The Winning Clue Part 42

"You're up against it, Morley. You know it as well as we do. And we don't want to trick you or bully you. We're only after the truth. If you'll tell the truth, it will help you and us. Will you give us a straight story?"

"Yes," he answered dully, his hands folded, like a woman's, against his body.

Braceway put more imperiousness into his voice.

"You know you're under arrest for embezzlement, don't you?"

"Yes."

"And you did take money from the Anderson National Bank?"

Morley squirmed and looked at each of the three in front of him before he replied to that.

"Yes," he said finally, swallowing hard, his voice high and strained.

"Good! That's the sensible way to look at it," Braceway jogged him with rapid speech. "We needn't bother any more about that tonight. How about the jewelry you p.a.w.ned in Baltimore today?"

The prisoner licked his lips and fixed on Braceway a look that grew into a stare.

"You mean the rubies?"

"Well, yes."

"I didn't p.a.w.n them, and--and they were my mother's."

"How about the diamonds and emeralds?"

"I had no diamonds and emeralds."

"You didn't! Where were you all the afternoon preceding the time you showed up at Eidstein's?"

This was his first intimation that he had been watched. He hesitated.

"Do I have to tell that?"

"Certainly. Why shouldn't you?"

A film, like tears, clouded his weak eyes. His voice was disagreeably beseeching.

"It would bring my mother into this," he objected, twining his fingers about each other and shuffling his feet.

"You'll have to tell us where you were and what you did," Braceway persisted.

"Oh, very well," he said desperately; "I was in a room in the Emerson Hotel with--with my mother. And I was--I was confessing to her that I'd stolen from the bank. She knew I needed money. I had told her I'd been speculating, and needed some extra money for margins. She gave me the rubies from her earrings; and she followed me to Baltimore. If I couldn't raise the money on the rubies, she was to borrow it on our house. She owns that."

He paused, on the verge of tears.

"Buck up!" Braceway prodded him. "You confessed to her, did you?"

"Yes. At the last, somehow, I couldn't stand the idea of her giving up the last thing she had, but--but she would have done it."

"Could she have mortgaged her home in Baltimore?"

"Yes. Mr. Taliaferro, A. G. Taliaferro, the lawyer, would have fixed it for her. He's a friend of the family--used to be of father's."

"Now, about the emeralds and diamonds?" Braceway began another attack.

"I don't know what you mean."'

"They belonged to Mrs. Withers."

Morley shook his head impatiently.

"I don't know anything about them."

Bristow took a hand in the questioning, flicking him and provoking him by tone and word. But neither he nor Braceway could get an admission, or any appearance of admission, that he knew anything about the Withers jewelry.

Furthermore, he declared that his presence in the hotel, from the time Delaney had "lost" him until his second appearance at Eidstein's at four o'clock, could be established by the room clerk, two bellboys, and a maid at the Emerson, and by the lawyer, Taliaferro, with whom he had talked on the telephone while there with his mother.

According to him, he had unwittingly evaded Delaney by the simple act of stepping into the elevator and going to the room where his mother, having reached Baltimore an hour later than he, was waiting to hear how he had fared in his interview with Eidstein.

He had hoped, he said, to cover up the $700 shortage at the bank with the money obtained from the dealer in antiques, but, thinking of the risk of his mother's being impoverished, he had renounced at the last moment the plan of getting more money through the mortgage or sale of the home.

"Do you happen to know that a man, clumsily disguised and answering to your description, p.a.w.ned some of the Withers jewelry in Baltimore today?"

Braceway asked.

"Did he?" He looked blank.

"Yes. What do you know about it?"

"I've already told you: not a thing."

Braceway, recognizing the futility for the present of prolonging this line of inquiry, paused, looking at him thoughtfully.

"If I p.a.w.ned them," Morley added, without raising his eyes, "why wasn't the money found on me?"

"Don't get too smart!" Bristow put in so roughly and suddenly that the prisoner started violently. "What we want is facts, not arguments!"

The lame man leaned forward in his chair and made his voice sharp, provocative.

"You're not as clever as you think you are. You lied when you made your statement about the night Mrs. Withers was murdered. Now, come through with that--the truth about it!"

Morley, utterly bewildered, stared and said nothing.

"What did you do that night? Where were you?"

Bristow left his chair and, going round the table, stood in front of Morley.

"I told you that once. I wasn't anywhere near Manniston Road."