The Black Eagle Mystery

"Did he say what he was doing in Philadelphia?"

"He had some new job there, he didn't say what, but he said he was well paid. That came out in his blustering about not wanting my money."

There was a pause, Babbitts and O'Mally scribbling in their note books, Ford sitting up in that hunched position, looking surly at his hands lying on the counterpane. So far every word he'd said tallied with what they already knew. Babbitts was wondering how O'Mally was going to get round to the real business of the interview, when the detective suddenly raised up from his notes, and leaning forward tapped lightly on one of Ford's hands with the point of his pencil.

"Say, Ford, how about that legacy from your uncle?"

Ford gave a start, stiffened up and looked quick as a flash into the detective's face.

"What about it?" he stammered.

O'Mally, his body bending forward, his pencil tip still on Ford's hand, said with sudden, grim meaning:

"We know where it came from."

For a second they eyed each other. Babbitts said it looked like an electric current was passing between them, holding them as still as if they were mesmerized. Then O'Mally went on, very low, each word falling slow and clear from his lips:

"We know all about that money and the game you've been playing. This Sammis business isn't what we're here for. It's the other – the Harland matter, the thing that's been occupying your time and thoughts lately. That outside job of yours – that job that was finished on the night of January the fifteenth." He paused and Ford's glance slid away from him, his eyes like the eyes of a trapped animal traveling round the walls of the room. "We've got you, Ford. The whole thing's in our hands. Your only chance is to tell – tell everything you know."

In describing it to me Babbitts said that moment was one of the tensest in the whole case. Ford was cornered, you could see he knew it and you could see the consciousness of guilt in his pallid face and trembling hands. O'Mally was like a hunter that has his prey at last in sight, drawn forward to the edge of his chair, his jaw squared, his eyes piercing into Ford like gimlets.

"Go ahead," he almost whispered. "What was that money paid you for?"

Ford tried to smile, the ghost of that cock-sure grin distorting his face like a grimace.

"I guess you've got the goods on me," he said. "I know when I'm beaten. You needn't try any third degree. I'll tell."

Babbitts was so excited he could hardly breathe. The Big Story was his at last – he was going to hear the murderer's confession from his own lips. Ford lifted his head, and holding it high and defiant, looked at O'Mally and said slowly:

"I got that money from Hollings Harland for reporting to him the affair between Johnston Barker and Miss Whitehall."

If you'd hit him in the head with a brick Babbitts said he couldn't have been more knocked out. He had sense enough to smother the exclamation that nearly burst from him, but he did square round in his chair and look aghast at O'Mally. That old bird never gave a sign that he'd got a blow in the solar plexus. For all anyone could guess by his face, it was just what he'd expected to hear.

"You were in Harland's pay," he murmured, nodding his head.

"I was in Harland's pay from the first of December to the day of his death. In that time he gave me eight hundred dollars."

O'Mally, slouching comfortable against his chair back, drooped his head toward his shoulder and said:

"Suppose you tell us the whole thing, straight from the start. It'll be easier that way."

"Any way you want it," said Ford. "It's all the same to me. I first met Harland in the elevator some time in the end of November. Seeing me every day he spoke to me casually and civilly, as one man does to another. There was nothing more than that till Johnston Barker began coming to the Azalea Woods Estates, then, bit by bit, Harland grew more friendly. I'll admit I was flattered, a chap in my position doesn't usually get more than a passing nod from a man in his. As he warmed up toward me, feeling his way with questions, I began to get a line on what he was after – he wanted a tab kept on Barker."

"Jealous?" O'Mally suggested.

"Desperately jealous. As soon as the thing opened up before me I saw how matters stood. He was secretly crazy about Miss Whitehall and was easy until Barker cut in, then he got alarmed. Barker was a bigger man than he, and there was no doubt about it that she liked Barker. When he realized that he put it up to me straight. He'd sized me up pretty thoroughly by that time and knew that I'd – what's the use of mincing matters – do his dirty work for him."

O'Mally inclined his head as if he was too polite to contradict.

"He offered me good money and all I had to do was to watch her and Barker and report what I heard or saw. It was a cinch – I was on the spot, the only other person in the office a fool of a stenographer, a girl, who hardly counted."

"What was the result of your – er – investigations?"

"That Barker was in love with her too. He came often on a flimsy excuse that he wanted to build a house in the tract. She was friendly at first, then for a while very cold and haughty – as if they might have had a quarrel. Then they seemed to make that up, and get as thick as thieves."

"Did she seem to care for Harland?"

"Not exactly – anyway not the way he did for her. She was always awfully nice to him – the few times he came into the office – gentle and sweet, but not the way she was with Barker. She was two different women to them – with Harland a sort of affable, gracious winner, but with Barker a girl with a man she's fond of, natural, glad to see him, no society stunts.

"A little before Christmas I caught on to the fact that she was receiving letters from Barker, and Harland offered me extra money if I'd get their contents. This wasn't so easy. Generally she took them away with her, but twice she left them on her desk. All I had to do then was to stay overtime and when she was gone, copy them. That way I got on to something that phazed us both – she and Barker were up to some scheme."

O'Mally moved slightly in his chair.

"Scheme?" he said – "What do you mean by scheme?"

"Something they were planning to do. After Christmas every time he'd come they'd go into the private office and talk there so low you couldn't catch a word. And the letters were all about it, but we couldn't get a line on what it was. I'll show them to you and you'll see for yourself. It got Harland wild, for though they weren't exactly love letters, they showed that she and Barker were close knit in some secret enterprise."

"Did you continue this work till the day of the suicide?"

"I did – to the night – to the time it happened. Harland was getting more and more worked up. I don't know whether it was the Barker-Whitehall business or his own financial worries, but I could see he was holding the lid on with difficulty. That day, January fifteenth, as you may remember, he was in her office and had a talk with her. As he went out I saw that he looked cheered-up, brisk and confident. Of course I've no idea what she said to him, but knowing the state he was in, I'll swear it was something that gave him hope. Yet a few hours after that he killed himself.

"Seeing him so heartened up and being curious myself, I decided to stay that evening and do a little quiet snooping among her papers. But she nearly blocked that game. She was in the habit of going between half-past five and six, leaving me to close up. That night she didn't do it, but hung about in the office, and after watching her for a few minutes I saw that she was on the jump – moving about, going from one desk to the other, glancing at the clock. Her manner made me certain that something was up – it was possible it had to do with the scheme she and Barker were hatching. I got the idea that I'd go and come back after a while, on the chance of stumbling on something that would be useful to my employer. I left her there and after loafing round for about half an hour returned. The office was dark and she'd gone. I lit up and looked over her desk in the Exhibit Room and a table in my room where she kept some papers, but found nothing. Then I thought I'd take a look into the private office but that door was locked."

"Ah, locked," said O'Mally, calm as a summer sea. "Was that her custom?"

"Not as far as I knew. I'd never found it locked before. It gave me an uneasy feeling for I thought she might have suspected what I was doing and turned the key against any invasion of her particular sanctum. She was no fool and might have caught on. So I fixed up the papers as I found them and left the office. You know what time that was, or you do if you read of the Harland suicide. I've always supposed the poor chap was up that side corridor as I stood there waiting for the car."

Babbitts bent over his notebook scribbling – he had to hide his face. He told me he thought the expression on it of stunned, crestfallen blankness would have given him away to an idiot. Waiting with their ears stretched to hear a confession of murder – and this was what they got! And the man wasn't lying. Every word he'd said matched with the facts we'd been worming and digging to find. He couldn't possibly have known murder had been discovered – he hadn't any suspicion a murder had been committed. The great revelation, that was to have broken on the public with an explosion like a dynamite bomb, was that Tony Ford was Harland's paid spy.

"Well," he said, looking at O'Mally, "what have you got to say? Go ahead with it if it'll give you any satisfaction. Only you needn't waste your breath. I know, without being told, that it's a rotten, dirty business."

O'Mally, his face as red as the harvest moon, pulled at his mustache looking thoughtful. But, sore as he must have been – you'd have to know O'Mally to realize what his disappointment was – he answered cool and easy:

"I ain't got anything to say. It's not my job to train the young. You've told me what I wanted to know – that's all I'm here for."

Ford turned to Babbitts and asked him to get some letters off the table and then went on to O'Mally:

"How did you come to find it out?"

Babbitts, gathering up the letters, cocked his head to listen, wondering how O'Mally was going to get out of it. But you couldn't phaze that veteran.

"Several ways – you see what we're after is Johnston Barker. It's the Copper Pool that owns us, and nosing round in our quiet little way we got on to the Barker-Whitehall affair and from that followed the scent to that legacy of yours. We didn't altogether believe in that uncle up-state – thought maybe he was Johnston Barker in private life, and that you might know something," he gave a lazy, good-humored laugh. "Got fooled all round. I don't mind telling you now that the way we happened on Sammis was pure accident. Thought he was Barker and had him shadowed. He looked like enough to him to have been his brother."

"That's so," said Ford, as Babbitts handed him the letters, "especially with his hat on. I noticed it myself." He selected two papers from the bunch and handed them to O'Mally. "There – those are the letters I spoke of. This one," he flicked it across the counterpane, "is just a note from Harland making a date. I don't know how I happened to keep it."

They were the three letters Babbitts had taken after the attack, copies of which at that moment were lying in O'Mally's pocket.

It was not till they were out on the hospital steps that they dared to speak. O'Mally's face was a study, his mouth drooped down to his chin and his eyes dismal and despairing like he'd come from a tragedy.

"Well!" he said, "what do you make of that?"

"Zero!"

"Not a thing to do with it, hasn't a suspicion of it, no more involved in it than that sparrow there," he pointed to a sparrow that had lit on the step near-by. "I've had setbacks in my profession before – but this!" He stopped, stuck his hands into his pockets and stared blankly at the sparrow.

"Well, if it lets him out," said Babbitts, "it tightens the cords round the other two."

"Um," agreed O'Mally, still gazing stonily at the sparrow, "that's what keeps your spirits up."

"With him eliminated the whole thing concentrates on her and Barker."

"It does, my son." O'Mally roused up and came out of his depression. "Instead of a brain and a pair of hands as we've called it, it was a brain and one hand – the smart hand, the right. That was the woman."

He turned and began to descend the steps, taking Babbitts by the arm to draw him closer and speaking low:

"Do you see how it went? They were in the private office when Ford came back – she and Barker and the dead man. When they heard him come they switched off the light and locked the door – and, Great Scott, can you imagine how they felt! Shut in there in the dark with their victim, not knowing who Ford could be or what he was doing, listening to him rummaging round, his steps coming nearer, his hand on the doorknob! I'm too familiar with murder to see any terrors in it – but that situation! I've never known the beat of it in all my experience. Then when Ford goes – on his very heels – over and out with the thing they'd killed. And both of them back there again, or maybe stealing to the front windows and taking a look down at the crowd below."

They walked up the street arm in arm, talking in hushed voices. As he looked at the faces of the people that passed the thought came to Babbitts that in a short time, maybe a few days, they'd be reading in the papers of the awful crime not one of them now had a suspicion of.

CHAPTER XV

MOLLY TELLS THE STORY

I heard all this late that night from Babbitts. But there was more to it than I've told in the last chapter, for after they left the hospital O'Mally and Babbitts went to the Whitney office and had a séance with the old man and Mr. George.

Though Ford had disappointed them his story had made the way clear for a decisive move. This was decided upon then and there. On Monday morning they would ask Miss Whitehall to come to Whitney & Whitney's and subject her to a real examination. If she maintained her pose of ignorance they would suddenly face her with their complete information. They felt tolerably certain this would be too much for her, secure in her belief that no murder had been suspected. Surprise and terror would seize her, even a hardened criminal, placed unexpectedly in such a position, was liable to break down.

The next day was Sunday. I'll not forget it in a hurry. Many a high pressure day I've had in my twenty-five years but none that had anything over that one. It was gray and overcast, clouds low down over the roofs which stretched away in a gray huddle of flat tops and slanting mansards and chimneys and clotheslines. Babbitts spent the morning on the davenport looking like he was in a boat floating through a sea of newspapers. I couldn't settle down to anything, thinking of what was going to happen the next morning, thinking of that girl, that beautiful girl, with her soul stained with crime, and wondering if she could feel the shadow that was falling across her.

After lunch Himself went out saying he'd take a shot at finding Freddy Jaspar and going with him up to Yonkers where there'd been some anarchist row. He was restless too. If things turned out right he'd get his Big Story at last – and what a story it would be! – he'd get a raise for certain, and as he kissed me good-bye he said he'd give me the two glass lamps and a new set of furs, anything I wanted short of sable or ermine.

In the afternoon Iola dropped in all dolled up and decked with a permanent smile, for she'd landed her new job and liked it fine. As she prattled away she let drop something that caught my ear, and lucky it was as you'll see presently. On her way over she'd met Delia, the Whitehalls' maid, who told her the ladies were going to move back to the Azalea Woods Estates where someone had given them a cottage. Delia had just been to see them and found that Mrs. Whitehall had already gone, and Miss Whitehall was packing up to follow on Monday afternoon. Iola thought it was nice they'd got the cottage but didn't I think Miss Whitehall would be afraid of the dullness of the country after living in town? I said you never could tell. What I thought was that if there was anything for Miss Whitehall to be afraid of it wasn't dullness.

At six Iola left, having a date for supper, and a little after that I had a call from Babbitts, saying he and Freddy Jaspar had found the anarchist business more important than they expected and he wouldn't be home till all hours.

Isabella doesn't come on Sunday so I got my own supper and then sat down in the parlor and tried to read the papers. But I couldn't put my mind on them. In a few days, perhaps as soon as Tuesday, the Dispatch would have the Harland murder on the front page. I could see the headlines – the copy reader could spread himself – and I tried to work out how Babbitts would write it, where he'd begin – with the crime itself or with all the story that came before it.

It was near eleven and me thinking of bed when there was a ring at the bell. That's pretty late for callers, even in a newspaper man's flat, and I jumped up and ran into the hall. After I'd jammed the push button, I opened the door, spying out for the head coming up the stairs. It came – a derby hat and a pair of broad shoulders, and then Jack Reddy's face, raised to mine, grave and frowning.

"Hello, Molly," he said. "It's late, but I couldn't find any of the others so I came to you."

If he hadn't seen anyone he didn't know what had transpired. The thought made me bubble up with eagerness to tell him the new developments. That was the reason, I guess, I didn't notice how serious he was, not a smile of greeting, not a handshake. He didn't even take off his coat, but throwing his hat on one of the hallpegs, said:

"I've only just got in from Buffalo. I phoned to the Whitney house from the Grand Central, but they're both out of town, not to be back till tomorrow morning, and O'Mally's away too. Do you know how Ford is?"

"You bet I do. He's sat up, taken nourishment and talked."

"Talked? Have they seen him?"

"They have." I turned away and moved up the hall. "Come right in and I'll tell you."

I went into the dining-room where the drop light hung bright over the table, and was going on to the parlor when I heard his voice, loud and commanding, behind me:

"What's he said?"

I whisked round and there he was standing by the table, his eyes fixed hard and almost fierce on me.

"Won't you come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly," I said laughing, just to tease him. He answered without the ghost of a smile:

"No. Go on quick. What did Ford say?"

"All right." I dropped down into Babbitts' chair and motioned him to mine. "Sit down there. It's a long story and I can't tell it to you if you stand in front of me like a patience on a monument."

He took the chair and putting his elbows on the table, raised his hands, clasped together, and leaned his mouth on them. The light fell full on his face and over those clasped hands his eyes stared at me so fixed and steady they looked the eyes of an image. I don't think while I told him he ever batted a lid and I know he never said a word.

"So you see," I said, when I was through, "Ford's as much out of it as you are."

Without moving his hands he asked:

"What do they think?"

"Why, what do you suppose they think? Instead of there being three of them in it there were two."

"They think she and Barker did it?"

"Of course. They've worked it out this way" – I leaned over the table, my voice low, giving him the details of their new theory. As I told it there was something terrible in those eyes. All the kindness went out of them and a fire came in its place till they looked like crystals with a flame behind them.

When I finished he spoke and this time his voice sounded different, hoarse and muffled:

"Have they made any plan? Decided on their next step?"

"They've got it all arranged," and I went on about the interview that was planned for the next morning. "With her thinking herself safe the way she does, they're sure they can give her such a jolt she'll lose her nerve and tell."

He gave an exclamation, not words, just a choked, fierce sound, and dropping his hands on the table, burst out like a volcano:

"The dogs! The devils! Dragging her down there to terrify a lie out of her!"

He leaped to his feet, sending the chair crashing down on the floor. I fell back where I sat paralyzed, not only by his words, but at the sight of him.

I think I've spoken of the fact that he had a violent temper and he's told me himself that he's conquered it. But now for the first time I saw it and believe me it was far from dead. I would hardly have known him. His face was savage, his eyes blazing, and the words came from him as if they were shot out on the breaths that broke in great heaving gasps from his lungs.

"Haven't you," he said, "a woman, any heart in you? Are you, that I've always thought all kindness and generosity, willing to hound an innocent girl to her ruin?"

He grabbed the back of a chair near him and leaned over it glaring at me, shaking, gasping, and the color of ashes.

"But – but," I faltered, "she's done it."

"She hasn't," he shouted. "You're all fools, imbeciles, mad. It's a lie – an infamous, brutal lie!"

He dropped the chair and turned away, beginning to pace up and down, his hands clenched, raging to himself. The room was full of the sound of his breathing, as if some great throbbing piece of machinery was inside him.

And I – there in my seat, fallen limp against the back – saw it all. What a fool I'd been – what an idiot! He with his empty heart and that beautiful girl – the girl that any man might have loved and how much more Jack Reddy, knowing her poor and lonesome and believing her innocent and persecuted. I felt as if the skies had fallen on me. My hero – that I'd never found a woman good enough for – in love with a murderess!

He stopped in his pacing and tried to get a grip on himself, tried to speak quietly with his voice gone to a husky murmur:

"Tomorrow do you say? Tomorrow they're going to do this damnable thing?"

"Tomorrow at ten in Mr. Whitney's office," I answered, weak and trembling.

He stood for a moment looking on the ground, his brows drawn low over his eyes, the bones of his jaw showing set under the flesh. A deadly fear seized me – a fear that followed on a flash of understanding. I got up – I guess as white as he was – and went over to him.

"Jack," I said. "You can't do anything. Everything's against her. There's not a point that doesn't show she's guilty."

He gave me a look from under his eyebrows like the thrust of a sword.

"Don't say that to me again, Molly," he almost whispered, "or I'll forget the debt I owe you and the affection I've felt for you since the day we swore to be friends."

"What can you do?" I cried, fairly distracted. "They've got the evidence. It's there – "

I tried to put my hand on his arm but he shook it off and walked toward the door. I followed him and during those few short steps from the dining-room to the hall, it came to me as clear as if he'd said it that he was going to Carol Whitehall to help her run away.

"What are you going to do?" I said, standing in the doorway as he pulled his hat off the peg and turned toward the hall door.

"That's my affair," he threw back over his shoulder.

He had his hand on the knob when a thought – an inspiration flashed on me. I don't know where it came from, but when you're fond of a person and see them headed for a precipice, I believe you get some sort of wireless communication from Heaven or some place of that order.

"Miss Whitehall's not in town now," I said.

He stopped short and looked back at me:

"Where is she?"

"They've gone back to New Jersey. Some people loaned them a cottage in the Azalea Woods Estates."

"I knew that – but they're not there yet?"

"Yes. They went yesterday, sooner than they expected."

He stood for a moment, looking at the floor, then glanced back at me and said:

"Thank you for telling me that. Good night."