The Greatest Works of Cleveland Moffett. Cleveland Moffett
was silent a moment. "Where is the banquet?"
"At the Ansonia. It's a new restaurant on the Champs Elysées, very swell. I didn't tell you because—well, because I didn't."
"Lloyd," she whispered, "don't go to the banquet."
"Don't go? Why, this is our national holiday. I'm down to tell some stories. I've got to go. Besides, I wouldn't come to you, anyway. What's the use? I've said all I can, and you've said 'No.' So it's all off—that's right, Alice, it's all off." His eyes were kinder now, but he spoke firmly.
"Lloyd," she begged, "come after the banquet."
"No!"
"I ask it for you. I—I feel that something is going to happen. Don't laugh. Look at the sky, there beyond the black towers. It's red, red like blood, and—Lloyd, I'm afraid."
Her eyes were fixed in the west with an enthralled expression, as if she saw something there besides the masses of red and purple that crowned the setting sun, something strange and terrifying. And in her agitation she took the book and pencil from the bench, and nervously, almost unconsciously wrote something on one of the fly leaves.
"Good-by, Alice," he said, holding out his hand.
"Good-by, Lloyd," she answered in a dull, tired voice, putting down the book and giving him her own little hand.
As he turned to go he picked up the volume and his eye fell on the fly leaf.
"Why," he started, "what is this?" He looked more closely at the words, then sharply at her.
"I—I'm so sorry," she stammered. "Have I spoiled your book?"
"Never mind the book, but—how did you come to write this?"
"I—I didn't notice what I wrote," she said, in confusion.
"Do you mean to say that you don't know what you wrote?"
"I don't know at all," she replied with evident sincerity.
"It's the damnedest thing I ever heard of," he muttered. And then, with a puzzled look: "See here, I guess I've been too previous. I'll cut out that banquet to-night—that is, I'll show up for soup and fish, and then I'll come to you. Do I get a smile now?"
"O Lloyd!" she murmured happily.
"I'll be there about nine."
"About nine," she repeated, and again her eyes turned anxiously to the blood-red western sky.
Chapter II.
Coquenil's Greatest Case
After leaving Notre-Dame, Paul Coquenil directed his steps toward the prefecture of police, but halfway across the square he glanced back at the church clock that shows its white face above the grinning gargoyles, and, pausing, he stood a moment in deep thought.
"A quarter to seven," he reflected; then, turning to the right, he walked quickly to a little wine shop with flowers in the windows, the Tavern of the Three Wise Men, an interesting fragment of old-time Paris that offers its cheery but battered hospitality under the very shadow of the great cathedral.
"Ah, I thought so!" he muttered, as he recognized Papa Tignol at one of the tables on the terrace. And approaching the old man, he said in a low tone: "I want you."
Tignol looked up quickly from his glass, and his face lighted. "Eh, M. Paul again!"
"I must see M. Pougeot," continued the detective. "It's important. Go to his office. If he isn't there, go to his house. Anyhow, find him and tell him to come to me at once. Hurry on; I'll pay for this."
"Shall I take an auto?"
"Take anything, only hurry."
"And you want me at nine o'clock?"
Coquenil shook his head. "Not until to-morrow."
"But the news you were going to tell me?"
"There'll be bigger news soon. Oh, run across to the church and tell Bonneton that he needn't come either."
"I knew it, I knew it," chuckled Papa Tignol, as he trotted off. "There's something doing!"
With this much arranged, Coquenil, after paying for his friend's absinthe, strolled over to a cab stand near the statue of Henri IV and selected a horse that could not possibly make more than four miles an hour. Behind this deliberate animal he seated himself, and giving the driver his address, he charged him gravely not to go too fast, and settled back against the cushions to comfortable meditations. "There is no better way to think out a tough problem," he used to insist, "than to take a very long drive in a very slow cab."
It may have been that this horse was not slow enough, for forty minutes later Coquenil's frown was still unrelaxed when they drew up at the Villa Montmorency, really a collection of villas, some dozens of them, in a private park near the Bois de Boulogne, each villa a garden within a garden, and the whole surrounded by a great stone wall that shuts out noises and intrusions. They entered by a massive iron gateway on the Rue Poussin and moved slowly up the ascending Avenue des Tilleuls, past lawns and trees and vine-covered walls, leaving behind the rush and glare of the city and entering a peaceful region of flowers and verdure where Coquenil lived.
The detective occupied a wing of the original Montmorency chateau, a habitation of ten spacious rooms, more than enough for himself and his mother and the faithful old servant, Melanie, who took care of them, especially during these summer months, when Madame Coquenil was away at a country place in the Vosges Mountains that her son had bought for her. Paul Coquenil had never married, and his friends declared that, besides his work, he loved only two things in the world—his mother and his dog.
It was a quarter to eight when M. Paul sat down in his spacious dining room to a meal that was waiting when he arrived and that Melanie served with solicitous care, remarking sadly that her master scarcely touched anything, his eyes roving here and there among painted mountain scenes that covered the four walls above the brown-and-gold wainscoting, or out into the garden through the long, open windows; he was searching, searching for something, she knew the signs, and with a sigh she took away her most tempting dishes untasted.
At eight o'clock the detective rose from the table and withdrew into his study, a large room opening off the dining room and furnished like no other study in the world. Around the walls were low bookcases with wide tops on which were spread, under glass, what Coquenil called his criminal museum. This included souvenirs of cases on which he had been engaged, wonderful sets of burglars' tools, weapons used by murderers—saws, picks, jointed jimmies of tempered steel, that could be taken apart and folded up in the space of a thick cigar and hidden about the person. Also a remarkable collection of handcuffs from many countries and periods in history. Also a collection of letters of criminals, some in cipher, with confessions of prisoners and last words of suicides. Also plaster casts of hands of famous criminals. And photographs of criminals, men and women, with faces often distorted to avoid recognition. And various grewsome objects, a card case of human skin, and the twisted scarf used by a strangler.
As for the shelves underneath, they contained an unequaled special library of subjects interesting to a detective, both science and fiction being freely drawn upon in French, English, and German, for, while Coquenil was a man of action in a big way, he was also a student and a reader of books, and he delighted in long, lonely evenings, when, as now, he sat in his comfortable study thinking, thinking.
Melanie entered presently with coffee and cigarettes, which she placed on a table near the green-shaded lamp, within easy reach of the great red-leather chair where M. Paul was seated. Then she stole out noiselessly. It was five minutes past eight, and for an hour Coquenil thought and smoked and drank coffee. Occasionally he frowned