“We did.”
“Well, I want you to take mine and match them up. I was out with a girl the night of the murder” — he leered suddenly, boastingly — “all night! And she’s a good girl, got a husband and a lot of folks; and it wouldn’t be right to drag her into this to prove that I wasn’t in Henny’s house when he was killed, in case you’d maybe think I killed him. So I thought I better come down here, tell you all about it, and get you to take my finger-prints, and have it all over with.”
We went up to the identification bureau and had Clane’s prints taken. They were not at all like the murderer’s.
After we pumped Clane dry I went out and sent a telegram to our Toronto office, asking them to get a line on the Waldeman angle. Then I hunted up a couple of boys who eat, sleep, and breathe horse racing. They told me that Clane was well known in racing circles as the owner of a small string of near-horses that ran as irregularly as the stewards would permit.
At the Marquis hotel I got hold of the house detective, who is a helpful chap so long as his hand is kept greased. He verified my information about Clane’s status in the sporting world, and told me that Clane had stayed at the hotel for several days at a time, off and on, within the past couple years.
He tried to trace Clane’s telephone calls for me but — as usual when you want them — the records were jumbled. I arranged to have the girls on the switchboard listen in on any talking he did during the next few days.
Ned Root was waiting for me when I got down to the office the next morning. He had worked on Grover’s accounts all night, and had found enough to give me a start. Within the past year — that was as far back as Ned had gone — Grover had drawn out of his bank-accounts nearly fifty thousand dollars that couldn’t be accounted for; nearly fifty thousand exclusive of the ten thousand he had drawn the day of the murder. Ned gave me the amounts and the dates:
May 6, 1922, $15,000
June 10, 5,000
August 1, 5,000
October 10, 10,000
January 3, 1923, 12,500
Forty-seven thousand, five hundred dollars! Somebody was getting fat off him!
The local managers of the telegraph companies raised the usual howl about respecting their patrons’ privacy, but I got an order from the Prosecuting Attorney and put a clerk at work on the files of each office.
Then I went back to the Marquis hotel and looked at the old registers. Clane had been there from May 4th to 7th, and from October 8th to 15th last year. That checked off two of the dates upon which Grover had made his withdrawals.
I had to wait until nearly six o’clock for my information from the telegraph companies, but it was worth waiting for. On the third of last January Henry Grover had telegraphed $12,500 to Joseph Clane in San Diego. The clerks hadn’t found anything on the other dates I had given them, but I wasn’t at all dissatisfied. I had Joseph Clane fixed as the man who had been getting fat off Grover.
I sent Dick Foley — he is the Agency’s shadow-ace — and Bob Teal — a youngster who will be a world-beater some day — over to Clane’s hotel.
“Plant yourselves in the lobby,” I told them. “I’ll be over in a few minutes to talk to Clane, and I’ll try to bring him down in the lobby where you can get a good look at him. Then I want him shadowed until he shows up at police headquarters tomorrow. I want to know where he goes and who he talks to. And if he spends much time talking to any one person, or their conversation seems very important, I want one of you boys to trail the other man, to see who he is and what he does. If Clane tries to blow town, grab him and have him thrown in the can, but I don’t think he will.”
I gave Dick and Bob time enough to get themselves placed, and then went to the hotel. Clane was out, so I waited. He came in a little after eleven and I went up to his room with him. I didn’t hem-and-haw, but came out cold-turkey:
“All the signs point to Grover’s having been blackmailed. Do you know anything about it?”
“No,” he said.
“Grover drew a lot of money out of his banks at different times. You got some of it, I know, and I suppose you got most of it. What about it?”
He didn’t pretend to be insulted, or even surprised by my talk. He smiled a little grimly, maybe, but as if he thought it the most natural thing in the world — and it was, at that — for me to suspect him.
“I told you that me and Henny were pretty chummy, didn’t I? Well, you ought to know that all us fellows that fool with the bang-tails have our streaks of bad luck. Whenever I’d get up against it I’d hit Henny up for a stake; like at Tiajuana last winter where I got into a flock of bad breaks. Henny lent me twelve or fifteen thousand and I got back on my feet again. I’ve done that often. He ought to have some of my letters and wires in his stuff. If you look through his things you’ll find them.”
I didn’t pretend that I believed him.
“Suppose you drop into police headquarters at nine in the morning and we’ll go over everything with the city dicks,” I told him.
And then, to make my play stronger:
“I wouldn’t make it much later than nine — they might be out looking for you.”
“Uh-huh,” was all the answer I got.
I went back to the Agency and planted myself within reach of a telephone, waiting for word from Dick and Bob. I thought I was sitting pretty. Clane had been blackmailing Grover — I didn’t have a single doubt of that — and I didn’t think he had been very far away when Grover was killed. That woman alibi of his sounded all wrong!
But the bloody finger-prints were not Clane’s — unless the police identification bureau had pulled an awful boner — and the man who had left the prints was the bird I was setting my cap for. Clane had let three days pass between the murder and his appearance at headquarters. The natural explanation for that would be that his partner, the actual murderer, had needed nearly that much time to put himself in the clear.
My present game was simple: I had stirred Clane up with the knowledge that he was still suspected, hoping that he would have to repeat whatever precautions were necessary to protect his accomplice in the first place.
He had taken three days then. I was giving him about nine hours now: time enough to do something, but not too much time, hoping that he would have to hurry things along and that in his haste he would give Dick and Bob a chance to turn up his partner: the owner of the fingers that had smeared blood on the knife, the table, and the door.
At a quarter to one in the morning Dick telephoned that Clane had left the hotel a few minutes behind me, had gone to an apartment house on Polk Street, and was still there.
I went up to Polk Street and joined Dick and Bob. They told me that Clane had gone in apartment number 27, and that the directory in the vestibule showed this apartment was occupied by George Farr. I stuck around with the boys until about two o’clock, when I went home for some sleep.
At seven I was with them again, and was told that our man had not appeared yet. It was a little after eight when he came out and turned down Geary Street, with the boys trailing him, while I went into the apartment house for a talk with the manager. She told me that Farr had been living there for four or five months, lived alone, and was a photographer by trade, with a studio on Market Street.
I went up and rang his bell. He was a husky of thirty or thirty-two with bleary eyes that looked as if they hadn’t had much sleep that night. I didn’t waste any time with him.
“I’m from the Continental Detective Agency and I am interested in Joseph Clane. What do you know about him?”