The Tragedy of Z (3 page)

Father said: “I'll be damned,” and regarded me much as if he had helped bring into the world a Bird Woman, the Zuzu Girl, or some similar freak of nature. But my little silly display of mental pyrotechnics so pleased Mr. Lane that from that moment on he accepted me as a very special sort of colleague; a little, I fear, to the chagrin of father, who had always been at daggers' point with the old gentleman on the subject of comparative detective methods.

We spent the afternoon together strolling in the quiet gardens, visiting the cobbled little village Mr. Lane had erected for his co-workers, drinking brown ale in his own Mermaid Tavern, seeing his private theater, his enormous library, his unique and thrilling collection of Shakespeariana. It was the most exciting afternoon I had ever spent, and it passed all too quickly.

In the evening a baronial feast was served in the medieval banquet hall, a noisy and luxurious repast partaken of by the entire population of The Hamlet in honor of Mr. Lane's birthday. Later, we four retired to the old gentleman's private apartments and settled down to Turkish coffee and liqueurs. An astonishing little man with a hump on his gnomish back popped in and out of the room; he seemed unbelievably ancient, and Mr. Lane assured me that he was well over a hundred years old. This was the admirable Quacey, his familiar, the Caliban of whom I had heard and read so many delightful stories.

The peace of leaping flames and oak walls was relief after the clatter below. I was tired, and relaxed with thankfulness into a magnificent Tudor chair to listen. Burly father, gray, craggy, broad-shouldered; Governor Bruno with his fighter's chin and slender aggressiveness; the old actor with his patrician face …

It was good to be there.

Mr. Lane was in high spirits; he plied the Governor and father with question, but of himself he refused to speak in detail.

“I've come upon evil days,” he said lightly at one point. “Fallen into the sear and yellow leaf; and, as Shakespeare said, I should be patching up my old body for heaven. Well, my physicians are trying hard to send me to my Maker in one piece. I'm old.” Then he laughed and flicked a shadow off the wall. “But let's not talk about a doddering gaffer. Didn't you say a moment ago, Inspector, that you and Patience were bound for the hinterland?”

“Patty and I are going upstate on a case.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Lane; and his nostrils quivered. “A case. I wish, I almost wish I could go with you. What's it all about?”

Father shrugged. “Don't know much. It's nothing in your line anyway. Ought to interest you, though, Bruno. I think your old pal Joel Fawcett of Tilden County is mixed up in it.”

“Don't be funny,” said the Governor sharply. “Joel Fawcett's no friend of mine, and the fact that he belongs to my party only irritates me. He's a crook, and he's built up a mailed-fist organization in Tilden County.”

“Glad to hear it,” grinned father. “Looks like action again. What do you know about Dr. Ira Fawcett, his brother?”

I fancied Governor Bruno started. Then his eyes flickered and he stared into the fire. “Senator Fawcett is the worst kind of political crook, but his brother Ira is the real boss of the roost. He doesn't hold office, but I don't think I'm telling tales when I say that he's the power behind his brother.”

“That explains it,” said father with a scowl. “You see, this Dr. Fawcett is silent partner to a big marble man in Leeds, and Clay—that's the marble man—he wants me to investigate some smelly contracts he suspects his partner is hooking for the firm. It all looks cut-and-dried to me. But to prove it is a different story.”

“I don't envy you. Dr. Fawcett's a slick article. Clay, eh? I know him. Seems to be quite all right.… I'm particularly interested because the Fawcetts face a battle this fall.”

Mr. Lane was sitting with his eyes closed, smiling faintly; I realized with a shock that he heard nothing now. Father had often mentioned the old actor's deafness, and his ability to read lips. But his eyelids shut off the world.

I shook my head impatiently at the irrelevancies drifting through my thoughts and applied myself to listen. The Governor was outlining in his forceful way the situation in Leeds and Tilden County. It appeared that a bitter political campaign was anticipated during the coming months. The vigorous young district attorney of the county, John Hume, was already slated for the senatorial nomination on the opposing ticket. He was admired and liked by the local electorate, had achieved a clean, forthright reputation as public prosecutor, and was seriously challenging the power of the Fawcett ring. Backed by one of the most astute politicians in the state, Rufus Cotton, young John Hume was running on a reform platform—a particularly felicitous platform, I gathered, considering the fact that Senator Fawcett was so notoriously dishonest—“the chief hog in the upstate pork-barrel,” as Mr. Bruno expressed it—and that the county seat, Leeds, housed one of the state penitentiaries, Algonquin Prison.

Mr. Lane had opened his eyes and for some minutes had been watching the lips of the Governor with a curious intentness, for no reason I could fathom. I saw his keen old eyes sparkle at mention of the prison.

“Algonquin, eh?” he cried. “That's most interesting. Several years ago—before your election to the governorship, Bruno—Lieutenant-Governor Morton arranged with Warden Magnus to allow me inside the walls on a tour of inspection. Fascinating place. I met an old friend there—Father Muir, the chaplain. I'd known him in the old days—before your time, I fancy. He was the patron saint of the Bowery when the Bowery was bad. Give Father Muir my sincerest regards, Inspector, if you see him.”

“Fat chance. My prison-inspection days are over.… Going already, Bruno?”

The Governor had climbed reluctantly to his feet. “I must. Capitol Hill's calling. I sneaked off in the midst of very important business.”

Mr. Lane's smile vanished, and the age-lines sprang back to his worn face. “Oh, come now, Bruno. You can't desert us this way. Why—we've only just begun, you know.…”

“Sorry, old fellow, I really must. Thumm, you're staying on?”

Father scratched his jaw, and the old gentleman snapped: “Of course the Inspector and Patience will remain overnight. I'm sure there's no hurry.”

“Oh, well, this Fawcett bird'll keep, I guess,” said father with a sigh as he stretched his legs luxuriously. And I nodded.

And yet, had we proceeded to Leeds that night, things might have worked out very differently. We should probably have met Dr. Fawcett before he went on his mysterious trip, for one thing. And much that was foggy later might have been cleared up.… As it was, we succumbed gratefully to the magic of The Hamlet and stayed on.

Governor Bruno regretfully took his leave in the midst of his troopers, and very shortly after his departure I was rolling in an ecstasy of fatigue between the soft sheets of a gigantic Tudor bed, blissfully unaware of what the future held in store.

2. I MEET A DEAD MAN

Leeds was a charming and busy little town sprawled at the foot of a conical hill. It was the center of a rural county, surrounded on all sides by rolling farms and a haze of blue uplands. Had it not been for the frowning fortress that crowned the hill, it would have been a paradise. As it was, the heavy gray walls topped by sentry-boxes, the ugly stacks of the prison mills, the oppressive solidity and menace of the immense prison, hung over the neat countryside and town like a shroud. Not even the green woody shanks of the hill softened the picture. I wondered aloud how many desperate men crushed between those unyielding walls thought longingly of the cool woods so very near their prison, and yet as remote as a Martian forest.

“You'll get over that, Patty,” said father as we taxied from the railroad station. “Most of the men in there are pretty bad. Its not a Sunday school, kid. Don't waste too much sympathy on them.”

Perhaps his lifelong association with criminals had hardened him; but to me it did not seem just that men should be shut away from the green earth and the blue sky; and I could not think of depravity deep enough to warrant such wanton cruelty.

We were both silent on the short ride to Elihu Clay's house.

The Clay mansion—it was a large white pillared house in the richest Colonial tradition—lay halfway up the hill on the outskirts of the town. Elihu Clay himself was waiting for us at the portico. He was gracious and a thoughtful host, and from his manner it would have been impossible to perceive that in a sense we were his employees. He put us at our ease at once, had his housekeeper assign us to pleasant bedrooms, and spent the remainder of the afternoon chatting about Leeds and himself—quite as if we had been old friends. We found that he was a widower; he spoke with sad affection of his dead wife, and remarked that one of the great regrets of his life was that he had no daughter to replace his wife. It semed to me that in his own and proper setting Elihu Clay was a vastly different individual from the brusque business man who had enlisted our services in New York. I grew to like him in the quiet days that followed.

Father and Clay spent many hours closeted together in the study. One entire day they spent at the quarries, which were located a few miles out of Leeds near the Chataharie River. Father was scouting the enemy, and from his perpetual grouch the first few days I saw that he anticipated a long and probably unsuccessful struggle.

“Not a single bit of documentary proof, Patty,” he grumbled to me. “This man Fawcett must be the devil's own keeper. No wonder Clay yelped for help. This thing is tougher than I thought.”

But while I sympathized, there was very little that I could do to assist the investigation. Dr. Fawcett was not in evidence. He had, as it happened, left Leeds the morning of our arrival—while we were en route—bound for an unknown destination. I gathered that this was not unusual; he worked in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, and his comings and goings were always dark and unpredictable. Had he been available, I might have been able to exercise whatever charms nature had provided me. I doubt that father would have fallen in with this plan of campaign, and certainly I should have had an armful of trouble with him.

The situation was rather agreeably complicated by another factor. There was a second Mr. Clay—a junior Mr. Clay of awesome construction and too handsome a smile for the good of the local belles. This gentleman's name was Jeremy, which matched his curly chestnut hair and a certain devil-may-care quirk of his lips. With that name, and dressed in the appropriate costume, he might have stepped out of the pages of a Farnol novel. Jeremy was freshly out of Dartmouth in more than one sense, weighed one hundred and ninety pounds, had rowed stroke-oar, knew half a dozen All-America football heroes by their first names, ate nothing but vegetables, and danced like a cloud. He was, he assured me gravely at the dinner-table on the first evening of our stay in Leeds, about to make America marble-conscious. He had hurled his diploma into a rock-crusher and was laboring at his father's Leeds quarries by the side of sweaty Italian drillers, tossing explosives about and getting his hair full of stone-dust. He was sure, he said enthusiastically, that he could learn to produce more marble of superior quality than … His father looked proud but skeptical.

I found Jeremy a most fascinating young man. For a few days, at any rate; his ambition to make America marble-conscious was put tenderly aside; for his father excused him from work to keep me company. Young Jeremy possessed a small but excellent stable, and for several afternoons we went riding. My education abroad, it soon developed, had been neglected in one respect: I had never been thoroughly schooled in the art of resisting the love-making methods of young American collegians.

“You're just a pup,” I told him severely one day when he had neatly pocketed our horses in a little gully from which there was no escape and had proceeded without permission to seize my hand.”

“Let's both be pups,” he suggested with a grin, and swung sideways out of his saddle. My riding-crop caught him on the tip of his nose just in time to prevent a minor catastrophe.

“Ouch!” he said, jumping back. “Is that nice? Pat, you're breathing fast.”

“I'm not!”

“You are. You like it.”

“I don't!”

“All right,” he said ominously. “I can wait.” And he grinned all the way home.

After that, however, Mr. Jeremy Clay went riding alone. But he was a dangerously nice boy just the same. In fact, I was nettled to discover that I
might
have liked it if I had permitted the catastrophe to occur.

It was in the midst of this Arcadian idyl that the blow fell.

It came, as such things do, with the unexpectedness of a summer thunderstorm. We had no way of anticpating it. The news reached us at the end of a calm, sleepy day. Jeremy had been sulky, and I had spent two blissful hours mussing his hair, of which he was unreasonably careful, and ragging him. Father had gone off on a strictly private expedition, and Elihu Clay had passed the day at his office. He did not appear for dinner, nor did father.

Jeremy, incensed about his hair, had become almost formal in his treatment of me. It was “Miss Thumm” here and “Miss Thumm” there; he was coldly solicitous of my comfort, insisted on fetching cushions, ordered special titbits from the kitchen for my dinner, lit my cigarettes and poured my cocktails—all with the pained, detached air of the man of the world who goes through the motions of polite social intercourse while his tired brain seethes with thoughts of suicide.

Father turned up, grumpy, perspiring, and disgusted, after dark; he shut himself up in his bedroom, splashed in a tub, and an hour later came down for a quiet cigar on the porch where Jeremy was bitterly strumming a guitar and I was singing with meekness a wicked ditty which I had learned in a Marseilles café. It was fortunate for me, I suppose, that father understood French not at all; and even Jeremy, under his bitterness, looked shocked. But there was something in the moon and the air that drove me on. I speculated dreamily, I remember, about how far I could go with Mr. Jeremy Clay without burning my virginial fingers.…