He handed me a sheet of white paper upon which the following had been typewritten:
L. F. G.—
I want what is mine. 6,000 miles and 21 years are not enough to hide you from the victim of your treachery. I mean to have what you stole.
“L. F. G. could be Leopold F. Gantvoort,” I said. “And E. B. could be Emil Bonfils. Twenty-one years is the time from 1902 to 1923, and 6,000 miles is, roughly, the distance between Paris and San Francisco.”
I laid the letter down and picked up the jewel case. It was a black imitation leather one, lined with white satin, and unmarked in any way.
Then I examined the cartridges. There were two of them, S. W. 45-caliber, and deep crosses had been cut in their soft noses — an old trick that makes the bullet spread out like a saucer when it hits.
“These in the car, too?”
“Yep — and this.”
From a vest pocket O’Gar produced a short tuft of blond hair — hairs between an inch and two inches in length. They had been cut off, not pulled out by the roots.
“Any more?”
There seemed to be an endless stream of things.
He picked up the new wallet from the desk — the one that both Whipple and Charles Gantvoort had said did not belong to the dead man — and slid it over to me.
“That was found in the road, three or four feet from the car.”
It was of a cheap quality, and had neither manufacturer’s name nor owner’s initials on it. In it were two ten-dollar bills, three small newspaper clippings, and a typewritten list of six names and addresses, headed by Gantvoort’s.
The three clippings were apparently from the Personal columns of three different newspapers — the type wasn’t the same — and they read:
GEORGE—
Everything is fixed. Don’t wait too long.
R. H. T.—
They do not answer.
CAPPY.—
Twelve on the dot and look sharp.
The names and addresses on the typewritten list, under Ganvoort’s, were:
Quincy Heathcote, 1223 S. Jason Street, Denver; B. D. Thornton, 96 Hughes Circle, Dallas; Luther G. Randall, 615 Columbia Street, Portsmouth; J. H. Boyd Willis, 4544 Harvard Street, Boston; Hannah Hindmarsh, 218 E. 79th Street, Cleveland.
“What else?” I asked when I had studied these.
The detective-sergeant’s supply hadn’t been exhausted yet.
“The dead man’s collar buttons — both front and back — had been taken out, though his collar and tie were still in place. And his left shoe was gone. We hunted high and low all around, but didn’t find either shoe or collar buttons.”
“Is that all?”
I was prepared for anything now.
“What the hell do you want?” he growled. “Ain’t that enough?”
“How about fingerprints?”
“Nothing stirring! All we found belonged to the dead man.”
“How about the machine he was found in?”
“A coupe belonging to a Doctor Wallace Girargo. He phoned in at six this evening that it had been stolen from near the corner of McAllister and Polk Streets. We’re checking up on him — but I think he’s all right.”
The things that Whipple and Charles Gantvoort had identified as belonging to the dead man told us nothing. We went over them carefully, but to no advantage. The memoranda book contained many entries, but they all seemed totally foreign to the murder. The letters were quite as irrelevant.
The serial number of the typewriter with which the murder had been committed had been removed, we found — apparently filed out of the frame.
“Well, what do you think?” O’Gar asked when we had given up our examination of our clews and sat back burning tobacco.
“I think we want to find Monsieur Emil Bonfils.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to do that,” he grunted. “I guess our best bet is to get in touch with these five people on the list with Gantvoort’s name. Suppose that’s a murder list? That this Bonfils is out to get all of them?”
“Maybe. We’ll get hold of them anyway. Maybe we’ll find that some of them have already been killed. But whether they have been killed or are to be killed or not, it’s a cinch they have some connection with this affair. I’ll get off a batch of telegrams to the Agency’s branches, having the names on the list taken care of. I’ll try to have the three clippings traced, too.”
O’Gar looked at his watch and yawned.
“It’s after four. What say we knock off and get some sleep? I’ll leave word for the department’s expert to compare the typewriter with that letter signed E. B. and with that list to see if they were written on it. I guess they were, but we’ll make sure. I’ll have the park searched all around where we found Gantvoort as soon as it gets light enough to see, and maybe the missing shoe and the collar buttons will be found. And I’ll have a couple of the boys out calling on all the typewriter shops in the city to see if they can get a line on this one.”
I stopped at the nearest telegraph office and got off a wad of messages. Then I went home to dream of nothing even remotely connected with crime or the detecting business.
III
“A sleek kitten that dame!”
At eleven o’clock that same morning, when, brisk and fresh with five hours’ sleep under my belt, I arrived at the police detective bureau, I found O’Gar slumped down at his desk, staring dazedly at a black shoe, half a dozen collar buttons, a rusty flat key, and a rumpled newspaper — all lined up before him.
“What’s all this? Souvenir of your wedding?”
“Might as well be.” His voice was heavy with disgust. “Listen to this: one of the porters of the Seamen’s National Bank found a package in the vestibule when he started cleaning up this morning. It was this shoe — Gantvoort’s missing one — wrapped in this sheet of a five-day-old Philadelphia Record, and with these collar buttons and this old key in it. The heel of the shoe, you’ll notice, has been pried off, and is still missing. Whipple identifies it all right, as well as two of the collar buttons, but he never saw the key before. These other four collar buttons are new, and common gold-rolled ones. The key don’t look like it had had much use for a long time. What do you make of all that?”
I couldn’t make anything out of it.
“How did the porter happen to turn the stuff in?”
“Oh, the whole story was in the morning papers — all about the missing shoe and collar buttons and all.”
“What did you learn about the typewriter?” I asked.
“The letter and the list were written with it, right enough; but we haven’t been able to find where it came from yet. We checked up the doc who owns the coupe, and he’s in the clear. We accounted for all his time last night. Lagerquist, the grocer who found Gantvoort, seems to be all right, too. What did you do?”
“Haven’t had any answers to the wires I sent last night. I dropped in at the Agency on my way down this morning, and got four operatives out covering the hotels and looking up all the people named Bonfils they can find — there are two or three families by that name listed in the directory. Also I sent our New York branch a wire to have the steamship records searched to see if an Emil Bonfils had arrived recently; and I put a cable through to our Paris correspondent to see what he could dig up over there.”
“I guess we ought to see Gantvoort’s lawyer — Abernathy — and that Dexter woman before we do anything else,” the detective-sergeant said.