“Yes, so far as I know.”
“Did he ever say anything to you about his life being threatened?”
“No.”
She shook her head decisively.
“Do you know Emil Bonfils?”
“No.”
“Ever hear Mr. Gantvoort speak of him?”
“No.”
“At what hotel is your brother staying in New York?”
The restless black pupils spread out abruptly, as if they were about to overflow into the white areas of her eyes. That was the first clear indication of fear I had seen. But, outside of those telltale pupils, her composure was undisturbed.
“I don’t know.”
“When did he leave San Francisco?”
“Thursday—four days ago.”
O’Gar and I walked six or seven blocks in thoughtful silence after we left Creda Dexter’s apartment, and then he spoke.
“A sleek kitten—that dame! Rub her the right way, and she’ll purr pretty. Rub her the wrong way—and look out for the claws!”
“What did that flash of her eyes when I asked about her brother tell you?” I asked.
“Something—but I don’t know what! It wouldn’t hurt to look him up and see if he’s really in New York. If he is there today it’s a cinch he wasn’t here last night—even the mail planes take twenty-six or twenty-eight hours for the trip.”
“We’ll do that,” I agreed. “It looks like this Creda Dexter wasn’t any too sure that her brother wasn’t in on the killing. And there’s nothing to show that Bonfils didn’t have help. I can’t figure Creda being in on the murder, though. She knew the new will hadn’t been signed. There’d be no sense in her working herself out of that three-quarters of a million berries.”
We sent a lengthy telegram to the Continental’s New York branch, and then dropped in at the agency to see if any replies had come to the wires I had got off the night before.
They had.
None of the people whose names appeared on the typewritten list with Gantvoort’s had been found; not the least trace had been found of any of them. Two of the addresses given were altogether wrong. There were no houses with those numbers on those streets—and there never had been.
IV
“Maybe That Ain’t So Foolish!”
What was left of the afternoon, O’Gar and I spent going over the street between Gantvoort’s house on Russian Hill and the building in which the Dexters lived. We questioned everyone we could find—man, woman and child—who lived, worked, or played along any of the three routes the dead man could have taken.
We found nobody who had heard the shot that had been fired by Bonfils on the night before the murder. We found nobody who had seen anything suspicious on the night of the murder. Nobody who remembered having seen him picked up in a coupe.
Then we called at Gantvoort’s house and questioned Charles Gantvoort again, his wife, and all the servants—and we learned nothing. So far as they knew, nothing belonging to the dead man was missing—nothing small enough to be concealed in the heel of a shoe.
The shoes he had worn the night he was killed were one of three pairs made in New York for him two months before. He could have removed the heel of the left one, hollowed it out sufficiently to hide a small object in it, and then nailed it on again; though Whipple insisted that he would have noticed the effects of any tampering with the shoe unless it had been done by an expert repairman.
This field exhausted, we returned to the agency. A telegram had just come from the New York branch, saying that none of the steamship companies’ records showed the arrival of an Emil Bonfils from either England, France, or Germany within the past six months.
The operatives who had been searching the city for Bonfils had all come in empty-handed. They had found and investigated eleven persons named Bonfils in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and Alameda. Their investigations had definitely cleared all eleven. None of these Bonfilses knew an Emil Bonfils. Combing the hotels had yielded nothing.
O’Gar and I went to dinner together—a quiet, grouchy sort of meal during which we didn’t speak six words apiece—and then came back to the agency to find that another wire had come in from New York.
Madden Dexter arrived McAlpin Hotel this morning with Power of Attorney to sell Gantvoort interest in B.F. and F. Iron Corporation. Denies knowledge of Emil Bonfils or of murder. Expects to finish business and leave for San Francisco tomorrow.
I let the sheet of paper upon which I had decoded the telegram slide out of my fingers, and we sat listlessly facing each other across my desk, looking vacantly each at the other, listening to the clatter of charwomen’s buckets in the corridor.
“It’s a funny one,” O’Gar said softly to himself at last.
I nodded. It was.
“We got nine clues,” he spoke again presently, “and none of them have got us a damned thing.
“Number one: the dead man called up you people and told you that he had been threatened and shot at by an Emil Bonfils that he’d had a run-in with in Paris a long time ago.
“Number two: the typewriter he was killed with and that the letter and list were written on. We’re still trying to trace it, but with no breaks so far. What the hell kind of a weapon was that, anyway? It looks like this fellow Bonfils got hot and hit Gantvoort with the first thing he put his hand on. But what was the typewriter doing in a stolen car? And why were the numbers filed off it?”
I shook my head to signify that I couldn’t guess the answer, and O’Gar went on enumerating our clues.
“Number three: the threatening letter, fitting in with what Gantvoort had said over the phone that afternoon.
“Number four: those two bullets with the crosses in their snoots.
“Number five: the jewel case.
“Number six: that bunch of yellow hair.
“Number seven: the fact that the dead man’s shoe and collar buttons were carried away.
“Number eight: the wallet, with two ten-dollar bills, three clippings, and
