CHAPTER I.
CAUSE FOR SUSPICION
Nick Carter waited, listening intently, listening vainly, with his desk telephone in his hand and the receiver at his ear.
Chick Carter, the celebrated detective’s chief assistant, sat watching him, noting each changing expression on his strong, clean-cut face, and wondering what occasioned it.
It was about nine o’clock one evening in October, and both detectives were seated in the library of Nick Carter’s spacious residence in Madison Avenue.
“Hello!” Nick now called quite sharply. “Hello!”
No answer.
“What’s the trouble?” Chick inquired. “Don’t you get a reply?”
“No, Chick, and that’s not the worst of it,” Nick said quite gravely.
“Why so? What do you mean?”
“I heard my name called just as I removed the receiver from its hook,” Nick explained. “The voice sounded like that of a woman, though I am not positive about it. Then came a single sharp crack, like the report of a revolver, or as if the telephone had dropped from the speaker’s hand and crashed upon the floor. I suspect there is something wrong.”
“Can you hear anything now?”
“Not a sound.”
“Call central,” Chick suggested. “You may learn who rang you up.”
“Presently. I still am hoping to hear something of more definite significance.”
One minute passed. It brought no sound over the wire.
The silence then was broken by a voice which Nick knew must be that of the exchange operator addressing the person who had rung him up.
“Did you get him?”
No answer.
Nick waited a moment longer, then cried abruptly:
“Hello, central!”
“Well?”
“This is Nick Carter talking. I can get no reply from the party who rang me up. What’s the trouble?”
“There should be none. The circuit is not broken.”
“Did you hear any unusual sound after making the connection, as if the telephone had been dropped, or as if something occurred?”
“I did not. I will try to get the party.”
“Do so.”
Nick waited and heard the operator cry repeatedly:
“Hello! Hello! Hello!”
No answer—still no answer.
No sound so much as suggesting what had occurred, what fateful deed had been done, or what horror might then be in progress, whence the mysterious telephone call had come.
The stillness over the wire was like that of death itself.
Had death, indeed, stilled the voice heard for a fleeting moment by the detective, the voice that had uttered his name, as if a cry of appeal had been cut short when it left the lips of the speaker?
The operator spoke again.
“Mr. Carter.”
“Well?”
“There is something wrong. The circuit still is complete, but I can get no reply. The person who called you up evidently has left the telephone, but has not hung up the receiver.”
“Were you asked to hold the wire?”
“No.”
“Can you find out who called, what number, or where the telephone is located?”
“I will try.”
“Do so, please, and notify me immediately.”
“I will, sir.”
Nick replaced his telephone on the library desk, then turned quickly to Chick.
“Have Danny here with the touring car as soon as possible,” he directed, referring to his chauffeur. “You had better get ready to accompany me.”
“You are going——”
“To the residence, office, or whatever the quarters may be, of the party who telephoned,” Nick interrupted. “The circumstances are decidedly ominous. We’ll find out why the milk is in the coconut.”
“I’m with you,” Chick declared, hastening to carry out the instructions given him.
Ten minutes brought the report Nick was awaiting. He then hurried through the hall, seizing his hat and overcoat, and rejoined Chick in the touring car, which had arrived at the curbing only a moment before.
“Great guns!” Chick exclaimed, upon hearing the terse directions Nick had given to Danny. “The Clayton residence, eh? Not that of Chester Clayton, our old friend and former client?”
“Yes, the same,” said Nick, now looking ominously grim and determined. “He no longer is running the Hotel Westgate, however, as when we twice served him so successfully. He now is in the banking and brokerage business with his wealthy father-in-law. The firm was established soon after his marriage with Clara Langham.”
“I know about that,” Chick replied. “But can Clayton again be up against trouble? What more have you learned?”
“Only that the phone call came from his residence,” Nick rejoined. “It is one of the most costly in Riverside Drive. Something is wrong there. The exchange operator stated again that the receiver still is off the telephone hook.”
“By Jove, that does appear decidedly ominous, Nick, in view of what you heard—a sound like the crack of a revolver.”
“That is why I apprehend trouble. We soon shall know definitely. Ten minutes will take us to the house.”
It was a palatial residence, indeed, at which they arrived within the time mentioned, and at precisely half past nine o’clock.
The night was agreeably warm for October, with a starry sky and a half-filled moon running low in the west, lending a silvery luster to the placid Hudson.
“Wait here with the car, Danny,” Nick directed, alighting at the driveway entrance to the somewhat spacious grounds, which occupied a corner and also abutted on a less pretentious rear street.
“Come on, Chick, and we’ll very soon solve the mystery.”
“Do you know of whom the family consists, Nick, besides Chester Clayton and his wife?” inquired Chick, as they walked up the driveway.
“His mother, Mrs. Julia Clayton, and his wife’s father, Mr. Gustavus Langham,” said the detective. “They also have one child about four months old. There may be others for all I know, for I have seen but little of the Claytons, mother or son, since his marriage and that extraordinary case at Langham Manor more than a year ago.”
“When Clayton’s double, Dave Margate, was wiped out of existence,” Chick observed. “He was an accomplished and vicious rat, Nick, if ever there was one.”
Nick Carter did not reply. He recalled for a moment the twin relationship of the two men mentioned. He was thinking, too, of the terrible secret known only to him and the mother of these two sons, whose extraordinary resemblance to one another had made possible the two strange cases in which they had figured; one a man of wealth, character, and social distinction, the other a notorious criminal, and both ignorant of their kinship and the circumstances under which they had been separated in infancy.
Nick’s mind had turned for a moment upon this distressing bit of family history confided to him by Mrs. Julia Clayton.
It still was the skeleton in her closet. Despite the death of that vicious son, who had followed the footsteps of his criminal father, or his supposed death under circumstances warranting hardly the shadow of a doubt, there had been no further disclosure of her terrible secret.
“Let it die with him, Mr. Carter, if David Margate is really dead,” she had said confidentially to Nick, after the sensational case at Langham Manor. “God grant that it is so. Not that I am an unnatural mother, however, who can deliberately wish for the death of her own son, but because his career has been one of persistent vice and crime, and his kinship with the loyal son who bears my maiden name has been the one black shadow that I have seen threatening the happiness and welfare of Chester Clayton. He does not know; must never know. It will be better far for all concerned. Let the dead bury the dead.”
Nick agreed with her to this extent, and he was again thinking of her when, after more than a year, he strode up the driveway toward the Clayton residence—instinctively feeling himself on the threshold of another mystery.
“There is a light in the front hall,” he remarked to Chick, when they came nearer the house. “There must be some one at home.”
“Surely.”
“Come this way. I think the library also is lighted. Instead of ringing, Chick, we’ll try to obtain a look from outside.”
Nick had observed a brighter beam of light from one of the side windows. He saw it through the gloom under the porte-cochère. It streamed out over the side driveway beyond, giving a faint glow to the hazy mist that hung just above the cold earth, and lending a waxy luster to the dew-damp greensward of the near lawn.
Nick led the way in that direction, passing under the porte-cochère and by the closed door of a dimly lighted side hall. He then could see more plainly the window from which the light was shed.
It was a broad French window, obviously that of the house library, and opening upon a spacious side veranda. The interior blinds were partly raised, and one section of the window was open several inches.
“For ventilation, perhaps,” Chick whispered, with a significant glance at his companion.
Nick did not reply. He crept noiselessly up the veranda steps, and stole toward the partly open window. Through it, at first, he caught sight of only one corner of the large, beautifully furnished room.
A telephone stand was overturned and lying on the floor. The instrument was lying near by, with the receiver fallen from its hook.
Nick stepped nearer, and obtained a view of the entire room.
The corpse of an elderly man was lying on the floor between the telephone stand and the library table. His face was upturned in the light from the electric chandelier. His linen and garments were saturated with blood.
He had been shot through the heart.
Seated in an armchair near the opposite wall was a solitary woman. Her fine figure was clad in a handsome evening gown of black lace, the somber hue of which accentuated her ghastly paleness and the dreadful expression then on her white face—a face attractive even then with its refined, matronly features, its lofty brow, and abundance of wavy, gray hair.
She sat gazing vacantly at the corpse, obviously that of a murdered man, but not a sound came from her ashy-gray lips. One would have thought her dead, also, but for the feverish gleam and glitter of her eyes and the piteous wringing of her shapely, jewel-bedecked hands.
It was as if, in a dazed and abnormal mental condition, she strove to cleanse them of the terrible stain, of the blood-red smears that covered them from her finger tips to her wrists.
“Good heavens!” Chick gasped, at Nick’s elbow. “Here’s murder, Nick, hands down. That woman——”
“Is Mrs. Julia Clayton,” said Nick, more calmly. “Be quiet.”
He stepped into the room and approached her, followed by Chick, but though she gazed at them with her glittering eyes turned quickly upon them, she did not stir from her chair, nor appear disturbed by their unceremonious entrance.
Nick paused in front of her, saying impressively:
“You recognize me, Mrs. Clayton, of course. Speak to me. What’s the meaning of this?”
She appeared to struggle inwardly, as if to make an effort to reply and to answer his question, but only two words, twice repeated in husky, horrified whispers, came from her drawn, gray lips:
“The scar! The scar—the scar!”