Dapne Sanders (Craig Rice)
Chapter One
FOR A LONG TIME after sundown the young man sat in a big, shabby easy chair by the window, watching the shadows that deepened on the floor, and the gathering darkness in the corners.He was a pale, grave young man. His face was thin, delicate-boned, almost ascetic, below a mass of unruly fair hair. His deep-set eyes were sober, thoughtful, almost dreamy. The room that seemed to absorb his gaze and indeed, his very thought, had once, surely, been magnificent, a marvel of substantial splendor, with its great, deep windows, its heavily carved molding, and its graceful panelling. The splendor was worn and tarnished now, giving the room an air of gentle and uncomplaining melancholy. Its furnishings were worn and shabby, almost threadbare, and, unlike the room, had never been either costly or beautiful even when new. All, with one exception. Over the handsome old fireplace hung a magnificent painting, its warm colors rich and mellow with age, catching the last rays of light that came from the windows.
As the young man returned from his reverie that had held him through the falling of twilight, a change seemed to take place in the atmosphere of the room. What had been the benign, gradual shadowing of early evening took on a quality of tenebrous gloom, the corners of the room became caves of somber dusk.
Suddenly he rose, walked to the table and stood for an instant with one hand on the lamp, as though debating in his mind whether or not to light it. At last he decided to leave it unlighted and vanished into the adjoining room.
A half hour later the door reopened and a young man in evening clothes came into the room, switching on the lamp without hesitation. He stood for a moment by the window, gazing out into the night. Then from the table drawer he took a small, compact, and efficient looking gun, and slipped it carelessly into his pocket. That done, he picked up hat, coat and stick, and left the room.
Where the other had been pale, serious, thin-faced, this young man was gay, debonair, seemingly thoughtless, with a merry, round face, and sleek, well-groomed hair.
Not more than three living persons knew that the two, so unlike in manner and appearance, were one and the same man.
HE LOOKED across the cafe table at the girl with the emeralds and felt an unexpected stab of pity. It wasn't that she mattered to him in the least, it was just that he felt honestly sorry for what was going to happen to her.
She had the brightest red hair in Greater New York, possibly in the civilized world. It made a frame of fire around her small, very pale face, it seemed to cast light and shadow on the little chin that was the sharp point of a triangle below her lovely, odd-shaped mouth. It made her immense eyes appear to be almost green, virescent, like the emeralds themselves.
Her arms were very slim, almost thin, and extremely white. On one of them she wore eighteen threadlike silver bracelets. He had counted them to make sure. Poppy Hymers, the girl with the emeralds.
The necklace was as famous as Poppy herself, though she wore it as carelessly as though it were a glass bauble from a five-and-dime. When people murmured “There goes Poppy Hymers,” they really meant “There go the Hymers' emeralds.”
He looked at her thoughtfully, came within a hair's breadth of a sigh. His round face was gay, debonair, thoughtless; the curiously tilted eyebrows above his grey eyes gave it an oddly Satanic cast. The photographer at the Stork Club had spent a bad half hour trying to remember who he was.
They weren't in the Stork Club, now. Just a second-rate bar with a shoddy floor show. He'd selected the place purposely.
Suddenly he leaned across the table. “Poppy dear, take that damn necklace off and park it in your handbag. You shouldn't go around flashing such stones in a dive like this.”
She pouted for a moment, shrugged her shoulders, and did as he had asked.
“That's better. Maybe I shouldn't have brought you here anyway.”
“Oh for the love of Mike, don't you turn out to be a dope.” Her pale, exquisite little face grew petulant. “Nobody ever wants me to have any fun. I'm the most miserable girl in the world.” Her voice rose in a little wail.
“Nonsense,” he said. There was a sharp edge to his tone. A crying jag on his hands now would be just too much.
“It's the truth. A lot of people envy me, but they haven't any idea how awful it is to be Poppy Hymers. I'm so unhappy I could die.”
Her voice went on and on, in a long complaint. Poppy Hymers, one of the richest girls in the world, and the most unhappy. The men who made love to her were either fortune hunters or they were deadly dull. She didn't have any friends. Everybody hated her.
“Hell,” she said suddenly, “nobody cares what I do. I'm here to have some fun.”
She had reached that stage of the evening when her eyelids had become heavy, her lower lip a trifle loose. He looked at her again. The funny thing about it was that there was courage there, of a sort. He recalled old newspaper paragraphs. Poppy Hymers throwing a champagne party for the newspapermen on the day she got her pilot's license. Poppy Hymers almost breaking the women's altitude record. Poppy Hymers driving her high-powered foreign car to a fire and beating the fire engines by two blocks just for the hell of it, and then hauling a bedridden old woman out of the blazing building just because nobody else was there to do it first. But courage was not enough.
“I'd better have another drink,” she was saying. “It'll either pick me up, or lay me down. Either way, it's going to be an improvement.”
He ordered a double rye for her. From the looks of things it would probably pass her out as cold as an oyster. Well, that was what he'd intended.
She leaned her elbows on the slightly soiled cloth of the table and looked at the young man. When she had met him at some cocktail party or other there had been something maddeningly familiar about his gay, round face, and his curiously tilted eyebrows. She had been trying ever since to remember where she had met him, and when.
“Tired of this stinky old place,” she said fretfully. “Want to go some place else now.”
I know just the place for you,” he said. She stood up just a shade uncertainly. “Le's go.”
She realized that he was guiding her steps carefully to the door and down the street to where they had parked her car and felt a moment's helpless anger. She wasn't sure just what was the cause of her anger, his helping her or her needing help, but she was angry. By the time he had stowed her in the front seat of the car, however, her anger had vanished. Instead she felt only a pleasant sense of relief.
“Want me to drive, Poppy?”
She nodded silently. Speech was too much of an effort.
“Like a drink?”
She nodded again, and he held out a small pocket flask. It was whiskey, but it had an odd taste for whiskey. Oh well, who cared. A drink was a drink. She handed the flask back to him and settled down in her seat.
It was terribly dark there in the car, and the young man appeared to be driving very fast. Something about rushing through the darkness made her think of a dream that had terrified her again and again as a child. She opened her eyes for a moment, the street . down which they were driving seemed unfamiliar, strange, cavernous, and oddly sinister.
The darkness around her was full of unknown things. She lifted her hand weakly to her throat, tried, to gather her breath for a scream. Somehow the scream would not come. The darkness was beginning to close in on her now, her flesh felt cold, numb, almost frozen. The yellow circles of streetlights receded until they became mere pin-pricks in the dark.
Poppy Hymers made a last, desperate effort to keep her eyes open, failed, and sank into a black and bottomless abyss.
The young man at the wheel glanced down at her, with a smile of satisfaction. He took one hand from the wheel, slipped the little bead evening bag from her unresisting fingers, and slid it into the pocket of his tuxedo.
As he reached the next intersection, a great black car came spinning around the corner, fairly springing out of the darkness. There was a frantic, desperate moment while he tried to swerve from its path, then the sudden, crashing, paralyzing impact.
For an instant there was only silence. He opened his eyes, caught the glow of a streetlamp, breathed the warm, moist air and realized that he was alive. He wriggled experimentally, found that he was unhurt. Then he scrambled out of the wreckage and glanced around quickly.
A little way down the street he could see the other car, a tangled mass, ominously still. No time to investigate it now. In a minute the street would be full of people.
Well, he was not far from refuge. He lifted the body of Poppy Hymers from the smashed car, and darted into the shelter of an alley, carrying her. By the time the first screaming sirens drew near to the scene of the accident, he had reached the end of the alley and turned up the next street.
“I GET plenty of crank letters,” Mr. Abernathy said, “but this is different. Besides,” he added,
“there were the others. He does what he says he is going to do.”
He mopped his brow nervously. He was a plump little man, with a round pink face and thin wisps of silvery white hair.
“The man must be crazy,” Mr. Abernathy said. “Crazy as a hoot owl.”
Donovan nodded. “Either that,” he said quietly, “or else so completely sane that none of us can understand him.”
He picked up the, letter, with its square, slightly slanted handwriting in jet black ink, and read it again. It was made to resemble a bill, made out to Lucius Abernathy, Esq., and it read:
Amount owed to society
The Starflower necklace,
Collectable immediately.
It was signed, simply, “N.”
Lucius Abernathy stared at the detective. “There was the Forristor's painting,” he said, “and the Gifford pearls.”
Donovan nodded, opened the drawer of his desk, and took out two letters which he tossed over to the little man.
“It doesn't take a handwriting expert to tell that they were written by the same hand. And the messages are essentially the same.”
Mr. Abernathy studied them for a moment. “I wonder what the 'N' stands for,” he said at last.
“It could stand for any one of a hundred names,” Donovan said.
“Well who is he?” Mr. Abernathy asked petulantly. “And if he isn't crazy, what's his idea?”
“There's one more note,” the detective said unexpectedly. He took it out of the same drawer and handed it across the desk. The handwriting was the same.
“Paid in full,”
“N”
“The Giffords received that a few days after the pearls had been stolen,” Donovan said. “But as far as I know, the Forristors haven't had anything like it.”
Mr. Abernathy mopped his brow again. “It's got me worried,” he said unhappily. “And not just Because of the necklace, either.”
Donovan clasped his hands behind his head and leaned far back in his chair. “Let's begin at the beginning. What did you and Forristor and Gifford ever do to anybody?”
“I don't know,” the plump little man said, shaking his head. “Nothing intentional. Of course, in business anything can happen—” His voice broke off suddenly.
“Who was in it besides you three?” Donovan asked sharply.
“Renzo Hymers, and—” Abernathy stopped, “I don't know what you're talking about.”
Donovan sighed. “Mr. Abernathy, going to a private detective is like going to a doctor. You've got to tell him all the truth, or he won't be able to do anything for you. If you don't want to have the Starflower necklace stolen and simply vanish from sight like the Gifford pearls and the Forristor Madonna, you'd better tell me everything I need to know.”
The little man leaned his pink forehead on a plump palm. “All right. I'll tell you anything I can.”
“Just fill in the gaps,” the detective said. “I know most of it. There were seven of you, as I recall. Renzo Hymers, Ginter, McGee and Hume were the other four, if I'm not mistaken.”
“There was nothing remotely illegal about it,” Mr. Abernathy said stiffly.
“I rather thought not,” Donovan said. “Well, let's see. The seven of you formed a secret syndicate and smashed the market wide open. I can't even guess how much you made, individually or collectively, but I do know that a lot of people lost their shirts.”
Mr. Abernathy looked up, startled. “You mean that one of them might be—”
Donovan nodded slowly. “Unless you can think of any other reason why somebody would want to revenge himself on the seven of you. Forristor got the first of the warning notes. He said it was a crank letter and let it go at that, though he did take a few precautions—he hired an extra watchman and put someone on guard in the room where the Madonna hung. One morning the watchman was found bound and gagged in the garden. The man on guard indoors was found drugged—and we have still to find out what the drug was and how it was administered. The picture was gone.”
He paused. “By the way, where did Forristor get that picture?”
Little Mr. Abernathy shifted uneasily in his chair. “It was one of the Porter collection. When the creditors put the Porter stuff up for sale Forristor bought it.”
“Porter was one of those ruined by the syndicate, wasn't he?” the detective asked.
“He could have come in with us,” Mr. Abernathy said defensively. He added “Surely you don't think—” paused, and said, “But, Porter is dead.”
“I know it,” Donovan said. His voice was entirely without emotion. He reached out to a little card file on his desk, took out a card and read aloud from it. “John Porter, suicide, June 27th 1936, after being wiped out in the market crash. Wife, Luna Porter, died during heart attack July 3rd 1936. John Porter Jr., only child, confined in French private hospital for mental cases.”
Mr. Abernathy looked up. “I didn't know that.”
“Not many people do. He's been there about five years. Hopeless case, poor devil.” Donovan slipped the card back into the cabinet. “You guys did a hell of a lot of damage.”
Mr. Abernathy pushed a wisp of hair back off his sweating forehead. “How did he get the Gifford pearls? I knew they'd been stolen, but I never heard any of the details.”
“It happened at a party,” Donovan said. “Some large, rather fashionable affair. A debutante brawl of some kind.” He drew a long breath. “Mrs. Gifford was wearing the pearls, in spite of the warning letter her husband had received. As a matter of fact, I don't think he had told her about it. At the party she met a very charming young man who was very attentive to her. They settled down in a quiet corner for a good long talk, as she tells it. She was found there asleep an hour or so later. The pearls and the young man were gone.”
“Then that must be him,” Mr. Abernathy said excitedly. “Who was he? What did he look like?”
“That's the hell of it,” Donovan said calmly. “No one seems to know,”
He glanced down at a paper on his desk and sighed. “Well, that leaves Hymers, Ginter, Hume, McGee, and yourself. It seems that you're next on the list.”
Little Mr. Abernathy gasped. “You aren't just going to sit here and let him get away with it! What am I hiring you fort You've got to do something!”
By the way of answer Donovan ran a thumbnail across the cards in the little file.
“There's the beginning, Mr. Abernathy. All the information I can gather about the people who lost money in your carefully engineered market crash, A number, like the card with poor Porter's history, can be discarded. The others will have to be traced down, one by one. In the meantime you had better put the Starflower necklace in a safety deposit box.”
Mr. Abernathy nodded his round pink head. “I just thought,” he began. He was interrupted by the opening of the office door. Donovan's office boy stood in the doorway.
“Boss, Mr. Hymers is here to see you.” Before Donovan could answer, the boy was shoved aside and a tall, muscular man with a perfectly expressionless face and hard, grey eyes, came into the office, kicking the door shut behind him.
Donovan opened his mouth to speak but the financier waved him to silence. “Donovan, I got a letter threatening that Poppy's emeralds would be stolen. I didn't turn it over to you because I thought it was just another damn fool crank letter. But now—” he paused for breath.
Donovan said quickly and very calmly “Now I take it you're here because the emeralds have been stolen.”
“That's right,” Renzo Hymers said. “Bat that isn't all. The necklace is gone, and Poppy with it.”
Donovan half rose from his chair. “Poppy gone!
Do you mean she's been kidnapped?”
“Kidnapped,” Renzo Hymers said. “Or dead.”
THE FIRST WAKING was brief, painful, with no consciousness of surroundings. Indeed, it was not so much a waking as a fear of waking,
Poppy Hymers sighed, shut her eyes, pretended to sleep for a few more minutes, then waked at last to the uncomfortable realization that it was day again.
What in blazes had she done the night before, any-way? She remembered starting on a round of nightclubs with that attractive young man she'd picked up at a party. The rest was all too vague.
She raised one hand to her aching forehead. Funny! Her fingers found a bandage. She felt gingerly of the gauze and adhesive tape. Now how did that get there?
She decided she would feel better after a bath and opened her eyes. She was in a strange room.
Then she discovered she was wearing pajamas, a man's pajamas.
There was a soft tapping at the door. She pulled the covers over her. “Come in.” Just the faintest quaver showed in her voice.
The door opened and a blond young man came in, carrying a tray. Thin-faced, rather pale, and almost scholarly—he was not the attractive man of the night before, though oddly like him.
He put the tray down on a little table by her bed and stood looking at her.
“I bet you feel too terrible for words.”
“Worse than that,” Poppy Hymers said fretfully.
“I thought you would. So I had my man make you a morning bracer. It's his own invention, and it never fails.”
Poppy reached for the tall glass on the tray. “It may not do any good, but it certainly can't do any harm.”
She took an experimental sip. It was cold, sharp, and pungent. It eased away that miserable taste in her mouth and that horrible, burning thirst. She took another sip, a larger one. “All right. Now, where am I?”
“You're in my house. Sorry I can't offer better accommodations, but we never needed a guest room before.”
“How did I get this?” She felt the bandage on her forehead.
“There was a smashup. You're not badly damaged.”
She thought it over for a moment. “Who brought me here?”
“I did.”
She stared at him. “But you aren't—” She paused, catching her breath. For just a moment his face was turned so that she saw its profile. “You are the same man! But you can't be!”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, sometimes a person can change a great deal. Even overnight.”
She began to feel uncomfortably cold. “Why did you bring me here, instead of home — or a hospital?”
“Because I was in no position to make explanations — especially to the police.”
That was when her fingers flew to her throat. “My necklace!”
“It's in the safe downstairs.” He paused for no more than a moment. “I haven't decided yet whether to sell it all in one piece or have it broken up. It would be rather a shame to break it up, but a lot less risky.” He saw her eyes grow wide, saw her lips part then close again. “I only meant to steal your necklace, but I seem to have inadvertently kidnapped you.”
“So after all these years,” she said, almost scornfully, “I finally have been kidnapped.”
“Perhaps I ought to apologize. I told you, it wasn't intentional. And I'm not sure of the correct etiquette for a kidnapping.”
“It isn't in any of the books,” she agreed. “But don't apologize.” She looked squarely at him.
Suddenly, to his surprise and horror, she began to cry. He reached out a hand to her, then drew it back. This wasn't hysteria. She was crying like a child, great tears streaming down her cheeks, crying as though her heart was broken.
“Go ahead and get it over with,” he said. His voice was unexpectedly soft. “Have a good cry while you're about it.”
He walked to the one window and stood looking out over the rooftops, listening to the sounds that came from the bed. At last they diminished, finally ceased altogether. He returned to the bedside.
“Now, what were you crying about? Here, for the love of Mike, don't start in again.”
“I'm all through for the day,” she whimpered.
“Good, What's it all about?”
“Nothing worth mentioning.” She turned her face away. “Every now and then I realize how unhappy I am, that's all.”
He lit a cigarette and sat regarding her silently, waiting for her to talk. Suddenly she began, a perfect torrent of words that rushed out as though they had been held back for years.
“Nobody cares a hang for me. Nobody ever did, not in my whole life. For the real me, I mean.”
The story she told was a lonely one, one of a child left motherless at birth, of childhood years peopled by a succession of nurses and governesses, of sedately dull playtimes on the clipped lawn of the famous Hymers' estate with armed guards always within calling distance.
“Are you surprised that I grew up to be that wild Hymers girl?” she asked him.
He shook his head.
“A girl with money can't have any friends.”
“I was thinking just that very thing last night,” he said.
“You were?” Suddenly she smiled at him. “Well, you would, of course. I'd forgotten what your interest in me was. But at least you were honest about your dishonesty, if you know what I mean.”
“I think I do, and thank you.”
“At home,” she said slowly, “it's worse. Or perhaps you don't know my father, the great Hymers.” Her lip curled scornfully.
“Yes, I know him,” the young man said.
“I hate him,” Poppy Hymers said. Her voice was cold, almost without emotion. “He's never done anything for me except to pay my bills, and make my life miserable. If he hadn't been so brutally cruel to my mother, she might have lived. All the meanness in me comes from him. Then there's Dorothy — my stepmother.” Her lips tightened. “It's like living in a war zone. She hates me and she knows I hate her. She knows I'm on to her, too, and she can't get away with anything when I'm around. If he ever finds out any of the things she does, God help her.”
A note of passionate anger came into her voice. “I hope he does find out. I'd like to see her dead. I'd like to see them both dead!”
He wheeled around. “I've got to do something about you. You may give me away to the police, but I doubt it will do any good. I'm a hard man to catch. I'm going to send you home.”
“Oh, no,” she said unexpectedly. “No, don't send me home!”
“What the hell?”
“I don't want to go home. It would just be going back to the same old squirrel-cage.”
He came over to sit in the chair beside her bed.
“Young woman —” He burst into uproarious laughter. “It's the first time I ever heard of a kidnap victim who insisted on staying kidnapped.”
Her laughter joined his. “It's the first time I ever heard of a kidnaper insisting that his victim go home.” Then her face grew serious.
“You're a crook,” she said very slowly and very thoughtfully. “A damned funny kind of a crook, but —” She paused and went on, “Well, anyway— I don't know what you're going to call this. Just a search for a new thrill, or something of the sort. But I'm serious about it.”
“Just what are you proposing?”
“You're the first decent person I've ever known,” she said. “And you're a criminal. Well, I think I'd make a good one myself. If you could use a partner — or just an assistant.”
“Poppy, you can't mean it.”
“But I do. And not just for the hell of it, either.”
He stood looking at her searchingly, while the thought revolved in his mind. To have the daughter of Renzo Hymers' tied up with him would be valuable, indescribably valuable. It would fit in very well with what he had in his mind to do.
“I'll take you up on it,” he said at last.
Her piquant little face was grave. “Maybe I'm good for something, anyway.”
A wry little smile played about the corners of his mouth. Renzo Hymers' only daughter and a life of crime! There was more justice in the world than he had realized. And yes, it fitted in with his plans perfectly.
Her voice cut through his thoughts. “But there's one thing, though. I would like to know your name.”
“My name is John Moon.” He paused a moment. “But I'm known in my correspondence as — 'N.'“
“THE BOSS is a heavy thinker,” Billy reflected, “and when he's thinking, there's no use trying to talk to him.”
He paused just inside the office door and stood looking at Donovan for a moment. The detective was a big man, tall and muscular, grey-haired, grey-eyed, with an amiable friendly face, and a deceptively soft manner of speech.
Billy took a deep breath and tried for the fourth time to break into the train of thought.
“Here's the newspaper you wanted, boss,” he said loudly and firmly.
“Oh, yes.” Donovan seemed to have suddenly returned to his office from somewhere beyond the moon. “I remember.” He began unfolding the paper. But Billy was ahead of him, pointing quickly to a story on the front page.
He read the story, quickly.
“Mystery surrounds the death of Tony Pacelli and Joe Greccio, long sought by the police in connection with a series of cafe bombings, whose bodies were found early this morning in the wreckage of their high-powered automobile. Both men had been killed instantly and police believe that their death was the result of the crash when their car drove headlong into one believed to have been driven by 'Poppy' Hymers, daughter of Renzo Hymers.
“Wreckage of the car belonging to Miss Hymers was found a short distance from the death car, but no trace of its driver or occupants has been found. Miss Hymers is said to be out of town. Renzo Hymers refused to make any statement other than that his daughter was alive and well, and could not have been involved in the accident.”
As he finished, the office door opened as though a sudden wind had struck it, and a tall young man, who seemed to be all arms and legs came bounding in.
“I haven't a thing to tell you, Tom,” Donovan told him before he'd had time to open his mouth.
Tom Clark grinned and sat down, wrapping his long legs around the chair. “I won't print it if you don't want me to. Not until you give the word.”
Donovan looked innocent and said nothing.
“Where are you hiding Poppy Hymers?”
“Miss Hymers?” Donovan waited a moment before he spoke. “I'm not hiding Miss Hymers. I haven't any more idea of where she is than you have.”
Tom Clark opened his mouth, shut it again, finally said, “Any other man, I'd call him liar.”
“According to your own newspaper,” Donovan said in an injured tone, “she's out of town.”
“That's a tip-off by itself,” the reporter said, grinning. “So let's be frank,” he added more seriously. “Renzo Hymers spent a long time in your office this morning. I know it because I was tailing him. At the Hymers house Poppy's maid—a handsome wench if I ever saw one, and I have a date with her for nine tonight—broke down after a little coaxing and confessed to me that Poppy hadn't been seen since she went out last night, presumably to paint the town a deep vermilion. This all adds up to something and you're the guy to give out the totals.”
“You probably know more about it than I do,” the detective told him. “And nothing is being said for publication, either.”
The young reporter closed his eyes, put his fingers in his ears, then made an elaborate gesture of laying a forefinger across his lips.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I know where she was last seen, and who with. Joe, the headwaiter at the Rendezvous—a very low joint if I ever was in one —says she was there last night with a blond young man, otherwise unidentified. Blond, handsome and very solicitous of Poppy's welfare. Poppy was as boiled as a lobster.”
Donovan was silent for a moment. “Well,” he said at last, “we knew he was blond.”
“You know about him?” Tom Clark asked, his eyebrows up.
“Not in connection with Poppy Hymers. Go on, was there any better description of him?”
“Joe says he was one of those perfectly ordinary blond young men who are a dime a dozen in our fair Does he sound familiar to you?”
“Very,” Donovan said bitterly.
“Who is he?”
“I wish I knew,” the detective said.
“Well,” Tom Clark untangled his long legs and rose to his feet. “This seems to have been a singularly profitable visit for everybody except me.” He paused to light a cigarette. “I came for two reasons. One, to see if you had anything to say. Two, to see if you wanted me to temporarily forget what I'd found out on my own. What's the word?”
“No to the first, yes to the second,” Donovan said. “And when there is anything to say—”
“You'll say it to me,” the young man finished for him. “Okay, if that's how you want to play it. We've worked together in the past. But there's one more thing.”
Donovan raised inquiring eyebrows.
“What do you think my chances are with the cute blonde in your outer office?”
“None,” Donovan said, grinning.
“I wouldn't bet on that,” Tom Clark said, opening the door. As it closed behind him they could hear him murmuring “Listen dear, how about dinner tomorrow night, and—”
The detective's mind was already on other things. Billy took one look at him, and sat down in the corner to read the comic page.
In the morning's interview, Renzo Hymers had seemed far more concerned with keeping the affair quiet than with getting Poppy back unharmed.
The detective smiled wryly. “If ever a man deserved to be robbed,” he told himself, “that man is Renzo Hymers.” But kidnapping was another thing.
With a little sigh he opened his box of filing cards and began going through it, turning over one card after another. Butler, Busch, Byrnes, Cabot, Carter, Casalis—he stopped suddenly and drew a card from the file.
“John Casalis, disappeared, April 12th, 1936.
He remembered very well. John Casalis had been an employee of Renzo Hymers, a minor clerk with a good record of employment. Everything he had in the world, some two or three thousand dollars, had been wiped out in the engineered crash.
The little clerk had seemed to go out of his mind. His threats against Renzo Hymers had resulted in Donovan's being called in for protection.
That night in April John Casalis left his house, promising his wife that he would return shortly. He had taken a commuter's train and alighted at the station nearest Hymers' country estate. Then he had vanished from the earth.
The search for him had been continued for months. No trace of him was ever found.
Donovan frowned, looking at the card. Mollie Casalis lived at 825 Milton street. He remembered her clearly, a pale, quiet, rather pretty little woman, frightened and yet brave. There had been a child, too, a baby girl.
The detective shut the card file with a sudden snap, stood up and reached for his hat.
Rosalie Casalis rubbed her brave bare toes on the sidewalk. The sun was warm and pleasant. She wished it might always be summer.
Winter was uncomfortable, when she had to spend her time penned up in the dreary furnished room. Too, she always seemed to be hungrier in the wintertime.
The clock in the barbershop down the street said it was nearly five. That meant that mother would be home before long. Rosalie hoped she would hurry. There hadn't been much in the house for lunch that day, nor for breakfast either.
“Is your mother home, Rosalie?”
She looked up at the towering bulk of Donovan.
“No, not yet. She'll be home pretty quick now. How did you know my name?”
“I saw you once, long ago.” The detective sat down on the steps beside her. “You were only — that big.”
Rosalie regarded him with grave eyes. “Was I a good baby?”
“You were a very good baby.” She nodded thoughtfully. “Mother says so, too. Mother most always gets home from work just about now.”
“She goes to work, does she?” Donovan asked. “Yes sir. Every morning, early.”
“Rosalie,” said the detective slowly, “if you could have anything you wanted in the whole world, what would it be?”
He didn't have to wait long for an answer. “Strawberry ice-cream, just like in the picture in the drugstore window.”
Donovan nodded again, even more gravely, and approvingly. “A very wise choice. I'm glad you're a sensible young woman.” He felt in his pocket for a coin. “Suppose you take this into the drugstore and ask for the biggest dish of ice-cream they can give you.”
Rosalie was gone up the street in a twinkle of skipping brown legs.
Donovan sat on the steps, reflecting on the large and small injustices of the world, watching Rosalie until she vanished into the drugstore. She was no more than barely out of sight when a small woman came wearily up the street in the other direction. Donovan rose to his feet and went to meet her. “Mrs. Casalis? Remember me?” Her face showed first surprise, then bitter disappointment.
“Oh, Mr. Donovan!” Then, slowly, “I'd halfway expected you. I suppose you've come about the money. I knew it was too good to be true.”
For a moment, then, Donovan thought she was going to faint.
“NOW THEN,” Donovan said, closing the door of the drab basement room behind them, “what money are you talking about?”
She stared at him in amazement. “You mean you don't know?” After a moment she unlocked a drawer in a battered old dresser, took out a large envelope and handed it to him.
He lifted the flap, supped out the contents, and whistled The envelope was full of money. He ran a finger over the pack of bills hurriedly and guessed there was over a thousand. Several thousand, he thought.
A slip of paper dropped to the floor, he picked it up and glanced at it.
“What the devil is all this?” Donovan demanded.
“I don't know,” Mollie Casalis said unhappily, shaking her head.
$2,900
less $290
(10% deducted for collection expense)
$2,610
“N"
He had hardly needed to look for that single initial at the end. One look at the handwriting was enough.
“What is it?” Mollie Casalis whispered. “Do you know what it means?”
Donovan nodded slowly. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I think I do.”
Then this was what had become of the Gifford pearls, and probably the Hymers emeralds. Someone was systematically robbing the seven men who had made fortunes by cracking the market and was using his gains to repay the investors who had lost everything.
“When did this come?” he asked at last.
“This morning,” Mollie Casalis said. “In the mail.
I've been so worried about it all day, wondering what I ought to do.” Suddenly tears rose to her tired eyes.
“I felt that I ought to tell someone about it. But if it was all right and if I could keep it, it would mean so much, so very much.”
Donovan laid the envelope on the table. “I haven't come about the money, Mrs. Casalis,” he said. “We'll talk of it later. What I came about — have you ever heard anything of John?”
The pale little woman shook her head. “Never one word, Mr. Donovan. If I ever had, I'd have come right to you. But no, there's been nothing.” She paused. “There's no doubt in my mind but that he's dead. I've always believed that.”
Donovan nodded. “I know you have.”
“If he was alive, no matter what had happened he'd try to come back to us.”
Donovan was silent for a moment. “Well, that's that.” He looked at her thoughtfully. “Rosalie said you were working. What do you do?”
“Sewing and mending — for Mrs. McGee.”
“McGee?” Odd, how the names of those seven men kept coming up again and again.
“Yes, Mr. Donovan. Miss Hymers — Miss Poppy — got me my first work, just after John disappeared.”
“Poppy did?” Donovan asked sharply.
“She was mighty nice to me, Miss Poppy was. You see, I went to the Hymers to see if I couldn't find work, seeing as how John had worked for Mr. Hymers. As luck would have it, I saw Miss Poppy and she gave me a job helping her maid to keep her clothes in order. Only she made me promise not to tell anybody who I was.”
“She did, eh?”
“Yes, Mr. Donovan. And she was right about it, too. After I'd been there about a year Mr. Hymers found out who I was and I was out of there in a hurry.”
Donovan's eyebrows went up. Before he had a chance to speak, the woman went on.
“Then Miss Poppy got me this job with Mrs. McGee, and I've been there ever since.”
Donovan was thinking of something else. “It's strange that Hymers would object to your working for his daughter. After all, it wasn't you who threatened him.”
“It seemed as if he couldn't rest until I was out of the house,” she told him. “Not that I wasn't glad to get out.”
Donovan looked at her questioningly. “What was the matter there?”
“It was a madhouse, sir, and that's the truth. I never was one to gossip, and you know it. But Miss Poppy and her father never get along one bit. You wouldn't believe it, how they used to quarrel and carry on.”
“I do believe it,” Donovan said.
“You'd think they hated each other,” little Mollie Casalis went on reminiscently, “and maybe they did. From all I heard, Mr. Hymers' first wife, Poppy's mother, was one of those cool, quiet women, and she was always able to see through all of his wickedness. It always seemed to me that he could never look at Poppy without seeing her dead mother in her.”
“How about the present Mrs. Hymers?”
“I never could stand her,” Mollie Casalis said, frowning. “She was a bad one, clear through. She was always one to be putting something over on Mr. Hymers, any chance she had.”
Donovan looked thoughtfully around the dingy little room. “Mrs. Casalis—I think you ought to keep that money.”
“You do? Honestly?” Her eyes suddenly shone, almost with tears.
“Yes, I do. It belongs to you, in a way. It was what you lost, through no fault of your own. And Heaven knows you need it.”
He carried the picture of her shining face back to the office in his mind. By the time he arrived there, he was smiling.
Billy looked at him inquiringly.
“I've been breaking the law,” Donovan told him. “I've been advising a woman to accept stolen property.”
“What ever you did is probably okay, boss,” Billy said.
The detective lit his pipe, settled down in his chair, and began thinking it over. What had happened to John Casalis? Mollie Casalis was probably right, he was dead. If he were alive, certainly he would have tried to find out what had happened to his wife and baby girl. But on the other hand, if he were dead, what had happened to him? Who or what had killed him? What had happened to his body, why had it never been found?
He looked down at his desk and suddenly frowned. As though he didn't have enough worries on his mind already, there was that letter from the head of the home for mental cases, bearing the news that John Porter had escaped.
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