“I’m not saying anything!”
“You decorated the head of my bed with that thing, I suppose?”
“You can suppose all you like.”
“Thanks! Rather surly, aren’t you?”
“You hand me over to the police, and you’ll get yours!” said the prisoner.
“Are you, by any chance, trying to frighten me?”
“I’m giving you fair warning. You hand me over and you won’t live long to gloat about it!”
Roger Verbeck grinned again and resumed his humming. His eyes never left the prisoner, but he was thinking deeply. In the first place, the letter from the Black Star bothered him. The remarks that the Black Star accused him of making he had made. But the puzzling part of it was that he had made them to half a dozen friends when there was no stranger near. He had spoken them in a drawing-room in the presence of Faustina Wendell, his fiancée; Howard Wendell, her brother, and some others concerning whose integrity there was no question. How, then, had the Black Star heard of them?
The Black Star had terrorized the city for the past four months. Whenever a master crime was committed a tiny black star had been found pasted on something at the scene of operations. The police had been unable to get a clew. Each crime seemed bolder and more daring than the one before, and more highly successful. The Black Star sent taunting letters to the newspapers and police, and the public demanded his arrest and imprisonment with loud voice.
His crimes, too, showed a deep knowledge of private matters. It appeared that the Black Star knew the interior arrangements of residences he robbed. Sometimes he even knew the combinations of safes—for in two instances a safe had been opened and looted, and then properly closed again, but with a tiny black star inside it. He was aware when valuable jewels were taken from safe-deposit boxes to be worn at some affair; he knew when members of families were out of the city, or servants absent. He had shown in a thousand ways that he possessed knowledge of great value to a criminal.