“Figures.”
“One more thing, Sol. How does Ventura get the shy lock money back to Scarpino if not through Martin.”
“It’s placed in a safe deposit box in the Broad Street Savings Bank. I often make the deposit myself, always cash. The box is in the name of J. Livingston. After each deposit the key is mailed directly to Guido Scarpino.”
Nearly a minute passed in silence. Woolstock broke it. “What do you think, Jim?”
“I think we’ve got the makings of a case, John,” Esmond said.
Sol Steinbach, isolated in a fairly comfortable cell, had a number of bad moments before the trial. The worst one was when a new guard tossed a folded piece of paper through the bars and moved away without a word.
Ten grand to slit your throat has been offered. And accepted. So long, rat.
Sol had the shakes until a Woolstock aide named Carlson arrived in response to his summons. The young lawyer read the typed note with a brow that grew deeper in furrows and then he arranged, within minutes, to have Sol removed from the cell in the county jail and transported secretly to a military installation.
At the trial a month later he tried, when testifying, to avoid Ventura’s eyes. He somehow didn’t worry too much about Scarpino because he didn’t really know him at all, and besides the old man seemed pretty tired, as if surrendering to an inevitable end. But Ventura’s smouldering gaze scorched him once without mercy.
One-eye wasn’t present. He’d been tried by the State on a variety of charges and found guilty. He was now doing time.
Mark Martin hadn’t been charged. The newspapers reported that no evidence had been developed to prove that he was any more than a glorified messenger boy for Scarpino. This grave misconception caused Steinbach to break out in a cold sweat.
Finally it was finished. Scarpino and Ventura were found guilty of income-tax evasion. Each was heavily fined. Scarpino drew a sentence of five to ten years, virtually life in his case. Ventura, only forty-one, got three to five.
Sol Steinbach’s skin crawled.
Appeal bonds were filed.
He suffered sleeplessly at night.
Known these days as Samuel A. Schneider, Sol Steinbach lives in a small city in South Carolina. He works for the U. S. Department of Agriculture. He painstakingly maintains such reliable records on dozens of research projects involving hybrid grains and organic fertilizers that, in his four years on the job, he has earned two promotions. He recently married a retired school teacher, a year older than he is, but looking much younger.
The hair that was still a glossy black at the trial is now white as snow. His face is much thinner and heavily lined. But he is fairly healthy and reasonably happy.
When Scarpino died in prison two years ago, he seemed to feel a certain weight lifted from his shoulders. A few months later, upon reading a newspaper report that Mark Martin was considered to be Scarpino’s heir apparent, he felt the weight return. A week ago, on television, he saw Ventura leaving prison. His wife inquired whether he was feeling ill. Next day, he heard that Ventura had been picked up by detectives from the district attorney’s office in connection with certain revelations made by One-eye Ollie Pace. He felt a great sense of relief.
That is the way it goes nowadays with Mr. Schneider, much the same as it goes with other law-abiding citizens.
Murder in Duplicate
by Herbert Harris
From the grave her hand had come-pointing to Murder...
Lawrence Wayne studied himself in the mirror of his hotel room at Brighton.
The wavy, dark wig that concealed his balding head and the mustache, carefully applied with spirit gum, looked quite real.
When he donned spectacles — an aid his strong eyesight had never needed — nobody could possibly have identified him as Lawrence Wayne.
He counted himself fortunate that he belonged to the theater. Anyone else might find it difficult-dangerous even — to acquire disguises.
It was fortunate, too, that the girl’s apartment was so near Victoria Station. The train, which sped between Brighton and London in one hour, would deposit him almost on the doorstep of Joan Bowman.
He thought: An hour there, a little time to kill, an hour back — not much more than a two-hour gap in the afternoon.
“I’m spending a few hours on the bed. I don’t want to be disturbed till six,” he said told the young chambermaid.
It would not be Lawrence Wayne who left the hotel and returned to it some two hours later. It would be a nebulous unknown — a man with dark hair and moustache and spectacles.
Yet it would not be till he arrived at Corunna Court, the apartments at Vicoria, that the disguise came into its own.
He would make a point of being seen by old Rogers, the porter. More than that, he would inquire of Rogers the number of Joan Bowman’s apartment.
Later, when they had found her dead, Rogers would be questioned. “Did she have any callers this afternoon?” — “Well, yes, there was a man who asked where her apartment was. A chap with dark hair and moustache and glasses...”
Neither the cabby nor anyone on Brighton Station recognized him. They might have done so if he appeared as his true self.
One could never be too careful. Hadn’t the local papers run his photo? And there were the regular patrons of the Brighton theatre, outside which his portrait appeared again. “Lawrence Wayne, actor-playwright, in his own thrilled, Hurried Departure, prior to London production.”
He tried to read in the train, but was unable to deflect his mind from the girl he was about to destroy.
It was only a year since he had first called on her, in answer to that advertisement: “Authors’ MSS typed by clean, accurate typist.” She had typed that first thriller, the one that had never reached the stage. Then came Hurried Departure.
He had been elated when she had finished typing the latter. Taking the manuscript from her, he had known that it had the “feel” of success. Perhaps out of that elation, made more feverish by whisky, had come the beginning of the sordid affair.
Even now, some weeks after she had told him she was pregnant, Wayne re-experienced that shock, mixed with revulsion and hate, that he had felt when she broke the news.
So inconsiderate of her. So inopportune. But, then, she had known nothing of his ambitious plans.
Such plans. The founding of a little theatrical empire carrying the label of Lawrence Wayne — and unlimited capital with which to do it, thanks to the stage-struck heiress who thought Wayne was in love with her...
Back in his Brighton apartment, three hours later, he somehow felt surprisingly calm when the C.I.D. man called on him.
The eyes of Inspector Grey were darting, perceptive, unnerving, shifting from the dressing-room table with its confusion of grease paints to the stage costumes on the pegs and to Lawrence Wayne himself.
“Forgive the intrusion, sir” Grey said after introducing himself, “but we are making inquiries into the death of Miss Joan Bowman.”
“Miss Bowman?” Wayne frowned. “She’s dead?” He was glad he was an actor as well as a writer.
“She was strangled this afternoon, sir.”
“It’s dreadful!” Wayne exclaimed. “I knew her quite well!”
“Then you can probably help. We have the description of a man we are trying to put a name to.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know who her friends were,” Wayne said. “You see, she just did my typing. She’s been typing my plays for a year. In fact, she’s nearly finished another for me.”
“She had finished it, sir. Indeed, she had it all ready to post to you.”