“I see. All right. Well then, I guess that’s that. Good-by.”
Brandon hung up the telephone, turned to Selby and said, “Too late again.”
“What happened?”
“Carr rang up the judge at seven-thirty this morning, told him there’d been some trouble with the surety bond and talked the judge into making a new order for one thousand dollars’ cash bail. Carr had a local attorney on the ground with the cash within ten minutes of the time the new bail order was made. Frank Grannis walked out of jail over an hour ago. With the stakes Carr’s playing for, a thousand dollars is a drop in the bucket. He’ll toss that away and think nothing of it. We’ll never find Grannis. Not now.”
Brandon slumped down in the chair. “Damn the guy. He always seems to be one jump ahead of us.”
Selby, snuggling the warm bowl of his pipe in his hand, started walking the floor, from time to time putting the pipe to his mouth for a few thoughtful puffs.
“Now,” he said, “the thing begins to make a pattern we can follow and understand. Darwin Jerome, intensely jealous, driving like a madman, trying to beat Moana Lennox back to Madison City, hits a cyclist on a lonely, deserted section of the road across the sand dunes from Yuma to El Centro.
“We can probably give him credit for having stopped to investigate. He found he’d killed a Mexican cyclist and that there was nothing he could do by way of giving aid. So he got back in his car and speeded on toward Madison City.
“He got there and waited for Moana. He found her driving with a man who actually was a stranger; but Darwin was hurt and jealous and thought that man had followed them and was the real reason Moana had jilted him. He knew that this man had been over the same road he had traveled, and he knew that Moana would never dare to come forward and give him an alibi. In order to do that she’d have to ruin her reputation. So Darwin did a clever thing as far as he’s concerned. He knew the motel where Grannis was staying. He waited until he was certain Grannis was asleep, then he took an iron bar, dented a fender and broke off a piece from the right headlight lens, being as silent as possible. Then he drove back to the place where the accident had occurred. It was probably daylight by that time, so he had no trouble finding the place. He dropped the piece from Grannis’s headlight by the body, where it was certain to be found, and then telephoned the sheriff’s office at El Centro that there was a dead man over in the dunes, and gave the approximate mileage.
“By that simple expedient Jerome put Moana in a spot, got out of his own difficulty, and put a potential rival in jail.
“Moana’s conscience bothered her. She went to A. B. Carr. Carr is a clearinghouse for criminal cases. He saw a chance to clear up some case that had been bothering him, by tying it onto Moana’s case. Now then, Rex, I think the murder is connected with that other case and I think we’re only going to solve the murder when we find out what that case was.”
“How can we find out?”
“It’s a case Rose Furman was working on. She was a detective. We’ve found out she was working on two cases but both of those apparently were closed. She could have had other cases. Something that was pretty close to home as far as old A. B. Carr was concerned.”
Brandon said, “I’m with you all the way, Doug, except that I go a lot further. I think she was working on a case involving Carr, and I think Carr knew about it, and I think he made an appointment to meet Moana and Daphne Arcola, and then when he found out Rose Furman was following him, he slipped a knife into her back and...”
“Wait a minute,” Selby said. “How do we know, Rex, that both of those cases Rose Furman was working on were cleaned up?”
“Well, both clients told us so.”
“And how did they know?”
“They’d received reports from Rose Furman.”
“But had they?”
“What do you mean? She’d left a note in the typewriter in one case and sent a telegram in the other.”
“How do we know she did? We don’t have her signature on either one. There’s a telegram for one thing, and a typewritten note for another. Where are her signatures?”
Brandon came bolt upright in his chair. “Where was that telegram sent from, Doug?”
“Corona. Of course, the assumption is that she sent the telegram, then went to her apartment, wrote the letter, and then started back for Madison City. But that letter could have been written in her apartment and the telegram sent later on from Corona as she was on her way back to Madison City. Now the question is, what brought her back?”
“A. B. Carr,” Brandon said positively.
“Let’s investigate and see what we can find out,” Selby said. “First rattle out of the box, let’s find out from Corona about the person who sent that wire. It may have been a man.”
“What’s holding us back?” Brandon said enthusiastically. “Now we’re on the right track.”
“You have some pictures of Rose Furman?”
“That’s right. Come on, let’s get started.”
They went pell-mell down the Courthouse steps.
Harry Elrod, The Blade reporter, came running toward them. “What is it, boys?” he asked. “Have you got a tip?”
They ignored him, but pushed on through the back door of the Courthouse into the official parking space.
Elrod, running along behind, shouted, “Hey, what’s it all about? What’s...”
They jumped into the sheriff’s car. The doors slammed.
Elrod made a dash for his own car, climbed in, and started the motor.
The sheriff, watching out of the corner of his eye, said, “This is going to be good. We’ll let him try to follow us.”
He gunned the powerful motor into life, switched on the red spotlight, and threw on the siren. “I don’t ordinarily go in for all this fanfare of trumpets, Doug,” he said, with a quiet grin, “but if that reporter wants to follow me in the jalopy The Blade provides as transportation for its reporters, he’s going to have quite a ride.”
The car rocketed through town, passed frozen traffic at the street intersections, out onto the main highway toward Los Angeles, and then settled down to steady, throbbing speed.
From time to time Brandon glanced in the rear-view mirror, then finally relaxed with a smile. “He probably thought we were going some place in town. When we took him out on the main highway he was hopelessly lost. Probably bogged down in the traffic.”
Brandon adjusted himself more comfortably in the driver’s seat, gave attention to driving the car until he screamed into Corona.
The telegraph operator in the railroad station in Corona remembered the occasion of the wire perfectly.
“It was a girl,” he said. “A young woman. A cute, red-haired girl with a nice figure.”
Brandon’s face fell. “You’re sure she’s the one?”
“That’s right.”
“How was the wire written?” Selby asked. “In handwriting, or...”
“No, it had been written on a typewriter. I remember that. I can dig into the files and find it, I guess. It was all written on a typewriter. I’m certain of that.”
“This the woman?” Brandon asked, showing him Rose Furman’s picture.
“I think it was. Of course, it’s hard to tell. There’s something sort of... yes, I think it was. Of course, her red hair doesn’t show in the picture, and... yes, I guess it’s the woman all right.”
“Well,” Brandon said to Selby, “I guess that knocks that theory into a cocked hat.”
They thanked the telegraph operator, started back to the county car.
“Hang it,” Brandon grumbled. “I thought we were on the right track. We must have...”