“Stick around,” he said. “We could not browbeat that bozo on suspicion. You wait here. I’m going to run over and see Joe Karg.”
And he shot out of the door as a man who is going some place in very much of a hurry. He went at once to the death room, where Joe Karg sneered at him.
“Oh yes,” sniffed the officer, sarcastically. “I’ll get the credit. I’ll get—”
He stopped. Shane was trying to light a cigarette, and his hand shook so that the match simply wouldn’t connect with the end of the cigarette until he had steadied it with the other hand.
“Listen, Joe,” said Snowy Shane, his voice stuttering with excited eagerness. “It’s the b-b-biggest thing in years. I pulled a boner on it!”
“What the hell,” asked Karg with interest, “are you talking about?”
“That match. That broken match.”
“Hell, you planted all of those smoke clues.”
“No, no. That is, Karg, you’re right about me planting ’em, but I had a hot tip on Symmes. When he swore he never broke a match I knew he was lying. I got hold of him after he left here and got him up to my office.
“Well, here’s what happened. I got him started smoking, and he broke a match before he thought. Then I put it to him, locked the door, rattled the handcuffs, gave him everything I had, and he confessed!”
“What!” yelled the officer.
“Telling you the whole truth, Joe. Honest Injun!”
The officer was suspicious.
“You’ve lied to us before, Snowy.”
“But never unless the lie cleared up a case,” protested Shane.
“Well, go on. Then what happened?”
“He thought it over, and retracted his confession and thought up another lie that’d get him out of it. See?”
Something of the detective’s trembling excitement communicated itself to Joe Karg.
“What the hell!” he exclaimed. “Why didn’t you send for me?”
“Didn’t have time. Listen. Here’s what happened. He knew Robb was at the office dictating. He hung around until the jane went home. Then he got in and had it out with Robb. He and Robb had been splitting the take. Robb was going to confess. Symmes tried to hold him in line, couldn’t. The state examiners were on the tail of the shortage and Robb was panicky.
“So Symmes finally got Robb to promise that Robb would take all the blame in his confession. Robb wrote out that confession. Then Symmes croaked him.
“He set the watch back, smashed it, and dusted. He telephoned the messenger department to come and get the confession and left it pinned to the door. Then he went to bed.
“That was just the way I had it doped. The confession stressed too much about Robb being the only one who was responsible.”
Joe Karg’s eyes were glistening.
“Never mind what you doped out. What did Symmes himself say?”
“Just what I’ve told you.”
“Then what?”
“Then I told him to write it out. He started, but got cagey, wanted to know if I could guarantee he could cop a plea. Then one thing led to another, and he got the idea he could swear that he’d gone into the building around eleven fifteen to see Robb, that he’d found Miss O’Keefe out powdering her nose, that he’d lit a cigarette, dropped the broken match, and then beat it before Miss O’Keefe came back.
“So that’s what he’s going to swear to now. He swears he never did confess, that he never was alone with me, that Sheridane was there all the time, and a lot of hooey like that.”
Karg took a deep breath.
“If I’d only been there! Then what?”
“Nothing. I let him go. I figured I’d let him think he’d checkmated me. Then you could go to work on him.”
Joe Karg bit a cigar clean in two.
“Son of a gun! We’ll fix that baby. We’ll frame a stoolie to dress up like a janitor and swear he saw him hanging around the building. We wouldn’t use the stoolie in court, but we sure can use him to make Symmes cave in again.
“Listen, Snowy, will you do something for me?”
“Anything, Joe.”
“Well, just duck out of this case. Leave it all to me. You promised the credit.” Shane was lugubrious.
“I promised Sheridane I’d get the broad free if she was innocent.”
“Well, if I get Symmes that’s all you want.”
Karg looked at the detective anxiously. Snowy Shane thrust forward his hand.
“It’s a go,” he said.
Sheridane and Snowy Shane sat in a suburban hotel where they had registered under assumed names.
“I still don’t get the idea,” he said. “You told me you’d give me the low down at breakfast.”
Snowy Shane glanced at his watch.
“Well, I started something.”
“Fourth degree?”
“Yes. I told Karg that Symmes had confessed, and then I ducked you out of town so they wouldn’t start quizzing you and have you throw me down.”
The lawyer’s jaw sagged.
“You told Joe Karg what?”
“That Symmes had confessed.”
“Good heavens! Of all the bone-headed fools! Why, that’s criminal defamation of character. What’d you do that for?”
Shane shrugged.
“You see, if Symmes had confessed to us, Karg wouldn’t have had much credit. Then again, Symmes would need more third degree stuff than we could give him. But, by letting Karg think, on the q.t. that Symmes had confessed, Karg would start working up a case against Symmes.
“Otherwise they’d never have done anything, because they thought they had the case pinned on the broad.”
Sheridane sighed.
“You kept me out of it?”
“Sure, swore you weren’t even with me.”
The attorney sighed again, this time with some measure of relief.
“You lied to Karg.”
Shane nodded easily.
“Sure. A dick’s gotta lie occasionally. It’s part of the game. We all do. I just tell different kinds of lies from the other guys. You’ve gotta catch crooks the best way you can, not the way you’d like to catch them.”
A uniformed bell boy walked into the dining room.
“You said to notify you if an ‘Extra’ came out, sir. Here it is.”
Snowy Shane reached for the paper. Across the top, in screaming head lines, were the words—
The attorney glanced with wide eyes, incredulously at the detective.
“Of all the nervy guys in the world, you’re it!”
Snowy Shane made a deprecatory gesture.
“No. It’s a simple system. All I had to do was to sell the police on the right idea and let ’em go to it. We could never have broken Symmes down. Joe Karg could, and did.”
The lawyer reached for checkbook and fountain pen.
“You win, Snowy.”
The detective grinned.
“Yeah,” he said, “I got by, but only by the skin of my teeth. You hired me because my methods were unusual. Well, they were unusual enough this time. Just make that check payable to bearer. I ducked for cover after pulling that last fast one, and I’m going to stay undercover until Joe gets his promotion.”
The Corkscrew Kid
Warden Bogger was a hard man, and he gloried in his hardness. He had no sympathy in his make-up. To him, justice was stem and righteous. His rugged countenance, as grim as granite, betrayed his uncompromising nature.
Slicker Williams stood before the warden. He stood slim and straight. His finely chiseled countenance was a mask.
The warden surveyed him with the grim disapproval which the plodder always feels for the man who has the fire of imagination.
“The trouble with you, Slicker, is that you think you can beat the law.”