Tragg’s chair squeaked as the Lieutenant took his feet from the place where he had propped them on the edge of the wastebasket and sat suddenly upright in his chair. “What’s this guy’s name, Mason?”
“Leighton.”
“Where is he?”
“Running a service station out there. Fleetwood knows all about the place. Bob will tell you about it in a minute.”
“I tell you I didn’t know who I was and...”
“But you remembered your girl friend and remembered her telephone number!”
Fleetwood was silent, sullen under Mason’s questioning.
“Now then,” Mason said, “are you going to tell Lieutenant Tragg or am I going to bring Leighton in?”
“I didn’t talk on any call,” Fleetwood said to Tragg.
Mason grinned and said, “I thought all that part of your life was blank to you, Bob. Remember, that was during the time you were suffering from amnesia. How do you know you didn’t talk on the call?”
“You go to hell!” Fleetwood shouted, jumping out of the chair. He swung his fist back for a haymaker.
Tragg’s long arm shot across the desk, grabbed Fleetwood’s shirt collar, slammed him back into the chair.
Mason had not even moved during the time that Fleetwood lunged at him and Tragg had pulled the prisoner back into the chair.
Now Mason calmly lit a cigarette with a steady hand, blew smoke at the ceiling, said, “There you are, Tragg. There’s your murderer.”
“What do you mean?” Fleetwood shouted. “You can’t frame this on me. You’re trying to protect your client, Lola Allred.”
“Sure, I am,” Mason said. “I’m trying to protect her by uncovering the real murderer. Here he is, Lieutenant. Here’s a man who has consistently lied all the way through. He was the last man to see Bert Allred alive. Despite the fact that he tells you he got along all right with Bert Allred, he didn’t. They’d had a big battle just before Fleetwood was knocked out. It wasn’t any automobile that hit Fleetwood. He knows it and I know it! Now, then, you’ve caught him in a whole series of lies. First he says he didn’t know anything at all about who he was, and he was lying. Now he says he doesn’t remember anything about that.”
Fleetwood glanced appealingly at Lieutenant Tragg. What he saw in Tragg’s face was not reassuring.
“All right,” Fleetwood blurted suddenly. “I’ll tell you the truth, and the whole truth. Then you can see the spot I was in. Allred had a partner in some mining deals, a man named Jerome. Jerome was a pretty tough citizen. In working back over some of the books, I found where Allred had been gypping Jerome. Jerome wasn’t the sort of a man you could gyp without having to face a lot of disagreeable consequences.
“I made the mistake of letting Allred find out what I had discovered. First he tried to bribe me to silence. Then he tried to threaten me to silence. Then, all of a sudden, he became very nice and suave and started telling me it was all a mistake and that he’d explain it to me by producing some additional evidence, but that that could wait until tomorrow, that I could have dinner with them and that we’d forget about business for an evening.
“I pretended to fall for it like a ton of bricks, because I knew the man was desperate, and I was unarmed. All of a sudden I was afraid of what might happen. I just wanted to get out of there, so I told him I was going to change my clothes, and that I’d be back for dinner. I had managed to get George Jerome on the telephone earlier and told him who was talking, but Allred suddenly became suspicious and started back for the room where the phone was, and I had to hang up in a hurry and pretend I was rummaging around in the files. He finally came to the conclusion I hadn’t phoned, but he was suspicious, and very edgy.
“Well, as I said, I started to get out of there, saying that I was going home to change my clothes, and he was all cordiality, patting me on the back and calling me his boy. It was a nasty, dark, rainy night. We’d been working until pretty late. I guess it was about half past seven or so. The Allreds have dinner at eight-fifteen every night. I left the wing of the house where Allred has his offices and started to walk across the patio, walking along the edge of that hedge. And believe me, I kept looking behind me. I was plenty jittery.
“I’d got to the point where the driveway comes in and had reached the end of the hedge when all of a sudden it felt as though fireworks had started going off inside my brain. Of course, I may have been hit by an automobile driven by Patricia Allred, but my own hunch is that Allred smacked me on the head with the blackjack, and probably hit me a couple of times more for luck while I was down.
“I know now what happened. Patricia was coming home in a hurry. Her mother was with her. They saw Allred’s car parked so that the rear bumper was almost on the edge of the driveway and did the natural thing. They turned their car suddenly and a little too sharp. The fender on Pat’s car went through the edge of the hedge. That was all Allred wanted. He thought he had committed the perfect crime. The only thing was, he hadn’t taken note of the thickness of my skull.
“Later on he pretended to be very much concerned about Pat hitting me with the car. Patricia was half crazy with remorse. The minute I started regaining consciousness, I realized I was in a spot At the time, to tell you the truth, I didn’t know very much about Mrs. Allred. I didn’t know how much she knew or whether she was in on what had been happening. I just knew that I was sick and hardly able to crawl and in the hands of people who wanted to kill me.
“So I got a bright idea. I pretended that I’d just regained consciousness. I had to. Allred was getting ready to load me in a car and take me to a hospital. I knew what that meant. So I opened my eyes. Then I put on the amnesia act.
“I think, at that, I fooled Allred. He wasn’t entirely fooled but it would have been a beautiful way out for him. If I only had had real amnesia and couldn’t remember who I was or anything about my associates, I wouldn’t be in a position to tell Jerome anything. I wouldn’t even remember what I had discovered about Allred’s double crossing. And Allred would have a chance to get a deal with Jerome all closed up and be sitting pretty.
“Allred would have killed me if he’d had to, but he didn’t want to unless he did have to. He told his wife that the thing to do was to take me some place where I could be quiet. She was to pretend she was my older sister and all that line of hooey.”
Fleetwood turned to Mason suddenly and said, “Give me a cigarette.”
Mason handed him a cigarette. Fleetwood lit it with a hand that was trembling so he had to steady the match with the other hand in order to get it to the end of the cigarette.
“Go ahead,” Tragg said.
Fleetwood said, “Allred was smart. He sent me out with his wife that way, thinking that if I had genuine amnesia, he’d have time to do something about it. But just in case I was putting on an act he started spreading the word around that I’d eloped with her.
“You can see the beautiful position in which that put him. He could catch up with us, kill us both and claim it was the unwritten law.
“Well, Allred was pretending to be my brother-in-law, and I honestly thought that, if I kept up the amnesia act until he’d concluded a deal with Jerome, that would be all there’d be to it. But I hated Allred’s two-timing, and I decided I’d get word to Jerome, if I had a chance, and tell Jerome to get a gun and come out and join us, have a showdown with Allred and take me away with him.
“Well, I never had a chance to get to a phone without getting caught; but I felt I had at least four or five days more. We left Springfield and drove a hundred miles or so north. Then Mrs. Allred got a chance to phone her husband. He evidently told her to come back and go to that Snug-Rest Auto Court.