Deputy Warden Crawford smiled wearily. “Perfect!” he said. “One more crime of which I can be accused!”
He turned to the police chief, a glum, silent man with a heavy jaw who, like Smythe, was looking with incredulous eyes at Mark Telfair.
“Doubtless you are meditating my arrest, Chief, but I advise you to meditate a long time,” Crawford said softly. “Fortunately for me proof is required as well as accusation. Why he should suspect me—”
“Why?” repeated Mark Telfair. “Before I’d been in your office two minutes you instructed Keeper Naylor to ask Herrington if he will see me at once — me, the only man standing between him and death. If! A damned queer question, Warden, and I got back a queerer answer. Suspect you? I—”
Chief Hardwick muttered, “Why should a man like Deputy Warden Crawford—”
“Five million dollars is the answer!” Mark broke in. “I accuse Deputy Warden John Crawford of the deliberate murder of Herrington in the electric chair. His motive was to prevent Herrington from revealing to the authorities the hiding place of his loot, the approximate location which was already known to Crawford and his accomplice Mitchell. And I accuse him, too, of the deliberate murder of Keeper Naylor because he suspected too much.
“Here’s something Warden Crawford may wish to answer,” Mark went on dryly, and unfolded a dirty, crumpled sheet of paper. “I found it in the sweat band of Chink Mitchell’s cap. No, Warden, I’d rather read it to you.”
“Shoot!” said Chief Hardwick.
“It is signed by the late Charles Hall Herrington,” Mark explained. “It was contained in this sealed envelope marked, ‘To be opened only in the event of my death.’ It reads as follows:
“This is written in my cell less than an hour from the time at which I am to enter the death house. I am harassed by doubts. If there is treachery afoot this statement probably will help avenge me. Of all who have talked to me in the death house only Deputy Warden Crawford talked sense. ‘You have five million reasons why you should not be executed,’ he assured me a week ago. ‘But if you’re clever you’ll buy not only escape from execution, but also a lighter sentence than life imprisonment. To do so you must drive a hard bargain for your secret.’
“Three days ago he told me that tremendous political pressure had been brought to bear upon the governor by influential members of the board of the bank. They wanted their five million returned at any cost. He himself, Crawford explained, had been selected by the governor to approach me.
“Crawford told me the governor had consented to reduce my sentence to ten years if I maintained publicly that I would rather die with my secret than drag out the rest of my life in prison. Crawford showed me a most confidential document which bore the governor’s signature, agreeing to commute my sentence to ten years if I revealed the hiding place of the money. But the governor had specified that only if I entered the execution chamber still steadfastly declining to speak was this reduction to be offered to me. The governor was most reluctant to exercise such clemency, Crawford said, because of the public’s prejudice against me. It had to appear that commutation was given me only as a last recourse. Naturally I expressed my gratitude to Warden Crawford for engineering this.
“ ‘But why are you so interested in driving this bargain for me, Mr. Crawford?’ I asked him. He replied promptly, ‘Because, Mr. Herrington, the State is a niggardly paymaster and I am in desperate need of ten thousand dollars.’
“He added immediately, ‘Payable only after your term has been reduced to ten years.’
“That answer explained Crawford. If he had said one word about my revealing to him where the bank money was hidden I would have had no dealings with him. But he wanted a small rake-off, that was all.
“While I appeared to hesitate he told me that his superior, Warden Grant, would report sick that very day and that he himself would be placed in charge of the prison.
“I agreed then that I would do just as he said, refusing all vague offers of reprieve and even entering the death chamber and approaching the chair with closed lips. At the last moment Crawford is to halt the execution on the authority of the governor. A maximum of ten years’ imprisonment, with time off for good behavior, is to be my lowest price for revealing my secret, and Crawford is to receive his money after the governor has openly commuted the sentence.
“Crawford has just told me that I have already won. But of course the farce in the death chamber must be gone through. If I open my mouth to this young fool Telfair they will give me life imprisonment for my fortune, which is as safely hidden as if at the bottom of the Atlantic. I must not show the slightest weakness.
“But, in spite of Crawford’s assurances, I cannot help feeling a strange terror at the thought of entering the death chamber. Crawford will, of course, halt the execution. He has nothing to gain by not doing so. But still I have decided to write this statement as a precaution, seal it, and give it to my friend Naylor to hold. He has sworn by God himself that he will give it back unopened when I return to my cell after the horrible moments in the presence of the death chair.
Chapter X
“One More Execution”
There was a moment of silence as Mark Telfair finished.
“Huh!” muttered Chief Hardwick.
“Ingenious!” murmured Crawford. “A tissue of lies. I deny it in toto. Let’s see; this adds forgery of the governor’s name to my other accomplishments, doesn’t it, Telfair?”
“Yes. You killed Herrington. He’d have had his reprieve if you hadn’t kept him silent. And you killed Naylor, who received this statement from Herrington. Perhaps some other keeper saw Herrington pass the paper to Naylor and told you. You had to get it, whatever it was, and silence Naylor, who knew too much. You brought Naylor out of the gate to Smythe’s car on the ground that you wanted him to go to town to get you some aspirin tablets.
“In spite of that ugly gash in his neck, Mitchell was able to tell me as he waited for the ambulance before he fainted, what happened to Naylor. As Naylor bent his head to enter Smythe’s limousine you crushed in his skull with a single blow of a blackjack. Then you pushed him in, told Mitchell to drive away, search the body, and get rid of it.”
The telephone tinkled. Smythe answered it; then thrust the instrument toward Mark Telfair. “The hospital.”
“Yes... Yes... I see,” said Telfair, on the telephone. “Tell me about it.”
There was not a sound in the room save for the faint, unintelligible voice issuing faintly from the receiver. Telfair listened at length. “Yes,” he said. “Thanks.”
He hung up, looked across the table at the unworried Warden Crawford, and spoke to Chief Hardwick.
“Mitchell has amplified his statement,” he said. “It seems that Mitchell caught a glimpse of Herrington, who was then unknown to him, inside the wall of Mr. Smythe’s estate. Herrington was carrying something bulky and heavy.
“Mitchell was meeting a train and had only a glimpse of the man. At that time police cars were closing in on Herrington from all sides. He was arrested near Croton half an hour later in a coupe he had just stolen from in front of a grocery store. But by then he had hidden his loot.”
“I assure you I didn’t know the stuff was hidden in my lily pond!” Martin P. H. Smythe broke in earnestly. “It is true that Herrington was an acquaintance of mine — but—”