Two Flights Up (11 page)

The smile died as she passed out of sight. He was committed to go to the Cox flat that night, and he had no idea how he was to do it. He had not told her the house was being watched. There were other things he had not told her, too. Asserting Cox’s innocence and proving it were very different things. Not only that; his own testimony would not help matters, seeing that he was clearly under suspicion himself.

Only Mrs. Bayne’s free and open confession would help any of them, and he had no idea that she would confess.

W
ARRINGTON WAS NOT CERTAIN
that the yard and the gate to it were being watched. He had an idea that Cox had been pretty carefully guarded, and that they hoped to catch himself on his way home, still ignorant of what had occurred.

Anyhow, he had to take that chance. His hat was on the table in the hall; he left his overcoat, as an impediment to what might turn out to be quick action, and went back to the kitchen. With his hand on the outer door, however, he remembered the dog and swore softly.

“Might as well raise an alarm and be done with it,” he reflected grimly.

But out that way he would have to go if he went at all, and the dog was quiet for the time. The kitchen was dark, and he opened the door cautiously and slid through it. Almost instantly he felt the creature beside him, wriggling its thin body and rubbing against him. He leaned down and patted its head.

“Quiet, old boy,” he whispered. “Down!”

He could feel it snuffing at his heels as he crossed the brick-paved yard. He did not go out by the gate into the alley, but chinning himself to the top of the fence at the side, dropped lightly into the next yard. From there he judged it would be safe to inspect the alley, and if it was clear, to get away by that route. But with his disappearance the dog began to yelp, and then to make small futile leaps at the fence.

“Damnation!” he muttered, and stood listening.

Above the dog’s desperate yelps and leaps he heard the other gate into the alley quickly open and somebody run in. And the dog, like a finger pointing, was now wailing and scratching at the boards. As Warrington reached the next fence and vaulted it, he heard the gate slam again, and knew that the chase was on.

The advantage was to the man running along the alleyway. He had only to move from gate to gate, looking in. The alley was well lighted, and the yards offered no hiding places. They were all alike, small rectangles of brick paving, on which abutted kitchen doors and windows. Warrington, to cover the same ground, had to climb a fence each time. And he was out of training. After the fourth fence he was breathing hard, and at the fifth he came to an
impasse
. He had reached the corner house, and it was surrounded by a high brick wall, offering no finger hold whatever.

In another minute the gate would open.

There was a door, slightly ajar, at the rear of the house beside him, and he did the only thing he could think of—ran up the steps, through the door, and closed it behind him. The kitchen was empty, but someone was moving in the pantry. He had only settled his tie and taken off his hat when an elderly cook entered. He smiled at her.

“Sorry,” he said. “I knocked, but nobody answered. My dog got away a few minutes ago, and I thought he came into your yard.”

“Haven’t seen him,” said the woman, eying him.

“He’s strange in this neighbourhood,” he told her, listening intently. “I just got him today.”

“Well, what do you want me to do about it?” she demanded. “I’m too busy to stop and cry.”

To signify her lack of interest she went to the stove, and with her back turned Warrington managed to turn the key in the door behind him. He was just in time; heavy footsteps ran across the yard, and the next instant they began to climb the steps.

He looked about him. The house in ground plan was not unlike the Baynes’s. In that case the door there should lead to the hall. He measured the distance with his eye, and as a peremptory knock came to the kitchen door, and the woman grumbling turned to answer, he opened it and slipped through.

He was in a closet.

Of the detective’s questions and the woman’s excited answers he heard little or nothing. The shock, plus the beating of his heart in his ears, almost deafened him, and the unreality of his situation dazed him. If he had committed a murder, he could not have shown guilt more clearly than by this whole absurd performance.

And all that in the drawing of a breath or two.

“He was right here when you knocked,” the woman was saying. “I didn’t even hear him go. He locked that door, too.”

“He’s run through the house. Which door?” The officer’s hand was actually on the knob of the closet, but the cook had opened another door and was peering through it.

“If he did, he’s gone for sure.”

She followed the officer as he ran forward, and Warrington, listening with strained ears, heard them in the front of the house. Very quietly he made his exit into the yard again and out the rear gate.

He doubled on his tracks, going back past the Bayne house and so out into a cross street farther down. Not until he had put a half-dozen blocks between himself and the search did he stop and take his bearings.

He had torn one trouser knee open and skinned both of his hands badly. In addition his collar and shirt were disreputable beyond words, and somewhere he had lost his hat. Afterward he was to look back on that flight of his as a sort of nightmare, as useless as a bad dream and much more disastrous. Better, far better, to have walked out the front door and given himself up.

Hatless, then, dirty and torn, he made his way toward the Cox apartment, taking back streets and avoiding policemen whenever he could. One can see him, I think, crossing lighted areas with a bit of a swagger, the wind blowing his hair about, and whistling valiantly for the benefit of possible observers; giving the impression that he had just wandered out from some near-by house to drop a letter in the box, or to buy a postage stamp at the corner drug store. And every now and then pausing, hands in pockets, to take a casual glance to the rear.

And in such fashion did he reach the Aurelia Apartments and, to a grin from the elevator boy, proceed to the third floor.

“Look as though you’d been having trouble,” said that youth, eying him.

“Motorcycle turned over,” said Warrington shamelessly. He considered that rather good; he had not said that
his
motorcycle had turned over. He smoothed his hair with his hands.

In spite of his morbid reflections earlier in the evening, he still could not regard either James Cox or himself as seriously involved. A straightforward story from him, and it must somehow clear up. The whole thing was absurd. It was monstrous. The bank ought to be darned glad to get the securities back and no questions asked.

With this in his mind, and the memory of Holly’s face as she had looked down from the angle of the staircase, he rang the bell of the Cox apartment.

Margaret opened the door. Even before she did so he was conscious of a deathlike stillness beyond it, and with his first sight of her face, he knew that tragedy, sheer stark tragedy, had entered the little flat.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said tonelessly. “Come in.”

James was sitting in a chair. Just sitting, with no newspaper about him, no cigar in his hand to waft its heavy masculine odour into the bedroom. He was sitting there, as he had sat almost ever since their return, staring straight ahead and not moving. …

“Don’t you want any dinner, James?”

“No, thanks.”

“I have broiled steak. You
like
that, James.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Finally Margaret had fixed him a tray and put it on the folding card table, extended before him; he had roused at that and had picked up the coffee cup. Then he groaned and put it down again.

“Sorry,” he said thickly. “Maybe later on—”

She knew he was afraid she would see that his hand was trembling.

She could not sew; she could not do anything. Once she had picked up her work basket, and he had seen the bit of Holly’s wedding dress she was working on. It was the only thing that had roused him.

“Put that down,” he said. “You’re through with them, my girl. Good and through.”

And she had silently put it away, out of sight. …

Into this situation, then, Warrington stepped as he entered the door. He had not seen Cox since the night he had struck the policeman, but the crushed figure in the chair bore little resemblance to the truculent individual of that evening.

“James,” Margaret said, “you remember Mr. Warrington, don’t you? You know he was—”

But her voice trailed off. At the name a change came over James’s face. His neck seemed to swell, his voice to flatten and thicken.

“So it’s you!” he said, slowly getting up. “You, you damned—”

“James!”

“Get out of that door or I’ll kill you,” said James, still in the strange voice. “I mean it. Off with you! Get out of the way, Margaret.”

He stood, his hands clenched and head lowered, impressive, dangerous.

“You dirty swine,” he said, “stealing into an honest man’s home and hiding your filthy stuff here!”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Cox. That wasn’t the intention.”

“Oh, it wasn’t, eh? Then what in hell was the intention? Do you know what they’ve done to me? They’ve arrested me. I’m out on bond. If it hadn’t been for Steinfeldt, I’d be in jail tonight. Me, James Cox! Honest James, they call me at the store, and now I’m through.
Through
!”

He sank back into his chair again, his fists still clenched, and a vein in his forehead swollen and throbbing.

Warrington glanced at Margaret. All the life had gone out of her masklike face.

“They searched the flat after you left this morning,” she said, still in her toneless voice. “Then they went to the store and arrested him. For receiving stolen goods. Mr. Steinfeldt went on his bond.”

Suddenly James began to laugh. It was hideous laughter, the chuckle of the martyr dying from the foot-tickling torture.

“We’ve got to hand it to them,” he said, be tween bursts of the horrible mirth. “They’ve used us all for their own dirty ends. You too! You and Margaret and me. Smart, they are. I take my hat off to them. And I used to see that hellhound of a woman marching through the store like a duchess! Used to admire her, too. May she—”

Margaret put her hand over his mouth, and he subsided like a child.

“I won’t have that sort of talk, James,” she said. “Mr. Warrington is going to tell us about it, and we’ll all see what we can do.”

Warrington looked at her. Over James’s head she was gazing at him with peculiar intentness.

“There isn’t much to tell,” she said. “Of course, the charge won’t stand. We’ll fix that up to-morrow. If anyone’s guilty, I’m the one. You see, the stuff was in the suitcase, hidden under some boards in the attic. When it was found—”

“Who found it?” asked James.

The question was to Warrington, but it was Margaret who replied.

“I’ve told you, James. It was Holly.”

“And I don’t believe it. It was that sister of yours. I’ll bet she’s known it was there all the time, too.”

“I only know what Holly says.”

But she was lying, deliberately and with a purpose. Warrington read the appeal in her eyes. Holly had told her the truth, but James was not to know it. To tell him that Mrs. Bayne had found the suitcase and sold a bond from it was to put a weapon in his hands against her, and one that, in his soreness and bitter humiliation, he was sure to use. She had dragged him, honest James Cox, and his pride in the mud. Not only now: from the beginning of his courtship, when she had denied him the privilege of seeing Margaret in her house, to this crowning humiliation, he owed her a thousand slights, a thousand miseries. Small wonder Margaret was lying to him.

But James was still suspicious.

“Let him tell it,” he said briefly, and sitting back, watched the two of them, his wife and Warrington, with hard, suspicious eyes.

“Well,” Warrington temporized, “there isn’t much to tell. I suppose they’re going on the theory that we’ve conspired to get the stuff out of the house, probably so that Mr. Bayne could get it later on; but what actually happened is that Holly wanted to avoid just that. She found it under some boards in the attic, and I brought it here. The idea was to make an arrangement at the bank for its restitution, but when I went to the bank this morning, there was nobody there, no responsible officers, and—I couldn’t very well hand it to the receiving teller!”

“And so you left it here, to ruin me. To ruin both of us.”

“I’m going to the District Attorney’s house, from here.”

But James only shook his head.

“What’s the use?” he said. “Don’t you suppose the Bayne house was searched from top to bottom after Tom Bayne was arrested? I’m not saying you knew, but somebody knew where those securities were, and has known all along. And don’t tell me it was the girl. She couldn’t have been more than ten when it happened.”

“If you mean my sister—” Margaret flared. But James took no notice of her.

“Y’see what I mean,” he went on. “And there’s no use going to the District Attorney. I gathered to-day he’s been fighting this pardon, and he’s pretty sore. But I’m not through fighting; I haven’t begun yet. If they think I’m going to sit down under this, they can think again.”

I
T WAS TEN O’CLOCK
when Warrington left them. He had a grateful glance and a word or two from Margaret as she let him out, but he was no farther along than when he had arrived. Left alone, free to tell all the truth, he would have been less confused, but he had the naturally honest man’s helplessness at having to connive at a lie.

He went down and out into the street. There was a roundsman standing on the pavement, and to save his life he could not avoid a self-conscious movement away from him.

“I’m afraid!” he muttered. “Afraid of a policeman!”

Margaret had roughly drawn the knee of his torn trousers together, and he had borrowed James’s cap. Strange to think that even so small an incident as that, of borrowing a cap, was to have its influence on his situation. How long ago it seemed since Margaret, on the pavement at Kelsey Street with a shawl over her head, had said: