No.
“From an Army post?”
No.
He scratched his head. “Where else could he get hold of things like that? From some friend, somebody he knew?”
Yes.
“That doesn’t help much. Who is he? Where’d he get them from?”
She stared intently at the morning sun, blinked twice, then her eyes sought his. Then she did it again. Then a third time.
“I don’t get you. The sun? He got them from the sun?”
This time she looked slightly lower than the sun, midway between it and the horizon. “The East?” he caught on.
Yes.
“But we’re in the East already. Oh— Europe?”
Yes.
“Wait a minute, I know what you mean now. He swiped them from someone who brought them back from there.”
Yes.
“That does it!” he cried elatedly. “Now I know how I’ll find out who he is! Through the Customs office. He had to declare those things, especially if he brought in several with him at once. They’ll be down on his Customs declaration. Now I see too why I haven’t been able to find any traces of them in ash heaps or refuse dumps. He must be holding them intact somewhere, waiting his chance to return them if he hasn’t already. He’ll try to get them back unnoticed to where he got them from. That would be the smartest thing he could do. At last I think we’ve got a lead, Mrs. Miller — if only it isn’t too late!”
The telephone rang out shrilly in the almost total darkness of the room. Casement pushed back his cuff, glanced at the radium dial of his wrist watch. A quarter to twelve. He didn’t move, just let it go ahead ringing until it had stopped again of its own accord. He had an idea who it was — trying to find out for sure if there was anyone in this particular house or not. He guessed that if he answered it he wouldn’t hear anything — just a click at the other end, and his scheme would have been a failure.
“Not taking any chances, is he?” he grunted to himself. “Even though by now he must have gotten that post card in Hamilton’s handwriting I had routed through Boston.”
He was longing for a smoke, but he knew better than to indulge in one. The slightest little thing, such as a lighted cigarette glimpsed through the dark windows of this supposedly untenanted house could ruin the whole carefully prepared setup. He’d worked too hard and patiently to have that happen now.
He looked at his watch again presently. A quarter after now; half an hour had gone by.
“Due any minute now,” he murmured.
Within the next thirty seconds the soft purr of a car running in low sounded from outside. It slowed a little as it came opposite the house, but neither veered in nor stopped. Instead, it went on past toward the next corner, like a ghost under the pale streetlights. He smiled grimly as he recognized it. It would go around the block, reconnoitering, then come by a second time and stop. Its occupant was taking every possible precaution but the right one — staying away from here altogether.
The showdown was at hand. Casement finally left the big wing chair he’d sat in ever since dusk, felt for the gun on his hip and moved noiselessly out into the hall. He went back behind the stairs, where there was a door leading into a small storeroom built into the staircase structure itself.
He disappeared in there just as the whirr of wheels approached outside once more, from the same direction as before. This time they stopped. There was a brief wait, then the muffled sound of a car door clicking open. Then a furtive footfall from the porch. A key turned in the lock.
Casement nodded to himself at the sound. “Swiped Hamilton’s key, evidently. Took a wax impression for a duplicate, and then got it back to him somehow. That’s how he got them out of here in the first place.”
The door opened and a little gray light from the street filtered into the inky front hall. Through a hairline door-crack at the back of the stairs Casement could make out a looming silhouette standing there, listening. It was empty-handed, but that was all right. He was just taking every precaution.
The silhouette widened the door-opening. Then it bent down, scanning the three-days’ accumulation of dummy mail Casement had carefully planted just inside the door, under Hamilton’s letter slot. There was also a quart bottle of milk that he’d bought at a dairy standing outside. The inked-in figure straightened, turned around, and descended from the porch again, leaving the door open the way it was. Casement wasn’t worried, didn’t stir.
There was another wait. Again the porch creaked. The silhouette was back again, this time with a square object like a small-sized suitcase in one hand. The door closed after it and everything became dark again.
Cautious footfalls came along the carpeted hall toward the staircase. They didn’t go up it but came on toward the back. He was feeling his way, smart enough not to put on the lights or even use a pocket torch or match in the supposedly untenanted house.
The storeroom door under the stairs that Casement had gone through opened softly. Still nothing happened. There was the sound of something being set down on the floor. Then of two small suitcase latches clicking open one after the other. Then a great rattling of paper being undone, followed by something scratchy being lifted out of the paper.
There were hooks along the wall in there, with various seldom-used things hanging from them. Golf bags, cased tennis rackets — and gas masks that Hamilton had brought back from Europe as souvenirs.
An arm groped upward along the wall, feeling for a vacant hook. Casement had left two conveniently unburdened for just this situation.
The other found it, by sense of touch alone. The arm dipped down again toward the floor, came up with something in it that rustled — and then suddenly there was a sharp metallic click in the stillness of the enclosed little space.
There was a gasp of abysmal terror, something dropped with a thud to the floor, and a light bulb went on overhead, lit up the place wanly.
Haggard and Casement were standing there face to face, across an upended trunk belonging to the house’s owner. Haggard was on the outside of it, the detective on the inside, but they were already linked inextricably across the top of it by a manacle whose steel jaws must have been waiting there in the dark the whole time for Haggard to reach toward that empty hook, like bait in a trap.
An olive-drab gas mask lay at Haggard’s feet. A second one still nestled in the small suitcase by the storeroom door, waiting to be transferred.
“Pretty,” was all Casement said. “It’s taken a long time and a lot of work, but it was worth it!” He glanced down at the torn half of a cardboard tag still attached to the handle of the suitcase. “So that’s where you had them hidden all the time I was looking for them. Checked in a parcel room somewhere under a phony name, waiting for Hamilton to be away and the coast clear so you could smuggle them back in again unseen. Not a bad idea — if it had only worked.”
The sky was blue, the sun was bright, and Janet Miller sat there in her chair on the front porch. She looked at the man and the woman standing before her, each handcuffed to a detective, and the flame within her blazed heavenward, triumphant.
“Take a look at this woman, whose son you murdered,” Casement said grimly. “Face those eyes if you can — and deny it.”
They couldn’t. Haggard’s head fell before her gaze. Vera averted hers. They shifted weight uncomfortably.
“You’ll see her again. She’ll be the principal witness against you — along with Hamilton and his two gas masks. Take them away, boys.” He turned her chair around so she could watch them go.
“I guess you wonder how I knew just which night he’d show up there at Hamilton’s house,” he said to her. “I made sure it’d be last night. I went to Hamilton, told him the whole story, and he agreed to help me. He went to Boston, mailed Haggard a postcard from there day before yesterday. He said he was staying until today. That made last night the only night Haggard would supposedly have had a chance to get those masks back in the house undetected. I faked some mail and filled the letter box with it, and stood a bottle of milk at the door. He fell for it.”