Munsey's Magazine/Volume 86/Issue 4/The Unwritten Story/Chapter 9
IX
The next afternoon, when Rodman Wyatt dropped in at the bone yard of the Messenger for a bit of a chat with John Lomax, that cynic had more than a bit of news for him.
“Here's a tip on your Lockwood story, old scout,” Lomax drawled, in a voice as dry as his own bloodless self. “Mellish picked it up in a Pi Alley beanery this morning.”
“Nothing like Pi Alley for tips,” smiled Wyatt. “Any place where chauffeurs loaf and chew the rag is a regular hotbed of 'em. Every garage and cheap beanery in town ought to have dictaphones connecting with police headquarters in Pemberton Square. What's this particular tip?”
“The old blueblood seems to be completely off his handle. That damned spiritualist bunk artist has him going, for fair!”
“What's Veazie putting over now?”
“Big-time stuff, I should judge.” Lomax scratched his bald spot. “He's been up to Lockwood's, pulling some kind of telepathy flubbydub, and using an African witch doctor's skull to give him a line on the long lost daughter. Hot dog, eh?”
Wyatt laughed.
“You don't mean the old boy would fall for any such—”
“Don't I, though? He'll eat it alive! If you were half the writer you think you are, you'd know that half the world's crooked and the other half foolish. Lockwood's in the foolish class. He's Mr. Lamb and the prof is Mr. Wolf. What's the answer? I'm asking you!”
“H-m-m-m! Looks as if Lockwood was in for rather a thin time, doesn't it? But is this straight dope?”
“Straight as a string. The maid up there spilled a whole mess of beans to the chauffeur. He's her sweetie, I hear, and a bad nigger all around. I bet all Coontown knows by now that there's hoodoo stuff being pulled up there.”
“By gad, there's the makings of a story in this, all right!” Wyatt's eye kindled with professional enthusiasm. “So you think Veazie's going to locate the daughter—for a consideration?”
“He's located her already, from what's buzzing in the beaneries.”
“Has, eh? Where?”
“Charleston, South Carolina; and—”
“You don't suppose that old moron would go all the way down there on any such wild-goose chase?”
“Hell, it won't be a wild-goose chase, you simp! Ill bet you a feed at Thompson's Spa that Veazie's got the daughter planted there already.”
“That's right—he might have. Great stuff! Looks to me as if I'd better dig out and hunt the chauffeur, pretty P. D. Q.”
“Intelligent young man!” gibed Lomax. “You've got a right hunch, for once in your pure life. Lockwood and the prof are going to chercher la femme. It's up to you to chercher le chauffeur, and do it now! Here's your hat. What's your hurry?”
Inside of an hour Wyatt had located the garage where Lockwood kept his limousine. It was not at the rear of the Lockwood mansion, there being no room for a private one there, but was a public establishment down on Charles Street, at the bottom of the hill. A little judicious questioning and a few cigars paved the way to the information that the chauffeur's name was Andrew Todd, that he roomed out in the Roxbury district, on Marble Street, and that “he's 'most always hangin' around some pool room or another, mornin's.”
“Odd he doesn't live at Lockwood's,” thought Wyatt; “but I guess the old man figures that one of the colored persuasion is enough to be under his roof at once.”
The day being drizzly, blustering with east wind, and raw with February chill, there seemed slight probability that Lockwood would go driving. Wyatt betook himself to Marble Street, in the heart of the Roxbury negro section, and after some two hours' scouting ran Andrew Todd to earth in the Black Eagle Pool Parlor, on Shawmut Avenue.
Andrew, he saw, was a “high yaller” with a cast in his right eye and a sinister expression. That Lockwood should intrust his life to such a type rather surprised Wyatt.
“If this baby doesn't shoot the needle, or sniff snow, I never saw the symptoms of it,” Wyatt judged. “Lomax had it right when he called him a bad nigger. However, that's not my funeral. The worse he is, maybe the more he'll spill.”
Andrew, at the moment having no partner for a game, was engaged in inhaling cigarette smoke, idly knocking pool balls around a badly scarred table, and humming to himself, on the tune of “It Ain't Goin' to Rain No More”:
“Oh, the high yaller gals ride automobiles,
The high browns ride the train;
The poor black gals ride old white mules,
But they get there just the same!
“Oh, I wisht I had a nickel,
I wisht I had a dime;
I wisht I had a high yaller gal—
I'd kiss her all the time!”
He abandoned his vocalism to answer a question from Wyatt.
“No, sir, I don't know nothin' about no skull,” he affirmed in an exculpatory manner. “What skull are you talkin' about, anyhow? How would I know about a skull? There ain't no skull, none at all, at no house I works at!”
The cool green of a five-dollar bill completely reversed Andrew's polarity. He suddenly knew a great deal about the skull. It took all of fifteen minutes to exhaust this reservoir of information.
“Things are coming my way!” Wyatt rejoiced, as he presently entered a drug store and called the Lockwood house by telephone.
An acidulous voice informed him that Mr. Lockwood was out, probably at the Boston Athenæum reading room, and that he would not be back before six o'clock, if then.
“Coming my way more than ever! If that's not the housekeeper, I'm no guesser. Luck, old man—bull luck!”
On the way down town on an elevated train, Wyatt smoked his pipe and reviewed matters with vast satisfaction.
“Veazie has the old man completely buffaloed. Andrew's instructions to overhaul the car and have it ready by the early part of next week mean that Veazie and Lockwood are leaving then for Charleston. They'll never come back without the long lost daughter with the strawberry mark on her left shoulder—that's a cinch; and then the fun begins. How a man of Lockwood's supposed intelligence can fall for a crook like that, and a skull séance, beats me. Senile dementia, probably. A fool and a faker—God bless the combination! If it wasn't for fakers and fools, where would most of the good stories come from?”
At the Lockwood house Wyatt met a hostile reception at the hands of Miss Lavinia Grush.
“Young man,” said she, fixing an inimical gaze on him, “I don't know what you want, but you look to me like a reporter, you do. Reporters aren't welcome here.” Severely she confronted him in the high-ceilinged hallway with the ancient clock ticking halfway up the stairs. “If you've come to ask me, or anybody, any questions about anything, you'd better save your breath to cool your porridge!”
“I don't eat porridge, thank you!”
Wyatt smiled, half at her quaint turns of speech, half at her factitious appearance of youth far below her years.
“What in the world are you sissying around here for?”
“Only to ask a simple question, madam—is Mr. Lockwood's long lost daughter now in Charleston, South Carolina?”
“Who—oh, my land of living—who's been blabbing, I'd like to know? Oh, of course, that Irene! And Andrew! I—I'll skin them alive!”
“Skinning a couple of young colored people alive won't have much effect on the newspaper story soon to appear,” Wyatt remarked unsympathetically. He drew out his notebook and pencil—he had always found them highly effective in making people talk against their will. “Though of course I'll make a note of the fact that you threaten the maid and the chauffeur with severe punishment!”
“You—you aren't going to put that down?”
“And why not? That's the way I earn my living, or part of it—by putting things down.”
“Well, young whippersnapper, I'd like to put you down—so far down you'd never come up! I'd like to put a feather in your cap, I would, and blow you away!” The housekeeper's bony fingers twined together, and her white-bristled jaw set with the intensity of her opposition. “Private matters, like this—it's scandalous, it is!”
“Scandal is the breath of life for many a good story. If I'm not to write this story, what am I to write?”
“Nothing—nothing!”
“I can't collect much pay for writing nothing.”
“Oh, but, don't you see? We—I—don't want any of this to get into print. It's all so crazy, so—”
“Of course!” sympathized Wyatt. “As I see it, Mr. Lockwood is the victim of an utterly unprincipled—”
“I hope to tell you he is! You think so, too?”
“I know so. Professor Veazie's record is far from savory,” Wyatt affirmed, his flair bidding him follow the lead that Miss Grush was obviously giving him. His brown eyes became analytical. “And the way he's putting this fraud over on Mr. Lockwood—”
“Fraud—that's the very namable word I call it!” The old woman's glance showed a spark of deadly hostility to Veazie and all his works. “It's all a fraud—a wicked money-making scheme. It's much as ever I can do to bear this, it is! Why, Mr. Lockwood's daughter, she's dead and gone, or lost, or Lord knows what, these fifty years; but would he listen to me? He would not! He—”
“Believes in the professor, does he?”
“Like gospel! And when I think of all the property involved, why, he ought to have a guardeen appointed. Veazie ought to be arrested, locked up, or something! It's terrible, awful, it is! And now you and your paper, you're going to make it worse!”
“Not necessarily.” Wyatt was all sympathy now. “My dear madam, perhaps I can be of real assistance. Suppose, for a moment, that somebody had a financial interest in this estate—don't you see how my exposure of the fraud might help them?”
Wyatt's sharp eye by no means missed the nervous twitch of the old housekeeper's mouth and the narrowing of her glance.
“Struck oil!” thought he. His heart leaped as he felt his fingers laying hold of threads which, unraveled, might be the making of his reputation. “Yes, a plot, by gad!” he realized. “Too damned big for any newspaper story. Why, this has the makings of a novel, and then some!”
But Miss Grush, after a long, keen glance that searched him, was saying in a new tone:
“How—how could you help anybody?”
Wyatt countered this thrust with a leading question:
“I'm right in assuming that you have some financial interest in this property?”
“You aren't to assume anything, young man, except that I don't want a helpless old man skinned alive and bled by a wicked fly-by-night like Veazie!”
“Very well! I'll see that he isn't. The power of the press, you know—”
“Power, yes! There isn't the thickness of tissue paper between the newspapers and hell! Power to wreck and ruin—that's what!”
“Not always, madam. The press is sometimes powerful to do good. Let's make an agreement!”
“Agreement?”
“Yes—you help me, and ['ll help you—help Mr. Lockwood, I mean.”
“How can I help you?”
“You can post me on developments, from time to time. For my part, when the story's ripe, I'll open fire on the professor. If that doesn't sink him without a ripple, I'm no judge of stories!”
The old housekeeper pondered for a long moment, her lips tight, her eyes calculant. Then all at once she nodded dryly.
“Young man,” said she, “come in the drawing-room. I think we'd better understand each other!”