Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 51, No. 2, June 28, 1930

“Hang it, Clint, it’s your coldblooded efficiency, your ever-present air of supercilious superiority that gets you into trouble!”

Clint smiled affably.

“Really?” he drawled.

“Yes, really! You remember that talk you made at the club the other night, about the fallacies of circumstantial evidence? You claimed that circumstances could lie just as well as human witnesses.”

Clint Kale reached for a cigarette.

“Ah!” he said. Then, after an interval during which he lit the tobacco and exhaled smokily: “So you’re wondering if she’s really guilty?”

The Governor started, flushed.

“I haven’t said so.”

“You were about to.”

The executive pulled a black cigar from a desk humidor, bit the end off with a snap of his decisive jaw, regarded his visitor over the flare of a match.

“Suppose we eliminate the mind reading.”

“You asked me to, you know.”

“Yes. You’re right. Hang it, you’re always right. That’s the irritating thing about you, Clint.”

He paused for a moment, and Clint bowed.

“All right. This is confidential,” snapped the harassed executive. “Jane Thurmond, fifty-two, convicted of first degree murder, sentenced to death, and the papers are urging me to sit tight and let the sentence be carried out.”

Clint nodded.

“Circumstantial evidence,” he said.

“Yes, and no. Partially circumstantial evidence. Partially direct testimony. But here’s the rub. If the woman had any sex appeal the newspapers would be singing another tune. If she’d had any looks the jury would never have convicted her. You can’t imagine an adventuress of twenty-five or six with pretty ankles and a baby stare, having been convicted of anything on that sort of evidence.

“It was because this woman was a coarse-skinned product of half a century of work that the jury rushed in and made short work of it. They weren’t out two hours!”

Clint nodded.

The Governor reached in a drawer, slammed out two bound volumes of typewritten transcript.

“There’s the record in the case.”

Clint stared at it for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders.

“If you doubt her guilt, why don’t you commute the sentence?”

The Governor puffed reflectively on his cigar.

“Hang it, Clint, I don’t know how I feel. I don’t doubt her guilt, and yet — well, I’d dismissed the matter from my mind until the other night when you broke loose with that psychological patter about circumstantial evidence. You made me think, and now I don’t know just how I do feel about the case.”

Clint shook his head after the manner of a teacher chiding a disobedient child.

“I must learn to keep my mouth shut,” he said. “It’s hard to realize one is talking to the highest executive in the State when one is at a card game—”

“Oh, forget it, Clint. Be serious. Cut the comedy. I have half an idea you deliberately started all that talk about criminal justice in order to raise a doubt in my mind!”

Clint raised one eyebrow.

“Really?” he drawled.

“Yes, really. Anyhow, that’s neither here nor there. But here’s what I’m up against. Unless I sign a pardon or a commutation of sentence that woman is going to die within two weeks. She’s a mother, two grown children. She has one grandchild.”

Clint nodded, that amused nod of superiority which the executive found so irritating.

The Governor waved his cigar toward the typewritten transcript.

“This case came up from a backwater of the State, a regular cow-county. The people in that county all know each other. The district attorney could have called every one on the jury by his first name. Jane Thurmond’s son engaged a city lawyer to go down and defend her.

“He was a good lawyer in the city. But he went up against a local combine. The district attorney had been in partnership with the trial judge. The people all figured it was a chance to show everybody how good their district attorney was. He licked the ‘slick city feller.’ That jury really didn’t vote on the woman’s guilt. They voted that a home town lawyer was just as good as the slick city lawyers.”

Clint Kale yawned, patted his lips in a deprecatory gesture.

“The evidence?” he asked.

The Governor flushed.

“All right, if I’m wearying you, I’ll be brief. The evidence is this. The woman had a place. It was mortgaged. She was desperately in need of funds. Old Sam Pixley was the town miser. He was murdered. Whoever committed that murder knew where he kept his money. It was in a strong box under his bed, in a little cubby-hole cunningly built into the floor.

“The woman had acted as Pixley’s housekeeper. She went to his house once every week and straightened up. The rest of the time Pixley did his own cooking and cleaning.

“He was found dead in his bed. He had been hit over the head with a club, several times.

“Then the murderer had moved the bed, opened the trap door in the floor, pried the lid off the box, and taken what money there was. Just how much there was no one knows. There were some bonds, a few diamonds set in old-fashioned jewelry and some money. The bonds were Hanover Irrigation District bonds, perhaps some others.