Honest Money Read online

  “All right,” Corning told him. “I’m listening.”

  “Well, everything happened sort of quick like, then. Somehow or other this guy, that’s your client, got loose from the two guys. He sort of crouched, swung to one side, and then I heard a gun go ‘bang,’ Your man started to run, and the other guy went down to the sidewalk. Right through the heart, I heard it was, and with lead that mushroomed.”

  “Go on,” Corning told him, as Lampson hesitated. “He started to run, and then what happened?”

  “It was a police radio car that swung around the corner. Seems like it had been somewhere in the neighborhood, and somebody telephoned an alarm in to the police. Anyway, that’s the way I heard it from the guy on the car. The police car saw the man running, and they nabbed him.”

  “How long was that after the shooting?”

  “It couldn’t have been very long. The man had run about a block. It takes a guy a little while to run a block, not long.”

  “And the two men who were with the murdered man. What did they do?”

  “They seemed to huddle there for a minute, then they went down on their knees beside the stiff. They were pulling open his shirt, taking off his vest, and doing that sort of thing. They didn’t raise a yell, and they didn’t try to get the man that was running. They told the cops they didn’t have guns, and they wasn’t running after any murderers.”

  Ken Corning paced the floor of the shabby room. The eager eyes of the narrow-shouldered man followed him.

  “The dead man had a gun,” Corning snapped suddenly. “The police found it on him. Isn’t that right?”

  “Sure that’s right. I seen it.”

  “Why didn’t the two guys take that gun and stop Pyle?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody asked them that question.”

  “And they found Pyle’s gun?”

  “Yeah. Pyle claimed lie didn’t do any shooting, that he didn’t have a gun and all that sort of stuff, but a broad from the apartment house on the corner saw him throw something back of a signboard. The cops started prowling around and found a gun. I heard one of them say that it was the gun that killed the dead man. I don’t know, only what the cops said.”

  Ken Corning turned to stare steadily at the other.

  “How did it happen they didn’t hold you as a witness?”

  “Because I didn’t speak my little piece. I pretended I was just a guy who had come up after the shooting.”

  “Why didn’t you tell them?”

  The man fidgeted slightly.

  “Because, brother, I don’t want the bulls prying around into my record, where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing.”

  He opened his coat. There was a leather case suspended under his arm. He snapped back a flap, pulled out steel tools which he dropped to the table. They gave forth dull, clinking noises as one of them dropped on top of the other.

  Ken Corning regarded the pile with puckered eyes.

  ““Burglar tools, eh?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why did you come clean with me?”

  “Because you’re a mouthpiece. I may need a good mouthpiece. I got a rod, too. See the point? I got a record. I ain’t clean on my last rap, broke parole if you want to know. I knew the bulls would take me to headquarters for questioning if I told my little story. So I kept mum. Then you came up and started talking, and I knew you could fix it so I got a little piece of jack, maybe, and didn’t get a police frame.”

  Ken Corning picked up the burglar tools.

  “Where’s the rod?” he asked.

  The man who had given his name as Lampson pulled back the bottom of his coat, tugged a gun from his right hip pocket. It was a .22 Colt automatic.

  “That’s it, brother,” he said. “You’re taking charge of it from now on.”

  Ken Corning sniffed of the end of the barrel. He pulled back the mechanism until he could eject the loaded shell, thrust a thumb nail into the opening, holding it in such a position that it reflected light into the interior of the barrel. He studied the riflings with a thoughtful eye, sniffed of the end of the barrel again.

  “Gee, you ain’t trying to pin it on me,” said the man, the whining tone of his voice once more in evidence.

  Ken Corning raised his eyes, regarded the man over the top of the end sight on the barrel.

  “What sort of gun was used in the killing?” he asked.

  “Gee, boss, how should I know? The cops found the gun a good half block from where I was standin’, and …”

  “Never mind that,” Corning told him, interrupting the whining flow of words. “You know all right. You were there, where you could hear everything. What sort of gun was it?”

  Lampson’s eyes sought the floor. His face twitched nervously.

  “Honest to gawd, boss …”

  “What sort of gun?” bellowed Corning.

  The answer was so weak as to be almost inaudible.

  “A .22 automatic, boss; what they call a Colt ‘Woodsman.’ That’s why I’m going to need a mouthpiece, bad.”

  Corning paced the floor of his office. Every few seconds he snapped his left arm around in front of his face and stared at the dial of his wrist-watch, then went on pacing.

  A key made a metallic noise in the lock of the outer door. The bolt clicked back. Helen Vail, Ken Corning’s secretary, stood straight and slim on the threshold, her eyes filled with anxiety.

  “Got here just as quick as I could, chief,” she said. “I didn’t get the telephone message until I got back from the picture show. What is it?”

  Ken Corning took out a package of cigarettes, snapped out one, offered it to Helen Vail, took another for himself. She came close to him to share the flame of the match.

  “I don’t know what it is,” he said, exhaling cigarette smoke as he extinguished the flame of the match. “I got a telephone call about eight o’clock from a man who said he was George Pyle’s bodyguard. He said Pyle had been framed, that there was a shooting out at Lincoln Drive and Beemer Street, and for me to get out there right away.

  “I had the car here. I made it in nothing flat. The police had moved the body and taken Pyle to jail. I picked up a yegg who tells me Ms name is Lampson. He’s a witness to the whole thing. He thinks perhaps Pyle did the shooting, but he’s willing to shade his testimony our way if he can get a little cash. He was packing a .22 automatic. The police say it was a Colt ‘Woodsman’ .22 that killed Glover. A girl says she saw Pyle chuck one away. She’s a peroxide blonde cashier in a cheap restaurant. She’s positive as hell. I didn’t get to talk with her, but I talked with the girl who shares the apartment with her.

  “Frank Glover was the man that got bumped. He’d been asking for it for a long while. Sam Gilman and Shorty French were with him at the time. They say Pyle got in an argument and tried to swing on Glover. Glover used some fighting language, but didn’t move his hands. They grabbed Pyle’s arms. He broke away, jerked out a rod and let Glover have it, right through the heart, just the one shot. That’s their story.

  “The gun the cops found back of the signboard seems okey to them. It had been recently fired-—one shot. I understand there were some fingerprints on it—-not so awfully clear, but clear enough, and that those fingerprints were Pyle’s.

  “The cops did the usual routine stuff They kept people on the move, I went to a rooming-house with this witness, Lampson.

  “When I came out, I went back to the scene of the shooting and did a little prowling. I found this.”

  Ken Corning took a jagged-edged bit of tissue paper from his pocket and placed it on the desk. The girl leaned forward, touched it with her fingertips, then recoiled.

  “Blood!” she said.

  Ken Corning nodded.

  “Sure,” he told her. “I found it lying in the pool of blood that was on the pavement. I picked it up.”

  “Does it mean anything?” she asked, staring.

  “I don’t know. It’s queer. Why should a piece of tissue paper be lying in a pool of blo
od. It’s not so very big—half an inch one way, by a quarter of an inch the other, but it’s something that isn’t explained; and, in a murder case, everything should be explained.”

  Helen Vail’s lips pursed thoughtfully.

  “Do you suppose that red color is due entirely to the bloodstains?” she asked. “The paper looks funny, somehow.”

  “I don’t know that, either,” Corning said.

  “What you want me to do, chief?”

  He shoved his feet wide apart, standing as though he had braced himself against a blow. His jaw was pushed forward, the lips clamped into a firm, straight line.

  “Those damned cops won’t let me talk with Pyle, and I’ve got to do it. I’m going to get out a writ of habeas corpus. ”

  “They won’t admit him to bail in a murder case,” she pointed out.

  “I know that right enough,” he said, clipping the words short, “but they’ll let me see him. I want to talk with him.”

  Helen Vail jerked the rubber cover from a typewriter.

  “After that?” she asked.

  “After that,” he said, “you’re going to find out something about that girl who saw the gun flung in behind the billboard,”

  “All rightie. Give me elbow room while I fill out these blanks. What’s his name? Just George Pyle?”

  “Right,” he said.

  She looked up as she was pulling legal blanks from the drawer of her desk.

  “How about other witnesses?” she asked.

  “Plenty of them who saw Pyle running away after the shooting. They heard the sound of the shot, and looked around to see what it was all about. They saw Glover falling, Pyle running. There’s no one who saw him throw the gun over behind the billboard except the jane in the apartment.”

  “Any question that the gun the police found is the one that did the shooting?”

  “Too early to tell. But an expert can check it by firing test bullets. Those things are proven mathematically these days.” She nodded, fed the legal blank into the typewriter and started swift fingers clacking the keys with the staccato effect of gunfire.

  George Pyle stared through the wire partition which stretched across the long table in the visitors’ room in the jail. His eyes were red and bloodshot. His face was pale. Every few moments he licked his lips nervously with the tip of his tongue. “Gawd, Corning, you’ve got to spring me on this rap.”

  “It’s a frame-up?”

  “Of course it’s a frame-up! Do you think I’m such a tripledamned fool as to shoot a man down, with four million witnesses staring at me?”

  “It was your gun that did the killing.”

  “That’s a damned lie. I never saw the gun in my life.”

  “It’s got your fingerprints on it.”

  “It can’t have.”

  “That’s what the experts say.”

  “What experts?”

  “A fingerprint expert the police lured, and one that I hired.” Pyle’s tongue flicked his lips. His eyes shifted from Corning’s, then returned with the look of desperation of a caged animal.

  “Can’t you get me out of here? It’s those damned bars. They leer at me all the time. I see them everywhere I turn. They’re driving me nuts.”

  Corning shook his head slowly.

  “Keep cool,” he counseled. “You get yourself all worked up and they’ll trap you into some sort of an admission, and then it will be all off.”

  Pyle sucked in a deep breath, as though he had been about to dive under a cold shower.

  “Corning, can they … will they … is there any chance … do you suppose that they’d … the death penalty, you know, I wouldn’t get that, would I?”

  Corning’s eyes were impatient.

  “Listen,” he said, “you’re in here, charged with first degree murder. The D. A.’s going after the death penalty. There’s a case against you that looks black as hell. Now quit this damned yellow yammering, and get down to brass tacks. There’s only one way I can get you out of here, and that’s through the front door, and I can”t do that unless you use your head to think with instead of getting hysterical. Now tell me what happened.”

  The man on the other side of the coarse wire mesh ran an apprehensive finger around the inside of his shirt collar.

  “Gawd!” he said, hoarsely.

  Corning waited, steady-eyed, remorselessly patient.

  After a moment, Pyle began talking in a low, mechanical voice, his eyes fastened on the battered top of the long table.

  “I was walking down the street with Sam Gilman, Shorty French and Frank Glover. Frank and I were due for a showdown. He’d been chiseling. I knew it. He was prepared to sit tight and fight it out. I didn’t want to do that.

  “I didn’t intend to discuss things until we got to Glover’s apartment. I was supposed to be alone, but I’d planted three of my men in an apartment next to Glover’s. They were ready to shoot the door of Glover’s apartment into splinters and bust in, if they heard any sounds of trouble. And they were watching the elevators so that if any of Glover’s men marched me out with a rod in my back they’d get a surprise.”

  Corning’s voice was impatient.

  “Where was your gun?” he asked.

  “I didn’t have any.”

  “Don’t make me laugh.”

  “That’s on the up and up, Corning. I didn’t have any rod. I swear I didn’t. That was one of the things Glover insisted on. I was to come alone and have no rod. We were to go to his apartment for a talk. What he didn’t know, was that I’d been working on a plant next to his apartment for three or four months. I’d moved some of my men in, and had Tommies up there and some grenades. I’d have pineappled his joint in a minute if he’d tried anything funny.

  “Well, we were walking along the street with everyone quiet-like, until suddenly, just at that place, Shorty French let a remark drop that showed me Glover had been two-timing with my girl. I saw red, I’ll admit that, He could have had a regiment around him, and I’d have called him just the same.

  “I tried to swing on him, and Shorty and Sam Gilman grabbed me. Glover sneered at me and asked me what I was going to do about it. I’d have done plenty if I’d had the chance. Then I managed to break away, and just as I did it, there was a bang. I swear I don’t know who fired the shot, but it sounded as though it had come from right around me somewhere.

  “It seemed like a half second after the shot before anything happened, and then I saw that Glover was sagging down to the ground. I knew it was some sort of a frame-up, and I guess I lost my head. I started to sprint.

  “Then a cop car came around the comer, and I knew I was framed for the rap. But I didn’t throw any rod behind any billboard, and I didn’t have any rod on me, and I didn’t do any shooting.”

  Ken Corning stared steadily at his client.

  “You heard the shot?”

  “Sure.”

  “It was right near you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you figure it must have been either Sam Gilman or Shorty French that fired that shot?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you didn’t see any gun, and you couldn’t swear that either of them made even so much as a threatening motion?”

  “No.”

  Ken Corning’s stare was that of a doctor who must give unpleasant news to a patient. “Pyle,” he said, slowly, “do you think any jury on earth is going to believe that story?”

  Beads of perspiration glinted from the prisoner’s forehead, but his eyes met those of the lawyer.

  “No,” he said, in a voice that was filled with terror.

  Corning stood, feet planted wide apart, eyes staring steadily at Harry Lampson.

  “Get this,” he said, “and get it straight. I’m representing George Pyle. He comes first. You can’t drag me into your troubles, or pull a double-cross on Pyle. I’ll help you out of your jam, if I can help my client by doing it. Otherwise I won’t.”

  The man who had been so meek and appealing was now
cold and hard.

  “Where the hell do you get that noise about me being in a jam? I ain’t in any jam. I came clean and told you the low-down that would help your client. If I don’t get a cut, I kick through with the real stuff.”

  Ken Corning eyed the man with evident distaste.

  “Meaning?” he asked.

  “Meaning that I’ll switch over and tell the bulls about your man flinging the gun away as he ran, about seeing the rod in his hand just before the shot was fired.”

  “Like that, eh?” Corning asked.

  “Like that,” Lampson told him.

  “Seems to me you’re independent as hell all of a sudden.”

  “Does it?”

  “It does.”

  The man shrugged his shoulders.

  “Well,” he said, “there’s the dope. Take it or leave it. I’m sitting pretty.”

  Ken Corning walked to the window of the room. It was dingy and narrow. The lace curtain which covered it seemed indicative of the fact that the occupants of the room were usually more concerned with keeping the public from seeing in, rather than seeing out themselves.

  Corning’s eyes, staring down at the shadows of the street, caught the swing of heavy shoulders as a big man pushed his way into the door of the rooming-house. Another man stood, loitering in a doorway across the street. He seemed strangely immobile.

  Ken Corning whirled on the man who was watching him with ratty eyes.

  “What kind of a double-crossing game—?”

  He had no chance to finish the question. Feet sounded in the corridor outside of the room. Heavy knuckles pounded the panels of the door.

  “Jeeze,” said Lampson in a strained, choking voice.

  He got to his feet, scuttled across the room in an ecstasy of haste, twisted the key in the lock. A man on the other side of the door pushed it open, barged into the room.

  “So,” he said.

  Police detective was stamped all over him, from the broad-toed shoes to the heavy neck, the accusing eyes, the thick lips that held a cigar clamped at an aggressive angle.

  “Hello, Maxwell,” said Corning, casually.

  Maxwell held Corning with his eyes.