Part 50 (1/2)
CHAPTER x.x.x
A CONFESSION
In the dingy office of the city prison, with its sand boxes and barrel stove, its hacked old desks, dusty books and papers, I watched Bronson Vandeman, and wondered to see how the man I had known played in and out across his face with the man Edward Clayte, whom I had tried to imagine, whom n.o.body could describe.
Helping to recover Clayte's loot for Worth Gilbert looked to the opposition their best bet for squaring themselves. d.y.k.eman from his sick bed, had dug us up a stenographer; c.u.mmings had climbed out of his tin clothes and come along with us to the jail. They wanted the screws put on; but I intended to handle Vandeman in my own way. I had halted the lawyer on the lock-up threshold, with,
”c.u.mmings, I want you to keep still in here. When I'm done with the man, you can question him all you want--if he's left anything to be told.” I answered a doubtful look, ”Did you see his face there in the ball room as he looked up at Barbara Wallace? He thinks that girl knows everything, like a supreme being. He's still so shaken that he'd spill out anything--everything. He'll hardly suppose he's telling us anything we don't know.”
And Vandeman bore out expectations. Now, provided with a raincoat to take the place of his Mandarin robe, his trousers still the lilac satin ones of that costume, he surveyed us and our preparations with a half smile as we settled our stenographer and took chairs ourselves.
”I look like h.e.l.l--what?” He spoke fast as a man might with a drink ahead. But it was not alcohol that was loosening his tongue. ”Why can't some one go up to my place and get me a decent suit of clothes? G.o.d knows I've plenty there--closets full of them.”
”Time enough when th' Shurff gets here,” Roll Winch.e.l.l, the town marshall grunted at him. ”I'm not taking any chances on you, Mr.
Vandeman. You'll do me as you are.”
”Stick a smoke in my face, c.u.mmings,” came next in a voice that tw.a.n.ged like a stretched string. ”d.a.m.n these bracelets! Light it, can't you?
Light it.” He puffed eagerly, got to his feet and began walking up and down the room, glancing at us from time to time, raising the manacled hands grotesquely to his cigar, drawing in a breath as though to speak, then shaking his head, grinning a little and walking on. I knew the mood; the moment was coming when he must talk. The necessity to reel out the whole thing to whomever would listen was on him like a sneeze. It's always so at this stage of the game.
For all the hullabaloo in the streets, we were quiet enough here, since the lock-up at Santa Ysobel lurks demurely, as such places are apt to do, in the rear of the building whose garbage can it is. Our pacing captive could keep silent no longer. Shooting a sidelong glance at me, he broke out,
”I'm not a common crook, Boyne, even if I do come of a family of them, and my father's in Sing Sing. I put him there. They'd not have caught him without. He was an educated man--never worked anything but big stuff. At that, what was the best he could do--or any of them? Make a haul, and all they got out of it was a spell of easy money that they only had the chance to spend while they were dodging arrest. Sooner or later every one of them I knew got put away for a longer or shorter term. Growing up like that, getting my education in the public schools daytimes, and having a finish put on it nights with the gang, I decided that I was going to be, not honest, but the hundredth man--the thousandth--who can pull off a big thing and neither have to hide nor go to prison.”
This was promising; a little different from the ordinary brag; I signaled inconspicuously to our stenographer to keep right on the job.
”When I was twenty-four years old, I saw my chance to shake the gang and try out my own idea,” Clayte rattled it off feelinglessly. ”It was a lone hand for me. My father had made a stake by a forgery; checks on the City bank. I knew where the money was hid, eight thousand and seventy nine dollars. It would just about do me. I framed the old man--I told you he was in Sing Sing now--took my working capital and came out here to the Coast. That money had to make me rich for life, respected, comfortable. I figured that my game was as safe as dummy whist.”
”Yeh,” said Roll Winch.e.l.l, the marshal, gloomily, ”them high-toned Eastern crooks always comin' out here thinkin' they'll find the Coast a soft snap.”
”Two years I worked as a messenger for the San Francisco Trust Company,”
Clayte's voice ran right on past Winch.e.l.l's interruption, ”a model employee, straight as they come; then decided they were too big for me to tackle, and used their recommendation to get a clerk's job with the Van Ness Avenue concern. I was after the theft of at least a half million dollars, with a perfect alibi; and the smaller inst.i.tution suited my plan. It took me four years to work up to paying teller, but I wasn't hurrying things. I was using my capital now to build that perfect alibi.”
He glanced around nervously as the stenographer turned a leaf, then went on,
”I'd picked out this town for the home of the man I was going to be. It suited me, because it was on a branch line of the railway, hardly used at all by men whose business was in the city, and off the main highway of automobile travel; besides, I liked the place--I've always liked it.”
”Sure flattered,” came the growl as Winch.e.l.l stirred in his chair.
”My bungalow and grounds cost me four thousand; at that it was a run-down place and I got it cheap. The mahogany--old family pieces that I was supposed to bring in from the East--came high. Yet maybe you'd be surprised how the idea took with me. I used to scrimp and save off my salary at the bank to buy things for the place, to keep up the right scale of living for Bronson Vandeman, traveling agent for eastern manufacturers, not at home much in Santa Ysobel yet, but a man of fine family, rich prospects, and all sorts of a good fellow, settled in the place for the rest of his days.”
He turned suddenly and grinned at me.
”You swallowed it whole, Boyne, when you walked into my house last night--the old family furniture I bought in Los Angeles, the second-hand library, that family portrait, with a ring on my finger, and the same painted in on what was supposed to be my father's hand.”
”Sure,” I nodded amiably, ”You had me fooled.”
”And without a bit of crude make-up or disguise,” he rubbed it in. ”It was a change of manner and psychology for mine. As Edward Clayte--and that's not my name, either, any more than Vandeman--I was description-proof. I meant to be--and I was. It took--her--the girl,”