The sheriff strode toward Minetta. “Have you any proof of it?”
“I don’t need proof. I know she killed him!”
“We want proof,” the sheriff said gruffly. “Did you see her go into the room where he died? Did you see her come out?”
“No,” Minetta said thinly. “But she did it. She did it to get his money, so she could run off with this man — this Cheseldine.”
“That’s a lie,” Cheseldine said.
The sheriff made an impatient gesture with his hand. “Now look here, folks. I won’t have arguments or wrangling. We’re gathered together here to find out who killed Benjamin Africa. One of you did it. If anybody knows anything about it, speak up — or I’ll have the whole kit and kaboodle of you taken down to jail.”
He turned almost savagely on the Eurasian girl. “What have you got to say for yourself?” he boomed.
“Take it easy,” Flash said.
The sheriff sent him a hot blue glance. “My boy, this is no time to take it easy. There’s been a murder committed. And I’m going to find out who did it. I asked you a question, Mrs. Africa. What have you to say for yourself?”
“I know nothing about it.”
“Oh, you don’t, eh?”
“No.” she said softly. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
“Where were you when it happened?”
“I have been in my room all evening except twice,” the girl answered in her musical, slurring voice. “Once I came to the foot of the stairs to speak to Mr. Horton when he came in. The second time I came when I heard all the noise — and found that my husband had been killed.”
“So that’s your story, is it?” Sheriff Hegg snapped.
“It is the truth.”
The sheriff came a little closer to her, thrusting out his red, wet underlip. In a menacingly low voice, he said, “Got anybody who can prove what you’re saying?”
“I was alone in my room all the time.”
The sheriff took a backward step. He plunged his hand into his coat pocket, but did not at once withdraw it.
“Mrs. Africa,” he said, “let me see one of your hairpins.”
Her large, dark eyes gazed at him, as if with bewilderment.
“My hairpins?” she whispered.
“Yes! A hairpin! One of the gadgets you hold your hair up with. Pull one of them out.”
The girl raised her slim white hands to her head. She took out a hairpin, and her blue-black hair came tumbling down about her shoulders, gleaming and glowing in the candlelight. It was lustrous, long, beautiful hair.
She held out in her hand a hairpin fashioned from some dark wood, the two tines joined by a golden mounting in which a little triangular fragment of jade was set.
The sheriff looked at it with an inverted smile. And Flash realized with finality that the mills of the gods were preparing to grind the Eurasian girl very fine indeed. He was watching her.
Not a vestige of her calm had deserted her. She was as poised, as imperturbable as ever. Or so she seemed to any searching eye. But it chanced that the elbow of the arm she was extending toward the sheriff was lightly touching Flash’s elbow. He was aware of the faintest of vibrations. The girl was shivering. And he knew that, despite her look of calm, she was terrified.
Convinced of her innocence, he suddenly felt coldly furious. He knew that the cards were being stacked against this girl. She, too, was aware of it. And she was like a bewildered and terrified young animal. It was as if these faces about her represented a circle of doom which was closing in on her, from which there was no escape.
Sheriff Hegg looked at the hairpin in her hand and said, “Is this the kind of hairpin you always use?”
She slightly inclined her head.
“Never use any other kind?” he asked, almost triumphantly.
“No.”
“Where do you get these hairpins?” he asked, his intention obviously being to prolong her agony and his own moment of triumph.
“They were given to me by a mandarin in Hongkong when I was a little girl.”
“You mean, they’re rare?”
“Yes.”
“Ever give any of them away?”
“No.”
Flash glanced at Minetta Africa, and he wondered how much she knew of where this was leading, for she was looking at the Eurasian girl with cold hatred, with a kind of awful greed.
The sheriff removed his hand from his pocket.
“This yours?” he softly asked, and produced the hairpin Flash had found.
The girl looked at it and nodded her lovely head.
“Where did you find it?” she asked.
“Where it dropped out of your hair,” Sheriff Hegg said triumphantly. “On the body of Benjamin Africa, after you killed him!”
Chapter X
The Net of Suspicion
Miss Minetta uttered a thin, harsh exclamation of satisfaction. Flash glanced quickly about the room. Wayne Cheseldine was staring at the girl from his puffed purple eyes. Harry Muroc was looking up from his chair with a sardonic twinkle at the corner of his mouth. At the end of the room the servants were staring with large eyes. Flash noticed particularly the colored woman, presumably the cook. Her bulging eyes showed grotesque areas of white.
The young widow of Benjamin Africa was slowly shaking her head.
“That could not be,” she said. “I did not kill him.”
“Just a moment,” Flash said, and forced his voice to be judicially calm. “You’re wrong, Sheriff. Your assumption is wrong. I’m absolutely convinced this girl is innocent.”
“Yeah? Then explain this hairpin!”
“She dropped it when she came into the study and bent down to look at her dead husband. I was there. She was horrified. She gave a little scream and sprang up. It dropped then.”
The sheriff said peevishly, “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“We weren’t discussing the hairpin before.”
The sheriff looked at him. He did not say that Flash’s preposterous lie was a preposterous lie, but his eyes said that. He must have realized that Flash was determined to protect Lotus Africa. For Flash was determined to protect Lotus Africa. Flash was sure that the person who had killed her husband had placed that hairpin under his collar deliberately to attach suspicion to her. He was more than ever certain that she had not killed her husband.
“That,” the sheriff growled, “puts us just where we were before. Dan, you can help us. You’re Mr. Africa’s lawyer. Who stood to gain the most by his death?”
Reluctantly, Flash admitted, “Mrs. Africa.”
Minetta sharply spoke. “That isn’t true. His will leaves everything he owns, half to her and half to me!”
“No,” Flash said quietly. “It did, previous to about a month ago. He had me change it. The new will leaves two-thirds to Mrs. Africa and one-third to you, after a bequest for one hundred and fifty thousand is paid to Miss Hopper here, and some small bequests to servants.”
The old maid uttered a gasp of angry surprise.
“Wait a minute!” the sheriff snapped. “Mrs. Africa, did you know about that change?”
The beautiful girl in red nodded. “Yes. My husband told me.”
“So that you knew that if he died, if you killed him and weren’t caught, you would receive two-thirds of his estate!”
Flash said curtly, “Don’t phrase it like that. You have absolutely no proof that this girl killed him. Why not get on with your questioning of these other people?”
Wayne Cheseldine said, “Two people here certainly had a good enough motive for killing him — Miss Hopper and Miss Minetta!”
The sheriff wheeled on him. “Sure! And now that he’s dead, what are you and Mrs. Africa planning to do?”
The man from Hongkong answered stiffly, “I am going away.”