He smoked two cigarettes before the attorney’s eyes flickered open. There was a moment or two during which Steele stared with punch groggy eyes that refused to focus. Then realization and expression flooded his eyes.

  Lester Leith made sure the man was in full possession of his faculties.

  He got to his feet.

  “I’m going to lock you in and summon the police,” he said.

  He opened the door, slammed it shut behind him, leaving the attorney in the office.

  That office was locked from the outside, but the spring lock could readily be opened from the inside.

  Leith walked to the counter where the pies were placed, back of the counter, paused, chatted a few moment with Lois Webber.

  The ex-convicts were standing in little knots, talking in low tones. Half a dozen garbage containers were in the center of the floor. There were more along the sides. Here and there some of the men were toying with them. The man who had posed as Lamont was standing out near the center of the floor. His attitude was charged with suspicion. His hand was near the hip pocket of his trousers.

  He glowered at Lester Leith, walked purposefully toward him. There was no further pretense of being merely an inventor. The man snarled his question.

  “What were you saying to Steele in there?”

  Lester Leith became confidential. “Do you know, Lamont, I have an idea Steele murdered his wife. I have accused him of it. I have left him in there with a typewritten confession. I felt that if he was alone with his conscience it would be a good thing for him. You know, a little of the subtle third-degree stuff.”

  Lamont gasped. His eyes grew wide, and the pink interior of his mouth showed as the sagging jaw dropped.

  “What?” he yelled.

  “A fact,” said Lester Leith. “If was apparent, right from the start, that the woman hadn’t used her latchkey to get into the house with. Now if the chauffeur was to meet the woman there, and wanted to rob her, why break in the window? She was going to let him in. And why have accomplices? He didn’t need them. If, on the other hand, he had robbed her, why overlook the coin in the purse?

  “Then there were other discrepancies. I’ve pushed them home to Steele. I firmly believe he’s going to weaken.”

  Lamont managed to get his jaw back into position, his eyes narrowed down.

  “The diamonds?” he asked.

  Lester Leith nodded.

  “I believe,” he said, “the man has the diamonds with him.”

  Lamont took a deep breath. “I’m going in there,” he said.

  Lester Leith shook his head, emphatically.

  “Don’t do it. The man’s a crook. You start crowding him, and—”

  “You go to hell,” said Lamont, and strode toward the door of the inner office. He wrenched the knob, flung his weight against the door.

  “Hand me the key,” he called back to Lester Leith.

  “Nothing doing,” snapped Lester Leith. “That man’s a murderer. He might kill you.”

  Lamont banged on the door. “Open up! This is the law!”

  His answer was the roar of a gun, a tearing slug that crashed through the panels of the door.

  “Don’t let a man leave this room,” called Lamont, brandishing his gun, covering the men who paused, uncertain of what course to take, ex-convicts who were hardened to conflict, trained to think quickly with cunning minds.

  Lamont shot the lock of the door off, reached out with his foot, kicked the door. A slender shape came rushing from the room, shooting as it came. Lamont ducked behind a garbage can, fired. The running figure staggered, whirled, shot at Lamont, dove through the door.

  “Stop him!” yelled Lamont, and ran in pursuit.

  He paused at the doorway, raised his arm, fired twice.

  Lester Leith turned to Lois Webber. “Run into the office and hide,” he said. She stared at him.

  “But-”

  “Please,” said Lester Leith, “do as I say, and take the boys in there with you.”

  He raised his voice.

  “Into the office, everybody. Clear this room. The police will be coming…”

  They scattered at his words. Some of them made for the door. There came the sound of police whistles. The men turned back. Lois Webber ran into the office.

  “Follow me,” she cried.

  Lester Leith ran toward the door.

  Shots sounded from the foot of the stairs. Then a shot from the stair head. There was the thud of a falling body. Lamont jumped up from behind a packing case.

  “I got him,” he said.

  There were cries from below. Feet sounded on the lower floor. A man shouted. A police whistle blew. Lamont took the stairs two at a time. Lester Leith was on his heels.

  Steele lay in a crumpled, inert heap at the bottom of the stairs. Lester Leith was at the side of the detective who had posed as the inventor of the garbage can when that individual knelt by the side of the corpse.

  “Dead,” said Lamont.

  “Through the back of the head,” said Lester Leith.

  A door banged open. Sergeant Ackley with a plainclothes officer at his side came thundering up on a flat-footed gallop.

  “What the hell?” asked Sergeant Ackley.

  Lamont looked up. “This man murdered his wife, Vivian Steele. He stole the diamonds.”

  Ackley pointed his finger at Lester Leith. “What are you doing here?”

  Lester Leith got to his feet.

  “Just a theory of mine, Sergeant, that seemed to work out. You know most of my theories are just academic solutions. They’re possible, but I’ve never had a chance to follow them up. On this case I managed to stay with it—all the way.”

  Lamont looked at Sergeant Ackley, nodded. “He called the turn, Sergeant.”

  Lester Leith glanced down at the body.

  “He framed his wife, cracked her skull as she entered the house. Then he arranged plates of grub so it looked, as though the house had been entered. He stole the diamonds.”

  Sergeant Ackley sneered. “Where are the diamonds?”

  Lester Leith shrugged his shoulders.

  The man who had posed as the inventor made a swift search of the corpse. Sergeant Ackley kept his eyes on Lester Leith. A door opened and three more men came in, joined the group.

  They regarded the dead man on the floor with casual interest. Sergeant Ackley indicated Lester Leith. “Watch him,” he said.

  The men moved forward, silently, efficiently, purposefully. Lamont straightened.

  “A money belt,” he said, “empty.”

  “Maybe,” suggested Lester Leith, “he left the diamonds in the room upstairs. I left him in there with a confession. Lamont busted in the door and started the party. If Lamont hadn’t been so impetuous we might have had a signed confession.”

  Lamont stared at Lester Leith.

  “You left him in there with a gun,” he said accusingly.

  Lester Leith shook his head. “The gun,” he said, “wasn’t loaded.”

  Lamont spat an expletive.

  Leith added: “But there were some shells in another drawer in the table. He must have gone through the drawers, found the shells, loaded the gun and started to shoot.”

  Sergeant Ackley pointed to Lester Leith.

  “Frisk him,” he said.

  Two of the men made swift motions. Lester Leith put his hands up.

  “This is an outrage,” he said. “You haven’t a warrant.”

  Sergeant Ackley laughed, and the laugh was without mirth.

  “Damn you! Ill find those diamonds if it takes a year. This time I’ve caught you red-handed. You’ve mixed yourself up in a pretty mess, and…”

  He stopped abruptly as a woman screamed.

  CHAPTER XIII

  Evidence to Convict

  “Who’s up there?” asked Ackley, pointing a finger toward the upper floor from which the scream had sounded.

  “A frail and a bunch of hard-boiled eggs,” said Lamont. Sergeant Ackley hesitated. “Go on up, Bill,” he said to one of the men. He turned back to the two who were searching Lester Leith.

  “Go on with this baby. He’s the one I want. He’s got fifty thousand dollars’ worth of sparklers on him somewhere.”

  Lester Leith’s tone was low, earnest.

  “Sergeant, you’re making a big mistake. All this is costing you…”

  “Shut up,” said Sergeant Ackley. “Pop him on the buzzer if he yips again, boys.”

  The woman screamed again.

  There were running steps. Then a man’s voice bellowed excitedly: “Sergeant! This way. Bring the men!”

  Sergeant Ackley cursed.

  The two who had been searching Lester Leith turned and reported to Ackley. “He’s clean,” they said.

  Ackley cursed again. “How the hell can he be clean? He’s got those sparklers. He…”

  Lester Leith interrupted. “I might have had them, Sergeant, if Lamont hadn’t been so impulsive. Then I could have turned them over to the authorities and the case would have been closed — “

  “Sergeant—quick!” yelled the voice of the detective who had gone upstairs. There was the sound of a shot, of blows, of the tramp of feet that surged forward in a concerted melee of motion.

  Then the feet avalanched across the room, broke into running steps. The woman screamed again, then again.

  Lamont straightened, stared at Sergeant Ackley with unfriendly eyes.

  “To hell with you,” he said. “I’m going up!”

  He ran for the stairs. One of the men who had searched Lester Leith followed.

  Sergeant Ackley tugged handcuffs from his pocket, eyed Lester Leith.

  “Put ‘em out,” he said.

  Lester Leith’s lips clamped.

  The detective who remained with Lester Leith and Sergeant Ackley pulled a blackjack from his hip, swung it suggestively. Lester Leith put out his wrists. The handcuffs clicked.

  “Okay,” said Sergeant Ackley. “I’ll hold him. You go up, Fred.”

  The man thundered up the stairs.

  Sergeant Ackley hesitated, stared at the dead man on the floor, then at Lester Leith. There were running steps coming down the stairs. The second detective who gone up came down, holding Lois Webber by the wrist. Her face was white, her lips bloodless. She stared at the man on the floor, at Lester Leith.

  “This baby,” said the detective, “saw the whole thing. She was the first into the room after Steele ran out. The diamonds were in a pile in the center of a table. She kept yelling for us to come. There were eighteen hard-boiled ex-cons up there. They copped the ice. The girl tried to stop ‘em. They flung her into a closet.

  “She got out and screamed. The cons were dividing the loot. Bill came up. He was in on the tail end of it. He yelled for help and drew his rod. The cons rushed him, smashed him down and beat it out the back.”

  “They won’t get far,” said Sergeant Ackley. “I’ve got men scattered all around the block.”

  “The hell they won’t,” said the detective. “These boys weren’t amateurs. They all had records.”

  “How did that happen?” asked Sergeant Ackley.

  Lester Leith answered the question.

  “My fault,” he said. “I hand-picked them. I was running a thieves’ kitchen.”

  Lamont came down the stairs. The detective who had first gone up was battered and bloody. He glowered at Sergeant Ackley.

  “If you’d sent the boys up when I yelled, we might have stopped ‘em!” he said, bitterly.

  Sergeant Ackley thought for a moment. “Did you see the diamonds?” he asked.

  “They were splitting them when I came in,” said the detective. “I tried to hold ‘em. They rushed me. I had time for one shot.”

  Sergeant Ackley sighed “Anyhow,” he said, slowly, “I’ve solved the Steele murder mystery.”

  Lamont stared at him with wide eyes. “You have!” he exclaimed.

  Sergeant Ackley gritted his answer. “I have,” he said, staring straight at Lamont, “and jobs are damned hard to get right now.”

  There was a silence.

  Sergeant Ackley stared at the others. “And that goes for you, too —all of you.”

  He took a key from his pocket, unfastened the handcuffs around Lester Leith’s wrists.

  “And a damned lucky break you got, too. If this guy hadn’t disregarded order and bungled the case, you’d have been caught with the goods on by this time.”

  Lester Leith arched his eyebrows. “Was Lamont a detective?”

  Sergeant Ackley sneered.

  “He was. Maybe he’ll keep on being one. Maybe not. I didn’t give a damn about the rest of it. I wanted you. I told this McNutt to play it that way. He lost his head.”

  Lester Leith sighed.

  “I didn’t think he was an inventor,” he said.

  Captain E. R. Walker stared at Sergeant Ackley through level-lidded eyes. The stare was unfriendly.

  “Grand jury, hell!” he said. “You’d be the laughing stock of the city.”

  Sergeant Ackley slammed a glittering bit of hard stone on the battered desk. The stone bounced, rolled, fetched up against an inkwell, came to rest. The rays of the morning sun glinted from it. “See what it is? It’s imitation. I rounded up three of those ex-cons who were in that thieves’ kitchen. I made ‘em cough up. The stones they had were imitations. Now Steele took those stones in that building. They weren’t on him when he was croaked. Lester Leith was in that building. I want an indictment.”

  Captain Walker’s eyes took on little crows’ feet as his lips twisted in a smile. “But you searched Leith right away, even before the stones were stolen,” he said.

  Ackley snorted. “Know what he could have done? I reasoned it all out. He ducked down behind the pie counter when the shooting started. He could have shoved all those stones into the apple pies. Afterwards, they dumped all that stuff in the garbage and took it away. Leith showed up and said he owned the garbage containers. Lamont was with him. They took them all away. He could have done it. He was there, and he had the opportunity.”

  Captain Walker’s smile was dry.

  “Sergeant,” he said. “I’ve reminded you several times that it takes evidence to convict. If you hadn’t bungled that whole case, you could have gone on up in time to cop those imitations. Then you could have searched the pies. But your damned personal grudge against Leith stood in your way. You bungled the whole case.”

  Sergeant Ackley pressed the point. “Yes,” he said, “and there were exactly eighteen two- and three-time losers in the room who could have done it.”

  “This is once he outguessed you, Sergeant. I won’t let the force be made the laughing stock of the newspapers. Not one suspect, but eighteen, and all of them trying to be guilty of stealing the diamonds, and you standing at the foot of the stairs, searching the one man in the house who didn’t have a criminal record.

  “No, Sergeant. It takes evidence to convict.”

  Captain Walker picked up an envelope, toyed with it, pulled out a tinted oblong of paper. “That is particularly true.” He said softly, “of a man who has just made a fifty-thousand-dollar donation to the Police Protective Association. The net result, Sergeant, is one murderer brought to justice without the expense of a trial for the state to pay; one innocent woman removed from suspicion; one innocent chauffeur, ditto; credit to the police department for having solved a baffling case in record time—and fifty thousand dollars for the wives and orphaned kiddies of brave men who gave their services to the state.

  “This Leith fellow may be a crook as you say. But, Sergeant, if we had about fifty more crooks like him we’d have a city that was free of crime, and a fund for orphaned kiddies and hungry widows that would make me sleep a lot better of nights.

  “And that, Sergeant Ackley, closes the subject!”

  There was a glitter in the eye of Captain Walker which was very significant to those who knew him. Sergeant Ackley knew that glitter. He straightened, bowed.

  “Yes, Captain,” he said, and closed the door very softly behind him as he went out.

  Captain Walker, treasurer of the Police Protective Association was endorsing the check, and he disliked the sound of slamming doors when he was writing.

  Put It in Writing!

  CHAPTER I

  “What About the Dog?”

  Lester Leith, attired in silk pyjamas of violent hue, toyed with a cigarette case and beamed at his valet.

  “Scuttle, I should like something novel in the way of a crime.” “Yes, sir?”

  “Yes, Scuttle. Crime is getting monotonous. Really all crimes are mere repetitions. The only thing that is different is the victim and the criminal. Greed or revenge is the motive. There are crimes of violence and crimes of cunning. But nearly all the crimes are bungling affairs. I wonder if we couldn’t find some really artistic crime, something new in the way of a crooked scheme, something where the motive was so obscure as to be baffling.”

  The valet straightened to his full six feet plus of beef and regarded the sprawled figure with glittering eyes. “You know, sir, if you don’t mind my saying so, sir, this mania of yours for criminal news is going to get you in jail, sir.”

  Lester Leith flung back his head and laughed.

  “My dear Scuttle! You are so delightedly ponderous! You amuse me! Tut, tut, Scuttle, here we have been suspected by the police for over a year. Why, we even found, only last month, that Sergeant Ackley had gone so far as to install a dictograph in my rooms. Lord knows how long it had been there. Think of it, Scuttle, all of our private conversations were recorded by the police. One might say that my innermost thoughts were open to police inspection.

  “And why did they do all this? Merely because they knew I was interested in the newspaper accounts of crime, that I liked to work out theoretical solutions, based purely upon newspaper reports. Can you imagine anything as puerile as the police, Scuttle?”

  And the valet, because he was in reality a police spy, working “under cover” as Lester Leith’s valet, squirmed uncomfortably.