I
“Do You Know … Emil Bonfils?”
“Mr. Leopold Gantvoort is not at home,” the servant who opened the door said, “but his son, Mr. Charles, is—if you wish to see him.”
“No. I had an appointment with Mr. Leopold Gantvoort for nine or a little after. It’s just nine now. No doubt he’ll be back soon. I’ll wait.”
“Very well, sir.”
He stepped aside for me to enter the house, took my overcoat and hat, guided me to a room on the second floor—Gantvoort’s library—and left me. I picked up a magazine from the stack on the table, pulled an ashtray over beside me, and made myself comfortable.
An hour passed. I stopped reading and began to grow impatient. Another hour passed—and I was fidgeting.
A clock somewhere below had begun to strike eleven when a young man of twenty-five or -six, tall and slender, with remarkably white skin and very dark hair and eyes, came into the room.
“My father hasn’t returned yet,” he said. “It’s too bad that you should have been kept waiting all this time. Isn’t there anything I could do for you? I am Charles Gantvoort.”
“No, thank you.” I got up from my chair, accepting the courteous dismissal. “I’ll get in touch with him tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry,” he murmured, and we moved toward the door together.
As we reached the hall an extension telephone in one corner of the room we were leaving buzzed softly, and I halted in the doorway while Charles Gantvoort went over to answer it.
His back was toward me as he spoke into the instrument.
“Yes. Yes. Yes!”—sharply—“What? Yes”—very weakly—“Yes.”
He turned slowly around and faced me with a face that was gray and tortured, with wide shocked eyes and gaping mouth—the telephone still in his hand.
“Father,” he gasped, “is dead—killed!”
“Where? How?”
“I don’t know. That was the police. They want me to come down at once.”
He straightened his shoulders with an effort, pulling himself together, put down the telephone, and his face fell into less strained lines.
“You will pardon my—”
“Mr. Gantvoort,” I interrupted his apology, “I am connected with the Continental Detective Agency. Your father called up this afternoon and asked that a detective be sent to see him tonight. He said his life had been threatened. He hadn’t definitely engaged us, however, so unless you—”
“Certainly! You are employed! If the police haven’t already caught the murderer I want you to do everything possible to catch him.”
“All right! Let’s get down to headquarters.”
Neither of us spoke during the ride to the Hall of Justice. Gantvoort bent over the wheel of his car, sending it through the streets at a terrific speed. There were several questions that needed answers, but all his attention was required for his driving if he was to maintain the pace at which he was driving without piling us into something. So I didn’t disturb him, but hung on and kept quiet.
Half a dozen police detectives were waiting for us when we reached the detective bureau. O’Gar—a bullet-headed detective-sergeant who dresses like the village constable in a movie, wide-brimmed black hat and all, but who isn’t to be put out of the reckoning on that account—was in charge of the investigation. He and I had worked on two or three jobs together before, and hit it off excellently.
He led us into one of the small offices below the assembly room. Spread out on the flat top of a desk there were a dozen or more objects.
“I want you to look these things over carefully,” the detective-sergeant told Gantvoort, “and pick out the ones that belonged to your father.”
“But where is he?”
“Do this first,” O’Gar insisted, “and then you can see him.”
I looked at the things on the table while Charles Gantvoort made his selections. An empty jewel case; a memoranda book; three letters in slit envelopes that were addressed to the dead man; some other papers; a bunch of keys; a fountain pen; two white linen handkerchiefs; two pistol cartridges; a gold watch, with a gold knife and a gold pencil attached to it by a gold-and-platinum chain; two black leather wallets, one of them very new and the other worn; some money, both paper and silver; and a small portable typewriter, bent and twisted, and matted with hair and blood. Some of the other things were smeared with blood and some were clean.
Gantvoort picked out the watch and its attachments, the keys, the fountain pen, the memoranda book, the handkerchiefs, the letters and other papers, and the older wallet.
“These were father’s,” he told us. “I’ve never seen any of the others before. I don’t know, of course, how much money he had with him tonight, so I can’t say how much of this is his.”
“You’re sure none of the rest of this stuff was his?” O’Gar asked.
“I don’t think so, but I’m not sure. Whipple could tell you.” He turned to me. “He’s the man who let you in tonight. He looked after father, and he’d know positively whether any of these other things belonged to him or not.”
One of the police detectives went to the telephone to tell Whipple to come down immediately.
I resumed the questioning.
“Is anything that your father usually carried with him missing? Anything of value?”
“Not that I know of. All of the things that he might have been expected to have with him seem to be here.”
“At what time tonight did he leave the house?”
“Before seven-thirty. Possibly as early as seven.”
“Know where he was going?”
“He didn’t tell me, but I supposed he was going to call on Miss Dexter.”
The faces of the police detectives brightened, and their eyes grew sharp. I suppose mine did, too. There are many, many murders with never a woman in them anywhere; but seldom a very conspicuous killing.
“Who’s this Miss Dexter?” O’Gar took up the inquiry.
“She’s well—” Charles Gantvoort hesitated. “Well, father was on very friendly terms with her and her brother. He usually called on them—on her several evenings a week. In fact, I suspected that he intended marrying her.”
“Who and what is she?”
“Father became acquainted with them six or seven months ago. I’ve met them several times, but don’t know them very well. Miss Dexter—Creda is her given name—is about twenty-three years old, I should judge, and her brother Madden is four or five years older. He is in New York now, or on his way there, to transact some business for father.”
“Did your father tell you he was going to marry her?” O’Gar hammered away at the woman angle.
“No; but it was pretty obvious that he was very much—ah—infatuated. We had some words over it a few days ago—last week. Not a quarrel, you understand, but words. From the way he talked I feared that he meant to marry her.”
“What do you mean ‘feared’?” O’Gar snapped at that word.
Charles Gantvoort’s pale face flushed a little, and he cleared his throat embarrassedly.
“I don’t want to put the Dexters in a bad light to you. I don’t think—I’m sure they had nothing to do with father’s—with this. But I didn’t care especially for them—didn’t like them. I thought they were—well—fortune hunters, perhaps. Father wasn’t fabulously wealthy, but he had considerable means. And, while he wasn’t feeble, still he was past fifty-seven, old enough for me to feel that Creda Dexter was more interested in his money than in him.”
“How about your father’s will?”
“The last one of which I have any knowledge—drawn up two or three years ago—left everything to my wife and me jointly. Father’s attorney, Mr. Murray Abernathy, could tell you if there was a later will, but I hardly think there was.”
“Your father had retired from business, hadn’t he?”
“Yes; he turned his import and export business over to me about a year ago. He had quite a few investments scattered around, but he wasn’t actively engaged in the management of any concern.”
O’Gar tilted his village constable hat back and scratched his bullet head reflectively for a moment. Then he looked at me.
“Anything else you want to ask?”
“Yes. Mr. Gantvoort, do you know, or did you ever hear your father or anyone else speak of an Emil Bonfils?”
“No.”
“Did your father ever tell you that he had received a threatening letter? Or that he had been shot at on the street?”
“No.”
“Was your father in Paris in 1902?”
“Very likely. He used to go abroad every year up until the time of his retirement from business.”