Chapter III: Helen Equivocates

Across the breakfast table Mr. Hardwick looked anxiously at his daughter. The wild-rose color that usually flooded her cheeks had faded a trifle since last night, and her eyes were less bright. Most of the time the curator's mind browsed among relics of the past, but his perceptions were amazingly keen where his daughter was concerned.

"Mr. Shei gave us quite a shock last night," he remarked.

Helen kept her eyes down while she poured his coffee and added two and a half lumps of sugar and the usual portion of cream. Then she stirred it for him, knowing he would be quite apt to forget to do so himself. Despite the half dozen titles bestowed upon him by universities and learned societies, she felt he needed looking after.

"Don't forget that you have a lecture engagement this afternoon," she admonished as she passed the cup across the table.

Mr. Hardwick nodded and sipped. "It is a most extraordinary case. The murder of that poor woman--assuming that it was a case of murder--seemed wholly unprovoked. I gathered from the conversation among the officers that no motive was in evidence. It looks like a wanton, despicable crime."

Helen crumbled a piece of toast. "Professor Warburton is coming to see you at three this afternoon."

"I have a memorandum of the appointment on my desk." Mr. Hardwick smiled faintly. "Our minds seem to be pulling in opposite directions this morning. This Mr. Shei interests me. He appears to be a remarkable criminal. His audacity and the originality of his methods are unparalleled. I don't know that I ever encountered anything quite so mystifying as the circumstances surrounding the murder last night. How the murderer went in and out without being seen is beyond understanding, and the subsequent removal of the body was the most amazing part of it all. There seems to be neither method nor reason in that. One thing appears certain. Mr. Shei could not have accomplished what he did unless he had been aided by accomplices. What do you think, my dear?"

Helen's head was lowered over her coffee cup. The captive sunlight in her hair gleamed and flashed.

"Your extra pair of glasses are at the optician's," she reminded him. "Don't forget to stop for it."

Mr. Hardwick looked at her helplessly; then carefully, and from force of habit, he folded his napkin.

"I wonder whether the police will ever learn Mr. Shei's identity," he murmured musingly. "So far the scoundrel has contrived to mystify them completely, but some day his egotism and love of self-glorification are apt to cause his undoing. In the meantime, however, he is likely to do a great deal of mischief. The fellow's effrontery is colossal, and his fearlessness and brains render him most dangerous. In some respects he bears a very close resemblance to that other notorious rogue, now reported to be in retirement."

Helen drew a quick breath. She bent her head a little lower over her cup. Her right index finger traced a design on the tablecloth.

"Another cup of coffee, dad?" was her only reply.

Mr. Hardwick appeared not to have heard. "You know who I mean. The man they used to call The Gray Phantom. For several years he was regarded as one of the cleverest and most dangerous criminals the world has ever known."

Slowly Helen raised her head. Her eyes, as they met her father's, were steady and bright.

"That was because the world didn't understand him," she said with emphasis. "The Gray Phantom wasn't really a criminal. He was only a--a sort of human dynamo whose energy happened to be turned in the wrong direction."

"Isn't that a distinction without a difference? A Robin Hood is an enemy of society despite the glamour with which he surrounds himself. However," and Mr. Hardwick's face softened quickly, "I am deeply in The Gray Phantom's debt. He saved your life twice, and but for him I would now be a lonely and heartbroken old man."

Helen nodded eagerly. "And the Assyrian collection, dad. You spent most of your life gathering it, and you were almost overcome with grief when it was stolen. The Gray Phantom risked his life and liberty in order to recover it and restore it to you. He wouldn't have done that if he had been just an ordinary criminal."

"True," admitted Mr. Hardwick. "I shall be under obligations to The Gray Phantom as long as I live. The man has a number of excellent qualities, whatever may be said of his past. On the whole, it is not surprising that you have taken an interest in him."

Helen's eyes were lowered again.

There was a mingling of tenderness and worry in Mr. Hardwick's face as he looked at her. "I know just how you feel," he said softly. "A man who is trying to live down a dark past always exerts a strong romantic appeal on a woman of your impressionable age. I don't know why it is, unless it pleases her to think he is doing it for her sake. It makes me think of your play, 'The Master of His Soul.' All last night, until the interruption came, I was wondering whether your _Marius_ was not The Gray Phantom."

Helen sat rigidly still for a moment. Then her lips began to twitch. She flashed her father a smile.

"Sometimes, daddy dear, you show a wonderful understanding of things that have nothing to do with Assyriology."

"I was right, then." His face sobered. "I hope you realize that, despite The Gray Phantom's admirable qualities, there is a gulf between him and you. But you are just as level-headed as was your mother, and I have no fear that the impulses of your heart will get the better of your judgment. We were discussing Mr. Shei. There seems to be a striking similarity between his methods and those of The Gray Phantom, except that the latter was never known to stoop to murder." He paused for a moment and studied her averted face. "You puzzled me last night, dear. You will admit that your conduct was--er, peculiar."

"It's getting late, dad," murmured Helen, a bit confusedly glancing at her wrist watch. "You should have been at your office half an hour ago. And this is the first time I've known you to take an interest in a murder case."

"Once during the evening you gripped my hand and tried to point out something to me," pursued Mr. Hardwick, heedless of her remark. "You spoke incoherently, and I had not the faintest idea what it was about. Then, a minute or so before the tragedy, you left the box and hurried away. Still later, while the officer was questioning you, I felt you were concealing something."

Helen, her fingers tightening about a fork handle, shook her head. "I answered every question he put to me."

"I know, dear. Yet you withheld a secret of some kind from him."

"Not exactly. I--I merely refrained from telling him something that--that I might have told."

"Something you had heard or seen?"

She hesitated for an instant. "If I had told all I had seen and heard, I wouldn't have been telling half of what I knew."

Mr. Hardwick leaned back against the chair and pondered this cryptic statement. He seemed puzzled rather than hurt by his daughter's evasive answers. Suddenly she looked up, saw the troubled expression in his face, and impulsively pushed back her chair and ran up behind him.

"Please don't ask me any more questions, dad." She put her arms around his neck and tilted her face to his. "It is true I held something back, but at the time I didn't know why. I merely felt that it wouldn't do to tell. This morning, after lying awake most of the night, I knew I had done the right thing." She gave a little laugh. "Isn't it just like a woman to act first and look into her reasons afterward?"

"I--well, I suppose so. And what were your reasons?"

"Would you be hurt if I told you I would rather not explain them just now?"

"No; I trust you. Experience has taught me that I can depend upon you in spite of your mysterious little ways and madcap pranks. There is one thing I wish you would tell me, though." He stopped, fumbling for words. "Was your reticence last night prompted by a wish to shield someone?"

"No," was her prompt reply, and her eyes gazed frankly into his. "What put such a thought into your head?"

"I scarcely know. You'll think I am an old fool, but it occurred to me that perhaps you had discovered something that led you to think that Mr. Shei and The Gray Phantom are identical."

"And you thought I was protecting The Gray Phantom? What an idea! But you were wrong, dad--absolutely wrong."

"Then I am glad." Mr. Hardwick rose and put his arm around her waist. "My goodness! Almost ten o'clock, and I have been sitting here gossiping like an old woman. You have taken a load off my mind, dear child. I was really worried."

She laughed, whisked a few crumbs from his coat, straightened his tie, and kissed him.

"And I hope," added Mr. Hardwick banteringly, "that Uranus won't lead you into any more foolhardy adventures."

Again she laughed, but her face sobered the moment he turned away and left the room. A wiser, maturer expression settled over the wide-set eyes and the vivid lips. It seemed as though her talk with her father had left a disquieting impression in her mind. She moved absently about the room, setting things in order here and there, but the far-away gleam in her eyes told that her mind was scarcely aware of what her hands were doing. Presently she stopped before the open window and looked out. A building was going up across the street, and the groaning of derricks and screaming of steam whistles jarred discordantly in the back of her mind. Near the curb a group of laborers were mixing concrete, and a powdery substance was drifting in the air.

She came out of her abstraction with a little start. Her eyes were on the window sill, and she spelled out the characters she had written in the thin layer of dust.

"G-r-a-y P-h-a-n-t-o-m," she mumbled, puzzled and somewhat annoyed with herself. The faint pencilings in the dust seemed all the stranger because she had not been thinking of The Gray Phantom. Instead, her mind had been occupied by Mr. Shei and what the morning newspapers had said about the tragedy in the Thelma Theater. The accounts she had read had been largely speculation and conjecture. The dying woman's strange laughter and her mysterious allusion to Mr. Shei had afforded material for columns of vivid and imaginative description. The medical examiner had reluctantly admitted that Miss Darrow's death might have been caused by a poison administered hypodermically, but he had added that the symptoms were strange to him, and that he knew of no drug producing just such effects. A number of toxicologists had been interviewed, but they had declared that the few facts at hand were not sufficient to enable them to form an opinion, and the disappearance of the body rendered it doubtful whether the cause of death would ever be learned definitely.

Only one thing seemed beyond dispute and that was Mr. Shei's complicity in the affair. The elusive and highly accomplished rogue already had a score of astounding crimes to his record, and the Thelma murder was hedged with all the mystery and baffling detail with which he loved to mask his exploits. Miss Darrow's dying words were scarcely needed to turn the finger of suspicion in Mr. Shei's direction. The absence of clews, the uncertainty in regard to the motive, the audacity that marked the crime itself as well as the subsequent snatching away of the body, all indicated a boldness and a finesse that left little doubt of Mr. Shei's guilt. Even if his own hand had not executed the crime, it seemed practically certain that his mind had planned and conceived it.

But who was Mr. Shei? The whole train of surmises and theories pivoted on that question. Not much was known of him save that he had a passion for tantalizing the public and keeping the nerves of the men at headquarters on edge, and that his achievements had not been equaled in scope or brilliance of execution since The Gray Phantom's retirement. He took a diabolical delight in flaunting his name before the world while keeping his person carefully out of the reach of the law's long arm, and even the name was a challenge to the police and a teaser for the public imagination. Someone versed in dead languages had discovered that the word "shei" was the ancient equivalent of the modern _x_, the symbol of the unknown quantity, and it was generally agreed that the name fitted the elusive individual who bore it.

Yet the name meant nothing. It was only an abstraction, for it afforded no clew to its owner's identity. The night before, while she sat beside her father in the Thelma Theater, a vagrant flash of intuition had come to Helen. She had seen the solution of the mystery in a swift, dazzling glimpse. The revelation had stunned and nearly blinded her, and thoughts had crowded upon her so thickly that she would have been quite unable to clothe them in words. The idea carried to her by that intuitive flash had seemed clear and unquestionable. It still seemed so, but her talk with her father had disturbed her a little and turned her thoughts in a new direction.

Again she looked down at the tracings in the dust. A smile, faint and wistful, reflected her softened mood, and a light of wonder and gentleness flooded her eyes. She reached out a hand to obliterate the telltale pencilings, but something restrained her. Besides, a freshly forming layer of dust was already blotting them out.

The telephone rang in the adjoining room, and she hurried away to answer.

"Miss Hardwick?" inquired a drawling voice which she instantly recognized. "Lieutenant Culligore speaking. I'm at the Thelma Theater. Wish you'd come over right away. I want to ask you a few questions."

Before she could reply, he hung up. Her face grew suddenly tense. Culligore's brusqueness piqued her, though she knew it was characteristic of the man, and she felt he had taken undue advantage of her by giving her no chance for argument. She did not wish to see him, yet she knew she could not escape him by merely ignoring his request. Anyway, she reflected as she hastily dressed for the street, it would be interesting to learn Culligore's theory of the murder.

A ride in the subway and a short walk brought her to the door of the Thelma. On the wall, at each side of the entrance, were posters stating that until further notice there would be no more performances of "His Soul's Master." Helen viewed the announcement of the withdrawal of her play without much regret. She had partly anticipated it, and last night's occurrence had given her weightier things to think of. As she passed through the foyer, a policeman nodded stolidly and in a way that told her she was expected. She passed unhindered into the auditorium.

At first she could see nothing. Every door was closed, and the vast room was full of silence and vague shadows. Presently, as her eyes grew accustomed to the dusk, she glanced toward the chair that had been occupied by Miss Darrow. She looked quickly aside, and saw that she was standing not far from the pillar that had supported her when the creature with the loathsome face brushed past her. The scene, which had seemed dim and immaterial while she was out in the sunlight a few minutes ago, now recurred to her with disagreeable vividness. Of a sudden the air about her felt heavy and oppressive.

A figure was moving up the aisle toward where she stood. The dawdling gait and the slouchy attitude told her it was Culligore, and she braced her nerves for an ordeal. In a few moments her quickly working wits had found a way of handling the situation.

"Good-morning, lieutenant," she said pleasantly as he came up beside her. "I suppose you are looking for clews. Any success?"

"Nope," he replied complainingly. "That's why I sent for you, Miss----"

"You have found no trace of the body?" she quickly cut in, anxious to maintain the role of questioner.

Culligore shook his head. She felt his eyes on her face, though he did not appear to be looking at her. Practicing a trick cultivated by his profession, he was studying her without seeming to do so.

"Don't you think it strange that the murderer should go to all that risk and trouble to remove the body?" she went on.

"Murderer? There must have been three or four of them, at least. There was some mighty fast work done when the lights went out, and one man didn't do it all. I've got a bump in the back of my head as big as a hen's egg. Selfkin, the man from the district attorney's office, is in bed with a fractured skull, and Starr looks as though somebody had hit him on the nose with a brick. One of the gang must have tampered with the switchboard back of the proscenium arch just before the others swooped down on us and carried away the body."

"But what was the object? Wasn't the murderer's purpose accomplished with the killing of Miss Darrow?"

"Hard telling. One thing is sure. As long as the body is missing there can be no autopsy, and I'll bet a pair of yellow socks that that's exactly what they wanted. Not that I pretend to understand it all, but it seems reasonable that they didn't care to have the exact cause of Miss Darrow's death become known."

Helen pondered this statement for a moment. "How about the motive for the murder?"

"We're pretty much in the dark there, too," admitted Culligore. "I don't suppose, though, that it was just by accident that Miss Darrow happened to die a few minutes after she had sent Starr a note warning him that Mr. Shei was in the house."

"Oh!" Helen gave a quick start. "You think she was killed because she had in some manner discovered Mr. Shei's identity?"

"Maybe." Culligore, with legs spread out and hands in trousers pockets, seemed engrossed in a study of Helen's bright-trimmed hat. "My mind isn't made up on that point. Mr. Shei's schemes go pretty deep. Maybe you can tell me----"

Again Helen interrupted him. "Have you discovered how the murderers got in and out of the building?"

"They didn't leave any tracks behind them, but there is a door in the rear of the basement that they might have used. It's supposed to be locked, but I satisfied myself a while ago that the spring lock can be picked. That the body was carried out that way is as good a guess as any. But look here, Miss Hardwick," and something that might have been a grin drifted across his face, "you're pretty good at firing questions, but it's my turn now."

She stiffened, seeing she would have to assume defensive tactics. She sent him a quick glance, but his face, always inscrutable, was even more so in the dusk.

"I asked you to come here, hoping the surroundings would refresh your memory of what happened last night," Culligore went on in his usual placid drawl. "You needn't repeat what you said then. What I'm after is the things you _didn't_ say."

"I don't believe I understand."

Culligore's chuckle sounded like a snort, though she knew it was meant to be good-natured. "Oh, yes, you do. I didn't do much talking last night, but I was watching you all the time. We'd met before, you know, and I could read you like an open book. I knew you were just as long on brains as on looks. Though you answered every question, you weren't telling anything. All the while you were holding something back. Isn't that true?"

She hesitated, having an uncomfortable feeling that Culligore was seeing through her and that any attempt at evasion would be useless.

"What do you want to know?" she asked.

"That's a lot better, Miss Hardwick. You might begin by telling me where you were sitting when the disturbance began."

"Why, I--I wasn't sitting anywhere."

"Standing up, then?"

"I wasn't standing, either."

"Oh, I see. You were lying down?"

"No, not even lying down."

Culligore gave her a queer look. "If you weren't sitting, standing, or lying, you must have hung suspended in the air. Was that it?"

Helen smiled engagingly. She had found time for deliberation while quibbling, and now her mind was made up. "I was so frightened I could neither stand up nor sit down. I was leaning against that pillar over there." She pointed.

"How did you happen to leave your seat?"

Helen told him of the flitting shadow that had caused her to leave her father and run to the rear of the house.

"And what did you see while you were leaning against the pillar?" was Culligore's next question.

Helen searched her mind for words vivid enough to recount her impressions during the terrible moments just before the drop of the curtain, but she felt her description was both hazy and fragmentary. Her picture of the face that had flashed past her in the dark was blurred and unreal, like one's recollection of a dream.

When she had done her best, Culligore walked back and forth for a time. Standing in an attitude of strained tensity, she wondered what his next question would be. Suddenly he stopped squarely in front of her, and again she had an uncomfortable feeling that his deceptively lazy eyes were reading her thoughts.

"What else?" he demanded quietly. "What you have told me so far is pretty good, but you're still holding back the most important thing--the thing you didn't want to tell about last night."

"How--how do you know that?" she asked.

He gave another snortlike chuckle. "Common horse sense tells me. The reason you didn't tell about the things you saw while leaning against the post was because you were afraid they would lead you on to a subject you didn't want to discuss. You were afraid that if you got started you might get tangled up and wouldn't be able to stop."

Helen could only stare at him. He had stated the truth far more clearly than she herself could have done.

"What was it, Miss Hardwick? I think you had better tell."

She stood silent, twisting her figure this way and that, and all the while wishing that he would take his eyes from her. Jumbled thoughts thronged her mind, and she felt her power of resistance slipping from her. Finally Culligore swung round on his heels, and a sigh of relief escaped her.

"The thing about you that puzzles me more than anything else is that your hair isn't red," he told her. "The rest I can savvy easily enough. I can even tell what it was you were holding back last night. Want me to?"

His tones were soft and teasing. She squirmed, torn between anxiety and despair. His face was expressionless, but she felt he was inwardly laughing at her.

"All right, then," he said, taking her silence for assent. "You couldn't have had more than one reason for keeping mum last night, and that reason was that you wanted to shield somebody. There is only one man on earth you could have wanted to shield, and that man is The Gray Phantom."

"No!" she cried. "You're mistaken! I wasn't----"

"Easy now." All at once his tone changed. "There's such a thing as protesting too much, you know. I don't take much stock in what I read in the Sunday papers, but there's a lot of talk going the rounds about a romance between you and The Gray Phantom. Most of it is pipe dreams, I guess. Anyhow, it's nobody's business, and it makes no difference. All I'll say is that if I was The Gray Phantom and had a girl like you fighting for me, I'd be willing to go through hell-fire for her every day in the week. You're loyal clean through and----"

"But you're wrong!" she interrupted emphatically. His words filled her with a great fear, but there was a kind of rough tenderness in his voice that warmed her.

"I knew you'd say that, but you have to hear me through. I take off my hat to The Gray Phantom. He always played the game according to the code, even when he cut those fancy didos that put gray hairs in almost every head on the force. I shouldn't say it, but it goes just the same. The Phantom's been lying low now for some time. Nobody seems to know where he is. He's shown himself only twice, and each time he came out in a good cause. They say he's going it straight, and it's rumored that a certain young lady has had a lot to do with his turning over a new leaf."

He paused, and for a moment his eyes rested on her averted face.

"It's hard work for a leopard to change his spots. Some people say it can't be done. The Phantom's human, like the rest of us. Maybe he's got tired of the straight and narrow path and gone back to his old tricks under a new name. Just for the sake of argument we'll say he has. And I've got a hunch that last night you saw or heard something that made you think that Mr. Shei is The Gray Phantom."

The assertion staggered her, though she had known all the time that he was leading up to it. Using almost the same words, her father had expressed the same idea at the breakfast table, and it was the similarity of the phrasing that startled her.

"No--no!" was all she could say.

"Then will you please tell me," said Culligore, his tones both gentle and insistent, "why didn't you come out with what you knew last night?"

She fell back a step, feeling suddenly weak as she realized that his question was unanswerable. A confusion of ideas churned and simmered in her mind. Her lips moved, but no words came.

"You've answered me," declared Culligore. "You think Mr. Shei is The Phantom. Maybe you're right, and maybe you're wrong. What I wanted to know was what you thought. And let me tell you something." A foolish grin, one of Lieutenant Culligore's infrequent ones, wrinkled his face. "I hate my job less whenever I meet up with one of your kind."

Helen did not hear what he said. She felt as if the swirl of thoughts and emotions within her had suddenly turned into a leaden lump. She glanced involuntarily at the chair in which Virginia Darrow had sat, and of a sudden she fancied she heard laughter--slow, tinkling laughter that sounded like a taunt flung in the face of an approaching specter. She knew the sounds existed only in her imagination, but with a low, long drawn-out cry she turned abruptly and fled toward the door, conscious only of a fierce desire for sunlight and air.

No one detained her. She ran across the street. An idea was slowly working its way out of the turmoil in her mind. She opened her bag and counted her scant supply of bills. Then she looked about her. Half a block down the street she saw the sign of a district messenger office. In a few moments she was inside, hastily scrawling a note which she had addressed to her father. A taxicab was passing as she stepped out on the street. She hailed the driver, and he drew in at the curb.

"Erie station--West Twenty-third Street," she directed breathlessly.

As the cab started she slumped back against the cushions and gazed rigidly out the window. Despite the bright sunlight, things blurred before her eyes, and there was only one clear thought in her mind.

She was on her way to The Gray Phantom, for she alone knew where to find him.