CHAPTER XIV
One Clue
And this sort of thing was destined to be Peter's experience for many days to come. Every waking hour, and many when he should have been sleeping, was spent in following up clues unearthed by eager detectives, spurred to incessant action by the large reward which Donald Morris had privately offered for any news of either or both of the sisters.
Morris had been inclined, at first, to limit the reward to news of Mary.
"I care nothing about the sister, Clancy," he said. "What does it matter to me where she is, or what she does? It's Mary—Mary——"
The agonized appeal in his eyes was almost more than Peter could bear. The two men, so unlike, but with the bond of one common interest, had become, in those few days, fast friends. Peter could not bring himself even to hint at the sinister possibility which had presented itself to his mind and to Captain O'Malley's. Hardened as they were to the terrible crimes which were committed in this great city every day, the possibility of murder—a word which they had not whispered, even to each other—was not one which Peter would willingly suggest to the client who had become his friend. It was, therefore, with great difficulty that he persuaded Morris to make the reward applicable to news of either of the sisters.
"If we can only find Anne," he said to O'Malley, after Morris had reluctantly consented, "I promise you I'll put the screws on her and find out what happened to Mary Blake, if it's necessary to have her arrested for murder to do it. You watch me! I'm going to find Anne!"
But for once, for all his confidence in himself, Peter seemed destined to failure. Each day and all day long and far into the night, all over the country, sharp-eyed men and women trained to the last keen edge of observation and inquiry sought for the missing women.
And always there were clues. Their name was legion, and Peter did not dare, in his own words, "to pass one up," for fear that it might lead true, at last. It seemed impossible that there could be so many unexplained women as were unearthed; so many women with birthmarks, so many who were young and dark, and to the observer's eager eye (dazzled, perhaps by the amount of the reward) so like the photograph which each detective carried about with him.
In his investigations, Peter travelled the country over. A swift journey to St. Louis—and failure. Returning, he had no more than reached his office, when a report came in of a young woman, with a conspicuous birthmark, who had recently taken obscure lodgings in a back street in Philadelphia. The cases of those who were supposed to be Anne Blake were the most difficult to cope with and took the most time. A decision could only be reached, in some instances, by finding out the antecedents of the suspects, and by determining that the person in question was definitely in some other place on the twenty-eighth of May, for there was nothing in Peter's possession with which to identify her except a meagre description.
He had made time to amplify this to the fullest extent possible. To this end, he had called again on the janitor, Angelo Russo, at the apartment in Waverly Place, late in the afternoon following his experience with the soi-disant Mrs. Florence Smith.
He had gone quietly into the old apartment house and, unheralded, had sought the janitor in his own domain. In the dark, stuffy basement, he had interviewed Angelo and his invalid wife, who appeared almost too ill to answer any questions.
"She not know noding 'bout noding," Angelo said, interposing his short body, protectively, between Peter and his wife. "She sick long time. Doc', she say mus' have fresh air—count-ree. How get him, me? Try ev' way I know, Godalmighty! but no good—Angelo have no lucka—only troub'—jus' troub'."
"Did your wife ever see Miss Anne Blake?" asked Peter, touched, in spite of his preoccupation, by the poor, stupid Italian's sincere distress. "That's all I want to know."
"Yes. Me seen her long time 'go," said the wife, in a thin, weak voice. "Long time 'go," she repeated, sadly.
"Could you describe her to me? Tell me how she looked?" asked Peter, kindly. "A woman sometimes sees more than a man."
But the poor woman's powers of description were little better than her husband's. She insisted, however, that Anne Blake was not thin, "not skinny," but—Peter supplied the word—slender. "Yes, she was slen', but stronga. Me see her lif' biga heavy ting, carry 'em 'roun' lika easy. No, not skinny—what you say, slen'? Yes." This was the only way in which her description varied from Angelo's.
After leaving the Russos, Peter had found two or three tradesmen, in the immediate vicinity, who knew Anne Blake by sight. He was able to determine from them that her appearance was, in a general way, such as before described. As to the birthmark, one or two thought it was on the left, and the others thought it was on the right, cheek. One perhaps fanciful lady, who owned a small bake shop, said she remembered it well, and that it was certainly on the right cheek, extending down on the neck. That it looked to her something like the mark of a hand, a big spot below, and four—or was it only three—smaller ones, running up on the cheek. "Dark it was, like blood, an' awful to have upon ye, the poor thing!"
This was all that Peter had to go upon in his subsequent attempts to trace Anne Blake, and only once, after investigation, had he been at all assured that he had found a genuine clue. This happened on the Wednesday following the disappearance.
He had sent a woman detective to interview the matron of the women's waiting room in the Pennsylvania Station. This detective found that the neat coloured woman, in charge of the pay dressing rooms, remembered seeing a veiled lady come in there on Sunday evening. She couldn't be sure, but she thought it was after five. It was not very long before the time when she went off duty, and that was at six. She recollected, too, that the lady had some sort of disfigurement on her face. She had received the fee and opened one of the pay dressing rooms for her, but whether it was because the lady stayed in there till after her time was up, or for whatever reason, the coloured woman had no recollection of seeing her again.
And after three weeks of almost incessant toil this was the one thing Peter had learned. Porters and conductors of every train which left the Pennsylvania Station on that fateful Sunday night had been personally interviewed. Not one remembered seeing any such lady as Peter described. As far as he was able to learn, Anne Blake might have vanished into thin air.
The search for a cab which Mary Blake might have taken on that Sunday evening had proved equally fruitless. The city, as Peter had promised Donald Morris, had been gone over with a fine-tooth comb. All the big taxi companies, the smaller garages, and all the "free lances," from the Bronx to the Battery, had been investigated, to no purpose. No one had seen Mary Blake leave Waverly Place and every trace of her was utterly lost. Like her sister, she had slipped out of sight, leaving no ripple to betray her passage.
"It looks as if the only chance of getting results would be to let the story leak out to the papers," said Peter to O'Malley, late one afternoon toward the end of June. "Mr. Morris is dead against it. Thinks that Miss Mary would hate the publicity worse than anything in the world. And even if we could persuade him to let us go ahead and practically advertise, even then I'm not any too hopeful." He sighed, wearily. "I don't see, in any case, why Anne should come out of the woods. Dammit! If she'd only draw some of that money that's lying up there at the Scoville Bank, it might give us a look-in. But they haven't heard a word. I'm sure she's got plenty of funds in hand, all right, and is lying low. Wonder how she figures to pull out that money without any one getting wise as to where she is."
"I've been puzzling about that, too," said O'Malley. "Seems as if she'd have to take somebody into her confidence to put it across, but if what we've doped out is true, and Mary Blake never turns up, for the simple reason that——" He made an expressive gesture.
"That letter keeps coming back to my mind, O'Malley," said Peter, reflectively, "the one Mary wrote to Donald Morris. And one phrase sticks in my crop—'There will be no one left but Anne, if I fail——' It looks like what we thought—and yet—somehow I can't get it out of my head——" Suddenly he banged his fist down on the desk and jumped to his feet. "I'm going through that apartment again, O'Malley," he said. "I've been trying to ever since—but some damned bright-eyes thought he had the whole thing cinched, and I've had to beat it somewhere on a wild-goose chase. But I'm through with that for the present. I don't care who has a pipe dream, induced by too big a reward, I'm going to see if there isn't something in that apartment that'll give us a lead. If we could only find out where they came from, and who they knew, it might give us a line on where they'd be likely to go. The way it is, we've just about come to a standstill, as I see it. There must be something left in the place where they've lived for several years that would be a hint to the guy who was able to take it. That key's been burning in my pocket all these weeks, and to-night I'm going to use it, see! I don't want any gallery, so I'm going late, just before the street door's closed for the night. That's at twelve o'clock. I'll try to fix it so that I don't run into the janitor."
"Oh, I guess you needn't be much afraid of that, from what Rawlins says. He's been pretty well fed up with just watching the house when there's been absolutely nothing stirring, and he's sort of made friends with Angelo to keep from being bored stiff. And the poor old devil, Angelo, I mean, is just about crazy on account of his wife. She won't go to a hospital, and there he is, taking care of her and trying to hold down his job at the same time. With the result that he's only upstairs when he can't get out of it. So——"
"So you think there's no fear of my running into him," concluded Peter. "Well, I don't suppose he'd beef about it much, but you never can tell with these ignorant foreigners. They sometimes have an attack of conscience in the most unexpected places. I won't take any chances. I'll get Rawlins to give me the tip when he's out of the way——"
"I guess it would be as well, at that," said O'Malley. "But what do you expect to find, Pete? You went over the apartment pretty thoroughly the first day, didn't you?"
"I did take a good look," answered Peter. "It was as thorough as I could make it at the time, and with Morris champing at the bit. But I'm not entirely satisfied—haven't been all along. There's a queer feel about the place, O'Malley. You may think I'm getting fanciful in my old age, and I can't explain to you just what it is that seems——The place is shut in—airy enough, and all that, you know, but cut off from the rest of the world.... You have the sort of feeling that almost anything might happen there—and no one the wiser.... The windows are all covered with curtains that are thin enough to let in the light and air but thick enough so you couldn't see a thing from the outside. They're not the usual sash curtains, but run from the top to the bottom of the windows, and there's a rod through them at the bottom so they can't blow—and there are thick, dark shades.... Of course it might be that way in any apartment where the outlook wasn't very attractive—and it may be just that.... You may think I'm a nut, O'Malley, but I've got it into my old bean that there was something more—a purpose—I don't know what.... But I'm going to find out. The thing's got me going. I'm going to find out, O'Malley, if it takes a leg!"