The Million-Dollar Suitcase - Alice MacGowan (guided reading books TXT) 📗

My hand was already fumbling in my pocket for the description of Clayte. The girl looked as though she wasn't going to answer him; she moved to shove back her chair. Worth's only recognition of her attitude was to put out a hand quietly, touch her arm, not once looking at her, and say in a lowered tone,

"Steady, Bobs." And then, "Did you say one lump or two?"

"None." Her voice was scarcely audible, but I saw she was going to stay; that Worth was to have his way, to get from her the opinion he wanted—whatever that might amount to. And I passed the paper to him, suggesting,

"Let her read it. This is too public a place to be declaiming a thing of the sort."

She hesitated a minute then gave it such a mere flirt of a glance that I hardly thought she'd seen what it was, before she raised inquiring eyes to mine and asked coldly,

"Why shouldn't that be read—shouted every ten minutes by the traffic officer at Market and Kearny? They'd only think he was paging every other man in the Palace Hotel."

I leaned back and chuckled. After a bare glance, this sharp witted girl had hit on exactly what I'd thought of the Clayte description.

"Is that all? May I go now, Worth?" she said, still with that dashed, disappointed look from one of us to the other. "If you'll just put me on a Haight Street car—I won't wait for—" And now she made a definite movement to rise; but again Worth held her by the mere touch of his fingers on her sleeve.

"Wait, Bobs," he said. "There's more."

"More?" Her eyes on Worth's face talked louder than her tongue, but that also gained fluency as he looked back at her and nodded. "Stunts!" she repeated his word bitterly. "I didn't expect you to come back asking me to do stunts. I hated it all so—working out things like a calculating machine!" Her voice sank to a vehement undertone. "Nobody thinking of me as human, with human feelings. I have never—done—one stunt—since my father died."

She didn't weaken. She sat there and looked Worth squarely in the eye, yet there was a kind of big gentleness in her refusal, a freedom from petty resentment, that had in it not so much a girl's hurt vanity as the outspoken complaint of a really grieved heart.

"But, Bobs," Worth smiled at her trouble, about the same careless, good-natured smile he had given little Pete when he flipped him the quarter, "suppose you could possibly save me a hundred thousand dollars a minute?"

"Then it's not just a stunt?" She settled slowly back in her chair.

"Certainly not," I said. "This is business—with me, anyhow. Miss Wallace, why do you think a description like that could be shouted on the street without any one being the wiser?"

"Was it supposed to be a description?" she asked, raising her brows a bit.

"The best we could get from sixteen or eighteen people, most of whom have known the man a long time; some of them for eight years."

"And no one—not one of all these people could differentiate him?"

"I've done my best at questioning them."

She gave me one straight, level look, and I wondered a little at the way those velvety black eyes could saw into a fellow. But she put no query, and I had the cheap satisfaction of knowing that she was convinced I'd overlooked no details in the quiz that went to make up that description. Then she turned to Worth.

"You said I might save you a lot of money. Has the man you're trying here to describe anything to do with money—in large amounts—financial affairs of importance?"

Again the little girl had unconsciously scored with me. To imagine a rabbit like Clayte, alone, swinging such an enormous job was ridiculous. From the first, my mind had been reaching after the others—the big-brained criminals, the planners whose instrument he was. She evidently saw this, but Worth answered her.

"He's quite a financier, Bobs. He walked off with nearly a million cash to-day."

"From you?" with a quick breath.

"I'm the main loser if he gets away with it."

"Tell me about it."

And Worth gave her a concise account of the theft and his own share in the affair. She listened eagerly now, those innocent great eyes growing big with the interest of it. With her there was no blind stumbling over Worth's motive in buying a suitcase sight unseen. I had guessed, but she understood completely and unquestioningly. When he had finished, she said solemnly,

"You know, don't you, that, if you've got your facts right—if these things you've told me are square, even cubes of fact—they prove Clayte among the wonderful men of the world?"

Worth's big brown paw went out and covered her little hand that lay on the table's edge.

"Now we're getting somewhere," he encouraged her. As for me, I merely snorted.

"Wonderful man, my eye! He's got a wonderful gang behind him."

"Oh, you should have told me that you know there is a gang, Mr. Boyne," she said simply. "Of course, then, the result is different."

"Well," I hedged, "there's a gang all right. But suppose there wasn't, how would you find any wonderfulness in a creature as near nothing as this Clayte?"

She sat and thought for a moment, drawing imaginary lines on the table top, finally looking up at me with a narrowing of the lids, a tightening of the lips, which gave an extraordinary look of power to her young feminine face.

"In that case, Clayte would inevitably be one of the wonderful men of the world," she repeated her characterization with the placid, soft obstinacy of falling, snow. "Didn't you stop a minute—one little minute, Mr. Boyne—to think it wonderful that a man so devoid of personality as that—" she slanted a slim finger across the description of Clayte—"Didn't you add up in your mind all that you told me about the men disagreeing as to which side he parted his hair on, whether he wore tan shoes or black, a fedora or derby, smoked or didn't,—absolutely nothing left as to peculiarities of face, figure, movement, expression, manner or habit to catch the eye of one single observer among the sixteen or eighteen you questioned—surely you added that up, Mr. Boyne? What result did you get?"

"Nothing," I admitted. "To hear you repeat it, of course it sounds as if the man was a freak. But he wasn't. He was just one of those fellows that are born utterly commonplace, and slide through life without getting any marks put on 'em."

"And is it nothing that this man became a teller in a bank without infringing at all on the circle of his nothingness? Remained so shadowy that neither the president nor cashier can, after eight years' association, tell the color of his hair and eyes? Then add the fact that he is the one clerk in the bank without a filed photograph and description on record with your agency—what result now, Mr. Boyne?"

"A coincidence," I said, rather hastily.

"Don't, please, Mr. Boyne!" her eyes glowed softly as she smiled her mild sarcasm. "Admit that he has ceased to be a freak and becomes a marvel."

"As you put it—" I began, but she cut in on me with,

"I haven't put it yet. Listen." She was smiling still, but it was plain she was thoroughly in earnest. "When this cipher—this nought—this zero—manages to annex to himself a million dollars that doesn't belong to him, his nothingness gains a specific meaning. The zero is an important factor in mathematics. I think we have placed a digit before the long string of ciphers of Clayte's nothingness."

"Nothing and nothing—make nothing." I spoke more brusquely because I was irritated by her logic. "You called the turn when you spoke of him as a zero. There are digits to be added, but they're the gang that planned and helped—and used zero Clayte as their tool. You're talking of those digits, not Clayte."

"I believe Bobs'll find them for you, Jerry—if you'll let her," said Worth.

"Oh, I'll let anybody do anything"—a bit nettled. "I'm ready to have our friend Clayte take his place, with the pyramids and the hanging gardens of Babylon, among the earth's wonders; but you've got to show me."

"All right." Worth gave the girl a look that brought something of that wonderful rose flush fluttering back into her cheeks. "I'm betting on her. Go to it, Bobsie—let him in on your mathematical logic."

"You used the word 'coincidence,' Mr. Boyne." She leaned across toward me, eyes bright, little finger tip marking her points. "Allow one coincidence—that the only description, the only photograph missing from your files are those of the self-effacing Clayte. To-day Clayte has proved to be a thief—"

"In seven figures," Worth threw in, and she smiled at him.

"You would call that another coincidence, Mr. Boyne?"

I nodded, rather unable at the moment to think of a better word to use.

"Two coincidences," she went on,—"we are still in mathematics—you can't add. They run by geometrical progression into the impossible."

The phone rang. While I turned to answer it, my mind was still hunting a comeback to this. The call was from Foster, just in from Ocean View and reporting for instructions. Covering the transmitter with my hand, I told Worth the situation and asked,

"Any suggestions?"

"Not I," he shook his head. I added, a bit sarcastically,

"Or you, Miss Wallace?"

"Yes," she surprised me. "Have your man Foster find three women who have seen Edward Clayte; get from them the color of his hair and eyes; tell him to have them be exact about it."

"Fine! But you know they'll not agree, any more than the other people agreed."

"Oh, yes they will," she laughed at me a little. "Don't you notice that a girl always says a blue-eyed man or a brown-eyed man? That's what she sees when she first meets him, and it sticks in her mind. Girls and women sort out people by types; small differences in color mean something to them."

I didn't keep Foster waiting any longer.

"Hello," I spoke quickly into the transmitter. "Get busy and dig out any women clerks of the bank, stenographers, scrub-women there, or whatever, and ask them particularly as to the exact shade of Clayte's hair and eyes. Get Mrs. Griggsby again at the St. Dunstan. I want at least three women who can give these points exactly. Exactly, understand?"

He did, and I thanked Miss Wallace for her suggestion.

"Now that," I said, "is what I want; a good, practical idea—"

"And it won't be a bit of use in the world to you," she laughed across the table into my eyes. "Why, Mr. Boyne, you've found out already that there are too many Edward Claytes, speaking in physical terms, for you to run one down by description. There are three of him here, within sight of our table right now—and the place isn't crowded."

I grinned in half grudging agreement, and found nothing to say. It was Worth who spoke.

"Like to have you go a step further in this, if you would," and when she shook her head, he went on a bit sharply. "See here, Bobs; you and I used to be pals, didn't we?" She nodded, her look brightening. "Well then, here's the biggest game I've been up against since I crawled out of the trenches and shucked my uniform. I come to you and give you the high-sign—and you throw me down. You don't want to play with me—is that it?"

"Oh, Worth! I do. I do want to play with you," she was almost in tears now. "But you see, I didn't quite understand. I felt as though you were sort of putting me through my paces."

"Sure not," Worth drove it at her like a turbulent urchin. "I'm having the time of my young life with this thing, and I want to