I beat out the fire around the bullet-hole in my coat, crossed the room to where his revolver had been knocked, and picked it up. I started to eject the bullets from it, but, instead, I snapped it shut again and stuck it in my pocket. Then I returned to my chair, opposite him.
“A man oughtn’t to act like that,” I kidded him; “he’s likely to hurt somebody.”
His little mouth curled up at me.
“An elbow, huh?” putting all the contempt he could in his voice; and somehow any synonym for detective seems able to hold a lot of contempt.
I might have tried to talk myself back into the Wisher role. It could have been done, but I doubted that it would be worth it; so I nodded my confession.
His brain was working now, and the passion left his face, while he sat rubbing his right hand, and his little mouth and eyes began to screw themselves up calculatingly.
I kept quiet, waiting to see what the outcome of his thinking would be. I knew he was trying to figure out just what my place in this game was. Since, to his knowledge, I had come into it no later than the previous evening, then the Boyd murder hadn’t brought me in. That would leave the Estep affair — unless he was tied up in a lot of other crooked stuff that I didn’t know anything about.
“You’re not a city dick, are you?” he asked finally, and his voice was on the verge of friendliness now: the voice of one who wants to persuade you of something, or sell you something.
The truth, I thought, wouldn’t hurt.
“No,” I said, “I’m with the Continental.”
He hitched his chair a little closer to the muzzle of my automatic.
“What are you after, then? Where do you come in on it?”
I tried the truth again.
“The second Mrs. Estep. She didn’t kill her husband.”
“You’re trying to dig up enough dope to spring her?”
“Yes.”
I waved him back as he tried to hitch his chair still nearer.
“How do you expect to do it?” he asked, his voice going lower and more confidential with each word.
I took still another flier at the truth.
“He wrote a letter before he died.”
“Well?”
But I called a halt for the time.
“Just that,” I said.
He leaned back in his chair, and his eyes and mouth grew small in thought again.
“What’s your interest in the man who died last night?” he asked slowly.
“It’s something on you,” I said, truthfully again. “It doesn’t do the second Mrs. Estep any direct good, maybe; but you and the first wife are stacked up together against her. Anything, therefore, that hurts you two will help her, somehow. I admit I’m wandering around in the dark; but I’m going ahead wherever I see a point of light — and I’ll come through to daylight in the end. Nailing you for Boyd’s murder is one point of light.”
He leaned forward suddenly, his eyes and mouth popping open as far as they would go.
“You’ll come out all right,” he said very softly, “if you use a little judgment.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Do you think,” he asked, still very softly, “that you can nail me for Boyd’s murder — that you can convict me of murder?”
“I do.”
But I wasn’t any too sure. In the first place, though we were morally certain of it, neither Bob Teal nor I could swear that the man who had got in the machine with Ledwich was John Boyd.
We knew it was, of course, but the point is that it had been too dark for us to see his face. And, again, in the dark, we had thought him alive; it wasn’t until later that we knew he had been dead when he came down the steps.
Little things, those, but a private detective on the witness stand — unless he is absolutely sure of every detail — has an unpleasant and ineffectual time of it.
“I do,” I repeated, thinking these things over, “and I’m satisfied to go to the bat with what I’ve got on you and what I can collect between now and the time you and your accomplice go to trial.”
“Accomplice?” he said, not very surprised. “That would be Edna. I suppose you’ve already grabbed her?”
“Yes.”
He laughed.
“You’ll have one sweet time getting anything out of her. In the first place, she doesn’t know much, and in the second — well, I suppose you’ve tried, and have found out what a helpful sort she is! So don’t try the old gag of pretending that she has talked!”
“I’m not pretending anything.”
Silence between us for a few seconds, and then—
“I’m going to make you a proposition,” he said. “You can take it or leave it. The note Dr. Estep wrote before he died was to me, and it is positive proof that he committed suicide. Give me a chance to get away — just a chance — a half-hour start — and I’ll give you my word of honor to send you the letter.”
“I know I can trust you,” I said sarcastically.
“I’ll trust you, then!” he shot back at me. “I’ll turn the note over to you if you’ll give me your word that I’m to have half an hour’s start.”
“For what?” I demanded. “Why shouldn’t I take both you and the note?”
“If you can get them! But do I look like the kind of sap who would leave the note where it would be found? Do you think it’s here in the room maybe?”
I didn’t, but neither did I think that because he had hidden it, it couldn’t be found.
“I can’t think of any reason why I should bargain with you,” I told him. “I’ve got you cold, and that’s enough.”
“If I can show you that your only chance of freeing the second Mrs. Estep is through my voluntary assistance, will you bargain with me?”
“Maybe — I’ll listen to your persuasion, anyway.”
“All right,” he said, “I’m going to come clean with you. But most of the things I’m going to tell you can’t be proven in court without my help; and if you turn my offer down I’ll have plenty of evidence to convince the jury that these things are all false, that I never said them, and that you are trying to frame me.”
That part was plausible enough. I’ve testified before juries all the way from the city of Washington to the state of Washington, and I’ve never seen one yet that wasn’t anxious to believe that a private detective is a double-crossing specialist who goes around with a cold deck in one pocket, a complete forger’s outfit in another, and who counts that day lost in which he railroads no innocent to the hoosegow.
Eleven
“There was once a young doctor in a town a long way from here,” Ledwich began. “He got mixed up in a scandal — a pretty rotten one — and escaped the pen only by the skin of his teeth. The state medical board revoked his license.
“In a large city not far away, this young doc, one night when he was drunk — as he usually was in those days — told his troubles to a man he had met in a dive. The friend was a resourceful sort; and he offered, for a price, to fix the doc up with a fake diploma, so he could set up in practice in some other state.
“The young doctor took him up, and the friend got the diploma for him. The doc was the man you know as Dr. Estep, and I was the friend. The real Dr. Estep was found dead in the park this morning!”
That was news — if true!
“You see,” the big man went on, “when I offered to get the phony diploma for the young doc — whose real name doesn’t matter — I had in mind a forged one. Nowadays they’re easy to get — there’s a regular business in them — but twenty-five years ago, while you could manage it, they were hard to get. While I was trying to get one, I ran across a woman I used to work with — Edna Fife. That’s the woman you know as the first Mrs. Estep.