“Ever since the funeral party left the house to go to the graveyard, sir.”
“Did any one come into this room while you were sitting here?”
“Not a living soul, sir.” Weekes was frightened now; the ring of cotton-white hair at the back of his pink scalp, puffing over his ears, quivered with earnestness. In the eyes of stuffy old Weekes there was something terrifying in Woodruff’s lord-and-master pose. Woodruff, it is to be feared, took advantage of his bulk, his red face and crackling voice to browbeat the old man almost to tears. “You were asleep!” he thundered. “You were dozing when I walked in here!”
Weekes mumbled in a soupy voice, “Just nodding, sir, really, sir, just nodding, sir. I wasn’t asleep for an instant. I heard you the instant you came in, didn’t I, sir?”
“Well . . . “ Woodruff was mollified. “I guess you did at that. Ask Mr. Sloane and Mr. Cheney to come in here at once.”
Woodruff was standing before the safe in a Messianic attitude when the two men came in, looking puzzled. He challenged them silently, with his best witness-baiting manner. He noticed at once that something was wrong with Sloane; precisely what he could not make out. As for Alan, the boy was scowling as usual, and when he moved nearer to Woodruff the lawyer caught the pungent odour of whisky on his breath. Woodruff spared no language in his peroration. He chopped at them savagely, pointed to the open safe, eyed each of them with heavy suspicion. Sloane shook his leonine head; he was a powerful man in the prime of life, elegantly attired in the height of foppish fashion. Alan said nothing―shrugged his spare shoulders indifferently.
“All right,” said Woodruff. “It’s all right with me. But I’m going to get to the bottom of this, gentlemen. Right now.”
Woodruff appears to have been in his glory. He had every one in the house peremptorily summoned to the study. Amazing as it may seem, it is true that within four minutes of the time the funeral party returned to the Khalkis house, Woodruff had them all on the carpet―all, including even Undertaker Sturgess and his assistants!―and had the dubious satisfaction of hearing them, to the last man and woman, deny having taken anything out of the safe, or even having gone to the safe that day at all.
It was at this dramatic and slightly ludicrous moment that Joan Brett and Alan Cheney were struck by the same thought. Both plunged for the doorway, colliding, boiling out of the room into the hall, flying down the hall to the foyer. Woodruff, with a hoarse shout, lunged after them, suspecting he knew not what. Alan and Joan assisted each other in unlocking the foyer door, scrambled through the vestibule to the unlocked street-door, flung it open and faced a mildly astonished throng in the street, Woodruff hurrying after them. Joan called out in her clear contralto, “Has any one come into this house in the past half-hour?” Alan shouted, “Anybody?” and Woodruff found himself echoing the word. A hardy young man, one of a group of reporters draped over the latched gate on the sidewalk, distinctly said, “No!”, another reporter drawled, “What’s up, Doc? Why the hell don’t you let us inside?―we won’t touch nothin’,” and there was a little scattering of applause from the onlookers in the street. Joan blushed, as was natural, and her hand strayed to her auburn hair, patting it for no apparent reason into place. Alan cried, “Did anybody come out?” and there was a thunderous chorus of No/” Woodruff coughed, his self-assurance shaken by this public spectacle, irritably herded the young couple back into the house, and carefully locked the doors behind them―both of them, this time.
But Woodruff was not the type of man whose self-assurance can be permanently shaken. He recaptured it immediately upon re-entering the library, where the others sat and stood about looking faintly expectant. He rapped questions at them, pouncing on one after the other, and almost snarled with disappointment when he discovered that most of the household knew the combination of the safe.
“AJl right,” he said. “All right. Somebody here is trying to pull a fast one. Somebody’s lying. But we’ll find out soon enough, soon enough, I’ll promise you that.” He prowled back and forth before them. “I can be as smart as the rest of you. It’s my duty―my duty, you understand,” and everybody nodded, like a battery of dolls, ‘to search every soul in this house. Right now. At once,” and everybody stopped nodding. “Oh, I know someone here doesn’t like the idea. Do you think I like it? But I’m going to do it anyway. It was stolen right under my nose. My nose.” At this point, despite the seriousness of the situation, Joan Brett giggled; Woodruff’s nose did cover a generous strip of territory.
Nacio Suiza, the immaculate, smiled slightly. “Oh, come now, Woodruff. Isn’t this a bit melodramatic? There’s probably a very simple explanation for the whole thing. You’re dramatizing it.”
“You think so, Suiza, you think so?” Woodruff transferred his glare from Joan to Suiza. “I see you don’t like the idea of a personal search. Why?”
Suiza chuckled. “Am I on trial, Woodruff Get a hold of yourself, man. You’re acting like a chicken with its head cut off. Perhaps,” he said pointedly, “perhaps you were mistaken when you thought you saw the box in the safe five minutes before the funeral.”
“Mistaken? You think so? You’ll find I wasn’t mistaken when one of you turns out a thief!”
“At any rate,” remarked Suiza, showing his white teeth, 7 won’t stand for this high-handed procedure. Try―just try―to search me, old man.”
At this point the inevitable occurred; Woodruff completely lost his temper. He raged, and raved, and shook his heavy fist under Suiza’s sharp cold nose, and spluttered, “By God, I’ll show you! By heaven, I’ll show you what high-handed is!” and concluded by doing what he should have done in the very beginning―he clutched at one of the two telephones on the dead man’s desk, feverishly dialled a number, stuttered at an unseen inquisitor, and replaced the instrument with a bang, saying to Suiza with malevolent finality, “We’ll see whether you’ll be searched or not, my good fellow. Everybody in this house, by order of District Attorney Sampson, is not to stir a foot from the premises until somebody from his office gets here!”
Chapter 3. Enigma
Assistant District Attorney Pepper was a personable young man. Matters proceeded very smoothly indeed from the moment he stepped into the Khalkis house a half-hou. after Woodruff’s telephone call. He possessed the gift of making people talk, for he knew the value of flattery―a talent that Woodruff, a poor trial-lawyer, had never acquired. To Woodruff’s surprise, even he himself felt better after a short talk with Pepper. Nobody minded in the least the presence of a moon-faced, cigar-smoking individual who had accompanied Pepper―a detective named Coha-lan attached to the District Attorney’s office; for Cohalan, on Pepper’s warning, merely stood in the doorway to the study and smoked his black weed in complete, self-effacing silence.
Woodruff hurried husky Pepper into a corner and the story of the funeral tumbled out. “Now here’s the situation, Pepper. Five minutes before the funeral procession was formed here in the house I went into Khalkis’s bedroom”―he pointed vaguely to another door leading out of the library―”got hold of Khalkis’s key to his steel box, came back in here, opened the safe, opened the steel box, and there it was, staring me in the face. Now then―”
“There what was ?”
“Didn’t I tell you? I must be excited.” Pepper did not say that this was self-evident, and Woodruff swabbed his perspiring face. “Khalkis’s new will! The new one, mind you! No question about the fact that it was the new will in the steel box; I picked it up and there was my own seal on the thing. I put it back into the box, locked the box, locked the safe, left the room . . . .”