We didn’t have to look far. In George Bishop’s desk was the rough draft of a letter to stockholders telling them not to lose faith in the company but that if they’d hang on through the period of financial adversity which was just ahead, they’d come out on top of the heap. The bank was bringing suit on a promissory note which had been signed to raise capital, but the mine was looking better and better and people who hung on could be almost certain of making a substantial profit, perhaps a hundred and fifty percent of their original investment, perhaps more.
It was a cleverly worded letter.
We found the list of addresses to which the letter was to be sent, together with the number of shares of stock owned by each individual.
“Want to take a chance?” I asked. “There seems to have been about thirty thousand dollars’ worth of stock sold. It probably can be bought in for around fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. But you’ll find that your husband kept controlling interest in the company. If you’re going to inherit his property you won’t have to buy anything. If not, you’d better invest this separate property of yours.”
“I think I’m going to inherit,” she said.
I prowled around the desk.
There were half a dozen or so heavy green cards, finely engraved with an elaborate pattern of curved lines.
They were passes to The Green Door, made out in blank, bearing the signature of Hartley L. Channing.
She looked at them in silence.
I slipped the whole bunch in my pocket. “These might come in handy,” I told her.
She said nothing.
“
“Nothing — Nothing I care to use.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
She hesitated.
“Do you?”
“Not in the way you mean. I made up my mind I’d play fair with George when I married him.”
“Wasn’t it rather lonely, what with him being away so much of the time?”
She looked me in the eyes. “Donald,” she said, “I’m a strip-teaser; I’m an exhibitionist. Once that gets in your blood it’s hard to get it out.
“I had the most supreme contempt for the
“I knew what they were applauding. It wasn’t my acting, it was my body. They were trying to get me to take more off than the law allowed. They’d stamp and pound and applaud and go nuts.”
“Didn’t they know you couldn’t take any more off than you had without going to jail?”
“That’s just the point, Donald. They knew it but my acting was good enough so I could make them forget it. A good strip-teaser can appear to be almost undecided, as though she’s just about ready to take a chance this once just to please this one particular audience. She stands there as though debating the thing within her own mind, and, of course, that spurs the audience on to the wildest applause — I tell you it’s an art, standing there looking like that.”
“And you miss it?”
“Donald, I miss it terribly.”
“What does all that have to do with where you were Tuesday night?”
“A lot.”
“Go on,” I said.
She said, “I knew George was leaving. I have some friends in burlesque here, some of the old gang — Well, after George left I went up to the theater, put on a mask, and did a strip tease as the ‘Masked Mystery.’ I loved it — so did the management. The audience went wild. I have a perfect alibi if I dare to use it — several hundred witnesses.”
“You were masked. They couldn’t see your face.”
“
“Ever done that before?”
“You mean since I married George?”
“Yes.”
“No. This was the first time.”
I said, “It’s not so good, Irene. It looks too much as if you had been manufacturing an alibi while a boyfriend did the dirty work. As an alibi it’s just too darn good.”
“I know,” she admitted. “I’d thought of that. I wondered if you would.”
“The police will,” I told her. “That’s the main point.
What have you told the police?”
“I’ve told them I was home and in bed.”
I said, “You’ve been up all night?”
“Yes.”
“And haven’t had much sleep for the last few days?”
“No.”
I said, “Get hold of your physician. Tell him you’re nervous and jumpy. Tell him you want to go to sleep and stay asleep for about twenty-four hours. If they ask you questions and you don’t have the right answers, you’ll be arrested.”
“I know.”
I said, “All right. You can’t talk while you’re asleep, and if when you wake up you overlook something, you can always claim it was the aftereffect of the drug that gave you hallucinations. And with your figure there isn’t a juror in the world who won’t give you all the breaks.
“But if you haven’t been drugged, you won’t sleep, and then the wrong answers will be easier to make and harder to explain.
“So give me that list of stockholders and as much money as you want to put into stock in that company, and I’ll see if I can’t add to your personal fortunes.”
“And what will you get out of it for yourself?”
I looked her straight in the eyes. “Fifty percent of the net profit.”
“Now,” she said with a sigh, “I can trust you.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t know what you wanted before,” she said, “and I get terribly distrustful of men until I know what they want.”
The San Francisco papers put out extras when John Carver Billings and his son were arrested.
One of the papers even went so far as to spread red ink above the banner:
The evidence that police had unearthed was circumstantial and deadly.
Police felt certain that Bishop had not been killed on the yacht where his body had been discovered.
A fingerprint expert had found prints on one of the brass fixtures. The prints were those of bloody fingers and they were the prints of three of John Carver Billings’s fingers on his right hand.
The padlock on the boat had been smashed and a new padlock had been placed on the boat. Police made a routine search of every hardware store in the neighborhood and found a storekeeper who remembered selling the padlock on Wednesday afternoon. Police showed him a photograph of John Carver Billings and the storekeeper made what the police described as an “instantaneous and positive identification.”
Police divers recovered a .38 revolver at the bottom of the bay, directly beneath the banker’s yacht. The numbers on the revolver showed that it had been sold to John Carver Billings for “protection” under a police permit.
