The Million-Dollar Suitcase — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Million-Dollar Suitcase
John Stuart Mill · en
While he was gone on his errand to the shed, I investigated the outer
walls of the study with the torch, hunting some break in their solidity.
They were concrete; a hair-crack would have been visible in the electric
glow; there was no break. Then, as he placed the ladder against the
coping, I climbed to the roof and stepped across its firmness to the
skylight. I looked down.
Worth, kneeling on the hearth, was laying a fire in the corner grate. As
he did not glance up, I knew he had not heard me. Evidently the study
had been built to resist the disturbance of sound from without. That
meant that the report of the revolver inside had not been heard by any
one outside the walls.
Directly below me was the library table and upon its top a blue desk
blotter; a silver filagreed inkstand stood open; penholders, pencils,
paper knife were on a tray beside it, one pen lying separate from the
others with a ruler, upon the blotting pad; books and a magazine neatly
in a pile. The walls, as I circled them with my eyes, were book-lined
everywhere except for the grate and the two doors.
Then I inspected the skylight, frame and glass, feeling it over with my
hands. There was no entrance here. Even should a pane of glass be
removable--all seemingly solid and tight--the frame between and the sash
were of steel, and the panes were too small for the passage of a man. I
crept back to the ladder as Worth was striking a match to light the
pitch-pine kindling.
"What about this Vandeman chink?" I asked of Hughes as I rejoined him at
the foot of the ladder. "Does he hang around here much?"
"Him and Chung visit back and forth a bit. I hear 'em talkin' hy-lee
hy-lo sometimes when I go by the kitchen."
"Take me over there," I said.
The fog was beginning to blow away in threads; moonlight somewhere back
of it made a queer, gray, glimmering world around us. We circled the
garden by the path, passing a sort of gardener's tool shed where Hughes
left the ladder, and from which I judged Worth had brought the bar he
pried the door planks off with, to find a gap in a hedge between this
place and the next.
There was a light in the rear of the house over there, and a
well-trodden path leading from the hedge gap made what I took to be a
servants' highway.
Vandeman's house proved to be, as nearly as one could see it in the
darkness, a sprawling bungalow, with courts, pergolas and terraces
bursting out on all sides of it. I could fairly see it of a fine
afternoon, with its showy master sitting on one of the showy porches,
serving afternoon tea in his best manner to the best people of Santa
Ysobel. Just the husband for that doll-faced girl, if she only thought
so. What could she have done with a young outlaw like Worth?