“Oh, I’ve heard all sorts of things about it! But all I really know is what Dr. MacPhail, who examined both of them, said.”
“And what was that?”
“That Mr. Brackert killed Mr. Ormsby – shot him – though nobody seems to know why; and then, before he could get out of the building, his heart failed him and he died.”
“And he was supposed to have a bad heart?”
“Yes. Dr. MacPhail told him a year ago that he would have to be careful, that the least excitement might be fatal.”
Steve caught her wrist in his hand.
“Think now,” he commanded. “Did you ever hear Dr. MacPhail speak of Brackett’s heart trouble until to- day?”
She looked curiously into his face, and a little pucker of bewilderment came between her eyes.
“No,” she replied slowly. “I don’t think so; but, of course, there was never any reason why he should have mentioned it. Why do you ask?”
“Because,” he told, her, “Brackett did not shoot Ormsby; and any heart attack that killed Brackett was caused by poison – some poison that burned his face and beard.”
She gave a little cry of horror.
“You think -“ She stopped, glanced furtively over her shoulder at the front door of the house, and leaned close to him to whisper: “Didn’t – didn’t you say that the man who was killed in the fight last night was named Kamp?”
“Yes.”
“Well, the report, or whatever it was that Dr. MacPhail made of his examination, reads Henry Cumberpatch.”
“You sure? Sure it’s the same man?”
“Yes. The wind blew it off the doctor’s desk, and when I handed it back to him, he made some joke” – she coloured with a little laugh – “some joke about it nearly being your death certificate instead of your companion’s. I glanced down at it then, and saw that it was for a man named Henry Cumberpatch. What does it all mean? What is -“
The front gate clattered open, and a man swayed up the walk. Steve got up, picked up his black stick, and stepped between the girl and the advancing man. The man’s face came out of the dark. It was Larry Ormsby; and when he spoke his words had a drunken thickness to match the unsteadiness – not quite a stagger, but nearly so – of his walk.
“Lis’en,” he said; “I’m dam’ near -“
Steve moved toward him. “If Miss Vallance will excuse us,” he said, “we’ll stroll to the gate and talk.”
Without waiting for a reply from either of them, Steve linked an arm through one of Ormsby’s and urged him down the path. At the gate Larry broke away, pulling his arm loose and confronting Steve.
“No time for foolishness,” he snarled. “Y’ got to get out! Get out o’ Izzard!”
“Yes?” Steve asked. “And why?”
Larry leaned back against the fence and raised one hand in an impatient gesture.
“Your lives are not worth a nickel – neither of you.”
He swayed and coughed. Steve grasped him by the shoulder and peered into his face.
“What’s the matter with you?”
Larry coughed again and clapped a hand to his chest, up near the shoulder.
“Bullet – up high – Fernie’s. But I got him – the big tramp. Toppled him out a window – down like a kid divin’ for pennies.” He laughed shrilly, and then became earnest again. “Get the girl-beat it – now! Now! Now! Ten minutes’ll be too late. They’re comin’!”
“Who? What? Why?” Steve snapped. “Talk turkey! I don’t trust you. I’ve got to have reasons.”
“Reasons, my God!” the wounded man cried. “You’ll get your reasons. You think I’m trying to scare you out o’ town b’fore th’ inquest.” He laughed insanely. “Inquest! You fool! There won’t be any inquest! There won’t be any tomorrow – for Izzard! And you -“
He pulled himself sharply together and caught one of Steve’s hands in both of his.
“Listen,” he said. “I’ll give it to you, but we’re wasting time! But if you’ve got to have it – listen.
“Izzard is a plant! The whole damned town is queer. Booze – that’s the answer. The man I knocked off this afternoon – the one you thought was my father – originated the scheme. You make soda niter by boiling the nitrate in tanks with heated coils. He got the idea that a niter plant would make a good front for a moonshine factory. And he got the idea that if you had a whole town working together it’d be impossible for the game ever to fall down.
“You can guess how much money there is in this country in the hands of men who’d be glad to invest it in a booze game that was air-tight. Not only crooks, I mean, but men who consider themselves honest. Take your guess, whatever it is, and double it, and you still won’t be within millions of the right answer. There are men with – But anyway, Ormsby took his scheme east and got his backing – a syndicate that could have raised enough money in build a dozen cities.
“Ormsby, Elder, and Brackett were the boys who managed the game. I was here to see that they didn’t double-cross the syndicate; and then there’s a flock of trusty lieutenants, like Fernie, and MacPhail, and Heman – he’s postmaster – and Harker – another doctor, who got his last week – and leslie, who posed as a minister. There was no trouble to getting the population we wanted. The word went around that the new town was a place where a crook would be safe so long as he did what he was told. The slums of all the cities of America, and half of ‘em out of it, emptied themselves here. Every crook that was less than a step ahead of the police, and had car fare here, came and got cover.
“Of course, with every thug in the world blowing in here we had a lot of sleuths coming, too; but they weren’t hard to handle, and if worse came to worst, we could let the law take an occasional man; but usually it wasn’t hard to take care of the gumshoes. We have bankers, and ministers, and doctors, and postmasters, and prominent men of all sorts either to tangle the sleuths up with bum leads, or, if necessary, to frame them. You’ll find a flock of men in the state pen who came here – most of them as narcotics agents or prohibition agents – and got themselves tied up before they knew what it was all about.
“God, there never was a bigger game! It couldn’t flop – unless we spoiled it for ourselves. And that’s what we’ve done. It was too big for us! There was too much money in it – it went to our heads! At first we played square with the syndicate. We made booze and shipped it out – shipped it in carload lots, in trucks, did everything but pipe it out, and we made money for the syndicate and for ourselves. Then we got the real idea – the big one! We kept on making the hooch; but we got the big idea going for our own profit. The syndicate wasn’t in on that.
“First, we got the insurance racket under way. Elder managed that, with three or four assistants. Between them they became agents of half the insurance companies in the country, and they began to plaster Izzard with policies. Men who had never lived were examined, insured, and then killed – sometimes they were killed on paper, sometimes a real man who died was substituted, and there were times when a man or two was killed to order. It was soft! We had the insurance agents, the doctors, the coroner, the undertaker, and all the city officials. We had the machinery to swing any deal we wanted! You were with Kamp the night he was killed! That was a good one. He was an insurance company sleuth – the companies were getting suspicious. He came here and was foolish enough to trust his reports to the mail. There aren’t many letters from strangers that get through the post office without being read. We read his reports, kept them, and sent phoney ones out in their places. Then we nailed Mr. Kamp, and changed his name on the records to fit a policy in the very company he represented. A rare joke, eh?
“The insurance racket wasn’t confined to men – cars, houses, furniture, everything you can insure was plastered. In the last census – by distributing the people we could count on, one in a house, with a list of five or six names – we got a population on the records of at least five times as many as are really here. That gave us room for plenty of policies, plenty of deaths, plenty of property insurance, plenty of everything. It gave us enough political influence in the county and state to strengthen our hands a hundred per cent, make the game safer.
“You’ll find street after street of houses with nothing in them out of sight of the front windows. They cost money to put up, but we’ve made the money right along, and they’ll show a wonderful profit when the clean-up comes.
“Then, after the insurance stunt was on its feet, we got the promotion game going. There’s a hundred
