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Title: The trap
Author: Murray Leinster
Release date: January 12, 2025 [eBook #75094]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Frank A. Munsey Company, 1929
Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TRAP ***
[Illustration: Colby stood stock still.]
THE TRAP
Colby’s murder plan was perfect--except at one point
By Murray Leinster
This is a very instructive story. It deals with the value of a
reputation, the best way to commit murder, what to do with embarrassing
letters, and where stolen thousand-dollar bills may be exchanged or
spent with the minimum discount--all of which information is useful; but
mostly it deals with the value of a reputation.
Colby had thought about reputations rather carefully, but the sound of
the shot with which he killed Grahame had not quite died away before he
remembered the reputation of Detective Sergeant Nesbit. Then cold sweat
came out on his forehead.
He stood stock-still for a matter of seconds, with a horrible sick
feeling coming all over him. Grahame, of course, caused none of that
feeling of nausea. Grahame had acted according to schedule. The load of
buckshot went into his skull just where the spinal column entered it.
While the thunderous crash of the gun still echoed among the nearer tree
trunks, his arms went stiffly out in an aimless gesture and he fell with
a slight splashing sound in the leaf-littered mud underfoot. Colby
stood still, with thinning smoke coming out of the gun barrel, while the
echoes died away to a dimming murmur among the trees, until even that
sound was lost in the noise of the breeze in the bare branches overhead
and the dry rustling of lingering brown leaves.
It was very peaceful, here among the trees. The brown clothing of the
crumpled figure on the earth blended in color with the carpet of leaves.
Any living creatures that might have been within hearing had been
startled into immobility and silence by the shot. Colby had not yet
moved even his feet after pulling the trigger. There was no sound at
all, except a faint trickling noise from a little stream some twenty
yards to the right.
Colby pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead--not at all the
conventional thing for a murderer to do, of course; but he was not
thinking of the dead man at his feet. He was thinking of Nesbit.
He stood with his handkerchief held rather absurdly before him,
listening to the stillness. Then he moved to put the handkerchief away.
His gun interfered irritatingly. Somehow his hands fumbled. Eventually
he shifted the gun to his left hand and stuffed the thing into his coat
pocket.
The silence continued. All the world seemed full of a vast immobility, a
vast quietude, which was only emphasized by the faint whispering of dry
branches and drier leaves overhead. The stillness was reassuring. Nesbit
would never know of this! Colby’s plan was too well worked out for him
ever to find out anything.
The murderer bent over the huddled mass at his feet. Grahame would have
ten thousand dollars on him. Colby searched for it industriously; but it
is a curiously unhandy business to go through another man’s clothes.
One’s hand catches, the linings follow one’s fingers out of the
pockets, one spills things messily--especially if the other man happens
to be dead.
Colby went into one pocket after another. A little trace of panic came
over him. He found a cigarette case, a lighter, a handkerchief, a
notebook, twenty or thirty dollars loose in a vest pocket. Then he
remembered--it would be in a money belt, of course.
He unbuttoned Grahame’s vest clumsily and fumbled with the buttons of
his shirt. It was unpleasant to have to search like this. Colby felt
hideously ashamed--not of the murder, of course, or even of the fact
that he was a thief; but searching like this, searching a dead man’s
clothing, made him feel unclean.
No, there was no money belt. Colby swore, a trifle shaken. Grahame must
have the money on him! He was a free-lance bootleg operator. He had come
down to make a deal for two thousand gallons of corn whisky. Colby told
him that he had been running a still for three months, and wanted to
sell all his product in a lump, avoiding constant dealings and
mysterious trucks and cars, and so eliminating the probability of
suspicion. Grahame must surely have brought the money; but where was it?
Colby felt sick with disappointment before he had finished hunting.
Every pocket contained its appropriate objects--a knife, a watch, a luck
piece, scraps of paper with undecipherable notations on them, a
newspaper clipping in an envelope.
Pure despair filled him the instant before he thrust his hand into
Grahame’s inside breast pocket. But the wallet was there, and the shock
of finding it brought back confidence. He should have known! Dealing as
Grahame did, the man knew all the tricks of the trade. An inside breast
pocket is the one place that a dip will never touch. It is the safest
possible receptacle for any valuable.
Colby opened the wallet. Four twenties, six hundreds, and ten, twelve,
thirteen other bills--thousand-dollar bills. Colby’s breath whistled in
his nostrils. Much better than he had expected! He had never seen a
thousand-dollar bill before.
He folded them and thrust them into his own breast pocket with a strong
sense of satisfaction. He felt a sort of professional gratification at
remembering why one should use a breast pocket. Now there remained only
the business of getting rid of Grahame and going back to town and making
his proper report. He had everything worked out. Nesbit would never even
hear of this affair. He was safe!
He rubbed his handkerchief carefully over every article that he replaced
in Grahame’s pockets, to remove possible finger-prints. The woods
remained very quiet. To be sure, as the effect of the single shot wore
away, there were little sounds near by. An old dog squirrel barked
reassuringly, and his wife and relations came out of their holes and
went about their businesses. A partridge that had frozen into stillness
at the sound of the shotgun came to life and darted to a more promising
spot. Colby heard it scratching and rustling among the fallen leaves.
It whirred off into nowhere when he picked Grahame up, however, and the
squirrels lapsed abruptly into utter silence when his feet crackled on
leaves and small branches as he staggered toward the stream with his
burden.
Twenty yards, no more. He had seen the glitter of the stream curving
toward the footpath before he shot Grahame. It was an unimportant little
watercourse, nowhere more than half a dozen paces across, and it
murmured and sang pleasantly to itself over its gravelly bed.
Colby went painstakingly down to its margin. He knew exactly where he
was and what he was going to do. After a heavy rain the stream ran with
a strong current. It was always carving at its banks or making minor
changes in them, and at one spot it had undermined the six-foot clay
wall which confined it so that a hollow of considerable depth was roofed
over only by tree roots and the earth on top of them. Sooner or later
that roof would cave in.
It was easy to push the dead body into the hollow, where it was well
hidden. Few people ever came near this place, anyhow. No one would ever
dream of creeping in there and risking a cave-in for no purpose. With
one single rain of any size, the roof would probably collapse and bury
Grahame securely. No one would ever think of looking for a missing man
under a cave-in of that sort.
Colby climbed up the bank and tested the roof with his foot. It quivered
promisingly. He stamped. He stamped harder. With a sticky thumping of
rain-softened earth, it gave way. Small rootlets snapped, falling earth
cascaded, and Grahame was safely buried under three feet of soil.
There was absolutely no suspicious sign above. The cave-in looked
perfectly natural. No searching party would ever dream of anything
hidden under there. No searching party would ever look for Grahame,
anyhow. He had come up from Richmond by train, and had ostensibly gone
out to hunt with Colby. Colby would explain that as they walked back
along the concrete road toward town, a car had come by, headed for
Richmond, and in it was an acquaintance of Grahame’s. The man had hailed
Grahame and offered a lift, which the latter had taken.
There would be no inquiry, no investigation. There was no need for
anything of the sort. It was unlikely that any one in Richmond knew
where Grahame had gone.
After Colby had spent twenty minutes clearing away tracks and had
carefully dropped one or two blood-spattered leaves into the hollow of a
double-trunked poplar, there was absolutely no evidence of a murder
anywhere except under that collapsed bank. There was the money in
Colby’s pocket, of course, but nobody would know anything about that for
a long time--not even Nesbit.
Colby had done his murder in an absolutely perfect way. As you see, this
story is instructive.
II
Walking to a little distance among the trees, Colby found a fallen
trunk, and on this he seated himself comfortably. He was supposed to be
hunting, and he wanted to kill a suitable amount of time, so he sat
there for two hours and smoked the better part of a pack of cigarettes,
going over and over his plans. He could find no flaw in them anywhere.
Before he emerged from the woods he dug a tiny hole and buried the
cigarette butts, just as an added precaution. The white paper would be
conspicuous, and a dozen of them lying in one spot would tell that a man
had been waiting there. Buried, and with pine needles strewn over the
spot, even that incitement to idle curiosity was removed.
He came out on the concrete road at a moment when there were no cars in
sight, and he marched sedately on toward town with his gun over his
shoulder. Within fifteen minutes he was passed by at least a dozen cars
going in both directions. He found it possible to smile comfortably at
the perfection with which things were going.
About a mile from the spot where he came out on the road, he overtook
two colored boys dawdling toward Culpeper, with a single antiquated gun
between them. They gazed at him fearfully and tried to hide the rabbit
that one of them was carrying. Colby passed them with a negligent nod.
They dropped behind, and were out of sight before he had gone a mile
farther.
Colby had gone over his plans so thoroughly that he felt entirely
secure. He felt so secure, in fact, that he began to puzzle a little
over his moment of terror immediately after firing the shot.
He had known all about Detective Sergeant Nesbit before he planned this
coup. He knew Nesbit personally, as he knew nearly everybody in
Culpeper. The man had a reputation altogether out of proportion to the
size of his territory. People considered him the equivalent of Nemesis.
For instance, when Jud Harris’s wife was found with her head beaten in,
and there was every indication that she had been killed by a casual
tramp, Nesbit had gone through the usual motions of investigation and
had turned up nothing at all; but a full two years later he got a new
story and convicting evidence from Jud Harris’s second wife. He had been
working on a bootleg case, and had terrified her into revealing the
secret of the nearly forgotten murder. That case was typical of the way
he worked.
Nesbit’s reputation, in Colby’s opinion, came from the fact that he
never forgot an unsolved case. He might not work out a solution at once.
Indeed, it seemed to Colby that he rarely did; but if any evidence
turned up, however belatedly, Nesbit was sure to fit it into its place
among the innumerable half solved puzzles that he always carried in his
brain. His results were slow but dramatic, and his reputation was
secure.
Hiking along with his gun over his shoulder, Colby congratulated himself
upon his own system. Nesbit would have no chance to come in this time.
There would be no mystery for him to mull over in his painful, patient
way. Grahame had come to town as Colby’s guest. Nobody knew him. He and
Colby had gone out hunting. A car had picked Grahame up and carried him
back to Richmond. That was all, absolutely all, except the little wad of
currency in Colby’s pocket.
The rattling rumble of an old Ford sounded behind him and came thudding
solemnly in his wake. It came roaring alongside, and its brakes
squealed.
“H’llo, Mistuh Colby!” said Nesbit heavily. “I’m goin’ in to town. Can
I give ye a lift?”
Colby swallowed something. He felt his forehead beading; but Nesbit was
bending down in the driver’s seat, critically adjusting the carbureter
ferrule and watching the radiator absently.
“Th-thanks,” stammered Colby.
He got in. Nesbit shoved in the clutch to first speed and took off his
foot, and the car jerked into high. It went quivering and rumbling along
the road to town.
Colby wiped the sweat from his face again. In the back seat, silent and
awed, and perhaps a trifle fearful, sat the two colored boys whom he had
passed twenty minutes before. They gazed at him with the amazing blank
woodenness of colored boys in a white man’s car. Colby felt his heart
racing.
“Get any shootin’?” asked Nesbit presently, never taking his eyes from
the road ahead. “I saw ye goin’ out with yer friend.”
“We bagged a few,” said Colby. He was fighting off a panic that he knew
to be unreasonable, so he added: “We started back to town, but a car
came along with one of Grahame’s friends in it. He was going on to
Richmond, so Grahame got in with him. Saved him a train trip. I gave him
the whole bag.”
“Yeah,” said Nesbit heavily. He drove in silence for a space. “I don’t
reckon we realize how much city people like birds. We can get ’em when
we want ’em. They can’t.”
“Grahame seemed to enjoy himself,” said Colby.
He forced himself to be calm. Nothing was wrong. Nesbit’s presence was a
pure accident. Those colored boys, with their rabbit--they must have been
near by when he shot Grahame; but Nesbit did not look suspicious. He
couldn’t know anything.
“He’s a good fellow,” said Colby rather breathlessly, “though he’s one
of the worst shots in the world.”
Nesbit nodded. He was coarse and unlovely, and seemed almost embarrassed
by Colby’s presence. He had offered a lift purely as a matter of the
courtesy of the road--nothing more than that. Colby gradually convinced
himself that the thing was pure coincidence. It couldn’t be anything
else.
He drew out his cigarette case and offered it to Nesbit. Nesbit took one
with a mumble of thanks. Colby shielded a match with his hands, lighted
his own, and offered to light Nesbit’s. Too late, he saw a tiny smear of
dried blood on one of the fingers. His cupped hands trembled like tuning
forks.
“Car shakes a lot,” said Nesbit heavily.
He took the match and puffed at it himself. Then he tossed it over the
side of the car and drove on, frowning over something in his mind.
“I got to get a new car somehow,” he observed presently. “This heah
one’s goin’ to fall apart.”
He jammed on the brakes and turned in his seat. The two colored boys
rose and tumbled out, headed for a small negro cabin set back from the
road. The older of the two mumbled his thanks. The car took up its
rattling way again.
“I sent their father to jail,” said Nesbit heavily. “Runnin’ a still.
He’ll be out in a couple o’ months.”
Colby felt a throb of satisfaction. The colored boys wouldn’t have been
willing to talk to Nesbit, anyhow. As a law officer, they would have
avoided him instinctively; but with a personalized family terror of him
they would have sat dumb behind him, no matter what they had seen or
suspected. Probably they had seen nothing at all. Probably, if Nesbit
had noticed the blood, he would credit it to a partridge. Colby could
ignore the little speck, now wiped off inconspicuously on the cracked
leatherette cushion.
The rather absurd confidence about the colored boys relieved his mind so
thoroughly that he was chatting amiably as the car chugged into town and
Nesbit obligingly turned off and set him down at his own door. It was
almost bravado that led him to say, with the wad of money that he had
taken from Grahame’s body pressing delightfully against his chest:
“I wish I’d thought of it before, Mr. Nesbit. I hear you’re a mighty
good shot. I’d have asked you to make a third with Grahame and myself.”
Nesbit managed to mumble something politely, without looking at Colby.
He would never shine in society, would Nesbit. Then he said heavily:
“Maybe nex’ time. I’d like to talk to Mistuh Grahame. I--uh--I think I
know him.”
His tone seemed peculiar to Colby; and as the sergeant drove off, Colby
found his heart pounding in a sudden paralyzing suspicion.
III
One phrase made Colby descend alive into hell, where he remained for
seven days and nights: “I--uh--I think I know Grahame.”
In seven days he aged five years, and all the time he spent desperately
in an effort to seem exactly as usual. The phrase might mean anything or
nothing. Nesbit might know everything, or nothing at all, or he might
merely be suspicious. It depended on the colored boys, perhaps; but
mostly it depended on how well he knew Grahame.
Colby was seeing him now and then, and he was waving abstracted,
meaningless greetings and disappearing amid the tinny rumblings of his
ancient car.
Colby tried to assure himself that he was safe. There was no evidence
anywhere to prove him a murderer. If the colored boys had had a tale to
tell--and most likely they had not--there might be suspicion of him, but
he could never be convicted. After he had burned the boots worn the day
of the murder, even footprints from the stream edge cast in plaster
would not incriminate him. Nesbit could not find proof that he was a
murderer. There was no proof!
He lay awake at night, staring at the moonlit rectangle of his window,
going over and over his plan in search of a flaw in it; but he found
none. There was no flaw in his plan.
Then he remembered Nesbit’s heavy, dull-witted patience, and how he had
hanged Jud Harris two years after his first wife’s murder. It had taken
him two years to solve that crime, but he had done it. If he believed
Colby had murdered Grahame, he would keep on working until he had an
air-tight case, if it took him ten years.
In the meantime all that Colby could do was to behave in a perfectly
natural fashion. Nesbit might know nothing. He had said that he thought
he knew Grahame. He might have meant just that. It might have been pure
coincidence. He was acting exactly as any man would act who had known a
fellow townsman vaguely for years, and one day had picked him up in a
car and talked to him for half an hour or so. His nod of recognition
would change to a wave of the hand thereafter. That was all. That was
how Nesbit was acting; but that was also how he would act if he were
suspicious.
Colby watched the moonlight wax nightly to full brightness and begin to
wane again, lying awake in the darkness while the curtains at his
window flapped idly in and out of the window sill according to the
vagaries of the chilly night breezes.
He would have given one of--no, he would give half of the thousand-dollar
bills set in behind the horrible chromo above his washstand, if he could
find out what Nesbit meant by saying that he thought he knew Grahame
when he saw him with Colby.
That one thing made Colby’s nerves grow taut and jangling. For seven
nights he lay awake and stared at the idiotically garnished rectangle
that let in the moonlight. For seven nights that one phrase fretted at
his nerves. During the day he went about his business under the
horrible, the overwhelming strain of acting exactly as usual, and at
night the problem banished sleep.
If Nesbit had known Grahame as a bootleg operator, he would have watched
the man closely. Going hunting with Colby, it would have occurred to him
that something else was in the wind. He might have cranked up his car to
find out. He might have thought of Grahame as intending to make a cache
of liquor near Culpeper. He might have gone out on the concrete road
just to look about, to see if there were signs of heavy trucks turning
off on the dirt side roads.
If he was out scouting around on Grahame’s account, he would know that
Grahame did not leave Culpeper in the car of an acquaintance. He might
have known from the beginning that Colby lied. That possibility put dark
circles under Colby’s eyes, and hollowed his cheeks a little, and after
a few days made his hands the least bit clumsy. One of his customers--a
motherly, meddling person--commented sympathetically that he did not look
well. Colby cursed her frantically in his heart, while he was beaming at
her and assuring her that there was nothing wrong except too much Sunday
dinner.
But he looked carefully in his mirror that night, and told himself to
stop worrying. There was no sign of anything wrong. Nesbit had shown no
suspicion. Colby and Grahame together had probably faded entirely from
his mind.
That same night, however, Colby lay awake despairingly in his bed with
the cold night air in his nostrils, watching the weaker rays of the
waning moon strike through his window upon the elaborately figured wall
paper, move slowly across to the washstand, reflect upward from the
china basin, and make wavy lines of feeble light upon the atrocious
chromo behind which he had hidden his booty. He had taken off the paper
backing of that picture and had gummed the bank notes beneath it.
It was near dawn, then, and he had not slept at all.
If Nesbit knew that he had lied, and knew Grahame, the detective might
have made inquiries in Richmond. He might have learned that Grahame was
not to be found. He would know, of course, that a man in Grahame’s
business makes his deals with cold cash, and carries it on him. He might
couple that fact with Grahame’s disappearance, and have a case to work
on in his clumsy, patient fashion. If so, his patience would lead him to
devise a trap for Colby.
The trap appeared on the eighth morning. No one but Colby would have
recognized it as a trap. It was the most innocent-appearing of
envelopes, bearing no return card, and mailed in Richmond the day
before. It was addressed to Grahame, in care of Colby.
Colby took it from the mail rack in the front hall as he came down
for his breakfast. He felt the blood draining from his face as he
stared at it. His knees shook horribly as he retreated to his room in
panic-stricken haste.
There he sat on his bed and gazed unseeingly at nothing, while the blood
drummed in his ears. After a long time he realized that he was staring
at the hopelessly inartistic picture which hid his booty--“Playmates,”
it was called, showing an impossibly benevolent St. Bernard dog with a
little girl in an impossibly starched pink dress.
Colby swallowed nothing whatever, and tried to fight down utter terror.
Nobody knew that Grahame was coming to Culpeper. Nobody would have
dreamed of writing to Grahame in his care, except Nesbit. It was a trap
of Nesbit’s. No doubt he had asked that a watch be kept in the post
office, to see what Colby did with the letter--to see if he remailed it
or destroyed it--to see what effect it had.
With a feeling of panic, Colby realized that he was already showing an
effect. His face was ashen. His hands were shaking. If he arrived late
at his business, Nesbit would assuredly notice that.
He rubbed his face desperately with a rough towel until the color came
back to it. He went down the stairs, savagely making his knees serve
him. He went out and set off briskly toward the store. If he acted
naturally in every way, Nesbit would think he was mistaken. Nesbit was
only suspicious. He couldn’t be more than suspicious.
He had gone three blocks when Nesbit passed him amid the tinny
thunderings of his decrepit car. He turned heavy, indifferent eyes upon
Colby, abstractedly waved a meaningless salute, and went on.
But Colby was ashen white and utterly limp behind him, and he could not
but believe that Nesbit had noticed.
That day was torture. Three people remarked that he didn’t look well.
Black blasphemy yammered in his heart as he assured them that it was a
touch of indigestion, nothing more. He lived all day in deepest hell,
and that night he cursed himself because he had not kept Grahame’s
notebook. There would be addresses in it, to one of which he could
forward the letter. Nesbit’s suspicions would follow whoever kept the
letter; but Colby knew no one who would accept the mail.
Of course he knew better than to go to the stream bank and dig down for
the notebook. Nesbit would have somebody watching there, night and day.
Colby’s terror was the deeper because he did not know what to do. He
dared not destroy the letter, for that would confirm Nesbit’s belief. He
did not dare open it, because that would be detected when Nesbit had it
again. He did not dare hold it. The frenzied helplessness that he felt
racked his already tortured nerves unbearably.
On the ninth morning after the murder he made his first panic-stricken
move. To make Nesbit doubtful, to get rid of the letter, which he knew
to be a trap, to gain time--anything!--he scribbled an address on the
envelope and crossed out his own. The address was meaningless, written
at random. He mailed the letter openly, so that he would be seen.
At noontime he saw Nesbit go into the post office, where he remained for
a long time. Colby had a nervous chill.
He had made a mistake. He should have burned the letter, written
another, and put it into a precisely similar envelope. It would not
matter to whom his own letter was addressed. He should have gone to
Richmond and mailed it in the central post office, at the busiest
possible instant, when it could hardly be picked out for Nesbit. It
would be assumed that he had remailed the trap letter to a proper
address for Grahame. Nesbit’s trap would have been useless.
This story, as you see, is instructive. That is the proper thing to do
with embarrassing letters--burn them.
Colby had made a mistake; and four days later his hands were shaking
uncontrollably as he stared down at a little white envelope in his
fingers. It was the letter addressed to Grahame. A rubber-stamped
notation with a penciled correction on the envelope showed that some
postal clerk had been zealous in the effort to keep a piece of mail with
no return card out of the dead letter office.
The notation read, in rubber-stamped characters, “Return”--in pencil,
“to previous addressee”--and in rubber-stamped letters again, “For
Better Address.”
IV
A room in a boarding house can be horribly still. On the night when
Colby came home and saw the trap letter returned, his room was quiet
with a deadly, isolated silence in which innumerable small noises from
outside came with the sharpness of scratches on a window pane. He heard
the squeaking of a car’s brakes blocks away; voices in the street
outside; the creak of bed springs somewhere in the house, as someone,
reading in bed, shifted his position.
The lamp shed a dismal glow about the room. Its shade was cracked, and
an irregular blotch of light was smeared against the figured wall paper.
Colby sat on the edge of his bed, twitching a little, while he stared at
the letter that had been returned. His brain was exhausted.
Some one walked past the house with measured, sedate footfalls--the
walk of a man who is not in a hurry. Colby’s mouth twitched. Of course
the house was watched now. He had no chance--none at all!
Heavily, drearily, his worn-out brain essayed one last review. He had
foreseen everything, he had taken care of everything, with one
exception; but no living man could have foreseen that Nesbit knew the
man he had chosen as a victim. Nobody could have known that! Colby
repeated it passionately, as a vindication, as an excuse--although there
was no one requiring excuses.
The tinny roaring which was unmistakably Nesbit’s car, was not even a
surprise when it came. Colby heard it blocks away. He heard it come
nearer and stop with squawking brakes before his door. The roaring
rumble of its engine ceased. Nesbit’s footsteps sounded crisp and
crackling on the cinder walk, and heavy and solid on the porch. He heard
Nesbit’s ring.
Minutes later there came a rap on the door, and the landlady’s voice.
“Mr. Colby! Mr. Nesbit’s downstairs to see you,” she said.
Colby’s voice was a croak.
“Tell him to come up,” he replied feebly.
Apathy possessed him. He stared at the little white envelope on the
dresser. His eyeballs burned from sleeplessness. His muscles twitched
occasionally, without warning. His throat felt dry. He seemed to be
moving feverishly amid a myriad thoughts without the possibility of
sleep, while his brain was desiccated, dried up, mummified from the lack
of rest.
The landlady turned the knob and released the door. Nesbit came in,
mumbling embarrassed thanks. The woman drew the door shut behind her.
One last flicker of spirit made Colby stand up. In the shadow of the
lamp shade, perhaps, his pallor did not show. He waited as if for the
volley from a firing squad.
“Howdy, Mistuh Colby?” said Nesbit awkwardly. “Maybe ye remember a
couple o’ weeks ago we were talkin’ about huntin’.”
Colby nodded. The movement was ghastly, the acquiescence of one who
looked like a dead man.
“I--uh--I was thinkin’ of takin’ a day off tomorrow,” said Nesbit,
“an’ I thought maybe ye’d like to go huntin’--”
Colby’s weary, wakeful brain told him pitilessly what Nesbit really
meant.
“Maybe,” said Nesbit heavily, “ye could locate Mistuh Grahame. That’d
be right nice.”
Colby’s face had been ghastly before. It became corpselike now. He moved
stiffly to a chair and sat down. His muscles twitched uncontrollably as
his knees gave way.
Nesbit moved embarrassedly, unlovely and ill at ease. He moved his hands
awkwardly.
“Mighty nice place ye got heah, Mistuh Colby. It’s just to my taste.
I--uh--I got a copy o’ that picture, too. It’s mighty pretty, ain’t it?”
Colby’s sleepless, smarting eyeballs turned to follow Nesbit’s gaze.
They stared at the benevolent St. Bernard dog and the coy, impossible
child in the pink starched dress.
Colby’s voice was dull and expressionless when he spoke.
“You don’t have to play with me, Nesbit. How much do you know?”
Nesbit was suddenly still.
“How much do you know?” repeated Colby apathetically. “I didn’t think
you knew the money was behind that picture, but I’ve known for a long
time you knew the rest. How did you find out?”
Nesbit mumbled inarticulately, staring at Colby.
“You don’t have to take me out hunting tomorrow,” continued Colby in a
flat, dull voice. “I’ll show you where I buried Grahame after I shot
him. You can count the money I got from him. It’s all there.”
It may be that Nesbit started, or perhaps he did not; but he looked
steadily at Colby now, and embarrassment had dropped from him.
Colby managed a mirthless grin. He was sick at heart. He didn’t know how
much evidence Nesbit had, but it was enough; and he was tired--so
hopelessly tired!
His voice was flat and lifeless. The small insistent noises of the world
outside intruded into his speech at first; but his tone rose when he
spoke of the letter. He had already told everything else, even where and
how he had hidden Grahame’s body.
“That damned letter told me you knew everything,” he said in a dreary
pride. “You thought it would break me down, or maybe make me go to look
at Grahame’s body; but it didn’t. If you hadn’t guessed where the money
was I’d have bluffed you at that.”
His muscles relaxed suddenly. Without any warning whatever, Colby, who
had just put his head in a noose, found it possible to sleep for the
first time in nearly two weeks. He slept heavily, slumped in his chair,
twitching a little from his fretted nerves.
Nesbit stared at him and whistled softly. It was the sort of whistle
with which a man expresses blank amazement. Also, perhaps, it was
Nesbit’s way of showing that he was disturbed. It is upsetting to go to
a man’s room for the sole purpose of inviting him to hunt with you, and
have him confess a cold-blooded murder.
“All mixed up,” muttered Nesbit. “All fussed up over a killin’!”
Colby had been hopelessly wrong from the beginning. Nesbit’s
acquaintance with Grahame had been limited to half an hour’s desultory
talk in a smoking car, a year or more ago. The envelope that Colby had
taken for a trap actually contained no more than the words:
Pete said you left this address in case of a telegram.
Limpy’s hanging around and says he wants to see you.
When are you coming back? Jim.
It was evidently a letter from a gentleman in Grahame’s own line of
business, but the matter to which it referred would never receive
Grahame’s personal attention. Nesbit, of course, had never seen it
before.
The detective’s reference to the picture of the benevolent dog and the
pink starched dress had been merely an expression of his whole-hearted
admiration for that particular work of art. Colby had been entirely,
utterly wrong all through. Even the money for which he had killed
Grahame--
Nesbit checked the bills with a list of scribbled numbers in his
notebook. He nodded. Thousand-dollar bills are much used in wholesale
bootleg circles. That is the only place, in fact, in which stolen
thousand-dollar notes are accepted with the minimum of discount. Colby’s
tale was proven in its entirety by the numbers on the bills, because all
banks and most police departments have their lists of stolen currency.
“What d’ye know about that?” asked Nesbit heavily. “What d’ye know
about that? Everything in the world breakin’ his way, an’ he blows the
works because he lost his nerve!”
Nesbit was wrong--Colby had not lost his nerve; he had been trapped.
Nesbit’s reputation was the trap that caught him.
As you see, this story is instructive.
[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the August 1929 issue
of “Munsey’s Magazine”.]
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