“The front door was ajar when I came downstairs this morning,” Mrs. Leggett said from the doorway. “I went upstairs and awakened Edgar, and we searched the house and found the diamonds gone. The police think the man I saw must have been the burglar.”
I asked about the man she had seen.
“It was last night, around midnight, when I opened the bedroom windows before going to bed. I saw a man standing upon the corner. I can’t say, even now, that there was anything very suspicious-looking about him. He was standing there as if waiting for somebody. He was looking down this way, but not in a way to make me think he was watching this house. He was a man past forty, I should say, rather short and broad–somewhat of your build–but he had a bristly brown mustache and was pale. He wore a soft hat and overcoat–dark–I think they were brown. The police think that’s the same man Gabrielle saw.”
“Who?”
“My daughter Gabrielle,” she said. “Coming home late one night– Saturday night, I think it was–she saw a man and thought he had come from our steps; but she wasn’t sure and didn’t think anything more of it until after the burglary.”
“I’d like to talk to her. Is she home?”
Mrs. Leggett went out to get her.
I asked Leggett: “Were the diamonds loose?”
“They were unset, of course, and in small manila envelopes–Halstead and Beauchamp’s–each in a separate envelope, with a number and the weight of the stone written in pencil. The envelopes are missing too.”
Mrs. Leggett returned with her daughter, a girl of twenty or less in a sleeveless white silk dress. Of medium height, she looked more slender than she actually was. She had hair as curly as her father’s, and no longer, but of a much lighter brown. She had a pointed chin and extremely white, smooth skin, and of her features only the green-brown eyes were large: forehead, mouth, and teeth were remarkably small. I stood up to be introduced to her, and asked about the man she had seen.
“I’m not positive that he came from the house,” she said, “or even from the lawn.” She was sullen, as if she didn’t like being questioned. “I thought he might have, but I only saw him walking up the street.”
“What sort of looking man was he?”
“I don’t know. It was dark. I was in the car, he was walking up the street. I didn’t examine him closely. He was about your size. It might have been you, for all I know.”
“It wasn’t. That was Saturday night?”
“Yes–that is, Sunday morning.”
“What time?”
“Oh, three o’clock or after,” she said impatiently.
“Were you alone?”
“Hardly.”
I asked her who was with her and finally got a name: Eric Collinson had driven her home. I asked where I could find Eric Collinson. She frowned, hesitated, and said he was employed by Spear, Camp and Duffy, stockbrokers. She also said she had a putrid headache and she hoped I would excuse her now, as she knew I couldn’t have any more questions to ask her. Then, without waiting for any reply I might have made to that, she turned and went out of the room. Her ears, I noticed when she turned, had no lobes, and were queerly pointed at the top.
“How about your servants?” I asked Mrs. Leggett.
“We’ve only one–Minnie Hershey, a Negress. She doesn’t sleep here, and I’m sure she had nothing to do with it. She’s been with us for nearly two years and I can vouch for her honesty.”
I said I’d like to talk to Minnie, and Mrs. Leggett called her in. The servant was a small, wiry mulatto girl with the straight black hair and brown features of an Indian. She was very polite and very insistent that she had nothing to do with the theft of the diamonds and had known nothing about the burglary until she arrived at the house that morning. She gave me her home address, in San Francisco’s darktown.
Leggett and his wife took me up to the laboratory, a large room that covered all but a small fifth of the third story. Charts hung between the windows on the whitewashed wall. The wooden floor was uncovered. An X-ray machine–or something similar–four or five smaller machines, a forge, a wide sink, a large zinc table, some smaller porcelain ones, stands, racks of glassware, siphon-shaped metal tanks–that sort of stuff filled most of the room.