The Winning Clue Part 54

"Note my heavily protruding lower lip--and, at rare intervals, my hollow cheeks.

"Also, there's your gold-tooth mystery--solved!

"As a disguise, the gold tooth is admirable. I mean a solid, complete tooth of gold, garish in the front part of the mouth.

"It unfailingly changes the expression; frequently, it degrades and brutalizes the face. Try it.

"Using my crooked nose as an every-day precaution, I always straightened it for night work. Forestier taught me that--great man, Forestier; marvellous with noses.

"He is now piling up a fortune as make-up specialist for motion pictures in Los Angeles--has a secret preparation with which he 'builds' new noses.

"Changing the colour of my eyes was something beyond the police imagination.

"I got the trick from a man in Cincinnati--another great character.

Homatropine is the basic element of his preparation.

"Some day women will hear of it and make him rich. He deserves it."

Fulton, after he had read that, looked at Braceway out of tortured eyes.

This turning of his tragedy into jest defied his strength.

"That's enough of that," Braceway raised his voice above the clatter of the typewriter. "Get down to the crime, or stop!"

"By all means," Bristow a.s.sented.

Flicking from the roller the page he had already begun, he tore it up and inserted another.

"I met Enid Fulton six years ago at Hot Springs, Virginia. She fell in love with me.

"I had always known that a rich woman's indiscretions could be made to yield big dividends. She was a victim of her----"

Braceway's grasp caught the writer's hands.

"Eliminate that!" he ordered sternly. "It's not necessary."

Bristow, imperturbable, his motions quick and sure, tore up that page also, and started afresh:

"Later she believed I had embezzled in order to a.s.sure her ease and luxury from the date of our marriage.

"Her exaggerated sense of fair play, of obligation, was an aid to my representations of the situation.

"Although she no longer loved me and did love Withers, my hold on her, rather on her purse, could not be broken.

"She gave me the money in Atlantic City and Was.h.i.+ngton. I played the market, and lost. I no longer had my cunning in dealing with stocks.

"I came here as soon as I had learned of her presence in Furmville. At first, she was reasonable. Abrahamson knows that. I p.a.w.ned several little things with him.

"At last she grew obstinate. She argued that, if she p.a.w.ned any more of her jewels, she would be unable to redeem them because her father had failed in business.

"But I had to have funds. Several times I pointed this out to her when I saw her in Number Five--always after midnight, for my own protection as well as hers.

"Finally, my patience was exhausted. Last Monday night, or early Tuesday morning, I told her so, quite clearly.

"She argued, plead with me. All this was in whispers. The necessity of whispering so long irritated me.

"Her refusal, flat and final, to part with the jewels enraged me. It was then that I made the first big mistake of my life.

"I lost my temper. Men who can not control their tempers under the most trying circ.u.mstances should let crime alone. They will fail.

"I killed her--a foolish result of the folly of yielding to my rage.

"Standing there and looking at her, I pondered, with all the clarity I could command. In a second, I perceived the advisability of throwing the blame upon some other person."

The faces of Braceway and Fulton mirrored to the others the horror of the stuff they were reading. The scene taxed the emotional balance of all of them. The evil-faced man at the typewriter, the father getting by degrees the description of his daughter's death, the policemen waiting to put the murderer behind bars----

Abrahamson, peculiarly wrought upon by the tenseness of it all, wished he had not come. His back felt creepy. He lit a cigarette, puffed it to a torch and threw it down.

Bristow wrote on:

"Mechanically, my fingers went to a pocket in my vest and played with two metal b.u.t.tons I had picked up in my kitchen the day before, Monday.

"I knew the b.u.t.tons had come from the overalls of the negro, Perry Carpenter. It would be easy to drop one there, the other on the floor of my kitchen, where I had originally found them.

"That would be the beginning of identifying him as the murderer. He had been half-drunk the day before.

"The rest was simple--dropping the lavalliere links back of Number Five, placing the lavalliere in the yard of his house, and so on.

"I had one piece of luck which, of course, I did not count on when I first adopted this simple course. That was when Greenleaf asked me to help him in finding the murderer. A confiding soul-your Greenleaf--and insured by nature against brain storms.

"Such a turn was a G.o.dsend. I had become the investigator of my own crime.

"There remains to be told only the fact that I made a second trip to Number Five.

"Having come back here in safety, I perceived I had left there without the jewels she was wearing and without those in her jewel cabinet.

"She had brought this cabinet into the living room to show me how her supply of jewelry had been depleted.

"To murder and not get the fruits of it, is like picking one's own pocket. I returned immediately and rectified the mistake.

"Before departing this last time, I switched on the lights to a.s.sure myself that I had left only the clue to the negro's presence, none to my own.

"That explains Withers' story of his struggle at the foot of the steps.

We really had it.

"In the ordinary course of events, the negro would have gone to the chair.

"But there were complications I did not foresee.