They walked from the room. Lampson locked the door and put the key in his pocket. Maxwell took Ken Corning’s arm in a firm grip. Ken Corning laughed.
“You fellows are going to hear more of this,” he said.
“Yeah, I know that line of hooey,” the detective told him.
They filed down the stairs. I here was a taxicab waiting at the curb. They entered it and went to the jail. Lampson scrawled a signature upon a legal blank that had already been typed. He held up his right hand and mumbled an affirmative to the oath which was administered.
“How about getting bail?” asked Corning.
“Sure,” said Maxwell. “You won’t have no trouble on that. We don’t want to throw you in. We’re just getting you where you ain’t tampering with witnesses. You can get out on your own recognizance if you want.”
“Well,” Corning said, “let me get to a telephone, and then I’ll fix up a bail bond.”
“You ain’t going to make application for a release without bail?” Maxwell inquired.
“No.”
“All right then. Have it your own way. I was just trying to be nice to you. Hell, you don’t have to get high hat! You’re playing a game, and so’m I. I caught you off first base, an’ I tagged you with the ball. There don’t need to be hard feelings.”
“Thanks,” said Corning, sarcastically. “When I want your advice I’ll ask for it. Let me get to that telephone.”
He was shown a telephone booth. He dropped a coin, closed the door, and gave the number of his office. Helen Vail’s voice answered the telephone.
“Listen,” he told her, “this is important as the devil. You’ve got to have some help. Get Johnson from the Intercoastal Agency to help you. There’s a rooming-house at Beemer Street near where Glover was murdered. A chap named Lampson has a room there. He’s out. Get a pass key. Get into the room, put in a dictograph some place where it’s concealed behind a picture or something. Run the wires into the adjoining room. I rented that room yesterday under the name of Ragland. I thought it might come in handy. Set up a plant there. Have a notebook filled with pothooks. Use an old one.
“Take this down, and put it in the notebook as the last thing that was said... Ready?... All right. Here we go. ‘And there’s no mistake or misunderstanding about the time and the place and the persons present?’ ‘Hell no. Have that your own way, but you’re coming with me now!’ ”
There was a moment of silence, then Helen Vail’s voice over the wire: “Okey, chief, I got that. What else?”
“Just use your head,” he told her, “and sit tight. I’ll be there some time. I don’t know when. Stick there, even if it’s a week. Have meals sent in if you have to. Sleep in a chair; but don’t leave that room.”
“I gotcha,” she told him.
Ken Corning hung up the telephone, walked from the booth.
“I’m having trouble getting bail,” he said.
Maxwell shrugged his shoulders. “Any time you want to ask a favor,” he said, “I’ll get hold of the D. A.’s office, and they’ll send a man down and agree you can go on your own.”
“I,” said Ken Corning, “will see you in hell before I ask a favor.”
“Okey, have it your own way,” said Maxwell, and grinned.
Ken Corning walked back to the telephone booth. “I’ll try another angle,” he said.
He got a bail bond company on the line, a company to whom he had given a fair share of business from various clients. “I’m in the can,” he told them, “on a charge of subornation of perjury. It’s a frame-up to blow up one of my witnesses in the George Pyle case, and give the witness a good background for switching over to the prosecution. The witness is a crook with a criminal record, and they want the publicity of getting me for subornation of perjury to make it look okey for the witness to make a switch. The bail’s ten thousand dollars. I’m stalling. Wait for about half an hour, then bring over a bond and spring me. Got that? Fine.”
Ken Corning hung up the telephone, waited around the jail office. Maxwell yawned, frowned. “We’re not waiting all night,” he said. “I’ve offered you an out. You won’t take it. You either raise bail in the next thirty minutes, or you stay here overnight.”
“It’ll be here inside of thirty minutes,” Corning told him.
“It’s just a matter of business all around,” Maxwell said, his manner propitiating.
“Go to hell,” Corning advised him.
At the expiration of the half hour, a representative of the bail bond company bustled in with the bail bond. Maxwell checked it over.
“Why didn’t you want to go out on your own?” he asked. “What’s the idea of all the fuss?”
Ken Corning regarded him with cold, watchful eyes. “Can you keep a secret?” he inquired.
Maxwell looked suspicious, but nodded.
“You see,” Corning explained, “I wanted to get something on the police. I wanted to show that the police were framing up cases, and show that they were trying to railroad George Pyle by intimidating his lawyer and his witnesses.”
Tom Maxwell sprawled out in the chair. He stretched his feet far out, slid down on the small of his back, yawned prodigiously.
“Yeah,” he said, “a fat chance you got, under arrest for subornation of perjury.”
Corning nodded.
“You see,” he went on, speaking in a patient tone, as though explaining an elemental matter to a small child, “I wanted to be certain that Lampson actually went on record under oath before I sprung my side of the case. Otherwise, I’d have taken you into the room where my witnesses were, before we went down to the jail.”
Maxwell was half way through another yawn. Abruptly, his jaws snapped shut. His body became rigid with attention. Slowly, he hoisted his weight on his elbows until he was sitting upright in the chair.
“Witnesses?” he asked.
“Sure,” Corning told him. “You don’t think I’m a big enough fool to walk into a police trap with my eyes shut, do you? I had a dictograph wired into that room, and every word that was said was taken down by a shorthand reporter who sat at the other end of the dictograph in an adjoining room. That was why I was so anxious to have it straight just exactly who was present, just exactly the time and place, and who was talking. Remember that don’t you?”
Maxwell came out of the chair as though it had been electrified. He stared at Corning with wide, bulging eyes. Then he strode across the room, jerked open a door, and said: “A couple of you boys come with me. We’re going to make a fast ride.”
He came back towards Corning, his face flushed, lips twitching.
“Damn you,” he said, “you can’t pull a line of hooey like that. You’ll plant witnesses by tomorrow, but this is the time we call you, and call you cold. Come on. If you’ve got any dictograph in that room, show it to me, and show it to me now!”
Ken Corning became reluctant.
“I’m a free man now, out on bail. You can’t order me around.”
Maxwell laughed sneeringly, “Thought it was all a damned big bluff. But it don’t make any difference what it was. You’re going right back there and point out any alibi you’ve got, and you’re going to do it now.”
They loaded Corning into a police car, took him back to the rooming-house, up to the room where he had been when Maxwell had made the arrest.
“Show us,” said the detective.
Corning shrugged his shoulders, walked across the room, looked out of the window, down into the darkness of the street, and said: “Go to hell!”
Maxwell’s laugh was gloating. “Search the dump, boys,” he commanded.
He started the search, jerking down a cheap, framed chromo. He pulled a calendar from the wall, flung it to the floor, pulled out another picture, and suddenly paused, eyes wide, mouth sagging, staring into a metallic circle.