“I know of nothing,” she replied.
He giggled and made a delighted face at me.
“That is it,” he said. “We know of nothing.”
“He came back to San Francisco eight o’clock Sunday night—three hours before he was killed and robbed—with twenty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. What was he doing with it?”
“It was the proceeds of a sale to a customer,” Bruno Gungen explained. “ Mr. Nathaniel Ogilvie, of Los Angeles.”
“But why cash?”
The little man’s painted face screwed itself up into a shrewd leer.
“A bit of hanky-panky,” he confessed complacently, “a trick of the trade, as one says. You know the genus collector? Ah, there is a study for you! Observe. I obtain a golden tiara of early Grecian workmanship, or let me be correct—purporting to be of early Grecian workmanship, purporting also to have been found in Southern Russia, near Odessa. Whether there is any truth in either of these suppositions I do not know, but certainly the tiara is a thing of beauty.”
He giggled.
“Now I have a client, a Mr. Nathaniel Ogilvie, of Los Angeles, who has an appetite for curios of the sort—a very devil of a cacoethes carpendi . The value of these items, you will comprehend, is exactly what one can get for them—no more, little less. This tiara—now ten thousand dollars is the least I could have expected for it, if sold as one sells an ordinary article of the sort. But can one call a golden cap made long ago for some forgotten Scythian king an ordinary article of any sort? No! No! So, swaddled in cotton, intricately packed, Jeffrey carries this tiara to Los Angeles to show our Mr. Ogilvie.