“What a sweet morning I picked to be late,” she said.
Ken Corning grinned at her.
“It’s okey, Helen. They didn’t get anywhere. Just trying to run a cheap bluff.”
“How long you been here, Chief?” she asked.
“Since two o’clock this morning.”
“Since two o’clock! Good grief! Why didn’t you call me?”
“No use. Nothing for you to do.”
“Something broke?”
“I’ll say. It’ll be announced in the papers in an hour or two. The police suppressed the news until it was too late for the regular morning papers. They’ll probably run an extra.”
“What was it?” she asked.
“Walter Copley, editor of The News, was murdered.”
She whistled.
“What’s our connection with it?” she asked.
“We’re retained by Amos Dangerfield. The police claim that it was his car that did the killing.”
“Go on,” she said. “What happened?”
“The News,” he told her, “goes to bed around two-thirty or three o’clock. Copley was leaving the paper. There’s an owl street car that makes a swing, and Copley had been in the habit of taking that car. He didn’t see very well, and he was afraid to drive his own car. He was always prejudiced against a hired chauffeur.
“Anyhow, he got to the front of his apartment house, got out of the car. The car started on. An automobile swung around the corner, coming fast, and Copley hugged the safety zone. That car held him there, so he couldn’t dodge.
“Another machine was running directly behind it, without lights. As the first machine flashed past, the second swerved out from the rear, cut directly across the safety zone and smashed Copley down. Both cars sped away.”
“Kill him?” asked the girl.
“Deader’n a door nail.”
“Was Dangerfield mixed up in it?”
“He says not. He got me here, said he knew that the crime was committed by certain political enemies, and that he’d been tipped off there was going to be an attempt made to involve him in it. He didn’t have any particulars, just had an anonymous telephone call telling him he was to be put in a bad spot, and he’d better run for cover.”
“He didn’t know who called him?” she asked.
“No. It was a woman’s voice.”
“You told Mm to skip out?”
He grinned down at her.
“Gosh,” he said, “you’re worse than a detective. No. Of course not. I told him that if he were not apprehended before morning papers came out, he’d doubtless have an opportunity to learn something of the facts of the case that would be built up against him. And, of course, in the case of a frame-up, the more one knows of what the evidence is going to be, the more one can tell what to do about it.”
He reached in the inside pocket of his coat and took out a leather wallet. From the wallet lie took two fifty-dollar bills, a twenty, three tens, and a check for nine hundred dollars.
“Retainer,” he said. “Enter it up in the cash.”
She turned the check over in her fingers. It was signed Amos Dangerfield in a hand that showed slight irregularities.
“Looks like he was sort of nervous when he signed that check,” Helen Vail said.
“Try waking yourself up at two o’clock in the morning and finding that there’s a murder charge hanging over your head, and see how you feel,” he told her.
She grinned. Her mouth twisted in a little grimace. “No, thanks,” she said. She moved towards the door, paused. “They got any motive?” she asked.
“Lord, yes! They’ve got motives to burn. Dangerfield was at swords’ points with Copley. At one time Dangerfield had political ambitions. He started getting them again, lately. Copley should have been the one to support him. His paper’s against the administration. Of late he’s been getting a lot of stuff on graft. He was preparing to blow the lid off the town and expose the whole machine that’s in power.
“If the campaign had been successful it would have swept the old bunch out of office and Copley could have written the slate. Dangerfield thought Copley should give him something nice. Copley had other plans.”
Helen Vail’s eyes narrowed.
“They won’t dare to show that as a motive,” she said. “And, at that, it isn’t much of a motive. A man wouldn’t go out and murder someone just because he couldn’t get some political job.”
“Sure,” he told her. “But be your age. They’ll use the quarrel the two men had, a bitter quarrel. Everyone in the office of the newspaper heard it. Dangerfield accused Copley of giving him a double-cross. He threatened to do everything from horsewhipping Copley to blowing up the paper and suing him for libel. You see, in the mess of stuff that Copley had collected to show graft and what-not, he uncovered a dump down on Birkel Street. It’s rather a tough neighborhood. There was a sort of dance-hall running there. It was a place that paid protection money, and the sort of things went on there that you’d expect to run if you were paying protection money.
“Copley chased back in the records to find who owned the building, just on general principles. He found that the owner was Amos Dangerfield. Dangerfield didn’t even know what sort of a place it was or what was happening down there. He turned the whole thing over to an agent, and the agent ran the place and collected the rents.
“But Copley was going to publish the story of this dance-hall as the opening gun in his campaign. He had a sob sister story on a couple of the dancers there, and a straight case of bribery, clean up to a sergeant.
“Naturally, it’d have put Dangerfield on a political spot. He could have made all the alibis he wanted about not knowing what was going on there, and all the rest of it, but he’d never have been elected even to the office of dog catcher on a reform ticket. Copley knew that and that’s why he was throwing Dangerfield over. If he’d teamed up with Dangerfield, he’d have had to throw away one of his best stories. He figured it’d be cheaper to get some other guy for office.”
Helen Vail let her face squint up with thought.
“Gee,” she said, “some of that stuff must have been hot — politically.”
“Of course it was,” he said. “It was dynamite.”
“What happened to it?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Nobody knows. Probably nobody ever will know. The authorities took charge of everything. They claimed that they had to dig up evidence about the murder. They pawed through a lot of stuff. They claim they didn’t find anything.”
“You mean they had someone slip it out of the safe or wherever it was, and destroy it?”
He said:
“I don’t mean anything except that they didn’t find anything. The authorities who made the investigation were the same authorities who were to be put on the pan by the evidence that Copley had collected. You can draw your own conclusions.”
“Well,” she asked, “what do you think?”
He grinned at her.
“Try reading my mind. It’s what a jury will be asked to do.”
“You think the case will go to a jury?”
“Sure. They want to make Dangerfield the goat. They’ve got to. They thought they could rub Copley out without leaving any back trail. But, if they did leave a back trail, it was going to be one that led directly to the fall guy, and that’s what Dangerfield is. Even if a jury acquits him, the people will think that he was guilty.”
“What you figuring on, Chief?”
“I’m going to try to beat ’em to it and dig up some witnesses.”
“Going to hire a detective to do the leg work?”
“No. I’m going to do it myself. I can’t trust anybody on this thing. It’s too delicate.”