The Twenty-Six Clues/Chapter 18

HE middle-aged individual with sandy mustache and twinkling blue eyes, who registered the following morning as Timothy Mack at the Oceanside Cottage in Atlantic City, had little of the look about him of the tired business man seeking rest. His jovial converse with the austere landlady and the gusto with which he lighted the most expensive cigar from the showcase upon the counter led her to conclude, as she later confided with some misgivings to the clerk, that he was "out for a time."

Her announcement that she maintained no bar and the house was locked up promptly at twelve was received with smiling good-nature, and after a brief survey of the diminutive, cell-like room to which he had been assigned the newcomer settled himself in the lobby to finish his smoke and await developments.

Oceanside Cottage was one of the army of small boarding houses which, crowded shoulder to shoulder, flanked the less pretentious avenues leading from the beach. Its slightly weatherbeaten exterior would have been the better for a fresh coat of paint, but the lobby was brave in its expanse of bright red carpet and glistening oak furnishings.

The latest arrival experienced a panicky feeling that he had invaded a manless Eden as he surveyed the groups of females of indeterminate age and uncompromisingly prim demeanor who passed before him. The description Billings had given of Calvin Norwood's visitor dwindled to meager and wholly unsatisfactory proportions as a means of identification. "Middle-aged, blousy, untidy gray hair, shabby black clothes, English but not a Londoner"; there was not an item of it which could not have been changed by suddenly acquired affluence except the age, the betraying accent and the hair, and the latter, as McCarty somewhat cynically reminded himself was by no means a safe bet.

Two of the guests, a lady with a transformation which obviously failed of its mission and a mournful spinster with a perpetual sniff, had seated themselves in close proximity and were evidently continuing a conversation started elsewhere, for the melancholy one remarked:

"Heavings knows, it ain't necessary to go around telling all your business, but I always say: if a person is so close-mouthed they won't let a word fall, there's a reason for it. There ain't an inquisitive bone in my body, but I talked to her for an hour last night and got nothing out of her beyond that she was English and had traveled a lot. I tried her on teaching and typewriting and every respectable thing I could think of, but my hints just rolled off her like water off a duck's back. Did you notice her hands?"

The transformation nodded emphatically.

"Housekeeper, I put her down," its wearer vouchsafed. "Housekeeper for some childish old man who'd died and left her money. She's got bold eyes and a wheedling manner for all her stand-offishness, and that's just the kind to get around an old fool. My poor husband"

"Hush! There she comes." The other sniffed. "I saw that hat in a boardwalk store the other day for eighteen dollars. Sinful, I call it, for a woman her age"

McCarty's teeth clamped upon his cigar and his eyes turned to the stairs. A tall, amply proportioned woman was descending, clad in a black, fur-trimmed cloak which revealed the lines of her trim, full figure and accentuated her height. Her face was not uncomely, of overblown slightly florid type, and the snap in her large, black eyes belied the streaks of gray in the dark hair beneath the smartly quilled hat.

She moved to the desk with a certain air of brisk assurance, deposited her key, and went out the door while McCarty threw away his cigar and after a few casual inquiries of the clerk as to points of interest, discreetly followed.

The woman was half-way down the block ahead of him in the direction of the beach, walking with a full, swinging stride which held a suggestion of a sailor's easy, rolling gait, but when she reached the boardwalk she paused uncertainly and finally started north toward the Inlet.

Past the hotels and piers she made her way, past shops and booths and shooting galleries to where scattered cottages and an unbroken expanse of beach and surf lined the boardwalk. The sky grew sullen and overcast and a stiff north-easter, precursor of a coming storm, beat in her face but she breasted it erectly with unbent head as though she gloried in the turbulence of the unrestrained elements. Pedestrians were few and only an occasional rolling chair shared their solitude, while the screaming gulls wheeled closer inshore and a stray dog nosing in a heap of wreckage upon the sands lifted his head and howled dismally.

The woman turned at last and McCarty with a grunt of relief dropped down upon a bench until she should have passed him. He was frankly winded and mentally anathematized the insidiously increasing flesh which years of ease and inactivity had girt about his sturdy form. He studiously averted his gaze as the woman approached and only when her tall figure was all but merged in the driving mist beyond did he rise and again set forth upon the trail.

He hoped devoutly that she was returning to the warmth and conventional cheer of the boarding house, but when the first of the piers was reached she halted, her eyes fixed upon the tumbling waves beneath and after a moment passed through the entrance gates and out upon the long jetty.

An exhibition building, closed now for the season, stood at the furthermost end of the pier facing the infinite waste of the ocean, and behind this structure the woman vanished. McCarty lighted a fresh cigar and clinging tenaciously to the rail in the lee of a stucco pillar, waited for a decent interval, but she did not reappear, and finally he strolled around the corner of the building. His quarry was seated on a bench close to the rail, gazing seaward with an unwinking stare and seemingly oblivious of his presence.

He hesitated, coughed deferentially, then seating himself on the end of the bench farthest from her, pulled a news- paper from his pocket and proceeded to study her over its top.

All at once she turned and fixed him with a disconcertingly level stare.

"It won't do you a bit of good to follow me," she announced calmly. "I've no use for fresh old flirts that ought to know better."

McCarty gasped.

"I'm sorry, ma'am." Injured dignity sounded in every syllable. "I'm a stranger and wanted to come out on this pier, but I didn't know it was allowed till I saw you going through the gate. If my cigar annoys you, I'll go away."

He made as if to rise but his scandalized look was inimitable and the woman laughed frankly.

"Oh, I don't mind a whiff of tobacco I I thought you were one of those smart blighters that give me the hump down here, fancying every woman, will fall for a smirk and a line of jolly. Stay where you are, if you like. It's a little bit of all right out here, isn't it?"

"It's grand, ma'am. Barring a day now and then at Coney I'm not what you might call familiar with the sea." McCarty's shocked expression had given place to a beaming smile of disarming frendliness [sic]. "This pier, now, might be the deck of a ship."

"Without the rolling and pitching." The woman squinted knowingly at the horizon. "We're in for a touch of heavy weather, I should say. Youll see something then, sir, that's well worth your trip."

"You're fond of the sea, ma'am. I'm city bred myself and sociable, like. There's a sort of lonesomeness about all this water to me." McCarty waved a comprehensive arm.

"I hate cities!" The woman shuddered and her eyes fell upon the newspaper which McCarty had purposely held so that the flaring head-lines might come within her range of vision. "You may be more lonely in them than at sea, and they're filled with dirt and poverty and dreadful happenings."

"There's bound to be both the good and the bad cropping out where a lot of people are crowded together," McCarty observed sententiously. "But if there's a criminal instinct in anybody it's as liable to make him act on sea as on land. You've heard no doubt, ma'am, of dreadful happenings on board all kinds of ships, from yachts to liners?"

"I—I suppose so." Her voice was lowered and her florid cheek had paled as she turned and stared once more steadily before her. "I don't hold with horrors myself."

"No more do I," McCarty conceded. "That is, not as a rule, but I've been reading about this murder that took place in New York a few days ago. You've seen the account of it, ma'am?"

"You mean the—the woman that was found strangled to death in some sort of museum?" she asked. "I haven't looked at to-day's paper. Did they find out who did it?"

"Not yet, ma'am. Would you be having a look at this?" He offered his newspaper, but just as she reached for it his fingers relaxed ever so slightly, and the wind tore it from his loosened grasp and bore it over the rail. "Too bad! We'll get another, though, on the boardwalk. There's rare news to-day; they've found out that the poor lady was not murdered in her own home and the body carried across yards and put in the museum, as was said all along. She went there herself, unbeknownst to anyone, and 'twas there she was killed."

"In that place?" The woman shuddered again. "It was some sort of collection of crime relics belonging to a rich, batty old man, wasn't it? I got that far with it the other day before I chucked it. I don't mind a bit of spicy reading now and then, but Lor'! that made my flesh creep, and no mistake! What would a lady like her be doing in that chamber of horrors?"

"They do be saying she went there for something the old man had bought just lately to add to his, collection," McCarty replied innocently. "Something to do with a crime she had knowledge of long ago."

"What!" The woman clutched at the back of the bench to steady herself as she turned and faced him once more, and he saw a dawning horror in her hard eyes. "Did to-day's paper say that?"

"It did," McCarty lied. "'Tis hinted she was afraid of the truth coming out and her name being connected with it."

"Did it mention what the object was that the lady was after? " His companion demanded in a tone which trembled despite her self-repression.

"Let me see!" McCarty rubbed his chin reflectively. "Yes. 'Twas a wallet; a man's black wallet with a couple of letters inside."

The woman drew in her breath with a sharp little hiss and there was a pause before she laughed shakily.

"Quite like a 'penny dreadful, isn't it? Lady Genevieve stealing the papers! I wonder what it was all about?"

"The old man told the police, it seems, that the letters had to do with the murder of some foreign gentleman with an outlandish name on board of a yacht in the Hudson some years back. 'Twas that I had in mind when I spoke just now of crimes at sea."

"Did he say—the old man—how the letters came into his hands?" There was an odd, choking quality in the woman's tones.

"I think so, but I only just glanced over the account of it" McCarty appeared to ruminate. "I remember it said something about a woman having sold them to him; a woman who used to be employed on the yacht I suppose the police will be hotfoot after her now."

"But why?" cried his companion. "They don't accuse her of the murder, do they? If she was working on the yacht the time the other affair happened she must have told all she knew at the inquest—I mean to say, if there was one."

"Not quite. She didn't say anything about the letters, and that's suppression of evidence; a serious matter in a case like that." McCarty watched the woman narrowly. "Then, too, she sold the letters, which lays her open to a charge of conversion of property and I don't know what else besides."

"You talk like a blooming solicitor!" the other jeered in an attempt at lightness.

"I've had to do with the law in my time," responded McCarty. "It stands to reason the woman must know something about this last crime, anyway, when another one was murdered for the letters she'd carried so long."

"I say, how do the bobbies know that the lady went there for the letters? Were they found on the body? Why hasn't there been a word about them in the papers before now?"

"They've not been found. In fact, they've only just, been missed. 'Twas known they were safe in the museum an hour before the murder and no one's been in since that would have touched them, so it's easy to dope out that whoever broke in and killed her, did it to get possession of the wallet and took it away with him."

The woman laughed scornfully.

"It's easy to dope out anything if you have enough imagination and nerve!" she remarked. "If that is all they have to go upon, they've a bloody lot of cheek, I say, to go smirching a lady's name by trying to connect it with a forgotten scandal just because the old duffer can't find his precious relic! They must be hard put to it for a scapegoat!"

Her voice had grown raucous and there was an ugly, sullen light in her eyes which hardened her expression immeasurably. McCarty took a long shot.

"But remember the letters themselves," he said slyly. "Though they're gone, their contents is known. They'd tell the whole story, and show the lady's connection with the case"

"How would they?" the woman shrilled. "There's no one alive cares tuppence for the letters!. They both died that night "

"Papers? New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington and Pittsburg morning pape-rs!"

A small, piping voice sounded close beside them and with a muttered imprecation McCarty tinned. A diminutive newsboy, shivering and clutching his few remaining papers tightly beneath, one arm, stood hopefully regarding them.

"Yes. Give me a morning paper, boy!" The woman exclaimed. "Any one will do, if it is the last edition. Here you are, and never mind the change!"

McCarty opened his lips to speak but it was too late. The boy was scurrying off with his unexpected largesse and the woman sat scanning her paper with an eagerness which gave place to blank astonishment merged in mounting wrath.

McCarty waited in silence until she crushed the paper in her hands and turned once more to him.

"Who are you?" She spoke quietly but her voice shook.

"My name is Timothy McCarty"

"I thought so! I thought you were one of that crew sent to hound me!" She twisted the paper convulsively and flung it over the rail. "I ought to have known, in spite of your smooth-spoken way, when you began talking about—about happenings on yachts! There is not a word in the news concerning a—a black wallet, and I don't know what you mean"

"You're Kate Stricker, aren't you?" McCarty demanded, with a sudden note of sternness in his voice.

"Oh! yes. I'm Kate, all right, as you could see by the register where I'm stopping. I didn't come down here to hide!" she declared in scorn. "I was stewardess on The Muette when Mr. Hoyos—when the accident happened, and I gave my testimony full and free at the inquest. If I'd been wanted, the police could have laid a finger on me any time in the past ten years. I don't know anything about any wallet, or letters, and I never laid eyes on the old duffer that owns the museum, or the lady who was murdered there!"

"Slow with that!" McCarty cautioned. "Remember the butler laid eyes on you when you went to the Norwood house to sell the letters, and he can back up Mr. Norwood's testimony."

"Pooh!" The woman snapped her fingers. "From what I read this past week, the old governor's so wild to be of importance in the case that he'd swear to anything, and show me a butler who can't be bought over! When it comes to that, I can prove where I was every minute of last week and my witnesses are as good as his! There was no other woman employed on The Muette in those days but me, and though I'd small liking for the master I wouldn't touch his dirty letters! If any were palmed off on that balmy old duffer it was a sell, and the woman claiming to be me, if there was one, was a blooming impostor! I've read about you, too, if you're the ex-Roundsman who was there when the body was found. You can go back to them who sent you down here, Mr. McCarty, and tell them that Kate Stricker is ready to face them, and any charge that suits their fancy!"

McCarty waited patiently until the tirade had ceased and then he asked quietly:

"How about the money you've come into lately? Where did it come from?"

"That's my affair!" she flared, then hastily as if realizing the weakness of defiance, she added: "I—I saved it.

"From your salary at the orphan asylum?"

"Let them prove it wasn't." She rose. "I'm not on the stand yet, and I'll answer no more of your questions! When the time comes I'll be ready, no fear!"

McCarty got slowly to his feet and remarked as if in afterthought:

"So you had no liking for the man Hoyos."

"I had not," the woman responded. "He's dead, but he was a beast if ever there was one. He got his just deserts, I say, and the only pity of it was that the poor young thing died with him! I know nothing about this other murder, or the wallet or any letters, and if you have no warrant for me, 111 thank you to let me pass!"

McCarty shrugged and stepped back, but as she moved he made a final effort

"You're mistaken in thinking anyone sent me. I'm not connected with the force any more and if you'll tell me the truth and what was in those letters, I can promise you the police won't bother you about selling them. If not, I'll have to go to Headquarters."

The woman smiled in triumph.

"So that's it! You don't know, eh, and you've come here on your own to pump me! I'm sorry, Mr. McCarty, but as I never heard of the letters until now, I can't tell you what's in them. Go to Headquarters and tell them what you please. I've said my last word."