“I was going up the main stairway as he was about to come down toward me. Almost directly I saw him – and I didn’t at the time think he saw me – he turned back as if you had called him from your room. He said, ‘What is it, Connie?’ then he walked down the corridor and stood half way in your room talking to you as I supposed. He looked like a gentleman who might belong to your clubs, sir, and spoke like one. What was I to think?”
“I’m not blaming you,” said Conington Warren. “I’m as puzzled as you are. Didn’t Yogotama see him when he went to my room to get my smoking jacket which you say he wore? What was Yogotama doing to allow that sort of thing?”
“You forget, sir,” explained Austin, “that Yogotama wasn’t there.”
“Why wasn’t he?”
“Directly he got your note he went off to the camp.”
“This gets worse and worse,” Warren asserted. “I sent him no note.”
“He got one in your writing apparently written on the stationery of the Knickerbocker Club. I saw it. You told him to go instantly to your camp and prepare it for immediate occupancy. He was to take Evans and one of the touring cars. He got the note about half past eight.”
“Just after you’d left the house,” McWalsh commented.
“It didn’t take Yogotama a half hour to prepare,” added Austin.
“What do you make of it, inspector?” Warren demanded.
“A clever crook, that’s all,” said the other, “but he can’t pull anything like that in this town and get away with it.”
Austin made a polite gesture implying doubt. It incensed the official.
“You don’t think so, eh?”
“Not from what I’ve seen of your methods. I’ve no doubt you can deal with the common ruck of criminals, but this man is different. It may be easy enough for a man to deceive you people by pretending to be a gentleman but we can see through them. Frankly,” said Austin growing bolder, “I don’t think you gentlemen of the police have the native wit for the higher kind of work.”
Warren looked from one to the other of them. This was a new and rebellious Austin, a man chafing under a personal grievance, a belligerent butler.
“You mustn’t speak like that to Inspector McWalsh,” he commanded. “He is doing his duty.”
“That may be sir,” Austin remarked, “but how would you like to be called ‘Little Lancelot from Lunnon’?”
“You look it,” McWalsh said roughly. “Anyway I’ve no time to argue with house servants. What you’ve got to do is to look through our collection of pictures and see if you can identify any of ’em with the man you say you saw.”
Austin surveyed the faces with open aversion.
“He’s not here,” said Austin decisively. “He was not this criminal type at all. I tell you I mistook him for a member of Mr. Warren’s clubs, the kind of gentleman who dines at the house. These,” and he pointed derisively to the pillories of crime. “You wouldn’t be likely to see any of these at our house. They are just common.”
McWalsh sneered.
“I see. Look more like policemen I suppose?”
Austin smiled blandly.
“The very thing that was in my mind.”
CHAPTER II
NTHONY TRENT TALKS ON CRIME
ANTHONY TRENTwas working his typewriter at top speed when there came a sudden, peremptory knocking at his door.
“Lord!” he grumbled, rising, “it must be old Lund to say I’m keeping him awake.”
He threw open his door to find a small, choleric and elderly man clad in a faded dressing gown. It was a man with a just grievance and a desire to express it.
“This is no time to hammer on your typewriter,” said Mr. Lund fiercely. “This is a boarding house and not a private residence. Do you realize that you generally begin work at midnight?”
“Come in,” said Anthony Trent genially. With friendly force he dragged the smaller man along and placed him in a morris chair. “Come in and give me your opinion of the kind of cigar smoked by the president of the publishing house for whose magazines I work noisily at midnight.”
Mr. Lund found himself a few seconds later sitting by an open window, an excellent cigar between his teeth, and the lights of New York spread before him. And he found his petulance vanishing. He wondered why it was that although he had before this come raging to Anthony Trent’s door, he always suffered himself to be talked out of his ill humors. It was something magnetic and engaging that surrounded this young writer of short stories.
“I can’t smoke a cigar when I’m working,” said Trent, lighting a pipe.
“Surely,” said Mr. Lund, not willing so soon to be robbed of his grievance, “you choose the wrong hours to work. Mrs. Clarke says you hardly ever touch your typewriter till late.”
“That’s because you don’t appreciate the kind of story I write,” Anthony Trent told him. “If I wrote the conventional story of love or matrimony I could work so many hours a day and begin at nine like any business man. But I don’t. I begin to write just when the world I write of begins to live. My men and women are waking into life now, just when the other folks are climbing into their suburban beds.”
“I understood you wrote detective stories,” Mr. Lund remarked. His grievances were vanishing. His opinion of the president of Trent’s magazine was a high one.
“Crook stories,” Anthony Trent confided. “Not the professional doings of thoughtless thugs. They don’t interest me a tinker’s curse. I like subtlety in crime. I could take you now into the great restaurants on Broadway or Fifth Avenue and point out to you some of the kings of crime – men who are clever enough to protect themselves from the police. Men who play the game as a good chess player does against a poorer one, with the certainty of being a move ahead.”
Mr. Lund conjured up a vision of such a restaurant peopled by such a festive crowd. He felt in that moment that an early manhood spent in Somerville had perhaps robbed him of a chance to live.
“They all get caught sooner or later,” asserted the little man in the morris chair.
“Because they get careless or because they trust another. If you want to be a successful crook, Mr. Lund, you’ll have to map out your plan of life as carefully as an athlete trains for a specific event. Now if you went in for crime you’d have to examine your weaknesses.”
“Thank you,” said Mr. Lund a little huffily, “I am not going in for a life of crime. I am perfectly content with my own line.” This, with unconscious sarcasm for Mr. Lund, pursued what he always told the borders was “the advertising.”
“There are degrees in crime I admit,” said Anthony Trent, “but I am perfectly serious in what I say. The ordinary crook has a low mental capacity. He generally gets caught in the end as all such clumsy asses should. The really big man in crime often gets caught because he is not aware of his weaknesses. Drink often brings out an incautious boasting side of a man. If you are going in for crime, Mr. Lund, cut out drink I beg of you.”
“I do not need your advice,” Mr. Lund returned with some dignity. “I have tasted rum once only in my life.”
Trent looked at him interested.
“It would probably make you want to fight,” he said.
“I don’t care to think of it,” said Mr. Lund.
“And the curious part of it is,” mused Trent, “that in the sort of crowd these