Actors and actresses -- Fiction; Boardinghouses -- Fiction; Detective and mystery stories; Murder -- Fiction
In the first place, the week following Mr. Ladley's arrest my house
was filled up with eight or ten members of a company from the Gaiety
Theater, very cheerful and jolly, and well behaved. Three men, I
think, and the rest girls. One of the men was named Bellows, John
Bellows, and it turned out that he had known Jennie Brice very well.
From the moment he learned that, Mr. Holcombe hardly left him. He
walked to the theater with him and waited to walk home again. He took
him out to restaurants and for long street-car rides in the mornings,
and on the last night of their stay, Saturday, they got gloriously
drunk together--Mr. Holcombe, no doubt, in his character of
Ladley--and came reeling in at three in the morning, singing. Mr.
Holcombe was very sick the next day, but by Monday he was all right,
and he called me into the room.
"We've got him, Mrs. Pitman," he said, looking mottled but cheerful.
"As sure as God made little fishes, we've got him." That was all he
would say, however. It seemed he was going to New York, and might be
gone for a month. "I've no family," he said, "and enough money to keep
me. If I find my relaxation in hunting down criminals, it's a harmless
and cheap amusement, and--it's my own business."
He went away that night, and I must admit I missed him. I rented the
parlor bedroom the next day to a school-teacher, and I found the
periscope affair very handy. I could see just how much gas she used;
and although the notice on each door forbids cooking and washing in
rooms, I found she was doing both: making coffee and boiling an egg
in the morning, and rubbing out stockings and handkerchiefs in her
wash-bowl. I'd much rather have men as boarders than women. The women
are always lighting alcohol lamps on the bureau, and wanting the bed
turned into a cozy corner so they can see their gentlemen friends in
their rooms.
Well, with Mr. Holcombe gone, and Mr. Reynolds busy all day and half
the night getting out the summer silks and preparing for remnant day,
and with Mr. Ladley in jail and Lida out of the city--for I saw in
the papers that she was not well, and her mother had taken her to
Bermuda--I had a good bit of time on my hands. And so I got in the
habit of thinking things over, and trying to draw conclusions, as I
had seen Mr. Holcombe do. I would sit down and write things out as
they had happened, and study them over, and especially I worried over
how we could have found a slip of paper in Mr. Ladley's room with a
list, almost exact, of the things we had discovered there. I used to
read it over, "rope, knife, shoe, towel, Horn--" and get more and more
bewildered. "Horn"--might have been a town, or it might not have been.
There _was_ such a town, according to Mr. Graves, but apparently he
had made nothing of it. _Was_ it a town that was meant?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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