Pennington Wise was impressed with their rich and harmonious effects, and his quick eyes darted here and there, taking in details. With marvelous swiftness he went through the three rooms of the suite nodding his head as he noted the special points of which he had been told. In the third room,—the Blue Room,—he glanced about, raised the map from the wall, and dropped it back in place, opened the door to the hall, and closed it again, and then turned back to the middle room, the office of Amos Gately, and apparently, to the detective’s mind, the principal place of interest.
He sat down in the fine big swivel-chair, whose velvet cushioning deprived it of all look of an ordinary desk-chair, and mused deeply as his eyes fairly devoured the desk fittings. Nothing had been disturbed, that I noticed, except that the telephone had been set up in its right position, and also the chair which I had found overturned was righted.
Wise fingered only a few things. He picked up the penholder, a thick magnificent affair made of gold.
“Probably a gift from his clerks,” said I, smiling at the ornate and ostentatious looking thing. “All the other gimcracks are in better taste.”
Pennington Wise opened the desk drawers. There was little to see, for all financial papers had been taken away by Mr. Gately’s executors.
“Here’s a queer bunch,” Wise observed, as he picked up a packet of papers held together by a rubber band. He sorted them out on the desk.
They were sheets of paper of various styles, each bearing the address or escutcheon of some big city hotel. Many of the principal hostelries of New York were represented among them. Each sheet bore a date stamped on it with an ordinary rubber dating-stamp.
“Important, if true,” commented Wise.
“If what’s true?” asked Norah, bluntly.
“My deductions,” he returned. “These letters, if we can call them letters, doubtless were sent to Mr. Gately at separate times and in separate envelopes.”