look of questioning came over his face. He got up and approached Hardeman again, turned back his coat, and nodded at sight of a leather wallet in the dead man’s inside breast pocket.
He hesitated, then whisked out a handkerchief and draped it over his fingers, gingerly drew the wallet out and went back to sit on the desk.
Using his handkerchief to prevent his own fingerprints being left behind, he opened the wallet and emptied the inner compartments of a miscellany of cards, receipts, and folded memoranda onto the desk.
Among them was a folded clipping from a newspaper. It was somewhat faded and brittle with age, beginning to crack in the folds. He smoothed it out carefully and his eyes brooded over a blurred halftone and the brief news story beneath.
With the handkerchief still guarding his fingers, he awkwardly gathered the other papers and cards and returned them to Hardeman’s wallet, replaced it in his coat pocket.
Shayne’s step had an elastic, springy quality as he turned back to the desk, as though he stalked a prey now certainly within his power.
The newspaper cut showed a picture of two men standing side by side. On the left was a lean-jawed man similar to the tinted wedding photograph hanging on the wall of Ben Edwards’s home. The man on the right had a dwarfish body with thin intense features and a big head made to appear bigger by bushy uncombed hair. The features were those of Gil Matrix a decade before.
The cut-line beneath the picture read: From left to right, Claude Bates and Theodore Ross, convicted in District Court today.
The item was dated February 18, 1931. An AP dispatch from Urban, Illinois:
District Judge K. L. Mathis today bitterly castigated Claude Bates in passing sentence upon Bates and his convicted accomplice, Theodore Ross, immediately after a jury brought in a verdict of guilty in a case which has attracted wide attention throughout the state and nation.
Charged more than a month ago with fraud in connection with the printing of fake tickets on the Irish Sweepstakes and their wholesale distribution to unsuspecting buyers, the two men have been in custody here in County jail while awaiting trial on the information sworn to by District Attorney Redford Mullins of Urban.
Claude Bates, confessed ringleader in the conspiracy, was characterized by Judge Mathis today as a menace to the community, and severely reprimanded from the bench for having turned his inventive talent to crime instead of applying it to the solution of worthwhile problems.
Denouncing Bates for putting temptation in the way of Ross, formerly a respected businessman in the neighboring town of Fountain, Judge Mathis imposed a sentence of from twenty to fifty years imprisonment upon the older man.
More lenient toward Theodore Ross, who was shown by evidence submitted at the trial to have had no part in the crime except to weakly allow his printing plant at Fountain to be used for illegal purposes, the judge sentenced him to serve from eight to fifteen years in the State Penitentiary at Joliet.
Deputy Sheriff Elisha Hogan will entrain with the two prisoners tomorrow morning for Joliet where the great steel gates will clang behind them, shutting them off from the outside world for many years and giving them full opportunity to consider the oft-repeated statement: Crime Does Not Pay.
Shayne got a cigarette from his pocket and lit it while his eyes raced over the item. He nodded his head slowly as he finished, inhaled deeply, and lifted his head to stare with abstracted eyes at the dead man.
His fingers slowly refolded the newspaper clipping and slid it into his coat pocket.
As he stared at Hardeman, the brooding look of lost hope faded slowly from his eyes. It was replaced by a gleam of fierce preoccupation, of intent concentration, as though he visualized something else, something entirely different from the scene of murder before his eyes.
His nostrils flared widely, then subsided. His features settled back into placid lines of decision as the silvery blast of a bugle came through the window announcing to patrons of the track that the last race of the evening was about to get under way.
He slid his hip off the desk and went to Hardeman’s side, studying the position of the body and the hand groping toward the pistol it never reached.
He stepped back and tentatively wormed his toe under the corner of the office rug, turned it back to uncover the bare floor between the swivel chair and desk.
Nodding with satisfaction, his eyes took on a hard brightness. He draped his handkerchief over the back of Hardeman’s flaccid right hand, put his own hand over the handkerchief and got a firm grip on the dead man’s fingers, which were stiffening rapidly.
He inched the hand gently forward in the open drawer, using extreme care not to change the natural position of the corpse. He pressed Hardeman’s fingers about the butt of his own. 38 and drew it out.
Careful to allow only Hardeman’s fingers to touch the polished steel and corrugated wooden butt, he turned the cylinder and assured himself that the pistol was fully loaded.
He crouched beside the chair, lowered the dead man’s hand and gun toward the floor with muzzle down, aimed at a spot of bare wood from which the rug had been turned back.
He cocked the pistol with his handkerchief over the hammer, maneuvered Hardeman’s unresisting first finger under the trigger, curled it snugly against the steel.
Sweat streamed from the detective’s seamed face as he crouched there at his ghoulish task. He forced himself to wait, his own finger on top of Hardeman’s, holding it against the trigger.
There was a lull in the crowd sounds coming in the window; the band ceased playing. It was as though the thousands in the grandstand had an inexplicable prescience of what awaited in the back office, as though they momently caught their collective breath, stilled the clamor of their voices so that the shot might be clearly heard if Shayne dared to press the trigger.
Into the lull came a faint racketing din familiar to every greyhound fancier. The clatter of wheels on curved rails starting at the far side of the oval track, growing louder as the electrically propelled motor zoomed, forcing the stuffed rabbit to bob around the track in exact simulation of the swift bounds of a fleeing jack rabbit.
The dogs set up a yapping in the starting-boxes as the rabbit rounded the turn and came toward them. The yelping of the hounds increased, rising to a shrill crescendo as the bouncing bit of fur raced by the boxes.
Michael Shayne waited with his finger tense on the dead finger gripping the gun. Sweat streamed from every pore of his body.
Then it came, surging in through the window. A deep roar that drowned the yapping of the hounds and the racketing of the mechanical rabbit. Two words bursting in unison from a thousand throats:
“They’re off!”
Shayne’s finger jerked against Hardeman’s, pressing the trigger hard.
The sound of the exploding cartridge was loud in the confines of the office, but merged soundlessly into the roar of the crowd outside.
The bullet tore into the pine floor beneath, a small round hole in the planking.
Still moving with infinite care, Shayne shifted his foot and let the corner of the rug fall back into place, covering the single bullet hole in the floor.
He released his hold on Hardeman’s hand and the pistol dropped to the rug.
Shayne stood up, mopping his face with the handkerchief which had just assisted him in turning a clear case of murder into a perfect suicide.
He then shook his head slowly. The job wasn’t perfect. Not yet. He bent down and pulled the rubber finger tip cover from Hardeman’s hand, slid it onto his own right forefinger.
Going to the typewriter, he began hitting the keys slowly and carefully, using only the protected forefinger for operation, pressing the shift key and moving the carriage with a handkerchief-covered left hand.
Beneath the date which Hardeman had typed before he was murdered, Shayne wrote:
I can’t go on this way longer. I thought I could get away with it but I was a fool. When Shayne was here this evening I could tell from the way he looked at me, the way he spoke, that he suspects the truth.
I killed Mayme Martin in her apartment. I had planned it that way from the beginning…
Shayne typed on steadily, the clacking of the machine loud in his ears. He ended with the words:
