room and of the body on the bed.

A moment later he looked up quickly, then bent down farther.

On her arm he had discovered a peculiar little red mark!

Gently, as if he would not hurt such an exquisite creature even in death, he squeezed a tiny drop of blood from the little puncture and caught it on a sterilized glass slide of a microscope, which he carried in a small compact emergency-case in his pocket.

He continued to rummage the room.

Thrown carelessly into a top drawer of the dressing-table was a chatelaine. He opened it. There seemed to be nothing there except several articles of feminine vanity. In the bottom, however, was a little silver box which he opened. There lay a number of queer little fuzzy buttons—at least they looked like buttons. He took one, examined it closely, found it rather soft, tasted it—made a wry face and dropped the whole thing into his pocket.

A HEAVY tap sounded on the door. McBride opened it. It was our old friend, Dr. Leslie, the coroner.

“Well,” he exclaimed taking in the whole situation, and hardly more surprised seeing us than at the strangeness of the handsome figure on the bed. “Well—what is all this?”

McBride shook his head gravely and repeated substantially what he had already told us.

There is no need to go into the lengthy investigation that the coroner conducted. He questioned one servant and employee after another, without eliciting any more real information than we had already obtained.

The maid was quite evidently a Mexican and spoke very little and very poor English. She seemed to be in great distress, and as far as we could determine it was genuine. Through her broken English and our own fragmentary knowledge of Spanish, we managed to extract her story, about as McBride had told it.

Madame Valcour had engaged her in Paris, where she had been taken and later had been thrown on her own resources by a family which had been ruined in the revolution in Mexico. As for a Monsieur Valcour, she had never seen him. She thought that Madame was a widow.

As the questioning continued, I read between the lines, however, that Madame Valcour was in all probability an adventuress of a high order, one of those female soldiers of fortune who, in Paris, London, New York, and all large cities, seem to have a way of bobbing up at the most unexpected moments, in some way connected, through masculine frailty, with great national and international events.

The questioning over, the coroner ordered that the body be sent down to one of the city hospitals where an autopsy could be performed, and we rode down in the elevator together.

“Extraordinary—most extraordinary,” repeated Dr. Leslie as we paused for a moment in an angle of the lobby to discuss the conclusion of his preliminary investigation. “There is just one big point, though, that we shall have to clear up before we can go ahead with anything else. What was the cause of death? There was no gas in the room. It couldn’t have been illuminating gas, then. It must have been a poison of some kind.”

“You assume then that it was suicide?” asked Kennedy keenly.

“Well,” he exclaimed taking in the whole “I assume nothing—yet,” replied the coroner, quickly backing water, and affecting the air of one who could say much if he chose but was stopped by professional and official etiquette.

“You’ll keep me informed as to what you do discover?” asked Kennedy with a deference that could not fail to be ingratiating.

“Indeed I will,” answered the coroner, cordially taking the flattery. “Now I must be off—let me see—an accident case. Yes indeed, Kennedy, I shall be only too glad to keep you informed and to have your co-operation on the case.”

“Poison of some kind,” repeated Kennedy as Dr. Leslie disappeared. “Sounds very simple when you put it that way. I wish I could handle the whole thing for him. However, I suspect he’ll come around in a day or two—begging me to help him save his precious reputation and find out what it really is.”

“I know what he’ll do,” asserted McBride with a scowl. “He’ll take this chance to rub it in on the Vanderveer. We’ve had a couple of suicides since we opened. It isn’t our fault if such things happen. But somehow or other it seems to appeal to the city official to blame some private agency for anything like this. I tell you, Kennedy, we’ve got to protect the reputation of the hotel against such things. Now, if you’ll take the case, I’ll see that you don’t lose anything by it.”

“Gladly,” replied Kennedy, to whom a mystery was as the breath of life. Then he added with a smile, “I had tacitly assumed as much after you spoke to me.”

“I meant that you should,” agreed McBride, “and I thank you. Only it is just as well that we understand each other clearly at the outset.”

“Exactly. Has anything in Madame Valcour’s actions about the hotel offered a clue—ever so slight?” asked Craig, plunging into the case eagerly.

“Perhaps,” hesitated McBride as if trying to separate something that might be trivial from that which might be really important. “When she came here about a week ago, she left word at the telephone-desk that if a Señor Morelos should call, she was at home.”

“Morelos?” repeated Kennedy. “That is the name of the man who called up to night. Did he call?”

“Not as far as I can find out.”

“But she must have had other callers,” pursued Craig, evidently thinking of the attractiveness of the woman.

“Yes indeed,” answered McBride, “plenty of them. In fact, she seemed never to be able to stir about downstairs without having some one looking at her and ogling.”

“Which is no crime,” put in Craig.

“No,” agreed McBride, “and to be perfectly fair to her, she never gave any of them any encouragement, as far as I could see.”

“You mentioned that she was a friend of Colonel Sinclair’s,” prompted Kennedy.

“Oh yes,” recollected McBride. “He called on her—once, I think. Then for a couple of days she was away—out on Long Island, I believe she left word. It seems that there is a sort of Summer settlement of Mexicans and Latin-Americans generally out there, at a place called Seaville. It was only today that she returned from her visit.”

“Seaville,” repeated Kennedy. “That is out somewhere near Westport, the home of Sinclair, isn’t it?”

“I believe it is,” remarked McBride.

He was chewing his unlighted cigar thoughtfully, as we tried to piece together the fragmentary bits of the story.

Suddenly he removed the cigar contemplatively.

“I have been wondering,” he said slowly, “just what she was here for anyway. I can’t say that there is anything that throws much light on the subject. But she was so secretive, she threw such an air of mystery about herself, never told any one much about her goings-out or comings-in, and in fact seemed to be so careful—well, I’ve just been wondering whether she wasn’t mixed up in some plot or other, wasn’t playing a deeper game than we suspect with these precious friends of hers.”

I looked at McBride attentively. Was he merely mystified by having had to deal with a foreigner who naturally was not as easy to understand as a native, or was the general impression he sought to convey really founded on that instinct which no true detective can afford to be without?

“In other words,” McBride pursued, uninterrupted by Kennedy who was only too glad to glean any impression the house-man might have received, “I was never quite able to fathom her. You see, yourself, that she could not even have made much of a confidant of her maid. She was just the type I should pick out as—as the agent of somebody.”

“You mean that she was playing a game?” I interjected.

“Yes,” he acquiesced. “You know as well as I do that if any one wants to accomplish anything, get information that it is hard to get, the first thing necessary is to employ a woman of the world. Why men will tell their inmost secrets to a clever woman, if she knows how to play the game right. I can’t persuade myself that—that it was all perfectly straight. She must have had a purpose in being here. I don’t know what it could be. But—well—this tragedy shows that there must be something hidden under the surface. She—she might have been a spy.”

Kennedy was watching McBride’s face encouragingly, but without a word so far.

He was evidently thinking of Colonel Sinclair. Sinclair, I knew, was a very wealthy mine-owner down in the southern state of Oaxaca in Mexico. I recalled having seen him once or twice—a tall, wiry, muscular man on whose face the deep tan showed that he had lived for years in the neighborhood of the tropical sun. Could Colonel Sinclair know anything of the mysterious death of Madame Valcour?

“A spy,” pondered Kennedy at length. “What other people have you seen her with—or have reason to think she was with?”

“Why,” replied McBride contemplatively, “I understand that she used to go around a good deal to a place which they call the Mexican-American Tea-Room—just around the corner from here.”

“The Mexican-American Tea-Room. Do you know anything of the place?”

“Not much—only that it seems to be frequented largely by people in the city who want to discuss affairs down in Mexico to the accompaniment of dishes that are hot with peppers and chillies. It’s a peculiar place. They have a cabaret upstairs in the evening. I believe it is—well—pretty swift.”

Kennedy seemed at last to have received some hint that indicated a possible line of action.

“I think I’ll drop in there before Leslie gives this thing out to the papers,” he decided. “Walter—come on—this is the life!”