* * *
—
“A cup worth at least several millions of dollars has been stolen,” announced Robbins. “It’s here, in the building. Find it.”
From a polite distance, Hildegarde Withers watched, for two hours, while every person in the building was searched, every nook and cranny and corner pried into. Mummy cases were opened, vases plumbed, fountains drained. Bundles of towels were turned out in the wash-rooms. Stew from the building cafeteria was poured out into the sink, and garbage sorted on newspapers. All to no avail.
Robbins and his guards took the lead in the search, but the actual fine-toothing was done by the officers under the leadership of Captain Malone of Centre Street. He recognized Miss Withers, and would have passed her up, but she requested quickly that the matron search her as well as the rest. “The quarry is too important for you to consider persons and personalities,” she told him.
But after all, the search finished where it had begun. A snarling, incoherent anarchist languished in handcuffs, loudly advocating the destruction of the paintings which Mr. Morgan had loaned to the museum for an indefinite showing. Three sad, bleary men holding trench-coats over their arms waited hopelessly and patiently in Robbins’s office, also handcuffed. But the Cellini Cup, the only remaining creation of the roistering genius of the Sixteenth Century, Signor Benvenuto Cellini, had vanished as if into thin air.
Robbins gave up in disgust and spent twenty minutes in browbeating Cassidy and Schultz, the two guards whose duty it had been to keep the Cellini in view all the time, and who had been lured away by the decoy shots. The police promised to get something out of the self-styled anarchist, but it was Miss Withers’s private opinion that he had been hired for the job by an intermediary, and would have little enough to tell, even in a third degree. The crowd clamored to be released; the art students took down their easels and their modeling stands and also demanded their freedom, and still the blond Dagmar smoothed and worked and patted at her satyr. Miss Withers shrewdly guessed that the girl had no intention of leaving until she had seen her young man.
* * *
—
It was at this stage of the game that Inspector Oscar Piper came battering upon the main doors of the museum until he was admitted. The wiry, gray little man, a dead cigar clenched, as always, in his teeth, made straight for Miss Withers.
“Hildegarde—I sent you here to calm down a fussy old man, and you’ve set off plenty of fireworks. What’s comin’ off?”
The spinster who had almost married him once now transfixed him with an icy eye. She told him. Not everything, but almost everything. “That’s how matters stand,” she finished. “And the Cup has vanished like morning dew.”
“Vanished my eye,” said Piper, ungallantly. He whirled around and stared toward the checkroom, where poor Joel Burton still stood, with nothing to do. Then the Inspector smashed his right fist into his left palm. “Blundering idiotic numbskulls,” he accused, genially. He spoke loudly enough, so that not only the police captain but also Curator Robbins approached.
With his cigar the Inspector indicated the checkroom. “Anybody look there for this wandering soup-plate of yours?”
“But Inspector,” protested Robbins. “The checkroom is outside the turnstile. Nobody but a magician could get down from upstairs, cross the wide lobby, and hide a package there without somebody seeing him.”
But Piper was already vaulting the barrier. Miss Withers tagged along behind, feeling unnecessary.
“It wouldn’t be hidden, it would be in plain view,” said the Inspector. He poked at a top-coat or two, tore open a bundle which contained nine packages of flea soap for dogs—Miss Withers often wondered why, afterward—and finally came to a square package, neatly wrapped and sealed, at the end of the package shelf.
It bore the seals of a mid-town drug store, and a label—“Medicines—breakable.” A check attached bore the number “41.”
He turned on Joel Burton. “When was this box checked?”
Burton shrugged. “It was here when I came to duty at about eleven. Ask Bruce, the regular checkroom man.”
Bruce, easily discovered, admitted that the package had been checked early that morning by a man whom he did not remember.
“Rats,” said the Inspector. “Are you all blind? This package was checked like fun. One resembling it was brought in here, and while you were all gawping at this so-called anarchist, the Cellini Cup was wrapped up, brought here, and substituted. Maybe the other box was crumpled up as waste paper. Anyway, the thieves planned on your being too stupid to put two and two together—and by heavens, you were!”
“Nobody could have substituted boxes without my knowing it,” cut in Joel Burton.
The Inspector stared at him. “That’s what I was thinking,” he said, gratingly.
The police and guards crowded around as the Inspector took out his pocket knife, carefully lifted off the seals, and opened the box. There was a quantity of tissue paper—and then, to Miss Withers’s utter amazement and chagrin, the delicately enamelled sphinx came into view. Beneath were the glowing curves of the shell, the dragon, and the turtle. There were excited cries from the crowd inside the gates.
Curator Robbins exhaled noisily. But the Inspector lifted out the glowing chalice and stared at it. Then he whirled on the curator.
“This the missing cup? Sure of it?” Miss Withers found herself nodding eagerly.
“Of course I’m sure,” said Robbins. “There couldn’t be two like it in the world. Of course, I don’t know the piece as thoroughly as poor old Carter, but it seems genuine to me.”
“We’ll make sure,” said Piper. He beckoned to Captain Malone. “Got anybody here from the Jewel Squad?”
“I was on it for two years,” said that worthy. Piper indicated the masterpiece, and Captain Malone bent over it. He tapped the shell. “Twenty-one carat, at least,” he said. He ticked at the enamel. “True-blue,” he decided. “They don’t mix colors like that today.” Last of all, he bent over the pendant pearl which hung from the breasts of the sphinx, and looked up, grinning. “First water, and a real honey,” he gave as his final verdict.
“Okay,” said the Inspector. He handed the Cellini Cup back to the curator. “Now hang on to it,” he said. “As for me, I’ll hang on to him.”
Moving cat-like across the floor, he suddenly pinioned the arms of the guard, Joel Burton. “And this washes up our case.”
* * *
—
But Hildegarde Withers did not join in the congratulations. “It was easy as falling off a log,” Piper told her as they moved toward the stair. “I’ll check over this sculptress’s testimony just to make sure which one of the three dopes with the trench-coats was hired to play messenger and deliver the Cup to Burton at the checkroom. Then we’re through.”
“Easy as falling off a log,” Miss Withers repeated. That was just the trouble. Something in the back of her mind clamored for attention, but she could not reach it. Something—
“I’d like to know what that fool of a guard thought he could do with the thing if he did get away with it,” Piper was saying. “Melted down it wouldn’t bring more than a thousand or two. It’s the craftsmanship and the associations that make it so valuable. And it would be unsalable. I guess the poor guy just went nuts looking at it day after day.”
“Nuts enough to kill poor Professor Carter when it wasn’t necessary?” Miss Withers wanted to know. She stopped suddenly. Suppose—suppose it was necessary?
“Wait,” she said. “You’re holding Burton downstairs until you all leave, aren’t you? May I have a word with him?”
“All you want,” Piper promised her. He was glowing with achievement. So it was that Hildegarde Withers faced a sullen, handcuffed man across a desk in an anteroom, with a policeman looking out of the window and another at the door.
She wasted no time i
n beating around bushes. “You’re in serious trouble, young man. Attempted grand larceny is one thing, but murder is another. Were you with Miss Dagmar whatever her name is when Carter plunged to his death?”
Burton stared at her, and shook his head. “I was getting a pail of water for her,” he said. “But you won’t believe me.”
“I won’t—until you tell me what happened to the ball of string,” Miss Withers ventured. But Joel Burton only turned his face away, and refused to answer. There Miss Withers left him.
The Inspector and Robbins were waiting. “Before you go,” said the latter, “I’d like to show you something. The electricians have been busy—and the new showcase has been brought up from the basement and installed.” He led them up the stairs and through the Rodin to the Florentine Wing. Dagmar had finally given up work, and sat sadly surveying her clay satyr.
She caught Miss Withers’s eyes. “I’m going home,” the girl announced. “And I’m never coming back. I hate this place and everybody in it!” She bent her sensitive face above her work. This had been a hard day for Dagmar.
As they came into the room containing the Cellini, an urchin or two disappeared through the far door. “Tell the cops that those kids can be released,” Robbins ordered a nearby guard. Miss Withers recognized with some amusement the curly red head of the little fellow with the ancient overalls and the toed-out, Chaplinesque feet. This must have been a memorable day in that lad’s life.
The Cellini Cup, restored to its rightful place, shimmered as brightly as ever. The turtle held his everlasting burden as cheerfully, the winged dragon hovered as balefully, and the golden lady whose body was that of a reptile smiled forever. Only the pearl which hung from her breast was still.
“This is not the first time that murder has been done for the possession of that Cup,” said Robbins. But the Inspector cut him short in his lecture.
“Come on, Hildegarde. A word with the little sculptress outside, and then we’ll write finis to this.”
“Finis” was very nearly written to another history as the three of them lingered beside the modelling stand in the hall. As Piper questioned the girl in regard to the mysterious man in the trench-coat, and as Miss Withers idly rubbed her fingers against the cool wet clay of the sculptured satyr, a globule of lead came twisting past her head to clip away a strand or two of brown hair and flatten itself against the wall. It happened so simply, and with so little noise, that the four of them stood aghast for nearly a minute before they could move.
There was only one direction from which the shot could have been fired, and to Robbins’s eternal credit let it be written that the dapper curator was abreast of the Inspector in the race down the corridor.
Robbins shouted to guards at the stair-head, and in a moment the entire wing was blocked off. From that time on it was only a matter of steady advance until every human being in the Florentine Wing was corralled.
The captives consisted of five little boys, most of whom Miss Withers remembered having seen here and there throughout the building during the hectic day. One of them was the grinning lad with the red hair and the Chaplin feet.
Two of the boys had been found playing with an automatic pistol equipped with a Maxim silencer, though they stoutly denied having fired it at all. They had found it underneath a showcase, they maintained, but a moment before.
“Hold these two, and let the others go,” decided the Inspector. But Miss Withers gripped his arm.
“I want to speak to that one,” she said. “The little boy with the red hair. Oscar, I’ve taught thousands of children, but while many of them toe in, I never saw one before that habitually toed out!”
She stepped forward, and suddenly the gamin wheeled and started to run. Miss Withers’s lunge missed his shoulder by a fraction of an inch, but caught at his curly red hair. She screamed a little as it came away in her hand, leaving a shiny bald head.
The running figure turned, disclosing the mature, seamed face of a grown man. “Lord Almighty,” said Piper. At last he saw the reason for the oddly turned feet. What they had thought was a child of nine or ten was a midget—and a midget whose face was now a mask of hate and defiance! The loose overalls had hidden the bowed legs.
Miss Withers turned away, acutely ill, as the abortive escape was halted and the hideous, frustrated creature dragged back by guards and police.
“Let me go, you canaille,” screamed the creature. “Take your hands from Alexius! I would have succeeded but for the fault of that worthless gun. But still you are fools, fools!” Spitting, cursing, the midget was dragged away. His eerie laughter echoed through the place for minutes after he was gone.
The Inspector returned and faced Miss Withers. “The shoe is on the other foot,” he said. “I knew there was a master-mind behind this, but it was you who saw through his disguise. I’ve heard of Alexius—the police of Budapest dubbed him ‘the Gnome.’ There were rumors that a mad dwarf was the brains of a gang operating in the large cities of Europe and stealing art treasures by sheer black magic, but I thought it was newspaper talk.”
Robbins nodded. “I heard the rumors, and evidently so did poor Carter. He feared that the gang were after his pet treasure, and so they were. But why they had to kill him—”
“I can answer that,” said Hildegarde Withers. She turned to stare, almost compassionately, at the tall girl who stood behind them. “But, by the way, I think here is a young lady who would very much like to go home, now that she knows her boy friend is innocent of wrong-doing.”
“But is he?” cut in Piper. “How about the checkroom?”
Miss Withers hushed him. “Is it all right for Dagmar here to leave, and take her copy in clay?”
“Of course,” said Robbins. “By all means.”
Gratefully, the girl began to throw wet clothes around the statue. But Miss Withers was quick and cruel.
She wheeled, so that almost by accident, the sharp point of her umbrella slashed into the soft clay. Dagmar cried out, but Miss Withers pointed like an avenging figure of justice. “Look!”
They all looked—and saw, beneath the concealing clay the gold and enamel of the true Cellini! Quickly Miss Withers laid more of the treasure bare.
“It might have been hidden there when I was knocked over…” began Dagmar wildly, but she stopped, for she saw that no one believed her. Her greenish eyes turned a flaring yellow, and she reached for a palette knife, but the Inspector gripped her in time. Silently, like a condemned Juno, she was led away after her master, the dwarf.
“You see,” explained Miss Withers later, “I knew that there must have been a real reason for killing Carter. He was the one man who could tell the true Cellini from the copy which had been made by some unknown but marvelous craftsman. The thieves were willing to pay the price of offering a substitute made of genuine gold, jewels, and enamel, in order to have the genuine Cellini. It fooled everybody—even myself—until I saw that the pearl in the spurious cup did not swing back and forth. It wasn’t balanced exactly as in the original.
“Carter was trapped. The midget found that the Professor had been annoyed by small boys, so he tied the cord across the stair and then lured the old man into chasing him for some minor infraction of the rules. That got him out of the way. Dagmar, at the time, was taking care that Burton, the guard at the stairhead, was out of the way. She even found opportunity to snip a length of the cord which he carried about with him to do magic tricks with, to further incriminate him.”
“The spurious cup, then, was checked in the checkroom and left to be found, just as I found it?” Piper was crestfallen.
Miss Withers nodded. “Exactly, if we hadn’t found it, a hint would have been dropped somehow. Alexius, in his role of urchin, kept tabs on that. Then at noon, when the place was nearly deserted, he planted a fake anarchist in the American wing, and while the alarm was on, smashed the showcase, lifted the Cellini, and immed
iately slipped it into the yawning statue of clay which Dagmar had ready just outside the door. She was thrown flat on the floor to cover her failure to identify the man properly—and probably she noticed the men with trench-coats and gave us that as a blind.”
“Then, with the Cup supposedly found, there’d be no difficulty in her getting out with the genuine one?”
“Not at all,” Miss Withers continued. “The only danger was that someone would get inquisitive about the girl’s statue. The midget lurked nearby, saw me touch it, and lost his nerve and fired.”
“I don’t suppose you’d mind telling me where he got the gun?” Piper wanted to know. “Remember, the midget has been twice searched—and the building, too.”
“Elementary,” quoted Miss Withers smilingly. “The gun was waiting in the receptacle provided under the clay for the Cup. Just in case something went wrong. As something did. He picked up the gun when everything was clear. And very nearly sent me to Kingdom Come with it, too.”
They were sitting on a marble bench in the main hall. The three men with trench-coats were being released, and hopelessly shambled out into the sunlight again. Joel Burton stood unhappily staring after the figure of Dagmar, the girl whose talent had been turned to such strange uses, as she was led away between two buxom police-women. She never glanced in his direction.
Then Robbins rushed up to Miss Withers. “My dear lady,” he beamed. “I have just consulted with our Board, and to show our appreciation we would like to give you as a souvenir of this day the imitation Cellini, provided the police do not want it to try and check up on its artisan…”
“I hope I never see it again,” said Oscar Piper fervently.
“Nor I,” said Hildegarde Withers.
“Instead, I wonder if you’d grant me just one thing—let me have the remains of the clay satyr which Dagmar copied so painstakingly from the original Rodin?”
That crumbling clay satyr leers today from Miss Withers’s living room table, the marks of her umbrella still gouged deep in the smoothly molded body. Strangely enough, the thing has about its eyes and mouth something of the twisted malevolence of Alexius, the red gnome.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 71