CHAPTER x.x.x
A CONFESSION
In the dingy office of the city prison, with its sand boxes and barrel stove, its hacked old desks, dusty books and papers, I watched Bronson Vandeman, and wondered to see how the man I had known played in and out across his face with the man Edward Clayte, whom I had tried to imagine, whom n.o.body could describe.
Helping to recover Clayte"s loot for Worth Gilbert looked to the opposition their best bet for squaring themselves. d.y.k.eman from his sick bed, had dug us up a stenographer; c.u.mmings had climbed out of his tin clothes and come along with us to the jail. They wanted the screws put on; but I intended to handle Vandeman in my own way. I had halted the lawyer on the lock-up threshold, with,
"c.u.mmings, I want you to keep still in here. When I"m done with the man, you can question him all you want--if he"s left anything to be told." I answered a doubtful look, "Did you see his face there in the ball room as he looked up at Barbara Wallace? He thinks that girl knows everything, like a supreme being. He"s still so shaken that he"d spill out anything--everything. He"ll hardly suppose he"s telling us anything we don"t know."
And Vandeman bore out expectations. Now, provided with a raincoat to take the place of his Mandarin robe, his trousers still the lilac satin ones of that costume, he surveyed us and our preparations with a half smile as we settled our stenographer and took chairs ourselves.
"I look like h.e.l.l--what?" He spoke fast as a man might with a drink ahead. But it was not alcohol that was loosening his tongue. "Why can"t some one go up to my place and get me a decent suit of clothes? G.o.d knows I"ve plenty there--closets full of them."
"Time enough when th" Shurff gets here," Roll Winch.e.l.l, the town marshall grunted at him. "I"m not taking any chances on you, Mr.
Vandeman. You"ll do me as you are."
"Stick a smoke in my face, c.u.mmings," came next in a voice that tw.a.n.ged like a stretched string. "d.a.m.n these bracelets! Light it, can"t you?
Light it." He puffed eagerly, got to his feet and began walking up and down the room, glancing at us from time to time, raising the manacled hands grotesquely to his cigar, drawing in a breath as though to speak, then shaking his head, grinning a little and walking on. I knew the mood; the moment was coming when he must talk. The necessity to reel out the whole thing to whomever would listen was on him like a sneeze. It"s always so at this stage of the game.
For all the hullabaloo in the streets, we were quiet enough here, since the lock-up at Santa Ysobel lurks demurely, as such places are apt to do, in the rear of the building whose garbage can it is. Our pacing captive could keep silent no longer. Shooting a sidelong glance at me, he broke out,
"I"m not a common crook, Boyne, even if I do come of a family of them, and my father"s in Sing Sing. I put him there. They"d not have caught him without. He was an educated man--never worked anything but big stuff. At that, what was the best he could do--or any of them? Make a haul, and all they got out of it was a spell of easy money that they only had the chance to spend while they were dodging arrest. Sooner or later every one of them I knew got put away for a longer or shorter term. Growing up like that, getting my education in the public schools daytimes, and having a finish put on it nights with the gang, I decided that I was going to be, not honest, but the hundredth man--the thousandth--who can pull off a big thing and neither have to hide nor go to prison."
This was promising; a little different from the ordinary brag; I signaled inconspicuously to our stenographer to keep right on the job.
"When I was twenty-four years old, I saw my chance to shake the gang and try out my own idea," Clayte rattled it off feelinglessly. "It was a lone hand for me. My father had made a stake by a forgery; checks on the City bank. I knew where the money was hid, eight thousand and seventy nine dollars. It would just about do me. I framed the old man--I told you he was in Sing Sing now--took my working capital and came out here to the Coast. That money had to make me rich for life, respected, comfortable. I figured that my game was as safe as dummy whist."
"Yeh," said Roll Winch.e.l.l, the marshal, gloomily, "them high-toned Eastern crooks always comin" out here thinkin" they"ll find the Coast a soft snap."
"Two years I worked as a messenger for the San Francisco Trust Company,"
Clayte"s voice ran right on past Winch.e.l.l"s interruption, "a model employee, straight as they come; then decided they were too big for me to tackle, and used their recommendation to get a clerk"s job with the Van Ness Avenue concern. I was after the theft of at least a half million dollars, with a perfect alibi; and the smaller inst.i.tution suited my plan. It took me four years to work up to paying teller, but I wasn"t hurrying things. I was using my capital now to build that perfect alibi."
He glanced around nervously as the stenographer turned a leaf, then went on,
"I"d picked out this town for the home of the man I was going to be. It suited me, because it was on a branch line of the railway, hardly used at all by men whose business was in the city, and off the main highway of automobile travel; besides, I liked the place--I"ve always liked it."
"Sure flattered," came the growl as Winch.e.l.l stirred in his chair.
"My bungalow and grounds cost me four thousand; at that it was a run-down place and I got it cheap. The mahogany--old family pieces that I was supposed to bring in from the East--came high. Yet maybe you"d be surprised how the idea took with me. I used to scrimp and save off my salary at the bank to buy things for the place, to keep up the right scale of living for Bronson Vandeman, traveling agent for eastern manufacturers, not at home much in Santa Ysobel yet, but a man of fine family, rich prospects, and all sorts of a good fellow, settled in the place for the rest of his days."
He turned suddenly and grinned at me.
"You swallowed it whole, Boyne, when you walked into my house last night--the old family furniture I bought in Los Angeles, the second-hand library, that family portrait, with a ring on my finger, and the same painted in on what was supposed to be my father"s hand."
"Sure," I nodded amiably, "You had me fooled."
"And without a bit of crude make-up or disguise," he rubbed it in. "It was a change of manner and psychology for mine. As Edward Clayte--and that"s not my name, either, any more than Vandeman--I was description-proof. I meant to be--and I was. It took--her--the girl,"
his face darkened and he jerked at his cigar, "to deduce that a nonent.i.ty who could get away with nearly a million dollars and leave no trail was some man!"
I raised my head with a start and stared at the man in his raincoat and lilac silk pantaloons.
"That"s so," I fed it to him, "She had a name for you. She called you the wonder man."
"Did she!" a pleased smile. "Well, I"ll give her right on that. I was some little wonder man. Listen," his insistent over-stimulated voice went eagerly on, "The beauty of my scheme was that up to the very last move, there was nothing criminal in my leading this double life. You see--as I got stronger and stronger here in Santa Ysobel, I bought a good machine, a speedster that could burn up the road. Many"s the stag supper I"ve had with the boys there in my bungalow, and been back behind the wicket as Edward Clayte in the Van Ness Avenue bank on time next morning. I was in that room at the St. Dunstan about as much as a fellow"s in his front hall. I walked through it to Henry J. Brundage"s room at the Nugget; I stayed there more often than I did at the St.
Dunstan, unless I came on here.
"I"d left marriage out. Then that night four years ago when Ina had her little run-in with old Tom Gilbert and got her engagement to Worth smashed, I saw there might be girls right in the cla.s.s I was trying to break into that would be possible for a man like me. The date for our wedding was set, when Thomas Gilbert remarked to me one afternoon as we were coming off the golf links together, that he was buying a block of Van Ness Savings Bank stock. For a minute I felt like caving in his head, then and there, with the golf club I carried. What a h.e.l.l of a thing to happen, right at the last this way! Ten chances to one I"d have this man to silence; but it must be done right. Not much room for murder in so full a career as mine--holding down a teller"s job, running for the vice presidency of the country club, getting married in style--but every time I"d look up from behind my teller"s grille, and see any one near the size of old Gilbert walk in the front door, it gave me the shivers. I"d put more than eight years of planning and hard work into this scheme, and you"ll admit, Boyne, that what I had was some alibi. A wedding like that in a town of this size makes a big noise. I managed to be back and forth so much that people got the idea I was hardly out of Santa Ysobel. The Friday night before, I had a stag supper at my house, and Sat.u.r.day morning if any one had called, Fong Ling would have told them I was sleeping late and couldn"t be disturbed. On the forenoon of my wedding day, then, I sat as Edward Clayte in my teller"s cage, the suitcase I had carried back and forth empty for so many Sat.u.r.days now loaded with currency and securities, not one of which was traceable, and whose amount I believed would run close to a million. It was within three minutes of closing time, when some one rapped on the counter at my wicket, and I looked straight up into the face of old Tom Gilbert.
"I saw a flash of doubtful recognition in his eyes, but didn"t dare to avoid them while counting bills and silver to pay his check. If I had done so, he would certainly have known me. As it was, I saw that I convinced him--almost. I watched him as he went out, saw him hesitate a little at the door of Knapp"s office--he wasn"t quite sure enough. I knew the man. The instant he made certain, he would act.
"The old devil wasn"t on terms to attend the reception at the Thornhill place, but I located him in an aisle seat, when I first came from the vestry with my best man. All through the ceremony I felt his eyes boring into my back. When I finally faced him, as Ina and I walked out, man and wife, I knew he recognized me, and almost expected him to step out and denounce me. But no--a fellow leading a double life was all he saw in it; bigamy was the worst he"d suspect me of at the moment. He didn"t give Ina much, wouldn"t lift a finger to defend her.
"Meantime, the manner of his taking off lay easy to my hand. I"d studied the situation through that skylight, seen Ed Hughes juggle the bolts with his magnets, and mapped the thing out. Gilbert killed there, the room found bolted, was a cinch for suicide. When the reception at the Thornhill house was over, I made an excuse of something needed for the journey, and started across to my bungalow. It was common for all of us to cross through the lawns; I hid in the shrubbery.
"There were people with Gilbert, no chance for me to do anything. I stood there and nearly went out of my hide with impatience over the delays, while he had his row with Worth, when Laura Bowman and Jim Edwards came and braced him to let up on his persecution of them. Mrs.
Bowman finally left; he went with her toward the front. Now was my chance; I dodged into the study, jerked his own pistol from its holster, squeezed myself in behind the open door and waited. He came back; I let him get into the room, past me a little, and when at some sound I made, he turned, the muzzle of the gun was shoved against his chest and fired.
"I"d barely finished pressing Gilbert"s fingers around the pistol b.u.t.t when I heard a cry outside, jumped to the door, shut and bolted it just as my mother-in-law ran in across the lawns. I gathered that she"d been there earlier to get those three leaves out of the diary that you were so interested in, Boyne; had just read them and come back to have it out with old Tom. She hung around for five minutes, I should say, beating on the door, calling, asking if anything was wrong.
"My one big mistake in the study was that diary of 1920. It lay open on the desk where he"d been writing. It did tell of his having identified me as Clayte. I"d not expected it, and so I didn"t handle it well. Time pressed. I couldn"t carry it with me; I tore out the leaf, stuck the book into the drainpipe, and ran.
"And after all," he summed up, "my plans would have gone through on schedule; you never could have touched me with your clumsy, police-detective methods, if it hadn"t been for the girl."
He dropped his head and stood brooding a moment, demanded another smoke, got it, shrugged off some thought with a gesture, and finished,
"I was in too deep to turn. It was her life--or mine. Things went contrary. We couldn"t get her to come out to the masquerade, where it would have been easy. With those two Mandarin costumes, Fong Ling in my place, I had my time from the hour we put on the masks till midnight.
Another perfect alibi. Well--it didn"t work. They say you have to shoot a witch with a silver bullet. And she"s more than human."
A siren"s dry shriek as the Sheriff"s gasoline buggy made its way through the crowded street outside. c.u.mmings raised his brows at me, got my nod of permission, and shot his first question at the prisoner.
"Vandeman, where"s the money?"
"Not within a hundred miles of here," instantly.
"You took it south with you--on your wedding trip?" c.u.mmings would persist. But our man, so expansive a moment ago, had, as I knew he would at direct mention of his loot, turned sullen, and he started for the San Jose jail, mum as an oyster.
CHAPTER x.x.xI
THE MILLION-DOLLAR SUITCASE
The Sheriff had gone with his prisoner; c.u.mmings left; and then there came to me, in the street there before the lock-up, riding with Jim Edwards in his roadster, a Worth Gilbert I had never known. Quiet he had been before; but never considerate like this. When I rushed up to him with my triumph and congratulations, and he put them aside, it was with a curious gentleness.