"Miss Brainerd," said Randall, when he was face to face with the t.i.tian beauty in the drawing-room of her suite, "I came with a message from your friend, Carl Cheney."
Here he paused and watched her expression very closely. As he had hoped, the girl was unable to master her feelings. Rage and hate wrote themselves large across her face and her voice fairly snapped as she started to reply. Randall, however, interrupted her with a smile and the statement:
"That"s enough! I"m going to lay my cards face up on the table. I am a Secret Service operative seeking information about Cheney. Here is my badge, merely to prove that I"m telling the truth. We have reason to believe that "the Count," as he is called, is mixed up with a pro-German plot which, if successful, would imperil the peace of the country. Can you tell us anything about him?"
"Can I?" echoed the girl. "The beast! He promised to marry me, more than two months ago, and then got infatuated with some blond chit of a chorus girl. Just because I lost my head and showed him a letter I had received--a letter warning me against him--he flew into a rage and threatened.... Well, never mind what he did say. The upshot of the affair was that he sent me out of town and gave me enough money to last me some time. But he"ll pay for his insults!"
"Have you the letter you received?" asked Randall, casually--as if it meant little to him whether the girl produced it or not.
"Yes. I kept it. Wait a moment and I"ll get it for you." A few seconds later she was back with a note, written in a feminine hand--a note which read:
If you are wise you will ask the man who calls himself Carl Cheney what he knows of Paul Weiss, of George Winters, and Oscar Stanley. You might also inquire what has become of Florence and Rose.
(Signed) AMELIA.
Randall looked up with a puzzled expression. "What"s all this about?" he inquired. "Sounds like Greek to me."
"To me, too," agreed the girl. "But it was enough to make Carl purple with rage and, what"s more, to separate him from several thousand dollars."
"Weiss, Winters, and Stanley," mused Guy. "Those might easily be Cheney"s former aliases. Florence, Rose, and Amelia? I wonder.... Come on, girl, we"re going to take a ride down to City Hall! I"ve got a hunch!"
Late that afternoon when Carl Cheney arrived at his hotel he was surprised to find a young man awaiting him in his apartment--a man who appeared to be perfectly at ease and who slipped over and locked the door once the count was safely within the room.
"What does this mean?" demanded Cheney. "By what right--"
"It means," snapped Randall, "that the game"s up!" Then, raising his voice, he called, "Mrs. Weiss!" and a tall woman parted the curtains at the other end of the room; "Mrs. Winters!" and another woman entered; "Mrs. Stanley!" and a third came in. With his fingers still caressing the b.u.t.t of the automatic which nestled in his coat pocket, Randall continued:
"Cheney--or whatever your real name is--there won"t be any invasion of Canada. We know all about your plans--in fact, the a.r.s.enal on West Houston Street is in possession of the police at this moment. It was a good idea and undoubtedly you would have cleaned up on it--were it not for the fact that I am under the far from painful necessity of arresting you on a charge of bigamy--or would you call it "trigamy"? The records at City Hall gave you away, after one of these ladies had been kind enough to provide us with a clue to the three aliases under which you conducted your matrimonial operations.
"Come on, Count. The Germans may need you worse than we do--but we happen to have you!"
XVI
AFTER SEVEN YEARS
Bill Quinn was disgusted. Some one, evidently afflicted with an ingrowing sense of humor, had sent him the prospectus of a "school"
which professed to be able to teach budding aspirants the art of becoming a successful detective for the sum of twenty-five dollars, and Quinn couldn"t appreciate the humor.
"_How to Become a Detective--in Ten Lessons_," he snorted. "It only takes one for the man who"s got the right stuff in him, and the man that hasn"t better stay out of the game altogether."
"Well," I retorted, anxious to stir up any kind of an argument that might lead to one of Quinn"s tales about the exploits of Uncle Sam"s sleuths, "just what does it take to make a detective?"
It was a moment or two before Quinn replied. Then: "There are only three qualities necessary," he replied. "Common sense, the power of observation, and perseverance. Given these three, with possibly a dash of luck thrown in for good measure, and you"ll have a crime expert who could stand the heroes of fiction on their heads.
"Take Larry Simmons, for example. No one would ever have accused him of having the qualifications of a detective--any more than they would have suspected him of being one. But Larry drew a good-sized salary from the Bureau of Pensions because he possessed the three qualities I mentioned.
He had the common sense of a physician, the observation of a trained newspaper reporter, and the perseverance of a bulldog. Once he sunk his teeth in a problem he never let loose--which was the reason that very few people ever put anything over on the Pension Bureau as long as Larry was on the job.
"That cap up there," and Quinn pointed to a stained and dilapidated bit of headgear which hung upon the wall of his den, "is a memento of one of Simmons"s cases. The man who bought it would tell you that I"m dead right when I say that Larry was persevering. That"s putting it mildly."
Quite a while back [continued Quinn, picking up the thread of his story]
there was a man out in Saint Joseph, Missouri, named Dave Holden. No one appeared to know where he came from and, as he conducted himself quietly and didn"t mix in with his neighbors" affairs, no one cared very much.
Holden hadn"t been in town more than a couple of weeks when one of the older inhabitants happened to inquire if he were any kin to "Old Dave Holden," who had died only a year or two before.
"No," said Holden, "I don"t believe I am. My folks all came from Ohio and I understand that this Holden was a Missourian."
"That"s right," agreed the other, "and a queer character, too. Guess he was pretty nigh the only man that fought on the Union side in the Civil War that didn"t stick th" government for a pension. Had it comin" to him, too, "cause he was a captain when th" war ended. But he always said he didn"t consider that Uncle Sam owed him anything for doin" his duty.
Spite of th" protests of his friends, Dave wouldn"t ever sign a pension blank, either."
A few more questions, carefully directed, gave Holden the history of his namesake, and that night he lay awake trying to figure out whether the plan which had popped into his head was safe. It promised some easy money, but there was the element of risk to be considered.
"After all," he concluded, "I won"t be doing anything that isn"t strictly within the law. My name is David Holden--just as the old man"s was. The worst that they can do is to turn down the application. I won"t be committing forgery or anything of the kind. And maybe it"ll slip through--which would mean a pile of money, because they"ll kick in with all that acc.u.mulated during the past fifty years."
So it was that, in the course of time, an application was filed at the Bureau of Pensions in Washington for a pension due "David Holden" of Saint Joseph, Missouri, who had fought in the Civil War with the rank of captain. But, when the application had been sent over to the War Department so that it might be compared with the records on file there, it came back with the red-inked notation that "Capt. David Holden had died two years before"--giving the precise date of his demise as evidence.
The moment that the doc.u.ment reached the desk of the Supervisor of Pensions he pressed one of the little pearl b.u.t.tons in front of him and asked that Larry Simmons be sent in. When Larry arrived the chief handed him the application without a word.
"Right! I"ll look into this," said Larry, folding the paper and slipping it into the pocket of his coat.
"Look into it?" echoed the supervisor. "You"ll do more than that! You"ll locate this man Holden--or whatever his right name is--and see that he gets all that"s coming to him. There"ve been too many of these cases lately. Apparently people think that all they have to do is to file an application for a pension and then go off and spend the money. Catch the first train for Saint Joe and wire me when you"ve landed your man. The district attorney will attend to the rest of the matter."
The location of David Holden, as Simmons found, was not the simplest of jobs. The pension applicant, being comparatively a newcomer, was not well known in town, and Simmons finally had to fall back upon the expedient of watching the post-office box which Holden had given as his address, framing a dummy letter so that the suspect might not think that he was being watched.
Holden, however, had rented the box for the sole purpose of receiving mail from the Pension Bureau. He had given the number to no one else and the fact that the box contained what appeared to be an advertis.e.m.e.nt from a clothing store made him stop and wonder. By that time, however, Simmons had him well in sight and followed him to the boarding-house on the outskirts of the town where he was staying.
That evening, while he was still wondering at the enterprise of a store that could obtain a post-office box number from a government bureau at Washington, the solution of the mystery came to him in a decidedly unexpected manner. The house in which Holden was staying was old-fashioned, one of the kind that are heated, theoretically at least, by "registers," open gratings in the wall. Holden"s room was directly over the parlor on the first floor and the shaft which carried the hot air made an excellent sound-transmitter.
It so happened that Simmons, after having made a number of inquiries around town about the original Dave Holden, called at the boarding house that night to discover what the landlady knew about the other man of the same name, who was seated in the room above.
Suddenly, like a voice from nowhere, came the statement in a high-pitched feminine voice: "I really don"t know anything about him at all. Mr. Holden came here about six weeks ago and asked me to take him in to board. He seemed to be a very nice, quiet gentleman, who was willing to pay his rent in advance. So I let him have one of the best rooms in the house."
At the mention of his name Holden listened intently. Who was inquiring about him, and why?
There was only a confused mumble--apparently a man"s reply, pitched in a low tone--and then the voice of the landlady again came clearly through the register:
"Oh, I"m sure he wouldn"t do anything like that. Mr. Holden is...."
But that was all that the pension applicant waited for. Moving with the rapidity of a frightened animal, he secured one or two articles of value from his dresser, crammed a hat into his pocket, slipped on a raincoat, and vaulted out of the window, alighting on the sloping roof of a shed just below. Before he had quitted the room, however, he had caught the words "arrest on a charge of attempting to obtain money under false pretenses."
Some two minutes later there was a knock on his door and a voice demanded admittance. There was no reply. Again the demand, followed by a rattling of the doork.n.o.b and a tentative shake of the door. In all, it was probably less than five minutes after Larry Simmons had entered the parlor before he had burst in the door of Holden"s room. But the bird had flown and the open window pointed to the direction of his flight.
Unfortunately for the operative the night was dark and the fugitive was decidedly more familiar with the surrounding country than Larry was. By the time he had secured the a.s.sistance of the police half an hour had elapsed, and there weren"t even any telltale footprints to show in which direction the missing man had gone.