“Except for this change.”
Quade shook his head. “He’s made this since he got out... Ah!”
Higgins was twitching. Charlie backed away hastily, darted into the other room of the suite and came back without the automatic. He winked at Quade.
Higgins sat up and held his jaw. “You lug!” he spat at Charlie.
Boston grinned. “No hard feelings?”
“I’ll let you know about that later!”
Higgins got to his feet and, still holding his jaw, started for the door. Quade shook his head at Boston and the latter blocked Higgins.
“I want to ask you some questions, Willie,” Quade said.
Higgins suddenly thought to look in his pockets. He pulled out the bank roll, ruffled it and nodded in satisfaction.
“Why didn’t you light out with the fifty thousand, Willie?” Quade asked.
“I was going to,” said Higgins, “until you said Slocum wanted to see me. Up to then I was hanging around — just in case.”
“Just in case someone tried to pin a murder rap on you, eh? All right, you didn’t bump Maynard. Who did?”
“I don’t know,” said Higgins. “I came out of The Rock without a dime. All I had was a chunk of — something. I sold it for fifty thousand. Then the guy got knocked off. Somebody might have said I did it. That long-legged shamus was nosing around. Maynard might have told him about me.”
“He had,” said Quade. “That’s how I got interested. Well, we won’t be seeing you around then?”
Higgins shook his head. “I guess I’ll see what South America looks like.” He started for the door and looked at Charlie. “Look me up if you come to South America, big boy.”
“I want to see America first,” retorted Boston. “No hard feelings?”
Willie Higgins shook his head and went out.
“I think,” said Quade, “we’d better hurry if we want to get down to that inquest.”
Lieutenant Murdock said to Quade: “I was just going to send out some boys for you.”
“You can always count on Quade,” Quade said, cheerily. “Well, I see everybody’s here. Got it all sewed up?”
Christopher Buck said, “In a knot, old man.”
“Can you tell now who’s paying your fee, Christopher?” Quade asked.
“Sure, why not? Young Clevenger. His old man owns a bank in Iowa. He wanted me to see that Miss Wentworth didn’t get mixed up. But she won’t be called to testify. The lieutenant said it wouldn’t be necessary.”
“Well,” said Quade, “if you don’t want to be shown up as a sucker in front of the newspaper boys, I suggest you call the principals into the next room.”
Murdock glared at Quade. “You’ve pulled enough jokes!”
“The joke’ll be on you,” said Quade, “if Tommy Slocum files a suit against you for false arrest.”
Buck’s eyes rolled. “What’s that, Quade?”
“I mean you didn’t hit the jackpot after all, Buck, old fellow. I just had a little chat with Willie Higgins.”
“Willie Higgins!” exclaimed Murdock. “The fellow who just got out of Alcatraz?”
“Yep. Remember Willie, Christopher? You’re the lad who told me about him yesterday.”
Buck fidgeted uneasily. “Maynard gave me a bum steer, there.”
“You mean you changed horses when your first one dropped dead. Well, you going to call them into the next room? Or would you rather have me spill it on the stand over there, Lieutenant?”
“I guess it wouldn’t hurt to hear him,” Buck mumbled to Murdock. “He’s wrong, but—”
“Bring Slocum’s lawyer, too,” said Quade. “So he can get an idea for how much to sue.”
Murdock walked off and spoke to the various principals in the case: Slocum, Thelma and Clevenger. As they passed into another room Quade fell in beside Slocum. “I just left Higgins, Tommy. He was looking up the sailing schedules to South America.”
Slocum groaned. “You blithering fool! You let him get away?”
“Sure. He didn’t have what you wanted. But don’t worry. Desmond Dogg will save you.”
Murdock growled: “Mr. Quade has some things he wants to talk about.”
Quade nodded and began: “Mr. Slocum, how long have you been making Desmond Dogg cartoons?”
Slocum’s nostrils flared. “Six years. But I was doing other cartoons for three years before then. I don’t see though what that’s got to do with this.”
“This is the laundry,” Quade said. “Everything gets washed. I saw a preview of one of your Desmond Dogg pictures today. The screen credit says: ‘From the famous character created by Tommy Slocum.’ That isn’t quite so. You didn’t create Desmond Dogg, Slocum.”
Tommy Slocum remained quiet.
“As a matter of fact,” Quade went on, “Stanley Maynard, who was a cartoonist on the Waterloo Morning News some years ago, drew a little comic strip about a St. Bernard dog who was called Desmond Dogg. The strip didn’t go over very well. When he left the News, Maynard got a release from the paper and tried to peddle the strip to a syndicate. They didn’t take it on. Probably because Maynard wasn’t such a good cartoonist and his ideas weren’t so hot.
“But when you got going good out here in Hollywood, Maynard submitted his Desmond Dogg to you, Slocum. You bought it from him.”
“Nothing wrong about that,” said Slocum. “I bought all rights to Desmond Dogg. I put him across. I gave Maynard a job at a big salary. He didn’t complain.”
“Not until recently. He didn’t know that a... a party somehow got the contract in which he signed Desmond Dogg over to you.”
Slocum sighed, wearily. “All right, Quade, if you’ve got to have it all. I wasn’t so prosperous five years ago. I got into a roulette game over in Willie Higgins’ club and lost a pile of dough. I gave the contract to Willie Higgins. That is, I signed over a transfer to him.” Slocum paused. “Of course, it was a gambling debt,” he smiled nervously, mopped at sweat, “and Willie agreed to keep the whole thing quiet until I could buy the contract back. Meanwhile, he went to jail.”
Quade held up his hand. “Let me tell the rest, Mr. Slocum. You transferred the contract to Willie. But Willie was no slouch. He made it very legal. He had witnesses, and a notary public. There was nothing mentioned about it having been a gambling debt.”
Slocum said, “I—”
“Take it easy,” Quade snapped. “All of this comes around into a nice little pattern and I’d like to round it out while it’s hot. When Willie got out of jail he still had the contract. You hadn’t bought it back. So he sold it to Maynard for fifty thousand dollars. All legal and everything. Maynard in turn put the bee on you. He was going to sue you and take over your business, now that he had the contract.”
“He was suing for a cool million,” Buck offered.
“Sure,” Quade said, “and you, Slocum, you were holding out, rather futilely, against Maynard. Your only action was based on the ground that the contract had gone to Willie on a gambling debt. And gambling debts in California are illegal. Therefore, you said a court would figure the contract was still yours. That threw Maynard for a while. But Willie had cinched the contract with a notary and witnesses. If Maynard could produce these, prove the contract was not transferred as a gambling debt, he would win the suit against you. But the transfer to Willie was old, so Maynard hired Chris Buck to find the notary Willie had, and the witnesses. They had scattered out, couldn’t be located. That’s the way things stood when Maynard was killed. Naturally, it looked as though you had done it, Mr. Slocum.”
“But, I—”
“No, you didn’t kill him,” Quade smiled. “I’ve done a little digging around. Since you aren’t guilty of murder there’s no point in my exposing any of the more sordid details of your life at this inquest. I won’t mention the names of the women and all, but the fact was that Paul Clevenger was blackmailing you. Isn’t that true?”