“Walter Desmond?” said the assistant warden thoughtfully. “Yes, I remember him very well. He was paroled just a few months ago.”
“What sort of man was he?” questioned Ronald.
“Oh, Desmond was a model prisoner, never gave us any trouble at all. Always busy, always cheerful. He was the sort of man who makes my job a little easier. It will be a great surprise to me—and I might say a great shock—if he ever comes back to prison again. I recommended him for parole a number of times.”
Ronald felt puzzled. “You say you recommended him for parole before this, and yet his parole only recently came through?”
“Yes. I say I recommended him, but Desmond himself refused to apply for parole. He felt that he wasn’t quite ready to face the outside world. We don’t try to rush that sort of thing—we feel a man like that is in a better position to judge himself than we are.”
“Isn’t that rather an unusual reaction?”
“Unusual, yes, but not unheard of. You’d be surprised how many men are in here because prison gives them a sense of security they’d never been able to find in the outside world.”
Six years, Ronald was thinking, six years. What did six years do for a man that five or four wouldn’t do? Was that the time Desmond needed to bring his invention to perfection?
“You mentioned that Desmond was very busy. Would it be asking too much to inquire just what it was that was occupying his time?”
“No, I don’t think so. It was an invention of his, something to do with storage batteries. I’m not personally acquainted with the details, but he had the help of some men who are more mechanically inclined than I am. Their opinion was that he had hold of an important new principle. Naturally I gave him all the encouragement I could—something like that goes far to hasten a man’s rehabilitation.”
“Then would you say this was a pretty valuable invention?”
“I’d hardly go that far,” said the older man cautiously. “It had possibilities, but it needed further perfection. Desmond couldn’t seem to arrive at quite the best combination of metals, and our facilities here for metallurgy are extremely limited. He had gone far enough so that he could procure a patent, but the battery would be of no commercial importance until it was improved. That would probably require a large sum of money, and the sponsorship of someone who had a great deal of confidence both in Mr. Desmond and in his invention. I hope that Desmond will somehow find the right man.”
“Then you know where Desmond is right now?”
“Oh, yes, our parole records would show that. However, our rules do not allow me to make such information public. But if you had a message you wanted to get to Desmond, perhaps I could see that it reached him.”
“No,” said Ronald slowly, “I don’t think I have any message for him that he would be likely to answer. He wouldn’t know me at all, and would probably think I was just trying to give his case more publicity.” He deliberated the matter in his mind. “Did Desmond ever claim he was innocent, or anything like that?”
“Why, no. I don’t think anything like that ever came up. Most of our men claim to be innocent, but they seldom expect anyone to believe them. I never heard Desmond make any such claim at all, not even in his application for parole. Fortunately, I might add, for a thing like that counts against a man, makes it look as though he hasn’t learned his lesson.”
“And yet I suppose that you do occasionally have an innocent man in here?” Ronald inquired. “I don’t want to be argumentative. It was just a philosophical point.”
“And I’ll try to answer in the same spirit, Wilford. Can an innocent man go to prison? It would be very difficult, for under our system of law an accused man is presumably given the benefit of every doubt. By innocent men I do not wish to include those who might possibly be mentally incompetent, or have a long record of social irresponsibility, or whose motives for doing what they did are open to interpretation.
“I would regard a man as innocent only if he actually did not commit this particular crime or any other major crime, does not know who did it, and is at a loss to explain the chain of circumstances that seem to prove his guilt. This might come about through a mistaken identification, or a remarkable series of coincidences, or the deliberate attempt of another person to plant evidence against him. Apparently none of these particular circumstances apply to Desmond, and so I must regard him as guilty. It may be that there are one or two or three truly innocent persons within this prison, but I sincerely hope there are not.”
The man to whom Ronald was talking was a man of vast experience in the field of criminology, and Ronald respected his opinion. That seemed to be final. Walter Desmond was guilty. The evidence was solid, everyone was convinced of his guilt, even Desmond himself did not protest very loudly. When he had a chance to get out of jail, he had asked instead to be allowed to stay in! But if Desmond was guilty, what was Ronald doing down here, anyway?
“There’s just one more thing on my mind. Did Desmond have any visitors, any correspondence, anyone who seemed to be interested in him?”
“Apparently there was only one person, a man by the name of Dixon Orlando. He stopped in every two or three months, appeared to be Desmond’s only contact. I was very much disappointed that Desmond would have an acquaintance like that. I went to some trouble to look Orlando up. It seems that he has no criminal record, but he knows his way around the underworld altogether too well to suit me. I sincerely hope that Desmond hasn’t tied up with him again.”
He shook his head slowly. “That was just one of the many things I never understood about Desmond, but the thing that bothered me the most was this: what was a man like Desmond doing in prison, anyhow?”
As Ronald drove north toward home he could not avoid a feeling of elation. After all his trouble, after all his apparently fruitless inquiries, he had finally struck pay dirt at the last moment. He had definitely proved a link between Barry Knight and Walter Desmond, and that link was Dixie Orlando.
CHAPTER 6
An Unexpected Visitor
“Good news, Carole,” Ronald announced to his fellow worker. “I finally came up with something.”
“But you didn’t find Barry Knight?”
“Oh, no, there’s no such person as Barry Knight. Doctor Milton is dead, and Mrs. Milton doesn’t remember him. Here—here’s a list of all the persons in his supposed high-school class, and his name isn’t on it. I’m convinced that Barry Knight doesn’t exist. Do I sound crazy?”
“You sound very excited,” she smiled. “Now what’s this piece of good news you’ve come up with?”
As rapidly as he could, he explained about the gas-station robbery in Imperial, how Walter Desmond had been in the penitentiary, and that Dixie Orlando was his principal visitor.
“If I could only find that Orlando character,” said Ronald, pacing restlessly around. “Don’t you think, Carole, that maybe Burnett is wrong? If I only went down to Short Vincent—”
She disagreed with a quick shake of her head. “You wouldn’t find him, Ronald, not if he didn’t want you to find him. And it’s more important than you know that a young reporter shouldn’t make a mistake on Short Vincent. It might influence your whole career. Wait a while longer.”
“What is this Short Vincent anyway? It’s only a couple of blocks from here, and yet I’ve never been there. I’m beginning to believe it’s a kind of never-never land that doesn’t really exist. Someday I’m going to have to go down and see for myself. What do you say, Carole, how about having lunch with me someday on Short Vincent—after I get my first by-line?”
“I’d love to, Ronald. It’s a date,” Carole replied with a smile.
He inquired how she had been making out on the case, but she had nothing encouraging to report.
“I’m beginning to think it’s hopeless, Ronald. There are so many things we can’t know about. There have been a number of people who have been hurt by Knight’s stories, but what about friends, relatives, people who have been hurt o
nly indirectly? What about people who only imagine they’ve been hurt? We can never cover them all. I’ve picked out some of the most obvious names, but somehow it doesn’t seem to me these are the kind of people Knight would be running away from.”
“We don’t know that Knight was running from something,” Ronald pointed out. “He might have been running to something.”
“Then why hasn’t he come running back?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Ronald seriously. “How do we know that Knight ever intended to come back? Oh, I know, he left a few clothes and a violin in his room, but that doesn’t seem important enough to make sure he’d return. Whatever was important enough to take him away might be important enough to keep him away.”
She turned her chair toward him, but as he seemed too restless to sit down, she cleared a little space on the desk, so that he could strike the pose most characteristic of him.
“Ronald, what’s your theory of all of this? I know you’re not supposed to have a theory before you have some facts, but the facts we’ve gotten so far don’t seem to be getting us anywhere.”
“If I tell you you’ll think I’m crazy. Call it a hunch if you want to, but I’ve got a strong feeling that for some reason Knight believes Desmond was innocent!”
She raised her eyebrows. “But how could he be? You said the evidence against him was conclusive.”
“I know, I know. I’ve heard a dozen or more things that prove Desmond was guilty, and I haven’t heard one single shred of evidence that would show he wasn’t. Just the same Knight must have thought so. In some ways Knight reminds me of my brother Ted. Ted always believes everybody’s innocent. If he stays in newspaper work, he’s going to find out this is a cold world.”
“But there are plenty of warm people in it, Ronald,” she reminded him.
They returned to the consideration of the case. “How would Knight know all this, anyway, Ronald? You haven’t been able to prove that Knight was connected in Imperial at all.”
“No, not Knight, but someone—maybe Knight under a different name—who knew what was going on. I’ve read over that letter from the minister again, and I notice it only used Knight’s first name. Maybe he had a different surname then.”
“Is there anyone in his graduating class named Barry?”
He looked over her shoulder, but her finger ran down the list more rapidly than his eye could follow. No such name appeared.
“Then maybe both his names were different,” Ronald suggested. “Maybe he went to the minister, and told how he wanted to change his name, and the minister agreed and wrote the letter.”
“Would a minister do something like that?”
“You’ve got me there. Maybe he would, if he felt the circumstances justified it.”
“But, Ronald, how was Knight concerned in the robbery? Maybe he did live in Imperial, maybe under a different name, maybe he did have his own ideas about what was going on. But why did it concern him?”
“Can you stand another wild flight into fancy?”
“I’d love to come along for the ride.”
“Six years ago Knight was a boy of about seventeen. I’ve been trying to think how a boy would fit into this case, and maybe I’ve come up with something. As I see it there’s only one way a boy would fit in. A number of people think that the window in the gas station was broken as a boy’s prank, and I’ve got a hunch Barry Knight was the boy.”
“But if it was a boy, he didn’t have anything to do with the burglary, did he?”
“No, everybody agreed no one could have entered the station through the broken window. About the only difference it made was that the robbery was discovered in the middle of the night instead of the next morning.”
“Who would have discovered it?”
“The owner, this man named Don, I suppose, when he came to work.”
“Wouldn’t the alarm ring when he went in? I know it wouldn’t, but I mean there must have been some means of shutting it off.”
“No, it was on clockwork, and shut itself off automatically at seven o’clock. I don’t know what time the station opened, but I noticed a sign that it now opens at nine o’clock, so maybe it was the same then. At least there must have been some time gap, for the proprietor wouldn’t want to take the risk of touching off his own alarm.
“Now think about that. A two-hour lapse between the time the alarm shut off and the proprietor came to work. Ordinarily he would have entered the station, and probably would never have noticed anything was wrong until he went over to the cash register and counted the money. Even then it would have been difficult for him to prove that Walter Desmond stole the money. Maybe a burglar broke in sometime after the alarm was switched off—this was autumn, and it would still be dark at seven o’clock. Maybe it would appear that Don himself stole the money. To my mind this makes the case against Desmond even more damaging. The question in everyone’s mind was why he should steal the money in such a way that all the evidence pointed toward him, but this would help explain how he might have expected to get away with it.
“Now look how the broken window changed all that. The breaking of glass was heard, and the burglary was discovered during the night. This was the crushing blow in the evidence against Desmond. So it couldn’t have been anyone except Desmond who stole the money. Even Don couldn’t have stolen it, unless Desmond absent-mindedly forgot to set the alarm when he left, and Desmond made no such claim. More than anything else it was the broken window that sent Desmond to prison.
“Now let’s try to see how all this would appear to Knight. He had broken the window as a foolish boyish prank, and now he suddenly finds that he has been the means of sending a man to prison. Wouldn’t that fact weigh on his conscience? Seventeen is a particularly sensitive age. I know, because I can see it in Ted. Don’t you think what happened would have a serious effect on Knight?”
“But what difference would it make, Ronald, as long as Desmond was really guilty?”
“That’s just it, what difference would it make? And the only answer I can come up with is that Knight must have thought Desmond was innocent. Now I don’t mean that Desmond was really innocent, only that Knight in his wretched state of mind was led to believe so. That would account for his later interest in the case—not so much to clear Desmond as to satisfy his own conscience.”
“Well, you may be right, Ronald,” she smilingly agreed, “but somehow it seems to me that we’re only answering riddles with more riddles. I know Knight, and he is pretty levelheaded. This story of yours only becomes reasonable if Desmond was innocent, and that seems impossible.”
After all his brilliant deduction, Carole’s summary came as a letdown, and yet Ronald was forced to admit it was probably true. Perhaps, as so often happens, he had arrived at part of the truth, but only a part, and he couldn’t tell which part was true. Maybe it was merely pride in his own creation, but he decided to hang on to his theory for a while until he saw what came of it.
Before he left the office, the telephone rang, and after answering it, Carole handed it to him.
“Ronald Wilford speaking.”
“This is Mr. Carey.” Carey was the manager at Ronald’s apartment house.
“Yes, Mr. Carey.”
“I didn’t know whether you were back or not, Wilford. The heat is still shut down in your rooms.”
“I came back to the city two days ago, but I haven’t had a chance to get home yet. I’ll be in tonight. Thanks for your interest.”
“That’s not what I called about. It’s something else. There’s a man here to see you. He wanted to get in touch with you, but of course I wouldn’t tell him where you are working, or anything, without your permission.”
“What does he want? Did he give a name?”
“No, that’s just it, he won’t give a name. Just says he has to see you, it’s very important.”
“What does he look like?”
“Elderly man, slender, not too tall, gray hair and not very muc
h of it, carrying a suitcase.”
“It doesn’t sound like anyone I know. You’re sure he’s not a salesman?”
“Doesn’t look to me like he’s got any business at all. I’d guess he could use a good meal, and that suitcase looks like it contains all his worldly possessions. Oh, another thing, it’s got the initials J.K. on it.”
“J.K.! Listen, I think I’d better see him. Get him something to eat if he wants it, and get my rooms warmed up and let him sit in there, but sort of keep an eye on him. I’ll be home just as soon as I can get there.”
“A new lead?” asked Carole as he hung up.
“I don’t know, it’s just that I’m being very alert for anyone whose last name begins with K. If it turns out to be phony, I’ll be back, but if it amounts to something, I’ll do whatever seems best to follow it up.”
He made the drive to his apartment in what must have been record time for such unfavorable driving conditions. He shared the apartment with another young man, a college student who was still away for the holidays. Pausing only long enough at the manager’s office to express a word of thanks, he hurried on upstairs to his rooms. The door was open, and a man was sitting on the sofa.
Upon catching sight of Ronald, the man rose and came forward. He was dressed rather shabbily, and his face had at least a two days’ growth of beard. When he walked, it was almost with a shuffle, and his manner was diffident. But Ronald had met enough people to know that many persons who adopt a pose of shyness and reserve are actually very forward and pushing about getting what they want. In their own quiet way, they are like the polite camel who drove his master out of the tent.
“Mr. Wilford?” the man asked hesitantly.
“That’s right.”
“I sure hated to bother you, Mr. Wilford, but—well, I guess there just wasn’t anything else I could do. My son spoke about you many times. My name is Joseph Knight. I’m Barry Knight’s father.”
The Star Reporter Mystery Page 5