His appearance did not alarm him. He was invisible. Lloyd George and
Clemenceau might have called. Mr. Ten Eyck Jones was not at home, sir.
If necessary he was dead. Always, while he dressed, his servant put,
unseen, a tray on the workshop table and, still unseen, disappeared.
With the tray was the morning paper and the usual letters, which Jones
never read. Morning in the workshop meant work. No interruptions
permitted. On one occasion the house got on fire. His servant did not
venture to tell him, though the firemen did. Apart from such outrages,
necessarily infrequent, the only intrusion was the morning paper and the
cat that talked in her sleep. The cat had many privileges, the paper had
few. Sometimes it was briefly considered, more often it was not even
looked at, but its great privilege consisted in being stacked.
On this morning Jones did look, but quite involuntarily, and only
because a headline caught his eye. It was the same headline from before
which Cassy backed. The leaping words shouted at the girl. They shouted
at the novelist, a circumstance which did not prevent him from
breakfasting.
The fruit, the crescents, the coffee he consumed, not as was customary,
with his thoughts on his own copy, but on that which the paper supplied.
It was very colourful. At the opera, the night before, Monty Paliser had
been killed.
In New York, many men are killed, but not so many are murdered and of
those that are murdered, few are millionaires and fewer still have a box
at the Metropolitan, where, apart from stage business, no one up to then
had been done for. The case was therefore unique and, save for the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln, without a parallel. In the
circumstances, the leaded line of leaping words was justified.
According to the story that followed and which, Jones realised, must
have reached the city editor just as the paper was going to press, an
attendant, whose duty it was to visit the boxes after the performance
and see what, if anything, the occupants had forgotten, had, on entering
Paliser's box, found him at the back of it, unconscious, on the floor.
There were no external marks of violence, but a commandeered physician
pronounced him dead and, on examination, further pronounced that death
was due to internal hemorrhage, superinduced by heart-puncture, which
itself had been caused by some instrument, presumably a stiletto.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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