Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist Part 18

Will you come along?"

Mr. Scanlon was willing, and so they made their way from the rathskeller into the sunlight. The Polo Club occupied a magnificent modern building in a prominent location. They pa.s.sed in at a door which was opened by a man in uniform, ostentatious in its soberness; at the end of a room, rich in rugs and paintings, they encountered another man, stout and impa.s.sive.

"Is Mr. Dennison here, do you know, Hocking?" asked Ashton-Kirk.

"Yes, sir, in the smoking-room," replied the man, impa.s.sively, but with certainty.

In the smoking-room they came upon Dennison, purple of jowl, with his white fat hands folded across his paunch, smoking a cigarette and looking out at a window.

"Oh, how are you?" lifting his eyes, but never stirring. "How do, Scanlon?"

"Quite comfortable here of an afternoon," said Ashton-Kirk as he dropped into a chair at the other side of the window. "I had no idea."

"How could you have?" complained Dennison; "you drop in only once or twice in a year, and then only of a night, and when old Hungerford is in town."

Ashton-Kirk smiled as he thought of those rare nights with Hungerford over the chess board--nights when he matched himself against an intelligence almost mystical, and out of each contact with which he emerged, drenched with new understanding.

"I suppose that's so," he admitted. "But I should get here oftener." He looked interestedly at the other, and added: "Get over your little jolt of the other night all right?"

"I'm pretty shaky." Dennison looked at Bat who had possessed himself of an easy chair. "I don't know if Scanlon knows anything about how I'm doing or not. He's giving me confounded little attention. Never in, it seems, when I get there, and one of his understrappers must put me through."

"It all depends on yourself at this point in the race," spoke Scanlon, easily. "In a week or so _I'll_ be ready to take you on. I'll be able to see what I'm doing then."

"Oh, I say, I'm not so beastly fleshy as all that!" protested Dennison, indignantly.

"Don't pay any attention to him," said Ashton-Kirk, smiling. "A thing such as you went through would be likely to upset any one."

"Of course it would," agreed Dennison, eagerly. "Tom Burton and myself were pretty intimate, and to find out suddenly that he'd gone down like that! Of course it would upset any one."

"You knew Burton for a long time, did you?"

"Not so very; maybe for seven or eight years. I met him at Danforth's place one night when he was playing roulette in big luck. That was about a year before he married Nora Cavanaugh, the actress." Dennison lighted a flat Turkish cigarette and inhaled a deep draught of smoke. "I was kind of surprised to hear about him being married, for he'd always talked against that state. He said it got a man into a great lot of trouble."

"Where was it you saw him on the night of his taking off?" asked the investigator.

"Why, at Danforth's. Things were a little dull," as though feeling an explanation of his presence in the gambling-house were necessary, "and I thought I'd drop around and get a little excitement out of the game if I could. Burton was there and had just been cleaned out; he was in an impatient sort of humor and was d.a.m.ning things at a tolerable speed.

Nothing vicious, you know, but just enough to show his ginger."

"Had you much of a conversation with him?"

"Yes; quite a long one." Dennison puffed at his cigarette, quite pleased that he had an interested audience for his, for the time, favorite topic. "You see, when Tom was in hard luck, he was a great fellow for going back and calling up a lot of disagreeable things that had happened to him. Maybe that doesn't sound very cheerful, but it wasn't so bad to listen to. Burton had a past that was a bit different, you see. While I'm sure he was a first-cla.s.s sport in all essential things, still he had mingled with a lot of people such as one seldom hears of outside novels. His comments upon his family were also rather frequent. Usually, if a fellow dislikes his family, he keeps it to himself, but Burton, when he was in the dumps, talked about it. His son, Frank, who draws the sporting cartoons for the _Standard_ came in for an especially strong dressing down that night. It seems he makes a remarkable salary--for he's devilish clever, I think--and yet, when his father was broke, and called on him at odd times, over the telephone, for a little tide to carry him over the bar, he always turned him down flat. Tom regarded this as rank ingrat.i.tude. He was the boy's father, he said, and was ent.i.tled to certain consideration and respect. He boiled over the thing and said he meant to square the account some day."

"Burton as the wronged father is funny," observed Scanlon. "Why didn't he have a little quivery music, and some paper snow flakes to fall on him? That would have increased the effect."

"Maybe he wasn't altogether wrong," said Dennison, as though feeling bound to defend his friend. "A son has certain duties toward his father, I believe. But Burton couldn't expect much of that sort of thing from his children; for it seems they weren't trained right. You know their mother must have been a queer sort; set in her ways, and always complaining. She had the country school teacher's idea of life, and what part of it should be lived; and Burton never hit it with her properly.

She brought up her children with the same views as her own; their father was always pointed out as the kind of person they must avoid. And with that sort of thing sounded in their ears continually, of course their att.i.tudes, as they became older, were to be expected."

"Well, from all accounts," said Scanlon, "they have a pretty good argument on their side--neglect and all that. Burton wasn't your idea of a family man, was he?"

"Well, no, not exactly," confessed Dennison. "But then, I don't put myself up as a judge of such things. However, I've got a notion it would be hard to live with a silent, religious wife, a son you knew hated you, and a daughter who had--er--well--spells."

Ashton-Kirk bent his head forward a trifle and a look of interest glinted in his keen eyes.

"Spells?" asked he. "What do you mean?"

Dennison smiled broadly.

"That's an expression I got from an old colored man who used to work for my father years ago. Queer how such things stick to one, isn't it? But I don't just know how to describe what Burton told me about his daughter in any other way. She wasn't an epileptic. That's a thing one goes down under; and _her_ case was just the reverse. She was, as a rule, propped up in a chair, as weak as a kitten; but when these things took her, she grew immensely strong and sort of wild."

"I see," said Ashton-Kirk. And Scanlon, as he watched, saw him, so to speak, store the fact carefully away in his memory. "Can you remember anything else Burton talked about that night?"

"Why, yes, to be sure." Dennison looked at the still figure of the investigator through the light rifts of smoke. "You seem to have a fair-sized interest in the matter," he added.

Ashton-Kirk nodded.

"Yes," he replied. "There is more to it than the police have shown; and I'm interested in the son's predicament."

"Nasty mess for him," agreed Dennison, pursing up his thick lips.

"Terrible kick up, that's a fact. Glad I'm not in it." He smoked for a moment or two and then proceeded. "What was on Tom's mind most of all that night was the condition of his pocketbook. According to his statement it was pretty flat. He'd come into Danforth's with about fifty dollars--all he had--hoping for a little luck at the wheel; but even that slipped away from him."

"Did he have anything in mind, do you know, that would get him out of his difficulties?"

"I suggested that he try his son once more," said Dennison. "But he didn't seem to take kindly to the notion. After a while he began to hint at some little matter--I couldn't quite get its nature." Ashton-Kirk's eyes narrowed as Dennison proceeded: "And he seemed to have some confidence in its turning out well."

"You say you couldn't _quite_ get its nature." Ashton-Kirk was still regarding the man steadily. "Am I to take from that that you _did_ understand a part of it?"

Dennison stirred uneasily.

"Why, yes," he replied. "I think I did. As I said a while ago, I've always believed him to be a sport who was strictly on the level--though I'll admit there are a lot of men I know who think just the other way around. But, though I do believe it, I'll agree, as I said before, he'd been a little different and had mixed with a queer lot of characters.

Well, from what he dropped, the matter he had in hand that night had one of these people somewhere in the background."

"You got no details?"

"Not any. Part of the time he talked _at_ me--not _to_ me, at all. He was regretting certain things; how he'd given up opportunities of profit so as to hold a place for himself in the society he moved in. He argued that if a man could bet on the turn of a card, or a wheel, in a place like Danforth's--which is an illegal establishment--why could he not do certain other things, which were also merely illegal, without losing caste. He had a habit of arguing this way when he was broke; but I never took him quite seriously. As a matter of fact, I never was sure as to what he meant; once or twice I asked, but he always turned the matter off, and began to talk about something else.

"He was always close about details or confidences in things like that,"

proceeded Dennison. "I've sometimes thought this reticence is what made the talk about him. But he was very angry that night; he stormed up and down," and here Dennison gestured with his cigarette, with the manner of one who is determined to hold back nothing. "And he did drop something, after a little, something, I'll admit, that made me wonder what was up."

"Have you any objections to telling what that was?" asked Ashton-Kirk, smoothly.

"No, of course not." Dennison looked exceedingly virtuous. "If it'll do any good, it ought to be known. I think I told you, last time we met, that when Tom Burton left me that night he said he was going to see a man on some business--something that would bring a profit. Remember?

Well, he didn't mention the man's name; but without realizing it, right in the middle of the talk he let out the nature of his occupation."

"What was that?" asked Scanlon.

"The man was a burglar."