I had disposed of Vera. But I hadn’t disposed of Halliday, and he was much the greater menace. Almost certainly he had been six or seven hours in New Orleans. That was time enough for him to have done to Mr. Brand what he had done to Deborah and Lena… and what his friends had probably done to Deborah’s father.
My little success, however, had made me optimistic. And the colt in my pocket helped my confidence. I had to have a break some time. Perhaps this was the moment for it. Perhaps I would find Mr. Brand safely ensconced at 1462 Dauphine Street.
I left the room, locked it behind me and downstairs turned the key in at the desk. I had brought the false gabardine bag with me because, if I did succeed in making contact with Mr. Brand, I would have to turn it in at the Airline office before I could retrieve my own.
The hotel lobby was crowded with cheerful, touristy-looking people. As I moved to the swing door I saw a group of telephone booths. It seemed unlikely in this perverse tangle, where nothing came easy, that Mr. Brand would be listed in the telephone book, but I went over to the directory. I leafed through it to the B’s and, mildly incredulous, saw the name:
Brand, William C.—1462B Dauphine Street.
My feeling of near-success sky-rocketed. This was an omen. Obviously it was both wiser and safer to telephone to Mr. Brand before going to an apartment which might, by now, be a trap. I went into a booth and dialled the number from the book. Almost at once a man’s deep gruff voice answered, a voice which certainly did not belong to Bill Halliday.
I said: “Mr. Brand?”
The voice said: “Yes. This is he.”
This was being almost too easy. I said: “I’m Peter Duluth. You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Deborah’s.”
“Deborah!” Mr. Brand’s voice was quiet, but I could trace suppressed excitement behind it.
“I’ve got something rather important for you—something from Deborah. Can I come round right away?”
“Of course, Mr. Duluth.”
It sounded melodramatic, but I felt it wiser to add: “You may not know it, but there are people who might cause trouble. I’ll ring three times. Don’t let anyone else in until I come.”
I had expected surprise, but Mr. Brands’ voice was even as ever. “Yes, Mr. Duluth, I am fully conscious of the danger. Three times?”
“Three times.”
I rang off. My hand was unsteady with excitement. Here was my break at last. This wasn’t going to end in a gun-battle with “sluggings and Chasings and Strippings”. It was going to end quietly in a peaceable apartment in an American city. I might even catch my night plane and keep my date in New York with Iris, after all.
I left the booth and went back to the telephone book to write down Mr. Brand’s number against any future need. As I scribbled it on a piece of paper, I saw that he was listed a second time. Beneath his home address was printed:
Brand, William C., Mining Engineer, and an address on Dock Street.
So Deborah’s uncle was a mining engineer. I played with the implications of this information as I moved out of the hotel into the pale late afternoon sunshine.
My watch showed four-thirty. I glanced up and down to make sure that Halliday wasn’t anywhere around. There was no sign of him. I started to walk, noticing the passers-by and convincing myself that I wasn’t being followed.
I would have been, of course, if Vera had been able to warn Halliday that I was going out. The thought of Vera trussed up in the bathroom added to my sensation of satisfaction.
I had been in New Orleans several times before, and knew it well enough. The Vieux Carré is pretty small. I was on Royale now. Dauphine Street, I remembered, ran parallel to it a couple of blocks over.
After Mexico, New Orlean’s much-boosted French Quarter seemed rather phony. The old houses with their delicate iron filigree balconies had charm, but they were all faked up. Ye Old Antique Shoppe with little leaded glass panes. Mother Whosit’s Chicken Kitchen. The Only Original Absinthe Parlor. America can’t leave a good thing alone.
As I passed a wildly antique drugstore that looked like something out of a Schubert Brother’s production of Naughty Marietta, I started seriously to think of Mr. Brand as a mining engineer. New ideas began to flutter in my mind like pigeons around a dovecot. South America is staggeringly rich in minerals. Deborah’s father was an archæologist. Archæologists dug things up.
Was the solution of this involved mystery somehow tied up with a mine?
I had reached Dauphine. It was another of the picturesque streets. A woman in an artist’s smock was being Bohemian and sitting in front of an easel on the sidewalk painting Gay Old New Orleans. My thought-pigeons were still fluttering. What if Mr. Brand in his archæological pursuits had stumbled on some mineral deposit, some vein which might have great value but whose authenticity wasn’t certain until checked by regular mining engineers? He could have sent Deborah to contact his brother, sent her secretly because there were other people with their eyes on the mine, too. And the other people could have been trying to stop her before she got to William C. Brand. Something like a mine which could make a fortune for anyone who got hold of it would have been a real incentive to wholesale murder and abduction.
Until then I had never evolved even the crudest theory of what lay behind all that had happened to me. Had it been that? The Brand brothers and Deborah against Halliday and Vera Garcia.
The numbers on Dauphine Street started at Canal Street. I was in the two hundred block. I turned into Dauphine past the woman in the smock and headed downtown.
The detective story could have contained some vital information about the mine in code. And the jar? What could be in the jar? A sample, perhaps, of the ore?
At last the violence and terror of the past few days came out of the fantastic realm of jewels and Inca relics into a world of brutal commercial danger. But who were Mr. Brand’s rivals? It must be a sizeable organization to be able to abduct Deborah’s father in Peru, send Halliday after Deborah to Yucatan and employ Vera as an agent in Mexico City.
Agent. The word opened up even wider vistas. Was some Government behind it all? In this age, dedicated to self-destruction, miniature unofficial wars for the control of minerals must be going on all over the world.
Had I all this time been blundering around in a war?
I reached the fourteen hundred block. The Vieux Carré was getting a little tired but it was still bravely quaint. No one had followed me. I was sure of that. And no one was loitering in front of 1462. It was an old house which had been renovated as an apartment building. The iron balconies had been painted red and were decorated with vines and geraniums in pots. The ground floor was occupied by an Art Book Store with engravings of clipper ships and books like The Romance of Louisiana in its window.
At one side of the store was an entrance which led to the actual apartments. A sign classified it as 1462B. I went into the doorway. Names were printed on cards by the buzzers. Beside the buzzer for Apartment 4 was a card saying:
William C. Brand.
Feeling absurdly elated, I pressed the buzzer three times. Almost immediately the button above released the door-catch. I moved into a small hall, painted primrose yellow, and started up the stairs.
After three flights, I came to the top floor. Brand apparently owned it all. His card was attached to the only door.
The simplicity of it all seemed almost an anti-climax.
I knocked on the door. It opened. A large man with red hair and very blue eyes stood smiling awkwardly at me on the threshold. He held out his hand.
“Well, Mr. Duluth, I’ve made a thorough mess of the whole thing, but it’s good to see you at last.”
I had anticipated danger and Halliday. I had anticipated uneventfulness and Mr. Brand. But I had never expected surprise.
And that is what I felt—sheer, undiluted surprise.
Because the man in front of me was Mr. Johnson, the bridegroom from Yucatan.