A LIGHT ALONG THE ROAD: DENNY GIVES AN ADDRESS
Herrick felt the strong light of the one lamp like something hypnotic; it reminded him of the glare in some Sardou or Belasco torture chamber. It seemed to him that the scene wasn't real; it was like a council of wolves and he powerless and quiet with them there, as they hungered to run, baying, on Christina. It was only a nightmare and yet it was more real and keen than life, and only God knew what would come of it! Then he saw the slight, dark figure pass the door; every eye, but with what different desires, turned, ravenous as his, for the secret that it carried in its breast.
The doorman brought Denny up to the end of the table and withdrew. The prisoner was very carefully dressed, his black hair brushed as smooth as satin, and against his dark blue coat the black silk handkerchief that supported his arm was scarcely noticeable. He looked a model of rigid decorum until you observed the heavy straps of plaster across his hands. Only his skin, always dark and pale, seemed really to be drained of blood. He nodded gravely to Kane, and with a sort of still surprise to Herrick. Ten Euyck he passed over. He remained standing until Kane told him to sit down. If he then dropped rather wearily into a chair he contrived to sit upright, with a good show of formal manners. As his dark eyes met the keen light ones of the lawyer a faint, derisive smile appeared, and was instantly suppressed, upon both their faces.
"You seem very sure of yourself!" Ten Euyck exploded.
Denny appeared to become slowly conscious of him. "Even the persuasive manners of your department," he said, "couldn't make me tell what I didn't know!"
Ten Euyck said quickly, "You don't know who killed Ingham?"
"If I said anything more incriminating, it's possible it might be used against me."
"We're not here," Kane interposed, "to discuss Ingham's death. Mr. Denny, within the last few days there have been some very grave occurrences, about which it's possible you can enlighten us. If you can, we shan't be ungrateful. Did you ever hear of an organization called the Arm of Justice?"
"Is this a joke?"
"You never heard of it?"
"No."
"Well, then, you can have no objection to repeating the name and address of Miss Hope's Italian friends?"
"Not the least in the world. Has she any?"
"You mean to tell me you don't know she has?"
"Not if it annoys you. I thought you asked."
Ten Euyck, with a gesture as of uncontrollable impatience, rose and went to the window.
"Since you're in a jocular mood, I will ask you something you may think extremely amusing. Do you know if Miss Christina Hope owns a red wig?"
He didn't think it amusing. He seemed to think little enough about it. "I suppose so."
"But you never saw one about her house?"
"She wouldn't keep it about her house, like a pet. She'd keep it in a trunk. She's not an amateur."
"You never saw her wear one in private life?"
"Not even on the first of April."
"You couldn't even swear she had one, perhaps."
"I certainly could not."
"Nor that she had not?"
"No."
"So that you wouldn't recognize hers if you saw it?"
"No."
The light was very strong upon his face, which remained relaxed and tranquil. But he was very weak and a faint moisture broke out upon it.
"Was there any love affair between you and Miss Hope which angered Nancy Cornish?"
"No."
"Don't lie to me!"
Denny drew in his breath a little. But he did not speak.
"What was your trouble with Nancy Cornish?"
Silence.
"Didn't she quarrel with you because of some woman?"
Silence.
"You know she did. You can't deny it. Do you know what many of your friends are saying? That you kept that appointment with her and got rid of her. They think you were tired of her and preferred Christina Hope!"
"Do they?"
It had missed fire utterly. Yet, since the mention of that other girl, a kind of hunger had been growing in his face, and suddenly Kane wholly veered on that new track.
"But I don't!" said Kane, leaning toward him, and trying to catch and hold his eye. "I think you really care for Nancy Cornish, whether she's alive or dead!" He paused. "I think you'll end by telling me what you know of the woman whom you'll find parted you."
The same dead silence; only Denny had closed his eyes.
"Come, give me your attention. Look at me, please. Look at me, and you'll see that I'm sincere. Did you hear me say if you can help me I shan't be ungrateful? But you can do better for yourself than that. You can simply tell the truth! Tell the truth and you won't need my favor. You'll be free. And you'll have set me in the way to find Nancy Cornish! It isn't possible you prefer to keep this ridiculous silence, to die like a criminal for nothing; or spend fifteen to twenty years in the penitentiary—spend life there,—ah, I thought so!" The District-Attorney laughed with triumph at the little straightening of Denny's nostrils. "There's your weak point, my friend! I have never seen a man to whom the idea of jail was so entirely uncongenial! Get rid of it, then! Admit the truth about Christina Hope! What do you owe her? She never even came to me with the witness that she promised."
"I rather thought she'd have trouble doing that!"
"Because you knew there was no such woman. Or rather that that woman was Christina Hope; that she tried to get up courage to incriminate herself in your place and failed!"
"You're a bad guesser, Kane!" Denny said. He had sunk a little forward with his arms upon his knees, and Kane rose and stood over him.
"Admit that your whole attitude is dictated simply by loyalty to her. You need be loyal no longer. Has she been near you since you've been in the Tombs?"
"No, you've kept her out. And a fine time you must have had doing it!"
Ten Euyck turned round and said, "She's so fond of you, I suppose!"
Denny flushed. "Yes," he said, "she's fond of me. She was born to be a good comrade-in-arms, to carry the flag of a forlorn hope and stand by you in the last ditch. If you gentlemen can't understand that, I'm sorry for you. I can't change her."
"Exactly," Kane said. "I knew that was your ground. Well, this comrade-in-arms has deserted you altogether. The day she should have brought me that witness, she threw down her engagement and left New York!"
"Oh, guess again!" said Denny. "Not while she lived, she didn't!"
"And she took with her," Ten Euyck cried, "forty thousand dollars' worth of my diamonds! Perhaps she was in hopes you'd get away and join her!"
"Well," said Denny, turning his eyes toward Herrick, without raising his head, "you!—you're not a criminal!—are you going to stand for that?"
"Doesn't his standing for it speak for itself!" said Ten Euyck. "If you want to defend a woman, why don't you come out like a man and confess that you did it yourself."
They all looked at him in astonishment and, flushing at himself, he subsided.
"Ah, thanks, Ten Euyck, that's what I've been suspecting! You think you can trap me into one of your damned confessions with these tricks! Get rid of that idea. I'll not confess. It's up to you to prove it; prove it! Why should I help you!" He turned again to Herrick, as if in justification. "Yes, I am afraid of jail! I'm a coward about prison, I confess that! and to give myself up to a lifetime of it—no!—Herrick, there's no chance of their being serious in this talk about Christina."
Kane took him by the unwounded shoulder and forced him from his leaning posture, till his face came full into the light. "Upon my word of honor, Denny," he said, "Christina Hope has disappeared."
The shock struck Denny like a sort of paralysis. He did not stir, but he seemed to stiffen. His eyes dilated with a horrified amazement. "What do you mean?" he said.
Kane handed him that evening's paper, folded to the headlines that dealt with the missing girl. He read them with greed, but it was plain that he found their information stupefying. "Chris, now! First, Nancy!" he said, "and then, Christina! What is this thing? What can it be? You," to Kane, "you that are so clever, have you any explanation at all? Have you the least clue? Have you?" he insisted, and from the dark meaning of their faces he seemed to kindle, and half rose, leaning on the table. "My God, then," he cried, "what is it? What is it?"
"Well, then," said Kane, "as you yourself suggest, she is very probably in the same place with Nancy Cornish." Denny continued to lean on the table, looking at him with ravenous eyes. "You know that Joe Patrick was knocked down by an automobile on his way to the inquest, that the same so-called accident happened two or three days later to Herrick, here; you know that subsequently four armed men attacked him in the park; to-day you had an experience of your own. Well, all these things hang together and were committed by a band of blackmailers. Your own shoulder gives you a taste of their quality. You can judge for yourself what they'll stop at. Brace yourself. We know, now, for a certainty that Nancy Cornish is in their hands."
Denny continued to lean there, without stirring. "It's a trick! It's one of your little tricks! Is it?" he said to Herrick with a sudden shrillness, "Is it?"
"One of them brought us a message from her. It said, 'Help me, dear Chris!'"
"No, no, no!" said Denny, as if to himself. "It's a lie. It's all a lie. I won't be frightened. I know it's a lie."
"Is that her writing?"
He cried out, a dreadful, formless sound, and covered his face with his hands. Kane's glance said to the others, "Let him alone! It's working!"
He asked them then, quite gravely and clearly, "When—do you expect—to catch—this—gang?"
"I don't know that we can catch them at all. We don't know how to get at them. We've no idea where they are."
His hands dropped from his face; it throbbed now and blazed; all the nerves had come to life in a quivering network. "Oh, for God's sake," he said, "don't tell me that!—Go on, then, go on! Tell me!" He looked beseechingly and then in a fury of impatience from face to face. "Don't stand gaping! You must know something! Look here, you don't understand! You don't know all I've been through all these weeks—wondering!—If she was in that lake where we used to row! If she'd only gone away, hating me! My mind's in pieces trying to think—think—following every sign! Hundreds of times I've seen her dead! And now you tell me she's alive! and calling—calling for help! Do you? Do you?"
"Yes," said Kane.
He swayed forward so suddenly that he had to catch at the table. "It's horrible! It's a nightmare!" With a strange monotonous inflection his voice rose higher and higher on the one strained note. "It's the thing I've dreamed of night and day, week out and in! That she was frightened and in danger! With brutes! With the faces of beasts round her! Oh, God—!"
"Don't!" Herrick cried.
"Yes, but look here!" With an eagerness sudden as a child's, he said to Herrick, "But it's hope! Hope, isn't it? She's alive! And she didn't just leave me!—I've got to get out of here! Yesterday—why, yesterday—this morning—but now! 'Help me!' she says! I've got to get out! I—" He stopped. The dusky choking red that had surged up horribly over his face and forehead receded sharply, and left only his eyes burning black in the white incredulous horror of his face. He cried, "There's no way out!"
"There may be," said the District-Attorney, "if you will look very carefully at this lock of hair."
Denny took the soft red curl in a hand that he vainly strove to steady; they could read recognition, but no further enlightenment in his tormented face.
"Sit down!" Kane said. "Untie the string. Shake the hair loose here on the table under the lamp. Now, does anything strike you? No?"
Once more Herrick had that singular impression of Denny's going, for an instant's flash, perfectly blind. Then he said, quite quietly, "Go! The station you want is Waybrook. Drive five miles inland, on the road to Benning's Point; about three miles south of the Hoover estate. The left-hand side of the road; an old house newly fixed up and painted yellow. Pascoe's the name. And, for God's sake, go quickly."
The District-Attorney sat back and wiped his forehead. It had been a hard day's work. "Don't you, Herrick, want to take a look at the curiosity without which I might as well have asked a clam for a Fourth of July oration?"
The hair was spread out and thinned under the lamp. And now Herrick could see distinctly that it was of two shades. The outer curl was the dark red of Nancy Cornish; hidden within it was a smaller lock of a singularly fine light shade, like the red of golden fire. This it was which had wrung the address from Denny and stricken down Christina in a faint.
"Nancy Cornish hid it there in the message she was allowed to send," guessed Herrick. "She was certain Miss Hope would know the head it came from."
"Then I needn't point out to a gentleman of your discernment that it was the head which astonished Joe Patrick on the night of Ingham's murder. Directly afterward, I think Miss Hope stored that head, inconspicuously, with her friends in the Arm of Justice."
Denny, rabid with impatience, seemed eating them alive with his savage eyes. "Start!" he bit out. "Go, can't you? Go! What are you waiting for?"
Kane looked up at him with a smile of triumphant ice. "We're waiting for your account of midnight in these rooms between the fourth and fifth of August. And no one stirs to Nancy Cornish till we get it."
Denny's jaw dropped and he hung against the edge of the table as if he were struck too sick to stand.
Ten Euyck, too, cried out and Kane silenced him. "Why not—since he says he's innocent?"
"You dog!" Denny groaned. "You won't save her?"
"You won't save her—you know how!"
"Lose time and you lose everything!"
"What do you know?"
"Know! Know! Of course I know! But do you think you can make me tell? Try that game! Try it! Try! You know damned well you can't! So what'll you give for what I know?"
"You mean—?"
"Come back to me when you've found Nancy Cornish and you shall have your murderer fast enough! Every detail, every fact, every clue! Till then I don't trust you! Bring her here, bring her!" He leaned forward, beside himself; shaken and exhausted, burning with fever, weak with loss of blood, he reached toward Kane and beat the table with his wounded hands. "That's my bargain! That's my price! I'm not going to give up for nothing! You don't get my life unless you give me hers—"
"What?"
The great gasp broke into a buzz. Denny came slowly to himself and read what he had uttered in their looks. His face went dead, a cold sweat stood out upon it. "O!" he breathed. And once more he covered his face with his hands.
It didn't take many questions to get his story from him after that.
"Yes, I killed him. Yes, I'm confessing. I've got to. All right,—take it down. I killed James Ingham. I went to his apartment after my dress-rehearsal on the night of the fourth of August. I had been told that he had injured Nancy Cornish. I shot him dead. I've regretted it every moment of my life since then. That's all. What are you waiting for now?"
"Then, Miss Hope—was not in Ingham's rooms that night?"
There was a dead pause. Denny looked hard in Kane's face. "Yes," he said, "she was. She came there to try and prevent our quarrel." The men who had seen the moving-picture of the shadow breathed again.
"What did she do when you fired?"
"I sent her down to the Deutches to get a doctor. I wanted her out of the way, and I switched off the lights so she need not see how useless any doctor was!"
"How did you yourself escape?"
"Up the back stairs, across the roof, into the next house."
"But she went out of the room before you did?"
The earth swam before Herrick's eyes, and then he heard Denny's "Yes."
"Then since you were the last to leave, explain how you were able to bolt the door behind you?"
"I didn't bolt it behind me. I stayed in the room."
Herrick lifted his head.
"I had dropped my revolver and in feeling for it on the rug I got my hand stained." He spoke lower and lower, but every now and then his voice flickered, licking upward like a flame, and cracked. "I ran into the bathroom and put it under the faucet, and after that it was too late to get away. People were peering and listening from their doors. I got in a blind panic—you've noticed I'm upset by jail!—I knew I was cornered—I bolted the door. But in doing that I saw how close the portières hung." Herrick drew a long breath. "I thought once I could clear that outside room a little I could make a dash for it. To do that it was necessary to remove the magnet. I dragged Ingham's body into the bedroom. The bed's head was toward the portières. I went and stood in its shadow, in the portières' folds. Then they burst in. When Deutch held the portière aside for the policeman I was so close at his back that he touched me. When he saw me he screened me almost completely. They had been so obliging as to clear the hall. There was plenty of noise; the men were opening the closet door, a motor whirring, a trolley passing the corner; they all had their backs to me, and I made but a couple of steps of it into the hall. A few moments later I had the honor and privilege of addressing Mr. Herrick, and of hearing from him that the murderer was a lady and had not been caught."
"Deutch screened you, you say? Why?"
A queer little color came into Denny's face. "I'm fated to be ridiculous," he said. "I had seen a hooded cloak of Christina's lying on the table; it was Christina's own blue-gray; just the shade of the portières. The hood covered my head. The shadow back there is very deep. Well, Deutch knew Christina had been there, you know. He must have left his apartment just before she got to it, for he was simply one funk of anxiety about her." Denny had to struggle up, for the interview had told on him terribly, and he kept one hand on the back of his chair. "I'm of no greatly imposing bulk," he said. "And Christina Hope is la tall woman!"
A cry came from within the portières. Denny, his self-control utterly shattered, flashed round. Henrietta Deutch greeted him with a radiant face.
"Ah, sirs, thank God! Oh, oh, it was that he saw! Mr. Deutch saw one he took for her! And Christina it could not have been! He was not two minutes gone when she was with me!"
"Thanks, Mrs. Deutch! I couldn't have trusted even you for the truth of that point if I'd simply asked you! But we must make sure that was what he saw—that and no other proof. Here's the same depth of shadow, then, and the same portières. Take this couch cover, Denny, for a cloak. Stand back, and screen your face with it.—Wade, bring in Deutch."
Herrick shuddered and anticipation choked him. This man had suffered so much for Christina, and now he was to decide her fate! The superintendent stepped into a silent room. All those eyes fed on him. The place cast its spell of horror. His plump, pale, sagging face quivered with dread; his eyes floundered from Herrick to Kane, and a kind of dumb moan burst from him. Kane pointed to the portières and his panic was complete.
"Show him, Herrick. Just as he stood, that night."
He stood there, dizzy with bewilderment, and suddenly he screamed. Gasping, he clutched at the portière through which some touch, some motion had repeated for him a dreadful moment. Behind it he once more beheld a dim, blue figure. He fell on his knees, strangling, his breath raving and rattling in his mouth, and brought out like a convulsion the one word "Christina!" Sobbing, he caught at a fragment of the cloak and covered it with piteous, protecting kisses. Denny let the cloaking stuff fall from him, and, stepping out, broken as a thing thrown away, stood in full view with hanging head. Every eye was fastened upon Deutch.
He had no need for words. What he had believed himself to have seen, what he had suffered, the mad relief, the almost ludicrous exultation in what he now learned, passed one after the other across that tormented visage and broke in one happy blubber as he ducked his head in his wife's skirts.
The relief that shook Herrick touched, too, every one in the room. No man there had really wished to sentence a girl. It was as though, at last, they had all got air to breathe. When into this new air Denny's voice broke with a sick snarl.
"And do you think you've saved her? You miserable, gabbling fools, did you think your Arm of Justice was her friend? Why, she knew no more of it than you do! If they've got the girl there, she's fighting, accusing, threatening them, she's facing her death! And now in God's name, can you hurry? Hurry!"