“You mean you’re going to use him to show up the sheriff?”
“I mean I’m going to use him to solve the mystery.”
“The sheriff won’t like that,” Quinlan said.
“Of course he won’t like it. But there’s a murder to be solved, and the County has some rights. I certainly trust that you have no objections.”
“No,” Quinlan said, “I haven’t any objections.”
“Come on in,” Medford invited and opened the door of his private office.
Martin Walworth was a short-bodied, heavy-featured man with bushy eyebrows and huge spectacles. His round black pupils were pinpoints of perpetual scrutiny in the center of pale, steady eyes. He didn’t get up or shake hands when the district attorney performed the introduction.
“No weapon was found?” Walworth asked after a few preliminaries.
“No weapon,” Quinlan admitted.
“The autopsy seems to have been handled in rather a careless manner,” Walworth said. “However, I’m hopeful of getting a fairly good description of the murder weapon by an investigation which I shall make personally. There were no fingerprints whatever on the cigarette case?”
“None whatever.”
The criminologist’s eyes were stem with accusation. “Do I understand that the sheriff picked it up?”
“He said he picked it up.”
“But there were no fingerprints?”
“None.”
“Not latents that were smudged?”
“No. There were none.”
Walworth grunted. “Then someone wiped it,” he said, “wiped it clean — after the sheriff picked it up.”
“Looked as though it might have been wiped with something like a chamois skin, polished as smooth and slick as a whistle,” Quinlan admitted.
“After the sheriff picked it up.”
Quinlan nodded. “I guess it has to be that way.”
“But you didn’t say so,” the district attorney accused, “not until after Walworth pointed it out.”
“I didn’t volunteer any suggestions. The fact speaks for itself,” Quinlan said.
Walworth grunted, “And there were no tracks in the soft soil?”
“No tracks.”
“That, manifestly, is impossible.”
“You can see the photographs—”
“Photographs, bah! They are taken with a synchronized flash. That makes the picture flat as a pancake. The lighting should have been scientifically controlled.”
Quinlan said nothing.
“Obviously,” Walworth went on, “the fact in itself is impossible. Therefore someone is lying. It may be this Beckett.”
“It may be,” Quinlan admitted.
The district attorney interposed hastily, “Here in the country where a good many people know each other and — well, you have to be a little careful, you know, Mr. Walworth. Political consideration as well as a person’s integrity—”
“I understand,” Walworth said. “Is there any other evidence?”
Quinlan told him about the car which had driven into the field after the tractor had made its last trip out.
Walworth digested that information with the profound expression of a deep thinker. “This piece that was gouged out of the right front tire,” he said, “you say you used a piece of paper to get the outline of that?”
“Yes.”
“Where is that paper?”
Almost involuntarily, Quinlan’s hand dropped to his pocket. Then he remembered. The triangular piece of paper had been in the pocket of the wet suit he had taken off to have sent to the cleaner. Because the paper had no weight, no bulk, he had overlooked it. To confess his negligence in this was unthinkable. He tried to keep his voice casual.
“I have it at home.”
Walworth’s comment was short and to the point.
“Get it,” he said, and then added disgustedly, “What a slipshod way of identifying a tire!”
Quinlan parked his car in front of his house and, because he intended to start back for the courthouse almost at once, left the door open.
He walked across the sidewalk, turned to the right on the smaller walk which skirted the house, and went around to the back porch.
He entered quietly and climbed the stairs to his room. He wondered if his wife had made a careful search of his pockets in preparing the wet suit for the cleaners. If she hadn’t, could he get hold of the suit before the bit of paper was ruined?
Quinlan’s pulse gave an involuntary reaction to the relief he felt as he looked at the place on the top of his dresser which was reserved for his personal belongings. Every minute since his talk with the criminologist had been a thought-tortured nightmare of apprehension that the piece of paper might have been irrevocably lost. But there it was, lying on the dresser, a mud-soiled triangular slip of paper, silent tribute to the thorough-going loyalty of a steadfast helpmeet.
Quinlan picked up the paper, turned, and walked quietly back down the stairs.
From the living room he heard Beryl’s clear voice, remarkable for its low-pitched carrying power, saying into the telephone, “Will you please give me the long-distance rate to San Rodolpho — after seven o’clock at night, please... Twenty-five cents for three minutes?... Thank you, Operator, very much.”
Quinlan left the house by the back door. He noticed that his daughter’s car was parked in front of the garage — a jalopy she had picked up herself a couple of years ago.
She should sell that car, the deputy thought, looking at it without quite seeing it. Then a sudden discovery jarred George Quinlan’s mind into a new line of activity. He stood regarding a triangular nick in the right front tire, his eyes locked in a stare of incredulous dismay.
Almost mechanically Quinlan moved the few steps necessary to hold the triangular torn bit of paper over the gouged-out place in the tire.
The mud-stained triangle of paper his wife had carefully saved for him was a perfect pattern, just fitting the hole in the tire.
Quinlan straightened, holding the triangle of paper between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. The hand seemed strange to him.
Once, when he had been arresting a man charged with some minor crime, the prisoner had unexpectedly whirled and delivered a smashing punch to the side of Quinlan’s head. The blow had lashed out so fast and hard that not only had Quinlan failed to see it coming, but the smashing impact had, for the moment, robbed him of all memory. And as his senses had begun to struggle for orientation, he had fancied himself in the midst of a strange world wherein surroundings that should have been familiar failed to have any significance whatever.
Now, in the same way, Quinlan’s mind was reeling from the impact of his discovery. It seemed only last week that Beryl had been a baby, getting her first tooth — the worry over whooping cough — the starting of school — blossoming into a young woman — and now this.
Gradually Quinlan’s mind reasserted itself. There was Martin Walworth waiting at the courthouse with the district attorney for this triangular piece of paper. Walworth would make a life-size photograph. The Rockville Gazette would publish it. Everyone in the community from service-station attendants on down would be looking for an automobile with this triangular gouge in the tread of the right front tire.
His first instinctive desire being to protect Beryl, Quinlan thought of changing the tire and putting on the spare. Then he took a deep breath and let his faith in his daughter assert itself. Surely Beryl could have had no part in a murder! It was simply that there were things that needed explaining, and George Quinlan, man of action, had never been one to postpone that which needed doing. Slowly he turned and walked back to the house.