He wouldn’t tell us where he had spent the night of the murder. We were fairly certain that he had left the train before it reached Los Angeles, though the train crew had been able to tell us nothing.
“Sorry,” he drawled. “But if you chaps don’t know where I was, how do you know that I was where the murder was?”
We had even less luck with Marcus. His formula was:
“Not understand the English very good. Ask the capitaine. I don’t know.”
The district attorney spent a lot of time walking his office floor, biting his finger nails, and telling us fiercely that the case was going to fall apart if we couldn’t prove that either Sherry or Marcus was within reach of the Kavalov house at, or shortly before or after, the time of the murder.
The sheriff was the only one of us who hadn’t a sneaky feeling that Sherry’s sleeves were loaded with assorted aces. The sheriff saw him already hanged.
Sherry got a lawyer, a slick looking pale man with hornrim glasses and a thin twitching mouth. His name was Schaeffer. He went around smiling to himself and at us.
When the district attorney had only thumb nails left and was starting to work on them, I borrowed a car from Ringgo and started following the railroad south, trying to learn where Sherry had left the train. We had mugged the pair, of course, so I carried their photographs with me.
I displayed those damned photographs at every railroad stop between Farewell and Los Angeles, at every village within twenty miles of the tracks on either side, and at most of the houses in between. And it got me nothing.
There was no evidence that Sherry and Marcus hadn’t gone through to Los Angeles.
Their train would have put them there at ten-thirty that night. There was no train out of Los Angeles that would have carried them back to Farewell in time to kill Kavalov. There were two possibilities: an airplane could have carried them back in plenty of time; and an automobile might have been able to do it, though that didn’t look reasonable.
I tried the airplane angle first, and couldn’t find a flyer who had had a passenger that night. With the help of the Los Angeles police and some operatives from the Continental’s Los Angeles branch, I had everybody who owned a plane — public or private — interviewed. All the answers were no.
We tried the less promising automobile angle. The larger taxicab and hire-car companies said, “No.” Four privately owned cars had been reported stolen between ten and twelve o’clock that night. Two of them had been found in the city the next morning: they couldn’t have made the trip to Farewell and back. One of the others had been picked up in San Diego the next day. That let that one out. The other was still loose, a Packard sedan. We got a printer working on post card descriptions of it.
To reach all the small-fry taxi and hire-car owners was quite a job, and then there were the private car owners who might have hired out for one night. We went into the newspapers to cover these fields.
We didn’t get any automobile information, but this new line of inquiry — trying to find traces of our men here a few hours before the murder — brought results of another kind.
At San Pedro (Los Angeles’s seaport, twenty-five miles away) a negro had been arrested at one o’clock on the morning of the murder. The negro spoke English poorly, but had papers to prove that he was Pierre Tisano, a French sailor. He had been arrested on a drunk and disorderly charge.
The San Pedro police said that the photograph and description of the man we knew as Marcus fit the drunken sailor exactly.
That wasn’t all the San Pedro police said.
Tisano had been arrested at one o’clock. At a little after two o’clock, a white man who gave his name as Henry Somerton had appeared and had tried to bail the negro out. The desk sergeant had told Somerton that nothing could be done till morning, and that, anyway, it would be better to let Tisano sleep off his jag before removing him. Somerton had readily agreed to that, had remained talking to the desk sergeant for more than half an hour, and had left at about three. At ten o’clock that morning he had reappeared to pay the black man’s fine. They had gone away together.
The San Pedro police said that Sherry’s photograph — without the mustache — and description were Henry Somerton’s.
Henry Somerton’s signature on the register of the hotel to which he had gone between his two visits to the police matched the handwriting in Sherry’s note to the bungalow’s owner.
It was pretty clear that Sherry and Marcus had been in San Pedro — a nine-hour train ride from Farewell — at the time that Kavalov was murdered.
Pretty clear isn’t quite clear enough in a murder job: I carried the San Pedro desk sergeant north with me for a look at the two men.
“Them’s them, all righty,” he said.
VIII
The district attorney ate up the rest of his thumb nails.
The sheriff had the bewildered look of a child who had held a balloon in his hand, had heard a pop, and couldn’t understand where the balloon had gone.
I pretended I was perfectly satisfied.
“Now we’re back where we started,” the district attorney wailed disagreeably, as if it was everybody’s fault but his, “and with all those weeks wasted.”
The sheriff didn’t look at the district attorney, and didn’t say anything.
I said:
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. We’ve made some progress.”
“What?”
“We know that Sherry and the dinge have alibis.”
The district attorney seemed to think I was trying to kid him. I didn’t pay any attention to the faces he made at me, and asked:
“What are you going to do with them?”
“What can I do with them but turn them loose? This shoots the case to hell.”
“It doesn’t cost the county much to feed them,” I suggested. “Why not hang on to them as long as you can, while we think it over? Something new may turn up, and you can always drop the case if nothing does. You don’t think they’re innocent, do you?”
He gave me a look that was heavy and sour with pity for my stupidity.
“They’re guilty as hell, but what good’s that to me if I can’t get a conviction? And what’s the good of saying I’ll hold them? Damn it, man, you know as well as I do that all they’ve got to do now is ask for their release and any judge will hand it to them.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’ll bet you the best hat in San Francisco that they don’t ask for it.”
“What do you mean?”
“They want to stand trial,” I said, “or they’d have sprung that alibi before we dug it up. I’ve an idea that they tipped off the Spokane police themselves. And I’ll bet you that hat that you get no habeas corpus motions out of Schaeffer.”
The district attorney peered suspiciously into my eyes.
“Do you know something that you’re holding back?” he demanded.
“No, but you’ll see I’m right.”
I was right. Schaeffer went around smiling to himself and making no attempt to get his clients out of the county prison.
Three days later something new turned up.
A man named Archibald Weeks, who had a small chicken farm some ten miles south of the Kavalov place, came to see the district attorney. Weeks said he had seen Sherry on his — Weeks’s — place early on the morning of the murder.
Weeks had been leaving for Iowa that morning to visit his parents. He had got up early to see that everything was in order before driving twenty miles to catch an early morning train.
At somewhere between half-past five and six o’clock he had gone to the shed where he kept his car, to see if it held enough gasoline for the trip.