The Million-Dollar Suitcase by Alice MacGowan (smallest ebook reader TXT) 📕

Worth put a restraining hand on my arm, and heard his soft,

"Psst!"

The two of us stood, how long I can't say, something besides the beauty of the young creature, even the dignity of her in this outré situation getting hold of me, so that I was almost reverent when at last the rigidity of her image-like figure began to relax, the pretty feet in their silk stockings and smart pumps appeared where they belonged, side by side on the edge of the planking, and she looked at us with eyes that slowly gathered their normal expression, and a smile of rare human sweetness.

"It is horrid to see—and I loathe doing it!" She shook her curly dark head like a punished child, and stayed a minute longer, eyes downcast, groping after gloves and hat. "I thought maybe I'd get the answer before you saw me—sitting up like a trained seal!"

"Like a mighty pretty little heathen idol, Bobs," Worth amended.

"Well, it's the only way I can really concentrate—effectively. But this is the first time I've done it since—since father died."

"And never again for me, if that's the way you feel about it." Worth crossed quickly and stood beside her, looking down. She reached a hand to him; her eyes thanked him; but as he helped her to her feet I was struck by a something poised and confident that she seemed to have brought with her out of that strange state in which she had just been.

"Doesn't either of you want to hear the answer?" she asked. Then, without waiting for reply, she started for the scuttle and the ladder, bare headed, carrying her hat. We found her once more adjusting turban and veil before the mirror of Clayte's dresser. She faced around, and announced, smiling steadily across at me,

"Your man Clayte left this room while Mrs. Griggsby was kneeling almost on its threshold—left it by that window over there. He got to the roof by means of a rope and grappling hook. He tied the suitcase to the lower end of the rope, swung it out of the window, went up hand over hand, and pulled the suitcase up after him. That's the answer I got."

It was? Well, it was a beaut! Only Worth Gilbert, standing there giving the proceeding respectability by careful attention and a grave face, brought me down to asking with mild jocularity,

"He did? He did all that? Well, please ma'am, who locked the window after him?"

"He locked the window after himself."

"Oh, say!" I began in exasperation—hadn't I just shown the impractical little creature that those locks couldn't be manipulated from outside?

"Wait. Examine carefully the wooden part of the upper sash, at the lock—again," she urged, but without making any movement to help. "You'll find what we overlooked before; the way he locked the sash from the outside."

I turned to the window and looked where she had said; nothing. I ran my fingers over the painted surface of the wood, outside, opposite the latch, and a queer, chilly feeling went down my spine. I jerked out my knife, opened it and scraped at a tiny inequality.

"There is—is something—" I was beginning, when Worth crowded in at my side and pushed his broad shoulders out the window to get a better view of my operations, then commanded,

"Let me have that knife." He took it from my fingers, dug with its blade, and suddenly from the inside I saw a tiny hole appear in the frame of the sash beside the lock hasp. "Here we are!" He brought his upper half back into the room and held up a wooden plug, painted—dipped in paint—the exact color of the sash. It had concealed a hole; pierced the wood from out to in.

"And she saw that in her trance," I murmured, gaping in amazement at the plug.

I heard her catch her breath, and Worth scowled at me,

"Trance? What do you mean, Boyne? She doesn't go into a trance."

"That—that—whatever she does," I corrected rather helplessly.

"Never mind, Mr. Boyne," said the girl. "It isn't clairvoyance or anything like that, however it looks."

"But I wouldn't have believed any human eyes could have found that thing. I discovered it only by sense of touch—and that after you told me to hunt for it. You saw it when I was showing you the latch, did you?"

"Oh, I didn't see it." She shook her head. "I found it when I was sitting up there on the roof."

"Guessed at it?"

"I never guess." Indignantly. "When I'd cleared my mind of everything else—had concentrated on just the facts that bore on what I wanted to know—how that man with the suitcase got out of the room and left it locked behind him—I deduced the hole in the sash by elimination."

"By elimination?" I echoed. "Show me."

"Simple as two and two," she assented. "Out of the door? No; Mrs. Griggsby; so out of the window. Down? No; you told why; he would be seen; so, up. Ladder? No; too big for one man to handle or to hide; so a rope."

"But the hole in the sash?"

"You showed me the only way to close that lock from the outside. There was no hole in the glass, so there must be in the sash. It was not visible—you had been all over it, and a man of your profession isn't a totally untrained observer—so the hole was plugged. I hadn't seen the plug, so it was concealed by paint—"

I was trying to work a toothpick through the plughole. She offered me a wire hairpin, straightened out, and with it I pushed the hasp into place from outside, saw the lever snap in to hold it fast. I had worked the catch as Clayte had worked it—from outside.

"How did you know it was this window?" I asked, forced to agree that she had guessed right as to the sash lock. "There are two more here, either of which—"

"No, please, Mr. Boyne. Look at the angle of the roof that cuts from view any one climbing from this window—not from the others."

We were all leaning in the window now, sticking our heads out, looking down, looking up.

"I can't yet see how you get the rope and hook," I said. "Still seems to me that an outside man posted on the roof to help in the getaway is more likely."

"Maybe. I can't deal with things that are merely likely. It has to be a fact—or nothing—for my use. I know that there wasn't any second man because of the nicks Clayte's grappling hook has left in the cornice up there."

"Nicks!" I said, and stood like a bound boy at a husking, without a word to say for myself. Of course, in this impasse of the locked windows, my men and I had had some excuse for our superficial examination of the roof. Yet that she should have seen what we had passed over—seen it out of the corner of her eye, and be laughing at me—was rather a dose to swallow. She'd got her hair and her hat and veil to her liking, and she prompted us,

"So now you want to get right down stairs—don't you—and go up through that other building to its roof?"

I stared. She had my plan almost before I had made it.

At the St. Dunstan desk where I returned the keys, little Miss Wallace had a question of her own to put to the clerk.

"How long ago was this building reroofed?" she asked with one of her dark, softly glowing smiles.

"Reroofed?" repeated the puzzled clerk, much more civil to her than he had been to me. "I don't know that it ever was. Certainly not in my time, and I've been here all of four years."

"Not in four years? You're sure?"

"Sure of that, yes, miss. But I can find exactly." The fellow behind the desk was rising with an eagerness to be of service to her, when she cut him short with,

"Thank you. Four years would be exact enough for my purpose." And she followed a puzzled detective and, if I may guess, an equally wondering Worth Gilbert out into the street.

CHAPTER VII THE GOLD NUGGET

The neighbor to the south of the St. Dunstan was the Gold Nugget Hotel, a five story brick building and not at all pretentious as a hostelry. I knew the place mildly, and my police training, even better than such acquaintance as I had with this particular dump, told me what it was. Through the windows we could see guests, Sunday papers littered about them, half smoked cigars in their faces, and hats which had a general tendency to tilt over the right eye. And here suddenly I realized the difference between Miss Barbara Wallace, a scientist's daughter, and some feminine sleuth we might have had with us.

"Take her back to the St. Dunstan, Worth," I suggested. Then, as I saw they were both going to resist, "She can't go in here. I'll wait for you if you like."

"Don't know why we shouldn't let Bobs in on the fun, same as you and me, Jerry." That was the way Worth put it. I took a side glance at his attitude in this affair—that he'd bought and was enjoying an eight hundred thousand dollar frolic, offering to share it with a friend; and saying no more, I wheeled and swung open the door for them. The man at the desk looked at me, calling a quick,

"Hello, Jerry—what's up?"

"Hello, Kite. How'd you come here?"

The Kite as a hotelman was a new one on me. Last I knew of him, he was in the business of making book at the Emeryville track; and I supposed—if I ever thought of him—that he'd followed the ponies south across the border. As I stepped close to the counter, he spoke low, his look one of puzzled and somewhat anxious inquiry.

"Running straight, Jerry. You may ask the Chief. What can I do for you?"

Rather glad of the luck that gave me an old acquaintance to deal with, I told him, described Clayte, Worth and Miss Wallace standing by listening; then asked if Kite had seen him pass through the hotel going out the previous day at some time around one o'clock, carrying a brown, sole leather suitcase.

The readers of the Sunday papers who had been lured from their known standards of good manners into the sending of sundry interested glances in the direction of our sparkling girl, took the cue from the Kite's scowl to bury themselves for good in the voluminous sheets they held, each attending strictly to his own business, as is the etiquette of places like the Gold Nugget.

"About one o'clock, you say?" Kite muttered, frowning, twisted his head around and called down a back passage, "Louie—Oh, Louie!" and when an overalled porter, rather messy, shuffled to the desk, put the low toned query, "D'you see any stranger guy gripping a sole leather shirt-box snoop by out yestiddy, after one, thereabouts?" And I added the information,

"Medium height and weight, blue eyes, light brown hair, smooth face."

Louie looked at me dubiously.

"How big a guy?" he asked.

"Five feet seven or eight; weighs about hundred and forty."

"Blue eyes you say?"

"Light blue—gray blue."

"How was he tucked up?"

"Blue serge suit, black shoes, black derby. Neat, quiet dresser."

Louie's eyes wandered over the guests in the office questioningly. I began to feel impatient. If there was any place in the city where my description of Clayte would differentiate him, make him noticeable by comparison, it was here. Neat, quiet dressers were not dotting this lobby.

"Might be Tim Foley?" he appealed to the Kite, who nodded gravely and chewed his short mustache. "Would he have a big scar on his left cheek?"

"He would not," I said shortly. "He wasn't a guest here, and you don't know him. Get this straight now: a stranger, going through here,