The ex-croupier walked over to the buffet, poured out for himself a stiff four fingers of whisky, and tossed off the neat spirit at a gulp. He forced an uneasy grin.
“I don’t often drink in business hours,” he said nervously. “But I’m not used to playing this high—maybe I’m a little shaky. Are you sure-fire on the witnesses to that will? Their signatures would have to be proved.”
“They’re the only things that are genuine,” said Karlin, with a malicious laugh. “We had two of our boys working around the hotel down on Long Island where Rodgers spent a month this spring, and where he is supposed to have written the will. They identify their signatures, and their story’s straight. Rodgers asked them to witness his signature to a paper, that’s all. He didn’t tell them what the paper was, and they didn’t know—see? If there’s any question crops up, the hotel proves that the two men were its employees at the time Rodgers was staying there.” He pulled out his watch again. “It’s ten o’clock!” he said brusquely. “Merxler ought to be showing up. I——”
The ex-croupier had suddenly laid a finger to his lips in caution. A knock was sounding on the hall door.
“Here he is now,” said the ex-croupier, in a lowered voice. “I told them to send him here as soon as he came.”
“All right, let him in,” instructed Karlin. “And tell the boys to drift along as soon as they like. _It’s the man who cuts the first jack._”
The ex-croupier opened the door, and was instantly continental in both manner and speech. He bowed profoundly, as a young man entered.
“Ah, Monsieur Merxler—a great pleasure! I was telling Monsieur Karlin that——”
Billy Kane had drawn slightly back from the window. His lips were thinned, compressed. The fiendishness of it all had got him now—-Karlin with his suave, oily, Judas smile, preening at his Vandyke beard—and Merxler, for all that he had played the fool for several years now, still with a frank and boyish face, his broad shoulders squared back as he laughed a pleasant greeting. There was a whiteness in Billy Kane’s face, a whiteness that was like to the fury, no longer cold, that was white-hot in his soul. Murder! Well, perhaps—but it would not be Merxler’s murder! He whipped his mask from his pocket, and adjusted it swiftly over his face. His fingers automatically tested the mechanism of his revolver, as he again looked in through the window. The ex-croupier was bowing himself out of the room, closing the door behind him.