When he rose to depart, Olsen shook him gratefully by the hand, assured him of his everlasting esteem and invited him to come in any time. If he had known the story which Dan O’Hara was concealing, he would have slain him, for Olsen, as befitted the city editor of a very sensational paper, was not entirely sane.
Chapter XIV
Too Many Trails
Dan went across to City Hall Park and seated himself on a bench.
He had things to think about.
It began to look to Dan very much as though Jack Billings, a couple of whose Corona Corona cigars the detective had not yet smoked, had slain R. J. Conlin. He was far from being able to prove it. He couldn’t produce the body and there was evidence that he could not yet controvert that Conlin had been in New York on Friday night, while Dan happened to know that Billings was on Nantucket Island on Friday night. The collapse of Conlin and Company, coinciding with the disappearance of Conlin and the signatures on two hotel registers made it very evident that the banker had skipped, like so many captains of industry who couldn’t stand the gaff.
Dan pulled out his dudeen, filled it and lighted it. If it wasn’t for the hotel registers and the failure of Conlin’s firm he could make out a fair case against Jack Billings. The exfootball star had murdered one of Stella Starr’s husbands and he might have murdered the other. Dan had the police complex of believing that innocent persons are never brought to trial and the acquittal of an accused individual is usually a miscarriage of justice.
Jack Billings was in Nantucket. He claimed to have arrived the day after the murder, but he might be lying. He called himself John Smith. He might have been the John Smith who rented the Rapidan-Sears house. He had assumed that he was safe after he had destroyed the features of R. J. Conlin, but when he was recognized by Dan O’Hara, he was probably terrified and had decided that the dead body might be identified after all, so he had stolen it from the undertaker’s shop and gotten rid of it.
It would take a man of great force of character to carry off the corpse of somebody he had murdered and mutilated, but Dan had seen Billings on the football field, and he knew he had been tried for the murder of one of Stella Starr’s husbands, so it seemed he was capable of it. Dan hesitated to convict Jack in his mind, of slaying the three servants. He rather liked Billings, wished him well, certainly had no wish to accuse him unjustly. However, any man who has slain one person might kill by wholesale if he thought his safety demanded it.
What did Billings have against Conlin? Well, a man who is in love with another man’s wife doesn’t have to have a special enmity to her husband. The fact that he keeps the lovers apart is sufficient reason to kill him.
The point was that here was a very deep mystery. By following up a wild theory Dan had not only identified the murdered person, but had found an individual who was on the ground, who had a strong motive for murder, who had already killed the first husband of the wife of R. J. Conlin, who could easily have stolen the dead body from the undertaking rooms in Nantucket town, and the mystery was almost solved.
On the other hand, the presumption was that the corpse was that of John Smith, since it had been found lying on the bed in his home. Jack Billings claimed to have landed in Nantucket upon the day following the murder. If he were the killer he would have made sure that his presence on steamship and bus on Friday were noted.
There was a bus driver to swear that Conlin had been landed at the steamship pier on Friday night. There was the evidence of the register at the New Bedford Hotel which indicated that Conlin had arrived there with a blond woman. And Dan had questioned the hotel people and displayed Conlin’s photo and found nobody willing to declare that its original had not been the companion of the blond woman. Of course Mrs. Conlin was in with Billings — she was always sympathetic to her husbands’ murderers and she, probably, would insist that the signature upon the New Bedford and the New York registers were those of her husband.
There was no longer a chance of identifying the murdered man as Conlin, since the body had vanished. And there was a failure of Conlin and Company to supply the motive for the disappearance of the head of the firm.
Dan knew too much to suppose he could arrest Jack Billings for the murder of R. J. Conlin. He knew that he couldn’t get a grand jury indictment. He even found it difficult to believe that a person like Billings could commit four such atrocious murders as had taken place on Nantucket. He jumped to the conclusion that the Conlin woman and Billings were still lovers, an assumption that the reader is aware is false. He didn’t see what he could do except go back to Nantucket and keep his eyes open.
He went over to the Western Union office and wrote a telegram to Chief Plympton of Nantucket.
“Make sure that Mrs. Conlin does not leave the island and if necessary arrest John Smith at the Sippiconsett House if he tries to leave before I get there.”
Police Headquarters in New York had some information for the Massachusetts officer after he had smoked his pipe in the park and dropped in upon his Gotham colleagues.
It appeared that the servants had been engaged from the Universal Agency by a woman who gave the name of Mrs. John Smith and whose address was the Biltmore Hotel.
She had personally selected all three from a host of applicants. The Negro was George Washington Cook, who had a wife and four children in the Lenox Avenue district, and who had excellent recommendations. The Englishman, Robert Dover by name, had served as a butler for several Park Avenue families and had excellent recommendations, and the maid was a Roumanian who spoke almost no English but who understood German and French.
The manager of the agency insisted that the three were not acquainted with one another so far as he knew; that each had worked for good people in New York and was well spoken of. The police had investigated the references and found them all authentic. There had been a swarm of applicants for employment at the agency upon the day the three unfortunate servants were engaged and the woman who had hired them had picked them out of a score or more.
The police had a fair description of the alleged Mrs. Smith. She was about thirty or thirty-five, tall, solidly built, rather good looking, very pale and with straight features. She had worn a blue knitted dress and a blue turban. She spoke with a refined accent and appeared to be a lady. They had a copy of her signature in the agency book, a tracing of which the police presented to O’Hara.
The Negro’s family wanted his body. The other two servants had no relatives so far as was known.
From police headquarters O’Hara went to Grand Central Station and bought a through ticket to Nantucket.
The New York authorities would do their best to locate the blond woman who passed as Mrs. Smith and who answered in a general way the description of the woman who had spent the night at New Bedford with R. J. Conlin.
If Jack Billings had killed Conlin, it was evident that the plan had been made long in advance and he had had the assistance of this blond woman, and that worried Dan O’Hara.
A man with murder in his mind does not pick up a woman accomplice very easily. If the blonde had worked with Billings, it ought to be because she was in love with him, and if she and he were lovers where did Mrs. Conlin come in? If Dan’s theory that Billings had killed Conlin because he was insanely in love with Mrs. Conlin were correct, would Mrs. Conlin have stood for the other woman?
And the fact that the servants were reputable people, strangers to one another, and highly recommended made it hard to believe that they had entered a conspiracy to murder anyone. But, if they were innocent, it made the task of the killer very much more difficult. First he must have killed Smith or Conlin, then rounded up the servants, forced them into the car at the point of a gun, taken them out on the moors and shot them down.