“That was the first thing that looked phony,” Shayne went on, taking a deep drag on his cigarette. “Then there was Hardeman all tied up in the clothes closet. But the closet door had been left ajar so he wouldn’t smother in there. Why? Why were they being careful of Hardeman’s health-unless he was the one who had hired them to pull the attack on me?”
“By God,” Boyle broke in excitedly, “Hardeman mentions that right here. He realized leaving the closet door cracked was a mistake.”
“The only reason I could see for any of it was that Hardeman had fixed that scene to put himself wholly in the clear before the investigation started. By faking an attack on himself he hoped to divert suspicion from himself entirely. His own guilty conscience made him do it, of course, and it served to point suspicion at him instead.”
“Why didn’t you say something right then?” Payson interpolated with genuine regret. “Ben Edwards might still be alive if you had.”
“Hell,” Shayne snapped, “that wouldn’t have done any good. Where would my proof be? I just had a hunch. I’m sorry about Ben Edwards, but I’m not sure it isn’t better this way. If he had lived he would have gone back to Joliet to serve an unexpired sentence. He escaped after serving five years of a twenty- to fifty-year rap.”
“That’s right, too.” Boyle’s tone was full of awe. He tapped a forefinger on Hardeman’s confession and nodded. “It’s all written down here.”
Shayne directed his next explanation to Will Gentry, who had subsided and slumped to a restful position in his chair. “I wanted to talk to Mayme Martin before I started on the case, and made a flying trip back to Miami to see her. I didn’t have time before leaving.” He paused and grinned sardonically. “I had an important engagement with Mr. Hardeman at exactly seven o’clock.” Shayne caught Gentry’s eye. Gentry nodded approval. His gaze shifted to Tim Rourke. Rourke’s nostrils flared and his eyes twinkled.
“When I got back to her apartment, Mayme Martin was dead,” Shayne resumed. “I made the mistake of first thinking she was murdered to prevent her from talking. Then-when Gentry showed me a slip of paper with my name and phone number on it, I began to see it differently. It looked as though she had been sent to tell me something that someone wanted me to know. You understand, gentlemen, I knew nothing about the case when I talked to Miss Martin. The only name she mentioned was Payson’s. She knew, somehow, that Payson intended calling me in on the case.”
By way of interruption, Mr. Payson coughed delicately.
“Then I realized,” Shayne continued, “what had actually happened. Whoever sent her to me knew that I had been to see her. They didn’t know she had demanded money from me for herself and I had refused. Anyone who knows me would know that I would, naturally, refuse.” He paused and grinned, catching Will Gentry’s eye. “Right here, I would like to exonerate Mr. Payson. Miss Martin’s deal was entirely with Hardeman.
“When Hardeman murdered her he was positive that she had told whatever she was supposed to tell-and her usefulness was ended. Not only that, but she was safer out of the way so she couldn’t keep on talking and ball up the deal. So-” Shayne drew his hand across his throat, intimating the manner in which Mayme Martin had died.
“When I learned that Miss Martin and Gil Matrix were old friends and that she had broken with him, it looked like a good bet that her information dealt with Matrix’s past-which eliminated Matrix as the man who had sent her to me. He had gone to certain extremes to keep his past a secret.”
Shayne sought out Will Gentry’s eyes, found them, and winked.
Chief Boyle took advantage of the quiet and said in a loud voice, “Damned if all that isn’t right here in Hardeman’s confession.”
“Now, we come to the part Ben Edwards and his camera played in the case. While I was in Miss Martin’s apartment, she called Max Samuelson on the phone and told him she knew for a fact that the invention was perfected and knew where the model and the plans were. This was confusing, as you can readily understand, gentlemen, but the name Ben Edwards stuck in my mind. Remember, I hadn’t the faintest idea what anything was about at the time.
“After I arrived here and started working on the case, both Mr. Matrix and Mrs. Edwards tried to convince me that the invention of the camera was not perfected. They gave this reason for Ben’s refusal to patent it. I thought he must have another reason, after talking with John Hardeman who assured me that it was perfected. Naturally, I began to bore into that reason. I deduced that there was something in his past which he was afraid would come to light if he applied to Washington for a patent. I know Max Samuelson, and had an idea that he knew what it was.
“I know now what that reason was-Edwards was afraid his real name would come out when the patent office investigated, and he would have to go back to prison.”
“Yes, sir,” Boyle interjected. “Hardeman knew all that a month ago. He says here that that was when-”
“Wait.” Shayne held up his hand with a pained expression on his face. “I’ve got to convince Mr. Payson I have earned my fee.”
“This is all most amazing,” Mr. Payson said quickly. “So far as the fee is concerned, I am convinced, but-”
“That was when Hardeman saw what a slick chance he had to put over a counterfeiting deal,” Shayne interrupted, “with a perfect frame-up to hang the rap on Matrix and Edwards when the going got tough. I don’t know what salary you were paying Hardeman for managing the track,” he went on, turning to Mr. Payson, “but it evidently was not enough. He saw the stockholders earning huge dividends while he did all the work.”
“That is not true-” Mr. Payson began, but Shayne cut him off.
“The camera and Ben’s refusal to patent it must have given Hardeman the idea. It was simple enough for him to arrange with a printer in Miami to print the forgeries. Hardeman was the man who decided what the new design would be each day. He could have his forgeries printed ahead, distributed to the stooges who cashed them for him before the genuine ones were even printed at the Elite shop. And he could get out from under any time he wanted to by letting the truth about Matrix and Edwards’s past records leak out. It had to leak out, though, in a way so it wouldn’t seem to come from Hardeman-because if it ever became known that he had been in possession of that knowledge all the time he would have had to explain why he hadn’t told the authorities at once. Thus, the elaborate precautions to have Mayme Martin tell me-and her death afterward so she couldn’t spill the beans about his sending her to me.”
“I’ll be eternally damned,” Gil Matrix rasped out. He spoke slowly and thoughtfully, as if to himself alone, when Shayne paused. “And I thought all the time it was MacFarlane.”
“There’s still one important fact of the case which you have failed to clear up, Mr. Shayne,” Albert Payson warned. “Ben Edwards’s death-the murder you accused me of committing.”
Shayne chuckled. “I thought you might have-at the time,” he told the banker cheerfully. “I had most of the angles figured, but even then I wasn’t sure it wasn’t you instead of Hardeman. In a way, you have one of the biggest crooks at large to thank for it. I learned from Max Samuelson that Hardeman was out of his office when Edwards was killed. Edwards had been called to his death by a telephone call from some unknown party. Why? I admit I was stuck for an answer.
“Then it came to me. Samuelson was here for the express purpose of paying cash for Edwards’s invention. A very little cash, I may say, but we all know Edwards would have accepted the offer. Hardeman knew about it. As soon as Samuelson told him over the phone what he intended to do, Hardeman realized that Edwards’s sale of the camera would do away with the mystery it was making of the counterfeiting, and thus discount the value of the camera as evidence against Matrix. Hardeman’s nightly revenue from the track would be at an end.
“By that time Hardeman was frantic. He didn’t know why I was fooling around and hadn’t arrested Matrix-not realizing that Mayme Martin had not told me what she knew. The only out he could see was to kill Edwards before Samuelson got to him with his offer-and to hope the crime would be laid to Matrix when the truth came out-on the assumption that Matrix had killed them both to keep his past a secret and, perhaps, that Matrix could cash in on the camera besides.”