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"Does it? Her father, step-mother, physician, and husband have been killed, one after the other, in less than two months; and her maid jailed for murder. All the people closest to her. Doesn't that look like a program? And"-I grinned at him-"are you sure it's not going further? And if it does, aren't you the next closest person to her?"
"Preposterous!" He was very much annoyed now. "We know about her parents' deaths, and about Riese's, and that there was no link between them. We know that those responsible for Riese's murder are now either dead or in prison. There's no getting around that. It's simply preposterous to say there are links between one and another of these crimes when we know there's none."
"We don't know anything of the kind," I insisted. "All we know is that we haven't found the links. Who profits-or could hope to profit-by what has happened?"
"Not a single person so far as I know."
"Suppose she died? Who'd get the estate?"
"I don't know. There are distant relations in England or France, I dare say."
"That doesn't get us very far," I growled. "Anyway, nobody's tried to kill her. It's her friends who get the knock-off."
The lawyer reminded me sourly that we couldn't say that nobody had tried to kill her-or had succeeded-until we found her. I couldn't argue with him about that. Her trail still ended where the eucalyptus tree had stopped the Chrysler.
I gave him a piece of advice before he left:
"Whatever you believe, there's no sense in your taking unnecessary chances: remember that there might be a program, and you might be next on it. It won't hurt to be careful."
He didn't thank me. He suggested, unpleasantly, that doubtless I thought he should hire private detectives to guard him.
Madison Andrews had offered a thousand-dollar reward for information leading to discovery of the girl's whereabouts. Hubert Collinson had offered another thousand, with an additional twenty-five hundred for the arrest and conviction of his son's murderer. Half the population of the county had turned bloodhound. Anywhere you went you found men walking, or even crawling, around, searching fields, paths, hills, and valleys for clues, and in the woods you were likely to find more amateur gumshoes than trees.
Her photographs had been distributed and published widely. The newspapers, from San Diego to Vancouver, gave us a tremendous play, whooping it up in all the colored ink they had. All the San Francisco and Los Angeles Continental operatives who could be pulled off other jobs were checking Quesada's exits, hunting, questioning, finding nothing. Radio broadcasters helped. The police everywhere, all the agency's branches, were stirred up.
And by Monday all this hubbub had brought us exactly nothing.
Monday afternoon I went back to San Francisco and told all my troubles to the Old Man. He listened politely, as if to some moderately interesting story that didn't concern him personally, smiled his meaningless smile, and, instead of any assistance, gave me his pleasantly expressed opinion that I'd eventually succeed in working it all out to a satisfactory conclusion.
Then he told me that Fitzstephan had phoned, trying to get in touch with me. "It may be important. He would have gone down to Quesada to find you if I hadn't told him I expected you."
I called Fitzstephan's number.
"Come up," he said. "I've got something. I don't know whether it's a fresh puzzle, or the key to a puzzle; but it's something."
I rode up Nob Hill on a cable car and was in his apartment within fifteen minutes.
"All right, spring it," I said as we sat down in his paper-, magazine-, and book-littered living room.
"Any trace of Gabrielle yet?" he asked.
"No. But spring the puzzle. Don't be literary with me, building up to climaxes and the like. I'm too crude for that-it'd only give me a bellyache. Just spread it out for me."
"You'll always be what you are," he said, trying to seem disappointed and disgusted, but not succeeding because he was-inwardly-too excited over something. "Somebody-a man-called me up early Saturday morning-half-past one-on the phone. He asked: 'Is this Fitzstephan?' I said: 'Yes;' and then the voice said: 'Well, I've killed him.' He said it just like that. I'm sure of those exact words, though they weren't very clear. There was a lot of noise on the line, and the voice seemed distant.
"I didn't know who it was-what he was talking about. I asked: 'Killed who? Who is this?' I couldn't understand any of his answer except the word 'money.' He said something about money, repeating it several times, but I could understand only that one word. There were some people here-the Marquards, Laura Joines with some man she'd brought, Ted and Sue Van Slack-and we had been in the middle of a literary free-for-all. I had a wisecrack on my tongue-something about Cabell being a romanticist in the same sense that the wooden horse was Trojan-and didn't want to be robbed of my opportunity to deliver it by this drunken joker, or whoever he was, on the phone. I couldn't make heads or tails of what he was saying, so I hung up and went back to my guests.
"It never occurred to me that the phone conversation could have had any meaning until yesterday morning, when I read about Collinson's death. I was at the Colemans', up in Ross. I went up there Saturday morning, for the week-end, having finally run Ralph to earth." He grinned. "And I made him glad enough to see me leave this morning." He became serious again. "Even after hearing of Collinson's death, I wasn't convinced that my phone call was of any importance, had any meaning. It was such a silly sort of thing. But of course I meant to tell you about it. But look-this was in my mail when I got home this morning."
He took an envelope from his pocket and tossed it over to me. It was a cheap and shiny white envelope of the kind you can buy anywhere. Its corners were dark and curled, as if it had been carried in a pocket for some time. Fitzstephan's name and address had been printed on it, with a hard pencil, by someone who was a rotten printer, or who wanted to be thought so. It was postmarked San Francisco, nine o'clock Saturday morning. Inside was a soiled and crookedly torn piece of brown wrapping paper, with one sentence-as poorly printed with pencil as the address— on it:
ANY BODY THAT WANTS MRS. CARTER
CAN HAVE SAME BY PAYING $10000-
There was no date, no salutation, no signature.
"She was seen driving away alone as late as seven Saturday morning," I said. "This was mailed here, eighty miles away, in time to be postmarked at nine-taken from the box in the first morning collection, say. That's one to get wrinkles over. But even that's not as funny as its coming to you instead of to Andrews, who's in charge of her affairs, or her father-in-law, who's got the most money."
"It is funny and it isn't," Fitzstephan replied. His lean face was eager. "There may be a point of light there. You know I recommended Quesada to Collinson, having spent a couple of months there last spring finishing _The Wall of Ashdod_, and gave him a card to a real estate dealer named Rolly-the deputy sheriff's father-there, introducing him as Eric Carter. A native of Quesada might not know she was Gabrielle Collinson, nйe Leggett. In that case he wouldn't know how to reach her people except through me, who had sent her and her husband there. So the letter is sent to me, but starts off _Anybody that_, to be passed on to the interested persons."
"A native might have done that," I said slowly; "or a kidnapper who wanted us to think he was a native, didn't want us to think he knew the Collinsons."
"Exactly. And as far as I know none of the natives knew my address here."
"How about Rolly?"
"Not unless Collinson gave it to him. I simply scribbled the introduction on the back of a card."
"Said anything to anybody else about the phone call and this letter?" I asked.
"I mentioned the call to the people who were here Friday night— when I thought it was a joke or a mistake. I haven't shown this to anybody else. In fact," he said, "I was a little doubtful about showing it at all— and still am. Is it going to make trouble for me?"
"Yeah, it will. But you oughtn't mind that. I thought you liked first-hand views of trouble. Better give me the names and addresses of your guests. If they and Coleman account for your whereabouts Friday night and over the week-end, nothing serious will happen to you; though you'll have to go down to Quesada and let the county officials third-degree you."
"Shall we go now?"
"I'm going back tonight. Meet me at the Sunset Hotel there in the morning. That'll give me time to work on the officials-so they won't throw you in the dungeon on sight."
I went back to the agency and put in a Quesada call. I couldn't get hold of Vernon or the sheriff, but Cotton was reachable. I gave him the information I had got from Fitzstephan, promising to produce the novelist for questioning the next morning.
The marshal said the search for the girl was still going on without results. Reports had come in that she had been seen-practically simultaneously-in Los Angeles, Eureka, Carson City, Denver, Portland, Tijuana, Ogden, San Jose, Vancouver, Porterville, and Hawaii. All except the most ridiculous reports were being run out.
The telephone company could tell me that Owen Fitzstephan's Saturday morning phone-call had not been a long distance call, and that nobody in Quesada had called a San Francisco number either Friday night or Saturday morning.
Before I left the agency I visited the Old Man again, asking him if he would try to persuade the district attorney to turn Aaronia Haldorn and Tom Fink loose on bail.
"They're not doing us any good in jail," I explained, "and, loose, they might lead us somewhere if we shadowed them. He oughtn't to mind: he knows he hasn't a chance in the world of hanging murder-raps on them as things now stack up."
The Old Man promised to do his best, and to put an operative behind each of our suspects if they were sprung.
I went over to Madison Andrews' office. When I had told him about Fitzstephan's messages, and had given him our explanation of them, the lawyer nodded his bony white-thatched head and said:
"And whether that's the true explanation or not, the county authorities will now have to give up their absurd theory that Gabrielle killed her husband."
I shook my head sidewise.
"What?" he asked explosively.
"They're going to think the messages were cooked up to clear her," I predicted.
"Is that what you think?" His jaws got lumpy in front of his ears, and his tangled eyebrows came down over his eyes.
"I hope they weren't," I said; "because if it's a trick it's a damned childish one."
"How could it be?" he demanded loudly. "Don't talk nonsense. None of us knew anything then. The body hadn't been found when-"
"Yeah," I agreed; "and that's why, if it turns out to have been a stunt, it'll hang Gabrielle."
"I don't understand you," he said disagreeably. "One minute you're talking about somebody persecuting the girl, and the next minute you're talking as if you thought she was the murderer. Just what do you think?"
"Both can be true," I replied, no less disagreeably. "And what difference does it make what I think? It'll be up to the jury when she's found. The question now is: what are you going to do about the ten-thousand-dollar demand-if it's on the level?"
"What I'm going to do is increase the reward for her recovery, with an additional reward for the arrest of her abductor."
"That's the wrong play," I said. "Enough reward money has been posted. The only way to handle a kidnapping is to come across. I don't like it any more than you do, but it's the only way. Uncertainty, nervousness, fear, disappointment, can turn even a mild kidnapper into a maniac. Buy the girl free, and then do your fighting. Pay what's asked when it's asked."
He tugged at his ragged mustache, his jaw set obstinately, his eyes worried. But the jaw won out.
"I'm damned if I'll knuckle down," he said.
"That's your business." I got up and reached for my hat. "Mine's finding Collinson's murderer, and having her killed is more likely to help me than not."
He didn't say anything.
I went down to Hubert Collinson's office. He wasn't in, but I told Laurence Collinson my story, winding up:
"Will you urge your father to put up the money? And to have it ready to pass over as soon as the kidnapper's instructions come?"
"It won't be necessary to urge him," he said immediately. "Of course we shall pay whatever is required to ensure her safety."
XVI.The Night Hunt
XVII.Below Dull Point
"Preposterous!" He was very much annoyed now. "We know about her parents' deaths, and about Riese's, and that there was no link between them. We know that those responsible for Riese's murder are now either dead or in prison. There's no getting around that. It's simply preposterous to say there are links between one and another of these crimes when we know there's none."
"We don't know anything of the kind," I insisted. "All we know is that we haven't found the links. Who profits-or could hope to profit-by what has happened?"
"Not a single person so far as I know."
"Suppose she died? Who'd get the estate?"
"I don't know. There are distant relations in England or France, I dare say."
"That doesn't get us very far," I growled. "Anyway, nobody's tried to kill her. It's her friends who get the knock-off."
The lawyer reminded me sourly that we couldn't say that nobody had tried to kill her-or had succeeded-until we found her. I couldn't argue with him about that. Her trail still ended where the eucalyptus tree had stopped the Chrysler.
I gave him a piece of advice before he left:
"Whatever you believe, there's no sense in your taking unnecessary chances: remember that there might be a program, and you might be next on it. It won't hurt to be careful."
He didn't thank me. He suggested, unpleasantly, that doubtless I thought he should hire private detectives to guard him.
Madison Andrews had offered a thousand-dollar reward for information leading to discovery of the girl's whereabouts. Hubert Collinson had offered another thousand, with an additional twenty-five hundred for the arrest and conviction of his son's murderer. Half the population of the county had turned bloodhound. Anywhere you went you found men walking, or even crawling, around, searching fields, paths, hills, and valleys for clues, and in the woods you were likely to find more amateur gumshoes than trees.
Her photographs had been distributed and published widely. The newspapers, from San Diego to Vancouver, gave us a tremendous play, whooping it up in all the colored ink they had. All the San Francisco and Los Angeles Continental operatives who could be pulled off other jobs were checking Quesada's exits, hunting, questioning, finding nothing. Radio broadcasters helped. The police everywhere, all the agency's branches, were stirred up.
And by Monday all this hubbub had brought us exactly nothing.
Monday afternoon I went back to San Francisco and told all my troubles to the Old Man. He listened politely, as if to some moderately interesting story that didn't concern him personally, smiled his meaningless smile, and, instead of any assistance, gave me his pleasantly expressed opinion that I'd eventually succeed in working it all out to a satisfactory conclusion.
Then he told me that Fitzstephan had phoned, trying to get in touch with me. "It may be important. He would have gone down to Quesada to find you if I hadn't told him I expected you."
I called Fitzstephan's number.
"Come up," he said. "I've got something. I don't know whether it's a fresh puzzle, or the key to a puzzle; but it's something."
I rode up Nob Hill on a cable car and was in his apartment within fifteen minutes.
"All right, spring it," I said as we sat down in his paper-, magazine-, and book-littered living room.
"Any trace of Gabrielle yet?" he asked.
"No. But spring the puzzle. Don't be literary with me, building up to climaxes and the like. I'm too crude for that-it'd only give me a bellyache. Just spread it out for me."
"You'll always be what you are," he said, trying to seem disappointed and disgusted, but not succeeding because he was-inwardly-too excited over something. "Somebody-a man-called me up early Saturday morning-half-past one-on the phone. He asked: 'Is this Fitzstephan?' I said: 'Yes;' and then the voice said: 'Well, I've killed him.' He said it just like that. I'm sure of those exact words, though they weren't very clear. There was a lot of noise on the line, and the voice seemed distant.
"I didn't know who it was-what he was talking about. I asked: 'Killed who? Who is this?' I couldn't understand any of his answer except the word 'money.' He said something about money, repeating it several times, but I could understand only that one word. There were some people here-the Marquards, Laura Joines with some man she'd brought, Ted and Sue Van Slack-and we had been in the middle of a literary free-for-all. I had a wisecrack on my tongue-something about Cabell being a romanticist in the same sense that the wooden horse was Trojan-and didn't want to be robbed of my opportunity to deliver it by this drunken joker, or whoever he was, on the phone. I couldn't make heads or tails of what he was saying, so I hung up and went back to my guests.
"It never occurred to me that the phone conversation could have had any meaning until yesterday morning, when I read about Collinson's death. I was at the Colemans', up in Ross. I went up there Saturday morning, for the week-end, having finally run Ralph to earth." He grinned. "And I made him glad enough to see me leave this morning." He became serious again. "Even after hearing of Collinson's death, I wasn't convinced that my phone call was of any importance, had any meaning. It was such a silly sort of thing. But of course I meant to tell you about it. But look-this was in my mail when I got home this morning."
He took an envelope from his pocket and tossed it over to me. It was a cheap and shiny white envelope of the kind you can buy anywhere. Its corners were dark and curled, as if it had been carried in a pocket for some time. Fitzstephan's name and address had been printed on it, with a hard pencil, by someone who was a rotten printer, or who wanted to be thought so. It was postmarked San Francisco, nine o'clock Saturday morning. Inside was a soiled and crookedly torn piece of brown wrapping paper, with one sentence-as poorly printed with pencil as the address— on it:
ANY BODY THAT WANTS MRS. CARTER
CAN HAVE SAME BY PAYING $10000-
There was no date, no salutation, no signature.
"She was seen driving away alone as late as seven Saturday morning," I said. "This was mailed here, eighty miles away, in time to be postmarked at nine-taken from the box in the first morning collection, say. That's one to get wrinkles over. But even that's not as funny as its coming to you instead of to Andrews, who's in charge of her affairs, or her father-in-law, who's got the most money."
"It is funny and it isn't," Fitzstephan replied. His lean face was eager. "There may be a point of light there. You know I recommended Quesada to Collinson, having spent a couple of months there last spring finishing _The Wall of Ashdod_, and gave him a card to a real estate dealer named Rolly-the deputy sheriff's father-there, introducing him as Eric Carter. A native of Quesada might not know she was Gabrielle Collinson, nйe Leggett. In that case he wouldn't know how to reach her people except through me, who had sent her and her husband there. So the letter is sent to me, but starts off _Anybody that_, to be passed on to the interested persons."
"A native might have done that," I said slowly; "or a kidnapper who wanted us to think he was a native, didn't want us to think he knew the Collinsons."
"Exactly. And as far as I know none of the natives knew my address here."
"How about Rolly?"
"Not unless Collinson gave it to him. I simply scribbled the introduction on the back of a card."
"Said anything to anybody else about the phone call and this letter?" I asked.
"I mentioned the call to the people who were here Friday night— when I thought it was a joke or a mistake. I haven't shown this to anybody else. In fact," he said, "I was a little doubtful about showing it at all— and still am. Is it going to make trouble for me?"
"Yeah, it will. But you oughtn't mind that. I thought you liked first-hand views of trouble. Better give me the names and addresses of your guests. If they and Coleman account for your whereabouts Friday night and over the week-end, nothing serious will happen to you; though you'll have to go down to Quesada and let the county officials third-degree you."
"Shall we go now?"
"I'm going back tonight. Meet me at the Sunset Hotel there in the morning. That'll give me time to work on the officials-so they won't throw you in the dungeon on sight."
I went back to the agency and put in a Quesada call. I couldn't get hold of Vernon or the sheriff, but Cotton was reachable. I gave him the information I had got from Fitzstephan, promising to produce the novelist for questioning the next morning.
The marshal said the search for the girl was still going on without results. Reports had come in that she had been seen-practically simultaneously-in Los Angeles, Eureka, Carson City, Denver, Portland, Tijuana, Ogden, San Jose, Vancouver, Porterville, and Hawaii. All except the most ridiculous reports were being run out.
The telephone company could tell me that Owen Fitzstephan's Saturday morning phone-call had not been a long distance call, and that nobody in Quesada had called a San Francisco number either Friday night or Saturday morning.
Before I left the agency I visited the Old Man again, asking him if he would try to persuade the district attorney to turn Aaronia Haldorn and Tom Fink loose on bail.
"They're not doing us any good in jail," I explained, "and, loose, they might lead us somewhere if we shadowed them. He oughtn't to mind: he knows he hasn't a chance in the world of hanging murder-raps on them as things now stack up."
The Old Man promised to do his best, and to put an operative behind each of our suspects if they were sprung.
I went over to Madison Andrews' office. When I had told him about Fitzstephan's messages, and had given him our explanation of them, the lawyer nodded his bony white-thatched head and said:
"And whether that's the true explanation or not, the county authorities will now have to give up their absurd theory that Gabrielle killed her husband."
I shook my head sidewise.
"What?" he asked explosively.
"They're going to think the messages were cooked up to clear her," I predicted.
"Is that what you think?" His jaws got lumpy in front of his ears, and his tangled eyebrows came down over his eyes.
"I hope they weren't," I said; "because if it's a trick it's a damned childish one."
"How could it be?" he demanded loudly. "Don't talk nonsense. None of us knew anything then. The body hadn't been found when-"
"Yeah," I agreed; "and that's why, if it turns out to have been a stunt, it'll hang Gabrielle."
"I don't understand you," he said disagreeably. "One minute you're talking about somebody persecuting the girl, and the next minute you're talking as if you thought she was the murderer. Just what do you think?"
"Both can be true," I replied, no less disagreeably. "And what difference does it make what I think? It'll be up to the jury when she's found. The question now is: what are you going to do about the ten-thousand-dollar demand-if it's on the level?"
"What I'm going to do is increase the reward for her recovery, with an additional reward for the arrest of her abductor."
"That's the wrong play," I said. "Enough reward money has been posted. The only way to handle a kidnapping is to come across. I don't like it any more than you do, but it's the only way. Uncertainty, nervousness, fear, disappointment, can turn even a mild kidnapper into a maniac. Buy the girl free, and then do your fighting. Pay what's asked when it's asked."
He tugged at his ragged mustache, his jaw set obstinately, his eyes worried. But the jaw won out.
"I'm damned if I'll knuckle down," he said.
"That's your business." I got up and reached for my hat. "Mine's finding Collinson's murderer, and having her killed is more likely to help me than not."
He didn't say anything.
I went down to Hubert Collinson's office. He wasn't in, but I told Laurence Collinson my story, winding up:
"Will you urge your father to put up the money? And to have it ready to pass over as soon as the kidnapper's instructions come?"
"It won't be necessary to urge him," he said immediately. "Of course we shall pay whatever is required to ensure her safety."
XVI.The Night Hunt
I caught the 5:25 train south. It put me in Poston, a dusty town twice Quesada's size, at 7:30; and a rattle-trap stage, in which I was the only passenger, got me to my destination half an hour later. Rain was beginning to fall as I was leaving the stage across the street from the hotel.
Jack Santos, a San Francisco reporter, came out of the telegraph office and said: "Hello. Anything new?"
"Maybe, but I'll have to give it to Vernon first."
"He's in his room in the hotel, or was ten minutes ago. You mean the ransom letter that somebody got?"
"Yeah. He's already given it out?"
"Cotton started to, but Vernon headed him off, told us to let it alone."
"Why?"
"No reason at all except that it was Cotton giving it to us." Santos pulled the corners of his thin lips down. "It's been turned into a contest between Vernon, Feeney, and Cotton to see which can get his name and picture printed most."
"They been doing anything except that?"
"How can they?" he asked disgustedly. "They spend ten hours a day trying to make the front page, ten more trying to keep the others from making it, and they've got to sleep some time."
In the hotel I gave "nothing new" to some more reporters, registered again, left my bag in my room, and went down the hall to 204. Vernon opened the door when I had knocked. He was alone, and apparently had been reading the newspapers that made a pink, green, and white pile on the bed. The room was blue-gray with cigar smoke.
This district attorney was a thirty-year-old dark-eyed man who carried his chin up and out so that it was more prominent than nature had intended, bared all his teeth when he talked, and was very conscious of being a go-getter. He shook my hand briskly and said:
"I'm glad you're back. Come in. Sit down. Are there any new developments?"
"Cotton pass you the dope I gave him?"
"Yes." Vernon posed in front of me, hands in pockets, feet far apart. "What importance do you attach to it?"
"I advised Andrews to get the money ready. He won't. The Collinsons will."
"They will," he said, as if confirming a guess I had made. "And?" He held his lips back so that his teeth remained exposed.
"Here's the letter." I gave it to him. "Fitzstephan will be down in the morning."
He nodded emphatically, carried the letter closer to the light, and examined it and its envelope minutely. When he had finished he tossed it contemptuously to the table.
"Obviously a fraud," he said. "Now what, exactly, is this Fitzstephan's-is that the name?-story?"
I told him, word for word. When that was done, he clicked his teeth together, turned to the telephone, and told someone to tell Feeney that he-Mr. Vernon, district attorney-wished to see him immediately. Ten minutes later the sheriff came in wiping rain off his big brown mustache.
Vernon jerked a thumb at me and ordered: "Tell him."
I repeated what Fitzstephan had told me. The sheriff listened with an attentiveness that turned his florid face purple and had him panting. As the last word left my mouth, the district attorney snapped his fingers and said:
"Very well. He claims there were people in his apartment when the phone call came. Make a note of their names. He claims to have been in Ross over the week-end, with the-who were they? Ralph Coleman? Very well. Sheriff, see that those things are checked up. We'll learn how much truth there is to it."
I gave the sheriff the names and addresses Fitzstephan had given me. Feeney wrote them on the back of a laundry list and puffed out to get the county's crime-detecting machinery going on them.
Vernon hadn't anything to tell me. I left him to his newspapers and went downstairs. The effeminate night clerk beckoned me over to the desk and said:
"Mr. Santos asked me to tell you that services are being held in his room tonight."
I thanked the clerk and went up to Santos' room. He, three other newshounds, and a photographer were there. The game was stud. I was sixteen dollars ahead at twelve-thirty, when I was called to the phone to listen to the district attorney's aggressive voice:
"Will you come to my room immediately?"
"Yeah." I gathered up my hat and coat, telling Santos: "Cash me in. Important call. I always have one when I get a little ahead of the game."
"Vernon?" he asked as he counted my chips.
"Yeah."
"It can't be much," he sneered, "or he'd 've sent for Red too," nodding at the photographer, "so tomorrow's readers could see him holding it in his hand."
Cotton, Feeney, and Rolly were with the district attorney. Cotton-a medium-sized man with a round dull face dimpled in the chin-was dressed in black rubber boots, slicker, and hat that were wet and muddy. He stood in the middle of the room, his round eyes looking quite proud of their owner. Feeney, straddling a chair, was playing with his mustache; and his florid face was sulky. Rolly, standing beside him, rolling a cigarette, looked vaguely amiable as usual.
Vernon closed the door behind me and said irritably:
"Cotton thinks he's discovered something. He thinks-"
Cotton came forward, chest first, interrupting:
"I don't think nothing. I know durned well-"
Vernon snapped his fingers between the marshal and me, saying, just as snappishly:
"Never mind that. We'll go out there and see."
I stopped at my room for raincoat, gun, and flashlight. We went downstairs and climbed into a muddy car. Cotton drove. Vernon sat beside him. The rest of us sat in back. Rain beat on top and curtains, trickling in through cracks.
"A hell of a night to be chasing pipe dreams," the sheriff grumbled, trying to dodge a leak.
"Dick'd do a sight better minding his own business," Rolly agreed. "What's he got to do with what don't happen in Quesada?"
"If he'd take more care of what does happen there, he wouldn't have to worry about what's down the shore," Feeney said, and he and his deputy sniggered together.
Whatever point there was to this conversation was over my head. I asked:
"What's he up to?"
"Nothing," the sheriff told me. "You'll see that it's nothing, and, by God! I'm going to give him a piece of my mind. I don't know what's the matter with Vernon, paying any attention to him at all."
That didn't mean anything to me. I peeped out between curtains. Rain and darkness shut out the scenery, but I had an idea that we were beaded for some point on the East road. It was a rotten ride-wet, noisy, and bumpy. It ended in as dark, wet, and muddy a spot as any we had gone through.
Cotton switched off the lights and got out, the rest of us following, slipping and slopping in wet clay up to our ankles.
"This is too damned much," the sheriff complained.
Vernon started to say something, but the marshal was walking away, down the road. We plodded after him, keeping together more by the sound of our feet squashing in the mud than by sight. It was black.
Presently we left the road, struggled over a high wire fence, and went on with less mud under our feet, but slippery grass. We climbed a hill. Wind blew rain down it into our faces. The sheriff was panting. I was sweating. We reached the top of the hill and went down its other side, with the rustle of sea-water on rocks ahead of us. Boulders began crowding grass out of our path as the descent got steeper. Once Cotton slipped to his knees, tripping Vernon, who saved himself by grabbing me. The sheriff's panting sounded like groaning now. We turned to the left, going along in single file, the surf close beside us. We turned to the left again, climbed a slope, and halted under a low shed without walls-a wooden roof propped on a dozen posts. Ahead of us a larger building made a black blot against the almost black sky.
Cotton whispered: "Wait till I see if his car's here."
He went away. The sheriff blew out his breath and grunted: "Damn such a expedition!" Rolly sighed.
The marshal returned jubilant.
"It ain't there, so he ain't here," he said. "Come on, it'll get us out of the wet anyways."
We followed him up a muddy path between bushes to the black house, up on its back porch. We stood there while he got a window open, climbed through, and unlocked the door. Our flashlights, used for the first time now, showed us a small neat kitchen. We went in, muddying the floor.
Cotton was the only member of the party who showed any enthusiasm. His face, from hat-brim to dimpled chin, was the face of a master of ceremonies who is about to spring what he is sure will be a delightful surprise. Vernon regarded him skeptically, Feeney disgustedly, Rolly indifferently, and I-who didn't know what we were there for-no doubt curiously.
It developed that we were there to search the house. We did it, or at least Cotton did it while the rest of us pretended to help him. It was a small house. There was only one room on the ground-floor besides the kitchen, and only one-an unfinished bedroom-above. A grocer's bill and a tax-receipt in a table-drawer told me whose house it was-Harvey Whidden's. He was the big-boned deliberate man who had seen the stranger in the Chrysler with Gabrielle Collinson.
We finished the ground-floor with a blank score, and went upstairs. There, after ten minutes of poking around, we found something. Rolly pulled it out from between bed-slats and mattress. It was a small flat bundle wrapped in a white linen towel.
Cotton dropped the mattress, which he had been holding up for the deputy to look under, and joined us as we crowded around Rolly's package. Vernon took it from the deputy sheriff and unrolled it on the bed. Inside the towel were a package of hair-pins, a lace-edged white handkerchief, a silver hair-brush and comb engraved G. D. L., and a pair of black kid gloves, small and feminine.
I was more surprised than anyone else could have been.
"G. D. L.," I said, to be saying something, "could be Gabrielle Something Leggett-Mrs. Collinson's name before she was married."
Cotton said triumphantly: "You're durned right it could."
A heavy voice said from the doorway:
"Have you got a search-warrant? What the hell are you doing here if you haven't? It's burglary, and you know it."
Harvey Whidden was there. His big body, in a yellow slicker, filled the doorway. His heavy-featured face was dark and angry.
Vernon began: "Whidden, I-"
The marshal screamed, "It's him!" and pulled a gun from under his coat.
I pushed his arm as he fired at the man in the doorway. The bullet hit the wall.
Whidden's face was now more astonished than angry. He jumped back through the doorway and ran downstairs. Cotton, upset by my push, straightened himself up, cursed me, and ran out after Whidden. Vernon, Feeney, and Rolly stood staring after them.
I said: "This is good clean sport, but it makes no sense to me. What's it all about?"
Nobody told me. I said: "This comb and brush were on Mrs. Collinson's table when we searched the house, Rolly."
The deputy sheriff nodded uncertainly, still staring at the door. No noise came through it now. I asked:
"Would there be any special reason for Cotton framing Whidden?"
The sheriff said: "They ain't good friends." (I had noticed that.) "What do you think, Vern?"
The district attorney took his gaze from the door, rolled the things in their towel again, and stuffed the bundle in his pocket. "Come on," he snapped, and strode downstairs.
The front door was open. We saw nothing, heard nothing, of Cotton and Whidden. A Ford-Whidden's-stood at the front gate soaking up rain. We got into it. Vernon took the wheel, and drove to the house in the cove. We hammered at its door until it was opened by an old man in gray underwear, put there as caretaker by the sheriff.
The old man told us that Cotton had been there at eight o'clock that night, just, he said, to look around again. He, the caretaker, didn't know no reason why the marshal had to be watched, so he hadn't bothered him, letting him do what he wanted, and, so far as he knew, the marshal hadn't taken any of the Collinsons' property, though of course he might of.
Vernon and Feeney gave the old man hell, and we went back to Quesada.
Rolly was with me on the back seat. I asked him:
"Who is this Whidden? Why should Cotton pick on him?"
"Well, for one thing. Harve's got kind of a bad name, from being mixed up in the rum-running that used to go on here, and from being in trouble now and then."
"Yeah? And for another thing?"
The deputy sheriff frowned, hesitating, hunting for words; and before he had found them we were stopping in front of a vine-covered cottage on a dark street corner. The district attorney led the way to its front porch and rang the bell.
After a little while a woman's voice sounded overhead:
"Who's there?"
We had to retreat to the steps to see her-Mrs. Cotton at a second-story window.
"Dick got home yet?" Vernon asked.
"No, Mr. Vernon, he hasn't. I was getting worried. Wait a minute; I'll come down."
"Don't bother," he said. "We won't wait. I'll see him in the morning.'
"No. Wait," she said urgently and vanished from the window.
A moment later she opened the front door. Her blue eyes were dark and excited. She had on a rose bathrobe.
"You needn't have bothered," the district attorney said. "There was nothing special. We got separated from him a little while ago, and just wanted to know if he'd got back yet. He's all right."
"Was-?" Her hands worked folds of her bathrobe over her thin breasts, "Was he after-after Harvey-Harvey Whidden?"
Vernon didn't look at her when he said, "Yes;" and he said it without showing his teeth. Feeney and Rolly looked as uncomfortable as Vernon.
Mrs. Cotton's face turned pink. Her lower lip trembled, blurring her words.
"Don't believe him, Mr. Vernon. Don't believe a word he tells you. Harve didn't have anything to do with those Collinsons, with neither one of them. Don't let Dick tell you he did. He didn't."
Vernon looked at his feet and didn't say anything. Rolly and Feeney were looking intently out through the open door-we were standing just inside it-at the rain. Nobody seemed to have any intention of speaking.
I asked, "No?" putting more doubt in my voice than I actually felt.
"No, he didn't," she cried, turning her face to me. "He couldn't. He couldn't have had anything to do with it." The pink went out of her face, leaving it white and desperate. "He-he was here that night-all night-from before seven until daylight."
"Where was your husband?"
"Up in the city, at his mother's."
"What's her address?"
She gave it to me, a Noe Street number.
"Did anybody-?"
"Aw, come on," the sheriff protested, still staring at the rain. "Ain't that enough?"
Mrs. Cotton turned from me to the district attorney again, taking hold of one of his arms.
"Don't tell it on me, please, Mr. Vernon," she begged. "I don't know what I'd do if it came out. But I had to tell you. I couldn't let him put it on Harve. Please, you won't tell anybody else?"
The district attorney swore that under no circumstances would he, or any of us, repeat what she had told us to anybody; and the sheriff and his deputy agreed with vigorous red-faced nods.
But when we were in the Ford again, away from her, they forgot their embarrassment and became manhunters again. Within ten minutes they had decided that Cotton, instead of going to San Francisco to his mother's Friday night, had remained in Quesada, had killed Collinson, had gone to the city to phone Fitzstephan and mail the letter, and then had returned to Quesada in time to kidnap Mrs. Collinson; planning from the first to plant the evidence against Whidden, with whom he had long been on bad terms, having always suspected what everybody else knew-that Whidden was Mrs. Cotton's lover.
The sheriff-he whose chivalry had kept me from more thoroughly questioning the woman a few minutes ago-now laughed his belly up and down.
"That's rich," he gurgled. "Him out framing Harve, and Harve getting himself a alibi in _his_ bed. Dick's face ought to be a picture for Puck when we spring that on him. Let's find him tonight."
"Better wait," I advised. "It won't hurt to check up his San Francisco trip before we put it to him. All we've got on him so far is that he tried to frame Whidden. If he's the murderer and kidnapper he seems to have gone to a lot of unnecessary foolishness."
Feeney scowled at me and defended their theory:
"Maybe he was more interested in framing Harve than anything else."
"Maybe," I said; "but it won't hurt to give him a little more rope and see what he does with it."
Feeney was against that. He wanted to grab the marshal pronto; but Vernon reluctantly backed me up. We dropped Rolly at his house and returned to the hotel.
In my room, I put in a phone-call for the agency in San Francisco. While I was waiting for the connection knuckles tapped my door. I opened it and let in Jack Santos, pajamaed, bathrobed, and slippered.
"Have a nice ride?" he asked, yawning.
"Swell."
"Anything break?"
"Not for publication, but-under the hat-the new angle is that our marshal is trying to hang the job on his wife's boy friend-with homemade evidence. The other big officials think Cotton turned the trick himself."
"That ought to get them all on the front page." Santos sat on the foot of my bed and lit a cigarette. "Ever happen to hear that Feeney was Cotton's rival for the telegraphing hand of the present Mrs. Cotton, until she picked the marshal-the triumph of dimples over mustachios?"
"No," I admitted. "What of it?"
"How do I know? I just happened to pick it up. A fellow in the garage told me."
"How long ago?"
"That they were rival suitors? Less than a couple of years."
I got my San Francisco call, and told Field-the agency night-man-to have somebody check up the marshal's Noe Street visit. Santos yawned and went out while I was talking. I went to bed when I had finished.
Jack Santos, a San Francisco reporter, came out of the telegraph office and said: "Hello. Anything new?"
"Maybe, but I'll have to give it to Vernon first."
"He's in his room in the hotel, or was ten minutes ago. You mean the ransom letter that somebody got?"
"Yeah. He's already given it out?"
"Cotton started to, but Vernon headed him off, told us to let it alone."
"Why?"
"No reason at all except that it was Cotton giving it to us." Santos pulled the corners of his thin lips down. "It's been turned into a contest between Vernon, Feeney, and Cotton to see which can get his name and picture printed most."
"They been doing anything except that?"
"How can they?" he asked disgustedly. "They spend ten hours a day trying to make the front page, ten more trying to keep the others from making it, and they've got to sleep some time."
In the hotel I gave "nothing new" to some more reporters, registered again, left my bag in my room, and went down the hall to 204. Vernon opened the door when I had knocked. He was alone, and apparently had been reading the newspapers that made a pink, green, and white pile on the bed. The room was blue-gray with cigar smoke.
This district attorney was a thirty-year-old dark-eyed man who carried his chin up and out so that it was more prominent than nature had intended, bared all his teeth when he talked, and was very conscious of being a go-getter. He shook my hand briskly and said:
"I'm glad you're back. Come in. Sit down. Are there any new developments?"
"Cotton pass you the dope I gave him?"
"Yes." Vernon posed in front of me, hands in pockets, feet far apart. "What importance do you attach to it?"
"I advised Andrews to get the money ready. He won't. The Collinsons will."
"They will," he said, as if confirming a guess I had made. "And?" He held his lips back so that his teeth remained exposed.
"Here's the letter." I gave it to him. "Fitzstephan will be down in the morning."
He nodded emphatically, carried the letter closer to the light, and examined it and its envelope minutely. When he had finished he tossed it contemptuously to the table.
"Obviously a fraud," he said. "Now what, exactly, is this Fitzstephan's-is that the name?-story?"
I told him, word for word. When that was done, he clicked his teeth together, turned to the telephone, and told someone to tell Feeney that he-Mr. Vernon, district attorney-wished to see him immediately. Ten minutes later the sheriff came in wiping rain off his big brown mustache.
Vernon jerked a thumb at me and ordered: "Tell him."
I repeated what Fitzstephan had told me. The sheriff listened with an attentiveness that turned his florid face purple and had him panting. As the last word left my mouth, the district attorney snapped his fingers and said:
"Very well. He claims there were people in his apartment when the phone call came. Make a note of their names. He claims to have been in Ross over the week-end, with the-who were they? Ralph Coleman? Very well. Sheriff, see that those things are checked up. We'll learn how much truth there is to it."
I gave the sheriff the names and addresses Fitzstephan had given me. Feeney wrote them on the back of a laundry list and puffed out to get the county's crime-detecting machinery going on them.
Vernon hadn't anything to tell me. I left him to his newspapers and went downstairs. The effeminate night clerk beckoned me over to the desk and said:
"Mr. Santos asked me to tell you that services are being held in his room tonight."
I thanked the clerk and went up to Santos' room. He, three other newshounds, and a photographer were there. The game was stud. I was sixteen dollars ahead at twelve-thirty, when I was called to the phone to listen to the district attorney's aggressive voice:
"Will you come to my room immediately?"
"Yeah." I gathered up my hat and coat, telling Santos: "Cash me in. Important call. I always have one when I get a little ahead of the game."
"Vernon?" he asked as he counted my chips.
"Yeah."
"It can't be much," he sneered, "or he'd 've sent for Red too," nodding at the photographer, "so tomorrow's readers could see him holding it in his hand."
Cotton, Feeney, and Rolly were with the district attorney. Cotton-a medium-sized man with a round dull face dimpled in the chin-was dressed in black rubber boots, slicker, and hat that were wet and muddy. He stood in the middle of the room, his round eyes looking quite proud of their owner. Feeney, straddling a chair, was playing with his mustache; and his florid face was sulky. Rolly, standing beside him, rolling a cigarette, looked vaguely amiable as usual.
Vernon closed the door behind me and said irritably:
"Cotton thinks he's discovered something. He thinks-"
Cotton came forward, chest first, interrupting:
"I don't think nothing. I know durned well-"
Vernon snapped his fingers between the marshal and me, saying, just as snappishly:
"Never mind that. We'll go out there and see."
I stopped at my room for raincoat, gun, and flashlight. We went downstairs and climbed into a muddy car. Cotton drove. Vernon sat beside him. The rest of us sat in back. Rain beat on top and curtains, trickling in through cracks.
"A hell of a night to be chasing pipe dreams," the sheriff grumbled, trying to dodge a leak.
"Dick'd do a sight better minding his own business," Rolly agreed. "What's he got to do with what don't happen in Quesada?"
"If he'd take more care of what does happen there, he wouldn't have to worry about what's down the shore," Feeney said, and he and his deputy sniggered together.
Whatever point there was to this conversation was over my head. I asked:
"What's he up to?"
"Nothing," the sheriff told me. "You'll see that it's nothing, and, by God! I'm going to give him a piece of my mind. I don't know what's the matter with Vernon, paying any attention to him at all."
That didn't mean anything to me. I peeped out between curtains. Rain and darkness shut out the scenery, but I had an idea that we were beaded for some point on the East road. It was a rotten ride-wet, noisy, and bumpy. It ended in as dark, wet, and muddy a spot as any we had gone through.
Cotton switched off the lights and got out, the rest of us following, slipping and slopping in wet clay up to our ankles.
"This is too damned much," the sheriff complained.
Vernon started to say something, but the marshal was walking away, down the road. We plodded after him, keeping together more by the sound of our feet squashing in the mud than by sight. It was black.
Presently we left the road, struggled over a high wire fence, and went on with less mud under our feet, but slippery grass. We climbed a hill. Wind blew rain down it into our faces. The sheriff was panting. I was sweating. We reached the top of the hill and went down its other side, with the rustle of sea-water on rocks ahead of us. Boulders began crowding grass out of our path as the descent got steeper. Once Cotton slipped to his knees, tripping Vernon, who saved himself by grabbing me. The sheriff's panting sounded like groaning now. We turned to the left, going along in single file, the surf close beside us. We turned to the left again, climbed a slope, and halted under a low shed without walls-a wooden roof propped on a dozen posts. Ahead of us a larger building made a black blot against the almost black sky.
Cotton whispered: "Wait till I see if his car's here."
He went away. The sheriff blew out his breath and grunted: "Damn such a expedition!" Rolly sighed.
The marshal returned jubilant.
"It ain't there, so he ain't here," he said. "Come on, it'll get us out of the wet anyways."
We followed him up a muddy path between bushes to the black house, up on its back porch. We stood there while he got a window open, climbed through, and unlocked the door. Our flashlights, used for the first time now, showed us a small neat kitchen. We went in, muddying the floor.
Cotton was the only member of the party who showed any enthusiasm. His face, from hat-brim to dimpled chin, was the face of a master of ceremonies who is about to spring what he is sure will be a delightful surprise. Vernon regarded him skeptically, Feeney disgustedly, Rolly indifferently, and I-who didn't know what we were there for-no doubt curiously.
It developed that we were there to search the house. We did it, or at least Cotton did it while the rest of us pretended to help him. It was a small house. There was only one room on the ground-floor besides the kitchen, and only one-an unfinished bedroom-above. A grocer's bill and a tax-receipt in a table-drawer told me whose house it was-Harvey Whidden's. He was the big-boned deliberate man who had seen the stranger in the Chrysler with Gabrielle Collinson.
We finished the ground-floor with a blank score, and went upstairs. There, after ten minutes of poking around, we found something. Rolly pulled it out from between bed-slats and mattress. It was a small flat bundle wrapped in a white linen towel.
Cotton dropped the mattress, which he had been holding up for the deputy to look under, and joined us as we crowded around Rolly's package. Vernon took it from the deputy sheriff and unrolled it on the bed. Inside the towel were a package of hair-pins, a lace-edged white handkerchief, a silver hair-brush and comb engraved G. D. L., and a pair of black kid gloves, small and feminine.
I was more surprised than anyone else could have been.
"G. D. L.," I said, to be saying something, "could be Gabrielle Something Leggett-Mrs. Collinson's name before she was married."
Cotton said triumphantly: "You're durned right it could."
A heavy voice said from the doorway:
"Have you got a search-warrant? What the hell are you doing here if you haven't? It's burglary, and you know it."
Harvey Whidden was there. His big body, in a yellow slicker, filled the doorway. His heavy-featured face was dark and angry.
Vernon began: "Whidden, I-"
The marshal screamed, "It's him!" and pulled a gun from under his coat.
I pushed his arm as he fired at the man in the doorway. The bullet hit the wall.
Whidden's face was now more astonished than angry. He jumped back through the doorway and ran downstairs. Cotton, upset by my push, straightened himself up, cursed me, and ran out after Whidden. Vernon, Feeney, and Rolly stood staring after them.
I said: "This is good clean sport, but it makes no sense to me. What's it all about?"
Nobody told me. I said: "This comb and brush were on Mrs. Collinson's table when we searched the house, Rolly."
The deputy sheriff nodded uncertainly, still staring at the door. No noise came through it now. I asked:
"Would there be any special reason for Cotton framing Whidden?"
The sheriff said: "They ain't good friends." (I had noticed that.) "What do you think, Vern?"
The district attorney took his gaze from the door, rolled the things in their towel again, and stuffed the bundle in his pocket. "Come on," he snapped, and strode downstairs.
The front door was open. We saw nothing, heard nothing, of Cotton and Whidden. A Ford-Whidden's-stood at the front gate soaking up rain. We got into it. Vernon took the wheel, and drove to the house in the cove. We hammered at its door until it was opened by an old man in gray underwear, put there as caretaker by the sheriff.
The old man told us that Cotton had been there at eight o'clock that night, just, he said, to look around again. He, the caretaker, didn't know no reason why the marshal had to be watched, so he hadn't bothered him, letting him do what he wanted, and, so far as he knew, the marshal hadn't taken any of the Collinsons' property, though of course he might of.
Vernon and Feeney gave the old man hell, and we went back to Quesada.
Rolly was with me on the back seat. I asked him:
"Who is this Whidden? Why should Cotton pick on him?"
"Well, for one thing. Harve's got kind of a bad name, from being mixed up in the rum-running that used to go on here, and from being in trouble now and then."
"Yeah? And for another thing?"
The deputy sheriff frowned, hesitating, hunting for words; and before he had found them we were stopping in front of a vine-covered cottage on a dark street corner. The district attorney led the way to its front porch and rang the bell.
After a little while a woman's voice sounded overhead:
"Who's there?"
We had to retreat to the steps to see her-Mrs. Cotton at a second-story window.
"Dick got home yet?" Vernon asked.
"No, Mr. Vernon, he hasn't. I was getting worried. Wait a minute; I'll come down."
"Don't bother," he said. "We won't wait. I'll see him in the morning.'
"No. Wait," she said urgently and vanished from the window.
A moment later she opened the front door. Her blue eyes were dark and excited. She had on a rose bathrobe.
"You needn't have bothered," the district attorney said. "There was nothing special. We got separated from him a little while ago, and just wanted to know if he'd got back yet. He's all right."
"Was-?" Her hands worked folds of her bathrobe over her thin breasts, "Was he after-after Harvey-Harvey Whidden?"
Vernon didn't look at her when he said, "Yes;" and he said it without showing his teeth. Feeney and Rolly looked as uncomfortable as Vernon.
Mrs. Cotton's face turned pink. Her lower lip trembled, blurring her words.
"Don't believe him, Mr. Vernon. Don't believe a word he tells you. Harve didn't have anything to do with those Collinsons, with neither one of them. Don't let Dick tell you he did. He didn't."
Vernon looked at his feet and didn't say anything. Rolly and Feeney were looking intently out through the open door-we were standing just inside it-at the rain. Nobody seemed to have any intention of speaking.
I asked, "No?" putting more doubt in my voice than I actually felt.
"No, he didn't," she cried, turning her face to me. "He couldn't. He couldn't have had anything to do with it." The pink went out of her face, leaving it white and desperate. "He-he was here that night-all night-from before seven until daylight."
"Where was your husband?"
"Up in the city, at his mother's."
"What's her address?"
She gave it to me, a Noe Street number.
"Did anybody-?"
"Aw, come on," the sheriff protested, still staring at the rain. "Ain't that enough?"
Mrs. Cotton turned from me to the district attorney again, taking hold of one of his arms.
"Don't tell it on me, please, Mr. Vernon," she begged. "I don't know what I'd do if it came out. But I had to tell you. I couldn't let him put it on Harve. Please, you won't tell anybody else?"
The district attorney swore that under no circumstances would he, or any of us, repeat what she had told us to anybody; and the sheriff and his deputy agreed with vigorous red-faced nods.
But when we were in the Ford again, away from her, they forgot their embarrassment and became manhunters again. Within ten minutes they had decided that Cotton, instead of going to San Francisco to his mother's Friday night, had remained in Quesada, had killed Collinson, had gone to the city to phone Fitzstephan and mail the letter, and then had returned to Quesada in time to kidnap Mrs. Collinson; planning from the first to plant the evidence against Whidden, with whom he had long been on bad terms, having always suspected what everybody else knew-that Whidden was Mrs. Cotton's lover.
The sheriff-he whose chivalry had kept me from more thoroughly questioning the woman a few minutes ago-now laughed his belly up and down.
"That's rich," he gurgled. "Him out framing Harve, and Harve getting himself a alibi in _his_ bed. Dick's face ought to be a picture for Puck when we spring that on him. Let's find him tonight."
"Better wait," I advised. "It won't hurt to check up his San Francisco trip before we put it to him. All we've got on him so far is that he tried to frame Whidden. If he's the murderer and kidnapper he seems to have gone to a lot of unnecessary foolishness."
Feeney scowled at me and defended their theory:
"Maybe he was more interested in framing Harve than anything else."
"Maybe," I said; "but it won't hurt to give him a little more rope and see what he does with it."
Feeney was against that. He wanted to grab the marshal pronto; but Vernon reluctantly backed me up. We dropped Rolly at his house and returned to the hotel.
In my room, I put in a phone-call for the agency in San Francisco. While I was waiting for the connection knuckles tapped my door. I opened it and let in Jack Santos, pajamaed, bathrobed, and slippered.
"Have a nice ride?" he asked, yawning.
"Swell."
"Anything break?"
"Not for publication, but-under the hat-the new angle is that our marshal is trying to hang the job on his wife's boy friend-with homemade evidence. The other big officials think Cotton turned the trick himself."
"That ought to get them all on the front page." Santos sat on the foot of my bed and lit a cigarette. "Ever happen to hear that Feeney was Cotton's rival for the telegraphing hand of the present Mrs. Cotton, until she picked the marshal-the triumph of dimples over mustachios?"
"No," I admitted. "What of it?"
"How do I know? I just happened to pick it up. A fellow in the garage told me."
"How long ago?"
"That they were rival suitors? Less than a couple of years."
I got my San Francisco call, and told Field-the agency night-man-to have somebody check up the marshal's Noe Street visit. Santos yawned and went out while I was talking. I went to bed when I had finished.
XVII.Below Dull Point
The telephone bell brought me out of sleep a little before ten the following morning. Mickey Linehan, talking from San Francisco, told me Cotton had arrived at his mother's house at between seven and seven-thirty Saturday morning. The marshal had slept for five or six hours-telling his mother he had been up all night laying for a burglar-and had left for home at six that evening.
Cotton was coming in from the street when I reached the lobby. He was red-eyed and weary, but still determined.
"Catch Whidden?" I asked.
"No, durn him, but I will. Say, I'm glad you jiggled my arm, even if it did let him get away. I-well, sometimes a fellow's enthusiasm gets the best of his judgment."
"Yeah. We stopped at your house on our way back, to see how you'd made out."
"I ain't been home yet," he said. "I put in the whole durned night hunting for that fellow. Where's Vern and Feeney?"
"Pounding their ears. Better get some sleep yourself," I suggested. "I'll ring you up if anything happens."
He set off for home. I went into the cafй for breakfast. I was half through when Vernon joined me there. He had telegrams from the San Francisco police department and the Marin County sheriff's office, confirming Fitzstephan's alibis.
"I got my report on Cotton," I said. "He reached his mother's at seven or a little after Saturday morning, and left at six that evening."
"Seven or a little after?" Vernon didn't like that. If the marshal had been in San Francisco at that time he could hardly have been abducting the girl. "Are you sure?"
"No, but that's the best we've been able to do so far. There's Fitzstephan now." Looking through the cafй door, I had seen the novelist's lanky back at the hotel desk. "Excuse me a moment."
I went over and got Fitzstephan, bringing him back to the table with me, and introducing him to Vernon. The district attorney stood up to shake hands with him, but was too busy with thoughts of Cotton to bother now with anything else. Fitzstephan said he had had breakfast before leaving the city, and ordered a cup of coffee. Just then I was called to the phone.
Cotton's voice, but excited almost beyond recognition:
"For God's sake get Vernon and Feeney and come up here."
"What's the matter?" I asked.
"Hurry! Something awful's happened. Hurry!" he cried, and hung up.
I went back to the table and told Vernon about it. He jumped up, upsetting Fitzstephan's coffee. Fitzstephan got up too, but hesitated, looking at me.
"Come on," I invited him. "Maybe this'll be one of the things you like."
Fitzstephan's car was in front of the hotel. The marshal's house was only seven blocks away. Its front door was open. Vernon knocked on the frame as we went in, but we didn't wait for an answer.
Cotton met us in the hall. His eyes were round and bloodshot in a face as hard-white as marble. He tried to say something, but couldn't get the words past his tight-set teeth. He gestured towards the door behind him with a fist that was clenched on a piece of brown paper.
Through the doorway we saw Mrs. Cotton. She was lying on the blue-carpeted floor. She had on a pale blue dress. Her throat was covered with dark bruises. Her lips and tongue-the tongue, swollen, hung out-were darker than the bruises. Her eyes were wide open, bulging, upturned, and dead. Her hand, when I touched it, was still warm.
Cotton, following us into the room, held out the brown paper in his hand. It was an irregularly torn piece of wrapping paper, covered on both sides with writing-nervously, unevenly, hastily scribbled in pencil. A softer pencil had been used than on Fitzstephan's message, and the paper was a darker brown.
I was closest to Cotton. I took the paper, and read it aloud hurriedly, skipping unnecessary words:
"Whidden came last night . . . said husband after him . . . frame him for Collinson trouble . . . I hid him in garret . . . he said only way to save him was to say he was here Friday night . . . said if I didn't they'd hang him . . . when Mr. Vernon came Harve said he'd kill me if I didn't . . . so I said it . . . but he wasn't here that night . . . I didn't know he was guilty then . . . told me afterwards . . . tried to kidnap her Thursday night . . . husband nearly caught him . . . came in office after Collinson sent telegram and saw it . . . followed him and killed him . . . went to San Francisco, drinking whiskey . . . decided to go through with kidnapping anyway . . . phoned man who knew her to try to learn who he could get money from . . . too drunk to talk good . . . wrote letter and came back . . . met her on road . . . took her to old bootleggers' hiding place somewhere below Dull Point . . . goes in boat . . . afraid he'll kill me . . . locked in garret . . . writing while he's down getting food . . . murderer . . . I won't help him . . . Daisy Cotton."
The sheriff and Rolly had arrived while I was reading it. Feeney's face was as white and set as Cotton's.
Vernon bared his teeth at the marshal, snarling:
"You wrote that."
Feeney grabbed it from my hands, looked at it, shook his head, and said hoarsely.
"No, that's her writing, all right."
Cotton was babbling:
"No, before God, I didn't. I planted that stuff on him, I'll admit that, but that was all. I come home and find her like this. I swear to God!"
"Where were you Friday night?" Vernon asked.
"Here, watching the house. I thought-I thought he might— But he wasn't here that night. I watched till daybreak and then went to the city. I didn't-"
The sheriff's bellow drowned the rest of Cotton's words. The sheriff was waving the dead woman's letter. He bellowed:
"Below Dull Point! What are we waiting for?"
He plunged out of the house, the rest of us following. Cotton and Rolly rode to the waterfront in the deputy's car. Vernon, the sheriff, and I rode with Fitzstephan. The sheriff cried throughout the short trip, tears splashing on the automatic pistol he held in his lap.
At the waterfront we changed from the cars to a green and white motor boat run by a pink-cheeked, tow-headed youngster called Tim. Tim said he didn't know anything about any bootleggers' hiding places below Dull Point, but if there was one there he could find it. In his hands the boat produced a lot of speed, but not enough for Feeney and Cotton. They stood together in the bow, guns in their fists, dividing their time between straining forward and yelling back for more speed.
Half an hour from the dock, we rounded a blunt promontory that the others called Dull Point, and Tim cut down our speed, putting the boat in closer to the rocks that jumped up high and sharp at the water's edge. We were now all eyes-eyes that soon ached from staring under the noon sun but kept on staring. Twice we saw clefts in the rock-walled shore, pushed hopefully in to them, saw that they were blind, leading nowhere, opening into no hiding-places.
The third cleft was even more hopeless-looking at first sight, but, now that Dull Point was some distance behind us, we couldn't pass up anything. We slid in to the cleft, got close enough to decide that it was another blind one, gave it up, and told Tim to go on. We were washed another couple of feet nearer before the tow-headed boy could bring the boat around.
Cotton, in the bow, bent forward from the waist and yelled:
"Here it is."
He pointed his gun at one side of the cleft. Tim let the boat drift in another foot or so. Craning our necks, we could see that what we had taken for the shore-line on that side was actually a high, thin, saw-toothed ledge of rock, separated from the cliff at this end by twenty feet of water.
"Put her in," Feeney ordered.
Tim frowned at the water, hesitated, said: "She can't make it."
The boat backed him up by shuddering suddenly under our feet, with an unpleasant rasping noise.
"That be damned!" the sheriff bawled. "Put her in."
Tim took a look at the sheriff's wild face, and put her in.
The boat shuddered under our feet again, more violently, and now there was a tearing sound in with the rasping, but we went through the opening and turned down behind the saw-tooth ledge.
We were in a v-shaped pocket, twenty feet wide where we had come in, say eighty feet long, high-walled, inaccessible by land, accessible by sea only as we had come. The water that floated us-and was coming in rapidly to sink us-ran a third of the way down the pocket. White sand paved the other two thirds. A small boat was resting its nose on the edge of the sand. It was empty. Nobody was in sight. There didn't seem to be anywhere for anybody to hide. There were footprints, large and small, in the sand, empty tin cans, and the remains of a fire.
"Harve's," Rolly said, nodding at the boat.
Our boat grounded beside it. We jumped, splashed, ashore-Cotton ahead, the others spread out behind him.
As suddenly as if he had sprung out of the air, Harvey Whidden appeared in the far end of the v, standing in the sand, a rifle in his hands. Anger and utter astonishment were mixed in his heavy face, and in his voice when he yelled:
"You God-damned double-crossing-" The noise his rifle made blotted out the rest of his words.
Cotton had thrown himself down sideways. The rifle bullet missed him by inches, sang between Fitzstephan and me, nicking his hat-brim, and splattered on the rocks behind. Four of our guns went off together, some more than once.
Whidden went over backwards, his feet flying in the air. He was dead when we got to him-three bullets in his chest, one in his head.
We found Gabrielle Collinson cowering back in the corner of a narrow-mouthed hole in the rock wall-a long triangular cave whose mouth had been hidden from our view by the slant at which it was set. There were blankets in there, spread over a pile of dried seaweed, some canned goods, a lantern, and another rifle.
The girl's small face was flushed and feverish, and her voice was hoarse: she had a cold in her chest. She was too frightened at first to tell us anything coherent, and apparently recognized neither Fitzstephan nor me.
The boat we had come in was out of commission. Whidden's boat couldn't be trusted to carry more than three with safety through the surf. Tim and Rolly set off for Quesada in it, to get us a larger vessel. It was an hour-and-a-half's round trip. While they were gone we worked on the girl, soothing her, assuring her that she was among friends, that there was nothing to be afraid of now. Her eyes gradually became less scary, her breathing easier, and her nails less tightly pressed into her palms. At the end of an hour she was answering our questions.
She said she knew nothing of Whidden's attempt to kidnap her Thursday night, nothing of the telegram Eric had sent me. She sat up all Friday night waiting for him to return from his walk, and at daylight, frantic at his failure to return, had gone to look for him. She found him-as I had. Then she went back to the house and tried to commit suicide-to put an end to the curse by shooting herself.
"I tried twice," she whispered; "but I couldn't. I couldn't. I was too much a coward. I couldn't keep the pistol pointing at myself while I did it. I tried the first time to shoot myself in the temple, and then in the breast; but I hadn't the courage. Each time I jerked it away just before I fired. And after the second time I couldn't even get courage to try again."
She changed her clothes then-evening clothes, now muddy and torn from her search-and drove away from the house. She didn't say where she had intended going. She didn't seem to know. Probably she hadn't had any destination-was simply going away from the place where the curse had settled on her husband.
She hadn't driven far when she had seen a machine coming towards her, driven by the man who had brought her here. He had turned his car across the road in front of her, blocking the road. Trying to avoid hitting his car, she had run into a tree-and hadn't known anything else until she had awakened in the cave. She had been here since then. The man had left her here alone most of the time. She had neither strength nor courage to escape by swimming, and there was no other way out.
The man had told her nothing, had asked her nothing, had addressed no words to her except to say, "Here's some food," or, "Till I bring you some water, you'll have to get along on canned tomatoes when you're thirsty," or other things of that sort. She never remembered having seen him before. She didn't know his name. He was the only man she had seen since her husband's death.
"What did he call you?" I asked. "Mrs. Carter? Or Mrs. Collinson?"
She frowned thoughtfully, then shook her head, saying:
"I don't think he ever called me by name. He never spoke unless he had to, and he wasn't here very much. I was usually alone."
"How long had he been here this time?"
"Since before daylight. The noise of his boat woke me up."
"Sure? This is important. Are you sure he's been here since daylight?"
"Yes."
I was sitting on my heels in front of her. Cotton was standing on my left, beside the sheriff. I looked up at the marshal and said:
"That puts it up to you, Cotton. Your wife was still warm when we saw her-after eleven."
He goggled at me, stammering: "Wh-what's that you say?"
Cotton was coming in from the street when I reached the lobby. He was red-eyed and weary, but still determined.
"Catch Whidden?" I asked.
"No, durn him, but I will. Say, I'm glad you jiggled my arm, even if it did let him get away. I-well, sometimes a fellow's enthusiasm gets the best of his judgment."
"Yeah. We stopped at your house on our way back, to see how you'd made out."
"I ain't been home yet," he said. "I put in the whole durned night hunting for that fellow. Where's Vern and Feeney?"
"Pounding their ears. Better get some sleep yourself," I suggested. "I'll ring you up if anything happens."
He set off for home. I went into the cafй for breakfast. I was half through when Vernon joined me there. He had telegrams from the San Francisco police department and the Marin County sheriff's office, confirming Fitzstephan's alibis.
"I got my report on Cotton," I said. "He reached his mother's at seven or a little after Saturday morning, and left at six that evening."
"Seven or a little after?" Vernon didn't like that. If the marshal had been in San Francisco at that time he could hardly have been abducting the girl. "Are you sure?"
"No, but that's the best we've been able to do so far. There's Fitzstephan now." Looking through the cafй door, I had seen the novelist's lanky back at the hotel desk. "Excuse me a moment."
I went over and got Fitzstephan, bringing him back to the table with me, and introducing him to Vernon. The district attorney stood up to shake hands with him, but was too busy with thoughts of Cotton to bother now with anything else. Fitzstephan said he had had breakfast before leaving the city, and ordered a cup of coffee. Just then I was called to the phone.
Cotton's voice, but excited almost beyond recognition:
"For God's sake get Vernon and Feeney and come up here."
"What's the matter?" I asked.
"Hurry! Something awful's happened. Hurry!" he cried, and hung up.
I went back to the table and told Vernon about it. He jumped up, upsetting Fitzstephan's coffee. Fitzstephan got up too, but hesitated, looking at me.
"Come on," I invited him. "Maybe this'll be one of the things you like."
Fitzstephan's car was in front of the hotel. The marshal's house was only seven blocks away. Its front door was open. Vernon knocked on the frame as we went in, but we didn't wait for an answer.
Cotton met us in the hall. His eyes were round and bloodshot in a face as hard-white as marble. He tried to say something, but couldn't get the words past his tight-set teeth. He gestured towards the door behind him with a fist that was clenched on a piece of brown paper.
Through the doorway we saw Mrs. Cotton. She was lying on the blue-carpeted floor. She had on a pale blue dress. Her throat was covered with dark bruises. Her lips and tongue-the tongue, swollen, hung out-were darker than the bruises. Her eyes were wide open, bulging, upturned, and dead. Her hand, when I touched it, was still warm.
Cotton, following us into the room, held out the brown paper in his hand. It was an irregularly torn piece of wrapping paper, covered on both sides with writing-nervously, unevenly, hastily scribbled in pencil. A softer pencil had been used than on Fitzstephan's message, and the paper was a darker brown.
I was closest to Cotton. I took the paper, and read it aloud hurriedly, skipping unnecessary words:
"Whidden came last night . . . said husband after him . . . frame him for Collinson trouble . . . I hid him in garret . . . he said only way to save him was to say he was here Friday night . . . said if I didn't they'd hang him . . . when Mr. Vernon came Harve said he'd kill me if I didn't . . . so I said it . . . but he wasn't here that night . . . I didn't know he was guilty then . . . told me afterwards . . . tried to kidnap her Thursday night . . . husband nearly caught him . . . came in office after Collinson sent telegram and saw it . . . followed him and killed him . . . went to San Francisco, drinking whiskey . . . decided to go through with kidnapping anyway . . . phoned man who knew her to try to learn who he could get money from . . . too drunk to talk good . . . wrote letter and came back . . . met her on road . . . took her to old bootleggers' hiding place somewhere below Dull Point . . . goes in boat . . . afraid he'll kill me . . . locked in garret . . . writing while he's down getting food . . . murderer . . . I won't help him . . . Daisy Cotton."
The sheriff and Rolly had arrived while I was reading it. Feeney's face was as white and set as Cotton's.
Vernon bared his teeth at the marshal, snarling:
"You wrote that."
Feeney grabbed it from my hands, looked at it, shook his head, and said hoarsely.
"No, that's her writing, all right."
Cotton was babbling:
"No, before God, I didn't. I planted that stuff on him, I'll admit that, but that was all. I come home and find her like this. I swear to God!"
"Where were you Friday night?" Vernon asked.
"Here, watching the house. I thought-I thought he might— But he wasn't here that night. I watched till daybreak and then went to the city. I didn't-"
The sheriff's bellow drowned the rest of Cotton's words. The sheriff was waving the dead woman's letter. He bellowed:
"Below Dull Point! What are we waiting for?"
He plunged out of the house, the rest of us following. Cotton and Rolly rode to the waterfront in the deputy's car. Vernon, the sheriff, and I rode with Fitzstephan. The sheriff cried throughout the short trip, tears splashing on the automatic pistol he held in his lap.
At the waterfront we changed from the cars to a green and white motor boat run by a pink-cheeked, tow-headed youngster called Tim. Tim said he didn't know anything about any bootleggers' hiding places below Dull Point, but if there was one there he could find it. In his hands the boat produced a lot of speed, but not enough for Feeney and Cotton. They stood together in the bow, guns in their fists, dividing their time between straining forward and yelling back for more speed.
Half an hour from the dock, we rounded a blunt promontory that the others called Dull Point, and Tim cut down our speed, putting the boat in closer to the rocks that jumped up high and sharp at the water's edge. We were now all eyes-eyes that soon ached from staring under the noon sun but kept on staring. Twice we saw clefts in the rock-walled shore, pushed hopefully in to them, saw that they were blind, leading nowhere, opening into no hiding-places.
The third cleft was even more hopeless-looking at first sight, but, now that Dull Point was some distance behind us, we couldn't pass up anything. We slid in to the cleft, got close enough to decide that it was another blind one, gave it up, and told Tim to go on. We were washed another couple of feet nearer before the tow-headed boy could bring the boat around.
Cotton, in the bow, bent forward from the waist and yelled:
"Here it is."
He pointed his gun at one side of the cleft. Tim let the boat drift in another foot or so. Craning our necks, we could see that what we had taken for the shore-line on that side was actually a high, thin, saw-toothed ledge of rock, separated from the cliff at this end by twenty feet of water.
"Put her in," Feeney ordered.
Tim frowned at the water, hesitated, said: "She can't make it."
The boat backed him up by shuddering suddenly under our feet, with an unpleasant rasping noise.
"That be damned!" the sheriff bawled. "Put her in."
Tim took a look at the sheriff's wild face, and put her in.
The boat shuddered under our feet again, more violently, and now there was a tearing sound in with the rasping, but we went through the opening and turned down behind the saw-tooth ledge.
We were in a v-shaped pocket, twenty feet wide where we had come in, say eighty feet long, high-walled, inaccessible by land, accessible by sea only as we had come. The water that floated us-and was coming in rapidly to sink us-ran a third of the way down the pocket. White sand paved the other two thirds. A small boat was resting its nose on the edge of the sand. It was empty. Nobody was in sight. There didn't seem to be anywhere for anybody to hide. There were footprints, large and small, in the sand, empty tin cans, and the remains of a fire.
"Harve's," Rolly said, nodding at the boat.
Our boat grounded beside it. We jumped, splashed, ashore-Cotton ahead, the others spread out behind him.
As suddenly as if he had sprung out of the air, Harvey Whidden appeared in the far end of the v, standing in the sand, a rifle in his hands. Anger and utter astonishment were mixed in his heavy face, and in his voice when he yelled:
"You God-damned double-crossing-" The noise his rifle made blotted out the rest of his words.
Cotton had thrown himself down sideways. The rifle bullet missed him by inches, sang between Fitzstephan and me, nicking his hat-brim, and splattered on the rocks behind. Four of our guns went off together, some more than once.
Whidden went over backwards, his feet flying in the air. He was dead when we got to him-three bullets in his chest, one in his head.
We found Gabrielle Collinson cowering back in the corner of a narrow-mouthed hole in the rock wall-a long triangular cave whose mouth had been hidden from our view by the slant at which it was set. There were blankets in there, spread over a pile of dried seaweed, some canned goods, a lantern, and another rifle.
The girl's small face was flushed and feverish, and her voice was hoarse: she had a cold in her chest. She was too frightened at first to tell us anything coherent, and apparently recognized neither Fitzstephan nor me.
The boat we had come in was out of commission. Whidden's boat couldn't be trusted to carry more than three with safety through the surf. Tim and Rolly set off for Quesada in it, to get us a larger vessel. It was an hour-and-a-half's round trip. While they were gone we worked on the girl, soothing her, assuring her that she was among friends, that there was nothing to be afraid of now. Her eyes gradually became less scary, her breathing easier, and her nails less tightly pressed into her palms. At the end of an hour she was answering our questions.
She said she knew nothing of Whidden's attempt to kidnap her Thursday night, nothing of the telegram Eric had sent me. She sat up all Friday night waiting for him to return from his walk, and at daylight, frantic at his failure to return, had gone to look for him. She found him-as I had. Then she went back to the house and tried to commit suicide-to put an end to the curse by shooting herself.
"I tried twice," she whispered; "but I couldn't. I couldn't. I was too much a coward. I couldn't keep the pistol pointing at myself while I did it. I tried the first time to shoot myself in the temple, and then in the breast; but I hadn't the courage. Each time I jerked it away just before I fired. And after the second time I couldn't even get courage to try again."
She changed her clothes then-evening clothes, now muddy and torn from her search-and drove away from the house. She didn't say where she had intended going. She didn't seem to know. Probably she hadn't had any destination-was simply going away from the place where the curse had settled on her husband.
She hadn't driven far when she had seen a machine coming towards her, driven by the man who had brought her here. He had turned his car across the road in front of her, blocking the road. Trying to avoid hitting his car, she had run into a tree-and hadn't known anything else until she had awakened in the cave. She had been here since then. The man had left her here alone most of the time. She had neither strength nor courage to escape by swimming, and there was no other way out.
The man had told her nothing, had asked her nothing, had addressed no words to her except to say, "Here's some food," or, "Till I bring you some water, you'll have to get along on canned tomatoes when you're thirsty," or other things of that sort. She never remembered having seen him before. She didn't know his name. He was the only man she had seen since her husband's death.
"What did he call you?" I asked. "Mrs. Carter? Or Mrs. Collinson?"
She frowned thoughtfully, then shook her head, saying:
"I don't think he ever called me by name. He never spoke unless he had to, and he wasn't here very much. I was usually alone."
"How long had he been here this time?"
"Since before daylight. The noise of his boat woke me up."
"Sure? This is important. Are you sure he's been here since daylight?"
"Yes."
I was sitting on my heels in front of her. Cotton was standing on my left, beside the sheriff. I looked up at the marshal and said:
"That puts it up to you, Cotton. Your wife was still warm when we saw her-after eleven."
He goggled at me, stammering: "Wh-what's that you say?"