“Come along!” he said gaily. “Shouldn’t be surprised if we heard something about this Horton affair. You read of it, of course?”
Storm pondered. It was far from his intention to draw any possible limelight on himself, yet if his companion ran into George the latter would be sure to mention that Horton was an old friend of them both, and Millard might think it strange that he had made no reference to it.
“Yes.” He nodded carelessly. “Rather a shock, too. There was a chap in our freshman class at college of that name. Holworthy thinks it may be the same fellow, but I doubt it. We lost track of him years ago, anyway.”
“They’ll get him,” Millard asserted with conviction. “He won’t get far, even with that bank-roll. I tell you, I wouldn’t steal a pewter golf cup—and that’s the nearest thing to temptation of that sort that I can imagine—with that organization down here after me!”
At Headquarters, while Millard searched for the official who was to be their guide, Storm gazed reflectively at the ornate brass plate let into the wall on which were inscribed the names of the former Chiefs and Commissioners. Each had held his own pet theories of the detection of crime, each had had his widely published successes, his obscure failures, and each of them in turn had passed on and out of the office. He could have faced them all just as he was about to face their successor, and he could have beaten them at their own game! Surely no other man in the world with such a secret as he carried would have had the supreme audacity to enter this building on so innocent an errand and converse calmly with the very men who would be hot upon his trail if they knew! It was immense!
Millard returned with a secretary of the Commissioner, and they were conducted through the small octagonal anteroom to the inner sanctum of the great man himself. The latter greeted them with brisk geniality, and during the brief talk which followed the introduction, Storm studied him blandly. He was a comparatively young man, not much older than Storm himself, with a pleasant, mildly intelligent face and frank, terse manner. He might have been a mere broker or bank official, courteous but pressed for time, Storm reflected contemptuously; a business man in a political job! What had he to fear from an organization with such a man at its head?
His eyes wandered to the tall glass cases which lined one wall. The shelves were filled with a miscellaneous collection of small objects; pistols and revolvers of every caliber and pattern, ugly looking bludgeons and sawed-off lengths of lead pipe swathed in frayed, stained cloth and various small phials half-filled with tablets and liquids of ominous color. As Storm stared idly at the curious collection, his eye was caught by a strangely incongruous object on one of the lower shelves. It was a pale blue satin slipper, absurdly small, inconsequentially gay and flippant among its grim neighbors, lying on its side with the narrow sole and heel turned toward him as though its wearer had kicked it carelessly aside. Then he saw that imbedded in the heel was an odd sliver of steel like a coarse needle on a strong, slender, curved wire, and he started involuntarily.
The Chatsworth case! Less than a year before, the city had resounded with the sensational death without apparent cause of the beautiful Mrs. Chatsworth. Then that infinitesimal wound had been discovered upon her heel, the subtle poison traced and the secret spring in the slipper revealed. Storm remembered vaguely that the Commissioner himself was said to have taken a hand in the work of the Homicide Bureau, and that a timely suggestion of his had much to do with the solution of the affair.
The insolently gay little slipper seemed all at once more sinister than the grimmest of the weapons which flanked it, and Storm’s eyes were still fastened upon it when he became aware that the Commissioner was addressing him.
“It’s the wickedest of the lot, Mr. Storm, isn’t it? It looks strangely out of place there at the first glance—just a bit of woman’s finery among those crime relics; and yet it is the most deadly weapon of them all.”