about it, but she was like the janitor – only a gag would stop her. So I let her run on while I looked round and took in the place.
It was a fine, large room, two windows in the front and two more on the sides. The furniture was massive and rich-looking and the rugs on the floor as soft to your foot as the turf in the Park. On the walls were blue and white maps, criss-crossed with lines, and pictures of houses, in different styles. But the thing that got me was a little model of a cottage on a table by the window. It was the cutest thing you ever saw – all complete even to the blinds in the windows and the awning over the piazza. I was looking at it when Iola, having got away with the sandwich, said:
"Come on in to Mr. Ford's office while I finish my lunch. I got to get through with it before he comes back."
I followed her into the next room, nearly as large as the one we'd been in, with a wide window and in the center a big roll-top desk. On the edge of this stood a pasteboard box, with some crumpled wax paper in it and an orange. Iola sat down in the swivel chair and picking up the orange began to peel it.
"I hardly ever do this," she explained, "but I thought Miss Whitehall wouldn't mind today as I felt so mean I couldn't face going out to lunch. And then it was all right as she won't be down and I'll have it all cleared off before Mr. Ford comes back."
"Would he be mad?"
You ought to have seen the look she gave me.
"Mad – Tony Ford? It's easy seen you don't know him. She wouldn't say anything either. She's awful considerate. But she's so sort of grand and dignified you don't like to ask favors off her."
"Was she here when it happened last night?"
"I don't know, but I guess not. She generally leaves a little before six. Thanks be to goodness, she told me I could go home early yesterday. I was out of the building by half-past five." She broke the orange apart and held out a piece. "Have a quarter?" I shook my head and she went on. "We're all out of here soon after six. Tony Ford generally stays last and shuts up. Did you see all the papers this morning?"
"Most of them. Why?"
"I was wondering if any of them knew that Mr. Harland and Mr. Barker were both in here yesterday afternoon."
"It wasn't in any of the papers I saw."
"Well, they were – the two of them. And I didn't know but what the reporters, nosing round for anything the way they do, mightn't have heard it. Not that there was anything out of the ordinary about it. She knew them both. Mr. Harland's been in here a few times and Mr. Barker often."
"Why did he come?" I said, surprised, for Iola had never told me they'd the magnate for a customer.
"Business," she looked at me over the orange that she was sucking, her eyes sort of intent and curious. "Didn't I tell you that? He was going to buy a piece of land in the Azalea Woods Estates and build a house for his niece."
"Seems to me," I said, "that the press'll be interested to know about those two visits."
"Well, if any reporters come snooping round here Tony Ford told me to refer them to him or Miss Whitehall, and that's what I'm going to do."
"What time was Mr. Harland here?"
"A little after four. He and Miss Whitehall went into the private office and had a talk. And I'll bet a new hat that he hadn't no more idea of suicide then than you have now, sitting there before me. When he came out he was all smiles, just as natural and happy as if he was going home to a chicken dinner and a show afterward."
"All the papers think it was what Mr. Barker said that drove him to it."
"And they're right for a change – not that I'm saying anything against the press with your husband in it. But it does make more mistakes than any printed matter I ever read, except the cooking receipts on the outside of patent foods. It was Barker that put the crimp in him."
"Then Barker came in afterward?"
"Yes, just before I left. And he and she went into the private office."
I turned in my chair and looked through the open doorway into the third room of the suite.
"Is that the private office?" I asked.
"Yes," says Iola with a giggle, "that's its society name, but Mr. Ford calls it the Surgery."
Before I could ask her why Mr. Ford called it that, the bell rang and she jumped up, squashing the orange peel and bits of paper back in the box.
"Here, you go and answer it," I said, "I'll hide this." She went into the front office and as I pushed the box out of sight on a shelf I could hear her talking to a man at the door. The conversation made me stand still listening.
The man's voice asked for Miss Whitehall, Iola answering that she wasn't there.
"Where is she?" said the man, gruff and abrupt it seemed to me.
"In her own home – she hasn't come down today at all."
"Is she coming later?"
"No, she's sick in bed."
There was a slight pause and then he said:
"Well, I got to see her. I've notes here that are overdue and the endorsee's dead."
"Endorsee?" came Iola's little pipe, full of troubled surprise, "who's he?"
"Hollings Harland who killed himself last night. What's her address?"
I could hear Iola giving it and the man muttering it over. Then there was a gruff "Good morning" and the door snapped shut.
Iola came back, her eyes big, her expression wondering.
"What do you suppose that means?" she said.
I didn't know exactly myself but – notes, endorsee dead! – it had a bad sound. As Iola reached down her lunch box and tied it up, talking uneasily about the man and what he'd wanted, I remembered the gossip in New Jersey when Miss Whitehall started her land scheme. There'd been rumors then that maybe she was backed, and if Hollings Harland had been behind it – My goodness! you couldn't tell what might happen. But I wasn't going to say anything discouraging to Iola, so to change the subject I moved to the door of the private office and looked in.
"Why does Mr. Ford call this the surgery?"
At the mention of the managing clerk Iola brightened up and said with a smirk:
"Because it's where Miss Whitehall chloroforms her clients with her beauty and performs the operation of separating them from their money. He's always saying cute things like that."
We stood in the doorway and looked in. It was a smaller room than the others, but furnished just as richly, with a mahogany center table, big leather-covered armchairs and photographs of foreign views on the walls. In one corner was an elegant, gold-embossed screen, that, when I spied behind it, I saw hid a washstand. It was the last room of the suite and had only one door that led into the office we'd been sitting in. In the outside wall was a window from which you could see way over the city – a wonderful view.
I walked to it and looked out. Over the roofs and chimneys I caught a glimpse of the Hudson, a silvery gleam, and the Hoboken hills beyond. Pressing my forehead against the glass I glimpsed down the sheer drop of the walls to the roof of a church – a flat, black oblong with a squatty dome at one end – squeezed as close as it could get against the lower stories. Back of that were old houses, dwellings that would soon be swept away, the yards behind them narrow strips with the separating fences as small as lines made by a pencil.
I was so interested that for a moment I forgot Iola, but she brought me back with a jerk.
"It was in the room above this that Mr. Harland was sitting with Mr. Barker, before it happened."
"You don't say," I answered. "Is it like this?"
"Exactly the same. I've seen it – one day when the boss was away and I went up with Della Franks. They were in there just as we are in here and then he went out this way – "
The door had been partly pushed to and she started to illustrate how he had left the room, brushing round its edge. Something caught her, there