“Witness that for years Miss Arden has been exceedingly partial to a particular brand of perfume, yet, over night, she suddenly turned against that scent and gave away hundreds of dollars’ worth of it to her stand-in, Lucy Molten.
“Moreover, Miss Arden would have nothing to do with garments which even bore the smell of that perfume. She sent some to be cleaned, gave others away. She ordered her perfumer to furnish her with an entirely new scent which was immediately installed on her dressing table both at home and in the studio.
“I trust that Miss Arden will forgive me for this intimate revelation which, for some reason, she apparently tried to clothe in secrecy. But it’s merely one of those examples of outstanding individuality which mark the true artist.”
Selby looked up into Sylvia Martin’s steady eyes, then reached for the telephone.
“I want to get Shirley Arden, the picture actress, in Hollywood,” he said to the operator. “If I can’t get her, I’ll talk with Ben Trask, her manager. Rush the call. It’s important.”
He slammed the telephone speaker back into its pronged rest. His lips were clamped tightly shut. His face had changed color.
Sylvia Martin looked at him for a moment, then crossed to his side and rested her hand on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Doug,” she said, and proved the extent of her understanding and sympathy by saying nothing more.
Chapter XIII
Events during the next few minutes moved in a swift, kaleidoscopic fashion.
Frank Gordon entered the office, very much excited, to report a shooting scrape down on Washington Avenue.
“You’ll have to go, Gordon,” Selby said. “This will be a good chance for you to break in. Take a shorthand reporter with you and take down everything that’s said, ask the suspect if he wants a lawyer.”
Selby gave Gordon a few more instructions and sent him out. Sylvia smiled across at Selby.
“If cases would only come singly,” she said, “but they don’t.”
“No,” he told her, “they don’t, and this Larrabie case is a humdinger.”
The telephone rang.
“That,” Selby said, squaring his jaw, “will be Ben Trask.”
But it wasn’t Ben Trask, it was Harry Perkins, the coroner, and for once his slow, drawling speech was keyed up to an almost hysterical pitch.
“I want you to come down here right away, Selby,” he said; “there’s hell to pay.”
Selby stiffened in his chair.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “A murder?”
“Murder nothing. It’s ten times worse than a murder,” he said, “it’s a dirty damn dog poisoner.”
For the moment Selby couldn’t believe his ears.
“Come on down to earth,” he said, “and tell me the facts.”
“My police dog, Rogue,” the coroner said, “somebody got him, with poison. He’s at the vet’s now. Doc’s working on him. It’ll be touch and go, with one chance in ten for the dog.”
He broke off with something which sounded very much as though he had choked back a sob.
“Any clews?” Selby asked.
“I don’t know, I haven’t had time to look. I just found him and rushed him down to the veterinary’s. I’m down at Dr. Perry’s hospital now.”
“I’ll come down and see what can be done,” Selby said.
He hung up the telephone, and turned to Sylvia Martin.
“That,” he said, “shows how callous we get about things which don’t concern us, and how worked up we get when things get close to home. That’s Harry Perkins, the coroner. He’s been out on murder cases, suicides, automobile accidents and all forms of violent death. He’s picked up people in all stages of dilapidation, and to him it’s been just one more corpse. Tears, entreaties and hysterics mean nothing to him. He’s grown accustomed to them. But somebody poisoned his dog, and damned if he isn’t crying.”
“And you’re going down to see about a poisoned dog?” Sylvia Martin asked.
“Yes.”
“Good Lord, why?”
“In the first place, he feels so cut up about it, and, in a way, he’s one of the official family. In the second place, he’s down at Dr. Perry’s Dog and Cat Hospital — you know, Dr. H. Franklin Perry, the brother who stands to inherit the money in the Perry Estate if young Herbert Perry loses out.”
“Well?” she asked.
“I’ve never talked with Dr. Perry,” Selby said. “The sheriff’s office found he didn’t know anything about the man who was killed and let it go at that, but somehow I want to take a look at him.”
“Anything except a hunch?” she asked.
“It isn’t even that,” he said, “but, if that morphine was deliberately mixed in with the sleeping tablets, it must have been done by someone who had access to morphine, and who could have fixed up a tablet. Dr. Perry runs a veterinary hospital and...”
“Forget it,” she told him. “That whole thing was a plant, along with the letter. Larrabie never took that sleeping medicine. Not voluntarily, anyway. His wife said he never had any trouble sleeping. Don’t you remember?”
Selby nodded moodily.
“Moreover,” she pointed out, “when it comes to suspicions, you can find lots of people to suspect.”
“Meaning?” he asked.
“Meaning,” she said, “that I’ve never been satisfied with this man Cushing’s explanations.
“In the first place, the way he shields Shirley Arden means that in some way she’s more than just a transient customer who occasionally comes up from Los Angeles. In the second place, he didn’t disclose anything about that five thousand dollars in the safe until pretty late. In the third place, he was so blamed anxious to have it appear the death was accidental.
“Now, whoever wrote that letter and addressed the envelope was someone who didn’t know the man’s real identity. The only thing he knew was what he’d picked up from the hotel register.
“Therefore, the murderer must have been someone who had access to the information on the hotel register. And, aside from what he could learn from that register, he didn’t know a thing about the man he killed. Therefore, he acted on the assumption that his victim was Charles Brower.
“He wanted to make the murder appear like suicide so he wrote that letter and left it in the typewriter. If the man had really been Charles Brower, nothing would ever have been thought of it. The post-mortem wouldn’t have been continued to the extent of testing the vital organs for morphine. And, even if they had found some morphine, they’d have blamed it on the sleep medicine.
“Now the person who would have been most apt to be misled by the registration would have been the manager of the hotel.”
“But what possible motive could Cushing have had for committing the murder?”
“You can’t tell until you find out what the bond is between Cushing and Shirley Arden. I can’t puzzle it all out, I’m just giving you a thought.”
His eyes were moody as he said slowly, “That’s the worst of messing around with one of these simple-appearing murder cases. If someone sneaked into the room and stabbed him, or had shot him, or something like that, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but... Oh, hang it, this case had to come along right at the start of my term of office.”
“Another thing,” she said, “to remember is that the person who wrote the letter, and probably the person who committed the murder, got in there from three nineteen. Now there wasn’t anyone registered in three nineteen. That means the person must have had a passkey.”