by Otto Penzler
“You know the answer. It was used, and most effectively. Once more the ambulance vanished from the face of the earth. But by that time I was certain of my theory.
“You see, the invitation presented by Mrs. Pensonboy Forster when she secured admission to the Demarest affair was forged. The engraving was forged perfectly, but the art work—the hand lettering of each guest’s name, added later to the engraved invitation—the lettering showed discrepancies.
“You suspected the social secretary because the forgery of the engraving was so perfect that you felt the invitations must have been left where they would be accessible to the forger. But you overlooked the fact that the lettering was not so faithfully copied.
“Therefore, I came to the conclusion that the person who forged the invitation for Mrs. Pensonboy Forster had had access to the blank engraved invitation, but not to the completed invitation. Yet he was an artist or he wouldn’t have drawn in the name as cleverly as he did.
“And the ambulance affair also pointed to an artist. You see, Sergeant, an ambulance legitimately bearing the name of Proctor & Peabody, displayed quite prominently, could never have escaped detection. But a sign painter–artist could easily have lettered the name on flexible curtains which could have been adjusted to a specially-made delivery truck, and made it look like an ambulance.
“The curtains could be snapped on, and the truck changed into an ambulance. They could instantly have been taken off, and the ‘ambulance’ would revert to a commercial truck.
“That suggested a business establishment with a light delivery truck. It suggested a criminal with access to engraving facilities, with access to the Demarest invitations. It suggested a criminal who was also an artist and a sign painter.
“You see, now, Sergeant, how the finger of suspicion pointed to Stanley Garland. He had but to fill in an extra, blank invitation with some of his own hand lettering, and his accomplice was passed into the Demarest reception. The rest was easy. His accomplices could be men who were actually employed in the printery. They changed the truck into an ambulance, looted the place, changed the ambulance back into a truck, and went through the police cordon with no difficulty whatever. The police recognized the truck with the sign of the Garland Printery upon it, and raised not so much as a question.”
Sergeant Ackley heaved a great sigh.
“It sounds reasonable,” he admitted, “and yet it’s so obvious, why didn’t we think of that? Go on.”
The clubman shrugged his shoulders.
“The rest was easy, Sergeant, too easy. I secured some kunzite made into a necklace. That stone has almost as much fire as a diamond. Against white cotton it will fool anyone who is not an expert. By a process of suggestion I made everyone think it was a very valuable diamond necklace. Then I had my valet bring it to Garland.
“I knew he would be tempted. So I arranged to speed up the affair a bit. I had Louise Huntington come in with an empty gun and claim the necklace was stolen, that she had the police on the way. And I primed her with a story to tell, after Scuttle had taken the gun away from her, that would appeal to the ears of Garland alone.
“It was a story that sounded foolish unless its object had been to make the police enter the place to search the printery. Of course, Garland saw the scheme immediately. He thought I was onto him, and that the police were on the way. He had to get away rapidly and take what loot he could with him, so he decided he might as well take this well-matched diamond necklace too.
“I, of course, was waiting in the printery, watching and listening, and I was armed. I waited until Garland had come into the place, had rushed to his secret hiding place, had given unmistakable proof of his guilt, and then I tried to arrest him.
“I made him throw up his hands. And then, when I had taken his gun away from him, he surprised me. He had a second weapon on him, one that, it now appears, he had taken away from my valet.
“He surprised me with that weapon. We struggled. He overpowered me and made his escape with the kunzite necklace and the cream of the loot from the Demarest affair. But I have no doubt he had to leave a lot of his plunder. We might look, Sergeant?”
The sergeant was on his feet. “Come on, men. Take Leith with us. See that he has no chance to escape. I’m not entirely satisfied yet.”
They entered the printery, found a light switch, flooded the shop with light, and, instantly, the correctness of Leith’s reasoning was disclosed.
There was a secret panel in the wall. Inside it was a motley collection. There were rolled curtains of some fabrikoid material which were arranged with snaps to be fastened onto the side of a car. They bore in big letters Proctor & Peabody. There were gems, quantities of gold settings, and some coin. There remained none of the better class of stones or any of the currency. It appeared as though someone had scooped out about as much as could conveniently be carried.
Sergeant Ackley surveyed the secret hiding place, checked through the plunder which remained.
“It’s the stolen stuff all right,” he admitted. “There’s around fifty thousand dollars of bulky stuff here. The man must have escaped with around two hundred thousand dollars, in round figures, if we count both the currency and the stones together.”
Leith nodded.
“Too bad he got away,” he said.
Sergeant Ackley looked at the clubman long and earnestly. He stroked the angle of his jaw with a spade-like thumbnail, and the gray stubble gave forth little rasping noises.
“If your plan had worked, you’d have had him cornered here in the printery,” he said.
Lester Leith nodded.
“And he’d have had about two hundred thousand dollars on him. And you two men would have been here alone.”
Leith shrugged his shoulders. “Until I could have summoned the police, of course.”
“Of course!” echoed Sergeant Ackley, and there was no attempt to disguise the sarcasm of his voice. “And we have been on your trail for a year as a hijacker. Now suppose you had made the arrest and then signified to Garland that he could escape if he left the loot behind. And then suppose you had ruffled yourself all up and claimed you’d been in a struggle, and told the same story you now tell. You’d be just two hundred thousand dollars to the good.”
Lester Leith smiled faintly. “You wouldn’t accuse me of a crime in the presence of witnesses unless you had some ground for the accusation.”
“Certainly,” agreed the officer, his voice still dripping sarcasm. “I wouldn’t think of it for a moment. I was only mentioning that if the circumstances had been different, and if you had told the same story you now tell, the circumstances would appear the same as we now have them.
“Under the circumstances, I think I’ll make a complete search of your person, Leith, and I’ll have my men go through this printery with a fine-tooth comb, looking for a concealed package somewhere.”
“Certainly,” said Leith, repeating the word and tone of the officer. “I would like you to do that so I would be relieved of any suspicion.”
They searched him, and they found nothing. They searched the printery and they found nothing, and then there came a wild exclamation from the undercover man.
“Good God! The fat girl! She took the Flyer!”
Ackley frowned at him.
“Spill it, quick!”
“And her suitcase was in the printery! If she’d set it down there, and then Garland had locked the door and gone to his hiding place, and Leith had hijacked the stolen gems from him, and simply put them in the fat girl’s suitcase, and the fat girl had gone to the train, she wouldn’t have ever suspected the contents of the suitcase until…”
Sergeant Ackley gave a bellow of inarticulate rage.
“Get to the telephone! The idea of letting anything like that go on under your nose!”
“I was handcuffed,” reminded Scuttle.
“Seems to me,” remarked Lester Leith, “that, for a valet, you show a most official and officious type of mind. I’m afraid you might
instill a suspicion into the head of our dear but overzealous sergeant.”
“Suspicion, hell!” yelled Ackley. “It’s a certainty. Here, let me at that telephone.”
He grabbed the instrument and began to throw out a dragnet. The Flyer left at ten o’clock. He assigned men to cover the depot, the gatemen, the taxicabs, and soon the reports began to filter in.
The telephone announced that special officers, covering the train, had reported a very fat woman who had held a ticket to a drawing room. She was carrying a suitcase, and the suitcase was constantly in her hand. She had been escorted aboard the train with difficulty, the suitcase with her. She had almost jammed in the door of the drawing room. It had taken assistance to get her in.
Sergeant Ackley got into immediate action. He ordered the arrest of the woman at a suburban stop where the Flyer was scheduled to make its last stop for through passengers.
Lester Leith gazed at him reproachfully.
“If you arrest that woman you will be responsible for a grave injustice and subject yourself to a suit for false arrest,” he said.
“You admit you purchased the ticket on which she’s traveling?” asked Ackley, his eye on Scuttle.
Lester Leith clamped his lips shut.
“You have accused me of a crime. I could explain this whole affair in a few words. As it is, I shall say nothing until I have counsel present. But I want the witnesses to remember that I warned you against arresting this woman.”
Sergeant Ackley’s only comment was a sneer of triumph.
“You came so close to getting away with it, no wonder you’re sore. If I hadn’t thought of that fat woman, you’d have pulled one of the slickest jobs of all time.”
Ten minutes passed. The telephone shrilled its summons. A report came in from the suburban town. They had caught the train, arrested the woman, taken her from the drawing room. The suitcase she carried had been opened. It contained a green silk jacket and some shorts, rather a skimpy costume for a fat woman in a side show.
Ackley chewed a cigar meditatively.
“Have men stay on the train and search every inch of the drawing room. Bring the woman to the central station. I’ll meet you there.”
He turned and glowered about him.
“This party’s going to adjourn,” he said.
They went to the central station. After an hour a police car arrived with an angry fat woman. She was taken to a cell. Sergeant Ackley gave her a third degree. The woman told a straightforward story. She had never seen Lester Leith but twice in her life—once when she went to his office in response to a want ad, once when he had called upon her with a suitcase and a railroad reservation and employed her to take the suitcase on the train to the destination of the ticket.
She refused to admit she had been previously employed by Leith, or that his valet had taught her to fall in a faint; she denied ever having been in a side show.
Ackley called in Beaver to confront her.
It needed but a glance at the goggle eyes of the undercover man to give Ackley his answer.
“That’s not the one. I never saw her before…Yes I did, too. She was one of the unsuccessful applicants for the job Sadie Crane got.”
Ackley’s jaw sagged.
“Then…she doesn’t even look like the other?”
“No. This one is blonde. The other was brunette. This one has black eyes, the other had hazel eyes. They’re both fat—that’s all.”
“And because I didn’t ask for a description I presume I’ll be on the carpet,” groaned Ackley.
They went back to the room where Lester Leith was being held.
“Where’s Sadie Crane?” rasped Ackley.
Leith blew a cloud of smoke in a lazy spiral.
“I’m sure I wouldn’t tell you.”
Beaver spoke up again.
“He had fifteen drawing-room reservations on night trains. Maybe she went on one of those other reservations.”
Ackley exploded into action.
“Beaver, you have the most infuriating habit of withholding important information!” he yelled, and got busy once more on the telephone.
Investigation disclosed a startling fact. Five of Leith’s drawing-room reservations had been filled. Each one with a woman of astonishingly ample proportions, each woman with a suitcase which never left her hand.
It was a stupendous job to intercept each train and interview each woman, search each suitcase—chartered airplanes, long-distance telephone calls, emergency stop signals on various railroads…
By morning several facts were apparent.
The railroad systems out of the city had been badly confused by a wholesale stopping of limited trains at various points en route. Five fat women had been taken from trains to automobiles. They were all yelling vehement threats of lawsuits. Five suitcases had been confiscated. Each suitcase contained exactly the same thing—a pair of green trunks and a jacket.
Sergeant Ackley finally threw up his hands in disgust.
He had disrupted railroads, irritated powerful officials. He had done it all on a suspicion alone, and he had subjected himself to several suits by irate fat women who, as Lester Leith pointed out, were more inconvenienced at being jammed into police automobiles than were thin women.
Also, as Lester Leith managed to point out, Ackley had done virtually nothing toward apprehending the man, Garland, who had escaped; nor had he acted diligently in rounding up Garland’s accomplices.
By the time Ackley had turned his attention to that angle of the case, the accomplices had vanished. There remained for him nothing but the glory of having solved the Demarest robbery, and he took unto himself every bit of that glory.
—
Three days later Ackley received a hurried call from Beaver.
“The apartment where Sadie Crane lived is occupied. No one knows who’s in it, but the milkman delivers three quarts of whipping cream every day.”
Sergeant Ackley gripped the receiver until the skin over his knuckles was pale. “I’m coming right over,” he said.
“Leith is in his apartment,” cautioned Beaver.
“Keep him there,” roared Ackley, and slammed down the telephone.
He made record time to Leith’s apartment house.
A hammering on the door of the apartment where Sadie Crane had lived was answered by a thin wisp of a man.
“Who are you?” demanded Ackley.
“I’m Spinner.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I married Sadie Crane.”
“Where’s your wife now?”
“In the sitting room, the last I saw of her.”
“Here?”
“Yes, sir.”
Sergeant Ackley picked the thin little man up bodily by the coat collar, set him to one side, and strode into the apartment.
He came to a spacious room, in the center of which, sitting in a specially made armchair, cheerfully knitting, was a mountain of flesh.
“You Sadie Crane?” he yelled.
She shook her head.
“Who are you, then?”
“Sadie Crane Spinner. I married Arthur Spinner yesterday.”
Sergeant Ackley took a deep breath, controlled the outburst that quivered on his lips.
“You were at the Garland Printery the night Scuttle was there?”
“Oh, yes.”
“You were to take the Flyer?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“At the request of Lester Leith?”
“Yes. He wanted me to take a suitcase with my things in it and put on a performance in some suburban town.”
“But you changed your plans at the last minute?”
“Oh, yes. You see, when I left the printery to take a cab to the depot, the cabbie had a note that had just been delivered. It was from Leith telling me not to catch the train. He’d changed his mind. He said to take the suitcase up to his apartment and leave it there and go back to my apartment and wait until I heard from him. So I did it. It suited me�
��I don’t like to ride on trains. The berths ain’t big enough.”
Sergeant Ackley’s eyes were bulging.
“You came here, and have been here all the time?”
“Certainly. Then I got married and had to give up the idea of traveling. I’ve got to take care of Arthur.”
“And your suitcase? What became of it?”
“Oh, Mr. Leith brought it back here the next morning. He said he’d changed his plans.”
Sergeant Ackley fitted the mental picture puzzle together.
“What was in the suitcase when he returned it?”
“My trunks and jacket.”
“Nothing else?”
“Nothing else.”
“What are you doing now?”
“On my honeymoon. Times are good. Lester Leith employed me at twenty-five dollars a day as a human elephant, my husband at the same figure as a walking skeleton. When his side show blew up he gave us a month’s pay in lieu of notice; and the apartment’s rented until the middle of the month and the rent paid. So we’re staying on here.”
“Well,” remarked Sergeant Ackley, “I’m a cock-eyed—”
The woman nodded cheerfully.
—
Sergeant Ackley strode into the apartment of Lester Leith. Scuttle let him in, flashed him a look of inquiry.
Ackley walked to the chair where Lester Leith was blowing spirals of cigarette smoke.
“Pretty clever, sending a woman to the only place I’d never look for her—right back to her own apartment. I covered every train, arrested five fat women who were false alarms, covered every hotel and rooming house—and here she was all the time!”
Lester Leith shrugged.
“Of course. That’s where she would be if I were innocent of the crime you accused me of. But you thought I was guilty, so you looked in all the wrong places.”
Sergeant Ackley’s hands clenched.
“And you had only to take the loot from Garland, slip it in Sadie Crane’s suitcase, have her take it out of the printery for you, then come to this apartment—take it out right under our noses—and you cleaned up two hundred thousand dollars!”
