Jimmie Dale, pushed him savagely back into his seat. “Yes—you cur!” he said again. “You got your first fright when you found those evidences of suicide were gone—you even lost your nerve a little in your bluff with the bank examiners—and you hurried here the moment you could get away from the preliminary police investigation that followed—I was even afraid you might get here a little sooner than you did. Shall I give you the details of this afternoon and to-night? The plant was ready. You had sent for the bank examiners. You had already prepared the forged confession, and had a small package of securities ready. Forrester had gone to New York. You turned over the confession and the package of securities to your accomplice, or accomplices, to be left in Forrester’s room. I imagine that you telephoned, or sent a message, to New York to Forrester telling him that the bank examiners were in the bank, that there was something the matter, and for him to go to his rooms, and, say, meet you there before going to the bank. Your accomplice, for you established an alibi by remaining with the bank examiners, stole in after him, or even in the dark hallway stunned him with a black-jack, then forced the poison down his throat, laid him on the floor, placed the empty bottle beside him, and left the confession on the desk. The plan was very cunningly worked out. The bruise on Forrester’s head was most obviously accounted for—his head had struck, of course, against the leg of the couch—he was found lying in that position! It is strange, though, isn’t it, how sometimes the most cunning of plans go astray in the simplest and yet the most perverse of ways? Who, under the circumstances, would have thought of it! Your accomplice had simply to place a document already prepared upon the desk. Even you did not think to warn him yourself. It did not enter his head to see if there were pen and ink there with which it might have been written, or, failing that, a fountain pen in Forrester’s pocket—and there was neither the one nor the other. That’s all—except the name of the man who killed Forrester.” Jimmie Dale leaned forward sharply. “Who was it?”
English Dick wet his lips again.
“I—they—they’d kill me like—like a dog if I told,” he mumbled.
“They?” The monosyllable came curt and hard.
“I don’t know,” said English Dick. “That’s God’s truth—I never knew—there’s a big gang—none of us know.”.
“But you know who worked with you in this.” Jimmie Dale was speaking through clenched teeth. “You know who killed Forrester.”
“Yes.” The man’s whisper was scarcely audible.
“Who?”
“Reddy—Reddy Mull.”
“Yes,” said Jimmie Dale in his grim monotone, “I thought so.”
He reached into the satchel where a small package of securities were wrapped up in a sheet of the bank’s stationery, removed the sheet of paper, and spread it out before English Dick. “Write it down!” he commanded—and the muzzle of his automatic jerked forward to touch the fountain pen in the other’s vest pocket. “Write it—all of it—your own share—Reddy Mull’s—the whole story!”
The man’s lips seemed to have gone dry again, and again and again his tongue circled them.
“I can’t!” he said hoarsely. “I daren’t—they’d kill me. And—and if they didn’t, it would send me up, and perhaps—perhaps to the chair.”
“You take your chances on that”—Jimmie Dale’s voice was low and even—“but you take no chances here—for there are none.” The automatic in Jimmie Dale’s hand edged ominously forward. “It’s Forrester’s exoneration—or you. Do you understand? And you make your choice—now.”
For an instant the man’s eyes met Jimmie Dale’s, then shifted, as though drawn in spite of himself, to the muzzle of Jimmie Dale’s automatic; and then his hand reached into his pocket for his pen.
From the pool room in front came an outburst of hand-clapping and applause—there was evidently a match of some kind going on. Jimmie Dale, his eyes on English Dick, as the latter began to write with a sort of feverish haste as though fear and a miserable desire to have done with it spurred him on, picked up the articles from the table, and placed them in the satchel. He waited silently then—and then English Dick pushed the paper toward him.
Jimmie Dale picked it up, and read it. It was all there, all of it—and the signature this time was not forged! He placed the paper in the satchel, and closed the satchel.
English Dick passed his hand across a forehead that beaded with perspiration.
“What are you going to do?” he asked under his breath.
“I’m going to see that this—and you—reaches the hands of the police,” said Jimmie Dale tersely. “We’ll leave here in a moment—by the window. There’s a patrolman who passes the end of the lane once in a while, and I expect, with the aid of a piece of cord and a pocket handkerchief as a gag, that he’ll find you there. My method may be a little crude, but I have reasons of my own for not walking into a police station with you. but before we go, there’s still that matter of—the men higher up. They needed a clever pen man for this job and one who wouldn’t be recognised—and they got the best! Who brought you over from England?”
“A friend over there, one of the ‘swell ones,’ put it up to me,” English Dick answered heavily.
“Yes—and here?” prodded Jimmie Dale. “Who got you into the bank here?”
“I don’t know.” English Dick shook his head. “I reported to a man called Chester. He doped out the story I was to tell, and told me to go to the bank and apply for the job, and that it was already fixed.”
“I’d like to meet ‘Chester,’” said Jimmie Dale grimly. “Where does he live?”
“I don’t know,” said English Dick again. “I tell you, I don’t know! They’re big—my God, they’ll get me for this, if the law doesn’t! I don’t know where he lives—he always came to me. The only one I know is Reddy Mull, and—”
His voice was drowned out in a louder and more prolonged burst of applause from the pool room, which mingled shouts, cries and the thunderous banging of cue butts on the floor.
“A good shot!” said Jimmie Dale, with a grim smile.
“Yes,” said English Dick, “a good shot”—but into his voice had crept a new note, a note like one of malicious triumph.
Jimmie Dale’s lips set suddenly hard and tight. Yes, he heard now—perhaps too late—what the other saw. The uproar that had drowned out all other sounds had subsided—the door behind him had been unlocked and was now opening slowly.
And then Jimmie Dale, quick as thought is quick, his fingers closed on the satchel, hurled himself around the table and to the floor. There was the roar of a report, a flash of flame, as Reddy Mull, hand thrust in through the partially open doorway, fired—a wild scream, as the shot, meant for him, Jimmie Dale, found another mark directly behind where he had been standing—and English Dick, reeling to his feet, pitched forward over the table, carrying the table with him to the floor. It had taken the time that a watch takes to tick. Came the roar of a report again, as Jimmie Dale fired in turn—at the electric-light bulb a few feet away from him on the wall. There was the tinkle of shattering glass—and darkness. Came shouts, cries, a yell from the door from Reddy Mull, a fusillade of shots from Reddy Mull’s revolver, the rush of many feet from the pool room—and Jimmie Dale, in the blackness, dropped silently from the window to the ground.
He gained the street; and, five minutes later, blocks away, he entered the private stall of a Bowery saloon. Here, Jimmie Dale added another paper to the contents of the satchel. The characters printed, and badly formed, the paper looked like this:
WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE
