“Just as I thought!” she muttered.
The closet, a long narrow room, was hung solidly with fur coats!
“So Maxine Miller was working for the hotel interests after all,” Penny told herself. “I’ve stumbled into something big!”
Groping along the wall of the storage room, she found a switch and pressed it. Again the partition revolved, revealing a flight of stairs leading downward. She slipped through and the wall slid into place behind her.
The stairway was lighted with only one weak electric bulb. Penny’s body cast a grotesque shadow as she cautiously descended. There were so many steps that she decided they must lead to a basement in the hotel.
She reached the bottom at last and followed a narrow sloping tunnel, past a large refrigerated vault which she reasoned must contain a vast supply of additional furs, and kept on until a blast of cool air struck her face. Penny drew up sharply.
Directly ahead, at a bend in the tunnel, sat an armed guard. He was reading a newspaper in the dim light, holding it very close to the glaring bulb above his chair.
Penny dared go no farther. Quietly retreating the way she had come, she stole back up the long stairway. At the top landing she found herself confronted with a blank wall. After groping about for several minutes, her hand encountered a tiny switch similar to the one on the opposite side of the partition. She pressed it, and the wall section revolved.
Letting herself out of the storage closet, Penny started toward the door, only to pause as she heard one of the teletypes thumping out a message. She crossed over to the machine and stood waiting until the line had been finished and a bell jingled. The words were unintelligible in jumbled typewriting, and Penny had no time to work out the code.
Tearing the copy paper neatly across, she thrust it in the pocket of her jacket.