Erle Stanley Gardner
Something Like a Pelican
It was approximately two-thirty in the afternoon, and Lester Leith, strolling idly along a backwash in the shopping district, was very frankly interested in a pair of straight-seamed silk stockings — not those which were in the hosiery display of the window to his right, but those which were very animatedly displayed on the legs of a short-skirted young woman some fifty feet in front of him.
In such matters Lester Leith was a connoisseur, but because his interest verged upon the abstract, he made no effort to shorten the distance. Leith liked to stroll and watch the panorama of life streaming past. A few seconds from now his interest might be claimed by a face which showed character, or some passing pedestrian might interest him. At the moment it was a shapely pair of legs.
Half a block away a woman’s head protruded from a fourth-floor window. Above the sounds of traffic could be heard her shrill screams.
“Help! Police! POLICE!!”
Almost instantly a dark furry object was thrown from the window. For a half-second it fell as a compact ball; then the resistance of the air opened it out into what seemed to be a fur cape. This cape, like the proverbial young man on the flying trapeze, sailed through the air with the greatest of ease, to come to rest finally upon a metallic crosspiece which supported a street sign four stories below.
At his right, Lester Leith heard cynical laughter, and his eyes, seeking the source, encountered the grinning face on one of those cocksure individuals who is never at a loss to explain the significance of anything that has happened.
“Advertising stunt,” the man said, catching Leith’s eye. “That’s a fur company up there. Just throwing fur capes away. Get it? They’ve hatched up something which will give ’em a lot of newspaper publicity.”
Leith heard the sound of a police whistle and the pound of authoritative feet as the traffic officer from the corner came down the sidewalk.
For reasons of his own, Leith preferred to avoid contact with police officers who were rushing to the scene of a crime. His methods were far too subtle and delicately balanced to invite risk by blundering into some police dragnet.
“Thanks for the tip,” he said to the omniscient stranger. “I was just about to fall for it. As it is, I won’t be late for my appointment.”
And Leith deliberately turned his back upon the scene of excited confusion.
Lester Leith, slender and debonair in his full-dress evening clothes, stood in the lobby of the theater at the end of the first act and debated whether to wait and see the rest of the show.
The usual opening-night audience of celebrities, sophisticates, and the social upper crust either promenaded around the lobby or formed in little clusters where they engaged in low-voiced conversations.
Many a feminine eye, drifting in the direction of the straight-shouldered, slim-hipped young man, registered approval, but Lester Leith was, for the moment, engrossed in the problem which had been gnawing at the back of his consciousness all evening. Why should a young woman trying on a silver fox cape in a furrier’s on the fourth floor of a loft building abruptly toss the cape out of the window, nonchalantly pay the purchase price in cash, and leave the premises, apparently seeing nothing unusual in the incident?
Melodious chimes announced that the show would resume in exactly two minutes. People began pinching out cigarettes and drifting through the curtained doorways to the rows of seats. Lester Leith still hesitated.
The show, he was forced to admit, was better than average, but his mind simply refused to let the entertainment on the stage exclude from his consideration the mysterious young woman who had so casually tossed a valuable fur cape out of a fourth-story window.
Lester Leith inserted his thumb and forefinger in the pocket of his waistcoat and removed the folded clipping which he had taken from the evening paper. Despite the fact that he knew it almost by heart, he read it once more.
Pedestrians on Beacon Street were startled this afternoon by the screams of a young woman who leaned from a window of the Gilbert Furrier Company in the Cooperative Loft Building four stories above the sidewalk calling for the police. Looking up, they saw a silver fox cape come plummeting toward the sidewalk. The cape spread out, caught the breeze, and finally fell across a rod supporting the sign of the Nelson Optical Company, where it lodged just out of reach of the clutching fingers of dozens of eager feminine shoppers. The screaming woman was later identified as Miss Fanny Gillmeyer, 321 East Grove Street, an employee of the furrier company.
Officer James C. Haggerty, on duty at the intersection, left his post to rush with drawn revolver into the loft building, commandeering an elevator which rushed him up to the fourth floor. As the officer came running down the corridor, he was greeted by F. G. Gilbert, head of the Gilbert Furrier Company, who explained that the screamed alarm had been a mistake.
Officer Haggerty insisted upon an investigation which disclosed that a young woman customer, whose name the company refused to divulge, had been trying on silver fox capes. Abruptly, she had said, “I’ll take this one,” wadded it into a roll, and tossed it out of the window. Miss Gillmeyer, the clerk who had been making the sale, thinking that she was encountering a new form of shoplifting, promptly proceeded to shout for police.
By the time Mr. Gilbert, the proprietor, appeared upon the scene, the customer was quite calmly counting out bills to the amount of the purchase price. She offered no explanation as to why she had thrown the cape out of the window, and quite casually left instructions covering the delivery of the cape when it was recovered. During the confusion which ensued just prior to the arrival of officer Haggerty, the young woman, who was described as a dazzlingly beautiful blonde some twenty-five years of age, left the building.
Officer Haggerty was inclined to believe the young woman was an actress who was intent upon getting publicity. If this was true, her desire was foiled by the refusal of the furrier company to divulge her name and address. The cape was subsequently retrieved and, after being cleaned, presumably delivered by the Gilbert Furrier Company to the eccentric purchaser.
The dimming lights announced that the second act of the play was about to start. Lester Leith, returning the clipping to his pocket, reached a decision and turned toward the street. A waiting taxi took him to the Cooperative Loft Building on Beacon Street.
There was nothing about the appearance of the Cooperative Loft Building which offered a clue to the strange behavior of the purchaser of the fur cape. The Gilbert Furrier Company occupied the entire fourth floor. The window from which the fur cape had been thrown was evidently the one directly over the sign of the Nelson Optical Company.
Leith noticed, on the opposite side of the street, two men who were evidently waiting for some event which they felt would take place in the not too distant future.
The manner in which they “loafed” on opposite sides of the entrance of the Rust Commercial Building, directly across the street from the Cooperative Loft Building — the manner in which they completely ignored each other, yet managed to turn their heads in unison whenever the sound of a clanging elevator door came from the lobby of the office building — indicated a certain common purpose. Moreover, whenever one of the belated office workers left the building, these men converged upon the doorway, only to move casually away again as soon as they got a good look.
Leith got back in his cab and said to the driver, “We’ll wait here.”
The cabbie smiled knowingly. “Want the radio on?” he asked.
Leith said, “No, thanks,” and settled back to a cigarette and a period of watchful waiting which was terminated after about twenty minutes when a slim, youthful woman in a blue skirt and jacket wearing a rakish, tight-fitting hat perched at an angle over her right car, walked out from the elevators across the lobby to the entrance her trim, smooth-swinging legs carrying her at a rapid pace.