Mitchell did his job thoroughly. Suddenly he gave vent to a soft yet exultant ejaculation. He pulled a small wad of paper out of the top of Naylor’s shoe, where it had been rammed in between his instep and the leather tongue. Kneeling over the dead man, he ripped open an envelope, and unfolded the sheet within. He read it slowly, with both hands clutching it. Then, again he muttered an expletive.
Suddenly, with a gasp, he flung himself from the car, sprawling over Naylor’s body in his terror-stricken haste. The light in his hand flicked out.
Mark Telfair, too, was startled by the sound that had so frightened Chink Mitchell. It was very plainly a tap on the closed door of the garage.
In the darkness Mark heard for an instant a faint crumpling as Mitchell disposed of the paper he had taken from Naylor’s body. Then all was (utterly still within the garage.
Listening intently, Mark Telfair heard the noise outside the door again. This time it was more like a scratch than a tap, and it was followed by the loud sniff of an animal. Then, distinctly, a persistent scratching and a whine.
“That blasted mutt!” Mitchell’s whispering voice was tremulous with rage. He crept to the door, unlocked it and softly called in a dog. Telfair heard the pad of feet; then a heavy blow. With the blow was mingled a sound of crunching bone — and then from the dog no sound at all.
The door closed; the flashlight snapped on again, revealing the hand of Mitchell as it caught by the scruff of the neck a limp mongrel, plainly dead.
Mitchell dragged the dog to the sedan and threw him in on the floor beside the murdered man. Then he lifted Naylor’s body further into the sedan, and closed the door. He pulled down the dust sheet over the car and switched off the flashlight.
The silence that followed was hard on Mark Telfair. He dropped down behind the roadster again and waited alertly. He heard nothing, saw nothing, of Chink Mitchell. The man was standing in the darkness, motionless. For several minutes he made no sound, betrayed himself by no motion.
At last Mitchell’s feet tapped softly on the concrete floor. He approached the door; pushed back the bolt softly, and swung open each side. He no longer used the flashlight. The moon’s ray, filtering in through the open doors, gave him enough light to move about in these accustomed surroundings.
He put a spade and a pick into the limousine. Then he unlatched the emergency brake of the car. Straining against it, he rolled the heavy car out onto the cement apron in front of the garage. Working the steering wheel with one hand, he turned the car until it was pointing down the driveway to the service entrance. He opened the rear door. Then he moved some paces down the road and stood for a long moment, looking about him and listening.
Mark Telfair, choosing his opportunity, glided out of the garage. He crept around the corner of the building and flattened himself out against the rough stucco. His foot touched something on the soil at his feet. He picked it up. It was a smooth round stone.
Not until Chink Mitchell turned toward the garage did he move again.
With three long, noiseless strides he came up behind the man. All at once Mitchell whirled around, startled.
Mark Telfair’s right fist, fingers wrapped around the stone, shot toward Mitchell’s head with all the force of his tall pivoting body behind it. The bruised knuckles thudded heavily upon Chink’s broad flat chin.
The ex-convict’s head snapped back on his shoulders. He wavered on his feet, a moment, stepping widely in an automatic effort to balance himself. Then he sagged to the concrete.
Telfair dropped the stone. He bent beside Chink and frisked him as rapidly as his inexperience would permit. He took the flashlight from one pocket and from a shoulder holster pulled out a small, flat automatic. He made sure that the safety was not in position on this diminutive weapon before he thrust it into his pocket.
With a glance around at the dark night he gripped Mitchell by the shoulders and dragged him into the garage. He closed the doors as soundlessly as the ex-convict had done. His flashlight fell upon a scrap of paper on the floor. He caught it up. It was the envelope that Naylor had carried, but it was empty. On it was pencilled: “To be opened only in the event of my death. Charles Hall Herrington.”
Mark Telfair trained the flashlight on the man and settled down to a more minute and methodical search of his body. But though he emptied every pocket, ran his hands along every seam, and inspected shoe tops, trouser cuffs, coat collar and every other possible hiding place, he found no crumpled wad of paper.
Suddenly he realized that Chink Mitchell was stirring. His fist doubled up to deliver another knockout; then he loosened his fist as he frowned thoughtfully down at the round, flattened face of his captive.
Mitchell’s eyes opened — blinked — opened again. With pinpoint pupils he stared into the flashlight that Mark kept levelled at him. His lips formed a word; then he clamped them together and waited.
“Cautious, aren’t you, Chink?” Mark Telfair remarked. “Not saying anything about anything?”
“I don’t know who you are, fellow, but you ain’t got nothin’ on me,” Chink Mitchell retorted thickly.
For a brief moment Mark Telfair played the flashlight upon his own bruised countenance. He caught a flicker of alarm on the ex-convict’s sullen face.
“Now do you know what I’ve got on you?” Mark demanded. “You’re too rough with your fenders, Chink — or not rough enough.”
Over Mitchell’s blunt, unpleasing features there settled an expression neither apprehensive nor resentful — it was more an absence of feeling than anything else. The look hardened upon his face, like a drying, rigid mask of clay, until it became the expression of a wary, wise convict, betraying nothing, threatening nothing. It was the prison face.
Chapter VII
Double Deception
Mitchell did not even repeat his claim of innocence; he was now deliberately a voiceless, feelingless creature who would not awaken into life without a lawyer.
Mark Telfair wasted no more time on questions. He marched Mitchell at the point of a pistol to the rear of the garage. As they passed the covered sedan, Chink Mitchell’s eyes shifted almost imperceptibly to survey the dust cloth. It hung smoothly, a blank innocent-appearing curtain over the car in which lay concealed a murdered man and a dead dog. Mark glanced at it, too. Though alert enough to forestall any move of Mitchell, his eyes roved here and there in the garage to detect a possible hiding place for the wad of paper that was not on Mitchell’s person.
There was an elaborate work bench laden with tools at the rear of the garage, and on it Mark found a coil of stranded copper wire. He halted his captive, chest to the wall to prevent any sudden movement, and wound turn after turn around him, binding his arms to his sides. As he worked he detected a quiet, almost imperceptible effort on the convict’s part to get some looseness in the wire. His arm muscles were taut; his stomach expanded.
As surreptitiously as Chink Mitchell attempted to get slack in his bonds, Mark Telfair assisted him in his effort. At the same time he broke into a running patter of threats and self-congratulatory remarks.
“You’ll find, Mitchell, that the state doesn’t like to have its prosecuting attorneys crowded off roads,” he assured the silent ex-convict jubilantly, while he bound Chink’s feet as slackly as he had fastened his arms. “And you aren’t smart enough to get away with it, either. We’ll have to find out why you did it, too, Mitchell.”
Chink Mitchell stood like a statue, giving no indication that he heard.