Rich Crooks/Chapter 10

WANTED to meet Steve Ellis. It had been made plain that he wanted to meet me, so nothing would have been more simple than the making of an appointment, if I had had known where he was or how to reach him. I doubted whether Ellis paid attention to the personals in the newspapers. He probably did not search them out as many city men do over the breakfast coffee, young brokers and clerks hoping to find themselves somehow identified as the man the “lady in blue with the Merry Widow hat wishes to meet again,” or some such romantic nonsense. Besides it would have been impossible to say much in such a personal without letting all the reporters in the city in on the appointment.

However, I thought I could use the reporters. I permitted them to think I was trying to retire, to evade them, to escape publicity, to hide, when I moved over to the Jersey side and took a modest little cottage such as I hoped would encourage midnight prowlers to come and call on me. The reporters, thinking of course that they had something that I did not want known, managed to get my new address into their follow-up stories on the Cornwall case. The important thing was that Jack—this time acting under instructions—intimated to them that the little black steel box went with me.

It had come to the point where it seemed that I would have to offer myself as bait to catch the sort of fish I was after. I had taken the small furnished cottage with an idea toward encouraging the sort of people who probably thought I did not want to see them, to pay me unexpected calls. I made a few minor alterations in the arrangement of the furniture and hangings and waited.

The first to come arrived boldly in the daylight. Yang Li, standing behind curtains near the door, took a long look at the fellow and shook his head. Yang was telling me that this was not the man who had cracked him over the head when he had opened the door two days before.

The man knocked and I called to him to come in. He hesitated but came. He was a person of no importance, probably a cross between a lawyer and a private detective, and had been sent by Joseph Cornwall to buy the little black box. He acted as if he were being vastly generous in offering ten thousand dollars for the box.

I said I would not consider less than thirty thousand dollars. He protested. I told him the price was now forty thousand dollars. He gasped. I assured him that the value of the box had gone up to fifty thousand. He almost shouted that I must be crazy. For the insult I added another ten thousand dollars. I always did think that I had the making of a financier in me. He offered forty thousand dollars but my price had jumped to seventy thousand dollars, and I was courteous enough to assure him—that every attempt to bicker or beat down my price would make it rise again. He lost his temper, so I came out flatly for one hundred thousand dollars.

“Go back to Cornwall,” I said, “and ask him how much he thinks I could get for the box by offering it at auction in Salt Lake!”

Of course the fellow did not know the story and value of the box but he was a little shaken. He thought his gift of legal rhetoric could influence me. He snapped “blackmailer” and the price mounted ten per cent. He began to get rattled and asked—

“You will take one hundred thousand then?”

“No,” I told him, “it is one hundred and twenty thousand dollars now, and if you open your mouth to object again it will be one and thirty thousand dollars, so the best thing you can do is to get out!”

“But if my client wants to pay it?” he almost wailed. Evidently he had been instructed to get the box if money could buy it.

“Then tell him to come in person—in person, mind you—next Thursday at 2:35 promptly, with a cashier's check for one hundred and thirty thousand dollars made out to Mr. J. C. Collins, to the Suite C of the Treborne Hotel. He is to notify me by tomorrow whether or not he will accept, or else I may offer my box for sale in Salt Lake.”

Mr.—or rather Dr.—J. C. Collins was a friend of mine, and a devoted enthusiast who gave all of his time and most of his money to the Star of Hope hospital, an institution for crippled children. And bless his soul, he had no scruples about tainted money. He believed that when it went into bandages and braces for children even the smell of coal oil would be cleansed from it.

I had already engaged the suite as a fitting place to let the governor of Utah interview me. Maybe he had already taken by telegraph the precaution of engaging a room, maybe not. He was no doubt a little excited. Anyway, it would make no difference.