The Stolen War-Secret. Arthur B. Reeve
on the telephone leave any message—give any name?” asked Craig.
“Yes. It was a man who seemed to be very much excited—said that it was Señor Morelos—just Senor Morelos—she would know.”
“What then?”
“Why, when he found he couldn’t get her, he rang off. A few minutes later her maid Juanita came in. The moment she opened the door with her key, she gave a scream and fainted.”
“Suicide?” I ventured under my breath to Kennedy, as McBride paused.
Craig said nothing. He was making a careful examination of both the room and of the body on the bed.
A moment later he looked up quickly, then bent down farther.
On her arm he had discovered a peculiar little red mark!
Gently, as if he would not hurt such an exquisite creature even in death, he squeezed a tiny drop of blood from the little puncture and caught it on a sterilized glass slide of a microscope, which he carried in a small compact emergency-case in his pocket.
He continued to rummage the room.
Thrown carelessly into a top drawer of the dressing-table was a chatelaine. He opened it. There seemed to be nothing there except several articles of feminine vanity. In the bottom, however, was a little silver box which he opened. There lay a number of queer little fuzzy buttons—at least they looked like buttons. He took one, examined it closely, found it rather soft, tasted it—made a wry face and dropped the whole thing into his pocket.
A HEAVY tap sounded on the door. McBride opened it. It was our old friend, Dr. Leslie, the coroner.
“Well,” he exclaimed taking in the whole situation, and hardly more surprised seeing us than at the strangeness of the handsome figure on the bed. “Well—what is all this?”
McBride shook his head gravely and repeated substantially what he had already told us.
There is no need to go into the lengthy investigation that the coroner conducted. He questioned one servant and employee after another, without eliciting any more real information than we had already obtained.
The maid was quite evidently a Mexican and spoke very little and very poor English. She seemed to be in great distress, and as far as we could determine it was genuine. Through her broken English and our own fragmentary knowledge of Spanish, we managed to extract her story, about as McBride had told it.
Madame Valcour had engaged her in Paris, where she had been taken and later had been thrown on her own resources by a family which had been ruined in the revolution in Mexico. As for a Monsieur Valcour, she had never seen him. She thought that Madame was a widow.
As the questioning continued, I read between the lines, however, that Madame Valcour was in all probability an adventuress of a high order, one of those female soldiers of fortune who, in Paris, London, New York, and all large cities, seem to have a way of bobbing up at the most unexpected moments, in some way connected, through masculine frailty, with great national and international events.
The questioning over, the coroner ordered that the body be sent down to one of the city hospitals where an autopsy could be performed, and we rode down in the elevator together.
“Extraordinary—most extraordinary,” repeated Dr. Leslie as we paused for a moment in an angle of the lobby to discuss the conclusion of his preliminary investigation. “There is just one big point, though, that we shall have to clear up before we can go ahead with anything else. What was the cause of death? There was no gas in the room. It couldn’t have been illuminating gas, then. It must have been a poison of some kind.”
“You assume then that it was suicide?” asked Kennedy keenly.
“Well,” he exclaimed taking in the whole “I assume nothing—yet,” replied the coroner, quickly backing water, and affecting the air of one who could say much if he chose but was stopped by professional and official etiquette.
“You’ll keep me informed as to what you do discover?” asked Kennedy with a deference that could not fail to be ingratiating.
“Indeed I will,” answered the coroner, cordially taking the flattery. “Now I must be off—let me see—an accident case. Yes indeed, Kennedy, I shall be only too glad to keep you informed and to have your co-operation on the case.”
“Poison of some kind,” repeated Kennedy as Dr. Leslie disappeared. “Sounds very simple when you put it that way. I wish I could handle the whole thing for him. However, I suspect he’ll come around in a day or two—begging me to help him save his precious reputation and find out what it really is.”
“I know what he’ll do,” asserted McBride with a scowl. “He’ll take this chance to rub it in on the Vanderveer. We’ve had a couple of suicides since we opened. It isn’t our fault if such things happen. But somehow or other it seems to appeal to the city official to blame some private agency for anything like this. I tell you, Kennedy, we’ve got to protect the reputation of the hotel against such things. Now, if you’ll take the case, I’ll see that you don’t lose anything by it.”
“Gladly,” replied Kennedy, to whom a mystery was as the breath of life. Then he added with a smile, “I had tacitly assumed as much after you spoke to me.”
“I meant that you should,” agreed McBride, “and I thank you. Only it is just as well that we understand each other clearly at the outset.”
“Exactly. Has anything in Madame Valcour’s actions about the hotel offered a clue—ever so slight?” asked Craig, plunging into the case eagerly.
“Perhaps,” hesitated McBride as if trying to separate something that might be trivial from that which might be really important. “When she came here about a week ago, she left word at the telephone-desk that if a Señor Morelos should call, she was at home.”
“Morelos?” repeated Kennedy. “That is the name of the man who called up to night. Did he call?”
“Not as far as I can find out.”
“But she must have had other callers,” pursued Craig, evidently thinking of the attractiveness of the woman.
“Yes indeed,” answered McBride, “plenty of them. In fact, she seemed never to be able to stir about downstairs without having some one looking at her and ogling.”
“Which is no crime,” put in Craig.
“No,” agreed McBride, “and to be perfectly fair to her, she never gave any of them any encouragement, as far as I could see.”
“You mentioned that she was a friend of Colonel Sinclair’s,” prompted Kennedy.
“Oh yes,” recollected McBride. “He called on her—once, I think. Then for a couple of days she was away—out on Long Island, I believe she left word. It seems that there is a sort of Summer settlement of Mexicans and Latin-Americans generally out there, at a place called Seaville. It was only today that she returned from her visit.”
“Seaville,” repeated Kennedy. “That is out somewhere near Westport, the home of Sinclair, isn’t it?”
“I believe it is,” remarked McBride.
He was chewing his unlighted cigar thoughtfully, as we tried to piece together the fragmentary bits of the story.
Suddenly he removed the cigar contemplatively.
“I have been wondering,” he said slowly, “just what she was here for anyway. I can’t say that there is anything that throws much light on the subject. But she was so secretive, she threw such an air of mystery about herself, never told any one much about her goings-out or comings-in, and in fact seemed to be so careful—well, I’ve just been wondering whether she wasn’t mixed up in some plot or other, wasn’t playing a deeper game than we suspect with these precious friends of hers.”
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