The Complete Simon Iff (27 page)

"So you think somebody has been getting after Barker."

"Sure of it! Barker would never have trusted himself to gamble. Suppose he had really had some secret tip from Paris, he would have refused to win on the 'sure thing'. He would have said, 'I daren't break my principles. The first win will tempt me to a second flutter - until one day I plunge on a rotten tip, and go under, as I've seen so many poor devils of gamblers do?' Eh? Then, even if he had decided to take the dive, he would still have got the money in a regular way. He wouldn't have called attention to the game by breaking his routine. So I'm perfectly sure that the man who took the money was not Andrew P. Barker."

"But, Good God, who could possibly hope to personate him? The most familiarly conspicuous and eccentric figure in New York!"

"That Italian cloak would be an asset as far as the figure goes. And he always wore a suit of the same cloth, always the same singular pattern of top hat. Then the beard is a great help."

"But his extraordinary stature! There aren't fifty men in the whole of the United States who could be mistaken for him, however well disguised, even in twilight."

"Ah, by taking thought one may add a cubit to one's stature."

"About an inch, perhaps, with special boots. More, and the walk would be thrown out."

"Quite so. I'm not clear on this, mind, yet. But the personation is helped once more by his habits. An imposter, well advised as to Barker's routine, would know that no one would dare speak to him. Every rigid defence has its weak spot. Conspirators could play up to him with absolute safety. He would never do anything unusual which would disturb them."

"Well, on that hypothesis he's been murdered or at least kidnapped. They have to have his keys. It could have been done in the street, with a car. I think I'll get busy, and look out for a very tall man." Teake rose, and rang for his coat and hat.

"No," said Simon Iff, "on my hypothesis, you should look for a very short man."

"Well, he's not short any more!"

Teake laughed heartily at his play on words, and thought it safer to explain it. "Six hundred thousand or so! Some haul!" He went down the steps of the house.

"By the way, dine with me to-morrow night?" cried Iff.

"Right."

"I'll 'phone you time and place."

"Single-track mind," mused Iff, when he had gone. "He never even waited to hear my theory of Morning, Noon, and Night, and their very interesting revelations."

He went upstairs, and told Mrs. Barker that Commissioner Teake thought her husband had been kidnapped. Some one must have known that he would leave the bank that day with that money on him - perhaps the party to whom he intended to pay it.

This pious fraud accomplished, the mystic returned to his apartment, and spent the night in meditation upon the Four Formless States, ending with that which is "not Nothing, and yet neither P nor p'." At ten o'clock, however, he was at the tavern where Barker always lunched. In his hand was a gripsack. "I want you to look after this," he said to the attendant, "and have you got a place where I could dress for dinner? I want a table for six thirty."

"Sure; there's a dressing room in here." He led the way through the 'men's room'. A little corridor gave access to four private rooms, small but comfortably furnished, and fitted with all toilet accessories.

"Keep this for me. Six o'clock," said Simon Iff. "And tell the head waiter to book me a table for four at six thirty." Then he went out to a telephone booth. Teake promised to be punctual.

He then called up Mr. Noon. "Mr. Barker has been found," he said; "he had a lapse of memory, and is not quite recovered. But he has asked me to tell you to take up your duties at six thirty to-night, at the usual table in the tavern. Please tell Mr. Night and Mr. Morning to report at the Pleasance at their regular hours."

Simon Iff was looking at the second hand of his watch. Twenty seconds elapsed before the reply came. "I'm very glad to hear your news, Mr. Iff. I will be on hand at six twenty-five."

The mystic hung up the receiver. "Yes," he mused, "the young man may well be astonished."

Lastly he rang up Sinorina Visconti, and asked her to join the little party - to celebrate the return of the banker. The girl was frankly and spontaneously overjoyed. Iff told her that he was motoring out to convey the glad intelligence to Mrs. Barker. Indeed, he went to the Pleasance; but his errand was another. He broke it to the widow that she need have no hope.

The three guests were punctual to the moment. Iff ordered dinner to be served. "Oughtn't we to wait for Mr. Barker?" suggested Noon. "He will not be here," replied Simon; "I will explain his absence." He applied himself to his oysters with a will. The others followed his example, but it was a poor pretence. The nerves of all three were terribly on edge. Simon Iff ate and drank remorselessly, now and again speaking of the weather, or asking some question about American customs or politics. By the time he had lighted his cigar the social atmosphere was impossible.

"I will now keep my promise. I will explain the absence of Mr. Barker. As I told you last night, Teake, he was a moral weakling. He had strong passions - even horrible vices, one might say, if one were conventional - and he was afraid of them, as he was afraid of everything else. So he pigeon-holed them. 'I must be absolutely safe,' he thought, I doubt not; 'I will give ten minutes daily of my time to this indulgence. And I will choose a time and place where no one can possibly suspect me.' So he took one of the dressing-rooms upstairs for his house of assignation. Hardly anybody comes here before twelve thirty; the attendant, well bribed, could easily slip any one through without suspicion being aroused. He chose his secretaries for their sympathy with his ideas, and made them his accomplices. So much you and Mr. Night were good enough to tell me, don't you know, with that 'shershy lafamm'* talk. Besides, I knew it all before. The weak character was enough to inform anyone who happens to have read the works of Doctor Sigmund Freud. I was looking already for something of the sort when your appearance and manner brought the fullest confirmation." He smiled pleasantly at Mr. Noon.

"What has this to do with Mr. Barker's absence?" said the Italian girl. "Has he eloped?"

"I think he must have lost his head," replied Simon, lightly. It was quite ten seconds before he obtained an echo to his laughter.

"Now, how should we attack this person, if we wished? We know exactly what he will do at any moment - and we have a matter of ten minutes or so daily when he is - in his way - off his guard. Ten minutes when he has contracted out of the regular protection which a policed society affords its members! Some genius conceives the idea of killing him and personating him, taking his keys, and robbing his bank. The only weak moment in the man's day is this fatal ten minutes. So the attack is timed accordingly. But the attendant must suspect nothing. Therefore the body has to be disposed of. Difficulty Number One. You can't carry the corpse of a giant out of a public restaurant without causing comment. Difficulty Number Two. You can't look like Andrew P. Barker. However, our genius put the two difficulties together, and made one ease of them. It's a case of an old head on young shoulders." Again he laughed pleasantly, and again the others forced their courtesy to echo him.

"Now, to play the part of Barker, we need some one who knows the bank like the palm of his hand - for he may not be able to see very well."

"Why?" said Teake.

"A technical difficulty, merely technical. I dare say there was a clever dodge to obviate it. To proceed, our friend must know Barker and his little ways very well. Possibly Morning, Noon, or Night. Eh? All three have alibis, true. But a man in bed with a sick headache in a darkened room - couldn't we get away with a wax work bust?"

"Are you accusing me?" asked Noon, with a face as black as a thunder cloud.

"Of course not. I'm merely theorizing. You forget altogether that you're a very short man - a full head shorter than Barker, I should judge." Again he rippled audiably, and again his guests automatically copied him.

"Now suppose that we had a surgeon or exceptional skill waiting in the dressing-room with Mr. Noon. Barker arrives, and is killed with a single blow. Our surgeon has a water-proof sheet, and all sorts of paraphenalia, ready in the dressing-room next door. They take in the corpse. He cuts off the head, stops the bleeding with paraffin wax or some such simple device, and fits it into the framework which has been fitted to the head and shoulders of our young friend here. The difficulty of the stature and the likeness disappears at a stroke. The cloak completed the device, and off marches Mr. Noon to do his work at the bank, while the surgeon divides the trunk and limbs, and packs them away into the sample-cases of our convenient salesmen. The surgeon, possibly enough, drives off in a closed car, picks up Noon, removes the disguise, goes home and destroys the traces. Each salesman gets rid of his trophy easily enough - one twelfth of a two-hundred pound man is only a little over thirty pounds - there are fifty ways of working it. Then Noon distributes the swag, and they are all separately offering the stock on the market before one o'clock."

He had been addressing the ceiling, but now he turned his eyes on Commissioner Teake.

"Have I explained Mr. Barker's absence to your satisfaction?"

"You sure have. I think I'll take Mr. Noon along with me. There will be no trouble in getting evidence."

Noon smiled. He knew that Iff's accusation had been merely guess-work. But Teake, once started, went on like a steam-roller.

"We happen to have had all this dope on Barker for ten years. If Mr. Iff could guess that right, I'll take the rest of the guess on trust, and work it up. Come along, Mr. Noon."

The young man followed with a grin. Teake was plainly puzzled by his attitude.

The Italian girl smiled. "A most charming surprise dinner, Mr. Iff! It was really perfectly wonderful. But now I must get home to Bacchus - will you take me?"

"I had hoped you would allow me."

She asked him up into her studio, and threw off her wraps. Simon was more fascinated than ever with her beauty and vivacity.

"I'm going to tease you," she said.

"I hope so."

"So you dare put me off, like that wooden Teake, with a half-finished story? And poor Mr. Noon! Really, it's too bad to play such a joke on a creature like that!"

"Yes, I thought I should like to finish the story in less unimaginative surroundings."

"I should really like to know how you deduced what you did."

"You should be ashamed to be envious. Creation's far finer than analysis - and you are an artist!"

"I shall not quote 'Intentions' against you."

"Well, there was no difficulty at all in seeing what had occurred. Step one: Barker wasn't the man at the bank. Therefore some one else was. Step two: Time and place became extremely limited. Step three: Noon's manner in the billiard room showed that he knew something. I saw at once that his alibi was shaky. A wax model. Then where was he? Personating Barker. To succeed he must have either a very large stature or - a very small one, and another wax model. Then I saw that no wax would deceive people in the street or in the bank for a second. Disguise is cut out, as soon as one cuts out the tall man. Then what could resemble Barker's living head? Obviously, his dead one!

"Step four: Limitation of time and space help us to cast the persons of the drama, and to pick the scenery. When I went down to the tavern this morning I took my grip in the fullest confidence that I should find a locale suitable for a murder. Mr. Morning's story of the Twelve Jolly Salesmen went very nicely with Teake's tale of the Twelve Jolly Stock-dumpers. The disposition of corpses and stocks is made easier by the Great Economical Principle of Division of Labour. Need I say more?"

"About the - dramatis personae?"

"Oh, the mask of Noon? Yes, somebody had to make that, and somebody had to do that brilliant bit of rough dissection against time. And somebody had to devise the whole scheme - a lovely mixture of the ghastly and the grotesque - the finest gargoyle on the Black Cathedral of Crime! Well, possibly one person might have done all three. Personally, I think so."

Signorina Visconti rose slowly from her chair.

"I wonder if you'd care to see my work - my other work."

She pulled the damp cloth from the clay bust. Simon Iff jumped from his chair: the figure was a head of Christ, the conventional Italian type in all externals. But the mouth wore a smile Satanic in mad merriment, and the eyes glared with a cold ferocity which was only the more fearful for their sardonic triumph.

The girl's laughter rang brilliant through the room.

"I asked you here because I knew you knew, and I thought I had better appeal to your better feelings. Noon will hold his tongue until he hears from me; but you must tip off that ass Teake, or he'll blurt something out."

"I imagine so." Simple Simon was slightly inclined to asperity, whose source he did not seek to trace.

"But it won't do. Observe, I shall come out into the lime light."

"I imagine so."

"But, my dear master, you are not in Europe. This is the State of New York."

"I believe so."

"You have not been here long. So I suppose you want to read the story of the Bad Banker and the Wronged Woman; or the Martyred Maiden's Madness."

"Oh!" said Simon Iff.

"With all your penetration, you have missed one vital fact. I have a pituitary body."

"So has everybody."

"But mine is hypo-hypertrophied; that is, of normal size. Consequently, I can do anything without knowing it; but that can only happen once in my life. So I'm not only innocent, but I can never do it again. The greatest alienist in the country will swear to this nonsense, partly for the fee, but most of all for the advertisement."

"I see," said Simon Iff, very slowly and painfully.

"All you can do is to hush up the whole affair. Surely Noon's grin surprised you? Mrs. Barker is the dearest old lady; why should she find out what her adored husband was?"