The Riddle of the Yellow Zuri

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  Kate Barwick appeared to be intrigued. The grey eyes showed a glint of pronounced interest.

  “That’s the situation very briefly stated,” nodded Wolff. “I’d like to give you the full details — all of ‘em — but I’m pledged not to do so and I don’t feel that I can violate my pledge at this stage of the game. But here’s the dope, and as much of it as you’ll need to understand thoroughly the conditions. Kate, a St. Paul girl by the name of Mary Brann — a girl worth a good bit of money — has been in the habit of visiting a cousin who lives here in Chicago. This cousin lives out on a thoroughfare known as St. Giles Lane, this city. His name is Peter Brann. He is the heir, by virtue of a peculiar will involving it, of the estate which this girl owns, if by any chance she dies. Now every time she comes back to St. Paul after visiting her cousin here, she is taken violently ill, and the last time could hardly be pulled through. All efforts to determine the cause of her mysterious illnesses have defied medical men and toxicologists. The toxicologists up there, however, are more or less in unity on holding the theory that the girl has been somehow inoculated each time with the venom of some deadly and rare serpent. This is the hypothesis at present. The girl absolutely refuses to listen to any suggestion that her cousin would poison her or injure her in any way. We have investigated this Peter Brann, however. He is in financial trouble, very deeply so, at that. Four times following visits to him this girl has gone down with this strange sickness, and each time she has recovered she is in worse condition than before the illness. And that she has received in her blood a kind of venom which works insidiously in her body after the lapse of so many days is, as I say, the hypothesis all of us who are handling the case hold.”

  Casper Wolff waited a moment so that his hearer might absorb more fully his story.

  “Now detectives on the trail have unearthed the significant fact that each time this girl comes to visit her cousin here, he has received about a week before her arrival a mysterious box apparently from India. We have searched the house completely, unknown to him. We are not sure of our case, you see. Nothing is to be found out of the way — not a drop of poison in the house. But we suspect — ”

  “You suspect,” interpolated his hearer, adjusting her stiff serge skirt over her angular limb, “that this Peter Brann is poisoning the girl while she sleeps, by some serpent?”

  “Ab-so-lutely,” asseverated Wolff, pounding his clenched fist dramatically on the arm of his chair. “I have been authorized to employ secret investigators here, and in spite of it we can neither get the goods on this man nor can we warn this girl. Now today is Wednesday. Mary Brann arrives in Chicago next Saturday or Sunday on her late summer visit to her cousin. The usual package from India has arrived at the house on St. Giles Lane. We have complete evidence on that point. We have likewise complete evidence that something very much like snake venom has been found in Mary Brann’s blood. We need just one more bit of evidence — namely that that monster living on St. Giles Lane has a venomous serpent in his possession; and — pronto — we’ve got a case against him for attempted murder. I, strange to say, because the girl’s father was an old theatrical man, have been employed to handle the case.”

  “Yet what do you want me to do, Wolff?” asked Kate Barwick.

  “Just this, Kate,” said Wolff. “The house where this Peter Brann lives is situated out on the prairies practically. The nearest house is a full block away. The nearest street-car line is several blocks away. Brann himself is out of town. Two of our operatives have seen him leave and are following him day and night. The contents of his traveling bag have been checked over unknown to him, and we know that if he received a snake from India he did not take it with him. Now we cannot enter his place with a search warrant, unless we absolutely know he has the goods. But, Kate, he has them. He must have them! Kate, that reptile is in his safe — that reptile from India the venom of which, or one of its species, is ultimately going to kill Mary Brann as sure as you live. Kate, you are the cleverest woman at safes and locks working on any circuit today. I believe that you can open that safe without the use of force — without leaving a trace behind you — and establish definitely whether this snake is in there. The reason I prognosticate this is for the reason that the safe has been reported as being one of the old-fashioned iron type. If we can establish this fact through such aid as you can give, we are in a position to arrest Brann as he steps back into the house next Saturday, drill his safe open before officers and witnesses on the strength of our inside knowledge, and show him up before the world as the man who is conspiring to murder, if not actually murdering, an innocent trustful girl for her money. Kate, a girl’s life depends upon your stepping into this case.”

  The grey eyes rested on Casper Wolff for a long, long time. Their coldness was more apparent now, their friendliness almost absent. They studied every detail of his face. Then came a single question.

  “You want nothing from that safe, Wolff?”

  “Nothing. I want the screened box that reptile is in. More specifically, I want merely to see with my own eyes that screened box and the thing it contains. I do not want the box. I do not want the serpent in it. I want merely to know that it is there. Once we look it over, we replace it in the safe and close the entire thing up again. I want nothing out of it. And I stand ready to pay you one hundred dollars cash for your assistance in the matter, together with additional money which I will try to secure for you from the Trust Company who is footing the bills.”

  Kate Barwick thought long and intently for a moment. “Wolff, to be frank with you, I would have been more than suspicious of you if you had wanted a paper or anything out of that safe, for your story is a pretty melodramatic one. But there is melodrama in life as well as on the stage. And your story is backed up, I’ll say with no reserve, by the fact that you want nothing from that strong box. If you had, Wolff, I would not touch the affair under any conditions. Now you say you are willing to pay me one hundred dollars. One hundred dollars is a lot of money, for my act doesn’t bring anything worth speaking of on Pringle’s rural circuit. It brings me a bare living — and no more. Why, Wolff, I’ve been several years even trying to save a thousand dollars. That’s what working on a rural circuit means. But we circus people are artists of a sort. We love our work — our world — and the people we travel with from town to town. Money — we see little of it — at least on the small time. Nevertheless, Wolff, I do not care to accept your hundred. You were very decent to me on that legal work you did for me when I went to South America with Pringle some time back, and I am willing to reciprocate. But there is this to consider. In perpetrating an act such as you propose, I may not be morally guilty of any crime but I am legally guilty of housebreaking — and worse. I don’t feel that I can take money for what you ask me to do. That lends an unsavory flavor to my contribution. About the safe itself, I may be able to open it merely by listening for the tumblers. On the other hand I may have to study its make and type and attack it in another way. Very few safes, old or new, can be opened by tumbler counting, but many of the old-fashioned soft-iron ones can be opened by drilling in certain definite spots and then manipulating a stiff wire. The drilled hole can afterwards be plugged up with wax and rubbed with lampblack. If you do not know the actual make of this safe, it may require two nights’ work — one to secure the data and one to operate, as we might call it. Do you know the make of it? Another thing. You say this house is out on the prairies. Quite sure it’s not near any eyes, eh?”

  “Absolutely, Kate. Absolutely. Under cover of the darkness we can pry open a cellar window, come upstairs, forcing a lock if we have to, and go out later just as easy. The place is ours and ours only.” He paused. “And as to your first question, I am sorry to say that I don’t know the exact make of the safe.”

  “I see.” Kate Barwick thought again for a moment. Then she spoke. “Wolff, I’ll help you out because it goes against my grain to think of a girl being murdered by snake venom, and the law powerless to circumvent the
man who is doing it. Understand one thing, however. Nothing is to leave that safe. You can have your look at that reptile, providing it’s there, get a good mental picture of its markings, and then we lock it up again just as we found it. From that moment on you can proceed utterly to forget Kate Barwick. I’m a woman, Wolff, and I’m ready to protect a woman any time. Who Mary Brann is I don’t know, and probably never will know, but Kate Barwick will protect her in spite of herself.”

  “Bully for you, Kate,” said Wolff. “I knew you’d see fair play and help out the law as well. Now when will I see you and where?”

  Kate Barwick thought. “Well now I don’t want to cut any more performances with Pringle. It gets him mighty riled up. I find that it takes only an hour to come into Chicago from Kensington on that Illinois Central. So I’ll leave there tonight at nine o’clock, directly after my act, and be here at the Ratagoba House a few minutes after ten. We’ll start for this place immediately. We should make this house on the outskirts at around eleven o’clock, I take it. I’ll bring an electric flashlight that I happen to own, and also a magniscope, a new electrophonic instrument that I’ve added to my paraphernalia. It’s a device by which the tumblers can be very accurately counted. I have an electric drill — I do considerable of this sort of work in country towns, you know, for people whose safes get out of commission — but part of the windings on my drill are burned out and I doubt that I can get it rewound by tonight. If the tumbler method won’t work, we’ll likely have to come back tomorrow night. I don’t know yet, but so long as this Peter Brann is out of the city till Sunday, with your operatives shadowing him, it doesn’t particularly matter so far as I can see.” Kate Barwick glanced down at the little watch ticking away on her wrist. “It’s three P.M. Must be going, Wolff. You can take me to the train, and I’ll let you order the taxicab.”

  Casper Wolff, only too pleased to order and pay for such a vehicle considering that his offer of one hundred dollars had been courteously refused, and likewise glad of the chance to get Kate Barwick out of Chicago at a time of day when there was still a faint chance that a morning Herald-Examiner might be lying on some newsstand or street-car seat, went downstairs and ordered a taxicab. When it came, he accompanied his visitor in it clear to the I. C. depot at the foot of Randolph Street, and there saw her safely on a bright yellow express just ready to pull out for Kensington. Once the train had drawn out from the sheds, its trolley sliding over the high-tension conductor that ran parallel to Chicago’s famous Boul Mich, he turned away from the Randolph Street terminal, a smile on his thin lips.

  “If anybody can open that safe, Kate’s the one,” he told himself confidently. “And then for quick work. The minute I get the dope I want, I’ll double-cross Lola so quick she won’t know what it’s all about. I’ll give her a ticket back to the hills, and put her on a train.” He shrugged his shoulders cynically, and taking a cigar from his vest pocket bit off the end of it. “Life is a case of every man for himself,” he went on ruminatively as he fumbled for a match. “Jumping Jehosephat, how nicely Kate fell. That little story I pulled about someone of her sex being in danger pulled her over. And she wouldn’t even take the hundred. Gad, women are easy!”

  CHAPTER XII

  THE CLUES OF THE LETTER “K”

  IT WAS Thursday morning, the day following that on which the snake story had appeared in the Herald-Examiner, and the precise day, moreover, when Mrs. Galioto and her lawyer were expected to call, when Carson, poring over a local map of Arizona in which a new spurious mine had been reported as roping in innocents at a point which as a mining engineer he knew had thus far been quite devoid of any kind of precious metal whatever, heard his telephone bell ring sharply. Rising up from the map laid out on the table in the inside room, he stepped into the outer office and lifting the receiver of the telephone recognized the voice on the end at once as that of the little girl who was to become Mrs. Clifford Carson before many more weeks.

  “Cliff,” Marcia told him hastily, “I wish it were possible for you to come over here. Someone — I am sure, Cliff — has been inside this house during the night.”

  “Been in the house during the night!” he ejaculated. “Burglars?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied troubledly. “There is nothing missing. But there has been someone here. Someone has been in Grandfather’s library.”

  “How do you know this, honey-girl?” he asked.

  “Because,” she said, “I swept up there yesterday afternoon and this morning when I went in to get Grandfather’s dictionary to look up a certain word, I found a slip of manilla paper lying on the floor almost underneath the safe. There are certain pencil tracings on the door of the safe, as though one person had been tracing out some mechanism for another. And then I examined the house, Cliff. One of the swinging cellar windows had been apparently forced away from its fastening. If this were the case it would have been easy for an intruder to come up the cellar stairs and get in the house proper.”

  “But, my dear girl,” he interposed, feeling quite sure that the typical fears of her sex relative to house-breakers had gotten the better of her, “if anyone were after the contents of that safe, surely — did you look in the safe?” he broke off suddenly, as the memory of the newspaper story describing the location of the Zuri serpent flashed across his brain.

  “Yes indeed, Cliff. I lost no time in opening it up. Everything is intact. No one has been inside. The stuffed snake lies there on the newspaper exactly as you placed it when we locked it up Tuesday afternoon. If anyone were here, they went away without obtaining what they were after. Cliff, I feel that they were after that Zuri snake.”

  “Hm.” He thought for a moment. “Honey-girl, I’ll jump in a taxi and be out there in a jiffy. Perhaps there’s something to what you say. I don’t know. I’ll come immediately so as not to keep you out of bed any longer than necessary. As a matter of fact, I’ve got to get back, because a certain Mrs. Galioto and her lawyer are going to take me for a ride!”

  “Take you for a ride, Cliff! Why — ”

  He laughed. “They’d like to,” he explained. “It’s that Tex Helium certificate that Cary let slip. He told you about it, of course. It can be said to be actually out of existence now — for it’s transferred on the books of the company, reissued, and in Germany to boot. A German company’s the holder of it now — a company which evidently has at least thirty-three and one-third percent American ownership in order to comply with the Lydon Act regulating the export of helium from America. Anyway, the original owner of the stock, a Mrs. Angelo Galioto, and her lawyer, are due in here after lunch to demand it. Mrs. Galioto had some hectic dream about it, and her fortune-teller told her not to sell it under any conditions. So she doesn’t want the ten thousand dollars that Cary deposited in my account out of that money his father sent us all — she wants the stock, and she wants that very certificate.”

  “But — but what are you going to do with them, Cliff? What can you say — what can you do — with such people, against dreams and fortune-tellers?”

  “Yes — what? Well, I ran over to Little Sicily last night and fortified myself with some data. And I’ve got some other things to say. I don’t know how it’ll come out. But I’ve got to keep Mrs. Galioto from making any fool inquiries at Washington. That’s certain. But don’t worry about it. Leave it to me. And I’ll start now for your place.” And he hung up.

  He took his hat from the rack in the corner and giving a few orders to his stenographer, went downstairs to the street and boarded the first yellow taxi that came bowling along, giving the driver the destination which lay so far away from that better-known part of Chicago that the latter had to look it up first in his street guide. It was thirty minutes later when Carson reached St. Giles Lane, and it was a rather perturbed Marcia who met him at the front door. He hung his hat on the hallrack and she led him without further words to the library, snapping on the overhanging electric bulb to show more plainly what she had to exhibit.

 
She knelt down, and he stooped over to watch her slender finger. “See, Cliff,” she directed.

  Sure enough he could see, due to the reflected glare of the electric light from the surface of the safe, the lazy tracing of a light pencil line as though someone with pencil in hand were demonstrating the position and type of certain supposed mechanism which lay hidden back of the dial. He inspected it in silence for a second or two. Then he spoke.

  “Honey, just throw open that door for me if you will.”

  With the door wide open, and Mr. Zuri with his blue glass eyes calmly contemplating the performance, Carson compared the light tracings on the front of the door with the fairly simple mechanism that lay exposed back of it. It was plain that whoever had been there the night before had had a perfect mental picture of that mechanism, for the pencil tracings followed almost to a hair’s-breadth the direction of the bolts, sockets and tumbler operating device which was hidden from the eye of anyone outside the strongbox. At length Carson bid her close the door and lock it, and then he arose.

  “Now we’ll look at that cellar window,” he said.

  Without a word she took him out the rear door and around the side of the house to where a transom-like window, hinged at the top, gave light to an empty cellar to whose dirt floor only a drop of about four feet would have been necessitated. It appeared that a sharp bar of iron had been inserted at the bottom, prying the swinging window backward and snapping the rusty bolt which held it fast on the inside.

  “As I said to you on the phone, Cliff,” she told him while he inspected it frowningly, “I don’t know for sure that this happened last night. Boys play ball in these vacant lots, and one cannot tell just when a depredation like this might have happened. Then, too, tramps from the railroad over to the east may have forced entrance at some time during the past weeks thinking that there were preserves or jellies in the cellar. But this broken lock taken in conjunction with these other things — ”