I walked rapidly down the corridor, in the direction of the elevator.
After a moment I detoured back, walking silently and hugging the far side of the wall.
Doctor Krueg had a suite of offices. I had been in three of them. There were five adjoining doors, each marked private. I picked one of the doors that was dark, and wasted about fifteen seconds getting a key that would work the lock.
It was a good lock.
The door swung open and I stepped into a room. It was a room containing three hospital beds. Two of the beds were occupied. One of the figures was still. The other raised on an elbow and looked at me in staring curiosity, then his right hand started groping under the pillow.
“Take it easy, brother,” I told him. “It’s okey.”
I walked across the room to the door which communicated with the other office. It had a spring lock on it, and I clicked back the lock and stepped into the operating room.
It was deserted. I walked on through it and into the other office.
Doctor Krueg just had the safe open. He was standing in front of it, with the roll of bills I had dropped in his left hand; his right held a key that he fitted into a lock on the inner steel door. Then he twirled the knobs on the combination. There was both a lock and a combination on that inner door.
The door clicked back and I stepped quietly behind the tall form of the doctor.
There was still another lock to work, and then a door disclosed a little vault in the interior of the safe. Doctor Krueg was just dropping the bills into this vault when, somehow, he sensed my presence.
He whirled.
I caught the glitter of his eyes—cold rage and a murderous impulse. His right hand swung to his hip.
My blow caught him squarely on the jaw. He slammed his head against the edge of the safe as he went back.
I eased him to the floor and looked in the vault.
My roll of bills was the first thing that went into my pocket. Then I took stock. The Loring jewels had been too well described to be easily mistaken. I dropped them in my pocket.
God knows by what devious chain of battle, murder and sudden death the other gems in that safe had found their way into that vault-like compartment! But I was absolutely certain they hadn’t come there by legitimate means.
I had just reached the outer door of the office, when I heard the half-scream of a woman.
I turned, to see the nurse standing in the doorway. Then I caught the glitter of the light on nickeled steel.
The shot shattered the glass front of the door as I slipped into the corridor. There were no more shots. Doctor Krueg was not in a position to court publicity.
I reached the Continental Hotel and went to the seventh floor, just in case the elevator boy would remember too much about me later on. Then I dropped down to the fifth, by taking the stairs two steps at a time.
Carl Rankin was still away. I slipped into his room, turned on the lights and pulled out the bureau drawer. The Loring diamonds dropped back into the cotton-lined compartment. Then I replaced the bureau drawers, locked the drawer, raced down to the third floor, and caught sight of the drawn anguish on Edith’s face as I slipped into the room.
I raised my eyebrows.
She nodded.
“Just now,” she said. “He never did regain consciousness.”
I walked over to the bed, sat down beside the corpse and took the telephone.
“Police Headquarters,” I said.
I got the desk sergeant on the line and lowered my voice to a point to which it was barely audible.
“Get this,” I said. “I’m Howard Cove . . . Continental Hotel. . . . Carl Rankin covered me on the Loring job . . . I did it . . . ‘Frank The Fixer’ and Sam Stillwell backed it . . . they gave me the works tonight in front of my apartment . . . six five nine Porter Street . . . the diamonds are in Rankin’s room behind . . . behind bureau drawer . . . room five nineteen Continental . . . I’m finished. . . .”
I banged the receiver on the floor, and hit the transmitter against the side of the bed. Then I closed the fingers of the dead man’s hand about the receiver, and let the telephone itself lay on the floor.
I got the packing case apart and made two bundles of the light boards.
“Come on,” I said to the girl.
There was a back way out of the hotel. We made it without anyone seeing us and got rid of the boards in the alley.
I glanced across the breakfast table at the girl. The headlines of the morning paper told the story.
“Spectacular Raid Recovers Loring Gems.”
Down below, in smaller headlines:
“Police Smash Gem Ring, Solve Murder.”
The account was the usual line of hooey, about the wonderful detective work of a couple of the big shots in the police department; the manner in which they had patiently trailed the criminals for days, only finally to run their quarry to earth in a cheap downtown hotel, where they found one of the men dead from gunshot wounds received in a gang war. The man had been shot in front of his apartment house on Porter Street, and, in some mysterious way, had managed to get to the hotel.
The article stated that the police were looking for a surgeon who had made a visit to the dead man’s room in the hotel and had given first-aid treatment.
In the hotel, the police had raided the room of Carl Rankin, a notorious gangster. They had lain in ambush for him; had arrested him when he came to his room. The gangster had refused to heed the police warning, and had opened fire. In the fusillade he had been fatally shot. Before he died, he made a complete confession, naming “Frank The Fixer” and Sam Stillwell as accomplices in both the robbery and the murder of Howard Cove.
The newspaper went on to state that police were investigating a rumor which was circulated in the underworld, and which was substantiated by the confession of the dying gangster, to the effect that the loot taken from the messenger who was delivering the Loring gems was much more extensive than had originally been suspected. In fact, it was the failure to account for some of this additional valuable loot that had precipitated the gang war.
“Is it true,” Edith asked, “that Cove held out some of the loot?”
I shook my head.
“What makes them think he did?”
“A blunder on my part,” I told her.
She raised her eyebrows.
“The line the police handed your man,” I told her, “was a stall. It wouldn’t have done him any good to have returned the stones, but I thought I could find out who did the job and perhaps get a confession from one of the men, so I trapped a crook into rushing to the head of the gang that pulled the job, with fictitious information, figuring they’d start moving around and I could get somewhere. But they thought Cove had crossed them on the delivery, and gunned him out.”
“But,” she said, “Cove was a double-crosser, himself. He crossed Frank Jamie by framing the crime on him, and he tried to kill me. I wasn’t robbing his apartment at all; just pleading with him to come across and he pulled a rod and took a shot at me.”
“I figured it like that,” I told her. “He was a crook, but the doctor was also a crook. They heard Cove’s confession when he gave it to us, and the doctor had the nurse slip out and hijack the stones for him. I had to pull some rough stuff to get them back.”
She pointed her finger at the last paragraph of the newspaper account.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
I looked at it.
It was a statement to the effect that there was an underworld rumor linking the activities of Ed Jenkins, The Phantom Crook, with the gang war that had resulted in Cove’s death, but that as usual, The Phantom Crook had left no tangible clue for the police; only an underworld whisper.