Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 2, March 19, 1938
- Автор: Clark Dale, 12627 Convict
- Год: 1938
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 2, March 19, 1938». Краткое содержание книги:
Hatch opened his fists and closed them again. “Be damned careful you don’t give me an excuse to get rough,” he warned. “You were coming out of the Club Grotto with Rhoda Quinn last night when you met Seligman. Seligman said something that scared the pants off you, and then you disappeared. Where the hell did you go?”
“I... I simply left,” Sanders said.
“Sanders, you be careful,” Hatch warned him again. “You had Rhoda Quinn’s gun. You hid behind the hedge, and just as Seligman was going into the club, you shot him.”
“I didn’t!” Sanders blurted.
“This morning you and Sam Flack had a hell of an argument in my apartment. While my secretary was gone, you killed Flack. She came back just as you were sneaking out, and you knocked her unconscious, you rat.”
“I swear I didn’t kill Flack. I didn’t kill either of them,” Sanders insisted.
“I’m going to break your neck,” Hatch said.
“I swear it!”
Hatch shrugged and turned away. “Got anything to drink in this place?”
“There’s a bottle of Scotch in the dresser,” Sanders said.
Hatch found the bottle. It was three-quarters full. He brought a glass from the bath, poured Scotch into it, handed it to Sanders and kept the bottle.
“Want any water in that?” he asked.
“No, thanks,” Sanders said. “The man who made it knew how much water to put in it.”
“Like hell he did,” Hatch said, sitting on the bed. “They always put too damned much.” He drank from the bottle, rolled the liquor around his tongue, swallowed it and sighed. “Go ahead,” he said.
Sanders took a long drink. “Let me tell you in my own way. Let me explain everything from the very beginning.”
“Don’t try to put anything over on me,” Hatch said. “I feel like beating hell out of somebody, and it might as well be you.”
Sanders strained forward in his chair. “I began working in Seligman’s office four or five months ago.”
“You forged your law degree,” Hatch said.
“I say!” Sanders took another mouthful of Scotch. “Very well, I admit that. In London I was a clerk in a barrister’s office. I knew law, but I hadn’t a degree. I needed a good job here in America. Flack thought I was a bit of all right. He thought an Englishman would give his office class. The trouble began when Seligman put me to work on the Quinn case.”
“Doing what?”
“Tracing Timothy Quinn. Rhoda Quinn had told Seligman a great deal about her husband, and Seligman had taken a great many notes. I studied them and began investigating. Before long I’d found Timothy Quinn.”
“Through the bloody birds,” Hatch said.
“That’s right,” Sanders said. “Timothy Quinn had kept a loft of homing pigeons in Chicago. I knew that racing pigeons are registered. I looked into the files of the American Racing Pigeon Union and the International Federation of Homing Pigeon Fanciers. Most of Timothy Quinn’s pigeons were still registered in his name, though his wife had gotten rid of them — she’d said she poisoned them after her husband left her — but a few had been transferred to another name. To Howard Westcott, of New York.”
“As simple as that,” Hatch said.
Sanders nodded.
“Timothy Quinn had taken a few of his best birds with him when he’d left home. In order to race the birds here, he’d transferred the registration to his assumed name. I felt sure Howard Westcott and Timothy Quinn were the same man, because Westcott answered Quinn’s description.”
“Today Rhoda Quinn took the hint you dropped and traced him in exactly the same way,” Hatch said.
“I say!” Sanders blurted. Then he went on, “I turned my information over to Seligman. He warned me to keep it strictly confidential. Then the bloody crook began playing Westcott and Rhoda Quinn against each other.”
“Seligman had you forge a letter. He took it to Westcott, and Westcott thought it was from Rhoda Quinn.”
Sanders stared and said, “That’s right.”
“Seligman told Rhoda Quinn he hadn’t found her husband, and kept getting money from her,” Hatch said. “At the same time he blackmailed Howard Westcott.”
“That’s not the half of it,” Sanders said.
“No?” Hatch said. “What’s the rest?”
“Seligman found out my law degree was forged. He’d checked up on me. But he didn’t tell Flack about it, and he told me I could stay on at the office, if I’d follow his orders and keep my mouth shut. He said if I didn’t do as he ordered, he’d send me to gaol.”
“What has that to do with Rhoda Quinn and Howard Westcott?”
“Seligman made use of what he’d learned about me. He had me prepare a death certificate,” Sanders explained. “I forged a set of papers showing that Timothy Quinn had died and been buried in the Potter’s Field three years ago.”
“What was the idea behind that?” Hatch asked.
“Seligman showed a copy of the papers to Rhode Quinn. He told her that was the end of her search. Several weeks later, Rhoda Quinn married Lloyd Daly.”
The bottle stopped midway to Hatch’s mouth. “What! Do you mean to tell me that Rhoda Quinn and Lloyd Daly became man and wife?”
“That’s right,” Sanders said.
“Good heavens!” Hatch said. “She didn’t let me in on that, and neither did Daly. Doesn’t anybody ever tell the whole truth? No! The answer is no.”
“And they hadn’t been married a week before Seligman called Rhoda Quinn into his office,” Sanders continued. “He told her there’d been a terrible mistake. He said he’d gone on investigating and discovered that the Timothy Quinn in the Potter’s Field wasn’t her husband after all.”
“How could he get away with that?” Hatch asked.
“He showed her where the fake death certificate said that the Timothy Quinn in the Potter’s Field had died of dementia paralytica. That’s another name for general paresis. He said he’d checked back over some records in Chicago, and found that the real Timothy Quinn had taken a Wassermann test just before his marriage, and of course the test was negative. The lapse of time between the test and the date on the death certificate wasn’t long enough for paresis to develop. That’s the way Seligman convinced Rhoda Quinn that the imaginary Timothy Quinn in the Potter’s Field wasn’t her husband at all.”
“Good heavens!” Hatch exclaimed. “Seligman pulled off all this skulduggery to clear the way for Rhoda’s marriage to Daly, is that it?”
“That’s it exactly,” Sanders said. “He deliberately jockeyed her into a bigamous marriage. She found herself in a position where she couldn’t prove she’d acted in good faith, upon sound evidence that her husband was dead, because Seligman got rid of the forged death certificate — said he’d lost it. And of course Rhoda Quinn couldn’t find the original, because it didn’t exist.”
“Then Seligman proceeded to blackmail Rhoda Quinn on the basis of her bigamy, and at the same time he went on blackmailing Timothy Quinn for the same reason.”
“That’s right,” Sanders said.
“The guy deserved to be killed,” Hatch said.
He refilled Sanders’ glass and took a long pull from the bottle. He peered at Sanders.
“Where do you fit into this picture?”
“I knew what Seligman was pulling off,” Sanders said.
“So did John Pirano,” Hatch said.
“Seligman was too smart to tell Pirano much about it. Pirano knew Seligman was pulling off some kind of deal, that’s all. Pirano tried to bribe me to tell him what it was all about.”
“Did you tell him?”
“No, because if I had, Seligman would have finished me.”
“Then Pirano still doesn’t know who Timothy Quinn actually is?”