Beginning with a Bash. Phoebe Atwood Taylor
did. Jones was in the store—”
“Yeah. North said he swiped the forty grand, too. The cops is dopes. He didn’t.”
“How’d you know?” Dot demanded.
“Just a moment,” Leonidas said softly. “I begin to see a—suppose we all sit down and relax and get this affair settled. I have an idea. My name, by the way, is Witherall. Leonidas Witherall. This is Miss Peters.”
“He’s Freddy Solano,” Gerty informed them.
Leonidas’s eyebrows rose. “Solano? Ah, yes. Yes, indeed. I have heard of you.” In his way, Mr. Solano was as notorious a person as Gerty’s brother Bat.
“Who from?” Freddy demanded. “Who from, huh?”
“From a Mr. Spud Bugatti. M’yes. I’d almost forgotten all about that slight assistance I rendered Mr. Bugatti last spring—”
“Say, are you the guy that hid Spud when O’Connell was after him?”
“M’yes, I was temporarily out of work at the time, and sitting on a bench on the Common, envying the gentlemen on the bulb planting project—at least, I think it was a bulb planting project. I watched them a week, but I never did find out anything definite about the real purpose of their hoe-leaning. Some of the finest hoe-and-rake-leaners I ever saw. At all events, while I enjoyed the city’s hospitality on that bench, Spud appeared, and—”
“Yeah, I know. He was all in, an’ you helped him to some friend’s rooms an’ got him to keep him there. Say, didn’t Spud tell you to buzz around and we’d fix things up for you, huh?”
“I fully intended to,” Leonidas said, “but I found a job. Not as elementary as the bulb project, but more permanent. Believe me that I intended to call on him if the job had not turned up.”
Freddy reached out a pudgy hand. “Any pal of Spud’s,” he said, “is a pal of mine. Now, what about North?”
Leonidas painstakingly told his story all over again, this time giving full details about Volume Four and the paper label.
Freddy nodded thoughtfully. “So they grabbed Jones. He was the tall guy that was with you when I was in the store, huh?”
“Exactly. Now, Mr. Solano—”
“Say, wait a minute. Ain’t I seen you somewheres before? You look like someone I must of met somewheres. I thought so this afternoon, too. Say, where I seen you, huh?”
“I feel that way too,” Gerty said. “Where we seen him, Freddy?”
Leonidas sighed.
“He looks like Shakespeare,” Dot explained. “You know. The man who wrote all those plays. You’ve probably seen pictures of him in school books.”
Solano brightened. “Sure. That’s it. You look like him a lot. Ain’t that funny, Gert?”
Gert agreed that it was a scream, and it took them several minutes to get over how funny it all was. Finally Leonidas called them to order.
“Mr. Solano—”
“Freddy to you, pal! You’re a pal, Bill. Ha, ha. Bill Shakespeare!”
“Freddy, who took that forty thousand?”
“The forty grand? I don’t know.”
“I’ve told you all I know,” Leonidas said quietly.
“Aw, Freddy,” Gerty said, “it won’t hurt to tell what we know, will it? All that Bill here, and Jones’s girlfriend—” in spite of herself, Dot felt her ears burn—“all they want is to get him off. Ain’t that right?”
“Exactly,” Leonidas said. “Now, Freddy, before Monday morning, I’m going to find out who really killed North.”
“You, an’ who else?”
“I, and no one else. Whoever killed North took that volume, Freddy. I’m sure of it. Now, you want the book. If I find the person who killed North, I find the book. If you get what I’m driving at.”
“I get it, Bill. Tell ’em the story, Gert.”
“Okay, only I got to get more clothes on, first. I’m freezing.”
In a very few minutes she reappeared, so completely and entirely dressed that Dot felt thrown together by comparison.
“Here’s the story.” She accepted a cigarette from Freddy. “First of all, when North got Jones pinched, I thought it was all on the level. Then after they let Jones off, I begun to wonder who did get them bonds, anyways. Well, just about then, before Christmas, North went to Florida. Before he went, he stuck a lot of books on the floor in his study and told me to get rid of ’em. Send ’em to some charity or other. He was getting a lot of new books himself, and he needed the room them old ones took up. Well, with him away and his sister away, I didn’t hang around the house here so much, and Bat, he was in N’York.”
Freddy grinned broadly, and she shook her head at him.
“So,” she continued, “I got a girl to stay here that I know. She sold the books, of course. No sense giving ’em away. Well, I come back here the day before North did. When he got back he went right upstairs and when he come down—wheee! Was that guy burning up! Wanted to know where in hell was those four volumes of sermons.”
“Twitchett’s?”
“Yeah. I didn’t know. I’d told the girl to sell the books to a junk man. For all I knew she’d taken those four other books off the shelves and sold ’em by mistake, along with the rest. But I couldn’t let on that I hadn’t been here, so I says for him to calm down and that he must of been absent-minded and put those four in the pile he wanted sold. He said he never wanted the books sold anyway, but given away.”
“What’d you do then?” Dot asked.
“I told him it was the hell of a pity he couldn’t remember from one day to another the orders he give around the house. That shut him up. You see, he’d lost his trunk, and he’d messed up a lot of things, and I had him comin’ and goin’. I said he was too absent-minded to be let out without a nurse. He couldn’t say anything. He was awful absent-minded, and he done so many crazy things that he just never fussed much if you told him anything was his fault on account of him being that way, and all, see?”
Leonidas nodded.
“So,” Gerty said, “then he says where did I sell them books because he wants ’em back, real bad and quicker than lightning. Well, what could I say? I told him none of the bookstore people would come this far to get ’em, and that went all right. Then I just said, I sold ’em to a junk man going by. I had a five dollar bill to prove it, too, out of my own pocketbook. You see, I told the girl to keep what she got. Well, I told him I didn’t know what junk man it was—”
“But couldn’t this girl have—”
“I’m getting to that, Bill. Of course, right away I went off and called her up. But she’d left where she’d been after she left here, and the landlady didn’t know what’d happened to her. I finally found out she’d gone back to Ireland. Or somewhere. Anyway, she’d gone on a boat. She had a boyfriend on a boat. Well, North was fit to be tied. I asked him why he wanted the books so bad, and he said all he really wanted was Volume Four. I asked was it worth a lot, or what, and he said no, but that he wouldn’t have parted with that book for forty thousand dollars. And—”
“And right away she told me that,” Freddy picked up the tale, “right away I clicked, see? Forty grand, see?”
“You mean,” Leonidas said, “it occurred to you that Volume Four had something to do with the forty thousand stolen from the museum—”
“Yeah. Gert and me, we doped it out like this, see. North takes that forty grand himself. He’s always after people to give him jack to dig