“Take us some place where we can talk without anybody butting in,” McCarty suggested. “It’s for your own sake, man! If you’ll come clean—?”
“I’ve heard that before!” Porter shrugged, with a shadow of a dreary smile. “Come along back to my pantry if you want to, but why don’t you take me right downtown now and be done with it? If you’re out to frame me, cut all the bluff!”
“Did I ever?” demanded McCarty. “Did I ever try to send you or any other guy up unless I had the straight goods on them?”
“I guess not, Mac. I haven’t got anything against you but I’ve had a rough deal; what’s come now is just the luck of the game, I suppose.” He closed the pantry door carefully behind them and motioning to chairs he leaned back against the table, gripping its edge with his thin hands. “What do you want to know? I’ll come clean all right—about myself.”
McCarty noted the almost imperceptible pause and asked quickly:
“How long have you been out this time?”
“A year and a half. My lungs went back on me and I would have been a goner if I hadn’t got pardoned, but what good did it do me? Every time I got a job clerking in a drug store one of the Narcotic Squad came along with my record and I was kicked out. My record—God! And I wasn’t guilty! I never knew my boss was crooked and in with the dope ring, making me the scapegoat!” His voice had roughened again with a sort of savage earnestness. “I was about at the end of my rope but the—the man who’d had me pardoned was keeping his eye on me all the time and saw how hard I’d tried and—and so Mr. Parsons took me on here to give me a breathing spell. Anything else—about me—you want to know?”
“Yes.” McCarty replied on a sudden inspiration. “You were tried with Radley, weren’t you, and convicted of sending that poisoned candy—?”
He paused and Porter shrugged again.
“What’s the comedy for? You got that from headquarters, and nobody’s making a secret of it. It was that old charge, the record of that first case that convicted me again and it helped convict Radley, too, for we were both of us innocent—but what’s the use of telling that to you now?”