“I’ll have bail and be out of your damned jail within twenty minutes of the time you put me in,” Carr said angrily.
“I don’t think you can do it under half an hour,” Brandon told him. “It’s going to take a little while to book you and fingerprint you, you know. And since you’re on such friendly terms with the press, perhaps you’d like to call in your publisher friend to write up the story. He might like to make some reference to the fact that at last we’ve found the genuine stolen jewelry. Come on, Carr.”
Carr hesitated.
Brandon pulled handcuffs from his belt. “Are you coming the easy way, or the hard way?”
Carr looked at Brandon’s grim face and suddenly smiled. “Why certainly, Sheriff. I’ll come the easy way, of course. Naturally you have the power to do this, if you want to take the chances.”
“I’m taking the chances,” Brandon told him. “You’re going to jail. You may get yourself out in half an hour, but you’re sure as hell going to jail.”
23
In Brandon’s office the next morning the two compared notes.
Sheriff Brandon, grinning gleefully, said, “You certainly said a mouthful when you said you never won anything by being on the defensive, and that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Lord knows, though, I hate to think what would have happened if Carr hadn’t had those jewels.”
“We sure took a chance,” Selby admitted, “but from a political standpoint we were dead pigeons if we hadn’t done something of the sort... You can begin to get a picture now, Rex.”
“Well,” Brandon conceded, “we’re getting parts of the puzzle which begin to fit together, but it’s not any picture yet.”
“It’s darn close to a picture,” Selby said. “Carr was using Moana, and at the same time making her pay for it. He was getting her out of some scrape, but that shrewd devil was smart enough, and cunning enough, to plan to kill two birds with one stone.”
Brandon said, “Keep talking, Doug.”
Selby thought for a few moments, then said, “I think Moana got herself into some sort of a scrape. I think that she went to Carr. I think that Carr saw a heaven-sent opportunity to clean up something else that was bothering him. In the person of Moana Lennox he had a young woman of good family whose word would be taken as gospel in any case...”
There was a knock at the door of Brandon’s private office.
“What is it?” Brandon asked.
A deputy said, “Horace Lennox is out here and his sister Moana is with him. He says that it’s very important they see you at the earliest possible moment.”
“I’ll say it’s important,” Selby grinned. “Rex, it looks as though this is the break we’ve been waiting for.”
Brandon nodded. “Tell them to come in and then see that we’re not disturbed for a while. No matter what happens don’t let anyone else in.”
The deputy nodded, withdrew, and a moment later ushered Horace and Moana Lennox into the office.
Horace said, as soon as the door was closed, “I’m not going to waste any time with preliminaries, gentlemen. My sister told me a story and as soon as I heard it, I knew that it was something she should tell you. I’ve had some difficulty in getting her to come up here, and I may say that no one — no other member of the family — knows that we’re here, or knows Moana’s story.”
“We were just speculating about what Moana’s story must be,” Brandon said. “Suppose you sit down and tell us, Moana.”
Horace and his sister sat down. “Go ahead, Moana,” Horace said.
She looked him over with the hard, green eyes of a trapped animal. There was no sign of tears or of lids swollen from crying. She was still a gambler, still looking for the breaks, and the only reason she was surrendering was because she could find no other alternative. A hard little schemer, brought to bay, she sized them up with the cold eyes of a professional fighter searching for an opening.
“Go ahead, Moana,” Horace urged.
She said, “The only reason that I’m telling you this is because... because I have to.”
“I can well understand that,” Brandon said, studying her face.
She said, “I went to A. B. Carr. I wanted him to protect me. He’s messed everything all up. Now he expects me to clear him.”
“What did you consult him about? Why did you go to see him?” Horace asked. “Go ahead, tell these men the story just as you told it to me.”
She said, “I don’t know whether you gentlemen know anything about my family background. My mother has made a fetish of respectability. Well, I guess I didn’t do so good. Things happened that I just didn’t want Mother to know anything about. It all started back in July when Darwin Jerome and I were going to get married. I knew Mother wouldn’t approve and I just didn’t care. I decided to run away with Darwin and get married.
“He fixed things all up. We told Mother that we were going up to spend the week end with Connie Kerry, and Connie, knowing what we were planning to do, agreed to front for us so that it would appear we were up there, until I could send Mother a telegram announcing that I was Mrs. Darwin Jerome...” She hesitated for a moment, and the look of calculating defiance left her eyes as she contemplated the misty memories of that July night.
“Go on,” Horace said impatiently.
She said, “I’ve always been very fond of Darwin, but he’s a heel. I knew he had weak points but he was likable and sophisticated in his whole attitude toward life. He wanted me to take a chance that I wouldn’t take, a chance I couldn’t take.”
“What?” Selby asked.
“On the road to Yuma it turned out that he was already married. He’d married a girl in France when he was overseas. He told me that he knew it would be all right, and that he could send her money and she’d get a French divorce. He was perfectly willing to go ahead and marry me there in Yuma, but I had visions of what would happen. That French girl would learn he had married again. She’d make trouble and... well, you can see what a position I’d be in. The bride of a bigamist — no binding ceremony — and somehow I had an idea that that might be a very bad position to be in with Darwin Jerome. A girl who is going to toss everything away in order to marry Darwin wants to be darn certain she’s got him, and that he’s tied up good and tight legally.”
“So what did you do?” Brandon asked.
She said, somewhat regretfully, “Oh, well, I let my head dominate my heart. I told him nothing doing. I told him to take me back home, and... well, he wanted me to spend the night in Yuma and we had an argument, and that was that. We separated.”
“Then what?” Horace prompted.
“Then,” she said, “I was in a fix. I simply had to get back, and I had to get where I could communicate with Connie and tell her what had happened. I could have taken the bus, but I knew Darwin would be down at the bus station looking for me. I just left him flat. I started to hitchhike.
“I walked across the bridge over the river into California and saw a lot of cars lined up at the California checking station. I just stood around as though waiting for the car in which I was riding to be cleared. Finally I saw a man with whom I thought I could take a chance. A nice-looking young fellow who was all alone. I walked up to him and... well, anyway, he gave me a ride. He was Frank Grannis.
“Frank Grannis was a perfect gentleman. Naturally I wasn’t foolish enough to tell him any of my story or to give him a name. I told him that I had to get to Los Angeles to see about a job, and that I had to be there by nine o’clock in the morning in order to land the job. It was quite a line I handed him. He had planned to stop in Brawley all night, but after he heard my story he decided that he’d keep on driving.”