Y. Cheung Business Detective Read online

  “Yes, of course,” nodded Cheung. “For that was all that was sent to him from Spain, by the former Marceau serving girl, Jane Trotter.”

  “That is right,” acquiesced Harven. “For you will recall that Jane stole the manuscript from Marceau’s desk the night of his strange extinguishment. Believing that it would incrim­inate her brother. Later, she passed it into the hands of an American detective named Nide, who was associated with one Gilbert Whittimore, London news correspondent for the All-American News Syndicate. But before doing so, she made a complete tracing of these three cards, believing that they held the coded information to which Marceau had alluded in his penciled notation at the top—and, after she was safely married in Spain and not likely to be held in England for suppressing evidence, she sent her tracing to Jones. And so, in all fairness to him, that was all he ever had of that script!”

  “Yes, of course,” nodded Cheung. “As even he himself stated in his analysis. But why, Mr. Harven—in reference to your words of a short while back—do you suppose this erroneous deciphering of the picture cards did not appear in the British versions of Jones’ remarkable report?”

  “I know the answer to that also,” pronounced Harven. “Thanks to no less a person than Edward J. Consel, general manager and—and—and—”

  “High Muck-a-Muck—or Grand Mogul,” Harry put in, “is what Dad wants to say, Cheung—only he considers the phrase beneath his dignity!”

  “Well—such terms are,” Milford Harven grunted. “But I’ll call Ed Consel the ‘Big Man’ of the Amalgamated News Syndicate. He’s an Indianapolis man, and despite the fact that the A. N. S. is the biggest news syndicate in America, he maintains his offices right here in the Indianapolis branch of it, in the new Moderne Building on Washington Street, and he—But anyway, I was introduced to him on Washington Street, a couple of weeks back—by a mutual acquaintance—and though my telling him any of the inside facts about the Marceau script was quite ‘out’—since I had given it, and all rights of any kind inherent in it to a friend, Cortland van Renssalear of New York City—I did take occasion to ask Consel why Jones’ decoding of the three picture cards was not included in the British news versions. And, as might be expected, he knew the answer. He was, in fact, in the offices of the big English news syndicate in London the night the Jones’ report was released. And several pieces of important news—purely British in interest, too—broke just as they were ready to send out the report. So they chopped it freely—hewed off in particular, many of the footnotes—which practically insured, you see, that the large footnote, numbered 18 in the American report, had to go—almost in toto. And a good thing it was for Jones, even if, perhaps, he didn’t relish it, for Harry and I today know correctly and definitely that any manner in which those three fantastic Tarot cards apparently fitted in with André Marceau’s death was a mere ‘happenstance’ at most. In the face of which I rather think the importance of my copy of that death script—or rather, should I now say, Mr. van Renssalear’s copy—is much increased, don’t you think so, Mr. Cheung?”

  Cheung nodded emphatically. “Indeed yes. I am a collector, in a small measure, as Harry may or may not have told you—of original cryptograms—and cryptographic writings; and,” he added, “I don’t mind saying that I am truly envious of Mr. van Renssalear, to whom you gave the script, for he possesses, I would say, a really valuable curio.”

  “Oh, do you think so?” asked Harven. “In comparison with many he has, I rather doubt that. Take for instance, well—he possesses, I happen to know, one of the original scytales of the early Greeks which—”

  “Oh yes,” put in Cheung. “The parchment wound on a roller, which, to be decoded, has to be re-wound on a roller of the same diameter.”

  Harven stared surprisedly at his guest.

  “Yes,” he grunted. “And Van also possesses a piece of the actual scalp of some Spartan slave runner, whose head was shaven, and then tattooed with a battle plan, and the hair allowed to grow over it—and then the message, thus concealed, was carried to the Spartan general who won, by the plan, the battle of—of—now, of—”

  “Of Lacedaemon,” put in Cheung, eagerly. “I know by hearsay all of Mr. van Renssalear’s items. But really I meant, in speaking of the Marceau manuscript as ‘valuable,’ valuable because it has not, so I take it, yet been deciphered. Or—or has it?”

  “No. Harry and I couldn’t decipher the fool thing. A friend of Harry’s here, who once conducted a cryptography department on a magazine, couldn’t pluck anything out of it. Again, a professor McWheel, of Yale, a friend of the family who has written a considerable bit on cryptograms and worked with them, and who passed through here recently, couldn’t get anything out of it either. I rather fancy that Cortland, after he does get back from the Himalayas this coming Spring, will have something to take out of his $100,000 vault now and then—and play with. And in fact, that was why I gave the script to him. Because it was a pristine, un-coded, undeciphered cryptogram. And van Renssalear’s father, here in Indianapolis, when I was a young man, loaned me money to save my business—and would not accept the then exorbitant interest prevailing. In fact, I couldn’t then get money at any interest.”

  Harry Harven was gazing at the clock.

  “But good heavens, Dad—and Cheung—we are not here, I guess, any of us—to discuss cryptograms, and Cortland van Renssalear, and manuscripts, or even André Marceau—now some many years dead and gone. I can tell Cheung all about how we got the script, and how we at last found that Jones’ decryptification of it was entirely wrong—after Cheung’s been started on the main affair. For I take it, Dad, Cheung is accepted as ‘Official Investigator of the Problem’”—Milford Harven nodded—“and that we are here to discuss a really serious problem in the offices of the Central Indiana Construction Company.”

  “Yes,” begged Cheung hastily, “tell me the problem.”

  “I will,” said Harven, suddenly bitter again. “Though I warn you, it’s a problem lying virtually in the realm of Black Magic.”

  “And what,” asked Cheung, equally bitterly, “would be so illuminating upon a problem in Black Magic—as a yellow light? Yes—a yellow light! So let me hear the problem, Mr. Harven.”

  * * *

  1 The details of this famous English murder case, and the work upon it by the American detective delegated to solve it, are set forth in one of Harry Stephen Keeler’s earlier novels, The Marceau Case; while the work of X. Jones, the British detective on the case, and Jones’ solution are found in Mr. Keeler’s subsequent novel, X. Jones of Scotland Yard.

  CHAPTER IV

  A Mystery in Bridge Building

  Milford Harven leaned back in his rocker, and lighted a cigar from a box which he passed around—but of which none but himself took one.

  “The thing actually started, Mr. Cheung,” he began, “a number of months ago. I noticed that on two big local construction jobs, on which our company and several other Indianapolis construction companies were bidding, we lost out to our worst business rival—a rival which, by the way, hasn’t refrained from stooping to unfair tactics on several occasions before that. I am referring to the Hoosier Steel Bridge Corporation; the head of it is an old business enemy of mine, Mullock—Ambrose Mullock. Ever hear of him?”

  Cheung shook his head.

  “Mullock,” put in Harry, by way of explanation, “is the man who narrowly escaped indictment some four years ago when the auxiliary grandstand at the Speedway—our world-famous auto racing track—went down and killed two men and a woman. The investigation committee found hopelessly defective lumber in the thing—and it cost Mullock a pretty penny in lawyers’ fees to wriggle out. That was one of his firm’s minor jobs.”

  Cheung made no comment, but his oblique eyes narrowed slightly.

  “Well, as I was saying,” the elder Harven went on, “the Hoosier Steel Bridge Corporation managed to underbid us on two big jobs by just the bare few hundred dollars that overlapped the thousands in our figures. And e
ach time, I attributed it to coincidence, in spite of the fact that construction bids often vary from each other by ten to twenty-five per cent.”

  He smoked for a few seconds and then went on:

  “But when the thing happened the third time, I began to sit up and take notice. I couldn’t help but wonder if someone in the contract offices who was familiar with the figures of the bid hadn’t sold the information to the other company; I tell you I was more than suspicious. Our erection plant and warehouses are at North Indianapolis; our general offices are on a lower floor of the Critchfield Building, on Pennsylvania Street. But our special contract offices, Mr. Cheung—the office which handles the reports, the timekeeper’s records, the payroll and the valuable contracts themselves—is in a special room on the top floor of the building adjoining which is Tuttle’s private office and my own.”

  “Tuttle?” queried Cheung, raising his eyebrows. “Just who is Tuttle?”

  Harven smiled as he carefully knocked the ashes from his cigar. “Tuttle’s vice-president and secretary—and lately—well—chief putterer around. I’ll go into the odd matter of Tuttle presently.” He paused. “Where did I leave off?”

  “You had just told me about the top floor offices and their location,” said Cheung.

  “Yes,” said Milford Harven, “These contract offices are a small suite on the top floor, containing one large room, and two smaller adjoining rooms, usually open—one for myself and one for Tuttle. There’s only one entrance—one doorway—to them all, and that leads from the larger room into the corridor of the building.” He paused again. “So, as I said before, when the thing happened for the third time, I got suspicious and determined to put a stop to it; at least to see whether some of my suspicious were unfounded or not.

  “Perhaps, Mr. Cheung, not ever having had any practical experience to follow your purely theoretical experience at the technical school, you may not be familiar with the general method of submitting a bid for a complicated steel structure, like, say, for instance—a bridge—but doubtlessly you will realize that such a bid necessarily contains a thousand and one separate cost estimates—gotten up by a good many individ­uals. Take for instance, the case of a bridge—for since the bridges so hastily built after our White River flood of 1913 have been becoming archaic, rebuilding of them has been rampant. There is, in such a job: Erection; skilled labor—such as riveting and drilling: unskilled labor; overhead expenses during the estimated duration of the job; profit on certain phases at a reasonable per cent; haulage; skeleton erection; center piers; embankments; material—both steel and concrete approaches; and even carpentry and electrical work. You must know, of course, how we send out our men and sub-contractors with duplicate blueprints and specifications to inspect the territory; and how each foreman and subcontractor submits an estimate—a very careful estimate—of the cost of his particular phase of the job.

  “The foundation or embankment man calculates the time, labor, machinery moving, and material for the concrete embankments. The shop foreman calculates the time for the shop riveting and erecting. The job foreman does the same. The work for the center pillars, if a multiple-span bridge over a river is intended, is separately figured, and the material itself, from rivets and turn-buckles to plates, I-beams and channels, is secured by separate bids from the steel trust and the independent rolling mills in this part of the country. For instance, we may be able to buy a certain size or shape or channel or plate more cheaply from a private mill than from the steel trust.” He paused. “You know how the final bid is a component bid, made up of many separate estimates, by different individuals who in many cases do not even know the other individuals who are helping to construct that same component bid.

  “Now,” Harven went on, “my own figuring of overhead and profit, together with these many individual sealed estimates and price quotations, are made up in our contract office on the top floor into a final and complete bid.”

  “Hence,” interpolated Cheung, very much interested, “it’s more than plain that if advance information is leaking out about the size of your bids, it goes from that top floor office—after the final bid is put together.”

  CHAPTER V

  A Question Without an Answer

  Harry Harven was the first to speak. “You’ve put your finger on the situation, Cheung, but the thing isn’t such a simple proposition as it appears.” He looked up at his father. “Go ahead, Dad.”

  The elder Harven leaned back in his chair and blew a few smoke rings ceilingward.

  “And so,” he continued, after a short pause, “when the thing happened the third time, I determined either to prove to my own satisfaction whether it was chance or whether someone in the offices was playing crooked to the company. Outside of Harry and myself, there are four people in that office who either see the amount of that component bid, or else hear it mentioned by others. Of those four—three are employees. The other is—well—it’s Tuttle. Yet it’s beyond all reason that Tuttle should—” He stopped gloomily and appeared lost in his own reflections for a moment.

  “But I took certain precautions which appeared to me to be sure to stop the possibilities of any of these four employees—or three—since Tuttle is an officer and stockholder—from either deliberately selling this information to an agent from the Hoosier Steel Bridge Corporation, or from inadvertently letting it slip out. The exigencies of the situation demand that every one of us see the bid—since we all either help to make it up, or else, as in the case of Tuttle and me, sign it. But I thought I’d got around the leak in a pretty way.

  “I arranged that on the next bid, the smaller individual sealed estimates should not be opened until the morning of the day on which the bid was to be submitted. I took away all leave of absence from the office that day, and in order that no employe should feel slighted or injured, Harry and Tuttle and I agreed to abide by the same rules that we posted in the outer room—not to leave the contract offices that day until the final hour of submitting bids was past. I had lunch brought in from a cafeteria downstairs, and I myself took the trays from the waiter outside the door. Hence, no one neither entered the offices nor left them—with the exception of myself, who took the bid over to the customer’s offices, a public corporation. During my absence, Harry did the eagle-eye act—and Tuttle too, so he claims. But not one suspicious thing took place during my absence. After I returned to the offices, the whole force was held until the final closing hour for the bids was past. Then they were dismissed.” Harven paused. His face grew stern. “But again, the fourth time, the bid of the Hoosier Steel Bridge Corporation underlapped ours not by even a thousand dollars, but by the few paltry hundreds that over­lapped the thousands in our figure. Again they got a fat contract. Again we lost by the narrowest of margins.”

  He paused a long time and gazed gloomily across the room.

  “You will ask me, Mr. Cheung, why I did not immediately discharge the three employes I have just mentioned, and thus eliminate the guilty one.” A grim smile came over his face—the smile that sometimes is seen on the face of a fighter in the ring as his opponent is battering him into the corner by a fusillade of well-directed blows. His hand clenched and unclenched nervously. “There’s a law, Mr. Cheung,” he said in a level tone of voice, “that anyone found guilty of stealing and selling private business information can be prosecuted and convicted of a crime. But there’s a more important law than that. And here it is: Anyone found guilty of purchasing or using such stolen information can be prosecuted in the courts as equally guilty with the seller. And in the case of Ambrose Mullock—by all the powers, I know that he’s at the bottom of this rotten plot! I’ll lose ten thousand contracts if I can only tie up the scheme to him. Then let Mullock watch out! He’s been playing a shady game for years—the case Harry cited is one of a long string—and he’s due now to be brought to a short stop in his schemes of all kinds. If he is guilty, I’ll tie this thing up to him if we lose a hundred thousand dollars in profits on contracts. And I’ll not only
send him over the road where he belonged years ago, but I’ll sue his company for conspiracy to ruin our business.” Harven grew almost apoplectic as he proceeded, but finally calmed himself with an effort. He leaned back in his chair and finished his story.

  “Enough to tell you, Mr. Cheung, that the same perform­ance followed, under all my precautions, the fifth and sixth times, making six distinct cases in which we were barely underbid by the Hoosier Bridge. In two cases of the six, a third company succeeded in underbidding both of us, so our chief rival didn’t profit in those instances. But their figures nevertheless kept just below ours. As I’ve already told you, every possible precaution was followed in the last three cases in order that we might learn just what method was used; in order that we might have something definite to work on—the identity of the cat’s-paw through whom we might get Mullock himself. But to no avail. No one enters or leaves the offices on the day of the bid. The individual estimates are left sealed in my strongbox until the final day of submittance of bids. No one—not even Harry, Tuttle or I—uses the phone for outgoing calls. No one acts suspiciously. In fact, everyone by this time must be watching everyone else. I myself have charge of the sealed bid from the time it leaves that office until it is in the hands of the final parties. We have already proven to our satisfaction that no one signals anything from the windows. No one, of course, has any visitors, either on business or pleasure.”

  Harven stopped and leaned back in his chair, gazing at the younger man across from him.

  “So there you are, Mr. Cheung. How in the name of all that’s rational does this vital information leak out from the place with such a network around it? Is it black magic—or does it go out by way of the fourth dimension?”