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

I growled, and got the flicker of a smile from her eye.

"What about those library books he carried in the suitcase?" Worth came in with an echo from the bank meeting.

"Some more bunk," I said morosely. "So far we've not been able to locate him as a patron of any public or private library, and the hotel clerk's sure his mail never contained a correspondence course—in fact, neither here nor at the bank can any one remember his getting any mail. If he ever carried books in that suitcase as Knapp believed, it was several years back."

"Several years back," Miss Wallace repeated low.

"Myself, I've given up the idea of his studying. This crime doesn't look to me like any sudden temptation of a model bank clerk, spending his spare hours over correspondence courses. I rather expect to find him just plain crook."

"Oh, no," the girl objected. "It's too big and too well done to have been planned by a dull, commonplace crook."

"Right you are," I agreed, with restored good humor. "A keen brain planned this, but not Clayte's. There had to be an instrument—and that was Clayte—also, likely, one or more to help in the getaway."

The getaway! That brought us back with a thump to the present moment. Our pretty girl had been all over the shop now, glanced into bathroom, closet and cupboard, noted abandoned hats, clothing and shoes, the electric plate where Clayte got his breakfast coffee and toast, asked without much interest where he ate his other meals, and nodded agreeingly when she found that he'd been only an occasional customer at the neighboring restaurants, never regular, apparently eating here and there down-town. She seemed to get something out of that; what I didn't know.

"You speak of this crime not being committed on impulse," she turned to me at length. "How long ahead should you say he planned it?"

"Or had it planned and prepared for him," I reminded her.

"Well, that, then," she conceded with slight impatience. "How long do you think it might have been planned or prepared for? Years?"

"Hardly that. Not more than a year probably. A gang like this wouldn't hold together on a proposition for many months."

The black brows over those clear, childlike eyes, puckered a bit. I saw she wasn't at all satisfied with what I had said.

"Made all the observations you want to, Bobs?" Worth asked.

"All here. I want to see the roof." She gave us rather a mechanical smile as she silently ticked her points off on her fingers, appealing to me with, "I'm depending upon you for such facts as I have been unable to observe for myself, so if you give me wrong facts—make mistakes—I'll make mistakes in deduction."

There was such confidence in her deductive abilities that a tinge of irony crept into my tones as I replied,

"I'll be very careful what opinions I hold."

"I don't mind the opinions," this astounding young woman took me up gaily. "I never have any of my own, so I don't pay attention to anybody else's. But do be careful of your facts!"

"I'll try to," was all I said. Worth cut in with,

"Do you consider the roof another fact, Bobs?"

"I hope to find facts there," she answered promptly.

"Remember," I said, "your theory means another man up there, and you haven't yet—"

"Please, Mr. Boyne, don't take two and two and make five of them at this stage of the game," she checked me hastily, and I left them together while I made a hurried survey of the hall ceilings, looking for the scuttle. There was no hatchway in view, so I started down to the clerk to make inquiry. As I passed Clayte's open door, Miss Wallace seemed to be adjusting her turban before the dresser mirror, while Worth waited impatiently.

"Just a minute," I called. "I'll be right back," and I ducked into the elevator.

CHAPTER VI ON THE ROOF

When I returned with a key and the information that the way to the roof ran through the janitor's tool-room at the far end of the hall, I found my young people already out there. Worth was trying the tool-room door.

"Got the key?" he called. "It's locked."

"Yes." I took my time fitting and turning it. "How did you know this was the room?"

"I didn't," briefly. "Bobs walked out here, and I followed her. She said we'd want into this one."

She'd guessed right again! I wheeled on her, ejaculating,

"For the love of Mike! Tell a mere man how you deduced this stairway. Feminine intuition, I suppose."

I hadn't meant to be offensive with that last, but her firm little chin was in the air as she countered,

"Is it a stairway? It might be a ladder, you know."

It was a ladder, an iron ladder, as I found when I ushered them in. My eyes snapped inquiry at her.

"Very simple," she said. Worth was pushing aside pails and boxes to make a better way for her to the ladder's foot. "There wouldn't be a roof scuttle in the rented rooms, so I knew when you called in to tell us there was none in the halls."

"I didn't. I said nothing of the sort." Where was the girl's fine memory that she couldn't recollect a man's words for the little time I'd been gone! "All I said was, 'Just a minute and I'll be back.'"

"Yes, that's all you said to Worth." She glanced at the boy serenely as he waited for her at the ladder's foot. "He's not a trained observer; he doesn't deduce even from what he does observe." There were twinkling lights in her black eyes. "But what your hurried trip to the office said to me was that you'd gone for the key of the room that led to the roof scuttle."

Well, that was reasonable—simple enough, too; but,

"This room? How did you find it?"

She stepped to the open door and placed the tip of a gloved finger on the nickeled naught that marked the panels.

"The significant zero again, Mr. Boyne," she laughed. "Here it means the room is not a tenanted one, and is therefore the way to the roof. Shall we go there?"

"Well, young lady," I said as I led her along the trail Worth had cleared, "it must be almost as bad to see everything that way—in minute detail—as to be blind."

"Carry on!" Worth called from the top of the ladder, reaching down to aid the girl. She laughed back at me as she started the short climb.

"Not at all bad! You others seem to me only half awake to what is about you—only half living," and she placed her hand in the strong one held down to her. As Worth passed her through the scuttle to the roof, I saw her glance carelessly at the hooks and staples, the clumsy but adequate arrangement for locking the hatch, and, following her, gave them more careful attention, wondering what she had seen—plenty that I did not, no doubt. They had no tale to tell my eyes.

Once outside, she stopped a minute with Worth to adjust herself to the sharp wind which swept across from the north. Here was a rectangular space surrounded by walls which ran around its four sides to form the coping, unbroken in any spot; a gravel-and-tar roof, almost flat, with the scuttle and a few small, dust covered skylights its only openings, four chimney-tops its sole projections. It was bare of any hiding-place, almost as clear as a tennis court.

We made a solemn tour of inspection; I wasn't greatly interested—how could I be, knowing that between this roof and my fugitive there had been locked windows, and a locked door under reliable human eyes? Still, the lifelong training of the detective kept me estimating the possibilities of a getaway from the roof—if Clayte could have reached it. Worth crossed to where the St. Dunstan fire escape came up from the ground to end below us at a top floor window. I joined him, explaining as we looked down,

"Couldn't have made it that way; not by daylight. In open view all around."

"Think he stayed up here till dark?" Worth suggested, quite as though the possibility of Clayte's coming here at all was settled.

"My men were all over this building—roof to cellar—within the hour. They'd not have overlooked a crack big enough for him to hide in. Put yourself in Clayte's place. Time was the most valuable thing in the world with him right then. If ever he got up to this roof, he'd not waste a minute longer on it than he had to."

"Let's see what's beyond, then," and Worth led the way to the farther end.

The girl didn't come with us. Having been once around the roof coping, looking, it seemed to me, as much at the view as anything else, she now seemed content to settle herself on a little square of planking, a disused scuttle top or something of the sort, in against one of the chimneys where she was sheltered from the wind. Rather to my surprise, I saw her thoughtfully pulling off her gloves, removing her turban, all the time with a curiously disinterested air. I was reminded of what Worth had said the night before about the way her father trained her. Probably she regarded the facts I'd furnished her, or that she'd picked up for herself, much as she used to the problems in concentration her father spread in the high chair tray of her infancy. I turned and left her with them, for Worth was calling me to announce a fact I already knew, that the adjoining building had a roof some fifteen feet below where we stood, and that the man, admitting good gymnastic ability, might have reached it.

"Sure," I said. "But come on. We're wasting time here."

We turned to go, and then stopped, both of us checked instantly by what we saw. The girl was sitting in a strange pose, her feet drawn in to cross beneath her body, slender hands at the length of the arms meeting with interlaced finger-tips before her, the thumbs just touching; shoulders back, chin up, eyes—big enough at any time, now dilated to look twice their size—velvet circles in a white face. Like a Buddha; I'd seen her sit so, years before, an undersized girl doing stunts for her father in a public hall; and even then she'd been in a way impressive. But now, in the fullness of young beauty, her fine head relieved against the empty blue of the sky, the free winds whipping loose flying ends of her dark hair, she held the eye like a miracle.

Sitting here so immovably, she looked to me as though life had slid away from her for the moment, the mechanical action of lungs and heart temporarily suspended, so that mind might work unhindered in that beautiful shell. No, I was wrong. She was breathing; her bosom rose and fell in slow but deep, placid inhalations and exhalations. And the pale face might be from the slower heart-beat, or only because the surface blood had receded to give more of strength to the brain.

The position of head of a Bankers' Security Agency carries with it a certain amount of dignity—a dignity which, since Richardson's death, I have maintained better than I have handled other requirements of the business he left with me. I stood now feeling like a fool. I'd grown gray in the work, and here in my prosperous middle life, a boy's whim and a girl's pretty face had put me in the position of consulting a clairvoyant. Worse, for this was a wild-cat affair, without even the professional standing of establishments to which I knew some of the weak brothers in my line sometimes sneaked for ghostly counsel. If it should leak out, I was done for.

I suppose I sort of groaned, for I felt