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CHAPTER 4

“Why,” Dot asked plaintively as they changed cars at Harvard Square, “why go to North’s anyway, Bill? He may be the centre of things, but why not tell the police about the hammer and the label from that book, and everything?”

“Not the police,” Leonidas returned. “My, no. For one thing, their minds are completely made up. For another, they wouldn’t believe us, and you couldn’t blame them. Actually all we know is that our rounding hammer’s missing and that we have a paper label which belonged to a certain book which North was seeking, and which he might have found, and which someone might have stolen. And that that someone might be the murderer. It’s really not much more than a flight of fancy on our parts, and I greatly doubt if the police would do much more than snicker at us, and not very politely. But North’s house—that’s a different thing. I particularly want to interview that maid of his. She seems to be a garrulous sort, if the inspector quoted her correctly.”

“But what would a maid know about the hammer, or Volume Four?”

“Nothing, perhaps. On the other hand, from the information about North’s comings and goings which she presented the inspector over the telephone, I should judge it would be worth our while to chat with her.”

“I still don’t see why,” Dot said a little obstinately.

“I want to know more about that book,” Leonidas said as they alighted from the street car. “I am consumed with curiosity concerning that volume. I want to know if North ever owned it, and why, if he did, it left his possession. Why he wanted it so badly now. Why that Italian wanted it—”

“That’s enough,” Dot said. “Just let this slow freight mind of mine rest there.”

It was just quarter to eight when they mounted the front steps of North’s small ivy-covered suburban home. After several minutes of waiting, a girl appeared to answer their ring.

She was scantily clad in a blue figured négligée and blue satin mules from which the worn feather boa trimmings were beginning to separate; they trailed forlornly a few inches behind her. Dot wasn’t sure, but she thought she heard Leonidas murmur something about Sadie Thompson.

From the girl’s look of surprise, it was evident that Dot and Leonidas were not the visitors she had expected. With one hand she gripped her robe more tightly about her, and with the other she made some attempt to smooth out her damp black curls. Dot guessed that she had just emerged from the bath tub.

“Er—is this Professor North’s?” Leonidas asked politely.

“Yeah, but he ain’t here. He’s out. Won’t be back till late tonight. He’s getting his dinner in Boston, he is.”

“You’ve not heard from—that is, about him?”

“Nope. I went out around half-past five and just came back a few minutes ago. I got tonight off.”

“Oh. Thank you. I—”

“Say,” the girl said suddenly, “he didn’t ask you two to have dinner with him, did he? He often forgets about things like that.”

“No. Oh, no.”

The girl sighed her relief. “Thank God. Say, want me to catch him for you? He’d ought to be at the City Club around now, if he ain’t changed his plans.” She opened the door hospitably and Leonidas and Dot walked into the minute front parlor.

“You are the maid?” Leonidas asked. He was sure she was, but on the other hand the girl was much more at home than most of the domestics with whom he had come in contact.

“Yeah. I’m Gerty McInnis. I’ll go call the City Club. He always tells me where he’s going so’s I can phone him about people he’s asked here and forgot about, and things like those. Awful absent-minded, the professor is. When his sister’s here, she looks after him, but she’s in California, thank God. You—”

“Just a moment. I’m afraid we’re letting you get the wrong impression,” Leonidas said. “Is it—is it possible that you have not heard what has happened to Professor North?”

“No, what’s wrong? Did he go walking by a red light and get run over again?”

“You recall, possibly, a man calling about Martin Jones this afternoon?”

“Yeah. So what?”

“Well, shortly before that, Professor North had been found dead. Killed. In a Boston bookstore.”

“Killed, huh? Who done it?” Gerty’s self composure was admirable.

“They’ve arrested Martin Jones.” Leonidas told her the whole story briefly.

“So they pinched Jones, huh? They’re crazy. Well, well. It’s like them cops.”

“You take this very calmly,” Leonidas remarked.

“My brother’s Bat McInnis,” Gerty announced, as though that explained everything. “You heard of Bat, ain’t you? He’s head of the McInnis mob. I’m sort of used to people being bumped off. My oldest brother got taken for a ride two years ago next week. You’d ought to of seen the funeral. Well, here today and gone tomorrow, as Bat always says. Wonder should I ought to let his sister know? North’s, I mean. Anyway,” she concluded cheerfully, “I won’t have to stay here any longer, and that’s a help.”

“Why?” Dot wanted to know. Gerty, with her husky voice, savoir faire and gangster relations, had made a decided hit with Dot. “Why? Don’t you like it here?”

“Not much! But Bat, he says I got to work and be decent. It’s a lot of hooey. Bat, he thinks heaven’ll protect the working girl, but I could tell him a thing or two! You tell me why a maid should have any more chances to be decent than anyone else! But Bat, he don’t see it that way. He says I can’t go running around with any of his gorillas, and if I lived with him, I would. So since ma died, he’s made me work. Says he can’t take the time to look after me himself. I wonder should I tell Bat about all this?”

The negligee was getting out of hand. She jerked her shoulders and hips convulsively and somehow covered herself again. Dot looked at Leonidas to see what his reactions to Miss McInnis were. He appeared to be enjoying himself thoroughly.

“I guess,” Gerty went on, “I won’t call Bat until tomorrow, not unless he hears of it and comes around. Always checking up on me. You’d think I was one of his joints. I’m going out tonight with my boyfriend, and Bat—well, I guess I won’t tell him until tomorrow anyway. Say, did you just come to break this news to me, or did you want something special?”

“I did want to know something about North,” Leonidas admitted, “but if you’re in a hurry to go out, I won’t—”

“No hurry. What is it?”

“It’s about a book North was hunting—”

As he reeled off the title, Gerty’s expression became absolutely wooden. Too wooden entirely, for up till now, up to the mention of Volume Four, her face had mirrored every emotion she felt. Now it was blank. Gerty apparently knew something about Volume Four, but it was equally apparent that she was going to maintain her poker face and express complete ignorance of the book.

“Now I wonder,” Leonidas went on, “if you ever heard Professor North—”

The front doorbell rang, and Gerty departed to answer it.

“She knows the hell of a lot,” Dot whispered.

“She does,” Leonidas returned.

“Aw, Freddy,” Gerty’s voice was wafted in to them. “Aw, Freddy, you shouldn’t ought—say, get out of that doorway, you dumb kluck! Bat’s got someone hanging around—”

The front door shut abruptly. After an expressive silence, Gerty re-entered the parlor.

Dot and Leonidas all but jumped out of their chairs.

Behind her was the Italian who had asked for Volume Four that afternoon!

Recognition was mutual. The Italian began to back out of the room.

“Wait!” Leonidas ordered. “Wait just a moment, please!”

“What you want, huh?”

For a moment the two men eyed each other.

“That book you wanted,” Leonidas began, “is—”

“Found it?”

“No. But North did. And whoever killed him in our store this afternoon stole it—”

“Who killed him, huh?”

“Say, Freddy,” Gerty said plaintively, “say—”

Freddy motioned for her to be silent.

“Who bumped North off, huh?”

“The police said that Martin Jones did. Jones was in the store—”

“Yeah. North said he swiped the forty grand, too. The cops is dopes. He didn’t.”

“How’d you know?” Dot demanded.

“Just a moment,” Leonidas said softly. “I begin to see a—suppose we all sit down and relax and get this affair settled. I have an idea. My name, by the way, is Witherall. Leonidas Witherall. This is Miss Peters.”

“He’s Freddy Solano,” Gerty informed them.

Leonidas’s eyebrows rose. “Solano? Ah, yes. Yes, indeed. I have heard of you.” In his way, Mr. Solano was as notorious a person as Gerty’s brother Bat.

“Who from?” Freddy demanded. “Who from, huh?”

“From a Mr. Spud Bugatti. M’yes. I’d almost forgotten all about that slight assistance I rendered Mr. Bugatti last spring—”

“Say, are you the guy that hid Spud when O’Connell was after him?”

“M’yes, I was temporarily out of work at the time, and sitting on a bench on the Common, envying the gentlemen on the bulb planting project—at least, I think it was a bulb planting project. I watched them a week, but I never did find out anything definite about the real purpose of their hoe-leaning. Some of the finest hoe-and-rake-leaners I ever saw. At all events, while I enjoyed the city’s hospitality on that bench, Spud appeared, and—”

“Yeah, I know. He was all in, an’ you helped him to some friend’s rooms an’ got him to keep him there. Say, didn’t Spud tell you to buzz around and we’d fix things up for you, huh?”

“I fully intended to,” Leonidas said, “but I found a job. Not as elementary as the bulb project, but more permanent. Believe me that I intended to call on him if the job had not turned up.”

Freddy reached out a pudgy hand. “Any pal of Spud’s,” he said, “is a pal of mine. Now, what about North?”

Leonidas painstakingly told his story all over again, this time giving full details about Volume Four and the paper label.

Freddy nodded thoughtfully. “So they grabbed Jones. He was the tall guy that was with you when I was in the store, huh?”

“Exactly. Now, Mr. Solano—”

“Say, wait a minute. Ain’t I seen you somewheres before? You look like someone I must of met somewheres. I thought so this afternoon, too. Say, where I seen you, huh?”

“I feel that way too,” Gerty said. “Where we seen him, Freddy?”

Leonidas sighed.

“He looks like Shakespeare,” Dot explained. “You know. The man who wrote all those plays. You’ve probably seen pictures of him in school books.”

Solano brightened. “Sure. That’s it. You look like him a lot. Ain’t that funny, Gert?”

Gert agreed that it was a scream, and it took them several minutes to get over how funny it all was. Finally Leonidas called them to order.

“Mr. Solano—”

“Freddy to you, pal! You’re a pal, Bill. Ha, ha. Bill Shakespeare!”

“Freddy, who took that forty thousand?”

“The forty grand? I don’t know.”

“I’ve told you all I know,” Leonidas said quietly.

“Aw, Freddy,” Gerty said, “it won’t hurt to tell what we know, will it? All that Bill here, and Jones’s girlfriend—” in spite of herself, Dot felt her ears burn—“all they want is to get him off. Ain’t that right?”

“Exactly,” Leonidas said. “Now, Freddy, before Monday morning, I’m going to find out who really killed North.”

“You, an’ who else?”

“I, and no one else. Whoever killed North took that volume, Freddy. I’m sure of it. Now, you want the book. If I find the person who killed North, I find the book. If you get what I’m driving at.”

“I get it, Bill. Tell ’em the story, Gert.”

“Okay, only I got to get more clothes on, first. I’m freezing.”

In a very few minutes she reappeared, so completely and entirely dressed that Dot felt thrown together by comparison.

“Here’s the story.” She accepted a cigarette from Freddy. “First of all, when North got Jones pinched, I thought it was all on the level. Then after they let Jones off, I begun to wonder who did get them bonds, anyways. Well, just about then, before Christmas, North went to Florida. Before he went, he stuck a lot of books on the floor in his study and told me to get rid of ’em. Send ’em to some charity or other. He was getting a lot of new books himself, and he needed the room them old ones took up. Well, with him away and his sister away, I didn’t hang around the house here so much, and Bat, he was in N’York.”

Freddy grinned broadly, and she shook her head at him.

“So,” she continued, “I got a girl to stay here that I know. She sold the books, of course. No sense giving ’em away. Well, I come back here the day before North did. When he got back he went right upstairs and when he come down—wheee! Was that guy burning up! Wanted to know where in hell was those four volumes of sermons.”

“Twitchett’s?”

“Yeah. I didn’t know. I’d told the girl to sell the books to a junk man. For all I knew she’d taken those four other books off the shelves and sold ’em by mistake, along with the rest. But I couldn’t let on that I hadn’t been here, so I says for him to calm down and that he must of been absent-minded and put those four in the pile he wanted sold. He said he never wanted the books sold anyway, but given away.”

“What’d you do then?” Dot asked.

“I told him it was the hell of a pity he couldn’t remember from one day to another the orders he give around the house. That shut him up. You see, he’d lost his trunk, and he’d messed up a lot of things, and I had him comin’ and goin’. I said he was too absent-minded to be let out without a nurse. He couldn’t say anything. He was awful absent-minded, and he done so many crazy things that he just never fussed much if you told him anything was his fault on account of him being that way, and all, see?”

Leonidas nodded.

“So,” Gerty said, “then he says where did I sell them books because he wants ’em back, real bad and quicker than lightning. Well, what could I say? I told him none of the bookstore people would come this far to get ’em, and that went all right. Then I just said, I sold ’em to a junk man going by. I had a five dollar bill to prove it, too, out of my own pocketbook. You see, I told the girl to keep what she got. Well, I told him I didn’t know what junk man it was—”

“But couldn’t this girl have—”

“I’m getting to that, Bill. Of course, right away I went off and called her up. But she’d left where she’d been after she left here, and the landlady didn’t know what’d happened to her. I finally found out she’d gone back to Ireland. Or somewhere. Anyway, she’d gone on a boat. She had a boyfriend on a boat. Well, North was fit to be tied. I asked him why he wanted the books so bad, and he said all he really wanted was Volume Four. I asked was it worth a lot, or what, and he said no, but that he wouldn’t have parted with that book for forty thousand dollars. And—”

“And right away she told me that,” Freddy picked up the tale, “right away I clicked, see? Forty grand, see?”

“You mean,” Leonidas said, “it occurred to you that Volume Four had something to do with the forty thousand stolen from the museum—”

“Yeah. Gert and me, we doped it out like this, see. North takes that forty grand himself. He’s always after people to give him jack to dig up bones or something, Gerty says, and folks ain’t been crashing through much in the last four-five years.”

“But he had the money in the first place, didn’t he?” Dot asked. “Or at least, he’d have had control of it? And if that’s so, why should he steal it?”

“The money wasn’t just for him,” Gerty explained. “It was for a new wing in the museum, see? And North was crazy to go dig up his own favorite Indian bones. He liked the museum, and all, but them Indians of his, they was tops. Get it?”

“Ah—” Leonidas twirled his pince-nez. “Ah. M’yes. I begin to see it. Martin said he was alone at the museum when the bonds arrived, but North might well have had access to the place of which Martin was ignorant. Assume, then, that North was in the museum, that he took the bonds, then hid them away till all this should blow over. Then, because he was absent-minded, he made a map of the place where he concealed the bonds, and put it in a safe place. And the safe place was probably Volume Four, which—”

“Which God knows nobody would ever read with a name like that,” Gerty concluded. “Bill, you’re a bright lad. We doped all that out, too. Well, that was a couple of weeks ago, and since then North’s been goofy. Didn’t know which end he was on. Steaming around finding fault with everything. What a life I been leading!”

“So,” Leonidas looked at Freddy, “so you set out on your own hook to have a try at finding Volume Four?”

“Yeah. Gert wrote down the name with North’s typewriter. Hell, I couldn’t say a name like that!”

“And your idea was to get the book before North did, see if it really had any clue to the bonds that North might have taken—and get to them first?”

“That’s it.”

“Hm. I wonder why North, after discovering that the book was missing, didn’t go get the bonds without all this dithering around?”

“You don’t know North, Bill. He probably forgot.”

“Impossible,” Leonidas said. “Impossible.”

“Honest,” Gerty insisted. “He’d forget his head if it wasn’t sewed on to the rest of him. The guy just plain forgot where the place was.”

“M’yes. Well, possibly—Freddy, why don’t we team up?”

“Huh?”

“You want the money, and I want to clear Jones. Whoever killed North must have known, although the good Lord knows how, about Volume Four and the bonds. I fully intend to find the person. I—er—have no interest in the money. Is it worth your while to aid us for the next twenty-four hours or so, Freddy, on the strength of finding forty grand in the end? All I ask is—er—one grand with which to exonerate Martin.”

“Bill,” Freddy said in admiration, “you got a brain. You got this in five minutes, and it took me and Gert a couple of days. When do we start?”

“Presently. But, Freddy, I—if I’m not asking a very personal question, how do you reconcile—I mean, how do your group and Miss McInnis’s brother’s get along? If I remember correctly, Mr. Bugatti said there was considerable tension between the Solano group and the McInnis organization.”

“We don’t agree,” Freddy said briefly. Leonidas, recalling the amount of blood shed between the two mobs, considered Freddy’s few words a miracle of understatement.

“You see,” Gerty explained, “I didn’t know who Freddy was when I first met him. Not any more than he didn’t know who I was. Gee, did we have a time, and have we had a time since! Bat’s sworn he’s going to get Freddy, and Freddy’s been having trouble with his boys on account of me. The whole thing’s none of their business, I say. None of those gorillas understand what is real love.”

Dot swallowed.

“You mean that Bat is after you, Freddy?” Leonidas asked.

“Yeah, but don’t let it worry you none, Bill. My boys always stick around, just in case.”

Dot swallowed again.

“You—Bill Shakespeare,” she said at last, “what did I tell you? Bill, I say, let’s get—”

The front knocker began to set up a thunderous tattoo that sounded throughout the house.

“Bat!” Gerty gasped. “That’s Bat! He never uses the doorbell! He always bangs—”

“Go to the door,” Leonidas commanded, “and get rid of him. Tell him about the murder of North, and say that the police are on their way here, and that you’re waiting for them, and expect them any moment! Hurry!”

He tossed the contents of the ash trays into his hat, picked up the rubbers which he, Dot and Freddy had kicked off, hurriedly pulled a small rug over the little puddles of water on the floor.

“Come!”

He grabbed Dot by the arm, and hustled her and Freddy out towards the dining-room as Gerty hissed something about kitchen closets.

“Aw, let me get at that mug!” Freddy protested. “Don’t hide from him, Bill! Let me at him! There ain’t no sense in keepin’ puttin’ it off—”

“Later.” Leonidas shoved him into the kitchen closet, pushed Dot in after him, and finally wedged in himself, shutting the door behind him.

“Bill,” Freddy sounded plaintive, “why can’t I—”

“Later!” Leonidas repeated in a whisper. “Later, after you’ve got your forty grand. Don’t spoil things now, Freddy! Be sensible! Be reasonable!”

Dumbly they listened to Bat McInnis’s entrance.

“Where’s that wop! I’m goin’ to pump that greaseball full of slugs!”