TO MCKEE she said: “Sorry, I do turn up at the most unexpected times, but you did, too. I came in while you were talking in the kitchen.” Slim, composed, her body without tension under the excellent lines of a tweed suit, her eyes bright in the shadow of a little hat, she turned to the other woman.
“You are Mrs. Barcley? I came to return your son’s key. I found it on the floor in the Sanctuary after the dancer was shot, had just picked it up and was about to hand it to him when the outcry began. Afterwards I couldn’t find him.”
“You are very kind.” There was bitter hostility behind Mrs. Barcley’s thin smile as she held out her hand and the girl dropped the key into it.
“Most thoughtful of you, Miss Pierce,” the inspector murmured. “The key explains how you got in. It doesn’t explain why you searched this room, after your arrival and while we were at the other end of the apartment.”
She gave it to him then with a smile, the lie direct, opening her gray eyes wide, “Oh, but I didn’t.”
He let them both go then, left himself after a quick survey of the remaining rooms. It was almost nine o’clock. Five minutes later both men were in the Cadillac on their way uptown to interview the archeologist.
Herbert Parle, A.M., B.A., Ph.D., lived with his sister in an unpretentious house on a quiet street in a decent, shabby neighborhood. The scientist was expecting them. And seated in a big room at the back of the hall, so full of objects that Tannin felt the sister’s devotion must be boundless to permit such a bunch of junk on the premises, McKee looked around curiously. There wasn’t an inch of space unoccupied. The walls were buried under a fresco of hundreds of photographs, maps, paintings. All sorts of objects littered the surfaces. Books were piled anyhow, on the floor, on chairs, and sheets of manuscript strewn broadcast added a final note of disorder to the confusion in the midst of which the doctor received them. He was a thin elderly man as bald as an egg, but with a beautiful sandy beard that would have made the fortune of a hair tonic.
Much of his ornamental and exceedingly verbose conversation with McKee was obscured by the vituperative screaming of a green parrot in a cage under the window. The sergeant, between looking and listening, was a little at sea. Such things as, “The first astronomical observatory in America with reference to the arrangements of temples, E-I, E-II, E-III, Pyramid E-VII, and Stella XX,” a jaguar skin draping a rough mass of stone, a model of a queer building named the “Temple of the Dark Writing,” confused his sturdy common sense. He concentrated on the doctor with an effort.
Behind the desk Parle was turning over the bit of jade between bony fingers the color of parchment, and listening to the inspector’s story. He began to talk, and Tannin got hopelessly lost again. Maya and Inca civilizations tangled themselves in knots. He did gather at the end of a long and complicated narrative that the bit of jade was centuries old and part of a woman’s betrothal ornaments. And to the best of Parle’s belief had come from Costa de Muerte.
McKee’s eyes gleamed behind squeezed-together lashes. Tannin stared. The liquid syllables rolled queerly back from the walls of this strange room. Parle translated: “In English, gentlemen, the ‘Beach of Death.’ ”
Then it turned out that the beach wasn’t a beach at all, but the bank of a river. “These alluvial stretches used to be used as burial grounds in ancient days. Successive deposits of silt when the river overflows in the rainy season have in most instances made them difficult to find. The Thorndyke Museum has made valuable excavations at Costa de Muerte.”
“And where is this Beach of Death, Dr. Parle?” McKee already knew, but Tannin’s eyes opened when the scientist answered. “In Colombia, about fifty miles away from the coast, thirty southeast of Bogota, high up in the mountains—a wild region.”
“When were these excavations you speak of begun?”
“About five or six years ago, Inspector.”
“What would a white woman be doing in such a locale?”
“Oh—she might be the wife of an engineer, or a man attached to one of our home industries, oil, bananas, rubber. The white population lives entirely in the hills. The coast is a marsh—full of fever.” The doctor went on talking for some time. Although he had traveled extensively himself he had never run across Rita Rodriguez. When the interview was at an end McKee mentioned the waiter under both his aliases, Green and Mendez. The archeologist shook his head—then frowned.
“Green … Green. Curious! I seem to associate the name somehow with Costa de Muerte but not precisely in that way. Dear me, my memory’s not what it was. If the connection comes to me I shall let you know.”
The Scotsman thanked him, and the two men left the house. He was silent and abstracted on the way down through the city. Back at the office he threw away his hat, didn’t pay any attention to the sheaf of messages from the Telegraph Bureau, the reports that had come in from men running down various angles, went out of the room, came back with a large thin book, dropped into his chair and leafed pages. Tannin crossed the floor and looked down. The book was an elementary school geography, and McKee had paused at an industrial map of South America. The sergeant’s stupefaction deepened. They didn’t even have their hands on the waiter who was wandering around loose in New York at that moment. How did McKee expect to …
Without looking up, the Scotsman said: “Exports,” in a dreamy voice, and began to trace with a pencil various lines shooting out from the Colombian coast across the ocean to other parts of the world and labeled with the names of commodities: “coffee, mineral oil, gold, platinum, hides …” he stopped, looked away, looked back at the map “… and emeralds, Tannin,” he said slowly, “emeralds.”
The sergeant tried to take the implication—and failed. A dancer dead in a speakeasy in New York, mixed up with a young swell and a lot of other people doing monkey tricks, a shabby little waiter without a cent to his name … It was true that he had come from South America, true also that the dancer was carrying around a bit of jade that hailed from there, too, but … emeralds!
“She didn’t have any jewelry, boss!”
McKee didn’t answer. Looking pleased, he played a tune on some buttons at the back of the desk. The policeman-secretary thrust in his head. “Send someone for Lily Henderson. I want that check girl from the Sanctuary, too. Her address is in the files.” And when the secretary withdrew, he fished a card out of his wallet with “Tiffany” engraved across the front, and beneath it a man’s name and telephone number. McKee pulled the phone toward him and called this number.
“It was as big as the end of my thumb halfway down.” The hat-check girl was very positive, sitting bolt upright on the edge of her chair, a little in awe of her surroundings. McKee glanced at the jewel expert, a slight man with a nondescript face, who knew as much about precious stones as any man in New York. Nixon said:
“Really? Then, my dear young lady, if it was genuine, it was very valuable indeed.” There were four people in the room: Lily Henderson, looking a little gray (a defect she was on the point of remedying with a raspberry lipstick) above a hundred and fifty pounds of flesh shoved into a shiny satin dress; Nixon; the sergeant; and the girl from the Sanctuary.
As Nixon made this announcement, Lily held the tube of red paste motionless, awe in her voice: “You don’t mean to tell me that that bit of brownish rock was worth anything? Sure I knew she had it … but in London it wasn’t on the chain. More than once she said to me, and once it was while she was handling the funny-looking thing: ‘I don’t intend to stay in this business all my life.’ I thought she meant a man, of course, but now—did the dirty louse who did her in shoot her for the stone, Inspector?”
McKee asked: “How much would it be worth, Nixon? She must have had it cut and polished since that time.”
The expert shrugged. “Not having seen the stone myself, of course I wouldn’t be able to give an authoritative opinion. But granting that it was a good color and without any cracks or flaws, even in the present depressed market it ought to fetch—say from ten to eighteen or twenty thousand dollars. You know the market is artificially controlled—that’s what you’ve got to come to in all industry sooner or later. The supply is never permitted to catch up with the demand.”
And that was that. Nixon went away, the room was cleared, and McKee sat staring down at his desk. The emerald was not on the dancer’s person. It was not in her flat. It was not in her safe-deposit box. (This had already been examined.) Where, then, was it? The check girl had contributed, in addition, before she left, that Rita wore it the first three nights she was in the Sanctuary, and after that—never.
Of one thing the inspector was now convinced: the bit of jade, the emerald, were intimately bound up with her murder. The shrill summons of the telephone roused him from intricate conjecture. It wasn’t news of Archer, or of the waiter, either. It was only Telfair, and he sounded furious. What the cartoonist said (in reaction from terror about the damn purse which had disappeared, leaving him free to move) was:
“Look here, McKee. You’ve got a man tailing Judith Pierce. Would you mind telling me the reason?”
The Scotsman gazed steadily at the wall, instrument loose in his hand. Keys. Archer’s key. The girl had turned up with it in the penthouse. There must have been keys in the dancer’s purse. The purse was missing. The girl had been hidden in the telephone booth. The telephone booth was near Rita’s dressing room. Some one of those people might have seen her take it. A man watching her! He didn’t say, “But we haven’t”—instead: “Miss Pierce will be best able to answer that question. Suppose you meet me at her rooms in twenty minutes.”
Leaving Tannin to wade through the mass of reports that had come in, he left the precinct.