CHAPTER V.
PLAIN FOOLS OR IDEALISTS.
THE disk was round and flat, a third of an inch in diameter, with a narrow, well-beveled edge, and no marks of any sort on it except a number—17—deeply engraved in the center. Ogilvie was still examining it when Gadsby returned from the next room, where he had had a lengthy telephone conversation with headquarters.
“I have sent some of my very best men out on the case,” he said. “Detective Sergeant Miller is going to get a line on Martyn Spencer. O'Neale will investigate the murdered man and his connection with Doctor McGrath. And Campbell and Wimpflinger and a couple of others are going to see what they can find out about the different club members.”
“That's bully.”
“What do you make of that disk?”
“Oh, nothing much. I guess it's the badge of the Benefactors Club.”
“Sounds fairly reasonable.”
“There's only one thing about it that's puzzling me,” continued Ogilvie.
“What?”
“Here!” Ogilvie gave the round bit of metal to the other. “See for yourself, then we'll compare notes. In the meantime I'll take a look at friend Spencer's luxurious ulster.”
While the police commissioner examined the club badge, Ogilvie took the sable coat from the rack in the outer hall and scrutinized it narrowly.
Presently he got up and put on the coat.
Gadsby looked up. “Not dreaming of going out, are you?” he asked, alarmed.
“Heavens—no! I'm just going to reconstruct the scene in No. 17 when I entered. Look here a moment, will you?”
“Certainly.”
“That's the way I came in. I took off my coat and gave it to the boy—like this. The boy gave it to the girl—this way. Watching?”
“Yes, yes. Go on.”
“The girl” Ogilvie puzzled, then continued: “Wait! I remember! Yes. First she fingered the coat as if she liked the feel of it. And afterward—afterward, Bob—she made that funny remark about my having the check—'the right check'—and exchanged looks with the red-bearded man.”
“Well, I fail to see”
“Question is,” said Ogilvie, “did she feel something which caused her to make that remark? Let me see if I can recall the scene. She took the coat with both hands—this way. No, no—wait—the other way! Her right hand like this—while her left hand slipped beneath the fur collar—here—watch—this way!” He suited the action to the words. “Now, what did she feel? Or what did she find?”
He turned up the fur collar, looked close for several seconds, and smiled.
“Bob,” he said, “let's have that badge for a moment.”
“Found a clew?”
“I think so.”
The police commissioner came nearer. “Another such badge?” he inquired.
“No, but the marks of one. Look here! See where the fur has been rubbed off? Now watch!” He put the disk over the place he had indicated. “The disk fits it exactly—isn't that so?”
“Right. And”
“It's quite clear. There was a badge fastened here when the girl took the coat. And—by jingo—Spencer knew it when he forced the coat on me!”
“Where is the disk now?”
“I haven't the faintest idea. The girl took it, or I lost it. 'The right check'—the disk she meant! And it was this disk, combined with the signal code of knocks at the door, which gave me the right to enter, or perhaps”—he slurred, then went on, instinctively lowering his voice—“the duty to enter?”
“What do you mean by that?” came the other's puzzled query.
“Just that.”
“But”
“Listen!” said Ogilvie. “Wasn't Spencer afraid of No, 17?”
“Doubtless.”
“Would he have been afraid unless it had been his duty to go there? If it had only been his right—why, man—he needn't have gone! That's clear, isn't it?”
“Yes.”
“And, furthermore, didn't he slip me twenty thousand dollars of the realm to go in his place? Weren't they expecting”
“Not Spencer!” interrupted Gadsby. “Otherwise they wouldn't have framed you up, since they didn't know you—had no reason to”
“Well, they were expecting somebody—somebody who was going to get it in the neck, for some reason or other. That's the knot we'll have to solve.”
Ogilvie was silent for a few moments. He walked up and down, thinking deeply, presently turning to answer Gadsby's question what the puzzling thing was which he had noticed about the badge.
“Just this!” he replied. “What metal is it made of?”
The police commissioner looked at it again. “I don't know,” he admitted finally.
“Nor do I. Of course I am not an expert metallurgist. But I know enough to tell that it's neither gold nor silver”
“It isn't platinum, either.”
“And it isn't steel or bronze or any other metal I am familiar with. Bob, please send Tompkins over to some jeweler on the Avenue and have him examine the thing.”
“We've an expert assayist at headquarters—one of my innovations,” said the police commissioner rather proudly. “He'll give us a report by to-night.”
“Bully!”
The day crawled on leadenly. Gadsby left to attend to his duties at headquarters, and Ogilvie fell a prey to certain violent reactions from his cheerful, jesting mood. He became nervous, fidgety, even afraid, as he stared out into the street, well hidden by the window curtains.
Day died, with a white, purple-nicked pall of snow, pierced by the crimson and gold lights reflected on innumerable windowpanes, and the dull, lemon glow of the street lamps, and melting, farther out, into a drab cosmos where the brown, moist haze from the Hudson drifted up, twisting and turning to the call of the river wind.
Night was coming. Night—thought Ogilvie, with just a trace of bitter self-pity—night, over on Broadway, with food and light phrases, with the festive hooting of motor horns and gayety and laughter and the tuning-up of the orchestras and the clapping of white-gloved hands! And here he was—suspected of murder—in hiding.
“Mr. Ogilvie! Please, sir!” Tompkins interrupted the other's gray reveries.
“Yes?”
“I telephoned to Miss Dillon, sir. I met her and talked to her.”
“Oh—good!” Ogilvie smiled as he regained his poise. “What particular lie did you tell her?”
Tompkins hesitated for a few moments. Then he spoke up straight: “Beg pardon, sir, but I told her the truth.”
At first Ogilvie felt enraged. “What the mischief”' Then quite suddenly he smiled and shook the butler's wrinkled hand.
“Tompkins,” he said, “you're an A Number One peach, and—take it from me—you do know women. Miss Dillon's the sort of girl one just naturally has to tell the truth to. You were right and I was wrong. How did she take it?”
“Well, sir, she took it very bravely. But then, of course, she had had a sort of a warning”
“Warning! What do you mean?”
And, urged on by the impatient Ogilvie, the stoical old Englishman told him how he had telephoned to Miss Dillon, how suddenly he had decided not to trust his message to the telephone wires, but had made an appointment with her. He had met her in front of the public library. “Yes, sir,” he added with a little smile, “I felt quite like I used to forty years ago; asked her to wear a red rose so I'd recognize her.” Then he had related to her what had happened to her fiancé. She, on her side, had given him also some rather startling news to communicate to Ogilvie. For late last night—she was living alone in a tiny flat—a messenger had brought her an envelope. She had found in it a check for a hundred thousand dollars, drawn on the Drovers' National Bank, and made out by Martyn Spencer, with a note which she had given to Tompkins to bring to Ogilvie.
The latter read:
- Dear little Marie: I haven't seen you since you were a small girl in short skirts and I quite a big boy, just out of college, up at Grandmother Ryerson's old farm in Vermont. But I haven't exactly forgotten you. I have made a lot of money these last few years, and so—please—accept the inclosed check with all my very best cousinly wishes. Don't be a silly little proud fool and refuse it. After all, we are cousins, and you may need the money; or, if not you, then the man you are engaged to marry, Blaine Ogilvie. And criminal lawyers are expensive. Don't call me up or write to me, as I am leaving the country to-night, and not even my office force has the faintest notion where I am bound for. Yours very cordially,
The news of Spencer's having left the country was confirmed a few moments later by the police commissioner, who came in filled to the brim with the different reports he had received from his picked detectives, as well as from his expert assayist.
All the reports, according to the police commissioner's system, were in writing, and Detective Sergeant Miller's was explicit:
- Martyn Spencer left last night for an unknown destination. I don't know yet whether by train, boat, or automobile. I questioned some of his employees, the help of the Hotel Stentorian, where he has taken a suite by the year, rent paid in advance, his valet, and the elevator starter in his office building. They are all new people whom he has hired since his return to New York, a few months back. They have orders to carry on the work which he has mapped out for them, mostly the selling of various parcels of real estate in the Bronx, and which will take them easily twelve months, Mr. Anthony Hicks, his private secretary, has been given power of attorney over whatever local business Martyn Spencer has in New York, with orders to transmit all money realized to the credit of Martyn Spencer with the branch of the British Linen Bank in Glasgow, Scotland. He has also been intrusted with a large sum banked with the Drovers' National Bank to pay the salaries of the office force and of Spencer's valet for the next eighteen months, as well as for overhead expenses and incidentals. I have started inquiries as to Spencer's former life and shall make a further report to-morrow.
“Found out quite a lot, didn't he?” complimented Blaine Ogilvie.
“Right,” agreed the other. “Miller has a persuasive way and X-ray eyes. Oh—wait”—turning over the typewritten sheet. “Here's a postscript;” and he read:
- I have furthermore found out that the Bronx real estate which Martyn Spencer has given orders to sell was only acquired by him during the last few months, after his return to America.
The police commissioner shook his head. “I don't see what good that particular bit of information will do us,” he commented.
“Don't you?” asked Ogilvie softly.
“Do you?”
“You bet!” came the other's reply. “In fact, I think that, taken in conjunction with the other business details, it's the most interesting and illuminating part of the whole report. I believe it constitutes that mysterious and romantic thing which you fellows of the police call a clew.” .
“Mind explaining?”
“Not a bit.” Ogilvie leaned forward in his chair. “There's been a sudden and tremendous slump in business these last few months, hasn't there?”
“Yes,” admitted the other rather sadly. “All my own investments”
“Everything,” interrupted Ogilvie, “has come tumbling down like a house made of cards, and chiefly real estate. There has been no building going on in Manhattan for over three months, isn't that right?”
“Perfectly. And”
“Why, then, should Martyn Spencer—who is a business man, a mighty shrewd one and as rich as mud—take, for instance, that hundred thousand dollars he sent to Miss Dillon and the twenty thousand he slipped to me—sell at this moment, when prices are down to bed rock, instead of holding on and waiting for a rise? Furthermore, why does he, the wary, careful, farsighted financier, leave his local affairs in the hands of a recently hired office force and give his power of attorney to a youthful and recently acquired private secretary?”
“Well, why? What's the answer?” asked Gadsby impatiently.
“Spencer got away in such a hurry that he didn't care, hadn't time to care, what happened to his business here. And, by the same token, it's evident that he does not intend to return to New York. On the other hand, when he came here, he took a long lease on his office space and on his suite at the Hotel Stentorian—which proves that originally he did intend to make a lengthy stay, perhaps to settle here for good. Therefore, he made up his mind to leave in a hurry, regardless of everything except”
“His safety?” interjected Gadsby.
“Exactly! Clew, eh?”
“Clew is right!” said the police commissioner, and turned to the next report, O'Neale's, which dealt with the murdered man, Monro Clafflin, and his connection with Doctor McGrath.
O'Neale, too, had worked with efficiency and dispatch. Via the gliding gossip of the back stairs and the pantry and with the help of his honeyed Irish tongue, he had ascertained that Doctor McGrath—the same McGrath, he added incidentally, who had invented the famous McGrath pulmotor—had been Clafflin's physician for a number of years, that practitioner and patient were intimate personal friends, that the latter had been suffering for a long time from a complication of organic diseases, and that—here O'Neale had attached a verbatim report by Miss Maisie Heinz, nurse—he had not been expected to live the year out. For the last eighteen months Clafflin had been in almost continuous pain.
The report wound up:
- For the last few weeks Mr. Clafflin appeared a little more cheerful. Once he mentioned to Josiah Higgins, his butler—whose verbatim report I attach—that there was a possibility of his recuperating, as Doctor McGrath had spoken to him about a remarkable young physician whom he wished to consult about the case. Last night Mr. Clafflin left in the doctor's car, coughing badly and evidently in pain, but cheerful and laughing in spite of it. The butler overheard the last conversation between the two. “Monro, old man,” had said the doctor, “there's a pretty good chance that you'll be rid of your sufferings for good and all to-night!” “Rather quick cure?” Clafflin had replied, with a smile. “But possible!” had come the doctor's final words.
The police commissioner put down the report, and Ogilvie looked up.
“Bob,” he said, “Doctor McGrath's prophecy came true, didn't it?”
“How so?”
“Well, Monro Clafflin did get rid of his sufferings for good and all last night, didn't he? He died!”
“That's one way of putting it,” said the police commissioner, and added that he had met O'Neale coming up the Avenue on his way home, and that the latter, in the meantime, had made further investigations about Doctor Hillyer McGrath.
“Did he find out anything interesting?” asked Ogilvie.
“No. He called on the doctor—under some professional pretext, sore throat or something like that—and found him at home. He tells me the doctor lives in an extremely modest little apartment and seems to be a poor man.
“Funny!” commented Ogilvie.
“You mean—because Clafflin, his friend and patient, was rich?”
“No. But I would have imagined that the pulmotor he invented must have brought him in quite a lot of money.”
“Perhaps he didn't have it patented,” said Gadsby, and turned to the next report.
Detectives Campbell and Wimpflinger had been sent to investigate the hunchback, as well as the five men whom Ogilvie had particularly noticed at No. 17 and with whom he had had the fight.
It was pithy and succinct, and read as follows:
- 1. Montross D. Clapperton. Studied in Boston, Paris, and Freiburg. Forty-three years of age. Excellent reputation. Quiet, kindly, charitable. Engineer by profession. Inventor of the Clapperton automatic cream separator and the Clapperton self-adjusting tube wrench. Lives alone, in a modest two-room flat, without servants.
- 2. Cornelius van Alstyne. College man. Twenty-four years of age. Good reputation in his neighborhood, except that his landlady and the small shops where he trades complain that he is very slow pay. Chemist by profession. Was instrumental in separating and clas#fying a new metal, called rhizopodin, which may eventually revolutionize and cheapen the entire manufacture of electric globes.
- 3. Leopold Fischer. Studied at Berlin and Vienna, his native town. Thirty-nine years of age. Engineer by profession. Well liked by his neighbors, though he went into bankruptcy last year. Inventor of the Fischer piston pump, the Fischer water gauge, and said to be at work now on a new gyroscope.
- 4. Holister Welkin. Fifty-seven years of age. A native of England. Earlier life unknown. Came here twenty-odd years ago. Lives at Gordon Hotel, evidently in very straitened circumstances. Is a recluse, and nothing could be found out about him except that—according to the proprietor of a hardware store in his neighborhood—he was quite famous, twenty years ago, as the inventor of Welkin's electric windlass.
- 5. Audley P. Chester. Sixty-four years of age. Belongs to the well-known Chester family of Portland,, Maine. Very rich, though he lives in a modest hotel of the west forties. Is said to be a miser. The same Chester who was so viciously attacked a year or two ago by certain newspapers for his refusal to contribute to any of the war charities.
Gadsby folded the report and gave them to his friend.
“Here you have all of it.”
“What about the disk?” queried the other. “Did your assayer examine it?”
“Yes. It's made of rhizopodin”
“Oh, yes—that new metal, which our friend Van Alstyne of the green Norfolk and the buckskin spats separated. I might have known it. What about the other members of the club?”
“Oh, just a repetition of this special list. A few doctors and business men, but mostly engineers with a sprinkling of skilled mechanics.”
“All rather poor?” suggested Ogilvie.
“Yes, with the exception of Chester. And all have excellent reputations. We looked up the records as much as we could, and not a single one of them seems to have ever been convicted of a crime or a misdemeanor, not even suspected or accused. And here they go and commit murder and frame you up.”
He stopped, then continued:
“I wonder why they call that organization of theirs the Benefactors Club?”
“I don't wonder,” replied Ogilvie. “I am beginning to understand.”
“Oh—sort of ghoulish self-irony, you mean?”
“Not a bit of it. They are quite sincere—quite, quite sincere! The Benefactors Club! The very name for it!”
“Why?” asked the police commissioner.
“I'll tell you presently,” replied the other, and added with cool arrogance, “just as soon as I have cleared up the rest of the case.”
Gadsby gave a crooked smile. “The rest of the case?” he repeated in mockery.
“Exactly!”
“Pretty cocksure, aren't you?”
“Yes,” said Ogilvie. “Fact is, after I get out of this pickle”
“If you get out of this pickle!”
“I repeat—after I get out of this pickle, I shall apply to you for a job with the detective force. My boy, I am finding no fault with your methods, your elaborate system” He pointed at the voluminous reports.
“Thanks!” the police commissioner said dryly.
“But,” Ogilvie continued unabashed, “it takes a man like myself to use the information they contain, through a thing called applied psychology.”
“And which,” interjected the police commissioner, “might with equal truth be styled applied poetry.”
“By the way,” said the other, “do you happen to know anybody in Washington, in the patent office, some big bug, I mean?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know him well. enough to get him on the long-distance telephone this time of night and have him look up certain records?”
“Well, yes. In my capacity as police commissioner I can cut a couple of miles of official red tape. Why do you ask?”
“Because I want you to get your Washington party on the wire as quickly as possible. And I want you to introduce me to him over the wires as your confidential assistant—which, I repeat, I am going to become as soon as I'm out of this mess.”
“More clews, I suppose?” asked Gadsby ironically.
“As right as rain!”
“But—in Washington?” queried Gadsby, seeing that his friend was serious.
“Yes. You see, I am curious to find out why all these people”—he pointed at the detectives' reports—“are so poor in spite of all their inventions. I want to find out if all of them neglected taking out patents for their brain children—if they are all plain fools or”
“Or?”
“Idealists, Bob,” said Ogilvie; “members of the Benefactors Club!”