Clark reached for his hat.
“Do you suppose you could take me with you and introduce me as a gem expert who had been called in by the insurance company for the purpose of doing some special detective work?”
“Sure,” said Bander, his face lighting with relief.
“And,” went on the criminologist, “do you suppose that you could manage to keep a straight face, regardless of what I said, and not show surprise, no matter what my remarks consisted of?”
“Well,” said Bander, grinning, “I can try. But tell me, what’s the one key clew in this case?”
“Not now,” said Clark. “I’ll tell you later.”
“Where do we go and what do we do?” asked the detective.
“First,” said the criminologist, “I have got to engage an assistant to run down certain angles of the case. Tell me, Bander, do you know anything about diamonds personally?”
“Not a thing,” said the detective.
“Have you ever seen this Clinkoff diamond?”
“No. It was stolen before I was called in on the case.”
“Do you know anything about its size and shape?”
“Nothing, except that it’s rather a large diamond. But anybody who is an expert jeweler can tell you all about it. It’s a diamond that is listed in various catalogues of famous gems.”
“I think,” said Clark, “that is all I am going to need.”
“It’s ten o’clock now. Suppose I meet you at three-thirty this afternoon at the Millright residence. I take it that the servants will all be there?”
“They will be unless the police have removed some of them for questioning.”
“That’s all right. You’d better be there and have the man who wrote the insurance policy there. What did you say his name was?”
“You mean the agent for the insurance company?”
“Yes.”
“Sam Townley, a likeable chap, right up on his toes.”
The criminologist grinned.
“Yet you included him,” he said, “in your list of suspects?”
“Not exactly that,” said the detective. “I mentioned that he had been out at the house that evening, and therefore was to be included in the list of suspects.”
“Now you say he’s a likeable young chap,” pursued the criminologist.
Bander grinned and said, “By the time you’ve been in the game as long as I have, Clark, no matter how likeable they are you’ll include them in a list of suspects if they had any opportunity whatever to commit the crime.”
“Did Townley have an opportunity?” asked Clark.
“No, but I included him just in order to make it cover everybody who was anywhere around the house that night. You know, as a matter of fact, Townley might have come back and crawled in the window.”
“But,” said Clark, “the window was jimmied open from the inside.”
“Yes, that’s right. I’d forgotten about that.”
“Therefore, Townley couldn’t have done it.”
“Well,” said the detective, “if you’re going to figure that way, you can also figure that Pete Dimmer, the chauffeur, couldn’t have done it.”
“All right,” said Clark. “How about the housekeeper or her daughter?”
“Either or both might have done it,” said Bander, “although I’d be inclined to suspect the valet if we were starting out without any clews. It is, of course, obvious that whoever entered that room was someone who had some right to be there. In other words, it wasn’t a stranger, either to Millright or to the house. It was someone who walked in to see him about something, and the fact that that person was there didn’t arouse Millright’s suspicions in the least. He sat calmly and placidly in his chair and faced this person while the person got the gun into position and fired.”
“Do you think a woman would have been that cold-blooded?” Clark inquired.
“You can’t tell about women,” said Bander slowly, “and the daughter of the housekeeper is a very attractive baby. I’m not going to bandy about the name of a woman or besmirch the reputation of a dead man, but there’s some servants’ gossip to the effect that Millright had taken more than a passive interest in the girl since she had been there with her mother.”
“Well,” said Clark, “you can’t blame him for that. I know what you’d have done under similar circumstances. But anyway, meet me at the house this afternoon and I think I will have some word for you.”
Key-Clew Clark didn’t engage an assistant of the type that Phil Bander had been led to expect.
The criminologist had the complete record of the lives, histories, and present locations of many criminals. What is more, there were many people, both in the underworld as well as in business along more legitimate lines who were deeply indebted to the criminologist.
Therefore, when the criminologist set about engaging an assistant, he took a taxicab which deposited him in a cheap district on the border of Chinatown. He consulted an address in his notebook, verified a number over the door, and plunged at once into a narrow doorway which opened into a labyrinth of dark, smelly passages.
The criminologist located a flight of stairs and moved upward cautiously. He came to an upper corridor which was better lighted, moved down it to a door, and tapped with his knuckles. As he knocked on the door, he took particular pains to stand well to one side of the doorway.
There were sounds from the interior of the room, and a bolt clicked on the door.
The door swung inward, and an attractive young woman attired in a sable coat stared out at him through uncordial eyes.
“Well?” she asked.
“I am looking,” said Clark, “for George McCoy.”
“He don’t live here,” said the girl.
“Do you know him?” insisted the criminologist.
“No!” she said.
“He is more generally known,” said the criminologist, “as ‘Gorilla George.’ ”
“I never heard of him,” she said, and started to close the door.
The criminologist spoke hastily.
“Tell him that his friend, Key-Clew Clark, is trying to locate him.”
There was a rumble of sound from the interior of the room, the noise made by the heavy body crossing the creaking planks, and a hairy hand came out and caught the shoulder of the girl’s coat, pushed her to one side, and a grinning gorilla face was framed in the doorway.
“Hell!” said Gorilla George. “I thought I knew that voice, but I couldn’t place it for a minute. I figured you were a dick. I was sitting back there with my rod all ready to smoke my way out.”
David Clark grinned and extended a tentative hand, which was promptly engulfed in the hairy paw.
“Hell!” said Gorilla George. “Come in! Don’t stand there gawking in the doorway. Come in and meet the girl friend. Madge, shake hands with Dave Clark. The boys in the game all call him Key-Clew Clark, and he’s a bearcat.
“I’ve told you about the time they were going to frame me for murder on the Gilmore job, didn’t I? Well, this is the fellow that came along and showed where the boys had figured the evidence all wrong, and there was another man who was the murderer. It sure was a break for me, because with my record I would never have dared to get on the witness stand.”
The girl extended her hand and gave Clark that glance of the professional moll, a certain demure invitation.
“Hello,” she said.
Gorilla George turned her around, spinning her on her heel by twisting her shoulders.
“Look her over, Clark,” he said. “Ain’t she a peach? She’s a cute little trick. She’s going steady with me now, ain’t you, kid?”
The girl nodded.
“Look at the fur coat,” said Gorilla George. “I picked it up the other night, and the beauty of it is, it ain’t hot. There’s no dick in town has got anything on that fur coat. She can wear it anywhere, could walk right into the office of the Chief of Police with it if she wanted to.”