McKnight pointed silently to a large copper ashtray, filled with ashes and charred bits of paper.
“The notes, probably,” he said ruefully. “He got them after all, and burned them before her. It was more than she could stand. Stabbed him first and then herself.”
Hotchkiss got up and took off his hat. “They are dead,” he announced solemnly, and took his notebook out of his hatband.
McKnight and I did the only thing we could think of - drove Hotchkiss and the dog out of the room, and closed and locked the door. “It’s a matter for the police,” McKnight asserted. “I suppose you’ve got an officer tied to you somewhere, Lawrence? You usually have.”
We left Hotchkiss in charge and went down-stairs. It was McKnight who first saw Johnson, leaning against a park railing across the street, and called him over. We told him in a few words what we had found, and he grinned at me cheerfully.
“After while, in a few weeks or months, Mr. Blakeley,” he said, “when you get tired of monkeying around with the blood-stain and finger-print specialist upstairs, you come to me. I’ve had that fellow you want under surveillance for ten days!”
CHAPTER XXX
FINER DETAILS
At ten minutes before two the following day, Monday, I arrived at my office. I had spent the morning putting my affairs in shape, and in a trip to the stable. The afternoon would see me either a free man or a prisoner for an indefinite length of time, and, in spite of Johnson’s promise to produce Sullivan, I was more prepared for the latter than the former.
Blobs was watching for me outside the door, and it was clear that he was in a state of excitement bordering on delirium. He did nothing, however, save to tip me a wink that meant “As man to man, I’m for you.” I was too much engrossed either to reprove him or return the courtesy, but I heard him follow me down the hall to the small room where we keep outgrown lawbooks, typewriter supplies and, incidentally, our wraps. I was wondering vaguely if I would ever hang my hat on its nail again, when the door closed behind me. It shut firmly, without any particular amount of sound, and I was left in the dark. I groped my way to it, irritably, to find it locked on the outside. I shook it frantically, and was rewarded by a sibilant whisper through the keyhole.
“Keep quiet,” Blobs was saying huskily. “You’re in deadly peril. The police are waiting in your office, three of ‘em. I’m goin’ to lock the whole bunch in and throw the key out of the window.”
“Come back here, you imp of Satan!” I called furiously, but I could hear him speeding down the corridor, and the slam of the outer office door by which he always announced his presence. And so I stood there in that ridiculous cupboard, hot with the heat of a steaming September day, musty with the smell of old leather bindings, littered with broken overshoes and handleless umbrellas. I was apoplectic with rage one minute, and choked with laughter the next. It seemed an hour before Blobs came back.
He came without haste, strutting with new dignity, and paused outside my prison door.
“Well, I guess that will hold them for a while,” he remarked comfortably, and proceeded to turn the key. “I’ve got ‘em fastened up like sardines in a can!” he explained, working with the lock. “Gee whiz! you’d ought to hear ‘em!” When he got his breath after the shaking I gave him, he began to splutter. “How’d I know?” he demanded sulkily. “You nearly broke your neck gettin’ away the other time. And I haven’t got the old key. It’s lost.”
“Where’s it lost?” I demanded, with another gesture toward his coat collar.
“Down the elevator shaft.” There was a gleam of indignant satisfaction through his tears of rage and humiliation.
And so, while he hunted the key in the debris at the bottom of the shaft, I quieted his prisoners with the assurance that the lock had slipped, and that they would be free as lords as soon as we could find the janitor with a pass-key. Stuart went down finally and discovered Blobs, with the key in his pocket, telling the engineer how he had tried to save me from arrest and failed. When Stuart came up he was almost cheerful, but Blobs did not appear again that day.
Simultaneous with the finding of the key came Hotchkiss, and we went in together. I shook hands with two men who, with Hotchkiss, made a not very animated group. The taller one, an oldish man, lean and hard, announced his errand at once.
“A Pittsburg warrant?” I inquired, unlocking my cigar drawer.
“Yes. Allegheny County has assumed jurisdiction, the exact locality where the crime was committed being in doubt.” He seemed to be the spokesman. The other, shorter and rotund, kept an amiable silence. “We hope you will see the wisdom of waiving extradition,” he went on. “It will save time.”
“I’ll come, of course,” I agreed. “The sooner the better. But I want you to give me an hour here, gentlemen. I think we can interest you. Have a cigar?”
The lean man took a cigar; the rotund man took three, putting two in his pocket.
“How about the catch of that door?” he inquired jovially. “Any danger of it going off again?” Really, considering the circumstances, they were remarkably cheerful. Hotchkiss, however, was not. He paced the floor uneasily, his hands under his coat-tails. The arrival of McKnight created a diversion; he carried a long package and a corkscrew, and shook hands with the police and opened the bottle with a single gesture.
“I always want something to cheer on these occasions,” he said. “Where’s the water, Blakeley? Everybody ready?” Then in French he toasted the two detectives.
“To your eternal discomfiture,” he said, bowing ceremoniously. “May you go home and never come back! If you take Monsieur Blakeley with you, I hope you choke.”
The lean man nodded gravely. “Prosit,” he said. But the fat one leaned back and laughed consumedly.
Hotchkiss finished a mental synopsis of his position, and put down his glass. “Gentlemen,” he said pompously, “within five minutes the man you want will be here, a murderer caught in a net of evidence so fine that a mosquito could not get through.”
The detectives glanced at each other solemnly. Had they not in their possession a sealskin bag containing a wallet and a bit of gold chain, which, by putting the crime on me, would leave a gap big enough for Sullivan himself
