“To start out,” I said, “I want you to understand you have to tell me the truth or I can’t help you. If you killed Ford, I don’t want a confession, but I want you to tell me to drop the case right now. There isn’t any point in wasting Madeline’s money on a lost cause.”
“I didn’t kill him, Mr. Moon,” he said earnestly. He regarded me with a thoughtful expression and added, “I don’t much like the idea of Madeline bearing the expense though. Couldn’t I assume the responsibility of paying you?”
“Got any money?”
“Well, no. A few dribbles of royalties from a couple of minor inventions. Nothing above living expenses. That is, not at the moment. I didn’t mean I could pay you right away. I have a couple of new patent applications in, and both should bring me a lot of money within the next few years.”
“I may not live beyond the next few years,” I told him. “Particularly if none of my clients pay me until their ships come in and I have to stop eating until they do. We’ll let Madeline handle the bills, and if you feel indebted to her, pay her back when the bonanza arrives. Now what’s the story on the gun found in your workshop?”
He claimed he had never seen it before Hannegan pulled it from his workshop drawer.
“I understand it’s probably one of several Walter Ford gave to various people as presents,” he said. “I believe they’re checking serial numbers to make sure. But Ford never gave me a gun. Why should he have? I’ve only known him a couple of months, and our acquaintanceship was merely casual.”
“How casual?”
“Well, I met him at Madeline’s house one night about three months ago when I dropped in unexpectedly. He and Madeline and Barney Amhurst were having some kind of meeting. About the Huntsafe, I guess, though at the time I didn’t even know Barney was working on the Huntsafe. After that I saw Ford at Madeline’s maybe a half dozen times, but we never said more than a few words to each other. We certainly didn’t know each other well enough to exchange presents.”
“How do you account for your initials on the pistol?”
“I don’t,” he said.
There was nothing more I could get out of him about his relations with Walter Ford, but I did get his version of the ruckus with Barney Amhurst. According to Tom Henry, he himself had started working on a gadget similar to the Huntsafe while still a student at M.I.T. and had on several occasions discussed his idea with Madeline Strong’s brother Lloyd, who was also a student there. Lloyd had never mentioned that he was working on the same idea himself.
“Lloyd was closemouthed to the point of secretiveness,” Henry said. “You’d think that after I told him what I was doing, he’d return the compliment inasmuch as he was working on a similar project. Particularly since he was probably my best friend. I’ve known both Lloyd and Madeline since we were all kids together. But even Madeline didn’t know what Lloyd and Barney were working on until after Lloyd was shot. You see...”
“Whoa!” I said. “Lloyd was murdered too?”
Chapter Nine
Thomas Henry shook his head impatiently. “No, no, Mr. Moon. A hunting accident last November. Up in the New York Catskills when five of us were out after deer.” His voice turned rueful. “Kind of an ironic thing for a fellow who was working on an invention to prevent hunting accidents to die in exactly the kind of accident he was trying to eliminate.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“The usual asinine thing that happens too often every year when amateurs with guns fill the woods. Lloyd got himself in the wrong place at just the right time. He, Madeline, Barney Amhurst and I were out together. A girl named Beatrice Duval was along on the trip too, but...”
“Beatrice Duval?” I interrupted. “You mean Bubbles?”
Henry looked surprised. “You know her?”
“Last night she was the date of the man you’re accused of killing. What was she doing on your hunting trip?”
“She used to go around with Lloyd,” Henry said. “What a fellow as intelligent as he was could see in such a dumb blonde, I don’t know, but the last few months he was alive he dragged her everywhere. She had no business on a hunting trip. Beatrice is strictly an indoor girl. The first morning she went out with us, but Lloyd spent so much time untangling her from briars, it ruined the whole hunt. After that she stayed at camp when the rest of us went out. Lloyd was killed on the third morning.”
“How’d it happen?”
“I can tell you how, but I don’t know why, because Lloyd was an experienced hunter and was used to hunting with that particular team. For the past three years he, Madeline, Barney and I had made the trip to the Catskills every fall.” He puffed thoughtfully at his cigar. “Madeline and Barney were on a stand while Lloyd and I drove through a basin full of cedars. The basin wasn’t large enough to get lost in, but somehow Lloyd got himself in such a position that when a buck broke from the cedars, he was behind it instead of off to the flank. It was nobody’s fault but Lloyd’s, because he knew where the shooters were and it was his business to stay out of the line of fire. Both Madeline and Barney fired at the deer, and both missed. One of the slugs hit Lloyd and killed him instantly.”
“Which one?”
Henry shrugged. “They didn’t make a comparison test of the bullet. Because it didn’t really matter, I suppose. The coroner just issued a certificate of accidental death. Barney insisted it was his bullet, but I don’t think he really knew. Madeline was so broken up I think he just shouldered the blame to be gallant. In any event it ended the hunting trip.”
“I see. Get back to your quarrel with Amhurst.”
“It wasn’t much of a quarrel,” Henry said. “One evening Madeline told me that Barney had completed work on the Huntsafe and had filed a patent application that day. It was the first I knew that he and Lloyd had been working on such a thing, because Barney had sworn all three of the other members of the proposed corporation to secrecy until the application was in. Madeline didn’t know I was working on the same idea. Not that I deliberately kept it a secret, but Madeline doesn’t understand electronics very well, and I just wasn’t in the habit of discussing my work with her. When she told me about the Huntsafe, I got angry and went over and bawled Barney out for stealing my idea.”
I asked, “Why do you say it wasn’t much of a quarrel?”
“Because it wasn’t. When Barney showed me the Huntsafe, I realized it was based on an entirely different principle than my invention and made mine obsolete. Mine used an omnidirectional radio signal pretuned to a specific high frequency. In effect it was a miniature broadcasting station which automatically broadcast an intermittent signal. And its big defect was that, together with the receiver, the equipment weighed nearly twenty pounds. Amhurst’s Huntsafe works on the principle of the radio compass and is powered by a seventy-five-volt battery he developed which is only two inches square and an inch thick. The whole outfit weighs only two pounds. After Amhurst explained it, I realized I was just unlucky not to have thought of the radio-compass principle myself, and my idea hadn’t been stolen after all. So I apologized to Amhurst and went away.”
As I left headquarters, I mulled over in my mind whether or not I believed in Tom Henry’s innocence. If I did believe in it, I had to assume someone had gone to elaborate lengths in order to frame him, for it was beyond the realm of possibility that mere coincidence could have woven such a tight net of circumstantial evidence. The evidence was so flawless, only one thing prevented me from accepting it at face value and deciding Henry was lying.
That one thing was Ed Friday’s unsuccessful attempt to get me to leave town.