He took a sheet of paper from his pocket, and placed it on the desk.
“There’s a brief report. . . . I followed Mr. Vance’s suggestion, and took a look at the stock record and the cashier’s collateral blotter, and traced the transfer receipts. I ignored the journal entries against the ledger, and concentrated on the activities of the firm heads. Major Benson, I found, has been consistently hypothecating securities transferred to him as collateral for marginal trading, and has been speculating steadily in mercantile curb stocks. He has lost heavily—how much, I can’t say.”
“And Alvin Benson?” asked Vance.
“He was up to the same tricks. But he played in luck. He made a wad on a Columbus Motors pool a few weeks back; and he has been salting the money away in his safe—or, at least, that’s what the secretary told me.”
“And if Major Benson has possession of the key to that safe,” suggested Vance, “then it’s lucky for him his brother was shot.”
“Lucky?” retorted Stitt. “It’ll save him from State prison.”
When the accountant had gone, Markham sat like a man of stone, his eyes fixed on the wall opposite. Another straw at which he had grasped in his instinctive denial of the Major’s guilt, had been snatched from him.
The telephone rang. Slowly he took up the receiver, and as he listened I saw a look of complete resignation come into his eyes. He leaned back in his chair, like a man exhausted.
“It was Hagedorn,” he said. “That was the right gun.”
Then he drew himself up, and turned to Heath.