Beryl was crossing the kitchen as the deputy opened the back door. She glanced up and smiled casually. Then she caught his eyes and stopped in her tracks.
“Where’s your mother?”
“Upstairs. She’s coming down now. Why, Dad?”
“Come to the front room. I want to talk with you. I don’t want her to hear.”
Silently Beryl followed her father into the living room. George Quinlan indicated a chair, but Beryl didn’t sit down. Instead she remained standing, very trim, very erect, and very white.
“Your car,” Quinlan said with a gesture of weariness. “Last night, after the murder, did you go to the Higbee place?”
For a long moment she hesitated, and in that moment Quinlan knew the most awful suspense he had ever experienced. If she should lie to him now, it would rip his soul to shreds.
“Yes,” she said finally.
“Why?”
“I was... The sheriff telephoned. He asked me to look for you.”
George Quinlan ceased to be a father. He was now only a representative of the law, his eyes keeping a steady, insistent pressure on his daughter’s mind, his questions probing her thoughts. “What did the sheriff tell you?”
“Told me he’d found a cigarette case. He wanted you to take fingerprints.”
“Did he ask you to look for me?”
“He asked me where you were — asked me to try and find you.”
“And you went to the Higbee place?”
“Yes.”
“Looking for me?”
There was a pause, a pause long enough for George Quinlan to be conscious of his perspiring hands, of the hammering of his heart, but his eyes didn’t waver.
“No.”
“Why did you go there?”
“I went... Oh, Dad!” Her lips quivered at the edges, and tears swam into her eyes. Then the mouth became firm. She brushed aside the tears and met her father eye to eye. “I went there because I thought it was Roy’s cigarette case.”
“Was it?”
“I–I thought so.”
“Was it?”
“Apparently not.”
“What did you do?”
“I took a chamois skin from the car and wiped every single fingerprint off of it.”
“Why?”
“Because... because he had called me — and, well, he said it was from Fort Bixling, but I think now it was from San Rodolpho, and I... Dad, I don’t know why I did it. Don’t ask me why. I can’t tell you. All I know is that I thought I had a chance to protect Roy, and all of a sudden it seemed more important to me to do that than anything else on earth. I didn’t care if they killed me, I was going to protect him.”
A vast weariness settled on George Quinlan. This was the end of the trail so far as he was concerned. He was discredited, finished. “You say it wasn’t Roy’s cigarette case after all?”
“Dad, I don’t know. I can’t understand it. Roy was here this morning. I asked him for a cigarette and he acted just as naturally as could be. He reached into his pocket, took out the silver cigarette case and — and afterwards, when he’d gone, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t seen the engraving on it. He’d acted so completely offhand about the whole thing that it had put me off my guard. I—”
“Where’s Roy now?”
“At the hotel, I guess. He wanted to clean up and get a short sleep. He wants to come out here a little later.”
“Say nothing about this to him,” Quinlan said. “Say nothing about it to anyone.”
“Dad — I’m sorry.”
Quinlan looked at her as though she were some stranger in the house.
“Will it make much difference?” she asked.
For twenty years George Quinlan had been trying to stand between Beryl and life, trying to protect her, to ward off the blows that Fate might deal, telling little white lies when he thought those might be necessary to reassure her. Now, looking at her, he suddenly realized that the time for this had passed. She was a woman, not a child, and she had become a woman by reason of her own act.
“Will it, Dad? Will it make much difference?”
“Yes, it will,” Quinlan said and walked out, letting it go at that.
As he walked past Beryl’s automobile the thought occurred to Quinlan once more to change the tire on her car. He shook it off and walked out to where he had left the car. The door swinging open was a grim reminder of the extent of the gap which existed between his life of only a few minutes ago and the maelstrom of events into which he had been swept.
“George, oh, George!”
His wife was calling from the upstairs window.
Quinlan turned. “Yes, dear?”
“You’ll be home for dinner tonight?”
It needed only that homely touch to bring him back to realities. His answer was mechanical. “I don’t know, dear — yet. I’ll telephone.”
“Okay, let me know,” she called cheerily.
Quinlan got in the car. A new worry had entered his mind, the thought of what this would mean to Martha. A man might have enough resilience and dogged determination to slug his way through to a comeback, but Martha couldn’t take it. As the wife of the deputy she enjoyed a certain position in the social life of the community. People liked her for herself, but in addition there was the recognition of the importance of her husband’s position.
Quinlan carefully placed the damning triangle of paper in between the leaves of his notebook. It would hold flat there. It—
It was at that moment a thought struck him.
Changing the tire on Beryl’s automobile might or might not stave off discovery, but there was one absolutely certain way by which George Quinlan could give his daughter complete immunity.
Hardly realizing the full significance of what he was doing, Quinlan tore another sheet of paper from the notebook. Seemingly without orders from Quinlan’s mind, but working mechanically his fingers shaped a new triangle, a triangle not quite so broad at the base and a little more pointed. He had only to walk into the district attorney’s office, hand that new triangle to Martin Walworth and walk out — and Beryl’s connection with the murder at the Higbee homestead need never be known.
He started the car and drove directly to the courthouse.
The district attorney’s secretary was at her desk. “You may go in. They are expecting you,” she said.
Quinlan entered the private office. Martin Walworth had moved over to occupy the district attorney’s swivel chair. Edward Lyons, publisher of the Rockville Gazette, was seated at the other side of the desk, his pencil sprawling extensive notes on folded newsprint that Quinlan could read over Lyons’ shoulder.
Printed on top of one of the sheets, apparently to be used as a headline, were the words: SHERIFF’S SLIPSHOD METHODS MAY RESULT IN MURDERER’S ESCAPE, DECLARES CRIMINOLOGIST.
Rush Medford, his face suffused with smiles, was standing behind Walworth, and Bertram Glasco, puffing contentedly on a cigar, was nodding his head as though not only agreeing with something the criminologist had said, but also signifying his continuing agreement with anything the man might be going to say.
John Farnham, sitting erect in a chair to the right of the criminologist, was watching Walworth with fixed intensity. Leave it to Farnham not to approve entirely of anything or anyone, Quinlan thought. Farnham was a typical dour-faced crusader who would never be happy, never satisfied. A one-time cowboy, he still did a little horse trading in addition to his real-estate business, and Quinlan couldn’t help thinking that while he was sanctimoniously honest in his real-estate transactions, his reputation as a horse trader was such that the initiated seldom dealt with him. There had been a bay saddle horse that Farnham had sold Beckett a couple of months ago. Quinlan had seen it in the Higbee place. Farnham had said the horse was twelve, but Quinlan would bet a month’s salary it was at least—