PART VII (continued 3)

The extreme importance of wrecking the alibi at the time required, caused him to deal it two simultaneous smashes, either one of which would have done the trick—barring accident. The boots might not have been kept in the Lost Property Department of the Eastern Steamship Lines, Inc. On the bare chance of their having been thrown away, Operator’s License 2026 would bring the chauffeur into the case; up to then he could have had no idea that his fare to Boston on that fateful night was Hugo Pentecost. If Augustus Findlay had failed to take his revolver with him as he plunged madly away from the house, the fight in Collamore Street almost directly under Mr. Rathbun’s window would have gone on just the same; the only readjustment being that Pentecost’s man would have picked up the gun wherever Findlay dropped it—whether at the mansion or on the road—and brought it along, making it appear in the struggle that he got it away from the terrified boob; so there it would be, finger marks and all, ready to shove up in the water conductor. And if you imagine that it was any kind of an accident when Mr. Pentecost tipped up his pocket flashlight and gave the old woman a glimpse of his face as she came toward him in the pitch-dark room just after the Machine had done its deadly work; or that the roller shades being not quite down was a matter of chance; or a hundred and one things like that, call it off and take a new start.

I saw it troubled both you gentlemen when that carefully constructed alibi began to crumble. The first thing that occurred to you must have been an inquiry as to why all the trouble and ingenuity expended on planting it, if an old pair of boots or an operator’s license was going to throw it down. But your second thought was undoubtedly quite different, for unless I’m mistaken, you soon realized that not only was that fake alibi one of the most effective advertising nuts for the spirits to crack, but vastly more important than that, it was the veritable backbone that was to hold up the entire Pentecost operation. Without it they’d have picked him up that same night or early the next morning, and the mediums—with the possible exception of Mr. Ernest Everett Blatchford of West Philadelphia—wouldn’t have had any play at all.

If you’re financially minded, it might seem unbelievable that two such seasoned sharps as Harker and Pentecost would let a thirty-five-thousand bundle of bills go out of their hands with the chance against them that the Machine might not function or that Haworth wouldn’t stand up to the grisly game he’d set himself to play. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if the young fellow, when he got right up against it, were to go mad; indeed, both partners had a notion he was half there already. But do you notice that this money never did go out of their hands—that, as the crucial time approached, Pentecost had Dreek outside the house where he could instantly seize on it at a signal from inside—and that he himself was inside?

But neither this nor the taking of the motion picture accounted so much for Pentecost’s presence in the room at the crucial moment as the absolute necessity of his being seen there by a competent witness in order to make the case against him have the look of being incontestable. His trial for murder was the final play, and he’d begun laying lines for it at his very first interview with the Inspector, adroitly behaving, on that occasion, in a manner calculated to awaken the suspicion that he’d been connected in some way with the crime, even though the alibi—at that time unshaken and to all appearances unshakable—blocked any idea of his having committed it himself.

I won’t go any further with small details as to Pentecost’s methods of operation. But I’ll ask you to take it from me that from the time he staggered—to all appearances a semi-intoxicated coal heaver or something like that—into telephone booth 19 at the South Station in Boston, just before boarding the night train for New York, and calling up Pemberton Square (that is to say, headquarters) told the official in charge that a man named Pentecost who was supposed to have embarked for New York that afternoon on the Steamer North Land had been seen near the Haworth house just before the murder that evening, and suggested that it might be a good idea to have the New York police verify this on arrival of the steamer there (thus, as you’ll see, making his alibi official in a certain sense by bringing in the New York detectives as witnesses to it), to the moment of his having himself put on the witness stand and reciting his fake statement before the court, his hand never for one instant left the throttle.

Notwithstanding all this, he found time, during that stressful period, without personally appearing in the matter or indeed ever meeting her, to have everything possible attended to for Edith Findlay. All things tending to her comfort and well-being were arranged for: a nurse brought from the hospital to take care of her and manage everything about the house; Augustus Findlay permanently eliminated by having such a fright thrown into him that the entire continent of North America was thenceforth relieved of his weight upon it, with South America standing a good chance of equal immunity; and finally (it was some weeks before the Pentecost trial came on) her departure, with little Mildred and two nurses, to one of the most highly recommended places in the Austrian Alps.

At once after his acquittal Mr. Pentecost did his best—as he’d promised Haworth he would—with the $18,000 life insurance and the more than gruesome “movie”—which he had himself taken. The former he succeeded in collecting after a campaign of sharp practice devoted to it; the latter—as he’d figured from the start—stood no chance with censors and the inter-state people. He got a few thousand for it from the “bootleggers” of padlocked films who smuggle them across state lines and put them in the “private show” programs. These things, with the $51,000, and odd which was Haworth’s share on his percentage of profits on the game, more than doubled the total of deposits to the credit of Edith Findlay in the bank which had been designated to take care of her property. While no mention of this percentage was made in the contract between Haworth and the firm, it was one of those things that Pentecost would have paid though it reduced him to penury.

When you say—as you’re more or less liable to if I give you the chance—that this man was a surprising combination of characteristics, you will have spoken the truth. Not quite so surprising, though, when you come to reflect that every man is that—more or less—if he has any characteristics worth considering.

And while we’re speaking of it, it’s just as well for you to know that the man was taking all this care of Edith Findlay’s interests—as well as of Edith Findlay herself, solely and entirely because of Haworth. Something about the fellow had appealed to him in a peculiar way.

As the matter stood there was no possibility of Edith’s ever knowing that the money coming to her—aside from the insurance—was other than the amounts realized from the sale of one of Haworth’s mechanical inventions. This was shown by Haworth’s contract with the firm and by the receipt he gave for the cash payment, as well as implied in his statement and will. The tragic truth of the matter, which might have affected her disastrously both mentally and physically, as well as undoubtedly preventing her from touching a penny of the inheritance, was safely locked up with the firm of Harker & Pentecost.

For several months all went well. According to the doctors there, Edith’s condition was improving. Then a cable that was rather disquieting. A slight turn for the worse. Probably only temporary. Must expect ups and downs.

This talk about temporary ups and downs was nothing to Pentecost. He found, after some drastic searching, a high-up specialist who would go over. He felt that an American patient ought to have an American doctor. Whatever you say, races are different and need different treatment.

He met the doctor at the steamer on his return and they had a talk in the latter’s cabin while the baggage was coming off. The gist of the physician’s report was that while Mrs. Findlay was in a much better condition as far as the disease itself was concerned, and ought to go right on improving, her present mental activity was holding her back. This had not been the case heretofore, as the shock of the affair had, in a certain sense, stunned her. For several months she seemed hazy about it all, but recently things were becoming clearer to her, which was unfortunate. Everything was being done to divert her mind, but it was an obstinate case—she didn’t want it diverted.

“What does she want?” Pentecost inquired.

“Well—it amounts to this: She’s made up her mind to die and so far there’s no shaking her determination.”

“I wish I had her here,” said Pentecost.

Two weeks after that a cable reached him signed by Edith Findlay herself, begging him to come over as soon as he possibly could—utmost importance that she see him before the end, which was near.

He was on the next steamer going out.

Mr. Pentecost was sitting by the side of her bed. The nurse had told her his name before he came in, but for quite a time she couldn’t remember who he was or why he was there. Perceiving this, the nurse came in from the adjoining room and explained that it was the gentleman who’d been so kind in attending to everything for her, and that he’d come all the way from New York because she’d asked to see him.

“Oh, you—you came from America!” Her voice was faint and far away.

He said “Yes” softly.

The nurse had retired again to the next room.

“Did——” Edith glanced about searching for some one—then her eyes came back to him. “Did he come with you?”

“No.”

“Isn’t that strange!” She spoke hardly above a whisper. “Oh, it is so strange! But he’s coming! He’s coming just as soon as he sets up the machine and regulates it—that was in the contract you know!”

“Yes Mrs. Findlay, but it’ll take quite a while yet.”

“Oh, will it? It seems so long! I can’t understand why they keep him so long!”

“You mustn’t worry yourself about it.”

“Oh no—no, I mustn’t! But it does seem as if they’d be through by this time!” She lay quiet for a little—her eyes closed. Then suddenly turning her head on the pillow she looked at him again.

“How long did it take to get here?” she asked.

“Ten days, but I didn’t get a very fast steamer.”

“Yes, I see. Maybe he took a slow one. But I’m expecting him very soon now—very soon.”

She went on for a little, asking questions about the detention of the one she expected—the length of time it would take to regulate the machine he’d sold—whether a fast steamer would be leaving when it was finished, and other fancies like that, to all of which Pentecost replied briefly and in a low voice. He was waiting his chance.

She’d been lying back against the pillows, but rather suddenly in the midst of her questioning she stopped and sat up erect in the bed, staring at him. “Oh——” she finally breathed. “I thought you—I didn’t know——Are you Mr. Pentecost?”

“Yes, Mrs. Findlay.”

“They—they said so, but I didn’t seem to——” She glanced about, thinking; then her eyes were fixed on him again. “You were so good to come,” she whispered painfully.

He saw that the merciless memories were coming back to her.

“You—you can be such a help to me—if you will—such a help! It’s something that——” She broke off, and raising her head a little from the pillow, glanced at the door into the nurse’s room. “Would you shut it, please?”

Pentecost carefully closed the door—then returned to his chair by her side.

“I want to ask you to do something for me, Mr. Pentecost—because—you see—they think I’m going to get well—but it isn’t so—no,” (shaking her head a little on the pillow) “it isn’t so.”

Pentecost sat looking at her with a peculiar glint in his prominent eyes, but said nothing.

“I tell you,” she went on after a momentary pause, “because you—you’re the only one I can trust.”

“Where did you get that idea?”

“He told me. It was in a letter he left. He said you were his friend, the only friend he had except the old woman who took care of him, and that I must trust you in everything.”

“In view of this, Mrs. Findlay, tell me in what way I can be of service?”

“Mr. Pentecost, what will become of my little Mildred?”

“It strikes me” (in a suddenly sharp, penetrating voice) “you’re the one to answer that.”

She looked at him in amazement.

“I?” she finally asked in a faint voice.

“Who else?” he inquired. “Aren’t you the one who’s proposing to abandon her?”

“Abandon——!” (With a slight gasp.) “Why——How——You don’t mean——”

“Well what would you call it?”

“No—no—no! Oh, wait! Let me tell you!” (With all her earnestness she could hardly do more than whisper.) “Oh, I couldn’t stay—I don’t want to!” She shook her head a little on the pillow. “He’s gone—gone! The thought of it is killing me. I want to go. I want to be where he is!”

“How do you know where he is?” Pentecost’s voice cut in like a knife.

She stared at him in astonishment.

“My religion tells me that, Mr. Pentecost,” she whispered, reverently.

“And does this religion of yours omit to tell you where your daughter is?”

“Oh yes—yes!—that’s why I wanted to see you. That’s why I——” She broke off and glanced distressfully about the room.

“You seem to have made up your mind to leave her,” Pentecost observed.

Edith was silent.

“Aren’t the living of some consequence,” he went on, “or is it only the dead we have to consider?”

“No no—that’s wrong! I hadn’t forgotten her! Oh, how can you think such a thing, when it was about her that I wanted to see you—just about her—nothing else!”

“What can I do?”

“I hope—I hope you’ll consent to take her—to take care of her! I don’t know who else to ask—and he told me to trust in you—about everything. If I can only know she’ll be with you I shall die happy!”

Pentecost suddenly turned and blazed out upon her—something as he used to do in the Chicago days when he leaped, tigerlike, on a victim in the witness stand.

“What is it to me whether you die happy or not! Whatever I can do in this affair I’m doing on account of someone else—not for you Mrs. Findlay! You cut no figure with me—why in God’s name should you? I’ve never laid eyes on you before—and now I come to see you it looks to me like a cursed low-down play you’re making, that while I’m doing my best to carry out everything he wanted, you’re lying here doing your best to block his game! That’s just what you’re doing, Mrs. Findlay,—pitching the fulfillment of his most vital wish into the discard!”

“Why I——Why you——” She couldn’t go on.

“Look, then—look at this! The one thing in the world he wanted money for—the reason he was mad and crazy and demented to sell his machine and get it, was so he could send you here and do everything on earth to save your life! He lived for that—nothing else—it was the one thought that possessed him! He made a will to make it certain that—if anything happened to him—the money would be used for that and nothing else. And after all this—which you know as well as I do, I come over here and find you deliberately throwing away all he worked for and hoped for and—for all I know—prayed for. Of course if you’re bound to go against it I’ll do what I can about the child—though God knows the little one needs you. It all rests with you, Mrs. Findlay. The head medical sharp that came over, tells me it isn’t the disease that’s killing you—it’s yourself. He says you’ve made up your mind to die—you’re determined to do it—and that play’s certainly going to take the trick if you sit in the game long enough. It’s up to you to quit that if you want to do the right thing by the dead——and by the living.”

Pentecost rose and took her thin little hand in his. “I’ll say good-by, Mrs. Findlay,” he said in an altered tone. “They’ll keep me informed” (motioning toward the nurse’s room) “of which way the cards fall, and I’ll act accordingly.”

As he reached the door he thought he heard her call to him faintly, and went back to see if it was so. She was looking up at him as he stood by the bed, and tried to speak—but only her lips moved. He bent nearer to catch what she said.

“I’ll try,” she whispered.

He took her hand again.

“There’s some sense to that Mrs. Findlay,” he said; and after looking down into her eyes a moment he laid her hand back on the coverlet where he’d found it, and quietly left the room.

It was still early enough to get the afternoon train out—which he did.

A few days short of a month after Mr. Pentecost’s brief visit to the Austrian Alps, he walked, one wintry afternoon, into the office of the firm, having come direct from a trans-Atlantic steamer—just docked. Wasting no more time on salutations than he usually did—which was precisely none at all, he quickly got Harker into the small inner office—sometimes referred to by the staff as the dissecting room—and after pushing him into a chair and drawing one for himself close to it, began talking to him in tones that were subdued to the limit.

“We’re moving the office to London,” he said, “—and inside of twenty-one days. I’ve got something I want to put on over there. I’ll need most of the office force—especially Finch Dugas—and I’m taking eleven of the boys.” (By which he meant his “trusties.”)

“What’s the matter,” Harker inquired; “can’t you play it with the natives?”

“You’re dippy! Hasn’t the Yard got their numbers?”

“Sure—the Yard’s got everything. And take it from me if you’re going up against that layout you’ve got to watch your step and then some!”

“Now, Roxy—you’ve hit on the one thing that’s doing the pull on me. As I was over on that side I thought I’d come home by way of London and take a look around. While I was doing it a little something crossed my mind that looked to me as if it might interest ’em. That being so, we play it.”

“Don’t say we. Maybe you’ll play it, I don’t know; but if this London scheme you’re pulling off is one of your favorite flirtations with the undertaker, I declare myself out of it here and now. I can get myself nicely hung in the U. S. A. without going abroad for it—and I’d just as soon patronize home industries.”

“Not a killing to it I give you my word,” Pentecost assured him. “We play a corpse for two or three moves, but it’s handed to us—no chance of a line across—they’ll have the guy that did it. Now every one of us comes in from different places—I go round and get across from Stockholm—you and Dugas make it from Rio—plenty of time as you don’t play in till near the finish. Kennedy makes it from Holland—” and he went on laying out the “game” with Harker to the uttermost detail.

Three days later Pentecost (but not as Pentecost) embarked on a Swedish-American Line steamer. Harker was at the dock getting final instructions (of course he was going in on it as Pentecost knew he would), and there was a vast lot of things to do in a limited time.

The two stood talking on the pier, hidden by piled-up crates and boxes, yet only a short distance from the gangplank so that Pentecost could go on board at the last moment. When they had about finished up matters connected with the London “operation,” Harker happened to think of something.

“Oh—by the way,” he said; “how was that lady you went over to see?”

“Not so well,” Pentecost muttered in a way that suggested aversion to talking about it.

But Harker, not affected by this, cheerfully pursued the subject.

“Going to die?” he asked.

“Had it all fixed to.” (Speaking very shortly.)

“Who? Who do you mean had it fixed?”

“She did.”

“Oh—I see—she wanted to.”

“Yes, and her wanting was doing it. The doctors were hunting some way to shake her up, and left it to me. So I went in and gave her a jolt or two that might change her mind.”

“What did you say?”

“Anything I could grab off the line.”

“Then she’s going to get well, is she?”

“How the hell do I know?”

Pentecost had put an end to the subject with that, but after a silence of some little time, he went on,—and Harker took notice of a most unusual softness in his voice.

“D’you know what I’d do, Hark, if I had it to do again—that is, if I knew what it was that was eating him?”

Harker—surprised at his tone—kept his eyes on him for the answer.

“I’d ’a’ framed that Findlay soak for a twenty-year jack in a nice cool cell, and then staked those two out in the mountains—or wherever it was she had to go.”

“I thought you did know.”

“Not till too late. It was in a letter he left for me with Jamie Dreek.”

The two stood looking at one another.

“Well,” said Harker after a brief silence; “what’s the good of post mortems?”

Pentecost nodded. “What’s the good?” he muttered.

A moment later he was hurrying on board, and with that came the end of this “Pentecost Episode.”

I take the liberty of adding a brief statement. H. McC.

Dudley sat smoking heavily and abstractedly after Mr. Barnes had finished a few business details with me, and after shaking hands with both of us, had gone. I was to take a night express for New York, as my time was up. We’d just got it in on the ten-day limit.

I saw that Duds had something on his mind—puffing away at his pipe and staring down at the floor—so, as there was plenty of time before my train I let him alone. He looked up at me after a wink, in the manner of rousing himself.

“D’you know who that was that just went out?” he asked.

“What?—Oh!—Why Barnes of course!”

“No.” He shook his head. “Not Barnes of course, but some one else of course. I’ve been keeping a few tabs on the man that’s been telling us all this stuff, and there’s four things—with a possibility of five—that no one on earth could know but Hugo Pentecost.”

“Good Lord!... Why ... then you think——”

“That’s it—I think.—But I’m going to make sure. He’s in town yet. I’ll drop you a line to-morrow.”

The “line” reached me a couple of days later.

“It was Pentecost,” was the statement it began with. And went on: “That is, I mean it was the man that was—he’s something else now. He’s in business abroad, and taking a steamer from here. His agent (or ‘trusty’ if you like) is going to get the manuscript from you when you write it out. Take my advice and put in all this at the end of the thing. It needs some sort of a finish, and this might do. If he doesn’t like it he can cut it out when he gets the proof—and you can bet he’ll get it.

“Couldn’t make him tell the sort of an enterprise he’s on over there—says maybe he will sometime.

“It seems the girl—Edith Findlay—is making a slow recovery. I asked him how the book would affect her if she got hold of it, and he said it wouldn’t do her any harm by then. ‘And by God!’ he went on, ‘it’s just as well for her to know—now she’s able to stand it—that such a man as Charles Michael Haworth went happily and eagerly to his death, so that she might live. You’d think she might run through her life on that, and ask for nothing more. But probably not.’”

THE END