After the letter was finished and mailed, Corning spent some time giving careful instructions to his alert secretary and having her repeat them back to him until he was satisfied.
Helen Vail sat in a dilapidated overstuffed chair in Mrs. Ambrose’s former home. She wore stockings that were shapeless, with runs in each stocking. Her dress was ill-fitting and had evidently been dyed by unskilled hands. The color was a nondescript black which seemed to have been unequally spread over brown, with the brown peeping through in places. There were deep lines etched about her mouth and her eyes. In the dim light, she seemed twenty-five years older than her real age. She was patiently embroidering.
Knuckles sounded on the door.
“Come in,” she called.
The door pushed open, and a big man with a curiously white face, stood on the threshold.
“Mrs. Ambrose?” he asked.
“Come in,” she said, in a thin toneless voice of great weariness.
He closed the door behind him.
“I’m Harrison Burman,” he said slowly. “I got your letter.”
Helen Vail sighed. It sounded like a sigh of weariness, but it was of intense relief. The man did not know the real Ella Ambrose and had taken her at her word.
“All right,” she said. “Come in and sit down. I want to talk with you.”
Burman’s tone was cautious. “You want money?” he asked.
“No. I just want to put my mind at rest.”
“All right,” he told her irritably, “go ahead and put it at rest. You probably know that you’re double-crossing me. You’re not living up to your bargain. You had promised to be in Colorado by this time, and to stay there.”
Helen Vail acted her part perfectly.
“I can’t help it,” she said, in that same lifeless tone which is the unconscious badge of those who have given up the struggle. “I’m a mother with a boy to bring up and I want to bring him up right.”
“Well,” rasped Burman, “what is it you want?”
“I know a lot more than most people think I know,” she said.
“Have you got to go into all that?”
“Yes,” she said, “into all of it.”
“Then go ahead and get it over with.”
His hands were pushed down deep into his coat pockets.
Helen Vail kept her eyes downcast and spoke in the same weary monotone.
“I knew Sam Driver,” she said, “and Driver talked to me, and I knew Harry Green, who wasn’t Harry Green, but was Richard Post, a man wanted for murder.”
“Sure,” said Burman irritably, “we know all that. That’s why you got the money to get out of the country. If it hadn’t been for that, you wouldn’t have had a cent.”
“I know,” she said, in that patient monotone of weariness. “And I know something else. Harry Green didn’t kill George Bixel. You paid him to take the rap. You got caught with Mrs. Bixel. George Bixel, her husband, caught you, and you shot him.
“I guess you had to do it to keep him from shootin’ you. Maybe you’re to blame. Maybe you ain’t. That’s what bothers me. I got that on my conscience and I can’t sleep. You didn’t think I knew about it. You thought I just knew about planting Harry’s body in Sam Driver’s car. But I knew everything about what had happened. Sam Driver didn’t know it, because Harry never told him. Harry told me all he knew and Sam told me all he knew. So I knew everything.
“There you was out with another man’s wife and mixed up in a shooting. She and her husband hadn’t taken that cottage at all and have you come up to join them. You and the woman had taken that cottage and the husband found you. You was a big publisher and you couldn’t afford to get mixed in a scandal, even if you could prove that you had to kill him to keep him from killing you. So you paid Harry to take the rap for murder and get out. You made him do it. But Harry spent the money, and then he wanted to get more, so he came back and got more.
“First, you tried to scare him by saying you’d let him get tried for the murder and then he scared you by telling you to go ahead and his lawyer would show up what happened. There was a lot of things, I guess, that had to be kinda shaded over. Things that you didn’t want the authorities looking into too much, about how long you’d been up there and how long Mrs. Bixel had been up there and how long her husband had been up there.
“So Harry Green got to bleeding you for money. You couldn’t stand it. You had an argument or a fight with him and shot him. But you knew where Sam Driver was, because Harry Green had told you where he was. Harry tried to make you think that Sam Driver could be a witness for him if you ever pinched him on the murder rap.
“Well, you had somebody that helped you and you put Harry’s body in Sam’s car and then you fixed the headlights so Sam would get pinched. You knew Sam was an ex convict and nobody’d believe him. But you did a slick stunt. You put lots of money in Harry’s pockets; then, if anybody did know the truth, it would look like Harry had been to your place and got the money and somebody had killed him afterwards. You figured either that Sam Driver would find the body and take out the money and try to beat it — as he did — or else, if he didn’t find the body until after he’d got pinched, the money would make it look like Harry Green had been to your place and gone away, in case anybody suspected what the truth was.”
Burman’s face was the color of bread dough, pasty and lifeless. He stared at her with glassy eyes and a mouth that sagged.
“You’re absolutely crazy,” he said, “you can’t prove a word of it!”
“Maybe not,” she said, “but, with what I know, and what Sam Driver knows we could come pretty near proving it. And I could prove that you and somebody else took Harry Green’s body and dumped it into Sam Driver’s car, because I seen you. I seen your Cadillac car and I know it. And I seen you. You had on evening clothes when you did it.”
Burman stood staring down at her with eyes that were cold and malevolent, lips that quivered.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I want to know that you acted right,” she said. “If you did, I can shield you. But if you didn’t, I can’t.”
Burman spoke swiftly, persuasively.
“Look here,” he said, “some of your facts are right and some of them are wrong. Green didn’t tell you the whole truth. Green had broken into the place and tried to hold up Mrs. Bixel. I came into the room just in time and smashed Green over the head. It knocked him out and I put him in a closet.
“Then Bixel showed up and was going to shoot me. I had the gun that I’d taken from Harry Green and I shot first, that’s all. When Green regained consciousness, I put it up to him that he could either take five thousand dollars in cash and dust out, or that I’d turn him in for murder and frame it on him anyway. I was desperate and I had to do it. You can understand that. The killing was in self-defense, but I had another man’s wife with me and I’d killed her husband. A jury would have been hostile.”
Helen Vail’s voice maintained its tone of dreary weariness.
“You ain’t justified yourself yet. It ain’t right to have Sam Driver framed for this other murder. You had no right to kill Harry Green. You’re a rich man. You could have kept on paying him money and it wouldn’t have hurt you. You’ve got to let Sam Driver go free.”
“I can’t do that,” he said irritably. “I’ve fixed it up so he can get a break. He can take a plea for manslaughter.”
“Maybe the District Attorney wouldn’t agree to that,” said Helen Vail, in her assumed voice.
“Sure he will,” said Burman. “I can get anything I want. I am a political power here and I can fix things up. I’ve already got word to his lawyer. All you’ve got to do is to get out and stay out, and things will be all right.”