“However, fortunately, radium is sufficiently active to impress a photographic plate with its environment. Let me place the capsule between two plate holders. Fine. Now we’ll put them in this developing box, put on the top, pour developer in the opening. Now there’s nothing else to do while we wait for the plates to develop.
“Tell me, since we’re all here, gentlemen, how about that Sam Pixley case?”
“That what you came down here to investigate?” asked Chief Hatcher.
“Yes. I might as well admit it. It is.”
“The case is closed,” said the district attorney.
Ezra Hickory said nothing.
“I always felt,” said Clint Kale, speaking in a reflective monotone, “that the woman wasn’t guilty. Her testimony is too utterly incredible to have been fabricated, the telephone call to go see Pixley, the finding of the package of currency in the exact amount required to pay off the mortgage. Only a fool would have told such a story if it were the truth. Not even a fool would have made up such a yarn as a lie.
“But there were no finger-prints on the job. That indicates mental shrewdness. But, most convincing of all, the shares of stock in a worthless company were left untouched. But only a few of the older inhabitants knew that this stock was worthless. Mrs. Thurmond had only lived here eight years. The history of that stock goes back farther than that.”
Clint ceased speaking, smiled around him.
“I think the plates have developed. We will now pour off the developer and put in the hypo to fix them.”
He walked to the wash bowl, poured off liquid, washed the plates, poured off the washing water, poured hypo through the light-proof opening that was placed in the top of the developing box.
Then he returned to his chair.
“I have carefully examined the transcript,” he said. “It seems to me that the testimony of Ezra Hickory was the determining factor in the conviction.”
Ezra Hickory squirmed in his chair.
“I have long wanted to talk with Mr. Hickory, to get him to face my lie detector.”
Thomas Jefferson Train cleared his throat with a metallic rattle.
“You’ll settle this matter of the reward first,” he rasped.
“Betcha life,” growled Chief Hatcher.
“I’ll tell my story anywhere!” snapped Ezra Hickory, glancing around him with some visible apprehension as he took in the various equipment of the place.
“Fine,” agreed Clint, and took the top off the developing box. “We can now inspect the plates.”
They were perfect exposures.
“Look here,” said Clint, draining one and holding it to the light. “You can see where this radium was stored the last few hours. There’s a wall. But the radio rays go right through the wall and give a perfect photograph of the interior. There are some stocks, and some currency. Look! You can even see the names on the stocks, the numbers of the shares— Let’s see. There’s a name. There’s a number. There’s a date. Stock in the — no, it’s bonds — bonds in the Hanover Irrigation District. And here are some diamonds — most interesting. One has only to seek such a wall—”
There was a flourish of motion.
Ezra Hickory had snatched the blued steel six-shooter from the desk.
“Hands up!” he yelled.
His hearers stared at him with wide eyes.
The little man, brandishing the weapon, scuttled for the bathroom, went through it to the communicating room, opened the hall doorway.
A State officer was posted at the end of the corridor.
Ezra Hickory didn’t hesitate. He raised the weapon to his temple.
There was the roar of an explosion, the sound of a limp body thudding to the floor.
He was dying as they reached him.
He rattled out a confession as they took him to the ambulance. He died as he reached the hospital.
Chapter VI
He Got His Reward
Governor Kendall frowned over the desk at the dapper figure that lounged in the chair across from him. On the desk was the signed pardon which liberated Jane Thurmond. Also on the desk were copies of the Middlevale Courier.
The Governor indicated those copies with a wave of his hand.
“I don’t like your methods,” he said.
“What’s wrong with them? I told you I’d have to be more or less unconventional. That paraphernalia was just a stage setting.”
“Oh, it isn’t that. It’s the casual manner in which you made it possible for Ezra Hickory to shoot himself. In fact, you fixed it so he couldn’t do much else.”
“Oh, that,” remarked Clint Kale, with a shrug. “It was, after all, only a matter of reward. Ezra wanted his just reward. He came with his attorney to collect it. He got it.”
“Humph,” shrugged the executive. “How long had you known he was guilty?”
“Some time. The newspaper reports showed he must be. The woman didn’t have enough mentality to guard against finger-prints, not if she was as foolish about the rest of the facts as she seemed. And, in any event, she wouldn’t have known the worthless nature of the American Carbonator stock.”
The Governor sighed.
“And you staged that elaborate third degree with the idea Ezra Hickory would save the State the expense of his trial.”
Clint shrugged.
“It would have embarrassed the district attorney to have had to prosecute Ezra. He might have been half-hearted about it. And Ezra would have been shrewd enough to get a local lawyer.
“No. He was there to collect his reward. He got it.”
The Governor slammed the blotter down upon the signed pardon.
“Get out of here,” he said, “and let me think just what I’m going to tell the newspaper reporters.”
A Line to Lefty
by Robert H. Rohde
Coats decides to “pick ’em dumb,” after one experience with a girl who thinks faster than he shoots...
I
“I’ll take that rod!” Coats said suddenly.
For a sultry minute, hiding with lowered lids eves that were murderously aflame, Coats would let Byrne do all the talking. Let him strut his stuff.
Then: “I’ll take that rod!” A whip-crack.
Foolishly, Byrne had taken his hand from his pocket. Saying it with words wasn’t quite enough. He wanted to add the gesture of snapping his fingers at Coats.
He didn’t snap his fingers. Coats, flying at the chance, had made one of those split-second, miracle draws of his. His gun, squeezed free in its holster under his left arm, flashed into his hand as uncannily as a sleeved ace into a magician’s.
Byrne stopped short, staring with round, dazed eyes at that dark hole in the pistol muzzle aimed uphill at his heart. His palms jerked to a level with his reddening ears and remained elevated after Coats had deftly rid his pocket of the blue-steel weight that had sagged it.
“Now, go on an’ tell me, Lefty,” Coats invited. “Tell me where I get off at.”
A car rolled into the garage, and one of the four hard-mouthed passengers it had brought walked to the door of the office in back. What he saw wrenched a startled oath from him.
“You birds rehearsin’ something?”
Coats turned a razor-thin smile on the questioner.
“ ’Lo, Jimmy Walsh,” he said. “No — it ain’t a rehearsal. It’s a play.”
“Yeah?” The newcomer’s stolid gaze reappraised the tableau and fastened on Coats — blank. “I don’t get it.”
“The play itself, that’s what it is,” Coats repeated. His rhetorical figure pleased him, and he extended it. “Wrote and produced by Mr. Lefty Byrne. I was supposed to be the dog audience for th’ try-out — see? What I’m doing right now, I’m callin’ the author!”