Almost at once a line hit the deck of the boat, the running lights switched on, and the motor started its rhythmic chugging.

  On the rail of the boat, just aft of the pilot house, the figure of Vera Thurmond showed, her eyes straining into the night, her arm upflung in a gesture of farewell.

  Beside her was the indistinct shape of the girl who had boarded the yacht under such exceptional circumstances. She was motionless, silent.

  The yacht swung out on the tide, the motor speeded up and a churning of cheesy water just under the stern, marked the pulsation of the screw as the craft gracefully melted into the darkness.

  CHAPTER IV

  The Adventuress

  MRS. NETTIE PEASE AMES regarded Sidney Zoom through tear reddened eyes. “B-but you s-s-said you w-w-wanted to give me some information. N-n-now you’re

  asking questions. I w-w-would not have seen you at all so soon after the tragedy.” Sidney Zoom nodded.

  “I am very sorry, madame, to intrude upon your grief; but I must get certain matters clear in my mind before I can give you the information. Then I believe I can clear up the shooting mystery and have the culprit in your hands.”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “Come up to my sitting room,” she said. “There are too many servants around here.”

  And the sobbing stammers had entirely disappeared from her voice.

  Sidney Zoom followed her up a flight of stairs, into a room, tastefully furnished.

  The woman indicated a chair, facing the window, and sat opposite. “Now spill it,” she said.

  Sidney Zoom chose his words cautiously.

  “I know the police feel Eve Bendley is guilty of the murder. Yet there are certain facts which haven’t as yet been satisfactorily explained.”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Such as?”

  “Several things. I will come to them later. In the meantime, may I ask another question? There’s no possibility that the marriage didn’t annul the will, I take it? In other words, you are the sole heir?”

  The eyes widened.

  “Of course, I hadn’t thought of it. I’d been so prostrated with grief. But I guess that’s right. In fact, an attorney so advised me this morning.”

  Sidney Zoom smiled, a close-clipped smile of frosty humor. “Your great grief didn’t prevent you from consulting him, I take it?”

  The woman crossed her legs, leaned back in her chair and grinned.

  “All right. There’s no use beating around the bush. I’m a gold digger. But I married him. I’m damned glad he’s gone. I wouldn’t have helped him along any, but I knew he wouldn’t live forever when I married him. He was in the late seventies. I’m twenty-nine. You’ve suspected all this, and I might as well own up to it—privately. You ever repeat a word of this conversation and I’ll call you a liar.

  “But that’s all I have been keeping under cover. As for the rest, it’s right out in the open. The girl killed Ralph Ames. I don’t know whether she did it deliberately or whether she lost her head. She was getting money out of the safe when we came in. I’d recognize her figure anywhere, man’s clothes or woman’s. I know the way she carries head, the little swing she has to her shoulders.”

  Sidney Zoom smiled.

  “Thanks for being frank. You know, of course, that the girl only took the money from the safe that was due her under the bonus agreement with Mr. ’Ames.”

  “I know nothing of the sort!” snapped the woman. “I know that the books she kept had been doctored, and I have an idea there was a lot more money in the safe than she admitted or acknowledged in her books.

  “And I know something else. I know that she has been traced to the waterfront, that she was dressed in men’s clothes and tried to stow away on a freighter. I know that she was in a brawl with a bunch of sailors, and that some man who was about your build rescued her.

  “Now you haven’t told me what your interest is in this case and I don’t know as you need to. But I’ll tell you something. You either get that girl into the hands of the police, or I’ll charge you with being an accessory!”

  Sidney Zoom lit his cigarette, regarded the blazing eyes of the woman, and smiled, his frosty smile of cold humor.

  “Very well, Mrs. Ames. Now we understand each other perfectly. If you’ll dismiss the charge you made against the girl of theft and embezzlement, I’ll have her come back here to answer the murder charge.”

  The laugh which greeted this comment was coarse and mocking.

  “Go jump in a lake! The jury might acquit her on the murder charge. Juries have been known to do fool things. But I’ve got her dead to rights on the theft. I’m going to see she has plenty to occupy her mind for a while.”

  Sidney Zoom crossed his long legs, and sighed. “Yes, of course,” he said, “after—”

  “After what?”

  “After you catch her, of course.”

  The woman’s face mottled with dull rage.

  “Go ahead and wise crack,” she said. “See what it gets you.” She reached for the telephone.

  “Police headquarters?” asked Sidney Zoom, courteously.

  “No,” she snapped. “I’ve no confidence in the police. I have a private agency at work on this, and they’ll pick you up from the time you leave here and tell me where you go and what you do.”

  Sidney Zoom arose and bowed.

  “I enjoyed the chat, anyway. I suppose you’ll be the heart-broken widow with the red eyes the next time I see you.”

  “Don’t be a damned fool,” sneered the woman. “Of course I will.”

  And, holding the telephone ready for her call with her right hand, she reached for a small bottle with her left, and drew it under her nose. Almost instantly tears welled into her eyes and trickled slowly down her cheeks. The eyes themselves reddened and the lids became swollen.

  Sidney Zoom turned the knob of the door. “Good day,” he said.

  The woman made no answer. She was giving a number to the telephone, a number which was, doubtless, the telephone number of the private detective agency, just as she had threatened.

  Sidney Zoom closed the door, paused in the hallway.

  A shadowy figure flitted from an adjoining door on noiseless feet. A long, bony finger was pressed crosswise upon thin lips. Gray eyes that set like jewels in a fine network of smile wrinkles, regarded Sidney Zoom with stern speculation. Then the bony finger left the lips, crooked in a gesture of beckoning, and the man led the way down the corridor.

  Sidney Zoom followed.

  Within a small bedroom on the ground floor, back of the kitchen, the figure once more confronted Sidney Zoom.

  “You saw her?” husked a hoarse whisper. Sidney Zoom laughed.

  “You’re Graves, I take it.”

  The man nodded, slowly, solemnly.

  “She always called me Gravy,” he remarked. “You mean the girl?”

  The nod was quick and eager this time. “You’re her friend?” asked the butler.

  Sidney Zoom smiled. “Right at present I’m an investigator, getting certain facts together.”

  The butler’s face twisted into a smile.

  “Beg pardon, sir, but I was listening, sir, at the doorway, you know. It’s a prerogative of servants, sir. I heard—and, if you’ll pardon my saying so, sir, I know you’re a friend of the girl.”

  And the gray eyes twinkled from their network of radiating wrinkles. Sidney Zoom answered the smile.

  The butler lowered his voice to a mere whisper.

  “If they catch her, sir, I’m going to swear that the shot came from the other direction. I know she didn’t fire that shot. Why, she wasn’t the kind. She’s so tender hearted she wouldn’t hurt a fly, sir.”

  Sidney Zoom smiled again.

  “She didn’t impress me as being particularly soft,” he remarked. The affirmation of the butler was eager.

  “Yes, sir. That’s right, sir. She isn’t, sir. But with those she likes she’s always thinking of anybody but herself. I had to urge her to get the money in the way she did. And yet it was hers, sir. By every right and every justice it was hers!”

  The gray eyes were blazing with earnestness now, and an anxious hand groped for the lapel of Sidney Zoom’s coat.

  CHAPTER V

  Clews in the Yard

  “OF COURSE, sir, you know that I was the one that gave her the idea in the first place. Probably I shouldn’t say so, sir. But I don’t want her to take all the blame. I guess I’m an accessory or something in the eyes of the law; but it was a mistake of the head and not of the heart, sir.

  “I tell you what I’m afraid of, sir. I’m afraid that our conversation was overheard, and someone was lying in wait to grab the money from her. Or perhaps, it was that blond adventuress, after all, sir. Miss Eve swears that the shot came from the other side of the room, and it sounded so to me, sir.”

  Sidney Zoom let his eyes bore into the gray eyes with their puckered wrinkles radiating from the corners.

  “Very well, Graves, could you swear to that?”

  “Swear to it, sir! I’ll tell the world, I’ll swear to it. I’d even swear to anything that

  wasn’t the truth to help the young lady out. And this is the truth, sir. That shot sounded from the back of the room, sir.”

  “But the bullet,” said Sidney Zoom, speaking with the finality of a judge pronouncing sentence, “entered Mr. Ames’s chest and came out at his back. Everyone agrees that he was running after the masked figure.”

  The butler twisted his mouth in a grimace. For several long seconds he seemed lost in thought.

  “Do you know, sir, I believe it was someone standing just outside the house, sir, in the yard. That would account for the peculiar sound of the explosion. The window in the south-east corner of the room was open. A man could have fired through that window, and—”

  “Show me,” snapped Sidney Zoom, his voice clipping off the words with machine gun precision.

  The butler went to the door, opened it, peered cautiously up and down the corridor. “Come,” he said.

  Sidney Zoom followed him to a wider corridor that went past the kitchen, through a door, and walked down a carpeted passageway. A long room opened before him.

  “This was where it was done,” whispered the butler.

  Sidney Zoom surveyed the room, the safe in one corner, the entrance hall from the outer door, then, after he had given these things a close inspection, followed the direction of the butler’s pointing finger.

  He saw a window in an alcove, open. “It’s nearly always left open, sir.”

  Zoom regarded the window, the interior of the room again. “The body fell here?” he asked.

  “Just about, sir.”

  “The shot might have come through the window, all right. If the old man had been partially turned it could very readily have come from the window.”

  The butler nodded eager acquiescence.

  “What I thought, sir, was that perhaps someone standing outside the window might have made a motion, and the old man half turned and caught it square in the chest.”

  Zoom pursed his lips.

  “Have you looked outside the window?”

  “No, sir, I haven’t, sir. Fact of the matter is, I’m mixed up in this too much as it is.” Zoom strode toward the window.

  “Have a care, sir. She’s a devil, that adventuress. If she finds you—”

  “Bosh!” snapped Sidney Zoom. “Look here, Graves. Here are foot-prints in the soil out here. Have they been made recently?”

  “I couldn’t say, sir. If you would not mind, sir, I’d like to leave the room—”

  “Bosh again, Graves. Don’t be so frightened of her. You want to help Miss Eve,

  don’t you? Very well, then, you’d better stick by me for a little while. How can we get outside from here without using the front door?”

  “Right this way, sir. Back of the curtain are French doors, sir.”

  Sidney Zoom walked to the curtains, pushed them apart, strode through the doors and began to examine the loamy soil which fringed the cement walk running around the house.

  “Look here, Graves. This is serious. See where a box was planted in the soft loam there? And it looks as though some one had stood on it! And look here. Here’s a perfect footprint!”

  The butler bent down.

  “Yes, sir. So it is, sir. But I’d rather not mix in it any further—”

  Sidney Zoom grasped the man by the shoulder, whirled him back against the side of the house.

  “Now, Graves, come clean. You’re trying to duck out of this because you think you know who was standing out here. Tell me the truth and talk fast.”

  The butler gulped, stammered, swallowed with audible effort, then began to spill words with a rapidity that was almost hysterical.

  “Amos Style, sir. He claims to be a cousin of the adventuress. But I think he’s a son of hers by a former marriage. She’s altogether too fond of him for a mere cousin, sir, and he’s nothing but a callow lad. He comes to visit her and stays here in the house a large part of the time.

  “If the woman wanted Mr. Ames out of the way quickly, she could have conspired with her son to do the trick—if he is her son. And the fact that Mr. Ames just happened to find Miss Eve at the safe, sir, was in the nature of a coincidence, and—”

  Sidney Zoom regarded the imprint of the foot in the soft soil, the oblong indentation that had marked the place where the end of the wooden box was placed.

  “Stays here in the house, eh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Here now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Could you get me his left shoe?” The butler sighed.

  “I don’t know, sir, but I can try. I’d do anything for Miss Eve, sir.”

  And Graves melted away, as furtively silent as a shadow, as swift as a stalking cat. Sidney Zoom leaned forward and searched the ground, inch by inch.

  Between the cement walk and the side of the house there had been dwarf shrubbery planted. Between these shrubs there were stretches of bare ground, and it was in these bits of bare ground that the incriminating depressions were found.

  But Sidney Zoom parted the little branches, looked with the intentness of a hawk searching good game cover.

  And his search was rewarded.

  A little glitter of metal struck his eyes, and he stooped. There was a brass cartridge of the type automatically ejected from a gun known as an automatic.

  Sidney Zoom picked up the cartridge in his handkerchief, lest he should destroy some of the fingerprints on it. He renewed his search, and found the blued steel of a barrel sticking up from the base of one of the plants.

  Once again he used his handkerchief, and dragged to light a small automatic, the same caliber as the shell, the same caliber as the bullet which had resulted in the death of Ralph C. Ames.

  Sidney Zoom covered the evidence with the handkerchief, placed it in his pocket, straightened up from his search.

  Almost at once he heard a door close, and then Graves came cat-treading down the cement.

  “I’ve got it, sir!”

  Sidney Zoom took the shoe from his hand, bent down and fitted the sole to the impression in the ground.

  The fit was perfect.

  “Good God!” exclaimed the butler. “You’ll notify the police of this?”

  “That,” remarked Sidney Zoom, “depends upon a variety of things. Thanks, Graves, for your cooperation.”

  “You’ll tell her I’m willing to do anything for her, sir?”

  “If I see her?”

  “Well, will you see her?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Sidney Zoom. Then, as he saw the gray eyes film with disappointment, he flashed the man a reassuring smile. “Not right away, Graves, but later, perhaps. I’ll tell her then.”

  And he strode down the cement walk, went to his roadster, where Rip was growling at a man with an undershot jaw and a cauliflower ear who stood on the sidewalk, studying the car. Slightly behind him, parked at the curb, was an automobile. At the wheel of this car sat a thin individual with a beak-like nose and a catfish mouth.

  Sidney Zoom bowed to them both. He climbed in his roadster and pressed his foot on the starter. The car purred into motion, and the man with the cauliflower ear hopped into the other machine, which promptly swung out into traffic.

  Three blocks down the street another machine, driven by a woman, casually cut in ahead of the car with the two private detectives. Thereafter, Sidney Zoom made certain highly intricate maneuvers. The car with the two men got lost in the shuffle.

  The other machine, driven by a baby-faced brunette, somehow or other managed to show up after Zoom had finished his turns and twists from one street to another.

  But Zoom paid no attention to that machine, which fact brought the faintest suggestion of a gleam of triumph to the baby-faced brunette.

  CHAPTER VI

  Past History

  SIDNEY ZOOM lounged back in the chair at police headquarters. Captain Berkeley, seated across the desk, stared at a typewritten report which had been handed him by a messenger.

  “Report of the finger-print expert?” asked Zoom, casually. “Yes—and of the ordnance expert, too.”

  “Indeed,” said Sidney Zoom, his eagerness showing in the crispness of his tone. “And what did they discover?”

  Captain Berkeley drummed on the battered desk for a few seconds, the tips of his fingers beating a nervous tattoo.

  “Zoom,” he remarked, “you’re in wrong.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. You’ve allowed yourself to become prejudiced against Mrs. Ames. And you’ve pulled your usual big-hearted stunt of falling for the hard luck story of a girl in misfortune—”

  Sidney Zoom’s tone was hard as he interrupted. “All of which is preliminary to stating what?”

  “To stating,” snapped Captain Berkeley, “that the fatal bullet was undoubtedly fired from this weapon. But every finger-print on it is the print of Miss Eve Bendley— the person, by the way, who did the shooting.

  “Probably she tossed the gun out of the window after the shooting. We’re tracing the numbers, but haven’t had a complete report yet.”