This time there was no attempt to disguise the whispering. Leith could even hear the hum of low-voiced conversation.
“You send Bernice Lamen up to my office,” Bellview instructed.
Leith laughed and said, “No chance. You don’t talk with her until you’ve agreed to pay ten thousand. Otherwise you talk with a lawyer.”
There was a momentary pause, then Leith heard Bellview mutter, apparently to some person standing beside him, “He says it’s ten or nothing. That’s too much. What do we do?”
The low voice made a suggestion, then Bellview said into the telephone, “I’ll put my cards on the table. My lawyer’s here. We’ve talked this thing over. You may have a lawsuit. You may not. We’ll pay five thousand as a cash settlement.”
Lester Leith smiled into the transmitter. “You’ve saved yourself a lawsuit,” he said.
“All right, tell Miss Lamen to come up here right away.”
Lester Leith dropped the receiver into place, reached across, and picked up the one thousand dollars from under Bernice Lamen’s saucer.
She looked up at him, her eyes large with incredulity. “You mean—”
Leith said, “You may not stand much chance, but with that face and figure, you should at least go to Hollywood and try for a screen test. A girl can do a lot on five thousand dollars.”
Captain Carmichael was enjoying a cigar and the sporting page of the morning newspaper when Sergeant Ackley, carrying a cardboard folder, entered the office.
“What is it this time?” Carmichael asked, frowning as he looked up.
Sergeant Ackley sat down on the other side of the captain’s desk. “This guy Leith,” he said disgustedly.
“What about him?”
“Beaver said he’d written a letter to me, and he thought it might be a good idea for me to know what was in the letter before Leith signed it and mailed it.”
Captain Carmichael’s eyes danced. “A confession?”
“You listen to it,” Sergeant Ackley said, “then you can tell me.”
Ackley turned back the pasteboard folder and read from a carbon copy of a letter:
My dear Sergeant: The original manuscripts of famous authors have at times commanded fabulous prices. It is, perhaps, conceited to think that my own efforts will some day be worth thousands of dollars to the discriminating collector. Yet, after all, Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and other famous writers must have felt the same way when they regarded their manuscripts.
This story, my dear Sergeant, has been rejected by the publisher, which may make it even more valuable. In any event, I want you to have it as a token of friendship and as some slight measure of my appreciation for the zealous efforts you have made to enforce the law, even when my own convenience has been sacrificed to your zeal.
Sergeant Ackley looked up. “Now what,” he asked, “do you make of that?”
“Nothing,” Captain Carmichael said.
“That’s the way I feel about it, but he told Beaver the letter wasn’t to be mailed until tomorrow, so Beaver thought I might want to know about it today.”
“What’s the manuscript?” Carmichael asked.
“A bunch of tripe,” Ackley said.
“Did you read it?”
“Oh, I glanced through it.”
Captain Carmichael reached for the manuscript. “This is a carbon copy?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How come?”
“He isn’t going to mail this letter until tomorrow, you see, and he has the original story with him.”
Captain Carmichael frowningly regarded the carbon copy. “He must have some reason for sending it to you.”
“Just wants to give me the old razzberry.”
Captain Carmichael frowned at the end of his cigar. “Don’t be too certain, Sergeant. You know Leith may have intended to grab off the swag and then give you a tip to the crook.”
“Why should he do that?”
“Well, you know this crime is a little different from the other crimes we’ve worked on. This is getting pretty close to treason, and I don’t think Leith would care very much about shielding a traitor.”
“All he cares about is getting the swag.”
“And you’ve read through this?” Carmichael asked.
Sergeant Ackley fished a cigar from his waistcoat pocket and nodded.
Carmichael turned rapidly through the pages. Suddenly he said, “Wait a minute. What’s this?”
“Where?” Ackley asked.
“On page five,” Carmichael said. “Listen to this:
“It isn’t every place that would be suitable as a hiding place for a set of blueprints. It would take a long, hollow tube, and such a tube would be hard to conceal.”
“Well,” Ackley snorted, “what’s significant about that?”
Captain Carmichael’s face showed his excitement. “Wait a minute!” he exclaimed. “That’s just paving the way for the next paragraph. Listen to this:
“As soon as the actress I had employed started screaming for the police, I noticed a man pick up a shotgun. This man was in the offices of the Precision instrument Company, standing in the doorway of an office which adjoined that containing the vault. A shotgun. How interesting!”
Captain Carmichael looked up. “Well, don’t you get it?”
“Get what?” Sergeant Ackley said.
“The shotgun!” Carmichael shouted.
Sergeant Ackley said, “We know all about that. Frank Packerson, the editor of the Pidico house organ, had been trap-shooting, and—”
“Are there some photographs that go with this?” Carmichael asked.
“The same ones you saw. They don’t mean anything.”
“The shotgun!” Captain Carmichael shouted. “Don’t you get it, you fool? The shotgun!”
“What about it?”
Captain Carmichael pushed back his chair. His voice showed that he was making an effort to keep his temper. “Tomorrow Lester Leith wanted you to read this manuscript. You’re reading it just twenty-four hours early. In this manuscript Leith intended to show you how to get the man who had stolen those blueprints. By that time Leith intended to have the blueprints and have covered his tracks so you could never get anything on him. By virtue of some nice brainwork on the part of Beaver, you get this stuff twenty-four hours early — and haven’t sense enough to know what it means.”
Sergeant Ackley’s face became a shade darker. “Well,” he demanded, “what does it mean?”
Captain Carmichael got to his feet. “Get a squad car,” he said, “and I’ll show you.”
Frank Packerson clicked on the interoffice loudspeaker. The reception clerk announced, “Two gentlemen from headquarters.”
Packerson smiled. “Show them in.”
Captain Carmichael did the talking. “We’re working on that blueprint case, Packerson. The thief must have had some unusual hiding place prepared in advance. All he needed was a second or two to slip the blueprints out of the vault and into this hiding place.
“In other words,” Carmichael went on, “the theory we’re working on now is that the thief had some hiding place so carefully prepared that, while it was instantly available, no one would ever have thought to look there. A hiding place where he could push the blueprints — a long, smooth, slender tube. After that, the tube could be taken out of the building without arousing suspicion.”
Packerson wasn’t smiling now.
“A man could be holding a shotgun in his hands,” Captain Carmichael went on, “standing right in front of the safe, asserting that he was looking for a thief, and people would naturally regard the shotgun as a weapon — not as a hiding place!”
Packerson’s face was flushed. Little beads of perspiration dotted his forehead. He cleared his throat and said, “I don’t know what you’re insinuating, Captain. In my case, it happens that I had a gun. Naturally, when I was aroused by someone shouting for the police, I grabbed the gun. Are you insinuating...”