Honest Money

by Erle Stanley Gardner

  “You get the picture?” asked Corning.

  “And how! He caught a picture just when the guy was socking you with a right. But when they both started chasing you, it was a break we’d been looking for. Our photographer stuck in another plate, dashed down the corridor, stuck his camera in the room and set off another flash.

  “We’re rushing ’em over to develop ’em. We think we got a peach of the mystery witness that they’re trying to keep under cover. If we did, we’ll play it up strong. It’ll mean the D. A. will be sore, so we might as well go the whole hog. If I can sell the Chief on it, I’m going to give you a big play.”

  “Okey, thanks,” said Corning, and walked out.

  He was careful not to look directly at the automobile with the two officers, but was equally careful to observe, out of the corner of his eye, that the machine crawled into motion.

  He walked to a drug-store on the comer and called his office.

  “Anything?” he asked Helen Vail when he heard her voice on the line.

  “I’ll say. You got an answer to your ad.”

  “Fine. What was it?”

  “Telephone call to meet the party at the Fleming Hotel He said you knew the name he’d be registered under. He’s in Room 526.”

  “Okey,” said Corning. “If he calls in again, tell him that I’m on my way out there, but that a couple of dicks are trailing me in the hope that I’ll lead them to him, so I’ll have to take it a little easy.”

  “You going to ditch them?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, “this is my day for taking the police department for a ride. I’m going to kid ’em along strong. ”

  He hung up, walked out and caught a cab.

  He noticed that the police car fell in behind.

  “Fleming Hotel,” he said.

  The cab made good time. The police car clung doggedly. Ken Corning sat back on the cushions and apparently was lost in thought. His right eye was swelling rapidly, and the soreness in the side of his face was increasing.

  The cab swung in to the curb in front of the hotel. Corning paid the driver. The uniformed doorman made something of a ceremony out of opening the door of the cab.

  Corning walked into the hotel.

  He paused at the desk. One of the plain-clothes officers was walking in the lobby as Corning leaned over and asked the clerk: “Who’s in 528?”

  The clerk stared at him a moment, then consulted a card.

  “Mr. Carl Grant, of Detroit,” he said.

  “That’s the party,” said Corning. “I’d forgotten the name. Will you give him a ring and tell him that Mr. Ken Corning, the lawyer, is on his way up? Tell him it’ll only take a minute.”

  And he walked towards the elevators.

  As the door of the cage clanged shut, he saw the plain-clothes officer who had followed him in, pausing to confer with the clerk at the desk.

  Ken Corning left the elevator on the fifth floor, walked along the corridor, knocked on the door of 528.

  The door opened.

  A portly figure in a silk dressing gown stared at him belligerently.

  “I don’t know you!” he said.

  Ken Corning heard the door of the elevator clang open and shut, heard steps in the hall.

  He raised his voice.

  “Okey, Amos, get dressed and we’ll go and get it over with.”

  The man stared at him with bulging eyes.

  “Say,” he began, “I never …”

  He didn’t finish. Ken Corning heard the banging of heavy steps behind him, caught the glimpse of a heavy body rushing forward. Then he was pushed to one side as though he had been a floating cork in the path of a battleship. Reaching hands darted forward, came down on the shoulder of the man in the doorway.

  “Mr. Amos Dangerfield,” boomed the voice, “I arrest you in the name of the law for the murder of Walter Copley, and I warn you that anything you may say will be used against you.”

  The man sputtered.

  “But I’m not Dangerfield. I don’t know anything about the case except what I read in the paper! I’m Carl Grant of Detroit… .”

  The officer pushed his way into the room.

  “May I have a word with this man?” asked Ken Corning, making as if to push his way past the door.

  The officer grinned.

  “At the jail,” he said, and kicked the door shut in Ken Corning’s face.

  Corning whirled, moving with the swift rapidity of a hunted animal. He stepped to the adjoining room, twisted the knob of the door, and walked into the room.

  He slammed the door and twisted the bolt.

  “All right, Dangerfield,” he said. “They haven’t got pictures and descriptions out yet They shadowed me here, but the officers were going blind. I ditched them on to the party next door. The car’s waiting down the street. Stick around until we see them drive away.”

  Corning walked over to the window, drew up a chair and looked down on the street. He could see the top of the parked police car, pushed against the curb in front of the space reserved for taxicabs.

  Amos Dangerfield was a fleshy man much given to excitement. His voice was shrill and quavering. He came and stood by Ken Corning and asked innumerable questions.

  Ken Corning didn’t raise his eyes from the street, nor did he answer the questions. He waited a few seconds, then interrupted the flow of language.

  “Never mind all that. Get ready to leave and keep quiet. I’ve got to get you in to headquarters before they grab you. Otherwise they’d make a point of your flight. They spotted the ad in the personal column, and figured I was going to meet you somewhere, so they put a tail on me… . Tell me, do you know a heavy-set man in the early forties with a scar down the right side of his face? Guy with black hair and gray eyes?”

  “No,” said Dangerfield, slowly.

  “All right then,” Ken Corning told him. “Shut up! I want to think, and the racket bothers me.”

  He sat and watched. Five minutes became ten. Then he saw the plain-clothes officer escort a man across the strip of sidewalk to the waiting automobile.

  The pair stood at the door of the car.

  “Okey,” said Corning. “They’ll probably split and leave a shadow here. On our way. Make it snappy!”

  He led the way out into the corridor, down the back stairs.

  Amos Dangerfield wheezed and sputtered his way down the five flights of stairs. The descent took all his wind, and he made no comments, asked no questions.

  Ken Corning found a stairway to the baggage-room, went to it, tipped the porter, walked out the side entrance to the alley, went down the alley, caught a cab.

  Amos Dangerfield tugged at the cab and lifted his bulk into the vehicle.

  “Police headquarters,” said Ken Corning.

  Mrs. Markle stood in the doorway of her boarding house. Her ample form was covered with a dress of silk which gave her a stiffly starched, dressed-up appearance. Her eyes surveyed Ken Corning without the hostility they had shown earlier in the day, but with a certain curiosity.

  “He’s gone,” she said.

  “When will he be back?” asked Corning.

  “He won’t be back. He’s gone. Got a job, took a plane somewhere.”

  “How about his mail? He must have left you with a forwarding address.”

  She rotated her head in a decided negative.

  “No, he didn’t. And, if you ask me, there was something fishy about the whole business. He left in less than an hour after you did. When you called on him he didn’t have any more job than a tramp, and he owed me for two months’ room and board. I wouldn’t have let him get that deep into me, only he’d been a steady boarder for more than a year, and he’d always paid up regular when he had it.

  “But after you left, the man that went up there left, and then another man came, a fish-faced little brat that was all smiles and smirks. He went up and talked with Briggs for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then Briggs came down all in a flutter, yelling for transfer men
, and acting as though he was running to put out a fire.

  “He paid me everything he owed me that was in arrears, and paid me for a week in advance. I saw his wallet when he took it out. It was just bursting with money. He said he had a job offered him, and he’d got to take a plane to get there. He didn’t say where the job was. I asked him about his mail, and he said to forget it, that if any mail came it’d be a bill probably.

  “He never used to be like that. Always was a quiet, self-respecting, respectable chap. Now he’s rushing around scattering money to the winds and taking aeroplanes. I don’t like it. I’m as glad he’s gone.”

  Ken Corning’s face remained impassive.

  “Thank you, very much, Mrs. Markle,” he said.

  “Can I let you know if I hear from him—where he is?”

  He raised his hat politely.

  “No,” he said. “Thank you, but you won’t hear.”

  And he turned down the steps.

  He drove back to his office. Helen Vail stared at him and broke into laughter.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “The eye,” she said. “What a beautiful shiner!”

  He grinned.

  She indicated the paper which lay on the desk in front of her.

  “Like to see yourself as others see you? Here’s a photo of you on the receiving end of the wallop, It must have been a beaut!”

  He touched his sore cheek bone.

  “It was,” he told her,

  She said, “Well, the Star is giving you some swell publicity. I bet the D. A. is gritting his teeth. Notice that they don’t say you tried to bust into the room, but that the guards of the D. A.’s office assaulted you when you made inquiries about the witness.”

  “That’s what happened,” he said, grinning. “I just acted dumb until the guy started to shove me around, and then I let him fall over himself. That made him mad, and he lost control of himself.”

  Helen Vail indicated another photograph.

  “Look at this. Exclusive photograph of the mystery witness who claims that he saw Dangerfield driving the car. He looks tough, sitting there playing solitaire.”

  Ken Corning studied the picture.

  “They give you an awful good play up,” said Helen.

  “They should,” he told her. “Look at the story I got for them, and the pictures they had a chance to take. It makes good front page stuff. It gave them a chance to run out an extra.”

  She looked at him appraisingly.

  “Well,” she said, “it’ll be good publicity for your side of the case. Makes it look as though the district attorney had something he was trying to cover up, eh?”

  “That’s right. That’s the way I played it.”

  “Fine. Where you been all afternoon?”

  “Going around, leg work. They got to my witness and bought him off.”

  She stared at him.

  “The police?”

  “Oh, no. Of course not. The police were all regular, just sore because any witness told anyone what he knew before he’d talked with the police. According to them, a witness is either a witness for the state, or else he’s a liar.”

  Her eyes were wide and alarmed.

  “But, Ken, what happened? Who did it?”

  “Same old stunt,” he said. “There’s a leak around the detective bureau. And when the cops get a case worked up they figure that all evidence that conforms to their theory of the case is the truth; that all evidence that doesn’t is framed.

  “Anyhow, the detectives reported to the D. A., and there was a leak. The guys that are mixed up in the political expose that Copley was figuring on decided that they couldn’t afford to have this chap, Briggs, give his testimony. So they sent a fixer out there with a wad of dough and a fake job at the ends of the earth some place.

  “Naturally, Briggs didn’t want to testify anyway. The fixer persuaded him that his testimony wouldn’t amount to anything one way or the other, held out the bait of a job and a cash advance, and Briggs just simply faded from the picture. You can’t blame him.”

  She stared at him with stricken eyes.

  “But, Ken,” she said, “that was your whole case.”

  “I know it,” he told her, his face a mask.

  “But what can you do? You got Dangerfield to surrender on the strength of that witness. Now you’ve lost him—and Amos Dangerfield is in jail.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “The fortunes of war,” he said.

  But his voice contained something which had been kept from the expression of his face, a cold, hard something.

  “What can you do?” she asked.

  “I can fight the devil with fire,” he told her. “I started out to play a decent ethical game. They come along and pull this stunt. It’s crooked. All right. Now let them watch out. I’ll pull some fast ones myself.”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t like that, Ken. You know they’re laying for you. If they can get you suborning perjury or fixing a jury or anything like that, they’ll railroad you right over the road.”

  “Yes,” he said, tonelessly, “If they can, they will.”

  She stared at him.

  “I found another witness,” he went on in that same dispassionate tone of voice. “They won’t get him. I’ve got him buried.”

  “Witness to what?” she asked, and her voice lacked enthusiasm. It was as though she doubted the testimony of this witness, even before hearing what it would be.

  “Do you know,” he said musingly, “that this mystery witness of theirs, this Bob Durane, must be the man that drove the death car. They’re using him both as the man to pull the murder, and as the star witness for the prosecution.”

  “You mean the D. A. is?” she asked.

  “Of course not. Don’t be silly. The D. A. isn’t in the thing. But he’s got a political office, and he knows the side of the bread that has the butter. D. A.’s are human just the same as anybody else is human.”

  “Well,” she said, “what you talking about then?”

  “I’m talking about the gang that did this and want to make Dangerfield the fall guy. Briggs got a look at the face of one of the men who wheeled the car out. It had a scar on the cheek, and the man answers the description of this guy, Durane, who is the star witness for the prosecution.”

  “How you going to prove it with Briggs gone?” she asked.

  He walked wearily across to his desk, picked up the receiver, and gave a number. After a moment he said: “Is Reed Nixon there? … Put him on, please, … Hello, Nixon? This is Corning… . Yeah… . Fine stuff. You’ve given me the breaks, now I’m going to give you one… . Yeah, I’ve got another witness… . Yeah. This one saw the whole thing. It’s a fact. He’s a taxicab driver. He was parked in a cab that was at the curb. He was sitting there with the lights out, waiting for the owl street car to come along. He figured he’d pick up the street car and trail it, hoping that one of the passengers who got off somewhere would give him a short ran instead of walking for a few blocks in the dark.

  “Well, he saw the car come, and then he saw the two machines, and he saw Copley get off the car, and saw the murder. But as the death car went by, the lights of the street lamps Hashed in it for a second, and he saw the face of the man who was driving. He swears that he can identify that man if he sees him again. The man had on a light hat and a tweed suit, and there were other things about him that can be identified.

  “You can spill that yarn all over the front page of your paper if you want. I’ve got this witness buried where he can’t be found until Fm ready to produce him. I don’t like the way the D. A.’s office messes around with my witnesses. I’m going to let him tell his story from the witness stand.”

  Ken Corning sat silent, grinning wearily into the transmitter, while the receiver made rasping metallic noises.

  “Sure,” he said at length, “use it as a rumor if you want to. I’d rather you made it seem it hadn’t come directly from me. You can label i
t as coming from ‘a source close to the defendant.’ Yeah, that’s the line. Okey. G’bye.”

  He slid the receiver back on the hook.

  Helen Vail looked at him with hurt eyes.

  “If you suborn perjury,” she said, “and they can catch the witness before he testifies and break him down, they can still hook you for conspiracy or something, can’t they, Ken?”

  He said, his voice flat and weary, “Are you asking me for legal advice, or just talking?”

  “Neither,” she snapped. “I’m trying to tell you something.”

  He shook his head.

  “Go on home, kid. It’s way after five o’clock. There’s nothing to stick around here for any more.”

  She put on her hat.

  “Okey,” she said. “I’m going to find where Briggs went and make him come back.”

  He shook his head listlessly.

  “Not a chance, kid; they’re too slick for that. You won’t find even the ghost of a trail to follow.”

  She said: “I won’t know until I try, will I?”

  “Not if you won’t listen to me,” he said.

  She started for the door, turned, walked back to the desk, stood by him for a moment, and then patted his cheek.

  “ ’Night, Ken,” she said tenderly.

  “ ’Night, kid.”

  She walked swiftly across the two offices, let herself out of the outer door, and threw on the night latch.

  Ken Corning sat at the desk, his eyes heavy, his chin resting on his hand, elbow propped on the desk.

  Robert Durane was going out.

  The two guards flanked him on either side. A uniformed police officer stood at the door of the elevator. There was another one in the lobby. At the doorway of the hotel a police car was parked at the curb, four officers strung out between the car and the hotel entrance.

  The preparations would have indicated that a shipment of gold was being moved from a bank.

  A little crowd collected. The crowd became more congested. The police started detouring the people out into the street, keeping them moving.

  The door of the hotel swung open.

  Robert Durane stepped out into the light of day. Cameras clicked as newshawks snapped pictures. The D. A.’s office had yielded to the pressure of the disgruntled ones who had been scooped by the Star.