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Show " mJ BLACK tBMfq feV'M TtTC LIFFORD KNIGHT sl,, i Margaret Nichols owned some property m joint tenancy with Kitty Chatfleld. When Kitty died It meant $200,000 to her. Ehe explains the situation to her friend, Barry. While they are talking, Elsa Chat-Held, Chat-Held, a niece of Aunt Kitty, drives bp. ; Elsa had been disinherited at Aunt Kit-! Kit-! ty's death. Huntoon Rogers, a detective, asks what Aunt Kitty died of. He Is told an overdose of morphine, but that the district attorney's office had their doubts s to whether the morphine was self-administered. self-administered. Elsa, who admitted that be hated her Aunt Kitty, was "glad to be free of her and the centuries of no ! and cannot." Reed Barton, one of the ! last to see Aunt Kitty alive, was said to have had a motive. CHAPTER II -The tires rippled on the pavement as we dropped down off the hills behind be-hind Hollywood and came presently i to Laurel Canyon. Other cars flashed I past. Laughter, song, earnest voices In wisps and snatches fell upon our ears and were swept away, but in none was there the note of deadly earnestness that vibrated to Elsa's voice. j We had started off from Dwight's amid laughter, Elsa in her working . girl suit, which proved to be one of Margaret's street dresses. She carried car-ried an overnight bag the lightness Df which she explained by saying: i "Just pajamas, Barry. I have to have something." We had moved off down the curving driveway and entered en-tered the road which descended Hollywood's Hol-lywood's backdrop of hills. I She was very sure, this young woman with the almost golden hair, and eyes I believed to be gray, and which Dwight called blue. I "Put me down anywhere on Holly- 1 wood Boulevard," said Elsa. We had emerged from the winding can- i yon road and were speeding into Hollywood. "I start from there." "It's eleven o'clock," I reminded her. "It doesn't matter. Time never meant anything to me." And so I dropped her on the boulevard. boule-vard. She flashed me a smile, pat- ted my cheek with a soft, caressing hand, and skipped out to the sidewalk side-walk in that working girl suit and carrying the overnight bag with just pajamas, because she had to have something. The crowded sidewalks swallowed her up. I got into a traffic traf-fic snarl. After a while it was broken bro-ken up and I moved on. Near Vine Street the crowd opened for a brief moment on the sidewalk, and there went Elsa, the working girl suit and the overnight bag. Then crowd, night, and the moving traffic contrived to shut her wholly from sight, and I drove onward reflecting re-flecting upon things like bravery and courage and marveling at what we call youth. Wondering, too, about Aunt Kitty's overdose of morphine. For the district attorney, who was an old friend of mine, had asked me hf I wanted to try my hand at the problem. One usually dashes into a railway terminal. In the taxicab as one approaches, the demoralizing discovery dis-covery is made that it lacks but three minutes until the 4:36 is due to leave, or the train for the White Mountains, or Seattle, or wherever It is you are going. By not waiting or your change, commandeering a red cap and prodding him along, you gain the gate just in time to be numbered num-bered among the passengers. It is all right, of course, if you have the sporting instinct. Only fixed ideas occupy the mental processes once you enter the terminal. You grasp thoughts like luggage, tickets, gate, kiss somebody good-bye; and your legs do the rest. I had just seen my sister and her two boys off for New York. I had driven them down in my own car, so there had been four minutes instead in-stead of three, and the boys had entered en-tered into the spirit of the thing. Therefore, we made the gate with a full minute to spare, which accounts for the word Anne was able to put In about Reed Barton. "Where?" I asked, turning to stare back through the crowd which, had closed in behind us. "Over by the information booth. Here, kiss me good-bye, quick! Don't forget to write." The gate slammed and they all went running down the platform, boys, Anne, red caps, boiling and bobbing in a last melee. The fact that Reed Barton was standing still had caught Anne's attention. at-tention. He would be doing just that in the station when others were rushing about like ants in a disturbed anthill. "I try to live with the fundamentals," fundamen-tals," he had said one night at Dwight's. "Simple things are more latisfactory. ' The world is befuddled with needless things, with complexities. complexi-ties. They are so many that there Is no longer room in life to live. I must have time for the contemplation contempla-tion of beauty." "Finding beauty?" I asked, slapping slap-ping him on the shoulder. He turned his gaze upon me, reaching slowly for my hand and said: "I've just seen one of our slaves off for Mazatlan Chesebro'g slave. A mining engineer." Somehow his words brought back that dreamy, sun-baked town far down' the western coast of Mexico, and a vague wind of prescience itlrred uneasily within me as at the prospect of some horrible thing. It tyai one of those strange, unaccount able experiences; it caused an inward in-ward shudder which Reed Barton detected, for he looked at me inquiringly. in-quiringly. But, instead, he asked, "Can you give me a lift out to Hollywood?" Holly-wood?" "Yes, glad to have your company." compa-ny." We walked out to the car and climbed in. "Living in Hollywood now, Reed?" I asked as we rolled on out Sunset Boulevard. "Yes, since father died, in Pasadena." Pasa-dena." I didn't say anything more just then, remembering the shock of his father's suicide. Beaten and penniless penni-less after a lifetime of comfort, the soft-spoken, courteous old gentleman had leaped into the Arroyo Seco from the Colorado Street bridge. "Oh," he said after a moment, "you asked me at the station if I were finding beauty. I've found her." He motioned with his fingers as if he would wipe out the miles of pavement, the street lights, the December De-cember night itself, and bade me contemplate an address in Hollywood. Holly-wood. "It's only a step or two off the boulevard. The place smells a little. They all do, with the cabbage "Put me down anywhere on Hollywood Holly-wood Boulevard." of yesteryear. And of course there's chintz " "There, too, is the haunt of beauty?" beau-ty?" "Chesebro sent me with some papers pa-pers for her to sign. Had to do with her aunt's estate. But it was difficult diffi-cult to track her. She'd dropped out of sight, and I'd been hunting her for several weeks." I made mental note of the address as Reed Barton went on talking. "Ink on her fingers. Some on her nose too. Hair you know how it would be I mean, beauty won't yield even to disorder. That's Nature's way. But the color I'm still trying to decide what it is. Drawing like mad. There were sketches all over the place. Clever things commercially. They'll get by easily. Probably make her a living. She signed up the things I brought -without looking at them. 'Get out!' she said. 'Tell Jimmy the Cheese (meaning my boss), to let me alone.' " , I pulled into a parking lot at a restaurant on Vine Street. I was hungry. The excitement of getting a woman off on a long journey is fatiguing. fa-tiguing. Reed Barton said he wasn't really hungry, but he went in with me. "Hello," called a voice from a booth. Huntoon Rogers was sitting alone over the dessert of a late dinner. din-ner. "Not brooding, are you, Hunt?" I inquired lightly, for there was a glumness about him. I introduced Reed Barton. "No-o," he said hesitantly. "Sit down and let me enjoy your company." com-pany." "What's the trouble?" "Theme papers," he said with a wry smile. "They get me down sometimes and I'm driven to extremes. ex-tremes. Therefore, I spent the afternoon after-noon looking over the files in the Katherine Chatfleld case." Reed Barton shot a quick glance at Rogers but said nothing. "Find anything to interest you?" "Yes. And no. It's one of those cases you keep coming back to, wondering won-dering what the answer is." Reed Barton ate mechanically, like a man in a mild trance. "Reed was telling me about Elsa Chatfleld as we drove out from town," I said to Rogers. "You know her. Professor Rogers?" Rog-ers?" Reed inquired quickly. "I've met her." "Interesting, isn't she?" He sketched briefly what he had told me on the way out. "You know," he concluded, "even when they clutch economic Independence to their blessed little bosoms they haven't got all there is in life. Not even half. They've only got the beginning." At the time it didn't occur to me that Reed Barton had never heard of the baby. I supposed, of course, he had, for he knew Elsa's friends. But it was revealed subsequently that, during the height of the gossip, gos-sip, he was in Mexico. The conversation came back tc Aunt Kitty Chatfleld. Rogers asked if there had been any physical resemblance re-semblance between Elsa and her aunt. "None whatever," answered Reed Barton. "That Is, as I remember Katherine Chatfleld. I never saw the two side by side, however. As a matter of fact, I had never met Elsa until today. She must have been at home that night her aunt died, for I remember that the maid asked me which Miss Chatfleld I wished to see." "You were there that night?" inquired in-quired Rogers, his mild Jjlue eyes coming to rest upon Reed Barton's face. "Yes. You see, I'm one of Chese-bro's Chese-bro's slaves. At times only his errand er-rand boy, although I'm supposed to be something of a mining engineer. But I am required to run a great many personal errands for Chesebro. Chese-bro. I think I took Miss Chatfleld a book something that had interested inter-ested Chesebro, and which he wanted want-ed her to read too." "I see," said Rogers. "And she died that night?" "Yes. She killed herself some time that night." Rogers was silent for a moment, then he looked at me. "There's one chap from the police department in Pasadena whose report interested me, Madison. He says that he smelled chloroform faintly when he went into the room to investigate. That was several hours afterward. No one else smelled it, however. It might have been an overactive odor of it noted in the autopsy report. re-port. But chloroform is peculiar in that respect; the odor is not necessarily neces-sarily present even at autopsy in a death from chloroform." "Yes, of course," I said. "You're not by any chance thinking think-ing that Katherine Chatfleld was murdered, Professor Rogers?" inquired in-quired Reed Barton. Rogers smiled faintly. "I have no opinion, Mr. Barton. ,The case has been closed for over a year now. Who am I to stir it up at this time? The police were satisfied that it was suicide; there were no fingerprints, except her own, on the hypodermic syringe she used, or on the bottle in which she kept her supply." sup-ply." "I guess I was one of the last to see her alive," said Reed Barton after a short silence, looking beyond Rogers to a group making merry in an opposite booth. "I've since been glad It wasn't murder. The police might have made it uncomfortable for me; they could have saddled a motive on me that I couldn't have denied. Because Katherine Chat-field Chat-field killed my father just as much as if she had pulled a trigger. Things were looking up, you know. Father had struggled all through the worst of the depression to keep things together; he'd managed somehow to make the Interest payments pay-ments to her. She held a mortgage, mort-gage, you know, on all he had. Even as little as a two months' extension would have seen him out of the woods. But you know, there's no Shylock like a woman Shylock her pound of flesh must come from the heart. And so," he shrugged his shoulders, "father jumped." He went on after a moment: "The police po-lice could have said I hated her. But I don't think I did." Dwight Nichols tapped the ash from his cigarette and looked away through the gathering dusk across the vast Pacific into which the sun's dark red ball had sunk. The air was humid; small waves lapped wetly on the damp sand. Indeed so all-pervading was the feeling of wetness wet-ness that I fancied I could push off from the veranda rail of the beach club, where Dwight, Huntoon Rogers and I sat, and swim out across the lawn. Two screaming children had been engaged in a feud on the beach and the mother with difficulty was now bringing them toward the club house. Dwight seemed more interested inter-ested in them at the moment than in my remark about Kitty Chatfleld, for he drew twice on his cigarette before he replied: "Oh, I should say that Katherine Chatfleld might have been forty-one or two when she died. She was not old." "According to the flies," Huntoon Rogers said, coming to life after long contemplation of the sea, "she was forty years and ten months old." "But Elsa" I began. "I am coming to her. We are always al-ways getting back to Elsa. There was new blood with Elsa's mother. It was an alien strain to the Chat-fields Chat-fields new and fresh and vigorous like a clear mountain stream flowing flow-ing into a sluggish river. Sam Chat-field Chat-field married his stenographer. That sort of thing Is heroic. It does violence vio-lence to family traditions; it puts a terrific strain on family pride, but ' biologically it Is a good thing,' provided pro-vided It doesn't become a habit. Sam didn't reason things out quite ' like that. He loved the girl, which is much simpler, and so he married mar-ried her. He was young. (TO BE CONTINUED) |