“He looks like a dick to the boys.”

  Lester Leith shook his head. “He’s an inventor…Tell me, have you got plenty of apple pies and chocolate cakes?”

  “Of course. There’s enough on the counter to last for quite a while, and a dozen of each in the shelves underneath.”

  Leith nodded.

  “I’m going to keep out of the picture,” he said. “I want Lamont to have a chance at the boys when I’m not around.” And Lester Leith slipped unobtrusively into a little private lounging room the door of which was equipped with a spring lock, the only key to which dangled on Leith’s key-ring.

  There was a telephone in that room, and he used it, when he had seen that the door was locked and fastened, to call Conrad Steele, the lawyer, husband of the murdered woman.

  “I think,” said Lester Leith over the telephone in low tones, “that I can show you evidence that’ll demonstrate the guilt of your chauffeur, and free your secretary.”

  Steele’s voice was harsh, rasping, stern. “Who is this talking?”

  “A private investigator who’s uncovered something worthwhile.”

  “Well,” rasped the voice, “come on over.”

  “No,” said Lester Leith, “you’ve got to look over two men without letting them know that you’re looking at them. If I get your cooperation in this thing, I can show you some results. You’d better plan on being absent from your office for three or four hours.”

  “I can’t,” rasped Steele. “I’m busy.”

  “Say-y-y-y,” snarled Lester Leith, “what’s eating you? Why are you so anxious to pin this crime on your secretary?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Well, you’re acting funny. This business is the most important piece of business you’ve got, right now.”

  “What’s the address?” asked the attorney, using a milder tone of voice.

  Lester Leith gave him the address.

  “Ask for Mr. Leith,” he said, “and don’t tell anyone who you are or what you want to see me about. And make it snappy. I think we can have your secretary out in a couple of hours if you play cards right.”

  “I’ll be over,” promised the attorney.

  “Okay,” said Lester Leith. “See that you show up, or the cops’ll use it against you.”

  The attorney flared into rage.

  “What are you talking about?” he bellowed.

  “You,” said Lester Leith, and hung up the receiver.

  He opened the drawer in the little desk in the room and took out a pile of imitation diamonds. They were excellent imitations. Purchased wholesale, they amounted to a neat sum, but they would have deceived any save a careful eye. Lester Leith placed these diamond imitations on the table, covered them over with a handkerchief. Then he opened another drawer which contained a gun, and put a glove on his right hand. He selected a cigarette with his left, leaned back in the chair, smoked, and waited.

  It was precisely eleven minutes and forty-three seconds after he had hung up the telephone receiver that a timid knock came on the door of the little office like room. Lester Leith slipped the bolt, opened the door a few inches.

  Lois Webber slid through the opening in the door, into the room.

  “There’s a man outside who won’t give his name, and he’s mad as a hornet,” she whispered. “I’m afraid he may do something to you. He’s sputtering and popping like a bunch of firecrackers.”

  Lester Leith smiled.

  “Show the gentleman in,” he said.

  “But he might hurt you!”

  “I think not. Show him in.”

  The girl held the door open. “This way, please,” she said.

  A small man, vigorously aggressive, his black eyes snapping beneath heavy black brows, barged into the room, his shoulders swinging, his lips clamped in a straight line, his black hair ruffled.

  “What the devil did you mean by that last crack of yours?” he stormed.

  Lester Leith waved a conciliatory hand.

  “I wanted to make certain you came. That’s all.”

  The man glared at him.

  “Well, that’s a hell of a way to get a man to come. I’m fed up on the whole batch of you detectives. The detectives, the reporters, and the police, all make me sick …”

  Lester Leith motioned to Lois Webber. “Get out,” he said.

  The girl closed the door behind her, slowly and reluctantly. The spring lock clicked into place.

  Lester Leith reached out toward the handkerchief which covered the pile of imitation stones.

  “I think,” he said, “that I have recovered your wife’s diamonds. That’s why I was so insistent upon your dropping your business affairs and coming over.”

  The man’s black eyes widened a bit. “Recovered the diamonds!” he said.

  “Exactly,” said Lester Leith, and snatched the handkerchief from the glittering pile of imitation diamonds.

  The man checked a startled exclamation, clapped his right hand to his side, near the bottom of his vest, leaned forward, pushed the imitation stones about with the forefinger of his left hand.

  “No,” he said, “those aren’t the stones.”

  Lester Leith’s face showed disappointment. “Are you certain, Mr. Steele?”

  “Certain.”

  Lester Leith frowned, after the manner of one who is checking and rechecking certain conclusions.

  “The chauffeur didn’t have a latchkey to the front door,” he said, almost dreamily; “that’s why he had to jimmy the windows.”

  “Naturally,” said the attorney. “I don’t trust my hired help with keys to the front door. The only latchkeys were those which my wife and I had.”

  Lester Leith pursed his lips.

  “Now don’t mistake me on this thing,” rasped the lawyer in a harsh voice. “I know that convention requires that a man be all broken up over the murder of his wife. I want to see justice done. I want to see her death avenged. But I am not going to be a damned hypocrite. The woman was double-crossing me, and she met her death because of that fact.

  “I’m sorry she’s dead. I want to see her murderers brought to justice. I don’t want to see an innocent person convicted. But I’m not prostrated with grief.

  “Her life was insured in my favor. I shall not touch one penny of that insurance money. The diamonds were insured. I shall insist upon the payment of that insurance money, unless the stones are recovered. I paid for those diamonds, and it’s only fair that I should be reimbursed for them. I suffered a loss on them.

  “The insurance on the life of my wife was to compensate me in a measure for the loss of her society and affection in the event she should die. I now find that the value I placed upon that society and affection were vastly overrated. I shall, therefore, request the insurance company to refund the premium paid. That’s all.”

  He got to his feet.

  “Just a minute,” said Lester Leith. “I have here a diagram showing the various carat sizes of stones. Will you indicate the approximate size of the diamonds your wife wore?”

  And Lester Leith slid a diagram across the table. That diagram was in glass covered frame, similar to the printing frames used by photographers.

  “This size,” said Steele.

  “Which size?” asked Leith.

  “This one.”

  “Which one?”

  “This one right here,” said the lawyer, and pressed an emphatic and impatient forefinger upon the glass.

  “Ah,” said Lester Leith, and there was something sinister about the tone of his voice. It was a purring indication of something ominous to come.

  The lawyer stared at him.

  Lester Leith unfastened spring clips in the back of the frame, removed the glass, taking great care to use his right hand, which was gloved, whenever he touched the glass. He took a small bottle of aluminum powder from a drawer, dusted it over the place where the lawyer’s finger had pressed. Then he placed the glass against a black background in the shape of a piece of velvet cloth.

  The marks of the fingerprint stood out startlingly distinct.

  CHAPTER XI

  No Proof

  Lester Leith took out the package of pie plates which he had taken from his apartment. He placed the pie plate that had the developed latent of Beaver’s fingerprint upon it, immediately next to the piece of glass. He adjusted a magnifying glass, started checking the two latents.

  The attorney paused, took a hesitant step, sat down in a chair. His piercing, black eyes were narrow now, and the color of the face was a shade whiter than it had been.

  Lester Leith nodded from time to time.

  “Well?” asked the lawyer, “what are you doing?”

  Lester Leith glanced up, surveyed the attorney. “If,” he said, “there were only two latchkeys to the front door of your house, and your wife’s latchkey was found in her purse when she had just stepped inside of the reception hall, the answer is obvious.”

  The lawyer swallowed with difficulty. “Precisely what,” he asked, “do you mean?”

  “I mean,” said Lester Leith, “that when a woman carries her latchkey in her purse, and opens a door with that key, she naturally has to take the key out of her purse. And she wouldn’t be able to replace it in the purse and close the purse after opening the door until a second or two had elapsed.

  “If, therefore, that woman were found, just inside of the locked door, murdered, with the key in her purse, and it was apparent from the position of the body and the fact that there had been no struggle that she had been murdered just as soon as she opened the door, I would deduce that someone had been with her. I would further deduce that someone had a key, and that the door had been opened with that key.”

  The lawyer stared at Lester Leith, his face set, defiant. “Are you trying to accuse me?” he asked.

  “And,” went on Lester Leith, “it would be natural to suppose that if robbery had been the motive, the five thousand dollars in the purse would have been taken. But if jealous rage were the real motive of the crime, and the diamonds had been taken merely in order to strengthen the hypothesis of a hold-up, it would be only natural for the murderer to overlook the purse—particularly if he expected to inherit its contents in any event.

  “But let us suppose for the sake of the argument that such a person had struck the woman down, and he wanted to make it appear that the crime had been done by someone else he only had to go to the garage, get a bar that had been used as a jack handle, and was, therefore well covered with the fingerprints of the chauffeur, jimmy a window, and then ransack the interior of the house.

  “Then, deciding that he’d gild the lily a bit and paint the rose, he went ahead and made it appear three persons were concerned in the stick-up. That was easy. He had only to set three places at the table in what appeared to have been a hasty lunch.

  “Then this person slipped out, went to a public telephone, called the police, told them that he had been one of a group of three who had conspired to rob the woman, that the others had resorted to murder, and that this person disclaimed any responsibility.

  “Now such a telephone call is mysterious, and puzzling. If it had been placed by the person who claimed he had been one of three, and had been a genuine confession, the person could have gained nothing. On the other hand, it undoubtedly did give the police a chance to discover the crime several hours sooner than would otherwise have been the case.

  “Now why should the criminal be concerned as to the time the crime was discovered? One would naturally conclude that it was because the murderer had a good alibi he could use in the event of the police suspecting him.

  “Now, as a matter of fact, Mr. Steele, your wife didn’t go home to meet the chauffeur. She went home because someone telephoned her. As soon as she received that telephone message she pretended she wasn’t feeling well, excused herself from the reception and went home.

  “Those facts are uncontradicted. Now let’s analyze them a bit.

  “Let’s suppose, first, that your wife had received the letter from Bert Meggs, your chauffer, making a rendezvous at the house. Then let us suppose some other person had telephoned her, telling her he had to see her at once. She would never have taken such a person to the house, because she knew the chauffeur was to be there.

  “On the other hand, there was no occasion for the chauffeur to telephone, because he thought she already had his note. The explanation, therefore, would be that your wife did not receive the note which the chauffeur sent her, but that some other person told her something over the telephone, sufficiently important, to make her plead illness and return to her home at once.

  “And it’s reasonable to suppose, at least as a working hypothesis, that such a person met her somewhere between the reception and her home and that this person had a latchkey to the front door.”

  Lester Leith smiled urbanely.

  Steele sneered, but there was just the faintest suggestion of pallor about his face.

  “When you consider that the note Meggs sent was actually found in the wife’s possession, and that I have a complete alibi,“ he said, “this theory of yours wouldn’t seem to hold much water.”

  Lester Leith’s smile became a grin.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, almost soothingly, “your wife did have the note in the sole of her stocking, didn’t she? And that’s pretty conclusive evidence that you were the murderer. You intercepted the note, baited your own trap, then pressed the note down into the stocking where it would be found by the coroner.

  “The evidence shows she didn’t know Meggs expected her there. Yet she would have known Meggs was to be there had she received the note. Yet the note was found on her body. That would indicate the note had been intercepted, delivered after her death.

  “And as for your alibi, it works both ways. If you couldn’t give an alibi for your secretary, she couldn’t give one for you.”

  “But,” said Steele, speaking rapidly, “I was dictating steadily. The number of records I sent out on the brief would show that.”

  Lester Leith smilingly shook his head.

  “Cylinders on a dictating machine can be made at any time. You could have dictated that brief in the afternoon, simply sent out the cylinders during the evening.”

  The lawyer took a deep breath.

  “You can’t prove a thing! You can only pull some fancy conversation. That’s all!”

  Lester Leith shrugged his shoulders, returned his attention to the fingerprints. In utter silence he checked various points of real or pretended similarity in the two prints, exclaiming under his breath, little whispered comments of satisfaction.

  “You overlooked a bet here,” he said, “and this is proof!”

  The lawyer stretched back his arms, yawned.

  “Yeah?” he said, as though the thing interested him not at all. “Is that so? And can’t I leave a fingerprint on a pie plate in my own home if I want to?”

  Lester Leith shrugged his shoulders without looking up. “That’s for you to tell the jury… And there’s another thing.”

  Lester Leith whirled about, faced the lawyer as he snapped out the last of his accusation. “I have an idea you’re a gambler, one of the whole-hog-or-nothing guys. You knew the officers would be searching every place they thought the diamonds might have been hidden. With supposed thieves in your house, that meant your house would be searched. With a chauffeur suspected of murder, that meant the garage would be searched. With a secretary also accused of murder, that meant your office would be searched. So I have a hunch you carried those diamonds where they’d be safe from discovery unless the police should suspect you! And your relied on your ingenuity to keep them from suspecting you.”

  And Lester Leith swung back for a final inspection of the fingerprints.

  CHAPTER XII

  Red-Handed

  There was a sudden rustle of swift motion.

  Steele made a lunge. His hand darted out to the drawer. The clutching fingers grasped the butt of the gun, slipped, fumbled, grasped again. He leaped backwards, fangs showing, black eyes glittering, mouth twitching. The gun was in his hand, pointed at Lester Leith.

  “All right, damn you. I won’t be taken alive. They can only burn a man once. I may as well eliminate you and your damned fingerprints. That’ll destroy the evidence of Vivian’s murder. Then I’ll take a chance on yours, damn you!”

  Lester Leith faced him, hands up.

  “Don’t do that, Steele,” he pleaded. “I’ll listen to reason. I’ll make you a proposition…”

  “Baloney!” snapped the lawyer, squinted deliberately down the sights, and pulled the trigger.

  The hammer clicked.

  The lawyer pulled the trigger again. There sounded another click.

  “Empty,” said Lester Leith with a smile. “I left that empty gun in the drawer. Thought you might betray yourself with it. The shells for it are in the pasteboard box. Now this gun is loaded.” And Lester Leith’s gloved hand darted beneath his armpit, brought to light a wicked looking automatic.

  The lawyer caved into a sitting position. The whites of his eyes were showing now, around the black irises, as the whites show in the eyes of a fighting horse. He was breathing hard as thought he had been running.

  Lester Leith pushed across a typewritten sheet of paper. “A confession for you to sign,” he said. “It covers all the major points.”

  The lawyer stared. Beads of sweat were on his forehead. “You,” he snarled, “can go to hell!”

  Lester Leith shrugged his shoulders. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll call the police.”

  He got from his chair, started toward the door. The attorney, vicious as a cornered rat, lunged.

  Lester Leith stepped back. His motion was as well-timed as the footwork of a professional boxer. The lawyer smashed down with the gun, using it as a metal club. The blow whizzed past. Lester Leith’s right travelled a matter of eight inches. The slender form of the attorney stiffened as the blow contacted with his jaw.

  Lester Leith eased the man back into the chair, opened his vest and shirt, pulled open the pockets of the money belt which was next to the skin.

  From those chamois pockets he extracted diamonds, dumped them into the pockets of his own coat. Then he fastened the shirt and vest, sat down to wait.