Читать книгу Murder of a Startled Lady - Charles Fulton Oursler - Страница 11

Arthur, the giant negro serving man, let me in Colt's front door on West Seventieth Street and directed me to the long library on the third floor. There I found Dougherty sitting before a hearth blazing and crackling with cannel coal; the District Attorney thrust the toe of his right boot into the nap of the library rug like a child dibbling its toes in the sand; while his popping, flabbergasted eyes followed Thatcher Colt, in pipe and purple dressing-robe, back and forth and up and down the room.

"It was really not a difficult thing to manage," Colt was explaining; he motioned me to a chair and drinks. "Having located the spot on the map we had to locate it in the water. So I sent three emergency service division men in a row-boat down there. One man rowed the boat, a second wore a diver's helmet and a third handled the air hose and grappling hooks. And, gentlemen, telling the truth and shaming ourselves for the materialistic sceptics that we are, the man with the hook did find something that felt like it might be a box. But he couldn't get it up. It seemed to be held down there by some powerful grip. So he ordered the diver down."

My blood tingled as I imagined the dark scene. Fairland, between Jones Beach and Long Beach! A coast resort, a flash place now, though, founded by New England puritans nearly three hundred years ago; to-day we called it the Cicero of New York—the place where the big shots among the big-money criminals, the policy men, the racketeers, could congregate and have a local habitation. Fairland Beach! Its outraged decent citizenry hated the bandits and their harlots who had moved into power in that lovely place—a strip of sand between Wiswall Channel and the open sea. The Boardwalk, really made of cement, would be covered with ice to-night; the wind would cut the spume from the tall breakers as they rushed in under the pilings of the promenade; lights would be glimmering on Point Lookout and along shore; liners to all the coloured ports of the earth would be passing up and down; it would be the time, too, for the flights of the migratory birds, moving in a wedge, close to the water, and near to shore, flying all through the night. These were the sights the diver must have seen before the helmet was locked on his head and he was lowered into the December water, far down to the soft, wet bottom, there to grope among crabs and fishes, in that nightmare region, that other world, to probe and blunder and at last to come upon it, to find the predicted and horrible thing.

"He found it," Colt was saying. "They brought it up with a derrick."

"And where is it now, Thatch?" breathed Dougherty.

Before Colt could reply, black Arthur tapped lightly on the door and thrust in a face full of fright, whites of eyes prominent: "Mr. Colt! Detective Sherman is here—and some other men too—and they're carrying a long box up the staircase, Mr. Colt—I tried to stop them—this ain't no funeral parlour——"

"Bring the box in here!" snapped Thatcher Colt, as Dougherty and I hastily rolled back the Persian rug and began to spread out newspapers.