Anthony Trent, Master Criminal

CHAPTER XXIV

DEVLIN’S PROMISE

HALF an hour later the stone, reposing in a tin box of cigarettes, was in the mails on the way to Trent’s camp at Kennebago. Mrs. Kinney had instructions to hold all mail and its safety was thus assured. There was nothing more to fear. He wanted very much to know what had happened at Miss Thompson’s apartment and proposed to call after breakfast.

But Devlin called first upon him. It was a depressed Devlin. Not indeed a Devlin come to be apologetic, but one less assured.

“Well?” said Trent affably, “come to search me again. I’m getting a little tired of it, my good man.”

“I want to know why you pass here under the name of Maltby of Chicago when your name is Trent and you live in New York City.”

“A private detective has no right to demand any such knowledge. Last night you took upon yourself powers and authority which we could have resisted if we chose. You had no legal right to search us. I submitted first because I had nothing to fear and secondly to see if the others had the stone. I didn’t think they had.”

“What do you know about the stone?” Devlin demanded suspiciously.

“Everything except just where it is at this present moment. Between you and me, Devlin, I’m here after it too. I was at Groton, as can easily be proved, on the day after the murder.” Trent smiled as a curious look passed over the detective’s face, “I’m going to disappoint you. I passed the day and night in Boston when the murder was done. I have just as much use for that ten thousand dollars as you have. By the way I suppose you got the stone?”

“Like hell I did,” Devlin cried red in the face, “I got this.” He showed Trent the piece of cut glass which had hung in his room for so long. “Glass, that’s what it is.” Devlin leaned forward and looked hard into Anthony Trent’s eyes. “You know more about this than you pretend. It ain’t accident that brings you around when two such stones as Dangerfield’s ruby and this here emerald get stolen. There’s something more to it than that. There’s something mighty queer about you, Mister Anthony Trent, and I’m going to see what it is.”

Trent looked at him for a moment and then smiled. It was the tolerant smile of the superior. It angered Devlin. His red face grew redder still.

“My good Devlin,” said Trent, “stupidity such as yours may be a good armor but it is a poor diving suit.”

“Talk sense,” Devlin commanded.

“If you wish,” Trent agreed easily. “I mean that you haven’t the mental equipment to live up to your desires. You have the impertinence to think you can outwit me. I’m your superior in everything. Mentally, morally and physically I can beat you and in your heart you know it. I think I’ve stood about as much from you as I care to take from any man. For a time you amused me. At Sunset Park you thought you were being very subtle searching my room with your twin ass, O’Brien, but I was laughing at you.”

“You was drunk,” said Devlin slowly.

“That’s how gin takes me,” said the other, “I see the ludicrous in men and things. Just listen to me. My past and present bears investigation. You looked me up and you know.” Trent drew his bow at a venture. “You found that out, didn’t you?”

“Because I couldn’t find anything against you doesn’t prove you’re what you pretend,” Devlin admitted grudgingly.

“The point I wish to make is this,” Anthony Trent said incisively, “I’m tired of you. You bore me. You weary me. You exasperate me. I am willing to overlook your blundering stupidity this time but if you worry me again I shall go after you so hard you’ll wish you’d never heard my name. I’ve got money and that means influence. You’ve neither. Think it over. Now get out.”

Devlin looked at him doubtfully. There was a strong personal animus against Anthony Trent. He hated anything suave, smiling or polite. And when these qualities were in conjunction with physical prowess they spelled danger. But for the moment nothing was to be gained by violence. Devlin essayed a genial air.

“We all of us make mistakes,” he admitted. “I’m willing to say it. I’m sorry I’ve gone wrong over this case.” He held out a big short fingered hand. “Good-bye.”

“What’s the use?” Trent demanded. “You will always be my enemy and I never shake hands with an enemy if I can get out of it.”

Devlin was at a loss for the moment. It had been his experience that when he offered a hand it was grasped gladly, eagerly. There was something in this harder unsmiling Trent which impressed him against his will.

“They shake hands before the last round of a prize fight,” he reminded the other man.

“So they do,” said Trent smiling a little, and offered his hand.

Two weeks later he was compelled to concede that Devlin’s pertinacity sometimes won its reward.

Devlin had always been an advocate of the third degree. Together with some operatives from his agency he staged a gruesome drama into which hysterical and frightened the drink-enervated Norah Thompson was dragged. Under the pitiless cross-examination of these hard men she broke down. Andrew Apthorpe’s murderer was found. But the triumph was incomplete. She convinced them that although the emerald had been hers for a time, of its destination or present ownership she had no idea. She went into penal servitude for life with a newspaper notoriety that made the Takowaja emerald the most famous stone in existence.

CHAPTER XXV

ON THE TRAIL OF “THE COUNTESS”

The expert has usually a critical sense well developed. It was so with Anthony Trent. He read the details of all the crimes treated in the daily press almost jealously. What the police regarded as clever criminals were seldom such in his eyes. There were occasionally crimes which won his admiration but they were few and far between. Violence to Trent’s mind was a confession of incompetency, the grammar school type of crime to a university trained mind. One morning the papers were unusually full of such examples of robberies with attendant assaults. Clumsy work, he commented, and then came to a robbery in Long Island of jewels whose aggregate value was more than a hundred thousand dollars.

The home of Peter Chalmers Rosewarne at the Montauk Point end of Long Island was the victimized abode. All Americans knew Peter Chalmers Rosewarne. He was the “Tin King,” enormously wealthy, splendidly generous and fortune’s favorite. His father had been a Cornish mining captain who had come from Huel Basset to make a million in the United States. His son had made ten millions.

His Long Island place, known as St. Michael’s Mount after that estate in Cornwall near where his father had been born, was a show place. The gardens were extraordinary. The house was filled with treasures which only the intelligent rich may gather together. Rosewarne was a convivial soul in the best sense of the phrase. He loved company and he loved display and more than all he loved his wife on whom he showered the beautiful things women adore. Abstractors of precious stones would gravitate naturally to such a home as his.

Anthony Trent remembered that the Rosewarne strain of Airedales was the best the breed had to show. He had read once that Rosewarne turned his dogs loose at nights and laughed burglars to scorn. And well he might, for of all dogs, the gods have blessed none with such sense as the Airedales possess. Theirs not to bark indiscriminately or bite their master’s friends. Theirs to reason why: to know instinctively what is hidden from the lesser breeds.

A dozen such dogs roaming their master’s grounds, their guardian instincts aroused, would effectually bar out strangers. That a robbery had been committed at St. Michael’s Mount spelled for Trent an inside job. The papers told him that a large house party was gathered under the hospitable Rosewarne roof. Rosewarne himself indignantly denied the possibility of his guests’ guilt. The servants seemed equally satisfactory.

Sifting the news Anthony Trent learned that the suspected person was a girl who had been member of a picnic party using the Rosewarne grounds. There was a space of nearly ten acres which the mining man had reserved for parties, suitably recommended, who made excursions from the Connecticut side of the Sound. Here Sunday Schools passed blameless days and organized clambakes. The party to which the suspected girl belonged was a camp for working girls situated on one of the Thimble Islands.

Nearly forty of them, enjoying the privilege of the Rosewarne grounds, had spent the day there. Mrs. Rosewarne herself had seen them depart into the evening mist. Then she had seen, thirty minutes later, a girl running to the water’s edge. She was dressed, as were the others of her party, with red trimmed middy blouse and red ribbons in her hair. A brunette, rather tall and slight, and awed when the chatelaine of the great estate asked what was the matter. It seemed she had become tired and had slept. When she awoke the boat was gone; she had not been missed.

Mrs. Rosewarne was not socially inept enough to bring the simple girl to her own sophisticated dinner table. Instead the girl had an ample meal in the housekeeper’s room. At nine o’clock a fast launch was to be ready to take her to her camp. It might easily overtake the sail boat if the breezes died down.

At nine-fifteen the mechanician in charge of the boat came excitedly into the house to relate his unhappy experiences. The girl, wrapped in motor coat, was safely in the boat when she begged the man to get her a glass of water from the boat house at the dock. It was while he was doing so that the boat disappeared. He heard her call to him in fright and then saw the boat – one capable of twenty knots an hour – glide away with the girl holding her hands out to him supplicatingly. She had fooled with the levers, he averred, and would probably perish in consequence. It was while Rosewarne considered the matter of sending out his yacht in pursuit that the discovery was made that a hundred thousand dollars worth of jewels had been taken.

The mechanician had been fooled, of that they were now assured, and the working girl became a fleeing criminal. The sudden temptation through seeing sparkling stones in profusion was the result. A number of boats went in pursuit and the ferries were watched, but the fast motor launch was not found.

Considering the case from the evidence he had at command Trent was certain it was no genuine member of the working girls’ camp who had done this thing. Every move spoke of careful preparation. Some one had chosen a moment to appear at the Mount when suspicion would be removed and her coming seem logical. And no ordinary person would have been able to drive a high powered boat as she had done. Another thing which seemed conclusive proof of his correctness was the fact that the girl had overlooked – this was as the police phrased it – Mrs. Simeon Power’s pearl necklace and the diamond tiara belonging to Mrs. Campbell Glenelg. This omission supported the police theory that it was the work of an inexperienced criminal.

Anthony Trent chuckled as he read this. He also had rejected the Power’s pearls and the Glenelg tiara. They had been in his appraising hand. They were both extraordinarily good imitations! Assuredly a timid working girl could not be such a judge of this. She was a professional and a clever one. Probably she had sunk the launch and swam ashore.

Later reports veered around to his view. The camp people were highly indignant at being saddled with a criminal. They had counted noses before embarkation and none was missing. Mrs. Rosewarne described the girl and so did the housekeeper. The latter, remarking on the slightly foreign intonation, was told by the girl herself that she came from New Bedford where her father was employed in a textile mill belonging to Dangerfield. Like so many of the inhabitants of this mill town he was of French Canadian stock and habitually spoke French in the home. But the housekeeper who had served the wealthy in England and Continental Europe would have it that this intruder come of a higher social class than New Bedford mills afford.

Interviewing the housekeeper in the guise of a Branford newspaper man Trent asked her a hundred questions. And each one of her answers confirmed the belief that had grown in him. This clever woman was “The Countess.” He felt certain of it. That slight intonation was hers. The figure, the height, the coloring. And of course the exact knowledge of what stones were good and what were not. This was another count against her for Trent had marked St. Michael’s Mount for his hunting ground and now precautions against abstractors would be redoubled.

He felt almost certain that this was the Countess’s first exploit since her escape from the hotel after the Guestwick robbery. He had followed the papers too closely to miss any unusual crime. A woman of her breeding need never drop to association with the typical criminal. Since she was marooned in the United States during the war she was of necessity cut off from her favorite Riviera hunting grounds. Where, then, might she meet the wealthy set if not among the owners of big estates on Long Island? Trent felt it probable that she was near some such social center as Meadowbrook or Piping Rock. How was he to find her?

To begin with he decided to attend the Mineola Horse and Dog show. This country fair, held during late September, invariably attracted, as he knew, all the horse-loving polo-riding elements of the smart set. Not to go there, not to be interested intelligently in horses, hounds and dogs was a confession of ineligibility to the great Long Island homes.

Although he entertained a bare hope of seeing her and passed the first day in disappointment, he saw her almost directly he entered the show grounds on the second morning. She looked very smart in her riding habit, her hair was done in a more severe coiffure than he had noticed before. She was talking to a well known society woman, also in riding kit, a Mrs. Hamilton Buxton, famous for her horses and her loves. But he could not judge from this whether or not the Countess was on friendly terms with her or not. There is a camaraderie among those who exhibit horses or dogs which is of the ring-side and not the salon. Outside it was possible Mrs. Hamilton Buxton might not recognize her.

Later on he saw that both women were riding in the class for ladies’ hunters, to be ridden side saddle by the owners. So the Countess owned hunters now! Well, he expected something of the sort from a woman who had outwitted so astute a craftsman as himself. In a sense he was glad of it. It was better to find her in such a set as this. When she rode around the ring he saw by the number she bore that she was a Madame de Beaulieu of Old Westbury. She rode very well. There was the haute école stamp about her work and she was placed second to Mrs. Hamilton Buxton whose chestnut was of a better type.

Anthony Trent went straightway to New York. He did not want to be seen – yet. He called up a certain number and made an appointment with a Mr. Moor. This man, David Moor, was a private detective without ambition and without imaginative talent. It always amused Trent when he employed a detective to find out details that were laborious in the gathering. In some subtle manner Trent had given Moor the impression that he was a secret service agent exceedingly high in the department.

“Moor,” he said briskly as the small and depressed David entered the room, “I want to find all about a Madame de Beaulieu who lives in Old Westbury, Long Island. I suspect her of being a German spy. Find out what other members of the household there are, and who calls. Whether they are in society or only trying to be. I want a full and reliable report. The tradesmen know a whole lot as a rule and servants generally talk. I want to know as soon as possible but keep on the job until you have something real.” He knew that Moor by reason of an amazingly large family was always hard up. He handed him fifty dollars. “Take this for expenses.”

Moor went from the room with tears in his eyes. He looked at Trent as a loving dog looks at its master. Two years before his wife lay at the point of death, needing, more than anything, a rest from household worries and the noise of her offspring. Trent sent her to a sanitarium and the children to camps for the whole of a hot summer. In his dull, depressed fashion, Moor was always hoping that some day he could do something to help this benefactor who waved his thanks aside.

The report, written in Moor’s small, clear writing, entertained Trent vastly. Madame de Beaulieu was a daughter of France whose husband was fighting as an officer of Chasseurs and had been decorated thrice. Many pictures adorned the house of her hero. She had a French maid who allowed herself to be very familiar with her mistress. Undoubtedly she was the “aunt” of the Guestwick occasion. The men of the household were doubtful according to Moor. One was Madame’s secretary, an American named Edward Conway, who looked after her properties, and the other an Englishman, Captain Monmouth, a former officer of cavalry who had broken an ankle in a steeple chase, so the report ran, and was debarred from military service. He was a cousin by marriage. The servants asserted that he was an amazingly lucky player at bridge or indeed of any card game. So much so indeed that the neighboring estate owners who had been inclined to be friendly were now stiffly aloof. The captain’s skill at dealing was uncanny. Bills were piling up against them all. It was due largely to this that Moor was able to get so much information. A vituperative tradesman sets no watch on his tongue. Conway, the secretary, confined his work almost entirely to drinking. There were many bitter wrangles at the table but the English tongue was never adopted on such occasions. The part of Moor’s screed which interested Trent most was that there had been a discussion overheard by a disgruntled maid to take in some wealthy paying guest and offer to get him into Long Island’s hunting set. It would be worth a great deal to an ambitious man to gain an entrée into some of these famous Westbury homes. Of course the odd household could probably not live up to such promises but its members had done a great deal. For example, a Sunday paper in its photogravure supplement had snapped Madame de Beaulieu talking with Mrs. Hamilton Buxton; and Captain Monmouth was there to be seen chatting with Wolfston Colman, the great polo player. An excellent beginning astutely planned.