The Tragedy of Z (27 page)

“Ah,” said Mr. Lane. “Thank you, Bruno, thank you. It's decent of you. The first rays of sunshine in these horrible weeks. Thumm, Patience—let's get back!”

“Just a minute.” The Governor fingered a paper on his desk. “I've been debating with myself whether I ought to tell you this or not. But as long as we're allies I suppose I've no right to withhold it. It may be important.”

The old gentleman's head rose sharply. “Yes?”

“You're not the only ones who want Aaron Dow's execution called off.”

“Yes?”

“Somebody else from Leeds——”

“Do you mean to stand there and tell me,” thundered Mr. Lane in a terrible voice, his eyes flashing fire, “that someone we know, someone connected with the case, anticipated us here in asking you for a stay, Bruno?”

“Not for a stay,” muttered the Governor. “For a full pardon. She came two days ago, and although she wouldn't tell me on what she based her knowledge——”

“She!” We all echoed that in stunned surprise.

“It was Fanny Kaiser.”

Mr. Lane stared unseeingly at the oil painting above the Governor's head. “Fanny Kaiser. Well, well. And I've been—” He smashed the desk with his fist. “Of course, of course! How could I have been so blind, so stupid! Wouldn't tell why she wanted the pardon, eh?” He bounded across the rug to us and grasped our arms with fingers that hurt. “Patience, Inspector—back to Leeds! There's hope, I tell you!”

19. CHECKMATE

Our journey back to leeds was fantastic. Mr. Lane sat sunken in his greatcoat—the days were growing chill—his eyes feverish; I could feel the powerful tug of his will on the wheels of the limousine, and he roused himself only to command Dromio to drive faster.

But Nature makes her demands; we were forced to stop overnight for food and sleep. In the morning we raced on again; and it was little before noon when we pulled into Leeds.

There seemed to be an unprecedented commotion in the streets; newsboys were yelling and holding up limp papers whose naked front pages shrieked something in bold type. My ears were assailed suddenly by the words:
Fanny Kaiser!
on the lips of one of the young hawkers.

“Stop!” I cried to Dromio. “Something's happened!”

And I leaped out of the car before either father or Mr. Lane could move. I flung a coin to the boy and snatched a paper.

“Eureka!” I screamed, scrambling back into the car. “Read this!”

The story was pleasantly plain. Fanny Kaiser, “for years,” as the
Leeds Examiner
said, “a notorious member of the community, has been arrested by order of District Attorney John Hume and charged with …” Here followed a long list of counts: white slavery, drug peddling and other unpleasant vices. It seemed, from the newspaper account, that Hume had made excellent use of the documents he had found in the Fawcett house during the investigation of the first murder. There had been raids on several “establishments” owned by Fanny Kaiser. The lid had been wrenched from the stewpot of corruption; rumors of the ugliest nature were fife; there were scarcely camouflaged hints that many citizens of Leeds prominent socially, industrially, and politically were directly involved.

The woman had been held in twenty-five thousand dollars' bail. The bail had been promptly paid, we noted, and she was at large awaiting indictment.

“This is news,” said Mr. Lane thoughtfully. “Fortunate, Inspector, I can't tell you how fortunate. Now that our friend Fanny Kaiser is in hot water, perhaps …” He dismissed the arrest and charges as of little consequences except for their demoralizing effect on the woman. “Creatures like that invariably wriggle out of such scrapes.… Dromio, drive to District Attorney Hume's office!”

We found John Hume at his desk, expansively sucking a cigar, and amusedly eager to please. Where was the woman now? Out on bail. Where were her headquarters? He smiled and gave us the address.

We dashed there—a large officer-infested house in an outlying section of the town; plushy, ornate, gilded, and very much decorated with paintings of enthusiastic nudity but doubtful artistic merit. She was not there. She had not been there since her release on bond.

We began a frantic search, the hard lines reappearing on our faces. At the end of three hours we looked at each other in silent despair; the woman was not to be found anywhere.

Had she forfeited her bond, left the state—perhaps the country? It was horribly possible, considering the formidable charges arrayed against her, and we went through agonies while the old gentleman, grim as the Reaper, roused John Hume and the police. The wires began to sizzle. All Fanny Kaiser's known haunts were searched. Detectives were ordered out to track her movements. Railway stations were watched. The New York police were warned. All to no avail; the woman had vanished.

“The devil of it is,” muttered John Hume as we sat exhausted in his office waiting for reports, “she's not scheduled for indictment for three weeks; that is, until two weeks from this coming Thursday.”

We groaned in unison. Even with Governor Bruno's stay, this would cause her to appear—if ever she did—exactly one day after the execution of Aaron Dow.

I think we all aged years in the terrible days that followed. The week slipped by. Friday … We did not give up the search. Mr. Lane was a dynamo of energy. Through the cooperation of the police, the local broadcasting agencies were placed at his disposal. Calls, appeals, were sent over the air. Every known affiliation of the woman's nefarious and widespread organization was under surveillance. Employees of hers—women, solicitors, hangers-on, gunmen from the Leeds underworld—were summarily hustled to Headquarters and questioned.

Saturday, Sunday, Monday … On Monday we learned from Father Muir and the newspapers that Warden Magnus had officially set the day and hour of execution for Wednesday, 11:05
P.M.

Tuesday … Fanny Kaiser was still missing. All Europe-bound steamers had been cabled; but no woman of her unmistakable description was aboard any of them.

Wednesday morning … We lived as in a dream, eating mechanically, talking little. Father had not taken off his clothes for forty-eight hours. Mr. Lane's cheeks were cadaverous, and his eyes smouldered with an unholy illness. We tried desperately to get into Algonquin for a talk with Dow, but were refused admittance. It was against the strict prison regulations. But rumors drifted out, as such things will: Dow was strangely calm, had become almost monosyllabic; he no longer cursed us, and indeed seemed to have forgotten our very existence. As the hour of execution drew nearer, we learned, he did in truth bcome visibly shaken, and paced the floor of his cell with jerky steps; but Father Muir, the tears in his eyes, smiled and reported to us that “he clings to faith.” Poor padre! Aaron Dow was not clinging to spiritual faith; I felt certain that he had been stiffened by a much more worldly hope, for instinct told me that somehow Drury Lane had been able to get word to him that he was not to die that night.

Wednesday, a day of horrors and surprises. Breakfast—we barely touched it. Father Muir was gone, hurrying on tired old legs to the condemned cells in the quadrangle. Then he came back, restlessly, and retired to his bedroom upstairs. When he reappeared, clutching his breviery, he seemed more serene.

We were naturally congregated in Father Muir's that day. I seem dimly to recall that Jeremy was there, a hang-dog look on his young face, pounding up and down before the little gate outside, smoking innumerable cigarettes. His father, he said once when I went down to talk to him, was doing a horrible thing. It appeared that Elihu Clay had received the warden's invitation to attend the execution, and—Jeremy was bitter—had accepted. I could think of nothing to say.… And so the morning crept by. Mr. Lane's face was pinched and mottled; he had not slept for two nights, and a recurrence of his old ailment had painted deep lines of anguish on his features.

Somehow, it was like a gathering of relatives outside the sickroom of a dying man. No one spoke unnecessarily; when one did speak, it was in hushed tones. Occasionally someone would go out to the porch and stare wordlessly at the gray walls. I caught myself wondering why we were all taking the death of this pitiful creature so personally. He meant nothing to us—nothing as a personality. Yet somehow he had grown on us—he or the cause abstractly that he personified.

At a few minutes to eleven that morning Mr. Lane received the last report from Leeds by messenger from the district attorney's office. All efforts had come to nothing. Fanny Kaiser could not be found, nor any trace of her last movements.

The old gentleman squared his shoulders. “There is only one thing to do,” he announced in a low voice. “And that is to remind Bruno of his promise to stay execution. Until we find Fanny Kai——”

The doorbell rang, and from our startled looks he instantly sensed what had happened. Father Muir hurried into the vestibule. Then we heard his little choking cry of joy.

We stared stupidly at the doorway of the sitting room, stared at the figure standing there leaning against the jamb.

It was Fanny Kaiser, resurrected, it would seem, from the dead.

20. THE TRAGEDY OF Z

Gone was that cigar-smoking, imperturbable, and fantastic Amazon who had so cooly defied John Hume. This was a different creature. Her once-crimson hair was blotched with dirty pink and gray. Her mannish clothing was dusty, wrinkled, in several places torn. Her cheeks and lips were unpainted, and they sagged toward her sagging chest. And in her eyes … a glitter of naked terror.

Se was a frightened old woman.

We leaped forward all together and half dragged her into the room. Father Muir danced around us in an ecstasy of simple joy. Someone placed a chair for her and she sank into it with a hollow, curiously aged groan. Mr. Lane dropped his unhappy manner; the mask fell into place again, but this time it concealed such raw eagerness that his fingers trembled and a little pulse in his temple began to dance.

“I've been—away,” she said hoarsely, licking her cracked lips. “And then—I heard—you people were lookin' for me.”

“Oh, you did!” shouted father, his face purple. “Where've you been?”

“Hidin' out in a little shack in the Adirondacks,” she replied wearily. “I wanted—wanted to get away; see? This—all this dirty, scummy mess in Leeds … It kind of wore me down. Up there … Hell, I'm ‘way out o' touch with civilization. No 'phone, no rural delivery, nothing. Not even a paper. But I had a radio …”

“That's Dr. Fawcett's cabin!” I cried instinctively, as the thought flashed through my mind. “The place where he must have spent the week-end his brother was murdered!”

Her heavy lids rose and fell, and her cheeks sagged even lower so that she looked like a lugubrious old seal. “Yes, dearie, that's right. That's—I mean, that was Ira's. His love-nest, you might say.” She cackled mirthlessly. “Took his lady-friends up there. Week-end when Joe died, he was up there with some floozie——”

“That's irrelevant, now,” said Drury Lane quietly. “Madam, what brought you into Leeds?”

She shrugged. “Funny, ain't it? Never knew I had one. Next thing I know I'll be bustin' out cryin'.” She sat up straighter and boomed at him, defiantly: “My conscience, that's what!” as if she expected to be laughed at, or at least disbelieved.

“Indeed, I'm very happy to hear that, Miss Kaiser.” She blinked, and he pulled a chair over and sat down facing her. We looked on in silence. “It was while Aaron Dow was in the county jail—before the trial, was it not?—that he sent you the last section of chest, the third section with the letter Z on it?”

Her mouth popped open like the hole in a large doughnut, and her red-rimmed eyes stared wildly. “Jeeze!” she gasped. “How did you know that?”

The old gentleman waved it aside impatiently. “Elementary enough. You had visited the Governor to plead for a pardon for Dow, a creature whom presumably you did not know. Why should Fanny Kaiser, of all people, do such a thing? Only because Dow had a hold over you. The same hold, I reasoned, that he had had over Senator Fawcett and Dr. Fawcett. Then it was apparent that he had sent you the last section of chest. The Z …”

“Might of known,” she muttered.

He tapped her meaty knee lightly. Tell me,” he said.

She was silent.

He murmured: “But you see, Miss Kaiser, I already know part of it.
The ship …”

She started, and her big fingers dug deep into the arm of the overstuffed chair. And she sank back. “Well!” she said with a short, ugly, somehow pathetic laugh. “Who the hell are you, anyway, Mister? I see it ain't a secret any more, although how the devil
you
found … Dow didn't talk?”

“No.”

“Holdin' on to the last gasp. The poor damn' mutt,” she mumbled. “Well, sir, that's what comes of bein' a sinner. It's got to come out. The psalm-singers always nab you in the end. 'Scuse me, padre.… Yes, Dow has a hold on me, and I tried to save him to keep him from spilling the beans. So when I couldn't save him, I ran like hell. Wanted to get away.…”

A curious light flared in the old gentleman's eyes. “Afraid of the consequences of his telling, eh?” he said softly, but not as if he meant it.

Her fat arm flailed the air. “No, hot that. Not so much. But first I better tell you what that damn' kid's toy means, what Dow's had on me, on Joe and Ira Fawcett, all these years.”

It was an amazing, an incredible story. Years before—twenty, twenty-five; she was vague about the exact period that had elapsed—Joel and Ira Fawcett had been two young American scoundrels knocking about the world, picking up what cash they could in any and every way. Crookedly by preference, since it entailed less labor as a rule. Their name had been something else; it did not matter what. Fanny Kaiser, daughter of an American beachcomber and a thieving English expatriate, at this time had been the obscure if ambitious proprietress of a café in Saigon—in those days the wide-open, hell-roaring capital of Cochin-China. The two brothers had drifted into port, on the alert for “pickin's,” as she told us, and she got to know them; she had “liked their style; they were two smart young grifters with plenty of guts and not too much Christian scruple.”