The Black Eagle Mystery

"Good gracious, Molly!" she cried. "I'm so glad to see you. Come in."

I hesitated, almost whispering:

"Will Miss Whitehall mind?"

"She's not here. I had a phone this morning to say she was sick and wouldn't be down, and Mr. Ford's gone out to lunch." She took me by the hand and pulled me in, shutting the door. "Jerusalem, but it's good to see you. I'm that lonesome sitting here I'm ready to cry."

She didn't look very chipper. Usually she's a pretty girl, the slim, baby-eyed, delicate kind, with a dash of powder on the nose and a touch of red on the lips to help out. But today she looked sort of peaked and shriveled up, the way those frail little wisps of girls do at the least jar.

"Isn't it awful?" she said as soon as she'd got me in – "Just the floor above us!"

I didn't want her to talk about it, but she was like the janitor – only a gag would stop her. So I let her run on while I looked round and took in the place.

It was a fine, large room, two windows in the front and two more on the sides. The furniture was massive and rich-looking and the rugs on the floor as soft to your foot as the turf in the Park. On the walls were blue and white maps, criss-crossed with lines, and pictures of houses, in different styles. But the thing that got me was a little model of a cottage on a table by the window. It was the cutest thing you ever saw – all complete even to the blinds in the windows and the awning over the piazza. I was looking at it when Iola, having got away with the sandwich, said:

"Come on in to Mr. Ford's office while I finish my lunch. I got to get through with it before he comes back."

I followed her into the next room, nearly as large as the one we'd been in, with a wide window and in the center a big roll-top desk. On the edge of this stood a pasteboard box, with some crumpled wax paper in it and an orange. Iola sat down in the swivel chair and picking up the orange began to peel it.

"I hardly ever do this," she explained, "but I thought Miss Whitehall wouldn't mind today as I felt so mean I couldn't face going out to lunch. And then it was all right as she won't be down and I'll have it all cleared off before Mr. Ford comes back."

"Would he be mad?"

You ought to have seen the look she gave me.

"Mad – Tony Ford? It's easy seen you don't know him. She wouldn't say anything either. She's awful considerate. But she's so sort of grand and dignified you don't like to ask favors off her."

"Was she here when it happened last night?"

"I don't know, but I guess not. She generally leaves a little before six. Thanks be to goodness, she told me I could go home early yesterday. I was out of the building by half-past five." She broke the orange apart and held out a piece. "Have a quarter?" I shook my head and she went on. "We're all out of here soon after six. Tony Ford generally stays last and shuts up. Did you see all the papers this morning?"

"Most of them. Why?"

"I was wondering if any of them knew that Mr. Harland and Mr. Barker were both in here yesterday afternoon."

"It wasn't in any of the papers I saw."

"Well, they were – the two of them. And I didn't know but what the reporters, nosing round for anything the way they do, mightn't have heard it. Not that there was anything out of the ordinary about it. She knew them both. Mr. Harland's been in here a few times and Mr. Barker often."

"Why did he come?" I said, surprised, for Iola had never told me they'd the magnate for a customer.

"Business," she looked at me over the orange that she was sucking, her eyes sort of intent and curious. "Didn't I tell you that? He was going to buy a piece of land in the Azalea Woods Estates and build a house for his niece."

"Seems to me," I said, "that the press'll be interested to know about those two visits."

"Well, if any reporters come snooping round here Tony Ford told me to refer them to him or Miss Whitehall, and that's what I'm going to do."

"What time was Mr. Harland here?"

"A little after four. He and Miss Whitehall went into the private office and had a talk. And I'll bet a new hat that he hadn't no more idea of suicide then than you have now, sitting there before me. When he came out he was all smiles, just as natural and happy as if he was going home to a chicken dinner and a show afterward."

"All the papers think it was what Mr. Barker said that drove him to it."

"And they're right for a change – not that I'm saying anything against the press with your husband in it. But it does make more mistakes than any printed matter I ever read, except the cooking receipts on the outside of patent foods. It was Barker that put the crimp in him."

"Then Barker came in afterward?"

"Yes, just before I left. And he and she went into the private office."

I turned in my chair and looked through the open doorway into the third room of the suite.

"Is that the private office?" I asked.

"Yes," says Iola with a giggle, "that's its society name, but Mr. Ford calls it the Surgery."

Before I could ask her why Mr. Ford called it that, the bell rang and she jumped up, squashing the orange peel and bits of paper back in the box.

"Here, you go and answer it," I said, "I'll hide this." She went into the front office and as I pushed the box out of sight on a shelf I could hear her talking to a man at the door. The conversation made me stand still listening.

The man's voice asked for Miss Whitehall, Iola answering that she wasn't there.

"Where is she?" said the man, gruff and abrupt it seemed to me.

"In her own home – she hasn't come down today at all."

"Is she coming later?"

"No, she's sick in bed."

There was a slight pause and then he said:

"Well, I got to see her. I've notes here that are overdue and the endorsee's dead."

"Endorsee?" came Iola's little pipe, full of troubled surprise, "who's he?"

"Hollings Harland who killed himself last night. What's her address?"

I could hear Iola giving it and the man muttering it over. Then there was a gruff "Good morning" and the door snapped shut.

Iola came back, her eyes big, her expression wondering.

"What do you suppose that means?" she said.

I didn't know exactly myself but – notes, endorsee dead! – it had a bad sound. As Iola reached down her lunch box and tied it up, talking uneasily about the man and what he'd wanted, I remembered the gossip in New Jersey when Miss Whitehall started her land scheme. There'd been rumors then that maybe she was backed, and if Hollings Harland had been behind it – My goodness! you couldn't tell what might happen. But I wasn't going to say anything discouraging to Iola, so to change the subject I moved to the door of the private office and looked in.

"Why does Mr. Ford call this the surgery?"

At the mention of the managing clerk Iola brightened up and said with a smirk:

"Because it's where Miss Whitehall chloroforms her clients with her beauty and performs the operation of separating them from their money. He's always saying cute things like that."

We stood in the doorway and looked in. It was a smaller room than the others, but furnished just as richly, with a mahogany center table, big leather-covered armchairs and photographs of foreign views on the walls. In one corner was an elegant, gold-embossed screen, that, when I spied behind it, I saw hid a washstand. It was the last room of the suite and had only one door that led into the office we'd been sitting in. In the outside wall was a window from which you could see way over the city – a wonderful view.

I walked to it and looked out. Over the roofs and chimneys I caught a glimpse of the Hudson, a silvery gleam, and the Hoboken hills beyond. Pressing my forehead against the glass I glimpsed down the sheer drop of the walls to the roof of a church – a flat, black oblong with a squatty dome at one end – squeezed as close as it could get against the lower stories. Back of that were old houses, dwellings that would soon be swept away, the yards behind them narrow strips with the separating fences as small as lines made by a pencil.

I was so interested that for a moment I forgot Iola, but she brought me back with a jerk.

"It was in the room above this that Mr. Harland was sitting with Mr. Barker, before it happened."

"You don't say," I answered. "Is it like this?"

"Exactly the same. I've seen it – one day when the boss was away and I went up with Della Franks. They were in there just as we are in here and then he went out this way – "

The door had been partly pushed to and she started to illustrate how he had left the room, brushing round its edge. Something caught her, there was a sound of ripping and she stopped, clapping her hand on her back:

"There go my pleats – Ding it!" she craned round over her shoulder trying to see the back of her skirt. "What's got me? Oh, the key. Well what do you make of that – caught me like a hook."

She drew her dress off the key, which fell out of the lock on to the floor.

"It's only ripped," I said consolingly. "I can pin it for you."

"Well, there's always something to be thankful for," she said, as I pinned her up. "But it's an unlucky day, I can feel that. That key's never before been on the inside of the door." She bent and picked it up. "I'd like to know what smart Aleck changed it."

"Probably the scrubwoman."

"I guess so," she grumbled, "put it on the wrong side where it waited patiently and then got its revenge on me. Such is life among the lowly."

That night Babbitts was late for dinner. I expected it but Isabella, who says she never lived out except in families where the husband comes home at six like a Christian, was getting restive about the chops, when he finally showed up, tired as a dog.

"My Lord!" he said, as I helped him off with his coat. "What a day!"

"Because of the suicide?"

"Outcome of the suicide and all the rest of it. The wildest panic on the Street. The Copper Pool's gone smash. Let's have something to eat. I've had no lunch and I'm famished."

When we were at table and the edge off his hunger he told me more:

"It began this morning, and this afternoon when there was still no trace of Barker – Gee whizz! it was an avalanche."

"You mean he's gone? Disappeared?"

"That's the way it looks. They had their suspicions when they couldn't find him last night. And today – nobody knows a thing about him at his house or his office, can't account for it, don't understand. Then we turned up something that looked like a clincher. One of his motors, a limousine, and his chauffeur, fellow called Heney, have disappeared too."

"What do they say about that at the house?"

"Same thing – know nothing. Nobody was in the garage from six to half-past eight. When the other men who sleep there came back Heney and the limousine were gone."

"Did anyone see Barker at the Black Eagle Building?"

"No – that's the strongest proof that he's decamped. You'd suppose with such a scene as that going on he'd have shown up. But not a soul's been found who saw him there. If he wanted to slip out quietly he could easily have done it. Jerome and the Franks girl say they were so paralyzed they never gave him another thought and he could have passed behind them, as they stood in the corridor, and gone down by the side stairs. There's another flight round the corner on the branch hall. The street on that side was deserted – the boys say every human being in the neighborhood was round on the Broadway front."

"But, but," I stammered, for I couldn't understand it all, "what's he done? What's the reason for his going?"

"Reason!" said Babbitts with a snort. "Believe me, there's reason enough. Somebody's welched on the Copper Pool and they think it's he and that he's disappeared with twenty million."

"Twenty million! How could he?"

"By selling out on the rest of the crowd. They think he's been selling copper to the Pool itself of which he was the head."

"Was that what he and Mr. Harland were supposed to be quarreling about yesterday afternoon?"

"Yes. The idea now is that Harland, who was one of the Copper crowd, suspected and accused him, that there was a fierce interview in the course of which the lawyer realized he was beaten and ruined."

"Good gracious!" I said. "What are they going to do with him?"

"If he doesn't show up, go after him. A group of ruined financiers doesn't kneel down and pray for their money to come back. And they've got a man looking after their interests who's a lightning striker. A friend of yours. Guess who?"

"Wilbur Whitney!" I crowed.

"The same," said Babbitts.

"Then," I cried, "they'll have him and the twenty millions served up on a salver before the week's out."

If you don't know the story of the Hesketh Mystery you don't know who Wilbur Whitney is, so I'll tell you here. He's one of the biggest lawyers in New York and one of the biggest men anywhere. You'd as soon suspect that an insignificant atom like me would know a man like him as that the palace ashman would know the Czar of Russia, but I do, well – I guess I'm not stretching things if I say we're friends. The Babbitts and the Whitneys don't exchange calls, but they think a lot of each other just the same. And it's my doing, little Molly's – yes, sir, the ex-telephone girl. In the Hesketh case I did a job for Mr. Whitney that brought us together, and ever since it's been kindnesses from the big house off Fifth Avenue, to the little flat on Ninety-fifth Street. He doesn't forget – the real eighteen-carat people never do – and he'll send me tickets for the opera one night and tip off Soapy to a bit of news so he'll get a scoop the week after. Oh, he's just grand!

And right in his office – Mr. Whitney's assistant this year – is one of our realest, truest, dearest pals, Jack Reddy. If this is your first acquaintance with me you don't know much about him and I'll have to give you a little sketch of him for he's got a lot to do with this story.

To look at he's just all right, brown with light-colored hair and gray eyes, over six feet and not an ounce of fat on him. It's not because he's my friend that I'm saying all this, everybody agrees on it. He's thirty years old now and not married. That's because of a tragedy in his life: the girl he loved was killed nearly three years ago. It's a long story – I can't stop to tell it to you – but it broke him up something dreadful, though I and Babbitts and all of us know it was better that he shouldn't have married her. Ever since I've been hoping he'd meet up with his real affinity, someone who'd be the right woman for him. But he hasn't so far. Babbitts says the girl isn't born I'd think good enough – but I don't know. I guess in the ninety millions of people we've got scattered round this vast republic there's a lady that'll fill the bill.

Once I had a crush on him – Babbitts teases me about it now – but it all faded away when Himself came along with his curly blond hair and his dear, rosy, innocent face. But Jack Reddy's still a sort of hero to me. He showed up so fine in those old dark days and he's showed up fine ever since – don't drop off his pedestal and have to be boosted back. I've put several people on pedestals and seen them so unsteady it made me nervous, but he's riveted on.

He's got a country place out in New Jersey – Firehill – where he used to live. But since he's been with Mr. Whitney he stays in town, only going out there in summer. His apartment's down near Gramercy Park – an elegant place – where his two old servants, David and Joanna Gilsey, keep house for him and treat him like he was their only son. Babbitts and I go there often, and Gee, we do have some eats!

"Well," I said, wagging my head proud and confident at Babbitts, "if Wilbur Whitney and Jack Reddy are out to find that Barker man, they'll do it if he burrows through to China."

CHAPTER III

JACK TELLS THE STORY

The appalling suicide of Hollings Harland, followed by the non-appearance of Johnston Barker, precipitated one of the most spectacular smashes Wall Street had seen since the day of the Northern Pacific corner. It began slowly, but as the day advanced and no news of Barker was forthcoming it became a snowslide, for the rumor flew through the city that there had been a "welcher" in the pool and that the welcher was its head – Barker himself.

For years the man had loomed large in the public eye. He was between fifty and sixty, small, wiry, made of iron and steel with a nerve nothing could shake. Like so many of our big capitalists, he had begun life in the mining camps of the far Northwest, had never married, and had kept his doors shut on the world that tried to force his seclusion. Among his rivals he was famed for his daring, his ruthless courage and his almost uncanny foresight. He was a financial genius, the making of money, his life. But as one coup after another jostled the Street, the wiseacres wagged their heads and said "Some day!" It looked now as if the day had come. But that such a man had double-crossed his associates and cleaned them out of twenty millions seemed incredible.

It was especially hard to believe – for us I mean – as on the morning of January 15 he had been in the Whitney offices conferring with the chief on business. His manner was as cool and non-committal as usual, his head full of plans that stretched out into the future. Nothing in his words or actions suggested the gambler concentrated on his last and most tremendous coup. Only as he left he made a remark, that afterward struck us as significant. It was in answer to a query of the chief's about the Copper Pool:

"There are developments ahead – maybe sensational. You'll see in a day or two."

It was the second day after the suicide and in the afternoon, having a job to see to on the upper West Side, I decided to drop in on Molly Babbitts and have a word with her. I always drop in on Molly when I happen to be round her diggings. Three years ago, after the calamity which pretty nearly put a quietus on me for all time, Molly and I clasped hands on a friendship pact that, God willing, will last till the grass is growing over both of us. She's the brightest, biggest-hearted, bravest little being that walks, and once did me a good turn. But I needn't speak of that – it's a page I don't like to turn back. It's enough to say that whatever Molly asks me is done and always will be as long as I've breath in my body.

As I swung up the long reach of Central Park West – she's a few blocks in from there on Ninety-fifth Street – my thoughts, circling round the Harland affair, brought up on Miss Whitehall, whose offices are just below those of the dead man. I wondered if she'd been there and hoped she hadn't, a nasty business for a woman to see. I'd met her several times – before she started the Azalea Woods Estates scheme – at the house of a friend near Longwood and been a good deal impressed as any man would. She was one of the handsomest women I'd ever seen, dark and tall, twenty-five or – six years of age and a lady to her finger tips. I was just laying round in my head for an excuse to call on her when the villa site business loomed up and she and her mother whisked away to town. That was the last I saw of them, and my fell design of calling never came off – what was decent civility in the country, in the town looked like butting in. Bashful? Oh, probably. Maybe I'd have been bolder if she'd been less good-looking.

Molly was at home, and had to give me tea, and here were Soapy's cigars and there were Soapy's cigarettes. Blessed little jolly soul, she welcomes you as if you were Admiral Dewey returning from Manila Bay. Himself was at the Harland inquest and maybe he and the boys would be in, as the inquest was to be held at Harland's house on Riverside Drive. So as we chatted she made ready for them – on the chance. That's Molly too.

As she ran in and out of the kitchen she told me of a visit she'd paid the day before to Miss Whitehall's office and let drop a fact that gave me pause. While she was there a man had come with a note from some bank which, from her description, seemed to be protested. That was a surprise, but what was a greater was that Harland had been the endorsee. Out Longwood way there'd been a good deal of speculation as to how the Whitehalls had financed so pretentious a scheme. Men I knew there were of the opinion there had been a silent partner. If it was Harland – who had a finger in many pies – the enterprise was doomed. I sat back puffing one of Babbitts' cigars and pondering. Why the devil hadn't I called? If it was true, I might have been of some help to them.

Before I had time to question her further, the hall door opened and Babbitts came in with a trail of three reporters at his heels. I knew them all – Freddy Jaspar, of the Sentinel, who three years ago had tried to fix the Hesketh murder on me and had taken twelve months to get over the agony of meeting me, Jones, of the Clarion, and Bill Yerrington, star reporter of a paper which, when it couldn't get its headlines big enough without crowding out the news, printed them in blood red.

They had come from the inquest and clamored for food and drink, crowding round the table and keeping Molly, for all her preparations, swinging like a pendulum between the kitchen and the dining-room. I was keen to hear what had happened, and as she whisked in with Jaspar's tea and Babbitts' coffee, a beer for Yerrington and the whiskey for Jones, they began on it.

There'd been a bunch of witnesses – the janitor, the elevator boy, Harland's stenographer who'd had hysterics, and Jerome, his head clerk, who'd identified the body and had revealed an odd fact not noticed at the time. The front hall window of the eighteenth story – the window Harland was supposed to have jumped from – had been closed when Jerome ran into the hall.

"Jerome's positive he opened it," said Babbitts. "He said he remembered jerking it up and leaning out to look at the crowd on the street."

"How do they account for that?" I asked. "Harland couldn't have stood on the sill and shut it behind him."

Jaspar explained:

"No – It wasn't that window. He went to the floor below, the seventeenth. The janitor, going up there an hour afterward, found the hall window on the seventeenth floor wide open."

"That's an odd thing," I said – "going down one story."

"You can't apply the ordinary rules of behavior to men in Harland's state," said Jones. "They're way off the normal. I remember one of my first details was the suicide of a woman, who killed herself by swallowing a key when she had a gun handy. They get wild and act wild."

Yerrington, who was famous for injecting a sinister note into the most commonplace happenings, spoke up:

"The window's easily explained. What is queer is the length of time that elapsed between his leaving the office and his fall to the street. That Franks girl, when she wasn't whooping like a siren in a fog, said it was 6.05 when he went out. At twenty-five to seven the body fell – half an hour later." He looked at me with a dark glance. "What did he do during that time?"

"I'll tell you in two words," said Jaspar. "Stop and think for a moment. What was that man's mental state? He's ruined – he's played a big game and lost. But life's been sweet to him – up till now it's given him everything he asked for. There's a struggle between the knowledge that death is the best way out and the desire to live."

"To express it in language more suited to our simple intellects," said Jones, "he's taken half an hour to make up his mind."

"Precisely."

"Where did he spend that half hour?" said Yerrington, in a deep, meaningful voice.

"Hi, you Yerrington," cried Babbitts, "this isn't a case for posing as Burns on the Trail. What's the matter with him spending it in the seventeenth floor hall?"

Molly, who was sitting at the head of the table in a mess of cups and steaming pots, colored the picture.

"Pacing up and down, trying to get up his nerve. Oh, I can see him perfectly!"

"Strange," said Yerrington, looking somberly at the droplight, "that no one saw him pacing there."

"A great deal stranger if they had," cut in Jones, "considering there was no one there to see. It was after six – the offices were empty."

They had the laugh on Yerrington who muttered balefully, dipping into his glass.

"It fits in with the character of Harland," I said, "the stuff in the papers, all you hear about him. He was an intellect first – cool, resolute, hard as a stone. That kind of man doesn't act on impulse. As Mrs. Babbitts says, he probably paced up and down the empty corridor with his vision ranging over the situation, arguing it out with himself and deciding death was the best way. Then up with the window and out."