Keeban (Little, Brown and Company)/Chapter 6
Shirley was at her piano near a window facing the boulevard walk. As the night was cool and therefore the window was down, I could not hear what she played but her fingers moved over the keys and her red lips parted and closed and her red head tossed with animation as she sang her song.
She sang to no one; at least, no one but she was visible from the walk. Surely it was a light, happy song which she sang as she tossed her head and smiled. Her hair was bobbed and it flung like fine spun bronze about her pretty ears. I thought that if I could paint, I'd take a try at her just now with the soft pink light of her piano lamp upon her. I'd paint her as Youth—Youth and something else. Youth Enchained!
No; that wouldn't do. There should be something submissive, or at least something pathetic about a young person enchained; and there was nothing submissive about Shirley Fendon Scofield; and not the slightest touch of pathos. Not at this moment, at least. Quite the contrary.
I am not a fanciful or figurative man; watch symbolic dancing from Pavlova and Ukrainsky up and down and, unless I hold my programme in a good light, the performance never brings to me any pervading sense of "Dawn" or "Death," of "The Swan" or "Wild Pansies." But that dance of Shirley Scofield's gave me a thrill.
It was a dance, almost, as she tossed and flung herself to the lilt of the song I could not hear. Perhaps you say I took my thrill from the programme which Jerry had furnished to me. Let it go at that; anyway, I got it. Youth was set on snapping her chains to-night; and it was not to be nice snapping. Not at all! Youth was wild, orgiastic, reckless and bent on being free.
I thought her over while I stood out there after her dance was done and she had disappeared. Beyond any doubt, she was Christina. For her appearance to me in that room beside the river, she'd assumed yellow hair and a different dress and changed several other things; yet I was sure of her. I wondered what was her place in the plot afoot to-night.
I was looking in on a last act, I knew; the first had started long ago when Win Scofield met her in some cabaret and she decided to marry him. She might have been Keeban's woman then, I thought; and he, hearing her plan, had told her to go ahead. Or perhaps he had made the plan for her, marking up Win Scofield on his board then; and to-night old Win's number had come to the top.
I went down the street to my car and started the engine and kept it going to be ready while I watched. Ten minutes past eleven, I saw a light in Win Scofield's garage; a black car came out and a girl got into it. I waited until it was in the street and then, stepping on my gas, I charged up the road and gave that black car all I had.
It went into the curb and smashed a wheel and bent the axle too. I wrecked my front, naturally. Shirley Scofield's driver was out yelling at me; he turned and opened the door of his car sitting in a corner. Youth snapping her chains wasn't there. A scared girl was, you'd think; but she wasn't scared. Not she! She was merely pretending to be frightened, while she sat there mighty quiet and trying to size me up.
She was wondering whether I recognized her from that room by the river, I thought; she must have been wondering several other things. For one, how did I happen to run into her just at this moment? For another, how much did I know?
One thing about me, I'm slow but I'm not expressive. I may be gradual about getting a fact from somebody else but not many learn much from me. In bridge, when I bid my hand, nobody's sure whether I have the cards or whether I'm just trying to force the other fellow up. To-night I stepped up to the car as though I'd no idea who might be in it.
"I hope you're not hurt?" I started; and then, "Why, isn't it Mrs. Scofield?"
She spoke my name; I said the obvious regrets and all that. She made the ordinary replies.
"I was going down after Mr. Scofield," she mentioned and she spoke to the chauffeur who had come about beside me. "Thurston, if you'll get out the other car now."
For a moment that stumped me; for if she was going to use another car, I had to use another plan and I hadn't another. My own machine, as I've commented, was in no shape to respond to an encore on the act I'd just finished. At this crisis, Thurston saved me.
"You're all shook up, Mrs. Scofield," he told her; and then I was sure, as I'd suspected before, that he was in on her game. He knew that I hadn't just accidentally run him down; and he had different ideas about the advisability of trying their old plan with the other car.
He was a thin, Cassius-looking driver of about thirty and of the sort that smoke and dope, as well as think, too much. He was a smooth-shaven chap and would be good looking if the bones of his cheeks were less sharp.
"I'm all right, Thurston," she assured him; but I saw she was thinking things over and sparring for time.
"You'd better go back into the house and rest, Mrs. Scofield," Thurston suggested respectfully enough but strengthened the suggestion with a jerk of his head which he supposed I didn't see.
Cars were stopping all about us and people piling out and asking questions and offering help and so on. Shirley took Thurston's tip and let him and me assist her across the street into her house.
She thanked me beautifully and tried at once to be rid of me; but I said I'd stay awhile to make sure she suffered no bad effect from my carelessness. So she gave up in a few minutes and telephoned her husband, at his club, that she wasn't coming down to-night and he'd better take a taxi home. I waited till I was sure he'd started in that taxi and then I left.
I'd done fairly well, I thought; I didn't fool myself into feeling that I'd seen old Win out of danger absolutely but I did feel sure that I'd pried his demise out of the present into the future. What's the phrase that surgeons use? I'd considerably prolonged his life, I thought; and, so thinking and fairly much pleased with my plan after all, I went to bed and to sleep.
It was half-past four, as I learned after I got fully awake, when I was roused by some one shaking me. It was father.
"Wake up, Stephen!" he was saying to me. "Wake up! The police are here. They want to talk to you. Jerry has just shot and killed Winton Scofield."
I stumbled up, as you may imagine, with father's words painting the picture in my mind. Jerry was in that picture. Then I shook myself and cast him out of the image and put Keeban, Harry Vine, in his place.
"When was it, father?" I asked.
"Less than an hour ago. The police roused your mother who woke me."
He was in pajamas and dressing gown, was father, with bedroom slippers on. He was tall and gray and gaunt-looking in the glow of my reading lamp which he'd lit. He shook a little and bent a little more; he believed that Jerry did it.
"Where was it?"
"Jerry killed him at home."
"How?"
"He shot him, I said; he shot him down in cold blood."
I began at this time to feel it; and what I felt was not that Jerry had shot Win Scofield; no, not Jerry who'd grown up beside me as my brother in this house. That duplicate of Jerry, whom I myself had mistaken for Jerry when I found him in that basement room, that man and his Christina, who then was with him, had "got" Win Scofield; and my rage rose against her. She was his wife and, if she had not fired the shot, she'd been in the plot. I thought how I had seen her last night singing and exultant. I clenched my hands and shook.
My father was going on. "He was seen and recognized by three persons. There's no doubt about it at all."
"Who saw him?" I said.
"Mrs. Scofield."
I laughed at that and it must have seemed mad to father. "Who else?" I asked him.
"The chauffeur."
I laughed again.
"And the butler," father finished.
I didn't laugh at that. I hadn't seen the butler but there was no reason for believing he was not in the game.
"They got him," I thought to myself. "They got old Win Scofield."
His life was not an invaluable one, as perhaps you have gathered; but that wasn't the point with me. They—his wife and other people close about him and upon whom he had a right to depend—had got him, and certainly in some low, treacherous way. No wonder Jerry had warned me to try and stop this; he'd told me he'd pick and choose, so when he took the risk of warning, he'd warn against a more than ordinary crime.
"Jerry killed Winton Scofield," my father repeated just then; and I came back at him now, "He didn't."
I couldn't tell him that Jerry had sent me to try to stop this murder. I remembered in time that Jerry forbade me a word. There was no use talking to father, anyway.
"Get some clothes on," was all he said to me.
"Keeban did that!" I proclaimed; and father pulled up and faced me.
"There's no Keeban; don't let me hear you say that again. This family faces the fact; Jerry's gone to crime. We face it and we do not shirk our responsibility. Come to yourself, Stephen. Jerry's picture is in police headquarters in every city east or west; New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Baltimore, every headquarters has reported the same; they have no criminal in their galleries who would be taken for Jerry. There's never been a Keeban in crime; it's Jerry."
"Keeban, he goes by the name of Harry Vine," I returned; "he's not in their galleries because he's kept out of their hands. They've got to catch a man before they can photograph him."
My father gave me up. "Come talk to the police," he said and stalked from my room.
Downstairs I met Mullaney and a plain clothes man from the central detective bureau who wanted to know how I happened to run into Mrs. Scofield's car at eleven in the evening.
I wanted to know something before I answered this; I wanted to know that the witnesses, Shirley and Thurston and the butler, were being held by the police.
All three were; so there could be no harm in keeping what I knew. You can always tell what you've kept to yourself but never call back what you've chattered. I thought, "When Jerry warned me of this murder, he said 'not a word to any one.' If I say he warned me against Shirley, and the news gets out, not only the police'll be after him; the crowd he trains with now will go for him and get him, surely." So I said to Mullaney about my collision with Shirley's car, "You have the report on that accident."
"So you stick to it that 'twas an accident?"
I nodded.
"Then tell us, please, what was you doing up that way alone at that time so that you had the little accident?"
I didn't like his tone; I didn't like it at all.
There was no possibility of my convincing him of the existence of Keeban; and the impossibility of it only made me surer of Keeban, just as it always did when I argued with father, You see at that time, it was a matter of faith with me; and nothing feeds up faith like antagonism. I was slow but also stubborn, as perhaps you've perceived. These men were here because they were sure Jerry had shot down Winton Scofield; Jerry'd been seen doing it. I wouldn't believe that; therefore I had to believe in Keeban.
"What are you getting at?" I asked Mullaney.
He changed his tone. "Our cards are face up on your table, Mr. Fanneal," he said, respectfully enough. "We're not accusin' of any doin's; but we think you know more about him who was Jerry Fanneal than you are telling us."
"What do you think I know?"
"We figure that you thought he was up by Mr. Scofield's big house last night and that's why you was there; we think you was lookin' for him when you bumped into Mrs. Scofield comin' out."
I could deny that directly and I did. "That's wrong."
"You didn't know he was there or you didn't expect him there?"
"No: that's flat."
"Where may he be now? Do you know that?"
"I do not."
"That's flat too, sir?"
"Absolutely."
They gave me up after a while; and the reporters arrived, bringing details not mentioned to me by Mullaney or his companion. The reporters had to see all the Fanneal household and learn what we thought of Jerry now; they wanted fresh pictures, previously unpublished, of Jerry and of the rest of us; they had no doubt at all that Jerry had committed the murder.
"Why would he?" I asked them.
"Why?" was exactly what they wished most to know. They asked, "When Jerry was one of your family and before he 'reverted,' had he ever quarrelled with or taken a particular dislike to Winton Scofield?"
They were all full of that "reversion" idea which they played up in their papers.
I went to my office that morning, not with an intention of doing any business but to wait by my private wire on which yesterday Jerry had called me. Likely enough it was being watched this morning, I thought; surely I was being watched as a natural consequence of the police knowledge that I was loyal to Jerry. Every few minutes, on the office wire, a newspaper or some friend or some crank was calling me; once mother called me on the private line; but otherwise it was silent.
By midforenoon the newspapers were strewing all over the streets the news that Jerry Fanneal, who had vanished since his attack upon Dorothy Crewe, had reappeared in the rôle of murderer and shot down old Winton Scofield, the recently rejuvenated. It gave them full flood tide for all their sensation stuff with the sun of the new murder and the moon of old scandals pulling the same way. Naturally they raked over the robbery of Dorothy Crewe and the fate of old Win with his former wives. You know those pages of pictures which every news sheet seems to have these days,—three-quarters photographs of the people who stopped their car on the railroad crossing, the lady who ate the poison and the lady who sent it, the new back-stroke swimming champion and the tenor who sang at the Auditorium. Well, the Fanneals and the Scofields, with Win's wives, pushed them all off the page that day; we had it solid.
When I looked at the picture of Win's last wife, Shirley of the yellow hair, knowing she was also Christina, you may imagine I had some arguments with myself about staying silent.
A buyer was bothering me all through this time. I'd told the doorkeeper and the telephone girl, "Turn off everybody you can." But weak words had taken no effect upon this gentleman who, by his own account, was one Klangenberg, a keeper of a delicatessen on a fourth-rate street off Larrabee. He demanded to see me personally about a claim over a shipment of Hawaiian pineapple.
"He will see you, sir," my office manager reported. "He says you promised to see him."
I shook my head.
"He says to say to you, sir, if you don't remember," my manager continued, "that when you promised, he asked you about Smetsheen of Minneapolis."
I sat up at that; for Jerry was the one who had last asked me about Smetsheen of Minneapolis. I went out to see Klangenberg, who was a tall, phlegmatic Swede entirely positive on the subject of pineapple and quite fluent about it until he had drawn me off alone with him. Then he said, "'Kidnapped' and 'Westward Ho' says to Steve, 'They crossed us last night; but stick. Not a word; you can help and we'll get them. Stick, Steve.'"
That was all he would say; when I asked him anything more, he went back to pineapple; he was a buyer again, seeking satisfaction on a claim.
This word, which surely was from Jerry, of course helped me to stick. It meant to me that he'd tried to prevent the murder and, having been "crossed" somewhere, had failed; but he counted on me to stick while he kept after Keeban.
A few minutes later, Fred Scofield 'phoned me and asked me to come up to his father's place.