she saw nobody until she reached Pine Street. If Kelly had been telling the truth, she would have seen him on Jones Street. He said he didn’t turn the corner until after the shot was fired.
“Either of the women could have killed Gilmore, but hardly both; and I doubted that either could have shot him and got away without running into Kelly or the other. Suppose both of them were telling the truth—what then? Kelly must have been lying! He was the logical suspect anyway—the nearest known person to the murdered man when the shot was fired.
“To back all this up, he had let Miss Kenbrook go into the apartment building at 3:00 in the morning, in front of which a man had just been killed, without questioning her or mentioning her in his report. That looked as if he knew who had done the killing. So I took a chance with the empty shell trick, it being a good bet that he would have thrown his away, and would think that—”
McTighe’s heavy voice interrupted my explanation.
“How about this assault charge?” he asked, and had the decency to avoid my eye when I turned toward him with the others.
Tennant cleared his throat.
“Er—ah—in view of the way things have turned out, and knowing that Miss Kenbrook doesn’t want the disagreeable publicity that would accompany an affair of this sort, why, I’d suggest that we drop the whole thing.” He smiled brightly from McTighe to me. “You know nothing has gone on the records yet.”
“Make the big heap play his hand out,” O’Gar growled in my ear. “Don’t let him drop it.”
“Of course if Miss Kenbrook doesn’t want to press the charge,” McTighe was saying, watching me out of the tail of his eye, “I suppose—”
“If everybody understands that the whole thing was a plant,” I said, “and if the policemen who heard the story are brought in here now and told by Tennant and Miss Kenbrook that it was all a lie—then I’m willing to let it go at that. Otherwise, I won’t stand for a hush-up.”
“You’re a damned fool!” O’Gar whispered. “Put the screws on them!”
But I shook my head. I didn’t see any sense in making a lot of trouble for myself just to make some for somebody else—and suppose Tennant proved his story …
So the policemen were found, and brought into the office again, and told the truth.
And presently Tennant, the girl, and I were walking together like three old friends through the corridors toward the door, Tennant still asking me to let him make amends for the evening’s work.
“You’ve got to let me do something!” he insisted. “It’s only right!”
His hand dipped into his coat, and came out with a thick billfold.
“Here,” he said; “let me—”
We were going, at that happy moment, down the stone vestibule steps that led to Kearny Street—six or seven steps there are.
“No,” I said; “let me—”
He was on the next to the top step, when I reached up and let go.
He settled in a rather limp pile at the bottom. Leaving his empty-faced lady love to watch over him, I strolled up through Portsmouth Square toward a restaurant where the steaks come thick.
The Golden Horseshoe
I
“I haven’t anything very exciting to offer you this time,” Vance Richmond said as we shook hands. “I want you to find a man for me—a man who is not a criminal.”
There was an apology in his voice. The last couple of jobs this lean, grey-faced attorney had thrown my way had run to gunplay and other forms of rioting, and I suppose he thought anything less than that would put me to sleep. Was a time when he might have been right—when I was a young sprout of twenty or so, newly attached to the Continental Detective Agency. But the fifteen years that had slid by since then had dulled my appetite for rough stuff. I don’t mean that I shuddered whenever I considered the possibility of some bird taking a poke at me; but I didn’t call that day a total loss in which nobody tried to puncture my short, fat carcass.
“The man I want found,” the lawyer went on, as we sat down, “is an English architect named Norman Ashcraft. He is a man of about thirty-seven, five feet ten inches tall, well built, and fair-skinned, with light hair and blue eyes. Four years ago he was a typical specimen of the clean-cut blond Britisher. He may not be like that now—those four years have been rather hard ones for him, I imagine.
“I want to find him for Mrs. Ashcraft, his wife. I know your agency’s rule against meddling with family affairs, but I can assure you that no matter how things turn out there will be no divorce proceedings in which you will be involved.
“Here is the story. Four years ago the Ashcrafts were living together in England, in Bristol. It seems that Mrs. Ashcraft is of a very jealous disposition, and he was rather high-strung. Furthermore, he had only what money he earned at his profession, while she had inherited quite a bit from her parents. Ashcraft was rather foolishly sensitive about being the husband of a wealthy woman—was inclined to go out of his way to show that he was not dependent upon her money, that he wouldn’t be influenced by it. Foolish, of course, but just the sort of attitude a man of his temperament would assume. One night she accused him of paying too much attention to another woman. They quarreled, and he packed up and left.
“She was repentant within a week—especially repentant since she had learned that her suspicion had had no foundation outside of her own jealousy—and she tried to find him. But he was gone. It became manifest that he had left England. She had him searched for in Europe, in Canada, in Australia, and in the United States. She succeeded in tracing him from Bristol to New York, and
