It was getting along toward evening when Pat and I left the Banbrock house. Before we knocked off for the day, I called up the Old Man — the Continental’s San Francisco branch manager, and therefore my boss — and asked him to sic an operative on Irma Correll’s past.
I took a look at the morning papers — thanks to their custom of appearing almost as soon as the sun is out of sight — before I went to bed. They had given our job a good spread. All the facts except those having to do with the Correll angle were there, plus photographs, and the usual assortment of guesses and similar garbage.
The following morning I went after the friends of the missing girls to whom I had not yet talked. I found some of them and got nothing of value from them. Late in the morning I telephoned the office to see if anything new had turned up. It had.
“We’ve just had a call from the sheriff’s office at Martinez,” the Old Man told me. “An Italian grapegrower near Knob Valley picked up a charred photograph a couple of days ago, and recognized it as Ruth Banbrock when he saw her picture in this morning’s paper. Will you get up there? A deputy sheriff and the Italian are waiting for you in the Knob Valley marshal’s office.”
“I’m on my way,” I said.
At the ferry building I used the four minutes before my boat left trying to get Pat Reddy on the phone, with no success.
Knob Valley is a town of less than a thousand people, a dreary, dirty town in Contra Costa County. A San Francisco-Sacramento local set me down there while the afternoon was still young.
I knew the marshal slightly — Tom Orth. I found two men in the office with him. Orth introduced us. Abner Paget, a gawky man of forty-something, with a slack chin, scrawny face, and pale intelligent eyes, was the deputy sheriff. Gio Cereghino, the Italian grapegrower, was a small, nut-brown man with strong yellow teeth that showed in an everlasting smile under his black mustache, and soft brown eyes.
Paget showed me the photograph. A scorched piece of paper the size of a half-dollar, apparently all that had not been burned of the original picture. It was Ruth Banbrock’s face. There was little room for doubting that. She had a peculiarly excited — almost drunken — look, and her eyes were larger than in the other pictures of her I had seen. But it was her face.
“He says he found it day ’fore yesterday,” Paget explained dryly, nodding at the Italian. “The wind blew it against his foot when he was walkin’ up a piece of road near his place. He picked it up an’ stuck it in his pocket, he says, for no special reason, I guess.” He paused to regard the Italian meditatively. The Italian nodded his head in vigorous affirmation.
“Anyways,” the deputy sheriff went on, “he was in town this mornin’, an’ seen the pictures in the papers from Frisco. So he come in here an’ told Tom about it. Tom an’ me decided the best thing was to phone your agency — since the papers said you was workin’ on it.”
I looked at the Italian. Paget, reading my mind, explained, “Cereghino lives over in the hills. Got a grape ranch there. Been around here five or six years, an’ ain’t killed nobody that I know of.”
“Remember the place where you found the picture?” I asked the Italian.
His grin broadened under his mustache, and his head went up and down. “For sure, I remember that place.”
“Let’s go there,” I suggested to Paget.
“Right. Comin’ along, Tom?”
The marshal said he couldn’t. He had something to do in town. Cereghino, Paget and I went out and got into a dusty Ford that the deputy sheriff drove.
We rode for nearly an hour, along a county road that bent up the slope of Mount Diablo. After a while, at a word from the Italian, we left the county road for a dustier and ruttier one. A mile of this one.
“This place,” Cereghino said.
Paget stopped the Ford. We got out in a clearing. The trees and bushes that had crowded the road retreated here for twenty feet or so on either side, leaving a little dusty circle in the woods.
“About this place,” the Italian was saying. “I think by this stump. But between that bend ahead and that one behind, I know for sure.”
Paget was a countryman. I am not. I waited for him to move.
He looked around the clearing, slowly, standing still between the Italian and me. His pale eyes lighted presently. He went around the Ford to the far side of the clearing. Cereghino and I followed.
Near the fringe of brush at the edge of the clearing, the scrawny deputy stopped to grunt at the ground. The wheel-marks of an automobile were there. A car had turned around here.
Paget went on into the woods. The Italian kept close to his heels. I brought up the rear. Paget was following some sort of track. I couldn’t see it, either because he and the Italian blotted it out ahead of me, or because I’m a shine Indian. We went back quite a way.
Paget stopped. The Italian stopped.
Paget said, “Uh-huh,” as if he had found an expected thing.
The Italian said something with the name of God in it. I trampled a bush, coming beside them to see what they saw. I saw it.
At the base of a tree, on her side, her knees drawn up close to her body, a girl was dead. She wasn’t nice to see. Birds had been at her.
A tobacco-brown coat was half on, half off her shoulders. I knew she was Ruth Banbrock before I turned her over to look at the side of her face the ground had saved from the birds.
Cereghino stood watching me while I examined the girl. His face was mournful in a calm way. The deputy sheriff paid little attention to the body. He was off in the brush, moving around, looking at the ground. He came back as I finished my examination.
“Shot,” I told him, “once in the right temple. Before that, I think, there was a fight. There are marks on the arm that was under her body. There’s nothing on her — no jewelry, money — nothing.”
“That goes,” Paget said. “Two women got out of the car back in the clearin’, an’ came here. Could’ve been three women — if the others carried this one. Can’t make out how many went back. One of ’em was larger than this one. There was a scuffle here. Find the gun?”
“No,” I said.
“Neither did I. It went away in the car, then. There’s what’s left of a fire over there.” He ducked his head to the left. “Paper an rags burnt. Not enough left to do us any good. I reckon the photo Cereghino found blew away from the fire. Late Friday, I’d put it, or maybe Saturday mornin’... No nearer than that.”
I took the deputy sheriff’s word for it. He seemed to know his stuff.
“Come here. I’ll show you somethin’,” he said, and led me over to a little black pile of ashes.
He hadn’t anything to show me. He wanted to talk to me away from the Italian’s ears.
“I think the Italian’s all right,” he said, “but I reckon I’d best hold him a while to make sure. This is some way from his place, an’ he stuttered a little bit too much tellin’ me how he happened to be passin’ here. Course, that don’t mean nothin’ much. All these Italians peddle vino, an’ I guess that’s what brought him out this way. I’ll hold him a day or two, anyways.”
“Good,” I agreed. “This is your country, and you know the people. Can you visit around and see what you can pick up? Whether anybody saw anything? Saw a Locomobile cabriolet? Or anything else? You can get more than I could.”
“I’ll do that,” he promised.
“All right. Then I’ll go back to San Francisco now. I suppose you’ll want to camp here with the body?”
“Yeah. You drive the Ford back to Knob Valley, an’ tell Tom what’s what. He’ll come or send out. I’ll keep the Italian here with me.”