Finger finger, p.36
Finger, Finger!, page 36
“Well thanks, Mack, for letting me know.”
“Thank you, Terry, for such a good tipoff. If it hadn’t been for your running down that Aigyptian inscription, they’d have been eating their way right this minute through the back of that Currier and Landry vault.”
“Right, they would! Well, see you again, Mack.”
Thus—the news that filtered in to me through a B-hookup on a police department switchboard!
But finally, after all discussion was over, Mongolian gentlemen included, I returned, like a dog getting back to his buried bone, to the prime subject: Peter Hess.
“And you’re still willing, are you,” I asked, “to bet a hundred dollars that Hess didn’t kill Kenwood?”
“Greybeard, eh? Well, I tell you, Rand, somep’n’s happened to that laddie! There ain’t a guy popped up anywhere in Chi—where a guy should-a popped up by this hour—talkin’ with him, beard on or off. And then again, since he hisself passed that there ring to Kenw—”
The switchboard girl came into the circuit again.
“Excuse me, Mr. O’Rourke—but Assistant Coroner’s Physician Gillmore has something to report. I put him on Phone Number 7.”
“O. K., Jessica. I’ll catch it. Hold the wire, Rand.”
Now there was silence. For I was in no hookup with O’Rourke’s connection. I heard O’Rourke’s brief “Yes. Yes. Yes,” repeated at regular intervals, at some distance from the transmitter of the phone on which he had been talking to me. And finally the clattering, resonant deposit of a receiver nearby. Then O’Rourke came back on to our original speaking-circuit once more.
“Well, Rand—you win all right. Damned if you don’t! It was Hess, all right, who killed Kenwood. Assistant Coroner’s Physician Gillmore, in looking over Kenwood’s corpse, just now, in our morgue downstairs, pulled off a long rubber fingercot that was on the third finger of Kenwood’s left hand—third finger, that is, not counting the thumb as finger. A cot what had been smeared around the inside of its top with glue.”
“With glue? Why—”
“Yeah. Glue. To hold it on. Because the cot, you see, was packed full of absorbent cotton. And was fitted nicely to a stub o’ flesh and bone. Yes—stub, I said. For Kenwood’s finger has been chopped off—just below its middle joint!”
CHAPTER XXXI
A Surprising Discovery
“His finger—his finger—” I repeated dazedly.
“Was chopped off—yeah. Does that surprise you—after that other finger you found today? Yes, after chopping Kenwood’s skull open and killing him almost instantly—say—have you got a little chopping block—or anything o’ that general nature—in that office?”
“I’ll say we have! An old-fashioned round wooden paving block, supposed to be from an old Chicago street. From the hansom-cab days. It carries—or used to carry, anyway—an aluminum stencil tacked on its side, the name or announcement of some modern paving block manufacturer whose offices were next to us when we were in the Old Colony Building. Just a curio—or at least a curio once—for we’ve used it, for as long as I can remember, just to hold down stacks of large-sized papers.” I paused. “Generally, it stood on one or the other of the extra work tables.”
“Well, that was what was prob’ly used. I’ll call immediately for a check-up of both its top an’ under side for th’ mark of a hatchet blade. From the diagram I got here, showin’ how Kenwood’s body laid—and his arms hung down—fingers nearly touchin’ the floor—it’s easy to see what was did. The murderer fetched over that block. Laid it under Kenwood’s hand. Or put the hand atop it. And—chop!—off went the finger. And he had a rubber fingercot all ready, stuffed with cott—well—maybe he did—maybe he didn’t. You got any cotton in that office—any quick-action glue?”
“Yes. We had both, on a little table near the left wall, kept for office materials only. The cotton Kenwood got originally to re-pack that fine-screen gravestone marble and halftone in—to send it to the printer’s. The glue—yes—it was quick-action glue.”
“There you are. A bunch o’ cotton jammed down into the fingercot—a smear of that glue around the inside of its neck—and then a slipping of it onto the stub of flesh an’ bone—and you got it. Doc says it was glued on so tight it pulled off hairs and skin both nearly, when he pried it off. Well, that piece of camera-flage was an afterthought all right. One o’ them brilliant afterthoughts. It mighta been a coupla days before that finger would of been discovered to be phony.” O’Rourke paused. “Well, Brother Hess did the job all right—but where in ’ell is Brother Hess right now?”
He paused again, helplessly. Then spoke once more.
“Well, Rand, this throws a new complexion onto things. I might have let you go on up an’ go to sleep under ord’nary circumstances—but this changes th’ whole lay-out. Sinjohn’ll want that ring now. And th’ new facts. So you might as well hang up, an, start for the Bureau. So—hop down here pronto. Come to my office, not Sinjohn’s. His is two floors beneath me, and—wait—wait—you can’t come to my office if I don’t let you know how to get to it. Take Elevator Number 5 only. Only one that discharges anyone at the locked floor. Which is where I am. Show the ring itself to the elevator man. That’ll be your pass tonight. I’ll phone to him it’s your pass. He’ll show you how to reach my hole in the wall. All clear?”
“Yes,” I said. “And I’ll come at once.”
I hung up and went slowly up the old creaking stairs of Number 72 West Oak Street. To my room. And changed my hat. An old custom of mine when I wanted to refurbish my wits. My powerful burning glass lay in sight on my chiffonier, so I fatuously took it along in order that the milk and graham-cracker eating Sinjohn himself could view the interior of that ring—should he deem it worth his while. And my package of cigarettes, overlooked earlier in the evening. And my silver pocket-lighter likewise overlooked. Then I went downstairs again.
I did not try to call a taxicab on the hall phone. I knew I could flag one on the nearest corner, which itself was North Dearborn, from the many that would be bowling back towards the Loop at this hour, after taking various night-club rounders home and to bed; and much more quickly, at that, than I could summon one at this time of night.
Outside I walked toward Dearborn Street. And took up a position under the low lamp-post there, till a cab should come along. Several did come—and I signalled them—only to find in each case that when the windshield, with its deceiving glare, had swept past me, the cab had one or more passengers in it.
I took out the ring from my vest pocket.
Was this ring back of Kenwood’s murder? Rather, his presumed possession of it at the time he was killed?
If so—why had his finger, on which the ring obviously had never even rested—and was not resting then—been stolen? Was Hess a madman. Was he—
I looked helplessly within the ring. That inscription—no longer now a riddle about a baldheaded man. It—
I screwed my eyes closer under the low old-fashioned lamppost. Strange—that inscription. It didn’t look exactly so—
In a flash I drew forth my burning glass, as well as my pocket lighter, and under the low street lamp lighted the pocket lighter with a single snap. Standing it upright on a cast iron ornamental projection of the lamp-post, about even with my shoulder, I now had a real light. I held the ring in my left hand, and once more brought ring and glass into proper focal distance of each other—and with my eye, as well.
And what I saw, in the bright glare of that pocket-lighter wick, made me utter an exclamation of utter bewilderment.
The characters were different. They were not Egyptian at all. One, in fact, looked exactly like the upper end of a telegraph pole that had been blown awry in a wind. A couple looked like curious forked sticks. All in all, they were jerky, perky, saucy, angular—why—they were Phoenician!
It was plain that I had in my possession a different ring altogether.
CHAPTER XXXII
At Johnny LaMont’s
Different?
I’ll say the inscription was different.
Even, this time, to the x’s and the y’s—and the digits, too. And the curleycue on the end. For the arrow comprising the chief element in that curleycue now ran in a different direction, and contained a y instead of an x! As I turned the ring helplessly leftward, and then revolved it slowly rightward, the panorama of hieroglyphics which, enlarged many many times, circled beneath my eye, ran:
I put my burning glass back into my pocket. And turned the ring stupidly over in my hand. The same, to a T, as the one I had been slugged for today—unless, perchance, I had been slugged, after all, for that finger instead of the ring! The same simple broad gold band, the same small silver horseshoe merely welded, brazed or soldered to the band, and the same size diamond, mounted in the same place in the horseshoe, and with the same sickly scintillations, such as they were. But a different ring, nevertheless.
A cab, attracted by my pocket flambeau, drew up with a terrific scrunch of its brakes in front of me. That driver knew for a certainty I was waiting for one.
I snapped out the pocket-light, popped it into my pocket, and climbed angrily in.
“Where to?” he asked.
“The Detective Bur—” I began. “No—wait. Take me to—to—let’s see—to 1311 Astor Street.”
He swung round in a great arc on the deserted street, and I settled back in my seat. For at 1311 Astor Street resided Johnny LaMont. With his mother. And for purposes of record I may state that Johnny LaMont was just a chap I had met a few times when playing tennis in Lincoln Park. One of the most placid, unexcitable, imperturbable persons I had ever encountered in my life. If he accidentally drove a good tennis ball into the lagoon, he merely yawned and asked whether it wasn’t time for tea. If he fanned the air with his racquet, and the ball flew past him and all the way to Diversey Boulevard on the other end of the park, he was like to remark that the sun was a bit low in the west, and we had better hurry the game. If he brilliantly got under a desperately short one, and sent it back to his opponent with the speed of a cannonball, he would ask whether Swinburne was a better poet than Heine, or whether the International Encyclopedia had not given inadequate treatment to the Renaissance.
And now I was travelling towards Johnny’s home. At a quarter after 2 in the morning. And on my first visit, too. A very de luxe home, too, judging from what I had heard about it. A home that had been left in perpetuity to Johnny’s mother, together with some $400 a month, by Johnny’s father, deceased. But a home with certain little literary accoutrements such as had been in that home in Cedardale where I had grown up with my foster-parents. In other words, a home with a library, an encyclopedia, and a standard dictionary. In which latter book I might find something on the Phoenician alphabet.
The Standard Dictionary!
That—an old edition of it—was what Peter Hess had bought early that day on his way from the depot. He probably knew then that the interior of the ring had contained Egyptian letters, or rather Egyptian characters which had helped to create the modern alphabet. So that was what the dictionary was for. It took my own need of one to begin to understand what Hess was trying to do.
O’Rourke could wait. He had enough to do down there to investigate some of these latter points I had just given him Such as the existence of the little “chopping-block”—and the quick-acting glue—and the cotton. And to convey to St. John Mackenzie all of what I had heard direct on that convenient “B”-hookup. This matter of the jumping rings had now become the most important thing in the case. As big a mystery, in themselves, as Kenwood’s death itself. Although not the same tragedy—for one D. Rand.
We arrived where I wanted to go within less than ten minutes. Johnny did, indeed, live in good style. His home was a 3-story greystone building, with quite flat front, a carefully trimmed lawn no more than 2 1/2 feet wide, hemmed in by a tall London-like spiked iron fence cutting it off from the sidewalk, and with two little potted trimmed green trees at the sides of the staid looking door. I let the cab tick while I went up the two steps to the low stoop.
There was no bell, but there was a big lion’s head knocker. I rattled it in the quiet of narrow Astor Street. And again. And still again. And presently Johnny himself came to the door in pajamas, rubbing his eyes. He did not even blink them when he saw me, but swung aside the door graciously.
“You know,” he began right off, “I was thinking yesterday that that Bott Stradivarius that Lyon and Healy sold last year for $16,000 was greatly underpriced. I was reading only today in the encyclopedia, under violins, that—”
I broke in.
“That’s what I need to consult, Johnny. And in a big hurry. Your encyclopedia. Or a standard dictionary if you have one.”
“Quite,” he said, dosing the door. “But you’ve forgotten to dismiss your cab.”
“I can’t dismiss it, Johnny. I’m letting it tick. For I go from here to the police department.”
“Of course. Forgive me, old chap, for calling your attention to it. This way.”
He led the way through a rich reception hall, with highly polished floor, and small oriental rugs sprinkled everywhere about it. Huge shields on the wall, and a velvet balustraded stairway going into the upper regions. Mighty nice home Johnny had. And this—my first acceptance of his invitation to call! He turned on a bright hanging light in a small nook off the reception hall, where the walls were covered with bookshelves, and two different sets of encyclopedias met the eye, as well as a giant pivoted globe nearly 3 feet in diameter vying with a huge standard dictionary mounted on a neat pulpit stand.
“Here,” Johnny said, pulling the drapes partly to, so that I might have a semi-privacy which I did not require.
And leaving me there to my own resources, he courteously went up the hall where I saw him lighting a cigarette from a polished smoking cabinet. His equanimity was perfect.
I disregarded the encyclopedias for the moment, and followed Peter Hess’ hunch. And instead looked up “Alphabet” in the standard dictionary. And no need to go further. Tabulated there in a neatly engraved table were the letters of the many alphabets—the Hieroglyphic Egyptian, the Phoenician, the Greek, Roman, and Hebrew.
I pulled out my notebook wherein a brief while ago I had disgruntedly inscribed O’Rourke’s painstaking rendering of the Egyptian letters that had been in Hess’ ring. And without even requiring the burning glass, so powerful was the tungsten bulb in Johnny’s hanging light just above the dictionary, I wrote out underneath that first string the translation of the Phoenician letters in this ring. Which was a simple enough feat. None resembled very much any other. And wherever one came up for which there appeared to be no character, it proved in every case to have the exact shape and formation of an ordinary English letter. Such as V. And Y. And W. It was all more than obvious. Just as in the inscription in that other ring, where letters were required that had no Egyptian equivalents, and the English letters themselves therefore had been set down, but squarish in shape, picture-like in aspect, here, too, where letters were required that had no Phoenician equivalents, the English letters had been set down angularly, jerky, perky. And when I had done, and had inserted a couple of notations to make the thing a perfect record, my memorandum ran:
I counted them hastily with the penpoint of my fountain pen.
Both contained the same number of letters. The same number of algebraic terms encased in brackets. The same total number, therefore, of letters and terms.
Were they the same inscription? Its true meaning, in each case, buried deep, within a combination of cipherings? Most likely. Then it must be a mighty important message.
I turned out the light myself, and emerged.
“Thank you, Johnny,” I said.
“Don’t mention it, D. R.,” he replied, bowing me out. “If you get time, mail me that descriptive brochure on the prehistoric dinosauria, will you?”
I shall always remember Johnny LaMont’s perfect sang froid. Someday I must go over there and tell him more of what it was all about—more, that is, than he has since read in the newspapers. I truly believe that had I come in that night and requested him for a watermelon and a bandanna handkerchief, he would have obtained them both for me, and bowed me out with the same gracious absence of comment.
My cab was of course waiting, and I now told the driver where I wanted to go.
We drew up at the Detective Bureau in about 12 minutes, for Michigan Avenue, both North and South, was pretty devoid of vehicles at this hour of the morning. The big whitestone building towering many stories into the dark sky, on the corner of 11th and South State Streets, was fair to middling busy, as detective bureaus are in the night. A number of cars, some with translucent press labels affixed to their windshields, were drawn up diagonally, noses against the curb, like sailboats all blown to exactly the same angle by the same wind. Heavy-shoed, as well as heavy-jawed, men—police workers—and lighter men with bored expressions and cigarettes in mouths—reporters, obviously—flowed in and out the main doors.
Inside the big foyer, thick with the invisible aroma of cigars, cigarettes and pipes, I went to the battery of elevators. As in the Interstate Life Building, at night, not all by any means were now in operation. I waited for Number 5 to come down. And climbed in, by myself.
“Floor?” the grizzled white-haired red-faced operator said, as we shot upward.
“Terrence O’Rourke of the Alibi-Check—”
“You can’t get off there,” he said, looking around back at me scowlingly. “Neither you, nor any other reporter. You ought to know—”
I took the horseshoe ring from my vest pocket, and showed it to him.
“Oh!” he said. And added “O. K!” And slowed the car with disconcerting suddenness to a floor whose opening, on the other side of the sliding elevator gates, was entirely cut off by a heavy looking oak door, in a niche of which—but back in, so as never to be caught by the rising and descending elevator—was a one-handed telephone, no doubt used to inquire, through some subterranean switchboard, or what not, from the parties thereon, whether they would see thus and so.
“Thank you, Terry, for such a good tipoff. If it hadn’t been for your running down that Aigyptian inscription, they’d have been eating their way right this minute through the back of that Currier and Landry vault.”
“Right, they would! Well, see you again, Mack.”
Thus—the news that filtered in to me through a B-hookup on a police department switchboard!
But finally, after all discussion was over, Mongolian gentlemen included, I returned, like a dog getting back to his buried bone, to the prime subject: Peter Hess.
“And you’re still willing, are you,” I asked, “to bet a hundred dollars that Hess didn’t kill Kenwood?”
“Greybeard, eh? Well, I tell you, Rand, somep’n’s happened to that laddie! There ain’t a guy popped up anywhere in Chi—where a guy should-a popped up by this hour—talkin’ with him, beard on or off. And then again, since he hisself passed that there ring to Kenw—”
The switchboard girl came into the circuit again.
“Excuse me, Mr. O’Rourke—but Assistant Coroner’s Physician Gillmore has something to report. I put him on Phone Number 7.”
“O. K., Jessica. I’ll catch it. Hold the wire, Rand.”
Now there was silence. For I was in no hookup with O’Rourke’s connection. I heard O’Rourke’s brief “Yes. Yes. Yes,” repeated at regular intervals, at some distance from the transmitter of the phone on which he had been talking to me. And finally the clattering, resonant deposit of a receiver nearby. Then O’Rourke came back on to our original speaking-circuit once more.
“Well, Rand—you win all right. Damned if you don’t! It was Hess, all right, who killed Kenwood. Assistant Coroner’s Physician Gillmore, in looking over Kenwood’s corpse, just now, in our morgue downstairs, pulled off a long rubber fingercot that was on the third finger of Kenwood’s left hand—third finger, that is, not counting the thumb as finger. A cot what had been smeared around the inside of its top with glue.”
“With glue? Why—”
“Yeah. Glue. To hold it on. Because the cot, you see, was packed full of absorbent cotton. And was fitted nicely to a stub o’ flesh and bone. Yes—stub, I said. For Kenwood’s finger has been chopped off—just below its middle joint!”
CHAPTER XXXI
A Surprising Discovery
“His finger—his finger—” I repeated dazedly.
“Was chopped off—yeah. Does that surprise you—after that other finger you found today? Yes, after chopping Kenwood’s skull open and killing him almost instantly—say—have you got a little chopping block—or anything o’ that general nature—in that office?”
“I’ll say we have! An old-fashioned round wooden paving block, supposed to be from an old Chicago street. From the hansom-cab days. It carries—or used to carry, anyway—an aluminum stencil tacked on its side, the name or announcement of some modern paving block manufacturer whose offices were next to us when we were in the Old Colony Building. Just a curio—or at least a curio once—for we’ve used it, for as long as I can remember, just to hold down stacks of large-sized papers.” I paused. “Generally, it stood on one or the other of the extra work tables.”
“Well, that was what was prob’ly used. I’ll call immediately for a check-up of both its top an’ under side for th’ mark of a hatchet blade. From the diagram I got here, showin’ how Kenwood’s body laid—and his arms hung down—fingers nearly touchin’ the floor—it’s easy to see what was did. The murderer fetched over that block. Laid it under Kenwood’s hand. Or put the hand atop it. And—chop!—off went the finger. And he had a rubber fingercot all ready, stuffed with cott—well—maybe he did—maybe he didn’t. You got any cotton in that office—any quick-action glue?”
“Yes. We had both, on a little table near the left wall, kept for office materials only. The cotton Kenwood got originally to re-pack that fine-screen gravestone marble and halftone in—to send it to the printer’s. The glue—yes—it was quick-action glue.”
“There you are. A bunch o’ cotton jammed down into the fingercot—a smear of that glue around the inside of its neck—and then a slipping of it onto the stub of flesh an’ bone—and you got it. Doc says it was glued on so tight it pulled off hairs and skin both nearly, when he pried it off. Well, that piece of camera-flage was an afterthought all right. One o’ them brilliant afterthoughts. It mighta been a coupla days before that finger would of been discovered to be phony.” O’Rourke paused. “Well, Brother Hess did the job all right—but where in ’ell is Brother Hess right now?”
He paused again, helplessly. Then spoke once more.
“Well, Rand, this throws a new complexion onto things. I might have let you go on up an’ go to sleep under ord’nary circumstances—but this changes th’ whole lay-out. Sinjohn’ll want that ring now. And th’ new facts. So you might as well hang up, an, start for the Bureau. So—hop down here pronto. Come to my office, not Sinjohn’s. His is two floors beneath me, and—wait—wait—you can’t come to my office if I don’t let you know how to get to it. Take Elevator Number 5 only. Only one that discharges anyone at the locked floor. Which is where I am. Show the ring itself to the elevator man. That’ll be your pass tonight. I’ll phone to him it’s your pass. He’ll show you how to reach my hole in the wall. All clear?”
“Yes,” I said. “And I’ll come at once.”
I hung up and went slowly up the old creaking stairs of Number 72 West Oak Street. To my room. And changed my hat. An old custom of mine when I wanted to refurbish my wits. My powerful burning glass lay in sight on my chiffonier, so I fatuously took it along in order that the milk and graham-cracker eating Sinjohn himself could view the interior of that ring—should he deem it worth his while. And my package of cigarettes, overlooked earlier in the evening. And my silver pocket-lighter likewise overlooked. Then I went downstairs again.
I did not try to call a taxicab on the hall phone. I knew I could flag one on the nearest corner, which itself was North Dearborn, from the many that would be bowling back towards the Loop at this hour, after taking various night-club rounders home and to bed; and much more quickly, at that, than I could summon one at this time of night.
Outside I walked toward Dearborn Street. And took up a position under the low lamp-post there, till a cab should come along. Several did come—and I signalled them—only to find in each case that when the windshield, with its deceiving glare, had swept past me, the cab had one or more passengers in it.
I took out the ring from my vest pocket.
Was this ring back of Kenwood’s murder? Rather, his presumed possession of it at the time he was killed?
If so—why had his finger, on which the ring obviously had never even rested—and was not resting then—been stolen? Was Hess a madman. Was he—
I looked helplessly within the ring. That inscription—no longer now a riddle about a baldheaded man. It—
I screwed my eyes closer under the low old-fashioned lamppost. Strange—that inscription. It didn’t look exactly so—
In a flash I drew forth my burning glass, as well as my pocket lighter, and under the low street lamp lighted the pocket lighter with a single snap. Standing it upright on a cast iron ornamental projection of the lamp-post, about even with my shoulder, I now had a real light. I held the ring in my left hand, and once more brought ring and glass into proper focal distance of each other—and with my eye, as well.
And what I saw, in the bright glare of that pocket-lighter wick, made me utter an exclamation of utter bewilderment.
The characters were different. They were not Egyptian at all. One, in fact, looked exactly like the upper end of a telegraph pole that had been blown awry in a wind. A couple looked like curious forked sticks. All in all, they were jerky, perky, saucy, angular—why—they were Phoenician!
It was plain that I had in my possession a different ring altogether.
CHAPTER XXXII
At Johnny LaMont’s
Different?
I’ll say the inscription was different.
Even, this time, to the x’s and the y’s—and the digits, too. And the curleycue on the end. For the arrow comprising the chief element in that curleycue now ran in a different direction, and contained a y instead of an x! As I turned the ring helplessly leftward, and then revolved it slowly rightward, the panorama of hieroglyphics which, enlarged many many times, circled beneath my eye, ran:
I put my burning glass back into my pocket. And turned the ring stupidly over in my hand. The same, to a T, as the one I had been slugged for today—unless, perchance, I had been slugged, after all, for that finger instead of the ring! The same simple broad gold band, the same small silver horseshoe merely welded, brazed or soldered to the band, and the same size diamond, mounted in the same place in the horseshoe, and with the same sickly scintillations, such as they were. But a different ring, nevertheless.
A cab, attracted by my pocket flambeau, drew up with a terrific scrunch of its brakes in front of me. That driver knew for a certainty I was waiting for one.
I snapped out the pocket-light, popped it into my pocket, and climbed angrily in.
“Where to?” he asked.
“The Detective Bur—” I began. “No—wait. Take me to—to—let’s see—to 1311 Astor Street.”
He swung round in a great arc on the deserted street, and I settled back in my seat. For at 1311 Astor Street resided Johnny LaMont. With his mother. And for purposes of record I may state that Johnny LaMont was just a chap I had met a few times when playing tennis in Lincoln Park. One of the most placid, unexcitable, imperturbable persons I had ever encountered in my life. If he accidentally drove a good tennis ball into the lagoon, he merely yawned and asked whether it wasn’t time for tea. If he fanned the air with his racquet, and the ball flew past him and all the way to Diversey Boulevard on the other end of the park, he was like to remark that the sun was a bit low in the west, and we had better hurry the game. If he brilliantly got under a desperately short one, and sent it back to his opponent with the speed of a cannonball, he would ask whether Swinburne was a better poet than Heine, or whether the International Encyclopedia had not given inadequate treatment to the Renaissance.
And now I was travelling towards Johnny’s home. At a quarter after 2 in the morning. And on my first visit, too. A very de luxe home, too, judging from what I had heard about it. A home that had been left in perpetuity to Johnny’s mother, together with some $400 a month, by Johnny’s father, deceased. But a home with certain little literary accoutrements such as had been in that home in Cedardale where I had grown up with my foster-parents. In other words, a home with a library, an encyclopedia, and a standard dictionary. In which latter book I might find something on the Phoenician alphabet.
The Standard Dictionary!
That—an old edition of it—was what Peter Hess had bought early that day on his way from the depot. He probably knew then that the interior of the ring had contained Egyptian letters, or rather Egyptian characters which had helped to create the modern alphabet. So that was what the dictionary was for. It took my own need of one to begin to understand what Hess was trying to do.
O’Rourke could wait. He had enough to do down there to investigate some of these latter points I had just given him Such as the existence of the little “chopping-block”—and the quick-acting glue—and the cotton. And to convey to St. John Mackenzie all of what I had heard direct on that convenient “B”-hookup. This matter of the jumping rings had now become the most important thing in the case. As big a mystery, in themselves, as Kenwood’s death itself. Although not the same tragedy—for one D. Rand.
We arrived where I wanted to go within less than ten minutes. Johnny did, indeed, live in good style. His home was a 3-story greystone building, with quite flat front, a carefully trimmed lawn no more than 2 1/2 feet wide, hemmed in by a tall London-like spiked iron fence cutting it off from the sidewalk, and with two little potted trimmed green trees at the sides of the staid looking door. I let the cab tick while I went up the two steps to the low stoop.
There was no bell, but there was a big lion’s head knocker. I rattled it in the quiet of narrow Astor Street. And again. And still again. And presently Johnny himself came to the door in pajamas, rubbing his eyes. He did not even blink them when he saw me, but swung aside the door graciously.
“You know,” he began right off, “I was thinking yesterday that that Bott Stradivarius that Lyon and Healy sold last year for $16,000 was greatly underpriced. I was reading only today in the encyclopedia, under violins, that—”
I broke in.
“That’s what I need to consult, Johnny. And in a big hurry. Your encyclopedia. Or a standard dictionary if you have one.”
“Quite,” he said, dosing the door. “But you’ve forgotten to dismiss your cab.”
“I can’t dismiss it, Johnny. I’m letting it tick. For I go from here to the police department.”
“Of course. Forgive me, old chap, for calling your attention to it. This way.”
He led the way through a rich reception hall, with highly polished floor, and small oriental rugs sprinkled everywhere about it. Huge shields on the wall, and a velvet balustraded stairway going into the upper regions. Mighty nice home Johnny had. And this—my first acceptance of his invitation to call! He turned on a bright hanging light in a small nook off the reception hall, where the walls were covered with bookshelves, and two different sets of encyclopedias met the eye, as well as a giant pivoted globe nearly 3 feet in diameter vying with a huge standard dictionary mounted on a neat pulpit stand.
“Here,” Johnny said, pulling the drapes partly to, so that I might have a semi-privacy which I did not require.
And leaving me there to my own resources, he courteously went up the hall where I saw him lighting a cigarette from a polished smoking cabinet. His equanimity was perfect.
I disregarded the encyclopedias for the moment, and followed Peter Hess’ hunch. And instead looked up “Alphabet” in the standard dictionary. And no need to go further. Tabulated there in a neatly engraved table were the letters of the many alphabets—the Hieroglyphic Egyptian, the Phoenician, the Greek, Roman, and Hebrew.
I pulled out my notebook wherein a brief while ago I had disgruntedly inscribed O’Rourke’s painstaking rendering of the Egyptian letters that had been in Hess’ ring. And without even requiring the burning glass, so powerful was the tungsten bulb in Johnny’s hanging light just above the dictionary, I wrote out underneath that first string the translation of the Phoenician letters in this ring. Which was a simple enough feat. None resembled very much any other. And wherever one came up for which there appeared to be no character, it proved in every case to have the exact shape and formation of an ordinary English letter. Such as V. And Y. And W. It was all more than obvious. Just as in the inscription in that other ring, where letters were required that had no Egyptian equivalents, and the English letters themselves therefore had been set down, but squarish in shape, picture-like in aspect, here, too, where letters were required that had no Phoenician equivalents, the English letters had been set down angularly, jerky, perky. And when I had done, and had inserted a couple of notations to make the thing a perfect record, my memorandum ran:
I counted them hastily with the penpoint of my fountain pen.
Both contained the same number of letters. The same number of algebraic terms encased in brackets. The same total number, therefore, of letters and terms.
Were they the same inscription? Its true meaning, in each case, buried deep, within a combination of cipherings? Most likely. Then it must be a mighty important message.
I turned out the light myself, and emerged.
“Thank you, Johnny,” I said.
“Don’t mention it, D. R.,” he replied, bowing me out. “If you get time, mail me that descriptive brochure on the prehistoric dinosauria, will you?”
I shall always remember Johnny LaMont’s perfect sang froid. Someday I must go over there and tell him more of what it was all about—more, that is, than he has since read in the newspapers. I truly believe that had I come in that night and requested him for a watermelon and a bandanna handkerchief, he would have obtained them both for me, and bowed me out with the same gracious absence of comment.
My cab was of course waiting, and I now told the driver where I wanted to go.
We drew up at the Detective Bureau in about 12 minutes, for Michigan Avenue, both North and South, was pretty devoid of vehicles at this hour of the morning. The big whitestone building towering many stories into the dark sky, on the corner of 11th and South State Streets, was fair to middling busy, as detective bureaus are in the night. A number of cars, some with translucent press labels affixed to their windshields, were drawn up diagonally, noses against the curb, like sailboats all blown to exactly the same angle by the same wind. Heavy-shoed, as well as heavy-jawed, men—police workers—and lighter men with bored expressions and cigarettes in mouths—reporters, obviously—flowed in and out the main doors.
Inside the big foyer, thick with the invisible aroma of cigars, cigarettes and pipes, I went to the battery of elevators. As in the Interstate Life Building, at night, not all by any means were now in operation. I waited for Number 5 to come down. And climbed in, by myself.
“Floor?” the grizzled white-haired red-faced operator said, as we shot upward.
“Terrence O’Rourke of the Alibi-Check—”
“You can’t get off there,” he said, looking around back at me scowlingly. “Neither you, nor any other reporter. You ought to know—”
I took the horseshoe ring from my vest pocket, and showed it to him.
“Oh!” he said. And added “O. K!” And slowed the car with disconcerting suddenness to a floor whose opening, on the other side of the sliding elevator gates, was entirely cut off by a heavy looking oak door, in a niche of which—but back in, so as never to be caught by the rising and descending elevator—was a one-handed telephone, no doubt used to inquire, through some subterranean switchboard, or what not, from the parties thereon, whether they would see thus and so.
