maid who opened the door told me
Mr. Gungen was at home. She led me upstairs.
Rose Rubury was coming down the stairs. She stopped on the landing to let us pass. I halted in front of her while my guide went on toward the library.
“You’re done, Rose,” I told the girl on the landing. “I’ll give you ten minutes to clear out. No word to anybody. If you don’t like that—you’ll get a chance to see if you like the inside of the can.”
“Well—the idea!”
“The racket’s flopped.” I put a hand into a pocket and showed her one wad of the money I had got at the Mars Hotel. “I’ve just come from visiting Coughing Ben and Bunky.”
That impressed her. She turned and scurried up the stairs.
Bruno Gungen came to the library door, searching for me. He looked curiously from the girl—now running up the steps to the third story—to me. A question was twisting the little man’s lips, but I headed it off with a statement:
“It’s done.”
“Bravo!” he exclaimed as we went into the library. “You hear that, my darling? It is done!”
His darling, sitting by the table, where she had sat the other night, smiled with no expression in her doll’s face, and murmured, “Oh, yes,” with no expression in her words.
I went to the table and emptied my pockets of money.
“Nineteen thousand, one hundred and twenty-six dollars and seventy cents, including the stamps,” I announced. “The other eight hundred and seventy-three dollars and thirty cents is gone.”
“Ah!” Bruno Gungen stroked his spade-shaped black beard with a trembling pink hand and pried into my face with hard bright eyes. “And where did you find it? By all means sit down and tell us the tale. We are famished with eagerness for it, eh, my love?”
His love yawned, “Oh, yes!”
“There isn’t much story,” I said. “To recover the money I had to make a bargain, promising silence. Main was robbed Sunday afternoon. But it happens that we couldn’t convict the robbers if we had them. The only person who could identify them—won’t.”
“But who killed Jeffrey?” The little man was pawing my chest with both pink hands. “Who killed him that night?”
“Suicide. Despair at being robbed under circumstances he couldn’t explain.”
“Preposterous!” My client didn’t like the suicide.
“Mrs. Main was awakened by the shot. Suicide would have canceled his insurance—would have left her penniless. She threw the gun and wallet out the window, hid the note he left, and framed the robber story.”
“But the handkerchief!” Gungen screamed. He was all worked up.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I assured him solemnly, “except that Main—you said he was promiscuous—had probably been fooling with your wife’s maid, and that she—like a lot of maids—helped herself to your wife’s belongings.”
He puffed up his rouged cheeks, and stamped his feet, fairly dancing. His indignation was as funny as the statement that caused it.
“We shall see!” He spun on his heel and ran out of the room, repeating over and over, “We shall see!”
Enid Gungen held a hand out to me. Her doll face was all curves and dimples.
“I thank you,” she whispered.
“I don’t know what for,” I growled, not taking the hand. “I’ve got it jumbled so anything like proof is out of the question. But he can’t help knowing—didn’t I practically tell him?”
“Oh, that!” She put it behind her with a toss of her small head. “I’m quite able to look out for myself so long as he has no definite proof.”
I believed her.
Bruno Gungen came fluttering back into the library, frothing at the mouth, tearing his dyed goatee, raging that Rose Rubury was not to be found in the house.
The next morning Dick Foley told me the maid had joined Weel and Dahl and had left for Portland with them.
This King Business
I
“Yes”—and “No”
The train from Belgrade set me down in Stefania, capital of Muravia, in early afternoon—a rotten afternoon. Cold wind blew cold rain in my face and down my neck as I left the square granite barn of a railroad station to climb into a taxicab.
English meant nothing to the chauffeur, nor French. Good German might have failed. Mine wasn’t good. It was a hodgepodge of grunts and gargles. This chauffeur was the first person who had ever pretended to understand it. I suspected him of guessing, and I expected to be taken to some distant suburban point. Maybe he was a good guesser. Anyhow, he took me to the Hotel of the Republic.
The hotel was a new six-story affair, very proud of its elevators, American plumbing, private baths, and other modern tricks. After I had washed and changed clothes I went down to the café for luncheon. Then, supplied with minute instructions in English, French, and sign-language by a highly uniformed head porter, I turned up my raincoat collar and crossed the muddy plaza to call on Roy Scanlan, United States chargé d’affaires in this youngest and smallest of the Balkan States.
He was a pudgy man of thirty, with smooth hair already far along the gray route, a nervous, flabby face, plump white hands that twitched, and very nice clothes. He shook hands with me, patted me into a chair, barely glanced at my letter of introduction, and stared at my necktie while saying:
“So you’re a private detective from San Francisco?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Lionel Grantham.”
“Surely not!”
“Yes.”
“But he’s—” The diplomat realized he was looking into my eyes, hurriedly switched his gaze to my hair, and forgot what he had started to say.
“But he’s what?” I prodded him.
“Oh!”—with a vague upward motion of head and eyebrows—“not that sort.”
“How long has he been here?” I asked.
“Two months. Possibly three or three and a half or more.”
“You know him well?”
“Oh, no! By sight, of course, and to talk to. He and I are the only Americans here, so we’re fairly well acquainted.”
“Know what he’s doing here?”
“No, I don’t. He just happened to stop here in his travels, I imagine, unless, of course, he’s here for some special reason. No doubt there’s
