This theory left the sudden change in Rathbone’s plans unaccounted for; but it made his return to the office on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh more plausible. He had come back to confer with his partner over that unknown necessity for the change, and they had decided to leave Mrs. Earnshaw out of it. Then they had gone out to Zumwalt’s house. For what? And why had Zumwalt decided not to sell the house? And why had he taken the trouble to give me an explanation? Could they have cached the bonds there?
A look at the house wouldn’t be a bad idea!
I telephoned Bennett, at the Oakland Police Department.
“Do me a favor, Frank? Call Zumwalt on the phone. Tell him you’ve picked up a man who answers Rathbone’s description to a T; and ask him to come over and take a look at him. When he gets there stall him as long as you can — pretending that the man is being fingerprinted and measured, or something like that — and then tell him that you’ve found that the man isn’t Rathbone, and that you are sorry to have brought him over there, and so on. If you only hold him for half or three-quarters of an hour it’ll be enough — it’ll take him more than half an hour traveling each way. Thanks!”
I stopped in at the office, stuck a flashlight in my pocket, and headed for Fourteenth Avenue.
Zumwalt’s house was a two-story, semi-detached one; and the lock on the front door held me up about four minutes. A burglar would have gone through it without checking his stride. This breaking into the house wasn’t exactly according to the rules, but on the other hand, I was legally Zumwalt’s agent until I discontinued work that night — so this crashing in couldn’t be considered illegal.
I started at the top floor and worked down. Bureaus, dressers, tables, desks, chairs, walls, woodwork, pictures, carpets, plumbing — I looked at everything that was thick enough to hold paper. I didn’t take things apart, but it’s surprising how speedily and how thoroughly you can go through a house when you’re in training.
I found nothing in the house itself, so I went down into the cellar.
It was a large cellar and divided in two. The front part was paved with cement, and held a full coal-bin, some furniture, some canned goods, and a lot of odds and ends of housekeeping accessories. The rear division, behind a plaster partition where the steps ran down from the kitchen, was without windows, and illuminated only by one swinging electric light, which I turned on.
A pile of lumber filled half the space; on the other side barrels and boxes were piled up to the ceiling; two sacks of cement lay beside them, and in another corner was a tangle of broken furniture. The floor was of hard dirt.
I turned to the lumber pile first. I wasn’t in love with the job ahead of me — moving the pile away and then back again. But I needn’t have worried.
A board rattled behind me, and I wheeled to see Zumwalt rising from behind a barrel and scowling at me over a black automatic pistol.
“Put your hands up,” he said.
I put them up. I didn’t have a pistol with me, not being in the habit of carrying one except when I thought I was going to need it; but it would have been all the same if I had had a pocket full of them. I don’t mind taking chances, but there’s no chance when you’re looking into the muzzle of a gun that a determined man is holding on you.
So I put my hands up. And one of them brushed against the swinging light globe. I drove my knuckles into it. As the cellar went black I threw myself backward and to one side. Zumwalt’s gun streaked fire.
Nothing happened for a while. I found that I had fallen across the doorway that gave to the stairs and the front cellar. I figured that I couldn’t move without making a noise that would draw lead, so I lay still.
Then began a game that made up in tenseness what it lacked in action.
The part of the cellar where we were was about twenty by twenty feet and blacker than a new shoe. There were two doors. One, on the opposite side, opened into the yard and was, I supposed, locked. I was lying on my back across the other, waiting for a pair of legs to grab. Zumwalt, with a gun out of which only one bullet had been spent, was somewhere in the blackness, and aware, from his silence, that I was still alive.
I figured I had the edge on him. I was closest to the only practicable exit; he didn’t know that I was unarmed; he didn’t know whether I had help close by or not; time was valuable to him, but not necessarily so to me. So I waited.
Time passed. How much I don’t know. Maybe half an hour.
The floor was damp and hard and thoroughly uncomfortable. The electric light had cut my hand when I broke it, and I couldn’t determine how badly I was bleeding. I thought of Tad’s “blind man in a dark room hunting for a black hat that wasn’t there,” and knew how he felt.
A box or barrel fell over with a crash — knocked over by Zumwalt, no doubt, moving out from the hiding-place wherein he had awaited my arrival.
Silence for a while. And then I could hear him moving cautiously off to one side.
Without warning two streaks from his pistol sent bullets into the partition somewhere above my feet. I wasn’t the only one who was feeling the strain.
Silence again, and I found that I was wet and dripping with perspiration.
Then I could hear his breathing, but couldn’t determine whether he was nearer or was breathing more heavily.
A soft, sliding, dragging across the dirt floor! I pictured him crawling awkwardly on his knees and one hand, the other hand holding the pistol out ahead of him — the pistol that would spit fire as soon as its muzzle touched something soft. And I became uneasily aware of my bulk. I am thick through the waist; and there in the dark it seemed to me that my paunch must extend almost to the ceiling — a target that no bullet could miss.
I stretched my hands out toward him and held them there. If they touched him first I’d have a chance.
He was panting harshly now; and I was breathing through a mouth that was stretched as wide as it would go, so that there would be no rasping of the large quantities of air I was taking in and letting out.
Abruptly he came.
Hair brushed the fingers of my left hand. I closed them about it, pulling the head I couldn’t see viciously toward me, driving my right fist beneath it. You may know that I put everything I had in that smack when I tell you that not until later, when I found that one of my cheeks was scorched, did I know that his gun had gone off.
He wiggled, and I hit him again.
Then I was sitting astride him, my flashlight hunting for his pistol. I found it, and yanked him to his feet.
As soon as his head cleared I herded him into the front cellar and got a globe to replace the one I had smashed.
“Now dig it up,” I ordered.
That was a safe way of putting it. I wasn’t sure what I wanted or where it would be, except that his selecting this part of the cellar to wait for me in made it look as if this was the right place.
“You’ll do your own digging!” he growled.
“Maybe,” I said, “but I’m going to do it now, and I haven’t time to tie you up. So if I’ve got to do the digging, I’m going to crown you first, so you’ll sleep peacefully until it’s all over.”
All smeared with blood and dirt and sweat, I must have looked capable of anything, for when I took a step toward him he gave in.
From behind the lumber pile he brought a spade, moved some of the barrels to one side, and started turning up the dirt.
When a hand — a man’s hand — dead-yellow where the damp dirt didn’t stick to it — came into sight I stopped him.