The coroner shook his head.
Selby looked through other clippings. One of them, from a fan magazine, listed the motion picture actors and actresses in the order of their popularity. Another one gave what purported to be a tabulation of the gross earnings of the various stars during the preceding year.
A second pocket in the brief case contained a sheaf of typewritten papers. Evidently the typewriting had been done on the minister’s portable typewriter. It was a ragged job filled with crossed-out words and strike-overs. The district attorney noticed that at the top of page one appeared a title reading “Lest Ye Be Judged.” There followed a story written in laborious, pedantic style. Selby started to wade through the story. Despite himself, it was impossible for him to read without skipping whole paragraphs at a time. It was the story of an old, irascible judge, entirely out of sympathy with the youth of the day, who had passed a harsh judgment upon a delinquent girl who had come before him. The judgment had been entirely without understanding and without mercy. The girl, declared to be an incorrigible, had been sentenced to a reformatory, but friends rallied to her support, led by a man whose status was not entirely clear. He was referred to as a lover of humanity.
The district attorney, searching the manuscript for some clew which would indicate this man’s love might have had a more personal focal point, became lost in a maze of pointless writing. He finally gathered that the man was much older; that his love was, in fact, really impersonal. The girl took up the study of medicine in the second chapter and became a noted surgeon before the third.
In chapter three, the judge’s granddaughter, suffering with a brain tumor, was taken to the “greatest specialist in the world,” and when the judge, tears streaming down his face, called to plead with the surgeon to do his best, he found that the surgeon was none other than the girl he had sentenced as an incorrigible.
There were several pages of psychological explanations, the general purport of which was that the girl had been filled with a certain excess of vitality, a certain animal energy which required a definite ambition upon which to concentrate. The man who had saved her had been shrewd enough to place her in school and to dare her to accomplish the impossible. The very difficulty of the task had served to steady her.
“What’s it about?” the coroner asked, when the district attorney had turned over the last page.
“It’s a proof of the old axiom,” Selby said, grinning.
“What axiom?”
“That there lives no man with soul so dead, who hasn’t tried to write a picture scenario.”
“That what it is?”
“That’s what it was probably intended to be.”
“I’ll bet you he figured on going down to Hollywood to peddle that scenario.”
“If he did,” Selby pointed out, “he certainly made a peculiar detour. He was sneaking into Hollywood by the back way.”
There were no further papers in the brief case. The district attorney closed it and the coroner taped and sealed it.
Once more Selby went into the suitcase.
“There aren’t any laundry marks on any of those clothes,” the coroner said. “Not even on his starched collars. Ain’t that a little peculiar?”
Selby nodded.
“Probably the first trip he’d made with these clothes,” he said, “or he’d have had them laundered somewhere. And he couldn’t have been away from home very long. Also, he must have a very efficient wife who’s a hard-working housekeeper. That all indicates a ministerial background.”
Selby inspected the small pasteboard box containing a long roll of paper in which five-grain tablets had been folded.
“This the sedative?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And one of these tablets wouldn’t have brought about death?”
“Not a chance,” the coroner said. “I’ve known people to take four of them.”
“What did cause death then?”
“Probably a bad heart. A double dose of this stuff might have helped bring on the heart attack.”
“You have Dr. Trueman check carefully on that heart attack,” Selby instructed. “I want to know, absolutely, what caused this man’s death.”
The coroner fidgeted uneasily, finally said, “I wonder if you’d mind if I gave you a little advice, Douglas.”
“Go ahead, Harry, dish it out,” Selby said with a smile, “and I’ll try and take it.”
“This is your first case,” the coroner said. “You seem to be trying to make a murder case out of it. Now I wouldn’t go putting the cart before the horse. There’s a lot of sentiment against you in this county, and a lot of it for you. The people who are for you put you in office. The people who are against you hate to have you in office. You go along without attracting any great amount of attention for a month or two, and pretty quick people will forget all about the political end of things. Then those who hated you will be smiling and shaking hands when they see you on the street. But, you get off on the wrong foot, and it’s going to hurt. Your enemies will be tickled to death and you’ll lose some of your friends.”
Selby said, “Harry, I don’t care how this thing looks to you, I’m not satisfied with it. There are lots of things about it I’m not satisfied with.”
“You get to looking at dead people through a microscope and you’ll never be satisfied with anything,” the coroner objected. “Things never do check out in real life. I’ve seen lots of deaths that couldn’t be explained; that is, some things didn’t look as though they could possibly fit in with other things. But you learn to take cases for granted, after a while. This guy was registered under a phony name, that’s all. Nothing to get excited about in that — lots of people do it.”
Selby shook his head and laid down what was to be his primary code of conduct during his term of office.
“Harry,” he said, “facts fit. They’re like figures. If you get all the facts, your debit column adds up the same as your credit column. The facts balance with the result and the result balances with the facts. Any time they don’t, it’s because we haven’t all of the facts, and, are trying to force a balance with the wrong figures. Now take that typewritten letter, for instance. It wasn’t written by the same man who wrote the scenario. The typing in the letter is perfect, evenly matched and free of strike-overs. The scenario is a hunt-and-peck affair, sloppy and ragged. Probably they were both written on the same machine, but they weren’t written by the same person. That’s an illustration of what I mean by saying that facts must balance, if they’re going to support theories.”
The coroner sighed. “Well, I told you, anyhow,” he remarked. “Go ahead and make a murder out of it, if you want to. You’ll find it’ll be a boomerang.”
Selby grinned, thanked him, left the mortuary and went at once to the Madison Hotel.
In the manager’s private office Selby had a showdown with George Cushing.
“Otto Larkin,” Cushing said reproachfully, “tells me you’re making a mountain out of a molehill on this Brower case, Selby. I didn’t think you’d do that to me.”
“I’m not doing it to you, George.”
“Well, you’re doing it to my business.”
“I’m not doing anything to your business. I’m going to find out the facts in this case, that’s all.”
“You’ve already got the facts.”
“No, I haven’t. The facts I’ve had have been wrong. The man isn’t Charles Brower.”
“Oh, that,” Cushing said, with a wave of his hand, “that frequently happens. Lots of people register under assumed names for one reason or another, and sometimes, if people happen to have a friend’s card in their pockets, they’ll register under the name of the friend, figuring they can produce the card, if anyone questions them.