It was galling to have to stand here in inaction at a time when we felt that we might be learning much if we had only so much as a hint where else to look.
“The easiest way of finding out is to watch,” concluded Kennedy. “We can’t just stand about in the hall. That in itself will look suspicious. You wait here a few minutes while I see if I can find the agent of the building.”
Around a bend in the hall I waited, trying to seem interested more in some other office down the hall. No one appeared, however, looking for any of the offices, and it was only a few minutes before Kennedy returned.
“I found him,” he announced. “Of course he could tell me next to nothing. It was as I had supposed, just some one who was an emissary of our criminal. I doubt if it would do us much good to catch the person now, anyway. Still, it’s worth while taking a chance on. A girl who said she was a typewriter and stenographer hired the place, and paid for it in cash in advance. I managed to persuade the agent to let me have the key to this vacant office opposite. We can watch better from that.”
We let ourselves into the opposite office, which was bare, and I could see that I was in for a tiresome wait.
No one had arrived yet in Hastings’s office and Kennedy was eager to receive some word from Riley as well as watch the eavesdropping plant. Accordingly, he left me to watch while he returned to the lawyer’s office.
Every footfall in the hall raised my hopes, only to dash them again as the new-comer entered some other office than the one I was watching.
XVII
THE CIPHER LETTER
Irksome though it was to be compelled to do fruitless watching in a vacant office, there was nothing to do but stick at it. What Paquita might be up to was a mystery, but I knew that until we heard from Riley we could have only the most slender chance to locate her in the big city.