From Place to Place. Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
educated; smokes cigarettes constantly; has one upper front tooth crowned with gold—" He hesitated, searching his memory for more details.
"Remember anything else about him that was striking?" prompted Green.
"Let's see?" pondered Mr. Cassidy. Then after a little pause, "No, that's all I seem to recall right now."
"How about his being a patron of moving pictures?"
"That's right," agreed the other, "that's the only part of it I forgot." He repeated pretty exactly the language of the concluding paragraph of the official police circular that all the papers had carried for days: "Formerly addicted to reading cheap and sensational novels, now an inveterate attendant of motion-picture theatres." He glanced at Judson Green over his cigar. "What's the idea?" he asked. "Know something about this case?"
"Not much," said Green, "except that I have found the man who killed old Steinway."
Forgetting his professional gravity, up rose Mr. Cassidy, and his chair, which had been tilted back, brought its forelegs to the floor with a thump.
"No!" he said, half-incredulously, half-hopefully.
"Yes," stated Mr. Green calmly. "At least I've found Maxwell. Or anyway, I think I have."
Long before he was through telling what he had seen and heard the afternoon before, Mr. Cassidy, surnamed Michael J., was almost sitting in his lap. When the younger man had finished his tale the detective fetched a deep and happy breath.
"It sounds good to me," he commented, "it certainly sounds to me like you've got the right dope on this party. But listen, Mr. Green, how do you figure in this here party's fad for getting himself manicured as a part of the lay-out—I can see it all but that?"
"Here is how I deduced that element of the case," stated Green. "Conceding this man to be the fugitive Maxwell, it is quite evident that he has a highly developed imagination—his former love of trashy literature and his present passion for moving pictures would both seem to prove that. Now then, you remember that all the accounts of that murder told of the deep marks of finger-nail scratches in the old man's throat. If this man is the murderer, I would say, from what we know of him, that he cannot rid himself of the feeling that the blood of his victim is still under his nails. And so, nursing that delusion, he goes daily to that manicure girl–"
He got no farther along than that. Mr. Cassidy extended his large right hand in a congratulatory clasp, and admiration was writ large upon his face.
"Colonel," he said, "you're immense—you oughter be in the business. Say, when are we going to nail this guy?"
"Well," said Green, "I think we should start watching his movements at once, but we should wait until we are pretty sure of the correctness of our theory before acting. And of course, in the meanwhile, we must deport ourselves in such a way as to avoid arousing his suspicions."
"Just leave that to me. You do the expert thinking on this here case; I'll guarantee a good job of trailing."
Inside of forty-eight hours these two, working discreetly, knew a good deal of their man. For example, they knew that under the name of Morrison he was living in a summer boarding house on a little hill rising to the west of the park; that he had been living there for a little more than a fortnight; that his landlady didn't know his business, but thought that he must be an invalid. Among the other lodgers the impression prevailed that he suffered from a nervous trouble. Mornings, he kept to his room, sleeping until late. In fact, as well as the couple occupying the room below his might judge, he did most of his sleeping in the daytime—they heard him night after night, walking the floor until all hours.
A maid-servant of ultra conversational tendencies gratuitously furnished most of these valued details, after Michael J. Cassidy had succeeded in meeting her socially.
Afternoons, the suspect followed a more or less regular itinerary. He visited the manicure girl at the new barber shop; he patronized one or both of the moving picture places in the vicinity, but usually both, and then he went for a solitary walk through the park, and along toward dusk he returned to the boarding house, ate his supper and went to his room. He had no friends, apparently; certainly he had no callers. He received no letters and seemingly wrote none. Cassidy was convinced; he burned with eagerness to make the arrest without further delay. For this would be more than a feather in the Cassidy cap; it would be a whole war bonnet.
"You kin stay in the background if you want to," he said. "Believe me, I'm perfectly willing to take all the credit for pulling off this pinch."
As he said this they were passing along Broadway just above the subway terminal. The straggling line of new shops was on one side and the park stretched away on the other. Green was on the inner side of the pavement. Getting no answer to his suggestion, Mr. Cassidy started to repeat it.
"I heard you," said Green, stopping now dead short, directly in front of the resplendent front of the Regal Motion Picture Palace. He contemplated with an apparently unwarranted interest the illuminated and lithographed announcements of the morrow's bill.
"I'm perfectly willing to stay in the background," he said. "But—but I've just this very minute thought of a plan that ought to make us absolutely sure of our man—providing the plan works! Are you at all familiar with the tragedy of 'Macbeth'?"
"I don't know as I am," admitted Mr. Cassidy honestly. "When did it happen and who done it?"
Again his employer seemed not to hear him.
"Let's go into this place," he said, turning in towards the hospitable portals of the Regal. "I want to have a business talk with the proprietor of this establishment, if he's in."
The manager was in, and they had their talk; but after all it was money—which in New York speaks with such a clarion-loud and convincing voice—that did most of the talking. As soon as Judson Green had produced a bill-roll of august proportions, the proprietor, doubtful until that moment, showed himself to be a man open to all reasonable arguments. Moreover, he presently scented in this enterprise much free advertisement for his place.
On the following afternoon, the weather being rainy, the Regal opened its doors for the three-o'clock performance to an audience that was smaller than common and mostly made up of dependable neighbourhood patrons. However, there were at least two newcomers present. They sat side by side, next to central aisle, in the rearmost row of chairs—Judson Green and Michael J. Cassidy. Their man was almost directly in front of them, perhaps halfway down toward the stage. Above a scattering line of heads of women and children they could see, in the half light of the darkened house, his head and shoulders as he bent his body forward at an interested angle.
Promptly on the hour, a big bull's-eye of light flashed on, making a shimmering white target in the middle of the screen. The music started up, and a moving-picture soloist with a moving-picture soloist's voice, appeared in the edge of the illuminated space and rendered a moving-picture ballad, having reference to the joys of life down in Old Alabam', where the birds are forever singing in the trees and the cotton-blossoms bloom practically without cessation. This, mercifully, being soon over, a film entitled "The Sheriff's Sweetheart" was offered, and for a time, in shifting pictures, horse-thieves in leather "chaps," and heroes in open-necked shirts, and dashing cow-girls in divided skirts, played out a thrilling drama of the West, while behind them danced and quivered a background labelled Arizona, but suggesting New Jersey. When the dashing and intrepid sheriff had, after many trials, won his lady love, the ballad singer again obliged throatily, and then from his coop in the little gallery the lantern man made an announcement, in large, flickering letters, of a film depicting William Shakespeare's play, "Macbeth."
Thereupon scene succeeded scene, unfolding the tragic tale. The ill-fated Duncan was slain; the Witches of Endor capered fearsomely about their fearsome cauldron of snaky, froggy horrors; and then—taking some liberties with the theme as set down by the original author—the operator presented a picture wherein Macbeth, tortured by sleeplessness and hag-ridden with remorse, saw, in imagination, the dripping blood upon his hands and vainly sought to scour it off.
Right here, too, came another innovation which might or might not have pleased the Bard of Avon. For as Macbeth wrestled with his fears, the phantom of the murdered Duncan, a cloaked,