Framed at the Benefactors Club/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII.
“NEITHER BY MURDER, SUICIDE, NOR ACCIDENT.”
DIRECTLY on the butler's heels Marie Dillon entered.
“Oh—Blaine! Blaine, dear!”
She threw herself into Ogilvie's arms and held him tight, quite disregarding the presence of the police commissioner, who after a moment or two, when a discreet, twice repeated cough had seemed to have made no impression on the girl, moved in the direction of the door with a rambled word that he hated to be in the way.
She turned. “Please, Mr. Gadsby,” she said, “forgive me, won't you?” She smiled, and he smiled back at her.
“There is nothing to forgive, Miss Dillon,” he replied, “except that instead of falling in love with a perfectly proper and perfectly respectable police commissioner”
“She wastes her young affections on a reckless idiot who is going to become said police commissioner's chief assistant and confidential clerk,” Ogilvie interrupted.
The girl laughed and kissed Ogilvie again.
She was small and strong, with russet, short-cut hair. You could tell by looking at her rather large, firm, well-shaped hands, her short, softly curved nose, and the straight black eyebrows which divided her gray eyes from the broad, low forehead that she had imagination and claims to independent ideas.
“Have you any influence over Blaine?” asked Gadsby in a martyred voice.
“How?”
“To make him less fresh!”
“I'll try to,” she said, “after we're married.”
The next moment she was serious and turned to Ogilvie. “Blaine,” she said, “I did what you asked me to do last night over the telephone.”
“Already?”
“Yes, dear. I got up early.”
“Succeed?”
“I guess so,” she replied.
And, in answer to Gadsby's questions, Ogilvie explained that he had telephoned to Marie Dillon last night, after he had hunted through the two volumes on forgotten and not yet discovered inventions.
“I hesitated a long time,” he said, “between the absolute, fool-proof gyroscope, the tempering of copper, and a self-adjusting linotype machine. Finally I decided that no woman takes an interest in that sort of thing, and that it might make the whole thing look fishy. Woman, I thought, housewifely duties—sewing machine! And so, in my poor male brain, I studied it. I decided that what the world needs is a new device which will sew on trouser buttons by a simple twist of the wrist—something like that. I wrote it all down—a lot of stuff—enough to fool a chap who isn't an engineer, but only a rich visionary—prompted Marie across the wires, and she went there this morning—didn't you, honey?”
“Yes,” replied the girl.
“Went where?' asked the exasperated police commissioner.
“Where do you think? To Audley Chester! To whom else?”
It appeared that the Chesters and the Dillons were old friends, as were the Chesters and the Dillons' cousins, Martyn Spencer's family. And so, asked Ogilvie, wasn't it perfectly natural that Marie Dillon, being poor, should go to her family's rich friend, Audley Chester, to ask him for advice and help with that marvelous invention of hers; and too, perhaps, though without saying so since she was not supposed to be familiar with Chester's connection with the Benefactors Club, indirectly, by mental suggestion, get the idea into Chester's brain that, as a budding inventress, she might be promising material for a member of the club which, added Ogilvie, had at least one other woman member—the brown-eyed Slav girl who presided over the hat rack at No. 17?
“Good heavens, man!” exclaimed Gadsby. “You certainly drew a long bow! How did you imagine you'd get away with it? Didn't you consider that Chester, chiefly since the Clafflin murder, might suspect a trap?”
“Not in the least,” replied Ogilvie. “Marie and I talked it all out over the telephone last night, point for point, logically and psychologically. We figured out the exact part she was going to play. An idealistic young enthusiast—can't you see her, with those wide gray eyes of hers? All for giving the benefit of her brain, her work, her invention, to the public, the world at large, long-suffering, long-overcharged humanity—and not so as to line her own pockets with gold! You see, these last forty-eight hours I've been considering what sort of people the gentry at No. 17 are—chiefly Audley Chester. So I couldn't very well go wrong, could I?”
“And you didn't,” said Marie Dillon. “Chester was awfully kind and considerate and patient. He listened to me. Told me he would be glad to back me financially if my invention turned out feasible, that he knew very little, though, about mechanical details, and would therefore find me some expert engineers and skilled mechanics to go over my plans, report on them, and help me, if practicable, with working them out and perfecting them”
“Don't you see, Bob?” interrupted Ogilvie. “That's where the club members come in.”
“Yes, yes,” came the other's slightly impatient rejoinder. “You needn't cross all the t's nor dot all the i's. Once in a while, when a thing is as plain as a pikestaff, I can see it—even though I am only the police commissioner.”
“Stop your quarreling, both you children!” said the girl. “Chester was delighted when I told him that I wanted to give my idea to the world, that I did not wish for any personal remuneration”
“'Except the satisfaction of a decent thing decently accomplished'—did you get in that line, Marie?” asked Ogilvie. “Remember—we rehearsed it last night ever the telephone.”
“I did,” replied Marie Dillon, “and I improved on it on the spur of the moment. I said something to him about poverty not mattering as long as I knew that the rest of the world found life a little more easy to bear through my invention.”
“Like the rest of the benefactors,” commented Ogilvie. “Their idealism! That's what kept them so poor, and that's just why they are so terribly vindictive against Martyn Spencer. It wasn't really because he cheated them, stole money from them by appropriating their patents for his private use, but because he stole it, as they figured, from the public, the world, humanity at large.”
Marie Dillon went on to say that toward the end of the interview Audley Chester, carried away by her carefully rehearsed, girlish enthusiasm, had become even more confidential. He had told her of the existence of an organization composed of people—as he expressed it—trying to do social uplift work not, as usually attempted, by giving money, thus pauperizing those whom they were trying to help, but by using their inventive brains and faculties so as to reduce the cost of living and to make life easier for the masses.
“If somebody invents, for instance, a new mangle,” he had explained, “which reduces time and effort of labor by fifty per cent and incidentally does not ruin the linen or cotton which it rolls and smoothes, such an article, ordinarily, would cost the price of manufacture plus the overhead, plus the profit to the company which manufactures it, and plus the royalty to the inventor. We cannot always regulate the profit which the manufacturing company demands. But we can always influence it by giving our invention to a company which is more reasonable, and we always do cut out our own royalties, reducing the cost by just that amount to the poor woman who needs the mangle. We, as an organization, make therefore a gift to the people at large, not of money—no, no, no! We don't believe in that—but of our brains, our talents. We are the world's real benefactors!”
At the next meeting of this organization, he had gone on, he would mention the matter to the other members, and they would talk it over together. He had added that they had to be very strict and careful about whom to admit to their circle, because, on the very face of it, they had to rely absolutely on the honesty of each individual member. “Mutual trust is our motto,” he had wound up, “and the moment anybody breaks this trust”
“What happens then?” Marie Dillon had asked casually, but with enough of a shade of feminine curiosity to make the question appear natural.
And Ogilvie had smiled disagreeably. “We rely on fate to punish him,” he had replied. “Fate—possibly helped by—oh—deputy fate!”
“Deputy fate?” she had queried.
“Yes,” had come Audley Chester's slow reply. “After all, even fate is more or less man-made. And—don't forget—we have in our organization some very great inventors, some very great physicians and surgeons and biologists!”
“Such as Doctor Hillyer McGrath,” commented Blaine Ogilvie, “who had been Clafflin's physician for many, many years and knew all about the state of his health.”
“What gets me,” said the police commissioner, shaking his head, “is how any member of the Benefactors Club, be he the very cleverest physician, surgeon, inventor, or biologist in the world, can stage manage a death, clearly caused by a revolver bullet, since Clafflin's temples were pierced, which is neither due to murder nor to suicide nor to accident—to believe you,” and he turned to Ogilvie.
“You'll believe me all right after your expert doctors at headquarters get through with the autopsy on Clafflin's body,” replied the latter, “or I lose my bet.”
“What bet?” asked Gadsby.
“Oh—long odds! My life against the district attorney's wits! For, of course, I realize that you can't keep me in hiding forever.”
“Oh—please—please—Blaine!” exclaimed the girl, suddenly nervous and frightened.
“Don't worry, honey!” Ogilvie said. “I'm not worrying. Let's see—one hundred thousand bucks Martyn Spencer sent you. That'll get you a peach of a trousseau.” He interrupted himself and turned to Gadsby.
“Look here, Bob,” he said. “Show a little delicacy and leave the room when an engaged couple talk about intimate details. Too, you might run down to your office and see how that autopsy came out!”
It was quite late in the afternoon when the police commissioner returned, accompanied by two men, whom he introduced as Doctor Elliot and Doctor Griffith, and—“Miss Dillon—and Mr. Blaine Ogilvie—the man who”
“The commissioner told us about you,” said Doctor Elliot, shaking hands with Ogilvie.
“Did he blacken my reputation?” demanded Oglivie with a twinkle in his eye. “Did he tell you a long sob story of how I, a fugitive from justice, a supposedly crimson-handed assassin, took refuge in his house and caused him to be false to his sworn duty?”
“He did,” said Doctor Elliot with a laugh.
“Heavens! I'm surprised he tried to put that one across!” said Ogilvie.
“But he has reformed,” interjected the other doctor. “Mr. Ogilvie, let me be the first to tell you the good news. You are a free man. You can come and go where and as you please. You are no longer under suspicion.”
“Which means you finished the autopsy and you found out”
“Well, what did we find out?”
“That the revolver bullet which pierced Clafflin's temples was fired after the man had died,” said Ogilvie. “That he died by natural causes, neither by murder, suicide, nor accident!”
“How did you figure it out?” asked the police commissioner with admiration.
“Why, you chump, I was trying to tell you straight along! Simply by figuring out the psychology of the case—the peculiar psychology of the gang of idealists at No. 17—Clapperton and McGrath and”
“Incidentally,” cut in Doctor Elliot, “it's that same McGrath whom you have to thank for the fact that you are free from all suspicion.”
“Oh,” asked Marie, “he confessed?”
“We didn't see him,” said Doctor Elliot, “nor would he have had anything to confess. But Mr. Ogilvie has to thank McGrath for another of his marvelous medical discoveries, namely an instrument which, used during an autopsy, registers almost automatically to what cause death has been due. If death apparently has been due to more than one cause, it decides between them and points at the right one.
“It's the most delicate instrument you ever saw. You lay people wouldn't understand it. It looks rather like a tiny barometer, with a number of needles composed of a new metal. This metal has a great deal to do with the success of the instrument, since it has a peculiar, almost uncanny, power over blood circulation and blood pressure. It can, so to speak, catch the reflex action of blood even after death. The metal is called rhizopolin.
“We used the instrument,” continued the doctor, “and we discovered that death was due to heart failure, while the heart failure, in its turn, was due to a complication of organic troubles which had ravaged poor Clafflin and had sapped his vitality for a number of years.”
“Exactly,” said Ogilvie. “And McGrath had been Clafflin's physician for a long time. He could read the state of his health—marvelous physician that he is—with the same ease as I can read a simple book. He took him to No. 17 that night. Everything had been minutely prearranged, minutely dovetailed. They were sure that Spencer would come. Perhaps Spencer telephoned or wrote them that he would, and, beforehand I mean before arranging for the date of Spencer's coming, McGrath had mathematically figured out that Clafflin would die that night—perhaps, though I don't know, kept him alive with powerful drugs until that very night.”
“Medically quite possible,” commented Doctor Griffith.
“He got Clafflin out of the house,” went on Ogilvie, “under the promise—remember the testimony of Clafflin's nurse and butler—that he would meet a remarkable young physician who would cure him. All right; they came. I, whom they supposed to be Spencer, was there. Clafflin died suddenly—McGrath, the great physician, and absolutely, intimately familiar with the man's state of health, saw it at once, gave the signal, when I happened to be looking the other way. Then the shot, either fired by McGrath himself or by somebody else—it makes no difference—and there you are.”
“Except,” said the police commissioner, “that I believe you have a clear case against the Benefactors Club for trying to frame you up. In fact, I think it is really my duty to”
“Forget your duty!” interrupted Ogilvie. “After all, they are idealists, public benefactors, and they can't and shouldn't be measured with the ordinary yardstick of police morality. Just you go down there, Bob, to No, 17 some night and throw a good scare into them. By the way, how about that job as assistant something-or-other with your detective force' you promised me?”
“I didn't promise,” said Gadsby, “but you're on, old man.”
“Thanks!” Ogilvie turned to Marie Dillon. “Shake hands with my new boss, honey,” he said, “and smile at him. I need all the pull I can get in my new profession. My first job will be to trace Spencer and hand him the accumulated dividends of the Benefactors Club.”