That Royle Girl/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
Calls for Calvin persisted. A girl somehow eluded the doorman and when Calvin's man-servant opened his door at her knock, she pushed past him and furnished Calvin one of his most amazing experiences of the day.
She was a blonde, childish-faced girl of not more than eighteen, with her natural pink color covered with orange, her plucked eyebrows blackened, her eyelashes mascara-ed together in points to feign an effect of jet irradiance from her large, pale blue eyes. Her pouting lips were painted into extreme, crimson bows and her blouse was cut so as to display, under her opened coat, the full rounding of her bosom.
She gave her name as "Miss Nesson," and she might have been—Calvin thought—a younger sister or a cousin of the woman whose body he had seen in the flat by the lake. But she was not, as it proved. She had no concern for Adele Ketlar at all. If he had patiently studied the gallery of signed pictures, Calvin might have remembered that hers was the photograph labeled "Lola," which held one of the most conspicuous positions on Ketlar's wall.
It appeared to Calvin, when she started to talk, that she had come in defense of Joan Royle.
"She's nothing in Fred's life," Miss Nesson asserted loftily. "You come on him with her because she lives in his building—she moved in after him, the damn little broad."
Thus was Calvin warned that he must look for another interpretation of Miss Nesson's purpose, but he was slow to discern it.
"She certainly kids herself," Miss Nesson charged, with disgust. "So you're boarding her as his big friend! That's what she told you!"
"Who is his big friend?" Calvin asked.
"She sure kids herself that Fred went to that trouble for her."
"What trouble?" asked Calvin, unable to comprehend that this child-faced girl thus referred to the killing of Ketlar's wife.
"My Gawd!" exclaimed Miss Nesson. "Ain't you heard about it?"
Still it did not occur to Calvin that this girl had intruded to assert her claim to Joan Royle's peculiar distinction. Imagining that she possessed some useful evidence, he questioned her with no result but to penetrate, at last, her point of view.
To this pouting young person, it appeared that Joan Royle had pushed herself into an enviable position by having herself arrested as the one for whom Ketlar had shot his wife; and the only discoverable object of Miss Nesson's call was to seek for herself a share of notoriety. She would like to be known as the woman for whom a man had killed; she would like, actually, the thrill of arrest in such a role. Very plainly, she entertained no idea of danger to herself from it.
Calvin dismissed her, and, evading the newspaper men who sentineled the building, he made his way to the hotel, as yet undiscovered by the reporters, where Ketlar and the Royle girl were held. Ketlar, he knew, he could continue to hold; to-morrow morning, in court, he could make and sustain an accusation of murder against the man.
But Calvin recognized that he had obtained no competent evidence against the girl which he could cite in court as cause to deny Hoberg's grand demand that she be freed; so, if she were held until morning, the State would be obliged to bow to Hoberg.
Evidently no more was to be learned from her by questioning in confinement; and there was no risk to the State's case, if she were released; she could not run away. The State could keep her under surveillance and, from observation of her, perhaps develop new evidence against Ketlar and her. So Calvin decided to free her and see what she would do.
She was sitting at her window watching the lights of the city and now and then replying to Mrs. Hoswick's cheerful efforts at conversation, when the policewoman was called into the hall.
"You can go home now," Mrs. Hoswick announced, when she returned.
"Home?" cried Joan Daisy, jumping up. "Why?"
"Why," repeated Mrs. Hoswick. "They're through with you."
"Through!" cried Joan Daisy. "Oh, where's Ket?"
"Downstairs, I suppose. But they're not through with him."
"Not! Why not?"
"They're not, dearie. It's just you that's going home."
"Oh!" breathed Joan Daisy, dropping to her chair and clinging to it. "Then I'll stay here, thanks."
"You can't," denied Mrs. Hoswick firmly but kindly. "You're released. You're sent home."
"I don't want to go home. I don't want to leave Ket."
"You'd not see him again anyhow, dearie."
"Why, what are they doing with him?"
"They're taking him to a station, dearie."
"Oh!"
"And this room's given up. You got to go."
"Oh!"
"I have her started now," Mrs. Hoswick made report a few minutes later to the men below who were to keep Joan Daisy under surveillance.
Calvin was in the lobby and he delayed near the door of the hotel and saw her step from the elevator.
She saw him, nodded and approached him, carrying her little handbag which she had taken from the bell-boy who had accompanied her from the elevator.
"Where's Mr. Ketlar, Mr. Clarke?" she asked.
"At central station. You can't see him, if you go there. He's locked up," said Calvin decisively. "You're to go home."
"Yes," said Joan Daisy. "Mrs. Hoswick told me. My bill here is paid?"
"Yes. How are you going home?" Calvin suddenly inquired.
"Elevated."
"You can take a cab," he told her and he struck spirit in her.
"Of course I can; but I don't care to."
"I mean," said Calvin, "I'll send you home."
"You?" she challenged him, gazing evenly into his eyes in her disconcerting way. "You mean, you you, or you the State—the People of Illinois?"
"Take a cab," Calvin answered, evading, and he signaled one, but was left at the curb, holding the door open, when Joan Daisy walked away.
Watching her, he saw her give herself a shake which was slight yet so expressive that it put him in mind of a thrush which he had captured when he was a boy and kept for a day in a box and then released. He always remembered the quiver of the bird, when it had hopped a few feet from the box and suddenly felt it was free.
Joan Daisy was hungry. She had not expected to be, and she had not planned to stop down town, for supper had been served to her in the hotel room, and she had not wanted it, only a couple of hours ago; but as she passed the gleaming windows of a cafeteria and gazed in upon the racks of bread and rolls, the plates of salads and the covered pots wherein steamed broths and soups, she felt weak for food and she stepped into the lunch-room, greeted by the warm, familiar odors of baked meats and hot puddings, and spicy, simmering stews.
The hour was after nine and less than a dozen patrons, all of them men, were seated at the tables. They looked up when Joan Daisy entered and followed her with their eyes, aS men usually inspected her and in no different way.
She left her bag with the cashier, provided herself with a tray and obtained a bowl of soup, bread, a chop and peas, a plate of salad, ice-cream and a macaroon. She felt famished and, with a sigh of anticipation, she laid her loaded tray upon an empty table.
Then, two tables away, she saw a newspaper abandoned by some just-departed diner and she read the headlines which were identical with those which had faced Ket's mother from her porch when she went to take in the milk.
Suffering some part of that fascination which had prevented Anna Folwell from immediately picking up the paper, Joan Daisy did not carry the newspaper to her table, but bore her tray to it.
A huge picture of Ket stared at her from the first inside page; she stared upon the likeness of herself with Mr. Clarke beside her.
They were upon a flight of steps; of course it was the photograph taken by flashlight when he was leading her down from her home.
There was a print of Adele and of the baby—Adele and Ket's baby. Evidently it had been taken from a photograph made a year or so ago and procured, probably, from Adele's flat. There was a diagram of the flat, with outlines showing where Adele had been found.
Joan Daisy pushed the paper away and tried to taste her soup. She arose and presented her check at the cashier's desk.
"Get to feeling sort-a sick, dearie?" the woman asked, friendlily.
"Yes," admitted Joan.
"You didn't touch some dishes; we can take those back," the woman offered and made a generous allowance on the check.
A copy of a newspaper, with that big picture of Joan Daisy Royle beside Assistant State's Attorney Calvin Clarke—that staring portrayal of "the girl who was with Ketlar and who tried to save him by an alibi proved false," the girl "who evidently was the immediate cause of the fatal quarrel"—this lay beside the cashier, who looked up from it to make her friendly query; and Joan Daisy wondered that the woman did not know her. But she did not. Nor did the men at the tables, though supplied with the same papers.
On the elevated for Wilson Avenue, Joan sat beside a large man who held her picture before him and he commented, to a diminutive friend:
"Ever slapped the sole to this bird's jazz?"
"Have I! Give a girl a choice and she's got to go where Ketlar is playin'. Some sheik, that baby."
"Sure. He had the pick of a flock of chickens; but he had to have—her!"
Here was Joan Daisy's picture indicated.
"What d'you say about it?" the small man asked, sardonically considering Joan Daisy's picture. "Worth shooting for, is she?"
"He'll tell the world, if he gets off."
Joan Daisy shuddered and deserted the seat to stand at the other end of the car; but this proved no place for her to escape discussion of Ket and herself.
How people pored over her picture!
When any one noticed her, herself, he gazed at her only in the manner to which she was accustomed; since no one recognized her as the girl for whom a man had shot another girl, no one showed particular interest in Joan Daisy, the person; but Joan Daisy, the picture, was in glamour.
She hoped, as she neared home, that Dads would be in and that he would not be drunk; she needed Dads' best counsel to-night and dreaded the prospect of returning to her mother alone.
No one upon the boulevard or upon the side street recognized her; and she passed no one on her way into the second entrance on the long, narrow court.
Ket's window was dark and his door was closed and silent, when she waited at it for a moment, breathless. Her own window had been alight and when she climbed to the third floor and let herself in with her latch-key she found her mother prostrate upon the lounge.
"Daisy!" her mother moaned, with effort rolling upon her side. "Daisy, you've come back to me!"
Daisy let fall her bag and rushed to her mother and put her arms about her, whereupon immediately her mother utterly relaxed, frightening Daisy, as she always succeeded in doing by this resort.
Daisy snatched a vial of spirits of ammonia which her mother sniffed, whispering, "Sinking . . . sinking . . . sinking. . . ."
Throughout these sinking intervals, her mother's pulse throbbed as fully and evenly as ever, but Daisy never suspected it; she always was kept too busy chafing her mother's hands, rubbing her flabby body and anxiously kissing her mother's flaccid cheeks while she pleaded, "Mamma, mamma, come back!"
At last mamma decided to recover sufficiently to let herself be assisted to a sitting posture; and to an unaccustomed person her pretense would have been transparent; but to Daisy, this was mamma, herself, and this always had been mamma's way. To another person, the heavy body and flaccid face and the bobbed hair, bleached and with its youthful wave, would have seemed absurd; but Daisy saw no absurdity. She only saw, more or less anxiously, "mamma," who had been Daisy's care, more like a child than like a mother for many years.
"Daisy, you frightened me so," mamma rebuked. "You frightened me so."
"I didn't mean to, mamma."
"But you did."
Mamma was in a loose satin dressing-robe and her crepe silk underwear, her favorite attire for home reading and candy-eating. A half emptied box of the most expensive chocolates was on the stand beside the couch; Sunday papers strewed the floor, and the sight of them seemed to recompose mamma to a purpose which had been in her mind.
"Daisy, you can tell mamma the truth; Ket did it, didn't he?"
"He did not, mamma!" Daisy cried.
"Trust mamma, Daisy! You can trust mamma!"
And when Daisy obstinately refused to impart the confidence desired, mamma announced, crushingly, "Mr. Hoberg says he did!"
"Hoberg!" cried Daisy. "He hopes Ket did!"
"Mr. Hoberg," said mamma, and repeated the name in an accent of satisfaction, "Mr. Hoberg seems to be a very substantial man, Daisy—very substantial."
"Oh, he's substantial!" Daisy admitted.
"He was here for nearly an hour this afternoon. He was most considerate of me—most, Daisy."
"He would be," said Daisy, and understood who had presented the large box of the most expensive chocolates.
"He is very much interested in you, Daisy."
"Don't I know it?" Daisy cried, wrenched by a pang of the self-abasement which often seized her when she received advice from her mother. For this meant that mamma, who had favored Ket and wanted Daisy to plan to marry Ket when he had honor and a big income, already had abandoned Ket and wanted Daisy to make the most of an opportunity with Hoberg.
"He not only makes money; he must have a lot, with all his buildings," observed mamma.
"Don't I know it?"
"He's never married, he tells me."
"That's right," agreed Daisy. "He doesn't marry any of 'em."
"Any of whom?" asked mamma.
"You name 'em," said Daisy.
"You could marry him!"
"I could?" repeated Daisy. "Not last night, I couldn't. Not that I tried or wanted to. But I know; I couldn't."
"You could now!"
"How could I now?" Daisy asked.
"Now," mamma emphasized, not childishly at all but very sagely, "now is different."
"How's it different?"
"Act quick and careful," mamma counseled, "and you can marry him. I've talked to him, I tell you; he was here twice to-day, and now he's out looking for you."
Daisy removed her arms from about her mother who wanted her to act "careful and quick" so that she could marry Hoberg now, although last night, even if she had wanted to, she could not have. What was different now? Ket had killed—that is, Hoberg believed that Ket had killed and for her.
She thought of the people on the elevated poring over her picture, although they gazed at herself in only the usual way. But if they had recognized her, what a thrill she would have given them!
Such a thrill she had been supplying to Hoberg today! The glamour of the crime committed, supposedly for her, had made her different and more desirable to Hoberg; because Adele had been killed, Joan Daisy Royle had ceased to be merely a good-looking girl who worked in his office and had become capable of exciting him to a new sensation; and she might capitalize that sensation to maneuver him into marriage, mamma said.
Daisy walked away and mechanically set to making mamma's bed, while trying not to think with disgust of mamma.
"Where's Dads?" she asked, to change the subject, when mamma followed her into the bedroom.
"He's with Mr. Hoberg, trying to find you."
And, thought Daisy miserably, undoubtedly Dads was borrowing money from Hoberg. Dads would miss no such chance as the gods had given him to-day. But never would he expect her to redeem his debt; nor, for all of Hoberg's money, would Dads tell her to marry. No; Dads disgraced himself and her only in other ways.
Mamma undressed and flopped down upon the bed.
"Rub my back now, Daisy," she bid. 'Rub my back good. I've had a terrible hard day. . . . That's a right nice looking man in the picture with you. Assistant State's Attorney Clarke, the paper calls him. Mr. Hoberg went to see him and told him what's what. . . . Tell me about him, Daisy; and rub deeper—deeper right there. That's good. . . . Now tell me about that nice looking lawyer Clarke."
"He's not nice looking," Daisy denied, with a sudden vengefulness, which surprised herself. "He's mister-God looking! He thinks he's mister God!" she cried out. "He's one of those essential citizens, mamma; he's one that packs the country on his back and the rest of us are dirt."
While Joan Daisy was thus making outcry to mamma against Calvin Clarke, he was engaged in like manner with denunciation of her to his mother. For he had returned to his rooms and was alone and, since it was Sunday evening, it was time for his regular letter.
Before beginning to write, he always imagined, according to the season, where his mother would be and what she would be doing when she should receive his letter on Tuesday morning.
This letter, he thought, would be delivered to her in the gate garden—the old, perennial garden by the white picket fence in front of the house, where the marigold and late chrysanthemum would be in bloom in the warm, October sunlight and where cosmos dotted delicate tints along the garden's edge.
"The gate garden," Calvin repeated to himself aloud for the pleasure and pride of the words; for this designation of the garden was more than two hundred years old, having been written in a diary of the date of 1722, proving that the Clarkes had had a garden on that spot when a stockade followed the later line of the picket fence and that the original log gate had swung over the arc of the light, latticed barrier of to-day.
Calvin imagined his mother with garden shears in hand clipping the stems of cosmos and marigold for the table and glancing down the lane for old Santry, the postman, who would hand her the letter over the pickets and stand and chat for a minute or so.
His mother would go on cutting her flowers until she had forty blossoms, which she would arrange in vases in the cool, quiet north room overlooking the Merrimac, where she would seat herself on the hooded bench beside the fireplace for an undisturbed reading of his letter.
She was tall and spare and strong, his mother, with whitening hair simply arranged and clear, healthful color in her cheeks; and her calm resolute blue eyes would need no glasses to read.
So, having seen her, Calvin began, with his mind on her:
"The shirts you made for me fit perfectly. Thank you, mother. The neck bands are exactly right. I am well as usual and have plenty of exercise. I keep busy and I am sure to find myself a great deal busier than I have been.
"For I am assigned to the prosecution of Ketlar.
"I say, casually, 'Ketlar,' for I have no doubt that his fame has reached you before this. Here, even before he shot his wife, every one knew him. He was a hero, being a jazz band leader. . . .
"He is a boy, barely twenty-four years old, born of an unmarried mother who was a manicurist in a barber-shop. Ketlar was her name, of nationality indeterminate as yet. I have not personally seen her. The father, of course, is completely problematical.
"Ketlar's reward for ridding himself of his wife was to have been the Royle girl, who unquestionably was associated with him in the crime and who now is trying to free him.
"She lives, or lived, immediately above Ketlar, in an exact duplicate of his own flat, having moved into the building for the purpose of being near him when he had deserted his wife. The place is her home, where her mother sleeps off veronal and her father liquor.
"The case against this girl is morally as bad as that against Ketlar; it is worse. But legal proof against her is lacking. Therefore, to-night I have released her but with the expectation of rearresting her soon.
"Even more than Ketlar, she is a destroyer of society, an enemy of our civilization. She told me today, when I had her in custody, that the country would be better off when there were more Ketlars and fewer of our blood. There was no comparison, in her mind, of the values of playing jazz and enforcing law. This is what our country is coming to.
"Do not imagine that she is unique. Murderers, when they kill for love, become heroes here; a thousand girls would marry Ketlar to-morrow.
"A girl of eighteen forced her way up to my rooms this evening to inform me that Ketlar had not killed for the Royle girl but because of herself. She desired the honor!"
Calvin realized that he was writing heavily, with black ink flowing broadly from his pen; he felt the cramp of his fingers in the intensity of his emotion. Seldom, indeed not since the war, had he been so stirred.
He reread what he had written and took up the sheet to tear it, realizing how his mother would wonder at this demonstration from him. Then, his hand stiffened again and he determined to let the letter go. In fact, he added to it:
"I put the punishment of the Royle girl as more important than the punishment of Ketlar, although probably the law can not touch her," and signed his name.
He took the letter to the mailbox on the street, and, after dropping it in, immediately assailed himself for the violence of his last lines. What would they mean to his mother?
What did they mean to himself? he asked, as he strode across the street to the lake, his mother forgotten, his mind and soul absorbed by emotion roused by Joan Daisy Royle, daughter of a drug addict, accomplice of Ketlar, false swearer and defier of the law and challenger of Calvin Clarke.
Over the lake stood stars and his eyes sought a patch of them configuring the constellation which Joan Daisy had shaped in stones on the sand.
Calvin stirred to rills of warm blood at memory of her voice when first she met and challenged him, her eyes even to his, her head up.
"What's the matter with me?" he arraigned the thumping in his breast, and turned toward his rooms, determined to dismiss her and the whole affair of Ketlar until to-morrow.
But a woman awaited him outside his building. She was alone, and she stood quietly, never moving when Calvin approached. She was middle-aged or more, he saw, with a fine, straight figure endowed in the dark with a brooding dignity which impelled Calvin to remove his hat.
"You are Assistant State's Attorney Clarke?" she asked.
"Yes."
"I am Anna Ketlar Folwell. I am his mother."
"What?" said Calvin.
"I'm his mother."
"Oh," said Calvin and, believing that the dark deceived him, he moved to have a better light upon her; and he supposed that he was in for a painful and utterly useless ordeal; but the woman only said, in a low voice:
"I've come just about his child. A neighbor has her now, one of Adele's neighbors."
"Yes."
"Can—can't I have her?"
"Her grandmother," said Calvin, choosing his word stupidly, but without intent, "will be here to-morrow for the child. She is coming from Minnesota."
"I am the child's grandmother, too. I want her. Let me have her—oh, let me have her, at least while my boy's in jail."
"I've sent for the mother's mother," Calvin said, stubbornly, and the woman turned away, abandoning her appeal so suddenly that he watched her with surprise. Then he realized that, being what she was, she had expected only to be denied, that she was in perfect control of herself and she would not trouble him again.