He opened the door wider and threw his arm back like an usher. As they passed in, Bud tried awkwardly to supply the introduction that still hadn’t taken place.
“Jubal, you know Roger Dale, I reckon, and this here’s Sheriff Taylor.”
Jubal grunted acknowledgment, then pushed around them to lead the way out of the storage room and into the main house.
“Come on over through here into the living room. That’s where my gun case is at,” he told them.
Roger Dale tried to slow him down. “Hold on a minute, Jubal. Let’s look around in here and see if they damaged anything else.”
“No,” Scroggs insisted. “I done looked, and they ain’t nothing. Now, come on in here.”
Roger Dale shrugged and followed. “There it is,” Scroggs said, pointing to a handsome glass-fronted gun cabinet built into a wall. One of its doors stood open. The other lay on the floor, squarely in front of the cabinet.
The cabinet had racks for six long guns. Two shotguns, a.22 rifle, a reproduction of a muzzle loader, and an over-and-under stood in five of them. Scroggs rested his hand on the empty rack.
“This is where it stood,” he announced. “My best rifle. Only had it three years, and I bought it new. They tore my gun rack up, too. Built it myself.”
“How’d they do it?” Roger asked as he bent to examine the apparently undamaged door.
“Well, I had it locked. But when I built it, I put them good piano hinges on it. They must have took their screwdriver or whatever and popped the pin out of that one. It’ll be a sight of trouble to get another one.”
“Where were you at when they done it?” Roger Dale asked him.
“Me and them dogs was out running coons from sundown to about six this morning. They could have done it anytime.”
“It ain’t coon season,” Fornby told him.
“No, but it will be,” Scroggs said. “And them dogs needed work.”
Roger thought a minute. “You was out running dogs all night on a Thursday. Didn’t you have to work today?” he asked.
“No. I got some time coming at the foundry, and I was going to take today off. I was going to sleep a little and farm a little. Now I’m going to have to work on fixing them doors. Anyway, it don’t matter none about that. What are y’all gonna do about whoever busted into my house and stole my rifle?”
“The more information we’ve got, the better chance we’ll have of catching them,” Roger Dale told him. He looked around the living room. On an end table not far from the gun rack stood a framed eight by ten of Scroggs with a very attractive blonde woman and a small boy. Across the room on the interior wall hung a montage of the same woman and the boy, the child aging from infancy to about four years of age across the range of the photos.
Fornby gestured at the eight by ten. “Where was your wife when they came in?”
Scroggs bridled. “You leave my wife out of this.”
“Jubal, we’ve got to find out if she saw anything,” Roger told him calmly.
Scroggs’s lips tightened. “She left me a week ago. Took my boy. One of my cars, too.”
“Where’s she staying at now?” Roger asked him.
“Ain’t none of your concern,” Scroggs snapped. “She wasn’t here, so she couldn’t have seen nothing.”
“We might want to talk to her just in case she can think of somebody that might have done it. It pretty much had to be somebody that had been here.”
“What do you mean?” Scroggs asked.
“Well, looky here,” Roger said, gesturing at the remaining guns. “He didn’t just break in here to rummage around. He left five pretty good guns and just took the one real good one. He knew what he was looking for, and he come in here and got it.”
“That don’t mean he’d been here,” Scroggs said. “He could have just been somebody that knowed guns. He broke in here and seen a real good one, and he took it.”
“Jubal,” Roger retorted, “that don’t make sense. Somebody that knew guns didn’t just happen to come all the way up the Cove, find you and your dogs gone, and happen to see a Smith and Wesson .30- .30 and steal it. It had to be somebody that knew what you had and come up here after it.”
“Well, it couldn’t have been nobody that had been here,” Jubal insisted. “There hasn’t been nobody here but me and my family for a year or so. And there wouldn’t be none of them do that to me.”
“That being the case,” Fornby said, “it had to be somebody that knew you had that gun from somewheres else. Where all had you had it at?”
“Nowhere. Not since deer season last year. It ain’t deer season this year.”
“No. But like you said about coon season, it’s fixing to be,” Roger said. “Ain’t you been taking target practice and trueing in your rifle?”
“Not off the place,” Jubal answered.
“Yeah, I guess you’ve got plenty of room right here,” Roger agreed. “I reckon you stand out there in front and set your targets down toward the springhead. With them big oak trees and that little hill behind it, you’d know where your round was going and not have to worry about killing one of your cows or something.”
“What if I do?” Jubal snapped. “How does that catch whoever it was that stole my gun?”
Bud walked over and patted him on the shoulder. “Ol’ Roger Dale’s just trying to get the facts. If you’ll tell him all you can, it’ll help us get started.”
That seemed to satisfy him. “Okay. That’s where I shoot.”
Roger Dale slid a small notebook out of his jacket pocket and wrote in it for several seconds. Then he looked up at Jubal again. “So you can’t think of anybody who could have seen you with that gun lately?”
Jubal shook his head.
“That’s all the more reason we need to talk to your wife. Where’d you say she’s staying at?” Roger asked.
“I didn’t,” Jubal grunted. “She called, but she never said where she’s at. Maybe her sister’s, Mabel Wade, over beyond Gibsontown.”
After a few more unproductive questions, Bud got a camera out of the car and took pictures of everything. Then the officers went out, assuring Jubal that they would try to recover his rifle.
When they were back in the car, the sheriff spoke first. “I suppose we sit here and talk a while so he’ll begin to wonder if we’re suspicious of him.”
“You learn fast,” said Fornby.
“Looks like he done it, all right,” Bud observed.
“Either that or we’ve got the most considerate and careful burglar that ever turned on a flashlight,” said Roger. “Lucky, too. Hits a house a mile and a half from anywhere on the only night in recent memory when there ain’t nobody home all night. Then he steals one gun with the least possible trouble for himself. And the gun just happens to be the same caliber that killed the breadman.”
“I think we know one more thing,” the sheriff put in. “He really is as stupid as we talked about. He couldn’t have faked a less likely burglary if he had tried.”
Bud nodded. “He ain’t got it in him to break anything that’s his. And if he reported the rest of his guns stolen he’d be without guns. He’d never be able to explain it when he used them again.”
“Maybe so,” Roger said, “but while we’re sitting here talking about how stupid he is, we still don’t have the first piece of evidence that he committed a murder that we know he’s guilty of. No motive. No weapon. No nothing.”
“Where you think he got rid of that rifle?” Bud asked.