“Yes. I’d seen Bacon with Mrs. Wallace, who worked for Lucius, and I knew Mrs. Wallace owned just the sort of house I might need in my plans. I cultivated Bacon. Six months ago I saw to it that Jane Shannon moved into the house across the street from the Wallace house. She and her husband, Horace, had lived in Great Falls. Horace knew me well and he trailed me east and forced me to send him enough money to live on. He had a bad heart and a touch of lung trouble. I knew he would not last long. It was his wife I feared. He was onto my game and of course he told her before he died.
“When she came to me to protest and to say that she must tell if the suicides did not cease, I knew I had to get rid of her. Bacon put me wise to the vacant little house on Camac Avenue and we sent her advertisements about it with many cheap inducements, and since it was going to cost her less to live there than where she was, in an apartment, finally she went to see it and moved in. I wanted here here, because already the plot which was to finish her off with Delaney was seething in my mind.
“As long as she was where Bacon could report to me regarding her movements and friends, I felt better, and she was hardly ever from under Bacon’s eye. He knew every one who went to her house and he reported when Hopeton began to get attentive. That looked good to me.”
“Just tell me this,” put in Big Jim, “You burned that cottage at Sparrow Wood, didn’t you?”
Boyerson nodded, sneering. “If you cops had ever gone over that, the game would have been up. We kept everything of any importance out there.”
“But what had the police done that made you take that step?” asked Jim.
“You had taken to questioning Hopeton,” replied Boyerson. “And we didn’t know what Jane had told him.”
“What did you have on Bill Delaney?” asked Ransom, while Big Jim returned to jotting down the story as the lawyer told it.
“Bill ran a sort of mild drug traffic,” said Boyerson. “He let people come to his house where his wife and kids were to get the stuff. He was a bad lot, and finally I sent him the last of my notes, which Bacon wrote on some of Hopeton’s paper in the Wallace house. Bacon had summoned Delaney to that house before, when he was alone in it. Nobody knew Delaney knew Bacon. He had scraped acquaintance with him soon after we started our partnership, and he let him think he was interested in the drug racket. Bacon was clever.”
“Then after you had that note sent to Delaney you made the appointment for Jane to meet Delaney in the Wallace house and you waited in the living room and shot her as she entered,” stated Ransom. “Or was it Bacon?”
“No.” Boyerson shook his head. “You see, Jane didn’t know Delaney and she was dead against me. When Bacon wrote the note to her, which was apparently from Delaney, telling her he was in trouble and had known her husband in Montana and wanted to see her about it that he might expose the man who was causing all these deaths, she fell for it. In the note she was asked to meet Delaney in the Wallace living room at midnight. She was probably suspicious because Delaney asked that, for Hopeton lived there. That was likely why she did not go in alone, but hung around watching, not knowing what to do until the taxi came along. I guess she was sweet on Hope-ton or she would have let him in on this.”
“It was Bacon who did for Delaney, then?”
“Yes. I gave him the aconitine and he met Delaney in the living room of the Wallace house and offered him a drink. That was all there was to it. He had Hopeton’s gun and he simply hid it in the living room where I could get it when I arrived later on. Bacon kept an eye on the living room and intended to steer any one away from it who seemed inclined to enter it. If the body of Delaney had been discovered, well — no one was involved, and we would have finished off the Shannon girl before morning anyhow.”
“Where did you get the aconitine?” demanded Ransom.
“I took a good supply of several deadly poisons from my rival’s laboratory in Great Falls,” replied Boyerson. “I didn’t know when I might need them, and I wasn’t anxious to sign a paper to get possession of one of them.”
“This Shannon girl knew, I suppose, about the cottage at Sparrow Wood, and she muttered a lot about hex and made the sign of the horned fingers,” mused Ransom. “Was she trying to tell me something, Boyerson?”
“Maybe Horace told her all he knew. Some of the people I worked for cash were very, superstitious. I knew that if I used the witch stuff strong in the Delaney case and the Raddock case it would make my game all the easier. The papers eat that sort of thing. When Gail told me about the note she found in Bill’s dressing gown and that she had let Shafter take it to the Raddock family, hoping that it would be used by some of that down-at-the-heels lot to injure Bill or bring him to his senses or expose what he was up to, I knew I had to get that note.
“I went to the Raddock house early in the morning while it was still dark and looked the place over. Gail had told me exactly where it was. I had a thought of breaking in and scaring them into giving up the note, but when I walked around back I saw a lighted window and the figure of a girl outlined in it. The girl was posing in that red dressing gown.
“The next morning I returned, watched my chance, made the cross of salt on the ramshackle porch, and went in and found Rose alone with the baby. She defied me and held back the note. She was a regular little vixen. Well, I had no choice. I had to get rid of her. Then I walked out the back door and reached my car on another street.”
Feeling a repulsion at the horrible crimes of this polished looking gentleman, who sat so calmly in his handsome living room and talked about them, Ransom kept his voice quiet as he asked his questions, and only the scratch of Jim’s pencil broke the silence when both men paused for a moment.
“And so you shot the dead Delaney to throw us off the track?” asked Ransom presently.
“Not entirely,” said Boyerson. “That hadn’t worked in Great Falls. No; it gave me a kind of satisfaction to pretend that Jane had been killed by the man with whom she was plotting to expose me.”
“You were the cowled figure Dorgan and Jane saw on the Wallace porch?”
“Of course. Wasn’t that clever? Aconitine, monkshood, the cowled figure of the monk! And it was witches’ brew all right, first brewed by that witch in Great Falls. I went to the Wallace house to lay the cross of salt, to see if Delaney had been done for, to learn if our plot had been discovered and if it was safe for me to enter the house and wait for Jane. With Delaney out of the way I could marry Gail and get Lu’s fortune, and with Jane out, Bacon and I could go ahead with our scheme and pile up a few more fortunes.”
Dorothy Wilde drew a gasping breath.
“God!” she whispered to the officer beside her. “I’m breaking out in a rash!”
Chapter LV
Red Ink
“What gave me a jolt were those two words spelled on the card table before Delaney’s body,” went on Boyerson gloomily. “Those words, ‘Find Jane’. I knew Bacon had not done that, for he was true to me. He has a fat bank account where you cops haven’t located it. But there, when I crept into the living room where Delaney sat alone, dead, staring at me, I saw those words! I tell you, it gave me a turn. I didn’t know then that Bacon had seen Mrs. Delaney creep into the living room and discover her husband’s body. He let me know that later. It seems strange that Bill was talking to me over the telephone the day Gail overheard the mention of Jane. He had called me to read me a note he had received from his stepfather, Talbot, and in it Talbot told him to find Jane, that Jane could tell him all he wanted to know.
“I knew at that moment that Eu Talbot was breaking, that sooner or later he would tell one of his boys about the game I was playing for millions. I knew Gail had heard that conversation, for she had hinted at it to me several times since the death of Bill and the shooting of Jane.”