The Million-Dollar Suitcase Part 19

"When?" I gave him a sharp look. He seemed not to notice it.

"Just now. I came straight from there."

He came straight from there? Did he supply an alibi so neatly because of that shadowy head on the door panel? For a long minute we each took measure of the other, but Eddie's nerves were less reliable than mine; he spoke first.

"Well?" he grunted, scarcely above his breath. And when I continued to stare silently at him, he writhed a shoulder with, "What's doing? What d'yuh want of me?"

Still silently, I pulled out with my thumb through the armhole of my vest the police badge pinned to the suspender. His ill-colored face went a shade nearer the yellow white of tallow.

"What for?" he asked huskily. "You haven't got nothin' on me. It was suicide--cor'ner's jury says so. Lord! It has to be, him layin' there, all hunched up on the floor, his gun so tight in his mitt that they had to pry the fingers off it!"

"So you found the body?"

He nodded and gulped.

"I told all I knowed at the inquest," he said doggedly.

"Tell it again," I commanded.

Standing there, working his hands together as though he held some small, accustomed tool that he was turning, shifting from foot to foot, with long breaks in his speech, the chauffeur finally put me into possession of what he knew--or what he wished me to know. He had been out all night. That was usual with him Sat.u.r.days. Where? Over around the canneries. Had friends that lived there. He got into this place about dawn, and went straight to bed.

"Hold on, Hughes," I stopped him there. "You never went to bed--that night, or any other night--until you'd had a jolt from the bottle inside."

He gave me a surly, half frightened glance, then said quickly,

"Not a chance. Bolts on the doors, locks everywhere; all tight as a jail. Take it from me, he wasn't the kind you want to have a run-in with--any time. Always just as cool as ice himself; try to make you believe he could tell what you were up to, clear across town. Hold it over you as if he was G.o.d almighty that stuck folks together and set 'em walkin' around and thinkin' things."

He broke off and looked over his shoulder in the direction of the study.

The walls were thick--concrete; the door heavy. No sound of Worth's moving in there could be heard in this room. Apparently it was the old terror of his employer, or the new terror of the employer's death, that spoke when he said,

"I got up this morning late with a throat like the back of a chimney.

Lord! I never wanted a drink so bad in my life--had to have one. The c.h.i.n.k leaves my breakfast for me Sundays; but I knew I couldn't eat till I'd had one. So I--so I--"

It was as though some recollection fairly choked off his voice. I finished for him.

"So you went in there--" I pointed at the study door, "and found the body."

"Naw! How the h.e.l.l could I? I told you--locked. I crawled up on the roof, though; huntin' a way in, and I looked through the skylight. There he was. On the floor. His eyes weren't open much, but they was watchin'

me--sort of sneerin'. I come down off that roof like a bat outa h.e.l.l, and scuttled over to Vandeman's where his c.h.i.n.k was on the porch, I bellerin' at him. I telephoned from there. For the bulls; and the cor'ner; and everybody. Gawd! I was all in."

I caught one point in the tale.

"So the way into the study is through the skylight, Hughes?" and he shook his head vaguely, fumbling his lips with a trembling hand as he replied,

"Honest to G.o.d, Cap'n, I don't know. I never tried. I gave just one look through it, and--" He broke off with a shudder.

"Get a ladder," I commanded. "I want to see that skylight."

While he was gone on his errand to the shed, I investigated the outer walls of the study with the torch, hunting some break in their solidity.

They were concrete; a hair-crack would have been visible in the electric glow; there was no break. Then, as he placed the ladder against the coping, I climbed to the roof and stepped across its firmness to the skylight. I looked down.

Worth, kneeling on the hearth, was laying a fire in the corner grate. As he did not glance up, I knew he had not heard me. Evidently the study had been built to resist the disturbance of sound from without. That meant that the report of the revolver inside had not been heard by any one outside the walls.

Directly below me was the library table and upon its top a blue desk blotter; a silver filagreed inkstand stood open; penholders, pencils, paper knife were on a tray beside it, one pen lying separate from the others with a ruler, upon the blotting pad; books and a magazine neatly in a pile. The walls, as I circled them with my eyes, were book-lined everywhere except for the grate and the two doors.

Then I inspected the skylight, frame and gla.s.s, feeling it over with my hands. There was no entrance here. Even should a pane of gla.s.s be removable--all seemingly solid and tight--the frame between and the sash were of steel, and the panes were too small for the pa.s.sage of a man. I crept back to the ladder as Worth was striking a match to light the pitch-pine kindling.

"What about this Vandeman c.h.i.n.k?" I asked of Hughes as I rejoined him at the foot of the ladder. "Does he hang around here much?"

"Him and Chung visit back and forth a bit. I hear 'em talkin' hy-lee hy-lo sometimes when I go by the kitchen."

"Take me over there," I said.

The fog was beginning to blow away in threads; moonlight somewhere back of it made a queer, gray, glimmering world around us. We circled the garden by the path, pa.s.sing a sort of gardener's tool shed where Hughes left the ladder, and from which I judged Worth had brought the bar he pried the door planks off with, to find a gap in a hedge between this place and the next.

There was a light in the rear of the house over there, and a well-trodden path leading from the hedge gap made what I took to be a servants' highway.

Vandeman's house proved to be, as nearly as one could see it in the darkness, a sprawling bungalow, with courts, pergolas and terraces bursting out on all sides of it. I could fairly see it of a fine afternoon, with its showy master sitting on one of the showy porches, serving afternoon tea in his best manner to the best people of Santa Ysobel. Just the husband for that doll-faced girl, if she only thought so. What could she have done with a young outlaw like Worth?

When I looked at the Chinaman in charge there, I gave up my idea of questioning him. Civilly enough, with a precise and educated usage of the English language, he confirmed what Eddie Hughes had already told me about the telephoning from that place this morning; and I went no further. I know the Chinese--if anybody not Mongolian can say they know the race--and I have also a suitable respect for the value of time. A week of steady questioning of Vandeman's yellow man would have brought me nowhere. He was that kind of a c.h.i.n.k; grave, respectful, placid and impervious.

On the way back I asked Eddie about the Thornhill servants at the house on the other side of Gilbert's, and found they kept but one, "a sort of old lady," Eddie called her, and I guessed easily at the decayed gentlewoman kind of person. It seemed that Mrs. Thornhill was a widow, and there wasn't much money now to keep up the handsome place.

I left Eddie slipping eel-like through the big doors, and went into the study to find Worth sitting before the blazing hearth. He looked up as I entered to remark quietly,

"Bobs said she'd be over later, and I told her to come on down here."

CHAPTER XI

THE MISSING DIARY

My experience as a detective has convinced me that the evident is usually true; that in a great majority of cases crime leaves a straight trail, and ambiguities are more often due to the inability of the trailer than to the cunning of the trailed. Such reputation as I have established is due to acceptance of and earnest adherence to the obvious.

In this affair of Thomas Gilbert's death, everything so far pointed one way. The body had been found in a bolted room, revolver in hand; on the wall over the mantel hung the empty holster; Worth a.s.sured me the gun was kept always loaded; and there might be motive enough for suicide in the quarrel last night between father and son.

Because of that flitting shadow I had seen, I knew this place was not impervious. Some one person, at least, could enter and leave the room easily, quickly, while its doors were locked. But that might be Hughes--or even Worth--with some reason for doing so not willingly explained, and some means not readily seen. It probably had nothing to do with Thomas Gilbert's sudden death, could not offset in my mind the conviction of Thomas Gilbert's stiffened fingers about the pistol's b.u.t.t. That I made a second thorough investigation of the study interior was not because I questioned the manner of the death.

I began taking down books from the shelves at regular intervals, sounding the thick dead-wall, in search of a secreted entrance. I came on a row of volumes whose red morocco backs carried nothing but dates.

"Account books?" I asked.

Worth turned his head to look, and the bleakest thing that could be called a smile twisted his lips a little, as he said,

"My father's diaries."