The Winning Clue Part 53

Great G.o.d, man! Do you mean to say you're going to let him cram this into you?"

He got himself more in hand.

"Think a minute. You know me well, chief. And you, Mr. Fulton, you're no child to be bamboozled and turned into a laughing stock by a detective who finds himself without a case--a pseudo expert on crime who tries to work the age-old trick of railroading a man guilty of a less offense!"

"This is no place for an argument of the case," Braceway said crisply.

"Mr. Abrahamson, tell us what you know about this man."

"It is not much, Mr. Braceway," the Jew replied; "not as much as I would like. I've seen him several times; once in my place when he was fixed up with moustache and so forth, and twice when he was fixed up with a beard and a gold tooth; once again when he was sitting out here on his porch."

Abrahamson talked rapidly, punctuating his phrases with quick gestures, enjoying the importance of his role.

"Mr. Braceway," he explained smilingly to Greenleaf, "talked to me about the man with the beard--talked more than you did, chief. You know Mr.

Braceway--how quick he is. He talked and asked me to try to remember where and when I had seen this Mr. Bristow. I had my ideas and my a.s.sociation of ideas. I remembered--remembered hard. That afternoon I took a holiday--I don't take many of those--and I walked past here.

'I bet you,' I said to myself--not out real loud, you understand--'I bet you I know that man.' And I won my bet. I did know him.

"This Mr. Splain and the man with the beard are the same, exactly the same."

Bristow's smile was tolerant, as if he dealt with a child. But Fulton, his angry eyes boring into the accused man, saw that, for the first time, there were tired lines tugging the corners of his mouth. It was an expression that heralded defeat, the first faint shadow of despair.

"You have my story, and I've the facts to prove it a hundred times over,"

Braceway announced. "Why waste more time?"

"For the simple reason," Bristow fought on, "that I'm ent.i.tled to a fair deal, an honest----"

On the word "honest" Braceway turned with his electric quickness to Greenleaf, and, as he did so, Bristow leaned back in his chair, as if determined not to argue further. His face a.s.sumed its hard, bleak calm; his cold self-control returned.

"Now, get this!" Braceway's incisive tone whipped Greenleaf to closer attention. "You've an embezzler and murderer in your hands. He admits one crime; I've proved the other. The rest is up to you. Put the irons on him. Throw him into a cell! You'll be proud of it the rest of your life.

Here's the warrant."

He drew the paper from his hip pocket and tossed it to the chief.

"Get busy," he insisted. "This man's the worst type of criminal I've ever encountered. Not content with blackmailing and robbing a woman, he murdered her; not satisfied with that, he deliberately planned the death of an innocent man because he, in his cowardice, was afraid to take the ordinary chances of escaping detection. By openly parading his pursuit of breakers of the law, he secured secretly his opportunity to excel their basest actions. He----"

Quicker than thought, Braceway lunged forward with his cane and struck the hand Bristow had lifted swiftly to his throat. The blow sent a pocket knife clattering to the floor. A policeman, picking it up, saw that the opened blade worked on a spring.

The accused man sank back in his chair. The gray immobility of his face had broken up. The features worked curiously, forming themselves for a second to a pattern of mean vindictiveness. His right hand still numbed by the blow, he took his handkerchief with the left and flicked from his neck, close to the ear, a single red bead.

"Search him," Braceway ordered one of the officers.

Bristow submitted to that. When he looked at Braceway, his face was still bleak.

"You've got me," he said in a tone thoroughly matter-of-fact. "I'm through. I'll give you a statement."

"You mean a confession?"

"It amounts to that."

"Not here," Braceway refused curtly. "We've no stenographer."

"I'd prefer to write it myself anyway," he insisted. "It won't take me fifteen minutes on the typewriter." Seeing Braceway hesitate, he added: "You'll get it this way, or not at all. Suit yourself."

The detective did not underestimate the man's stubborn nerve.

"I'm agreeable, chief," he said to Greenleaf, "if you are."

"Yes," the chief agreed. "It's as good here as anywhere else."

Darkness had grown in the room. Abrahamson and the policeman pulled down the window shades. Greenleaf turned on the lights.

Bristow limped to the typewriter and sat down. Braceway opened the drawer of the typewriter stand and saw that it contained nothing but sheets of yellow "copy" paper cut to one-half the size of ordinary letter paper.

Every trace of agitation had left Bristow. Colour crept back into his cheeks.

Braceway and Greenleaf watched him closely. They had the idea that he still contemplated suicide, that he sought to divert their attention from himself by interesting them in what he wrote. They remembered the boast he had made in the cell in New York.

He felt their wariness, and smiled.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE LAST CARD

He worked with surprising rapidity, tearing from the machine and pa.s.sing to Braceway each half-page as he finished it. He wrote triple-s.p.a.ce, breaking the story into many paragraphs, never hesitating for a choice of words.

"My name is Thomas F. Splain.

"I am forty years old.

"I am 'wanted' in New York for embezzlement.

"Fear is an unknown quant.i.ty to me. I have always had ample self-confidence. The world belongs to the impudent.

"I learned long ago that no man is at heart either grateful, or honest, or unselfish."

With a turn of the roller, he flicked that off the machine and, without raising his head, pa.s.sed it to Braceway. The detective glanced at it long enough to get its meaning and handed it to Fulton. When it was offered to Greenleaf, he shook his head.

The chiefs rage had reached its high point. To his realization of how perfectly he had been duped, there was added the humiliation of having two members of his force as witnesses of its revelation.

"If he makes a move," he thought savagely, fingering the revolver in the side pocket of his coat, "I'll kill him certain."

The man at the machine wrote on:

"After leaving New York, I was caught in a street accident in Chicago, suffering a broken nose. Thanks to my physicians--an incompetent lot, these doctors--I emerged with a crooked nose.

"That was a help. I then had all my teeth extracted. Knowing dentistry, I saw the possibilities of disguise by wearing differently shaped sets of teeth.