Warden Garrity had recognized the name too. “Oh yes,” he said quickly. “That must have been it. But I doubt if we could prove it.” He paused just an instant, and looked fixedly at Malone, as though daring him to speak. “The report will read that Paul Palmer obtained a rope, by means which have not yet been ascertained, and committed suicide while of unsound mind.”
Malone opened his mouth and shut it again. He knew when he was licked. Temporarily licked, anyway. “For the love of mike,” he said, “leave out the unsound mind.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” the warden said coldly.
Malone had kept his temper as long as he could. “All right,” he said, “but I’ll start an investigation that’ll be a pip.” He snorted. “Letting a gangster smuggle a rope in to a guy in the death house!” He glared at Dr. Dickson. “And you, foxy, with two escapes from the prison hospital in six months.” He kicked the wastebasket again, this time sending it halfway across the room. “I’ll show you from investigations! And I’m just the guy who can do it, too.”
Dr. Dickson said quickly, “We’ll substitute ‘temporarily depressed’ for the ‘unsound mind.’ ”
But Malone was mad, now. He made one last, loud comment regarding the warden’s personal life and probably immoral origin, and slammed the door so hard when he went out that the steel engraving of Chester A. Arthur over the warden’s desk shattered to the floor.
“Mr. Malone,” Bowers said in a low voice as they went down the hall, “I searched that cell, after they took the body out. Whoever smuggled in that rope smuggled in a letter, too. I found it hid in his mattress, and it wasn’t there yesterday because the mattress was changed.” He paused, and added “And the rope couldn’t of been there last night either, because there was no place he could of hid it.”
Malone glanced at the envelope the guard held out to him — pale grey expensive stationery, with “Paul Palmer” written across the front of it in delicate, curving handwriting.
“I haven’t any money with me,” the lawyer said.
Bowers shook his head. “I don’t want no dough. But there’s gonna be an assistant warden’s job open in about three weeks.”
“You’ll get it,” Malone said. He took the envelope and stuffed it in an inside pocket. Then he paused, frowned, and finally added, “And keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. Because there’s going to be an awful stink when I prove Paul Palmer was murdered.”
The pretty, black-haired girl in Malone’s anteroom looked up as he opened the door. “Oh, Mr. Malone,” she said quickly. “I read about it in the paper. I’m so sorry.”
“Never mind, Maggie,” the lawyer said. “No use crying over spilled clients.” He went into his private office and shut the door.
Fate was treating him very shabbily, evidently from some obscure motive of personal spite. He’d been counting heavily on that five thousand buck fee.
He took a bottle of rye out of the filing cabinet marked “Personal”, poured himself a drink, noted that there was only one more left in the bottle, and stretched out on the worn red leather davenport to think things over.
Paul Palmer had been an amiable, stupid young drunk of good family, whose inherited wealth had been held in trust for him by an uncle considered to be the stingiest man in Chicago. The money was to be turned over to him on his thirtieth birthday — some five years off — or on the death of the uncle, Carter Brown. Silly arrangement, Malone reflected, but rich men’s lawyers were always doing silly things.
Uncle Carter had cramped the young man’s style considerably, but he’d managed pretty well. Then he’d met Madelaine Starr.
Malone lit a cigar and stared dreamily through the smoke. The Starrs were definitely social, but without money. A good keen eye for graft, too. Madelaine’s uncle was probably making a very good thing out of that political appointment as prison doctor.
Malone sighed, wished he weren’t a lawyer, and thought about Madelaine Starr. An orphan, with a tiny income which she augmented by modelling in an exclusive dress shop — a fashionable and acceptable way of making a living. She had expensive tastes. (The little lawyer could spot expensive tastes in girls a mile away.)
She’d had to be damned poor to want to marry Palmer, Malone reflected, and damned beautiful to get him. Well, she was both.
But there had been another girl, one who had to be paid off. Lillian Claire by name, and a very lovely hunk of girl, too. Lovely, and smart enough to demand a sizable piece of money for letting the Starr-Palmer nuptials go through without a scandalous fuss.
Malone shook his head sadly. It had looked bad at the trial. Paul Palmer had taken his bride-to-be night-clubbing, delivering her back to her kitchenette apartment just before twelve. He’d been a shade high, then, and by the time he’d stopped off at three or four bars, he was several shades higher. Then he’d paid a visit to Lillian Claire, who claimed later at the trial that he’d attempted — unsuccessfully — to talk her out of the large piece of cash money, and had drunk up all the whiskey in the house. She’d put him in a cab and sent him home.
No one knew just when Paul Palmer had arrived at the big, gloomy apartment he shared with Carter Brown. The manservant had the night off. It was the manservant who discovered, next morning, that Uncle Carter had been shot neatly through the forehead with Paul Palmer’s gun, and that Paul Palmer had climbed into his own bed, fully dressed, and was snoring drunk.
Everything had been against him, Malone reflected sadly. Not only had the jury been composed of hard-working, poverty-stricken men who liked nothing better than to convict a rich young wastrel of murder, but worse still, they’d all been too honest to be bribed. The trial had been his most notable failure. And now, this.
But Paul Palmer would never have hanged himself. Malone was sure of it. He’d never lost hope. And now, especially, when a new trial had been granted, he’d have wanted to live.
It had been murder. But how had it been done?
Malone sat up, stretched, reached in his pocket for the pale grey envelope Bowers had given him, and read the note through again.
My dearest Pauclass="underline"
I’m getting this note to you this way because I’m in terrible trouble and danger. I need you — no one else can help me. I know there’s to be a new trial, but even another week may be too late.
Isn’t there any way?
Your own
“M”, Malone decided, would be Madelaine Starr. She’d use that kind of pale grey paper, too.
He looked at the note and frowned. If Madelaine Starr had smuggled that note to her lover, would she have smuggled in a rope by the same messenger? Or had someone else brought in the rope?
There were three people he wanted to see. Madelaine Starr was one. Lillian Claire was the second. And Max Hook was the third.
He went out into the anteroom, stopped halfway across it and said aloud, “But it’s a physical impossibility. If someone smuggled that rope into Paul Palmer’s cell and then Palmer hanged himself, it isn’t murder. But it must have been murder.” He stared at Maggie without seeing her. “Damn it, though, no one could have got into Paul Palmer’s cell and hanged him.”
Maggie looked at him sympathetically, familiar from long experience with her employer’s processes of thought. “Keep on thinking and it’ll come to you.”
“Maggie, have you got any money?”
“I have ten dollars, but you can’t borrow it. Besides, you haven’t paid my last week’s salary yet.”
The little lawyer muttered something about ungrateful and heartless wenches, and flung himself out of the office.