Sidney Zoom lit his cigarette, regarded the blazing eyes of the woman, and smiled, his frosty smile of cold humor.
“Very well, Mrs. Ames. Now we understand each other perfectly. If you’ll dismiss the charge you made against the girl of theft and embezzlement, I’ll have her come back here to answer the murder charge.”
The laugh which greeted this comment was coarse and mocking.
“Go jump in a lake! The jury might acquit her on the murder charge. Juries have been known to do fool things. But I’ve got her dead to rights on the theft. I’m going to see she has plenty to occupy her mind for a while.”
Sidney Zoom crossed his long legs, and sighed.
“Yes, of course,” he said, “after—”
“After what?”
“After you catch her, of course.”
The woman’s face mottled with dull rage.
“Go ahead and wise crack,” she said. “See what it gets you.”
She reached for the telephone.
“Police headquarters?” asked Sidney Zoom, courteously.
“No,” she snapped. “I’ve no confidence in the police. I have a private agency at work on this, and they’ll pick you up from the time you leave here and tell me where you go and what you do.”
Sidney Zoom arose and bowed.
“I enjoyed the chat, anyway. I suppose you’ll be the heart-broken widow with the red eyes the next time I see you.”
“Don’t be a damned fool,” sneered the woman. “Of course I will.”
And, holding the telephone ready for her call with her right hand, she reached for a small bottle with her left, and drew it under her nose. Almost instantly tears welled into her eyes and trickled slowly down her cheeks. The eyes themselves reddened and the lids became swollen.
Sidney Zoom turned the knob of the door.
“Good day,” he said.
The woman made no answer. She was giving a number to the telephone, a number which was, doubtless, the telephone number of the private detective agency, just as she had threatened.
Sidney Zoom closed the door, paused in the hallway.
A shadowy figure flitted from an adjoining door on noiseless feet. A long, bony finger was pressed crosswise upon thin lips. Gray eyes that set like jewels in a fine network of smile wrinkles, regarded Sidney Zoom with stem speculation. Then the bony finger left the lips, crooked in a gesture of beckoning, and the man led the way down the corridor.
Sidney Zoom followed.
Within a small bedroom on the ground floor, back of the kitchen, the figure once more confronted Sidney Zoom.
“You saw her?” husked a hoarse whisper.
Sidney Zoom laughed.
“You’re Graves, I take it.”
The man nodded, slowly, solemnly.
“She always called me Gravy,” he remarked.
“You mean the girl?”
The nod was quick and eager this time.
“You’re her friend?” asked the butler.
Sidney Zoom smiled. “Right at present I’m an investigator, getting certain facts together.”
The butler’s face twisted into a smile.
“Beg pardon, sir, but I was listening, sir, at the doorway, you know. It’s a prerogative of servants, sir. I heard — and, if you’ll pardon my saying so, sir, I know you’re a friend of the girl.”
And the gray eyes twinkled from their network of radiating wrinkles.
Sidney Zoom answered the smile.
The butler lowered his voice to a mere whisper.
“If they catch her, sir, I’m going to swear that the shot came from the other direction. I know she didn’t fire that shot. Why, she wasn’t the kind. She’s so tender hearted she wouldn’t hurt a fly, sir.”
Sidney Zoom smiled again.
“She didn’t impress me as being particularly soft,” he remarked.
The affirmation of the butler was eager.
“Yes, sir. That’s right, sir. She isn’t, sir. But with those she likes she’s always thinking of anybody but herself. I had to urge her to get the money in the way she did. And yet it was hers, sir. By every right and every justice it was hers!”
The gray eyes were blazing with earnestness now, and an anxious hand groped for the lapel of Sidney Zoom’s coat.
Chapter V
Clews in the Yard
“Of course, sir, you know that I was the one that gave her the idea in the first place. Probably I shouldn’t say so, sir. But I don’t want her to take all the blame. I guess I’m an accessory or something in the eyes of the law; but it was a mistake of the head and not of the heart, sir.
“I tell you what I’m afraid of, sir. I’m afraid that our conversation was overheard, and some one was lying in wait to grab the money from her. Or perhaps, it was that blond adventuress, after all, sir. Miss Eve swears that the shot came from the other side of the room, and it sounded so to me, sir.”
Sidney Zoom let his eyes bore into the gray eyes with their puckered wrinkles radiating from the corners.
“Very well, Graves, could you swear to that?”
“Swear to it, sir! I’ll tell the world, I’ll swear to it. I’d even swear to anything that wasn’t the truth to help the young lady out. And this is the truth, sir. That shot sounded from the back of the room, sir.”
“But the bullet,” said Sidney Zoom, speaking with the finality of a judge pronouncing sentence, “entered Mr. Ames’s chest and came out at his back. Every one agrees that he was running after the masked figure.”
The butler twisted his mouth in a grimace. For several long seconds he seemed lost in thought.
“Do you know, sir, I believe it was some one standing just outside the house, sir, in the yard. That would account for the peculiar sound of the explosion. The window in the south-east corner of the room was open. A man could have fired through that window, and—”
“Show me,” snapped Sidney Zoom, his voice clipping off the words with machine gun precision.
The butler went to the door, opened it, peered cautiously up and down the corridor.
“Come,” he said.
Sidney Zoom followed him to a wider corridor that went past the kitchen, through a door, and walked down a carpeted passageway. A long room opened before him.
“This was where it was done,” whispered the butler.
Sidney Zoom surveyed the room, the safe in one comer, the entrance hall from the outer door, then, after he had given these things a close inspection, followed the direction of the butler’s pointing finger.
He saw a window in an alcove, open.
“It’s nearly always left open, sir.”
Zoom regarded the window, the interior of the room again.
“The body fell here?” he asked.
“Just about, sir.”
“The shot might have come through the window, all right. If the old man had been partially turned it could very readily have come from the window.”
The butler nodded eager acquiescence.
“What I thought, sir, was that perhaps some one standing outside the window might have made a motion, and the old man half turned and caught it square in the chest.”
Zoom pursed his lips.
“Have you looked outside the window?”
“No, sir, I haven’t, sir. Fact of the matter is, I’m mixed up in this too much as it is.”
Zoom strode toward the window.
“Have a care, sir. She’s a devil, that adventuress. If she finds you—”
“Bosh!” snapped Sidney Zoom. “Look here, Graves. Here are foot-prints in the soil out here. Have they been made recently?”
“I couldn’t say, sir. If you would not mind, sir, I’d like to leave the room—”
“Bosh again, Graves. Don’t be so frightened of her. You want to help Miss Eve, don’t you? Very well, then, you’d better stick by me for a little while. How can we get outside from here without using the front door?”