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Speechless, the younger Shaynon hesitated, lifting an uncertain hand to his throat, as if to relieve a sense of strangulation. "Or what if I were to suggest delicately that you're within an Inche of the end of your rope?" the little man pursued, grimly playful. "Give you an Inche and what will you take, eh?"
Shaynon asked; and familiarly slipped a guiding hand beneath the arm of the girl with admirable effrontery ignoring his earlier dismissal. On the instant, halting, the girl turned to him a full, cold stare. "I prefer you do not touch me," she said clearly, yet in low tones. "Oh, come!" he laughed uneasily. "Don't be foolish " "Did you hear me, Bayard?"
"She won't listen to reason." "Well ... everything's arranged. You have me to thank for that." "Oh," sneered the younger man, "you've done a lot, you have!" And then, moving to give way to another making toward the elevators, Brian Shaynon discovered at his elbow that small attentive body in sinister scarlet and black. For a breath, utterance failed the old man.
The colloquy there was distinctly audible: "Mr. Bayard Shaynon?" "'Leventh floor. Hurry up don't keep the elevator waitin'." "Ah ferget it!" Whistling softly, the man with the yellow envelope ambled nonchalantly into the cage; fixed the operator with a truculent stare, and demanded the eleventh floor. Now Peter Kenny's rooms were on the twelfth....
What he saw from the threshold of the lighted room was Bayard Shaynon still in death upon the floor, one temple shattered by a shot fired at close range from a revolver that lay with butt close to his right hand carefully disposed with evident intent to indicate a case of suicide rather than of murder.
"I don't seem to know you," he said slowly, with a weary shake of his head; "and it's most inopportune the hour. I fear you must excuse me." "That can't be," P. Sybarite returned. "I've business with you important. Perhaps you didn't catch the name I gave your butler Nemesis." "Nemesis?" Shaynon repeated vacantly.
What incriminating knowledge could this boy possess, to render old Shaynon, willing that his memory should be expurgated by such a mind- and nerve-shattering agent as the knock-out drop of White Light commerce? Now Shaynon was capable of almost any degree of infamy, if not, perhaps, the absolute peer of Red November.
"Any employee of the establishment will do as well, for my purpose," P. Sybarite cut in. "Come, Mr. Manager! How about you? Mr. Shaynon declines; your detective has no stomach for the job. Suppose you take on the dirty work kind permission of Bayard Shaynon, Esquire. I don't care, so long as I get my grounds for suit against the Bizarre." The manager spread out expostulatory palms.
There was a sound of heavy, dragging footsteps on the upper landing, and Brian Shaynon showed himself at the head of the stairs; now without his furred great-coat, but still in the evening dress of elderly Respectability Respectability sadly rumpled and maltreated, the white shield of his bosom no longer lustrous and immaculate, his tie twisted wildly beneath one ear, his collar unbuttoned, as though wrenched from its fastenings in a moment of fury.
But at this juncture, from a point directly over their heads, the voice of Brian Shaynon himself interrupted them. "Who is that, Soames?" he called impatiently, without making himself immediately visible. "Has Mr. Bayard returned?" "No, sir," the butler called, distressed. "It's it's a person, sir insists on seein' you says 'is nime's Nemmysis." "What!"
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