John Farnham answered the question. “A daughter,” he said.
The brief period of tense silence which followed that statement was again broken by the strident ringing of the telephone.
Sheriff Eldon picked up the receiver, said, “Sheriff’s office, Bill Eldon speaking.” Then he said, “Wait a minute... What’s that?... Oh, I see... All right... Wait for about fifteen or twenty minutes, will you? Okay, goodbye.”
The sheriff hung up, saying nothing to any of the others.
Walworth’s manner was that of a teacher who is demonstrating some problem which to him is entirely simple, but which is puzzling a roomful of pupils. “May Task,” he inquired sarcastically, “whether this Beryl Quinlan is around nineteen, a rather tall dark girl with dark eyes and an unusually clear voice?”
He needed no answer other than the glances which the men gave each other.
“That, gentlemen,” Walworth said, “probably disposes of your murder case. It will account for the B on the cigarette case.”
Rush Medford took charge at that point. “I think,” he announced, “that, under the circumstances, it would be better if the district attorney’s office handled this by itself from this point on,” and with that he strode toward the door, jerked it open, and stood to one side, waiting for the others to precede him.
They made a self-righteous little procession as they stalked through the door, but Bertram Glasco couldn’t help stopping for one final dig at the discomfited deputy. “This,” he said, “probably accounts for something that puzzled me in our conversation last night.”
And with that he marched out into the corridor, Rush Medford closed the door with a mild slam, and Bill Eldon and George Quinlan were left alone in the sheriff’s office.
“Well,” Quinlan said, “I guess that does it.”
“Does what?”
“Wipes me out,” Quinlan said gloomily. “And I guess I’ve dragged you down along with me, Bill.”
“What did Glasco mean when he said something about last night?” Eldon asked.
“They wanted me to run against you.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I told them I wouldn’t do it as long as you wanted to run.”
“Then what?”
“Then they suggested that the next big case that came along I sort of keep in the background and let you run the thing all by yourself and see if you wouldn’t bungle on fingerprints or something.”
Eldon nodded. “I thought something like that might be in the wind. And that’s why Rush Medford called Martin Walworth in as a special investigator.”
Quinlan nodded. He felt so utterly dejected that he didn’t want to talk. They’d go and get Beryl. Rush Medford would take her to his office, go through the old rigmarole of advising her she didn’t need to talk, call in a court reporter to take down what she said—
The sheriff calmly lifted the telephone, dialed a number. Quinlan slumped in his chair, chin on his chest, heard the sheriff’s fatherly voice say, “Hello, Beryl? That you?... Where’s your car?... Go down and get in it quick and go out to the Stanwood Auto Camp, rent a cabin under your own name. Be sure you use your own name and give the correct license number of your car. Then look around. You’ll find a friend of yours there. Your father and I will be out in a few minutes, but get started now.”
The sheriff hung up.
“You can’t do that, Bill,” Quinlan said.
“Why not?”
“That’s compounding a felony. You know the district attorney is on his way out there to question her concerning what happened, and—”
“Well?” the sheriff asked.
“You can’t advise her to avoid him.”
The sheriff grinned. “I’m asking her to go where I can question her.”
“But the district attorney wants to take a statement from her.”
“And I want to take a statement from her. Rush Medford wants to solve this murder case, and I want to solve it. Buck up, George. We’re going places. Know who telephoned just a minute ago?”
“No,” Quinlan said.
“Roy Jasper. He’s out at the Stanwood camp. I told him to wait there.”
“I don’t see where we can do any good,” Quinlan said.
Bill Eldon put a sympathetic hand on the deputy’s shoulder. “Now, don’t get down in the dumps, George. You can’t blame Beryl for what she did. My gosh! I didn’t even bother to stop her.”
“You didn’t bother to do what?” Quinlan exclaimed.
“To stop her.”
“You mean you knew—”
“Of course I did,” the sheriff said. “I picked up that cigarette case and recognized it right away.”
“You recognized it? How?”
The sheriff said, “On your mantelpiece there’s a picture of Roy Jasper. He’s in Uniform, and if you’ll remember he’s holding this cigarette case out in front of him half open just as though he was offering someone a cigarette. You can see the engraving on the side clearly.”
“Why, yes,” Quinlan said. “I do remember now. How did you happen to notice that?”
“Oh, I just notice lots of things,” the sheriff said. “It’s a habit a man gets when he’s been fooling around with crime as long as I have. You see, George, I never had a chance to study up on all this fingerprint business, and things of that sort, and because I don’t do so good on those things I have to keep up on other stuff. I always felt that you have to know and understand people in order to make a good officer. It’s easier for me to understand people than it is to understand all this scientific stuff about whorls and loops. Now, Beryl isn’t going to be mixed up in any murder, and you know it.”
“She’s mixed up in one now,” Quinlan said dejectedly.
Bill Eldon shook his head. “I thought that was Roy’s cigarette case,” he said, “so I went to a phone and instead of telephoning the coroner’s office or the Gazette and locating you myself, I phoned Beryl and told her about wanting to get hold of you, and about my finding this cigarette case down there, and that I wanted you to fingerprint it. So then I went back where I could watch, and waited to see what happened.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“I wanted to see whether Beryl knew where the cigarette case was. I was very careful to tell her that I found it in the Higbee place and describe it to her, but I didn’t tell her where in the Higbee place I’d found it.”
“And what did she do?”
“Did just what I thought she’d do,” the sheriff said. “Drove down there.”
“You didn’t stop her?”
“No. I saw Beryl drive down, stop her car, open the gate, get in, drive up to the Higbee place, and then she had to do quite a bit of looking around before she found what she wanted.
“Then I watched her drive out and close the gate behind her. I really thought she’d taken the cigarette case with her, but she was too smart for that. She’d just wiped the fingerprints off it and left it.”
“She had no right to do that,” Quinlan said.
“She didn’t, for a fact,” the sheriff admitted cheerfully, “but I thought it was best to let her play it that way.”
“Why?”
“Because then she’d go to Roy Jasper and get him to tell her just exactly what had happened, and he’d tell her where he would’t tell either you or me. All I had to be certain of was that Beryl hadn’t been in the house when the cigarette case had been dropped. She proved that to me when she had to fumble around looking for it. If she’d gone right to the kitchen where the cigarette case had been left, I’d have had to stop her when she drove out and ask her questions. I’d have hated to do it, too, because Beryl’s a nice girl.”