“Detective Cass in there?” Saxon asked.
The man said, “I’m Cass.”
Saxon held out his hand. “My name’s Ted Saxon. I talked to you on the phone from Iroquois on New Year’s Day.”
The look of polite inquiry on Everett Cass’s face faded. Examining the outthrust hand with contempt, he made no move to grip it. “Yeah, we read about you in yesterday’s paper,” he said coldly.
Flushing, Saxon let his hand drop to his side. In an equally cold voice he said, “You a cop or a judge, Cass?”
The man stared at him.
“You’ve declared me guilty on the basis of what you read in the paper, have you? Who took you off the force and put you on the bench?”
The detective frowned. “What’s eating you, Saxon?”
“Your attitude. That rape charge was a frame, and the reason I’m here is to get evidence to prove the frame. What right have you to look at me as if I were some kind of dirt when you don’t know one damned thing about the case?”
After gazing at him for a while, Cass said, “Okay, you’ve made your point. What do you want?”
Saxon let himself simmer down. In a more normal tone he said, “I assume that when you picked up Grace Emmet here, she got the usual felony-suspect treatment, didn’t she? Prints and mug shots?”
The detective nodded. “Both. After she was killed in that auto accident, Buffalo called us for her prints to identify the body, and we sent them a set.”
“I know. I’d like to see her mugs.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Is there any rule against it?”
Everett Cass shrugged. “I guess not. Come along to Records.”
At the Records desk he asked for the mug shots of Grace Emmet. After a search, the clerk brought over a double photograph showing both front and profile views of the woman.
Saxon looked at it for a long time The blonde poodle cut was the same and there was a similar roundness to the face and a fullness of lips. But aside from that, the pictures bore no resemblance to the woman Sergeant Harry Morrison had left at the Iroquois jail for an hour.
Saxon had never before in his life seen the woman who was pictured.
“Can I get a copy of this?” he asked.
Detective Cass looked at him. “What for?”
“Because this isn’t the woman I’m accused of raping,” Saxon said. “The Buffalo sergeant who picked up Grace Emmet here rang in a substitute when he got to Iroquois. I told you it was a frame.”
Cass stared at the picture, then back at Saxon. “You mean the Buffalo cop passed off somebody else as Grace Emmet at your jail?”
“You’re beginning to get the picture. How about a copy of the mugs?”
“Sure,” Cass said, his attitude suddenly changing to one of puzzled friendliness. “Why’d he pull a thing like that?”
“To frame me out of my job,” Saxon said. “It’s too long a story to go into. If you’ll get me my copy of the mugs, I’ll get going back to Iroquois.”
They had to wait twenty minutes for a print to be run off from the negative. Saxon got started back toward Iroquois at 4 P.M.
Chapter 20
At five-fifteen Saxon pulled into Ben Foley’s driveway. He rang the bell.
“Hello, Ted,” Foley said. “Come on in.”
Stepping into the entry hall, Saxon removed his hat but made no move to take off his coat. “What time do you eat on Sunday?” he asked.
Foley looked surprised. “Usually not until about seven. Why? You hungry?”
“I just didn’t want to disturb your dinner. Get your coat on and we’ll take a run over to Arn Kettle’s.”
Foley’s eyebrows shot up. “You must have found whatever it was you rushed off after.”
“I certainly did.”
They took Saxon’s car.
Joanne Kettle answered the door and told them her husband was in his study.
“That’s the only quiet place in the house on Sunday afternoons,” she said as she took their coats and hats.
Saxon could see what she meant. The Kettles had two teen-age girls, and apparently both had invited over all their friends. A hi-fi was playing in the front room and a dozen teen-agers were doing some kind of tribal dance in which the partners stood apart from each other, in some cases back to back, and shuffled their feet. It wasn’t the twist, with which Saxon was familiar. This seemed to be some new craze.
He followed Ben Foley down the hall to the study. Arnold Kettle opened the door at Foley’s knock. The noise from the front room followed them inside but abruptly ceased when Kettle closed the door.
“I had this soundproofed,” the district attorney explained. “It was either that or get rid of the kids, and nobody will take the monsters. Cocktail?”
Saxon was too impatient to announce his discovery to be interested in a drink. Foley, as curious as Saxon was impatient, declined too.
“All right,” Kettle said, settling back in his chair. “What’s the big news?”
Saxon laid the front and profile views of Grace Emmet on the desk. Picking it up, the D.A. first read the printing beneath the pictures, then studied the photographs.
He looked up with a puzzled frown. “This says Grace Emmet.”
“I know,” Saxon said. “I just got it from the Erie police. They mugged and printed her when they picked her up.”
“But it isn’t Grace Emmet.”
“Sure it is, Arn. The woman you questioned in jail wasn’t Grace Emmet.”
Kettle stared at him. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said slowly. “Who in the devil was she?” He handed the double photograph to Foley. “Look at this.”
After examining it, Foley laid it back on the desk. “It doesn’t mean anything to me. I never saw the woman in jail.”
“That’s right,” Kettle remembered. “But a number of other people did. Jenny Waite, Doc Harmon, Verne Dowling, who was on the desk. We can blow this frame wide apart. Who was she, Ted?”
“I suspect it was Morrison’s friend, Ann Lowry,” Saxon said. “That must be why they got so excited when I got on her trail. If I had ever seen her, the whole plot would founder. Not only would the frame be uncovered, but Sergeant Harry Morrison would be arrested for murder.”
“Of course,” Kettle breathed. “The accident that killed Grace Emmet was rigged. It had to be.”
Saxon said, “One thing I couldn’t understand about the frame from the beginning was how they set it up so quickly. Morrison didn’t know until the previous night that Grace Emmet had been captured in Erie, and didn’t know until that day that she had waived extradition and he was supposed to go after her. They only had a matter of hours to make plans and line Coombs up as a witness. Yet it was the sort of thing that would require careful advance planning and detailed rehearsal by the actors for it to work.”
“I felt that way, too,” Kettle agreed. “That’s why at first I couldn’t see it as a frame.”
“I think it was planned days in advance. Ten days beforehand it was generally known around town that I’d be on duty New Year’s Day. How the news got from Iroquois to Larry Cutter, I don’t know. Possibly from Adam Bennock, if our new mayor is in cahoots with Cutter. At any rate, I think plans were all made and the actors had been thoroughly rehearsed before the Emmet woman was ever captured. I don’t believe she was included in the original plan.”
Ben Foley said frowningly, “I don’t think I follow that.”
“It’s simple enough, Ben. I think the original plan was for Ann Lowry to come to Iroquois and get herself arrested on some charge. Possibly soliciting in one of the local taverns, since that was her normal trade and a check with Buffalo would probably show a previous record of such offenses. They would want an offense that was plausible, yet would not get her into too much trouble. After she was jailed, Sergeant Morrison would drop in on some pretext just in time to be a witness when she yelled rape. Coombs, of course, would already be in a cell as a second witness. But when Morrison learned he had to go to Erie after Grace Emmet that night, he had a brilliant idea. There weren’t any photographs of the Emmet woman, and her features in the composite drawing vaguely resembled Ann Lowry’s. Their hair color and styles were totally different, but that was easily remedied. He had Ann cut her long red hair in the same style Grace Emmet wore hers and dye it blonde. I imagine Ann followed Morrison to Erie in a second car. After picking up his prisoner in Erie, Morrison forced her to change clothes with Ann. You know, I wondered about that at one point New Year’s Eve.”