“If worst came to worst, we were prepared to go to court. We were sitting pretty! But I’d have been satisfied with half the estate. It would have come to a few hundred thousand at the least, and that would have been plenty for me—even deducting the twenty thousand I had promised Edna.
“But when the police grabbed the doc’s wife and charged her with his murder, I saw my way into the whole roll. All I had to do was sit tight and wait until they convicted her. Then the court would turn the entire pile over to Edna.
“I had the only evidence that would free the doc’s wife: the note he had written me. But I couldn’t—even if I had wanted to—have turned it in without exposing my hand. When he read that fake piece in the paper, he tore it out, wrote his message to me across the face of it, and sent it to me. So the note is a dead giveaway. However, I didn’t have any intention of publishing it, anyhow.
“Up to this point everything had gone like a dream. All I had to do was wait until it was time to cash in on my brains. And that’s the time that the real Humbert Estep picked out to mess up the works.
“He shaved his mustache off, put on some old clothes, and came snooping around to see that Edna and I didn’t run out on him. As if he could have stopped us! After you put the finger on him for me, I brought him up here.
“I intended salving him along until I could find a place to keep him until all the cards had been played. That’s what I was going to hire you for—to take care of him.
“But we got to talking, and wrangling, and I had to knock him down. He didn’t get up, and I found that he was dead. His neck was broken. There was nothing to do but take him out to the park and leave him.