American Sherlocks by Nick Rennison (reading like a writer .TXT) 📕

kicked a rocker to my side and dropped into it with a rueful glance at the rumpled sheets of the bed. With Madelyn Mack at the telephone at midnight, only one conclusion was possible; and such a conclusion shattered all thought of sleep.

‘Have you read the evening dispatches from Boston, Nora?’

‘I have read nothing – except the report of the Farragut jury!’ I returned crisply. ‘Why?’

‘If you had, you would perhaps divine the reason of my call. I have been retained in the Rennick murder case. I’m taking the one-thirty sleeper for Boston. I secured our berths just before I telephoned.’

‘Our berths!’

‘I am taking you with me. Now that you are up, you may as well dress and ring for a taxicab. I will meet you at the Roanoke hotel.’

‘But,’ I protested, ‘don’t you think –’

‘Very well, if you don’t care to go! That settles it!’

‘Oh, I will be there!’ I said with an air of resignation. ‘Ten minutes to dress, and fifteen minutes for the taxi!’

‘I will add five minutes for incidentals,’ Madelyn replied and hung up the receiver.

The elevator boy at ‘The Occident,’ where I had my modest apartment, had become accustomed to the strange hours and strange visitors of a newspaper woman during my three years’ residence. He opened the door with a grin of sympathy as the car reached my floor. As though to give more active expression to his feelings he caught up my bag and gave it a place of honour on his own stool.

‘Going far?’ he queried as I alighted at the main corridor.

‘I may be back in twenty-four hours and I may not be back for twenty-four days,’ I answered cautiously – I knew Madelyn Mack!

As I waited for the whir of the taxicab, I appropriated the evening paper on the night clerk’s desk. The Rennick murder case had been given a three-column head on the front page. If I had not been so absorbed in the Farragut trial, it could not have escaped me. I had not finished the headlines, however, when the taxi, with a promptness almost uncanny, rumbled up to the curb.

I threw myself back against the cushions, switched on the electric light, and spread my paper over my knee, as the chauffeur turned off toward Fifth Avenue. The story was well written and had made much of a few facts. Trust my newspaper instinct to know that! I had expected a fantastic puzzle – when it could spur Madelyn into action within six hours after her landing – but I was hardly anticipating a problem such as I could read between rather than in the lines of type before me. Long before the ‘Roanoke’ loomed into view, I had forgotten my lost sleep.

The identity of Raymond Rennick’s assassin was as baffling as in the first moments of the discovery of the tragedy. There had been no arrests – nor hint of any. From the moment when the secretary had turned into the gate of the Duffield yard until the finding of his body, all trace of his movements had been lost as effectually as though the darkness of midnight had enveloped him, instead of the sunlight of noon. More than ten minutes could not have elapsed between his entrance into the grounds and the discovery of his murder – perhaps not more than five – but they had been sufficient for the assassin to effect a complete escape.

There was not even the shadow of a motive. Raymond Rennick was one of those few men who seemed to be without an enemy. In an official capacity, his conduct was without a blemish. In a social capacity, he was admittedly one of the most popular men in Brookline – among both sexes. Rumour had it, apparently on unquestioned authority, that the announcement of his engagement to Beth Duffield was to have been an event of the early summer. This fact was in my mind as I stared out into the darkness.

On a sudden impulse, I opened the paper again. From an inside page the latest photograph of the Senator’s daughter, taken at a fashionable Boston studio, smiled up at me. It was an excellent likeness as I remembered her at the inaugural ball the year before – a wisp of a girl, with a mass of black hair, which served to emphasize her frailness. I studied the picture with a frown. There was a sense of familiarity in its outlines, which certainly our casual meeting could not explain. Then, abruptly, my thoughts flashed back to the crowded court room of the afternoon – and I remembered.

In the prisoner’s dock I saw again the figure of Beatrice Farragut, slender, fragile, her white face, her sombre gown, her eyes fixed like those of a frightened lamb on the jury which was to give her life – or death.

‘She poison her husband?’ had buzzed the whispered comments at my shoulders during the weary weeks of the trial. ‘She couldn’t harm a butterfly!’ Like a mocking echo, the tones of the foreman had sounded the answering verdict of murder – in the first degree. And in New York this meant –

Why had Beatrice Farragut suggested Beth Duffield? Or was it Beth Duffield who had suggested – I crumpled the paper into a heap and tossed it from the window in disgust at my morbid imagination. B-u-r-r-h! And yet they say that a New York newspaper woman has no nerves!

A voice hailed us from the darkness and a white-gowned figure sprang out on to the walk. As the chauffeur brought the machine to a halt, Madelyn Mack caught my hands.

Her next two actions were thoroughly characteristic.

Whirling to the driver, she demanded shortly, ‘How soon can you make the Grand Central Station?’

The man hesitated. ‘Can you give me twenty minutes?’

‘Just! We will leave here at one sharp. You will wait, please!’

Having thus disposed of the chauffeur – Madelyn never gave a thought to the matter of expense! – she seized my arm and pushed me through