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Updated: June 22, 2025
"No; I've been bringing things in for a good many years, and the customs people know I'm not a thief." "That's quite a compliment," I pointed out. "They've been tearing things wide open lately." "They've had a tip of some sort, I suppose. Come in," he added, answering a tap at the door. The door opened and Vantine's man came in. "A gentleman to see you, sir," he said, and handed Vantine a card.
If he had known of them, he would have had them out before the cabinet was shipped." "What is it, then?" I demanded. "And, above all, Godfrey, why should this fellow hide himself in Vantine's house and kill two men? Did they surprise him while he was working over the cabinet?"
Never before, in the face of any mystery, had I felt so blind and helpless, and the feeling took such a grip upon me that it kept me awake for a long time after I got to bed. It seemed, in some mysterious way, that I was contending with a power greater than myself, a power threatening and awful, which could crush me with a turn of the wrist. Vantine's will was probated next morning.
Was Vantine quite normal, I wondered? Could any man be normal who was willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars for a piece of furniture? Especially a man who could not afford such extravagance? I knew the size of Vantine's fortune; it was large, but a hundred thousand dollars represented more than a year's income. And then I smiled to myself.
"In the light of those provisions, do you know of any one who would have an interest in Vantine's death?" "I think I may tell you the provisions," I said, after a moment. "With the exception of a few legacies to his servants, his whole fortune is left to the Metropolitan Museum of Art." "You have been his attorney for some time?" "We have been his legal advisers for many years."
Adjoining it to the north is Vantine's, its dimly lighted and incense-scented aisles running between counters covered with rare and costly curios from the Orient. Northward to the Plaza commerce has moved with giant stride. The march might be studied and pictured block by block, corner by corner, and page after page blackened with detail and description.
The Frenchman's business, then, had something to do with this cabinet, and with this secret drawer. Left to himself, he discovered the cabinet in the room adjoining the ante-room, attempted to open the drawer, and was killed." "Yes," I agreed; "and now how about Vantine?" "Vantine's death isn't so simply explained. Presumably the unknown woman also called on business relating to the cabinet.
There must be no leisure, for leisure meant paralysis. At the Twenty-third Street ferry-house he got into a hansom and gave the address of "the flat." He did not note where he was until the hansom drew up at the curb. He leaned forward and looked at the house at their windows with the curtains which she had draped so gracefully, which she and he had selected at Vantine's one morning.
Vantine's bedroom, and another in mine, and sends in a call to the police." "Is it working?" "Yes, sir; Mr. Vantine himself tested it this evening just before dinner." "Then why didn't it work when I opened those windows just now?" I demanded. Parks laughed. "Because I threw off the switch, sir," he explained, "when I came out to get the shutters.
I acquiesced in all these arrangements, but I was feeling decidedly blue when I started back to the office. Vantine's collection had always seemed to me somehow a part of himself; more especially a part of the house in which it had been assembled.
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