Wolff colored red at the younger man’s blunt denunciation of him. But at the name of Kate Barwick a supplicatory look came into his green eyes. “I — I hope to God you don’t go and make it hard for Kate, young man. I’m not wholly bad myself, but as for her — well — I — I got her into this thing on a phoney story that the striped snake was evidence in a case where a man on St. Giles Lane was poisoning his cousin, a St. Paul girl who was visiting him from time to time. Kate is a woman handcuff expert, known on the stage as Madame Mercedes, the Handcuff Queen, working with Pringle’s Circus. They’re playing out at Kensington now. She wouldn’t come into this affair on a money basis at all. I guess she doesn’t hardly make more than a bare living with such a dinky outfit, for she said she’d been several years even trying to save up a measly thousand dollars. But even so, she refused to take a cent, and I offered her a hundred cold dollars at that. She was willing to help us run down this villain — this villain who really didn’t exist. Now I’ve got her in bad. As to what happened last night, here it is in a few words. We went to the St. Giles Lane house toward midnight. We opened the cellar window with a short bar of iron, dropped down inside without any trouble, and walked upstairs. By means of an electric torch Kate looked the safe over, noting the vital details, the name, date and make. Kate is a keen one on safes — but considering that Jeff Barwick, her father, was the first lock and handcuff professional in America, the first person to put on that kind of an act, it’s not so surprising. As soon as she saw the make of the safe, she claimed that it was one of two similar types put out by the same company in which the mechanism was practically the same, but in one of which if a hole is drilled three inches under the knob of the combination dial, and an inch and a quarter to the right of the median line, access is given to a lever which can be raised by a stiff wire, and the entire safe door swung open. The other of the two types could be operated in the same manner, except for the location of the drilled hole.”
“But why didn’t you and she open it last night?” asked Carson.
“Well,” Wolff said, “Kate does more or less safe work of that kind in rube towns where for some reason old safes get stuck on their owners. She has all the tools necessary for the work, including of course an electric drill. Her drill was being repaired at an armature winder’s out in Kensington yesterday, and wasn’t to be finished until today. So she brought along an instrument called a magniscope which counts tumblers in certain styles of safe, but as soon as she saw the make of this one she knew at once that the magniscope wouldn’t be of any service. So I took down the entire data on the lockbox for her — Amos Todd and Sons Mfg. Co. Type B-18. 1864 — so she could verify her diagnosis of the mechanism from notes she has collected on the entire subject of safes. She is to return tonight. We are not to meet here at the Ratagoba House as we did last night. Instead I am to go out to St. Giles Lane at nine o’clock and watch from that little empty shed across the street so that we can be sure no one returns to the house. When she appears around eleven, she is to flash a light from her handbag. I am to flash back if the coast is clear. I am to remain in the shed across the street, ready to run across to the window of the library and give the alarm in case anyone enters the house by the front door. As soon as she signals the safe is opened, I am to join her. And that is the whole story, entire and complete, every word true.” Wolff gazed despairingly at the younger man. “For God’s sake, youngster, don’t send that woman up. I got her into this. She’s doing it all under a misapprehension of things.”
Carson thought hard for a moment or two. His own apparently sound structure involving Henry Desmond had been literally tumbling about his ears — he could almost hear the rending of the stout beams of which that structure had been built. And what was even more exasperating, he could not make head nor tail of the way in which the Jennings’ swindling scheme, launched in North Dakota, could have interlocked, even in appearance only, with the affairs of Marcia and Cary in Chicago and that missing father, Henry Desmond. That he himself had received the blotter in which the stolen twenty thousand dollar gold note had been hidden by Lola Jennings, was now as certain as the fact that the sun sets in the west. And that he himself, furthermore, had just saved his own career and future prospects by blithely issuing a check for ten thousand and some odd dollars, drawn against the half of that stolen gold note which had been deposited in his account by Cary Desmond, was also too, too certain. For that stolen gold note, supposedly from Henry Desmond, was beyond all doubt whatsoever the one he had supinely turned over to Henry Desmond’s son to straighten out that young man’s hopelessly tangled affairs. In spite of all of which certainty, the receipt of the gold note by Carson, of all persons, was a coincidence too great to accept. And in addition to this very irritating anomaly of chance, there remained the unanswerable puzzle: Why was Jake Jennings sending out blotters to his prospective clients bearing such a cryptic message as the one which Carson himself had received?
Carson shook his head. It was all too bewildering even to attempt an answer at this time. But now another set of ideas, ideas more coherent, more logical, forced themselves into his mind in the place of those other riddles. Reggie van Twillingham, in order to refute Dolly van Twillingham’s sensational accusations that he had tried to murder her, had actually offered the sum of twenty-five thousand dollars for an idea for a man-trap — a safe which no cracksman could open without killing himself. In the relief occasioned by the receipt of that twenty thousand dollar gold note enclosed in the blotter, neither he nor Cary had pressed very actively on the going after of the nebulous van Twillingham reward. But now it developed that they had simply used a stolen twenty thousand dollar bank note to make good Cary’s combined peculations and accidental misuse of entrusted stock, adding up to practically that sum. And now Cary himself was nicely out of the woods — while he, Carson, was holding a sack of some sort — for he still possessed ten thousand dollars out of that gold note — and his check to Mrs. Galioto had not yet gone through — nor even been cashed. What a contretemps! Truly, in a moral sense, he and Cary had robbed Peter to pay Paul! But as to the man-trap. If anyone had just such a fantastic object that person was Cary Desmond — Cary Desmond who by all the laws that govern vocations should have been an inventor instead of a bank teller. And now Kate Barwick, the professional safe expert, was thrown into the scheme of things. This was the chance — the veritable opportunity of opportunities — not only to interest Reggie van Twillingham over a horde of applicants who, so Carson felt, could not possibly have the ingenious secret which Cary had evolved, but actually to demonstrate Cary’s man-trap before van Twillingham’s eyes with a human subject. Only — and Carson’s brow darkened — Cary Desmond’s man-trap was a killer — sure and absolute — and they could not kill a woman in cold blood even to make twenty-five thousand dollars, and even though she were entering a house against the law of the land.
CHAPTER XVII
A RESOLUTION
IT WAS exactly three o’clock that afternoon when Carson, standing at the rope railing on the edge of the Municipal airport, saw taxying down the field with a roar of its three propellers the giant Twin-Cities passenger transport plane in one seat of which sat the discomfited Casper Wolff, his handbag packed, his hotel bill paid, on his way back to St. Paul, a sadder and wiser man. Just fifty minutes before, the two of them had seen Lola Jennings, the illiterate hill-girl of the Ozarks, on a train in the LaSalle Street depot, her ticket bought to the town nearest the point where she had grown up clad only in a cotton dress, and with five dollars more in her purse for her fare via mule-back out to her family in the wilds, convinced now that her scheme of revenging herself upon the man who had married her from the snake pit and treated her brutally was completely demolished by what she thought was the law — but further assured that that same man was quite on the road to punishment at the Chicago Detective Bureau for another crime. And thus, as the hands of the gargantuan airport clock left the hour of three, Carson stood alone, Lola Jennings and C
asper Wolff speeding from Chicago in opposite directions.
He took a checker taxi back to his office, and sank into the grey upholstered seat with a puzzled, deep frown on his face. Again the strange coincidence which had apparently been perpetrated by Fate — a coincidence by which a twenty thousand dollar blotter which Lola Jennings had manufactured had come into his possession with a message seemingly addressed to him from Henry Desmond — sprang to the fore of his consciousness and refused to be ousted. Some way — somehow — he must get to the bottom of this completely inunderstandable phenomenon if it were the last thing he ever did in his life.
Reaching his office, the very first thing he did was to call Marcia by telephone. He disliked to wake her at this hour, but realized that the situation demanded unusual measures.
“Honey-girl,” he apologized, as soon as he heard her tones on the wire, “I’m afraid you never will get any sleep as long as you live until you’ve left the exchange and become Mrs. Clifford Carson. But a matter of extreme importance has come up, and I’ve had to ring you. Now what I want you to do is this: Open up the little safe in the library. Pull out the paper on which that stuffed tiger snake is lying. With the tip of your finger, or else a pencil if you don’t like to touch it, I want you to count every black ring from the tail forwards toward the head, counting the black tip of the tail as ‘one.’ When you come to a black ring which is broken, imperfect, give me the number of it. I’ll explain all this later.”
She asked no questions, but obediently left the phone to follow implicitly his instructions. After a wait of fully five minutes, she returned to the wire. “I did what you asked, Cliff. The broken black ring is there, and counting from the black tail tip it is the nineteenth.”
“The nineteenth,” he repeated. “Many, many thanks, little girl. I’ll try not to disturb you again today.”
And when they had said good-bye, he hung up.
He lost no time in inspecting the typewritten list of names which he had compelled Casper Wolff to turn over to him. Counting downward from the very first name, which headed the A’s, he found that the nineteenth name lay in the B’s, and with its address complete, ran:
J. Annister Brown, 936 Delaware Street, Indianapolis, Ind.
He studied it for a moment, and then, true to the old go-and-do-it side of his personality, lifted the receiver of his phone and dialed the instrument for the long distance operator. When he got her, he gave his order: “I want a party-to-party connection with J. Annister Brown of 936 Delaware Street, Indianapolis, Ind.” He repeated it while the girl took it carefully down, and then hung up and waited impatiently for the call-back that would tell him they had his party.
Evidently the long-distance wires were not busy at this hour of the day, at least those lying Indianapolisward, for within five minutes the expected call-back came. He pressed his ear to the receiver. But it was the long-distance operator who was talking. “The party asked for in Indianapolis,” she said metallically, “is reported as having died two years ago. The report comes from the present occupants of that address.”
Carson hung up somewhat bewildered. Where he had anticipated throwing some light on a very perplexing conundrum, he had obtained information which made it more confusing than ever. It would appear on the surface of things that a dead man had received the blotter. He shook his head and sighed. And, sighing, he fell to opening his afternoon mail which the stenographer had piled upon his desk, in the drastic effort to change somehow the current of his thoughts, to give him a new angle by which to approach this strange riddle. And then, as do all mystery bubbles, when one ceases trying to pierce them, gently blow up with a loud “plop,” Carson’s mystery concerning his receipt of the stolen twenty thousand dollar gold note and the message — the supposed message from Henry Desmond — were solved within several successive seconds of time.
The first letter he opened contained a typewritten communication which with its embossed letterhead ran as follows:
THE STANDARD STEEL CAR WHEEL COMPANY
OF INDIANA
— HAMMOND INDIANA PLANT —
September 8, 1931.
Mr. Clifford Carson,
Agent, Gov’t Bureau of Mining Stock Investigation,
333 Building,
Chicago, Ill.
Dear Mr. Carson:
I am taking the liberty of sending to you some business literature of an alleged silver mine combination being worked from the West, due to the fact that I read with considerable interest the generous write-up in the Chicago newspapers about the new Government Bureau of which you were to be the Central West agent. This propaganda came into my hands through being addressed to my father, J. Annister Brown of Indianapolis, my home city, who has been dead for some two years. My father has, I daresay, thrown away a goodly fortune on quack mining schemes of all sorts, and I venture to say without hesitation that his name is on so-called “sucker lists” all over the United States. The propaganda consists of a businesslike blotter bearing a message whose import I do not grasp, but behind which there is probably some advertising dodge; an 8-page printed booklet; and a filled-in form letter — evidently “feeler letter No. 1” — which reached Indianapolis Sunday night, and was forwarded back to me here at Hammond the same night as per standing instructions from me in the Indianapolis postoffice. Through the carelessness of my stenographer who was instructed to send these to you last Monday morning, at the time I received them, only the blotter was mailed, both the booklet and the form letter failing to be enclosed. I enclose the latter two items, therefore, with this letter of explanation, and if this be of interest to your valuable department, rest assured that I am very glad to have been of service.
Very truly yours,
James C. Brown, Superintendent.
For a moment Carson riffled over the first four or five leaves of the speciously written little eight-page booklet which Jake Jennings had composed to interest gullibles in the possibilities of the Black Eagle silver mine for which, according to Wolff, he had paid a paltry hundred dollars, and the worthless Red Eagle claim for which he had parted with only half that sum. Dropping the booklet aside, he turned his attention to the glowing form letter which introduced the swindler, beneficent and philanthropic, to the swindlee! Yet matters were still far from clear. After he had read a few paragraphs, he placed it under his paper weight for later study, and proceeded to open the next letter on the pile in front of him, a large businesslike envelope. Its contents, more brief and more pungent, than those of the first, and written in pencil on ruled paper, ran:
Dear Sir:
Is this guy pulling something crooked or is it a straight game? I seen your name in the paper and all about you, and also heard the end of your talk last week over WBIL. Can you tell me if this is straight? I’m ready to shove $150 in it if I get your O.K. I’ll pay you a $5 fee too. Thank you. My address below.
Timothy Goff,
1232 Wells Street.
And from the large Post Office envelope containing this second communication tumbled forth a pink blotter, a form letter and a booklet exactly like that sent in by the son of the defunct J. Annister Brown of Indianapolis. One look at the blotter, however, and the mystery was no more. The printed communication which had come to Carson that last Monday afternoon, and which read:
was nothing more than the black impression of a two-color blotter, printed in red and black, a defective that had somehow missed the red impression of the press and had been discarded. The perfect blotter, sent by the new aspirant for mining wealth, printed complete in its red and black, read:
For what seemed an interminable space of time Carson gazed down at the blotter whose message now left nothing but the mist of a great beautiful iridescent bubble which he had spun from the black part of its two components. “And I actually believed,” he told himself dejectedly, “that Henry Desmond had been found — that his share of the valuable Outer Ravenswood tract was being saved for him — for Marcia — for Cary — for Granddad — for them all
. Instead, the estate is lost, and we’ve thrown over our shoulders the single chance we had last Tuesday to make a thousand dollars apiece for Marcia and Cary for their father’s quitclaim. And even worse — ” Carson groaned out loud just barely audibly enough that his stenographer looked up from her work with curiosity written on her face. “And even worse — I have given a stolen twenty thousand dollars to Cary to make good his defalcations, money which belongs neither legally nor morally to him nor to me. And still worse — I’ve got to stop payment now first thing tomorrow morning on that Mrs. Galioto check — which means the end of me here after all. What a life!” He heaved another deep sigh, and slumped down into his chair with the feeling that he was Atlas, carrying a world of recriminations on his shoulders. And thus he sat till suddenly into his brain crept an idea — an idea so startling in its possibilities that he sat upright in a second and stared off into space surveying it from every side.
The Riddle of the Yellow Zuri Page 23