Geraldine Bonner - The Black Eagle Mystery

The following story of what has been known as "The Black Eagle Mystery" has been compiled from documents contributed by two persons thoroughly conversant with the subject. These are Molly Morgenthau Babbitts and John Reddy, whose position of inside observers and active participants makes it possible for them to give to the public a consecutive and detailed narrative of this most unusual case.

"Hello!" said Babbitts from the sheets of the morning paper.

I'll call him Babbitts to you because that's the name you'll remember him by – that is if you know about the Hesketh Mystery. I generally call him "Soapy," the name the reporters gave him, and "Himself," which comes natural to me, my mother being Irish. Maybe you'll remember that too? And he calls me "Morningdew" – cute, isn't it? It's American for my last name Morgenthau – I was Molly Morgenthau before I was married.

In case you don't know about the Hesketh Mystery I'll have to give a few facts to locate us. I was the telephone girl in Longwood, New Jersey, met Babbitts there when he was a reporter for the Dispatch – he is yet – and the switchboard lost one of its brightest ornaments. It was town for us, an apartment on West Ninety-fifth Street, near the Subway, five rooms on a corner, furnished like a Belasco play. If you read the Hesketh Mystery you know how I came by that furniture, and if you didn't you'll have to stay in ignorance, for I'm too anxious to get on to stop and tell you. Every day at ten Isabella Dabney, a light-colored coon, comes in to do the heavy work and I order her round, throwing a bluff that I'm used to it and hoping Isabella isn't on.

We've been married over two years and we're still – Oh, what's the use! But we do get on like a house on fire. I guess in this vast metropolis there's not a woman got anything on me when it comes to happiness. It certainly is wonderful how you bloom out and the mean part of you fades away when someone thinks you're the perfect article, handsewn, silk-lined, made in America.

And so having taken this little run round the lot, I'll come back to Babbitts with his head in the morning paper saying "Hello!"

It was a clear, crisp morning in January – sixteenth of the month – and we were at breakfast. Himself had just got in from Cleveland, where he'd been sent to write up the Cheney graft prosecution. It took some minutes to say "How d'ye do" – he'd been away two whole days – and after we'd concluded the ceremonies I lit into the kitchen to get his breakfast while he sat down at his end of the table and dived into the papers. His egg was before him and I was setting the coffeepot down at my end when he gave that "Hello," loud and startled, with the accent on the "lo."

"What's up now?" said I, looking over the layout before me to see if I'd forgotten anything.

"Hollings Harland's committed suicide," came out of the paper.

"Lord, has he!" said I. "Isn't that awful?" I took up the cream pitcher. "Well, what do you make of that – the cream's frozen."

"Last night at half-past six. Threw himself out of his office window on the eighteenth story."

"Eighteenth story! – that's some fall. I've got to take this cream out with a spoon." I spooned up some, all white spikes and edges, wondering if it would chill his coffee which he likes piping hot. "Darling, do you mind waiting a little while I warm up the cream?"

"Darn the cream! What rotten luck that I was away. I suppose they put Eddie Saunders on it, sounds like his flat-footed style. Listen to this: 'The body struck the pavement with a violent impact.' That's the way he describes the fall of a man from the top of a skyscraper. Gee, why wasn't I here?"

"But, dearie," I said, passing him his cup, "Saunders would have done it if you had been here. You don't do suicides."

"I do this one. Hollings Harland, one of the big corporation lawyers of New York."

"Oh," I said, "he's an important person."

"Rather. A top liner in his profession."

"Why did he commit suicide?"

"Caught in the Copper Pool, they think here."

With the cup at his lips he went on reading over its edge.

"Does it taste all right?" I asked and he grunted something that would have been "A 1" if it hadn't dropped into the coffee and been drowned.

My mind at rest about him I could give it to the morning sensation.

"What's the Copper Pool?" I asked.

"A badly named weapon to jack up prices and gouge the public, young woman. Just like a corner in hats. Suppose you could buy up all the spring hats, you could pretty near name your own figure on them, couldn't you?"

"They do that now without a corner," I said sadly.

"Well, they can't in copper. The Pool means that a bunch of financiers have put up millions to corner the copper market and skyrocket the price."

"Oh, he lost all his money in it and got desperate and jumped out."

"Um – from the hall window in the Black Eagle Building."

That made it come nearer, the way things do when someone you know is on the ground.

"Why that's where Iola Barry works – in Miss Whitehall's office on the seventeenth floor."

Babbitts' eyes shifted from the paper to his loving spouse:

"That's so. I'd forgotten it. Just one story below. I wonder if Iola was there."

"I guess not, she goes home at six. It's a good thing she wasn't. She's a hysterical, timid little rat. Being round when a thing like that happened would have broke her up more than a spell of sickness."

Iola Barry was a chum of mine. Four years ago, before I was transferred to New Jersey, we'd been girls together in the same exchange, and though I didn't see much of her when I was Central in Longwood, since I'd come back we'd met up and renewed the old friendship. Having the fatality happen so close to her fanned my interest considerable and I reached across and picked up one of the papers.

The first thing my eye lit on was a picture of Hollings Harland – a fine looking, smooth-shaven man.

When I saw the two long columns about him I realized what an important person he was and why Babbitts was so mad he'd missed the detail. Besides his own picture there was one of his house – an elegant residence on Riverside Drive, full of pictures and statuary, and a library he'd taken years to collect. Then there was all about him and his life. He was forty-six years of age and though small in stature, a fine physical specimen, never showing, no matter how hard he worked, a sign of nerves or weariness. In his boyhood he'd come from a town up state, and risen from the bottom to the top, "cleaving his way up," the paper had it, "by his brilliant mind, indomitable will and tireless energy." Three years before, his wife had died and since then he'd retired from society, devoting himself entirely to business.

Toward the end of the article came a lot of stuff about the Copper Pool, and the names of the other men in it – he seemed to be in it too. There was only one of these I'd ever heard of – Johnston Barker – which didn't prove that I knew much, as everybody had heard of him. He was one of the big figures of finance, millionaire, magnate, plutocrat, the kind that one paper calls, "A malefactor of great wealth," and its rival, "One of our most distinguished and public-spirited citizens." That places him better than a font of type. He was in the Copper Pool up to his neck – the head of it as far as I could make out.

I had just got through with that part – it wasn't interesting – and was reading what had happened before the suicide when Babbitts spoke:

"Harland seems to have had a scene in his office with Johnston Barker in the afternoon."