“You would not find my kitchen like this ordinarily,” he remarked. “I would not like to have Doctor Murray see it, for since last year, when monsieur had the bad stomach, I have been very careful.”
The chef seemed to be nervous.
“You prepared the mushrooms yourself?” asked Kennedy, suddenly.
“I directed my assistant,” came back the wary reply.
“But you know good mushrooms when you see them?”
“Certainly,” he replied, quickly.
“There was no one else in the kitchen while you prepared them?”
“Yes,” he answered, hurriedly; “Mr. Mansfield came in, and Miss Hargrave. Oh, they are very particular! And Doctor Murray, he has given me special orders ever since last year, when monsieur had the bad stomach,” he repeated.
“Was any one else here?”
“Yes—I think so. You see, I am so excited—a big dinner—such epicures—everything must be just so—I cannot say.”
There seemed to be little satisfaction in quizzing the chef, and Kennedy turned again into the dining-room, making his way back to the library, where Miss Grey was waiting anxiously for us.
“What do you think?” she asked, eagerly.
“I don’t know what to think,” replied Kennedy. “No one else has felt any ill effects from the supper, I suppose?”
“No,” she replied; “at least, I’m sure I would have heard by this time if they had.”
“Do you recall anything peculiar about the mushrooms?” shot out Kennedy.
“We talked about them some time, I remember,” she said, slowly. “Growing mushrooms is one of Miss Hargrave’s hobbies out at her place on Long Island.”
“Yes,” persisted Kennedy; “but I mean anything peculiar about the preparation of them.”
“Why, yes,” she said, suddenly; “I believe that Miss Hargrave was to have superintended them herself. We all went out into the kitchen. But it was too late. They had been prepared already.”
“You were all in the kitchen?”
“Yes; I remember. It was before the supper and just after we came in from the theater-party which Mr. Mansfield gave. You know Mr. Mansfield is always doing unconventional things like that. If he took a notion, he would go into the kitchen of the Ritz.”
“That is what I was trying to get out of the chef—Francois,” remarked Kennedy. “He didn’t seem to have a very clear idea of what happened. I think I’ll see him again—right away.”
We found the chef busily at work, now, cleaning up. As Kennedy asked him a few inconsequential questions, his eye caught a row of books on a shelf. It was a most complete library of the culinary arts. Craig selected one and turned the pages over rapidly. Then he came back to the frontispiece, which showed a model dinner-table set for a number of guests. He placed the picture before Francois, then withdrew it in, I should say, about ten seconds. It was a strange and incomprehensible action, but I was more surprised when Kennedy added:
“Now tell me what you saw.”
Francois was quite overwhelming in his desire to please. Just what was going on in his mind I could not guess, nor did he betray it, but quickly he enumerated the objects on the table, gradually slowing up as the number which he recollected became exhausted.
“Were there candles?” prompted Craig, as the flow of Francois’s description ceased.
“Oh yes, candles,” he agreed, eagerly.
“Favors at each place?”
“Yes, sir.”
I could see no sense in the proceeding, yet knew Kennedy too well to suppose, for an instant, that he had not some purpose.
The questioning over, Kennedy withdrew, leaving poor Francois more mystified than ever.
“Well,” I exclaimed, as we passed through the dining-room, “what was all that?”
“That,” he explained, “is what is known to criminologists as the ‘Aussage test.’ Just try it some time when you get a chance. If there are, say, fifty objects in a picture, normally a person may recall perhaps twenty of them.”
“I see,” I interrupted; “a test of memory.”
“More than that,” he replied. “You remember that, at the end, I suggested several things likely to be on the table. They were not there, as you might have seen if you had had the picture before you. That was a test of the susceptibility to suggestion of the chef. Francois may not mean to lie, but I’m afraid we’ll have to get along without him in getting to the bottom of the case. You see, before we go any further we know that he is unreliable—to say the least. It may be that nothing at all happened in the kitchen to the mushrooms. We’ll never discover it from him. We must get it elsewhere.”
Miss Grey had been trying to straighten out some of the snarls which Mansfield’s business affairs had got into as a result of his illness; but it was evident that she had difficulty in keeping her mind on her work.
“The next thing I’d like to see,” asked Kennedy, when we rejoined her, “is that wall safe.” She led the way down the hall and into an ante-room to Mansfield’s part of the suite. The safe itself was a comparatively simple affair inside a closet. Indeed, I doubt whether it had been seriously designed to be burglar-proof. Rather it was merely a protection against fire.
“Have you any suspicion about when the robbery took place?” asked Kennedy, as we peered into the empty compartment. “I wish I had been called in the first thing when it was discovered. There might have been some chance to discover fingerprints. But now, I suppose, every clue of that sort has been obliterated.”
“No,” she replied; “I don’t know whether it happened before or after Mr. Mansfield was discovered so ill by his valet.”
“But at least you can give me some idea of when the jewels were placed in the safe.”
“It must have been before the supper, right after our return from the theater.”
“So?” considered Kennedy. “Then that would mean that they might have been taken by any one, don’t you see? Why did he place them in the safe so soon, instead of wearing them the rest of the evening?”
“I hadn’t thought of that way of looking at it,” she admitted. “Why, when we came home from the theater I remember it had been so warm that Mr. Mansfield’s collar was wilted and his dress shirt rumpled. He excused himself, and when he returned he was not wearing the diamonds. We noticed it, and Miss Hargrave expressed a wish that she might wear the big diamond at the opening night of ‘The Astor Cup.’ Mr. Mansfield promised that she might and nothing more was said about it.”
“Did you notice anything else at the dinner—no matter how trivial?” asked Kennedy.
Helen Grey seemed to hesitate, then said, in a low voice, as though the words were wrung from her:
“Of course, the party and the supper were given ostensibly to Miss Hargrave. But—lately—I have thought he was paying quite as much attention to Mina Leitch.”
It was quite in keeping with what we knew of “Diamond Jack.” Perhaps it was this seeming fickleness which had saved him from many entangling alliances. Miss Grey said it in such a way that it seemed like an apology for a fault in his character which she would rather have hidden. I could not but fancy that it mitigated somewhat the wistful envy I had noticed before when she spoke of Madeline Hargrave.
While he had been questioning her Kennedy had been examining the wall safe, particularly with reference to its accessibility from the rest of the apartment. There appeared to be no reason why one could not have got at it from the