Money in the Bank (16 page)

"But where is it?"

"On the ground floor, back of the joint, looking out on where the tradesmen's carts drive up and all like that. He can't miss it. There's a water barrel outside the window, tell him, and just to one side a tombstone with 'To Ponto, Ever A Faithful Friend' on it. Where they buried a dog, I guess," said Dolly, thinking it improbable that the remains of members of the family would be distributed about the grounds in this casual fashion.

Mr. Molloy was surprised at this omniscience.

"How do you know all that?"

"I was up early a coupla days ago, you remember the morning, and I strolled around there, and I seen the old bird at the window, doing his daily dozen. He was in his pants, and nothing else except suspenders," said Dolly, involuntarily dropping her voice to a whisper, for the spectacle of Lord Uffenham stripped to the waist, with a pair of mauve braces draped over his massive shoulders, had made a deep impression on her. "He looked like King Kong. Well, that's the set-up. You tell Chimp the old bozo has gotten the ice somewheres in his room, you put him wise where the room is and when it's sure to be empty, and you tell him he's got to handle the searching of it because you haven't the nerve. All straight?"

Mr. Molloy hesitated. He was reluctant to reply in the negative, for he felt that in some way not at the moment obvious to him it would place him in the unpleasant position of looking like a Dumb Isaac. He had had this experience before, on occasions when he had questioned the soundness of his wife's inspirations.

On the other hand, he could not see where the thing made sense.

"Well, I'll tell you, sugar," he said. "It's straight enough, far as that goes. But it seems to me as if nothing's going to happen. He sneaks in, hunts around, doesn't find the ice, because it's not there, and comes away. Where's the percentage? Aside from just making a monkey out of Chimp, of course. It don't seem to get us anywheres. I thought you were going to come across with something that would keep him from visiting at the house."

"So I have."

"I don't see it."

It occurred to Dolly to reply that he wouldn't see the Woolworth Building if he was standing across the street with a telescope, but she refrained, partly because she loved her mate and shrank from paining him, and partly because this was no time for cracks.

"Well, look," she said. "What happens when Lord Cakebread comes in and catches him?"

"But he won't. You said he'd be busy around the joint.

“I didn't say any such thing. I said that was what you was to tell Chimp. The moment you phone me that he's bit, I go to Lord Cakebread and warn him to watch out, because I happen to know there's a low-life coming to hunt around in his room this evening. So then what? He lies in wait, and catches Chimp. Maybe he beats him up. Maybe he just chases him out. But, anyway, whichever he does, Chimp'll have a swell chance of horning in next morning, saying he's a millionaire that's interested in these here new Ugubus and wants to join the gang. If he tries it, out steps Lord Cakebread and says to Mrs. Cork 'The hell he's a millionaire! He's just a porch climber,' and Mrs. Cork reaches for her gun and tells Chimp he's got two minutes to beat it away from here before he gets an ounce of lead in his pants and has the dogs set on him. Now, do you get it?"

Mr. Molloy did not actually lay his head in the dust, but he felt a strong inclination to do so. Never again, he was telling himself, would he lack faith in this woman's schemes, even if their true worth was not immediately apparent to his slower masculine intelligence. His fine, candid eyes lit up.

"Honey', it's a pip!"

"I'll say it is."

"It can't miss."

"I'll say it can't."

"You won't be able to see Chimp for dust."

"I'll say you won't."

"Then I'd best be getting along to the inn and contacting him."

"Yay. And make it snappy. Call me from the post office, if everything's jake, and then I can go ahead. We don't want to lose no time."

Mr. Molloy set off at a capital pace, enthusiasm lending wings to a pair of legs not normally planned for swift pedestrianism. And so excellent were his speed and staying power that it was scarcely half an hour later that Dolly, having been informed over the telephone by her second in command that Mr. Twist had swallowed the whole setup, hook, line and sinker, and might be expected at the tryst any minute now, made her way to Lord Uffenham's pantry.

The glazed look in the latter's eyes—he had been giving his brain a rest at the moment of her entry—disappeared as he saw one whom, from her evident taste for his society, he had come to look upon as an old friend. He lumbered to his feet like a bison leaving a waterhole, and was about to offer her a courtly glass of port, when he saw that her fists were clenched and her eyes glittering. Plainly, something had occurred to disturb the dear little woman, and his generous heart ached for her. Dolly always aroused the protective instinct in him. She seemed so weak, so fragile, so unfitted to cope with the problems of life.

"Is something the matter, Madam?" he asked, solicitously, in his most artistic Cakebread manner.

Dolly gulped.

"You betcher. Am I mortified! I'm as mad as a wet hen."

Such a statement, made to Lord Uffenham in other circumstances, would have plunged him into abstruse speculation as to how mad hens were, when wet—how you detected this dementia—and where such birds might be held to rank in eccentricity of outlook as compared, say, with hatters or the members of Mrs. Cork's Ugubu colony. But now his only thought was for her distress.

"What's the trouble?" he asked, adding a rather un-Cakebreadian "Hey?" It was not his practice, as we have seen, to step out of his role, but he was much moved.

"Listen while I tell you," said Dolly, much moved herself. "I've just heard they're sending a private dick this evening to search your room."

"A private what?"

"Dick."

"You mean a rozzer? A detective?"

"That's right. He's coming to search your room, on account they think you've got stolen property hid away there. That's what's made me so mad, feeling they're casting this what you might call slur on your honesty."

As Lord Uffenham had been informed by Anne that it was Mrs. Molloy who had been the first to cast this slur, and that it was she who was primarily responsible for the establishment of a detective on the premises of Shipley Hall, he might have replied with something calculated to reproach and wound. But he had long since forgiven his little friend for an action of which he was convinced that she would never have been guilty, had she had the privilege then of knowing him as well as she did now.

"You mean young Adair, as he calls himself?"

Dolly felt it advisable to start confusedly. She remembered that she was not supposed to know that her companion knew anything about the inwardness of young Adair.

"You know about that guy?"

Lord Uffenham chuckled fatly.

"Yes, I know all about him."

"Well, aren't you smart!"

"People have said so," said Lord Uffenham, though not naming them. " Lord-love-a-duck, I don't mind young Adair searching my room."

"Ah, but this isn't him," said Dolly. "This is another one. I've just been talking with that old bird, Trumper. It seems he isn't satisfied with Adair. Thinks him too young and frivolous. So, without saying a word to Mrs. Cork, he's gone and hired a dick on his own account, and he's coming to search your room."

Lord Uffenham's complacency had vanished.

"Is he, the rat? When?"

"I'm telling you. This evening. Any minute now. He chose this time on account he thought you'd be busy around the joint. What you'd ought to do, seems to me-is hide and pop out and paste him one."

"I will, the slinking slug."

"Is there somewheres in your room where you can hide?"

"Behind the screen."

"At-a-baby!" cried Dolly, clapping her little hands with girlish enthusiasm. "Park yourself there, and don't shoot till you see the whites of his eyes."

It was some minutes later that Lord Uffenham, passing through the hall on his way back from the dining-room, whither he had been to see that everything was in order, so that he might go off duty for a while, encountered Mr. Trumper, on his way to practise billiards in the billiard-room. He fixed him with a stare so cold and penetrating that the little man sagged beneath it like a bird
vis-a-vis
with a serpent. This butler always gave Eustace Trumper a scared, guilty feeling, as if he had been caught wearing a made-up tie or had used, his fish fork for dealing with a
soufflé.

CHAPTER XV

The hour of seven-fifteen found Chimp Twist at the main gates of Shipley Hall, humming a gay air beneath his breath and feeling that God was in His heaven and all right with the world. He surveyed the rolling parkland, and admired it enormously. He listened to the carolling of the birds, and thought how sweet their music was. Even an insect, which got entangled in his moustache, struck him as probably quite a decent insect, if one had only got to know it. His mood, in short, was one of saccharine benevolence. He was in the frame of mind when he would have patted a small boy on the head and given him sixpence, though it is probable that a moment later he would have tossed him for it and won it back again.

The letter which Jeff had sent round by district messenger boy that morning had brought to this monkey-faced little chevalier of industry a sensation of relief and
bien etre
which he could scarcely have obtained from a brimming beaker of the most widely advertised nerve tonic on the market. Ever since the Board Meeting which had ended in his being compelled to entrust the executive end of their venture to the Molloys, Chimp Twist had been tortured by the problem of how to prevent these old friends double-crossing him, as he had no doubt they would do, should the opportunity arise, with that blithe alacrity which he had so often noted in them.

If, he had felt with a sinking heart, they succeeded in locating that ice, they would do it while he was far away, unable to keep an eye on them. And if ever a couple lived and breathed on whom it was advisable for a shareholder to keep an eye, and that a skinned one, it was the Molloys, Mr. and Mrs. He trusted neither of them as far as he could spit, and he was a poor spitter, lacking both distance and control.

But now this letter had come, removing all obstacles in the way of a visit to Shipley Hall. And on top of that there had been his recent interview with Soapy.

The whole thing, he felt as he floated through the sunlit grounds, was going to be almost too easy to be interesting. And when he stood outside the window of Lord Uffenham's bedroom, and noted that it was open and presented no difficulties of access to even the least nimble of intruders, his confidence reached its peak.

Until this moment, burglary was a form of gainful occupation of which Chimp Twist had had no experience. He had always made his money by brain work. But now the circumstances had turned him temporarily into a manual labourer, there was no diffidence in his soul, no hesitation in his bearing. If, as he stood at journey's end, his heart beat a little faster, that was all.

Inside the room, his first act was to go to the door, open it and listen intently. Somewhere in the distance, a female voice was singing a hymn with a good deal of stomp in it, which would have indicated to the practised ear that Mrs. Cork's cook had started to boil the spinach, but no other sound broke the silence. He left the door open, so that he might be warned, should feet come along the passage, and was pleased to see that the passage was a stone-flagged one. If such feet did approach, it would be to the accompaniment of a booming noise like the rolling of drums, and he would be enabled to withdraw well in advance of their arrival.

The room in which he stood, it seemed to him as his eye roamed about it, was a good deal more luxuriously furnished than one would have expected of a butler's bedroom. The explanation of this was that Lord Uffenham, in accepting employment at his old home, had made it clear to his niece that if he had to become a dashed Hey-You and cleaner of silver, he was blowed if he intended to live in absolute squalor; and he had collected from other parts of the establishment various pictures and ornaments, not to mention an easy chair, a carpet of the softest pile and even a chaise-longue, on which he could recline of an afternoon with his boots off. Thanks to this resolute scrounging, the place had become virtually a boudoir.

Nevertheless, there existed in Chimp's mind no doubt that he had come to the right spot. Immediately beneath the window was the water barrel of which Soapy had spoken, and beside it that touching memorial to the unidentified Ponto, stressing deceased's fidelity and friendliness. All that remained for him to do, therefore, was to ransack the apartment and hope for the best.

He set to work swiftly and silently, like a New York Customs official dealing with the effects of a star of the musical comedy stage who has left her native America for a trip to Paris and, returning, has announced that she has nothing to declare. He looked in drawers, he searched cupboards, he hunted behind chairs and pictures. He even prodded the chaise-longue, to make sure that its stuffing was bona fide stuffing.

Activities like these, especially when the weather is sultry, take their toll of a man, and presently he was obliged to pause and mop his brow. And it was while he was so engaged that his glance happened to fall on a handsome lacquer screen which stood in the far corner. In the gap between its base and the carpet there was visible a colossal pair of boots.

They caught Chimp's eye, and astonished him by their dimensions, but they conveyed no sinister message to him. Just boots, he felt—his host's spare ones, presumably. It was only a moment later that, looking more closely, he noticed above them the southern end of a pair of trousers. And it was suddenly brought home to him, with a sickening shock which reduced his spinal column to the consistency of the spinach which was now boiling briskly on the kitchen stove, that inside these trousers were human limbs. It was, in short, no mere supplementary brace of beetle-crushers that stood there, but a pair in active use, with their proprietor in occupation.