"Well, sir, day before yesterday morning I missed from my safe, at my house, seven thousand two hundred and fifty-five dollars, which I placed there the night before, having received most of it that day, at an hour too late to make deposit of it in bank;" and here he paused.
"Well, sir," said I, "who took it? That's the question, I presume, which you wish to solve."
"Yes, that, of course, is the point; but I can't fix my suspicions upon anybody."
"You say that most of this money was received after banking hours. Suppose you tell me next where and of whom you received it, and in what amounts, for I infer that you did not receive it in a lump."
"No; I collected it partly from rentals due, and some came to me from the country,—notes due,—and some from the sale of a cargo of pressed hay over at Jersey City, and I did not get around in time to put it in bank, such as I had, before closing hours," looking at memoranda.
"Well, I am glad you have memoranda of the amounts. Now tell me where you received these, each one;" and he went on to tell me, in detail, where, and who was near by, if anybody, in each case where a tenant or other debtor paid him money. I listened intently, and could get at nothing worthy of note till he came to the hay transaction at Jersey City. It appeared that there were several persons standing about at the time of the payment of the money to my client (call him Latimer, for further convenience), mostly working-men, some dealers, loafers, and two or three well-dressed, but rather dashily-dressed, young men. Mr. Latimer had been obliged to take out considerable money from his own purse, in order the better to arrange it to put in the amount then received; and feeling that he had quite an amount of money, even at that time, and he added some before he reached home, put his purse in his inner vest pocket, thinking of nothing worse than possibly encountering pickpockets, or losing his money by accident on the way. In his vest pocket he thought it secure, and secure it was to take home, but not secure for keeping.
The result of our conference was that evening, that I should be obliged to go with Mr. Latimer to his home the next morning, when he would call at my office for me. I could not go that night, and perhaps it was as well; for I had a business appointment which led me, not an hour after parting with Mr. Latimer, into certain haunts where I fancied,—it was mere imagination, if it were not instinctive perception, in which I do not much believe, although many mysterious things have occurred in my life which seemed to be governed or directed by some subtle law, which the human brain is not yet strong enough to discover,—where I fancied, I say, that I saw some of the money which Mr. Latimer had lost, displayed, and distributed in dissipation. In short, I imagined that I had stumbled upon the thief, and had I known the character of the bills, which Mr. Latimer, however, could not tell me much about, I might have seized my man then and there.
But the next morning I visited Mr. Latimer's house in an up-town street, which was not then, as now, compactly builded; at least, in the portion of it where he dwelt. I examined everything about the premises, concluded where a thief might have gotten into the house without much trouble, and finally commenced questioning Mr. Latimer about his family, the servants, etc. None of Mr. L.'s family, except his wife, were at home. Two boys, or young men, were at school, rather at college one of them, and both far away, and the daughters were at the female seminary in Cazenovia. As to the servants, in whose honesty Mr. Latimer had the utmost confidence, I had them called into my presence, and questioned them about the condition of the house on the night of the robbery. One of them heard some slight noise, at some time between twelve o'clock and four in the morning; was not definite. The others slept soundly; heard nothing. They did not seem to me likely to be connected with anybody, or to have lovers who would be apt to be of the class who might have robbed the safe. Besides, nobody, not even Mrs. Latimer, knew that Mr. L. had deposited any amount of money in his safe that night. He was of the order of men who attend strictly to "their own business," too strictly, sometimes, when evidence is wanted especially. His bedroom adjoined the room in which the safe stood, and was so situated in regard to a pair of "back stairs," that if the robber had come in from the back (on the theory of his possible complicity with the servants), he could have hardly gotten into the room without disturbing Mr. and Mrs. Latimer, unless on that night, which was probably the case, they slept with unusual soundness. I concluded that the robber must be an expert one, and somehow I constantly referred in mind to the fellow whom I have alluded to before as having been seen liberally dispensing money. He seemed to me competent for the business; but there was one thing which I left to the last, which arose in my mind at first on my interview with Mr. Latimer at the Howard; but I said nothing of it then, for I had learned that the best way is to approach the most serious troubles softly; as often the "course of things," as they take shape in an interview, will better point out how this or that mystery occurred than all the attempted solutions which one might, a priori, project for a week, and that one thing which perplexed me was, How did the robber unlock that safe? He must either have been familiar with the house and the safe, and perhaps had a key to it, or he must have carried about him, probably, several safe keys, one of which happened to fit (and the key to this safe was a small one, fifty of the like size of which would not much trouble a burglar to carry), or he must have gotten possession of Mr. Latimer's key. But his key was in his vest pocket, and his clothes were on a chair at the head of his bed, he said, on my inquiring,—there's where he left them, and there was where he found them in the morning,—and he was sure he locked his safe securely after putting the money in. I finally, as the concluding portion of my examination, asked Mr. Latimer to let me see the inside of his safe, and to show me where he deposited the money. He unlocked and opened the safe,—a simple lock concern, proof really against nothing but fire, perhaps; for although it was supposed that the keyhole was so small, and the safe so constructed, that burglars could not get sufficient powder into it to blow it up, yet it would not have stood a minute against the skill and power of professional burglars; but to open it, as they would have done, would have necessitated noise enough to have awakened Mr. Latimer, especially as the bedroom door was open. Mr. Latimer had put the money into a little drawer in the safe, and turned the key of that, which key, however, remained in the drawer lock. But the drawer was tight, and we tried a dozen times to pull it out without making a creaking noise, without avail; so I concluded that, on the whole, Mr. Latimer and his wife had slept that night pretty soundly.
We were about closing the safe again,—I having made due examination, and asked all necessary questions,—when Mr. Latimer, thinking to arrange a half dozen or so papers which had been thrown loosely upon the bottom of the safe, took them up in one grasp of the hand, and commenced to put them in file, when out of his hand dropped a little white card with figures on it, which arrested his attention. He picked it up, looked at it with astonishment, and said, "That's a curious thing to be here," handing it to me. "You will perhaps think me a sporting man, a devotee of the Goddess of Luck; but I don't know who put that here." "Who has access to your safe besides yourself?" "My wife; she has a key." "O," said I, "perhaps she's put it here then." "Not she," said he. "She'd turn pale with horror if she had found that here, in fear that I might be trifling with lotteries. A brother of hers spent a good-sized fortune in lottery tickets, and died of disappointment and chagrin over his course. Not she!" "Yes, I know," said I; "still she may have put it there, if not for herself, for one of the servants, perhaps; for you know many servants have a mania for 'trying their luck.'" So Mrs. Latimer was called, and asked about the lottery ticket. There was no mistaking her seriousness when she said that if one of the servants had asked her to lock up the ticket for safety, she would have taken it and torn it to pieces before her eyes. I was satisfied. But how came the ticket there. "No. 1710, Great Havana Consolidated Lottery," to be drawn on such a day, through the house of Henry Colton & Co., Baltimore. This is as near as the notes of my diary of those days, much worn, permit me to recount the words and figures of the ticket as I took them down in pencil. I studied the ticket, and saw from a note at the bottom that some days would elapse before the drawing was to come off. It was a fresh ticket then, evidently. But how did it get there? Mr. and Mrs. Latimer knew nothing about it—that was clear. It had not been there long—that was equally clear. I questioned Mr. Latimer about the condition of the loose papers in the bottom of the safe. It appeared he did not observe much order in them, so I could learn nothing by that query. Finally, I concluded that perhaps in pulling out the drawer the robber experienced considerable trouble, and that if he had the ticket in his vest pocket at the time, in bending over, and exerting some force to pull out the drawer, he might have dropped it on the floor, and perhaps his curiosity led him to pull out the papers too, some of which fell from his hand, and he picked them up, the ticket along with them. I settled upon this, and there was a clew to the robber, if nothing more. But how did he unlock the safe? This question remained unanswered. Perhaps with a false key, as I have before suggested; but this lock was one supposed to need a special key, none other exactly like it in the whole world. After we had finished our examination, Mr. Latimer closed the safe door, gave a turn to the knob, and jerked out the key. I do not know what led me to think of it, but I asked, "Have you locked it?" "Yes," said he, "that's all you have to do to lock one of these safes," at the same time taking hold of the knob, and pulling it, to show me how securely and simply it was fastened; when, lo, open came the door! Mr. Latimer was confounded, and I confess I was greatly surprised. It might have been that the robber that night found as easy access to the drawer as Mr. Latimer then. We examined the working of the lock as well as we could, and found that something must be deranged, for although it would, on turning the knob, give a "thud," as if the bolts were driven home, it did not always put them in place. Mr. Latimer had his safe repaired after that, and found some "slide" in the lock-work a little out of place.
But I had gotten the ticket, and I told Mr. Latimer that we must work out the problem with that, or fail; and I sent Mr. Latimer about to his debtors, who had paid him the stolen money, to see if any of them could remember the denominations of the bills, and by what banks issued, which they had given him. He found something in his search which seemed likely to serve me. I gave Mr. Latimer my theory of the case, and pointed out to him the course I should pursue, and we concluded that a week would probably bring us to the determination to try longer, or would put us on the clear track of the robber or robbers, for there might have been more than one. Mr. Latimer authorized me, in case I saw fit, to offer a reward of five hundred or a thousand dollars for the robbers, or double these sums for the robbers and the money.