The Two Clergymen
Stone sat back, contemplating us gently, and chuckled.
"Then Hogenauer lied when he said-" Evelyn cried, after a pause.
"Yes, Hogenauer lied."
"Wait a minute!" I protested. "This is rather strong news to spring on us all of a sudden. Hogenauer was pretty positive that L. was alive, and in England, a week ago. I'm not necessarily doubting you, but have you got any proof of what you say?"
"Plenty of proof," said Stone. He broke off as a ticket-collector came in, and Evelyn slipped into my hand the ticket she had bought at Moreton Abbot. The ticket-collector was a spare sandy-haired man-with a spare sandy moustache: a Scot if I ever saw one. We were all uneasily silent when he took our tickets, for the train was pulling into Exeter, and if news of a wanted man had been sent ahead we should hear it very soon. The ticket-collector grunted and withdrew.
"I got into it by accident," Stone pursued, "and this is the way it happened. I was out at Forbes Field-that's the ballpark at home — seeing a game, and afterwards I dropped into the Schenley Hotel. The manager's a friend of mine: he called me aside and asked whether I could see someone upstairs. He said this fellow was dying, and insisted on talking to some, unimportant official in the police department, and was raving about it.
"I went up, and there was a handsome old boy, about sixty-five, propped on some pillows and hardly able to breathe. It was bright spring feather, but he was choking to death of pneumonia. He managed to ask me if I knew him. I said Nope, I hadn't that pleasure. Then he sort of smiled and pointed to a trunk. The manager and I opened it
"Well," said Stone, in a somewhat awed voice. "I don't need to give you all the details, but if there was ever a cabinet of Secret History opened, it was opened right there in that hotel room. Half the stuff I couldn't understand, because it was in foreign languages, but there were three or four decorations that anybody could understand. And from different countries: this L. played no favourites. There he was smiling away like a crazy man while he watched us at it.
"Afterwards he tried to tell his story. It boiled down to this. He had a daughter somewhere, and he didn't know where. He wasn't what you'd call an attentive parent; he was all for Number One and iced champagne on his own table. But he had a pretty tidy sum put by, and nobody else to leave it to, and he was trying to make amends. He thought the police could handle it better than any lawyers, because there weren't many clues to work on, so he begged me to get moving and find this girl. All be knew was that she'd been married about six years before to a young fellow who had just graduated from an Irish medical college. He didn't even know the man's name — except the first name, which was Lawrence. But there was a blurry kind of snapshot of him. That's not usually as much help as it sounds. All the same, I'm certain I've met the man. I'm certain I saw him to-night."