“Herm, I’m afraid breaking the plate won’t get you out of this,” the head photographer said coolly. “Your guilt is fairly well established in the minds of every person in this room.”
“I didn’t! It ain’t fair to try to make me lose my job.”
“You’ll be lucky if you don’t spend your declining days in jail,” Orris said sharply. “It’s a serious business, tampering with pictures, not to mention striking a man with a blackjack.”
“Herm,” spoke Flash persuasively, “I’m not particularly interested in seeing you turned over to the police. Maybe if you tell us what you did with my fire picture we’ll let you go? Did you destroy it?”
“I don’t know anything about your picture,” the watchman insisted sullenly. “I already proved to the police I wasn’t in this here part of the building at the time it was stole!”
“You were punching the time clock on the sixth floor?” recalled Flash.
“That’s right. I wouldn’t have had time to get down here even if I had been a-mind to do such a thing!”
“Suppose we see what Jeff has to say about it?”
Old Herm cringed back against the wall, and every trace of bravado left him.
“Has Jeff been talkin’ to you?” he faltered.
“You’ve been paying him money to ring the different bells for you,” Flash accused. “It came in very convenient when you wanted to run down to your room for an hour off. And it provided you with a perfect alibi the night my fire picture was stolen.”
“Wait until I lay hands on that boy,” Old Herm muttered. “The no-good sneak! Carryin’ tales behind my back!”
“I’ll call the wagon,” said Fred Orris impatiently.
As the head photographer started for a desk telephone, the old man collapsed into a chair.
“Don’t call the police,” he pleaded. “I’ll tell you everything. Sure, I did it, and I ain’t sorry, either!”
“I’ll tell you,” the old man answered, his eyes glazed with hatred. “Your father was the cause of killin’ my boy.”
“Your son Dick was discharged from the _Post_ for taking funds which did not belong to him,” Flash corrected. “My father brought the matter to the attention of the newspaper owners in order to save an innocent man. But from what I can learn he did not even send your son to jail.”
“He done worse. Dick couldn’t get a job. He fell in with bad company. One night he was ridin’ with some boys who aimed to rob a filling station. There was some shootin’ and Dick was hit in the right lung. They took him to the hospital. I hired the best doctors, but they couldn’t do anything for him. I vowed then I’d get even with the man who was the cause of Dick’s death. I never did have my chance until you came here to work.”