But because, on the floor, lay a dead man! A dead man, in the striped overalls and jumper of a janitor and night watchman. And his face was covered with a blue bandanna handkerchief that presumably had been his own.
“Good—grief!” said Mr. Wainwright, to whom a mere corpse was nothing at all. For many were the corpses—women, of course—that he had prettied up with rouge and lipstick for his good friend, Gideon Arkwright, the North Avenue undertaker. “I certainly inferred,” he commented, to himself, scratching his chin, “that the body had been removed elsewhere. For—now what the devil did that story say on that? Oh yes!—that the body had been ‘left all morning exactly where ’twas found.’ ‘All morning’ is right!—plus a piece of ‘afternoon’ thrown in! He nodded sagely. “One shrewd piece of language, that ‘all morning’—and struck in there like a plum to make others think as P. Wainwright, Esquire—and keep curiosity seekers away. Well, my profit, that’s all.”
And he gave a philosophical shrug of his shoulders.
And proceeded to business.
Though not without first reading a white card that had been placed on the inside of the door he had just closed, with 4 thumbtacks. It bore, on its top, the engraved words:
CHICAGO POLICE DEPARTMENT
and underneath it, in handwriting, and signed, was the notice:
This room completely inspected by me at 8:30 a.m. October 23 by special request of State’s Attorney Louis J. Vann, and notes and camera shots made of all vital and essential criminological residua.
Rufus Scott,
Inspector, Burglary Division,
Chicago Detective Bureau.
Mr. Wainwright smiled dolefully. “Then a few ‘post-crime’ ‘traces’ oughtn’t to hurt matters in the least!”
And apparently acting on which, he crossed the room quickly to that open safe. Where he drew from his pocket the watch he had just procured. Setting its hands to the hour of 10:43—which it seems the able inspector Scott had, according to the newsstory, been able to determine as conclusively and absolutely the hour of the crime and the murder—Mr. Wainwright twisted the winder till something in the watch snapped.
After which, squatting down, he sent the watch sliding—with a slight shuffling noise—back under the safe, the under bottom of which cubicle cleared the floor very narrowly, thanks to the odd manner in which the makers—or perhaps some later secondhand dealers—had appended the wheels, the axles of the latter protruding at points considerably up the sides of the iron box. Mr. Wainwright did not, however, attempt to follow the progress of the watch with his eye, if for no other reason than because of the darkness beneath the safe, but, judging from the smart rap that sounded forth, the watch just hit the wall board and came to a stop.
Mr. Wainwright now went straight to where an old diploma hung on one wall, a bit higher than an eye could conveniently reach. And here, again, he indulged in a double procedure. The first part of which consisted of rubbing his ten fingertips vigorously in his hair. Which done, he planted them—the whole 10—fingers slightly outstretched—against the painted wall under that diploma.
And now he stood not further on the order of his going!
For stepping adroitly over the thing on the floor, he was again at the door through which but three-quarters of a minute before he had entered. And opening which, a few inches, he gave a cautious peep into the hall. In both directions.
But the hall was clear.
It was the work of a split second for him to emerge and to slip, back into the eyelets of the bolt, the curved shaft of the open padlock which had been reposing in his side coat pocket. Click! And the padlock was locked.
Again he took the stairs to the street. Tossing the master padlock key back of a radiator between floors 5 and 4.
The elevator was not in sight as he came down the last flight, and into the wood-moored foyer.
And within a minute of having left that 8th floor, he was out again on the sidewalk. And a full 40 feet away, in a westerly direction, though gazing studiedly back of himself. With the result that he could see a yellow taxicab draw up sharply in front of the Klondike Building, and a well-built man in a tweed suit, carrying a leather portfolio, climb out and pay off the driver with some kind of very official-looking tickets. After which, striding forward to the door, the tweed-suited man took up a position at the side of the Klondike Building entrance.
To some persons, he would have been—in the light of his portfolio!—nothing other than a salesman, waiting some client or customer scheduled to enter, or to leave, the Klondike Building. Not so was he, apparently, to Mr. Wainwright. Who, now standing on the curb, was nodding his head.
“Soles an inch thick,” the latter was commenting. “And looking as innocent as a cat who’s just swallowed the family parrot. A detective, of course. Put there by the State’s Attorney.” And he gave a tiny chuckle. “Yet why not? Doesn’t the criminal always return to the scene of his crime?” He gave a half-nod. “There’s the spot for my arrest, all right—and the man to make it! And then—then to confess to the murder of Rudol—no, Adolph Reibach! And the theft of that skull. So here goes! And I do hope, by Gracious, I do—that I haven’t slipped up anywhere. Heavens!—to have all this trouble—for nothing!”
And resolutely he walked toward the Klondike Building, and that innocent-appearing man with the portfolio!
CHAPTER VI
“Consultation Only!”
Elsa Colby was so small—at least as compared to the giant quilt cover which, on its slightly inclined rack, covered almost one wall of her cramped office—and which office, fortunately for its own size, was never crammed with clients and seldom with even client!—that at times she had to mount a small stubby stepladder stool to ply her skillful needle. The bright red of Elsa’s hair—made even brighter, seemingly, by its contrast with the knitted mouse-grey one-piece dress that she wore—was of the exact color as the great scarlet poppies which lay at each corner of the quilt; her blue eyes were precisely the blue of the pond which lay in its middle—at least of the one experimentally completed ripple on that pond; and the freckles on her face—and most particularly on her nose—were like—but no, they were not like anything on the quilt proper at all, but were like the spattering of brown ink from an angry fountain-pen on a sheet of white paper.
Her quilt, it might be said, lay exposed in entirety upon its huge rack for the simple reason that it held, here and there, throughout its entire area, certain flecks which must be done in green; and Elsa, having been able to pick up a huge amount of green silk thread—but green only!—at a discount, had to do that color first, and fully, just as independent shoestring movie producers, with little or no money to rent locations or to put up settings, have to complete, in one rented setting, all the scenes for two or more “quickies,”—before negotiating a new setting!
But though secondhanded the old step-ladder stool was—it had cost only 18 cents on West Madison Street—and rickety as it was to boot, Elsa made quite no strain on it whatsoever—for the reason that she was but 90 pounds in weight —95 normally, but the 20-cent meals at the Two Sisters Restaurant were notoriously shy of nutriment!
It might be said that only in the matter of the lettered door of her tiny front office on the 10th story of the ancient Ulysses S. Grant Building, the latter not a part of Chicago’s Loop, but a barnacle clinging hungrily on the dingy