The Twenty-Six Clues/Chapter 24

T was a soft, still night in early June and Dennis and McCarty sat side by side with their chairs tilted comfortably back against the wall of the firehouse, smoking in silence.

Their conversation had been desultory and flagging for their thoughts were busied with a subject neither of them broached. The distant whine of a hand-organ, the honk of motor cars, voices of children and the grating syncopation of a phonograph from an open window across the way alike fell on deaf ears.

At length Dennis took the plunge.

"I see by the papers that Hoyos went to the chair this morning."

McCarty nodded solemnly.

"He got his, and if ever a man deserved the trip through the little green door, he did."

"There's a hint that he made a confession at the last," Dennis observed.

"I would not put it past him." McCarty spoke with all the policeman's contempt for a squealer. "The coward that would strangle a woman and shoot a blind man would be apt to spill his soul when the end came."

"True for you." Dennis sucked at his pipe. "You told me once—it was the night when you showed him up—that 'twas me first put you on the track of him. How did I?"

A slow grin widened McCarty's lips.

"When I first told you about Miss Joan bringing him home you said he had a name like a dime novel. It did seem too high-sounding to be the real thing. You gave me another tip, too, later on. When I described how I doped it out that Mrs. Jarvis was not killed in her own home but went across to the Jarvis house alive and well, you said that she sneaked over 'like a thief.' And that's just what she had done, Denny, for she went to steal that wallet with the letters."

"What became of it anyway?" Dennis asked.

"'Twas found in Vivaseur's rooms at the hotel; Hoyos', I mean."

"Well, there's one thing!" Dennis knocked the ashes from his pipe and ground out the live embers with a capacious boot. "Your séance beat anything Terhune ever got up, with all his little machines! Man, 'twas grand when that Stricker woman stood up in the doorway and called Hoyos out of his name! But I don't see how you ever got her to come across with the admission that she'd sold the letters."

"She knew 'twould come out anyway and it was satisfaction to the soul of her to denounce him. When I had that first talk with her on the pier at Atlantic City I knew if I could once convince her that he was alive and she could help punish him for a crime she would talk, quick enough. She's a good, strong hater, that Kate!"

"Who's this coming?" Dennis squinted down the street, where from the corner a tall figure was approaching with a firm, familiar tread.

"'Tis the Inspector, no less!" McCarty rose eagerly. "Good-evening to you, sir! What brings you walking our beat?"

"I was passing by and stopped in at your rooms." Inspector Druet smiled. "When you weren't there I knew where I would find you! 'Evening, Riordan. Don't disturb yourself."

"There's another chair just inside the door." Dennis swung it out with a long arm. "There! We was just talking about the Hoyos case, sir, seeing as he was electrocuted this morning. Was it true that he made a confession before they turned on the juice?"

"Yes. We have it down at Headquarters now. He told a good bit about his life but a lot of it is colored to put him in as good a light as possible. There are parts that ring true, however. His father was a baker in Vienna, his mother a seamstress from Greece."

"That accounts for the cake, the macaroni paste and the Greek name Leonidas," McCarty nodded. "He flew high from the bakeshop, didn't he?"

"Yes. He was the manager of a gambling casino at a resort on the French coast before he came to this country. He doesn't say much about those early years here or where he got the money to start his Wall Street speculations which enabled him to buy that yacht he had down on the Mississippi. He tells, though, how he found and palmed off that body as his after the affair of The Muette; seems quite proud of it as a smart trick. The girl shot him through the shoulder, you know, not seriously and he easily swam ashore. Alongside the railroad which runs by the river he came on the body of a trackwalker who had evidently just been hit by a train. He walked on—it was near the dawn—when he came to a little shanty with overalls and underwear flapping on a line in the yard. That gave him an idea and he took what he needed, then went back and stripping the body of the trackwalker, dressed it in his own things even to the jewelry and dumped it into the river. He tied a stone to the dead man's clothes—I guess he'd been pretty badly mussed up by the train—and dropped them in after him. Then he dressed himself in what he had taken from the line and started off barefoot with what money he'd thought it prudent to keep out of the roll the dead man was floating down stream with.

"He is silent about what happened to him during the next ten years and how he discovered the girl again in Mrs. Jarvis, while about the blackmailing he merely says that we doped it out right. He claims that he really loved Miss Norwood and meant to marry her honestly as his first and legal wife was dead, but that is merely a play to the gallery. How did you find out so much about his actions after he became Vivaseur, Mac?"

"Through Jim Shane, that used to be on the force, too. He's running a private-detective agency now and I put him on the job before ever we started for New Orleans. It was clever of Hoyos to fix up that grand English name and accent and family tree for himself and sport around on the money he blackmailed Mrs. Jarvis out of with that swell Long Island bunch where Miss Norwood was visiting." McCarty paused and his face clouded. "That was almost the dirtiest part of the whole job I had to do; to kill that girl's faith and bring misery to her."

"It's not half the misery she'd have had if she'd married him," Dennis remarked.

"I know. She told me after that he had wanted her to elope with him. That was because he didn't dare face Mrs. Jarvis, you see, until he'd got the girl for himself. She says that he suddenly changed his mind the very day she brought him back and introduced him to her uncle; and good reason, too. He'd gone back to town over night and murdered the woman who might have stood in his way so he'd nothing to fear except a too curious search of his record, and old Norwood was not the man for that." McCarty paused to light a fresh cigar from the stump of the old one, and continued: "When Norwood wrote his niece about buying the Hoyos letters she told Vivaseur, of course, and he determined to get them. He stole her latch-key from her so that he could get in the house and he must have been watching it closely that Friday afternoon to have seen Norwood go out and figured that the coast was clear. I'll bet he was a surprised man the day to walk into the museum and find Mrs. Jarvis waiting for him!"

The Inspector nodded.

"He only killed her when he was convinced that she would spoil his game with Miss Norwood," he said. "If it hadn't been for you, Mac, he would have gotten off scot free, for I was on the wrong track entirely. I was a stubborn fool not to listen to you in the first place, and I don't mind admitting it before Riordan here. I never felt so lowdown in my life as when I had to sit there in your rooms with Terhune and that crowd and hear you give me the credit for what you had pulled off all alone while I laughed at you! You had your revenge that night and you saved my official head. I've not forgotten it."

"Well, sir, you had your notion of the case and I had mine," McCarty said simply. "I was just as stubborn as you, and 'twas just by accident that my notion happened to be the lucky one. It's only strange, with all the clues we had, that we didn't hit on the truth sooner."

"There were a lot of minor indications, of course," the Inspector admitted. "But there were just seven real clues. Did that ever strike you?"

"Seven?" McCarty looked up. "You mean that cake marked 'Noel,' the three warnings in macaroni paste, the two poor bits of notes in the wallet and the statement of Captain Marchal? Sure, there were more clues than that, sir; there were twenty-six."

"Twenty-six clues!" the Inspector echoed. "What are you getting at, Mac? I never heard of the others."

McCarty laughed.

"Indeed, and you did! They were the first things ever you learned in your life and the clues you mention are all part of them!" Then as Inspector Druet still looked his mystification McCarty explained naïvely: "All seven of the clues were made up of them, sir—the letters of the whole damned alphabet!"