living-room. Her eyes got big when she saw me.
Rhino Tingley said: "You know this gentleman, Minnie?"
Minnie said: "Yes."
"You shouldn't have left Leggetts' that way. Nobody thinks you had anything to do with the diamonds. What did Miss Leggett want here?"
"There been no Miss Leggetts here," she told me. "I don't know what you talking about.
"She came out just as we were coming in."
"Oh, Miss Leggett! I thought you said Mrs. Leggett. I beg your pardon. Yes, sir. Miss Gabrielle was sure enough here. She wanted to know if I wouldn't come back. She thinks a powerful lot of me, Miss Gabrielle does."
That, I thought, is a lie.
"That," I said, "is what you ought to do. It was foolish—leaving like that." Rhino Tingley took the cigar out of his mouth and pointed it at the girl, "You away from them," he boomed, "and you stay away from them, You don't have to take nothing from nobody." He put a hand in his pants pocket, lugged out a thick bundle of paper money, thumped it down on the table, and rumbled: "What for you have to work for folks?"
He was talking to the girl, but looking at me, grinning, gold teeth shining. The bundle of money was on the table close to me. I picked it up, counted it—eleven hundred and sixty-five dollars—and dropped it on the table again. Rhino, still grinning, returned it to his pocket.
The girl looked at the man, said scornfully, "Lead him around, vino," and turned to me again, her small face tense, anxious to be believed, saying:
"Rhino got that money in a crap game, mister, Hope to die if he didn't."
I assured her that I believed every word she said, again advised her to go back to the Leggetts, and departed.
Downtown, in an Owl drug store, I looked in the Berkeley section of the telephone directory, found only one Freemander listed, and called it. Mrs. Begg was there, and she told me she could see me if I came over right away. I caught the next ferry. The Freemander house was set off a road that wound uphill toward the University of California.
Mrs. Begg was a scrawny, big-boned woman, with not much gray hair packed close around a bony skull, hard gray eyes, and hard, capable hands. She was sour and severe, but plain-spoken enough to let us talk turkey without a lot of preliminary hemming and hawing.
I told her about the theft of the diamonds and my belief that the burglar had been helped, at least with information, by somebody who knew the Leggett household, and added:
"Mrs. Priestly told me you had been Leggett's housekeeper a few years ago, and thought you could help me."
Mrs, Begg said she doubted if she could tell me anything that would help me, but she was willing to do all she could, being an honest woman and having nothing to conceal from anybody. Once she started, she told me a great deal, damned near talking me earless. Throwing out the stuff that didn't interest me, I came away with the following information:
In the spring of 1921 Mrs. Begg had been hired by Leggett, through an agency, as housekeeper. At first she had a girl to help her, but there wasn't work enough for both, so, at her suggestion, the girl was let go. Leggett was a man of simple tastes, and spent most of his time on the top floor, where he had his laboratory and bedroom. He seldom used the rest of the house except when he had friends in for an evening. Mrs. Begg didn't like his friends, though she could tell me nothing about them except that "the way they talked was a shame and a disgrace."
Edgar Leggett was as nice a man as a person could want to know, she said, only so secretive that he made a person nervous. She was never allowed to go up on the top floor, and the doors were
