by Jerry eBooks
Then Kent acted. Before the lawyer’s hand came out of the brief case, he had a revolver out of his coat, Savage panic blazed in his face as he sent a bullet spinning into Fitch’s shoulder. The lawyer fell across the table.
Jeff leaped. His fist knocked the gun up. Kent’s second bullet crashed harmlessly into the oak ceiling. Then, snarling, Kent whirled to drive lead through Jeff.
But Jeff’s fists were active. The agonizing pain that had washed over him when he saw Lucy fall was a f1oodtide that carried reason with it in its passing, His fingers bit into Kent’s arm, bringing a sharp scream from his lips. The gun rattled to the floor, and Jeff’s fists went to work.
They avoided Kent’s face, first. Then he ripped off Kent’s glasses and smashed that weak, whimpering face until Kent toppled to the floor like a dropped puppet.
Sobbing in his throat, Jeff turned to the girl. He knelt by her. He kissed her and she opened her eyes.
“Wow!” she said weakly. “That brandy packs quite a wallop!”
Later, when they had tied up Fitch’s wounded shoulder, the lawyer started to explain, “When that gift bottle came and Mr. Dewer saw it, he laughed for the first time since his illness. I couldn’t understand why. Both I and the doctor insisted he mustn’t drink any of the brandy, and he promised he wouldn’t. He made me write out a new will, a very odd one. Then he made me promise I’d make you all drink a last toast from that bottle.”
“But why? What’s this all about?” Lucy demanded.
“I think I know,” Jeff said. “Kent sent Uncle Rocky that brandy. It was poisoned. You see, Kent was pretty smug about the will, pretty certain of himself.”
“So certain that he borrowed bank funds some months ago when it was thought Mr. Dewer was dying,” Fitch interjected.
“He got tired of waiting,” Jeff went on. “In fact, he had to have that money. But Uncle Rocky was getting better! So he sent him that poisoned bottle of brandy, thinking Rocky’s doctor would call it a relapse or blame it on too much brandy. Kent was clever. He knew how much Rocky liked good brandy, and that he was likely to drink it all himself. Even if he didn’t, Kent planned to be here to dispose of the rest of it.
“But somehow Rocky found out. He planned this trick of having us drink a toast—knowing that the one who poisoned the brandy wouldn’t drink any!”
“But I did!” Lucy said wide-eyed. “What am I doing here?”
“How about that?” Jeff asked Fitch. “I—I didn’t dare take any chances. I substituted the poisoned brandy for some cheap domestic liquor. I felt it would work equally well.”
“It did,” Jeff said grimly. “Now, about the will—the real one?”
Fitch smiled and pulled another envelope out of his brief case. “Here we are. It reads, ‘Like I said before, it’s my opinion that a man’s character stays pretty much the same throughout his life. Kent Forgey was too all-fired anxious to please me, too eager to assure me he was the one I should pick. He was clever, even as a boy. Clever and unscrupulous, and a tattle-tale as well. I knew then that if Kent Forgey had the means to do it, he would kill me for my money.
“ ‘I knew he sent me that bottle of brandy, and I suspected it was poisoned. It may sound loco to some people, but I was willing to gamble my life—rather my death—on it. Why should I take the chance? Why not! I haven’t more than a couple years left at the most, and I don’t cherish them much. I’m old and tired. What could be a sweeter way to die than to drink a couple glasses of Napoleon brandy, poisoned or not?
“ ‘As to my real heirs, Lucy and Jeff, I am confident they will find a way to manage my properties without splitting them up. At least, I hope they’ll give it a try. They always did get on good together—both good scrappers!’ ”
FINAL JUDGMENT
Ralph Oppenheim
Being acquitted of a murder charge doesn’t satisfy Jeff Corey, who won’t rest until he finds the guilty party!
JEFF COREY emerged from the stuffy courthouse into bright afternoon sunlight that made his blue eyes blink. He stood on top of the steps, dazedly breathing in the air of freedom.
People—spectators from the trial, passers-by—were pointing out his tall, well-built figure, so easily distinguishable because of his red hair. He gave no heed. He was grimly accustomed to being stared at, and his face, strong despite its pallor and strain, remained masklike even when he heard a woman’s shrill voice exclaiming:
“A disgrace! They should have hanged him! The whole city knows he’s guilty!” Yes, he thought wearily, the whole city. He remembered the frustrated tone the foreman of the jury had used when he had said: “We find the defendant not guilty, your Honor.”
Being honest, the jurymen had gone against their emotional belief only because of insufficient evidence.
Three men, emerging from the courthouse together, came over to Corey. One was John Hatcher, the city’s leading realtor, a jovialfaced, stocky man, wearing sporting tweeds, and with no hat covering his mass of gray hair. He seized Jeff’s hand and pumped it.
“Congratulations, my boy!” Hatcher said. “I knew you’d be cleared! You can come back to your job as my A One agent any time!”
“That’s swell of you, Mr. Hatcher,” Corey said huskily. “I know how you felt about—about ex-Judge Prentiss, so you must have believed me innocent.”
“How about me?” boomed the other man, Arthur Blanchard.
He was short and broad, with bushy-dark eyebrows. Though he had been ex-Judge Prentiss’ lawyer as well as friend, he had undertaken Jeff Corey’s defense.
“I did my best for you,” he said, “though I admit it was a stroke of fate that turned the final trick.”
When the third man, tall, suave and darkhaired District Attorney Floyd Saxon spoke, his tone was that of a beaten enemy who has not forgotten the battle.
“I also considered myself one of Jonathan Prentiss’ best friends,” he said. “All the more reason I was anxious to convict his murderer.”
He was doubtless bitter because, regardless of what developed now, Jeff Corey could never be tried again for the same crime, for so the law said. But Saxon’s attitude, as well as the open hostility of the townsfolk, strengthened the determination that had been growing in Jeff Corey.
“Mr. Hatcher,” he said, “I’ll come back to my job—as soon as I find ex-Judge Prentiss’ real murderer! Oh I know”—he waved off protests from Hatcher and Blanchard—“the murder is months old, the trail cold. But I want to stay in this town—for a lot of reasons. To do that I need more than a technical acquittal, and I aim to get it!” His blue eyes were agate-hard. “As soon as I go home and get my bearings, I’m going straight to the scene of the crime.”
Hatcher shook his gray head. The D.A. looked scornful. But Lawyer Blanchard expressed quick alarm.
“Corey, you’re not going to the Prentiss estate, are you? You must realize how upsetting that would be to Miss Arlene Prentiss.”
PAIN clouded Corey’s eyes, but his voice was hard.
“I’ll try not to upset Miss Prentiss. It’s the caretaker, Chris Jenson, I want to see. That’s where I’m starting, and I’m not stopping until I find the killer!”
A few hours later Jeff Corey, having gone to his apartment to shave and change to a clean, pressed suit, sat at the wheel of his convertible coupe, driving toward the Prentiss estate. Grimly he was reviewing the whole nightmare sequence of events that had brought him within the shadow of the gallows.
Hauntingly, the image of a slender, winsome girl kept thrusting itself foremost in his thoughts. Arlene Prentiss. He saw her lovely oval face, her liquid dark eyes, the page-boy cut of her auburn hair.
“I’m sure Dad won’t have any objections, Jeff darling,” she had said only the day before the tragedy, when she had been sitting in this very coupe with Corey.
And more than her words, the soft surrender of her lips had told Corey that a childhood playmate, now grown to lovely womanhood, would soon be his wife. He remembered how, as a little girl, Arlene ha
d come out of her opulent environment to play with less privileged kids and, still more scandalous, with young Jeff. For her father, then an incumbent Judge, had sent Jeff Corey’s stepfather to prison for embezzlement.
Jeff’s real father had died in an accident before Corey was born. The man who had married Jeff’s mother had been a spineless weakling tempted to stupid crime. He had died in prison of pneumonia, and Jeff’s brokenhearted mother had soon followed him to the grave.
Jeff, in his teens, had been thrown on his own, but John Hatcher, the realtor, had given him a good job. The city had not forgotten about his stepfather, though, and regardless of the fact that the embezzler had not been his real father, they had been prone to say “like father, like son.”
That was, until Jeff had returned from the war, bedecked with medals. The city had seemed willing to forget the past then, until tragedy had come.
Jeff was remembering more.
“So you want to marry my daughter, eh?” Jonathan Prentiss, seated at his scroll-oak desk in his sumptuous, paneled library, had translated Jeff’s fumbling words into crisp, brass-tack facts.
Arlene and Jeff had agreed that he would do the asking, and Arlene, unable to hang around in suspense, had gone out horseback riding shortly before Corey arrived, around two o’clock that afternoon. Chris Jenson, the old caretaker and gardener, had greeted Corey as the young red-haired man had approached the house. Ex-Judge Prentiss, alone in the house, had opened the heavy front door on a chain and, seeing who the caller was, had then admitted Jeff.
Screwing up his courage, Corey had told Prentiss that he and Arlene wanted to live on his, Jeff’s income, in a house of their own. The ex-Judge had seemed pleased. He had been a man with democratic ideas. He himself had been born to wealth, but that had not prevented him from giving his whole life to public work.
When arthritis and age had caused him to retire from the bench and kept him a virtual recluse, he had still participated both financially and physically in many civic activities. Shortly before his death he had become chairman and treasurer of the War Memorial Fund, a big enterprise whereby long-neglected park grounds would become a beautiful monument to commemorate soldiers who, unlike Jeff Corey, had never come back. It had been Jonathan Prentiss’ brilliant scheme to have important public and business men campaign personally for funds, each to collect through his own channels.
It had been just short of two-thirty by the heavy, onyx electric clock on Prentiss’ desk when a joyful Jeff Corey had taken his departure, with the ex-Judge’s full consent to marry his daughter. No mention had been made by either of them of Corey’s stepfather, both considering this as belonging to the dead past.
Treading on air, Corey had left the estate—but Chris Jenson, the caretaker, hadn’t seen him leave, having been busy with some rose bushes. Jeff had driven off in his car to intercept Arlene on the bridle path he knew she had taken, to break the news to her. But he had been so absent-minded in his joy that he had taken a wrong turn, and had been delayed half an hour before he finally got to her. And when they had returned to the Prentiss estate, the police had been there.
Ex-Judge Prentiss had still been in the library at the scroll-desk where Corey had last seen him. But he had been slumped over that desk, his skull hideously bashed. The police had found the weapon—the heavy onyx electric clock. A brutal killer had ripped it from its wires to deal the fatal blow. It had stopped at nineteen minutes to three.
Chris Jenson, the old caretaker, had already told the police he had seen Corey go into the house around two o’clock. A little after half-past two he had heard a loud argument coming from the library, as he had been near, trimming some hedges. A man had come out of the house, hiding his face with one arm.
As Jenson had tried to intercept him, the man had knocked the caretaker down and leaped through a hedge. Jenson had caught one clear, sunlit glimpse of the back of the man’s head beyond the hedge before it had disappeared, and there had been the sound of a car driving away.
Rushing into the house, Jenson had discovered the body and had called the police. And Jenson had sworn that the back of the head he had seen had been Jeff Corey’s—Corey’s conspicuous red hair.
By grim irony, it had been Arlene who unwittingly had supplied the motive when she had confessed that Corey had gone to ask her father for her hand, and that she had not broached the subject to the ex-Judge. District Attorney Floyd Saxon had based his case on the theory that Prentiss had refused to let his daughter marry the stepson of a man he had sent to jail, that Corey became enraged and killed him, then wiped his prints off the clock.
The city folk had readily accepted the theory, believing indeed that there had been “bad blood” between Jeff and the ex-Judge. Arlene, at first seeming unquestionably loyal, had insisted that Arthur Blanchard, her father’s lawyer, undertake Jeff’s defense. But she had not attended the trial, and Corey could not help feeling that she also must have had her doubts, her suspicions.
After all, her own father had been killed. And she could not know what had transpired at that interview between Prentiss and Jeff, and she knew that Jeff had no alibi except “taking the wrong turn” for the time of the murder.
The verdict had been a foregone conclusion—even Blanchard had seemed too resigned to put up much of a defense—until, unexpectedly, Chris Jenson had wavered in his repeated testimony. Where the old caretaker had been so positive, now he was uncertain. No, he decided, he couldn’t positively identify the man he had seen running away.
So the case had blown up. But Corey knew that ugly rumor said he had somehow got to Jenson, bought him off. Not only because it might be dangerous to live in a city that still thought him the killer of one of its most beloved citizens, but also because of his love for Arlene, he must once and forever clear his name.
Now, as he drove on in his coupe, the familiar Prentiss estate loomed out of the late afternoon landscape, with its sprawling mansion, its well-tended gardens and graveled private road. Driving through the open gate, Jeff Corey stopped near a small cottage screened by trees from view of the main house. This was where Chris Jenson the caretaker lived. Since Corey didn’t see him outside, he hoped the old man had come home.
His face grim and determined, Corey climbed out of the coupe and approached the cottage door. His mind teemed with the questions he would put to Jenson. Why had the caretaker at first been so sure the killer was Jeff, and then changed his mind at the last moment? Had he lied deliberately, then become firghtened? Had someone got him to lie, or had it been his own idea?
Corey lifted the decorative knocker hinged to the door, rapped with it. There was no answer. The shades of the cottage windows were drawn. He tried the door, found it unlocked. He let himself into a shadowy living room which had a rustic, raftered ceiling.
He took two steps, then froze in his tracks, icy needles of horror stabbing his spine. In the half-light of the room, he saw the figure of a man hanging on a rope that was fastened to one of the rafters!
Corey recognized the ghastly, death-frozen face as that of the grizzled caretaker. There was an overturned chair nearby, also some coiled, stout clothesline from which enough had been cut to make the improvised noose. Evidently Chris Jenson had come home and hanged himself.
But why? Had the same guilty knowledge which had made him change his testimony led to this final act of expiation? Had he feared that with Corey acquitted, he might somehow be involved in the unsolved crime?
Abruptly, Corey’s thoughts broke off as a draft on his back warned him that the door behind him was opening. Even as he whirled, he heard a girl’s familiar voice.
“Jeff! I saw your car from the house! Mr. Blanchard phoned to tell me you were acquitted and—”
The voice broke off with a gasped intake of surprise and horror. And Corey, turning to look at the girl, didn’t know just what her expression had been when she had first greeted him, for now her dark eyes, seeing the grisly corpse, were stark and wide, and the color had drained from her lo
vely oval face.
“Jeff—what—” Her voice was a sob. “It’s Chris Jenson! He—”
“Yes, Arlene.”
Corey spoke grimly. He had forced his own eyes back to the hanging man, was scrutinizing the dead caretaker. And now he saw the ugly bruise on Chris Jenson’s scalp, saw darkening blood drying.
“Jeff, it’s suicide, isn’t it?” he heard the girl say tensely.
He didn’t answer at once. He was moving about the room, his alert eyes searching. Presently his gaze narrowed, agate-hard, grim. Half-hidden under a book-shelf was a length of lead pipe. It seemed to have bloodstains on it.
He turned to the girl.
“No, it’s not suicide,” he answered her now. “It’s murder, Arlene! And unless I’m wrong, it was done by the same killer who murdered your dad months ago!” His eyes were slits. “Evidently the killer feared that Jenson could somehow expose him if I started probing.”
He stopped on that thought, grim memory working in his mind. Only three men had known he was coming here to question the old caretaker—D.A. Saxon, Blanchard the lawyer, and the realtor, John Hatcher, his boss. Was it possible that one of them was involved? It seemed fantastic—the man who had tried to convict him, the man who had tried to save him, and his own boss who had offered him back his job. And yet—
He moved to the corpse, felt one of the dangling wrists. It was just growing cold.
“Did you see anybody else on the estate before I came, Arlene?”
He was not surprised to get a negative. The killer would have moved surreptitiously. This cottage could not be seen from the windows of the mansion.
“Clever,” he muttered fiercely. “Fiendishly clever!”
“What do you mean, Jeff?” Arlene’s dark wide eyes were bewildered.
“I mean, this time the killer tried to frame me for keeps! I was supposed to assume that Jenson committed suicide, that I—or you—would call the police voluntarily. The police would quickly see that Jenson couldn’t have hanged himself, and would find the weapon that had really killed him before he was strung up!”