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At a quarter to seven that evening, while O’Gar remained down the street, I rang Jacob Ledwich’s bell. As I had stayed with Bob Teal in our apartment the previous night, I was still wearing the clothes in which I had made Ledwich’s acquaintance as Shine Wisher.
Ledwich opened the door.
“Hello, Wisher!” he said without enthusiasm, and led me upstairs.
His flat consisted of four rooms, I found, running the full length and half the breadth of the building, with both front and rear exits. It was furnished with the ordinary none-too-spotless appointments of the typical moderately priced furnished flat—alike the world over.
In his front room we sat down and talked and smoked and sized one another up. He seemed a little nervous. I thought he would have been just as well satisfied if I had forgotten to show up.
“About this job you mentioned?” I asked presently.
“Sorry,” he said, moistening his little lumpy mouth, “but it’s all off.” And then he added, obviously as an afterthought, “for the present, at least.”
I guessed from that that my job was to have taken care of Boyd—but Boyd had been taken care of for good.
He brought out some whisky after a while, and we talked over it for some time, to no purpose whatever. He was trying not to appear too anxious to get rid of me, and I was cautiously feeling him out.
Piecing together things he let fall here and there, I came to the conclusion that he was a former con man who had fallen into an easier game of late years. That was in line, too, with what “Porky” Grout had told Bob Teal.
I talked about myself with the evasiveness that would have been natural to a crook in my situation; and made one or two carefully planned slips that would lead him to believe that I had been tied up with the “Jimmy the Riveter” holdup mob, most of whom were doing long hitches at Walla Walla then.
He offered to lend me enough money to tide me over until I could get on my feet again. I told him I didn’t need chicken feed so much as a chance to pick up some real jack.
The evening was going along, and we were getting nowhere.
“Jake,” I said casually—outwardly casual, that is, “you took a big chance putting that guy out of the way like you did last night.”
I meant to stir things up, and I succeeded.
His face went crazy.
A gun came out of his coat.
Firing from my pocket, I shot it out of his hand.
“Now behave!” I ordered.
He sat rubbing his benumbed hand and staring with wide eyes at the smouldering hole in my coat.
Looks like a great stunt—this shooting a gun out of a man’s hand, but it’s a thing that happens now and then. A man who is a fair shot (and that is exactly what I am—no more, no less), naturally and automatically shoots pretty close to the spot upon which his eyes are focused. When a man goes for his gun in front of you, you shoot at him—not at any particular part of him. There isn’t time for that—you shoot at him. However, you are more than likely to be looking at his gun, and in that case it isn’t altogether surprising if your bullet should hit his gun—as mine had done. But it looks impressive.
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 in 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 a hour 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 was 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.