The Million-Dollar Suitcase, Alice MacGowan [free ebooks romance novels .TXT] 📗

out; about one o'clock; carried a suitcase."

"Bulls after him?" Louie asked, and I turned away from him wearily.

"Kite," I said, "let me up to your roof."

"Sure, Jerry." Released, the porter went on to gather up a pile of discarded papers.

"Could he—the man I've described—come through here—through this office and neither you nor Louie see him?" I asked. The Kite brought a box of cigars from under the counter with,

"My treat, gentlemen. Naw, Jerry; sure not—not that kind of a guy. Louie'd 'a' spotted him. Most observing cuss I ever seen."

Miss Wallace, taking all this in, seemed amused. As I turned to lead to the elevator I found that again she wanted a question of her own answered.

"Mr. Kite," she began and I grinned; Kite wasn't the Kite's surname or any part of his name; "Who is the guest here with the upstairs room—on the top floor—has had the same room right along—for five or six years—but doesn't—"

"Go easy, ma'am, please!" Kite's little eyes were popping; he dragged out a handkerchief and fumbled it around his forehead. "I've not been here for any five or six years—no, nor half that time. Since I've been here most of our custom is transient. Nobody don't keep no room five or six years in the Gold Nugget."

"Back up," I smiled at his excitement. "To my certain knowledge Steve Skeels has had a room here longer than that. Hasn't he been with you ever since the place was rebuilt after the earthquake?"

"Steve?" the Kite repeated. "I forgot him. Yeah—he keeps a little room up under the roof."

"Has he had it for as long as four years?" the young lady asked.

"Search me," the Kite shook his head.

But Louie the overalled, piloting us the first stage of our journey in a racketty old elevator that he seemed to pull up by a cable, so slow it was, grumbled an assent to the same question when it was put to him, and confirmed my belief that Skeels came into the hotel as soon as it was rebuilt, and had kept the same room ever since.

Miss Wallace seemed interested in this; but all the time we were making the last lap, by an iron stairway, to that roof-house we had seen from the top of the St. Dunstan; all the time Louie was unlocking the door there to let us out, instructing us to be sure to relock it and bring him the key, and to yell for him down the elevator shaft because the bell was busted, the quiet smile of Miss Barbara Wallace disturbed me. She followed where I led, but I had the irritating impression that she looked on at my movements, and Worth's as well, with the indulgent eye of a grown-up observing children at play.

On the roof of the Gold Nugget we picked up the possible trail easily; Clayte hadn't needed to go through the building, or have a confederate staked out in a room here, to make a downward getaway. For here the fire escape came all the way up, curving over the coping to anchor into the wall, and it was a good iron stairway, with landings at each floor, and a handrail the entire length, its lower end in the alley between Powell and Mason Streets. Looking at it I didn't doubt that it was used by the guests of the Gold Nugget at least half as much as the easier but more conspicuous front entrance. Therefore a man seen on it would be no more likely to attract attention than he would in the elevator. I explained this to the others, but Worth had attacked a rack of old truck piled in the corner of the roof-house, and paid little attention to me, while Miss Wallace nodded with her provoking smile and said,

"Once—yes; no doubt you are exactly right. I wasn't looking for a way that a man might take once, under pressure of great necessity."

"Why not?" I countered. "If Clayte got away by this means yesterday—that'll do me."

"It might," she nodded, "if you could see it as a fact, without seeing a lot more. Such a man as Clayte was—a really wonderful man, you know—" the dimples were deep in the pink of her cheeks as she flashed a laughing look at me with this clawful—"a really wonderful man like Clayte," she repeated, "wouldn't have trusted to a route he hadn't known and proved for a long time."

"That's theory," I smiled. "I take my hat off to you, Miss Wallace, when it comes to observing and deducing, but I'm afraid your theorizing is weak."

"I never theorize," she reminded me. "All I deal with is facts."

She had perched herself on an overturned box, and was watching Worth sort junk. I leaned against the roof-house, pushed Kite's donated cigar unlighted into a corner of my mouth and stared at her.

"Miss Wallace," I said sharply, "what's this Steve Skeels stuff? What's this reroofing stuff? What's the dope you think you have, and you think I haven't? Tell us, and we'll not waste time. Tell us, and we'll get ahead on this case. Worth, let that rubbish alone. Nothing there for us. Come here and listen."

For all answer he straightened up, looked at us without a word—and went to it again. I turned to the girl.

"Worth doesn't need to listen to me, Mr. Boyne," she said serenely. "He already has full faith in me and my methods."

"Methods be—be blowed!" I exploded. "It's results that count, and you've produced. I'm willing to hand it to you. All we know now, we got from you. Beside you I'm a thick-headed blunderer. Let me in on how you get things and I won't be so hard to convince."

"Indeed, you aren't a blunderer," she said warmly. "You do a lot better than most people at observing." (High praise that, for a detective more than twenty years in the business; but she meant to be complimentary.) "I'm glad to tell you my processes. How much time do you want to give to it?"

"Not a minute longer than will get what you know." And she began with a rush.

"Those dents in the coping at the St. Dunstan, above Clayte's window—I asked the clerk there how long since the building had been reroofed, because there were nicks made by that hook and half filled with tar that had been slushed up against the coping and into the lowest dents. You see what that means?"

"That Clayte—or some accomplice of his—had been using the route more than four years ago. Yes."

"And the other scars were made at varying times, showing me that coming over here from there was quite a regular thing."

"At that rate he would have nicked the coping until it would have looked like a huck towel," I objected.

"A huck towel," she gravely adopted my word. "But he was a man that did everything he did several different ways. That was his habit—a sort of disguise. That's why he was shadowy and hard to describe. Sometimes he came up to the St. Dunstan roof just as we did; and once, a good while ago, there were cleats on that wall there so he could climb down here without the rope. They have been taken away some time, and the places where they were are weathered over so you would hardly notice them."

"Right you are," I said feelingly. "I'd hardly notice them. If I could notice things as you do—fame and fortune for me!" I thought the matter over for a minute. "That lodger on the top floor, Steve Skeels," I debated. "A poor bet. Yet—after all, he might have been a member of the gang, though somehow I don't get the hunch—"

"What sort of looking person was this man Skeels?" she asked.

"Quiet fellow. Dressed like a church deacon. 'Silent Steve' they call him. I'll send for him down stairs and let you give him the once-over if you like."

"Oh, that's not the kind of man I'm looking for." She shook her head. "My man would be more like those down there in the easy chairs—so he wasn't noticed in the elevator or when he passed out through the office."

"Wasn't it cute of him?" I grinned. "But you see we've just heard that he didn't take the elevator and go through the office—Saturday anyhow, which is the only time that really counts for us, the time when he carried that suitcase with a fortune in it."

"But he did," she persisted. "He went that way. He walked out the front door and carried away the suitcase—"

"He didn't!" Worth shouted, and began throwing things behind him like a terrier in a wood-rat's burrow.

Derelict stuff of all sorts; empty boxes, pasteboard cartons, part of an old trunk, he hurtled them into a heap, and dragged out a square something in a gunny sack. As he jerked to clear it from the sacking, I glanced at little Miss Wallace. She wasn't getting any pleasureable kick out of the situation. Her eyes seemed to go wider open with a sort of horror, her face paled as she drooped in on herself, sitting there on the box. Then Worth held up his find in triumph, assuming a famous attitude.

"The world is mine!" he cried.

"Maybe 'tis, maybe 'tisn't," I said as I ran across to look at the thing close. Sure enough, he'd dug up a respectable brown, sole leather suitcase with brass trimmings such as a bank clerk might have carried, suspiciously much too good to have been thrown out here. Could it be that the thieves had indeed met in one of the Gold Nugget's rooms or in the roof-house up here, made their divvy, split the swag, and thus clumsily disposed of the container? At the moment, Worth tore buckles and latches free, yanked the thing open, reversed it in air—and out fell a coiled rope that curved itself like a snake—a three-headed snake; the triple grappling iron at its end standing up as though to hiss.

We all stood staring; I was too stunned to be triumphant. What a pat confirmation of Miss Wallace's deductions! I turned to congratulate her and at the same instant Worth cried,

"What's the matter, Bobs?" for the girl was sitting, staring dejectedly, her chin cupped in her palms, her lips quivering. Nonplussed, I stooped over the suitcase and rope, coiling up the one, putting it in the other—this first bit of tangible, palpable evidence we'd lighted on.

"Let's get out of this," I said quickly. "We've done all we can here—and good and plenty it is, too."

Worth took the suitcase out of my hands and carried it, so that I had to help Miss Wallace down the ladder. She still looked as though she'd lost her last friend. I couldn't make her out. Never a word from her while we were getting down, or while they waited and I shouted for Louie. It was in the elevator, with the porter looking at everything on earth but this suitcase we hadn't brought in and we were taking out, that she said, hardly above her breath,

"Shall you ask at the desk if this ever belonged to any one in the house?"

"Find out here—right now," and I turned to the man in overalls with, "How about it?"

"Not that your answer will make any difference," Worth cut in joyously. "Nobody need get the idea that they can take this suitcase away from me—'cause they can't. It's mine. I paid eight hundred thousand dollars for this box; and I've got a use for it." He chuckled. Louie regarded him with uncomprehending toleration—queer doings were the order of the day at the Gold Nugget—and allowed negligently.

"You'll get to keep it. It don't belong here." Then, as a coin changed hands, "Thank you."

"But didn't it ever belong here?" our girl persisted forlornly, and when Louie failed her, jingling Worth's tip