XVITHE INVISIBLE INK
We were awakened very early by the violent ringing of our room telephone. Kennedy was at the receiver almost before I realized what was going on.
“Have you a machine to follow her?” I heard him ask, hurriedly, then add: “All right. I’ll leave the trailing to you. Don’t let her get away. We will go to the city on the train and then you can communicate with me at Mr. Hastings’s office. I’ll go there.”
“Who was it?” I asked as Craig hung up. “What has happened?”
“Paquita has tried to steal a march on us, I imagine,” he replied, beginning to dress hastily. “Riley must have been up all night—or at least very early. He saw her come down-stairs—it’s scarcely five o’clock now—and a moment later her car pulled up. She’s off, apparently by the road to New York. It’s strange, too. Except that she got off so early, she made very littleeffort at concealment. You would think she must have known that she would be seen. I wonder if she wanted us to know it, or was just taking a chance at getting away while we were napping?”
“Is Riley following her?” I asked.
“Yes. As soon as he saw her speedster at the door he went out by another door and around to the garage. It just happened that the night man was there and Riley wheedled him into letting him have a car. It isn’t as fast as Paquita’s, but then it isn’t always the fast car that gets away with it between here and New York. Sometimes, if you know how to drive and where the bad spots in the road are, you can make up what you lack in speed.”
Kennedy had pulled a time-table out of his pocket and was hurriedly consulting it.
“The service is very poor at this hour,” he remarked. “It will be an hour before we can get the next train. We’ve missed the first by a few minutes.”
“What do you suppose she’s up to now?” I speculated.
Kennedy shrugged silently.
We had finished dressing and for the moment there seemed to be nothing to do but wait.
“By George!” Craig exclaimed, suddenly, startingfor the door. “Just the chance! Hardly anybody is about. We can get into her room while she is gone. Come on!”
Paquita’s room, or rather suite, was on the floor above and in a tower at the corner. It was difficult to get into, but from a porch at the end of the hall we found that it was possible to step on a ledge and, at some risk, reach one window. Kennedy did not hesitate, and I followed.
As was to be supposed, the room was topsy-turvy, showing that she had been at some pains to get away early and quick.
We began a systematic search, pawing with unhallowed fingers all the dainty articles of feminine finery which might conceal some bit of evidence that might assist us.
“Pretty clever,” scowled Kennedy, as drawer after drawer, trunk after trunk, closet after closet, yielded nothing. “She must have destroyed everything.”
He paused by a dainty little wicker writing-desk, which was scrupulously clean. Even the blotters were clean, as though she had feared some one might, by taking her hand-mirror, even read what she blotted.
The scrap-basket had a pile of waste in it, including a couple of evening papers. However, I turned it over and examined it while Craig watched.
As I did so I fairly pounced on a sheet of paper crumpled into a ball, and eagerly straightened it out flat on the table.
“Humph!” I ejaculated in disgust. “Blank! Might have known she wouldn’t leave anything in writing around, I suppose.”
I was about to throw it back when Kennedy took it from me. He held it up to the light. It was still just a crumpled sheet of white paper. He looked about. On a dressing-table stood an electric curling-iron. He heated it and passed it over the paper until it curled with the heat. Still it was just a blank sheet of paper.
Was he pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp?
For a moment he regarded it thoughtfully. “If I were in the laboratory,” he ruminated, “I could tell pretty quick whether—Wait!—that’s foolish. She hasn’t any laboratory here. Walter, fill that basin with warm water.”
In the bottom of the basin Craig laid the sheet of paper and we bent over it.
“Nothing doing,” I remarked, disappointed.
“Why not?” he returned, eagerly, turning the wet paper. “We had it wrong side up!”
There, before our eyes, under the water, characters of some sort were appearing.
“You can make a perfectly good sympathetic ink from linseed oil, liquor of ammonia, and any ofseveral other ingredients,” he said, watching with me. “When writing with it dries it is invisible. Only water will bring it out. Then when it dries it is invisible again. Look.”
I did, but could not yet make out what it was, except that it seemed to be a hodge-podge of figures:
251533331514543245434412152515354433331552543442254533442431521521243324432323154215
“It’s a cipher!” I exclaimed with that usual acumen that made Kennedy smile indulgently.
“Quite right,” he agreed, studying the peculiar scrawl of the figures. “But if we are going to get to New York at anything like the time she does, we must get that train. I can’t stop to decipher it now. We’ll have plenty of time later in the morning. There’s no use staying here, with the bird flown from the cage. I wonder whether Hastings is up yet.”
The lawyer, who was not as young as he used to be, was not awake, and it took some pounding on his door to wake him. As he opened it sleepily he was prepared to give some one a piece of his mind, until he saw that it was Kennedy and myself.
“Hello!” he suppressed a surly growl. “What’s the trouble?”
Quickly Craig told him of the strange departure of Paquita.
“Up to something again,” muttered Hastings, finding some one at least on whom he could vent his spleen, although by this time he was fully awake. “But, man, I can’t get away for that early train!”
“Oh, that’s all right,” reassured Kennedy. “I think it will be enough if you come down on the express. But I wanted to tell you that when Riley called up and said he was off after Paquita, I couldn’t think of a place in the city that was more central than your office and I took the liberty of telling him to call me up there, without thinking how early it would be.”
“I’ll let you have the key,” returned Hastings, taking one from a ring. “I’ll join you as soon as I can get away.”
“Just what I wanted,” commented Kennedy, as we left the lawyer and hurried down to the dining-room for the few remaining minutes before the hotel ’bus left for the station. “Besides, I wanted to get there when no one was around, so that I could have a chance to look at that confounded detectaphone again. Whoever it was who installed it was clever.”
“Might not that be the purpose of Paquita’s trip to New York?” I queried.
“I was thinking of that. Between us, Riley and ourselves ought to be able to find that out.”
There was just time for a hasty bite of breakfast and we went into the dining-room, where Burke was evidently looking for us, for he came over and sat down. No one else was about and he felt free to talk.
“If you’re going,” he decided, after telling us of Riley’s report to him also of Paquita, “I think I had better stay. We ought not to let any of them remain here unobserved—not after last night,” he added.
“Quite right,” agreed Kennedy. “Have you heard anything more about the attack on Winifred?”
Burke negatived. He was still sore at Sanchez, who seemed to have come out of the affair with credit. I fancied that if ever the sallow-faced man ran afoul of Burke it would go hard with him.
“I didn’t get that business straight last night,” mused the detective. “Why should any one have wanted to kidnap Winifred? It couldn’t have been to hurt her—for there was plenty of opportunity to do that. It must have been to hold her somewhere and force some one to do something. What do you think of that, Kennedy?”
“Your reasoning is very logical,” agreed Craig.
“There is only one thing missing—who was it and what was it for?”
“Pretty large questions,” agreed Burke, good-humoredly now. “There must have been some big reason for it. Well, I hope this trip of Paquita’s proves to be the key to something. I almost wish I had told Riley to stay. I’d like to go with you.”
“No,” reassured Craig. “It’s better that you should be here. We must not leave any loopholes. You’ll communicate with me if anything happens?”
Burke nodded and glanced hastily at his watch as a hint to us to hurry. With a parting assurance from him, we made the dash for the train in the hotel ’bus.
The crisp morning air as we spun up to the station was a tonic to Kennedy. He seemed to enjoy the excitement of the chase keenly and I must admit that I, too, felt the pleasing uncertainty of our errand.
I had found by this time that there was an entirely different crowd that regularly took each train. None of those whom we had seen the previous day on the express were on this train, although I felt sure that some of them at least would take their regular trip to the city later, especially Shelby. Whatever happened, at leastwe were ahead of them, although I doubted whether we would be ahead of Paquita unless she had some trouble on the road.
Nothing was to be gained by the study of the other passengers, and there was not even a chair car on the accommodation. The papers had not arrived from New York in spite of the fact that Westport was not very far out, and the time consumed in stopping at every station on the road seemed to hang heavy.
Kennedy, however, was never at a loss for something to do. We had no more than settled ourselves in the smoker with its seats of hot, dirty, worn, antiquated railroad plush, when he pulled from his pocket a copy he had made of the figures that had appeared on the wet paper.
In a moment he was deeply engaged in a study of them, trying all manner of tricks, combining them, adding them, setting figures opposite the letters of the alphabet, everything that could occur to him on the spur of the moment, although I knew that he had worked out a scientific manner of reading any cipher. Still, his system of deciphering would take time, and in the brief interval of the railroad journey it was his intention to see whether he might not save the labor and perhaps stumble on some simple key.
Evidently the cipher was not so simple. Oneafter another he used up sheets from his loose-leaf note-book, tearing up the scrawls and throwing them out of the window, but never seeming to become discouraged or to lose his temper at each fresh failure.
“I can’t say I’m making much progress,” he admitted, finally, closing his note-book and taking from his wallet carefully the original crumpled sheet I had found in the scrap-basket. “There’s just one thing I’d like to try—not to decipher it, for that will take time, I see—but to see if there is anything else that I missed as I looked at it so hastily up there in that room.”
At the ice-water cooler, which never had any ice in it, nor cups about it, he held the sheet of paper for a moment under the tepid running water. Since he had first wet it, it had dried out and the figures were again invisible. Then he returned to our seat and soon was deep in the study of the original this time.
“I can say one thing,” he remarked, folding the cipher carefully so as not to tear the weakened fibers, as we rolled into the New York terminus, “the person who wrote that thing is a crook—has the instincts of a spy and traitor.”
“How do you know that?” I inquired.
“How?” he repeated, quietly, glancing up sharply from a final look at the thing. “Did youever hear of the science of graphology—the study of character in handwriting? Much the same thing applies to figures. It’s all there in the way those figures are made, just as plain as the nose on your face, even if the meaning of the cipher is still hidden. We have a crook to deal with, and a very clever one, too, even if we don’t know yet who it is. It’s possible to hide a good deal, but not everything—not everything.”
From the station Kennedy and I went immediately down to the office of Hastings. It was still very early and few offices were occupied. Kennedy opened the door and, as I anticipated, went directly to the spot in the office where he had unearthed, or rather unwalled, the detectaphone transmitter.
There was not a chance that any one would be listening at the other end, yet he proceeded cautiously. The transmitter had been placed close to the plaster which had not been disturbed in Hastings’s office. So efficient was the little machine that even the plaster did not prevent sound waves from affecting its sensitive diaphragm.
“But how could it have been put in place?” I asked as Kennedy explored the hole he had made in the wall.
“That’s new plaster back there,” he pointedout, peering in. “Some one must have had access on a pretense to the next office and placed the transmitter that way, plastering up the wall again and painting it over. You see, Hastings wouldn’t know about that.”
“Still,” I objected, “any one going in and out of the next office would be likely to be seen. Who has the office?”
“It’s no use to look,” replied Kennedy, as I started for the hall. “They are as ignorant as we are. See—the wire doesn’t go there. It goes horizontally to that box or casing in the corner which carries steam-pipes. Then it goes down. It’s not likely it goes down very many floors. Let’s see what’s under us.”
The office beneath bore on its doors the name of a well-known brokerage firm. There was no reason to suspect them, and Kennedy and I walked down another floor. There, in a little office, directly under that occupied by Hastings, gilt letters announced simply “Public Stenographer Exchange.” Without a doubt that was the other end of the eavesdropper.
“There’s no one in yet, sir,” informed a cleaning woman who happened to see us trying the door.
Kennedy was ready with a story. “That’s too bad,” he hastened, with a glance at his watch.“They want to sublet it to me and I’d like to look at it before I decide on another office at nine o’clock.”
“I can let you see it,” hinted the woman, rattling a string of keys.
“Can you?” encouraged Kennedy, slipping a silver coin into her hand. “Thank you. It will save me another trip.”
She opened the door and we saw at once why Kennedy’s chance story had seemed so plausible. Whatever furniture had been there had been moved out, except a single plain chair and a very small table. But on the table stood a box, the receiving end of the detectaphone. It was the eavesdropper’s station, all right.
The woman left us a moment and we made the best of the opportunity. Not even a scrap of paper had been left. Except for what greeted us on our first entrance, there was nothing.
Who had rented the place? Who had listened in, had heard and anticipated even our careful frame-up?
Could it have been that this was the objective of the hasty visit of Paquita, that it had been she who was so eager to destroy the evidence of the eavesdropping on Hastings?
It was galling to have to stand here in inaction at a time when we felt that we might be learningmuch if we had only so much as a hint where else to look.
“The easiest way of finding out is to watch,” concluded Kennedy. “We can’t just stand about in the hall. That in itself will look suspicious. You wait here a few minutes while I see if I can find the agent of the building.”
Around a bend in the hall I waited, trying to seem interested more in some other office down the hall. No one appeared, however, looking for any of the offices, and it was only a few minutes before Kennedy returned.
“I found him,” he announced. “Of course he could tell me next to nothing. It was as I had supposed, just some one who was an emissary of our criminal. I doubt if it would do us much good to catch the person now, anyway. Still, it’s worth while taking a chance on. A girl who said she was a typewriter and stenographer hired the place, and paid for it in cash in advance. I managed to persuade the agent to let me have the key to this vacant office opposite. We can watch better from that.”
We let ourselves into the opposite office, which was bare, and I could see that I was in for a tiresome wait.
No one had arrived yet in Hastings’s office and Kennedy was eager to receive some word fromRiley as well as watch the eavesdropping plant. Accordingly, he left me to watch while he returned to the lawyer’s office.
Every footfall in the hall raised my hopes, only to dash them again as the new-comer entered some other office than the one I was watching.