I could put two and two together. Bill Peavey was the tool of Ogden Sly. He was the man who made the collections, who pulled the rough stuff. Somehow Caruthers had found out more than he was supposed to know about where the blackmail was going, and who was getting it. He had learned that the man who made the collections was really a pawn in the game, and had started investigations.
From the standpoint of a source of income he had shrunk to zero in the eyes of Ogden Sly, the real man higher up. As a nuisance he was looming on the horizon as a factor to be dealt with. It had all been arranged that Peavey was to call on Caruthers, offer to confess and expose the real head of the criminal blackmailing ring, and lure the victim to my apartment, where Peavey would promise to side in with Caruthers and they would demand a showdown. As a crook, Peavey would pick the lock of the apartment and he and Caruthers could hide within, waiting my arrival. When my key sounded in the door, Peavey had simply stabbed Caruthers in the dark, and dashed from the apartment, leaving me with the dying man. As soon as he could get to a telephone he had called headquarters, posed as the owner of one of the adjoining flats who didn’t want his name used, and tipped off the police.
I was supposed to be caught just as I was attempting to dispose of the body of a murdered man, a man who had been paying tribute to a blackmailer for a long time, a man who had been getting desperate under the strain of the continued extortions. It had all been rather clever in a maudlin, mediocre sort of a way.
I had dished their plans, and then had put them in a box by seeing that the body was found in the wreckage of Ogden Sly’s machine. I presumed he would have a pull with headquarters. A good blackmailer or confidence man usually has a friend in at the central office who can smooth things out for him, but murder is something else again.
Of course the police were not absolutely certain that a piece of glass from the broken windshield had not penetrated to Caruthers’ heart, but it was funny that he should be driving Ogden Sly’s machine at the time of his death, and that Ogden Sly should have no other explanation than that his car had been stolen. That was so old it was worn threadbare. Every crook who gets into trouble with his car and realizes that the registration numbers are going to be traced back to him always reports that his car has been stolen.
Then there was the Bill Peavey, alias Bert Strong angle of the case. I made up my mind that I’d give that a once over before so very long. They’d fixed up a good alibi for him in case the thing ever got hot around his head, but he was in the same fix I was. He had a police record, and that was a big factor. On the whole, I figured the bunch would be on the defensive for a little while. They hadn’t counted on Andy Caruthers leaving that last message that he could be located through the man he had known as Bert Strong.
However, I’d sat in the game taking a look at cards without having any money in the center long enough. I decided I’d better see if I couldn’t throw in a few chips and take a chance on winning something. I went to the telephone and called up John Lambert’s residence. Lois herself answered the phone.
“I’ll have a few words with you, young lady, at your convenience,” I told her.
“That’s jake with me, Ed,” she purred over the wire. “Are you inviting me to dinner, or do you want to take a joy ride?”
“I’ll meet you at the Rendezvous at eight,” I shot back at her.
“Omygosh! Ed. You’re crude. Your dinner maners are awful. When a gent invites his lady friend to dinner he’s supposed to go get her and see that she doesn’t get kidnapped by some taxicab driver.”
I’d been kidded long enough. There was something about this thing I didn’t like.
“You be there,” I said, short and snappy.
“Oh, Ed, you’re so good to me!” she cooed as I slammed the receiver back on the hook.
I was about half mad at that jane and yet I was grinning. I had a little job to do before I met her and I started out to do it. There are ways of getting information in the underworld, ways that are not always open to the cops. I thought that I could get a slant on the ways and methods of one Ogden Sly, a slant that might come in handy at some time in the very near future.
I’d have got the information all right, at that, by following ways of my own, but it was chance pure and simple that played into my hand and gave me the clue I needed. The way to the joint I was headed for lay past the steps of the courthouse, and I noticed a little crowd standing there at the foot of the steps with a man halfway up the flight holding out a bundle of letters.
I stopped long enough to hear what was going on, and got the idea he was auctioning off a pile of letters which “might contain anything or nothing.” I was further enlightened by a loquacious bystander.
“That’s the public administrator. Whenever a poor bloke passes in with a little bit of an estate he sells off the stuff at auction. They’ve found out that there’s a certain demand for letters, and if a stiff passes in his checks and leaves a bunch of letters tied up with a pink ribbon, or a pile of old papers that have some love letters in ’em, they do ’em up into bundles and sell’em off after they get enough of ’em. There are collectors that follow the game all the time, and it’s got to be a regular fad. The administrator gets enough out of it to pay him for his trouble all right. There’s one of the regular ones now, bidding in that bunch. I work here in the courthouse and get a chance to see all of the auctions, that bird’s been a regular customer for years.”
I glanced toward the man who was bidding in the bundle, and, as he mounted the steps with outstretched hands, I got a good look at him. He was my esteemed contemporary Ogden Sly, his fat, lifeless paunch protruding, his flabby face emotionless as his great, writhing arms stretched forth for the bundle of letters.
I ducked back out of sight and did some thinking. Here was Ogden Sly, mixed up in a mysterious death, very probably under request from the district attorney’s office to hold himself in readiness to be examined further in the event the grand jury should want him, and yet he couldn’t afford to miss one of these auctions of dead men’s letters.
I wandered back round the block, into the other entrance of the courthouse and caught the stenographer in the administrator’s office. Would she please look up the index of pauper estates and tell me if one C. W. Kinsington, deceased, had had his effects sold at auction. She looked at me in the aimless, inefficient way of all clerks who are in the employ of the taxpayers, yawned, left the room, and finally returned with a big book in which was entered the record of the estate of C. W. Kinsington, deceased. There had been no property beyond a pistol and cartridge belt, a watch, some clothes, a suitcase and a file of correspondence. All of these had been sold at auction, and the net amount of the returns were neatly entered.
I had seen all I wanted to. I ventured that I could tell right then why Ogden Sly was such a mystery, why he acted as he did, and why and how he managed to blackmail quietly and without undue notoriety. He’d pick up a bunch of letters, skim through them, look up the history of the man who had owned them, and then find the writers of those letters. It was a cinch.
The men whose letters were sold at auction were the ones who were failures, admitted failures, the letters they saved were the important letters that represented the most vital phases of their lives. All in all those letters were a mighty safe investment for a man who was making his living out of blackmail. Of course there’d be a lot of times when he’d draw a blank, and there’d be lots of times when it would be small stuff, such as getting a few dollars from some widow to hush up the pauper’s fate of the son who was supposed by the neighbors to have been making such a success in the city, but every once in a while he’d be bound to stumble on something big, something like the letters of C. W. Kinsington’s, letters which had given him a lead on which he had hooked John Staunton Lambert, had hooked him so cleverly that the Lamberts looked on Ogden Sly as a friend, and had even insisted that Lois should allow her engagement to Sly to be announced.