“Perhaps” — unconvinced; “but I have a feeling you’re wrong. That sheriff, Ruel, says—”
“Ruel is a fathead,” I broke in, “a caricature of a sleuth. Who, pray, could it have been? Your own brother? Ted Harrison? Polly Gleason? Mrs. Fothergill? Harry Fothergill?”
“None of those, silly. But there has always been one or two others, people we didn’t know very well.”
“Who then?” I insisted. “Count them off. First there was Tim Crosby.” I stopped to see what effect this name would have on her.
She leaped at the bait.
“You are silly!” she said, flaring up. “You’ve known Tim as long as you’ve known me.”
“But,” I reminded her, “Tim has been away — been away very very mysteriously. Even you hadn’t seen him for two years until he walked into the Brandons’. What has he been doing? How is he making his living? He certainly doesn’t toil, and yet he doesn’t borrow. The Crosby fortune has evaporated. Where, please tell me, does the money come from?”
There was anger in her eyes as she returned snappily: “You should be ashamed of yourself, Max, claiming to be a friend of Tim’s, and talking of him like that! I won’t listen to it. Unless you stop I’ll go in.”
“Please understand,” I insisted, “this is purely an academic discussion. I no more think Tim would steal from the Brandons or the Merritts than you do. I was simply going over the situation. And as for my having betrayed a friendship, you’ve, in exactly the same manner, betrayed all of your friendships here, by suspecting a thief among them.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean— Go ahead then.” She cooled off. “This is all impersonal, of course.”
“Of course,” I agreed. “Next, then, we may mention two men, both complete strangers to all of us, and both introduced and sponsored by Tim.”
Again she rose. “Why Tim all the time?” She demanded. “You are directly intimating something, Max, and it is not impersonal, either. You know very well that the first man — I forget his name — was an old army friend of Tim’s; and the second man—”
“The second,” I assisted her, “was an old college friend. Did you ever see anybody look less like a college man — old or young? Or act less like a college man?”
“It’s outrageous!”
“Well” — I was willing to pass over the matter, for it really was chance that had led me to mention Tim again — “there was this Englishman, Darcy, who claims to be a journalist and novelist and what-not. And he” — the idea occurred to me suddenly — “has been present at the Brandons’, at the Merritts’, and is coming here to-night. Otherwise, he’s been nowhere else so far as we know.”
Nan was stumped. “I don’t know,” she said after a pause, very slowly. “Polly Gleason vouches for him. Polly surely wouldn’t bring a crook in. And besides—”
“Yes, I know — and besides, he hasn’t any of the earmarks of a crook, of the kind of crook you’ve read about,” I finished the sentence for her. “He’s charming, isn’t he?”
“I think so.”
The list, so far as I could remember, went no further. And it was Nan who broke the silence.
“Why,” she demanded, “do you think Tim keeps bringing strangers in?”
“They are old army and college friends,” I reminded her slyly. “Why? Does it worry you?”
Her only answer was to jump down from the balustrade where we had been sitting, and start toward the door.
“Let’s go in,” she said. “I think somebody’s just arrived.”
I took one more puff on my cigarette and, throwing it away, followed her in. Nan was almost at the reception-room door. She had stopped and was listening. Beyond the door the usual introductions for a newcomer, a stranger, were going on. A voice, Tim Crosby’s:
“And I was sure you wouldn’t mind, so I brought him along. Mrs. Gleason, Mr. Durling, another of my old army pals.”
An odd light came into Nan’s eyes, a queer, troubled light, as she turned to me.
“Another stranger is here!”
Then, laughing, as though at her own suspicion, she parted the curtains which separated us from the reception room. The next minute she was acknowledging an introduction to Mr. Durling.
As I say, I was nervous too. So much had been said in the newspapers about the two robberies, and so lurid and persuasive — to me — had been the intimations of a Raffles, that I half believed it to be true. Only, who among these people, among this coterie of ours, could it be?
I had catalogued the names as much for myself as for Nan. All of the others were friends for whose honesty I would have bonded my life. But of Tim Crosby I knew nothing beyond the fact that he was a companionable lad who had been God knows where for the two years since his father’s death. He had inherited nothing, so people said, and yet — and this is the kind of thing that always puzzles me — he lived well, upheld his end financially in whatever the crowd did, and never worked. Men who can live without work invariably hold a fascination for me.
As for his apparently endless number of old college and army friends, I was willing to suspect any and all of them, particularly the latest, Mr. Durling. They all, the three, were of a stripe — gaudily dressed, inclined to be overly familiar on short acquaintance, and altogether too willing to be taken for granted.
I acknowledge, though, that in mentioning Leo Darcy as I had, I had done him an injustice. I had no reason on earth for suspecting him any ill intentions at all. He was Polly’s own guest, and without doubt he had brought the best of references, even assuming that she had not known him abroad. Well bred, well read, well mannered, he had quite won the liking of all of us — except me.
But I don’t count in such a respect. It was only that in him I seemed to see a little too much eagerness to be affable, to be accepted; indeed, just such another quality as I had found in Tim Crosby’s friends, with more polish. But then, I’m a bit diffident socially, and so no fit judge of such things.
The subject of the thefts came up, of course, at dinner. It was Leo Darcy who started it.
“I know,” he said in his pert little way, “that we’ve all been thinking at one time or another this evening about these little unpleasantnesses. It’s quite a revelation to me, I assure you. Never before did I fancy that some evening I might be sitting in er — er — in terror, you might say, lest a robber spring in the window.”
“Stuff!” Polly declared. “There’s little here in this house to tempt a robber.”
It was Durling who denied this. “Look at those pearls around your neck. Look at Mrs. Fothergill’s wrist watch, worth every bit of five hundred dollars. Look at—”
By chance my eyes strayed to Tim Crosby. He was glaring at his old army pal. But Durling failed to notice.
“Yes,” Nan chimed in, “and look at Polly’s rings.”
We looked, all of us, for some reason, though we knew them, had seen them a hundred times. Three platinum and diamond affairs that glistened wickedly as Polly held them up. She was proud of them, reveled in having them on her fingers. But fascinating as they were, they stirred some sense of danger in all of us, I believe.
Anyway, nobody spoke for a while. Again I glanced at Tim Crosby. His face was white as he busied himself with his food, and he kept his eyes on his plate. Durling, who sat at Polly’s left, stared blandly at the stones, and Darcy smiled affably across the table at Nan, as though they shared a secret between them.
“When we dance,” he presently said to her, “I’d like to have the first with you. May I?”