PAGE 6
Hoodwinked
by
“He has absolutely no idea of his own, then, as to the identity of Mrs. Williams?”
“He hasn’t; but I have. The telephone number which figures in the case is the number of a pay station in an all-night drug store in Washington. Westerfeltner freely gave me the number. Both the proprietor of this drug store and his clerk remember that night before last, shortly before eight o’clock, a rather small, slight woman wearing a black street costume with a dark veil over her face came into the place and said she was expecting a telephone call for Mrs. Williams. Within two or three minutes the bell rang and the clerk answered and somebody asked for Mrs. Williams. The woman entered the booth, came out almost immediately, and went away. All that the drugstore man and his clerk remember about her is that she was a young woman, plainly dressed but well-groomed. The druggist is positive she had dark hair; the clerk is inclined to think her hair was a deep reddish-brown. Neither of them saw her face; neither of them remarked anything unusual about her. To them she was merely a woman who came in to keep a telephone engagement, and having kept it went away again. So, having run into a blind alley at that end of the case, I started in at the other end of it to find the one lady to whom naturally the chief conspirator would turn for help in the situation that confronted him when he ran away from Washington. And I found her–both of her in fact.”
“Both of her! Then there are two women involved?”
“No, only one; but which one of two suspects she is I can’t for the life of me decide. I know who she is, and yet I don’t know. I’ll come to that part of it in a minute or two. I haven’t told you the name of the head devil of the whole intrigue yet, have I? You’ve met him, I imagine. At any rate you surely have heard of him.
“You know him, or else you surely know of him, as the Hon. Sidney Bertram Goldsborough, of London, England, and Shanghai, China.”
“Goodness gracious me!” In her astonishment Miss Smith had recourse to an essentially feminine exclamation. “Why, that does bring it close to home! Why, he is among the persons invited to my cousin’s house to-morrow night. I remember seeing his name on the invitation list. That’s why you asked me about her party a while ago. My cousin met him somewhere and liked him. I’ve never seen him, but I’ve heard about him. A big mining engineer, isn’t he?”
“A big international crook, posing as a mining engineer and ostensibly in this country to finance some important Korean concessions–that’s what he is. His real name is Geltmann. Here’s his pedigree in a nutshell: Born in Russia of mixed German and Swiss parentage. Educated in England, where he acquired his accent and the monocle habit. Perfected himself in scoundrelism in the competent finishing schools of the Far East. Speaks half a dozen languages, including Chinese and Japanese. Carries gilt-edged credentials made in the Orient. That, briefly, is your Hon. Mr. Sidney Bertram Goldsborough, when you undress him. He was officially suspected of being something other than what he claimed to be, even before Westerfeltner divulged his name. In fact, he fell under suspicion shortly after he turned up in Paris in January of this year, he having obtained a passport for France on the strength of his credentials and on the representation that he wanted to go abroad to interest European financiers in that high-sounding Korean development scheme of his–which, by the way, is purely imaginary. He hung about Paris for three months. How he found out about the document which the army officer was bringing home, and how he found out that the officer–in order to save time–would travel on a French liner instead of on a transport, are details that are yet to be cleared up by our people on the other side. There has been no time yet of course to take up the chase over there in Paris. But obviously there must have been a leak somewhere. Either some one abroad was in collusion with him or perhaps indiscreetness rather than guilty connivance was responsible for his learning what he did learn. As to that, I can’t say.