“Don’t make me laugh!” I said. “I’m going to put you away and free Mrs. Estep—both.”
“Go ahead and try it! You’re up against it without the letter; and you don’t think a man with brains enough to plan a job like this one would be foolish enough to leave the note where it could be found, do you?”
I wasn’t especially impressed with the difficulty of convicting this Ledwich and freeing the dead man’s widow. His scheme—that cold-blooded zigzag of treachery for everybody he had dealt with, including his latest accomplice, Edna Estep—wasn’t as airtight as he thought it. A week in which to run out a few lines in the East, and—But a week was just what I didn’t have!
Vance Richmond’s words were running through my head: “But another day of imprisonment—two days, or perhaps even two hours—and she won’t need anybody to clear her. Death will have done it!”
If I was going to do Mrs. Estep any good, I had to move quick. Law or no law, her life was in my fat hands. This man before me—his eyes bright and hopeful now and his mouth anxiously pursed—was thief, blackmailer, double-crosser, and at least twice a murderer. I hated to let him walk out. But there was the woman dying in a hospital. …