CHAPTER III
Upon another night than Saturday, which this happened to be, Mr. Clarke of the state's attorney's office would have been one of the innumerable citizens asleep under the roofs reaching away to the west and to the south and to the southeast, following the accrescent curve of the beach below the midnight moon. His rooms were in a building which presided over an area of park, a bit of boulevard, an outer strip of grass and garden abutting abruptly upon a wave-washed escarpment of concrete which continued the shore some five miles closer to the old center of the city.
Mr. Clarke's rooms composed, actually, an apartment; for they had no connection with other suites in the tall brick and stone structure. He had occupied the apartment for more than two years; consequently it constituted a most fixed and permanent establishment in comparison to Joan Daisy Royle's "home." But Clarke spoke of the apartment, because he always thought of it as "my rooms," in the same manner in which he had referred to his rooms in Perkins Hall, Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he had been attending Harvard Law School.
Now, as then, when any one inquired, "Where is your home?" It never occurred to him to mention the location of his rooms. He replied, "My home is at Clarke's Ferry." And since he had come to Chicago, he usually added, "It's in Massachusetts, near Haverhill."
Calvin Clarke was his name, as Calvin Clarke had been the recorded name of the stubborn, adventurous colonist who had cleared and settled and staked his stockade in the forest frontier on the south bank of the Merrimac, about thirty-five miles north of Boston in the year 1652.
Haverhill may be remembered as the village founded by eight men from Ipswich and four from Newbury, and which was so frequently attacked by Indians that fifty years after its settlement some argued for the abandonment of the place.
The Clarkes had no truck with this weakness, though Calvin long before had fallen with a flint-barbed arrow in him. His cabin had passed to his son Timothy; and when the Indians and French advanced on Haverhill, in Queen Anne's War, they burned the cabin and killed Timothy, but only after he had got his wife and seven children on their way into the town.
So there was another Calvin Clarke to return to the beautiful quiet bend of the river and to hew the beams and peg the wooden walls which, though originally raised in 1722, remain and are visible in the north wing of the present white-painted, square-pillared homestead. The ferry, which gave its name to the locality, was a much later affair, hardly pre-Revolutionary.
The Clarke who contrived the ferry for his own convenience also was named Calvin; and he served stubbornly and conscientiously with General Henry Knox and died of exposure in the winter of 1777. He had six sons and five daughters, and Jeremy, the third son, took to the law and became an advocate in Boston during John Adams' administration.
From that time there was always a lawyer in the Clarke connection and usually a son or two at Harvard studying for the law. They liked law, and they preferred, by tradition and temperament, that department of law which is shunned by commonplace men, by the mediocre and the money-seeking, and which therefore draws to itself the best and the worst of the legal profession—criminal law.
Jeremy Clarke, of John Adams' administration, was a public prosecutor; and his sons also took to the service of the commonwealth. Like him, they became prosecutors, leaving a long and oft-referred-to record of convictions of criminals, civil offenders and enemies of the state. Naturally, Calvin Clarke was a state's attorney; he had never thought about being anything else.
He was thirty, although he was only two years out of law school; for the Clarke character in him made him steady and conscientious, but he was not at all precocious. He had entered Harvard University when he was nineteen and left when he was twenty-three to go to France. At twenty-five, he had returned to the law school for three years, upon the completion of which he had traveled to Chicago and soon afterwards was appointed an assistant state's attorney.
A classmate, named Todd, had procured the appointment. Todd, who was a native Chicagoan, recently had married and had built a pleasant, red brick and plaster-and-timber Elizabethan house on a stretch of the suburban shore several miles north of Chicago where the land is called Winnetka.
Todd and his bride had week-end guests in mind when they had planned the house; and they had a room which they always denoted, hospitably, as "Calvin's." He was supposed to spend Saturday nights with them; so there he was, asleep in his room in the new Elizabethan house at one o'clock on this moonlit Sunday morning, when the telephone bell rang and Emily Todd answered from her phone in her bedroom.
Emily tried to make sense of what she heard but after a few seconds she handed the instrument to her husband, exclaiming:
"There's a creature on the wire who says his name is Denson. He says he's of the homicide squad, Arthur. Mercy, what does he mean?"
Arthur laughed. "Oh, he just wants Calvin," he assured her and after replying to Denson he explained: "A homicide squad is a group of men from the central detective bureau in the city who work on cases where somebody has been killed. They've a murder case to-night down in the Wilson Avenue district—a girl, Ketlar's wife, they say."
"Ketlar?" asked Emily.
"The fellow who has the dance band. We've one of his records."
"Oh, I know him—that nice boy with light hair!" Emily cried. "Why, has he a wife?"
"Apparently, since he seems to have killed her."
"That nice boy!" Emily exclaimed in horror.
Todd hurried into the hall and to Clarke's door, where he knocked and opened, without waiting for answer. He roused Calvin by seizing his shoulder.
"You've a call from the city, old man. Chap named Denson wants you."
Clarke sat up, blinking but not confused. Arthur's voice and the squares of moonlight through the open windows immediately reminded him where he was; and Denson's name brought him coherently to business.
"Thanks," he said, in his quiet, steady way. "Denson's holding the wire?"
"No; I told him to give you time to dress. He'll call again in five minutes. A girl's shot—murder, pretty clearly. She's Ketlar's wife."
"Ketlar?" asked Clarke.
"He has a dance band at the Echo Garden and he makes those jazz records."
"Oh, yes."
"He did it, apparently."
Clarke started slightly at this information. "Did he! . . . Where is it, Arthur?"
"Police were called to a flat near the lake on one of those streets near Wilson Avenue. They found her there. They've got him, and another girl, in a flat near to it. Denson's calling from Ketlar's room in the flat."
"Hmhm," said Calvin and got out of bed, stripping his pajamas from his strong, lean body; and he began to dress with deliberate, determined movements. "Sorry he had to knock up Emily and you."
"Oh, we weren't asleep," Arthur replied, aware that Calvin's mind was not really concerned with the small disturbance to Emily and him. "You're going down, I suppose."
"Yes. Do you want to lend me a car?"
"Course. Anything else?"
"Think not, thanks," Calvin said, in his restrained way, neither by voice nor gesture expressing the emotion under which he labored. Yet Todd, watching his slow, exact hands, which never hastened and never fumbled at shoe-eye or button, discerned the underlying agitation.
"What did Calvin say about it?" Emily interrogated her husband when he returned to her.
"Nothing," Arthur reported.
"But he must have said something, when you woke him up to tell him to go to a case where a man has killed his wife."
"He didn't say a thing," Arthur insisted. "But don't worry. He'll attend to that interloper."
"What interloper do you mean?" Emily asked.
"Ketlar, who's come and killed his wife in Calvin's country. Oh, Calvin will see to him."
Emily would not let this pass. "It's no more Calvin's country than it's ours or any one's else, Arthur!"
"Don't you think it," her husband warned her.
Calvin was dressed by the time the telephone rang again and he received a brief report from Denson, the substance of which was that the case against Ketlar was just about perfect and that Ketlar was being held along with a girl named Royle, who was "mixed up with him."
Denson strongly suggested that Ketlar had put his wife out of the way for the sake of the Royle girl; and this was likely enough, Calvin thought, as he drove off alone on his way to the city. Such an act was a common occurrence among the lawless nomads here to-day and gone to-morrow, lacking birth, lacking breeding, lacking education, training and self-control—the people who crowded the cities to-day.
Calvin repeated the name "Ketlar," guessing at its nationality. It bore to him no distinct association. It might be Swedish, or it might as well be German or Swiss or one of the names derived from the Magyar or from another alien race. Very likely no pure blood of any people flowed in Ketlar's veins; very likely there ran in him a turgid stream of traits descended to him out of a welter of indiscriminate matings of men and girls of many bloods who had reached America in recent years.
Calvin thought of the faces which he encountered on every Chicago street, characterless faces, weak, shallow, vain, distinguished by no true feature of any great race, the faces of the many-bloods who made for themselves a virtue of their minglings and boasted that, because they were most mixed, they were most American.
The idea further aroused Calvin and further offended him. How these men and women, these new Americans, defied the law! How they flouted the principles of right and order brought to this country and established and spread and defended by men of the old American stock, inheriting and handing down a habit of self-control and discipline and decency which these many-bloods never knew!
The worst of it was that these people not only broke the law but afterwards they went free. A girl shot her husband or a husband slew his wife, and weak-minded jurors of their own kidney sat in their judgment and acquitted them.
But Calvin Clarke determined that Ketlar should not go free. Calvin thought, "He's counting on an acquittal, undoubtedly. He's scheming out his defense now. More probably he arranged it beforehand. He'll have an alibi all ready."
Calvin drove from the suburbs onto the boulevards of the city, and as he neared his destination and huge, continuous blocks of dwellings rose upon his right and upon his left, the aspect, the idea and the very atmosphere of the place antagonized him. He thought how endlessly these prodigious blocks lay over the land, spreading their one-room, two-room, three- and four-room shelter over the city gypsies crowding this circle of shore and who called their encampments of brick and plaster "homes." Millions of many-blood nomads, boasting themselves Americans!
He summoned a vision of his home in the bend of the Merrimac where Calvin Clarke had settled in 1652; he saw the old white house with the sun-dial over the door that had shadowed the hour in days before Washington journeyed to Boston. He saw on the walls of the library the portraits of his fathers, and on the shelves the books which kept record of their honorable, useful and disciplined lives.
Looking up at the new, crude, crowded buildings beside him, he searched the lighted panes of the transoms for the number of the especial building in which to-night some one—probably her husband—had shot a girl.
Denson stepped to the car when he halted and said: "Nothin' to it, sir. It's Ketlar."
"You mean he's made a confession?" Calvin asked.
"No. He's got a girl who's putting up an alibi for him. We've shot it full of holes, but he'll go to a jury, I guess, on the strength of that girl. We've got him and her up the street at his place. But here's where his wife was livin'."
Calvin followed the man into the brick and plaster camping place and to the room where the body of Adele Ketlar lay.
She had been of the sort he had expected to see; she had been young and pretty, with a weak, shallow, vain expression persisting even in death. She was very pitiful, and the rouge on her cheeks and the paint on her lips grotesquely exaggerated the piteousness of her. It was impossible that she had been slain in a struggle of mighty emotions. Pique, a shallow, momentary pique of some self-willed, ill-constrained person, had put her to death. And Calvin looked up from her, doubly determined to punish that person.
Denson led him about the room, making explanations and pointing out objects of evidence. Calvin ordered that they be photographed in place and carefully preserved, but he gave them little attention.
He was thinking about the girl. He asked Denson, "What nationality is she?"
"Oh, she's an American," the policeman replied confidently.
American! That was it! Her weak, vain, characterless face, marked by no strong trait of any race, was now American! Her husband who—probably—had killed her also would be found to be an American!
Denson went on detailing the evidence against Ketlar.
"You see, sir," said Denson, exhibiting the objects. "They had a scrap before he shot her. She must have marked him, some. Well, Ketlar's hurt on the head. Fresh. You'll see it."
"How does he explain it?" Calvin asked.
"He says he ran into a door."
"Here?"
"Oh, no. He ain't been here at all to-night—according to his story. He'd been comin' here whenever he wanted to recently—to see his daughter, he says. He'd left the little wife. She was good enough for him five years ago when he married her. But since then he got his band, and the coin come rolling in. And the ladies sure liked him. Women and girls—you'll find a regular beauty show at his place. You'll see what was the matter with him and why he wanted to get rid of the little wife. . . ."
Denson went on, relating the events of the night in their order, as he discerned them. Ketlar was tired of his wife; he had admitted that he had tried to "tie the can" to her; but she had hung on to him.
Ketlar had left his orchestra early this evening, although it was Saturday and a big dance night at the Echo, and he had come to his flat about twelve o'clock, where he had met up with a girl calling herself Joan Daisy Royle. She said she was a stenographer working in an office in the loop.
She and Ketlar had been in his flat, drinking together. Probably they had gone together to the lake; but they told different stories about it, the girl admitting that she visited the lake about midnight, but Ketlar denying that he had. His story of what he did was full of holes.
Probably Ketlar went in alone to see his wife and threaten her or force her to make some sort of an agreement to divorce him. It was likely enough that the Royle girl stayed outside. Anyway, she swore that she had.
Well, Ketlar and his wife got in a scrap and he shot her; so he and the Royle girl ran back to their building, where Ketlar got into bed; and the girl went upstairs to her room. When he was arrested, she came down to put up an alibi for him. But Ketlar and she were not such awfully good liars; they had forgotten to fix up several things, such as the time when old man Royle came in and whether he saw them or not.
Calvin walked beside Denson up the street down which, a couple of hours earlier, Joan Daisy had drawn the moon. It moved before him, as it had paced beside her, but he did not notice it. He never had imagined himself playing with the moon, and never had he been in a mood further from such fantasy.
He accompanied Denson into the long, narrow court surrounded by the brick-and-plaster encampment with the several doors; and upon the second floor, above the second door, he came upon Fred Ketlar and the girl who was trying to aid him.
Ketlar was not yet dressed; he had a robe over his pajamas but otherwise he was as when the police roused him from bed, except that he was much exhausted. He was the type of man Calvin Clarke had expected.
He was handsome; and Calvin had been told that he was. He displayed, even in his fright at his arrest and following his examination, a flare of shallow spirit. Calvin had anticipated as much from a man who had had the energy to manage a band and compose jazz in the current mode.
Yet handsome as he was, he bore no more mark of the character of any race than had his wife, who lay dead with the rouge and paint on her face. He was, like her, an American.
The Royle girl proved something of a surprise. She was pale and actually lovely looking, when Calvin had expected a painted prettiness, at the most. Of course, her paleness was explained, when Calvin recollected that she had returned to this building and gone to bed, after her visit to the lake; so she had washed off the color which, undoubtedly, had daubed her cheeks and lips.
But the mere lack of rouge could not endow this girl with the definiteness of character which, at the first encounter of her eyes, she appeared to possess.
She had been seated, with a police officer beside her, upon a window bench when Calvin entered; but she arose immediately and advanced, as though she had been eagerly awaiting him. Since he was tall, and she was not, she came scarcely higher than his shoulder as she confronted him.
She had dark hair and she was wearing a black silk kimono with little flowers embroidered in red and yellow and blue; and between the shadow of her hair, which was bobbed, and the black of her kimono, her face and her smooth, lovely neck were very white. Her arms were white where they came out of the short kimono sleeves and she had small, white hands clenched at her sides.
"You are Mr. Clarke?" she asked him, in a queer, hoarse voice.
"Yes."
"You—you are the one who comes for the People of Illinois!" she said, and her hoarse voice offered a thrilling challenge to him.
"Yes," he repeated and gazed at her eyes which had not wavered from his.
Her eyes were blue and wide and beautifully shaped and with dark, even lashes; the contours of her face and her head were exquisite. She had not merely a smooth, white, beautiful brow, but behind it the shaping of will and intelligence. She was not at all like the girl who lay dead in the apartment by the lake, not at all like the man taken here with her and for whom she advanced to fight Calvin Clarke.
No negligible opponent, she! She had surprised Calvin, not only by offering herself as his chief antagonist, but by challenging him at the moment he had appeared.
She had not waited for his question of her; she had asked him, in her queer, hoarse, thrilling voice, by what right he might act for the People of Illinois?
"I'm an assistant state's attorney," he replied, and realized that actually he was defending himself.
"We're two of the people of Illinois, Ket and I are, Mr. Clarke!" she cried. "We've been waiting for you! For we're two of the People who are against whoever killed Adele! We are! And I want to talk to you."
Calvin retreated a step. She was trying to work upon him, he recognized; she had planned this, reckoned upon it. Had not Denson warned him that Ketlar had a girl who was "going alibi" for him and upon whom Ketlar could count to influence a jury?
"My business here," Calvin replied, severely, "is to examine the evidence against the prisoner—"
She cried, "The prisoner!"
Calvin nettled. "Didn't you know he was under arrest?"
"Yes," she said. "But no one had called him prisoner."
"That's what he is," Calvin insisted sternly, "a prisoner. I am here to examine the evidence against him in connection with the death of his wife. It is my business to present him for indictment and trial."
"When he didn't do it?"
"If you have evidence against another, of course it is my business to examine it."
"I have!"
"Then you may give it to me."
"Not with these men here. They've made up their minds. We're guilty. That's all they can see."
"I can send them out," Calvin suggested.
"Can you come out, alone, with me?"
"What do you mean?"
"What I say. Are you afraid of me? Or that I'll get away? I'll go handcuffed to you, if you'd rather. Or you can have your policemen around, but not with us. Then I can show it all to you. I can tell you the truth. Only let's leave here; let's get away from them. Let me speak alone to you!"