by Jerry eBooks
“It took you long enough.”
“Because I had to plug in the current and warm the water.” Her nod indicated an electrical outfit on the tray.
Boone scowled. “Then you were either in his bedroom or in this room here, all the time?”
“Of course.”
“You tell me how his wheel-chair got past you, and got downstairs, sister,” he said.
More parrot stuff.
“Wheel-chair? Downstairs?” shouted Boone. “And quit stirring that blasted drink!”
“Quit yelling at me,” Miss Radnew retorted. “We don’t wheel Mr. Depew up and downstairs. There is an elevator for the purpose, from his bedroom to the lower hall.”
“Show me.”
She led the way. “Why, he isn’t here!” she exclaimed upon entering the bedroom. “It’s over there. We converted closet space to make room for the shaft, and—”
Boone wrenched open the door she indicated. He stared into the shaft.
“That’s funny,” commented Miss Radnew. “The elevator is gone, too.”
As if automatically, her fingers continued to swish the spoon around inside the tumbler.
“Give me that!” cried Bill Boone, his suspicions suddenly aroused.
She drew back as his hand reached for the glass. Some of the warm, milky liquid slopped over the rim as they struggled over the tumbler. A cylindrical metal object was exposed to view.
“What the—?” gulped Boone.
The nurse paled as he hoisted the dripping device from its concealment. The “sleeping draught,” now that she had stopped stirring it, had begun to clear and a chalky deposit was forming at the bottom of the glass.
“You startled me so I forgot and left the plug in,” Miss Radnew explained weakly.
“Plug, your grandmother!” Bill Boone bit off. “That’s a mike!”
A curiously thick fragrance climbed from his wetted fingers.
“Face powder!” he said. “You dumped your compact into that glass. You had to keep stirring it or else—”
He was interrupted by the appearance of a frantically gesticulating Charley Howland in the bedroom doorway.
“Mr. Boone!” wailed the secretary. “Mr. Boone, the bonds are gone!”
“The dickens they are!”
“I swear it’s the truth! We turned around to look at Mr. Depew’s body, and somebody stole the bonds right out of the box!”
Boone wrinkled his forehead over this obvious impossibility.
“See you later!” he tossed threatfully at the red-haired nurse, and caught the secretary’s skeleton arm. “Come on, man!”
In the library, the glum-faced Crane men had been joined by Helen, attired now in an eye-entrancing sports frock.
“You see?” Howland rushed to the box and lifted its lid. “Empty!”
“Just the Amalgamated Gas ones missing?” asked Boone.
Fred Crane glared. “Isn’t that bad enough? There were fifty of them, each worth a thousand dollars!”
Bill Boone tailored his lips around a whistle.
“Fifty grand!”
His first impressions about the case were justified. It certainly had do-re-me at its bottom.
“Couldn’t you tell it was empty by the feel of it?” he demanded of Charley Howland.
The secretary stiffened. “Certainly not! Those vault boxes are fire-proofed and of such heavy construction you’d never miss a mere fifty bonds.”
“In that case, we’d better look in the vault,” Bill Boone suggested reasonably, “and see whether anything else is missing.”
Howland tottered ahead, leading the way to the study. This room adjoined the library, and had its own hallway door opening out in front of the stairs. Boone had time to note this detail while Howland, taking care to shield he vault dial with his spare body, and muttering cabalistically under his breath, proceeded to spin the combination and then unlock the inner door by means of a key attached to his watch-chain.
Fred and Steve Crane watched intently, as if their entire future lives depended upon what was, or was not, hidden behind the double, strong box doors.
Helen Crane was staring at her father and brother, as if startled and half-frightened by the expressions of hungry greed on their faces.
Only Bill Boone let his glance stray around the study, and only Boone saw the oblong of perforation-edged, yellow paper on the floor beside the desk. He stooped and picked it up.
“Merciful Heaven!” reverberated Howland’s sepulchral voice within the vault. “The Consolidated Steel Four-and-a-halves are missing, too!”
As the two Crane men surged convulsively toward the narrow, steel-framed door, Bill Boone stole a glance at the oblong of yellow paper in his hand.
It was a bank check, drawn on the Soledad National Bank, in the sum of Five Hundred Dollars and No Cents and duly signed by Forrest Depew—and payable to the order of himself, William Boone!
He pushed it into his pocket, along with the microphone seized from Miss Radnew.
Steve Crane’s voice rang out. “Charley Howland,” the plump youth accused, “you’re a dirty crook! Nobody but you could have got in the vault to steal those bonds!”
His fist pistoned wickedly, catching the secretary flush in the face. Howland slid down against the vault jamb, bleeding thinly from both nostrils.
“Steve!” choked Helen Crane.
Her brother scowled. “The guy’s guilty as thunder! Why, he and Uncle Forrest were the only ones who knew the combination!”
“But to hit him like that,” protested the girl. “A man twice your age, and wearing glasses, too. You might have blinded him.”
“Serve him right if I did,” retorted Steve. Bill Boone, moving lightly on tiptoe, eased himself out of the family quarrel and through the study’s hallway door.
He looked about, seeking to orient himself. At the library end of the hall, the blanket-swathed figure of the murdered Forrest Depew sat in lonely neglect. Staring at the old man, Bill Boone realized he didn’t give a hoot who had stolen the bonds. His sole, undivided interest lay in figuring out how Depew had met his death, and in bringing retribution upon the slayer.
There were only two doors in front of Boone, across the hall. He assumed the nearest one ought to belong to the elevator shaft, so he opened it.
He was right—the elevator was here. A small affair, it was of the type designed for home use by invalids, heart cases, and elderly people unable to climb stairs. There would have been barely room enough in it to accommodate Forrest Depew and his wheel-chair, plus, of course, the nurse who accompanied him.
Boone stared fixedly at the several red stains on its rubber-matted floor. While he did, he heard the rumble of a voice from below.
“That’s one of the finest things I ever heard in my life,” the voice declared.
Bill Boone started. He realized that the voice was his own.
A grunt followed. Then, the uncertain quaver of aged tones.
“My relatives don’t agree. They think I’m insane to let all that wealth get out of the family clutches.”
Bill Boone straightened, pulled the elevator door shut, and pressed the lowermost of its control buttons.
A matter of moments later, he stepped out into the subterranean gloom of the big house’s basement. He began picking his way through shadowy packing boxes and pillar toward the sound of his own voice.
CHAPTER III
WRITTEN IN WAX
The voices leaked around the edges of an imperfectly fitted basement door. Boone twisted its knob and entered. In front of him was a work-bench, equipped with a table model electric phonograph—the source of the sounds.
What mattered, however, was not in front of Boone. The attack came from above, dive-bomber style. A plummeting weight leaped from the overhead, asbestos-wrapped steam-pipes to crash onto Boone’s head and shoulders.
Taken by surprise, he went to his knees. Sinewy fingers sought his throat. A knee drew back and cracked violently into his spine. It was one
of those Pearl Harbor onslaughts, depending on initial surprise for its effect. Like the Pearl Harbor affair, it failed because the victim refused to be knocked out by the one fell blow.
Stubbornly, Bill Boone rose to his feet, still with the unknown assailant clinging viciously to his back. The fingers wrapped onto his windpipe had a strangling efficiency, and the gouging knee endeavored to snap his spine above the kidneys. It was no easy task for even a man of Boone’s muscular strength to break such a viselike, Old-Man-of-the-Sea grip.
He didn’t try.
Boone plunged forward until he reached the work-bench, gripped it with both hands, and hurled himself backward. He crashed into the opposite wall with all of the force of his surging, two-hundred-pound self.
To the accompaniment of a breath-bursting groan, the fingers unlaced from Boone’s throat. The assailant’s weight slipped from his shoulders onto the floor.
Bill Boone whirled and glowered. “You!”
White Pants huddled there, sobbing to regain his lost wind. The tennis player had the woeful, used-up expression of an amateur who had tried to play five sets with both Don Budge and Kovacs on the other side of the net.
“What’s the idea”—Boone waved his hand around—“of this layout?”
“It’s—not mine!” panted the youth. “Steve’s!”
“Yeah? What’s his idea?”
But White Pants was too winded to reply. Bill Boone let his eye wander about the set-up. It was simple enough. Just an ordinary electric phonograph, equipped with a home recording device. Its feed-in wire ran to a basement window, and thence, of course, up the outside wall to Forrest Depew’s window.
The only unusual item in the arrangement was the mike now in Boone’s pocket. He was familiar enough with that, because it was the type of microphone use by professional investigators, when a “bug” concealed in a radio or behind a picture frame must pick up conversation from any part of a room.
“What’s the idea?” he repeated.
The tennis player had refilled his lungs. “It’s Steve’s idea,” he reiterated. “He’s been making records to prove that Mr. Depew is crazy. The Radnew woman is in it too. She heckles the old man into saying something that sounds insane, and then she presses a button so there’s a record made down here.”
Bill Boone looked startled, although he had known ever since finding the mike that Miss Radnew must have been switching it on when she pretended to be busy with the invalid’s tray. She had done so, of course, to get a recording of what Depew told Bill Boone while she was out of the room.
“How long have you known this?” Boone asked, after an imperceptible hesitation.
“Monday. I was cleaning out the basement that afternoon.”
“And you didn’t tell Depew?”
“I couldn’t. I’m only the gardener’s son. There’s no way I could get a message to him.”
Boone considered. “Aren’t you pretty good friends with Helen?” he inquired.
A shrug. “She plays tennis with me. Because she’s too good for Steve, and he gets mad and hits the balls at her.”
Boone grunted. “What’s your name?”
“Jeremiah Pemberton.”
“She called you Pem,” Boone recalled. “That sounded pretty friendly to me.”
“Jeremiah Pemberton is too big a mouthful for the family,” White Pants explained grimly. “They all call me Pem for short.”
“Wouldn’t they call you worse than that, if they knew what you’ve been up to down here?” Boone demanded.
“Steve’d kill me if he caught me messing around with this stuff,” Jeremiah Pemberton said.
Bill Boone pinched an ear lobe between his thumb and forefinger. “Then why don’t you beat it before you are caught?” he asked.
The white-trousered youth gulped. “Yeah. Thanks. I will.”
His legs scissored into retreat until their whiteness was lost in the gloomy recesses of the vast basement.
Bill Boone turned to the phonograph and removed its disc. Stepping out of the workshop then, he peered about for a satisfactory place of concealment. The steel drum on which the elevator cable was wound caught his eye.
“The very thing,” he thought.
He crouched down and slid his hand experimentally into the pitch-black hole under the drum supports. His fingers retracted slightly, and then closed on stiff, richly embossed papers. He pulled out a handful.
“Hades’ hot hinges!” Bill Boone mumbled hoarsely.
His fingers surrounded a sheaf of Amalgamated Gas bonds, each having a face value of One Thousand Dollars. They were both negotiable and unregistered, and he knew that in half a dozen different ways a thief could have cashed them without especial risk of discovery.
“Why, I could tuck them inside my shirt and just scram out of here,” mused Bill Boone. With a start, he realized: “That’s what the murderer thought!”
He unbuttoned his shirt and stowed the bonds in a snug layer around his midriff. Then he went into the elevator and pulled its door shut.
When he emerged from the elevator into the main hallway, he was just in time to be greeted by a nickel-badged county sheriff who was arriving.
“Who called you?” inquired Boone. “Helen Crane,” replied the officer. “She wants to swear out a warrant for Charley Howland, she said.”
Somebody had wheeled Forrest Depew’s body out of sight. Boone and the sheriff entered the library door, and found the blond Helen Crane surrounded by her scowling father and brother, a contemptuous Miss Radnew, and an oddly elated Charley Howland.
In Helen Crane’s hand was a list of the missing bonds, totaling $102,000 worth.
“I don’t understand it!” she was saying bitterly. “Steve says Howland stole those bonds. You all admit he’s the only one of us who knew the vault’s combination.”
“What is it you don’t understand?” asked the sheriff.
“They don’t want to have him arrested,” the girl explained, with an indignant look at the other four. “They are determined to protect him, and they have been bawling me out for calling you, Mr. Andrews!”
“Shut up, dumb ox!” Steve Crane yelled at his sister. “If you have to put your big foot in your mouth, at least try and keep it there from now on!”
Fred Crane suddenly lost patience with his son.
“You could use some of your own advice, Steve,” he stated coldly.
He faced Sheriff Andrews. “We don’t want to be vindictive, Sheriff. We won’t prosecute Charley Howland—provided, of course, he makes restitution.”
Charley Howland didn’t look worried. He wore his usual undertaker’s expression, but it was the expression of a man attending somebody else’s funeral.
“You mean give back the bonds?” Bill Boone said.
The elder Crane nodded. “What about the murder?” asked Boone. “Can he give back life to Forrest Depew, too?”
Sheriff Andrews began spluttering like a melting magnesium bomb.
“Murder!” he exploded. “Depew dead? Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“Because,” said Helen Crane, “Steve jerked the phone out of my hand before I could tell you why I wanted Mr. Howland arrested.”
Howland’s face had lost much of its complacent look.
“You’re crazy!” he said jerkily. “I merely stepped into the study long enough to open the vault. There wasn’t time—not for me to go upstairs and bring a body down here!”
Boone interrupted. “Maybe the body brought itself down.”
“How do you mean that?” Andrews demanded. “Depew couldn’t walk, even when he was alive.”
“He could wheel himself into the elevator and ride down. The elevator connects with his bedroom, and he’d sent his nurse into the next room to mix a sleeping draught. That might have been a trick so he could come down to the study. Eh, Miss Radnew?”
The red-haired nurse, confronted by Boone’s stabbing forefinger, nodded in agreement.
“But why would he want to go to th
e study?” interrogated Sheriff Andrews.
“There were two reasons,” Bill Boone replied. “He wanted to be in on that Amalgamated Gas conference with us, for one thing. For another, he had promised to write me a check. And I found this on the floor in the study.”
He waved the check.
The effect was sensational. Sheriff Andrews was profoundly impressed.
“Holy cow! You figure Depew was already in the study, and that Howland killed him there?”
“If Howland stole that hundred and two thousand dollars,” Bill Boone said carefully, “it’s a cinch he had plenty of motive. Then, the knife was lying right in the old gentleman’s lap—convenient for a spur-of-the-moment murderer.”
The sheriff sprang forward and caught the secretary’s thin shoulder.
“By the Lord Harry! Ain’t that blood on your shirt?”
“I—I had a nosebleed.” Howland recoiled. “Anyway, Boone hasn’t explained how the body got to the library door.”
Boone said that was so simple he hadn’t thought it necessary to explain.
“The killer gave the chair a push and let it roll slowly down the hall,” he said.
Charley Howland whirled out of Andrews’ grasp with such force that the sheriff was flung back into a chair. Howland caught Fred Crane’s sleeve imploringly.
“Mr. Crane!” he wailed. “You’re not going to let them frame me like this, are you?”
“Fred can’t help you now,” Bill Boone pointed out grimly. “You can’t buy your way out of a murder rap by giving back a few bonds.”
The secretary quivered. “I didn’t steal them! And I didn’t kill him! It—it was her!” He stuck out a skeleton arm at the red-haired nurse. “She’s secretly married to Steve Crane, that’s why!” he raved hotly. “Steve would get a quarter of a million dollars under the old will. And that isn’t all! They paid me to steal his new will out of the vault so they could destroy it!”
Helen Crane gasped. Steve Crane lunged toward the secretary.
“Why, you doublecrossing rat!”