Ken Corning took out a package of cigarettes, snapped out one, offered it to Helen Vail, took another for himself. She came close to him to share the flame of the match.
“I don’t know what it is,” he said, exhaling cigarette smoke as he extinguished the flame of the match. “I got a telephone call about eight o’clock from a man who said he was George Pyle’s bodyguard. He said Pyle had been framed, that there was a shooting out at Lincoln Drive and Beemer Street, and for me to get out there right away.
“I had the car here. I made it in nothing flat. The police had moved the body and taken Pyle to jail. I picked up a yegg who tells me Ms name is Lampson. He’s a witness to the whole thing. He thinks perhaps Pyle did the shooting, but he’s willing to shade his testimony our way if he can get a little cash. He was packing a .22 automatic. The police say it was a Colt ‘Woodsman’ .22 that killed Glover. A girl says she saw Pyle chuck one away. She’s a peroxide blonde cashier in a cheap restaurant. She’s positive as hell. I didn’t get to talk with her, but I talked with the girl who shares the apartment with her.
“Frank Glover was the man that got bumped. He’d been asking for it for a long while. Sam Gilman and Shorty French were with him at the time. They say Pyle got in an argument and tried to swing on Glover. Glover used some fighting language, but didn’t move his hands. They grabbed Pyle’s arms. He broke away, jerked out a rod and let Glover have it, right through the heart, just the one shot. That’s their story.
“The gun the cops found back of the signboard seems okey to them. It had been recently fired — one shot. I understand there were some fingerprints on it — not so awfully clear, but clear enough, and that those fingerprints were Pyle’s.
“The cops did the usual routine stuff. They kept people on the move, I went to a rooming-house with this witness, Lampson. When I came out, I went back to the scene of the shooting and did a little prowling. I found this.”
Ken Corning took a jagged-edged bit of tissue paper from his pocket and placed it on the desk. The girl leaned forward, touched it with her fingertips, then recoiled.
“Blood!” she said.
Ken Corning nodded.
“Sure,” he told her. “I found it lying in the pool of blood that was on the pavement. I picked it up.”
“Does it mean anything?” she asked, staring.
“I don’t know. It’s queer. Why should a piece of tissue paper be lying in a pool of blood. It’s not so very big — half an inch one way, by a quarter of an inch the other, but it’s something that isn’t explained; and, in a murder case, everything should be explained.”
Helen Vail’s lips pursed thoughtfully.
“Do you suppose that red color is due entirely to the bloodstains?” she asked. “The paper looks funny, somehow.”
“I don’t know that, either,” Corning said.
“What you want me to do, chief?”
He shoved his feet wide apart, standing as though he had braced himself against a blow. His jaw was pushed forward, the lips clamped into a firm, straight line.
“Those damned cops won’t let me talk with Pyle, and I’ve got to do it. I’m going to get out a writ of habeas corpus.”
“They won’t admit him to bail in a murder case,” she pointed out.
“I know that right enough,” he said, clipping the words short, “but they’ll let me see him. I want to talk with him.”
Helen Vail jerked the rubber cover from a typewriter.
“After that?” she asked.
“After that,” he said, “you’re going to find out something about that girl who saw the gun flung in behind the billboard,”
“All rightie. Give me elbow room while I fill out these blanks. What’s his name? Just George Pyle?”
“Right,” he said.
She looked up as she was pulling legal blanks from the drawer of her desk.
“How about other witnesses?” she asked.
“Plenty of them who saw Pyle running away after the shooting. They heard the sound of the shot, and looked around to see what it was all about. They saw Glover falling, Pyle running. There’s no one who saw him throw the gun over behind the billboard except the jane in the apartment.”
“Any question that the gun the police found is the one that did the shooting?”
“Too early to tell. But an expert can check it by firing test bullets. Those things are proven mathematically these days.”
She nodded, fed the legal blank into the typewriter and started swift fingers clacking the keys with the staccato effect of gunfire.
George Pyle stared through the wire partition which stretched across the long table in the visitors’ room in the jail. His eyes were red and bloodshot. His face was pale. Every few moments he licked his lips nervously with the tip of his tongue.
“Gawd, Corning, you’ve got to spring me on this rap.”
“It’s a frame-up?”
“Of course it’s a frame-up! Do you think I’m such a tripledamned fool as to shoot a man down, with four million witnesses staring at me?”
“It was your gun that did the killing.”
“That’s a damned lie. I never saw the gun in my life.”
“It’s got your fingerprints on it.”
“It can’t have.”
“That’s what the experts say.”
“What experts?”
“A fingerprint expert the police lured, and one that I hired.”
Pyle’s tongue flicked his lips. His eyes shifted from Corning’s, then returned with the look of desperation of a caged animal.
“Can’t you get me out of here? It’s those damned bars. They leer at me all the time. I see them everywhere I turn. They’re driving me nuts.”
Corning shook his head slowly.
“Keep cool,” he counseled. “You get yourself all worked up and they’ll trap you into some sort of an admission, and then it will be all off.”
Pyle sucked in a deep breath, as though he had been about to dive under a cold shower.
“Corning, can they... will they... is there any chance... do you suppose that they’d... the death penalty, you know, I wouldn’t get that, would I?”
Corning’s eyes were impatient.
“Listen,” he said, “you’re in here, charged with first degree murder. The D. A.’s going after the death penalty. There’s a case against you that looks black as hell. Now quit this damned yellow yammering, and get down to brass tacks. There’s only one way I can get you out of here, and that’s through the front door, and I can’t do that unless you use your head to think with instead of getting hysterical. Now tell me what happened.”
The man on the other side of the coarse wire mesh ran an apprehensive finger around the inside of his shirt collar.
“Gawd!” he said, hoarsely.
Corning waited, steady-eyed, remorselessly patient.
After a moment, Pyle began talking in a low, mechanical voice, his eyes fastened on the battered top of the long table.
“I was walking down the street with Sam Gilman, Shorty French and Frank Glover. Frank and I were due for a showdown. He’d been chiseling. I knew it. He was prepared to sit tight and fight it out. I didn’t want to do that.
“I didn’t intend to discuss things until we got to Glover’s apartment. I was supposed to be alone, but I’d planted three of my men in an apartment next to Glover’s. They were ready to shoot the door of Glover’s apartment into splinters and bust in, if they heard any sounds of trouble. And they were watching the elevators so that if any of Glover’s men marched me out with a rod in my back they’d get a surprise.”
Corning’s voice was impatient.
“Where was your gun?” he asked.
“I didn’t have any.”
“Don’t make me laugh.”
“That’s on the up and up, Corning. I didn’t have any rod. I swear I didn’t. That was one of the things Glover insisted on. I was to come alone and have no rod. We were to go to his apartment for a talk. What he didn’t know, was that I’d been working on a plant next to his apartment for three or four months. I’d moved some of my men in, and had Tommies up there and some grenades. I’d have pine-appled his joint in a minute if he’d tried anything funny.