Dyer nodded. The captain opened the door and stepped back, saying, “Go right on in, folks. The chief will want to hear your story.”
Shayne moved to go out as a middle-aged couple came in, but Gerlach stopped him. “You’d better sit in on this, too, Mike.” He closed the door behind the couple and said, “This is Mr. and Mrs. Barton, Chief. They think they may have some information on the body we found in the river last night.”
Mrs. Barton was a small lady with silvery hair. She had a sweet, unlined face, and she had been crying. The tears started flowing again as she took a step toward the chief’s desk and said, “It’s our boy. We know it is. The picture in the paper don’t look like Jack but we know it’s him.”
Her husband was a tall, stooped man wearing what was evidently his “good” suit of blue serge, shiny in the seat and elbows, but neatly pressed. He moved to his wife’s side and took her arm and said, “Now, Mother. We don’t know for sure. Don’t take on like that.”
Captain Gerlach pushed a couple of chairs around for them, and Chief Dyer reseated himself. Mr. Barton got a clean white handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it into her withered hand, murmuring something in her ear.
She put the handkerchief up to her face and sobbed into it. Dyer asked, “Is your son missing?”
“Yes, sir. Jack’s been gone since last Tuesday. We’ve tried not to worry, but when we read about it in the paper and how it said he wasn’t identified yet, and all — well, we’re afraid it’s him.”
“Does the description fit him?”
“It fits him too good,” Mr. Barton said fearfully. “If we could look at him, sir. You haven’t identified him yet, I reckon?” He leaned forward, despair overcoming the faint hope in his voice.
“Murder,” Mrs. Barton sobbed through the handkerchief. “Jack said ’twould be murder, and that’s what it is. If we’d only opened his letter in time to stop him-”
“Now, Mother.” Mr. Barton clumsily patted his wife’s shoulder. “No need to blame yourself. We couldn’t stop him from going to see Mr. Towne. You know we couldn’t. Jack was always that stubborn.”
Captain Gerlach moved uneasily, and Chief Dyer’s hand trembled as he took the cigarette holder away from his mouth. “Jefferson Towne?”
“Yes, sir. The big mining man. Him that’s running for mayor. I dunno what this is in the paper about him killing a soldier last Tuesday, but I guess we better tell you the whole thing.”
“I think you’d better,” Dyer said dryly.
Mr. Barton reached inside his coat pocket and drew out a much-thumbed sheet of paper. He passed it across to Dyer, exclaiming dully, “Here’s a letter Jack wrote last Tuesday just before he went out right after noon. He left it pinned on his pillow and Mother didn’t find it till late that evening. But we didn’t worry so much after we read it, because a Mexican came by about five o’clock to get Jack’s Gladstone bag and he said Jack was going on a trip and for us not to worry. Jack had packed his bag, seems like, before he went out, but he never said anything to us about it. You better read the letter, and then you’ll see why we think it’s Jack.”
Dyer looked at Gerlach and Shayne as he unfolded the sheet of paper. He mashed out his cigarette and began to read aloud:
Dear Mother and Dad — I can’t stand the way things are going any longer. I’m just a burden on you and I’m going to quit letting you support me. You’ll think what I’m going to do is blackmail, but I don’t care any more. I’m leaving this note so you’ll know who’s to blame if anything happens to me. I’m going to see Mr. Jefferson Towne this afternoon and he has promised to give me ten thousand dollars in cash to pay me for keeping still about something I know so he can win the election. But I don’t trust Mr. Towne and am afraid he may try to kill me to keep from paying the money.
I’m going to take the risk because I don’t see any other way to quit being a burden on you. If I’m not back by tonight when you find this, you’ll know I’m probably dead and Mr. Towne is responsible.
If that happens, take this letter to the police, and get the notebook out of my Gladstone and take it to Mr. Neil Cochrane on the Free Press and he will give you $500 for the notebook, and he will use the information in it against Mr. Towne. I have sort of told Mr. Cochrane what it is and he has promised to pay that much for it. He suspects Mr. Towne will kill me instead of paying the money, and I’m leaving this letter at his suggestion.
No matter what happens I love you even if I haven’t been much good. Jack.
Chief Dyer refolded the letter and laid it on his desk. Mrs. Barton’s sobbing had ceased. She twisted the white handkerchief in her fingers and said falteringly, “You can see why we’re so worried about Jack. We even got to wondering last night — when we read in the Free Press Extra about Mr. Towne being arrested — well, we got wondering if that had anything to do with Jack. It being on Tuesday afternoon and all.”
“But Riley claims he saw Mr. Towne kill a soldier that afternoon.”
“That’s just it,” she hurried on. “Jack was wearing khaki breeches and high laced boots and a tan shirt when he left home. Sort of like a soldier’s uniform. Same color and all.”
Dyer nodded thoughtfully. “But you hadn’t worried about your son until then?”
“We worried about him plenty,” Mr. Barton put in. “About what he’d gone and done. But we didn’t think no harm had come to him, what with the Mexican coming for his Gladstone and saying he was going away on a trip. We thought, well, that he was ashamed to come back home after doing it and that he’d be writing to us.”
“He was a good boy,” Mrs. Barton cried out suddenly. “He never did anything bad in his life. He brooded about his sickness that kept him out of the army and a war job, and he worried about us not having much money.”
“He’s been changed and strange-acting since about a month ago when he came back from a prospecting trip in the Big Bend,” Mr. Barton explained apologetically. “You see, he went to the School of Mines two years and then the doctors told him he should get out in the open, so he went off on a prospecting trip by himself and was gone almost six months. He came back different and bitter, sort of. Kind of blaming God, it seemed like, because a rich man like Mr. Towne had a big silver mine down there and he couldn’t find nothing at all.”
“He was downright blasphemous about the injustice of it,” Mrs. Barton sobbed. “And we brought him up a good, religious boy, too.”
“Then he tried to get a job out to Mr. Towne’s smelter,” Mr. Barton went on, “but they said he wasn’t strong enough to do the work and he brooded over that some more. Then a couple of weeks ago he ups and goes off on a trip without saying nothing to us, and when he come back last Sunday he was extra cheerful and talked like he’d made some kind of strike. He never mentioned the bad thing he was planning to do when he left home Tuesday.”
“Could we see him now?” Mrs. Barton pleaded. “Seems like I can’t go on wondering anymore. It’d be a blessed relief to just know it was him.”
Dyer glanced at Gerlach. The homicide captain shook his head and explained, “They’re busy fixing him up right now. Doc Thompson didn’t get through with him until a little while ago, and they’re fixing him to look as natural as possible. You’d better wait until this afternoon,” he advised the Bartons in a kindly voice.
“Well, then, maybe we’d better go, Mother.” Mr. Barton got up. She put the handkerchief to her face and began to sob again as she got up. He took her arm and tenderly guided her from the office. Gerlach went out with them and returned a few moments later. He shook his head angrily and asked, “Why do homicide victims invariably have parents like that?”
“How does it strike you?” Dyer asked.
He shrugged and admitted, “It seems to fit slick as a whistle. I never was satisfied with Riley’s identification of the soldier’s picture as Towne’s victim, but I had an idea all the time he’d seen something down by the river Tuesday afternoon.”