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  Originally published under the title of

  MONEY MUSK

  COPYRIGHT, MCMXXII, BY BEN AMES WILLIAMS

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Published by arrangement with E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc.

  1

  INSPECTOR TOPE—Inspector still by courtesy, despite the fact that he had retired from the force a year or two before—was the figure about whom the incidents here to be related did revolve; but Charlie Harquail must figure briefly in the first of them. Charlie was a reporter on the Journal, a lean, long young man who through his acquaintance with the Inspector during the latter’s years of active service had more than once been able to beat the town on important stories that had to do with crime. But the Inspector retired, and Charlie married Phoebe Mannis, and Phoebe, though she might respect Tope’s abilities, would never love him. So Charlie saw less of the old man as time went on.

  But he did come one evening to ask the Inspector a favor, and thus obscurely does this tale begin.

  Inspector Tope, since his retirement, took his ease. In the summer he fished, wherever fish were biting within a range of two or three hundred miles; but in the winter he stayed snug at home, like a benign, pink-cheeked, hibernating bear.

  He dwelt, before his retirement and also afterward, on the second floor of an old office building on Boyleston Street, in a single room which he had modelled to his uses. There was a bed in a niche in the wall, modestly concealed behind a cretonne curtain during the day; and there were comfortable chairs, and a few books, and one long table entirely devoted to newspapers, which Inspector Tope read with a devout attention. In the grate a coal fire was likely to glow with a comforting warmth; and the old man liked to sit before this fire, his round cheeks bright with the reflected flames. He liked to sit there and talk over old days with his friends when they happened in.

  Yet the Inspector was on the whole rather lonely there, as old men are apt to be. It was not that he lacked friends. He had an infinite number of them. But most of them were younger men, engrossed in their own concerns. It is important to choose your friends with an eye to the years they have lived. If they are older than yourself, they may die and leave in your life an empty niche not easily to be filled; and if they are younger, your own advancing years may increase the gap between you. This was what had happened to Inspector Tope. His friends were younger than he, and after his retirement, he was not so often able to serve them. So whenever one of them dropped in to see the old man, it was apt to be from a mild sense of duty. Tope had helped so many people in his time; it was difficult to think of him without remembering some favor he once had done you, still unrepaid. So, many people thought of him, and planned to call in on the Inspector—in a day or two. But not so many of them actually carried out their good intent.

  Thus sometimes he had no visitors for days on end; but he did not complain. When they came he met them beamingly; and when they did not come, he read his many newspapers, and stared reflectively into the fire.

  He was, by the calendar, older year by year; yet Charlie Harquail could discover no particular change in him tonight. The Inspector’s eye was as mildly blue; his cheek as round; his hair as snowy. He stood with the same alertness; his head wagged a little from side to side with that curious suggestion that he smelled some puzzling odor and sought to discover the source; his hands when he walked still swung palms forward as though ready to seize and grip and hold. He had never seemed a formidable figure; Charlie found it hard to remind himself that this old man was formidable now.

  Yet though Inspector Tope might be officially retired, his attentive scrutiny of the world was still as keen; his interest in the movements of all those about him was as alert as it had ever been. An old setter dog, too blind and deaf to range the covers with his master, will nevertheless if he chance upon the scent of game come stiffly to a point; and it was so with the Inspector. When that happened which perplexed him, he was instantly curious; it was instinctive with him to begin forthwith by conjecture and inquiry to seek an explanation. And it happened that there was, even before young Charlie tapped at his door this night, such a puzzling matter in the inspector s mind, He had been intent upon this enigma now for days.

  It was about twenty minutes before eight o’clock when Charlie came; and Tope was just back from his solitary dinner. He had returned to his room a quarter of an hour ago; he took off his shoes and put on his slippers and an old dressing gown he liked to wear, and began to read the evening papers, neglecting not a page nor a line. And then Charlie knocked, and the Inspector went to open to him, and recognized the young man with a quick pleasure, and bade him in.

  “Glad to see you, son,” he said. “It’s been quite a while!” There was no suggestion of reproach in his tones; yet Charlie did feel in some degree disquieted. He gripped the old man’s hand, and said he had been very busy, and Tope nodded his understanding and bade the boy sit down. He offered tobacco and a pipe, but Charlie lighted a cigarette instead; and the conversation was for a moment brisk enough, then lagged and died. So the Inspector smiled, and he asked:

  “Well, son, what can I do for you?”

  Charlie grinned in a shamefaced way. “I suppose you figure I wouldn’t have come unless I wanted something,” he assented. He added disingenuously: “But as a matter of fact, I’ve got a couple of tickets to the theatre. Thought you might like to go along.”

  Tope’s eyes were shrewd. “That will be the Booth?” he suggested; and Charlie looked at him astonished. The Inspector chuckled, quite without resentment. “You want to get an interview on what an old policeman thinks of this gangster play? That’s the idea, isn’t it, Charlie?”

  Young Harquail shook his rueful head assentingly. “You always were too numerous for me,” he confessed. “But—yes! This show is the hit of the year, you know,” he pointed out. “They pull off a wholesale massacre, with machine guns, in the second act. Fire four or five hundred rounds of ammunition right on the stage. Makes more noise than you ever heard in a theatre before . . .”

  Tope shook his head. “You’re taking in too much territory, son,” he protested. “I remember a show came to town here a good many years ago, and I went to see it. They called it The Round Up, and there was a man named Arbuckle played the Sheriff. In the first act he pulled a gun, and an old lady behind me said: ‘Mercy, I hope there’s no shooting in this!’ But in the second act they had an attack by Indians, and a rescue by cavalry, with a rapid-fire cannon and all the rifles in the world going, right on the stage. I guess that could match you for noise!”

  Charlie chuckled. “If a thing hasn’t happened for ten years, it never happened before,” he said. “That’s newspaper gospel, Inspector. What do you say? If we’re going, we ought to get under way.”

  Tope considered again; and he said then: “I’ll tell you, Charlie. There won’t be anyone at your office after the show, will there?”

  “Two or three, maybe.”

  “We’ll go down there afterward,” the Inspector proposed. “While you’re writing your story, you let me look around in your Morgue. There’s a man I want to check up on; and you must have some clippings on him.”

  “I’ll look him up for you,” Charlie offered; but Tope shook his head.

  “No, you turn me loose and leave me alone. This is private! I don’t want you to know. Is that a bargain?”

  “Why, it’s against t
he rules,” Charlie confessed. “But—sure. But what are you up to, Inspector? I thought you’d retired.”

  “It’s just habit with me,” Tope admitted. “If I see a thing I don’t understand, I’m bound to start poking into it. That’s all.” He was leaning forward to tie his shoes, panting over the laces; he found his coat and overcoat. “Ready, son,” he said presently.

  And they went together down the stairs.

  The Booth Theatre, where Typewriters was in the midst of its record-breaking run, is near the exact middle of the theatrical district. It is semi-isolated from the neighboring buildings, with an alley behind, and another on one side which runs through the block, and on the other side a passage about six feet wide and fifty feet long, which gives access to the stage door. The theatre itself is modern, not over-large. Tope and Charlie tonight found it crowded to the doors; there were standees behind the orchestra. But their own seats were in the fourth row, the side aisle; and they were on the right-hand side of the house.

  And while they waited for the curtain, Charlie explained to the Inspector the general scheme of the play. But Tope seemed only mildly interested; he said when Charlie paused:

  “I’ve heard some talk about the leading woman in this show, Charlie!”

  “Lola Cyr,” Charlie agreed. “You bet! She’ll get you! She gets them all. All the men. There’s something funny about her, hard to analyze. She’s beautiful as the devil, and a swell figure. She wears a sort of turban all the time, a close-fitting hat that covers all her head except her face. You never see her hair, and they say she’s as bald as an egg. A man told me—” He hesitated, grinned. “Never mind who,” he said. “But this fellow told me he saw her one night without a hat; and he said this cold, hard, flaming beauty of hers, under that ivory bald head, was the most incredibly provocative thing he ever saw. He’s not susceptible, either!”

  He added: “And Mat Hews is making a hit, too! He never had a part before. They got him right out of some dramatic school in Pasadena, and he comes near stealing the show. He’s got a big future, they all say. Then of course Walter Hammond is the star; and there’s a cute kid named Kay Ransom . . .”

  Tope said thoughtfully: “I remember Hammond. I saw him once, years ago; but I hadn’t heard of him for a long time.”

  Charlie nodded. “He got in a jam about ten years back,” he explained. “Some woman died after a supper party; and he was at the party, and the police held him for a while. They didn’t pin anything on him; but he couldn’t get a job at all for years after that. Then he got a crack at this, and the part fits him like a glove. He’s great! He can name hi: own figure, now!”

  And he added: “Matter of fact, everybody connected with this show will be sitting pretty for a while. There she goes . . .”

  And he settled back expectantly as the curtain rose, to sit engrossed in the action that ensued.

  But though the play thus laid its spell on Charlie—who had seen it many times before—Inspector Tope was not equally moved. Its fable was conventional. Rival gangs and rival chieftains; a seductress who for love of one betrayed the other; the developing design, the famous massacre in the second act, the unfolding doom which in the end descended on them all. And the whole dark pattern was laid for contrast against the light and tender background of romance; the love of a boy for a girl . . . Young Mat Hews and Kay Ransom were these two.

  Yet for the Inspector, the whole performance lacked reality. The criminals who trod the stage were not true to his experience. He had found such folk on the whole to be a wily, furtive breed, rather than the bold and ruthlessly intelligent figures who were here portrayed. And the murders in the second act seemed to him more suitable to a charnel house than to the theatre.

  He was more interested in the individuals who here played their parts. Hammond, he thought, might have been in fact just such a man as he pretended on the stage to be, if he had courage to match his desires. Lola Cyr seemed wholly bold and dark and evil; yet Tope could find her seductive too, and it seemed to him possible that she was in private life a simple, rather friendly soul. Even a lonely one! Also the Inspector liked Mat Hews; and Kay Ransom was pretty and fresh and young.

  On the way downtown with Charlie afterward, he told the reporter that while this drama might be theatre, it was not life at all.

  “It’s hard to put in words,” he said. “But—there was make-believe murder on the stage, and yet it wouldn’t fool anyone that ever saw the real thing. Murder hits people, son! You can see it in their faces, hear it in their voices. Murder has a smell to it, you might say!”

  “The show got hold of me a lot more the second time I saw it,” Charlie suggested.

  Tope said good-humoredly: “Not likely I’ll see it again.” The old man was rather proud of his ability to foresee events, but he had just now no remotest anticipation that he would sit once more in this theatre, and watch this same play, and smell murder plain!

  He was concerned instead for Charlie’s sake. He added apologetically: “But I guess that’s not the line of talk you want for your interview!”

  Charlie insisted that it was exactly what he wanted; and when they came to the Journal office, he showed Tope the reference department and left the old man to his own devices there, while he himself went about the writing of the story he had planned.

  The reference department in the office of a great newspaper is a vast repository of information, much of it doomed to a perpetual uselessness. Every day, all available papers are read with scrupulous care; and out of them is cut every story involving the names of persons who are potentially news material. These cuttings are filed away, properly indexed and cross-indexed. So if your name has ever been in the papers, and you happen to be arrested for murder by and by, it will be possible to resurrect all the published reports of your previous escapades and parade them for the enlightenment of a reading public suddenly interested in your least affairs.

  The shelves in the Journal’s reference department were thickly filled with envelopes, each marked with a name; and Inspector Tope sought for one marked with the name of Clarence Peace. He found it and was surprised to see how well filled it was. For half an hour he scanned the clippings it contained, with an attentive care; and before Harquail was done, the Inspector was infinitely wiser than he had been before.

  Then Charlie finished, and wished him to read and to approve the interview, and Tope did so, and Charlie went to drop the typed sheets in the editor’s box.

  He came back with questions. “Find what you want in there?” he asked; and Tope nodded cheerfully.

  “Plenty,” he assented. “I didn’t look to find so much as I did.”

  Charlie grinned at him. “See here,” he urged. “What’s it all about? Battle, murder, arson, theft, fraud? Give me a line, Inspector. Is there a story in it anywhere?”

  Tope hesitated. “Why, not yet, son,” he decided. “There may be, later though. When a man starts out along a road, you can’t be quite sure where he’ll end.” He said almost sorrowfully: “Maybe I’ve made a business of murder too long; but it seems to me sometimes that almost any crooked trick can turn into a murder before it’s done.”

  Harquail protested: “Say, you’re making it tough for me! I don’t talk much, Inspector. Let me in on it. Let me watch the show, so I can be ready when it breaks.”

  But Tope shook his head. “If there’s a story here, you’ll never get it from me,” he declared. “It’s not mine to give you.” He added: “But as a matter of fact, there isn’t any story, far as I know!”

  “Then what are you after?” Charlie urged; and Tope said with a chuckle:

  “Why, I’m just trying to find out why a friend of mine hasn’t been around to see me lately, son.”

  Harquail colored with a quick embarrassment. “Are you riding me?” he asked. “Well, I haven’t any comeback. Whoever it is, he’ll probably come around when he wants something, the same way I did. I guess that’s the answer, Inspector?”

  Tope chuckled. “Do
n’t worry, Charlie,” he told the younger man. “I’m glad to see you any time.” And he added then, almost as though he wished to reassure the other: “If there’s a story in this, Dave Howell can give it to you.”

  “What will I ask him?” Harquail urged.

  Tope’s eyes were twinkling: “Why, you tell him I was wondering why he hasn’t been around.”

  So a moment later he said good night to the young man, and set out for home; and except for a brief appearance on the night of the first murder, Charlie does not enter into this chronicle again.

  2

  THIS Dave Howell of whom Tope spoke was a police inspector whose particular province was frauds and defalcations; and while he was a much younger man than Inspector Tope, they had long been friends. After Tope’s retirement, Dave had been a regular visitor till within two months or so. Then he ceased to come, and Tope began to wonder why, and to seek an answer to his own question.

  After his word to Charlie Harquail, he expected Howell to come; so he was not surprised when the next morning Dave knocked on his door. Tope opened to him smilingly, and made Dave comfortable, with a jar of tobacco at his elbow, matches at his hand. Dave lighted his pipe, and Tope spoke casually of this and that, and he watched the other wisely.

  Inspector Howell was a big, heavy-shouldered man, with lumbering wits, but with a tenacity about him that was apt to bring him results in the end. Usually he was physically calm as big men are apt to be; but today his hand moved aimlessly about the table beside his chair, picking up small objects and setting them down again; he struck many matches and held them to the bowl of his pipe, even though it was already burning freely; and he was so abstracted that he made only the briefest replies to Tope’s remarks, until the Inspector asked at last good-humoredly:

  “Well, Dave, this Peace got you worried, has he?”

  And at that Dave’s abstraction instantly did vanish. He fixed on the older man a level stare of deep surprise; and he demanded in an incredulous tone: