“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 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 honour 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 half 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 is 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.
Eleven
“There was once a young doctor in a town a long way from here,” Ledwich began. “He got mixed up in a scandal – a pretty rotten one – and escaped the pen only by the skin of his teeth. The state medical board revoked his license.
“In a large city not far away, this young doc, one night when he was drunk – as he usually was in those days -told his troubles to a man he had met in a dive. The friend was a resourceful sort; and he offered, for a price, to fix the doc up with a fake diploma, so he could set up in practice in some other state.
“The young doctor took him up, and the friend got the diploma for him. The doc was the man you know as Dr. Estep, and I was the friend. The real Dr. Estep was found dead in the park this morning!”
That was news – if true!
“You see,” the big man went on, “when I offered to get the phoney diploma for the young doc – whose real name doesn’t matter – I had in mind a forged one. Nowadays they’re easy to get – there’s a regular business in them – but twenty-five years ago, while you could manage it, they were hard to get. While I was trying to get one, I ran across a woman I used to work with – Edna Fife. That’s the woman you know as the first Mrs. Estep.
“Edna had married a doctor – the real Dr. Humbert Estep. He was a hell of a doctor, though; and after starving with him in Philadelphia for a couple of years, she made him close up his office, and she went back to the bunko game, taking him with her. She was good at it, I’m telling you – a real cleaner – and, keeping him under her thumb all the time, she made him a pretty good worker himself.
“It was shortly after that that I met her, and when she told me all this, I offered to buy her husband’s medical diploma and other credentials. I don’t know whether he wanted to sell them or not – but he did what she told him, and I got the papers.
“I turned them over to the young doc, who came to San Francisco and opened an office under the name of Humbert Estep. The real Esteps promised not to use that name any more – not much of an inconvenience for them, as they changed names every time they changed addresses.
“I kept in touch with the young doctor, of course, getting my regular rake-off from him. I had him by the neck, and I wasn’t foolish enough to pass up any easy money. After a year or so, I learned that he had pulled himself together and was making good. So I jumped on a train and came to San Francisco. He was doing fine; so I camped here, where I could keep my eye on him and watch out for my own interests.
“He got married about then, and, between his practice and his investments, he began to accumulate a roll. But he tightened up on me – damn him! He wouldn’t be bled. I got a regular percentage of what he made, and that was all.
“For nearly twenty-five years I got it – but not a nickel over the percentage. He knew I wouldn’t kill the goose that laid the golden eggs, so no matter how much I threatened to expose him, he sat tight, and I couldn’t budge him. I got my regular cut, and not a nickel more.
“That went along, as I say, for years. I was getting a living out of him, but I wasn’t getting any big money. A few months ago I learned that he had cleaned up heavily in a lumber deal so I made up my mind to take him for what he had.
“During all these years I had got to know the doc pretty well. You do when you’re bleeding a man – you get a pretty fair idea of what goes on in his head, and what he’s most likely to do if certain things should happen. So I knew the doc pretty well.
“I knew, for instance, that he had never told his wife the truth about his past; that he had stalled her with some lie about being born in West Virginia. That was fine – for me! Then I knew that he kept a gun in his desk, and I knew why. It was kept there for the purpose of killing himself if the truth ever came out about his diploma. He
