The Twenty-Six Clues/Chapter 23

REAT God!" Oliver Jarvis sprang to his feet. "Where is he? Have you got him? Take me to him, I say"

"Easy now, Mr. Jarvis ! There's more you've got to hear first," McCarty remonstrated. "We haven't got him yet but we will soon, don't fear! You'll only have to have a little more patience."

"Really, McCarty, your self-confidence is intended to be highly reassuring, no doubt," drawled Terhune, "but I fear that my client will have to exercise more than a little patience before your laudatory ambition is achieved, and we will have to hear a few more tangible facts before we can share your enthusiasm."

"You'll hear them!" McCarty promised grimly. "When I sat in the dark in your consulting room, Mr. Terhune, with a tennis ball on a wire squeezed in my hand and your little Fourth of July illumination inside the clock registering the sweat of me 'twas a fine little flight of fancy I listened to, if you remember with never a complaint. I've no phonographs here to play for you nor borrowed skeletons to rattle, nor yet an assistant to prance up and down and work the back-stage effects, but I'll give you plain, straightforward facts enough before I'm through, so sit tight, sir! You've had your little show but this is the Inspector's and mine. I'm going to prove that 'twas Hoyos himself that faced Mrs. Jarvis there."

"Can—can this be true?" Calvin Norwood's shaking lips could scarcely frame the words. "But how did he get in the museum?"

"I'm coming to that," responded McCarty. "We haven't found out yet how he got out of the river years ago nor where the body came from that was dressed in his clothes and with his jewelry and all, but the Inspector can prove that Hoyos found it mighty convenient to disappear just then and start all over again; not only on account of the girl but because his luck had gone against him in Wall Street and he'd forged some big checks to cover his losses. We're still working on his record during the past ten years but we know that he's traveled under different names and been in a lot of shady transactions. It's a safe bet that he didn't know the little convent girl he'd tricked into marriage was an heiress or he would have stuck to her till he'd got her fortune away from her. He must have been a surprised man when somehow, a year ago, he found out that she had become the wealthy and prominent Mrs. Oliver Jarvis.

"He sent her the cake in order to get the word 'Noel' to her notice in such a fashion that no one except her would guess what it meant and to pave the way for the blackmail later."

Wade Terhune laughed sneeringly.

"He evidently did not count upon your phenomenal guessing powers, my dear McCarty! To the merely scientific and I may add uninspired mind it would seem a far cry from Leonidas Hoyos to a frosted Christmas cake, but I have no doubt that you can supply the connection?"

McCarty's face reddened at the taunting tone, but he replied quietly.

"Perhaps I can, sir. You've heard, I dare say, of nicknames, and the like. You'd hardly think, perhaps, that a man like Hoyos would be called pet names"

"What utter rot!" Terhune's coolness was deserting him. "It is only a certain type of man whose personality invites nicknames and your Hoyos is not of that breed. Are you trying to show that the man was called 'Noel'?"

"Not trying to, Mr. Terhune; I am showing it." McCarty drew himself up. "Now, if you'd been saddled with a name like 'Leonidas' it stands to reason that your friends wouldn't be twisting their tongues over it except on special occasions. They'd be cutting it short and calling you 'Leon,' most likely. Supposing the girl that loved you found out by accident that those four letters turned backwards spelt 'Noel,' which means Christmas, and decided for a reason to call you that, 'twould not be such a far cry, after all."

"Preposterous!" Terhune exclaimed. "That is the most ridiculous, far-fetched thing you've tried to insult our intelligence with to-night. You surely cannot expect us to accept it!"

"'Far-fetched' is right." McCarty smiled. "For it's from New Orleans I fetched it, sir, from the lady who was Evelyn Beaudet's best friend when they were girls together at the convent."

"Loretta Sawtelle!" exclaimed Oliver Jarvis.

"The same, sir. She'd helped the elopement along and 'twas she told me how the pet name of 'Noel' came about. When the girl he married found that his name spelled a word meaning 'Christmas' she called him that because Christmas was also her birthday; and a fine birthday present she got in him, but no matter!

"You see, when he sent her the cake last year, the whole point was that she must still think he was dead and that she had killed him and somebody else who knew was threatening to squeal on her for murder. It worked, too, only along about October he must have found bigger game and decided to let up on blackmailing her; maybe he put a message in macaroni paste under the bush telling her so, but that's only another guess, Mr. Terhune. Anyway, if he learned that she was planning to go abroad he must have been just as well pleased to get her out of the way, for the new scheme he had in mind would have brought him in touch with her world.

"Those macaroni-paste letters were masterpieces, at that, for they took in the whole alphabet from 'a' to 'z'. He was thorough, that Hoyos, I'll say that for him! Thorough, but in one thing just an hour too late! However, I'm coming to that.

"He quit blackmailing her, and then he, too, heard about those letters being still in existence and that Mr. Norwood had bought them for his collection. He wanted to get them as badly as Mrs. Jarvis did, for they would be absolute proof to hold over her head in case he ever needed in the future to use his power over her. He managed to get possession of a key to the Norwood house but the door to the museum itself he opened with a spider.

"What happened when the two of them met there we don't have to guess entirely, for unknown to either of them at the time there was a witness, a third party who listened in on the scene long enough to hear about the secret Mrs. Jarvis had kept all those years. He crept away kind of stunned with the news, his only thought being to keep her from ever suspecting that he knew. Then that night her murdered body was discovered and he was nearly out of his head with self-reproach, thinking how he might have prevented her death if only he hadn't gone away and left them there in the museum together. He had one clue to the man; the sound of his voice which was forever ringing in his ears, and all that next week he kept thinking he heard it again and blaming his brain for the tricks it was playing.

McCarty paused as his glance traveled along the semi-circle of tense, set faces. Only the sound of a sharply drawn breath broke the stillness until he spoke again with deep solemnity.

"Captain Marchal did not kill himself. He was murdered, shot down in cold blood by the same hand that had strangled Mrs. Jarvis."

With his last word the tension which had held the others in leash snapped like a tautly strung wire and instantly the room was in confusion. Calvin Norwood, Oliver Jarvis and Wade Terhune had all three sprung to their feet and the former cried excitedly:

"I knew it! I knew Victor was neither insane nor a coward! He'd made too gallant a record in the war, too brave a fight afterward to go under and take his own life just because a whippersnapper of a detective tried to fasten the responsibility for the crime on him rather than admit his own failure to find the real murderer!"

He turned and glared with savage exultation upon Wade Terhune, who ignored him in cold disdain and advanced sneeringly to McCarty.

"I've listened very patiently to your ingenious though highly fanciful tale, my dear McCarty, but this is a little too much! Marchal was a suicide; the powder marks about the wound alone showed that, for the position of the furniture in the room precluded the possibility of anyone having approached him closely enough to have fired the shot."

McCarty smiled grimly.

"That's just what the murderer figured on making everyone believe, Mr. Terhune, and he took you in as well as the rest. 'Twas a clever stunt he pulled, but he didn't do it quite in time."

The shaft went home and the criminalist turned angrily upon Inspector Druet, who sat apart, his face a study.

"Inspector, is McCarty speaking by your authority? Do you, too, hold to this ridiculous assertion?"

For a moment the Inspector's eyes searched his self-constituted spokesman's face and what he read there evidently satisfied him, for he replied with a ring of finality in his tones:

"I do. Mac knows what he's about, Mr. Terhune; just give him the floor, please."

The others subsided and McCarty explained:

"You see, the poor young lad betrayed himself; he showed his suspicions too plainly before he was convinced enough to act on them and Hoyos—we'll call him that still, though now I could put another name to him—got to him there in the library when he was all alone. There was a struggle and Marchal managed to get the drawer of the desk open and pull out his pistol to defend himself with but Hoyos wrested it out of his hand. Marchal must have broke away from his grasp then and ran from him, for when Hoyos shot him the first time 'twas from a distance of several feet. He fell and then the bright idea came to Hoyos.

"He knew that everyone else in the house was out and he'd have all the time in the world to do what he wanted to. He extracted the second cartridge shell from the pistol and picking up this pair of shears from the table, he cut off the top of the shell with the blades of it and took out the bullet. Then he clamped the two pieces of the cartridge together again, using the heavy bronze handles of the shears like a pair of pincers, and putting it back in the pistol he went up close to where Marchal was lying and fired a second shot—a blank one—directly into the wound, scattering the powder all over it.

He put the empty shell of one cartridge at the feet of the corpse, dropped the pistol by his hand, pocketed the other shell and the second bullet, and pulled the furniture around like a barricade to make people think exactly what they did; then he went away greatly pleased with himself and the job, I've no doubt, but he'd forgot just three things. There's not much blood comes from a direct heart wound and he was too long about fixing up that blank cartridge; the sprinkling of powder from the second shot stayed on top of the bloodstains, almost dry, as the Inspector and I found later. We found something else, too; the marks of lead on the blades of the shears where he'd cut the cartridge and the grains of powder he'd let fall on the polished top of the library table."

Amid a silence as profound as before the recent interruption, McCarty handed the shears to the dazed Inspector and produced the envelope from which he shook out upon his palm the particles of powder and held them for all to see.

"He thought he'd rid himself of the last danger of discovery and all was plain sailing ahead of him," McCarty continued, carefully dusting the powder back into the envelope and tendering it also to the Inspector, "but he'd come on Marchal just an hour too late.

"There's the powder and the shears to prove it, and here I've something else that caps it all!

"They say that people who lose their eyesight get sharper in other ways, that they can sense things quicker than them that can see. Certain it is that Marchal not only suspected the owner of the voice that was so like the one he had heard in the museum, but he got it that the fellow was afraid he knew, somehow, and a warning came to him that he'd be done to death the same as Mrs. Jarvis was. Anyhow, that Wednesday afternoon he made up his mind to write out a statement of what he'd heard and suspected in case anything happened to him and when he found himself hunch came to him, what they call a premonition. He was in deadly fear for his own life from that minute, not that he was afraid of death but that it would come on him before he had a chance to denounce the murderer of Mrs. Jarvis.

"He'd followed some of them to the door, maybe, and then made a rush for his typewriter and in blundering around, knocked it off the table. The crash of it was the last straw to his frazzled nerves and a kind of a panic seized him, a frenzied determination to get that statement written as if every minute was going to be his last. He couldn't lift the typewriter because of an injury to his arm and shoulder which he got in the war, but he grabbed a sheet of paper and squatted down on the floor and wrote out his message. Then he found a pen, signed it, and put it in the desk where 'twould be the first thing seen when the drawer was opened. He never knew that the ribbon on the typewriter was broken by the fall and that no writing appeared on the papers at all but just his signature.

"There was something else in that drawer too; a photograph of Mrs. Jarvis' finger-print records, that she'd let Mr. Norwood take long ago, and that Marchal had got out of the museum and hid the morning after the murder, to shield her if she'd left any marks and anyone suspected what had brought her there.

"I've said there was nothing on that sheet of paper except his signature, and that's all that did show to the naked eye. Now I've turned up my nose at microscopes and such as playthings for the amateur and little I thought I'd ever come to one, myself, the sight that God gave me being plenty for my needs in the past, thanks be! But when the Inspector and I gave that paper the once-over we found little dents in it, and put it under a magnifying glass. Then we saw that it had been put through the typewriter and knowing the ink ribbon of it had been broken when crashed to the floor we put two and two together. The dents on the paper had been made by the keys striking directly on it instead of against the ribbon that wasn't there. I borrowed the typewriter from Mr. Norwood and we tested it, with and without the ribbon, till we'd doped out the message. Here it is, and I'm going to read you the notes we made from it."

The stillness was broken now by a wordless stir which ran around the semicircle as McCarty took from his pocket the folded blank sheet and another covered with laboriously scrawled writing. The first he passed to Inspector Druet, while from the second he read:

"I know who killed Madame Jarvis. He knows that I know and he will kill me also. I heard them there in the museum and the voice of her murderer is the voice of him who calls himself Eric Vivaseur!"

"It's a lie!" Vivaseur's voice rose to a snarling scream as he leaped from his chair, his once stolid, good-natured face distorted to a mask of demoniac fury. "That poor, crazed fool never wrote those words! You've made it up between you, damn you, to get up a case! It's a lie! A lie!"

He checked himself suddenly as though a hand had been laid across his writhing lips, and with eyes starting from their sockets he crumpled back into his chair.

A tall, dark woman robed in black had appeared in the door leading to the inner room. Her face was as white as chalk but her tones were firm and steady as she spoke:

"I'm Kate Stricker. I was stewardess on The Muette and I sold the letters to Mr. Norwood." Slowly, inexorably she raised her arm and pointed to the cowering, cringing figure before her. "Leon Hoyos' hair was black then and he was younger by ten years, but that is the man!"