The Million-Dollar Suitcase by Alice MacGowan (free ebook reader for android TXT) 📖

to the part of the festival they'd care for. In the orchards near town where the big picnic places had been laid out with rough board tables and benches, seats for thousands, there were occasional loud basket lunch parties scattered. All at once I was hungry enough to have gone and asked for a handout.

I went by back streets down to the house to get my mail. There seemed no human reason that I should feel it a treachery to have Worth in jail at San Jose, and be able to walk into his house at Santa Ysobel a free man. The place was empty; Chung had the day off, of course. It was possible Worth's cook, even, didn't know what had happened to his employer. Santa Ysobel had no morning paper. In the confusion of the blossom festival, I ventured to guess that not more than a score of people did as yet know of the arrest. Our end of town was drained, quiet; nobody over at the Vandeman bungalow; looking down at the Square as I made my sneak through, I had caught a glimpse of Bronson Vandeman, a great rosette of apricot blossoms on his coat lapel, making his speech of presentation to the cannery girl queen, while his wife, Ina, her fair face shaded doubly by a big flower hat and a blossom covered parasol, listened and looked on.

One of my pieces of mail concerned the Skeels chase. If my men down there had Skeels, and Skeels was Clayte, it would mean everything in handling Cummings and Dykeman. I took out the report and ran hastily through it; a formal statement; day by day stuff:

"Found Skeels and Dial at Tiajuana. Negotiating to buy saloon and gambling house. Arranged with Jefico for arrest of S. (Expense $20.) Rurales took S. to jail. (Expense, $4.50) I interviewed S., and he said he came here to open a business where he could sell booze. D. was his partner in proposition. S. knew nothing of bank affair. Would waive extradition and come back to stand trial at our expense. Interviewed D. He says combined capital of two is $4500., saved from S's business and D's miner's wages. D. said—"

Not much to show up with; but there were three photographs enclosed that I wanted to try on Cummings and Dykeman. No telling where I'd find either, but the Fremont House was my best bet. Getting back there through the crowd, I saw Skeet Thornhill in a corner drugstore, waiting at its counter. I was afoot, having been obliged to park my roadster in one of the spaces set apart for this purpose. I noticed Vandeman's car already there.

I lingered a minute on that corner looking down the slope that led to City Hall Square. Tent restaurants along the way; sandwiches; hot dogs; coffee; milk; pies; doughnuts. Part way down a hurdy-gurdy in a tent began to get patronage again; the school children in white dresses with pink bows in their hair had just finished a stunt in the Square. They and their elders were streaming our way, headed for the snake charmers, performing dogs and Nigger-in-the-tank. In the midst of them Vandeman and his wife came afoot. He caught sight of me, hailed, and when I joined them, asked quickly, glancing toward the drugstore entrance,

"Worth come with you?"

I shook my head. He made that little clucking sound with his tongue that people do when they want to offer sympathy, and find the matter hard to put into words.

A seller of toy balloons on the corner with a lot of noisy youngsters around him; the ka-lash, ka-lam of a mechanical piano further down the block; and young Mrs. Vandeman's staccato tones saying,

"I tell Bron that the only thing Worth's friends can do is to go on exactly as if nothing had happened. Don't you think so, Mr. Boyne?"

I agreed mutely.

"Well, I wish you'd say so to Barbie Wallace," her voice sharpened. "She's certainly acting as though she believed the worst."

"Now, Ina," Vandeman remonstrated. And I asked uncomfortably,

"What's Barbie done? Where is she?"

"Up at Mrs. Capehart's. In her room. Doesn't come out at all. Isn't going to the ball to-night. Skeet said she refused to speak to Mr. Cummings."

"Is that all Skeet said? Vandeman, you've told your wife that Cummings swore to the complaint?"

"Yes, but—er—there's no animus. The executor of Gilbert's estate—With all the talk going around—If Worth's proved innocent, he might in the end be glad of Cummings' action."

"Oh, might he?" Skeet Thornhill had hurried out from the drugstore, a package of medicine in her hand. Her eyes looked as though she'd been crying; they flashed a hostile glance over the new brother-in-law, excellently groomed, the big flower favor on his coat, the tall, beautiful sister, all frilly white and flower festival fashion.

"If Worth's proved innocent!" she flung at them. "Bronse Vandeman, you've got a word too many in when you say that."

"Just a tongue-slip, Skeeter," Vandeman apologized. "I hope the boy'll come through all right—same as you do."

"You don't do anything about it the same as I do!" Skeet came back. "I'd be ashamed to 'hope' for a friend to be cleared of a charge like that. If I couldn't know he was clear—clear all the time—I'd try to forget about it."

"See here, Skeet," Ina obviously restrained herself, "that's what we're all trying to do for Worth: forget about it—make nothing of it—act exactly as if it'd never happened. You ought to come on out to the ball with the other girls. You're just staying away because Barbara Wallace is."

"I'm not. Some damn fool went and told mother about Worth being arrested, and made her a lot worse. She's almost crazy. I'd be afraid to leave her alone with old Jane. You get me and this medicine up home—or shall I go around to Capehart's and have Barbie drive me?"

"I'll take you, Skeeter," Vandeman said. "We're through here. We're for home to dress, then to the country club—and not leave it again till morning. That ball out there has got to be made the biggest thing Santa Ysobel ever saw—regardless. Come on." The crowd swallowed them up.

Making for the Fremont House, I passed Dr. Bowman's stairway, and on impulse turned, ran up. I found the doctor packing, very snappish, very sorry for himself. He was leaving next day for a position in the state hospital for the insane at Sefton. His kind have to blow off to somebody; I was it, though he must have known I had no sympathy to offer. The hang-over of last night's drunk made emotional the tone in which he said,

"After all, a man's wife makes or breaks him. Mine's broken me. I could have had a fine position at the Mountain View Sanitarium, well paid, among cultured people, if she'd held up her damned divorce suit a little longer."

"And as it is, you have to put up with what Cummings can land you with such pull as he has."

"I'm not complaining of Cummings," sullenly. "He did the best he could for me, I suppose, on such short notice. But a man of my class is practically wasted in a place of the sort."

I had learned what I wanted; I carried more ammunition to the interview before me. I found Dykeman in his room, propped up in bed, wheezing with an attack of asthma. A sick man is either more merciful than usual, or more unmerciful. Apparently it took Dykeman the former way; he accepted me eagerly, and had me call Cummings from the adjoining room. The lawyer was half into that costume he had brought from San Francisco. He came quite modern as to the legs and feet, but thoroughly ancient in a shirt of mail around the arms and chest, and carrying a Roman helmet in his hand as though it had been an opera hat.

"Trying 'em on?" Dykeman whispered at him.

Cummings nodded with that self-conscious, half-tickled, half-sheepish air that men display when it comes to costume. His greeting to me was cool but not surly. What had happened might go as all in the day's work between detective and lawyer.

"Just seen Bowman," was my first pass at them. "I gather he's not very well pleased with the position you got him; seems to think it small pay for a dirty job."

"What's this? What's this?" croaked Dykeman. "You been getting a place for Bowman, Cummings?"

"Certainly," the lawyer dodged with swift, practical neatness. "I'd promised him my influence in the matter some little time ago."

"Yes," I said, "mighty little time ago—the day he promised the testimony you wanted in the Gilbert case."

"Anything in what Boyne says, Cummings?" Dykeman asked anxiously. "You know I wouldn't stand for that sort of stuff."

The lawyer shook his head, but I didn't believe it was ended between them; Dykeman was the devil to hang on to a point. This would come up again after I was gone. Meantime I made haste to shove the photographs before them. Cummings passed them back with an indifferent, "What's the idea?"

"You don't recognize him?"

"Never saw the man in my life," and again he asked, "What's the idea?"

"You'd recognize a picture of Clayte?" I countered with a question of my own.

"Yes—I think so," rather dubiously. "But Dykeman would. Show them to him."

Dykeman reached for the photographs, spread them out before him, then looked up from them peevishly to say,

"For the good Lord's sake! Don't look any more like Clayte than it does like a horned toad. Is that what you've been wasting your time over, Boyne? If you ask me—"

"I don't ask you anything," retrieving the pictures, planting them deep in an inner pocket. Then I got myself out of the room.

Standing on the sidewalk in front of the Fremont House, I felt sort of bewildered. This last crack had taken all the pep I had left. I suddenly realized it was long after dinner time, and I'd had no dinner, no lunch, nothing to eat since an early breakfast. Worth had sent me to the girl—and I hadn't gone. I dragged myself around to Capehart's cottage as nearly whipped as I ever was in my life.

I found Barbara with Laura Bowman, every one else off the place, out at the shows. Those girls sure were good to me; they fed me and didn't ask questions till I was ready to talk. Nothing to be said really, except that I'd failed. I told them of meeting the Vandemans, and gave them Ina Vandeman's opinion as to how Worth's friends should conduct themselves just now.

"So they'll all be out there," I concluded, "Vandeman and his wife leading the grand march, her sisters as maids of honor—except Skeet, staying at home with her mother. Cummings goes as a Roman soldier; Doctor Bowman as a Spanish cavalier. Edwards didn't see it as the Vandemans do, but after I'd talked to him awhile, he agreed to be there."

And suddenly I noticed for the first time how the relative position of these two women had shifted. Laura Bowman wasn't red-headed for nothing; out from under the blight of Bowman and that hateful marriage, she had already thrown off some of her physical frailness; the nervous tension showed itself now in energy. She was moving swiftly about putting to rights after my meal while she listened. But Barbara sat looking straight ahead of her; I knew she was seeing streets full of carnival, every friend and acquaintance out at a ball—and Worth in a murderer's cell. It wouldn't do. I jumped to my feet with a brisk,

"Girl, where's your hat? We'll go to the study and look over all our points once more. Get busy—get busy. That's the medicine for you."

She gave me a miserable look and a negative shake of the head; but I still urged, "Worth sent me to you. The