The Million-Dollar Suitcase

Sitting here so immovably, she looked to me as though life had slid away from her for the moment, the mechanical action of lungs and heart temporarily suspended, so that mind might work unhindered in that beautiful shell. No, I was wrong. She was breathing; her bosom rose and fell in slow but deep, placid inhalations and exhalations. And the pale face might be from the slower heart-beat, or only because the surface blood had receded to give more of strength to the brain.

The position of head of a Bankers' Security Agency carries with it a certain amount of dignity – a dignity which, since Richardson's death, I have maintained better than I have handled other requirements of the business he left with me. I stood now feeling like a fool. I'd grown gray in the work, and here in my prosperous middle life, a boy's whim and a girl's pretty face had put me in the position of consulting a clairvoyant. Worse, for this was a wild-cat affair, without even the professional standing of establishments to which I knew some of the weak brothers in my line sometimes sneaked for ghostly counsel. If it should leak out, I was done for.

I suppose I sort of groaned, for I felt 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, out; about one o'clock; carried a suitcase."

"Bulls after him?" Louie asked, and I turned away from him wearily.

"Kite," I said, "let me up to your roof."

"Sure, Jerry." Released, the porter went on to gather up a pile of discarded papers.

"Could he – the man I've described – come through here – through this office and neither you nor Louie see him?" I asked. The Kite brought a box of cigars from under the counter with,

"My treat, gentlemen. Naw, Jerry; sure not – not that kind of a guy. Louie'd 'a' spotted him. Most observing cuss I ever seen."

Miss Wallace, taking all this in, seemed amused. As I turned to lead to the elevator I found that again she wanted a question of her own answered.

"Mr. Kite," she began and I grinned; Kite wasn't the Kite's surname or any part of his name; "Who is the guest here with the upstairs room – on the top floor – has had the same room right along – for five or six years – but doesn't – "

"Go easy, ma'am, please!" Kite's little eyes were popping; he dragged out a handkerchief and fumbled it around his forehead. "I've not been here for any five or six years – no, nor half that time. Since I've been here most of our custom is transient. Nobody don't keep no room five or six years in the Gold Nugget."

"Back up," I smiled at his excitement. "To my certain knowledge Steve Skeels has had a room here longer than that. Hasn't he been with you ever since the place was rebuilt after the earthquake?"

"Steve?" the Kite repeated. "I forgot him. Yeah – he keeps a little room up under the roof."

"Has he had it for as long as four years?" the young lady asked.

"Search me," the Kite shook his head.

But Louie the overalled, piloting us the first stage of our journey in a racketty old elevator that he seemed to pull up by a cable, so slow it was, grumbled an assent to the same question when it was put to him, and confirmed my belief that Skeels came into the hotel as soon as it was rebuilt, and had kept the same room ever since.

Miss Wallace seemed interested in this; but all the time we were making the last lap, by an iron stairway, to that roof-house we had seen from the top of the St. Dunstan; all the time Louie was unlocking the door there to let us out, instructing us to be sure to relock it and bring him the key, and to yell for him down the elevator shaft because the bell was busted, the quiet smile of Miss Barbara Wallace disturbed me. She followed where I led, but I had the irritating impression that she looked on at my movements, and Worth's as well, with the indulgent eye of a grown-up observing children at play.

On the roof of the Gold Nugget we picked up the possible trail easily; Clayte hadn't needed to go through the building, or have a confederate staked out in a room here, to make a downward getaway. For here the fire escape came all the way up, curving over the coping to anchor into the wall, and it was a good iron stairway, with landings at each floor, and a handrail the entire length, its lower end in the alley between Powell and Mason Streets. Looking at it I didn't doubt that it was used by the guests of the Gold Nugget at least half as much as the easier but more conspicuous front entrance. Therefore a man seen on it would be no more likely to attract attention than he would in the elevator. I explained this to the others, but Worth had attacked a rack of old truck piled in the corner of the roof-house, and paid little attention to me, while Miss Wallace nodded with her provoking smile and said,

"Once – yes; no doubt you are exactly right. I wasn't looking for a way that a man might take once, under pressure of great necessity."

"Why not?" I countered. "If Clayte got away by this means yesterday – that'll do me."

"It might," she nodded, "if you could see it as a fact, without seeing a lot more. Such a man as Clayte was – a really wonderful man, you know – " the dimples were deep in the pink of her cheeks as she flashed a laughing look at me with this clawful – "a really wonderful man like Clayte," she repeated, "wouldn't have trusted to a route he hadn't known and proved for a long time."

"That's theory," I smiled. "I take my hat off to you, Miss Wallace, when it comes to observing and deducing, but I'm afraid your theorizing is weak."

"I never theorize," she reminded me. "All I deal with is facts."

She had perched herself on an overturned box, and was watching Worth sort junk. I leaned against the roof-house, pushed Kite's donated cigar unlighted into a corner of my mouth and stared at her.

"Miss Wallace," I said sharply, "what's this Steve Skeels stuff? What's this reroofing stuff? What's the dope you think you have, and you think I haven't? Tell us, and we'll not waste time. Tell us, and we'll get ahead on this case. Worth, let that rubbish alone. Nothing there for us. Come here and listen."

For all answer he straightened up, looked at us without a word – and went to it again. I turned to the girl.

"Worth doesn't need to listen to me, Mr. Boyne," she said serenely. "He already has full faith in me and my methods."

"Methods be – be blowed!" I exploded. "It's results that count, and you've produced. I'm willing to hand it to you. All we know now, we got from you. Beside you I'm a thick-headed blunderer. Let me in on how you get things and I won't be so hard to convince."

"Indeed, you aren't a blunderer," she said warmly. "You do a lot better than most people at observing." (High praise that, for a detective more than twenty years in the business; but she meant to be complimentary.) "I'm glad to tell you my processes. How much time do you want to give to it?"

"Not a minute longer than will get what you know." And she began with a rush.

"Those dents in the coping at the St. Dunstan, above Clayte's window – I asked the clerk there how long since the building had been reroofed, because there were nicks made by that hook and half filled with tar that had been slushed up against the coping and into the lowest dents. You see what that means?"

"That Clayte – or some accomplice of his – had been using the route more than four years ago. Yes."

"And the other scars were made at varying times, showing me that coming over here from there was quite a regular thing."

"At that rate he would have nicked the coping until it would have looked like a huck towel," I objected.

"A huck towel," she gravely adopted my word. "But he was a man that did everything he did several different ways. That was his habit – a sort of disguise. That's why he was shadowy and hard to describe. Sometimes he came up to the St. Dunstan roof just as we did; and once, a good while ago, there were cleats on that wall there so he could climb down here without the rope. They have been taken away some time, and the places where they were are weathered over so you would hardly notice them."

"Right you are," I said feelingly. "I'd hardly notice them. If I could notice things as you do – fame and fortune for me!" I thought the matter over for a minute. "That lodger on the top floor, Steve Skeels," I debated. "A poor bet. Yet – after all, he might have been a member of the gang, though somehow I don't get the hunch – "

"What sort of looking person was this man Skeels?" she asked.

"Quiet fellow. Dressed like a church deacon. 'Silent Steve' they call him. I'll send for him down stairs and let you give him the once-over if you like."

"Oh, that's not the kind of man I'm looking for." She shook her head. "My man would be more like those down there in the easy chairs – so he wasn't noticed in the elevator or when he passed out through the office."

"Wasn't it cute of him?" I grinned. "But you see we've just heard that he didn't take the elevator and go through the office – Saturday anyhow, which is the only time that really counts for us, the time when he carried that suitcase with a fortune in it."

"But he did," she persisted. "He went that way. He walked out the front door and carried away the suitcase – "

"He didn't!" Worth shouted, and began throwing things behind him like a terrier in a wood-rat's burrow.

Derelict stuff of all sorts; empty boxes, pasteboard cartons, part of an old trunk, he hurtled them into a heap, and dragged out a square something in a gunny sack. As he jerked to clear it from the sacking, I glanced at little Miss Wallace. She wasn't getting any pleasureable kick out of the situation. Her eyes seemed to go wider open with a sort of horror, her face paled as she drooped in on herself, sitting there on the box. Then Worth held up his find in triumph, assuming a famous attitude.

"The world is mine!" he cried.

"Maybe 'tis, maybe 'tisn't," I said as I ran across to look at the thing close. Sure enough, he'd dug up a respectable brown, sole leather suitcase with brass trimmings such as a bank clerk might have carried, suspiciously much too good to have been thrown out here. Could it be that the thieves had indeed met in one of the Gold Nugget's rooms or in the roof-house up here, made their divvy, split the swag, and thus clumsily disposed of the container? At the moment, Worth tore buckles and latches free, yanked the thing open, reversed it in air – and out fell a coiled rope that curved itself like a snake – a three-headed snake; the triple grappling iron at its end standing up as though to hiss.

We all stood staring; I was too stunned to be triumphant. What a pat confirmation of Miss Wallace's deductions! I turned to congratulate her and at the same instant Worth cried,

"What's the matter, Bobs?" for the girl was sitting, staring dejectedly, her chin cupped in her palms, her lips quivering. Nonplussed, I stooped over the suitcase and rope, coiling up the one, putting it in the other – this first bit of tangible, palpable evidence we'd lighted on.

"Let's get out of this," I said quickly. "We've done all we can here – and good and plenty it is, too."

Worth took the suitcase out of my hands and carried it, so that I had to help Miss Wallace down the ladder. She still looked as though she'd lost her last friend. I couldn't make her out. Never a word from her while we were getting down, or while they waited and I shouted for Louie. It was in the elevator, with the porter looking at everything on earth but this suitcase we hadn't brought in and we were taking out, that she said, hardly above her breath,

"Shall you ask at the desk if this ever belonged to any one in the house?"

"Find out here – right now," and I turned to the man in overalls with, "How about it?"

"Not that your answer will make any difference," Worth cut in joyously. "Nobody need get the idea that they can take this suitcase away from me – 'cause they can't. It's mine. I paid eight hundred thousand dollars for this box; and I've got a use for it." He chuckled. Louie regarded him with uncomprehending toleration – queer doings were the order of the day at the Gold Nugget – and allowed negligently.

"You'll get to keep it. It don't belong here." Then, as a coin changed hands, "Thank you."

"But didn't it ever belong here?" our girl persisted forlornly, and when Louie failed her, jingling Worth's tip in his calloused palm, she wanted the women asked, and we had a frowsy chambermaid called who denied any acquaintance with our sole leather discovery, insisting, upon definite inquiry, that she had never seen it in Skeels' room, or any other room of her domain. Little Miss Wallace sighed and dropped the subject.

As we stepped out of the elevator, I behind the others, Kite caught my attention with a low whistle, and in response to a furtive, beckoning, backward jerk of his head, I moved over to the desk. The reading gentlemen in the easy chairs, most consciously unconscious of us, sent blue smoke circles above their papers. Kite leaned far over to get his mustache closer to my ear.

"You ast me about Steve," he whispered.

"Yeah," I agreed, and looked around for Barbara, to tell her here was her chance to meet the gentleman she had so cleverly deduced. But she and Worth were already getting through the door, he still clinging to the suitcase, she trailing along with that expression of defeat. "I'm sort of looking up Steve. And you don't want to tip him off – see?"