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She looked at me for a moment without saying anything, then took the pail and walked out across the yard, skirted the swimming pool, went over to the back of the lot where trucks had been driving in and dumping crushed rock, and started picking up fragments here and there.

By the time she came in I had my little workshop fixed up. I started pounding up bits of rock in the mortar, pounding with the pestle until I had them reduced to a fine powder.

“Can you tell me what the idea of this is?”

“I’m mining.”

“Do you,” she asked, “expect to find the crushed rock that is delivered by a gravel company filled with diamonds?”

“Not exactly,” I told her. “I think we’ll hit gold. I certainly hope we do. If we don’t, I’ve put myself out on a limb.”

There was a galvanized washtub over in a corner of the garage. I filled it with water, perched myself on the end of a box and went to work panning.

She leaned over my shoulder and watched me.

The surface material was quickly washed away and we got down to a deposit of black sand in the bottom of the gold pan.

That took pretty careful manipulation if I wasn’t going to lose the values, and, working on that small a scale, just the difference of a color or two of gold might make a lot of difference in the value of a mine.

Then, of course, there was the chance that even if values were there they wouldn’t be “free-milling.” However, I thought I could tell something of what we had just by looking at the way the stuff panned out.

Gold is a beautiful metal, but no jeweler has ever been able to make gold as beautiful as when it is first seen in a gold pan nestling in a bed of black sand.

I spun the water around in the gold pan, and as the black sand washed away there was a long, wedge-shaped streamer of gold at the upper end of the little delta.

I had been expecting gold but not that much. It seemed as though the rock must have been a third black sand and a third gold.

Behind me I could hear Irene’s startled exclamation.

“That’s one thing about washing out gold in a gold pan. If you have ten cents’ worth it looks like two million dollars’ worth.”

“Donald!” she exclaimed, then, after a moment, she half whispered, “Donald!”

I gave the gold pan a twist and dumped a whole bunch of gold down into the tub, washed out the pan and put it away.

“Donald, aren’t you going to save that gold?”

“It would just make trouble.”

I drained the water off the tailings in the tub, dumped the tailings back in the bucket, and said, “Throw those out in the yard, Irene.”

She took the bucket out and dumped it, came back and
stood looking at me, with a curiously thoughtful expression on her tired face.

I said, “Take your ten thousand dollars and buy stock in the Skyhook Mining and Development Syndicate.”

“But that’s my husband’s company.”

“Sure it is. That’s the last one. That’s where this rock came from.”

“How do you know, Donald? There are five or six companies.”

“It had to come from there,” I said, “because he was trying to get the bank to foreclose a loan.”

“But why would he want to do that?”

“So he could write an optimistic letter to the stockholders telling them that while the company was in temporary financial trouble due to the fact that the bank was insisting on payment of a note, the stockholders should not be discouraged, that there probably were good values in the mine and they should hang on to their stock.”

“Well?” she asked.

“The effect of that,” I said, “would be to cause a panic on the part of the stockholders. Every one of them would want his money back. Every one that had purchased stock would be ready to throw the stuff on the market for what he could get.”

“Can you tell me what this is all about?” she asked.

“Sure. People have certain habits of thought. If money is made by a mining company, people think it must come from a mine. If a check is received from a smelting company, the assumption is that it came from smelting ore out of rock.

“Your husband ran a smelting company. It paid him money in nice tinted checks. He owned mining companies that turned ore over to the smelting company.

“It never occurred to anyone that the ore was merely crushed rock and that the smelting company owned a
profitable gambling house.”

She studied me. “Then I should buy stock in the smelting company?”

“In the mining company, Irene. The smelting company’s assets are being taken over by muscle men. Gambling houses don’t go through probate.”

“But how would I go about getting the stock; that is, knowing where to buy it?”

I said, “I have an idea your husband had already done some work along those lines. Let’s go take a look.”

We didn’t have to look far. In George Bishop’s desk was the rough draft of a letter to stockholders telling them not to lose faith in the company but that if they’d hang on through the period of financial adversity which was just ahead, they’d come out on top of the heap. The bank was bringing suit on a promissory note which had been signed to raise capital, but the mine was looking better and better and people who hung on could be almost certain of making a substantial profit, perhaps a hundred and fifty percent of their original investment, perhaps more.

It was a cleverly worded letter.

We found the list of addresses to which the letter was to be sent, together with the number of shares of stock owned by each individual.

“Want to take a chance?” I asked. “There seems to have been about thirty thousand dollars’ worth of stock sold. It probably can be bought in for around fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. But you’ll find that your husband kept controlling interest in the company. If you’re going to inherit his property you won’t have to buy anything. If not, you’d better invest this separate property of yours.”

“I think I’m going to inherit,” she said.

I prowled around the desk.

There were half a dozen or so heavy green cards, finely engraved with an elaborate pattern of curved lines.

They were passes to The Green Door, made out in blank, bearing the signature of Hartley L. Channing.

She looked at them in silence.

I slipped the whole bunch in my pocket. “These might come in handy,” I told her.

She said nothing.

“
Do
you have an alibi for Tuesday night?” I asked her abruptly.

“Nothing — Nothing I care to use.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

She hesitated.

“Do you?”

“Not in the way you mean. I made up my mind I’d play fair with George when I married him.”

“Wasn’t it rather lonely, what with him being away so much of the time?”

She looked me in the eyes. “Donald,” she said, “I’m a strip-teaser; I’m an exhibitionist. Once that gets in your blood it’s hard to get it out.

“I had the most supreme contempt for the
individuals
in the audiences, but the group of contemptible individuals became an entity, an audience. I loved to hear the roars of applause come up out of the darkened theater and crash against the backdrop in a wave of sound.

“I knew what they were applauding. It wasn’t my acting, it was my body. They were trying to get me to take more off than the law allowed. They’d stamp and pound and applaud and go nuts.”

“Didn’t they know you couldn’t take any more off than you had without going to jail?”

“That’s just the point, Donald. They knew it but my acting was good enough so I could make them forget it. A good strip-teaser can appear to be almost undecided, as though she’s just about ready to take a chance this once just to please this one particular audience. She stands
there as though debating the thing within her own mind, and, of course, that spurs the audience on to the wildest applause — I tell you it’s an art, standing there looking like that.”

“And you miss it?”

“Donald, I miss it terribly.”

“What does all that have to do with where you were Tuesday night?”

“A lot.”

“Go on,” I said.

She said, “I knew George was leaving. I have some friends in burlesque here, some of the old gang — Well, after George left I went up to the theater, put on a mask, and did a strip tease as the ‘Masked Mystery.’ I loved it — so did the management. The audience went wild. I have a perfect alibi if I dare to use it — several hundred witnesses.”

“You were masked. They couldn’t see your face.”

“
They
couldn’t, but a dozen performers knew that I was the ‘Masked Mystery’ and the audience knew I was there — two shows.”

“Ever done that before?”

“You mean since I married George?”

“Yes.”

“No. This was the first time.”

I said, “It’s not so good, Irene. It looks too much as if you had been manufacturing an alibi while a boyfriend did the dirty work. As an alibi it’s just too darn good.”

“I know,” she admitted. “I’d thought of that. I wondered if you would.”

“The police will,” I told her. “That’s the main point.

What have you told the police?”

“I’ve told them I was home and in bed.”

I said, “You’ve been up all night?”

“Yes.”

“And haven’t had much sleep for the last few days?”

“No.”

I said, “Get hold of your physician. Tell him you’re nervous and jumpy. Tell him you want to go to sleep and stay asleep for about twenty-four hours. If they ask you questions and you don’t have the right answers, you’ll be arrested.”

“I know.”

I said, “All right. You can’t talk while you’re asleep, and if when you wake up you overlook something, you can always claim it was the aftereffect of the drug that gave you hallucinations. And with your figure there isn’t a juror in the world who won’t give you all the breaks.

“But if you haven’t been drugged, you won’t sleep, and then the wrong answers will be easier to make and harder to explain.

“So give me that list of stockholders and as much money as you want to put into stock in that company, and I’ll see if I can’t add to your personal fortunes.”

“And what will you get out of it for yourself?”

I looked her straight in the eyes. “Fifty percent of the net profit.”

“Now,” she said with a sigh, “I can trust you.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t know what you wanted before,” she said, “and I get terribly distrustful of men until I know what they want.”

The San Francisco papers put out extras when John Carver Billings and his son were arrested.

One of the papers even went so far as to spread red ink above the banner:
Banker Arrested for Bishop Murder.

The evidence that police had unearthed was circumstantial and deadly.

Police felt certain that Bishop had not been killed on the yacht where his body had been discovered.

A fingerprint expert had found prints on one of the brass fixtures. The prints were those of bloody fingers and they were the prints of three of John Carver Billings’s fingers on his right hand.

The padlock on the boat had been smashed and a new padlock had been placed on the boat. Police made a routine search of every hardware store in the neighborhood and found a storekeeper who remembered selling the padlock on Wednesday afternoon. Police showed him a photograph of John Carver Billings and the storekeeper made what the police described as an “instantaneous and positive identification.”

Police divers recovered a .38 revolver at the bottom of the bay, directly beneath the banker’s yacht. The numbers on the revolver showed that it had been sold to John Carver Billings for “protection” under a police permit. Ballistics experts proved that the bullet which was found in the body of George Tustin Bishop had been fired from this gun.

One bullet had gone entirely through the body and that bullet had been found by police embedded in a hole in a corner of the main cabin of the Billings yacht, the
Billingboy
. Police took up the carpet in the main cabin and found traces of bloodstains on the floor, despite the fact that every effort had been made to remove the bloodstains. Chemicals, however, used by the police disclosed definite bloodstains on the floor of that cabin.

The carpet which had been laid in the main cabin was new carpet, and that carpet had been bought by John Carver Billings on Thursday morning. Finally, making a search of the garage of the rich banker, police uncovered
the original carpet which had been on the floor in the main cabin. It was bloodstained and there were hairs on the carpet. Microscopic examination showed that those hairs were identical in color, diameter, texture, and appearance with hairs from the head of George Tustin Bishop. A police expert swore positively they were Bishop’s hairs.

Police as yet had been unable to find a motive for the murder, but it was known there had been a sharp difference of opinion between Bishop and the banker over financial affairs in connection with the operation of a mining company which had borrowed money at Billings’s bank.

When questioned, both Billings and his son had offered alibis and the police had broken down both alibis. That of the junior Billings had been laboriously built up at considerable expense. The older Billings had stated he had been in conference with one of the bank’s directors, a Waldo W. Jefferson, on Tuesday night, when the murder had apparently taken place. However, Jefferson, under police grilling, finally broke down and admitted that John Carver Billings had asked him as a personal favor to swear that they had been in conference Tuesday evening in order to provide him with an alibi in case it should be needed.

Billings had explained to Jefferson that there were certain private reasons why he had to have an alibi for Tuesday night, and Jefferson had such implicit confidence in the integrity of the bank president that he thought only some marital private affair was involved. He had therefore agreed to furnish the alibi. Murder had been a different proposition, and he had speedily weakened when confronted by police with the evidence they had gathered.

I went down to the yacht club.

There must have been fully three hundred morbid spectators milling around, peering through the meshed
screen fences, walking aimlessly around on the outside, looking at the yachts from different angles.