CHAPTER VI
THE POLICE AND THE DUKE OF ARGYLE
TEN minutes later they trailed downstairs from a mournful inspection of the violet room. There could be no doubt as to the truth of what Joshua Q. Mosely had told them. The smallest of the traveling bags heaped in a corner of the room had been broken open. So had the flimsy lock of the chased silver jewel box it contained.
The thief, apparently, had made brief examination of the various bags in the jumbled heap until he had come upon the only one that was locked. Then with a sharp knife or razor he had slit the russet leather along the hinge, had thrust his hand in and had drawn forth the silver box. It had been absurdly simple to force the lock of this. Probably it had yielded to the first heave of the knifeblade in the crack under the lid.
The window screens had not been disturbed, nor were the vines outside broken or disarranged. Mosely declared he had left locked the room door when he came down to dinner; and had pocketed the key. Clive Creede’s comment on this information was to go to the door of the next room, extract its key and fit it in the door of the violet room. It turned the wards with entire ease.
“Most of the doors in private houses,” said Clive, by way of explanation, “have standard uniform locks. Any one who wanted to get in here could have borrowed the key of any door along the hallway. You say you found the door wide open when you came back?”
“Yep,” said Mosely, unconsciously nursing his fast-swelling jawpoint. “That’s what made us suspicious. So we switched on the light. And there was this bag, on top of the rest, all bust open. So we—”
He refrained from repeating, for the ninth time, his entire windy recital and mutteringly followed the others down to the living room.
“You look kind of tuckered out, young man,” he said, not unkindly, to Clive as he and Creede brought up the rear of the procession.
“I am,” replied Clive. “This shock and the scene at dinner and the dog fight and your mix-up with Vail—well, they aren’t the best things for a sick man. They’ve started my head to aching again.”
“H’m! Too bad!” commented Mosely. “But not so bad as if you’d lost $12,000 worth of good joolry.... I s’pose I spoke a little too quick when I told Mr. Vail he was a crook and said he ran a robber’s roost. But he had no call to knock me down. I didn’t carry it any further; because I don’t believe in fisticuffs before ladies. But I warn you I’m going to summons you folks as witnesses in the assault-and-battery suit I bring against him. The young ruffian!”
“If you’re wise, Mr. Mosely,” suggested Clive, his usual calm manner sharpening, “you’ll bring no suit. You’ll let that part of the matter drop as suddenly as you yourself dropped. If we have to testify that he knocked you down, we’ll also testify to what you called him and that you shook your fist at him in what looked like a menace. Such a gesture constitutes what lawyers call ‘technical assault.’ No jury will convict Vail for self-defense. As for your loss—even if this were a regular hotel—you surely must know a proprietor is not responsible for valuables left in a guest’s room. I’m sorry for you. But you seem to have no redress.”
Mosely glowered blackly. Then, without answering, he turned his back on Creede and stamped into the living room.
“Telephoned the police yet?” he demanded of Vail.
“No,” said Thaxton. “Call them up yourself if you like. The main phone is out there at the back of the hall. Call up the Aura police station. I suppose we come within its jurisdiction more than Lenox’s.”
Mosely departed in search of the telephone. His wife stood in the doorway, wringing her hands.
“Oh, if we’d only left Petty on guard up there!” she wailed. “We always feel so safe when Petty is on guard! Mr. Vail, I’m certain this is an inside job. It—”
“Yes,” assented Willis Chase. “That’s what the police are certain to say, anyhow. When they can’t find out anything else, they always label it an ‘inside job’ and behave as if that explained everything.”
“What is an ‘inside job’?” asked Creede. “It sounds familiar. But—”
“An inside job is a job the police can’t find a clue to,” explained Chase. “So they leave the rest of the work to the detectives. That’s the climax. When a policeman blows out his brains and survives, they make a detective of him. Why, Thax, don’t you remember when the Conant house was robbed and the—”
“Yes,” answered Vail, grinning at the memory. “I remember. That was the time Chief Quimby’s box of safety matches got afire in his hip pocket while he was on his hands and knees looking for clues. And you tried to extinguish the blaze by kicking him. I remember he wanted to jail you for ‘kicking an officer in pursuit of his duty.’ You said his hip pocket wasn’t ‘out yet but seemed to be under control.’”
While they had been talking, Miss Gregg and Doris had come quietly into the room. Both were a trifle paler than usual, but otherwise were unruffled. A moment later Mosely returned from his telephone colloquy with the police.
“The chief says he’ll be right over,” he reported. “He asked if any other rooms had been robbed. And I felt like a fool, to have to tell him we hadn’t even looked.”
“If you had waited a minute longer, before leaving the telephone,” spoke up Miss Gregg, “you could have told him that at least one more room had been ransacked. My niece and I stopped in our suite, on the way down, just now. Her little jewel case and the chamois bag I kept my rings and things in—both of them are gone.”
“Miss Gregg!” exclaimed Vail. “Not really? Oh, I’m so sorry! So—”
A babel of other sympathetic voices drowned his stammered condolences. Out of the babel emerged Willis Chase’s query.
“Were they locked up?”
“Yes, and no,” returned Miss Gregg. “We locked them in the second drawer of the dresser and hid the key. But being only normal women and not Sherlockettes, of course we quite overlooked locking the top drawer. The top drawer has been carefully taken out and laid on the bed. And the case and the chamois bag have been painlessly extracted from the second drawer. It was so simple! I quite envy the brain of that thief. It is a lesson worth the price of the things he took—if only they had belonged to some one else....
“Thax Vail!” she broke off indignantly. “Stop looking as if you’d been slapped! You’re not going to feel badly about this. I forbid you to. Here we all forced ourselves upon you, and turned your home upside down, against your will! And if we’re the losers, it’s our own fault, not yours. We—”
She stopped her efforts at consolation, catching sight of Clive Creede, who slipped unobtrusively into the room. A minute earlier she had seen him go out and had heard his step on the stairs.
“Well,” she challenged, as she peered up shrewdly into his troubled white face. “Another county heard from? How much?”
Clive laughed, in an assumption of carelessness, and glanced apologetically at Thaxton.
“Not much,” he made shift to answer the garrulous old lady. “Just a little bunch of bills I’d left on my chiffonier and—and a watch. That’s all.”
“The Argyle watch?” cried Miss Lane, in genuine concern. “Not the Argyle watch. Oh, you poor boy!”
“What might the Argyle watch be?” acidly queried Mrs. Mosely. “It must be something priceless, since it seems to stir you people up more than our $12,000 loss. But then—of course—”
“The Argyle watch,” explained Doris, forestalling a hot rejoinder from Vail, “is a big, old-fashioned, gold, hunting-case watch that the Duke of Argyle offered as a scholarship prize once at the University of Edinburgh. Mr. Creede’s father won it, as a young man. And it was his dearest possession. I don’t wonder Mr. Creede feels so about its loss. He—”
“The Duke of Argyle?” repeated Mosely, lifted momentarily from his daze of grief by sound of so magic and familiar a name. “The one who invented the scratching posts that made folks say ‘God bless the Duke of Argyle’? I read about him in a book. Was he the same one?”
“No,” said Willis Chase, “this was the one who put up sandpaper pillars on the border for Highlanders to rub the burrs off their dialect. He was the laird of Hootmon Castle, syne aboon the sonsie Lochaber.”
Once more Mosely favored the flippant youth with a scowl of utter disgust. Then, turning to the rest, he said:
“An idea has just hit me. I warn you I’m going to mention it to the police as soon as they get here. We came down to this room before dinner, and we had to wait around here for pretty near half an hour before we were called in to eat. Mr. Vail, you sneaked out of the room after we were here. And you were gone ten minutes or more. Long enough to—”
“To rob all my guests?” supplemented Vail. “Quite so. I’m sorry to spoil such a pleasant theory. But I was in the dining room trying to quell a servile insurrection—trying to stave off a domestic strike—so that you might get a decently appointed dinner instead of having to forage in the ice box after the servants quit.”
“That’s your version, hey?” grated Mosely. “Most likely you can bribe one or two of your servants to back it up, too.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Mosely,” put in Miss Gregg, as Vail choked back a retort. “I’m as sorry as Mr. Vail to spoil your perfectly beautiful theory. But our sinning host happens to be telling the truth. In fact, it is a habit of his. I know he’s telling the truth because I went out there to reënforce him just as he was losing the battle against butler and housekeeper combined, with the cook as auxiliary reserve. Of course, I may be bribed, too, in my testimony, for all you know. So if you care to—”
“I never doubt a lady’s word, ma’am,” said Mosely with ponderous gallantry.
“Why not?” insisted Miss Gregg. “It’s far safer than doubting Thaxton Vail’s. To save my life, I couldn’t hit as clean a blow or as hard a blow as the one that gave your chin that lovely mauve lump on it. Thax, you’re something of a fool, but you’re something more of a man. I never saw any one knocked down before. Except on the stage. I ought to have been sickened by the brutal sight. But I confess it thrilled me. I got the same reaction from it that I always get when the full Messiah Chorus bursts into the ‘Hallelujah.’ It—”
“Auntie!” cried Doris, scandalized.
“So did you, for that matter!” accused the old lady. “Your eyes were like a pair of overgrown stars. They—”
“Suppose,” broke in Doris, reddening painfully, “suppose the rest of us see if the thief visited us. Then we can have a full report to make when the chief comes. Let’s see—Auntie and I—the Moselys—Clive-oh, yes—Willis Chase! Is—”
“I saw him start upstairs a second ago,” said Vail. “He—”
“And, by the way,” exclaimed Joshua Q., on new inspiration, “Case didn’t come into the dining room till we had all sat down. He hurried in later than—”
“Chase is always hurrying in ‘later than,’” said Miss Gregg. “It’s his one claim to distinction. He is never on time anywhere. I’m afraid your new theory won’t hold water any more than the other did, Mr. Mosely.”
“If it comes to that,” suggested Clive Creede, “I got downstairs after all the rest of you did. Just as you were starting in to dinner. I was almost as late as Chase. There’s as much reason to suspect me as to suspect him, Mr. Mosely.”
“No,” denied Joshua Q., judicially, “there don’t seem to be. I can’t agree with you. The cases might be the same, if you hadn’t lost money and a watch. It isn’t likely you robbed yourself. Especially of a watch like that Argyle one you think so much of. That watch seems to be pretty well known to the other folks here. And if it’s known to them, it must be known by sight to lots of others. After saying it was stolen you couldn’t ever let it be seen again if you’d just pretended to steal it. No, that lets you out, I guess.”
“Thanks,” said Creede. “I am glad you honor me with such perfect trust.”
He spoke crossly. His face was dead white and was creased with pain-lines. Very evidently he was in acute suffering. Doris looked at him with worried sympathy. Thaxton Vail saw the look, and he was ashamed of the sharp pang of jealousy which cut into him.
Vail knew enough of women at large and of Doris Lane in particular to realize that Clive Creede, bearing sickness and pain so bravely, was by far a more dangerous rival than Clive Creede in the glow of health. He was disgusted at himself for his own involuntary jealousy toward the man who was his lifelong friend.
He moved over to where Clive stood wearily leaning against the wall.
“Sit down, old man,” he said, drawing a big chair toward him. “You’re all in. This has been too much for you. We—”
“I beg to report,” interrupted Willis Chase, airily, coming back from his tour of inspection, “I beg to report the total loss of a watch and my roll and my extra set of studs. The watch was not given to my father by the Duke of Argyle. But it was given to my father’s only son, by Mr. Tiffany, as a prize for giving the said Mr. Tiffany a check for $275. The transaction was carried on through one of his clerks, of course, but that makes it none the less hallowed. Besides—”
“This seems to put it up pretty stiffly to the servants,” said Mosely. “The police better begin with them. By the way, I suppose you’ve made sure, Mr. Vail, that none of them could sneak away, before the chief gets here.”
“No,” answered Thaxton, annoyed. “I never thought of it. But I’m certain I can trust them. They have been with me a long time, most of them. And—”
“Young man,” exhorted Mosely, from the depths of his originality, “if you had had as much business experience as I’ve had you’d know it’s the most trusted employee who does the stealing.”
“Naturally,” assented Miss Gregg. “Why not? The trusted employees are the only ones who get a chance to handle the valuables. That’s one of the truisms nobody thinks of—just as people praise Robin Hood because he always robbed the rich and never molested the poor. Why should he have molested the poor? If they’d been worth robbing, they wouldn’t have been poor. And it’s the same with—”
The chug and rattle of a motor car at the porte-cochère checked her. A minute later two men were ushered into the room by the awe-stricken Vogel. They were Reuben Quimby, the Aura police chief, and one of his constables.