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Show K Bv FREDERIC F. VAN DE WATF.ft .., .,t Grosvenor set down his cup with a clatter. "Miss Ferritcr," the old lady replied re-plied with ever so slight a stress on the title, "left twenty minutes ago. Her brother Everett called for her. They are going to stay at a hotel until tomorrow the Babylon, I believe." be-lieve." "That's where Lyon Is hanging out," Shannon growled. "Possibly," Miss Agatha agreed, and nodded at the paper folded by her plate. "Then he hasn't been arrested?" Her question made the Captain angrier. His thick neck bulged over his collar. "He has not. We took him in for questioning, that was all. He's told the truth as far as we can prove it. He ate at Mino's and washed up beforehand at the Grand Central, like he says. We have nothing to hold him on. Before we were through with him, his lawyer sprung him. I'd like to know who tipped of! the papers last night, I would indeed." in-deed." I looked across the air shaft at a window of the Ferriter flat. There was movement behind it, where Shannon's subordinates still searched for the missing weapon. "Someone," the Captain said in a surly voice, "killed that man. That's why I want to see lone Ferriter." Color crept into Grosvenor' s handsome hand-some face. He blurted. "lone of all persons. What utter rot!" Miss Agatha's eyebrows twitched. Her nephew crumpled his napkin in W Jj) L-X - SYNOPSIS , ln search of newspaper "T h board operator ln a swank 5 1"chS managed by officious Vna'Wt"1 " . There Dav d meets &M ,et. crippled o.d lady. lie Miming niece. Allesra One iid '"J,1? h Hlggins ln the lobby, 'a'. oWXrmed by a piercing scream. BjVid U J11 r.crera came from the rtment not far from the Wmrtrttm include Lyon and pi;; 5 aS . Ister. lone. Everett P""1'! S helping Agatha Paget f,waS about her blue-blooded an-a an-a ' XJt ithe apartment they find K rrfed man-dead. No weapon rjckf rt The police arrive. Hlg- . activej? dislikes David In-(-' , that he U fired. David is h ?im,, Paget apartment. There Elderly Prto-appeartag Agatha " inntaVa cocktail. She offers him fJ?tlSnl write her family hlstory-i hlstory-i am he ftearth a few family skele-m skele-m Hf accepts the offer. Meanwhile, t:! SDt Lyon Ferriter of the mur-W mur-W Jerry Cochran of the Press offers So a job helping solve the murder. CHAPTER V-Continued The fine old Mallory luck still tolds." I said. "You're about three pars too late." I mid of my discharge by Higgins ud tie life-Une Miss Paget had fco me. Cochrane heard me through with his pink face quiet but dis eyes were narrower when I fln- "I don't know why you re balking" balk-ing" he said. "You're sitting pretty pret-ty right in a family that lives across He Way from the Ferriters, a family fam-ily that's talcing care of the girl tonight to-night and that hires one of the broth-! broth-! rs." I felt better, but I was still both-: both-: ered. ; .took," I said. "This old lady has been more than white to me. If I throw in with you, I'm double-crossing double-crossing her." "You think maybe, the Pagets had s hand in it?" he asked softly and Hut stung me. Vhy " I began, so hotly that be grinned and looked like a rowdy cherub. "All right, all right," he soothed. 'Then if they're in the clear, how are you crossing them? Mallory, this town is paved with good newspaper men who would give one hand for your chance. Better take it." I nodded agreement at last. For a moment I had the good feeling inside that at last the breaks were going my way. Then I said: "I don't know why you think the story is still so hot, after Lyon Fer-ri'er's Fer-ri'er's pinch." "What!" he said as though I had struck him. I repeated what Fine-man Fine-man had told me. "Holy, suffering martyrs," he jerked beneath his breath and shoved back his chair. "And here I've been sitting. Shannon's been holding out again, the dirty tramp. So long, fella. Wait I'll see you let me think. Right here. Three tomorrow. G'by." He rose, thrust his check at the tashier and vanished with a wheeze of the revolving door. I ate a piece ol pie and then another before I followed him. Mrs. Shaw was suspicious when she answered her doorbell, but after I had paid a week in advance for the room I had used during my first month in New York and had redeemed re-deemed my trunk as well, she was glad to see me back. I took all my things from my trunk. I thought, as I hung them P. ot Allegra Paget and the ghastly ghast-ly uniform in which she first had n me. I should have dreamed ol her that night, by all standards ol romance and Freud, but I didn't. I was too tired to dream of anything. any-thing. '' I took a long time dressing. My 'hoes had to be shined and my hair needed cutting. I had barely time for a cup of mflee and arrived a little out of weath before the Morello where "'Bgins, once more arrayed in ma-'oon ma-'oon and gilt, glared at me. "I'll trouble ye, Mallory," he ! jrowled, "for the key of me flat oowstairs. And I told ye to move your things last night." . 1 gave him the key and told him would call for the suitcase later. 1 meant to gall him by my manner I must have for he turned red-" red-" and muttered something about upstarts and "that old so-and-so up-sls up-sls " I grinned. "Miss So-and-so to you," t said, j went on in. ' lo'Tl patrician 8lom of the Morel-nad Morel-nad been proof against yester-' yester-' upheaval. Hoyt beamed at he took me upstairs, and mut- : . congratulations. Shannon, erg,ng tiora toe Ferriter flat as T 1 ilT?. from elevator, was not " wrfcaL He followed me into the "Set apartment. flight on the opposite white-M white-M 1 WaU 0 air shaft ailed soft A8 a' room with been' eC'ed Cheer- The sun had en no i more visibly marked by the Z than old Iady her- the,M . ta her wheel chair at fen r head' whte-haired and sleen h ftnot' suUen from lost ( ! looked far less competent ' AgathT cmJorning' David'" Miss 1 Slannon on. precisely- "Captain ask ne1mo 'ah and I'll have . your intentions." C'C Sotened toe police- ""se"""".' em before wIt" lone Pern 'Td like to see Pltase" a minut If you . u. iervlts -rf ... q I thought I heard her chuckle as she trundled away. All morning I plowed through the uncensored annals of the Paget ancestryquotations an-cestryquotations from innumerable innumera-ble books, excerpts from court records, rec-ords, old letters and the like all compiled, no doubt with frequent shudders, by Everett Ferriter, genealogist. gene-alogist. When someone moved in the hall, I found my eyes jumping from the scandalous annals before me to the open door. My heart would pound and then, when nothing happened, I would swear and bend again to my work. Once, in midmorning, I heard Allegra Al-legra laugh in the dining room. Toward To-ward noon Miss Agatha rolled herself her-self in. "Well," she asked, "do you begin i to see why I wanted a newspaper ' man to write it?" "I begin to see," I told her, "that j a book like this would sell." She lit a cigarette, blew smoke through her nose and shook her head. "I know," she said. "One of those literary strip dances. I'm a sinful bid woman, David, but I'm not selling sell-ing the bones of my ancestors, no matter what I think of their owners. This book will be a family affair. Allegra and I are going out to lunch and you better, too." I thought of my date with Cochrane Coch-rane and shook my head. "I had a late breakfast I'll slip out later. There's a lot of reading still ahead of me." "If you can't finish today," sht began, but I cut her short. "If I'm not in the way, I'll stay till I've finished. Then we can talk it over tomorrow morning and get to work." "You're an obstinate person, aren't you?" Miss Agatha asked, and grinned. "Aren't you?" I asked her. She chuckled and turned her chair. Her warmth almost made me halt her and confess my arrangement with Cochrane, but I hesitate and then she was gone. Later I saw Allegra push her aunt's wheel chair past the door. She did not look toward me and I took my mind by the scruff and jammed it back into its job so thoroughly thor-oughly that it was ten minutes past the time appointed when I recalled my tryst with Cochrane. He beamed as I took the seat opposite op-posite him. "I'm glad to see you, accomplice. We beat the town for one edition on Lyon's getting pinched." . "And got him unpinched again," I added, and told of Shannon's anger an-ger that morning, his squabble with Grosvenor, and the Ferriters' retreat re-treat to the Babylon. That pink and chubby mask through which he peered did not stir. He gave me an envelope. "Confirmatory letter from Milli-gan," Milli-gan," Cochrane explained, "and a week's pay in advance. There's an expense account on this job, too, if you need it. How far along have you got?" "As far," I told him, "as Selah Paget who died in the odor of sanctity sancti-ty and foreclosed mortgages in 1737." "Not that" he grinned "this killing." kill-ing." "Nowhere." "You and me both," he answered. "Let's order and then solve it." While we ate, we groped among the scant unrelated facts, making crazy guesses, building theories and pulling them down. There were only the dead man still, Cochrane said, unidentified and the guttural voice I had heard over the telephone. tele-phone. Except for that, he might as well have been struck by lightning. light-ning. No finger-prints, no weapons, no purpose in the killing, no clue to the slayer, no proof, beyond the phone call and the body, that anyone any-one had been in the Ferriter apartment apart-ment "I'm laying off mention of that voice on the phone," Cochrane said, sawing away at his steak. "Shannon "Shan-non is sitting on it and so am I. No use tipping off the gifted murderer to all we know." "Gifted is small praise," 1 told him. "We're tinkering around the perfect crime." "Hooey," he snapped. "Perfect crimes are as rare as perfect thirty-sixes, thirty-sixes, my lad." I liked his mind quick and daring dar-ing yet solid and it whetted mine. The long hand of the white-enameled wall clock circled its face while we talked and I forgot Miss Agatha and the waiting records of the Paget family in a spell that was half puzzle, puz-zle, half hunt Cochrane said at last: "What have we got? We know who had keys to the flat. All right one of the Ferriters or your friend Higgins did it Let's not kid ourselves. our-selves. One of them did. Yesterday noon, while you were away, and Higgins Hig-gins may have been downstairs, and. the other guy this Hoyt may have been upstairs with the elevator, eleva-tor, is the only time Blackbeard and his' able assassin could have got in. All right again. Then it wasn't a' planned murder because they couldn't have known that luck would leave the way clear. But it wasn't unintentional, at that. For they walked upstairs. As soon as the killer knew they hadn't been seen, he began to design slaughter. Right?" "As far as you've gone, I agreed. (TO BE CO.V77.NXED "You think maybe the Pagets had a hand in it?" be asked. his fist. Shannon, angry and thwarted, thwart-ed, welcomed opposition. "Is it?" he asked nastily. "Who found the corpse? Who is the only one we know was in that flat, besides be-sides the dead man? lone Ferriter, me lad. Make what you will of it" Grosvenor's voice shook. "I know what you dumb cops do, first crack," he shrilled. "If you're too thick to understand a thing, you try to pin it on a woman. Why don't you accuse my aunt? She lives here too. lone Ferriter knows no more about this thing than than you do." He choked and water slopped from the glass in his hand. He drank with hot eyes still fixed on Shannon. Shan-non. Miss Agatha said dryly: "I'd suggest, Grove, that you pull yourself together and get on downtown. down-town. If you will dance all night, you're bound to be jittery in the morning." The lad hesitated, rose and flung himself out of the room. Shannon asked without expression: expres-sion: "It's the Babylon they're stayin' at. Miss Paget?" Miss Agatha looked at him with studious care. "It is," she said at last. He let his eyes rest on me a second, sec-ond, nodded and left the room. Miss Agatha pushed her wheel chair back from the table and propelled it toward to-ward the hall. "Somehow," she said half to herself, her-self, "an outburst at breakfast makes me feel young again. It's as if my own dear father still were alive. In here, David." We entered the chamber into which I had carried her yesterday. She pointed to the paper-laden desk. "In the top drawer," she said, "you'll find my outline for a first chapter, together with Everett Fer-riter's Fer-riter's bowdlerizing expansion. When you've read his work, you'll know how I don't want the book written. The dossiers of the Pagets from the first Calvert who incidentally inci-dentally got a baronetcy under Charles II for double-crossing the Protectorate are there. You might read them, too. It'll be a long day's work, I said it would be, didn't I? If there's anything you want, there's a call-bell on the desk's edge." She nodded briskly and wheeled her chair about with deft hands. As she rolled toward the door, she said over her shoulder in a mild scathing scath-ing voice: "Mr. Ferriter is still too shaken by yesterday's happenings to work. I suppose if Captain Shannon calls at the Babylon, he will have another an-other relapse." |