if they'd sell out – they had several offers – when it was announced that they were going to start a villa site company to be called the Azalea Woods Estates. In the Autumn when I was down at the Cressets – Soapy and I go there for Sundays sometimes – the Cresset boys had been over in their new Ford car, and said what were once open fields were all laid out in roads with little spindly trees planted along the edges. There was a swell station, white with a corrugated red roof, and several houses up, some stucco like the station and others low and squatty in the bungalow style.
It was a big undertaking and there was a good deal of talk, no one supposing the Whitehalls had money enough to break out in such a roomy way, but when it came down to brass tacks, nobody had any real information about them. For all Longwood and Azalea knew they might have been cutting off coupons ever since they came.
As soon as the Azalea Woods Estates started they moved to town. Iola told me they had a nice little flat on the East Side and the offices were the swellest she'd ever been employed in. I'd never been in them, though I sometimes went to the Black Eagle Building and took Iola out to lunch. I didn't like to go up, having no business there, and used to telephone her in the morning and make the date, then hang round the entrance hall till she came down.
Besides Miss Whitehall and Iola there was a managing clerk, Anthony Ford. I'd never seen him no more than I had Miss Whitehall, but I'd heard a lot about him. After Iola'd told me what a good-looker he was and how he'd come swinging in in the morning, always jolly and full of compliments, I got a hunch that she was getting too interested in him. She said she wasn't – did you ever know a girl who didn't? – and when I asked her point blank, ruffled up like a wet hen and snapped out:
"Molly Babbitts, ain't I been in business long enough to know I got to keep my heart locked up in the office safe?"
And I couldn't help answering:
"Well, don't give away the combination till you're good and sure it's the right man that's asking for it."
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
