Эрл Гарднер - The Amazing Adventures of Lester Leith

The clerk and the house detective shuffled out. The door closed. The girl raised an unpenitent face and grinned.

“Now what?” she asked.

Lester Leith regarded her gravely.

“If you had to build an ironclad, copper-riveted alibi, what would you do?”

She puckered her lips, narrowed her eyes in thought.

“Absolutely ironclad?” she asked.

Leith nodded.

“Well,” she said, “I’ve pulled a stunt once along that line that ain’t never been improved on. I let a cop who was pretty well up in the big time date me up. He was married. It would have been a swell alibi if I’d had to use it; only I didn’t have to use it.”

Leith took out a wallet.

“I think,” he observed, “it would be a fine time to start building an alibi.”

She took the bill he handed to her, whistled, thrust the money down the top of her stocking, and grinned.

“I like,” she said. “You’d rate a goodbye kiss if I hadn’t just smeared my mouth all up pretty for the clerk. As it is, you’re a good guy. G’bye.”

She went out the door, as graceful as a slipping shadow. The hallway seemed to be unduly active. Three men were strolling along. A fourth man was arguing with a porter about the cost of transporting a trunk.

Lester Leith smiled.

He locked the door, walked through Room 407 to Room 405, took a small leather packet from his pocket, extracted a tiny drill. With this drill he bored a very small hole in the panel of the communicating doorway which led to Room 403.

When this hole was completed, Lester Leith applied his eye, saw that the room was dark and vacant, nodded sagely, and took additional tools from the leather case.

After some ten seconds the bolt twisted and the communicating door swung open.

The room showed that it had been occupied for some time. The furnishings were those of the ordinary hotel bedroom, but there were individual touches — photographs on the walls, a pennant or two, a sofa cushion, and a special reading lamp.

Lester Leith noted them, noted also that the clothing had been unpacked from the suitcases and the bulky trunk, and placed in the closet of the room and in the drawers of the bureau. The massive trunk was presumably empty, but it was tightly locked.

Lester Leith nodded, as though he was finding exactly what he had expected, and set to work. He dragged the bulky trunk into Room 405, then into Room 407. He then went back to Room 403, pulled the clothes out of the bureau drawers, took the suitcases, the reading lamp, the sofa cushion, even the photographs on the walls. He denuded the room of every single item of individual furniture.

Then he retired once more to Room 405, locked the communicating door, applied his eye to the peephole he had gimleted in the panel, and waited.

He had over an hour to wait.

His room was dark, save for such light as came through the windows, light which ebbed and flowed with the regularity of clockwork, marking the clicking on and off of some of the neon signs which were on the roofs of adjoining buildings. The noise of the side street came to his ears in a confused roar. The blare of automobile horns, impatiently trying to move traffic, the muttered undertone which marks the restless motion and conversation of hustling throngs, all blended into an undertone of sound.

Lester Leith remained at his post, silently observant.

His vigil was at last rewarded.

A key clicked in the lock of 403. The door swung open, showing light from the corridor, the silhouette of a chunky man. The door closed. The bolt clicked, and the light switched on.

Lester Leith could see the look of stunned amazement on the face of the man in the adjoining room as he discovered what had happened.

The man was in his early forties, alert, broad-shouldered, self-sufficiently aggressive. But now his self-sufficience melted away from him. His face writhed with conflicting emotions. He glanced back of him at the door through which he had just entered, then at the doorway where Leith watched.

For some ten seconds he stood motionless, apparently adjusting himself. Then his hand slipped beneath the armpit of his coat, extracted a snubnosed automatic, and he tiptoed toward the door behind which Lester Leith crouched.

Softly, silently, he twisted the knob of that door, and found that the door was locked. Then he stepped back, letting light once more come through the small hole Leith had bored.

The man walked to the telephone in the corner of the room, took down the receiver.

“Room clerk,” he rasped.

The man recounted his troubles to the hotel clerk. Lester Leith could not catch all the words, but he could hear the tone, and gather the import of the conversation. Then the man in the adjoining room hung up the telephone, crossed swiftly to the window, pulled down the shade, went to the door, made certain it was locked, looked at the transom, making sure it was closed.

He secured a chair, stood on it, and unscrewed the brass screws from one of the wall lighting fixtures. The fixture lifted out, disclosing a cunningly designed hiding place. In that hollowed-out hiding place, at one side of the spliced electric wires which conveyed current to the wall fixture, was a chamois bag.

The man opened this bag with fingers that quivered, and gave an exclamation of relief. Then he hastily closed the bag, pushed it back into its hiding place, paused for a moment’s consideration, and replaced the screws in the wall fixture. He got down from the chair, moved it so that its back was against the wall, unlocked the outer door, stepped into the corridor, and closed the door, locking it from the outside.

Lester Leith worked with incredible rapidity.

He opened the communicating door, glided into the opposite room, pulled the chair back to the place directly underneath the wall fixture, untwisted the screws with a screwdriver, opened the chamois bag.

There were many gems in that bag, gems that sparkled and glittered. But Leith was careful to take only a limited number — very few, but those few the best. Then he closed the bag, pushed it back into its recess in the wall, screwed back the light fixture, replaced the chair, and slipped from the room into his own room, number 405.

He thrust a cautious head out of the window.

The fire escape stretched down the side of the building like a black ribbon. Three men were seated in the alley underneath that fire escape.

Another man sprawled on the seat of a truck that was parked a few feet to one side.

Leith abandoned the window.

He tiptoed to the door of his room, pulled up a chair, climbed on the chair, stared out through a crack in the transom.

He could see a section of the hallway.

Two men, wearing the uniform of bellhops, yet seemingly strangely mature for bellboys, were walking up and down, their manner that of sentries on duty. A burly porter, who would have never been taken as a porter save for the cap he wore, was seated on a trunk. A well-dressed man with alert eyes was standing far down at one end of the corridor.

There was no possibility of escape from Room 405.

And, as Leith stared, three purposeful men emerged from the elevator and moved toward his room. They were the clerk, the house detective, and the self-sufficiently belligerent man who occupied 403.

Even as Leith stood there, they started to knock on the door, and, as they knocked, the two mature bellboys crowded forward, the porter jumped down from his seat on the trunk, and the gimlet-eyed man at the end of the hall moved forward on rubber-soled feet.

Lester Leith stepped from the chair and went into action.

What had been a polite knock was repeated more loudly. Then it was repeated again with two-fisted emphasis.

“What is it?” called Lester Leith in the blurred tones of one who has been aroused from slumber.