The Corbin necklace
“Are the pajamas in there?” he asked, indicating the tool box. “The
ones with the tear in the leg?”
Raglan nodded, indifferently enough, and then rather suddenly arrested
his spoon for a thoughtful look at the boy.
“Yes,” he said, presently, turning back to his breakfast, “they’re down
at the bottom, with the window shade hanger’s tools. Get them out, if
you’re interested. Keep them for a souvenir. I never want to see them
again.”
Punch had them out in a minute. There they were, sure enough. Lavender
silk pajamas, with a big nail tear in one of the legs.
“They’re really an important souvenir,” Mr. Smith observed. “They must
have been the main inspiration of the--campaign.”
“Naturally,” Raglan said. “There’s no trick about getting into any
house, nor about hiding in it. But how to stay hidden for as long as
may be necessary--well, the pajamas struck me as a pretty good answer.
I could lie up by day almost anywhere providing I had freedom to move
about at night. In a big house like this, full of guests who weren’t
likely to know one another any too well, I’d be sure to have it. No
one would pay any attention to a man in pajamas on his way to the
bathroom. I could get all I needed to drink. I could shave, I thought,
every night. I did shave, as a matter of fact, Wednesday night and
Thursday night. It looked easy--a little too easy, I fancy. It was
probably one of my mistakes. I’ve made several of them on this job, you
know.”
“We shall have to rely upon you to tell us what they were,” said Mr.
Smith politely. “The main conception was, it seems to me, quite in your
best vein. Indeed I blame myself for failing to recognize your--idiom,
so to speak, in the mere prima facie aspects of the case.”
The fellow was vain as a peacock, I could see. He was drinking down the
old man’s compliments like wine. I ventured to lend a hand.
“You weren’t very far from it,” I reminded Mr. Smith. “The thing had a
certain look to you which you kept reverting to, which made it hard for
you to believe it to be the work of an amateur.”
“I failed to think clear through to the edge,” the old gentleman
confessed mournfully. “I fell before the irresistible presumption which
imposed on every one else; the presumption that a man wandering about
the house at night in bath-slippers and pajamas must be one of the
guests. And that despite the clear clue we had to the contrary, in the
failure of Punch’s review of all the pajamas in the house that had been
slept in, to account for the pair with a nail tear in the leg.”
This time it was Raglan’s coffee cup that halted sharply on the way to
his lips.
“Punch!” he murmured, and turned another thoughtful look on the little
boy.
But he was too hungry to be diverted more than momentarily from his
breakfast, and Mr. Smith let him alone until he’d finished it. Then he
offered him a cigar, and said, “I’d like to begin at the beginning. You
came to the house ostensibly to put up window shades.”
“Ostensibly!” Raglan put in. “I worked here for two days; I must have
put up hundreds of them, all over the house--practically all over the
house. I couldn’t get into the old lady’s room. There was no work of
any sort being done there. But the rest of the house I came to know
like the palm of my hand.
“Wednesday afternoon when the old woman went around in her wheel chair,
attended by her grandson, assigning rooms to the people who were
coming, I was working up on this floor and I learned the names of every
one who was coming and where every one was to sleep, which helped a lot.
“And a little later that afternoon,” Mr. Smith observed, “when it
was time for the workmen to quit, instead of leaving the house you
moved into the room you’d selected for yourself and made yourself at
home.--You know, I wonder a little at your choice of a hiding-place,
the top floor of the house with only one flight of stairs leading to it
and only one door out of the place, once you’d got in.”
Raglan laughed--not a very nice sort of laugh, either.
“I thought of all that,” he said. “But there were compensating
advantages. I found them the first time I went in there. You can hear
everything that’s said in both sitting rooms, the old lady’s and her
daughter’s--by some trick of construction that I didn’t figure out.”
“I know about that,” Punch volunteered. “The light comes up too. I
asked grandmother why it was once, and she said grandfather had had the
tops left off the window casings so that the long windows would slide
all the way up.”
“I no longer wonder at your choice of it as a hiding-place,” Mr. Smith
remarked dryly.
He took the staggering revelation, though, a good deal more calmly
than I did. Heavens, how much did the man know! What was there that
he didn’t know! I began to understand the basis for the fellow’s
extraordinary complacency in confessing the details of his crime before
three witnesses. Mr. Smith did nothing to disturb it.
“When was it you stole the imitation necklace from Mrs. Corbin’s safe?”
he asked. “Wednesday night?”
Raglan shook his head. “I hadn’t a chance. I’d planned to, but the old
woman wouldn’t quiet down; kept ringing for her nurse, and quarreling
with her; wanted more dope than the nurse would give her, evidently. So
I had to wait. I got my chance the next day. Just the time the lad here
thought. I don’t know how he figured it out. The servants were all at
lunch, I knew, and the family out on the veranda waiting for the guests
to come. It was a close connection but I figured the safe wouldn’t
give me any trouble, and it didn’t. I didn’t waste any time about it
though.
“I got the necklace, dropped it in my pocket, shut the safe and came
out into the hall. Everything was all right and I had a clear out, down
the servants’ stairs. I had my case with me and anybody I might have
met would have thought I’d come back that morning to finish up.
“I stood there with my hand in my pocket, feeling of the necklace. I
hadn’t taken time to examine it. It hadn’t occurred to me to doubt that
it was all right. But it did now. The feel of it was just a shade off,
enough to make me suspicious.
“Just then I heard someone coming up the main stairs, so I went up
instead of down. Back to that damned box room. There I turned my torch
on the thing and saw at once that I’d been done. So I settled down to
think it out.
“The old lady had been done, too, some time or other. That was plain
enough. There was no doubt about her thinking this was the right
string. There wasn’t any doubt, either, when I thought it over, that
by taking the phony string I’d played straight into somebody’s hands.
Whoever had made the substitution had nothing more to worry about now.
I was the goat and I didn’t like it.
“Of course, if the real necklace had actually been stolen and disposed
of there was no help for it. But there was almost as good a chance that
it had been borrowed--pawned perhaps.
“That seemed more likely the more I thought about it. Whoever had
pawned it must have been sweating blood over what would happen when the
old woman gave the necklace to the girl. They’d have one good laugh
over the boob who’d stolen the imitation necklace, and think no more
about it.
“Well, then, why not put the phony string back in the old woman’s room?
It might not do anything more than take the laugh off me. But it might,
you see, do duty as a decoy for the real one. Besides, it would make
everybody think that some fool amateur had taken the thing, lost his
nerve and brought it back. Head off a lot of prying around.
“That night I started out in my pajamas, had a bath and shaved in the
nearest bathroom, went down-stairs and put the necklace back. I’d have
put it back in the safe, but the nurse was sleeping there that night,
so I didn’t chance it. I went back up-stairs feeling pretty good. And
then I got a devil of a jolt.”
Punch grinned. “When I came up-stairs after you,” he asked, “and turned
on the light in the billiard room?”
“My God!” murmured Raglan after a long stare at him.
“You see,” said Punch, “I saw the pajamas going across in the
moonlight. That’s how I knew about the tear in the leg. There are lots
of nails sticking out in the trunk closet. I might have thought of
that. But when you went up-stairs I couldn’t think why anybody should,
or rather, why anybody who slept up-stairs should have come down, so I
followed up to see. Well, I didn’t see anything or hear anything, so I
came back. I was sort of scared myself.”
The first look of bewilderment in Raglan’s face had deepened into one
of sour disgust. Mr. Smith set about restoring his complacency.
“Well, your plan worked,” he commented. “The imitation necklace served
to decoy the real one back just as you meant it to.
“If you remember,” he added, turning to me, “it was the curiously
imaginative quality of this stroke which gave the whole affair to my
mind the look--what you will perhaps allow me to call the style--we
were speaking of. I should have recognized his handiwork from that
alone.”
Raglan beamed again and took a dainty draught or two of his cigar.
“Oh, there was nothing to it really,” he said, with a falsely
deprecatory air that made me want to hit him. “It needed a bit of luck
to put it through, but I had it right enough, and I knew I had it too.
“I heard our young friend Applebury getting his instructions, the first
thing yesterday morning, to go to the bank and get the real necklace. I
knew it would be somewhere in this house before night.
“I didn’t know where it would be. It might turn out to be in any
one of four places. The girl might have it, or her mother, or her
grandmother--though I doubted if they’d trust it again to that Noah’s
Ark of a safe.
“But it struck me that the best chance of all was Applebury. He’d put
up his money for it, and he’d hang on to it if he could. So I decided
to try his room first.
“I made another of my mistakes then. I didn’t realize that there was
any one left alive in the world who’d be such a fool as to try to guard
a thing by sleeping with it under his pillow. I thought he’d either
hide it seriously, or else attach it somehow to his person; put it on
around his neck. That would have been the simplest thing.
“I chose the other alternative first, since it wouldn’t involve giving
him a tap on the head. I began a search of the room. I began with the
bureau, and found it wasn’t there. Then I heard some one coming, and
slid into the bay window, behind one of the curtains. There was an
amateur thief on the job it seemed, in pajamas just as I was.
“I watched him pretty close through a crack between the curtain and
the wall. It was possible, of course, that he’d get the thing. He was
a rank amateur all right. He hadn’t rummaged more than a second or two
over the bureau top before he hit something with his hand and moved it
with a rattle.
“Applebury waked up, and I never wanted to laugh more, when I couldn’t
afford to, than I did then. Because he slid his hand straight under his
pillow and showed me where the thing was. Then he said, ‘Who’s there?’
Another fool thing to do. It was his cousin, Grant, as I suppose you
know. Grant said he’d come in for cigarettes, took them, and went away.
“I stayed where I was of course, and waited for things to quiet down.
They didn’t for quite a while. Grant was ramming around in the next
room, trying to dress without making a light. I was afraid he’d waken
everybody on the floor. He didn’t, though, and at last I heard him go
down the stairs.
“But the house didn’t quiet down perfectly even then. Every little
while I’d hear a sound. Something was going on, and I couldn’t make
out what it was. Of course I stayed right where I was by the window. I
hadn’t stirred out of my tracks. I had stood there so long I felt as if