“One moment.” Drury Lane took out his long wallet and extracted the letter which he had found in DeWitt’s library safe. He handed it to Ajos. “Is that the letter?”

  The consul nodded emphatically. “Yes, for Maquinchao showed it to me in a subsequent report, and then returned it to DeWitt after making a photographic copy.

  “DeWitt, Longstreet, and our operative had many conferences in West Englewood. Maquinchao of course had intended to secure the Cooperation of the American police at once, for he was virtually helpless alone. But both partners urged him to keep from the police, pleading that it would reach the newspapers, the old story of their humble beginnings, and the sordid murder-trial would come out… The usual sort of thing. Maquinchao did not know what to do, consulted me, and we decided because of their position to acquiesce to their plea. Both men, they said, had received similar letters sporadically over a period of some five years, all from New York. They had torn up the letters, but DeWitt grew very apprehensive over the last, which was more threatening than the others, and had preserved it.

  “To make a long story short, Mr. Lane, Maquinchao spent a month in vain searching, reported his failure to me and to the partners, washed his hands of the entire affair, and returned to Uruguay.”

  Lane was thoughtful. “And you say no trace of this man Crockett was ever found?”

  “Maquinchao learned from DeWitt that Crockett had parted company with them after leaving Uruguay, without giving an explanation. They heard from him periodically, they said, chiefly from Canada, although both maintained that they had not been in communication with him for six years.”

  “Of course,” murmured Lane, “we have only the word of two dead men for this information. Mr. Ajos, do the records contain any mention of the fate of Stopes’s infant daughter?” Ajos shook his head. “To a certain point only. It is known that she left, or was taken away from - which, is not clear - the Montevideo convent at the age of six. Nothing has ever been heard about her since.”

  Mr. Drury Lane sighed, rose, and towered above the little consul by his desk. “You’ve done yeoman service to the cause of justice today, Senor.” Ajos grinned through his white teeth. “I am so happy, Mr. Lane.”

  “You can, if you will,” continued Lane, adjusting his cape, “do justice an even greater service. If it is possible, you might cable your government for a telephotograph of Stopes’s fingerprints, to be followed by a telephotograph of the man’s face, if there is such a camera record, and a complete description. I am also interested in William Crockett, if you can secure similar information concerning that gentleman…”

  “It shall be done immediately.”

  “I take it your enterprising little nation has modem scientific facilities?” smiled Lane. They walked to the door.

  Ajos looked shocked. “Naturally! The photographs will be transmitted on as excellent equipment as you may find anywhere.”

  “That,” said Mr. Drury Lane, bowing, “will be most satisfactory.” He emerged into the street and headed toward the Battery. “Most satisfactory,” he repeated in a little mental hum.

  Scene 9

  THE HAMLET

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1:30 P.M.

  Inspector Thumm was conducted by Quacey through winding corridors to a concealed elevator, which shot them like a moon-missile through the interior of the main turret of The Hamlet to a small landing high in the tower. Thumm followed Quacey to a stone staircase which looked as ancient as the Tower of London, and up the curved ambulating steps to an iron-bolted oaken door. Quacey struggled with the hasp and heavy bolts, succeeding in freeing them, and pushed open the door with a loud exhalation of aged breath. They stepped out on the solid-stone battlemented roof of the tower.

  Mr. Drury Lane lay, almost nude, on a bearskin, arms shading his eyes from the sun high overhead.

  Inspector Thumm stopped short and Quacey grinned himself away. The Inspector could not conceal his stupefaction at the bronzed vigor, the firm youthfulness and muscularity, of Drury Lane’s figure. His lean sprawling body, hairless except for a faint golden down, brown, hard and smooth, was that of a man in the prime of life. This shock of white hair on his head was a startling incongruity when the eye traveled the full length of that clean hardy body.

  The actor’s only concession to modesty was a white breechclout. His brown feet were naked, but a pair of moccasins lay near the rug. A padded deckchair stood to one side.

  Thumm shook his head sadly and drew his topcoat a little more snugly about him. The October air was keen; a brisk wind blew about the tower’s head. He strode forward, closer to the recumbent figure; the skin was perfectly smooth, he saw, untouched by goose-flesh.

  Some alert intuition caused Lane to open his eyes; or perhaps it was the projection of Thumm’s shadow as the Inspector stood over him. “Inspector!” He sat up, instantly awake, hugging his slim hard legs. “A splendid surprise. Please excuse the informality of my attire. Draw up that deck-chair. Unless, of course,” he chuckled, “you would care to discard your swathings and join me on the bearskin…”

  “No, thanks,” said Thumm hastily, sinking into the chair. “In this wind? No, thanks.” He grinned. “It’s none of my business, I suppose, but how old are you anyway, Mr. Lane?”

  Lane’s eyes crinkled in the sun. “Sixty.”

  Thumm shook his head. “And I’m fifty-four. I’d blush - I give you my word, Mr. Lane - I’d blush to take off my duds and show you my body. Why, I’m a flabby old man compared with you!”

  “Perhaps you haven’t had the time to take care of your body, Inspector,” said Lane lazily. “I have both the time and the opportunity. Here - ’’ he waved his hand at the delicate toy-like panorama, “here I can do as I please. The only reason I decorate my middle in the manner of Mahatma Gandhi is that old Quacey is something of a prude and would be inexpressibly shocked if I did not conceal the ah - more personal elements of my nakedness. Poor Quacey! For twenty years I have been trying to persuade him to join me in these solar orgies. You should see him in the altogether! But then he is a very old man. I don’t believe he himself knows exactly how old.”

  “You’re certainly the most remarkable man I’ve ever met,” said Thumm. “Sixty…” He sighed. “Well, sir, things are looking up. I’ve come down to report new developments - one particularly.”

  “Collins, I take it?”

  “Yes. I suppose Bruno told you what happened when we broke into Collins’s apartment early Saturday morning?”

  “Yes. The doltish fool attempted suicide. So you are holding the man, Inspector?”

  “For dear life.” Thumm was grim. “In a way,” he said sheepishly, “I feel like a raw rookie. Here I am, telling you about something while we’re feeling around in the dark; and you, I suppose, know the whole thing.”

  “My dear Inspector, for a long time you were antagonistic to me. You felt that I was pretending to knowledge I did not possess. A natural feeling. You still do not know whether my silence is that of compulsion or deception, and yet you exercise a new faith. A compliment of vast proportions, Inspector. We are in this hideous mess together, now and until it is cleared up.”

  “If it will be,” said Thumm gloomily. “Well, as far as Collins is concerned, here’s the dope. We’ve dug back into his history and we’ve discovered just why he’s been so anxious to recoup his market losses. He’s been embezzling the State’s money on his income-tax job!”

  “Really?”

  “That’s the ticket. To date he’s appropriated a hundred thousand or more, there’s no telling now exactly how much. That’s no chicken-feed, Mr. Lane. It seems he’s been ‘borrowing’ the State’s money to play the market. Well, he lost, got in deeper and deeper, and took a last fifty grand at the time Longstreet tipped him off to plunge on International Metals. That was his grandstand play - an attempt to make good his former losses and cover his embezzlements. It seems that there’s been a hint of what was going on, and an investigation under cover started to check over the bookkeeping of the Bureau.”

  “Collins forestalled direct investigation, Inspector? How was he able to do this?”

  Thumm pressed his lips together. “Pie for him. He’s been falsifying the records, staving off discovery for months. Then, too, he swings a lot of cheap grafting political influence. But his back was up against the wall. He couldn’t stall any longer.”

  “A remarkable sidelight into human character,” murmured Lane. “This man, choleric, strong-willed, of passionate temperament, his life probably a succession of juggernaut impulses, his career probably strewn with the political corpses of his enemies… this man begging on his knees, as Bruno told me! A broken man, Inspector. Completely, devastatingly demoralized. He is already atoning to society for his crime.”

  Thumm did not seem impressed. “Maybe. Anyway, we have a pretty strong case against him-circumstantial again, but what the hell. Motive? Equally strong against both Longstreet and DeWitt. In revenge for what he thought was a double-cross by Longstreet, he kills Longstreet. When, desperate, faced with ruin, with nothing to lose, he hears DeWitt’s refusal to cover up Longstreet’s bum steer, he kills DeWitt. As far as circumstances are concerned, they favor Collins as the criminal in the murder of both partners, and don’t contradict the possibility of his having murdered Wood. He might easily have been one of the ferry passengers who escaped when the Mohawk docked. We’re checking up his movements for that night, and Collins can’t furnish an alibi… Then again, when he comes to trial, Bruno can present the evidence of Collins’s guilty conduct when we broke in on him - his shout, attempted suicide…”

  “In court, under the magic of the District Attorney’s oratory,” commented Lane with a smile, stretching his long lean arms, “I have no doubt but that Collins will appear the guilty man. But have you considered, Inspector, the possibility that when Collins heard the police at his door, at five o’clock in the morning, his frenzied mind leaped to the conclusion that his depredations on the State’s funds had been discovered, and that he was to be arrested for embezzlement or grand larceny? This would account, considering his state of mind, for his attempted suicide and his statement that you would never ‘get’ him alive.”

  Thumm scratched his head. “That’s just what Collins said when we confronted him this morning with that embezzlement charge. Plow did you know?”

  “Pshaw, Inspector, that was almost childishly obvious.”

  “It seems to me,” said Thumm soberly, “that you think Collins told the truth there. You don’t believe he’s our man, eh? As a matter of fact, Bruno sent me confidentially to ask your opinion. You see, we want to indict him on the murder charge. But Bruno’s had his fingers burnt once, and he doesn’t care to go through the experience again.”

  “Inspector Thumm,” said Drury Lane, rising to his bare feet and expanding his brown chest, “Bruno will never convict Collins of the DeWitt murder.”

  “I guessed you’d say that.” Thumm made a fist and stared at it glumly.

  “But look at the position we’re in. Have you been reading the papers? Sec the razzing we’re getting for pulling a dud on the DeWitt charge? They’ve raked it up and linked it with the DeWitt murder, and we can’t show our faces to the newspaper boys. Between you and me, it looks as if my job is at stake. The Commissioner had me on the carpet this morning.”

  Lane looked at the distant river. “If I felt,” he said gently, “that it would do you and Bruno any good, don’t you think I would tell what I know now? But the game is in its final period, Inspector; we’re very near the whistle. As for your job… I scarcely think the Commissioner will demote you when you deliver the fettered murderer to him.”

  “When I…”

  “Yes, Inspector.” Lane leaned his bare body against the rough stone of a parapet. “Now tell me what else is new?”

  Thumm did not reply at once. When he spoke, it was almost diffidently. “I don’t mean to push you, Mr. Lane, but for the third time since I know you you’ve made a positive statement about these crimes. How are you so sure that Collins can’t be convicted?”

  “That,” said Lane mildly, “is a long story, Inspector. On the other hand, we have reached the point where it is high time for me to prove as well as pose. I think I shall be able to prick your case against Collins this very afternoon.”

  Thumm grinned. “Now you’re talking, Mr. Lane! I feel better already… Developments? Plenty. Doc Schilling has had his precious autopsy 011 DeWitt and extracted the bullet. It’s from a .38 as he opined from the first. Point number two is sort of disappointing. Kohl, the D.A. of Bergen County, hasn’t been able to trace the passengers who got off the train before the discovery of the body. And neither his men nor ours have been able to locate the revolver anywhere along the tracks or roadbed. Of course, it’s Bruno’s opinion that Collins’s gun did the job; we’re having a micro-photographic study made of the bullet from DeWitt’s body to compare with a discharged bullet from Collins’s revolver. Even if they’re different, though, it won’t prove Collins’s innocence, because he might have used a different gun on DeWitt. At least that’s Bruno’s argument. Bruno’s theory is that Collins, if he did use a different gun, could easily have taken the revolver back with him in the cab that night and thrown it into the river while the cab was on the ferry going to New York.”

  “An interesting coincidence,” murmured Lane. “Go on, Inspector.”

  “Well, we checked the back-trail to the cab-driver who took Collins to New York, to see if he used the ferry and if Collins got out of the cab on the ferry. The driver didn’t know whether Collins had or not. He did testify that Collins took his cab just as the local was pulling out of the Ridgefield Park station. So much for that.

  “The third development isn’t a development at all. We haven’t found a solitary item of interest in our investigation of Longstreet’s business and personal files.

  “Number four is damned interesting, though. Because on examining DeWitt’s files at his office we made a remarkable discovery. Found the canceled vouchers - two checks a year for the past fourteen years - made out to a chap by the name of William Crockett.”

  Lane did not stir. His gray eyes took on an almost hazel tinge as he watched Thumm’s lips. “William Crockett. Hmm… Inspector, you are the harbinger of generous news. For what amounts were the checks, and through what bank or banks had they been canceled?”

  “Well, not one of them was less than fifteen thousand dollars, although the amounts varied. They were all cashed in the same bank - the Colonial Trust of Montreal, Canada.”

  “Canada? More and more interesting, Inspector. And how were the checks signed - were they personal signature of DeWitt, or firm checks?”

  “No, they seemed to be firm checks; they were signed by both DeWitt and Longstreet. We thought of that, too. We thought it might have been some blackmail stunt against DeWitt. Well, even if it was, both partners were in on it. There’s no record in the office of the reason for the semiannual checks; they were applied fifty-fifty against the personal drawing- accounts of the two men. The tax records are all right, too - we checked there.”

  “Did you investigate this Crockett?”

  “Mr. Lane!” said Thumm reproachfully. “The Canadian people must think we’re crazy. We’ve hounded them ever since we discovered the vouchers. Funny thing there. The investigation through Montreal revealed that a man named William Crockett - of course, each check was endorsed by him…”

  “There were no counter-endorsements? Each endorsement was in the same handwriting?”

  “Absolutely. As I was saying, we found that this Crockett had been depositing the checks through the mail from various places in Canada, and drawing against these deposits by check. He spent his dough, evidently, almost as fast as he got it. The bank could give no description of Crockett and no clue to his present whereabouts, except that statements and vouchers were requested to be mailed to a general post-office box in Montreal.

  “Well, we lost no time in that direction. We investigated the post-office box and didn’t find out a solitary thing of value. Nobody could remember how long before anyone had called at the box, although it was empty at the time we had it searched. We swung back on the trail at the DeWitt & Longstreet office and found that the checks themselves had all originally been mailed to the same general post-office address. No one in the office knows who William Crockett is, what he looks like, or why he’s been getting the checks. And as far as the postal box is concerned, it’s paid for by the year and always a year in advance - also by mail.”

  “Irritating,” murmured Lane. “I can imagine how disgruntled you and Bruno must have been.”

  “We still are,” grumbled the Inspector. “The more we looked into it, the more mysterious it got. A fool could see that this guy Crockett was keeping in the dark.”

  “Perhaps he was keeping in the dark, as you say, more at the instigation of DeWitt and Longstreet than from his own desire.”

  “Say, that’s an idea!” exclaimed Thumm. “Never thought of that. Anyway, it’s a toss-up what all this Crockett business means. Maybe it has nothing to do with the murders - that’s what Bruno thinks, and he certainly has plenty of precedent on which to base his opinion. I’ve never seen a murder- case in which the main issue wasn’t all tangled up in false and unimportant trails. Then again, it might really mean something… If Crockett were blackmailing the two of ’em, then we’ve got a motive for murder.”

  “How do you reconcile that statement, Inspector,” smiled Lane, “with the pleasant fiction of the goose that laid the golden eggs?”

  Thumm scowled. “I’ll admit the blackmail theory is funny. In the first place, the last check-voucher was dated only last June, so evidently Crockett got his semi-annual dough in the regular way. Why then should he kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, as you say? Especially since that last check was for the biggest amount of all.”