“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 passkey. 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 coattails. 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 to crawl through?
“Why don’t you say your little speech before Johnson brings the other man, Lawrence?” McKnight inquired. “They won’t believe you, but it will help them to understand what is coming.”
“You understand, of course,” the lean man put in gravely, “that what you say may be used against you.”
“I’ll take the risk,” I answered impatiently.
It took some time to tell the story of my worse than useless trip to Pittsburg, and its sequel. They listened gravely, without interruption.
“Mr. Hotchkiss here,” I finished, “believes that the man Sullivan, whom we are momentarily expecting, committed the crime. Mr. McKnight is inclined to implicate Mrs. Conway, who stabbed Bronson and then herself last night. As for myself, I am open to conviction.”
“I hope not,” said the stout detective quizzically. And then Alison was announced. My impulse to go out and meet her was forestalled by the detectives, who rose when I did. McKnight, therefore, brought her in, and I met her at the door.
“I have put you to a great deal of trouble,” I said contritely, when I saw her glance around the room. “I wish I had not—”
“It is only right that I should come,” she replied, looking up at me. “I am the unconscious cause of most of it, I am afraid. Mrs. Dallas is going to wait in the outer office.”
I presented Hotchkiss and the two detectives, who eyed her with interest. In her poise, her beauty,
