J. Thorne: The Black Mask Magazine (Vol. 1, No. 5 - August 1920)

"Where're you going?"

"To those hotels. Come on! Hurry! You have the list? Must get busy. There's something queer there. Might as well start at that as well as at any other place, now that you've roped me into this. And I'd have murdered you if you had left me out! Then we can go down to the morgue and the bank and—"

The rest was lost to Carranaugh as Peiperson stopped to tell Chris, his office boy, that he probably would not be back that afternoon and to tell any possible callers that he was busy figuring on a big contract. "And that's no lie!" he said to Jim as they ran for the descending elevator.

Going from one hotel to another until they had talked with the clerks and attaches of all seven they gradually pieced together the amazing and perplexing problem of the apparent sevenfold identity of Samuel Smith.

As they left the Hotel Butler, the last on Carranaugh's list, Jim uttered a piously emphatic belief in his future eternal condemnation, and Tom Peiperson agreed, for both of them. Mulling, wordless, over this mystery within a mystery, they walked over to the morgue and as silently checked up the items of the dead man's former appearance that coincided exactly with the seven times told description they had just listened to. Discuss it from every angle, they were no nearer a solution when, within a block of the Totem National, Peiperson halted, saying:

"No use both of us covering the same ground — there's plenty for each of us to do, and then some. You go on to the bank and have Snedeker let you examine that vault, as you suggested, and pick up anything more you can about the way the body of Smith looked when they found it. I don't suppose any of 'em had the brains to take a flashlight of the vault interior before they disturbed the lay-out. That's what comes of keeping the newspaper boys out of it! If they had been let in on it from the jump-off we wouldn't have to be depending upon the alleged memories of a lot of incompetent witnesses who have probably forgotten most of what they did see and imagine a lot that never was, they'd have a detailed and exact description by someone who knew how to see and what to look for. This hush stunt makes me tired."

"But in that case maybe we wouldn't have had a chance at the fifty thousand."

"That's so. Maybe not. Anyway, it's too late now. While you are at the bank I'll get busy and see if I can learn any more about this 'Samuel Smith'. Talk about your alibis! Meet me at my office — wait for me or I will for you. Adios ."

It was close to nine o'clock that evening when a tired, hungry, perplexed and perspiring advertising man let himself into his office to find an equally hungry and perplexed detective awaiting him.

"Well, what'd you find?"

"How about it?"

"Your lead, Tom."

"It won't take me long to tell. Smith left town the day before the bank was burgled."

"Left town! But the dead—"

"No, alive. Six times or six of him. He took boat for Victoria, San Francisco and Skagway, and train for Spokane, Portland, and Vancouver, B. C."

"The same day?"

"The same day."

"The same Smith?"

"The same Samuel Smith — or a man who is described as looking exactly like him and who used that name."

"But I tell you he's dead."

"Maybe so, maybe so. But he wasn't last Wednesday, not six of him."

"But he couldn't—"

"No, he couldn't, any more than he could have done the same things at the same times at seven different hotels. But they could."

"I get you! There were seven of him — then."

"Seven is right — seven men who looked alike, who dressed and acted in the same way according to a carefully prepared and rehearsed schedule, each of whom appeared, did his little stunt, and disappeared by and on the appointed minutes."

"But that lets them out of cracking the vault — if they left the day before. Everything was all right up to midnight Wednesday a week ago."

"Six of them left town that Tuesday."

"Six? Six! Then the seventh turned the trick and—"

"Aren't you forgetting the dead man found in the vault with a knife in his ribs?"

"Well, I'll be—"

"You probably will, if you continue to insist on it. But don't let's worry about that — yet. I'm anxious to hear what you found at the bank. There's nothing except the results that is interesting about my afternoon's work. I simply made the rounds of the railroads and steamship offices, depots and docks, until I satisfied myself beyond any doubt that all six and only six Samuel Smiths had left for the places I named, that they actually had gone and not merely pretended to. I would have thought the seventh one had taken an automobile for his getaway if it had not been for the man in the vault. He completes the count."

"That surely lets them out of it — at least of getting away with the million. But if they didn't — then why all the acting? They must have been mixed up in it in some way, or one of them wouldn't be in the morgue. And I was almost ready to finger Snedeker's check! Damn!"

"Then you found something at the bank?"

"I did — or I think I did. I can't be sure until — but wait until I tell you. I told Snedeker what I wanted and he gave me the run of the whole place — but with that idiot Daniels tagging at my heels and blatting every second about the 'effrontery of the miscreants' in picking on the Totem National for their 'dastardly outrage.' To hear him you'd think that the Totem was the only bank that ever had been cracked, that it was nothing short of sacrilege and high treason for rude hands to touch even a deposit slip belonging to it. If Daniels was judge and jury the thieves would be convicted on sight and boiled in oil — when they're caught. And he thinks the whole city, state and country administration should come to a halt until the heavy hand of the law is laid upon them — and that of the Totem National on its million. He got on my nerves until I wanted to hit him, choke him, anything to stop his incessant cackle — until I discovered what I think I discovered. Then I didn't hear his clack any more, though he kept it up without interruption. He—"

"Oh, cut the Daniels part now, Jim. Tell me what you found."

"Well, I think I found the way the thieves or thief got into the vault."

"You did?"

"Think, mind you. I'm not sure and can't be until I get a chance to investigate further. If I'm right I don't want Snedeker to know about it — yet. Not until we are ready to spring the whole story. He might go blabbing to the cops and spill our fat in the fire. They would try to grab all the credit and nose in on the reward. Then where would our island be? We don't want—"

"For the love of Mike, Jim, can the soliloquy and get down to cases. What did you find?"

"I'm telling you fast as I can, ain't I? Of course, if you want to call in every flattie on the force to share our pie or take it all away from us and put that island in the 'too muchee bimeby'—"

Peiperson threw up his hands in mock despair and Jim, grinning, got down to cases as exhorted.

"I had gone over every inch of the vault — walls, floor, ceiling, every nook and corner — several times without seeing a single thing out of kilter, and was standing thinking what to do next, wishing Daniels would shut up long enough to let me think uninterruptedly for a second, when I noticed one of the plates in the floor."

"The vault is built up, Snedeker told me, of three-inch chrome steel plates, three feet square, bolted together underneath like those of a battleship and set in concrete. The vault, the whole building, in fact, rests on solid ground, Snedeker said, without cellar or space of any kind below the level of the street. Seems they were afraid of water in that locality. He had assured me that our burglars could not have broken in from underground whatever other route they may have taken. Of course, I took his say-so on this point for what it might be worth, and no more."