Robbins bowed, twice. “You’ll probably find Joel Burton around a skirt,” he advised her. “He’s a new guard but highly recommended. Only has this one vice…”
“That you know of,” said the school teacher. “What does he look like?”
* * *
—
Tall, blue-eyed, and Irish as a thatched roof, Joel Burton stood near the end of the second floor corridor which leads to the Florentine Wing of the museum.
“Sure I ought to be getting back to my post,” he was saying. But he kept on obediently squirting water from an atomizer upon the clay figure which was beginning to take shape under the slim, deft fingers of the girl.
“Then go,” said Dagmar. Her voice was slow and rich and throaty. She looked at the young and handsome guard through lashes as tawny-yellow as her hair. All the same, he knew that she didn’t want him to go. It had been five weeks now since Dagmar, one of a dozen art students permitted to copy in the halls, had been at work on her version of Rodin’s “Satyr,” and for four and a half weeks of that time he had been her slave. The slave of hair and eyes and hands and the tall, smooth body…
She tweaked a clay ear into pert life. “That’s enough water,” she said. “Do you want to drown it? Now you can go back to your work.”
But Burton lingered. “Just the one trick I’m going to show you,” he said. From Dagmar’s fingers he took the braided bit of wire with which she cut the damp clay. Then with all his strength he flung it down the corridor. The girl heard it strike tinklingly against a distant window. Then Burton leaned over and neatly extracted it from her curving ear.
She clapped her hands excitedly. “Wonderful!”
Burton persisted. “That’s nothing. See this. I used to wow them with this when I was on Pantages time.” From his pocket he took a small roll of string, and handed it to her. “Take hold of the end, and pull.” He took back the ball, and Dagmar pulled. She pulled until the floor around her was a tangle of string, and then, from his cupped hands, came half a dozen silken flags of the Entente, knotted to the cord, followed by a birdcage containing two celluloid canaries.
Dagmar laughed, and clapped her hands again. The applause was echoed from behind them, and the young couple suddenly became aware of their situation, and sprang apart. Peering benevolently at them was an angular, school teacherish person in a Queen Mary hat. “Splendid, young man!” said Miss Withers. “You’ve missed your vocation.” She came closer.
“If you don’t mind an old woman’s butting in, you’ve also missed something else. There’s been an accident on the main staircase and unless I miss my guess, the curator is looking for you. You’d better start thinking up an excuse…”
“Huh? Thanks!” muttered Joel Burton, fervently. He scooped up his string and the rest of his props and flew.
“That was a kind-hearted thing to do,” said Dagmar, coolly, after there had been a moment’s silence.
Miss Withers stared at the lovely art student. “I’m not so old but that I can remember when I was young,” she said. She waved a thin yet graceful arm. “Romance…”
Dagmar flushed a little, and bent over her modeling. But Miss Hildegarde Withers was not to be got rid of so easily. “You have talent,” she observed, critically. “That’s an excellent copy you’re doing. The flair, the feeling of the original—and something added…”
Dagmar bowed, almost formally. Then she looked up and faced the intruder with a complete change of subject. “He really isn’t meant for this sort of thing, you know.” Her tone was almost defiant. “He may be only a museum guard, but he belongs in a different place from this.”
Miss Withers cleared her throat. Then—“I’m inclined to agree with you,” she said. If her tone was grim, the girl did not sense it. “Then you didn’t hear the noise a few minutes ago, either of you?”
Dagmar shook her head. “Oh, yes—I heard a man shouting. But the echoes distort sounds here so much that I didn’t pay much attention. I don’t know if Joel heard it or not—he was—”
“Oh, he wasn’t with you all the time?” Miss Withers noticed the pail of fresh water beside Dagmar’s stool. “Did he go on an errand?”
But the girl was quick. “Joel was with me for the last half hour,” she announced. “If it makes any difference…”
“It might—who can tell?” said Miss Withers softly, and then withdrew.
* * *
—
There was a guard outside the door of the curator’s office. “You can’t go in there,” he told Miss Withers.
“I can and I may,” she retorted, and plunged through, umbrella clutched firmly in her hand. Inside she found Robbins, flustered somewhat, facing fifteen or twenty youngsters of ages assorted from six to twelve.
“I want the boy who did this wicked thing to come forward and confess!” the curator was thundering. Behind him stood a perspiring and bulky guard. The urchins scratched and shrugged and kept their silence.
“Perhaps,” suggested a voice from the doorway—“perhaps you’d let me help, Mr. Curator. I’m used to boys of this age in my own classes…”
But Robbins was out of temper. “Thank you madam,” he said, shortly, “but I’m confident that one of these hooligans caused the death of Professor Carter, and I’m going to find out which one it was. Search them, Cassidy.”
Miss Withers stood back and watched the process, which was not without its difficulty. “Put everything out of yer pockets here on the table,” ordered Cassidy.
One boy hesitated, and Robbins leaped forward. “There! In that pocket. What have you got hidden there?”
He inserted his well-manicured hand swiftly, and withdrew it holding a gummy mass of old butterscotch. The guard continued the search, bringing to light several balls of kite string, but none which matched the sinister cord which lay across the curator’s desk. He stepped back, his face perplexed.
Then there came a knock at the door. It opened, and in came Joel Burton, clinging to the arm of a resisting red-headed gamin who had been discovered, he said, lurking in Armour Hall. “This is the last of them,” he announced.
The urchin grinned widely, showing the lack of a front tooth. His head was a mass of red curls, and his dress consisted of a ragged sweater and worn overalls. “Leave me alone,” the lad insisted. “I done nothing.”
“Search him, Cassidy, and see if you find any cord to match this,” ordered the curator.
* * *
—
The prisoner submitted without resistance, his hard, young-old face defiant. But Miss Withers was not watching the boy. Her keen eyes were upon Joel Burton, who stood by the door with his eyes upon the cord which lay on Robbins’s table. Automatically his hand went to his side pocket—closed around something—
“What have you there, if I may ask?” said Miss Withers swiftly. All eyes turned on her, and then on the guard.
He never blinked an eye. “Nothing at all,” he said. The muscles of his wrist flickered, and then he extended his open palm. “What would I have?”
Miss Withers remembered the exhibition in the hallway. “Never mind,” she said. And the search went on, with the result which Miss Withers had known would occur. The boys were released, with a general warning to behave themselves for the good of their souls, and poured out of the office, the red-haired lad in the lead. Miss Withers and the curator looked after them.
“I told you so,” said that lady. “No child planned that diabolical scheme.” Robbins did not answer. He was smiling at the red-headed urchin, who was walking fast down the hall, away from the others, with his cap perched on one side of his curly poll and his feet turned out, Charlie Chaplin fashion.
“Fathers of men,” observed the curator, sententiously.
“Fathers of men and sons of Belial,” Miss Withers told him, from bitter experience. Then she faced Robbins. “I still feel that this mystery
, if it is a mystery, has something to do with the Cellini Cup you spoke of. I wonder if you’d send one of the guards with me to look at it—preferably one of those whose duty it is to watch it.”
The curator hesitated. “That would be Joel Burton. From his post at the head of the stairs he commands a view, down the long corridor, of the Rodin Hall and the Florentine Wing which holds the Cellini. The Cellini case is placed beneath a skylight, so that he could check on it every minute—when he is at his post. He’s wandered away once too often, so I’ve demoted him to the checkroom downstairs, and put Cassidy in his place. Will he do?”
“Splendidly,” said Hildegarde Withers. A few moments later she was following the broad gray back of Cassidy down the hall, past the Rodin statues and the pale-haired girl who worked busily in her corner with the mobile clay, and on into a large, airy room whose walls were lined with glass cabinets filled with glittering gold-encrusted glass.
* * *
—
But she had no eyes for the walls. Set squarely in the center of the room, upon a solid metal pedestal, was a square case of heavy glass. Its base was a polished mirror, and upon the mirror rested an object at once so beautiful and so decadent, so opulent in its color and design, that Miss Withers almost shuddered.
It was small, this Cellini Cup—not more than eight inches in diameter and perhaps seven inches high. But she knew it to be worth the ransom of seven kings.
Its base, resting on the mirror, was a turtle—the legendary tortoise who holds the world upon his back, according to mythology. But this turtle was of crusted gold. Upon the turtle rested a winged dragon of shimmering green and yellow and red enamel, and upon the wings and neck and tail of the dragon rested a wide and richly curving sea-shell of hammered gold.
Crouching on the lip of the shell was a sphinx, with the head of a lovely woman modeled in pure gold, and a serpentine, animalistic body of ardent, opulent greens, blues, whites, and yellows. From the ears of the sphinx depended two miniature pearls, and from her breast, hanging over the bowl in which the Princes of Rospigliosi were wont to keep their salt, hung a great white pearl larger than a pear. This pearl swung back and forth, back and forth, endlessly.
“Vibration of the building,” said Cassidy, the guard. “Professor Carter used to say it showed perfect balance.”
Miss Withers nodded. “And this cup is left here, protected only by a glass case?”
Cassidy laughed, and then turned to make sure that they were alone. “Not on your life, ma’am. The Professor used to hang about all the time, but he didn’t need to. This case is safer than a vault. Look down the hall where we came. See the stair? Well, that’s where one of us is always stationed. Now look this way, toward the other end of the Florentine Wing. See Schultz watching us? One or the other of them has his eyes on this case every minute. But that ain’t all. Come here.”
With a thick finger he traced out the almost invisible wires which ran through the glass. “If one of them is broken, it sets off all the alarms. Instanter, every door and window in the place is double-locked. This wing has no doors and no fire escapes leading out—and the only exit is back through the Rodin Hall to the main stair. What chance do you think a burglar would have, even if the guards did slip? The police would get the alarm direct, and surround the place in two minutes…” He beamed at Miss Withers, proudly.
She was forced to admit that the protection of the priceless treasure did seem thorough. But hadn’t she read somewhere that anything one man devised could be out-done by some other man?
Miss Withers thanked Cassidy, and returned to the stair, pausing on her way to note the slow but steady progress of Dagmar’s satyr. She found, on reaching the main hall, that she was just in time to have missed the undertakers as they removed the body of Professor Carter, canvas and all. Full well she knew that it was her duty to telephone Inspector Piper that this was a job for the whole homicide squad. But that was one of the advantages of having no official standing. She could do exactly as she saw fit, as long as the results justified the means. For the time being she was content to have the death put down as simple misadventure.
She was surprised to notice that the building was gradually emptying—not because of the “accident” but because it was time for lunch. Thoughts of a sandwich began to fill Miss Withers’s busy mind, until she started down the main staircase and saw two white-clad porters mopping the floor around the statuary group at the foot of the stair, and she lost her appetite.
Hildegarde Withers would never have counted this minor loss as an evidence of the good luck which more often than not attended her amateurish efforts as a detective. Yet otherwise she might have stepped out of the building, and missed one of the most exciting hours of her life.
She was sitting on a stone bench in the vast main hall of the lower floor when it happened, trying unavailingly to put in their proper positions the various characters in this mad drama. But she leaped to her feet as there came, from somewhere on the second floor, an unmistakable shot followed by two more in rapid succession.
* * *
—
The few straggling visitors who remained within sight milled about like cattle, but Hildegarde Withers was going up the stairs three steps at a time. She passed Curator Robbins near the top, and both of them went galloping down the hall toward the American Wing, from which sounds of a scuffle were arising. All the alarms went off hideously.
In the doorway they came upon brawny Cassidy and two other guards, a wiry, swarthy little man grasped firmly in their thick red hands. He was mouthing incoherent cries, and making efforts to regain the cheap nickel-plated revolver which Cassidy had taken from him.
“Nobody hurt, Mr. Robbins,” announced Cassidy. “Just a bloody anarchist who wants to destroy the paintings that Mr. Morgan loaned us. All he did was to crack a molding.”
The curator drew a long breath. “Good Lord! I thought it was—well, something worse. This day has been a nightmare. Take him downstairs and turn him over to the cop on the beat. I’ll prefer drunk and disorderly charges against him later.”
Robbins walked back toward the head of the stair with Miss Withers, who was thinking fast. “Funny how things happen all at once,” he observed. “Six months go by, and this is the sleepiest place in town. Then in one day we have a fatal accident and an anarchist. I hope this is the end.”
* * *
—
But Miss Withers did not answer him. She was standing stock-still. “Prepare yourself,” she advised him. “This is far from the end of things.”
Somehow she had known all along that this would happen. She was staring down the Rodin Hall, toward the distant showcase which stood beneath the skylight. Even from that distance, both could see that the light glinted on smashed glass, and that the brilliant, jeweled setting of the showcase was gone.
“Come on,” shouted Robbins, unnecessarily, and began to sprint.
Miss Withers followed, but this time she did not run. She walked slowly, staring at the floor. It was too late to hurry. This was the time to be sure and careful. Half way down the Rodin Hall she paused, finding the clue, the discrepancy, for which she was looking.
She could hear the agonized voice of the curator as he came face to face with the shattered case which had held the Cellini. But Miss Withers was bending over the sprawled body of a tall girl in a black smock, a girl who tried weakly to sit up as the school teacher grasped her shoulder.
At least this wasn’t another corpse. Dagmar pushed aside the proffered aid and stared down the corridor. “Where did he go?”
“Where did who go?”
“The man in the trench-coat, blast him!” Dagmar’s red lips curled in anger. “Slamming into me that way, and knocking me headlong. And look—look what he did to my model!” The satyr did show signs of maltreatment.
Hastily the girl smoothed the profaned clay. “Five weeks work—ruine
d!”
“It’s not ruined beyond repair, child,” said Miss Withers. “But this man. Did you see his face?” The curator was coming back, and she beckoned to him. “We have a witness, Mr. Robbins.”
“Of course I saw his face,” said Dagmar. “It was—well, just a face. No whiskers or anything. About thirty, or maybe forty. He had his mouth open. And he wore a cap, or maybe it was a hat. Anyway, he had on a trench-coat.”
“Good enough,” the curator told her. “The doors and windows locked instantly when the case was broken. All we have to do is to round up the fellow…”
That was all. It was easy enough. Three men of early middle age were apprehended without difficulty in the lower halls carrying trench-coats. One wore a cap, the other two had hats. Each gave as his only reference the particular relief organization which happened to be maintaining him among the ranks of the unemployed, and none possessed any string or any sign of the Cellini Cup.
Worst of all, Dagmar, when confronted with the trio, was unable to point out any one of them as the man who had crashed into her in the hallway. They all looked familiar, but she couldn’t be sure. She tried, desperately, to remember. But, after all, she had got only the briefest glance of the man on his mad flight, and the subsequent crash and its resulting dizziness had erased everything but the memory of the trench-coat. Dagmar thought that the man of mystery had been holding something bulky beneath the coat, but even this was hazy.
Even now the tall, blond girl clung to her satyr, and as soon as Robbins permitted her, she went resolutely back at smoothing out the signs of its rude handling as the vandal rushed by. Miss Withers gave her a long mark for pluckiness.
Outside, the police were already hammering at the double-locked doors to be let in. Three carloads of the burglary squad and four cops from the local precinct station were admitted, and then the doors made fast again.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 70
