"Barker! But, Soapy——"
He raised a finger and pointed in my face:
"Don't begin with any buts till you know. Now if you'll be quiet and listen like a nice little girl, you'll see."
This is what he told me as I sat pressed up against him, every now and then giving myself a hitch to keep from sliding off, too eager listening to rise up and get a chair.
They gained access to both offices without any trouble, O'Mally flashing his badge at the nightman, whom he'd already seen and fixed with a story that he was after important papers for the Copper Pool men. They tried the Harland offices first, a cursory inspection showing nothing. It wasn't till O'Mally himself got busy in the rear room that they began to move forward. A mark on the window sill was what started him. It was a circular scrape about as big round as a butter plate and was made, he said, by the heel of a man's boot.
Then he turned his attention to the window casing, the ledge and the outside frame. He used a small pocket searchlight, also matches, dropping them as they burned down and examining every inch of the surface. The first thing he lit upon was the cleat to which the awning rope is fastened in summer. It is always screwed securely down to the woodwork, and has to be strong and firm to hold the awnings in heavy winds, especially at that height. The cleat outside the window was loosened, and between its base and the wood were a few torn threads of rope that had caught in the head of the upper screw. These threads, carefully untangled and preserved, were from a new rope, clean and yellow, not the gray wind and weather-worn shreds that would have been left from the summer. Below the cleat were scratches, some long and deep, some wide, zigzag scrapes. By the color of these he said they had been recently made.
From there they descended to the Whitehall suite. Here O'Mally wasted little time on the front rooms but went direct to the rear office and began on the window. Babbitts and Stevens were ordered to search the floors and walls, which was easy as the furniture was gone and the place was bare except for the radiator and the washstand. I may as well put here that their investigations produced nothing.
But O'Mally's did. He went to work just as he had on the floor above. This cleat was secure, but on the sill were more scratches, several long deep ones, and on the stone ledge that same round, circular mark. But what he found there that was the vital thing was a button. It was lodged in a corner made by one of the small wooden rims that go up the window casing parallel with the window. Anyone could have overlooked it, hardly visible in this little angle where it might have been sent by the cleaner's duster as she flicked about the sill and the ledge. It was a metal button of the kind used on men's clothes to fasten their braces to, and it bore round it in raised letters the name of a fashionable tailor.
By the time they had done all this it was coming on for morning. They slipped out of the building and went to an all-night restaurant near-by to wait for daylight when O'Mally had decided to make an inspection of the roof of the church. He and Babbitts would do this, while Stevens, as soon as the day was far enough advanced, was commissioned to go to the tailor whose name was on the button, and find out when and for whom he had made any suits having that button upon them.
Meantime the day had broken into morning. With a caution to Babbitts to stay where he was O'Mally sauntered off to see about fixing things for getting on the roof of the church. Babbitts was left wondering whether they were going to be plumbers or tin workers or members of the congregation admiring the sacred edifice. But when O'Mally came back he'd got a new one on Soapy, for he'd depicted them to the sexton as an architect and builder from the West who were so struck by the dome they wanted to get up on the roof and study its proportions.