“And so?” he asked.
I settled down in the chair; put my feet out in front of me and said, “And so I’m sitting right here until I know what the score is.”
“You won’t like it,” he said.
“I know that.”
“You have me where I have very little choice in the matter. I simply can’t afford to have you messing around here in Denver.”
“I counted on that.”
“You’re right,” he said.
“In what?”
“That we had to have an alibi.”
“Who’s the we?”
“Phyllis and I. Principally Phyllis.”
“Am I also right in assuming that the rap you were trying to beat here was something pretty damned serious?”
He nodded.
“What was it?” I asked.
He looked me in the eyes. “Murder,” he said.
That jolted me. I came up in the chair. “Murder!”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about it.”
“A blackmailer,” he said. “A dirty, slimy, shrewd ingenious, diabolically clever, ruthless blackmailer.
“He had compromising photographs. He had original registration cards he’d secured from hotels. He had the works.”
“You couldn’t deal with him?”
“He wouldn’t stay put.”
“So what happened?”
He sighed, started drumming on the edge of the desk. “I goofed,” he said.
“In what way?”
“I wanted to get the evidence.”
“What did you do?”
“I was to give him money and he was to produce the evidence.”
“You met him?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“At a little rooming house that he had selected.”
“You gave him the money?”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t produce the evidence?”
“No, he said that he would get it for me; that he’d left it in a safe place. That he hadn’t believed that I was acting in good faith. He said he had thought that I might have the police grab him and search him.
“All of that was not very smart, because if I’d wanted to go to the police, I’d have gone to them in the first place. I didn’t dare to have that stuff come out. Having him searched by a police officer or anyone else was the very last thing I wanted.”
“So what did you do?”
“I bought him a drink, and Phyllis put the knockout drops in it.”
“Oh, oh!”
“He took the drink and right at the last realized we’d drugged him. He had a gun and tried to pull it. I clobbered him and he passed out cold. We got the keys to his apartment, his gun, and went up to his place. We searched for more than an hour before we found what we wanted. We took it. Then I went back to put the guy’s keys back in his pocket.”
“He was still out cold?” I asked.
“He was dead as a doornail. His heart had stopped on him.”
I thought for a moment and said, “So you called Colton Essex in Los Angeles and told him you needed an absolute, ironclad alibi for yourself and Phyllis.”
“Principally Phyllis,” he said.
“All right, you needed an alibi for Phyllis, and you had to have it fast. You had to be able to prove she was in Los Angeles.”
“Right,” he said.
I thought that over.
“Well?” he asked. “Did I do the right thing in telling you all this?”
“I asked for it... Where did you get the name ‘Dawson’?”
“I made it up,” he said.
“Why?”
“Phyllis and I used that name and address to correspond with each other.”
“You’re married?”
He stroked his chin. “Yes and no.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’m married,” he said, “but my wife and I haven’t been getting along for a while. She went to Las Vegas to establish a six-week’s residence and get a divorce.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Then why take all these chances with a blackmailer?”
“She has a damned smart lawyer,” he said. “They knew that I had some outside companionship, but they couldn’t prove it. She held off for nearly a year getting a divorce, trying to catch me. They had detectives shadowing me; they tried everything.”
“Who’s the girl in the outer office, the one who got the letter for you?”
“She’s a girl I can trust.”
“What’s her name?”
“Mellie Belden.”
“Not Millie?”
“No, Mellie.”
“You trust her?”
“I trust her with my life.”
“Devoted to you?”
“Devoted to the job. She’s competent, capable, cool, collected and loyal.”
“Helen Loomis down there knows who you are?”
“No, she knows Mellie Belden and that’s all. When something comes in that’s important, she telephones Mellie. She thinks Mellie is the Dawson Re-Debenture Discount Security Company.”
I said, “You left a pretty wide back trail for your wife’s attorney not to be able to follow it.”
“They never did.”
“But you were afraid they were going to?”
“If this blackmailer had gone to my wife’s attorney, he could have sold the information he had for a big sum of money and he knew it.”
“Who was the blackmailer?”
“Deering L. Canby.”
I thought things over for a while. “How do you know he didn’t?” I asked at length.
“Didn’t what?”
“Go to your wife’s attorney?”
“Because they didn’t get the evidence. I got it.”
I said, “I know a little something about blackmail and blackmailers. When there’s a competitive market they like to sell to the highest bidder.”
“This one didn’t,” Badger said.
I thought some more. “You agreed on a price?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“Twenty thousand.”
“It was worth more?”
“I’d have paid a hundred if I’d had to.”
“You met him at this rooming house?”
“Yes.”
“He picked it?”
“Yes. He said he wanted to be certain the room wasn’t bugged.”
“But he didn’t have the stuff you wanted with him?”
“No.”
“Was a specific time fixed?”
He said, “Why do you ask that?”
“It might be important.”
“A very specific time was fixed and he warned me not to be over two minutes late.”
“Late?”
“That’s right.”
“You could have been earlier than the appointed time and that would have been all right, but you couldn’t be over two minutes late?”
“That’s right.”
I thought some more.
“How long before you’ll be in the clear on your divorce?” I asked at length.
“About ten days now.”
I took a long breath. “You had me mixed up in a hit-and-run deal,” I said, “and now I’ve listened to you and I’m mixed in a murder case up to my necktie. Some things are confidential, but information on a murder isn’t. If I don’t go to the police with this, I’ll be in a jam.”
He spread out his hands, palms upward. “You left me with no choice in the matter. I had to tell you. You were hot on the trail, and you’d have found it out.”
“Yes,” I said, “I’d have found it out. I intended to cover the police blotter for the time you had built your alibi and check on every crime... What do the police know about Deering Canby?”
“They know he was a blackmailer; they know that he was keeping an appointment with someone he was blackmailing; they know he had knockout drops slipped in his drink and that he was killed and they think papers and evidence were taken from his body.