“How much you got?”
“Oh — you think it will be a case of getting the limit, do you?”
“No, sir. You wanted to know how much they’d ask, not how much they’ll get. If you want to know how much they’ll get, I’d say nothing.”
“Your plan, then, is to dicker with them, and trap them?”
“No, beat whoever it is to it.”
“You mean recover the body?”
“Something like that, sir.”
“Then you have discovered something? Captain Brady has spoken very highly of your abilities.”
Riordan shook his head. “Mr. Keefe, I haven’t found out a thing new on this case, not since it was first put in my hands. The only new thing was this advertisement, and one of the Chronicle men brought that to us.”
“But you speak confidently, sergeant,” Riordan crossed to his desk, opened it, swung his chair around and sat down.
“You in a hurry to get this... this body, Mr. Keefe?” he asked.
“I desire very much to have the matter cleared up, sergeant. As Mr. Staples’s attorneys, and probable executors of his estate, there are a great many things that should be settled. Recovering his body would make it unnecessary to have the courts declare him legally dead, as now would be necessary.”
Riordan pursed his lips, and, shooting a lightning glance at Captain Brady, said:
“Then all your interest in the matter is to wind up his estate, is it?”
“That is our main interest, if you want to put it bluntly, sergeant. Of course, personally I regret Mr. Staples’s untimely end, and all that, and as a citizen I should like to see his slayers captured and punished. But as things now are, we are constantly being embarrassed by matters which we cannot settle.”
“Somebody trying to get a share of the estate?”
“No, sergeant, not that. But Mr. Staples has given several institutions to understand that at his death they would benefit, in one way or another. Now that he is dead, they want the benefits. The State Botanical Society, for example, had been promised his greenhouses and residence property — it is so provided in his will — and they want to know when they’re going to get it.”
“These people ever pay very much attention to Staples where he was alive? Bother him any about it?”
Keefe looked surprised at the question, but he answered promptly enough.
“No, sergeant, they didn’t. In fact, Mr. Staples had often remarked to me that it was very plainly evident that his various intended beneficiaries thought more of what they were going to get than they appeared to think of the donor.”
“Touchy on it, was he, sir? Wanted to make more of a stir in the world, did he?”
The attorney nodded his head. “Yes, sergeant, I think you have stated the case, in your way. Mr. Staples was a peculiar man. You and I know, and the captain here, of course, that he was really a very wonderful man in many ways, and that his collection of orchids is probably among the finest and most complete in the world. He was an authority upon them. But not very many people are interested in orchids.
“If I may say it, Mr. Staples desired a certain amount of adulation which he never received. Men did not appreciate them. Women might have, but he believed all women shallow, and did not want their praises or attention. In fact I think he took himself rather too seriously. While he was a great man in his own line, his line did not interest the world at large; and, curiously enough, he craved notoriety.”
“Well, I’ll say he’s getting it now.”
Keefe smiled wryly. “Is he, sergeant? Or isn’t it that it is chiefly the mystery of the crime that is creating the sensation and keeping the public interested. I have read the headlines very carefully, and I have not seen Mr. Staples’s name mentioned very prominently. They have proclaimed: ‘Millionaire Butchered,’ ‘Rich Man’s Death Mystery,’ ‘Police Find Hidden Murder Den,’ ‘Hunt Man with Hob-Nailed Boots.’ things like that. But nothing about Mr. Staples himself. Only incidentally is it mentioned in the various articles that he was a noted authority on and collector of orchids.”
Riordan slowly nodded his head. “That’s true,” he said, “I’m glad you mentioned it, called my attention to it. Well, Mr. Keefe, if I were you, I wouldn’t answer that advertisement at all, nor any others that may appear.”
“You wouldn’t answer them?”
“I wouldn’t pay the slightest attention to any of them. Not just yet, anyway. And I’d suggest that you tell the reporters that your firm doesn’t intend to pay any attention to them.”
“Ah, strategy! I see, sergeant. Well, I will take your advice.”
“That’s right,” spoke up Captain Brady. “You take his advice. He knows what he’s doing.”
Mr. Keefe rose to go, but paused near the door.
“You’re looking for the typewriter on which that was written,” he said, pointing to the original of the advertisement. “I’ve been told that typewriters could be traced by peculiarities—”
“Yes, we’re looking for it, sir,” interrupted Riordan. “It may take some time to find it, though.”
Mr. Keefe departed, and Brady turned to his aid.
V
“What’d you do?” Brady asked.
“Looked over Mallory then went down and had a look at that room over Pier B. Then I went home and visited mother, and told her all about my hunting trip, and that your wife would probably invite her over to-morrow night to help eat venison.”
Captain Brady considered this, but before he made any reply the doorman entered.
“Please, captain,” he said, “Halloran’s back with a messenger kid, and Sergeant Roberts, of the uniformed force, has a drunk he wants you to look at.”
“Shove ’em all in here.”
Halloran and a messenger boy entered first. He pushed the lad forward. “Tell the captain here, son, what you told me,” he said.
“Well, sir,” spoke up the boy, proud of being thus thrust into the glory of a stellar rôle, “a countrylike lookin’ feller come up to me on First Street just after noon and asked me would I run an errand for him. I says, ‘No, not for you, but for two bits I will.’ He don’t get me, and I repeats the crack. Then he laughs, pulls out an envelope and a dollar bill, an’ says for to take them to the Chronicle office. Then he gives me two bits and hurries away.”
The door opened again, and Sergeant Roberts entered with an active case of intoxication.
“Sufferin’ cats!” exclaimed the messenger boy. “That’s him now. Only he wasn’t lit up like that when he give me the message. If he had ’a’ been I’d ’a’ hit him for a dollar, an’ I betcha I’d ’a’ got it.”
“Take that kid out of here, get his statement and his pedigree, and turn him loose again,” said Brady. Then he turned and slowly eyed the drunk, who was twisting from side to side in Sergeant Roberts’s grip.
“I got this bird as he reeled out of a blind pig down on lower Center Street, cap’n,” the uniformed officer said. “Goin’ good, he was. I called the wagon, and as I threw him in I happened to look at his boots. So I come in with him. Take a look at ’em, cap’n.”
Brady reached forward and jerked one of the prisoner’s feet toward him, and the man promptly flopped on his back, muttering protestations. Brady reached again and got the other foot. Both were incased in practically new hob-nailed boots. The captain reached back to his desk with one hand and dragged forward a bit of tracing paper, which he slapped against one sole and then against the other. Then he dropped both the feet to the floor, exclaiming:
“The same boot, by gad! Fits the marks.”
He turned to Riordan elatedly. “Boy, we got him,” he exclaimed. “And just by luck!”