The Just And The Unjust Read Online Free

was long past midnight, and he could be sure nobody saw him. His next move was to walk back to the state highway and boldly try to thumb a ride. By a chance that could be only one in a hundred the first car he signalled, or at any rate, the first car that stopped, turned out to be the state police motor patrol. The two officers in the car asked Basso what he wanted.
    Though armed police could never have been a welcome sight to Basso, he was probably able to tell himself that he was still all right. He did not happen to know that there was a state law against thumbing rides. It was rarely or never enforced because it was impractical to enforce it, but it existed, and the officers certainly didn't expect anyone to ask them to help violate it. Probably they did not realize that the dark and the glare of headlights had kept Basso from seeing that the car was the patrol car. They thought he must have stopped them because there had been a breakdown or accident and he needed help. They asked him where his car was.
    The car, which had been on the teletype as stolen, was the last thing Basso wanted to show them; and, anyway, his story was that he was hitchhiking. If he had been a different sort of person, the police might have warned him that he was breaking the law, and driven on, or even given him a lift to the nearest town. On Basso they probably saw those indescribable little signs which mark, if not a criminal type, a man who has been in trouble with the law. Abner could imagine their expressions hardening as they listened to Basso trying to explain how he came to be hitchhiking there at that time of night, until one of them jerked his head and said, 'Get in, Joe! Down to the clubhouse!' They had a charge they could hold him on until the next day. The next day the stolen car was found, so they sent in Basso's fingerprints and continued to hold him.
    Meanwhile Bailey, who had undoubtedly directed the kidnapping and managed the killing of Frederick Zollicoffer, ran into bad luck, too. Bailey went to New York and several days after his arrival he heard a knock on the door of the Bronx apartment in which he was hiding out. When he asked who was there, the answer was, 'Police'. If Bailey had waited a moment, he would have found out that the patrolman had come to tell the people in the next apartment that a dog, by its licence number belonging to them, had been found running loose and taken to the police station. He had knocked on the wrong door.
    Bailey did not wait. He jumped to the conclusion, perhaps not without justification, since Howell and Basso and possibly Roy Leming were the only people in the world who knew where he was, that one of them had betrayed him. He tiptoed through the apartment, got out a back window on to a fire escape, and, presumably, slipped, for he fell three stories to the paving of the areaway. He was taken, fatally injured, to a hospital. What had happened was plain to the police. They did not know who Bailey was, or why he wanted to get away; but they thought it worth while to try and find out. Two detectives waited by his bed in case he recovered consciousness. When Bailey did recover consciousness, he recognized his attendants for what they were and told them, befuddled by pain and drugs, and also by his idea that one of his friends had, as he said, split on him, that he knew why they were after him.
    It then became merely a matter of keeping Bailey alive, and at least semiconscious, and making him think that they already knew all about it. What the detectives took down was rambling, incoherent, and as evidence dubious; but they got places and names. Before Bailey died that night, it was all on the wires; Roy Leming had been arrested; Basso had been located, still in custody on the stolen car charge; and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had been on the trail of Frederick Zollicoffer and his narcotics business for months, either by an informal arrangement with the local police or by getting