Part 4

“What was it――chorus girls?” chimed in the other, ever ready for a spicy bit of gossip.

“Yes――lately cabaret dancers――one in particular――at The White Light――a little Mexican――Paquita.”

“What――Paquita?” chorused the group, and I could see by the inflection that she was not unknown to several of them. “You don’t say. Well, you must admit he was a good picker.”

“I rather suspect that his acquaintance cost him high, though,” persisted Conigsby. “Paquita has a scale of prices. It costs so much to take dinner with her. She’ll drive out of an afternoon with you――but you must pay. There’s a union scale.”

“It takes dough to make tarts,” frivolously suggested another of the group, forgetful of the tragedy that they were discussing.

Indeed, I was amazed at the nonchalant attitude they took. Yet, on analysis, I concluded that it also might be significant. No doubt the estimate of Maddox by his club members was more accurate than that of the world at large.

“If it had been Shelby,” put in another man, “I wouldn’t have been surprised.”

“Don’t worry,” interposed Conigsby. “Shelby Maddox is clever. Remember, Shelby is young. Underneath his wildness there is ambition. I think you’ll hear more of that boy before we are through. I know him, and he’s likely to prove a chip off the old Maddox block. Nothing that Shelby does would surprise me.”

“How about the other sister, Frances?” inquired another. “Do you know her husband, Walcott?”

“Not very well. You’re more likely to find him on Broad Street than Broadway. You know what I care for Broad Street. I’d never visit it if my bankers were not down there. Walcott has a deuced pretty little sister, though. I hear that Shelby is quite smitten.”

“Well, whatever you may think of him, I have seen Shelby Maddox with Paquita, too. I’ll lay you a little bet that that little baggage knows something about the case. Remember, the murder was on Shelby’s yacht.”

Conigsby shrugged. “Quite possible――another case of notoriety for The White Light.”

“Notoriety for Paquita, you mean,” corrected another. “I hear she plans to get back into musical comedy this fall. She’s not at The White Light any longer.”

“Well, I think she’ll make good,” agreed Conigsby. “I wonder who the angel is for her new show?”

The conversation was now hopelessly drifting, and I excused myself. At least I had learned enough to give me an insight into another phase of the life of Marshall Maddox.

Pondering what I had just heard, I decided to wander over toward the café and theater district, and drop into the cabaret which they had mentioned――The White Light.

As I entered the place in broad daylight I was struck by the sordidness of it. Deserted except by those who were cleaning up for the coming late afternoon and evening, it was positively tawdry. It needed the glamour of bright faces and night life, and even then it must be viewed through the bottom of a glass to wear even the semblance of attraction.

In the main dining-room of the café, grouped about the little dancing floor before the platform on which sat the orchestra when things were in full swing, stood innumerable little white tables. Just now there seemed to be no one there except a man at the piano and a girl who was evidently rehearsing her dance steps.

I paused for a moment and a waiter who had been arranging the tables for the coming crowd moved over to tell me that the place was not yet open.

I satisfied him that it was on other business that I had come, then asked him whether Paquita was at The White Light any more.

“No, sir,” he replied, brusquely. “She hasn’t been here for several days. I’ve heard that she has gone away to the country――has another contract. It is a rehearsal for the girl who is to do her number that is going on now. Is there anything I can do for you?”

I thanked him. It was not the waiter I wanted, but the proprietor, Henri.

In a little office in the rear I at last discovered him, a rather stout, genial Frenchman who had made a reputation as one of New York’s restaurateurs to the _risqué_. I had known Henri once when I had the assignment on the _Star_ that covered the theater and hotel district, and I had no fear that he would not talk.

“Well, Henri,” I began cautiously, “I suppose you saw in the papers this morning about your friend, Marshall Maddox?”

Henri, who was matching up checks showing the business done up to an early hour of the morning, shrugged. “Monsieur was more the friend of La Paquita than of me,” he returned, still matching checks.

“Still, he came here a great deal,” I asserted, taking a chance.

“_Oui_,” he agreed, “but it was not to see us. Always La Paquita, La Paquita. So different from his brother.”

“Indeed?” I queried, quite overjoyed at the turn the conversation was taking. “Then you know Shelby, too?”

“Ver’ well. Oh yes. He has been here. A fine fellow, but――it is all right. Business is not for him. He is always ready for the good time――a sport, you call it?”

I smiled. “Was he a friend of Paquita’s, too?” I hazarded, watching Henri’s face.

He lifted his eyebrows a fraction of an inch. “No more than of the rest,” he returned, with a deprecating gesture. “Pretty faces and figures all look good to Shelby,” he added, with a smile; then, seriously: “But he will settle down. We will see him here no more, some day. Also I know his brother-in-law, Messtair Walcott. I do not like him.”

“Why?” I asked, somewhat amused at getting his point of view.

“Too quiet. He will come in, not often, perhaps, bow, maybe speak, then go away.”

I thought I “got” him. One must be a good spender to appeal to Henri. I could not imagine Johnson Walcott as such. In fact, I could scarcely imagine him coming to Henri’s at all.

“Paquita was quite intimate with Marshall Maddox, wasn’t she?” I ventured again.

Henri brought into play his ready shrug. It was not for him to say anything about his patrons, much less about the dead. Still, his very manner gave the impression that his lips would not frame.

“Did any one ever seem to be watching him here?” I asked, the thought of the sallow-faced man at Westport recurring to my mind.

Henri stopped matching his checks and looked up. Was he growing suspicious of my disinterestedness?

“Such things are not unusual,” he answered, showing a fine assortment of ivory beneath his black mustache.

I met his eye frankly. He seemed to understand.

“Not for the _Star_, you understand?” he nodded, still looking at me fixedly.

“Oh, no, no!” I hastened, truthfully. “I am not playing reporter now, Henri.”

He appeared to be satisfied, and it did not occur to him to inquire why else I should be interested.

“Yes,” he went on, slowly, “he has been watched. I have seen it myself. Several times there was a man who came in, Spanish-looking.”

“Did Mr. Maddox know it?” I inquired, more eager than ever.

Henri shook his head negatively. “Not until one day when La Paquita was talking to the man. Monsieur came in unexpectedly.”

The manager laughed a little to himself.

“Why do you laugh?” I asked. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” he returned. “It was not what happened. It was what she told him. So clever, too. She said it was a detective set to trail him by Mrs. Maddox, that she had flirted with the man and found out.”

“Then you do not think he was a detective?” I asked, puzzled.

“How should I know?” replied Henri, with another question. “It might have been. It might not have been. She is clever.”

“What did Maddox do?” I persisted. “Was he more cautious?”

Again Henri shook his head. “He gave orders that the man was not to be admitted. And we? He was a ver’ wealthy man, Mr. Maddox. We could not afford to lose him.”

“But this Spaniard,” I reiterated, convinced it was the same man whom we had seen at Westport, “isn’t it possible that Mrs. Maddox really did pick him out as a detective in the hope that he might get acquainted with Paquita and so report on her husband?”

“We are just guessing, monsieur,” dodged Henri. “I speak only of the things I know――and not all of them.”

He had evidently told me in substance about all that he was sure of. I knew him of old. Even after he had told his story he liked to leave a sort of “continued in our next” at the close of it, just so that you would not think he was not what Broadway calls a “live one.” I had absorbed about all that he had at first hand. It was enough. It gave me a view of the characters of the chief actors, from an angle which others did not know. I rose nonchalantly, thanked Henri, and sauntered out as I had in the old days when the _Star_ picked on me to expose some new society scandal.

The visit to Henri’s White Light cabaret had shown me one very important thing, however. Shelby Maddox had known Paquita before the night of the gay dinner party preceding the arrival of the Maddox family for the conference on the yacht.

What that might indicate I did not yet venture to guess. And yet I felt sure that it must prove significant. Else why had Paquita arrived at Westport at just that particular time? It seemed as though it must have something to do with the calling of the family conference.

Above all, however, stood forth the strange coincidence of the murder of Marshall Maddox, head of the family, and the stealing of the telautomaton, the most valuable single piece of property that the family owned. There was mystery enough in this case to satisfy even Kennedy.

VI

THE POISON GAS

A glance at my watch was sufficient to assure me that I should have no time for further inquiries if I wanted to meet Kennedy before going down to the office of Hastings. I wanted to do that, too, for I felt sure that Craig would talk more freely to me than to the rest, and my interest in the affair had by this time become insatiable.

Accordingly, I retraced my steps to the laboratory. Kennedy was still at work, partly over some reactions in test-tubes, but mostly using the strange three-tubed instrument I had noted. As I outlined to him rapidly what I had discovered and the plain inferences to be drawn from it, he listened attentively, still working.

“Very good,” was Kennedy’s sole comment as I concluded my story. “That’s very interesting――possibly very important. It begins to look as though Maddox had been in some one’s way and that that some one was taking no chances in order to ‘get’ him.”

“What have you discovered so far?” I hesitated, not sure yet whether he was willing to talk, for Kennedy never said anything, even to me, until he was perfectly sure of his ground.

“Marshall Maddox was not drowned, at least,” he vouchsafed.

“Not drowned?” I repeated, more to lead him on than because I was surprised.

“No. Whatever was the cause of his death, he was not killed by drowning. The lungs and stomach show that. In fact, I knew at Westport that he might have died a natural death or might even have been a suicide. But he certainly did not die of drowning. Only more careful tests than either the coroner or I could make at Westport were necessary.”

“How did it happen, then?” I continued, emboldened by his apparent readiness to talk.

Kennedy took a bottle with a ground-glass stopper and held it up so that I could see its greenish-yellow contents. Then he pulled out the stopper, covered with vaseline, for an instant and shoved it back again.

The instant was enough. A most unpleasant odor filled the laboratory. I felt a sense of suffocation in the chest, an irritation in the nose and throat, as though by the corrosive action of some gas on the air passages.

“If we could only have seen him before he died,” continued Kennedy, “I suspect we should have found his face as blue as it was when we did see him, his lips violet, his pulse growing weaker until it was imperceptible, and perhaps he would have been raising blood. It would have been like an acute bronchitis, only worse. Look.”

From a little pin prick which he made on his own thumb Craig squeezed out a drop of blood into a beaker containing some distilled water.

“This is a spectroscope,” he explained, touching the instrument I had noticed. “I think you are acquainted with it in a general way. Blood in water, diluted, shows the well-known dark bands between what we call ‘D’ and ‘E.’ These are the dark bands of oxyhemoglobin absorption. Now, I add to this, drop by drop, the water from that bottle which I uncorked. See――the bands gradually fade in intensity and finally disappear, leaving a complete and brilliant spectrum devoid of any bands whatever. In other words, here is a substance that actually affects the red coloring matter in the blood, bleaches it out, and does more――destroys it.”

I listened in amazement at the fiendish nature of his discovery.

“Marshall Maddox was overcome by the poison gas contained in a thin-shelled bomb that was thrown through his state-room window. The corrosion of the metal in the room gave me a clue to that. Then――”

“But what is this poison gas?” I demanded, horrified.

Kennedy looked at me fixedly a moment. “Chlorine,” he replied, simply; adding, “the spectroscope shows that there is a total absence of pigment in the blood. You can readily see that it is no wonder, if it has this action, that death is sometimes so rapid as to be almost instantaneous. Why, man alive, this thing destroys without the possibility of reconstitution! It is devilish in the quantity he inhaled it.”

I could only gasp with surprise at the discovery.

“But how was it done?” I repeated. “You think a bomb was thrown through the open port?”

“Without a doubt. Perhaps, as you guessed, from a boat outside, the roof of a cruiser, anything, as far as that end of it goes. Whoever did it might also have entered the room in the same way.”

“Entered the room?” I asked.

“Yes, wearing a mask composed of several layers of gauze impregnated with glycerinated solution of sodium hypophosphate. That is one of many substances used. All that was necessary was to wet the mask with water and adjust it. It would have served a double purpose――to protect the wearer’s life as well as his identity.”

Amazed at Kennedy’s powers of reconstruction from evidence that looked so slender, I merely waited for him to proceed.

“Then whoever it was probably rifled his clothes and so obtained the keys to the building and the office. From the brief-case they must have extracted the copies of the telautomaton plans. After that it was a simple matter to throw the body overboard in the hope that the affair might possibly be covered up as an accident or suicide. In the course of the night the wind cleared the room of the gas. They did not reckon, however, on what science can discover――or if they did, cared little. After that, I suppose, some one went to New York, perhaps in a high-powered car.”

“Mito couldn’t have gone to New York――and got back again,” I exclaimed, impulsively, recalling that Mito had been seen ashore that night without apparent reason.

“Mito may or may not have played his part,” was all that Kennedy would comment.

He left me wildly speculating. Was Mito a cog in the wheel, of which Paquita and the gang suspected by Burke were other cogs? Was Shelby Maddox also a cog, willingly or unwillingly? Could he have got away from the yacht and got back again? A host of unanswered questions raced through my mind. But Kennedy had said all that he was prepared to say now.

“We had better be going,” he remarked, calmly, “if we are to keep that appointment with Hastings and Burke.”

He was evidently much more interested in what Burke might turn up than in his own investigation, which was quite natural, for what he had told me was already an old story to him, and his restless mind craved to be speeding toward the solution of the mystery.

Half an hour later Kennedy and I entered the office of Hastings. I looked about curiously. There were, as in many lawyers’ offices, two private offices for the members of the firm, while outside was a large room for the clerks, the stenographers, and the telephone girl.

As we were welcomed by Hastings in his own office I wondered what the walls might have heard. Marshall Maddox and his lawyer must have had many conferences there during the time that Maddox was planning his great coup in the munitions company.

“Burke hasn’t arrived yet,” remarked Hastings, nervously. “I’ve been expecting him any moment. I wonder what is keeping him?”

There was no way of finding out, and we were forced to sit impatiently.

A few moments later we heard hurried footsteps down the hall and Burke burst in, his face flushed with excitement.

“This thing is devilish,” he exclaimed, looking keenly at Hastings. “I must be in your class.”

“How’s that? Did some one shoot at you?” queried the lawyer.

“No, but I came within an ace of being poisoned.”

“Poisoned?” we inquired, incredulously.

“Yes. You know I started to find that night watchman. Well, I found him. He knows nothing――and I think he is telling the truth. But after I had questioned him I made him admit that sometimes he takes a meal in the middle of the night. Of course he has to leave the front hall of the ground floor unguarded to do so. I figured that the robber might have got in and got away during that time. And I guess I’m right.

“After that I saw the policeman who walks the beat at night. I thought he was going to prove a better witness. He remembers, under questioning, seeing a speedster that stopped around the next corner and was left there standing some time――about the time that the robbery must have taken place, if I am right. He thought it was strange and hung about.

“When the fellow who drove the car came back the policeman walked over. The fellow offered no explanation of leaving his car on the street at such an hour, except that he had stopped to shift a shoe that had blown. Then he asked where there was an all-night lunch-room. The policeman directed him and the fellow thanked him and drove off in that direction.”

“But the poisoning,” prompted Craig. “How did that happen?”

“I’m coming to it. Well, I thought at once of going to the lunch-room and inquiring. You see, I thought I might check up both the night watchman’s story and the cop’s. So I went in and it happened that the night man was just going to work. I hadn’t had anything to eat since this morning and I ordered a sandwich and a cup of coffee. I left the coffee standing on a little table while I talked to the man behind the counter.

“I found out from him that the night watchman had been there, all right. But he didn’t remember any one in a speedster. In fact, I hadn’t expected that he would. I don’t believe the fellow went there.

“Anyhow, when I went to look for my coffee I noticed something on the lip of the cup. It looked like sugar, and I recollected that I hadn’t put any sugar in the coffee. Besides, this looked like powdered sugar, and I wouldn’t have put powdered sugar in when there was lump sugar. I tasted a bit of it. It was bitter――very bitter. Here’s some of it.”

Kennedy took from Burke a few particles of a white powder which he had carefully preserved in a piece of paper and began examining the particles closely.

“There were lots of people coming and going at the lunch-room,” went on Burke, “but I didn’t pay much attention to any of them.”

Kennedy had placed just a particle of the powder on his tongue, and was now making a wry face. As he turned toward us he exclaimed, “Strychnine!”

“See?” nodded Burke, excitedly. “I thought it was some poison. I knew there was something wrong.”

Burke looked at Kennedy fixedly. There could be no doubt now that we were watched. Some one was evidently desperate to prevent discovery. First the attack had been leveled at Hastings. Now it was Burke. Who would be next? I think we all realized that we were marked, though none of us said anything at the time.

Burke looked over questioningly at Kennedy.

“I’ve found out how Maddox was killed,” volunteered Craig, understanding the query implied in his glance.

“Indeed――already?” interrupted Hastings, to whom Kennedy was already frankly incomprehensible.

“How?” demanded Burke, checking himself in time to protect himself from setting forth a theory of his own, for Burke was like all other police detectives――first forming a theory and then seeking facts that confirmed it.

Eagerly both Burke and Hastings listened as Kennedy repeated briefly his discoveries of the spectroscopic tests which he had already told me.

“Gassed, by George!” muttered Burke, more puzzled than ever. “I may as well admit that I thought he had been thrown overboard and drowned. The shot at Mr. Hastings rather confirmed me in the rough-neck methods of the criminal. But this burglar’s microphone and the strychnine have shaken my theory. This fellow is clever beyond anything I had ever suspected. And to think of his using gas! I tell you, Kennedy, we don’t know what to expect of criminals these days.”

Burke shook his head sagely. At least he had one saving grace. He realized his own shortcomings.

“How about the speedster?” reverted Kennedy, passing over the subject, for both Craig and I had a high regard for Burke, whatever might be his limitations. “What did the patrolman say the fellow in the speedster looked like?”

Burke threw up his hands in mock resignation. “As nearly as I could make out, he looked like a linen duster and a pair of goggles. You know that kind of cop――doomed always to pound pavements. Why, it might have been anybody――a woman, for all he knew.”

“I think we’ve been away from Westport long enough,” concluded Kennedy. “Perhaps our unexpected return may result in something. A speedster――h’m. At least we can look over the garage of the Harbor House.”

I remember that I thought the words of little consequence at the moment. Yet, as it proved, it was a fateful statement made at this time and place.

VII

THE DIVORCE DETECTIVE

At the Westport station, when our train pulled in, there was the usual gathering of cars to meet the late afternoon express from the city.

As we four were searching for a jitney ’bus to take us down to the Harbor House I caught sight in the press of cars of the Walcott car. Sitting in the back were Winifred and her sister-in-law, Mrs. Walcott, sister of the murdered man. They had come up to meet her husband, Johnson Walcott, who now came down the platform from the club car, which had been well forward.