“How?”
“We’ll take everything out of the desk and stand the thing on its head.”
Hale didn’t say a word, started pulling the drawers out, and then removing things from the pigeonholes in the top of the desk, a bottle of ink, some pens, blotter, a couple of boxes of matches, and a few minor odds and ends which had accumulated as a hold-over from past tenants.
“Ready?” he demanded. I nodded.
We each took hold of an end of the desk and moved it out from the wall.
Hale said, “I may as well confess to you. Lam, that I’m something of a detective myself. I’m interested in human nature, and nothing gives me quite as much pleasure as to be able to pry into the unexpected corners of the human mind. I like to read old correspondence. Came on a trunk full of letters at one time in connection with cleaning up an estate. Most interesting thing I’ve ever seen. Now, just tilt it down on that side. There we are. Easy now. Well, this trunk full of letters belonged to a woman who died at the age of seventy-eight. She’d saved every letter she’d ever received. Letters in there she’d received during her childhood, letters during the time she was being courted. Most interesting collection I’ve ever seen. And they weren’t the repressed sort of letters that you’d expect either. Some of them were dynamite. Now, let’s turn the thing right on over. Say, there’s something heavy in there.”
There was indeed something heavy in the desk. It slid down the back of the desk, hit against the inverted top with a thud, and then lodged there. We’d have to find some other way.
“Pick the desk up and shake it,” I said. “Hold it down this way.”
The desk was heavy. It took us a minute to get it elevated at just the right angle. When we had it sloped right, the heavy object thudded out to the floor. After that, I could hear the rustle of papers sliding out and dropping to the carpet. We couldn’t see what they were while we were holding the desk.
“Give it a shake,” I suggested.