Chapter SIX: "harry Nichols"

Detective Triggy Drew flushed slightly beneath his olive skin. He bowed, with his keen eyes fixed upon the little, ivory-handled revolver clutched so tightly in Loris Stockbridge's right hand. He bowed for a second time. His eyes lifted and his brows arched as he said distinctly:

"Miss Stockbridge, something very serious has happened to your father. It happened in this library. It happened this morning. Won't you please go back upstairs to your rooms until I call for you. At present I am in charge of matters."

"Matters? What do you mean?"

The girl swayed slightly. She glanced down at the revolver as if she were unaware that it was in her hand. Drew advanced a step in her direction. He feared a woman and a gun more than anything else in the world. Both were liable to form a dangerous combination.

"Something happened," he repeated. "I'm very sorry for you, Miss Stockbridge."

"Happened!" she exclaimed. "Happened to him? You don't mean that letter--that telephone call--do you?"

Loris' splendid, dusky eyes, within the depths of which high lights shone, wandered over the polished table. They fastened upon the envelope from the cemetery company. They fixed where the letter lay with one corner beneath the center piece. They lifted in thought. They swung toward the waiting detective who had placed himself between her and the body of her father. She divined this movement with quick intuition. She stepped to one side and bent downward with a graceful movement of her hips. She gasped and pointed a left hand finger, which wavered and went up to her hair as her palm pressed against the side of her head. She started sobbing--short, throaty sobs of poignant distress.

"Please don't," whispered Drew holding out a guarding arm. "Please don't, Miss Stockbridge. Your father is beyond this earth. You should not have come down here."

"Dead?"

The word came from the depths of a soul. "Dead?" she repeated with her taper fingers spreading across her face.

"Yes, Miss," said Drew with a catch in his voice. "Yes, he is quite dead. He was slain in this room by a revolver shot which struck behind and under his left ear. No one was in the library when he locked himself in, save himself. No one was here when we broke the door down. And, save his servants and you, no one was in this house. He was----"

"Murdered!" Loris' voice had lifted to one wild shriek of final conviction and grief. She swayed. Her knees bent beneath her skirt and bulged outwardly. She sank into a slow faint at the detective's feet. She pillowed her head upon the rug. A silence followed.

Drew stooped, after a glance at the servants in the doorway, thrust his body as a barrier, and reached along Loris' white arm until his hand closed over the barrel of the little revolver. He untwisted her cold fingers, and palmed the weapon under a shielding cuff. He rose, saying to Delaney, who had hurried forward:

"I'll take charge of this."

"Sure, Chief. Plant it. She didn't have it."

"She had it all right, but--we'll suspend judgment. You and the butler carry her upstairs. Go easy. Her bedroom is on the third floor, I think. That's the reason she didn't come down sooner. Perhaps, well, I say, she didn't hear us breaking down the door. We are her agents in this matter, now. Remember that, and say nothing to anybody. I'll do the talking."

Drew dropped his hand into his side pocket. It came out without the revolver but with a handkerchief between his fingers. He mopped his brow gracefully, then replaced the handkerchief. The motion was a natural one.

He followed Delaney and the butler with their soft burden as far as the first steps of the stairway. He turned and strode back to the doorway leading into the library. He faced about in this. He eyed the servants, who lowered their heads beneath his accusing scrutiny. Focusing his gaze to a searching squint he tried to single out a culprit from their midst. There seemed to be none. Each face was terror-lined and drawn. Each seemed to want to avoid his direct glance. None of all of them faced him with boldness or assurance. It was as he expected things to be. There was no evidence shown in the case that the servants of the Stockbridge regime had ever threatened the master. They were old, tried and trusted. They had the faults of their kind. These faults only served to strengthen Drew's opinion that the murderer of the magnate had struck from the outside, without benefit of inside information. The letter and the telephone call were foreign. A note, pinned upon the millionaire's pillow, would have been more effective. Nothing had been tried like that. This proved to Drew that he could eliminate the servants, for the time being.

"Which one of you is the valet?" he asked with final resolve.

"I am, sir!"

Drew ran his eyes over an aged man in white vest and tight-fitting clothes which were studded here and there with gold-plated buttons. The fit of the stockings--the neatness of the low patent-leather shoes--the smartness and aloofness of the individual, caused the detective to smile slightly. The man was better dressed than his master.

"Your native country is Germany?" said Drew.

"It was, sir."

"No, it is yet. You can't change that part of it. When did you come to the United States?"

"Fourteen--fifteen years ago, sir. The master brought me from England where I was employed by the Right Honorable Arthur Sandhurst, sir."

"You are now a naturalized American?"

"Going on thirteen years, sir."

"Come down to my office about noon to-morrow. I want to speak to you then. I haven't time now. Be sure you bring that magpie with you." Drew turned and jerked his thumb toward the front of the library. "Do you understand?"

"I do, sir!"

"That's all!" exclaimed the detective. "One of you may stand by the door until Mr. Delaney returns. The rest may go downstairs. Remember, no talking to anybody but accredited police officers, who will soon be here."

"I'll stand guard!" announced the second-man with a pompous voice. "Nobody'll get by me, sir. I'll 'ave them know I'm right 'ere, sir."

Drew backed through the curtains as the second-man was speaking. He dropped them behind him and started another search, which was done in solitude and in silence. He went over everything in the library with the trained eyes of an operative who had learned his profession in many schools. He left deduction and surmise for a later hour. He was after cold facts which might lead to an answer to the riddle. He held, with some slight scorn, the theory of the armchair detective and the puzzle worked out by retrospection. His experience had been, that only through hard work could he expect to find his answer. He had been credited with visiting six hundred laundries in search of a certain mark. He had a note book filled with his failures to find the man he was after. The men he had found caused him no concern whatsoever. They had gone to prison and closed their accounts with him.

He applied hard work over the minutes to the case at hand. He went over the body of the aged millionaire. He took scrapings of the blood stains on the floor. He scratched up some few atoms of dried whisky. He examined the bottle. He searched each square inch under and about the body. He went through Stockbridge's pockets and beneath his vest. He tried everything in the way of getting facts which might bear on the case. A tape measure furnished certain distances which were recorded upon the back of an envelope. His data was complete, insofar as he had time to go. He desired to spend at least twelve hours in the library. This could not be. The case would be taken from his hands within minutes. Already there was a stir in the front part of the house. The bell had been ringing for some time. Delaney and the butler had hastened forward to answer it.

"The Central Office bunch!" announced the operative, parting the curtains and staring in at Drew. "Here they are, Chief!"

The detective stepped briskly out of the room and glided through the foyer hall to the front door. Here Delaney joined him, as steps were heard coming up from the servants' quarters as well as outside. It was as if a raid were in progress.

"Brass band methods!" said Drew. "You get out, Delaney, and go to our taxi. Stay there! I want to speak to Fosdick."

The door opened. A burly form blotted out the light from the Avenue and stamped in, shaking the snow from his overcoat. It was Fosdick--Chief of Detectives.

"Hello," he said cuttingly. "Hello, Drew! What's this you've been giving me over the 'phone?"

The detective drew Fosdick aside and allowed five Central Office men to stream into the hallway.

"Go and see," he suggested into the detective's ear. "Go and see. I've left everything just as I found it. The body is still there. The servants have been kept in the house. Question them. I'm off, now. 'Phone me not later than eight this morning. I'll be at my office. I'm acting in a private capacity. I'm protecting Loris Stockbridge--the sole heir!"

"Protecting!" exclaimed Fosdick. "What d'ye mean?"

Drew dropped his hand to his pocket and crammed down the little ivory-handled revolver. "Well," he smiled broadly. "You know what I mean. She's alone in this world--save for her friends. The old man called me in the case. I'm still in the case--remember that!"

Fosdick gulped hard. "All right," he said, turning and peeling off his coat. "I'll soon get to the bottom of this! Case looks easy to me. It's suicide! That's all it ever could be!"

Drew found his hat and coat where the butler had hung them. He went out through the front door without answering Fosdick. He crossed the Avenue on a diagonal which brought him to the waiting taxi where Delaney stood muffled to the chin. The two men climbed upon the running-board. The driver started up with a jerk, from his frozen position in the snow. They rounded the block and stopped in front of the drug-store where Loris had met the officer.

The Central Office man who had taken O'Toole's place had little to report. O'Toole had vanished toward the south. When last seen he was close on the heels of the man in olive-drab.

"Come on, Delaney," said Drew at this information. "We'll walk over to Fifth Avenue and then downtown. The driver can pick up our men in the alley. I want to clear my head of this muddle. A walk will do it!"

Delaney fell in behind his chief. They turned the corner. They struck through a side street and westward. They saw ahead of them the white expanse of untrodden snow, and beyond this the faint blue barricade of the Palisades.

The hour was after three. The crisp underfooting brought wine to their cheeks. The grip of winter air cleared both men's heads like a draught of ether. They stepped out. Their shoulders went back. Their thoughts passed from the case at the mansion to other things. The night had been filled with a thousand disappointments. Greatest of these was the stabbing memory that they both had been picked by the multimillionaire to protect him and save him from his enemies. They had failed in this trust. Their patron lay dead, and somewhere a whispering voice chuckled over a victory.

"Fifth Avenue!" announced Drew as they reached the corner. "Now, downtown, Delaney," he added cheerily. "Old Kris Kringle has nothing on us to-night. I believe we're the only ones out."

The operative caught his chief's humor, and glanced into his face with a smile. "Whew!" he breathed. "Whew!" he repeated from the depths of his lungs. "I'm glad, Triggy, to get from that damn house and that damn magpie and that----"

"So am I!" said Drew, thrusting out his hand and linking his elbow into the cove of Delaney's arm. "So am I. Fine night for the poor firm of Drew and Company."

Delaney glanced around and over his left shoulder. He blinked with frosty lids as he saw the towering facades of Stockbridge's mansion; its turrets and towers spiraled in the winter sky. He drew in his lips and compressed them. He puffed them out as he turned.

"I'm deducting," he said, "that there's more at the bottom of this thing than we think. Put it down for me that the Germans are mixed up in it."

Drew walked on for a block before he answered. He gripped the operative's arm by closing his own as he said:

"Quit deducting! It's fatal! Get your facts! Get all of them. The answer will come then, without an effort. It will be the right answer or none at all."

"Just the same, Chief----"

"The trouble with you," broke in Drew severely, "the trouble is, that you are forcing a conclusion to meet your own suspicions. The Germans, with the exception of a small clique, are behaving very well in this country at the present time. In other words, the most of them are good Americans and sane."

"That walley-sham?"

"He is not even under consideration! Did you notice him?"

"Sure, Chief!"

"Anything strike you as peculiar?"

"N--o."

"There were tears in his eyes--the only ones shed in that house for Stockbridge--outside of the daughter."

Delaney gulped. "I didn't see them," he said frankly.

"No! Well, I did--and when he wasn't expecting me to see them. A woman is never wholly lost who can blush, or a man who can shed tears."

"Sounds like good deduction," admitted the operative. "But then, Chief, there are a lot of fine actors in this world. I think there has been some in this case."

"This case, Delaney," Drew said, "is like many others which appear at first impossible of solving. All things can be solved by first principles. Give me all the facts and I'll give you the answer to any riddle. The answer will come! Don't try to write your plot until you have words to form your story. Don't make the mistake of forcing an answer to father a wish. In other words, Delaney, best of friends, we haven't all the facts we are going to get in this case and therefore it is idle to attempt to deduce who shot Stockbridge!"

"Or how he was shot, Chief?"

"It's almost the same thing. Both answers will come with hard work and plenty of it. We must keep along the main stem. Truth is a tree with many branches. It rises from the roots named cause, and reaches the top called effect. It springs from motive up to crime in one straight stem. We must trim away the branches and the false-work, and then we can see the trunk."

"There's one I'd like to trim right now," said Delaney, pausing in his snow-caked stride.

"Which one?" asked Drew.

"That noise in the library like a cat getting its tail twisted."

"I can explain that!"

"It's been driving me to drink, Chief."

"The telephone company, Delaney, have a device they call a howler. They cut this device in on the wire when a receiver is left off the hook. It is simply a high-frequency current generated for the purpose of vibrating the receiver's diaphragm until somebody hears the noise and puts the receiver back on the hook."

"It's a howler, all right, Chief!"

"Oftentimes a book or magazine gets under a receiver and lifts it up an inch or more. This attracts the attention of the central operator who thinks somebody is trying to get a number. When the situation is clear to her that the receiver is off the hook, or that the circuit is closed without anybody being at the receiver end, she notifies the wire-captain or chief-operator. It was either one or the other who put the howler on after Stockbridge was shot and the 'phone had fallen to the floor. Is that satisfactory? Does that explain the noise we heard in the library before we broke down the door?"

"I see now, Chief. I thought all along it was spirits like the rest of the job. Outside of spirits, what is the answer to the things that happened in that house? I know it. I deduct it, Chief. The old man was expecting somebody all of the time. He let this somebody into the library when the butler wasn't looking. Maybe it was a woman, for all we know. Maybe a German spy. Maybe anybody. This somebody got in an argument with him over spoils on some deal, and shot him dead. That's my idea, Chief!"

"You've missed your profession, Delaney. You've disgraced the firm! How did the library door get locked on the inside? How did that happen? Did Stockbridge, shot through the brain, rise and do it? It was mighty well locked--you remember!"

"I never thought of that," admitted the operative. "Then it looks, Chief, as if it was a case of suicide."

"Fosdick said the same thing without having many facts. How could a right-handed man shoot himself behind the left ear? How could he do a thing like that and then get rid of the weapon without leaving a trace of it? How--oh, well, get facts and you won't ask such questions!"

"Then it was done by an outsider?" blurted Delaney, staring through the wind-blown snow which came off the housetops. "It was done by the fellow who 'phoned and wrote that letter, or had the letter written? I don't see how he could do it!"

Drew smiled at Delaney's candor. "Neither do I," he said simply. "But we've crossed Forty-second Street and we're on the trail by everyday, up-to-date methods which never fail if they are continued long enough and men work hard enough. We'll start with Harry Nichols--the man in olive-drab! I've his address!"