The operator said, “I have a long-distance call for Miss Beryl Quinlan. Is she there?”
“Speaking,” Beryl said.
“Just a moment.”
Roy Jasper’s voice was eager. “Hello, hello!”
“Roy!” Beryl exclaimed.
“Oh, darling, I thought—”
The crisp voice interrupted, “Drop twenty-five cents for three minutes, please.”
Then Beryl’s end of the line went dead, and she had to wait agonized seconds until once more she heard Roy’s voice. “Say, Beryl! Have I got news for you! I’m going to be able to make it! Yes, sir, your GI’s coming home!”
“Oh, Roy!”
“Going to be glad to see me?”
“Am I!”
“How’s everything?”
“Oh, fine — especially now.”
“You were right there at the telephone, weren’t you?”
“Well — yes.”
“Honey, I think I’m breaking down their resistance. I may get a discharge.”
“Oh, Roy, you wouldn’t try to kid me, would you?”
“No fooling.”
“When?”
“I can’t tell when. Pretty soon, perhaps. But I’m getting off for a two-week furlough. I’ll see you tomorrow. You’ll save a date for me?”
“One?”
“Dancing?”
“That will be lovely!”
“Know something?”
“What?”
“I’m crazy to see you.”
Beryl’s youthfully clear voice, held low in an effort to insure privacy, was, nevertheless, distinctly audible to the anxious group in the living room. She said, “It’ll be nice — seeing you.”
Glasco growled irritably, “She wasn’t out there all the time, was she?”
“I don’t think so,” George Quinlan said apologetically. He went to the door of the living room and stared moodily out at the telephone. Then in an aggrieved gesture to emphasize his desire for privacy, he pulled the heavy curtains closer together. Beryl’s voice continued to penetrate through the curtains.
The four men sat uncomfortably silent while the cryptic conversation went on, until the operator’s businesslike tone advised the talkers that the three minutes were up.
Roy promptly said, “’Bye, honey,” and hung up. Beryl clung to the receiver for a moment or two after the connection was severed, as though loath to relinquish the channel over which Roy’s voice had come. Then she hung up.
Almost instantly the phone started ringing again.
Beryl eagerly snatched up the receiver. “Hello, hello!” she said. “Hello, Roy!”
A man’s heavy voice, sharp with excitement, said, “I want George Quinlan right away. It’s a murder!”
“Just a minute,” Beryl said. “Father, here’s a call. The man says it’s a murder.”
Quinlan jerked back the heavy curtains and strode to the telephone. He picked up the receiver, listened to Sam Beckett’s hurried voice. The deputy asked a couple of routine questions and then said, “I’ll be right out.”
He hung up and walked back to the living room. His face was without expression but his eyes couldn’t keep from showing his relief. “Woman murdered out on the old Higbee place,” he said. “I’ve got to go. Bill Eldon’s out there. It’s an impossible case on the face of it. Sam Beckett found her lying face down on a freshly plowed field with no tracks. They want me to go out right away. I’ve got to get a photographer and notify the coroner.”
Lyons’ eyes sparkled. “I’ll be right along,” he said.
“Don’t let on you got the tip from me,” Quinlan warned. “Bill might not like it.”
“Bill never gives us a break,” Lyons observed.
Bertram Glasco rubbed his hands. “This may be it, George. A body lying face down on a freshly plowed field with no tracks. That sounds as though it might be something way beyond Bill Eldon’s range.”
Lyons said, “Let him show the voters what an old fogy he is. It’ll serve him right.”
Quinlan interposed, “If you boys will excuse me I’ll have to rush for it.”
Farnham said, “I have every confidence in the ability of Sheriff Eldon to solve crimes. My objection is that he tolerates gambling. I wish you a good night, gentlemen. No, no, George, you have work to do. Don’t bother to show me out.”
He slipped out through the curtained doorway.
Quinlan said angrily, “It’d take an army to stop all the gambling in this county. And suppose you broke up the little poker games that run in the lodge rooms around the country—”
“Forget it, George,” Glasco said. “He’s just the front for our campaign.”
“You can’t ever satisfy him,” Quinlan grumbled.
“We know it,” Glasco soothed.
“I’ve got to go, boys,” Quinlan said. “Sorry, but you know how it is.”
Quinlan shot out the door. Lyons turned to Glasco. “Can’t depend on George,” he said. “I told you so.”
“He’ll come around all right,” Glasco said. “It might be a good thing to play this murder up big, Ed. And you might be able to work in a little stuff about how old Bill doesn’t have any knowledge of fingerprint classification. You can mention that he depends on George for all the modern stuff. Let it creep in between the lines that Bill’s getting to be an old fogy. Then if he slips up on—”
Lyons interrupted testily, “Hell’s bells, I’m two paragraphs ahead of you. When it comes to politics don’t ever forget that the Gazette has been in business a long time. Candidates the Gazette supports get elected. Well, I’m going to rush out there and cover this story right from the start.”
Glasco watched him out of the door, then said in a low voice, “You mean you support the men who are going to get elected, you damned old buzzard.”
He heard the sound of a quick intake of breath, whirled, and saw Beryl Quinlan sitting motionless by the telephone, lips slightly parted, watching him with wide startled eyes.
Glasco hesitated for a moment, then walked past her, saying nothing, because there was nothing to say.
The little group examined the huddled figure in the light of a floodlight that Sam Beckett had rigged on the tractor. They all agreed there were no footprints. The photographer took flashlight photographs from half a dozen different positions, placing his tripod on the light trailer which Sam Beckett had put on the back of the tractor in place of the plow which had been there.
“Well, Jim,” the sheriff said to James Logan, the coroner, “guess you can move her now. Poor kid, she can’t be over nineteen or twenty.”
“Stab wound in the back,” Logan said, crisply businesslike, “and the knife isn’t there. You got a murder case on your hands, Bill.”
“Uh huh.”
The coroner was plainly puzzled, slightly — impatient. “You can’t murder a girl in a freshly plowed field with soil as soft as this and not leave some sort of tracks.”
“Uh huh,” the sheriff announced, and then, raising his voice, said, “I want everybody here to remember that when they go out, they’re to go out on Sam Beckett’s tractor. I don’t want any footprints in this plowed ground, no footprints at all. You understand?”
No one said anything.
The sheriff turned to Quinlan and drew him to one side. “What do you make of it, George?” he asked.
“Well, it looks to me—” Quinlan cleared his throat.
“Yeh, go ahead,” the sheriff invited.
“Well, it’s a murder all right,” Quinlan said somewhat lamely. “I’m just wondering—”