“I didn’t tell Edna. She didn’t have a lot of use for him, as far as I could see, but you can’t tell how women will take things. Anyhow, she’ll stick, now that it’s done. She’s on the up and up all the time. And if she should talk, she can’t do a lot of damage. She only knows her own part of the lay.
“All this long-winded story is so you’ll know just exactly what you’re up against. Maybe you think you can dig up the proof of these things I have told you. You can this far. You can prove that Edna wasn’t the doc’s wife. You can prove that I’ve been blackmailing him. But you can’t prove that the doc’s wife didn’t believe that Edna was his real wife! It’s her word against Edna’s and mine.
“We’ll swear that we had convinced her of it, which will give her a motive. You can’t prove that the phony news article I told you about ever existed. It’ll sound like a hophead’s dream to a jury.
“You can’t tie last night’s murder on me—I’ve got an alibi that will knock your hat off! I can prove that I left here with a friend of mine who was drunk, and that I took him to his hotel and put him to bed, with the help of a night clerk and a bellboy. And what have you got against that? The word of two private detectives. Who’ll believe you?
“You can convict me of conspiracy to defraud, or something—maybe. But, regardless of that, you can’t free Mrs. Estep without my help.
“Turn me loose and I’ll give you the letter the doc wrote me. It’s the goods, right enough! In his own handwriting, written across the face of the fake newspaper story—which ought to fit the torn place in the paper that the police are supposed to be holding—and he wrote that he was going to kill himself, in words almost that plain.”
That would turn the trick—there was no doubt of it. And I believed Ledwich’s story. The more I thought it over the better I liked it. It fit into the facts everywhere. But I wasn’t enthusiastic about giving this big crook his liberty.