Herndon looked thoughtfully at the passing crowd on the other side of the balustrade and continued.  “It started, like many of our cases, with the anonymous letter writer.  Early in the summer the letters began to come in to the deputy surveyor’s office, all unsigned, though quite evidently written in a woman’s hand, disguised of course, and on rather dainty notepaper.  They warned us of a big plot to smuggle gowns and jewellery from Paris.  Smuggling jewellery is pretty common because jewels take up little space and are very valuable.  Perhaps it doesn’t sound to you like a big thing to smuggle dresses, but when you realise that one of those filmy lacy creations may often be worth several hundred, if not thousand, dollars, and that it needs only a few of them on each ship that comes in to run up into the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands in a season, you will see how essential it is to break up that sort of thing.  We’ve been getting after the individual private smugglers pretty sharply this summer and we’ve had lots of criticism.  If we could land a big fellow and make an object-lesson of the extent of the thing I believe it would leave our critics of the press without a leg to stand on.

“At least that was why I was interested in the letters.  But it was not until a few days ago that we got a tip that gave us a real working clue, for the anonymous letters had been very vague as to names, dates, and places, though bold enough as to general charges, as if the writer were fearful of incriminating herself—­ or himself.  Strange to say, this new clue came from the wife of one of the customs men.  She happened to be in a Broadway manicure shop one day when she heard a woman talking with the manicurist about fall styles, and she was all attention when she heard the customer say, ’You remember Mademoiselle Violette’s—­that place that had the exquisite things straight from Paris, and so cheaply, too?  Well, Violette says she’ll have to raise her prices so that they will be nearly as high as the regular stores.  She says the tariff has gone up, or something, but it hasn’t, has it?’

“The manicurist laughed knowingly, and the next remark caught the woman’s attention.  ’No, indeed.  But then, I guess she meant that she had to pay the duty now.  You know they are getting much stricter.  To tell the truth, I imagine most of Violette’s goods were—­well—­’

“‘Smuggled?’ supplied the customer in an undertone.

“The manicurist gave a slight shrug of the shoulders and a bright little yes of a laugh.

“That was all.  But it was enough.  I set a special customs officer to watch Mademoiselle, a clever fellow.  He didn’t have time to find out much, but on the other hand I am sure he didn’t do anything to alarm Mademoiselle.  That would have been a bad game.  His case was progressing favourably and he had become acquainted with one of the girls who worked in the shop.  We might have got some evidence, but suddenly this morning he walked up to my desk and handed me an early edition of an afternoon paper.  Mademoiselle Violette had been discovered dead in her shop by the girls when they came to work this morning.  Apparently she had been there all night, but the report was quite indefinite and I am on my way up there now to meet the coroner, who has agreed to wait for me.”