"In the cash drawer, on the right, you will find more," quietly remarked the young woman watching me from the side of the safe.
"It's locked," I said, as I tugged at the drawer knob. I stood erect at her sudden laugh.
"Why not take everything?" she asked, with her scoffing smile.
And I saw no reason why I shouldn't; though a suspicion crossed my mind that this might be still another ruse to kill time. If such it was, I faced it at once, for I sent my boot heel promptly in against the wooden cash drawer, smashing it at one blow.
She had been mistaken, or had deliberately lied, for the drawer was empty. And I told her so, with considerable heat.
"Ah, we all make mistakes, I think," she murmured with her enigmatic shrug.
"What I want to know," I said as I banded the four papers together and thrust them down in my pocket, "is just how you got that first code from my young friend the lieutenant?"
She smiled again, a little wearily, as I swung the safe door shut and locked it. She did not rise from the chair. But as I stood confronting her, something in my attitude, apparently, struck her as distinctly humorous. For she broke into a sudden and deeper ripple of laughter. There was, however, something icy and chilling in it. Her eyes now seemed more veiled. They had lost their earlier look of terror. Her face seemed to have relaxed into softer contours.
"Would you like to know?" she said, lifting her face and looking with that older, half-mocking glance into my own. She was speaking slowly and deliberately, and I could see the slight shrug she gave to one panther-like shoulder. "Would I be so out of place in a ballroom? Ah, have not more things than hearts been lost when a man dances with a woman?"
"I see—you mean you stole it, at the Plaza?"