CHAPTER TWELVE
I WAITED until Copperhead Kate had edged half-way through the heavy folds of brocaded velour, with her pistol hand still inside the lighted room. Then I decided to get ready for her.
Those portières, I saw, would keep her extended right hand from making any rapid movement toward the rear. So I reversed the hold on my own automatic and raised it above my head. As the figure in the rain-coat pushed still deeper in through the swaying draperies I brought that heavy mass of metal down on the extended forearm with all the force I could put into the blow. At the same moment I pushed Copperhead Kate bodily and none too gently back into the lighted room. She stumbled and fell forward, with a blasphemous little gasp, at almost the same moment that her pistol dropped to the floor.
I was after that pistol as quick as a lynx, and before my astounded friend Katie could so much as get to her feet, and even before the astounded line at the far side of the room could realize what had happened, I was stationed there in front of the portières with a black-barreled automatic in either hand and fire in my eye. And it was my turn, I knew, to take a hand in the little drama.
"Put up those hands," I told the startled woman as she turned and stared at me with empty and expressionless eyes.
"For the love of Mike!" she murmured, a little stupid with surprise.
"Then get back in that line! Get back there, quick, or you'll be swallowing a dose of the same bitters you've been talking about giving every one else!"
Copperhead Kate fell back, step by step, until she stood between the fat doctor and Ezra Tweedie Bartlett himself. I caught a grunt of relief from that rat-faced old rascal as she did so. But from the man in evening clothes, at the far end of that line, came a quiet but distinct sound of laughter.
I turned on him sharply, but he didn't seem in the least afraid of me.
"This is an awfully uncomfortable position, you know," he quietly reminded me. "And under the circumstances, I think you'll admit, altogether unnecessary."
My first impulse was to resent that speech, as an impertinence. Then I remembered that Wendy Washburn had his royal way of seeming right, even when he was in the wrong, and that i it came to a backdown I'd find it no easy thing to keep my position a dignified one. I remembered, too, that there was scarcely a chance of any member of that group being armed. It was ten to one, had any of them been heeled, that Copperhead Kate's speechifying would have been punctuated by a random bullet or two. And if you think it's easy to stand with your hands above your head, for even five minutes at a time, try it just once in front of a clock!
"All right!" I announced in my grandest manner. "You can stand at ease there, the whole lot of you!" For I was tired myself and it might not be so profitable, in the end, to add to their troubles.
I could hear the sigh of relief that went up from that weary array of figures. A dozen aching arms, I noticed, were very promptly lowered.
"But no shifting in the line!" I commanded, as I gave my fat blond doctor the full benefit of a barrel-end against his vest front. He made a stealthy move, as though to drop behind the others, possibly with a view toward bolting for the door. And I held them there like a drill-sergeant, with the two automatics wavering up and down their Little Mary's. For I meant business and I wanted them to know it.
"1 guess it's my turn to put a few questions to this little party," I told them as I backed slowly away, so as to command a better view of the line as a whole. "And I'm going to get answers to 'em or you're going to dance high. Now, you," I continued, confronting the smoldering-eyed Copperhead Kate, "how did you get into this house to-night?"
"I guess I walked in," was her sullenly insolent answer.
"Right through a locked door?"
"Oh, I've been carrying a pass-key to this house for a week or more," she airily acknowledged.
"Where'd you get that key?"
"A gen'l'man friend o' mine cut it from a blank."
"And you came to-night to make your haul?"
"Sure! You know that without askin' me!"
"But what made you come to this particular house?" I demanded, determined to get a snarl or two out of that tangle while the chance was before me.
"I liked the looks of it," was Copperhead Kate's altogether unsatisfactory retort.
"But who'd told you about the wall-safe up-stairs?" I persisted.
"I must 've dreamed it," she equivocated.
"Who told you?" I insisted.
"A butler who was fired from here early last winter."
"And that butler knew valuable papers were in this safe?"
She blinked at me meditatively. Then she laughed.
"Gee, no! All I was after was shiners—what your friend Bud used to call ice."
"Never mind my friend Bud," I called out to her, resenting the note of mockery that had crept into her voice. "But be so good as to tell me how you got hold of this second automatic."
Copperhead Kate hesitated for a moment. Her face looked genuinely perplexed.
"A ghost gave it to me," she finally explained.
An uneasy move went down the line.
"A what?" I demanded.
"I was lyin' up in that four-poster when something in white, with a white face, crept into the room. It came over to the bed. It stood there, without moving. Then without a word it dropped that gun into my hand and turned and slipped out of the room again."
Here was still another mystery in that crowded house of mysteries! And I had no reason to suspect that Copperhead Kate wasn't telling the truth.
"What did the visitor look like?" I asked.
"Like the morgue at four a.m.!" announced the woman with the thatch of russet bangs.
"But surely you saw her face."
Copperhead Kate shrugged a non-committal shoulder.
"There wasn't any too much light burning in that big bedroom. And I was so glad to get the gun I didn't ask for any identification cards!"
"You just got busy rounding up your friends here?"
Copperhead Kate stood regarding them with open contempt.
"All but that cuff-shooter at the far end there. He had the nerve to walk in on me with that club-bag of mine right in his hand. So I just took him in under my wing."
"Is that true?" I asked, turning to Wendy Washburn.
"Too true," was his flippantly solemn retort. He was not taking the situation, I could see, in quite the same spirit as the others were. He was still a puzzle to me. Every time I wanted to believe in him something turned up to make that belief impossible. And I couldn't help still questioning, even as he stood before me, whether he was in a compact with Copperhead Kate or not.
Yet I couldn't stand there all night third-degreeing that line of altogether unwilling witnesses. So I cut things short by swinging about to old Ezra Bartlett.
"I want to know what you did with that body?" I shot out at him straight from the shoulder.
"That what?" suddenly demanded Wendy Washburn, from the end of the line.
"Could I say a word or two?" almost as promptly requested Miss Ledwidge, who until this moment had remained both silent and passive.
"No," I told her. "It's this human house-rat I want to talk to!"
I repeated my question to Ezra Bartlett.
"But what body?" again interrupted Wendy Washburn, with an actual note of anxiety in his voice.
"There's a dead woman somewhere in this house," I informed him, "and I want to know what became of her!"
"A dead woman?" he echoed, peering along the line.
"Yes, and if I'm not greatly mistaken, that woman was murdered, and murdered by somebody in this room!"
There was an uneasy stir along that line of anxious faces. I could even hear Copperhead Kate's soft murmur of "Hully Gee!" and see her sleepy eyes widen with the shock of what she had heard. But I wasn't thinking so much about Copperhead Kate as I was about old Ezra Bartlett, who stood there blinking abstractedly at the barrel of my automatic. His body never shifted an inch but his eye followed my movements so closely that it made me think of a zoo eagle blinking at a visitor on a rainy day.
"And you, you weasel-faced old rat," I cried out at him, hot with an unreasoning indignation which I couldn't control, "I want to know what you're doing about that will you're trying to put over on this house!"
"What does she mean by that?" cut in Wendy Washburn, from his end of the line. There was a note in his voice that puzzled me, a note of authority, of impatience, as though he had a perfect right to ask the question he had.
"I'm sure I don't know," answered the old weasel, looking me straight in the eye. "For I never saw this young woman before in my life!"
The quiet assurance, the calm solemnity, with which he made that preposterous statement rather took my breath away. The deceit of the old scoundrel was incredible. And I felt sure it would be easy enough to prove that he was telling anything but the truth.
"You know that's a lie, don't you?" I challenged, turning to Alicia Ledwidge.
"You ordered me to keep out of this family conference," she coolly retorted, "and I prefer to take your advice!"
I stepped in front of Doctor Klinger.
"Have you ever seen me before?" I demanded.
"Never!" was his somewhat disquieting reply.
The whole thing was getting more and more like a nightmare. I was beginning to lose my perspective. And what was more, my arms were beginning to ache with the weight of those two heavy automatics.
The man at the end of the line seemed to notice this. I could see him smile a little as he witnessed the palsied motion which my overstrained arm-muscles were giving to the two pistol-barrels.
"Don't you think it would be just as well to put them down now?" he calmly inquired.
"They're not going down until you answer me a question or two," I told him. The way in which I barked out those words came as a surprise to me. I knew that I was slowly but surely losing my sense of humor.
"What is it you want to know?" my deposed Hero-Man was asking me.
"The first thing I want to know is where you got a key to this house."
He looked up at me, apparently perplexed.
"Didn't you drop a key into that black bag of yours?" he asked.
"No, I didn't. And I don't believe you ever found one there!"
"My dear young lady, you can believe what you like. But really, you know, I don't carry pass-keys for every house in Manhattan!"
"But you carried one for this house!"
"Which I should never have done if you hadn't happened to be carrying the family jewels of the same place!"
He didn't seem a bit afraid of me. On the contrary, he seemed to be enjoying some unknown joke at my expense. He seemed to be laughing at me in his sleeve, as he had so often done before. But I wasn't playing second fiddle, that night, to anybody, and this fact I intended to make quite clear to him, even though I was beginning to ask myself just how much longer I could keep those automatics poked in their faces.
His own face suddenly grew serious.
"And the valuables you carried away from this house in that bag, I trust, are still in that bag!" he suddenly flung out at me.
It was more a reminder, I think, than either a challenge or a question. My first impulse was to resent it. But it was really meant to serve, I began to see, as a tip on the wing. It indirectly warned me that the matter of the club-bag had passed completely out of my mind.
I remembered, with a sinking feeling, that this precious bag had been dropped out through the portières. And it was not the sort of thing one wanted to leave lying about in the dark on the far side of a door.
At the same moment that this fact came home to me I began backing away from that ragged line of captives, edging always toward those heavy portières that swung between me and the next room.
A couple of the figures in that line, I noticed, exchanged glances. It was a signal which might have meant anything. But I knew better than to take chances. And it pulled me up short.
"Any one of you trying to move," I told them with all the show of ferocity I could throw into the words, "will get a hole put through you so quick you'll never know what hit you!"
I could see Wendy Washburn, at the end of the line, luxuriate in one of his enigmatic and momentary smiles. But I had no time to worry over what it meant. I wanted that black club-bag back in my hand.
So I continued to veer off toward the portières, very much as Copperhead Kate had done before me.
I was taking no such chances, however, as that crimson-corniced lady of adventure, for as I edged in between the draperies, I advanced one hand with the automatic poised and ready, keeping it always ahead of me, just as with the other hand I continued to menace the patient-eyed row of figures standing for all the world like an awkward squad at the far side of the lighted room.
In two seconds, I told myself, I could be back in the lighted room with the bag in my hand. And I had them too well under cover to give them any chance for a breakaway.
What was more, I was watching them every moment of the time. My eye was on them even as I groped for the bag, found the handle, and clutched both the pistol and the bag-handle between the same fingers.
So intently was I watching them, in fact, that I saw nothing else that was taking place much closer to me.
My first intimation of this came with startling unexpectedness. It came in the form of a long arm girdling my waist, pinning my left hand to my side at the same time that it lifted me slightly off my feet. And the next moment my other arm was also in chancery.
"It's all right! I've got her!" called out a deep bass voice close to my ear. And startled as I was, I knew that it was Big Ben Locke himself, who had spoken.
I knew it even before he carried me kicking and struggling into the lighted room, where that line of worthies who'd been so meek and motionless a minute before now exploded into sudden action. They came running and flocking about me, none of them exactly breaking their neck to hide their satisfaction at the somewhat undignified figure which I must have presented.
"Steady, my girl, steady!" warned Big Ben, as he held me in a clutch that would have done credit to a grizzly. Then he proceeded first to take away my two automatics, and then the club-bag full of loot.
I wasn't so interested in this, at the moment, as I was in the discovery that Copperhead Kate, taking advantage of that distracting movement, had sidled closer about to the portières and was creeping unobserved out through them. I called to the big hulk still holding me, but he was too intent on the bird in his hand to think of the one slipping off through the bush. Then I twisted about and tried to gasp out a hurried word of warning to Wendy Washburn himself.
But my one-time Hero-Man, I discovered, had also quietly and mysteriously vanished from the room. And I found something in the well-timed disappearance of those two figures which seemed to crown my darkest suspicions.
"What'll we do with her?" Big Ben was demanding, a little out of breath, for I was still fighting like a terrier to break away from that south-paw clutch of his.
It was the weasel-eyed old Ezra Bartlett who answered that question. He had been stooping before me, in a sort of a crouch, with his claw-like hands over his slightly crooked knees, staring exultantly into my face. I'd been too busy to give him much attention. But his earlier air of querulous meekness had fallen away from him. And now I could see him positively licking his chops.
"We'd better lock her up in the Lilac Room," he announced, "for there are a good many things, young woman, you still have to answer for!"
"And things we've all got to know before that girl gets out of this house," echoed old Brother Enoch, with a tremulous hand cupped behind a prominent ear, which made him look like a rabbit.
It was then that I twisted about and tried to make Big Ben Locke listen to reason.
"Chief," I gasped out to him, "you've stumbled into one of the biggest cases you ever struck, but for the love of heaven, listen to me before you do anything!"
"Listen to you!" he echoed, with a lip-curl of scorn. "Didn't I have the pleasure of listenin' to you for considerable time this afternoon? And do you expect me to holler for an encore on that sort of talk?"
"But things have happened since then," I told him, "things that change everything."
"Yes, it sure looks like it," he announced, as he dropped my second automatic into his pocket.
"Bring her along!" commanded Ezra Bartlett, in his squeak of a voice, as he waited impatiently at the open door.
"Chief," I said with all the solemnity I could summon up, "there's been worse than murder take place in this house to-day!"
"Yes, I sure saw you meant business with those two guns o' yours!" was his flippant retort.
"But I can explain every step of that. I was only acting as any one of your operatives would act under the circumstances," I said, as he began to half drag and half carry me across the room. For old Ezra Bartlett had repeated his impatient command that I be brought along.
"But you're no longer an operative of mine," the bulky man at my side reminded me. "And we get one every now and then, you know, who turns out bad!"
"Then ask Wendy Washburn who brought me into this house!" I told him, for I was desperate now. I was desperate enough to eat crow before the two of them.
"Wendy Washburn! Who's Wendy Washburn?" demanded my captor, staring about the room. And of course there was no Wendy Washburn there.
"He's a friend of mine," I told him.
"You mean a confederate," corrected the Chief. And I saw that he didn't intend to give me the chance I was fighting for.
"Then you're not going to listen to me!" I said it in almost a scream, for my nerves were on edge and I saw my last hope vanishing.
"All I know, young woman, is that you're under arrest. And that's about all I want to know just now!" As he said this he brought my wrists together with a movement that was as quick as it was clever, and clicked a pair of nickeled handcuffs over them.
I stared down at them rather stupidly. It was my first experience with such things. And it took the fight out of me, for the moment, as completely as the thump of a night-stick could.
"And what are you going to do with me?" I asked, still staring down at the imprisoning rings of polished metal.
"We're going to put you where you'll be safe until we can get you, you and one or two others in this house, down to headquarters!" Big Ben explained as he followed the shifty-eyed old weasel up the stairway.
I had no choice in the matter. I had to go. I had to submit to the steady tug of that big brute as he led me down a darkened hallway and into a room which Ezra Bartlett had already thrown open for us.
"This'll do!" announced Big Ben, as he ushered me into that unlighted chamber. Then he looked over his shoulder to make sure Ezra Bartlett wasn't within hearing distance.
"Listen to me," he said in a hurried whisper. "This is a bluff, remember. There's a mix-up here I've got to get to the bottom of. And if you stay quiet in this room, Baddie, until I can come and get you, you'll be helping me out of a hole!"
- T don't believe you," I told him, between puffs, for I was still fighting for breath.
"Then what're you going to do?" he demanded in his heavy whisper. He was at least a good actor.
"Why don't you listen to me," I cried out at him. "Why haven't you the brains to see a thing when it's under your nose!"
"Hush!" he warned me, with a glance toward the door. "There's more under my nose than you imagine. And I can't explain things. You've just got to accept what I'm handing you. I want you to stay in this room until you hear from me!"
His hand dropped from my arm, and he was across the room before I could realize it.
"Until you hear from me," he repeated in a whisper, as he swung the door shut. The next moment I could catch the sound of the key turning in the lock.
I woke up to the fact, as I stood there in the darkness, that I was crying a little, crying, I think, from sheer exasperation, from sheer helplessness. And I was so tired, I remembered, that my joints ached.
Those hundred and one aches in my body, however, weren't half so hard to put up with as that misery of mind which came from knowing that I had made a mess of everything. Every step I'd taken had been a mistake. And the memory of it all suddenly made me see red. For a little while there in that unlighted room I wasn't anything better than a Chatham Square anarchist on the rampage. I think I could have blown up all New York and fiddled over the ruins, like a Nero in petticoats.
But instead of blowing up all Manhattan, I mopped my eyes, groped my way to the wall, found a light-switch and turned on the electrics.
It was a very comfortable-looking room to be a prisoner in, but period furnishings weren't the sort of thing I was trying to get comfort out of.
I tried the door, but that gave me no hope of escape. Then I noticed for the first time that the room had no window. So I went back to the door again. It was very heavy, and securely locked. I kicked on its panels with all my force, but I might as well have kicked against a brick wall. Then for a minute or so I must have imagined I was a whirling dervish, for I stood there pounding on the upper panels with my manacled hands. It made a good deal of noise, and did a good deal of damage to the highly polished woodwork. But that was the only satisfaction I got out of the performance. And I was too tired to waste energy as a paint-remover, once my foolish little frenzy had worn itself out. So I backed slowly away from the door, pondering just what my next move would be. I stood there in studious silence, trying to goad that empty head of mine into grasping an idea or two.
That silence was suddenly broken by three low yet distinct taps on the door which I had so recently been pounding. I moved toward this door, wondering what this signal might mean. Then, as I still advanced, the lights suddenly went out and I stood in utter darkness, with my shackled hands touching the wall, gropingly, for possible guidance. And as I stood there the key in the door turned quietly, and the door itself was slowly swung back.
It was not swung entirely open. The light from the hall without was quite dim. But for one shadowy moment I caught sight of a shadowy figure in white. It seemed to be the figure of a young woman. The face of this figure during that brief view, appeared to be as white as the floating white of the clothing she wore. She did not speak.
Before she disappeared, however, one thin white hand was stretched forward, toward me, I thought at the time, and was then withdrawn. The next moment I heard the tinkle of metal on the hardwood floor at my feet. I looked down, quickly. As I did so the door swung shut. A moment later the electrics flowered into light, controlled apparently by some switch outside the room. And I stood there feeling exactly as Horatio must have felt that night in front of Elsinore Castle when the ghost of Hamlet's father gave him the once over.
"Baddie," I said to myself out loud, "either you're seeing things again or there's something around this house that's escaped the undertaker!"