Quinlan was having difficulty in adjusting himself to these new developments. “Then you knew before I got there what car it was that had the triangular piece out of the right front tire?”
“Sure.”
“Then why did you have me go through all that business of tearing out a piece of paper?”
“Well, George,” the sheriff said, “I sort of wanted to see what you’d do. That’s why I gave you that triangular piece of paper to keep. I thought perhaps—”
“Don’t think for a minute I wasn’t tempted,” Quinlan interrupted bitterly. “I even went so far as to tear out a substitute piece of paper. But when it came to a showdown I couldn’t use it.”
“I know,” the sheriff said soothingly. “Well, let’s go out to the auto camp and see what’s up. I’ll call my house first.”
Sheriff Eldon called his house. Then, when the answer came, his face winced with displeasure. “Hello, Doris,” he said. “Where’s Merna? Is she there?... I see. Well, take a message for her, will you? Tell her that I want her to start looking through the personal mentions in the back issues of the papers beginning about six or seven months ago and see if she can find some mention of an Elvira Dow. I think she—”
The sheriff was interrupted by a burst of high-pitched staccato noises which came rattling over the wire.
Slowly the look of annoyance on his face faded to a whimsical smile. “All right, Doris,” he said, “I guess it’s a good thing to have a gossip in the family after all.”
He hung up and grinned at Quinlan. “Looks as though we’re getting somewhere, George. That was the old Human Encyclopedia, my sister-in-law, who sticks that long nose of hers into more different business of more different people than you’d ever suspect. She was visiting here when old Higbee died, and she eagerly devoured all the scandal about his common-law marriage to his housekeeper, and all the stink that was raised. Elvira Dow was the nurse who lived at the house for about ten days after Marvin Higbee had his stroke. She was with him up until the time of his death.”
“Then this girl who was murdered was—”
“Elvira Dow’s daughter. Put that together with the fact that people were zigzagging back and forth around the house looking for something, and we begin to get an answer. We—”
The telephone rang again. Eldon answered, listened to a rasping voice, and said, “So what?” After an interval he slammed the receiver back.
Quinlan looked at him questioningly.
“Rush Medford,” the sheriff said. “He’s down at your place. Your wife told him Beryl got a call a few minutes ago and then jumped in her jalopy and went tearing out.”
Quinlan groaned. “And I suppose he suspects me!”
Eldon grinned. “Come on, son. Kinda looks as though we gotta move fast.”
The little group in the cabin at the Stanwood Auto Court talked in low voices.
“All right, Roy,” the sheriff said, “I think it’s your move.”
Roy Jasper shifted his position uneasily. “I didn’t want Beryl to know about this,” he said. “I suppose I was foolish. After all, there was no reason why — oh, well, it would have meant explaining and—”
“Go ahead,” the sheriff said.
“It began last week,” Roy said, “when I was in San Rodolpho on official business. I ate in a cafeteria and — well, the cashier was a good-looking blonde, and I got to passing the time of day with her. I told her I was from Rockville and that I certainly hated to be so close to home without going on up to see my friends, and she laughed and wanted to know whether it was friends, plural, or a friend, singular, and we got to chatting.”
“Then what?”
“Well, then she asked me about whether I knew Marvin Higbee, and I told her he was dead, and she asked a few questions about the place, and I told her something about the lawsuit. Well —”
“Go ahead,” the sheriff said.
“Well, I could see this girl kept wanting to talk about Higbee, and finally she told me the story. Her mother nursed Higbee during his last illness, and then in Colorado her mother became critically ill and sent for the daughter. The daughter was there for a couple of days before the mother died, and the mother told her that Higbee had said to her in effect, ‘If anything happens and I shouldn’t pull through, you’ve got to do something for me. He’ll pay you for it and pay you well — make him pay. I told him he’d have to pay,’ but he wouldn’t tell her any more than that, just that she’d be paid well for what she was to do.
“Higbee had had a stroke and it had paralyzed one side. Then the day before he died, he had another stroke and knew he wasn’t going to make it. The nurse could see that he wanted to tell her something very badly, but there was always someone else in the room. No one trusted anyone else — people were waiting, watching. The housekeeper kept flitting around, and the doctor was there, in and out, and Carlotta, the man’s favorite sister, was there almost constantly, and business associates kept hanging around.
“Finally, in desperation, Higbee said to her, talking apparently with great effort, ‘Remember, I said you’d have to do something,’ and she nodded, and just then Carlotta came and stood by the bed, and Higbee frowned and said with the effort that talking costs a man who has had a stroke, ‘The joke is behind the joker,’ and that was all.
“Carlotta kept asking, ‘What was that? What about a joker?’ But he closed his eyes and pretended he couldn’t hear her. But the nurse felt certain that it was a message for her, but she never was able to figure it out. Higbee died the next day, and there was, of course, no further necessity for a nurse.
“Well, Elizabeth kept thinking over what her mother had told her, and after her mother’s death she began to wonder if it hadn’t been related to something in the house, so she started pumping me about the Higbee place, and I told her all I knew. Elizabeth wanted me to go with her and see if we couldn’t find something in the house, but of course she swore me to absolute secrecy.
“Well, it was an adventure, and I was there in San Rodolpho on official business. I got off once to come up and see Beryl, but the rest of the time they held me there so I couldn’t go anywhere. Then I went back to Fort Bixling, and then I got this furlough and — well, I’d promised Elizabeth that I’d get in touch with her the first chance I had. So I did, and she insisted that I mustn’t call anyone, or let anyone know about what we were going to do. She said she’d drive me up in her car, and that after I’d helped her locate what she wanted I could get in touch with my friends up here. I think she was just a little bit hurt that I was so eager to — well, you know.”
Beryl nodded.
“So when I left Camp Bixling yesterday morning, I took the bus up to San Rodolpho. I’d telephoned her that I was coming. She met me in the cafeteria. We talked for a while, and then we had some lunch put up, got in her car, and drove up to the old Higbee place. It certainly was a mess. I found that a passkey I’d picked up in a hardware store would work the lock on the side door, and we went in and prowled all around the place.”
“Find anything?” the sheriff asked.
Roy said, “At the time I didn’t think that we had, but now — well, now I don’t know.”
The sheriff raised his eyebrows, asking a silent question.
“You see,” Roy said, “we were sitting down eating lunch — in fact, we’d finished lunch and I’d had a cigarette, and I think she had — when all of a sudden we heard a car drive up. Well, you know, there’d been so much trouble among the heirs and, after all, we’d really broken into the place — I’d used a passkey — so we jumped up and ran to the window. It was all covered with cobwebs, but I could vaguely see a car and people coming to the house.