Honest Money Read online

“You got a hell of a crust, tampering with a state’s witness.”

  Ken Corning laughed.

  “In the first place,” he said, “I wasn’t tampering with him. In the second place, he isn’t a state’s witness. He’s my witness. I found him on the street after the shooting, and I brought him here. I was with him when he registered, and I paid for the room.”

  The detective twisted his heavy lips.

  “Says you!” he grated.

  He turned to Lampson. “What’s the low-down?” he asked.

  Lampson’s voice was low, rapid and toneless, like the voice of a frightened child speaking a piece at a school entertainment.

  “He came in here and told me I had to swear that Shorty French had a gun in his hand and that I seen it. He said I had to swear that the man that ran away couldn’t have done any shooting, that his arms were held until after the gunshot was fired, until after Glover hit the pavement. He said, if I didn’t swear that, he was going to plant a rod on me and frame me for the murder rap.”

  “Subornation of perjury,” remarked Maxwell in a voice of rumbling accusation.

  “Baloney!” snapped Corning.

  “If you think it’s baloney,” Maxwell told him, tugging handcuffs from the back of his belt, “try and laugh this off.”

  Corning looked at the handcuffs.

  “What the hell do you think this is?” he asked.

  “A pinch,” Maxwell said.

  Abruptly, Corning laughed. “Gentlemen,” he said, “let’s not have any misunderstanding about this. Let’s agree upon the date and the time; also the persons present. This is Wednesday, the eighth of the month. The hour is exactly seven and one-half minutes past four o’clock in the afternoon. There are present in this room, Henry Lampson, myself, and Thomas Maxwell, a police detective, who has just recently entered the room. There are no other persons in this room. Is that right?”

  Maxwell stared with suspicious eyes at Ken Corning. Lampson looked at the police detective with the look of helpless interrogation which a tenderfoot gives to a guide in the forest.

  “What the hell you trying to pull?” asked Maxwell.

  “Nothing,” Ken Corning told him, “except that I want to get the time and the place established beyond dispute. Have I said anything that wasn’t the truth?”

  “Aw, go jump in the lake!” Maxwell growled. “You can’t run a bluff on us with all that line of hooey. You’re going to headquarters.”

  “Got a warrant?” Corning asked.

  “Got enough to take you in for questioning,” Maxwell remarked with emphasis. “After I get you in for questioning, Lampson here is going to swear to a charge. Ain’t you, Lampson?”

  “Sure,” Lampson said.

  “And there’s no mistake or misunderstanding about the time and the place and the persons present?” Corning asked.

  “Hell, no!” the detective exploded. “Have that your own way; but you’re coming with me now.”

  “Fine,” said Ken Corning with evident satisfaction. “Put those bracelets away. They don’t frighten me any. You aren’t going to use them, anyway, until you’ve got a warrant. I’ll pay the taxi fare to the jail.”

  They walked from the room. Lampson locked the door and put the key in his pocket. Maxwell took Ken Corning’s arm in a firm grip. Ken Corning laughed.

  “You fellows are going to hear more of this,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know that line of hooey,” the detective told him.

  They filed down the stairs. I here was a taxicab waiting at the curb. They entered it and went to the jail. Lampson scrawled a signature upon a legal blank that had already been typed. He held up his right hand and mumbled an affirmative to the oath which was administered.

  “How about getting bail?” asked Corning.

  “Sure,” said Maxwell. “You won’t have no trouble on that. We don’t want to throw you in. We’re just getting you where you ain’t tampering with witnesses. You can get out on your own recognizance if you want.”

  “Well,” Corning said, “let me get to a telephone, and then I’ll fix up a bail bond.”

  “You ain’t going to make application for a release without bail?” Maxwell inquired.

  “No.”

  “All right then. Have it your own way. I was just trying to be nice to you. Hell, you don’t have to get high hat! You’re playing a game, and so’m I. I caught you off first base, an’ I tagged you with the ball. There don’t need to be hard feelings.”

  “Thanks,” said Corning, sarcastically. “When I want your advice I’ll ask for it. Let me get to that telephone.”

  He was shown a telephone booth. He dropped a coin, closed the door, and gave the number of his office. Helen Vail’s voice answered the telephone.

  “Listen,” he told her, “this is important as the devil. You’ve got to have some help. Get Johnson from the Intercoastal Agency to help you. There’s a rooming-house at Beemer Street near where Glover was murdered. A chap named Lampson has a room there. He’s out. Get a pass key. Get into the room, put in a dictograph some place where it’s concealed behind a picture or something. Run the wires into the adjoining room. I rented that room yesterday under the name of Ragland. I thought it might come in handy. Set up a plant there. Have a notebook filled with pothooks. Use an old one.

  “Take this down, and put it in the notebook as the last thing that was said… . Ready? … All right. Here we go. ‘And there’s no mistake or misunderstanding about the time and the place and the persons present?’ ‘Hell no. Have that your own way, but you’re coming with me now!’ ”

  There was a moment of silence, then Helen Vail’s voice over the wire: “Okey, chief, I got that. What else?”

  “Just use your head,” he told her, “and sit tight. I’ll be there some time. I don’t know when. Stick there, even if it’s a week. Have meals sent in if you have to. Sleep in a chair; but don’t leave that room.”

  “I gotcha,” she told him.

  Ken Corning hung up the telephone, walked from the booth.

  “I’m having trouble getting bail,” he said.

  Maxwell shrugged his shoulders. “Any time you want to ask a favor,” he said, “I’ll get hold of the D. A.’s office, and they’ll send a man down and agree you can go on your own.”

  “I,” said Ken Corning, “will see you in hell before I ask a favor.”

  “Okey, have it your own way,” said Maxwell, and grinned.

  Ken Corning walked back to the telephone booth. “I’ll try another angle,” he said.

  He got a bail bond company on the line, a company to whom he had given a fair share of business from various clients. “I’m in the can,” he told them, “on a charge of subornation of perjury. It’s a frame-up to blow up one of my witnesses in the George Pyle case, and give the witness a good background for switching over to the prosecution. The witness is a crook with a criminal record, and they want the publicity of getting me for subornation of perjury to make it look okey for the witness to make a switch. The bail’s ten thousand dollars. I’m stalling. Wait for about half an hour, then bring over a bond and spring me. Got that? Fine.” Ken Corning hung up the telephone, waited around the jail office. Maxwell yawned, frowned. “We’re not waiting all night,” he said. “I’ve offered you an out. You won’t take it. You either raise bail in the next thirty minutes, or you stay here overnight.” “It’ll be here inside of thirty minutes,” Corning told him. “It’s just a matter of business all around,” Maxwell said, his manner propitiating.

  “Go to hell,” Corning advised him.

  At the expiration of the half hour, a representative of the bail bond company bustled in with the bail bond. Maxwell checked it over.

  “Why didn’t you want to go out on your own?” he asked. “What’s the idea of all the fuss?”

  Ken Corning regarded him with cold, watchful eyes. “Can you keep a secret?” he inquired.

  Maxwell looked suspicious, but nodded.

  “You see,” Corning explained,
“I wanted to get something on the police. I wanted to show that the police were framing up cases, and show that they were trying to railroad George Pyle by intimidating his lawyer and his witnesses.”

  Tom Maxwell sprawled out in the chair. He stretched his feet far out, slid down on the small of his back, yawned prodigiously.

  “Yeah,” he said, “a fat chance you got, under arrest for subornation of perjury.”

  Corning nodded.

  “You see,” he went on, speaking in a patient tone, as though explaining an elemental matter to a small child, “I wanted to be certain that Lampson actually went on record under oath before I sprung my side of the case. Otherwise, I’d have taken you into the room where my witnesses were, before we went down to the jail.”

  Maxwell was half way through another yawn. Abruptly, his jaws snapped shut. His body became rigid with attention. Slowly, he hoisted his weight on his elbows until he was sitting upright in the chair.

  “Witnesses?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Corning told him. “You don’t think I’m a big enough fool to walk into a police trap with my eyes shut, do you? I had a dictograph wired into that room, and every word that was said was taken down by a shorthand reporter who sat at the other end of the dictograph in an adjoining room. That was why I was so anxious to have it straight just exactly who was present, just exactly the time and place, and who was talking. Remember that don’t you?”

  Maxwell came out of the chair as though it had been electrified. He stared at Corning with wide, bulging eyes. Then he strode across the room, jerked open a door, and said: “A couple of you boys come with me. We’re going to make a fast ride.”

  He came back towards Corning, his face flushed, lips twitching.

  “Damn you,” he said, “you can’t pull a line of hooey like that. You’ll plant witnesses by tomorrow, but this is the time we call you, and call you cold. Come on. If you’ve got any dictograph in that room, show it to me, and show it to me now!”

  Ken Corning became reluctant.

  “I’m a free man now, out on bail. You can’t order me around.”

  Maxwell laughed sneeringly, “Thought it was all a damned big bluff. But it don’t make any difference what it was. You’re going right back there and point out any alibi you’ve got, and you’re going to do it now ”

  They loaded Corning into a police car, took him back to the rooming-house, up to the room where he had been when Maxwell had made the arrest.

  “Show us,” said the detective.

  Corning shrugged his shoulders, walked across the room, looked out of the window, down into the darkness of the street, and said: “Go to hell!”

  Maxwell’s laugh was gloating. “Search the dump, boys,” he commanded.

  He started the search, jerking down a cheap, framed chromo. He pulled a calendar from the wall, flung it to the floor, pulled out another picture, and suddenly paused, eyes wide, mouth sagging, staring into a metallic circle.

  “Jeeze,” he said, “a dictograph!”

  “I told you,” Corning remarked, lighting a cigarette.

  Maxwell pushed his way from the room, into the corridor, turned the knob on the door of the adjoining room, flung his weight against the door, and sent it banging inward.

  There was a couch over near the window, on which lay a man, snoring peacefully. At a table in the center of the room, sat Helen Vail, hair somewhat rumpled, her eyes weary. About her were cigarette stubs, empty beer bottles, a litter of bread crusts from sandwiches. The room looked as though the two occupants had been there for a week.

  In front of Helen Vail was a shorthand notebook filled with pothooks and straight lines. There was a receiving end of a dictograph suspended above the table.

  Helen Vail turned tired eyes towards the door. The man on the couch gave one last explosive snore and sat up, knuckling his eyes.

  “Johnson,” explained Corning, “of the Intercoastal Detective Agency.”

  Johnson slid his feet to the floor, grinned sheepishly, and said: “Hello, everybody.”

  “Did you get it, Helen?” asked Ken Corning.

  Helen Vail stared at him. “I got everything,” she said.

  “What’s the last thing you’ve got?”

  She thumbed back through the pages of the notebook, saying mechanically: “You mean the last thing before this last bunch of conversation when the detectives took you into the room, searching for the dictograph?”

  “Yes.”

  She marked a place, started to read, using a toneless, artificial articulation: “Question by Mr. Corning: ‘And there’s no mistake or misunderstanding about the time and the place, and the persons present?’ Answer, by officer, ‘Hell, no. Have that your own way; but you’re coming with me now.’ ”

  She looked up questioningly.

  “That what you meant?” she said. “It’s the last of the conversation. The door slammed right after that and we heard you going down the corridor. I heard some words as you went past the door, but I didn’t try to take them. You said you wanted only the conversations that took place inside that room.”

  Corning nodded.

  She picked up the pages of the notebook, pinched them between thumb and forefinger, and riffled them. “There’s an awful lot of stuff here,” she said, “all the conversations, you know.”

  Ken Corning glanced over at Maxwell, then turned once more to Helen Vail, and said: “Never mind those, not now. You can write up your notes later and Johnson can support them with an affidavit.”

  Maxwell took two swift strides towards Corning. His face was flushed, the eyes glittering, veins on the sides of his forehead stood out like small ropes.

  “Damn you!” he gritted. “Think you’re—damned smart, don’t you?”

  “I think,” Corning told him, “that when the police rely on the testimony of an ex-convict to frame a charge of subornation of perjury on a reputable lawyer, and a charge of murder on George Pyle, that they’d better be damned certain they aren’t going to get in over their neckties before they start rocking the boat.”

  Maxwell granted a comment to the two men who had accompanied him.

  “Come on, boys,” he said, “there’s nothing for us here.”

  The men filed out of the room, the door slammed. Helen Vail grinned at Corning. Johnson sighed.

  “A good plant?” asked the girl, indicating the remnants of sandwiches, the butts of cigarettes.

  “I’ll tell the world,” Corning gloated. “You must have been busy!”

  “We raided the garbage pail in the lunchroom of the office building,” she told him, “and we dumped all the ash trays into a paper. It took a little while to rig the dictograph, but we worked it as fast as we could. The Intercoastal had a set, so we didn’t lose time there. It wasn’t connected up with anything except dead wires. I was afraid they were going to test it. If they had, it wouldn’t have worked.”

  Corning chuckled.

  “It was the build-up that did it. Maxwell got such a shock that he lost his grip.”

  “Want me for anything more?” Johnson asked.

  “Better stick around,” Corning told him. “There may be something that’ll turn up.”

  “What’ll they do now?” Helen Vail wanted to know.

  Corning studied his cigarette smoke.

  “That’s hard to tell. They had planned to make Lampson a star witness, to spread the news of my arrest, and the attempt to ‘fix’ the prosecution’s witness. Now they’ll have to crawl in a hole. Probably they’ll let Lampson sneak out of the picture. They’ll dismiss the charge against me.”

  “But,” protested the girl, “why don’t you be the one to bust into the newspapers with the whole story and make them see that the police are framing on Pyle?”

  He shook his head.

  “Because then I’d have to go on record as claiming we had verbatim reports of the conversations in that room. As it is, we made a good enough plant to bluff Maxwell. Hell let sleeping dogs lie, and wonder when and how
I’m going to raise my point. It’ll make them jumpy all through the case. But, if we busted into print, some of the wise guys would demand a transcription of the conversations. We could fake them, but they wouldn’t be exactly right. Some smart bird would see the discrepancy, start in checking up on details, and catch us in a hell of a mess.

  “I’d rather act on the sleeping dog principle and keep mum about the entire affair.”

  Johnson nodded.

  “My agency would go as far as it did,” he said, “but no farther. We couldn’t afford to be mixed up in a mess if someone should start checking back on the facts.”

  Helen Vail suddenly gave a little exclamation, slipped open the pages of her shorthand notebook, and took out a bit of colored tissue paper.

  “Lookee what I found,” she said.

  Ken Corning examined the piece of paper, a bit of crumpled red tissue, upon one side of which was a dark encrustation. It was about the same size as the other bit of paper he had found in the pool of blood on the sidewalk.

  “Where’d you find it?” he snapped.

  “Same place you found the other.”

  “What is it?” Johnson asked.

  Ken Corning kept his eyes on the piece of paper.

  “Damned if I know,” he said, “but I’m going to find out.”

  Helen Vail crossed her knees and made little smoothing motions with her fingers as she pressed her skirt over the curve of the uppermost knee. “I can’t get a thing on her, chief. Her name’s Mary Bagley. She has a corner apartment on the second floor. She works as cashier in the Big Disc Restaurant Company’s Ninth Street restaurant. She doesn’t seem to have any men friends to speak of, doesn’t flash around in expensive clothes, seems just like any ordinary working girl. She’s positive as the very devil. Says she didn’t see the shooting, but she did hear the noise of the shot, and that she looked out of the window and saw Pyle running down the street towards her apartment house. She says she saw Glover lying on the sidewalk, and the two men standing beside him.

  “She saw the men stoop over and start loosening Glover’s collar, and about that time Pyle was abreast of the billboard on the opposite corner of the street. She says he ran diagonally across the street, drew back his hand, and flung something that glittered just the way blued steel glitters in the light. Then he started running down the cross street, the police car swung around the corner, and picked him up. She says she got a good look at his face as he ran down the street, and it was Pyle, without the shadow of a doubt. She’ll identify him anywhere. She picked him out of a line-up at the jail.”