After leaving the real estate office, Morgan walked south on Broadway to Wilson Avenue and entered the Western Union office. Here he sent a short cable to London. Leaving his address so that the reply could be forwarded to him, he went across the street and took an elevated train for home.
After dinner Morgan settled down in his favorite chair to await Tierney, who had telephoned that he would be there in a little while. As he was filling his pipe for the second time, the bell rang. Morgan opened the door and Tierney bustled in. The cheerful smile, the snappy step, and the careless motion with which Tierney shot his hat into a nearby chair, told Morgan as plainly as words, that his partner brought worth while information. Tierney pulled an easy chair up to the table, and Morgan pushed the tobacco jar and an extra pipe over to him. Tierney filled the pipe, lighted up, and settling back, grinned at Morgan.
"I may have exceeded orders, but I've sure got some dope on that guy, Marsh. You told me to find out what I could about Atwood. I visited various stores in the neighborhood which a family was likely to patronize. No one knew the name. After I had stopped in a cigar store, and found that his name was not in the telephone directory, I figured that there was nothing more I could do along that line until I'd talked things over with you. So I decided to hang around in sight of the house and watch developments."
"At a quarter to three a young woman came out, walked down to Lawrence Avenue and stood on the corner, apparently waiting for a motor bus. As she did not look like anyone I had seen in the house, I gave her the once-over."
"Was she about medium height, slender, with blonde hair and dark blue eyes?" questioned Morgan.
"Well, I didn't get close enough to gaze fondly into her eyes," said Tierney, "but the rest of your description fits all right. Do you know who she is?"
"Probably Miss Atwood," Morgan explained, "daughter of the tenant in the flat across the hall. In the future it will do no harm to keep one eye on her, Tierney."
"I kept both eyes on her today, Morgan, and that's the way I got the dope I did."
Morgan smiled appreciatively, and Tierney went on.
"As I was saying, I watched this girl as she waited for the bus. Suddenly I glanced toward the house, and there was this guy, Marsh, standing just inside the doorway. To me it looked as if he was trying to keep an eye on this girl, without her seeing him if she looked back. So I kept out of sight as far as I could and watched the two of them. Sure enough, in about one minute along comes the bus and the girl gets in. Would you believe it, Morgan, that very minute Marsh dashes across the street, nails an empty taxi and starts after the bus."
"Now, I ain't as quick as you, Morgan, but I sure figured that my cue was to join the procession. Luck was with me, for the minute I got this idea I spotted a Checker taxi and rushed at it so hard the driver nearly fainted. 'Follow that Yellow ahead!' I yelled to the driver, and before he came to a full stop I had jumped in and we were off."
"We trailed down Sheridan Road, through Lincoln Park, and on to Michigan Avenue—the girl in the bus, Marsh in the Yellow, and me in the Checker. Just after we passed Adams Street the Yellow stopped at the curb and Marsh got out. I stopped my cab quick, and as I saw that Marsh was paying off his driver, I settled with mine and got ready for the next move."
"Marsh started down Michigan Avenue, and I could keep pretty close on account of the crowd. Pretty soon I sighted this girl trotting along a little way ahead of us. Now, there's a situation for you, Morgan—Marsh trailing the girl and me trailing Marsh."
At this point Morgan's interest was shown by the fact that he sat forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees, and for the moment forgot to pull at his pipe.
Tierney continued. "The girl turns into a building at six hundred and something Michigan Avenue—I've got the exact number in my book. Marsh strolls over to the curb, while I, taking advantage of his back being turned for the moment, shot into the building after her. She entered an elevator, and I strolled in, too. Luckily, she stood near the door, so I could get into the back of the car and not be specially noticed. She got off at a musical school. As we had been the only two people in the elevator, I took a chance, and said to the man running it, 'Some looker!'"
"'Yes,' he says, 'a fine looking girl. She comes here twice a week.'"
"'Well,' says I, 'that's a good thing for women—to learn music. How long do they teach them?'"
"'You mean, how long does a lesson last?' he asked me."
"'Yes,' I told him."
"'Oh, about a half-hour,' he says. 'Say! What floor do you want?' he shot at me as he reached the top."
"'Good Lord!' I says, winking at him. 'That dame sure upset me. I want to go back two floors.'"
"When he let me out I hustled over to the stairway, went down to the ground floor, and when Marsh had his eyes turned away for a minute, I beat it out and up Michigan."
"Now, Morgan, here's where I was clever. That girl was good for a half-hour and so was Marsh, if he was following her; as I was pretty sure he was. Now you or I haven't seen all of the inside of Marsh's apartment, have we? And yet we suspect this guy, and want to get something on him if we can."
Morgan nodded, and began to smile as he gathered what Tierney was about to tell him.
"Well, Morgan, I figured that a half-hour would give me all the time I needed, so I ran over to the elevated and went back to Lawrence Avenue. I slipped up the alleyway, back of the house, and climbed the rear stairs to Marsh's flat. After thumping on the door several times I made sure no one was home, especially as the shades in the kitchen and the pantry were pulled down. So I pulled out my bunch of keys and had the luck to find one that opened the lock. I closed the door softly, and tiptoed through the kitchen and the dining room. Would you believe it, Morgan—THERE WASN'T A STICK OF FURNITURE IN THOSE ROOMS!"
"You mean the place was empty?" asked Morgan.
"Up to the entrance to the hallway it was absolutely bare, Morgan. The living room is furnished, and so is the bedroom; and there were a few toilet articles in the bathroom. He has a pair of heavy drapes across the doorway to the dining room, so that anyone coming in would never guess the back part wasn't furnished. I looked things over pretty carefully in the few minutes I had, and I didn't find a single article that belonged to a woman. I tell you, Morgan, that fellow's living there alone and only got half the flat furnished! Take it from me, he's got something on. That flat's just a blind. If it was me, I'd lock him up tonight."
"Well, it's coming pretty soon, Tierney," acceded Morgan. "What you've found out today will help a lot."
There was a few minutes pause as the two men smoked their pipes, and Morgan analyzed the facts which Tierney had given him. Suddenly he leaned over and picked up the telephone from the tabouret.
"What's doing?" exclaimed Tierney.
"We shouldn't leave that man Marsh unwatched from now on," explained Morgan.
"I know it, Morgan, and I've taken care of all that."
"You mean the house is watched?"
"Sure," said Tierney. "The minute I got out of the flat this afternoon I telephoned the captain of the precinct and told him just enough to get his co-operation. There's a man on the job now and he won't leave there, unless he follows Marsh, until I relieve him in the morning."
"There's one drawback to that," observed Morgan, as he set the telephone back in place. "No one knows Marsh except you."
"There's a man knows him better than I do—Murphy, the man on the beat. He spent quite a spell with Marsh last night."
"That's right," agreed Morgan. "How did you fix it?"
"The Captain put another man on Murphy's beat, and put Murphy into plain-clothes for tonight. It worked all right, because Murphy was a night man anyway."
"You're all right, Tierney," Morgan complimented him.
Tierney grinned his appreciation.
"Now then, Tierney," went on Morgan, "you relieve Murphy in the morning, and watch things until I can get on the job. After I relieve you, you get in touch with Headquarters and have some fingerprint photos taken."
"Did you find finger prints?" exclaimed Tierney, sitting up with a start.
"No," explained Morgan, "but I found the marks of the sides of somebody's hands on the dining room table in that flat. I want them prepared and photographed just as if they were fingerprints."
"But you can't identify anybody by marks of that kind," remarked Tierney, with an inquiring note in his voice.
"Probably not," Morgan returned. "I haven't the slightest idea how I could make use of such a photo now. But I want to provide against anything that may turn up. The marks are there, and we might as well have a record of them."
Tierney opened his mouth to reply, but at that instant Morgan held up a warning hand.
In many of the older and smaller apartments, such as the one occupied by Morgan, the door from the main hall opens directly into the living room. Such was the arrangement here, and Morgan slowly turned his head toward this door and listened intently. Then he carefully arose from his chair, moved softly around the corner of the table, and slowly tiptoed toward the door. Tierney had not heard a sound, yet he instantly became as alert as Morgan. He stood ready for a quick move, if necessary, while his right hand rested on the butt of the revolver in his hip pocket.
At that moment there was a quite audible sound outside the door. Morgan leaped forward and threw the door open. With the sound of the opening door both men heard somebody break into a hasty descent of the stairs. Morgan dashed through the door and down the stairs. Tierney followed close behind him. Before they reached the front door they heard the roar of an opened muffler and an accelerated engine, and by the time they reached the front steps there was nothing to be seen except the black shadow of an automobile without lights rapidly disappearing down Sheffield Avenue.
"Well, I'm damned!" growled Tierney, as the car disappeared.
Morgan said nothing, but stood thoughtfully gazing down the street.
"What do you make of it?" inquired Tierney.
"Let's go up again," suggested Morgan, without replying to the question.
Back in the living room, the men resumed their seats, and spoke in lowered voices.
"It's hard to tell what it means," Morgan at last replied. "That's the first time anything of the kind ever happened to me."
"How did you get wise?" asked Tierney.
"I heard the door move several times," Morgan explained. "At first I thought it was the wind, but the last time I heard it I was sure it had a different sound. It seemed to me that somebody had leaned against the door while trying to listen."
"By God!" exclaimed Tierney. "This is SOME case, Morgan. Are we spying on somebody, or is somebody spying on us? Marsh trails a girl; I chase up Marsh; and now I'm damned if I don't think somebody's chasing me, too."
"It begins to look like a bigger case than I thought, Tierney. An ordinary murderer usually gets out of town or lays low. Quite likely somebody is afraid we will unearth more than a murder. You run along now. I want to be alone to think things over. On your way home stop off and look up Murphy. Find out whether or not Marsh has left the house tonight. Telephone me what you find out."
"Sure thing," answered Tierney, and picking up his hat, hurried away.
Morgan sat down in his chair and began to refill his pipe. After lighting it, he settled back into his chair and meditated on the case. Reviewing in his mind the various bits of fact, information and incident which he now had at hand, he endeavored to separate or combine them according to their direct bearing upon the case.
In his earlier days Morgan had learned that a criminal case was something like a dusty roadway. Many tracks crossed and re-crossed one another, becoming just a bewildering mass to the untrained eye. In the present instance, the situation in the Atwood apartment had queer aspects which seemed to connect it with the incident of the night before. The suspicious points were not so glaringly apparent, perhaps, as the circumstances which connected the man Marsh, but they were there just the same. While the Atwood situation attracted Morgan, he was inclined to believe that he had actually uncovered some other situation; of a criminal nature, perhaps, but not associated with his present investigations. To one unfamiliar with crime, the incident of Marsh following the girl might have seemed to form a connection, but Morgan realized that if there was anything between the Atwoods and Marsh, the latter would hardly have been secretly following Miss Atwood.
On the other hand, it was quite possible that a clever criminal, of the type he now suspected Marsh to be, having successfully accomplished one job, might have another in mind, which he thought he could execute before forced to make his final getaway. Instead of attributing this incident to a connection between the Atwoods and Marsh, Morgan figured that it weighed somewhat in the Atwoods' favor, while still further incriminating the man Marsh.
At this point in his reflections the telephone bell rang, and answering it, Morgan heard Tierney's voice.
"I've just seen Murphy," reported Tierney. "He says that Marsh came home about seven-thirty and has not been out since; unless he slipped out the back door. This doesn't seem likely as there is another man watching the rear. He don't know Marsh, but he would find out before he let anyone go. Murphy says he has seen a shadow pass the windows several times during the evening, and we are pretty sure that Marsh is the only person in that flat."
"All right," replied Morgan. They exchanged good-byes, and Morgan replaced the telephone on the tabouret.
Settling back into his chair once more, Morgan came to the conclusion that one or more of Marsh's confederates of the night before had simply been endeavoring to get information so as to warn Marsh whether or not he was suspected. Morgan knew that, as usual, he and Tierney had talked in guarded voices, so he felt confident that little, if any, of their conversation had been overheard. It was the anxiety of the person on the other side of the door to try and catch their words which had led him to lean heavily against the door and so warn Morgan of his presence. Morgan felt fairly certain that he would find Marsh at home the next day, and after that, if any reports could be conveyed to him, they would be of little use.
Piecing together, one by one, the various bits of evidence he had accumulated against Marsh, convinced Morgan that this was the man he wanted. The flattened bullet, the cigarette ashes, and the hand marks could not identify anyone. The cuff button, however, with its initial "M" was more direct in its accusation. It might be the principal hold on the suspect. Morgan admitted that the evidence was purely circumstantial, and that there was really nothing in it to convict a man in a court of law, but there was enough evidence to take Marsh up on suspicion, and past experience made him confident that once he had this man at Headquarters, the usual grilling would extract enough information from him to lead them to sufficient evidence of a positive nature.
There was, of course, still a doubt as to whether or not an actual crime had been committed. But something surely had happened, and Morgan began to feel that the next day would throw considerable light on what it was.
Having reached these conclusions, and a determination to visit Marsh the next day and take him into custody, Morgan went to bed.
At the first note from his alarm clock the next morning, Morgan jumped promptly out of bed. After awakening his mother so that she could get his breakfast, he hastily dressed.
Just as he was swallowing the last of his coffee there came a prolonged ring at the bell. His mother went to the door, and returned with a Western Union envelope. "My final bit of evidence!" exclaimed Morgan, as he hurriedly tore off the end of the envelope and read the cablegram within. It was brief and to the point, and read just as Morgan had anticipated it would.
Marsh unknown to me. Ames.
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg