American Sherlocks Nick Rennison (best big ereader txt) 📖

The car turned into Forty-fourth, passed the brownstone houses where every door bore its sign: ‘Table Board. Furnished Rooms.’ A red-headed boy ran out into the street, and the chauffeur slowed up.

‘It’s t’ree houses down, Mr Colton.’ The Fee’s voice fairly trembled with excitement. ‘He’s on the top floor. Kin I go with yuh?’

Colton nodded and stepped down from the machine. ‘We’ll walk the rest of the way,’ he told them. He started, the bright-eyed boy at his elbow.

They mounted the steps of a brownstone house, and Colton rang the bell. A frowsy-haired lady in a grease-spotted kimono opened the door. The smell of cooking onions assailed their nostrils; somewhere within a piano banged out a ragtime tune; a raucous voice screeched: ‘I call her Little Hy’cinth, but her name’s M’Swigg’; from the depths of the house a squeaky clarinet piped off-key opera.

‘Profesh’n?’ snapped the lady of the kimono suspiciously before anyone had a chance to speak.

‘We want to see Signor Delvetoi,’ said the blind man quietly.

Sydney Thames never remembered the short colloquy that followed; never recollected just how they entered the house. Signor Delvetoi! That name drove everything else from his mind. Once more he saw the black-clothed, black-bearded man at the theatre; again he saw the whirling knives flashing from the darkness into the beam of the calcium to bury their points beside the woman of the golden frame; once more came to his mind the wonderful skill that had directed those keen-pointed knives toward their target of living flesh – to brush a cheek and not even scratch it.

Then he found himself following the others up the narrow stairs. In the second floor hallway a fat, greasy-faced woman murmured husky endearments to a monkey in her arms, while a goose waddled at her side. A dozen discordant tunes came from the closed rooms. This was the place they had come to arrest a murderer!

On the third floor Thornley Colton stopped and knocked on a door panel. Thames could feel the tenseness of the men’s bodies as they crowded up close to the door as it slowly opened. Standing before them, framed in the light that came into the hallway from the room, stood a big man in a stained red bath-robe that trailed the floor behind the worn carpet-slippers. His head was bald, and across the skull ran a livid scar; his face was a deep-lined, jaundiced yellow.

‘We want you for the murder of Cartwright and the girl at the theatre.’ That was all Colton said, and his voice was low.

For an instant the face of the man went a fish-belly white; then murderous red rage leaped to the cheeks, and darted from the slit eyes.

‘You devils!’ he shrieked.

The red robe was flung back; but with a movement as quick as light itself Colton’s hand darted out, closed with a grip of steel on a wrist, and the red robe whirled as the man spun to his knees.

‘Better handcuff him,’ advised the blind man quietly, as he pushed aside the fallen knife with the thin cane that had warned him of the murderous movement. The handcuffs clicked on the knife-thrower’s wrists as the chief dragged him to a chair.

‘So you’re the one, eh?’ The detective chief tried to make his tone casual, but he could not keep the wonder from his eyes, or voice.

‘Oh, you got me right,’ sneered the knife-thrower.

‘How did you do it?’ put in Rogers dazedly. The picture he had seen the night before was still in his mind.

A cunning light leaped to the half-closed eyes of the red-robed man. ‘D’you want to hear the whole thing?’ he asked. ‘You might as well,’ he boasted. ‘I’ll never swing for it.’

‘Go ahead,’ growled the chief, drawing his chair up closer and placing his revolver on his knees. The knife-thrower grinned sneeringly.

‘Well,’ he began, and his evil eyes seemed to gloat at them. ‘I’m the only man in the world that could have pulled the trick. It took years of practice to get it down pat, but there’s Indian blood in me, mixed with the Irish. They don’t know much about me in this country, and I didn’t want them to, till I got Jim Cartwright. But in Europe I’m the best in the business, and I’m the only one that could ever plant five knives in a spot the size of a half-dollar at thirty feet, and do it on the level.’

There was boasting in the tone, but to Sydney Thames, who had seen his amazing work of the night before, it was not idle boasting.

‘The story of why I killed Cartwright is the same old game: I had a woman and he took her. She wasn’t much good, only a doll-faced fool, and there was a squalling kid that got on my nerves; but she was mine, body and soul.’ The listening men gritted their teeth at the tone, and he sneered at them for it. ‘Cartwright took her, and I went after them both. I had a little money, I was headin’ the olio in a burlesque. Before I started I went in a place along the river front in Chicago, where I was. I musta showed my roll, because – now I don’t expect you to believe what’s comin’, and I don’t give a damn whether you do or not!’ There was sullen defiance in the voice. ‘But I woke up in a hospital I never saw before, and the nurse talked German! It was in Berlin, and it was ten years after! Oh, it wasn’t anything new, the doctors told me. One of the Windy City thugs had lead-piped me for my roll; you can see the scar I got. Something cracked in my head then, and when I woke I’d just been in a German train smash-up. The doctors said the bump I got there straightened me out.

‘I remembered everything after