“I sure was a damn fool,” he mused. “Gaza would have made the greatest emotional actress the screen has ever known, if I’d given her a chance. I guessed her wrong and played her wrong. She’s not like any woman I ever saw before. I should have made her a great success and won her gratitude—that’s the way I ought to have played her. Oh, well, what’s the difference? She’ll come back!”
He rose and went to the bathroom, snuffed half a grain of cocaine, and then collected all the narcotics hidden there and every vestige of contributary evidence of their use by the inmates of the bungalow. Dragging a small table into his bedroom closet, he mounted and opened a trap leading into the air space between the ceiling and the roof. Into this he clambered, carrying the drugs with him.
They were wrapped in a long, thin package, to which a light, strong cord was attached. With this cord he lowered the package into the space between the sheathing and the inner wall, fastening the end of the cord to a nail driven into one of the studs at arm’s length below the wall plate.
“There!” he thought, as he clambered back into the closet. “It’ll take some dick to uncover that junk!”
Hidden between plaster and sheathing of the little bungalow was a fortune in narcotics. Only a small fraction of their stock had the two peddlers kept in the bathroom, and Crumb had now removed that, in case Allen should guess that he had been betrayed by his confederate and direct the police to the bungalow, or the police themselves should trace his call and make an investigation on their own account. He realized that he had taken a great risk; but his stratagem had saved him from the deadly menace of Allen’s vengeance, at least for the present. The fact that there must ultimately be an accounting with the man he put out of his mind. It would be time enough to meet that contingency when it arose.
As a matter of fact, the police came to the bungalow that very evening; but through no clew obtained from Allen, who, while he had suspicions that were tantamount to conviction, chose to await the time when he might wreak his revenge in his own way. The desk sergeant had traced the call to Crumb, and after the arrest had been made a couple of detective sergeants called upon him. They were quiet, pleasant-spoken men, with an ingratiating way that might have deceived the possessor of a less suspicious brain than Crumb’s.
“The lieutenant sent us over to thank you for that tip,” said the spokesman. “We got him all right, with the junk on him.”
Not for nothing was Wilson Crumb a talented actor. None there was who could better have registered polite and uninterested incomprehension.
“I am afraid,” he said, “that I don’t quite get you. What tip? What are you talking about?”
“You called up the station, Mr. Crumb. We had central trace the call. There is no use——”