Brandon looked questioningly at Selby, who nodded.
“I’m going back to the office,” Selby said.
“Got a car?” the sheriff asked.
“Yes, thanks. See you fellows later.”
Chapter III
Douglas Selby cleaned up the more urgent correspondence on his desk, went to a picture show, lay in bed and read a detective story. Reading the mystery yarn, he suddenly realized that it held a personal message for him.
Murder had ceased to be an impersonal matter of technique by which a writer used a corpse merely to serve as a peg on which to hang a mystery. Somehow, the quiet form of the wistful little minister lying in the hotel bedroom pushed its way into his mind, dominated his thoughts.
Selby closed the book with a slap. Why the devil, he thought, was the little minister insidiously dominant in death? In life, the man, with his painfully precise habits, quiet, self-effacing, almost apologetic manner, would never have given Selby any mental reaction other than, perhaps, an amused curiosity.
Selby prided himself upon being a red-blooded, meat-eating fighter. He knew he had gone into the district attorney-ship battle primarily because of the fight involved. It had not been because he wanted to be district attorney. It was most certainly not because he wanted the salary. He had, of course, as a citizen, noticed certain signs of corruption in the preceding administration. He had seen that the taxpayers wanted a change. Nothing had ever been proven against Sam Roper, but plenty had been surmised. There had been ugly rumors which had been gradually magnified until the time had become ripe for someone to come forward and lead the fight. And the fact that Selby had been the one to lead that fight was caused more by a desire to do battle than by any wish to better the county administration.
Selby switched out the light and tried to sleep, but the thought of what he had seen in that hotel bedroom persisted in his mind. Despite himself, he found his mind reviewing the inanimate objects in that room, as though they had been definite clews pointing toward some disquieting conclusion.
He thought of the deductive reasoning of the hero in the detective novel, and the disquieting thoughts became more persistent. He looked at his watch. It was nearly midnight.
He tried to sleep and couldn’t, and even his futile attempt at slumber reminded him of the apologetic little man who had sought to woo sleep with a sedative. At twelve-thirty he put his pride to one side and called Rex Brandon on the telephone.
“Rex,” he said, “you’re probably going to laugh at me, but I can’t sleep.”
“What’s the matter, Doug?”
“I can’t get over that minister.”
“What minister?”
“You know, the one we found in the hotel bedroom.”
“What about him, Doug, what’s the matter?”
“I can’t understand why he should have barricaded the door from the corridor, yet neglected to turn the knob in the door which communicated with the bathroom of three nineteen.”
Brandon’s voice sounded incredulous. “For God’s sake, Doug, are you really worrying about that, or are you kidding me?”
“No, I’m serious.”
“Why, forget it. The man died from an overdose of sleeping medicine. The stuff he was taking was in that pasteboard box. Perkins, the coroner, used to be a druggist, you know. He knew the stuff. This little preacher took too much, and his heart just gave out. It probably would have, sooner or later, anyway. This sleeping medicine just helped things along a bit, that’s all.”
“But why did he barricade his door as well as lock it?”
“He wasn’t accustomed to traveling. Perhaps it’s the first time in years he’d been away from home.”
“But that business of the pants being held in place in the bureau drawer,” Douglas persisted. “That’s an old trick of the veteran traveling salesman. No man who’d never been away from home would have done that.”
The sheriff laughed. “Just to show you how far you’ve missed that bet,” he said, “the man’s wife called up the coroner this afternoon. She’s coming on by plane. She told Perkins Brower carried five thousand in insurance, and she seems to want to collect that in a hurry. She’s due here in the morning. Seems she’s a second wife, been widowed once before. She said her husband hadn’t been feeling well lately and the doctor had advised a complete rest, so he took his flivver to go out camping. He’d been soliciting funds for a new church and had raised almost enough money to start the building, but it had been too much of a strain on him, and his nerves had given way a bit. She thinks he must have had some mental trouble, to wind up here, because he’d never done any traveling to speak of, and only went into Reno about once a year. She said he was frightened to death of that city. So that shows your pants theory is all wet.”
Selby laughed apologetically and said, “I guess it’s because we saw him in the hotel when he rode down in the elevator with us. Somehow, I couldn’t get over the feeling that if there had been... well, you know what I mean, Rex... oh, well, forget it. I’m sorry I bothered you.”
The sheriff laughed and said, “Better take two or three days and go fishing yourself, Doug. That campaign was pretty strenuous for a young chap like you.”
Selby laughed, said perhaps he would, and hung up the telephone. He suddenly snapped the receiver back off the hook to ask, “How much money did she say he’d collected?”
The buzzing sound of the wire made him realize that the sheriff had hung up the telephone.
Selby grinned sheepishly, once more dropped the receiver back on the hook and fought with sleep for an hour. When he finally did relax into slumber, it was a sleep which started with nightmare dreams in which the little parson, his face still dark with death, challenged the detective in the mystery novel to a duel to be fought with portable typewriters and sleeping draughts. This sleep finally merged into a dead stupor, from which Selby emerged to grope mechanically for the jangling telephone.
It was broad daylight. Birds were singing in the trees. The sun was streaming through his windows, dazzling his sleep-swollen eyes. He put the receiver to his ear, said, “Hello,” and heard Rex Brandon’s voice, sounding curiously strained.
“Doug,” he said, “something’s gone wrong. I wonder if you can get over to your office right away?”
Selby flashed a glance at the electric clock in his bedroom. The hour was 8:30. He strove to keep the sleep out of his voice. “Certainly,” he said, making his tone crisply efficient. “It will be about half an hour.”
“We’ll be waiting for you,” Brandon said, and hung up.
Selby wasn’t fully awake until two minutes later, when he sent a needle spray of cold water over his body. Then he realized that he wanted most desperately to know what it was that had gone wrong. But it was too late to ask now. Evidently it had been something Brandon didn’t want to discuss over the telephone.
He gave himself a quick shave, breakfasted on a can of tomato juice, climbed into his car and reached his office on the stroke of nine.
Amorette Standish, his secretary, said, “The sheriff and a woman are in your private office.”
He nodded. Entering his private office, his eyes focused immediately upon a matronly, broad-hipped, ample-breasted woman of some fifty years, whose gloved hands were folded on her lap. Her eyes surveyed him with a certain quiet capability. There was the calm of cold determination about her.
Rex said, “This is Mary Brower, from Millbank, Nevada. She arrived in Los Angeles by plane early this morning and came here on the bus.”
Selby bowed and said, “It’s too bad about your husband, Mrs. Brower. It must have come as very much of a shock to you. I’m sorry there wasn’t any way we could have broken the news gently...”