"Persons Unknown". Virginia Tracy
and the Kassites; within a few months Marion was married; and Herrick, with something like Whittington's sixpence in his pocket, famished for adventure and companionship, with the appetite of a man and the experience of a boy, started for the rainbow metropolis of his five-years' dream. In this mood he had rushed into the hot stone desert of New York in summer—a New York already changed, and which seemed to have dropped him out!
But he brought, like other young desperadoes, his first novel with him; and he had approached the junior partner of the famous old house of Ingham and Son with letters from mutual friends in Brainerd. Now, at last, within twenty-four hours after his own return from abroad, Ingham—himself scarcely a decade older than Herrick, preceding him at the same university, and with a Brainerd man for a brother-in-law—had responded with the invitation to lunch. Yes, it was exciting enough! Herrick looked at his watch. It was barely ten. And then he took time to remember when he had last looked at his watch in that room.
Certainly, it was rather grim! And yet, said the desperado, it wasn't going to be such a bad thing with which to command Ingham's interest at lunch and get him into a confidential humor that wouldn't be too superior. While he was attempting to inspire Ingham with a craving for his complete works, this thrilling topic would be just the thing to do away with self-consciousness. He mustn't lose faith in himself. And, before all things, he mustn't, as he had done last night, lose faith in his Heroine!
He looked across the room at her picture; got out of bed; walked over to her, and humbly saluted. Lose faith in her? "Evadne," he said, "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous—You darling!" Lose faith in her!
The photograph, which looked like an enlargement of a kodak, represented a very young girl, standing on a strip of beach with her back to the sea. Her sailor tie, her white dress, and the ends of her uncovered hair all seemed to flutter in the wind. Slim and tall as Diana she showed, in her whole light poise, like a daughter of the winds, and Herrick was sure that she was of a fresh loveliness, a fair skin and brown hair, with eyes cool as gray water. It was the eyes, after all, which had wholly captured his imagination. They were extraordinarily candid and wide-set; in a shifting world they were entirely brave. This was what touched him as dramatic in her face; she was probably in the new dignity of her first long skirts, so that all that candor and courage, all the alert quiet of those intelligent eyes were only the candor and courage of a kind of royal child. She wanted to find out about life; she longed to try everything and to face everything; but she was only a tall little girl! That was the look his Heroine must have! Thus had she come adventuring to New York with him, to seek their fortunes, and all during those dreary months of heat and dust she had borne him happy company; in the Park or in the Bowery, at Coney Island or along Fifth Avenue's deserted pomp, he had always tried to see, for the novel, how things would look to that young eagerness—no more ardent, had he but realized it, than his own!—"Evadne," said he, now, "if things look promising with Ingham this afternoon we'll take a taxi, to-night, and see the moon rise up the river." He called her Evadne when he was talking about the moon; when he required her pity because the laundress had faded his best shirt, he called her Sal.
A sound as of the Grubey children snuffling round his door recalled him to the illustrious circumstance that he was by way of being a hero of a murder story. But, if he was nursing pride in that direction, it was destined to a fall. Johnnie Grubey thrust under the door something which, as he had brought it up from the mail-box in the vestibule, Johnnie announced as mail. But it was only a large, rough scrap of paper, which astonished Herrick by turning out to be wall-paper—a ragged sample of the pale green "cartridge" variety that so largely symbolizes apartment-house refinement—and which confronted him from its smoother side with the lines, penciled in a long, pointed, graceful hand,
For the Apollo in the bath-robe! Or was it a raincoat?
But should not Apollos stay in when it rains?
It was many a day since Herrick had received a comic valentine, but all the appropriate sensations returned to him then. The hand of this neighborly jest was plainly a woman's and its slap brought a blush. He was forced to grin; but he longed to evade the solemn questioning of the Grubeys through whose domain he must presently venture to his bath and it occurred to him that the most peaceful method of clearing a road was to send out the younger generation for a plentiful supply of newspapers. Besides, he wished very much to see the papers himself.
He distributed them freely and escaped back to his room still carrying three. When he had closed his door, the first paragraph which met his eyes was on the lower part of the sheet which he held folded in half. It began—"The body of Mr. Ingham was not found in the living-room, but—" He flapped it over, agog for the headlines. They read:
DEATH BAFFLES POLICE.
James R. Ingham, Noted Publisher, Found Shot in Apartment—
Herrick was still standing with the paper in his hand when the second Grubey boy brought him a visiting-card. It bore the name of Hermann E. Deutch; and scribbled beneath this in pencil was the explanatory phrase, "Superintendent, Van Dam Apartment House."
CHAPTER VI
HERRICK IS ASKED A FAVOR
Hermann Deutch was a shortish, middle-aged Jew, belonging to the humbler classes and of a perfectly cheap and cheerful type. But at the present moment he was not cheerful. He showed his harassment in the drawn diffidence of his sympathetic, emotional face, and in every line of what, ten or fifteen years ago, must have been a handsome little person. Since that period his tight black curls, receding further and further from his naturally high forehead, had grown decidedly thin, and exactly the reverse of this had happened to his figure. But he had still a pair of femininely liquid and large black eyes, brimming with the romance which does not characterize the cheap and cheerful of other races, and Herrick remembered him last night as very impressionably, but not basely, nervous.
He now fixed his liquid eyes upon Herrick with an anxiety which took humble but minute notes. Since the young fellow was at least half-dressed in very well-cut and well-cared-for, if not specially new, garments, it was clear to Mr. Deutch's reluctant admiration that he was thoroughly "high-class!" Whatever was Mr. Deutch's apprehension, it shrank weakly back upon itself. Then he simply took his life in his hands and plunged.
"I won't keep you a minute, Mr. Herrick. But I've got a little favor I want to ask you.—You behaved simply splendid last night, Mr. Herrick.—Well, I will, thanks,"—as he dropped into a chair. "I—I won't keep you a minute—"
"I'll be glad to do anything I can," Herrick interrupted.
The news in his paper had made him feel as if he had just been disinherited and, now that the dead man was a personality so much nearer home, his brain rang with a hundred impressions of pity and wonder and excitement. But he sympathized with poor Mr. Deutch; it could be no sinecure to be the superintendent of a murder! Then, recollecting, "What made you so certain it was suicide?" he asked suddenly.
"What else could it be? There wasn't anybody but him there."
"There was a woman there," Herrick said, "when the shot was fired."
The superintendent took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. "Well, now, Mr. Herrick, that's just what I wanted to see you about. Now please, Mr. Herrick, don't get excited and mad! All I want to say is, if there was a lady there last night—but there couldn't have been—well, of course, Mr. Herrick, if you say so! Why, you couldn't have seen her so very plain, now could you?"
"What are you driving at?" Herrick asked.
"Couldn't it have been a gentleman's shadow you saw, Mr. Herrick? Mr. Ingham's shadow? Raising his pistol, maybe, with one hand—"
"While