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 nobody could describe.
Helping to recover Clayte's loot for Worth Gilbert looked to the
opposition their best bet for squaring themselves. Dykeman from his sick
bed, had dug us up a stenographer; Cummings 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,
"Cummings, 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 hell--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? God
knows I've plenty there--closets full of them."
"Time enough when th' Shurff gets here," Roll Winchell, 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, Cummings," came next in a voice that twanged
like a stretched string. "Damn 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 Winchell, 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 Winchell'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 institution
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 Winchell 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,"
his face darkened and he jerked at his cigar, "to deduce that a
nonentity who could get away with nearly a million dollars and leave no
trail was some man!"
I raised my head with a start and stared at the man in his raincoat and
lilac silk pantaloons.
"That's so," I fed it to him, "She had a name for you. She called you
the wonder man."
"Did she!" a pleased smile. "Well, I'll give her right on that. I was
some little wonder man. Listen," his insistent over-stimulated voice
went eagerly on, "The beauty of my scheme was that up to the very last
move, there was nothing criminal in my leading this double life. You
see--as I got stronger and stronger here in Santa Ysobel, I bought a
good machine, a speedster that could burn up the road. Many's the stag
supper I've had with the boys there in my bungalow, and been back behind
the wicket as Edward Clayte in the Van Ness Avenue bank on time next
morning. I was in that room at the St. Dunstan about as much as a
fellow's in his front hall. I walked through it to Henry J. Brundage's
room at the Nugget; I stayed there more often than I did at the St.
Dunstan, unless I came on here.
"I'd left marriage out. Then that night four years ago when Ina had her
little run-in with old Tom Gilbert and got her engagement to Worth
smashed, I saw there might be girls right in the class I was trying to
break into that would be possible for a man like me. The date for our
wedding was set, when Thomas Gilbert remarked to me one afternoon as we
were coming off the golf links together, that he was buying a block of
Van Ness Savings Bank stock. For a minute I felt like caving in his
head, then and there, with the golf club I carried. What a hell of a
thing to happen, right at the last this way! Ten chances to one I'd have
this man to silence; but it must be done right. Not much room for murder
in so full a career as mine--holding down a teller's job, running for
the vice presidency of the country club, getting married in style--but
every time I'd look up from behind my teller's grille, and see any one
near the size of old Gilbert walk in the front door, it gave me the
shivers. I'd put more than eight years of planning and hard work into
this scheme, and you'll admit, Boyne, that what I had was some alibi. A
wedding like that in a town of this size makes a big noise. I managed to
be back and forth so much that people got the idea I was hardly out of
Santa Ysobel. The Friday night before, I had a stag supper at my house,
and Saturday morning if any one had called, Fong Ling would have told
them I was sleeping late and couldn't be disturbed. On the forenoon of
my wedding day, then, I sat as Edward Clayte in my teller's cage, the
suitcase I had carried back and forth empty for so many Saturdays now
loaded with currency and securities, not one of which was traceable, and
whose amount I believed would run close to a million. It was within
three minutes of closing time, when some one rapped on the counter at my
wicket, and I looked straight up into the face of old Tom Gilbert.
"I saw a flash of doubtful recognition in his eyes, but didn't dare to
avoid them while counting bills and silver to pay his check. If I had
done so, he would certainly have known me. As it was, I saw that I
convinced him--almost. I watched him as he went out, saw him hesitate a
little at the door of Knapp's office--he wasn't quite sure enough. I
knew the man. The instant he made certain, he would act.
"The old devil wasn't on terms to attend the reception at the Thornhill
place, but I located him in an aisle seat, when I first came from the
vestry with my best man. All through the ceremony I felt his eyes boring
into my back. When I finally faced him, as Ina and I walked out, man and
wife, I knew he recognized me, and almost expected him to step out and
denounce me. But no--a fellow leading a double life was all he saw in
it; bigamy was the worst he'd suspect me of at the moment. He didn't
give Ina much, wouldn't lift a finger to defend her.
"Meantime, the manner of his taking off lay easy to my hand. I'd studied
the situation through that skylight, seen Ed Hughes juggle the bolts
with his magnets, and mapped the thing out. Gilbert killed there, the
room found bolted, was a cinch for suicide. When the reception at the
Thornhill house was over, I made an excuse of something needed for the
journey, and started across to my bungalow. It was common for all of us
to cross through the lawns; I hid in the shrubbery.
"There were people with Gilbert, no chance for me to do anything. I
stood there and nearly went out of my hide with impatience over the
delays, while he had his row with Worth, when Laura Bowman and Jim
Edwards came and braced him to let up on his persecution of them. Mrs.
Bowman finally left; he went with her toward the front. Now was my
chance; I dodged into the study, jerked his own pistol from its holster,
squeezed myself in behind the open door and waited. He came back; I let
him get into the room, past me a little, and when at some sound I made,
he turned, the muzzle of the gun was shoved against his chest and fired.
"I'd barely finished pressing Gilbert's fingers around the pistol butt
when I heard a cry outside, jumped to the door, shut and bolted it just
as my mother-in-law ran in across the lawns. I gathered that she'd been
there earlier to get those three leaves out of the diary that you were
so interested in, Boyne; had just read them and come back to have it out
with old Tom. She hung around for five minutes, I should say, beating on
the door, calling, asking if anything was wrong.
"My one big mistake in the study was that diary of 1920. It lay open on
the desk where he'd been writing. It did tell of his having identified
me as Clayte. I'd not expected it, and so I didn't handle it well. Time
pressed. I couldn't carry it with me; I tore out the leaf, stuck the
book into the drainpipe, and ran.
"And after all," he summed up, "my plans would have gone through on
schedule; you never could have touched me with your clumsy,
police-detective methods, if it hadn't been for the girl."
He dropped his head and stood brooding a moment, demanded another smoke,
got it, shrugged off some thought with a gesture, and finished,
"I was in too deep to turn. It was her life--or mine. Things went
contrary. We couldn't get her to come out to the masquerade, where it
would have been easy. With those two Mandarin costumes, Fong Ling in my
place, I had my time from the hour we put on the masks till midnight.
Another perfect alibi. Well--it didn't work. They say you have to shoot
a witch with a silver bullet. And she's more than human."
A siren's dry shriek as the Sheriff's gasoline buggy made its way
through the crowded street outside. Cummings raised his brows at me, got
my nod of permission, and shot his first question at the prisoner.
"Vandeman, where's the money?"
"Not within a hundred miles of here," instantly.
"You took it south with you--on your wedding trip?" Cummings would
persist. But our man, so expansive a moment ago, had, as I knew he would
at direct mention of his loot, turned sullen, and he started for the San
Jose jail, mum as an oyster.