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Updated: June 19, 2025
Everything was in that room that should have been there except Clayte and the suitcase." The babel of complaint and suggestion broke out as I finished, exactly as it had done when I got to this point before: "The Griggsby woman ought to be kept under surveillance"; "The clerk, the house servants ought to be watched," and so on, and so on.
"Well," I hedged, "there's a gang all right. But suppose there wasn't, how would you find any wonderfulness in a creature as near nothing as this Clayte?" She sat and thought for a moment, drawing imaginary lines on the table top, finally looking up at me with a narrowing of the lids, a tightening of the lips, which gave an extraordinary look of power to her young feminine face.
My fugue work brought little Pete, and Murray, one of the men from the operatives' room. "Where's Roberts?" I asked the latter. "He went to lunch, Mr. Boyne." "Where's Foster?" Foster was chief operative. "He telephoned in from Redwood City half an hour ago. Chasing a Clayte clue down the peninsula." "If he calls up again, tell him to report in at once. Is there a stenographer about?"
The broken sentences she'd sobbed out to me began to fit up like a puzzle-game. By all theories of good detective work, I should have seen from the first the similarity of these crimes. But Clayte, slipping in here to do this murder and why? What mixed him up with affairs here? And then the icy pang Dykeman had seen a connection Cummings had found one.
They talked as they lunched. I didn't pay any attention to what they said now; my mind was racing at the new idea Worth had given me. So far, I had been running Skeels down as one of the same gang with Clayte; the man on the roof; the go-between for the getaway.
And for the next few minutes I was making words mean something, drawing a picture of the Skeels I knew, so that others could visualize him. And it brought me a word of commendation from Miss Wallace, and made Worth exclaim, "Sounds more like Clayte than Clayte himself. You've put flesh on those bones, Jerry." "You keep busy at that phone and help land him," I growled.
We don't want a run on the bank, and under present financial conditions, almost anything might start one. But almost a million dollars!" He seemed unable to go on; none of the other men at the table had anything to offer. It was the silent youngster, the outsider, who spoke again. "I suppose Clayte was bonded for what that's worth?"
As I ran over to the table and looked at what was under her hand, it came again. "He did. He did. It was Clayte the wonder man!" "Do do you deduce that, Barbara?" "Did I?" she raised to mine the face of a sick child. "I must have. See it's here on the blotter: 'y-t-e, that's Clayte. Double l-e-r; that's 'teller, 'Avenue' is part of 'Van Ness Avenue Bank. Oh, yes; I deduced it, I suppose.
This was promising; a little different from the ordinary brag; I signaled inconspicuously to our stenographer to keep right on the job. "When I was twenty-four years old, I saw my chance to shake the gang and try out my own idea," Clayte rattled it off feelinglessly. "It was a lone hand for me. My father had made a stake by a forgery; checks on the City bank.
Boyne to think it wonderful that a man so devoid of personality as that " she slanted a slim finger across the description of Clayte "Didn't you add up in your mind all that you told me about the men disagreeing as to which side he parted his hair on, whether he wore tan shoes or black, a fedora or derby, smoked or didn't, absolutely nothing left as to peculiarities of face, figure, movement, expression, manner or habit to catch the eye of one single observer among the sixteen or eighteen you questioned surely you added that up, Mr.
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