The Twenty-Six Clues/Chapter 22

HE bachelor quarters over the antique shop presented a strange and unwonted aspect that evening. The sooty hearth had been scrubbed until it shone, cigar boxes, stray matches, newspapers and the usual litter to be found in the wake of the undomesticated male had miraculously disappeared and an unnatural and self-conscious state of cleanliness and order prevailed.

McCarty, too, seemed abnormally solemn as he greeted Inspector Druet and ushered his two assistants into the small inner bedroom.

"You'll wait here, boys," he announced. "No smoking, mind, for there'll be a lady present, and besides I don't want the rest of them that's coming to know you're here till I give the word, but when I do, look sharp!"

"You've got everything arranged?" the Inspector asked in a hurried undertone.

McCarty nodded.

"There'll be no hitch. I'm only asking one thing of you, sir; don't interrupt me no matter what I say, and for the love of God, don't contradict me! I'll be using your name pretty free, but you'll see in the end that 'twas right and proper I should if you've only the patience to wait for it."

"I'll give you your, head, Mac," promised the Inspector. "I wish you would put me wise as to what is coming off, but I'll have to take your word for it that you know what you're about. Are you sure the man we're after will show up?"

A knock upon the door prevented McCarty's immediate reply and he ushered in a tall woman dressed in black, whose features were all but concealed by a heavy veil.

"Good-evening, ma'am." There was an exaggeration of deference in McCarty's manner as he motioned toward the inner room. "I'll ask you to sit in here, please, with these two gentlemen. You've got it all straight about your part of it?"

He added the last in a lowered tone, and the woman nodded and throwing back her veil revealed a face unknown to the Inspector; a face wherein bold, black eyes snapped resolutely and grim lines about the compressed lips left no doubt as to the stern import of her errand.

Martin and Yost rose respectfully as she entered the inner room, but she ignored their presence and seated herself just beyond the range of vision from the doorway.

"Who is she, Mac?" the Inspector urged. "You'll tell me that much, at least!"

"Whist, now!" McCarty cautioned. "There's someone else coming up the stairs."

The door leading to the hall opened slowly and Dennis Riordan craned his neck through the aperture.

"Is it all right?" he demanded in a sepulchral whisper.

"Sure! Come in, Denny." McCarty bustled forward. "Sit you down over there by the window and mind you don't let a peep out of you, no matter what happens."

"But where is she?" Dennis gazed about him in bewilderment. "I could have sworn I saw a woman coming in here; a woman with a long, black veil!"

"You'll be seeing more than that before the night's over!" retorted McCarty impatiently.

The arrival of Vivaseur and Calvin Norwood, the former frankly curious, the latter laboring under an agitation which he strove in vain to conceal, precluded further talk, and Dennis subsided. The newcomers were scarcely seated when Wade Terhune accompanied by his client Oliver Jarvis appeared upon the scene.

McCarty had arranged the chairs so that they formed a rough semi-circle facing the bedroom door and now he stepped before it and cleared his throat.

"You all know that I've no longer any regular connection with the police department," he began, "but now and again when Inspector Druet needs me I go back as a special officer on his staff. I've been working on this investigation with him and he wants me to tell you what progress we've made. That's right, isn't it, sir? "

He appealed to the Inspector and the latter nodded speechlessly in confirmation.

"To do that I'll have to go back a good bit and I'll ask you to bear with me, for it's all a part of the story. A matter of eleven years ago, in nineteen-six in a convent away down south on the Mississippi River, there was a young girl of sixteen or thereabouts who fell in love with a man she flirted with over the wall. He was a dark, handsome fellow calling himself Leon Hoguet and he'd come ashore from a grand yacht anchored just off the bank. One night the girl ran away and married him, but he turned out to be a roystering blackguard and deserted her in less than three months."

Oliver Jarvis uttered a sharp exclamation beneath his breath and the others stared, spellbound, but McCarty continued as though unconscious of the impression his opening words had created.

"The girl went back heartbroken to her guardian in New Orleans and he took her in and hid the scandal of it. He tried unsuccessfully to find the scoundrel but the girl must have known where to reach him, for between then and spring she wrote him at least two letters. The first was just a poor, pitiful cry to him to come back to the little wife he had deserted, but she must have learned something of his true character in the meantime for the second letter threatened that if he had deceived her she would follow him to the ends of the earth, and she kept her word.

"Leon Hoguet had sold his yacht to a wealthy planter and skipped, but up in New York that spring a man named Leonidas Hoyos bought another one and went in for some gay times."

It was the Inspector's turn to start, but McCarty paid him no heed.

"Now, this Hoyos had appeared first in New York the summer before from nobody knew where, and making a killing in Wall Street he cut quite a swath. During the month that Hoguet was courting the little convent girl Hoyos was absent from the city and for the next three months he showed up only on flying trips but after that he came back for good.

"I don't know how the girl down south found out that Hoyos and Hoguet were the same, but I suspect it was through a discharged valet he'd beaten up; the stewardess on the second yacht, The Muette, heard him swear to get even. Anyhow, one night in May—the twenty-sixth, it was—when The Muette was lying off in the Hudson the girl came on board. Hoyos was evidently expecting to see someone else entirely for when he came into the saloon where he'd directed his guest was to be shown and found out who it was he took good care that none of the crew or the help should get a sight of her face.

"They had high words but no one could hear what was said then. They stayed shut up in the saloon and they never touched the food that had been laid out for them, but from the empty bottles scattered around Hoyos must have tanked up on enough champagne to float the whole boat. Later, going on toward midnight, the quarrel broke out again louder than before, the girl crying fit to kill herself and the man shouting and swearing like the brute he was.

"The stewardess on board had her own reasons for hating Hoyos and when she heard the girl's sobs she felt sorry for her, and crept up and listened at the door.

"The girl was pleading first to be taken back, and the stewardess said 'twould have moved the heart of a stone, but he just sneered at her and cursed and finally she demanded her rights as his wife. Then he up and told her where she got off, the blackhearted devil! He'd married other women before her, two or three of them under as many different names, and she had no more legal claim on him than a stranger.

"The girl screamed once and then was quiet and the stewardess thought she must have fainted. After a time she heard Hoyos advising the girl in a cold, sneering way to go back where she came from and not stir up a scandal that would only bring disgrace on herself. All of a sudden he stopped in the middle of a sentence, there was a scuffle and the crack of a revolver.

"The stewardess near fainted, herself, outside the door but the next thing she heard a kind of a choking cry from Hoyos and two heavy splashes in the water."

He paused as Oliver Jarvis with a groan buried his face in his hands. Norwood clutched the arms of his chair and even Vivaseur's ruddy face had paled slightly, while a frown of discomfiture had gathered on Wade Terhune's brow.

"If you remember the Hoyos case you all know what happened; how weeks later a mutilated body was fished out of the river and identified as as Hoyos' through his clothes and the jewelry with his initials on it. The girl was supposed to have been drowned for no trace was found of her and no one knew who she was.

"Because she hated Hoyos so and sympathized with the girl, the stewardess never told what she'd overheard and right after the shooting she remembered a wallet with a couple of letters in it that was in a desk in his cabin. She'd taken a peep at them and was afraid they might help in the girl's conviction if she was caught, so before the police boat came she took the wallet and hid it among her things.

"The girl wasn't drowned, however; she got safe ashore and although the Inspector hasn't been able to prove it yet, he's got an idea how it happened, for it is on the records in Hoboken that about that time a barge captain was arrested trying to dispose of a ruby ring worth thousands. He swore that it had been given to his wife by an old woman, richly dressed, that they pulled out of the river on the night of June first and that in return they provided her with dry clothes and money for a railway journey. The police couldn't prove him a liar for he and his wife and the crew had the description of the old lady down so pat they never suspected 'twas the girl from The Muette that was being shielded, nor that the date of the rescue had been changed.

"She got back to New Orleans and after a terrible, long sickness she shut herself up in her guardian's house like a hermit for a matter of two or three years. But she was young and the horror of it wore off and after a while she began to care for somebody else, a rich New Yorker that was down there on a visit. To be fair to her, she wanted to tell him the truth but her guardian forbade it—she'd sworn to him that Hoguet was dead but told him no more—and she married the Northerner without saying a word of the past.

"You all know who I'm talking about, but I'll have to use names now to keep from balling up the story, though I don't like to. Last Christmas Mrs. Jarvis received a gift of a big cake with 'Noel' on it in sugar; she didn't know who sent it but she nearly passed away, for she knew that someone from out of the past had spotted her and her secret would never be safe again. Three months afterwards she received an unsigned note made by spelling out words in macaroni letters pasted on paper, saying: 'All is known. Pay or I tell. First warning.'

"She got twenty thousand of her own money from her husband and waited, and around the beginning of the last week in May she got another note that told her to put five thousand dollars under the rose bush in the yard on the night of the twenty-sixth, calling attention to the date. It was the anniversary of that night on The Muette. I guess she must have done it, for two weeks later she got the third and last of the macaroni warnings. It ordered her to put a thousand dollars under the bush on the twenty-sixth of each month or everything would be told.

"I don't know—I mean the Inspector hasn't found out yet—how it came about, but the blackmailing must have stopped along in October for only nine thousand is gone out of the twenty, and Mrs. Jarvis planning to go abroad looks as though she thought herself out of danger."

McCarty paused again, but not a sound broke the tense stillness of the listening group, and after a moment he went on in a change of tone:

"I've got to go back now to the stewardess. She had kept the wallet with those letters in it all these years; in fact, it had been in a storage warehouse in a trunk with a lot of other old stuff belonging to her, and she'd almost forgotten that she had them until about a month ago. Then £he came across them just when she was out of a job and in desperate straits for money. She had heard of Mr. Norwood and his museum, and that he paid big prices for relics of crime, and the idea came to her to sell him the letters. She didn't think that after so many years had passed the identity of the young girl could be proved from them, and she'd not be hurting anybody.

"Mr. Norwood bought them from her three days before the murder and told all about them at the dinner at Mr. Jarvis' house on Wednesday night. Mrs. Jarvis was near crazy, for she knew that at any time Mr. Norwood might discover by accident that they were in her handwriting and it would be all up with her. She made up her mind that she'd have to get those letters and on the Friday afternoon she got rid of all her servants, put on the little dark dress with the veil around her head, and started out through the yards for the museum. She would have a clear field, for she had persuaded Mr. Norwood to visit his friend the professor and he'd told her the butler would be out I guess she didn't figure much on Captain Marchal disturbing her, on account of his blindness, and the cook and housemaid wouldn't see her, with the kitchen shades drawn and the lights turned on.

"There was no way Mrs. Jarvis could get into the museum except by climbing the ladder and forcing one of the windows, and she remembered that Mr. Norwood was a shark—begging his pardon!—on finger prints, so she decided to take a pair of her husband's old motor gloves with her and put them on. In her hurry, however, she only grabbed up one and that she dropped on the ladder. She knew where Mr. Norwood had likely put the wallet, in the tall cabinet where he kept most of his papers and documents relating to crime.

"She got in the museum, all right, and it's my belief that she had the wallet in her hands when she heard someone at the door, and turned to come face to face with the man she thought had died by her hand ten years before; Leonidas Hoyos himself, in the flesh!"