Mr. Leg suddenly smiled, arose to his feet, drew himself up, and performed a clumsy imitation of a military salute.
“At your orders, Captain Culp.”
When, a little later, the lawyer departed on his way to the Tombs, Dan remained behind to go over the testimony at the inquest. But he found nothing in it of importance except what Mr. Leg had already told him, and, having finished it, he left the office in care of Miss Venner and descended to the street.
A Broadway streetcar took him to a certain address near Union Square which he had got the day before from Mr. Yoakum. He entered a door marked in gilt lettering, “Levis & Levis, Real Estate,” and, after explaining his errand to a clerk, was admitted to the private room of a junior member of the firm.
“Yes,” replied the agent, in answer to his question; “we had a man named Cummings working for us. Patrick Cummings. Yes, he was janitor of the house where the murder took place. But we don’t know where he is now.”
“Isn’t he with you any longer?”
“No. It was mighty curious. He disappeared suddenly, and the funny part of it is we still owe him fifteen dollars wages, which makes it really mysterious. All we know is that when one of our men went up there Sunday, on account of the murder, Cummings was nowhere to be found, although the tenants said he had been there Saturday evening. We haven’t heard anything of him.”
“I should think,” observed Dan, “that you might have suspected his disappearance was connected with the murder.”
The real estate agent smiled condescendingly. “You’re a great little thinker, my lad. We did suspect it, and we communicated the fact to the police. I myself told Inspector Lobert about it. He said he’d let me know if they found him, but I haven’t heard.”
“Would you mind describing him to me, sir?”
“He was a little gray-haired man, about fifty, I should say, with light-colored eyes — I don’t know if they were blue or gray — and a scraggly mustache. He was about five feet seven and weighed about one hundred and thirty-five pounds.”
“Had he been working for you long?”
“About three years.”
“Thank you, sir. One other thing; I’d like to get permission to go through Mrs. Mount’s furniture and things — Miss Reeves, you know. The janitor says it is in storage. A letter from you, sir—”
“Nothing doing,” returned the agent. “It’s under the jurisdiction of the probate court, and I couldn’t give you permission if I wanted to. You’ll have to get a court order.”
So Dan went back down to Chambers Street, where, after interminable delays and examinations of his credentials from Mr. Leg, he obtained the sought-for permission. Then he had to wait another hour until a court officer was ready to accompany him to the storage warehouse; and in the end he had all his trouble for nothing. Among the hundreds of papers and books and other articles which he examined till late in the afternoon, he found absolutely nothing of significance.
“It’s mighty curious,” he muttered disgustedly, “that I shouldn’t find one letter, or one book with his writing in it, or anything.”
It was after four o’clock when he handed the court officer a two-dollar bill out of Mr. Leg’s diminishing hundred and left him to go farther uptown. His destination was the house on One Hundred and Fifty-seventh Street, and when he arrived there he once more made a round of the tenants, from the top floor to the bottom.
To each of them he showed the photograph which he had torn out of the book in his employer’s office, but no one remembered ever having seen the man; and when he asked the pale young woman on the second floor if the photograph resembled the man of whom she had spoken as a frequent caller at Miss Reeves’s apartment, she replied that she really couldn’t say, as she had never had a good look at him.
But most of Dan’s questions on this occasion concerned Patrick Cummings, the missing janitor. He learned little from the tenants; and then, realizing his mistake, he left the house and sought the basement next door.
The janitor here was a broken-down Scotchman with watery eyes. Yes, he replied, he had known Paddy Cummings welclass="underline" and, urged on by another appropriation from Mr. Leg’s hundred, he furnished a great deal of miscellaneous information concerning the character and habits of his missing confrère.
He said he had been a happy-go-lucky individual, much given, however, to unexpected fits of sullenness.
He had been unmarried, with no apparent relatives or friends whatever. Despite the fact that there was always money in his pocket, he had invariably cheated at pinochle. He had possessed the tastes of a gentleman, preferring whisky to beer. During the past year, however, he had contracted a disgusting fondness for motion pictures, having attended at least three times a week at the nickelodeon around the corner.
The Scotchman knew nothing of where he had gone; he missed him unspeakably, all the more on account of the insufferable Yoakum, who had taken his place.
Dan went back next door to see the insufferable Yoakum, from whom he learned that the former janitor had evidently departed unexpectedly and in a great hurry, as he had left his household goods behind him. Yoakum had found cooking utensils, a bed, two tables, some chairs, et cetera, in their places in the basement when he arrived; presumably they were the property of Cummings. Dan went through the place half a dozen times, but found nothing that gave any trace of the missing man’s reasons for departure.
By the time he emerged again into the street the day was gone; a clock in a window at the Broadway corner said ten minutes past six. He entered and sought a telephone booth to call up the office, thinking it barely possible that Mr. Leg would be awaiting his return, but he got no answer.
He went home to sleep over the developments of the day.
At the office the next morning Mr. Leg submitted his report of the previous day’s activities immediately upon his arrival. He had written down the answers to Dan’s questions in their order:
1. Mount hasn’t got the letter his wife left when she ran away. It was destroyed two years ago.
2. He was employed as bookkeeper at the office of Rafter & Co., coal dealers, foot of One Hundred and Twelfth Street, for the four months previous to the murder.
3. He was inside the drugstore only a few minutes. The rest of the time he waited outside on the corner. He bought a paper from the man at the newsstand and talked with him a little. He says this man might remember him.
4. He drank a great deal for the two years following his wife’s disappearance, but not since then. He swears he didn’t touch a drop that night.
5. He appears solid and calm, with a lifeless indifference that is extraordinary, except when speaking of his wife, when he nearly breaks down with grief.
“There,” said Mr. Leg, “that’s what you wanted to know. I went to Rafter & Co., and they corroborated Mount, saying that he had worked for them a little over four months, and that he had been very satisfactory. He never drank any as far as they knew.”
“I’m glad to hear that, sir,” replied Dan. “That settles it as far as Mount’s concerned. He’s out of it, anyway; only I thought he might have done it in a fit of drunkenness. You see, sir, he couldn’t have had any possible reason to kill his wife. The police supposition is that he found that she had been receiving another man in that flat, and killed her for revenge and jealousy.
“But, according to his story, he had agreed to take her back only the night before, knowing that in all probability she had done wrong. The reason I believe him is because of what he said about the money. He was even willing to make use of the money she was going to bring with her. No man would make up a thing like that about himself, even to save his own neck.”