A. Fair - Gold Comes in Bricks

She coloured. “No, no, no! Don’t be a fool.”

“I can’t imagine anything else that would be worth thirty thousand bucks to a young woman who’s as independent as you are.”

“You’ll understand when I tell you.”

“Well, go ahead and tell me.”

“The man’s name,” she said, “was—”

She broke off.

“What’s his name got to do with it?” I asked.

She took a deep breath, and then blurted, “Hampton G. Lasster.”

“That’s a funny name to get romantic about,” I said. “You seem to think it should mean something. What is he, a—” All of a sudden an idea hit me with the force of a blow. I stopped mid-sentence and stared at her. I saw by her eyes that I was right. “Good Lord,” I said, “he’s the man who murdered his wife.”

She nodded.

“Wasn’t there a trial?”

“Not yet. Just a preliminary hearing. He was bound over.”

I grabbed her shoulders, spun her around so I could look down in her eyes. “You didn’t have an affair with this man?”

She shook her head.

“Did he see you after you got back?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t ever write to him?”

“No.”

“What happened to his letters?”

“Those are what I was buying back,” she said.

“How did Ringold get them?”

“Some smart detectives working out of the district attorney’s office figured that what they needed to make a perfect case against Lasster was a motivation — one which would prejudice a jury. They checked back on Lasster just as much as they could. He couldn’t account for his time covering a period of eight weeks during the summer, while his wife was away. The detectives couldn’t find where he’d been.”

“Then, in searching a woodshed, they came on an old trunk which had a steamer label on it. They traced that back and found out about the trip to the South Seas, then got a passenger list, and interviewed passengers. Of course, it was a cinch after that. They found out that Lasster had been definitely interested in me while he was on the cruise.”

“Still,” I said, “if you were reasonably discreet, that didn’t give them anything they could work on — not if he kept his mouth shut.”

“But don’t you understand? It gave them just the lead they wanted. They waited for the right opportunity, managed to break into the house, go through my room in my absence, and— Well, they found the letters. You see what that means. I can swear on a stack of Bibles a mile high that I haven’t written Lasster or seen him since I found out he was married. No one would believe me.”

“How did it happen you bought the letters in three instalments?”

She said, “There were three detectives. After they got the evidence, they did a little thinking. They were drawing a low salary from the county. If they turned the letters over to the district attorney, they wouldn’t even get a rise in pay. I was supposed to be a wealthy woman... Of course, they didn’t appear in it themselves. They got Ringold to act as intermediary. I don’t know how much Ringold was making out of it, but it was arranged that I’d buy the letters in three installments.”

I pushed my hands down in my pockets, stuck my legs straight out in front of me, crossed my ankles, and stared at my toes, trying to see the picture, not only as she saw it but to get angles that she didn’t know anything about.

Now that she’d started talking, she didn’t want to stop. She said, “You can see what it would mean to a woman like me. The district attorney is crazy to get a conviction in that case. In the first place, they don’t know whether it was an accident and she fell and struck her head, or whether Lasster hit her with something. Then, even if the district attorney can prove that Lasster hit her, Lasster’s lawyer could bring up that Shanghai trip and might be able to make a showing of emotional insanity or whatever it is a lawyer pulls when he’s trying to prejudice a jury by making them think that a woman needed killing anyway.

“Well, the district attorney could put a stop to all that right at the start if he could introduce a lot of stuff about me, make it appear that Lasster was infatuated with me, and wanted to get rid of his wife so that he could marry me. I was wealthy and — well, not exactly ugly. He could put me up in front of the jury in a way that would absolutely crucify me, and if he had those letters, he could rip Lasster to pieces the minute he got on the witness stand and tried to deny it, or he could draw the worst sort of conclusions if Lasster didn’t try to deny it.”

I kept thinking, and didn’t say anything.

She said, “When the detectives first got the letters, they thought Hampton’s lawyer might buy them off, but Hampton hasn’t much money. I think it was the lawyer who suggested that they should work through Ringold and get the money out of me.”

“Who’s the lawyer?” I asked.

“C. Layton Crumweather,” she said. “He’s the lawyer, incidentally, who does the legal work for Bob’s corporation, and I’ve been terribly afraid that he’d say something, but I guess those lawyers can be trusted to keep their mouths shut.”

“Are you certain Crumweather knows about the letters?” I asked.

“Ringold said he did, and I suppose, of course, that Lasster told him. I guess when a man gets arrested for murder, he tells his lawyer everything, no matter whom it may affect.”

I said, “Yes, I guess he does.”

She said, “Of course, Crumweather wants to keep those letters out of the district attorney’s hands. Naturally, he wants to get an acquittal in that murder case. The letters would clinch the case against his client... From all I can hear of Crumweather. I think he’s very smart.”

I got up and started pacing the floor. Suddenly I turned and said, “You didn’t open that envelope when he gave it to you last night.”

She stared at me with eyes that began to get wider and rounder. “Then you were in that room, Donald?”

“Never mind that. Why didn’t you open the envelope?”

“Because I’d seen Ringold put the letters in the envelope and seal it. That’s just what he’d done with the other letters. He’d show them to me and then—”

“Did you open that envelope after you got home?” I asked.

“No. I didn’t. There were so many startling developments and—”

“Did you burn it?”

“Not yet. I was getting ready to, and then you—”

“How do you know this whole thing isn’t a trap the D.A. set for you?” I asked.

She stared at me. “How could it be?”

“He wants to use those letters to prove motive for the murder. It won’t do so much good to show letters that Lasster wrote you unless he can show that you answered them, but if he can show that you paid thirty thousand dollars to get those letters back, that would be better than anything else.”

“But, Donald, can’t you see? He won’t have the letters. He—”

“Where did you put that envelope?”

“In a safe place.”

“Get it.”

“It’s in a safe place, Donald. It’s too dangerous to—”

“Get it.”

She looked at me for a moment, then said, “Perhaps you know best,” and went upstairs. About five minutes later she came back with a sealed envelope. “I know these are the letters all right. I saw Ringold put them in. Then he sealed the envelope. That was just the way he’d handed me the other letters — showed them to me, then sealed them in an envelope—” I didn’t wait for her to finish. I reached across, took the envelope out of her hand, and tore it open. There were half a dozen envelopes on the inside. I shook those envelopes out into my hand, opened each one in turn. They were filled with neatly folded sheets of blank paper bearing the imprint of the hotel in which Ringold had been murdered.