“Maybe they’re all that way.”
“Maybe.” Then he admitted, “I never saw one before, so I can’t tell.”
She said: “Then one thing we can be sure of, there was no one staying in the house but him right now, or they would have heard it go off.”
He was scanning the room. “They took it away with them; there’s no sign of one lying around.”
“What’d you say their name was again — the people that live in this house?”
“Graves.”
“Is this the head of the family, the father?”
“There is no father; he’s dead about ten or fifteen years. There’s the mother, she’s a well-known society woman, I think. Then there’s two sons, and a daughter. This is the older son. There’s another one, still a student, away at college somewhere. The daughter’s one of these, what they call, debutantes; you know, they write her up in the papers a lot.”
“If we could figure out why, if we could get at the motive—”
“In a couple of hours. When it takes the police weeks sometimes. And they know all about these things.”
“Let’s start with the easy ones first. He didn’t do it himself, because then the gun would still have to be lying around the room somewhere, and it isn’t.”
“I guess that’s safe enough,” he said hesitantly. But he didn’t sound any too sure.
“Robbery or burglary is about the commonest reason. Was anything taken out of the safe, that had been in it the first time, when you went back to it just now, the second time?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I came in without using any lights, you know. I stumbled over him and went down on my hands and knees.”
She sucked in her breath sympathetically.
“It was like a third rail poking into your heart. So, after I’d lit a match and seen what it was, I just staggered over to the safe — I mean around behind it — tossed the money back into it, and got out fast without stopping to look.”
She struck her uptilted kneecap, poised a foot above the floor. “Then let’s look now. Do you think you’ll be able to remember, if there’s anything gone that was there the first time?”
“No,” he said frankly. “I was pretty steamed up even the first time, don’t forget. But I’ll try, and see if I can.”
They left their crouched positions and turned their backs on the body for the present. They went into the bathroom, Quinn in the lead because he knew where the light-switch was.
It exploded into a dazzling flash of white tiling at his touch. The mirrored surface of a wall cabinet at the other end gave them a disconcerting impression of other people stepping in from there at the same time that they were stepping in from here. Who were those frightened kids, looking so young, so hopeless, so helpless?
She didn’t waste time on that, though.
The most conspicuous thing was the square opening he had hacked into the plaster, to their right as they stepped in and just behind where the safe was in the outside room. It seemed incredible that walls, inner walls in a house, had once been made so thick.
He’d had the shower-curtain arranged the first time to conceal it; artificially draped and panoplied so that it fell over that way. He’d told her all about that. But in returning just now in his fright and haste, he’d cast it aside once more and then left it that way. It was pushed back, “dented” in, you might say, and within this sagging loop was where the wall-fracture lay exposed.
He’d done a neat job, but she took no pride in that, and she knew he didn’t either. She could tell by his face. It was almost as though he’d used a ruler to outline it, it was so straight. No more than a thin pencil-line of the white plaster-fill was exposed around the gums of the aperture. The tinted surface of the wall was scarcely cracked around this, it was so little disturbed. A flake or two threatened to peel off, that was all. He must have scuffed the fill he’d taken out, away from sight under the tub with the edge of his foot. She didn’t ask him, but there was none in sight on the floor, and the tub was one of these old-fashioned kind, raised above floor-level and supported by claw-feet, she saw.
At the back of the opening, plaster-whitened wood peered faintly. He reached in and caught at it around the edges with his fingers, in some way that he already knew of from having done it before, and presently he’d brought it out and set it down. It was the rear section of the lining, of the wooden casing or chamber within which the safe bedded.
Then slowly after this he drew out the steel cash-box rearwards, until he held it slanted across both his arms. That was all the safe consisted of: an ordinary steel cash-box, without even a lock to it, inserted into a wood-lined cavity built into the wall. It was true that on the opposite side, fronting the other room, it had a steel lid or plaque to cover the entire thing, that worked on a combination. But from the rear it had been like cutting through butter to get at it.
“Not much, is it?” she remarked.
“I suppose it was built years ago, when crime wasn’t as expert as it is now. When they didn’t expect it to come right into their homes with them—”
