Selby nodded, started dressing.
The sheriff settled himself in a chair, pulled a cloth sack of tobacco from his pocket, and started rolling a cigarette. His face, grizzled by years spent in the saddle during the time he had been a cattleman, was crinkled with lines of character which made little calipers at the corners of his mouth, crow’s-feet out from his eyes, giving him an expression of whimsical good nature.
“What is this body?” Selby asked, getting into his clothes. “Is this a murder?”
“Looks like it,” Brandon said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have got you up.”
“Where’s Otto Larkin, the chief of police?”
“I don’t know, probably on the job. He’s going to be tickled to death that this case is within the city limits, so he can strut around and be important. However, I left word that nothing was to be touched and I think that the officer was properly impressed by what I said.”
“Larkin will probably wait for us,” Selby said, lacing his shoes. “He’s been co-operating with us — lately.”
He finished with his shoes, picked up his hat and a flashlight, said, “Let’s go.”
They walked down to the big county car. Brandon said apologetically, “I should have taken a look first, Doug, before I got you out of bed. It may not be anything at all, but from the way it was described to me, I thought it was a case we were going to have to work on, and...”
“Now don’t start explaining or apologizing,” Selby said, grinning. “You know darned well, Rex, that when we’re working on a case which may develop into a trial, I want to have a look at the evidence while it’s on the ground.”
“Well, from all I can gather, this is that kind of a case,” Brandon said. “Of course, I got the dope over the telephone. Interesting bit of psychology there, Doug. The man who made the discovery was on the city police force. He telephoned in to headquarters and then he telephoned me.”
“The officer himself?”
“The officer himself,” Brandon said, smiling. “As far as I know, the night deputy on duty up at the Courthouse hasn’t heard a word yet from police headquarters.”
“Who was it who notified us?” Selby asked.
“Frank Bassett. You remember he worked on that case involving the unidentified corpse in the auto court, and he seems to be a good man. He’s more interested in getting cases solved than he is in trying to grab credit, and that means a lot.”
Selby laughed and said, “It certainly does mean a lot. You don’t encounter that attitude very often. I’ll bet Larkin will have fits when we show up, and he hasn’t as yet given orders to have us notified.”
Brandon grinned. “We’ll have to protect Bassett, of course,” and then swung the car around the corner, slowed down and eased into the graveled driveway of the park, where a sign said, “Orange Park — Madison Agricultural Station — Limit Twenty Miles per Hour.”
Headlights reflected from the white-graveled driveway, giving a brilliant illumination. Then the car came to a barrier in the middle of the driveway, indicating that the road was closed to all traffic.
A big, rawboned man in police uniform, moving with the easy grace of an athlete, stepped out of the shadows, recognized the county car, said, “Hello, Sheriff. How are you, Mr. Selby?”
Selby got out and Bassett, moving close to Brandon, said in a low voice, “I haven’t told the Chief...”
“It’s okay, Frank,” Brandon said. “We’ll protect you.”
“The Chief’s over there with the body,” Bassett said.
They started walking across the grass, then paused as a flashlight blazed into their faces for a moment, then was extinguished. A voice said, “Well, well, Sheriff Brandon and Doug Selby!”
There was surprise in the voice.
Brandon said, in his slow, cowboy drawl, “Hello, Larkin. What’s the trouble?”
“How did you get here?” Larkin demanded, and then added as an afterthought, “so soon.”
“Heard the road was blocked, and that you had something down here,” Brandon said. “What seems to be the trouble, Larkin?”
Larkin hesitated a moment, as though he would have liked to ask further questions, but could hardly see his way clear to doing so. “Body of a young woman over here,” he said. “Evidently a stabbing job. I haven’t touched the body. I’m waiting for the coroner, but I’ve been looking around a bit.”
“Okay, let’s take a look,” Brandon said cheerfully.
“You must have known it was important in order to get Selby up,” Larkin said, curiosity in his voice.
“Why, sure,” Brandon said. “You weren’t trying to keep it a secret, were you, Otto?”
“No, no. I just wondered — how you... how you got here so quick.”
“Oh, we’re fast workers,” Brandon said. “Where is she?”
“Over here.”
They followed the path of Otto Larkin’s flashlight along the grass, moistened slightly by evening dew, to the place where suddenly, out of the darkness, a huddled shape absorbed the circle of light.
“I’m waiting for Harry Perkins, the coroner,” Larkin explained. “But you can see the stab wound in the back there, right between the shoulder blades. It isn’t a messy job, but it must have been right clean to the heart, because apparently she died instantly.”
Larkin waited for a question, and when there was none, added with considerable self-importance, “Now, the reason I know she died instantly is because of the bloodstain on the back of her jacket. You can see that it’s just about evenly distributed around the wound. Now, if she’d been standing up for any length of time after she was stabbed, I figure the blood would have dropped down and there would have been stains on the back of her skirt. There aren’t any. The stains are all around the blouse and the jacket, and that’s all.
“She must have been conscious when she fell, because she flung out her hands in front of her. That’s why the left arm is doubled under and her face is lying on the left arm.”
“Any tracks?” Brandon asked.
“Well, now,” Larkin said, “when you come right down to it you can’t find a track. She’s out here on the grass where you can’t expect to find any tracks. Of course, the gravel driveway won’t help any, but there’s a strip of dirt between the driveway and the lawn and I’ve looked along there pretty carefully. You can’t see a thing.”
“What do you suppose she was doing off this far from the driveway?” Brandon asked. “She must be sixty feet from the driveway.”
“Well, the way I reconstruct what happened,” Larkin said, self-importantly, “is that she was out here on some sort of a necking party, sitting out here with her boy friend, and something happened and he just stabbed her. He was sitting over on the left-hand side, and he reached his right hand around back of her, as though he were just going to put his arm around her, and then suddenly stabbed. That would make the wound come slanting toward the left.”
“And then,” Brandon said, “she’d have pitched forward on her face. That right?”
“That’s right.”
“And what about her legs?”
“Well, they would have sort of straightened out.”
“In that event,” Brandon said, “the skirts would have remained in position as the legs stretched out, and that would give the effect of having the skirts up. This girl is lying with her skirts neatly smoothed out, just as though she’d been walking and had suddenly pitched forward on her face.”
“Or,” Larkin said, reluctant to give up his theory, “the man could have sort of straightened her out.”
“He could have,” Brandon said dryly.
The sheriff moved his flashlight around in probing scrutiny. His eyes, accustomed to reading trail on the range, took in every minute detail that was left, even to the grass which had been tramped down by Otto Larkin, and was now slowly straightening.