The Million-Dollar Suitcase Part 32

At last we came in sight of the country club upon its rise of ground overlooking the golf links. The low, brown clubhouse, built bungalow fashion, with a long front gallery and gravel sweep, was swarming with people--the decorators. Motors came and went. The grounds were being strung with paper lanterns. We skirted these, and the links itself where there were two or three players, obstinate, defiant old men who would have their game in spite of forty blossom festivals--climbed a fence, and crossed the gra.s.s up to the crest of a little round hill, halting there for the view. It wasn't high, but standing free as it did, it commanded pretty nearly the entire Santa Ysobel district. Ma.s.sed acres of pink and white, the great orchards ran one into the other without break for miles. The lanes between the trunks, diamonded like a harlequin's robe in mathematical primness, were newly turned furrows of rich, black soil, against which the gray or, sometimes, whitewashed trunks of apricot, peach and plum trees gave contrast. Then the cap of glorious blossoms, meeting overhead in the older orchards, with a warm blue sky above and puffs of clouds that matched the pure white of the plum trees' bloom.

The spot suited me well; we had left the town behind us; here neither d.y.k.eman's spotter nor any one he hired to help him could get within listening distance, I dropped down on a bank; Worth and Barbara disposed themselves, he sprawling his length, she sitting cross-legged, just below him.

It wasn't easy to make a beginning. I knew it wouldn't do me any particular good with Worth to dwell on his danger. But I finally managed to lay fairly before them my case against Eddie Hughes, and I must say that, as I told it, it sounded pretty strong.

I didn't want to put too much stress on having found my evidence in the diaries; I knew Worth was as obstinate as a mule, and having said that he would not stand for any one being prosecuted on their evidence, he'd stick to it till the skies fell. I called on my memory of those pages, now unfortunately ashes and not get-atable, and explained that Worth's father hired Hughes directly after a jail-break at San Jose had roused the whole country. Three of the four escapes were rounded up in the course of a few days, but the fourth--known to us as Eddie Hughes--was safe in Thomas Gilbert's garage, working there as chauffeur, having been employed without recommendation on the strength of what he could do.

"And the low wages he was willing to take," Worth put in drily. "Old stuff, Jerry. I wasn't sure till you spilled it just now that my father was wise to it. But I knew. What you getting at?"

"Just this. When I talked to Hughes that first night I came down here with you, while we all supposed the death a suicide, he couldn't keep his resentment against your father, his hatred of him, from boiling over every time he was mentioned."

"Get on," said Worth wearily. "Father hired a jail-bird that came cheap.

Probably put it to himself that he was giving the man a chance to go straight."

I glanced up. This was just about what I remembered Thomas Gilbert to have said in the entry that told of the hiring of Eddie. Worth nodded grimly at my startled face.

"Eddie's gone straight since then," he filled in. "That is, he's kept out of jail, which is going straight for Eddie. He'd certainly hate the man who held him as he's been held for five years. Not motive enough for murder though."

"There's more. The 1920 diary you gave me last night tells when and why the extra bolts were put on the study doors. Your father had been missing liquor and cigars and believed Hughes was taking them."

"Pilfering!" with an expression of distaste. "That doesn't--"

"Hold on!" I stopped him. "On February twelfth your father left money, marked coin and paper money, as if by accident, on the top of the liquor cabinet; not exposed, but dropped in under the edge of the big ash tray so it might look as though it were forgotten--in a sense, lost there."

"How much?" came the quick question.

"Fifty one dollars." He looked around at me.

"Just one dollar above the limit of petty larceny; a hundred cents added to put it in the felony cla.s.s that meant state's prison. So he could have sent Eddie to the pen,--eh? I guess you've got a motive there, Boyne."

"Well--er--" I squirmed over my statement, blurting out finally. "Hughes didn't take the money."

"Knew it was a trap," Worth's laugh was bitter. "And hated the man who cold-bloodedly set it to catch him. If he didn't take it, don't you think he counted it?"

"Worth," I said sharply. "Your father put those bolts on--and continued to find that he was being robbed. He was mad about it. Any man would be.

Say what you will, no one likes to find that persons in his employ are stealing from him. The aggravating thing was that he couldn't bring it home to Hughes, though he was sure of the fact."

"So he went back to what he had known of Eddie when he hired him? After profiting by it for five years, he was going to rake that up?"

"He was,"--a bit nettled--"and well within his rights to do so. Three weeks before he was shot, he wrote that he'd started the inquiry. There was no further mention of the matter in the book as it stands, but don't you see that the result of the inquiry must have been on that torn-out last page? Eddie's Sat.u.r.day night alibi won't hold water. His cannery girl, of course, will swear he was with her; but there's no corroborating testimony. No one saw them together from nine till twelve."

Dead silence dropped on us, with the white clouds standing like witnesses in the blue above, the wind bringing now and again on its scented wings little faint echoes of the noise down at the clubhouse.

"What more do you want?" Both young faces were set against me, cold and hostile. "Here was motive, opportunity, a suspect capable of the deed.

My theory is that Mr. Gilbert came in on Hughes, caught him in the act of stealing from the cabinet. Hughes jumped for the pistol over the fireplace, got it, fired the fatal shot, and placed the dead man's fingers about the b.u.t.t of the gun. Then he picked up the diary lying on the table, tore out the leaf about himself, and poked the rest of the book down the drain pipe."

"And the shot?" Worth resisted me. "Why didn't the shot bring Chung on the run?"

"Because he couldn't hear it. n.o.body'd hear it ten paces away. That's what I was trying out this morning. You told me I'd fired once. Well, I fired twice; once with the door shut, and neither you nor Chung heard it; afterward, with the door open--the report you registered."

"The blotter--and it had been used on that last page--showed no words to strengthen this theory of yours," said Barbara as confidently as though the little blue square had been clear print, instead of broken blurring.

Perhaps it was clear to her. I was glad I'd given it a thorough reexamination the night before.

"I think it does," I struggled against the tide, manfully, buoying myself up with the tracing of the blotter. "Here's the word 'demanded,'

reasonably connected with the affair. The letters 'ller' may be the last end of 'caller,' or possibly 'fuller'; I noticed Gilbert spoke in a former entry of the bottle in the cabinet and Hughes snitching from it, and used the word 'fuller.' Here's the word 'Avenue,' complete, and Lizzie Watkins, Hughes' girl, lives on Myrtle Avenue."

The silence after that was fairly derisive. Worth broke it with an impatient,

"And the fact of the bolted doors throws all that stuff out."

"Well," I grunted, "Barbara deduced the slipping of some bolts to please you once--why can't she again?"

"Mr. Boyne," the girl spoke quickly, "it wouldn't help you a bit to be a.s.sured that Eddie Hughes could enter the study and leave it bolted behind him when he went out--help you to the truth, I mean. These facts you've gathered are all wabbly; they'll never in the world fit in trim and true. They're hardly facts at all. They're partial facts."

"Wouldn't help me?" I e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "It would cinch a case against him.

We've got to have some one in jail, and that shortly. We're forced to."

"Forced?" Worth had sat up a little and reached far forward for a stone that lay among the weeds down there. He spoke to me sidewise with a challenging flicker of the eye. Barbara kept her lips tight shut.

"I need a prisoner," trying to correct my error; then burst out, "My Lord, children! An arrest isn't going to hurt a man like Hughes,--even if he proves to be innocent. It's an old story to him. Barbara, you said yourself that the man who stole the 1920 diary was the murderer."

"But I didn't say Eddie Hughes stole it." Her tone was significant, and it checked me. I couldn't remember what the deuce she had said that night. There recurred to me her mimicry of a woman's voice--Laura Bowman's as I believed--to determine through Chung who Thomas Gilbert's feminine visitor had been. Should that clue have been followed up before I moved on Eddie Hughes? Even as I got to this point, I heard Worth, punctuating his remarks with the whang of his rock on the bit of twig he was pounding to pieces,

"Boyne, I won't stand for any arrest being made except in all sincerity--the person you honestly believe to be the criminal."

"Does that mean you forbid me, in so many words, to proceed against Hughes on what I've got?"

"It does," Worth said. "You're not convinced yourself. Leave it alone."

"'Nough said!" I jumped to my feet. If he wouldn't let me lay hands on Hughes--there was nothing to do but go after the next one. "You two run along. Get your ferns. There's a man at the club here I have to see."

Barbara was afoot instantly; Worth lay looking at her for a moment, then heaved himself up, shook his shoulders, and stood beside her.

"Race you to the foot of the hill," she flashed up at him.

"You're on," he chuckled. "I'll give you a running start--to the tree down there--and beat you."

They were off. She ran like a deer. Worth got away as though he was in earnest. He caught her up just at the finish; I couldn't see which won; but they walked a few rods hand in hand.

Something swelled in my throat as I watched them away: life's springtime--and the year's; boy and girl running, like kids that had never known a fear or a mortal burden, over an earth greener than any other, because its time of verdure is brief, dreaming already of the golden-tan of California midsummer, under boughs where tree blooms made all the air sweet.

For sake of the boy and the girl who didn't know enough to take care of their own happiness, I wheeled and galloped in the direction of the country club.

There is an inst.i.tution known--and respected--in police circles as the Holy Scare. I was determined to make use of it. I'd throw a holy scare into a man I knew, and see what came out.