CHAPTER IV
"Where do you want me to go with you?" Calvin asked.
"I'll show you," she replied and looked at the door which Denson guarded.
Calvin turned to the plain-clothes man and said, "I will be responsible for her," and himself opened the door.
Immediately the girl slipped past him, but she awaited him in the hallway. "I'd better get on some clothes," she mentioned to him, as though she had just recollected that she was in night attire. "Do you want to come up with me?"
"I'll be here," answered Calvin, coldly.
"Come up first, for a minute. See my place," the girl urged. "I want to show it to you; I'm going to tell everything to you."
Calvin followed her up the stairs and tried not to think about her; but, as she ascended ahead of him, her small, white heels rose out of her slippers with every step and he could not help noticing them.
She led him into the large room, where Ket and she had listened to the radio, and where she had made up her bed.
"My mother and father are in there," she said, gesturing toward the bedroom. "He's drunk; she's dizzy from veronal. If you want, I can—"
"I am satisfied with the police report of them," Calvin interrupted.
"The things you see here," she continued, "are got by bluff. I want to tell you that before you find it out. Not a thing in the place is paid for or ever will be or ever was meant to be."
He glanced about the big, well-furnished room, noticing a girl's blouse and an undergarment of salmon-colored silk upon a chair near the couch which had been converted into a bed. Tan silk stockings lay upon the chair and a pair of small, pointed shoes stood below it. He looked away from these, and then they drew his glance again.
"They're paid for," the girl told him, bluntly. "I wear 'em. I paid for them."
Calvin flushed slightly and inquired. "What do you want to show me here?"
"The radio. It's a good set, you see. It cost—I mean the bill for it must be about three hundred dollars. It's not a necessary sort of thing. It made me almost crazy when I came home and found it here the first time. My father'd got it; it's the kind of thing he likes to get. But it'll save Ket's life, Mr. Clarke, if you'll just believe the truth. I'll tell you it—I'll tell you all of it, I say.
"We'd been downstairs in his room—Ket—Fred Ketlar and me. We'd had a drink, as they've told you. He was playing to me music he'd written. He came home early to-night to play it tome. After he'd played it, he wanted me to stay down there with him; but I came up here.
"He followed me and tried to get me to go downstairs again. Mamma, she was asleep in her room. My father hadn't come in yet. I was in this closet, putting away my hat and laughing at Ket for something he said, when he made a rush for me so I pulled over the door on him and he cut his head on the edge. Here.
"He went in there and washed up; and then he came out and played with the radio. He got Fort Worth or Kansas City, I don't know which, but some jazz came in and he cut it off. Then he left here. Now I'm telling you all the truth, Mr. Clarke. He didn't go to his room, like he said he did and I said, too. That was a lie I told to try to help him. A lot of good it did, when they got us apart! What he did was to leave the building and go down toward the lake. I saw him, for I followed him out of the building and down the street—part way."
She stopped with a catch of breath, as she gazed in Calvin's face; panic filled her with the idea that, trusting to this man who had come in the name of the people of Illinois, two of whom were Ket and she, now she had flung Ket's life away.
"That is the truth?" Calvin asked her.
"That's the truth," she gasped.
"I will call Denson to hear it and to record it," Calvin said. "You understand that your statement may be used against you or against Ketlar in court."
"I understand it; but I want to tell it just to you, now. I've been talking to them; I've seen them putting down what I say. There's no use telling the truth to them. But I thought—I think there may be, to you!"
"Go on," Calvin bid; but she denied, in panic, "That's all." So he had to drive her. "No; that is not all. Where did he go, besides 'toward the lake'?"
"He turned the corner."
"Which way—toward his wife's flat or away from it?"
She longed to lie; she yearned to cry, "Away!" But she had cast Ket's fate upon the truth and she replied, "Toward." And she saw the set of satisfaction in the face of the man who had come for the State.
"Exactly," he said. "You saw him go into the flat?"
"No; I didn't. I don't know that he went there at all. I don't know that he didn't go, either, Mr. Clarke! But I do know this—when Adele was being shot, Ket was here with me! Here by the radio! It was going then, Mr. Clarke. Dads—my father—he'd come in. He was pretty well ginned and he wanted to be sung to before going to bed. He found a woman singing in Los Angeles. She was singing "Home, Sweet Home." That was when Adele was shot, your own men say; some one in the building heard the shot just when that song finished in Los Angeles; and then Ket was here with me. Dads went to his room, after the second verse and Ket was at my door."
"Outside, you mean?" Calvin asked.
"Yes."
"It was shut?"
"Yes."
"Then how do you know he was there?"
"I opened the door, while the radio was still going. I saw him there. He grabbed me and kissed me."
She made a slight gesture, drawing together her shoulders as they would be pressed by arms about her and flinging back her head, as though at the forcing of hot, violent lips; and she so impressed the picture upon Calvin that she stirred in him a surprising twinge of offense at the image of her in Ketlar's arms.
"Then what did you do?" Calvin asked.
"When he let me go, I came back here and turned off the radio. It was just saying that the song was from Los Angeles."
Calvin gazed at her and thought, "That's just her story, of course. Ketlar wasn't at the door then." And he had a definite sensation of relief at thus being able to erase the offensive idea of her in Ketlar's embrace; then he realized that if she had not been so held by Ketlar at the place and at the moment described, of course she had been in his arms elsewhere.
"How else do you want to change your story now?" Calvin asked her, more coldly because of the hot twinge he had felt for her.
"That's all here. I'll show you the rest at the lake," she answered, suddenly gathering her blouse and undergarment from the chair and stooping for her shoes. She abstracted a skirt from the closet and disappeared into the bathroom.
He stood beside her bed with no inkling of the range of the marvelous dream which she had built up every night when she had lain here; he imagined her to have been filled with desire of the basest sort. He reminded himself, "She was in that murder with Ketlar. At any rate, she knows he killed his wife and she's working to save him in order to have him for herself."
At sounds from the street, he stepped to the window and witnessed the arrival of a patrol car which halted and backed before the building; and he was watching the men who came from the car, when the girl emerged from the bathroom and stood beside him.
"You're taking Ket away?" she asked, as she saw the dark, barred bulk of the car.
"Not yet, I think."
"Don't—yet!" she pleaded, seizing his sleeve.
He wanted to shake off her grasp and, oppositely, he wanted to continue to feel the appeal of her pull at his wrist.
She was dressed in her blouse and skirt and with the silk stockings and the small shoes upon her slender feet, which he had seen bare and white. She had applied color to her lips and a little to her cheeks. Not much, but she no longer was pale.
"Make them wait," she begged, "anyway until you come back with me."
Releasing him, she stepped to the closet and reached up for her hat and, as had Ket, Calvin saw the lovely line of her figure with her slender arms raised; and, very much as had Ket, Calvin drew in a deep breath.
When she was ready for the street, he led her to the lower floor where Ketlar's door opened for the passing of the police.
"I'm going out with her," Calvin informed Denson.
"Want a man, sir?"
"No; but you'd better have a woman here, fairly soon. Try to get Mrs. Hoswick," Calvin ordered. "Go on," he bid the girl in his charge.
"Where's Mr. Ketlar?" she appealed.
"In there."
"Oh, let me speak with him alone just a second"
"No," said Calvin; and Denson reported, "I've a stenographer in with 'him now taking down his statement."
"Good," Calvin approved.
A blinding light flashed and exploded and, looking down, Calvin saw a press photographer with camera set on the landing. Two reporters approached.
"Yes; this is the girl who claims an alibi for Ketlar," Calvin replied to them. "No; you can't talk to her yet. I am not through with my questioning."
"How much was she in it?" one of the reporters insisted.
Calvin refrained from reply and pushed past them, leading the girl down to the walk. He brought her to the street and, at a little distance, the reporters pursued, but did not interfere after he had called to a couple of men at the patrol car, "Follow and keep people from bothering."
The street, in the direction of the lake, was deserted and still. Normal night lights glowed in the entries; there seemed to be no contagion of activity from the building before which the police car backed and none from the apartment, which had been Adele's, on the next avenue. The street was bewilderingly the same as it had been two hours ago when Joan Daisy visited the shore, drawing with her the moon.
It had moved to the west and so was casting a longer shadow before Joan Daisy. Another long shadow lay before the stranger towering at her shoulder, the man who had come in the name of the State, but who was no better than the police in recognizing truth.
He was bent upon convicting Ket, upon killing Ket for the murder of Adele, which Ket never, never could have done! How could she affect this calm, confident man who possessed such power—the very power of life and death over Ket?
She glanced up at him and found him gazing down at her.
The reporter's question, "How much was she in it?", pressed for answer in Calvin's mind as he approached the corner near which was the apartment he had first visited to-night; and Joan Daisy, looking up at him and with the reporter's query in her ears, guessed why he stared at her.
"You didn't tell him," she said. "How much was I in it, do you believe? Tell me!"
He studied her face in the moonlight; he glanced down her slight, lovely figure; he thought, without meaning to, of her white heels and her slim, pretty feet; then he thought of her in Ketlar's arms, as she so graphically had depicted herself; he recollected Adele, lying dead with the spots of rouge on her pale cheeks; and he looked away.
"Where do you want me to go with you?" he asked.
"Across to the beach."
"Why?"
She did not answer and he observed that she was looking up at the sky. Suddenly she halted.
"See those stars, please!" she said and pointed up; and she surprised him so that he almost obeyed, without thinking; but first he seized her arm and then asked, "What stars?"
"Those over there!" she answered, directing him to a patch a few hours high.
"What about them?" he inquired, keeping firm clasp of her.
"I made them in the sand to-night," she told him. "I'll show them to you in stones; you'll see." And she led him across the street to the beach where she proceeded cautiously, searching for her smoothed place in the sand.
He watched her and held to her, wondering what was her trick.
"Here!" she cried. "Here! See! There they are, those stars I showed you! 'These stones here! See! I sat here and smoothed the sand. I'd come home from the office and I wasn't sleepy so I came down here alone; and I sat here, where you see, making those stars in the sand."
Calvin saw the stones and, looking up at the stars, while still tightly grasping her, he discerned how truly she had set her constellation.
"What about them?" he asked.
"Do you suppose I sat here, smoothing sand and making stars while I was waiting for Ket to—murder?" she asked, and he felt in the muscles of her slender arm the swelling tension of her passion. "I came down here alone, I tell you. I came down here by myself without an idea of anything wrong to-night. I sat here and made those stars and, when I got up, I came by Adele's flat and I saw her in there with a man who was like Ket—Fred Ketlar, but wasn't! He wasn't, I tell you! So get after him! Let Ket go! He didn't do it. Another man did it; and I saw him with her! I saw him, I tell you, from the walk just out here!"
"What's she saying?" a reporter demanded, approaching with a companion and the detectives, curious themselves.
"She's repeating her story about seeing the other man with Ketlar's wife," Calvin informed them.
"But what's the idea here? What was she showing you in the sand?"
"Stones," said Calvin.
"Stars!" she cried. "There they are, see; I was—"
Just then a detective stepped among them. "Bunk!" he said. "Where're you taking her now, sir?" he asked Clarke. "Over to the flat?"
"Adele's flat?" Joan gasped. "Oh, no! No!"
"Huh!" said the detective. "I guess you don't want to go; but—"
"Have you anything else to show me here?" Calvin asked her.
"No."
"This is what you brought me out to see?"
"Yes."
"Then we'll go back."
"I'll go," said Joan Daisy, dully.
On the way from the beach, she further amazed Calvin Clarke by humming. He made no comment about it; he did not speak with her at all, but he listened to her humming a few bars of a cheap, lively jazz tune. Over and over again she hummed it; and then suddenly she made explanation:
"You remember I told you that Ket got Fort Worth or Kansas City—I don't know which—before he went out of my room and he got some jazz, That's the tune he got, Mr. Clarke!" And she hummed her refrain over twice more. "Look it up! You'll see! Check up the programs from Fort Worth and Kansas City to-night; and you'll find that tune on one of them. And when they played it, Ket was still in the room with me!"
Calvin silently escorted her to the door where newspaper men questioned him and flashlights flared. He learned that the policewoman, whom he had summoned, was on the way; and personally he took Joan Daisy up to her apartment.
"I am sending you to a hotel in charge of a Mrs. Hoswick, whom I know very well," he announced. "You had better collect such articles as you will need for a day or two."
"You mean," asked Joan Daisy—she had ceased to hum—"you're arresting me for—for a part in killing Adele?"
"Not arresting," Calvin denied. "You will be held; that's all."
"What's the difference?"
"There will be no charge lodged against you, yet; and you will merely be kept in the care of Mrs. Hoswick at a hotel."
"Why?"
"Why?" repeated Calvin, nettling. "Because it is perfectly plain you know more about this murder than you have yet told; and we mean to get it out of you."
"I have told you," said Joan Daisy, "the whole truth now. The truth! The truth!"
"Do you want," asked Calvin, "to speak to your parents before you go?"
"What time is it?"
"Half past two."
"Maybe I can wake one of them."
She retreated, backing from him until she reached the door to the passage where she turned and slipped away; but, probably for the sake of the light from the front room, she left the door open and also left ajar the bedroom door after she entered.
"Mamma! Mamma!" Calvin heard her say; and for a few moments she tried to arouse her mother, but the drugged sleep proved too deep; so she stirred the man.
"Dads! Dads! . . . Dads! The police are taking me away. I want to tell you. Listen, Dads. The police are here—the police—"
"Here?" said a man's thick voice. 'Sorry, m'dear. Sorry," he apologized stupidly. "Wouldn't've had it happ'n for worlds, Joan—not f'r worlds."
"You didn't, Dads. It's about Ket, this time. Ket—he's in trouble. The police think I know something about it; so they're taking me away. Not to the station, to a hotel; just to a hotel, Dads; that's what they say. That's all. Don't think about it now; go back to sleep. Only—only remember in the morning."
She came from the room, her eyes blinking in the light. "He'll remember, I think; but I'd better leave him a note, too," she said to Clarke and crossed to a desk where she wrote for a minute before she asked: "What hotel are you sending me to?"
"I'll let him know later," Calvin answered.
She gazed at him steadily, her lips quivering; then she finished her note and asked him, "Do you want to See it?"
"No," said Calvin, feeling uneasy. "That's all right."
She set to packing her night-clothes and toilet articles in a little leather bag and Calvin watched her hands at work, deftly folding, arranging and pressing things into place while she thought about them not at all.
"What are you doing with him?" she asked, suddenly, not glancing up at Calvin, but staring at the floor as though she could peer through to the apartment below.
"We have not fully decided yet," Calvin answered.
"Can I see him a second before you take me away?"
"For what purpose?"
"I want to see him."
Calvin considered for a moment and then said, "No."
She offered no direct protest, but repeated, "He didn't do it," like a child insisting. She closed her bag and immediately occupied herself with stripping the blankets and sheets from her bed.
"Where do you live?" Calvin asked, watching her.
"Live? Why, here."
"I mean," he explained, "where is your home?"
"You're in it," she replied and he started, slightly.
A few minutes later, the policewoman arrived; and after she had escorted the girl away, Calvin lingered in Joan Daisy's room. From her window he watched for her on the walk below, and he followed her slender, pretty figure until she entered an automobile and was driven off.
Upon descending to the second floor, he found a lull in the proceedings. Denson and Goudy together, with a police stenographer, were grouped in chairs about Ketlar, who had dressed in a new, brown suit and who was seated, sucking at a cigarette.
He jumped up when Calvin confronted him.
"Well, your friend has just admitted more of what you were doing to-night," Calvin accused him. "She's broken on your alibi, Ketlar. She has just admitted that about one o'clock you left her and went out of this building and down to the lake and turned toward your wife's apartment."
Ket jerked and went white, and his cigarette dropped from his lips. "My God, does she say that?"
"She does."
"It's a lie—a damn lie!"
Calvin seated himself. "Sit down, Ketlar, and tell us why she would lie. Tell us—" And so they started at Ket again.
Dawn discovered them still at Ket—dawn, which dimmed the waning moon, which cast a creeping edge of shadow and light on the floor below Joan Daisy's window.
Her room was high in a city hotel; below it spread roofs and chimneys. Joan Daisy lay desperately counting chimneys and watching the waft of early morning smoke, rare and scattered at this sunrise, since it was Sunday.
She was in bed; for Mrs. Hoswick, who guarded her, had counseled bed and sleep.
Sleep! when the police and the State—most particularly and personally that man who had come in the name of the State, Mr. Clarke, with his cold, confident, eastern accent—were trying to take Ket's life.
She pressed at her breast to oppose the strange sensation of emptiness within her. They had scooped out her dream of Ket, of honor and fame for him, of worth and usefulness for herself. They had Ket in their power and they would kill him, if they could. "Ketlar, Frederic. Born in Chicago. . . . He early showed talent . . . the composition of mere catchy dance pieces until he met Joan Royle, who willed and inspired him to . . ."
Fragments of her dream, broken and wrenched away, seemed afloat above her. With the power of her fingers, pressing upon her breast, she would put them together within her again.
She turned on her side and set once more to counting chimneys. The sun was up and sent long, slanting shafts over the roofs.
Calvin's host and classmate, Arthur Todd, stirred at the strike of the sun into his room in his Winnetka home and was roused sufficiently to remember that he had reason to wish to awake early this morning.
"That business which knocked Calvin up in the night," he recalled to his wife, when she heard him go out. "Ketlar killing his wife, you know."
"That terrible boy!" exclaimed Emily, and since the newspaper had not arrived, she waited up with Arthur until it was delivered; and then to them who had foreknowledge and who were only indirectly interested, the newspaper proved innocent of any report of the crime.
Another edition of the paper, printed much later than that which was circulated in the suburbs, lay upon the city doorstep of Ket's mother, who had no warning at all of what awaited her on the other side of the deal door of her kitchen, where she was getting breakfast for her husband.
She was a woman of fifty, slender of limb, full in bosom, with weary, gray eyes and with firm, regular features distinguished by a clear, flawless skin very like Ket's. Her hair once had been naturally light like his and when it had turned darker, she had bleached it yellow and afterwards kept it so. She was remarkable, in the manicure trade, for having preserved her attractiveness and youthfulness so that she was pleasing to men and so had held her position in barbershops until she was almost forty.
She still kept her figure, but no amount of massaging now served to hide the crow's-feet edging her eyes or lifted the weariness from her lids; so, since she was obviously old, she no longer was wanted to manicure men's nails, and she had taken to washing women's hair for her living.
Two children she had borne—her first, when she was nineteen, a girl, who had been unwanted but loved passionately, and who had died in her first year through no fault or neglect of the mother. Ket, who had come when she was twenty-six, was the baby she had intended.
She had married, for the first time, three years ago and not for love but for companionship, choosing a good, steady widower of fifty, a methodical man and utterly dependable, and given neither to questioning her past nor to jealousy of forgotten lovers. Since he was a railroad conductor, and took an early run on Sunday, she had the coffee pot on the gas-burner before seven o'clock and, when she went to the porch for the milk, she saw the newspaper.
Great, black letters, turned upside down to her, spelled her name—the only name she ever had had until three years ago when she gained John Folwell's.
"Ketlar's," the paper said. "Ketlar's Wife Shot Dead."
Anna Folwell bent down and grasped for the paper, but it slipped from her fingers, and she merely pushed it right side about before she read: "Fred Ketlar, boy leader of the Echo Garden Orchestra, held for murder of his wife."
Anna seized it in both hands and carried it into the kitchen. She put her back against the door and pushed it shut behind her and leaned against it, staring at the black page which told her no more, except the description of the bullet wound which had killed her son's wife, and that her son was discovered in his flat, where he had been drinking with a girl; that he had a fresh hurt on his head, which he did not satisfactorily explain, and that he gave a contradictory account of his doings last night.
Anna, his mother, gasped to herself, "You didn't do it, Freddie! My Freddie, you didn't do it!" But a dire, fateful fear clamped upon her heart, doubting not her boy directly, but herself. Because he was hers, he had been fated; he would never be let to live, prosperous and honorable.
She closed her eyes, then opened them and read again.
When the coffee pot boiled over, she let it overflow until it smothered the gas flame and the smell brought her husband. "Why, Anna!" he cried; and she laid before him the paper.
"He didn't do it, John," she said. "But they'll get him."
"Why?"
"They will. I know," she answered and shut her lips.
They had no breakfast; and after ten minutes John was obliged to leave to take out his train.
Anna locked the door after him and thought of him no more for her memories of the man, her Fred's father, whom she had hardly known.
In the third floor flat on the side street to the lake, Joan Daisy's mother awoke first, and she was nervous and querulous as usual in the morning.
"Daisy!" she called fretfully. "Daisy!"
When she heard no answer, she propped herself up, abusedly, and called again; and then she shook her husband. "Poppa! Poppa!"
He aroused and she complained, "Daisy doesn't come."
"I'll call her at once, m'darling," poppa offered and arose and looked into the next room. "She's gone out, m'darling."
"Gone out? At this time Sunday? Where?"
"One minute," poppa cautioned, beginning hazily to recollect. "Something happened. Police. That's it. I remember now! I distinctly remember. Ket; something about Ket—and police."
He wandered about the front room, where Joan Daisy had converted her bed into a couch before she had left; and finally he spied the note on the desk which was addressed "Dads."
He read:
"I'm not here, because somebody shot Adele Ketlar to-night; and, Dads, the police came for Fred. They think he did it; but I know he didn't. I've been telling them so, but they're going to take him away and they'll take me, too.
"A Mr. Clarke, from the state's attorney's office, is giving the orders. He says he's simply sending me to a hotel, but he hasn't told me which yet. He says he'll let you know later. He hasn't hurt me and he won't, I think; but I don't think he'll believe me, either, though I've been telling him the truth. Dads, you tell him the truth—just the truth, when they ask you about it.
"I'll be all right; don't worry mamma, Dads; and don't you worry.
Hastily Dads concealed this at the complaint from the next room, "Where is Daisy, poppa?"
"She seems to have stepped out, m'darling," he called, reassuringly. "Merely stepped out somewhere."
"I want her."
"I'll look her up immediately, m'darling," Dads promised, soothingly; but as soon as he made sure that his wife was not stirring from her bed, he held Joan's letter in trembling hands and reread it.
Ketlar's wife shot, and Ketlar and Joan "held" for it! This was an affair of far graver and less compoundable character than the offenses with which he dwelt familiarly. Shot! Killed, that meant, undoubtedly. A matter of murder.
What had Joan and Ketlar been doing last night? He tried to recall. What had Joan told him?
What was the truth—just the truth—which Joan asked him to tell to the state's attorney, when he should be questioned?
Dads dressed without further disquieting his darling and he stole downstairs where he listened, cautiously, outside Ketlar's door. Hearing nothing, he deliberated whether to knock, decided against it, descended to the vestibule and requisitioned one of the newspapers which lay there.
Retreating with it, he set at once to scheming how to help Joan. He realized that some one surely would question him soon; and what would be the best thing for him to say? Not just the truth, of course. The truth, as he knew it in this case, was altogether too meager an affair for him to let it limit his usefulness to Joan.
Probably it would prove, as the truth frequently did, a convenient point of departure; but it was plain, from this newspaper, if it had not previously been obvious from Joan's note, that the girl to-day was in need of much more than mere truth.
So Dads planned and prepared, to the best of his wits and his knowledge, to help her.