“Jeeze,” he said, “a dictograph!”
“I told you,” Corning remarked, lighting a cigarette.
Maxwell pushed his way from the room, into the corridor, turned the knob on the door of the adjoining room, flung his weight against the door, and sent it banging inward.
There was a couch over near the window, on which lay a man, snoring peacefully. At a table in the center of the room, sat Helen Vail, hair somewhat rumpled, her eyes weary. About her were cigarette stubs, empty beer bottles, a litter of bread crusts from sandwiches. The room looked as though the two occupants had been there for a week.
In front of Helen Vail was a shorthand notebook filled with pothooks and straight lines. There was a receiving end of a dictograph suspended above the table.
Helen Vail turned tired eyes towards the door. The man on the couch gave one last explosive snore and sat up, knuckling his eyes.
“Johnson,” explained Corning, “of the Intercoastal Detective Agency.”
Johnson slid his feet to the floor, grinned sheepishly, and said: “Hello, everybody.”
“Did you get it, Helen?” asked Ken Corning.
Helen Vail stared at him. “I got everything,” she said.
“What’s the last thing you’ve got?”
She thumbed back through the pages of the notebook, saying mechanically: “You mean the last thing before this last bunch of conversation when the detectives took you into the room, searching for the dictograph?”
“Yes.”
She marked a place, started to read, using a toneless, artificial articulation: “Question by Mr. Corning: ‘And there’s no mistake or misunderstanding about the time and the place, and the persons present?’ Answer, by officer, ‘Hell, no. Have that your own way; but you’re coming with me now.’ ”
She looked up questioningly.
“That what you meant?” she said. “It’s the last of the conversation. The door slammed right after that and we heard you going down the corridor. I heard some words as you went past the door, but I didn’t try to take them. You said you wanted only the conversations that took place inside that room.”
Corning nodded.
She picked up the pages of the notebook, pinched them between thumb and forefinger, and riffled them. “There’s an awful lot of stuff here,” she said, “all the conversations, you know.”
Ken Corning glanced over at Maxwell, then turned once more to Helen Vail, and said: “Never mind those, not now. You can write up your notes later and Johnson can support them with an affidavit.”
Maxwell took two swift strides towards Corning. His face was flushed, the eyes glittering, veins on the sides of his forehead stood out like small ropes.
“Damn you!” he gritted. “Think you’re — damned smart, don’t you?”
“I think,” Corning told him, “that when the police rely on the testimony of an ex-convict to frame a charge of subornation of perjury on a reputable lawyer, and a charge of murder on George Pyle, that they’d better be damned certain they aren’t going to get in over their neckties before they start rocking the boat.”
Maxwell granted a comment to the two men who had accompanied him.
“Come on, boys,” he said, “there’s nothing for us here.”
The men filed out of the room, the door slammed. Helen Vail grinned at Corning. Johnson sighed.
“A good plant?” asked the girl, indicating the remnants of sandwiches, the butts of cigarettes.
“I’ll tell the world,” Corning gloated. “You must have been busy!”
“We raided the garbage pail in the lunchroom of the office building,” she told him, “and we dumped all the ash trays into a paper. It took a little while to rig the dictograph, but we worked it as fast as we could. The Intercoastal had a set, so we didn’t lose time there. It wasn’t connected up with anything except dead wires. I was afraid they were going to test it. If they had, it wouldn’t have worked.”
Corning chuckled.
“It was the build-up that did it. Maxwell got such a shock that he lost his grip.”
“Want me for anything more?” Johnson asked.
“Better stick around,” Corning told him. “There may be something that’ll turn up.”
“What’ll they do now?” Helen Vail wanted to know.
Corning studied his cigarette smoke.
“That’s hard to tell. They had planned to make Lampson a star witness, to spread the news of my arrest, and the attempt to ‘fix’ the prosecution’s witness. Now they’ll have to crawl in a hole. Probably they’ll let Lampson sneak out of the picture. They’ll dismiss the charge against me.”
“But,” protested the girl, “why don’t you be the one to bust into the newspapers with the whole story and make them see that the police are framing on Pyle?”
He shook his head.
“Because then I’d have to go on record as claiming we had verbatim reports of the conversations in that room. As it is, we made a good enough plant to bluff Maxwell. Hell let sleeping dogs lie, and wonder when and how I’m going to raise my point. It’ll make them jumpy all through the case. But, if we busted into print, some of the wise guys would demand a transcription of the conversations. We could fake them, but they wouldn’t be exactly right. Some smart bird would see the discrepancy, start in checking up on details, and catch us in a hell of a mess.
“I’d rather act on the sleeping dog principle and keep mum about the entire affair.”
Johnson nodded.
“My agency would go as far as it did,” he said, “but no farther. We couldn’t afford to be mixed up in a mess if someone should start checking back on the facts.”
Helen Vail suddenly gave a little exclamation, slipped open the pages of her shorthand notebook, and took out a bit of colored tissue paper.
“Lookee what I found,” she said.
Ken Corning examined the piece of paper, a bit of crumpled red tissue, upon one side of which was a dark encrustation. It was about the same size as the other bit of paper he had found in the pool of blood on the sidewalk.
“Where’d you find it?” he snapped.
“Same place you found the other.”
“What is it?” Johnson asked.
Ken Corning kept his eyes on the piece of paper.
“Damned if I know,” he said, “but I’m going to find out.”
Helen Vail crossed her knees and made little smoothing motions with her fingers as she pressed her skirt over the curve of the uppermost knee. “I can’t get a thing on her, chief. Her name’s Mary Bagley. She has a corner apartment on the second floor. She works as cashier in the Big Disc Restaurant Company’s Ninth Street restaurant. She doesn’t seem to have any men friends to speak of, doesn’t flash around in expensive clothes, seems just like any ordinary working girl. She’s positive as the very devil. Says she didn’t see the shooting, but she did hear the noise of the shot, and that she looked out of the window and saw Pyle running down the street towards her apartment house. She says she saw Glover lying on the sidewalk, and the two men standing beside him.
“She saw the men stoop over and start loosening Glover’s collar, and about that time Pyle was abreast of the billboard on the opposite corner of the street. She says he ran diagonally across the street, drew back his hand, and flung something that glittered just the way blued steel glitters in the light. Then he started running down the cross street, the police car swung around the corner, and picked him up. She says she got a good look at his face as he ran down the street, and it was Pyle, without the shadow of a doubt. She’ll identify him anywhere. She picked him out of a line-up at the jail.”