Drury Lane’s Last Case (24 page)

“No, sir. That's how I knew Dr. Ales must have gone away the night before, the same night he sent me off to Tarrytown. Because on Tuesday morning I saw he hadn't slept in his bed.”

“Why the dickens didn't you say so before?” snapped Thumm. “That's important. It means that whatever happened here that Monday night happened before Ales turned in. I mean—before Sedlar turned in.”

“Here, here, Inspector,” smiled the old gentleman. “Let's not become involved. Suppose for the time being, at any rate, we continue to refer to the missing tenant of this establishment as Dr. Ales.… Dr. Ales.” He smiled again, queerly. “Odd name, eh? Has it struck any of you how odd it is?”

Gordon Rowe, who was rummaging through a wardrobe closet, straightened up. “It's struck
me
how odd it is,” he said sharply, “and if there is any sense or pattern to the phenomenon of this benighted world, its oddity makes the Inspector right and you wrong, Mr. Lane!”

“Ah, Gordon,” said Lane with the same queer smile. “I might have known it wouldn't escape that terrier's pertinacity of yours.”

“What do you mean?” cried Patience.

“Escape what?” roared the Inspector, crimson with exasperation.

Joe Villa dropped disgustedly into the single chair, as if he were bored to tears with the antics of these maniacs. As for Maxwell, he stared at them with his mouth half-open, the picture of idiocy.

“The fact,” snapped Rowe, “that Dr. Ales has six very peculiar letters to his name. Think
that
over.”

“Letters?” echoed Patience blankly. “A-l-e-s.… Oh, Gordon, I'm so stupid!”

“Oh, yeah?” mumbled the Inspector. “A-l-e-s …”

“Not A-l-e-s,” said Lane. “D-r-a-l-e-s.”

“Drales?” frowned Patience.

Rowe shot a strange look at Lane. “So you
did
see it! Patience, don't you understand that the letters of the name ‘Dr. Ales' make a perfectly gorgeous anagram?”

Patience's eyes widened, and she went a little pale. She breathed a name.

“Exactly. The letters of the name ‘Dr. Ales' spell with the simplest sort of rearrangement the name … ‘Sedlar'!”

“How true,” murmured the old gentleman.

For a moment there was silence. Then Rowe very quietly returned his attention to the wardrobe.

“Say!” exclaimed the Inspector. “You're not so dumb after all, youngster! Well, Lane, you can't get around
that
.”

“Perhaps it doesn't require getting around,” smiled Lane. “No, I agree with Gordon that the anagram ‘Dr. Ales' is much too felicitous to be a coincidence. There's design there. But what sort of design, springing from what source, with what purpose …” He shrugged. “I've learned one thing since the time I began to investigate the vagaries of the human mind. And that is never to leap at conclusions.”

“Well, I'm ready to leap at this one,” began the Inspector harshly, when there was a satisfied grunt from young Rowe.

He backed out of the wardrobe, muttering to himself. Then he turned quickly and thrust his unwounded hand behind him.

“Guess what I've found,” he said with a grin. “Dr. Ales, old boy, you're a rotten and slightly mildewed Machiavelli!”

“Gordon! What have you found?” exclaimed Patience, taking a hasty step toward him.

He waved her off with his bandaged arm. “Now, now, little lady, live up to your name.” He dropped his grin abruptly. “This ought to interest you, Mr. Lane,” and he brought his sound arm forward. Among his fingers flowed a green-and-blue mat of false hair, neatly shaped. It was beyond question the extraordinary beard which Inspector Thumm's client had worn on his memorable visit to the Thumm Detective Agency on the sixth of May.

Before they could recover from their stupefaction, Rowe turned and dug again into the wardrobe. He brought out in succession three other objects—a soft hat of peculiar shade of blue, a pair of blue-tinted spectacles, and a luxuriant grey moustache.

“This is my lucky day,” chuckled the young man. “Well, what do you think of these little exhibits?”

“I'll be eternally damned,” said the Inspector blankly, regarding Rowe with grudging admiration.

“Oh, Gordon!”

Lane took beard, spectacles, moustache, and hat from Rowe. “I suppose there's no doubt,” he murmured, “that the beard and glasses are the same?”

“Listen,” growled Thumm. “There couldn't be two brushes like that in the whole world. Can y' imagine a sane man
wearin
' that thing?”

“Certainly.” Lane smiled. “Under certain very odd circumstances. Maxwell, have you ever seen these articles before?”

The servant, who had been staring at the beard with horrified fascination, shook his head. “Except for the hat, I never saw them, sir.”

The old gentleman grunted. “The hat.… Villa, is this the hat Dr. Ales was wearing the day you followed him to the Britannic? And the moustache?”

“Sure. I tol' you this guy's up to somepin'. I ain't——”

“Tangible proof,” Lane said in a musing way. “There's no doubt but that the man who left the envelope with you on May sixth, Inspector, and the man who burgled the Britannic on the afternoon of May twenty-seventh, were indentical. On the face of it——”

“On the face of it,” said the Inspector with a bitter savagery, “it's a clear case. With this evidence, and with the testimony of Crabbe and Villa and the swell proof of that snapshot, there's nothing to it. I tell you there's no Sedlar in this case at all!”

“No Sedlar? Inspector, you astonish me. What do you mean?”

“But there is a Sedlar,” objected Rowe, and Patience frowned at her father.

Thumm grinned. “I've busted the back of this mystery, by God! It's simple as pie. The man who showed up at the museum claiming to be the new curator they hired, Dr. Sedlar, isn't Dr. Sedlar at all! He's Dr. Ales, whoever
he
is! But I'll bet you a good smack in the whiskers that Ales managed to
do away with Sedlar
when Sedlar landed in New York and before the English johnnie could make tracks for his new job, took Sedlar's place—impersonating him maybe on the basis of a superficial resemblance, in build, height, and so on; these limeys look all alike anyway—and then started the whole train of monkeyshines. I tell you your slippery Dr. Ales is not only a thief but a
murderer
.”

“The question, it seems to me,” remarked Rowe, “is: Who
is
Dr. Ales?”

“You could put your theory to a very simple test, you know,” said Lane with a twinkle. “Simply cable your friend Trench of Scotland Yard to dig up a photograph of Hamnet Sedlar and send it to you.”

“There's an idea!” cried Patience.

“Come to think of it, I'm not so sure——” began Lane.

The Inspector, whose underlip had been creeping forward by marked degrees during this interlude, suddenly turned scarlet and threw up his hands. “Nuts!” he roared. “I'm finished with this whole damned case. I'm not going to do another lick of work on it. I'm through, I tell you. It's got me so I can't sleep nights. The hell with it. Patty, come on!”

“But what shall I do?” asked Maxwell helplessly. “I've got some of Dr. Ales's money left, but if he isn't coming back——”

“Forget it, old boy. Close up the joint and go home. Patty——”

“I think not,” murmured Mr. Drury Lane. “No, Inspector, I think not. Maxwell, it might be an excellent idea for you to remain on the premises quite as if nothing had happened.”

“Yes, sir?” said Maxwell, scratching his doughy cheeks.

“And if Dr. Ales should return—which is not at all without the realm of possibility—I'm sure the Inspector will be glad to hear the news.”

“Yes, sir,” said Maxwell with a sigh.

“Damn it, I won't——” grumbled the Inspector.

“Come, you old thunderer,” smiled Lane, “give Maxwell one of your cards.… That's better!” He linked his arm in Thumm's. “Remember, Maxwell, the instant Dr. Ales returns!”

21

Wickedness in Westchester

And then, as suddenly as if a blight had fallen upon it, the case died. For over a week it lay supine in death; nothing happened, nothing new was learned, and moreover no one seemed greatly to care.

The Inspector was as good as his word; he definitely threw up the case. His investigation into the jewel robbery he had mentioned—a sensational affair involving a valuable rope of pearls and an assault upon a languorous
demi-mondaine
nesting in the clouds above Park Avenue—consumed the Inspector's whole attention; he rarely appeared at his office and when he did it was merely for a snatched glance through his mail. The Thumm Detective Agency, except for an occasional visit by Patience, was left to the tearful mercies of Miss Brodie.

As for Patience, she had suddenly acquired a passion for learning. She haunted the Britannic Museum, to the mute approval of various gentlemen of the trades who were still busy applying architectural and ornamental cosmetics to that sadly battered edifice; and she and young Mr. Rowe applied themselves with all outward signs of diligence to research in Shakespeare. The Bard, it was to be feared, did not yield many of his secrets during this collaboration in literary history. Between discussing the enigmatic Dr. Sedlar and themselves. Patience and Rowe made little progress in Rowe's labours.

But the least concerned of all, it seemed, was Mr. Drury Lane. He sequestered himself in his convenently impregnable fortress, The Hamlet, and for nine days preserved a monastic silence.

There were picayune interludes. During the week, for example, two letters arrived at the Inspector's office which had a direct bearing upon the all-but-abandoned investigation. One was from Dr. Leo Schilling, Chief Medical Examiner of New York County, the medico-criminological terror of Manhattan's murderers. As a chemical symbol, the worthy physician wrote, the characters
3HS wM
were absolutely meaningless. At first he had thought of splitting the symbol into its componenets.
3HS
might mean three parts of hydrogen and sulphur; but unfortunately there was no such chemical compound, since one molecule of hydrogen had from Priestley's day, and before, stubbornly refused to combine chemically with one molecule of sulphur. As for the small
w
, it possessed various chemical interpretations, Dr. Schilling continued; such as
watt, th
e electrical term, and
wolframite
, which was a rare metal. Capital
M
being the generic sign for “metal,” there might be a connection between the
M
and the
w
, if the
w
stood for wolframite. “In general, however,” the Medical Examiner's report concluded, “my opinion is that this hodge-podge of number plus small and capital letters is plain nonsense. It has no scientific meaning at all.”

The second letter was from Lieutenant Schiff, cipher expert at the Bureau of Intelligence in Washington. Lieutenant Schiff excused himself for the delay in replying to Inspector Thumm's curious inquiry; he had been very busy; perhaps he had not given the symbol the proper study; but it was his opinion that “as a cipher or crypt it is so much abracadabra.” He did not believe it could be broken down, if it was intended as a cipher; if anything, it was possibly the kind of cipher for which prearranged secret code-meanings had been assigned to the individual characters. An expert might spend months searching for the key or code and still be unsuccessful.

Patience was near tears; she had secretly spent many sleepless nights puzzling over the odd symbol. Rowe comforted her rather helplessly; he had no better luck.

Other reports trickled in, similarly unenlightening. One was a confidential note from Inspector Geoghan: detectives from headquarters had spent fruitless days endeavouring to pick up Dr. Hamnet Sedlar's trail in New York City between May twenty-second, the day on which the
Carinthia
had docked, and May twenty-ninth, when he officially presented himself at the Britannic Museum. Inquiry at the Hotel Seneca, where the Englishman had then taken up residence, merely revealed that a Dr. Sedlar had engaged a room on the morning of May twenty-ninth—an obvious development, since it was the natural step to take after the man's false story of having arrived from England on the twenty-ninth. He had had bulky luggage. He was still living at the Seneca, a quiet middle-aged Englishman who took his meals alone in the Hunting Room and, on those occasions when he happened to be in the hotel afternoons, ordered four o'clock tea which he consumed in the staid seclusion of his room.

The unfortunate Irish guard, Donoghue, was still missing. Not the faintest clue to his fate had turned up.

Dr. Ales also had vanished without a trace.

Italian Mr. Villa had come in for his share of official surveillance. The Inspector explained one afternoon to Gordon Rowe—having apparently amended his opinion of the young man since Rowe's encounter with the masked man and his subsequent discovery of the false beard—that when Villa had been apprehended in the museum he, sharp old warrior that he was—ahem!—had excused himself and sought out a telephone. Yes, perhaps it
had
been at Mr. Drury Lane's suggestion. At any rate, the purpose of this procedure had been to prepare the hounds to take up the trail of the saturnine Mr. Villa when the Inspector should have finished with him. The particular hound had been one, Gross, an employee of the Thumm Detective Agency; and Gross had quite invisibly followed the entire party from the Britannic to Dr. Ale's house near Tarrytown, had quietly waited outside until the party emerged, and had then shadowed Villa with his considerable skill, sticking to the Italian's trail like the shadow of a Comanche. But Gross had nothing to report. The thief had apparently abandoned his attempt to fathom the “secret worth millions.”