“Why was that red ink spilled on the floor of the Wallace living room, Boyerson?” asked Ransom, determined to clear up everything while this amazing criminal was in a mood to talk.
“I don’t know,” replied the lawyer. “I suppose Bill or Bacon knocked the bottle on the floor.”
Ransom was silent for a moment, then, exchanging a glance with Big Jim. For the red ink, accidentally spilled, into which Dorothy Wilde had stepped and which had caused Bacon to try to entangle the girl in the case, had actually trapped Richard Boyerson! Ransom, knowing the man, doubted if in any other way than through this trap baited by a little gold digger, could he have so satisfactorily caught the killer.
“And it was you who telephoned young Delaney and summoned him to the Blue Dragon Inn to meet the brother who would never come there,” Ransom said.
Boyerson smiled grimly.
“Yes. Rather clever, wasn’t it? I knew young Giles was not known in such places and I hoped it would make him tell a fishy story. The Darien girl ruined that. It would have been so nice if both Delaney men were out of the picture and Gail and her fortune were undisputably mine.”
“Those acorns filled with hair,” said Ransom. “Talbot got one. It scared him to death.”
“Others had them, too. But they were suicides. Nobody found them or thought of them if they did. Talbot knew when he got his that I would kill him. I was mad then with gain. It was so easy to play people! I wanted to be famous as a kind of unique terror. A long time ago I paid Race Shannon twenty dollars for a lock of his wife’s hair. I could tie her up then with any crime I was caught with if she got unruly. I fancied I could protect myself against her, and I never believed she would really squeal. It would place her in too bad a position herself. But I found she meant to. You can’t tell about these women.”
“You unnatural devil!” cried Ransom, giving way for a moment to the rage which consumed him.
Dorothy Wilde rose from the couch and went close to the handcuffed man, her small face blazing with fury.
“Say, it was you who hit me that wallop the time I followed Bacon!” she cried hysterically. “It was you Dorgan saw in that monk rig.”
Boyerson grinned.
“Quite easy, my dear, to slip the hood on my head,” Boyerson said. “The story Dorgan told bears out my theory of carefully-built-up superstition. My fame was growing! And it was my one mistake, that. I did not hit you hard enough.”
“Oh, yeah?” screamed Dorothy, completely out of control now. “Well, we’re quits! I not only lied to you to-night about Bacon, I don’t only have your thousand dollars, but I’m going to be the first to hand you a bit of cheerful news! You are the world’s prize dumb-bell. Jane Shannon is dead! She died hours ago! She couldn’t squeal now if she wanted to!”
Boyerson sprang from his chair, his face livid with fury, his handcuffed arms lifted as though he would bring them down with crashing force on the little tap dancer’s defiant head, but Big Jim thrust out a powerful arm and flung him back in his chair.
“You better behave yourself!” he growled. “Dorothy, you calm down now. Your act’s done.”
“Well, I got him told, anyhow!” she said triumphantly.
The Man Who Died Twice
by William C. Davis
To die once is a misfortune; to die twice is a miracle. The ex-confidence man who revealed to me this grimly humorous chapter out of his life, insists that he is the only man who has died twice and made money both times.
His first death followed a deep vermilion spree in Little Rock, Arkansas. His family had literally thrown him out of the house, and he was doing his best to drown his sorrow. A young scion of a Virginia family swimming in tobacco money was suffering from a similar desire in the same city. The two met.
They got to comparing notes and holding post-mortems on happiness and contentment, when the young scion — Muller, we’ll call him — proposed a novel stunt.
“Suppose we send telegrams to our respective and revered families,” he suggested, “to find out how we stand. Judging from what you tell me, you are in Dutch with yours. I’m in the same position with mine. None of our parents seems to care anything about us living; let’s find out how they like us dead.”
The following telegram was framed, a copy being sent the father of each, over the signature of “O’Connor, coroner”:
THE BODY OF YOUR SON WILL ARRIVE ON THE EVENING TRAIN TUESDAY.
Having sent the wires, each took a train for his respective home, the confidence man — whom we’ll call Wesley — to Huntsville, Alabama, and Muller to a town in Virginia.
Wesley, who was very drunk when he stepped off the train at Huntsville, never dreamed that his death would be accorded such a demonstration. At least two hundred girls from his father’s college, a score of teachers also, half a hundred boys and girls of his own age and set, over a hundred carriages of prominent citizens, and two heavily laden wagons of floral tokens were there at the station to greet his coffin.
As Wesley climbed heavily down the train steps, there rose a sudden gasp of amazement; or it might have been chagrin. Wesley’s mother promptly fainted. His father registered indignation, put his wife into a carriage and drove home, leaving his “dead” son to attend to whatever obsequies might seem meet.
Most of the crowd faded silently away, though naturally many gathered around Wesley to inquire what it was all about.
“Well,” he explained, answering numerous queries, “I had sent a good many letters and telegrams home without receiving any answers. I decided that nobody cared for me living, so I thought I would see if my death would change their attitude.”
It did. The morning paper — the Mercury, had come out with an article headed “Requiescat in Pace.” The condolences of the journal were extended the bereaved parents. As there was little of good to say about the “deceased,” his record for chicanery being pretty well known, the paper did the next best thing. It spoke highly of the bereft parents.
However, everything considered, the young scamp had been treated with lavish charity.
For a week he remained at the hotel when his mother drove up and asked him to come home. His father was in the house when he walked in with his mother, but the old man treated him with scant consideration. Late that night the boy overheard his father say to his mother:
“The young rascal never told any lie in that telegram. He merely wired that his body would be here on such and such a train. And sure enough it was, though not in the form we expected.”
And then he laughed so heartily over the situation that Wesley began to think the storm clouds had dispersed, and by morning had summoned up enough courage to invade his father’s den, hoping to touch him for a few dollars. But the old man ordered him out of the house, and told him never to return.
How his friend Muller fared he never heard. Wesley’s second death came about in this fashion a few years later:
He was in New York, and having just been handed a suspended sentence in a petty jam, was broke. He wired home for fifty dollars, stating that he had been hurt in an accident and needed the money for medical attention. It happened that a friend of the family was visiting the family home at the time, and he promptly heaved a monkey wrench into the machinery by informing Wesley’s father that all the medical attention needed could be had at the New York free hospitals. So — “Go to a hospital,” was the curt reply in a wire.