The Case of the Two Strange Ladies by Harry Stephen Keeler

Author:Harry Stephen Keeler [Keeler, Harry Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery;murder;crime;classic;detective
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER X

Adventuress?

The girl who entered the room, with all the grace—real or assumed—of a born aristocrat, had golden yellow hair that fell to her white neck in a page-boy bob. A trim little Paris-like black hat graced the blonde hair, but her suit was a striped black and white of an extreme pattern as if she were trying to be a full-fledged American. She carried a weird-looking purse made of silver—and apparently Russian—coins. With eyes of the bluest blue imaginable she looked about her.

“Sit down, Miss Russakoff,” said the Chief, indi­cating the remaining—and fourth chair—in the office. “Mayor M’Nett wishes to speak to you.”

“Most gladly,” said the girl, speaking in an English so ultra-precise that it was patently an English never garnered in America, “do I seize the opportunity of speaking with our leading official.”

“Hrmph,” was all M’Nett said. He surveyed her gloweringly—as a man at bay. “Miss Russakoff,” he began suddenly, “I’m going to speak mighty plain. Either you, or this man here at my left, got my necklace—but of course you know, I take it, the exact nature of the job that was pulled off today in my home?”

“I do indeed,” she said sadly. “Because Bob here, he forbade me—in our brief talk on the telephone—to make a newsstory of it for my paper.”

“Well, that’s somep’n!” acknowledged the Mayor sardonically. “Well, Miss Russakoff, as the situation stands now, either you or this man you call Bob got that valuable necklace which this countryman of yours—”

“Oh—but I am no German,” said the girl proudly.

“Oh, I meant Eur’peanly speaking,” said the Mayor. “Anyway, if your fiancé—as I take it he is—got the necklace, he can fence it for enough to take care of you for many a year. Though I doubt you want to settle down to be a police dick’s wife—in a small city.” He paused impressively. “If you got it, though, I doubt if you’d know where in all America you could dispose of it—though I wouldn’t know as to that, either. The point is, Miss Russakoff, I was going to make Landell Chief of Police here in Lake City—but since he’s under certain suspicions, I can’t. Now if you got that necklace, girl, and will turn it over to us—we’ll say no more about it other than that, of course, you leave town. And this man you claim you love will be next Chief.”

The girl sighed deeply, dolorously. “I but wish,” she said; “that I did get it—and did have it! For—” she turned impulsively to Bob Landell—“I would do any­thing in the world, Bob, to make you successful—and happy. If just the little giving up of a foolish bauble, many of which my family owned in the days of the Czar, would advance you to the Chiefship here—believe me, I would produce it—but—” she shook her blonde head “—I just haven’t it. That spurious old Professor of Zoology simply did not, Your Honor, throw it out of the window above where I stood waiting—helping Bob; he did not even, so far as that goes, raise the window by enough of a crack to shove it out.

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