Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 51, No. 2, June 28, 1930

“Yeah. Them two road house babies, Bouchet and Collman, are kind of interesting. They’re tough lads. And did you notice they ain’t neither one got an alibi?”

“Sure. But that’s in their favor,” Oakes commented.

“In their favor! How do you get that way?”

“Listen, inspector. Bouchet and Collman maybe ain’t had the benefit of a good education, like you, for instance. But they’re pretty wise birds, at that. And if either one of them was going to stage a killing, that’s the first thing he’d arrange — a good alibi!”

Mallory looked disappointed.

“Well, anyway, I got a couple of pair of bracelets—”

“You won’t need ’em, inspector,” Oakes assured him,

Mallory, puzzled, turned to look at him.

“Why, say, you don’t mean that one of them two girls perforated Lanyon—”

“First,” Oakes interrupted, “did you find that truck?”

“Sure. I’ll give you credit for that, Oakes. That was a hot one. We found the truck.”

“And there was blood on the rear end?”

“Right you are. But how—”

“Just a matter of working on the most likely angles, inspector. You will remember that Jim Bouchet, proprietor of the Broken Lantern, was walking around outside his place of business at the time of the murder. But, so far as I could see, he was not a likely suspect. He would have gone to more trouble to cover his tracks.

“Yet, if some one else had shot Lanyon right where his body was found, Bouchet was almost sure to have seen or heard something. Well, he saw nothing and heard nothing. Therefore, the body must have been dropped there. And it must have been dropped from a moving vehicle, else there would have been blood leading up to the spot.

“All right. How? I knew the answer when Tom, the dishwasher, told me about the truck.”

“You ain’t accusing the dishwasher, are you?” Mallory waxed sarcastic. “If not, who are we after?”

“I found the answer to that one just outside the kitchen door of the Blue Plume,” said Oakes.

“What was that?”

“The second message. The message that the waiter delivered to Lanyon.”

“And who does that take us to?”

“We’ll see when we get there,” Oakes countered.

“Well, now, about this message—”

“Here we are at the Blue Plume,” Oakes put in. “Let’s hop to it.”

Inside the Blue Plume, business was slack; it was too early in the evening for the crowd. Collman, the proprietor, was sitting near his cashier, close to the door. He looked at Oakes with disagreeable surprise.

Oakes, however, paid no attention to Collman; he approached the cashier, a middle-aged woman with watchful eyes.

“Say, write ‘meet me at the kitchen door’ on a piece of paper for me,” Oakes instructed her bluntly.

The woman, startled, looked at Collman. And Collman looked at Mallory.

“That’s the law with him,” Collman told his cashier. “Better do as he says.”

She hesitated, then scrawled on a scrap of paper. Oakes took it, scrutinized it.

“Now, you, Collman.”

“Me!” said Collman. “Don’t kid me. Why, I can’t hardly write at all.”

“Thought not,” Oakes said, and turned to the cashier again.

“Say, lady, do your waiters write out their checks? Do they put down what a customer orders on the checks?”

“Sure,” said the woman. “There’s a stack of ’em on that spindle. And each waiter initials his own checks, too.”

Oakes ran through the stack rapidly, and presently lifted one. It was initialed in the corner, “B. H.”

“Let’s go see Billy Hayden,” said Oakes to Mallory.

The waiter was standing near the kitchen door at the back of the dining room. Oakes and Mallory crossed toward him. Oakes drew him aside, into a corner. He spoke to him, not unkindly.

“It’s all over, Hayden.”

The waiter looked at him steadily, his pale face set rigid.

“What is it, sir?”

“No good to bluff,” said Oakes. “You tricked Sydney Lanyon into going around to the kitchen door, by way of the road along the side of the building. There you shot him, loaded the body on to the back of a truck, rode with it out to the highway, and dumped it in front of the Broken Lantern. You returned the same way.”

Billy Hayden was silent.

“It was the message — that second message — that gave you away, Hayden.”

Oakes brought the crumpled piece of paper from his vest pocket, and unfolded it. Mallory leaned over his shoulder and read:

Meet me at the kitchen door of the Blue Plume, outside. I’ll be waiting for you. Leave by the front door, and don’t tell any one.

Myrtle.

“Your handwriting, ain’t it, Hayden?” Oakes insisted.

The waiter was still silent.

“You figured on taking this slip of paper away from him when you shot him,” Oakes went on. “But there was a slip up. Myrtle gave Lanyon the first message before she left, and it was that message that you took out of Lanyon’s pocket. This one — it was all crumpled up — must have been clasped in his hand, and he dropped it on the ground just as you were shooting him.”

Still Hayden said nothing.

“Snap out of it,” Mallory barked. “You had better come across.”

But the waiter paid no attention at all to Mallory.