The Smuggled Atom Bomb

“You needn’t have been. Not to this extent! I was telling Scotty about it. When Charles found Harry Ellings, we were upset, naturally. He’s been a member of the family for so long! He was so quiet — so nice! I don’t suppose we’ll ever find a boarder who will replace him.” She sighed. “He’d been ill, of course. His heart just stopped. His funeral is arranged.

Eleanor has been trying to get his friends together. There aren’t many.”

Duff couldn’t hold back the question any longer, “What about the thing Eleanor said she found? Was it another box?”

Mrs. Yates’ head shook. “The same one. That Mr. Higgins came last night. Poor Harry! He must have been a little off balance about money! He told you he’d sold his platinum, didn’t he? Well, he hadn’t. He did open a small savings account, but apparently he couldn’t bear to part with that — metal. He just moved the box.”

Duff tried to hide an enormous disappointment. “Oh.”

Her smiled was wistful. “So perhaps it was in your lily pond, Duff. Perhaps he fetched it out between the time you were taken to the hospital and the time the police and all the others searched. He’d put it up in the tree house.”

“Tree house?”

“Didn’t you ever notice it? In the woods, toward the house from that pit with water in it? Eleanor’s father built it when she was little and it’s stood all these years.”

Duff remembered the weathered platform.

“It was a very sad Christmas for us,” Mrs. Yates said. “And poor Eleanor was exhausted, anyhow.”

Duff finished his coffee and signaled to Scotty. They went out on the lawn.

“It looks,” Scotty said ruefully, “as if we’ve been hurrying ourselves and friends around without any need.”

“I’m glad I’m here, though. They can stand help.” Duff thought a moment. “Do you believe it’s possible that all the rumpus could come from Ellings’ merely moving that box around?”

“What about seeing the big man in New York?”

“Sure. That. I’ve got to tell the FBI that — and take a razz, probably. But if all the rest of it isn’t coincidence — if it was just Ellings’ platinum hoard — then two extra-tall men could be coincidence.”

“Could be,” Scotty agreed with grim sympathy.

“Only—” Duff shrugged and began again. “Only I had a feeling that there was something about that empty warehouse that meant something. I got one of those spooky impressions. Whatever it was, I can’t bring it up to view in my mind. Tried, off and on, all the way down here.”

Scotty removed his jacket; New York clothes were too warm even for the early sunshine. He sat down on the grass. “You can be certain, if what you suspected had been going on, that it would take a big organization. Brains. Imagination. Planning. Either there is a mob engaged in a very elaborate routine or else nothing was happening. Harry was a hoarder whose, heart failed, and a branch hit you, period. The thing that gets me is, if any such thing is going on, why hasn’t anybody, anywhere, got onto any of it, so the FBI or General Baines — would have some notion?”

“Maybe I’ve wasted a lot of your time, Scotty. And more than a hundred borrowed bucks.”

“Forget it!” Scotty grinned and got up; he stretched and walked down the drive to the place where the sleeping cabdriver had parked in the shade.

At ten, Duff presented himself in the office of the FBI.

Higgins listened, somewhat dazedly, to Duff’s account of the trip to New York. When Duff finished, the first thing he said was, “Haven’t you got any sense at all?”

The younger man flushed and stammered. What he finally got out was, “Apparently not!”

Higgins summed up his view of the affair, “To start with, you go on a wildgoose chase. If any customer of Miami-Dade was the sort of drop you thought of, you had no chance of finding it out just by making a call. Take a hundred men, working weeks — short of some lucky break. So your scheme is dumb. The next thing you do, just because you can pick locks, is break into what you call a suspicious building. That was plain crazy! If you d run into what you suspected, you’d be lying on the bottom of the Hudson now in a barrel of cement. Fortunately, the joint’s empty. But you saw a man — a whopping big man — come out. You’d also once seen Ellings talking to some flagpole-sized guy. There are many big men, Bogan, and unless a man stands beside somebody whose height you know, how can you tell how big he is exactly?”

“If you’d seen him! Here in Florida. There on Broadway—”

“So, all right! He gets in a car. Drives off. You never notice its license! So there’s no way on earth of tracing him. Even the FBI can’t find a man in New York by merely knowing he’s outsize.”

Duffs face was a deep scarlet. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m at last beginning to think I was souped up over nothing.”

For perhaps a minute, Higgins merely looked at Duff. When he spoke again, his brisk manner had left him. His tone was level and there was nothing sarcastic in it. “Look here, son. We’ve checked you from hell to breakfast You’re a solid citizen, from a solid family.

Can you keep your mouth shut?”