Just to play safe, I put in a few hours getting a line on Frederick. He had been at a ball on the night of the murder; he had never, so far as I could learn, quarreled with his father; his father was liberal with him, giving him everything he wanted; and Frederick was taking in more money in his brokerage office than he was spending. No motive for a murder appeared on the surface there.
At the city detective bureau I hunted up the police sleuths who had been assigned to the murder; Marty O’Hara and George Dean. It didn’t take them long to tell me what they knew about it. Whoever had made the bloody fingerprints was not known to the police here: they had not found the prints in their files. The classifications had been broadcast to every large city in the country, but with no results so far.
A house four blocks from Grover’s had been robbed on the night of the murder, and there was a slim chance that the same man might have been responsible for both jobs. But the burglary had occurred after one o’clock in the morning, which made the connection look not so good. A burglar who had killed a man, and perhaps picked up $10,000 in the bargain, wouldn’t be likely to turn his hand to another job right away.
I looked at the paper-knife with which Grover had been killed, and at the photographs of the bloody prints, but they couldn’t help me much just now. There seemed to be nothing to do but get out and dig around until I turned up something somewhere.
Then the door opened, and Joseph Clane was ushered into the room where O’Hara, Dean and I were talking.
Clane was a hard-bitten citizen, for all his prosperous look; fifty or fifty-five, I’d say, with eyes, mouth and jaw that held plenty of humor but none of what is sometimes called the milk of human kindness.
He was a big man, beefy, and all dressed up in a tight-fitting checkered suit, fawn-colored hat, patent-leather shoes with buff uppers, and the rest of the things that go with that sort of combination. He had a harsh voice that was as empty of expression as his hard red face, and he held his body stiffly, as if he was afraid the buttons on his too-tight clothes were about to pop off. Even his arms hung woodenly at his sides, with thick fingers that were lifelessly motionless.
He came right to the point. He had been a friend of the murdered man’s, and thought that perhaps what he could tell us would be of value.
He had met Henry Grover—he called him “Henny”—in 1894, in Ontario, where Grover was working a claim: the gold mine that had started the murdered man along the road to wealth. Clane had been employed by Grover as foreman, and the two men had become close friends. A man named Denis Waldeman had a claim adjoining Grover’s and a dispute had arisen over their boundaries. The dispute ran on for some time—the men coming to blows once or twice—but finally Grover seems to have triumphed, for Waldeman suddenly left the country.
Clane’s idea was that if we could find Waldeman we might find Grover’s murderer, for considerable money had been involved in the dispute, and Waldeman was “a mean cuss, for a fact,” and not likely to have forgotten his defeat.
Clane and Grover had kept in touch with each other, corresponding or meeting at irregular intervals, but the murdered man had never said or written anything that would throw a light on his death. Clane, too, had given up mining, and now had a small string of racehorses which occupied all his time.
He was in the city for a rest between racing-meets, had arrived two days before the murder, but had been too busy with his own affairs—he had discharged his trainer and was trying to find another—to call upon his friend. Clane was staying at the Marquis hotel, and would be in the city for a week or ten days longer.
“How come you’ve waited three days before coming to tell us all this?” Dean asked him.
“I wasn’t noways sure I had ought to do it. I wasn’t never sure in my mind but what maybe Henny done for that fellow Waldeman—he disappeared sudden-like. And I didn’t want to do nothing to dirty Henny’s name. But finally I decided to do the right thing. And then there’s another thing: you found some fingerprints in Henny’s house, didn’t you? The newspapers said so.”
“We did.”
“Well, I want you to take mine and match them up. I was out with a girl the night of the murder”—he leered suddenly, boastingly—“all night! And she’s a good girl, got a husband and a lot of folks; and it wouldn’t be right to drag her into this to prove that I wasn’t in Henny’s house when he was killed, in case you’d maybe think I killed him. So I thought I better come down here, tell you all about it, and get you to take my fingerprints, and have it all over with.”
We went up to the identification bureau and had Clane’s prints taken. They were not at all like the murderer’s.
After we pumped Clane dry I went out and sent a telegram to our Toronto office, asking them to get a line on the Waldeman angle. Then I hunted up a couple of boys who eat, sleep, and breathe horse racing. They told me that Clane was well known in racing circles as the owner of a small string of near-horses that ran as irregularly as the stewards would permit.
At the Marquis hotel I got hold of the
