The Face and the Doctor ebook

Contents

CHAPTER I. [UNTITLED]

CHAPTER II. A LIST OF CLUES

CHAPTER III. STRANGE IMPRISONMENT

CHAPTER IV. A LONG SLEEP

CHAPTER V. OLD FRIENDS MEET AGAIN

CHAPTER VI. [UNTITLED]

CHAPTER VII. THE CHILL OF DEATH

CHAPTER VIII. KATE DOES HER PART

CHAPTER IX. A DOCTOR'S HUMAN SCULPTURE

CHAPTER I. [UNTITLED]

WHEN Muir came up to the bar, a Third Avenue elevated train was going by like thunder in a tin heaven and he had to pitch his voice as though he were talking into a high wind in order to ask for a Scotch-and-soda, but by the time he could wrap his long fingers around the glass there was sufficient quiet for him to ask: “Has Everett Franklin been here?”

“Dunno the name,” said the bartender.

“Middle-sized, a good pair of shoulders, and as handsome as Hollywood,” said Muir. “Looks five years younger than I.”

The bartender scanned again the huge, scholarly forehead of Muir and the face half-ugly with pain that was not of the body. He looked forty, though in the morning of the day no doubt he seemed five years younger.

“It’s the reporter that you’re askin’ about,” said the bartender. “He’s been and gone.”

“When?” asked Muir.

“Fifteen, twenty minutes, maybe.”

Muir glanced at the clock on the wall and it was, in fact, a quarter past eleven. Other questions rose in his eyes, but he kept them silent and drew the letter from his pocket again. He read it very slowly, deliberately.

Dear Pete,

You remember when we were riding up-town in the taxi the other day, and I pointed to a house and said I was going to raise a scandal out of that place that would put a bad smell all through New York? Well, tonight is the night for me to do a little looking into the business, and it may be a job that will need your pick-lock, your flashlight, and even that big automatic you like to harness under your left arm.

The fact is that you haven’t had much fun since you were the boy aviator in ’18, playing tag with the enemy over the Western Front, but tonight I may be able to show you enough action to quiet your nerves, for a week or so, and you’ll be able to sleep every night through instead of going the rounds like a silly ass and lapping up all the liquor in New York.

I know you’re only four days back from Central America and you may have meant it when you said that you wanted to rest a bit, but if I know the old Peter Angus Muir, he’ll be on the job with me tonight.

When I say scandal, I don’t mean any dirty man- woman business because I know that’s not up your street. I mean another kind of dynamite that may blow New York wide apart. Till eleven, I’ll be at O’Doyle’s Saloon, on Third Avenue, near Fifty- ninth.

Adieu to the greatest detective outside of books from the greatest reporter that ever covered crime. And I mean it!

B. F.

Muir, refolding the letter, drank half the scotch-and-soda slowly, without taking the glass from his lips. More than ever he could curse, now, that restless habit which kept him roaming the city and which on this night had caused him to miss the telephone call of Franklin at his apartment, for he felt that some great venture lay ahead, and that he might be left hopelessly in the rearward of the event.

He lighted a cigarette and looked into the smoke with the eyes of a crystal-gazer, trying to step back to the hour when he had ridden up-town with Franklin four days before. He could remember first, and most clearly, the grinning face of that malevolent reporter as he had hooked his thumb over his shoulder and said: “One of those houses right there on the corner–I’m going to raise a worse smoke than murder, I think, out of it. The police are going to hate my heart all over again.”

It had been on the East Side, somewhere. Not Fifth, because there had been houses on each side of the street; not Park because the avenue had not been so wide. Not Third because there was no double file of ugly pillars for the elevated. It was Madison or Lexington, then.

MUIR paid for his drink and took a taxi across to Lexington and then up-town, driving slowly. Instead of peering earnestly at every corner, he relaxed in the left side of the seat as he had done when he was with Franklin and kept his eyes forward as in consideration, letting the street-corners drift casually through the widest angle of his vision. They were north of Seventy-second Street when a ghostly finger tapped at his forehead.

He got out at the next corner, paid the taxi, and went back. On the northern side of the block below, three houses of identical aspect, long and narrow as the faces of three fools, rose cheek to cheek. Now that he confronted them, all recollection of having seen them before departed from him, but he would not deny the authority of that electric touch which he had felt as the taxi passed this corner.

He went to the south west street corner and viewed the houses aslant, as he must have done when Franklin called his attention to them. Still nothing returned from his memory, so he came closer to examine them at first hand. The one nearest Lexington was alight from the first floor to the sixth and highest story; music. Young voices crowding together in laughter, told him of the party which was going forward.

It did not have the look of a place where Franklin might have need of a pick-lock, a flashlight, and a gun. The adjoining house carried a “For Rent” sign, so he went past it to the third place where the front windows were equally filled by empty blackness. His confidence in the trail he was following had diminished almost to nothing, but he wandered up onto the porch of the house and took from his inner coat an electric torch hardly larger than a fountain pen. It cast a thin, sharp ray with which he ran rapid pencil strokes of light about the porch.

He saw the doorplate of “Dr. David J. Russo;” he saw the folds of the thick satin drape which hung inside the door-glass; and on the cement floor of the porch lay a cigarette butt that had been stepped on by a foot which afterward twisted over it and left paper and tobacco as an ugly spot, well-ground into the cement. Few men put out their cigarette butts with such care, but Everett Franklin had that ugly habit.

Muir turned from the house and walked straight across the street, where he lounged in the thick shadow between two houses. Franklin had been at the third house before him, and not more than twenty-five minutes ago.

He had come, according to his letter, prepared to go to great lengths to enter the building, and therefore the chances were large that he was in the house at the present moment; for every successful reporter has to have a good deal of the bulldog about him and Franklin had the patience of a hunting beast.

A paved footway ran down the left side of the house but not a glimmer of light came from the windows on that side. If Franklin was inside, he was at work with one of those flashlights of which he had spoken.

If that were the case, it would probably be foolish or even a little dangerous to try to enter the place while the investigation was going on. There came to the eye of Muir a picture of shadowy hands running through the papers of a desk, while an electric torch set them flashing.

A GIRL walked down the farther side of the street and the eye of Muir commenced to follow her because her steps were not checked and stilted by high heels; she moved with the rhythmic lightness of an athletic boy, with a good, free swing. When she reached the house Muir was watching, she turned and ran up the steps, and for some reason he looked up at the bright December stars and laughed, silently.

He could even hear the click of the key in the lock, he thought, as he strained his ears; then the door opened and she went inside. The door glass was illumined only a moment later; then the shades of the double window to the side glowed faintly.

Muir forced himself to wait two minutes; then he crossed the street and rang the house-bell.

He heard a step come into the hall. The door was pulled open by the brisk hand of someone in a hurry, and he saw the girl before him with the fox-fur loosened about her throat. The cold of the winter night was rosy in her face and twinkling in her eyes. She had the glow and the air, if not the exact features, of beauty.

Muir took off his hat. “Dr. Russo in, by any chance?” he asked.

The late hour made her look carefully at him.

“He isn’t in,” she said, “and I’m afraid that he won’t be in tomorrow, either. I’m sorry.”

Muir smiled on her a little.

“After all, this is not an office hour, is it?” he said.

“Hardly,” she answered, and then, looking farther into him: “Are you in pain? Is it something acute?”

“Rather,” nodded Muir.

She glanced instinctively down at a wrist-watch. Then: “Will you come in? I can make a note and perhaps the doctor can get in touch with you later?”

“Thank you,” said Muir, and stepped inside.

Crossing the hall, he photographed on the sensitive plate of his memory the details of the hat-rack at the side, the two straight-backed chairs which flanked the mirror farther down the hall, and the stairs climbing into shadow. The girl showed him into an office with a small mahogany desk set at an angle in a corner, three framed diplomas on the wall, two shelves of books, a coal fireplace, a rather good Persian rug with a pine-tree pattern on the floor, and above the mantelpiece the large photograph of a narrow-bearded, professorial face, a sensitive face with a great slope of forehead and penetrating eyes; the moustaches and beard left the expression of the mouth somewhat indecipherable. But what Muir used his eyes on chiefly were the ranges of books. He picked the word “diet” out of half a dozen titles.

The girl was sitting behind the desk, now, pulling the glove from her right hand, then pulling a note-book in front of her.

“Your name, please?” she asked.

He did not hesitate. The name Peter Angus Muir was not known in many quarters. In 1918, when he came back from the front, the newspapers had made a good deal of the seventeen year old boy who perjured his way into the air force and shot down eight planes, but that was nearly two decades ago and people had forgotten the Great War.

He had another reputation which was almost entirely confined to a small scope in the New York police department for certain bits of voluntary detective work which he had done and it was this reputation which he was trying to keep in shadow as he gave the name: “Oliver Croft.”

“Your address, Mr. Croft?”

“The Centenary Club,” he answered, for the club knew what to do with communications addressed to “Oliver Croft.”

“And the symptoms?” she asked.

He considered his physical condition and began to speak the truth.

“For the last day or two,” he said, “I’ve had a subnormal temperature, a heaviness in the knees, disinclination to stir about, and something rather misty about the old brain. Living in something of a fog–that sounds a bit on the liverish side, doesn’t it?”

“A bit,” she answered, gravely.

He saw that he would have to add something more to justify this midnight call at a doctor’s office.

“And in addition, griping occasional pains in the stomach,” said Muir.

She made the notations swiftly. A huge tiger cat came into the room on silent feet, turned its yellow eyes on Muir, and then leaped onto the desk. It sat down facing the girl, with its long tail wrapped around its fore-paws. As she finished writing, she put out her hand and scratched the cat across the forehead. The sound of its purring began like a distant buzz-saw.

“Much drinking?” she asked.

“Much,” said he.

“Very late hours?”

“Very,” said Muir.

She read his face from right to left and then from left to right. She did not smile.

“May I ask who recommended the doctor to you?” she asked.

“A fellow down in Nicaragua, just before I flew back. Craig, or Krank, or some such name, I think.”

“May I ask a rude question?”

She had green eyes, full of penetrating thought.

“Fire away,” said Muir.

“You don’t look well,” she remarked, “but did you come here partly because you’re in pain and partly because you wanted something to do?”

“Partly,” he admitted. “Twelve o’clock hasn’t come, and that’s not so very late for a doctor to be awake in his home.”

“But he doesn’t live here,” she answered.

“Doesn’t he? The fact is that I was up in this part of the city and suddenly remembered his name and that my in-sides seemed to need some tinkering. Did you ever want to kill some time in the middle of the night?”

“Of course,” she said, rising.

“From the moment the sun goes down, in fact?” asked Muir. “Will you have a cigarette?”

She hesitated over the offer, and then smiled as she took the cigarette. Muir lighted their smokes.

“Will you sit down a moment?” she asked.

“I’m only going to take a bit of your time, and I’d as soon take it standing,” he answered. “I know you’re about to leave.”

“How do you know that?” she asked, her brows lifting slightly.

“You have a forward look in your eyes,” said Muir, “that tells me you have some place to go. You people with places to go–you have all the luck.”

“Do you always know what people are going to do?”

“They don’t have to look at their watches for me to know that they’re going to leave me.”

“No, people don’t leave you,” she decided.

“Ah, but they do. Can’t put a value on a thing you can have any time you want it. Oliver Croft is a glut on the market.”

She surveyed him again with a faintly whimsical smile.

“No, not a glut on the market,” she said. “I don’t think he puts himself on the market at all.”

“Don’t you?” asked Muir.

“No,” she decided more firmly. “He keeps away from his friends because humanity disgusts him a little; and then all at once the corners of the room fill up with shadows and he has to go somewhere, anywhere, quickly. Isn’t that it?”

“Who the devil are you?” asked Muir, abruptly. “If you don’t mind me asking?”

“I’m Katherine Edwards,” she said. “Trained nurse?”

“Yes. How do you guess that? Because I’m here in a doctor’s office?”

“Not at all. I guess by the professional way you have of picking up a man and sifting him through your fingers. Do you ever have trouble wasting time? But of course not.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“If you ever do, ring the Centenary Club and ask for poor Oliver Croft. But I know how they’re standing in line. A pretty girl in the upper brackets. Whenever I see one of you, there’s a procession of ghosts filing away behind your shoulders; all the poor devils who have looked at you and wished that your smiling were not such a confounded generalization. Do you mind me saying that?”

“You know I don’t mind it,” she answered. “It’s the manly way of doing the thing, I suppose.”

“What thing?” asked Muir.

“Paying a compliment, and wrapping it up in a little bitterness.”

“I’d better go,” said Muir.

“No, I have about two minutes more,” she answered.

“I don’t want the minutes,” said Muir. “You’ve seen too much already. Will you tell the doctor about me?” he added when he was at the door.

“Of course,” said she.

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