I said: “The newspapers had a field day with that case. It comes back like a picture now. They called the place the Old Dark House and they referred to it thereafter as New York’s number one haunt. Gloria Canova’s spook was supposed to walk the place, moaning loudly, the white ghostly cocker at her side, and sometimes unseen hands would touch an unseen organ and the results would be terrific. Cops on the beat heard the organ. I remember that. They said it was terrible!”
“The organ,” remarked the Old Man sagely, “was another red herring. Nobody could figure it out. Of course, the guy who owned the house before Walt Nurbeck was an organist and also a nut. He killed himself with a straight razor one night. So, naturally, the story went around that he came back to play in spectral form.”
It was getting late. Outside the night had come down and you couldn’t see the Hudson River anymore, out the window. You couldn’t see much of anything, as a matter of fact, since a greasy fog had seeped in over a greasy sea, and all the lights of Manhattan were clotted with the white cotton mist; they stood out like dim fuzzy balls up off the sidewalk.
“Well,” I said presently, “and what has all this talk about ghosts to do with the nocturnal assignment?”
The Old Man stared at the calendar on the wall and pecked at a front tooth with his right forefinger, frowning as he thought. “Walt Nurbeck is a close friend of mine,” he said. “That’s why I’m doing this. He doesn’t believe in ghosts either.”
Dinah asked: “So what?”
“He telephoned me this afternoon.” said the Old Man. “I told you: he wants to stay in town for the winter. So he has opened up the Old Dark House on East 72nd Street. It hasn’t been open since he closed it up after Gloria Canova disappeared, eight years ago. He hired some help — a male cook and a valet. He had the gas and water and light turned on yesterday morning. He spent his first night there last night.”
I began to feel goose pimples forming down my spine as if I had an intuition of what the Old Man was going to say. I choked and then gulped: “Yeah?”
“He hasn’t got a cook nor a valet this evening. They hauled out of the Old Dark House bright and early this A. M.”
“Why? Ghosts?” Dinah asked breathlessly.
“Ghosts!” said the Old Man firmly. “And the startling fact is that Walt saw one himself. He saw the cocker spaniel last night, shortly after midnight. He’d been in the living room. He turned off the lights as he left the room. As he started for the stairs in the hallway, he saw the cocker run down from the upper floor, pause on the first landing, then scoot up to the second floor again. The dog was there all right, but he could see right through the beast, as though it were running around in a coat of ectoplasm. He was quite shaken, put it down to imagination, and went to bed. At intervals throughout the night, he heard the organ — no practiced hand playing it — just a lot of minor chords, jumbled, horrible, filling the whole house and yet, not being there at all.”
I took a deep breath. “And I, foul fiend,” I protested, “am supposed to lay the banshee of the Old Dark House all by my lonesome tonight?”
“Not exactly,” the Old Man replied. “Walt didn’t believe his ears nor his eyes. He wanted me to send up one of my best men to cover the place. And he wanted a camera along for a quick picture of the cocker’s spook. You’re the man.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly. I glanced at Dinah. “Want to come along, Angel-Eyes? Your sex appeal might help.”
Dinah set her chin out firmly. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” she said, her voice a trifle tremulous. “I think it’s all a fake. I think you’re trying to rib Daffy on this one. And just to prove it, I will go along!”
“So will I,” boomed a big new voice. We all wheeled, startled, and who should we find standing there but Captain Bill “Poppa” Hanley of the New York Homicide Bureau.
“Poppa!” I said, sighing in relief. “You, too? What a pleasure!”
“The pleasure’s all mine,” Poppa Hanley said, smiling slightly as he tilted his red homely face toward us. “Couldn’t help overhearing you. And if you ask me, there’s something that isn’t quite so phony about the whole business. Why should the same things happen after eight years? There’s something in that house. And I’d like to find what it is. After all, wouldn’t it be nice to get a lead on what happened to Gloria Canova eight years ago? I’d like to break that case, by thunder!”
“May you, may you!” I said. “But have you got a rod?”
“You’ll probably need it.” said the Old Man, smiling as though he were enjoying a huge joke. “Look at the calendar!”
We all had a look. And we suddenly learned that this particular Friday fell on a thirteenth and that it was a night of the full moon, despite the fog. I felt lower than a catapillar’s tummy.
“Huh!” Poppa Hanley grunted noisily.
No more was said. I picked up the Speed Graphic, took Dinah’s arm, and Hanley followed us out.
It was a nasty night. The fog had closed down so that you couldn’t see the lights of buildings a short block away. It was that thick drizzling type of fog which seems to pick up the soft coal dust over the city and lay it down on everything — windshields, faces, clothes — until you felt like a secondhand soda straw.
We rode uptown in a cab to East 45th Street and we had dinner at the Divan Parisienne. It was a good dinner, but somehow, it didn’t give us a lift. Dinah Mason was very nervous. She kept chewing celery stalks and staring at me. I didn’t like the way she stared at me. You’d have thought I was a candidate for lilies or something.
Ghosts, however, did not affect Poppa Hanley’s appetite at all. He put it all away and looked for more.
As for myself, the story which the Old Man told seemed to reach me more than I liked. It was a depressing sort of thing. If some departed soul had staged a spectral spree in the Old Dark House, I’d have known it was a phony and it would have been fun to lay the banshee. But the fact that the spook was the shade of a faithful cocker spaniel — that kind of got me. Just like it had got Dinah and the Old Man.
There was something rather sad in the ghost of a dog.
When we finally left the Divan Parisienne and went uptown even further, to East 72nd Street, my spirits were lower than the fog. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like the entire business. The night was worse; rain had started to needle down in a fine spray. When we reached the place, it was nearly eight-thirty P. M.
We got out. I paid off the cab driver and made a mental note, duplicating the sum for the swindle sheet.
We gave the Old Dark House a once-over lightly.
It was a fine mansion for spooks. Surviving as a relic of the ancient regime of New York, it stood in East 72nd Street like an anachronism in a shining city. It was medieval, compared with the two ultra-modern apartment houses which flanked each side of it. It was a dreary gray-stone house, with gingerbread effects all up the front of it, including a bizarre Byzantine fencing around the flat surface of the roof.
There were three floors. Only the lower floor was lighted. The amber glow behind the drawn shades of the windows downstairs made the windows resemble two huge eyes, softly veiled by the rain and the fog of the night.
We went up the four steps to the front door and we rang the bell.
The man who answered was Walter Nurbeck himself. I recognized him from motion pictures of his various safaris in Africa. I had never met him before in my life. He was older than his pictures had indicated. There were weather lines in his face and a touch of maturity at his temples, a fine pepper-and-salt sprinkling of gray hair. He looked at us, quietly surprised, and then said: “I beg your pardon. I hadn’t expected—”