Oakes, however, paid no attention to Collman; he approached the cashier, a middle-aged woman with watchful eyes.
“Say, write ‘meet me at the kitchen door’ on a piece of paper for me,” Oakes instructed her bluntly.
The woman, startled, looked at Collman. And Collman looked at Mallory.
“That’s the law with him,” Collman told his cashier. “Better do as he says.”
She hesitated, then scrawled on a scrap of paper. Oakes took it, scrutinized it.
“Now, you, Collman.”
“Me!” said Collman. “Don’t kid me. Why, I can’t hardly write at all.”
“Thought not,” Oakes said, and turned to the cashier again.
“Say, lady, do your waiters write out their checks? Do they put down what a customer orders on the checks?”
“Sure,” said the woman. “There’s a stack of ’em on that spindle. And each waiter initials his own checks, too.”
Oakes ran through the stack rapidly, and presently lifted one. It was initialed in the corner, “B. H.”
“Let’s go see Billy Hayden,” said Oakes to Mallory.
The waiter was standing near the kitchen door at the back of the dining room. Oakes and Mallory crossed toward him. Oakes drew him aside, into a corner. He spoke to him, not unkindly.
“It’s all over, Hayden.”
The waiter looked at him steadily, his pale face set rigid.
“What is it, sir?”
“No good to bluff,” said Oakes. “You tricked Sydney Lanyon into going around to the kitchen door, by way of the road along the side of the building. There you shot him, loaded the body on to the back of a truck, rode with it out to the highway, and dumped it in front of the Broken Lantern. You returned the same way.”
Billy Hayden was silent.
“It was the message — that second message — that gave you away, Hayden.”
Oakes brought the crumpled piece of paper from his vest pocket, and unfolded it. Mallory leaned over his shoulder and read:
Meet me at the kitchen door of the Blue Plume, outside. I’ll be waiting for you. Leave by the front door, and don’t tell any one.
“Your handwriting, ain’t it, Hayden?” Oakes insisted.
The waiter was still silent.
“You figured on taking this slip of paper away from him when you shot him,” Oakes went on. “But there was a slip up. Myrtle gave Lanyon the first message before she left, and it was that message that you took out of Lanyon’s pocket. This one — it was all crumpled up — must have been clasped in his hand, and he dropped it on the ground just as you were shooting him.”
Still Hayden said nothing.
“Snap out of it,” Mallory barked. “You had better come across.”
But the waiter paid no attention at all to Mallory.
“You can see that the case is complete against you,” Oakes proceeded, almost coaxingly. “But I might add that if you don’t confess to the killing you will place some one else, a lady, in a dangerous position.”
For the first time the lines on the waiter’s face changed. Presently he spoke, reluctantly:
“A lady? Who?”
“Clara Fanning. Miss Fanning left the Broken Lantern just before Lanyon was shot. She has no alibi—”
“Clara had nothing to do with it,” Hayden broke in hastily.
“I might as well tell you the facts, sir,” he went on, after a pause. “There’s not much to it. I’ve been fond — too fond — of Clara for some time.”
“Yeah,” Oakes put in. “I noticed that picture of Clara in your watch this morning.”
“But she did not encourage me. I was too old, although no older than that snake, Lanyon. For a few weeks Clara was deceived by Lanyon. She was living in a fool’s paradise. Then he deserted her for the other girl. It hurt her terribly. I hated him for it. I often wished I could kill him, planned to do it.
“Then, last night, the chance came, when Clara had to leave work because of illness. And Clara’s illness itself enraged me all the more, sir, because I was sure he was the cause of it.
“Everything seemed to fit in so beautifully. The truck was out by the kitchen door. The driver was down in the cellar. Nobody in the kitchen would notice me going out and in, except Tom, and he was back in the storeroom.
“When that second message came from Myrtle to Lanyon, I destroyed it and wrote another one; it was so easy. You seem to have learned it all, sir. I went out by way of the kitchen, shot him, loaded his body on the truck, which I knew would leave soon. It took a bare five minutes, and nobody noticed my absence.
“And,” he added, “I’m not the least bit sorry.”
Oakes put his hand on Hayden’s shoulder.
“Say, this Lanyon killing gave me a client this morning — young Larry Deronda. Now I’ve lost my client, and I need another one. How about it?”
Hayden looked at him hopelessly.
“But I have no money, sir.”
Oakes laughed.
“Money! My dear man! The very last thing I ever expect of a client is money!”
The Blind Fury
by Sinclair Gluck
In the cellar of the mystery house Hal fights a madman and his murderous slave.
What Has Gone Before
Benjamin Hearn, Charles Murray, his partner in a company constructing a clam, and their attorney, Howard Evans, have each received a mysterious card bearing a double cross. They know that it is a threat from an old enemy.
That night Howard Evans’s house is burned to the ground; Evans is murdered. Hal Evans, his son, Mrs. Evans, and Dan Bottis, a loyal chauffeur of the dead man, go to the Hotel Belmore, where Captain of Detectives McCoy interviews Hal.
Hal tells the captain about the strange card, but when he wants to show it to him, discovers that it has disappeared.
McCoy enlists the aid of his friend, Christopher Morgan.
While Hal is away from the hotel, his mother vanishes. Morgan learns that Mrs. Evans went away with a man, and took the jewels that she had deposited at the hotel safe. Apparently she had been lured by a forged note purporting to have come from Hal.
On the heels of this comes news of two fresh disasters. The dam has been blown up. And Hearn is found murdered.
Hearn is throttled by the unknown.
Dorothy Hearn, his daughter, is robbed of her jewelry by a man with huge hands and a luminous death’s head face.
McHenry, foreman at the dam, comes to New York with his wife and takes a room across from Hal Evans’s.
Morgan learns from the police record that a former partner of Hearn and Murray, named Wallace, had been swindled by the pair shortly after the latter’s marriage to a chorus girl. The girl had later divorced Wallace, married a Levantine named Papaniotis, and subsequently had left him.
Murray is shot in Hal’s hotel room by the man with the luminous face, and Hal is attacked.
Hal is kidnaped by the avenger, who turns out to be the man Wallace, now “McHenry.” Chained to a stone wall, Hal is forced to listen to a terrible tale of misfortune which Wallace, half mad, pours into his ears. Wallace thinks that Hal’s father had been instrumental in his downfall, and is going to exact vengeance from Hal.
Dorothy Hearn also falls into Wallace’s hands.
Chapter XXIII
All But One
Some time later, Hal came to his senses, stimulated by a vague feeling of urgency that he could not define. The muscles of his shoulders and back had stiffened and felt horribly sore when he tried to move.