She stared at me. “How could it be?”
“He wants to use those letters to prove motive for the murder. It won’t do so much good to show letters that Lasster wrote you unless he can show that you answered them, but if he can show that you paid thirty thousand dollars to get those letters back, that would be better than anything else.”
“But, Donald, can’t you see? He won’t have the letters. He—”
“Where did you put that envelope?”
“In a safe place.”
“Get it.”
“It’s in a safe place, Donald. It’s too dangerous to—”
“Get it.”
She looked at me for a moment, then said, “Perhaps you know best,” and went upstairs. About five minutes later she came back with a sealed envelope. “I know these are the letters all right. I saw Ringold put them in. Then he sealed the envelope. That was just the way he’d handed me the other letters — showed them to me, then sealed them in an envelope—” I didn’t wait for her to finish. I reached across, took the envelope out of her hand, and tore it open. There were half a dozen envelopes on the inside. I shook those envelopes out into my hand, opened each one in turn. They were filled with neatly folded sheets of blank paper bearing the imprint of the hotel in which Ringold had been murdered.
I looked up at Alta Ashbury. If attendants had been strapping her to the chair in the gas chamber at San Quentin she couldn’t have looked any more ghastly.
Chapter six
Bertha was waiting in the agency car to take me to my jujitsu lesson. She had an afternoon paper on the seat beside her, and was jumpy.
“Donald, this is one time you can’t get away with it,” she said.
“Can’t get away with what?”
“They’ll catch you.”
“Not until they get some a lead to work on.”
“But sooner or later they’ll catch you. My God, why did you do it?”
“What else could I do? I’d taken the adjoining room. I’d bored a hole in the panel of the door. That connecting door was unlocked on the other side. Win, lose, or draw, I was elected.”
“But why did you go into Ringold’s room?”
“Why not? I was hooked any way — if they caught me.”
“Donald, you’re trying to protect that girl again.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Donald, you simply must give me the facts. My God, suppose the cops should run you in? I’d try to get you out, of course, but what would I have to work on?”
I said, “You can’t drive and talk. Get over and let me take the wheel.”
We made the switch. I said, “Get this straight. Alta Ashbury was being blackmailed. It doesn’t make any difference what for. The person who was blackmailing her was a lawyer named Crumweather — C. Layton Crumweather.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “She must have gone to see Ringold. The description fits and—”
“The description may fit, and she may have gone to see Ringold, but the man who was blackmailing her was Crumweather.”
“How do you know?”
“He was interested in getting some dough for the defence of a client of his — a man who was charged with a crime.”
“Who, lover?”
“I’ve forgotten his name.”
She glared at me.
“Now then,” I went on, “the only way we can handle this thing — to get Alta in the clear and to get me out of it — is to be in a position to put the screws down on Crumweather. He’s a crooked lawyer.”
“They’re all crooked.”
“You’re cock-eyed. About two per cent are crooked — and they’re damned smart. They cover a lot of territory. Some of the honest ones are stupid. The crooked ones can’t afford to be.”
“Stick up for lawyers if you want to, but give me the dope.”
“Crumweather,” I said, “is making a specialty of beating the Blue Sky Law.”
“It can’t be beaten. They’ve tried that before.”
“Any law can be licked,” I said. “I don’t care what it is.”
“Well, you studied it. I didn’t.”
I said, “The Blue Sky Law can be licked. The way Crumweather is licking it is taking old corporations which have forfeited their charters to the state for failure to pay their franchise taxes, reviving those corporations, and letting them engage in an entirely different form of business. In order to do that, he first buys up the stock of defunct corporations. It isn’t every franchise forfeiture that gives him just what he needs. He needs a corporation that had nearly all of its stock issued and which has no corporate liabilities. He buys up the old shares of stock which have become private property in the hands of a bona fide purchaser, then he revives the corporation. He finds out what his clients are going to sell the stock for and gives them the certificates at a price which gives him a ten-per-cent profit on every share that’s sold. He instructs his clients to avoid the appearance of selling generally to the public, but keeps them in the position of making individual private transactions.”
“Well?” she asked.
“We’ll never touch him on the blackmail,” I said. “He’s too slick and too far removed. The only way to hook him is to get him where we can bust him with some of this corporation crooked work. It isn’t going to be easy because he’s plenty smart.”
“How did you find all this out?” Bertha Cool asked, staring at me steadily.
“By spending expense money,” I told her, and that had her stymied.
“How are you and the girl getting along?”
“All right.”
“Is she trusting you?”
“I think so.”
Bertha heaved a sigh of relief. “Then the agency will continue on the job?”
“Probably.”
“Donald, you’re a wonder.”
I took that opportunity to say, “I’ve already approached Crumweather as a prospective client. I thought I could handle the situation that way. I can’t. He’s too wise. He covers his tracks every time he makes a move. There’s only one other way to do it.”
“What’s that?”
“Become an innocent purchaser for value of some of the stock in one of the other corporations he’s promoted.”
“What makes you think it’s Crumweather who’s doing the blackmailing?”
“It has to be. It’s the only way it makes sense. Earlier today I thought it might have been a trap set by the D.A., but it isn’t or they’d have sprung it by this time. Crumweather is representing a client. It’s an important case. A lot of public attention is going to centre on it. It’s a chance for him to make a big grandstand. He could, of course, do it just for the advertising, but Crumweather isn’t built that way. He saw there was an opportunity to bring pressure to bear on Alta Ashbury and make her put up dough. He did it. He got twenty thousand of her money. Something went wrong on the last ten.”
“Donald, I’m going to ask you something. I want you to tell me the absolute truth.”
“What?”
“Did you kill him?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t think you’d do it, Donald. I don’t think there’s a chance in ten thousand, but it looks— Well, you know how it looks. You’re just the type who would fall head over heels for a girl and do something desperate to save her.”
I slowed for a signal light, and managed a yawn.
Bertha shook her head and said, “You’re the coolest customer I ever saw. If you only weighed fifty pounds more, you’d be a gold mine to Bertha.”
“Too bad,” I said.
We drove for a while in silence, then I said, “I’m going to need a secretary and an office. I’ll either hire one or have to borrow Elsie Brand.”