“I’ll tell you, but I don’t want Mr. Courtney to hear.”
“I don’t want to,” the busy playwright returned, and Lulie Lloyd leaned over and whispered a name into the ear of Coleman Coe.
He nodded his head, as one who was not overwhelmingly surprised, and continued in a low tone, “And do you know a man with ever so many gold filled teeth in his lower jaw?”
“Do I?” she cried. “Why, he’s that man’s valet!”
And then Lulie Lloyd looked frightened, looked as if she regretted deeply what she had involuntarily blurted out, and she returned to her typewriter and began madly pounding the keys.
He left quickly, and hopping on a street car, he arrived at the house where lived the man whose name Lulie had whispered to him. The man whose valet had the auriferous teeth.
The man he asked for was out, and though not an easy matter, Coe succeeded by dint of threats and bribes to gain admission to the room where, he said, he would await his host’s return.
Left alone Coleman Coe proceeded to ransack the desk, which stood, carelessly open.
He ran rapidly through a sheaf of letters and bills, now and then shaking his feathery forelock wildly, in mad bursts of satisfaction.
The bills, paid and unpaid, were illuminating. The letters even more so, and Coe grew more and more beaming of face as he proceeded.
He kept a wary eye on the door, and at last finding an old letter that specially interested him, he read it three times, though this was the quickly mastered gist of it:
“I think Simeon Breese will be a _safe_ man for you.”
The address of the said Simeon followed, and this short bit of information seemed to afford Coley the deepest pleasure.
The underscoring of the word safe, particularly entertained him, and he laughed as at a great joke.
“I knew it!” he cried, though silently. “I knew it!”
Then, replacing such papers as he had visibly disarranged, Coe sauntered forth and left the house.
“Tell him I couldn’t wait any longer,” he said, casually to the door man and went his way.
His way took him to the establishment of Simeon Breese, Safe Maker.
“You make safes?” was Coe’s totally unnecessary query.
“Yes, sir,” admitted Breese, “what can I do for you?”
“I don’t exactly want a safe,” Coe said, with what was meant to be an ingratiating wink. “I,—that is,” he looked embarrassed, “I want a sort of a—well, a very confidential matter.”