“They both came back with nothing. There hadn’t even been a ship come in for a week from the tropics, where orchids grow. That was all we turned up Tuesday, except that I had the report posted, and as they did the same thing downstairs, it meant that every man, in uniform and out, was supposed to have his eyes and ears open.
“Wednesday the boys did just as well. Nobody got anything, not even a smell. Wednesday was a hard day for me, there was more small stuff coming in than usual, and so I let it go at that. Thursday morning, however, I decided I’d go out to Staples’s place myself and have a. look around. That was when I began to wish you were here, boy.
“You know Staples’s place, out on Glenn Avenue? It’s more like a park than a private place; beautiful grounds, all kinds of trees and things, and three big greenhouses, just filled with orchids. Private heating plant, private water system, and a great big house with everything in it a man could want, except a wife and children. Staples’s wife has been dead a long time, and his two boys have grown up and married and gone to New York.
“Well, I went all over the place, looked in the cisterns, under the plant racks, in the storerooms, all over the house. Nothing out of the way and no sign of Staples. The help didn’t know anything. Said the old man hadn’t seemed excited or morbid or in any way different. No trace of a woman or a love affair. No enemies that anybody knew about. Nothing. And so at last I got down to Staples’s study.
“I’d been over that before, of course, but I went back there with the secretary, and we began to go through his papers. Nothing there. I was sitting at the old man’s desk, thinking and trying to dope out some kind of a lead, when my eye fell on his desk calendar.
“It was one of these things with a leaf for each day, on a little metal stand. The leaf on top was Saturday, the fifth. I looked round the room. There was a day calendar on the wall in front of his desk, and that was turned up to Thursday, the tenth.
“Then there was another calendar, with dates for a whole week showing, and that was set for the week of Sunday, the sixth. But the day calendar was still at the fifth. I picked it up and looked at it, and written on the bottom of the sheet was just a line in lead pencil. It said: ‘Pier B, Ocean Terminal.’
“I showed it to Mallory, the secretary. He said it was the old man’s writing, but he didn’t know what it was about. I asked him who looked after the office, and he said he did. I flicked the other sheets of the day calendar over, and there was nothing written on them. ‘How come.’ I said to him, ‘that you’ve brought these other two calendars up to date, but you left this one set for last Saturday?’
“He said he hadn’t noticed it till I called his attention to it, that he’d overlooked it. Laughed and said he had a bit of a head when he came to work Monday, and in his hurry to fix things up for the old man he’d evidently overlooked it, and that later, when he found out Staples hadn’t been home, he had other things to worry about.
“ ‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘But you’ve changed that wall calendar since. Stop worrying, did you?’
“He saw what I was driving at, and flushed. Then he said the old man was fussy about his desk, and he never bothered with it much, except to straighten it up, pile the papers neatly, and so on. Well, I put him through rough then. But I couldn’t get anything out of him except that it was the old man’s writing on that desk calendar, and he didn’t know what it was. Not a thing else. So I told him to come with me, and we’d go down to the Ocean Terminal and see what we could find out.
II
“We went down there and Summerfield, the manager, took hold. He knew old Staples, but hadn’t seen him for a couple of months. He didn’t know anything about any orchids. I told him we were particularly interested in Pier B, and asked him if there was anything about that. He began to look sort of funny, and then he told us to follow him. We went out through the terminals and down to Pier B, way down at the end of the place. It hadn’t been used, hardly, since the war, and was dirty and dusty and full of rats. Halfway down the pier he took us up a stairway to the clearstory, in which there’d been built a lot of storage rooms. About two weeks ago, he said, a man who looked like he might be a Spaniard had come to him and wanted to rent a storage room about ten by ten, in a high and dry place that wouldn’t likely be disturbed for a year. Said he had a lot of dried onions and wanted to put them away till the market got stronger. He looked over the place and finally leased a loft over Pier B. Paid the charges on it for a year, and said he wanted to cover the inside of it with sheet tin, so as to keep the moisture out.
“That was all right with Summerfield, and the next day or so he came down and nailed tin all over the inside of the place. Summerfield himself didn’t recall any dried onions coming in, but he hadn’t been particularly interested, seeing he had his money in advance. Well, he took us up to the storeroom.
“It was padlocked on the outside. I’d begun to get pretty curious by that time, for the dried onions stuff didn’t sound good. I figured it was bootleg. Summerfield looked sheepish, and said he guessed it was, too. So we decided to have a look. We got a bar and pried off the staples that held the lock, and opened the door.
“Boy, you ought to have been there. The room had one window, opening on the water side, the lower side of the pier, away from the rest of the terminal. The window wasn’t there, no sash or frame even. And the room was absolutely bare, no dried onions, no tin, nothing. Summerfield said we must have got into the wrong place.
“We both looked around, and then we began to see things. There were marks on the walls where nails had been pulled out, and they ran in lines up and down and across. You could see where the sheets of tin had been tacked on.
“Looking closer we found marks where something like a flat chisel, about an inch and a half wide, had been used to pry the tin loose with.
“Apparently the whole place had been tinned — all over the floor and up on the walls to a height of about four feet. And evidently the tin had been pried off and the window casing along with it, and probably the whole thing thrown out in the river.
“It was so funny it was interesting. I went over the walls again, and on one of them there was a streak of dark red dots, like somebody had taken a brush and given it a shake and the drops of whatever were on it had flown off. I told Summerfield to go down to his office and telephone the river patrol to come down with their launch, that I’d wait. While he was gone I scraped off some of the wood with the red dots on it and put the shavings in an envelope. The secretary guy said he guessed he’d better be going, that there wasn’t much use of his waiting, and I slapped my cuffs on him and told him to sit down and be a good dog. He didn’t put up any holler at all, just squatted down on the floor and watched me.
“While I was waiting I went all over the walls of that room, and three or four places there were red dots or splotches. I marked ’em all with rings with my lead pencil.
“Pretty soon the launch came along, and I told the boys to tie up to the pier below and throw their grappling irons out and see what they could find. It wasn’t more than the second or third haul they made before the irons brought up a mess of tin, all crumpled up, and with nails sticking in the edges.
“Summerfield, who’d come back, said it was the tin that this Spaniard party had nailed on the walls. I told the boys in the river patrol to drag around by the terminal till they were sure there wasn’t anything else on the bottom of the slip there but water, and then report to me.