Later, Prye and Sands were to know Sammy quite well, but Sammy never became aware of them.
He shut the door of his elevator, hung up his “Use the Next Elevator Please” sign, reported to Mr. Jones at the desk, and went downstairs to have his lunch.
He was twenty, but he was small, thin, and quick, and he looked younger than his age. His youth and his ready grin earned him more than his share of tips, but a great deal of his money was spent on horses. He knew a lot about horses, so much that he was too subtle in picking his winners and most of them didn’t win.
The members of the hotel staff who saw Sammy on Monday swore to a man that he was exactly the same as he always was, friendly and a little sly. He carried his racing form down to lunch in the basement and read it while he ate.
What the staff didn’t know was that Sammy was not reading very carefully. He was troubled. He had a problem which required advice from someone older and wiser, but he couldn’t ask anyone to help him. He’d already used the fifty dollars.
Besides, Sammy thought, the whole thing sounded make believe. He didn’t want to make a fool of himself and there’d been nothing in the papers about a Miss Stevens dying. Sammy had been very careful on that point.
The whole thing was a joke, Sammy decided. The letter had said it was a joke. When he got back to his elevator he took the letter from his pocket and stared at it without opening it. The very way it had been delivered to him showed it was a joke, Sammy thought.
It had come last Friday. He had been busy all afternoon and at six he went down to his locker to change into his suit. When he took off his uniform he saw that an envelope had fallen part way out of his coat pocket. There was nothing written on the outside and it was sealed.
He knew it wasn’t his; but if it was put in his coat pocket maybe someone meant it for him. How had it gotten there?
Someone must have slipped it into his pocket that afternoon, one of his passengers, any one of them.
Sammy was cautious. He felt the envelope and pressed it and thought of foreign spies and secret plans and designs for bomb sights. What he didn’t think of was that someone was giving him a fifty-dollar bill for making one telephone call.
The bill fluttered to the floor. Sammy made a grab for it and put it in his pocket before anyone could come downstairs and see it. He hadn’t decided to keep it yet, of course, but it sure felt swell in his pocket.
And all he had to do was to call Toronto General Hospital on Saturday at twelve o’clock and tell them that Miss Stevens was an atropine case. It was, the letter said, a joke on Miss Stevens, and if Sammy did his part and kept quiet about it there was more money in it for him. The writer would communicate with him again.
Sammy did his part because Iron Man was bound to come in tomorrow and fifty split across the board meant big money.
At twelve on Saturday Sammy called the hospital, at four Iron Man reached the finishing line some seconds later than usual, and at midnight Duncan Stevens was dead.
When Sammy reached his boarding house at seven o’clock on Monday night he received a telephone call which worried him a great deal. While he was wondering what to do about it, Inspector Sands was flying back from Boston and Dr. Prye was putting mint jelly on a slice of roast lamb.
Tempers had mellowed somewhat in the Shane house. True, there were still two policemen in the place, and considerable noise was issuing from the cellar where boxes and coal and musty trunks were being hauled around. But at least the searching was over on the upper floors.
“It’s a pity,” Mrs. Shane observed, “that they don’t houseclean while they’re at it. We shall have to be upset all over again.”
“I’m afraid that won’t worry the law,” Prye said from the end of the table. “I believe Mr. Revel here could have helped a bit if he’d chosen to do so.”
Revel looked up from his plate and blinked. “What’s that?”
“I was telling Mrs. Shane that you might have helped with the searching.”
“How so?” Revel said lightly.
Dinah said, “If you’re thinking of making George admit something, give it up, Paul. George has perfect control and his tongue is so smooth it’s going to slip down his throat and choke him one of these days.”
Revel grinned at her across the table. “If it does it won’t cut my throat the way yours would, Dinah.”
“What dreadful ideas you young people get!” Aspasia cried. “If Jennifer or I had said such a thing at home we should have been dismissed from the table immediately, shouldn’t we, Jennifer?”
“I shouldn’t have been,” Mrs. Shane said, smiling. “Father was an old fraud and he knew I knew.”
“Your whole generation was a fraud,” Dinah said. “Perfect angels outside and God-knows-what inside. Like children. Children learn hypocrisy easily and early. I remember when I was ten Duncan and I were great pals, but I used to lie awake at nights and plan to murder him.”
“Be frank,” Prye said, “but try not to be foolish, Dinah.”
“Well, I did,” Dinah went on coolly. “He used to tease me about my hair. Once I decided to leave him in the jungle so the ants would eat him, but the jungle was so far away I never got around to it.”
“You always were a little fiend,” Mrs. Shane said mildly. “Of course Duncan was too. I used to think the two of you would be a bad influence on Jane.”
Jane smiled forgivingly, as if admitting that Dinah and Duncan had been a bad influence but that her own nature was too sweet to be affected.
“Duncan,” she said silkily, “turned out very well.”
Dinah raised an eyebrow. “He didn’t hang, if that’s what you mean.”
Jane opened her mouth to reply but Prye got there first. “The three of you went to the same school?” he asked casually.
Dinah nodded. “Touching, isn’t it? I used to live in Boston until romance snatched me away and set me down in Montreal. I don’t have a warm spot in my heart for either place at the moment.”
She’s talking too much today, Prye thought. It isn’t like Dinah. She’s too shrewd to let her tongue run away with her.
He looked at her carefully. Her eyes were unnaturally bright and her hands kept moving nervously, tracing the pattern in the tablecloth and smoothing the collar of her yellow dress. Her eyes caught his in a long stare, then she looked away and he saw the pulse beating in her temple. He counted the beats almost automatically.
Over a hundred, Prye thought. She’s excited about something.
“I feel safer with a policeman in the house,” he said aloud. “It makes a third murder a little more improbable.”
“A third murder!” Aspasia repeated. “Oh, please don’t talk about it.”
“More fraud, you see,” Dinah said. “We’ve had two murders, but we’re not supposed to talk about a third.”
“That isn’t the point at all,” Aspasia replied stiffly. “If we think and talk of evil, the evil is that much closer to us.”
“Bosh,” Dinah said.
Mrs. Shane interrupted tactfully. “It’s odd, but evil is something I always associate with modern things. I never remember that there was any when I was a girl. It’s rather a comforting thought at my age. Yet there were Jack the Ripper and Landru, and of course others. And then there was my grandfather who was caught stealing sheep.”
“I wish,” Nora said gloomily, “that we didn’t have to go into that again. To hear you talk you’d think he won the Nobel prize for stealing sheep.”
Mrs. Shane was aggrieved. “Really, Nora, I’m only trying to make conversation. When I leave the conversation to the rest of you, you merely exchange insults.”
She rang the little bell in front of her plate and Jack son came in.
“Jackson, we’ll have coffee in here tonight. Haven’t those policemen finished yet?”