Two Flights Up (18 page)

“All right, Cox,” he said. “Get to it quickly. I’ve had a hard day.”

James remained standing. Now that his moment had come, he found difficulty in rising to it.

“I’m a salaried man, Mr. District Attorney,” he said, thinking out his words. “Or I was. I suppose if I were what you’d call a gentleman, maybe I wouldn’t be doing what I am about to do, sir. It goes against the grain even with me.”

The District Attorney smiled.

“I’m a salaried man myself,” he said. “Let’s let that go just now. What is it you are about to do?”

“I’m about to accuse a woman,” said James. “That’s a thing I’ve never done before in my life, and I hope to God I’ll never have to again. I accuse my wife’s sister, Tom Bayne’s wife, of knowing about that stuff in the house, and of taking a bond from it and selling it.”

“And you also know she is dead and can’t defend herself,” said Phelps, with sudden sharpness. “Come, Cox! That won’t do unless you have proof.”

But James was staring at him with shocked, incredulous eyes.

“
Dead
!” he said thickly. “Since when?”

“Since last night.”

James slowly lowered himself into a chair, and Phelps watched him.

“See here,” he asked him, “haven’t you been home? Didn’t you know this?”

“I haven’t been home,” said James with difficulty. “I walked the streets all yesterday, and last night I drank too much whisky and the police picked me up. And I came here from the hearing this morning. I’ve been here all day.”

He got up and picked up his hat, now dirty and battered.

“Well,” he said, “I guess I’ve gone the limit. I can’t accuse a dead woman. I didn’t like her, but she can rest in peace for all of me.”

“I have an idea what you’ve come to say won’t disturb her,” said Phelps dryly. “You’ve made a statement. How do you propose to support it?”

“I’m telling you. She took it. I knew it all along. My wife lied to me when she said it was the girl.”

“How do you know that?”

“How does any man know when his wife is lying to him? They thought I didn’t notice it, but I did. It was night before last, when the fellow who rooms there came in to see what all the trouble was about. My wife told me it was the girl who had found the suitcase and sold the bond, and he didn’t like that. He knew better. I saw him look at her.”

“Why did your wife tell you that?”

“I figure she knew, if it was the mother, I’d use that information.”

“So you claim they were all protecting Mrs. Bayne?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“But why has Warrington kept his mouth shut, if that’s the case?”

James looked up, candidly.

“I suppose because he’s a gentleman. That’s what I meant before.”

“Where do you get that idea?” Phelps asked shrewdly. “From your wife?” And when James made no reply: “How long have you known this Warrington?”

“Never saw him but once before. He brought me a message from my wife. She wasn’t my wife then.”

“Do you remember that date?”

“I do,” said James sturdily. “If I’m wrong, you’ll find it on record at the station house in Number Three precinct. I hit a policeman that night.”

The District Attorney sat at his desk for some time after James had gone out. Then he got his hat and coat, and on his way out he stopped in to see the chief of detectives.

“I’ve got something I’d like done to-night, if possible,” he told him. “Tom Bayne is dying, and I’d like somebody to go to the pen and get a deposition from him. I want to know when his wife visited him last, and if he told her about the suitcase.”

The chief smiled.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll send Lyell. But he told her, all right; I can tell you that now.”

He opened the desk drawer and carefully brought out two small objects which he laid on the blotter.

“Exhibits A and B,” he said genially. “Lyell took Warrington up this morning and learned Mrs. Bayne died in the attic. So he locked the fellow off somewhere and took a look around. He found the nail file on the floor; she’d lifted the boards with it. And under the boards, where she’d dropped it, the handkerchief.”

“That doesn’t prove she’d used them, of course. Anybody else—”

“Who? The girl? There was no one else in the house last night. And the girl hadn’t been up there for anything; she knew the suitcase was gone. She’d sent it out of the house. Everybody concerned knew that suitcase wasn’t there except this woman. And why did she go? She went because she needed more money. She’d lost a pocketbook yesterday with several hundred dollars in it, and she was up against it. And if you ask me where she got several hundred dollars to lose, I’ll tell you. She got it from Warrington when he sold that bond for her.”

On his way out home in his car, the District Attorney thought it over. He was fairly sure now that he had been off on the wrong foot, and it annoyed him. But after a time, like poor Annie Bayne in her taxicab, he fell asleep. He had had a hard day.

That evening, while he was sitting comfortably by the radio, not so much listening to it as using it as a musical accompaniment to a book he was reading, the telephone rang, and he yawned and answered it. It was Lyell on long distance. Tom Bayne was dead. He had passed away comfortably an hour or so ago, but before he had done so, he had made his statement.

“Looks like we’ve been barking up the wrong tree,” was Lyell’s comment.

“Yeah,” said Mr. Phelps, yawning, and hung up the receiver.

He went back to his book and the radio, which was now singing, “Oh, Promise Me” in a throaty soprano. But before he settled down, he took an old envelope out of his pocket and wrote two words on it as a reminder for the next day.

“
Cox—Warrington
.”

H
OWARD WARRINGTON WAS RELEASED
the next day. There were neither apologies nor explanations. Simply the closed hand of the law opened and released him. He was free.

For all the change that the last forty-eight hours had made on the surface, they might never have been. The office greeted him with grins and cheerful badinage. Outside of that, so little had he counted there, his absence had been scarcely noted.

“I’m just reporting,” he told Miss Sharp. “I can’t stay. There’s been a death in the family where I live.”

“I thought you looked kinda shot,” said that young woman. “You just go along. I’ll fix it.”

But as he started out she called him back. “Say, Mr. Baylie’s got that suit of yours. Do you want to take it along?”

“I’ll get it to-morrow,” he told her, and made his escape. …

So it happened that Warrington and James Cox, who had suffered most through her, helped to carry Annie Bayne to her quiet grave. And later they went back together to Kelsey Street, where the heavy odour of flowers still filled the air, and the rooms had been only hastily restored to their usual order.

“I hope you’ll not hold against me what I said the other night,” said James.

“You weren’t half as violent as I would have been under the circumstances,” Warrington assured him. And that was all.

There was a family conference in the dining room that night, but Warrington was not a party to it. Only Holly could have brought him into it, and Holly was still dazed. He was not hurt; after all, what was he to them? For a little time he had been one of them, had lived and suffered with them; but now that was all over.

By that small unconscious omission they put him where he knew he belonged, in his third-floor room again, in the household but not of it. And as time went on, and James made his genial efforts to draw him into the family circle, it was he who held off. If there was some pride in it at first, it became sheer self-defense later on.

He could not see Holly in her black frocks, looking thin and white, without wanting to take her in his arms. And he would not do that; he would not drag her once more into poverty. She had had enough of that, and of the things it sometimes led to. She was comfortable now. Let her alone.

Certainly she was comfortable. With the coming of James and Margaret to live in the old house, it began to take on a new if slightly vulgar vitality. The furnace roared under James’s mighty wielding of the shovel; lights blazed; and Warrington, putting his key into the lock, would be met sometimes by the smell of frying onions, and on passing the drawing-room door would find James there, in Mrs. Bayne’s old chair, his feet on what had been the tea table, and a cigar in his mouth.

“Come in, Howard!” he would call genially. “Come in and make yourself at home. Shove that dog off, there. He’s too fat and lazy to move.”

James secretly adored the dog.

Warrington went in sometimes. If Holly was not there, he would even stay a little, listening to James talk and even putting in a word now and then himself. But occasionally Holly would be there, very quiet and very conscious of him, and then he would take himself in hand and resolutely go upstairs. If James ever noticed this, he made no comment.

James was very happy. He was enormously proud, of his wife, of Holly, and especially of the house. He would take the dog out for walks, and using that as an excuse, stand on the pavement and survey the building complacently, feet apart and head held high.

Once Mrs. McCook found him on her side of the street, looking across.

“Guess I’ll have to paint those shutters this spring,” he said. “Too good a house to let go.”

“It’s a very handsome house,” said Mrs. McCook—and won him completely.

He was constantly picking up bargains at the store and sending them home. And at last there came a truly great day, when he sent up a player-piano—twenty-five dollars a month on the installment plan. It came on Margaret’s birthday, and he kept her downtown that afternoon. When she came in, she went directly upstairs, and the first she knew of it was when the strains of some popular air arose to her overhead.

“Mercy!” she said to Holly. “Who on earth ever let that hurdygurdy into the house?”

After that, James spent a great deal of his leisure time at the piano, with a cigar in his mouth and his eyes peering at the punctured roll which was unwinding before him. He pumped vigorously with his feet, and the faster the time, the better he was pleased.

“That’s got some
go
to it,” he would say.

But one evening when he was playing some sentimental thing or other, and had a sore foot so that he had to play it softly, he looked up to hear Warrington closing the front door and to see tears in Holly’s eyes. That set him to thinking, and that night, while Margaret was brushing her hair, he spoke to her peevishly.

“What’s the matter between Howard and Holly?” he demanded. “They’re like a pair of shuttlecocks! When one’s in, the other’s out! It isn’t natural. Have they quarreled about something?”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“Well, I can’t make them out. If Holly isn’t crazy about him, after all he did for her! And as for him, where are his eyes, anyhow? I’ve a good notion to up and tell him.”

“You let them alone,” said Margaret. “They’ll work it out some way.”

And for a considerable time James did let them alone. When he could stand it no longer, he devised small, innocently obvious schemes to throw them together, but without much result. For instance, he would stand down in the lower hall and bellow up to the third floor.

“Hi!—Warrington!” he would yell. “Put down that book and come on to the movies. Hurry up!”

And sometimes Warrington went. The desire to sit next to Holly in the warm darkness was too much for him. They would sit side by side, saying little or nothing, and sometimes one or the other would lean a bit to one side, and there would be for an instant a sense of contact that warmed and thrilled them both.

And then James, sturdily holding Margaret’s hand, would shift his position and glance over at them, and they would straighten self-consciously and miserably.

Once James caught Holly in the hall looking up, after Howard had disappeared above, and he put a hand on her shoulder.

“See here, sister,” he said. “If you like him, why don’t you let him see it? I think he’s darned unhappy myself.”

And she had looked at him with her direct and honest eyes.

“Why should he care for me?” she asked him. “I used him; we all used him. I don’t see how he can bear to look at me.”

“Well, I do,” said James stoutly. “And as for the other matter, that’s all water over the dam now. He’s none the worse for it, is he?”

There came, however, a terrible day, when James came home to find a car in front of the house, and in the drawing room a tall young man with prominent eyes and a rather pasty skin. The door was open, and James stopped there and gave the visitor a long hard look. Then he stamped back to Margaret in the pantry.

“Who’s that in the parlour with Holly?” He demanded.

Margaret was looking worried.

“It’s Furness Brooks again,” she said. “Really, I don’t know why he came. I thought that—Where are you going, James?”

“Don’t worry about me, my girl,” he said loftily. And he went up the stairs. He walked into Warrington’s room without the ceremony of knocking, passed that morose and brooding young gentleman without a word, and stalked across to a window.

“Come here,” he said. “Look down there. Do you know whose car that is?”

“I know it. What about it?”

“Well!” said James. “What are you going to do? Sit here belly-aching, or go down and throw him out?”

“What’s the good of either, if she wants him?”

“She doesn’t want him!” James roared. “Not any more than she wants the smallpox. She’s thrown him over once. But if he hasn’t the guts to stay away, and you haven’t the guts to keep him away, I’m through.”

“I’m not asking any woman to share poverty with me.”

“Oh, you’re not, eh?” said James. “Too proud, aren’t you? Well, by and large, there’s been too much pride in this house already, and I’m about sick of it!” And he stamped out again.

It was about two days later that James imparted to Margaret an astonishing bit of news.

“I’ve asked Mr. Steinfeldt up to dinner tomorrow night,” he said.

“Mr. Steinfeldt!” said Margaret weakly, and sat down. “Why on earth, James?”