The Dead Don't Talk

Lanky, slicker-clad body hunched over the wheel of his slowly moving old roadster, Detective Lee Benton watched the rain crawling down his windshield and the lights of Morris Weir’s big coupe reflecting in his rear-view mirror. He kept the roadster moving just fast enough to hold his block-and-a-half lead on Weir’s heavier car.

Unknown to Weir, he had been shadowing the tall, cold-eyed East City restaurant owner practically every minute of his off-duty time for two weeks, ever since the Dean bonds were stolen. Weir, he believed, could know the answer to the Dean bond theft, for which Dick Benton, Lee’s younger brother, faced trial and almost certain conviction in court next week.

Dick, a Dean & Co. clerk, was carrying seventy thousand dollars in negotiable securities to another office a few blocks away. His story was that two men had suddenly started fighting, with himself caught between them, about a block from the Dean office. That they were planning to steal the Dean bonds didn’t enter Dick’s mind. He thought it was just a fight, and thought only of getting out of the way.

Both men had knocked him about a bit, apparently in trying to get at each other. The fight lasted but a few minutes, and a crowd gathered to watch it. Then Morris Weir appeared and tried to part the struggling men. In the following confusion, the two men had disappeared in the crowd. The East City police arrived about that time, and Dick Benton discovered that the Dean bonds were missing.