The Detective Megapack®

THE TAGGART ASSIGNMENT, by Vincent Starrett-3

I jumped. “You mean that you got something you went there expecting to find?”

“I went there hoping to find a correspondence between Parris and Lennard,” he replied, “and what do you suppose I discovered?” He fumbled in his pocket, and produced an electric torch, for dusk was now falling and the interior of the taxicab was almost dark. “This!” he concluded triumphantly, and turned his light on a crumpled sheet of paper.

Bending over excitedly, I smoothed it out on his knee and read the words written on it in ink. Apparently it was the beginning of a letter which had been discontinued and thrown away. It read:

My Good Prince Rupert:

This is to say that your romantic career is at an end. Every dog, ’tis said, has his day, and yours—poor dog!—has come. You have been useful to me, I shall not deny, and I am grateful for a few. things. For the rest—no matter! At any rate, I am through with you, and for good. It may be that your little enterprise—

There the fragment ended. I sat staring at it until Lavender snapped off his light and plunged us into darkness.

“Well?” he asked, and chuckled at my astonishment.

“That is a threatening letter, Lavender,” I said soberly. “Did Lennard write it? There’s no signature.”

“Oh, I have no doubt that he wrote it; Taggart could tell us. It was never finished, of course. He may have written another that pleased him more. A very curious letter! Did Parris receive one like it? Or was this written for us?”

“For us?”

“For any who would take the trail! It seems incredible that such a letter, preceding such a mystery, should have been left lying for anybody to find.”

“You can’t ignore it, Jimmie,” I said.

“No, I can’t! Furthermore, I must assume that its brother went to Parris, and that it had something to do with this double disappearance. On the face of it, it would appear that Lennard was threatening Parris, but the tone of the letter is not violent; it is more ironical than malicious. One might suppose such a line as ‘your day has come,’ to be a threat—or, such a line as ‘I am through with you for good.’ And yet the tone of the letter is rather one of amused pity, as if the writer had knowledge of the other’s disgrace in some connection, and were twitting him about it.”

“I would arrest Lennard, just the same, on the strength of that letter,” I vigorously asserted.

“So would the police,” said Lavender. “I’m not sure that I wouldn’t arrest Parris on the strength of it!”

I stared at him for a moment, then nodded.

“I see your point, of course; but both are missing—Parris the more mysteriously of the two.”

He did not, answer, and for a time there was silence between us while the auto scudded toward the Loop. Then Lavender broke the silence with another question.

“And why ‘Prince Rupert’?”

“Part of Lennard’s irony, no doubt,” I made answer. “You pointed out the satirical tone of the letter.”

“Maybe,” he shrugged, “but it has a romantic sound. That is, it suggests a masquerade. And Lennard obviously has something on Parris. May it not be that he has unmasked Parris, who is really somebody else? That would explain the letter in part. Parris’s receipt of the letter—I wish it were dated!—would explain his rushing off to see Lennard and breaking his engagement for Sunday evening with Miss Valentine.”

I nodded agreement.

“Very ingenious, Jimmie,” I applauded, and it sounds more than plausible as you state it. I think it almost equally obvious, though, that Parris has something on Lennard.”

“Because Lennard, too, has disappeared? Perhaps! It’s quite possible, of course. But if what Lennard knew about Parris was of great importance, as it seems to have been, Lennard may have disappeared for reasons best known to Parris.”

This gruesome suggestion gave me a shock.

“See how easily everything is explained by such a supposition,” he continued. “Parris receives a letter and learns that he is discovered—whatever his sin may have been—so he hastens off to the Beacon office and sees Lennard. While there he calls Miss Valentine on the telephone, expecting that he will be through with Lennard in time to join her in an hour. Or did he really expect to meet her at all? The question intrudes itself! Assuming that he did, however, he is not through with Lennard in an hour, so we must believe that something unexpected happened. In other words, he was unable to shut up Lennard in one way, so he chose another. And it took him longer than an hour, and left him fearful of a return. Eh?”

I nodded again, unwillingly. I think I liked the unknown Parris better than Lavender did.

“Oh, I admit the plausibility of it,” I said. “Yet Lennard has found Parris ‘useful,’ by his own showing, and must have known of Parris’s sin, whatever it was, for some time. Parris must have known that Lennard knew.”

“I think not,” disputed Lavender. “Lennard undoubtedly had known Parris’s secret for some time, but Parris may not have known that Lennard knew. When Lennard speaks of Parris as having been ‘useful,’ he means merely that he has used Parris for his own purposes—not that they were confidants.”

Beyond question, it occurred to me, Lavender already had builded a strong theoretical case against Parris. I blurted out the plain American of his argument.

“It comes to this, then: That Parris has murdered Lennard to stop his mouth.”

“My dear Gilly, you know very well that I would never make such a charge with so little to go on. I do not even hint it, really, save as a possibility. I casually suggest it to you; I’m not telling the police. But you will admit, I think, that, if Lennard’s body were to be found, some place, our task of locating Miss Valentine’s fiancé would become a very unhappy one. In short, we should probably be looking for Lennard’s murderer at the same time.”

At the Waterside Club we found Taggart impatiently. awaiting us, although we were quite on time.

“We’ve only a moment for a bite, I’m afraid,” he greeted us. “Lennard has been found, and—”

“Not in Milwaukee, surely?” interrupted Lavender, while something clutched at my, heart.

“Milwaukee, hell!” said Taggart. “He was found in the lake. Dead—drowned—probably a suicide. Poor old man!”

And there were tears in the eyes of Gorman B. Taggart.

CHAPTER III

It was true enough. Taggart identified the body while we looked on in silence. He had been telephoned at the club, and had only awaited our coming to hasten to the undertaking establishment whither his manager’s body had been removed.

Lavender made his usual careful examination, but, startling as had been his suggestion in the taxicab, a suggestion that was almost prophecy, in one detail he had missed. To all appearances Lennard had not been murdered. The man had been drowned, but no mark showed on the body to indicate that violence had preceded the plunge. Lavender was frankly puzzled.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Taggart suddenly! And when we were all back at the club he abruptly finished the thought that had been in his mind. “Lavender, it’s all my fault! I’m the man to blame! I threatened him with dismissal. Yes, I did! After forty years of faithful service, I threatened him with dismissal! And why? Because the poor devil was drinking more than I thought he ought to. Poor old Lennard! And he went away and drowned himself! By God, I ought to be held responsible for it!”

Lavender shook his head in slow disagreement.

“No,” he said. “Your feelings do you credit, of course, but you need not hold yourself responsible. You could not have anticipated this. I’m sorry that you didn’t tell me sooner, though. Not that it would have made any difference to Lennard; he’s been in the water since Sunday.”

“I’m to blame;” repeated Taggart grimly. “A damned old fool, that’s what I am! Well, the case is over, Lavender. I’m sorry. I hadn’t looked for anything like this. I’ll sign a check for whatever amount you like, and add a thousand to it for charity.”

This would not be at all to Lavender’s liking, I thought, to give up the case. There was another side to it about which Taggart knew nothing. I looked anxiously at my friend, wondering what he would say. To my surprise he accepted his dismissal easily, accepting at the same time a handsome check for services which, he declared, he had not rendered, and applauding Taggart’s benevolent intentions toward “charity.”

“There will be an inquest tomorrow,” he said, “but I can’t imagine that I shall be wanted. If so, you can communicate with me. And now, as I have another matter on hand, I’ll thank you and say good-by.”

We stood up and shook hands, and shortly thereafter were in the street, I wondering mightily. Lavender smiled at my perplexed face.

“I couldn’t arouse his suspicions, Guy,” he said. “We must protect Miss Valentine’s name at all costs. But, of course, I’m not through with the case. More than ever now, I must see it through. What, time is it? Late, of course! I wonder if. that old chatterbox, Mrs. Barrett, is up at this hour? Probably not. I’ve got to see her again. She probably knows all about Lennard, and it’s particularly necessary now for me to know all that she can tell. Well, I’ll have to wait until morning. And we shall have to see Miss Valentine again. What a muddle this Lennard episode has made of the case!”

But the morning brought our second and biggest shock; one that left us blinking. Miss Valentine called and calmly stopped the search. I had spent the night with Lavender, and we were hardly done with our breakfast when the young woman appeared.

“I’ve been thinking it over,” she told us, “and I know now that I have acted foolishly. If Mr. Parris has seen fit to go away, it is his own business. It is mine, too, of course, but I have no right to make it anybody else’s. If I have been—well, to be brutal, if I have been jilted, there is no reason for me to cry it from the housetops. And I am making myself ridiculous by seeking a man who may not care to have me find him. No, Mr. Lavender, let him come back to me, if there is a reasonable explanation for his action. I shall not demean myself by running after him.”

Lavender delicately pointed out that her fiancé’s disappearance had not been cried from the housetops, ind was not likely to be; but his words fell on deaf ears. Nor did the suggestion that Parris might need our assistance move her to reconsider her decision.

There was no help for it. Lavender had been dismissed again, and when a few moments later she had gone away he said as much with bitter amusement. He had flatly declined to accept a fee from her, and I could see that he was greatly disturbed by this latest and apparently final development.

“I must admit that she did that very well,” he said with a snort. “Now, why did she do it?”

“I thought she told us pretty clearly,” I replied. “And, truth to tell, Lavender, there was sense in what she said—about running after him, you know.”

“That’s the clever part of it,” he nodded. “On the face of things, she has simply reconsidered and decided that she will not pursue a man who may not want her. But her agitation of yesterday does not check with her calmness of today.”

“Why else should she call us off?”