“She is thrilled and naturally tells her best friend all about it. Marion gets panicky. If Maxine makes another comeback, everything she has accomplished will be ruined. She knows there isn’t room for both of them in pictures? — they’re too much alike.
“So she pumps Burke full of poison to the effect that Maxine knows about the Zolta incident and is going to talk. They plot Maxine’s death to look like suicide. Only it doesn’t quite come off that way.
“I run into Burke and give him a pushing around on the Zolta affair. He goes to pieces on Marion, she garrots him while he’s asleep and hangs him in the closet. Also to look like a suicide. But again nobody’s fooled.
“All this time she’s holding an ace — a letter Clark wrote to Maxine when she married Wally Burke threatening to kill them both when he got out of poky. If it gets too hot, she figures she can always produce this letter and Clark will take the rap.
“There’s only one little thing wrong. She figures I’m having hunches about her. She’s working on that, when you pick me up and charge me with murder. It looks good, but when it doesn’t take, she calls Clark and tells him I gave the police his letter to shift suspicion to him. She’s counting on Clark killing me. Then she can play her hole card — turn the letter over and let Clark collect for killing Keyes, Burke, and me.
“Well, that’s about all there is to it. Clark only half-killed me. You know the rest.”
Hillman smoked it over in silence for a minute. “Kid,” he said, at last, “I don’t know what kind of a detective you are, but you’ve sure got a talent for slinging the bull.”
I turned to Clark and offered him a cigarette. “You see, that’s the thanks I get. He sits around smoking two-bit cigars while I solve his case for him, then the joker turns on me!”