“Perhaps,” the lawyer agreed. “Is there anything in your private accounts or in your bank transactions that would suggest that you appropriated the money?”
“No,” said Hanley. “And nothing to show I didn’t. Yet, as a matter of fact, I’ve drawn only half my salary each month since I made the discovery. I wanted to put the money back and thus prevent all chance of my ever being accused. Clayburne arrived about a year too soon. I hadn’t quite made it good.”
For a moment he was silent, and then he shrugged his shoulders and laughed bitterly.
“As it stands, Ah Fu’s useless and foolish sacrifice not only fails to clear me, but establishes a motive which brands me as a crook as well as a murderer. He has even burned up the deposit book, which would show my honest efforts at restitution. I haven’t a Chinaman’s chance of proving that I’ve played straight since my first and only mistake.”
“I’m genuinely sorry for you, Hanley,” sympathized the attorney. “It’s rotten, too, after the devotion which prompted that crazy yellow heathen to give his life for you.”
“Be sorry for him, not for me,” Hanley smiled. “If the world’s going to think I stole Morely’s money after all his kindness, I’d just as leave be hung for murder. Poor Ah Fu did the best he knew how when he tried to help me out; but the foolish fellow will be tortured through eternity when he learns — as the dead surely must do — what a sorry mess his good intentions really made of things.”
The Police Sometimes Guess Wrong
by Harold Ward
I
My visitor dropped wearily into the chair across the desk from me, a look of horror on his pale, weak face.
“There’s been a murder!” he gasped thickly. “Old Levi Jones — Jones, the money lender! Stabbed! Safe opened and rifled — everything taken!”
“Who killed him?” I snapped.
“I–I don’t know.” He buried his face in his hands and sobbed softly for an instant. “I went there to rob him. I found somebody had beat me to it and had — killed — him! Oh, God! It’s horrible!” he ended, sobbing again.
“Let’s get the straight of this,” I commanded gruffly. Police chiefs are not usually the sweetest tempered men in the world, and I am no exception to the rule — especially when I have been without sleep for forty-eight hours, as in the present instance. “You say that old Jones is dead — murdered — his safe robbed? I’ve had no report of it. Now who the devil are you and how does it come that you know so much about the affair?”
My visitor stopped his snivelling abruptly.
“I’m Tompkins,” he answered shortly, as if the mention of his name settled the whole affair.
“That fails to enlighten me,” I growled. “Elucidate.”
“I am — or was until this afternoon — Jones’ clerk. We had a racket — a quarrel — and he fired me. Let me go with out a second’s notice. And he owed me four hundred dollars commission for dirty work that I’ve done for him. Refused to give me a cent of it. Told me to go to the devil when I threatened to tell the police of some of his crooked deals. Said that I was as deep in the mire as he was in the mud and that his word, because he was rich, would go farther than mine anyway. That’s why I — that’s the reason I went there to rob the safe tonight — just to get what was coming to me. I swear I didn’t intend to take a cent more than he owed me.”
I nodded comprehendingly.
“All right. Now go ahead with your story,” I said, a trifle more gently than before.
Tompkins dabbed at his eyes with his handkerchief.
“I went to the office tonight just about midnight,” he explained, “intending to let myself in with my passkey. When we had our racket today the old man forgot to ask me for it and I was too sore to give it to him — me who’s done his dirty work for five years past and then getting fired that way.
“I knew that lie hadn’t had the combination on the safe changed, and he and I were the only ones who knew it. I knew that if I got the four hundred he owed me he’d never dare squeal. And even if he did I’d be far enough way by morning to be out of danger. You know where his office is? — fifth floor of the Torrence Building. I climbed the stairs rather than take the elevator, figuring on not taking any chances.
“I didn’t meet a soul on the way going up. The office was dark. I let myself in with my passkey, stood inside the door listening for an instant, then pulled down the shade so that there would no light show through the ground-glass panel of the door. Then I tiptoed my way to the two windows and pulled down their shades and then punched the electric-light button. I don’t know why I tiptoed. No one knew that I had been fired, and anyone in the building would have presumed, had they noticed me, that I was there working overtime, as I often have in the past. I suppose that it was the natural caution a man feels when he knows that he is somewhere he hadn’t ought to be.”
He hesitated a second. Then: “I suppose that you’ll think I’m a darned liar when I tell you what happened,” he finally resumed.
“Go ahead!” I said shortly.
“When the lights flashed on I naturally took a survey of the room. The safe was standing open with a lot of papers that had been in it strewn about the floor.
“I knew then that somebody had been there ahead of me — might be there then. You can bet that I lost no time in making for the door.
“I was scared — scared all over. I had that creepy feeling that a fellow gets at such times. And just as I got my hand on the knob I heard a noise from the private office — the office the old man uses — used, I mean — in which to receive his clients.
“It sounded like a moan — a sort of dull, throaty groan!
“Every hair on my scalp rose straight up. I turned my head involuntarily in the direction from whence the sound came.
“Through the door I saw the old man sitting behind his desk, his head hanging over the back of his chair! The handle of a knife was sticking out of his chest, and his whole breast was covered with blood!
“Right then and there I opened the door and fled. You couldn’t have held me in that room with a million dollars.”
“Did you see anyone in the corridor as you passed out?” I asked.
Tompkins looked sheepish.
“That’s one of the reasons I hurried right here, Chief,” he answered. “One of the fellows who cleans the rooms — janitors I guess you’d call ’em — was puttering around in the hallway a dozen doors down. I’m pretty certain that he saw me. They all knew me by sight, probably, and I knew that as soon as the murder was discovered he’d remember seeing me come out and report me.
“My first idea was to beat it out of town. But I’m short on money and I knew that you’d get me sooner or later anyway. So I decided to get to you first, make a clean breast of what actually happened and turn myself over to you for attempted burglary before you got me for murder.”
“How long ago did this happen?” I demanded.
Tompkins shuddered.
“Not over ten minutes,” he answered. “You know the Torrence Building’s only six blocks away and I hurried here as fast as my legs would carry me.”
I jabbed the button which brought Moore of the Detective Bureau to my side.
“Get a couple of your best men and come with me!” I told him. “Somebody’s snuffed old Levi Jones’s light out.”
Moore gave a quick glance at Tompkins.
“The old devil’s been flirting with trouble for the past ten or fifteen years!” he remarked dryly, as he turned to obey my order. “Meet you in the hallway, Chief, with Dugan and Miles, in about two minutes.”