“No, madam. They are still in the cellar.”
“The cellar! Why should they be in the cellar?” Dinah leaned toward Mrs. Shane and said, “Have you forgotten about Dennis, Aunt Jennifer? Dennis was murdered in your cellar.”
If Sammy Twist had heard this he would have stopped pondering over his telephone call and gone to bed behind a locked door. Instead, he sat in the dining room of his boardinghouse with the evening paper spread on the table in front of him.
There was no mention of anything unusual happening at 197 River Road. A Mr. Duncan Stevens of Boston had met an accidental death while visiting in the city, but Stevens was a common name.
One ninety-seven River Road. Sammy knew that was a residential section. Classy, Sammy called it. He knew, too, that classy people often did crazy things just for a laugh, but they didn’t commit crimes. Because if you were classy you didn’t have to—
“Going out, Mr. Twist?” his landlady asked with an indifference that didn’t fool Sammy.
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”
“I just wondered,” the landlady said. “Because if you aren’t going out I thought I’d slip over to the Adelphi and see Myrna Loy and you could watch Roscoe.”
Roscoe was six years old and Sammy did not find him amusing.
“I think I will go out,” Sammy said. “On business.”
“Oh, that telephone call, eh?” she said brightly. “Peculiar voice, wasn’t it? Sort of muffled.”
Muffled, Sammy thought. Sure it was, but it was classy just the same.
“He had a cold,” he said rather stiffly.
“Your boss?”
Sammy rattled the paper and pretended he hadn’t heard her. Until that minute he hadn’t thought how the person had learned his name and his telephone number.
Through Mr. Jones at the desk, Sammy decided. That was simple. You walked up and asked Jones who was the guy operating the second elevator from the left.
At eleven o’clock. Why so late? Sammy wondered.
Well, maybe the guy was going some place before that.
“Will you be late?” the landlady asked.
“Twelve, I guess.”
“I’ll leave the hall light on then,” she said.
He folded the paper. He had a sudden desire to tell her everything, to ask her what he should do, just in case. In case of what? Sammy shook his head angrily.
“Something bothering you, Mr. Twist?”
“Business worries,” Sammy said, scowling.
“Anything I can do?”
Just in case, Sammy thought. “Yes,” he said. “I’m going to tell you an address I want you to remember for me. It’s 197 River Road.”
She wrote it down on the pad beside the telephone.
Inspector Sands had both hands clasped to his stomach. Not that he felt any better that way but he was afraid that if he took them away he would feel worse. He held his stomach and cursed softly and sadly every time the plane hit an air pocket.
He wanted to read over the notes he had taken during the day but his head felt as if it were caught in a revolving door. He leaned back and thought of the three interviews he had had in Boston.
Mr. Pipe, Duncan Stevens’ lawyer, had been cautious. It was not, Sands felt, the caution of a lawyer protecting his client but rather the caution of a man protecting himself.
“Stevens,” Mr. Pipe said, rolling the word on his tongue like a piece of alum, “Stevens. Dead, you say? What a sad thing! It grieves me when I see the young meet an untimely end. It doesn’t seem to matter so much for old codgers like you and me.”
Sands, who was fifty-one, took an instant dislike to Mr. Pipe. “You made his will?”
“He made it,” Mr. Pipe said precisely. “I merely assisted. The will is perfectly simple.”
“In that case you’ll have no difficulty remembering it?” Sands said.
Mr. Pipe smiled sourly. “He leaves everything to his sister Jane. What ‘everything’ means I have no idea.”
“Didn’t you handle his affairs?”
“I did, up to a point,” Mr. Pipe said. “I handled his father’s affairs completely, but young Stevens was a secretive fellow. I know that he keeps an account in the First National.”
“Much money?”
“He had a private fortune to begin with,” Mr. Pipe went on. “A considerable one. But he was extravagant. How much is left I don’t know.”
“Any real estate?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Safe-deposit box?”
“Probably,” Mr. Pipe agreed.
“This brokerage business he started,” Sands said. “As far as you know it was on the level?”
Mr. Pipe pursed his lips and said, “So far as I know, yes. I suspect, however, that he conducted the business merely to amuse himself, as a kind of hobby, you understand. Stevens was like that. He tried a number of things, including a racing stable. He thought he could do anything.”
Mr. Pipe had not been very helpful, but the manager of the First National branch where Stevens banked was almost too helpful.
“Stevens’ account,” he told Sands flatly, “is exactly one dollar.”
A month previously Stevens had begun to withdraw large sums of money, ranging from five thousand dollars to a final withdrawal of twenty thousand a week and a half ago.
He gave no explanation and the bank manager bad asked for none. He had left one dollar in his account to keep it open.
“Had he ever done this before?” Sands asked.
“Not so mysteriously,” the manager said with a smile. “Usually he confided to me the details of some new scheme he had. His account has been going downhill steadily, but these last withdrawals have been preposterous. One dollar left of his father’s fortune.”
“Perhaps he meant to bring it back doubled.”
“He usually meant to,” the bank manager said grimly. “I thought of blackmail this time, but a man wouldn’t allow himself to be blackmailed out of his whole bank account.”
“Which was?”
“Last month it had dwindled to forty-two thousand. What is in his safe-deposit box I don’t feel at liberty to tell you.”
“I’ve brought the key,” Sands said. “It was found on him.”
“The property is his sister’s now.”
“I’m sorry,” Sands said, “but I’d like to look at his deposit box.”
He did, but it was a disappointment. There were some shares of stock and a letter to Jane. It lay in his pocket as he flew back to Toronto, a mute reminder of the time and effort a policeman wastes on blind alleys. Because the letter destroyed the slim possibility that anyone had killed Stevens to inherit his money.
The letter was dated August the first, before Stevens had begun his final withdrawals. It contained one sentence to the effect that the enclosed shares would be sufficient to support Jane, if she was careful, and if Duncan died possessed of nothing else.
It didn’t make sense, Sands thought bitterly. Nothing made sense.
When he left the bank he called at Duncan Stevens’ office. He was surprised to find that it consisted of only two rooms, one of them containing a large and beautiful blonde with an exquisitely blank expression.
The blonde’s name was Miss Evans. She was Mr. Stevens’ private secretary, she informed him loftily. She didn’t know when Mr. Stevens would be back. He had gone to Toronto to attend a wedding.
Sands looked around and gathered that Stevens’ business was not very pressing. There was no sign of the feverish activity associated with brokers’ offices. A ticker tape machine was languidly coughing in one corner of the room. Miss Evans ignored it. She also ignored Sands until he told her that Mr. Stevens was never coming back.
There was an easy flow of mascara and rouge down Miss Evans’ classic cheeks. It developed that she had just bought a fox cape on the installment plan and now she was out of a job and couldn’t pay for it. What was a poor girl to do?