Perry Newberry - The Million-Dollar Suitcase

I had watched them coming back to me at our old table, with its telephone extension, the girl with eyes for no one but Worth, who helped her out of her wrap now with a preoccupied air and,

"Shed the coat, Bobs," adding as he seated her beside him, "The luck of luck that I chanced on you here this evening."

That brought the color into her face; the delicate rose shifted under her translucent skin almost with the effect of light, until that lustrous midnight beauty of hers was as richly glowing as one of those marvellous dark opals of the antipodes.

"Yes," she said softly, with a smile that set two dimples deep in the pink of her cheeks, "wasn't it strange our meeting this way?" Worth wasn't looking at her. He'd signaled a waiter, ordered a pot of black coffee, and was watching its approach. "I didn't go down to the wedding, but Ina herself invited me to come here to-night. I had half a mind not to; then at the last minute I decided I would – and I met you!"

Worth nodded, sat there humped in a brown study while the waiter poured our coffee. The minute the man left us alone, he turned to her with,

"I've got a stunt for you."

"A – a stunt?"

The light failed abruptly in her face; her mouth with its soft, firm molding, its vivid, floral red, like the lips of a child, went down a bit at the clean-cut corners. A small hand fumbled the trimming of her blouse; it was almost as if she laid it over a wounded heart.

"Yes," he nodded. "Jerry's got something in his pocket that'll be pie for you."

She turned to me a look between angry and piteous – the resentment she would not vent on him.

"Is – is Mr. Boyne interested in stunts – such as I used to do?"

"Sure," Worth agreed. "We both are. We – "

"Oh, that was why you wanted me to come back with you?" She had got hold of herself now. She was more poised, but still resentful.

"Bobs," he cut straight across her mood to what he wanted, "Jerry Boyne is going to read you something it took about 'steen blind people to see – and you'll give us the answer." I didn't share his confidence, but I rather admired it as he finished, poising the tongs, "One lump, or two?"

Of course I knew what he meant. My hand was already fumbling in my pocket for the description of Clayte. The girl looked as though she wasn't going to answer him; she moved to shove back her chair. Worth's only recognition of her attitude was to put out a hand quietly, touch her arm, not once looking at her, and say in a lowered tone,

"Steady, Bobs." And then, "Did you say one lump or two?"

"None." Her voice was scarcely audible, but I saw she was going to stay; that Worth was to have his way, to get from her the opinion he wanted – whatever that might amount to. And I passed the paper to him, suggesting,

"Let her read it. This is too public a place to be declaiming a thing of the sort."

She hesitated a minute then gave it such a mere flirt of a glance that I hardly thought she'd seen what it was, before she raised inquiring eyes to mine and asked coldly,

"Why shouldn't that be read – shouted every ten minutes by the traffic officer at Market and Kearny? They'd only think he was paging every other man in the Palace Hotel."

I leaned back and chuckled. After a bare glance, this sharp witted girl had hit on exactly what I'd thought of the Clayte description.

"Is that all? May I go now, Worth?" she said, still with that dashed, disappointed look from one of us to the other. "If you'll just put me on a Haight Street car – I won't wait for – " And now she made a definite movement to rise; but again Worth held her by the mere touch of his fingers on her sleeve.

"Wait, Bobs," he said. "There's more."

"More?" Her eyes on Worth's face talked louder than her tongue, but that also gained fluency as he looked back at her and nodded. "Stunts!" she repeated his word bitterly. "I didn't expect you to come back asking me to do stunts. I hated it all so – working out things like a calculating machine!" Her voice sank to a vehement undertone. "Nobody thinking of me as human, with human feelings. I have never – done – one stunt – since my father died."

She didn't weaken. She sat there and looked Worth squarely in the eye, yet there was a kind of big gentleness in her refusal, a freedom from petty resentment, that had in it not so much a girl's hurt vanity as the outspoken complaint of a really grieved heart.

"But, Bobs," Worth smiled at her trouble, about the same careless, good-natured smile he had given little Pete when he flipped him the quarter, "suppose you could possibly save me a hundred thousand dollars a minute?"

"Then it's not just a stunt?" She settled slowly back in her chair.

"Certainly not," I said. "This is business – with me, anyhow. Miss Wallace, why do you think a description like that could be shouted on the street without any one being the wiser?"

"Was it supposed to be a description?" she asked, raising her brows a bit.

"The best we could get from sixteen or eighteen people, most of whom have known the man a long time; some of them for eight years."

"And no one – not one of all these people could differentiate him?"

"I've done my best at questioning them."

She gave me one straight, level look, and I wondered a little at the way those velvety black eyes could saw into a fellow. But she put no query, and I had the cheap satisfaction of knowing that she was convinced I'd overlooked no details in the quiz that went to make up that description. Then she turned to Worth.

"You said I might save you a lot of money. Has the man you're trying here to describe anything to do with money – in large amounts – financial affairs of importance?"

Again the little girl had unconsciously scored with me. To imagine a rabbit like Clayte, alone, swinging such an enormous job was ridiculous. From the first, my mind had been reaching after the others – the big-brained criminals, the planners whose instrument he was. She evidently saw this, but Worth answered her.

"He's quite a financier, Bobs. He walked off with nearly a million cash to-day."

"From you?" with a quick breath.

"I'm the main loser if he gets away with it."

"Tell me about it."

And Worth gave her a concise account of the theft and his own share in the affair. She listened eagerly now, those innocent great eyes growing big with the interest of it. With her there was no blind stumbling over Worth's motive in buying a suitcase sight unseen. I had guessed, but she understood completely and unquestioningly. When he had finished, she said solemnly,

"You know, don't you, that, if you've got your facts right – if these things you've told me are square, even cubes of fact – they prove Clayte among the wonderful men of the world?"

Worth's big brown paw went out and covered her little hand that lay on the table's edge.

"Now we're getting somewhere," he encouraged her. As for me, I merely snorted.

"Wonderful man, my eye! He's got a wonderful gang behind him."

"Oh, you should have told me that you know there is a gang, Mr. Boyne," she said simply. "Of course, then, the result is different."

"Well," I hedged, "there's a gang all right. But suppose there wasn't, how would you find any wonderfulness in a creature as near nothing as this Clayte?"

She sat and thought for a moment, drawing imaginary lines on the table top, finally looking up at me with a narrowing of the lids, a tightening of the lips, which gave an extraordinary look of power to her young feminine face.

"In that case, Clayte would inevitably be one of the wonderful men of the world," she repeated her characterization with the placid, soft obstinacy of falling, snow. "Didn't you stop a minute – one little minute, Mr. Boyne – to think it wonderful that a man so devoid of personality as that – " she slanted a slim finger across the description of Clayte – "Didn't you add up in your mind all that you told me about the men disagreeing as to which side he parted his hair on, whether he wore tan shoes or black, a fedora or derby, smoked or didn't, – absolutely nothing left as to peculiarities of face, figure, movement, expression, manner or habit to catch the eye of one single observer among the sixteen or eighteen you questioned – surely you added that up, Mr. Boyne? What result did you get?"