Tales of Men and Ghosts. Edith Wharton

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V

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      DESPAIRINGLY, Granice gazed up and down the shabby street. Beside him stood a young man with bright prominent eyes, a smooth but not too smoothly-shaven face, and an Irish smile. The young man’s nimble glance followed Granice’s.

      “Sure of the number, are you?” he asked briskly.

      “Oh, yes—it was 104.”

      “Well, then, the new building has swallowed it up—that’s certain.”

      He tilted his head back and surveyed the half-finished front of a brick and limestone flat-house that reared its flimsy elegance above a row of tottering tenements and stables.

      “Dead sure?” he repeated.

      “Yes,” said Granice, discouraged. “And even if I hadn’t been, I know the garage was just opposite Leffler’s over there.” He pointed across the street to a tumble-down stable with a blotched sign on which the words “Livery and Boarding” were still faintly discernible.

      The young man dashed across to the opposite pavement. “Well, that’s something—may get a clue there. Leffler’s—same name there, anyhow. You remember that name?”

      “Yes—distinctly.”

      Granice had felt a return of confidence since he had enlisted the interest of the Explorer’s “smartest” reporter. If there were moments when he hardly believed his own story, there were others when it seemed impossible that every one should not believe it; and young Peter McCarren, peering, listening, questioning, jotting down notes, inspired him with an exquisite sense of security. McCarren had fastened on the case at once, “like a leech,” as he phrased it—jumped at it, thrilled to it, and settled down to “draw the last drop of fact from it, and had not let go till he had.” No one else had treated Granice in that way—even Allonby’s detective had not taken a single note. And though a week had elapsed since the visit of that authorized official, nothing had been heard from the District Attorney’s office: Allonby had apparently dropped the matter again. But McCarren wasn’t going to drop it—not he! He positively hung on Granice’s footsteps. They had spent the greater part of the previous day together, and now they were off again, running down clues.

      But at Leffler’s they got none, after all. Leffler’s was no longer a stable. It was condemned to demolition, and in the respite between sentence and execution it had become a vague place of storage, a hospital for broken-down carriages and carts, presided over by a blear-eyed old woman who knew nothing of Flood’s garage across the way—did not even remember what had stood there before the new flat-house began to rise.

      “Well—we may run Leffler down somewhere; I’ve seen harder jobs done,” said McCarren, cheerfully noting down the name.

      As they walked back toward Sixth Avenue he added, in a less sanguine tone: “I’d undertake now to put the thing through if you could only put me on the track of that cyanide.”

      Granice’s heart sank. Yes—there was the weak spot; he had felt it from the first! But he still hoped to convince McCarren that his case was strong enough without it; and he urged the reporter to come back to his rooms and sum up the facts with him again.

      “Sorry, Mr. Granice, but I’m due at the office now. Besides, it’d be no use till I get some fresh stuff to work on. Suppose I call you up tomorrow or next day?”

      He plunged into a trolley and left Granice gazing desolately after him.

      Two days later he reappeared at the apartment, a shade less jaunty in demeanor.

      “Well, Mr. Granice, the stars in their courses are against you, as the bard says. Can’t get a trace of Flood, or of Leffler either. And you say you bought the motor through Flood, and sold it through him, too?”

      “Yes,” said Granice wearily.

      “Who bought it, do you know?”

      Granice wrinkled his brows. “Why, Flood—yes, Flood himself. I sold it back to him three months later.”

      “Flood? The devil! And I’ve ransacked the town for Flood. That kind of business disappears as if the earth had swallowed it.”

      Granice, discouraged, kept silence.

      “That brings us back to the poison,” McCarren continued, his note-book out. “Just go over that again, will you?”

      And Granice went over it again. It had all been so simple at the time—and he had been so clever in covering up his traces! As soon as he decided on poison he looked about for an acquaintance who manufactured chemicals; and there was Jim Dawes, a Harvard classmate, in the dyeing business—just the man. But at the last moment it occurred to him that suspicion might turn toward so obvious an opportunity, and he decided on a more tortuous course. Another friend, Carrick Venn, a student of medicine whom irremediable ill-health had kept from the practice of his profession, amused his leisure with experiments in physics, for the exercise of which he had set up a simple laboratory. Granice had the habit of dropping in to smoke a cigar with him on Sunday afternoons, and the friends generally sat in Venn’s work-shop, at the back of the old family house in Stuyvesant Square. Off this work-shop was the cupboard of supplies, with its row of deadly bottles. Carrick Venn was an original, a man of restless curious tastes, and his place, on a Sunday, was often full of visitors: a cheerful crowd of journalists, scribblers, painters, experimenters in divers forms of expression. Coming and going among so many, it was easy enough to pass unperceived; and one afternoon Granice, arriving before Venn had returned home, found himself alone in the work-shop, and quickly slipping into the cupboard, transferred the drug to his pocket.

      But that had happened ten years ago; and Venn, poor fellow, was long since dead of his dragging ailment. His old father was dead, too, the house in Stuyvesant Square had been turned into a boarding-house, and the shifting life of New York had passed its rapid sponge over every trace of their obscure little history. Even the optimistic McCarren seemed to acknowledge the hopelessness of seeking for proof in that direction.

      “And there’s the third door slammed in our faces.” He shut his note-book, and throwing back his head, rested his bright inquisitive eyes on Granice’s furrowed face.

      “Look here, Mr. Granice—you see the weak spot, don’t you?”

      The other made a despairing motion. “I see so many!”

      “Yes: but the one that weakens all the others. Why the deuce do you want this thing known? Why do you want to put your head into the noose?”

      Granice looked at him hopelessly, trying to take the measure of his quick light irreverent mind. No one so full of a cheerful animal life would believe in the craving for death as a sufficient motive; and Granice racked his brain for one more convincing. But suddenly he saw the reporter’s face soften, and melt to a naive sentimentalism.

      “Mr. Granice—has the memory of it always haunted you?”

      Granice stared a moment, and then leapt at the opening. “That’s it—the memory of it … always …”

      McCarren СКАЧАТЬ