“The police found bloody finger-prints on the knife, the table, and the front door; but so far they have not found the man who left the prints, which is why I am employing your agency. The physician who came with the police placed the time of father’s death at between eleven o’clock and midnight.
“Later, on Monday, we learned that father had drawn $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills from the bank Saturday morning. No trace of the money has been found. My finger-prints, as well as the servants’, were compared with the ones found by the police, but there was no similarity. I think that is all.”
“Do you know of any enemies your father had?”
He shook his head.
“I know of none, though he may have had them. You see, I really didn’t know my father very well. He was a very reticent man and, until his retirement, about five years ago, he spent most of his time in South America, where most of his mining interests were. He may have had dozens of enemies, though Barton — who probably knew more about him than anyone — seems to know of no one who hated father enough to kill him.”
“How about relatives?”
“I was his heir and only child, if that is what you are getting at. So far as I know he had no other living relatives.”
“I’ll talk to the servants,” I said.
The maid and the cook could tell me nothing, and I learned very little more from Barton. He had been with Henry Grover since 1912, had been with him in Yunnan, Peru, Mexico, and Central America, but apparently he knew little or nothing of his master’s business or acquaintances.
He said that Grover had not seemed excited or worried on the night of the murder, and that nearly every night Grover dismissed him at about the same time, with orders that he be not disturbed; so no importance was to be attached to that part of it. He knew of no one with whom Grover had communicated during the day, and he had not seen the money Grover had drawn from the bank.
I made a quick inspection of the house and grounds, not expecting to find anything; and I didn’t. Half the jobs that come to a private detective are like this one: three or four days — and often as many weeks — have passed since the crime was committed. The police work on the job until they are stumped; then the injured party calls in a private sleuth, dumps him down on a trail that is old and cold and badly trampled, and expects — Oh, well! I picked out this way of making a living, so...
I looked through Grover’s papers — he had a safe and a desk full of them — but didn’t find anything to get excited about. They were mostly columns of figures.
“I’m going to send an accountant out here to go over your father’s books,” I told Frederick Grover. “Give him everything he asks for, and fix it up with the bank so they’ll help him.”
I caught a street-car and went back to town, called at Ned Root’s office, and headed him out toward Grover’s. Ned is a human adding machine with educated eyes, ears, and nose. He can spot a kink in a set of books farther than I can see the covers.
“Keep digging until you find something, Ned, and you can charge Grover whatever you like. Give me something to work on — quick!”
The murder had all the earmarks of one that had grown out of blackmail, though there was — there always is — a chance that it might have been something else. But it didn’t look like the work of an enemy or a burglar: either of them would have packed his weapon with him, would not have trusted to finding it on the grounds. Of course, if Frederick Grover, or one of the servants, had killed Henry Grover... but the finger-prints said “No.”
Just to play safe, I put in a few hours getting a line on Frederick. He had been at a ball on the night of the murder; he had never, so far as I could learn, quarreled with his father; his father was liberal with him, giving him everything he wanted; and Frederick was taking in more money in his brokerage office than he was spending. No motive for a murder appeared on the surface there.
At the city detective bureau I hunted up the police sleuths who had been assigned to the murder; Marty O’Hara and George Dean. It didn’t take them long to tell me what they knew about it. Whoever had made the bloody finger-prints was not known to the police here: they had not found the prints in their files. The classifications had been broadcast to every large city in the country, but with no results so far.
A house four blocks from Grover’s had been robbed on the night of the murder, and there was a slim chance that the same man might have been responsible for both jobs. But the burglary had occurred after one o’clock in the morning, which made the connection look not so good. A burglar who had killed a man, and perhaps picked up $10,000 in the bargain, wouldn’t be likely to turn his hand to another job right away.
I looked at the paper-knife with which Grover had been killed, and at the photographs of the bloody prints, but they couldn’t help me much just now. There seemed to be nothing to do but get out and dig around until I turned up something somewhere.
Then the door opened, and Joseph Clane was ushered into the room where O’Hara, Dean and I were talking.
Clane was a hard-bitten citizen, for all his prosperous look; fifty or fifty-five, I’d say, with eyes, mouth and jaw that held plenty of humor but none of what is sometimes called the milk of human kindness.
He was a big man, beefy, and all dressed up in a tight-fitting checkered suit, fawn-colored hat, patent-leather shoes with buff uppers, and the rest of the things that go with that sort of combination. He had a harsh voice that was as empty of expression as his hard red face, and he held his body stiffly, as if he was afraid the buttons on his too-tight clothes were about to pop off. Even his arms hung woodenly at his sides, with thick fingers that were lifelessly motionless.
He came right to the point. He had been a friend of the murdered man’s, and thought that perhaps what he could tell us would be of value.
He had met Henry Grover — he called him “Henny” — in 1894, in Ontario, where Grover was working a claim: the gold mine that had started the murdered man along the road to wealth. Clane had been employed by Grover as foreman, and the two men had become close friends. A man named Denis Waldeman had a claim adjoining Grover’s and a dispute had arisen over their boundaries. The dispute ran on for some time — the men coming to blows once or twice — but finally Grover seems to have triumphed, for Waldeman suddenly left the country.
Clane’s idea was that if we could find Waldeman we might find Grover’s murderer, for considerable money had been involved in the dispute, and Waldeman was “a mean cuss, for a fact,” and not likely to have forgotten his defeat.
Clane and Grover had kept in touch with each other, corresponding or meeting at irregular intervals, but the murdered man had never said or written anything that would throw a light on his death. Clane, too, had given up mining, and now had a small string of race-horses which occupied all his time.
He was in the city for a rest between racing-meets, had arrived two days before the murder, but had been too busy with his own affairs — he had discharged his trainer and was trying to find another — to call upon his friend. Clane was staying at the Marquis hotel, and would be in the city for a week or ten days longer.
“How come you’ve waited three days before coming to tell us all this?” Dean asked him.
“I wasn’t noways sure I had ought to do it. I wasn’t never sure in my mind but what maybe Henny done for that fellow Waldeman — he disappeared sudden-like. And I didn’t want to do nothing to dirty Henny’s name. But finally I decided to do the right thing. And then there’s another thing: you found some finger-prints in Henny’s house, didn’t you? The newspapers said so.”