CHAPTER II
MOLLY TELLS THE STORY

The Black Eagle Building is part-way downtown – not one of the skyscrapers that crowd together on the tip of the Island's tongue and not one of the advance guard squeezing in among the mansions of the rich, darkening their windows and spoiling their chimney draughts – poor, suffering dears!

As I came up the subway stairs I could see it bulking up above the roofs, a long narrow shape, with its windows shining in the sun. It stood on a corner presenting a great slab of wall to the side street and its front to Broadway. There were two entrances, the main one – with an eagle in a niche over the door – on Broadway, and a smaller one on the side street. There is only one other very high building near there – the Massasoit – facing on Fifth Avenue, its back soaring above the small houses that look like a line of children's toys.

My way was along the side street, chilled by the shadow of the building, and as I passed the small entrance I stopped and looked up. The wall rose like a rampart, story over story, the windows as similar and even as cells in a honeycomb. Way up, the cornice cut the blue with its dark line. It was from that height the suicide had jumped. I thought of him there, standing on the window ledge, making ready to leap. Ugh! it was too horrible! I shuddered and walked on, pressing my chin into my fur and putting the picture out of my mind.

When I turned the corner into Broadway it was brighter. The sun was shining on the outspread wings of the eagle in his niche and turning the icicles that hung from the window ledges into golden fringes. Near the entrance a man in a checked jumper and peaked cap was breaking away the bits of ice that stuck to the sidewalk with a long-handled thing like a spade. And all about were people, queer, mangy-looking men and some women, standing staring at the pavement and then craning their necks and squinting up through the sunlight at the top of the building.

I sized up the man in the jumper as a janitor, and for all he seemed so busy, you could see he was really hanging round for an excuse to talk. He'd pick at a tiny piece of ice and skate it over careful into the gutter when in ordinary times he'd have let it lie there, a menace to the public's bones. Every now and then one of the people standing round would ask him a question and he'd stop in his scraping and try to look weary while he was just bursting to go all over it again.

"Where did he fall?" asked a chap in a reach-me-down overcoat, fringy at the cuffs, "there?" and pointed into the middle of the street. The janitor gave him a scornful glance, let go his hoe and spat on his hand. He spoke with a brogue:

"No, not there. Nor there neither," he pointed some distance down Broadway. "But there," and that time he struck on the edge of the curb with his hoe.

A girl who was passing slowed up, her face all puckered with horror:

"Did he come down with a crash?"

The janitor drew himself up, raised his eyebrows and looked at her from under his eyelids like she was a worm:

"Is fallin' from the top of the buildin' like steppin' from a limousine on to a feather bed?" He turned wearily to his hoe and spoke to it as if it was the only thing in sight that had any sense. "Crash! What'll they be after askin' next?" Then he suddenly got quite excited, raised his voice and stuck out his chin at the girl. "Why, the glasses off his nose was nearly to the next corner. Didn't I meself find the mounts of them six feet from his body? And not a bit of glass left. There's where I got them – in the mud," he pointed out into the street and everyone looked fixedly at the place. "Crash – and the pore corpse no more than a sack of bones."

An old man with a white beard who'd been standing on the curb examining the street as if he expected to find a treasure there said:

"Struck on his head, eh?"

"He did," said the janitor in a loud voice. "An' if you'd listen to me you'd have known it without me tellin' yer."

The girl, who was sort of peeved at the way he answered her, spoke up:

"You never told it at all! You only spoke about the glasses."

The janitor gave her a look sort of enduring and patient as if, she being a woman, he'd got to treat her gentle even if she was a fool.

"Say, young lady," says he, "I'm not goin' to bandy words with you. Have it any way you like. I was here, I seen it, I seen the corpse lyin' all bunched up, I seen the crowd, I seen the amberlanch, and I seen Mr. Harland's clerk come down and identify the body – but maybe I don't know. Take it or leave it – any way you choose."

The people snickered and looked at the girl, who got red and walked off muttering. The janitor went back to picking at a piece of ice as big as a half dollar, watching out for the next one to come along.

I hadn't phoned to Iola this time and it being an unusual occasion I decided to go up. There were men in the entrance hall talking together in groups and from every group I could hear the name of Harland coming in low tones. In the elevator when the other passengers had got out, the boy looked at me and said:

"Tough what happened here last night, ain't it?"

I agreed with him and as we shot up with the floors flashing between the iron grills, he had his little say about it. One of the things that seemed to trouble him most was that he hadn't been there, as the express elevator which he ran was broken early in the afternoon and he'd gone home before the event.

The corridor of the seventeenth floor was a bare, clean place, all shining stone, not a bit of wood about it but the doors. At one end was a window looking out on the Broadway side and near it the stairs went down, concrete with a metal balustrade. I'd asked for Miss Whitehall's office and as I got out of the car the boy had said, "First door to your left, Azalea Woods Estates." There were two doors on each side, the upper halves ground glass with gold lettering. Those to the right had "The Hudson Electrical Company" on them and those to the left "Azalea Woods Estates" with under that "Anthony Ford, Manager."

As I walked toward the first of these I could see out of the window the great back of the Massasoit Building, tan color against the bright blue of the sky. Pausing before I rang the bell, I leaned against the window ledge and spied down. The street looked like a small, narrow gully, dotted with tiny black figures, and the houses that fronted on it, extending back to the Massasoit, no bigger than match boxes.

I pressed the bell and as I waited turned and looked down the corridor, stretching away in its shiny scoured cleanness between the shut doors of offices. Just beyond the elevator shafts there was a branch hall and along the polished floor I could see the white, glassy reflection of another window. That was on the side street, one of those I had looked up at, and as I was thinking that, the door opened slowly and Iola peered out, with her eyes big and scared and a sandwich in her hand.

"Good gracious, Molly!" she cried. "I'm so glad to see you. Come in."

I hesitated, almost whispering:

"Will Miss Whitehall mind?"

"She's not here. I had a phone this morning to say she was sick and wouldn't be down, and Mr. Ford's gone out to lunch." She took me by the hand and pulled me in, shutting the door. "Jerusalem, but it's good to see you. I'm that lonesome sitting here I'm ready to cry."

She didn't look very chipper. Usually she's a pretty girl, the slim, baby-eyed, delicate kind, with a dash of powder on the nose and a touch of red on the lips to help out. But today she looked sort of peaked and shriveled up, the way those frail little wisps of girls do at the least jar.

"Isn't it awful?" she said as soon as she'd got me in – "Just the floor above us!"

I didn't want her to talk 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."