He shook his head doggedly and said, “I promised I was going, I’m going to go. I owe that much to my self-respect. She called me in confidence, and I’ll see what she has to say before I betray that confidence.”
“She’s a little two-faced hypocrite,” Sylvia said savagely. “Every time you’ve come in contact with her you’ve been strung along. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. You should have found that out by this time.”
Selby said simply, “I’m sorry, Sylvia, but I’m going.”
Her lip quivered. She glanced beseechingly at Rex Brandon.
The sheriff shook his head, sucked on his brown-paper cigarette and exhaled a thin wisp of pale blue smoke from the corner of his mouth.
“No use, sister,” he said. “He’s going.”
Selby started for the door. He looked back, to see Sylvia Martin’s pleading eyes, then he closed the door.
Chapter XVIII
Doug Selby knocked at the door of five fifteen, then, without waiting for an answer, pushed the door open.
Shirley Arden was coming toward him. She was alone in the room.
He closed the door behind him, stood staring at her.
“Well?” he asked.
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be.”
“I am. I shouldn’t have believed Ben. Ben is excitable and suspicious. But you know how it looked to him.”
“I’m listening,” Selby said.
She came close to him, put her hands on his shoulders. Eyes which had thrilled millions of picture fans stared into his with compelling power.
“Am I forgiven?” she asked.
“That depends,” he told her.
“Depends on what?”
“Depends on what you say and how you say it.”
“What do you want me to say?” she asked... “Oh, please, please. I don’t blame you for being angry with me, but after all it was such a shock, and Ben’s explanation sounded so logical.”
“That I’d done it as a publicity stunt?”
“Yes. And to drag me into it. He insisted that you were back of the leak to the newspapers. He warned me you’d string me along, but that you’d try to drag me into it so you could get the big news syndicates interested, focus a lot of publicity on yourself, and capitalize on it politically.”
“Yes,” he said bitingly, “you can see how much I’ve capitalized on it. Trying to play square with you is going to make me the laughingstock of the whole county.”
She nodded and said contritely, “I realized that when I heard about The Blade. I came here because I couldn’t go back on you. You’d been square and big and fine and genuine.”
“I presume,” he said, “Ben Trask sent you here and rehearsed you in what you were to say.”
“Ben Trask thinks I’m on an airplane headed for Mexico City to recuperate.”
“Trask was up here the day of the murder?” he asked.
She nodded.
“And the day before?”
Again she nodded.
“Do you suppose his interest in keeping things under cover is selfish?”
She shook her head.
“What’s your hold on George Cushing?” he asked.
She said simply, “He’s my father.”
Selby’s face showed his surprise. “Your what?” he asked.
“My father. He kicked me out to shift for myself when I was eleven. After I made fame and riches, he hunted me out.”
“And how about this preacher?” he asked.
She motioned him to a chair.
“I’m going to tell you the truth,” she said. “I don’t care what happens. I don’t care what my father or Ben Trask think.”
“Go on,” he told her.
“No one knows very much about my past,” she said. “The fan magazines carry a synthetic story every once in a while about my having been raised in a convent, which is a lie. I was raised in the gutter.”
He stared at her in steady, watchful scrutiny.
“When I was seventeen,” she said, “I was sentenced to a reform school as an incorrigible. If I’d gone to the reform school, I’d have been incorrigible. But there was one man who had faith in me, one man who saw the reason for my waywardness.”
“You mean Larrabie?” Selby asked.
“Yes. He was a minister who was taking a great interest in human welfare work. He interceded with the judge and managed to get me paroled for a year. He made me realize I should have some ambition, that I should try to do something for myself. At the time, I thought a lot of what he said was just the old hooey, but I was impressed enough by him and cared enough for him so I tried to make good. Four years later I was an extra in Hollywood. Those four years had been four years of fight. I’d never have stuck it out, if it hadn’t been for his letters, for his steady, persistent faith, for the genuine, wholehearted goodness of the man.”
“Go on,” he told her.
“You know what happened after that. I played extra parts for a year. Then I had a minor speaking part. A director thought I showed promise and saw that I had a lead in a picture.”
He nodded.
“Last week Larrabie telephoned me,” she said. “He said he had to see me right away, that he couldn’t come to Hollywood because of a matter which demanded his attention here. He told me he needed five thousand dollars — in fact, he told me that over the telephone.
“I went to the bank and drew out five thousand dollars in five one-thousand-dollar bills. I came up here. He had a scenario he wanted to sell. It was entitled Lest Ye Be Judged. You know how hopeless it was. I explained to him that I didn’t have anything to do with the purchase of pictures. It was, of course, founded on my life story.”
“Then what?”
“Then he told me what he wanted with the five thousand dollars. A very close friend of his, a man by the name of Brower, was in a financial jam. Larrabie had promised to get him the money. He’d been working for months on that scenario. He thought it was a masterpiece. He felt that with me to give it a good word he could easily sell it for five thousand dollars. I told him to forget the scenario and gave him the five thousand dollars. I told him to consider it as a loan.”
“That was all?”
“That was all.”
“Did he tell you why he was registered here under the name of Brower?”
“He said he was working on some business deal and the man for whom he was working told him the thing must be kept under cover. He said he’d written the man from Riverbend, and the man had telephoned him, told him that it would be dangerous to come here and register under his right name; that the thing to do was to come here without anyone knowing he was here and register under a fictitious name.”
“Did he tell you any more about that?” Selby asked.
“He said the man asked him if he’d told anyone about having written. Larrabie said he hadn’t. Then the man said that was fine and to come here without letting a soul know — not even his wife. Poor Larrabie thought it would be less wicked to register under the name of someone else than it would to use a purely fictitious name. So he took Brower’s identity — borrowed his driving license and wallet. Brower was in hiding, afraid he’d be arrested for embezzling some church money or something. He was waiting in Los Angeles to hear from Larrabie.”
“Larrabie said he’d written a letter to the man he was to meet here?”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t tell you who the man was?”