Another razor-edge turn that lifted the two outside wheels clear, and they were in Thirty-fourth. And there it was, under way already, the bus they were supposed to have taken. It must have just cleared the terminal ramp as they got there.
He sent the lighter car winging after it. They overtook it just as it reached Tenth, slowed to make its turn. He made a wider, outside turn, cut in ahead lengthwise, and came to a shuddering stop that effectively blocked it.
Its brake screamed. The driver swore at them — in pantomine and also with his horn. They jumped out, ran back to it, pounded on the glass inset of the door. “Glen Falls? Let us in, let us in! We’re going your way! Don’t leave us behind!”
Anyone with a heart would have taken them on. And the driver evidently used something to pump his blood with.
Carol went reeling down the aisle, found a vacant double seat near the back. A moment later Frank had dropped down beside her, their barricading car removed from the right-of-way and their fares paid.
When she’d got her breath back, she said in an undertone: “I wonder if we’ll be able to make what we did stick? Do you think those two back there will be able to wrangle out of it? There wasn’t very much motive for the police to see.”
“There is now — back there in Stephen Gadsby’s inside coat pocket, where I put it so they’d be sure to find it the first thing. A six-page confessional letter from the younger brother. Tommy, was delivered at the house special delivery while I was waiting there for you.
“I just had time to read it before those two showed up with you. The kid brother made a clean breast of everything in it, hoping to forewarn the elder Gadsby not to come across if the Beacon woman tried to put her hooks in him. He’d been roped into a gin marriage with her; she was an entertainer at a roadhouse near his college.”
“She’d called on this former vaudeville partner of hers from the city and he’d impersonated the justice of peace at the mock ceremony. They bled the kid for all they could, until Stephen Gadsby cut his funds. Then the kid caught sight of the partner hanging around the roadhouse one day, and tumbled to the frame that had been worked on him.
“They saw the game was up at the end, so they lit out fast. They figured their dodge might be good for one more ‘painless extraction’ at this end, before Jimmy could warn his brother. Unluckily for himself, Gadsby wasn’t the type that bluffed easy. Instead of getting frightened, he got sore.”
“I know” Carol said. “I heard Rose discuss that part of it with her partner. Gadsby told her to go to hell, so she jumped down to the door and let her accomplice into the house, like a fool, thinking that would cow him. Instead, it enmeshed them in a murder.”
Frank took something out of his pocket, showed it to her. Her face paled at the sight of so much money. For a minute she thought—
“No, don’t be frightened.” he reassured her. “It’s honest this time. It was given to me. I had that bad cheek of Holmes’ with me when I went over there to see him, you know. Holmes hadn’t meant to do it. He’d just been caught short, and he’d raised the money to cover it even by the time he went over to see Gadsby last night. Only he could not square it because Gadsby couldn’t find the cheek at the time. It had dropped out of the cash box when I broke into the safe the first time.
“Anyway, I let him have the check back; it would only have gotten him mixed up in the murder. He made out a new one right under my eyes and mailed it back to Gadsby; the estate can cash it, of course. And he was so grateful and relieved at getting out of the mess, he made me a present of two hundred.
“He insisted on my taking it. He said he had a fellow feeling for me, because we’d both been guilty of mistakes last night that might have led to serious consequences — me breaking into that safe and he with his bad check — but we’d both been given another chance, and we’d probably learned our lessons. I’d told him about us, how badly we wanted to get back home.”
She wasn’t listening any more. Her head dropped to his shoulder, rocked there gently in time with the motion of the bus. Her eyes dropped blissfully closed. “We’re going home,” she thought drowsily. “Me and the boy next door, we’re going home at last.”