American Sherlocks Nick Rennison (best big ereader txt) 📖

had been characteristic was gone, his big hands trembled. He tried in vain to get permission to remove the girl’s body from the morgue immediately. But the law demanded that the coroner see it first; and the official was out of town.

Cartwright remembered his political friends. He tried to locate a dozen over the telephone and failed. Then, by chance, he met the one man in the city who could help him; the one man among the four millions whom he could trust: Theodore Rogers, the theatrical lawyer, a friend for thirty years.

He tried to tell Rogers what he wanted, but his nervousness made his words a jumble.

‘What is it, Jim? What’s the trouble?’ Rogers shook him, and he looked into his eyes anxiously.

Cartwright told him of the shooting. ‘And, by God, Ted!’ he finished passionately. ‘I won’t rest a minute till I see that devil in the electric chair! God! To kill a girl like that!’

The lawyer looked at him curiously. This was not the cool, suave Cartwright he had known so long.

Cartwright read the look on the lawyer’s face, and the thoughts behind it. ‘Not that! I swear it’s not that, Ted!’ he choked.

‘Come, have a drink,’ pleaded Rogers, pulling him toward the lighted entrance of a rathskeller.

‘With that girl on a slab in the morgue?’

‘One drink,’ insisted Rogers. ‘You are worse than useless this way. Come!’

He dragged Cartwright down the steps. The clock over the bar said half-past two, and the leather-seated booths were in darkness. But drinks could be had. The barman dozed, and the lone waiter yawned as he carried a tray toward the booths in the rear. Rogers led the theatrical man to a seat at the side of the room in front of the bar, ordered whisky, and waited patiently until Cartwright had gulped down the liquor.

‘Now tell me about it, Jim,’ demanded Rogers.

Cartwright, as near the end of the leather seat as he could get, glanced at the dark booths in the back, then turned and surveyed the front of the place. The rathskeller was empty, except for the dozing barman and the waiter, who had gone into one of the front booths to figure his day’s checks.

‘Don’t think – what you’ve been thinking about me and that girl, Ted.’ There was almost pathetic pleading in the manager’s voice; it was pitched so low that even the lawyer at the other side of the narrow table could scarcely hear. ‘She was – a daughter to me – the daughter of the only woman I ever loved.’

Rogers stared. This from the man Broadway thought it knew!

‘Remember twenty years ago?’ continued Cartwright, in that same low, pleading voice.

‘The girl I took away from Kelly, that drunken burlesque magician?’

The lawyer nodded, a look of understanding in his eyes.

‘You know we loved each other, and we ran away; she, and I, and the six months old kid,’ he went on. ‘You know how she died: killed in the C & O wreck two hours out of Chicago, two hours after we started – and the kid under her body, alive! I guess that’s what woke me up. All I thought about after that was making money for the kid. I put her with good people, and I didn’t tell them who she was, or who I was. When she got old enough to understand, I adopted her legally. But she never knew who her father and mother were. I couldn’t tell her about the drunken sot that died in the Chicago alcoholic ward. A thing like that would have spoiled her.

‘She was born with music in her. I kept her away from me and the people that knew me. I sent her abroad. And tonight was her try-out! I wanted to see if she could face the lights, because I wouldn’t have her laughed at by the highbrows if she couldn’t make good. And she did! God, how they went wild! I wouldn’t tell a soul that she was my adopted daughter – until tomorrow. Now –’ He fingered his whisky glass with twitching hands.

Theodore Rogers, whose heart was reputed to be of stone, felt a lump in his throat. He pushed his gloves from the table, so in bending he would get the needed instant to hide his feelings. Something made him jerk up his head! He saw –

The roar of the pistol in his ears deafened him. He cried out as the long-barrelled gun recoiled across the table and struck him, butt foremost, on the chest. His glass was crashed to a hundred pieces as the pistol fell on the table before him. The white shirt front of Cartwright was black, a small circle of fire glowed in the linen; on his face was an awful look of horror as his head pitched forward on his arms.

And then Rogers understood what his eyes had first seen; the picture that had lasted but the hundredth part of a second, perhaps, but which would be graven on his mind for a lifetime.

He had seen the pistol against Cartwright’s heart, with nothing to hold it there; the recoil of the explosion had driven it across the table before it fell, because no human hand had grasped it; no finger had pulled the trigger!

III

In the darkness of his library Thornley Colton paced back and forth. The cigarette-end glowed and died as he puffed thoughtfully. Each detail of the girl’s murder at the theatre, described to him by the excited Sydney, while panic had raged above them and below them in the playhouse the night before, was being visualized by the wonderful brain that so unerringly found logic in seeming absurdity; explanation in apparent impossibility – because that brain had never been tricked by seeing eyes.

The murder of the girl had moved him mightily; the stilling forever of that wonderful music seemed more a crime against the world than against an individual. And as he paced the curtained room the mosaics of detail became a complete picture, and he