"Yes, Ben, I saw them," he said. "They went past around a quarter after seven this morning, hitting it up."
"They?" I asked, while Rolly asked: "Them?"
"There was a man and a woman-or a girl-in it. I didn't get a good look at them-just saw them whizz past. She was driving, a kind of small woman she looked like from here, with brown hair."
"What did the man look like?"
"Oh, he was maybe forty, and didn't look like he was very big either. A pinkish face, he had, and gray coat and hat."
"Ever see Mrs. Carter?" I asked.
"The bride living down the cove? No. I seen him, but not her. Was that her?"
I said we thought it was.
"The man wasn't him," he said. "He was somebody I never seen before."
"Know him again if you saw him?"
"I reckon I would-if I saw him going past like that."
Four miles beyond Whidden's we found the Chrysler. It was a foot or two off the road, on the left-hand side, standing on all fours with its radiator jammed into a eucalyptus tree. All its glass was shattered, and the front third of its metal was pretty well crumpled. It was empty. There was no blood in it. The deputy sheriff and I seemed to be the only people in the vicinity.
We ran around in circles, straining our eyes at the ground, and when we got through we knew what we had known at the beginning-the Chrysler had run into a eucalyptus tree. There were tire-marks on the road, and marks that could have been footprints on the ground by the car; but it was possible to find the same sort of marks in a hundred places along that, or any other, road. We got into our borrowed car again and drove on, asking questions wherever we found someone to question; and all the answers were: No, we didn't see her or them.
"What about this fellow Baker?" I asked Rolly as we turned around to go back. "Debro saw her alone. There was a man with her when she passed Whidden's. The Bakers saw nothing, and it was in their territory that the man must have joined her."
"Well," he said, argumentatively; "it could of happened that way, couldn't it?"
"Yeah, but it might be a good idea to do some more talking to them."
"If you want to," he consented without enthusiasm. "But don't go dragging me into any arguments with them. He's my wife's brother."
That made a difference. I asked:
"What sort of man is he?"
"Claude's kind of shiftless, all right. Like the old man says, he don't manage to raise nothing much but kids on that farm of his, but I never heard tell that he did anybody any harm."
"If you say he's all right, that's enough for me," I lied. "We won't bother him."
XV.I've Killed Him
Sheriff Feeney, fat, florid, and with a lot of brown mustache, and district attorney Vernon, sharp-featured, aggressive, and hungry for fame, came over from the county seat. They listened to our stories, looked the ground over, and agreed with Rolly that Gabrielle Collinson had killed her husband. When Marshal Dick Cotton-a pompous, unintelligent man in his forties-returned from San Francisco, he added his vote to the others. The coroner and his jury came to the same opinion, though officially they limited themselves to the usual "person or persons unknown," with recommendations involving the girl.
The time of Collinson's death was placed between eight and nine o'clock Friday night. No marks not apparently caused by his fall had been found on him. The pistol found in his room had been identified as his. No fingerprints were on it. I had an idea that some of the county officials half suspected me of having seen to that, though nobody said anything of that sort. Mary Nunez stuck to her story of being kept home by chills. She had a flock of Mexican witnesses to back it up. I couldn't find any to knock holes in it. We found no further trace of the man Whidden had seen. I tried the Bakers again, by myself, with no luck. The marshal's wife, a frail youngish woman with a weak pretty face and nice shy manners, who worked in the telegraph office, said Collinson had sent off his wire to me early Friday morning. He was pale and shaky, she said, with dark-rimmed, bloodshot eyes. She had supposed he was drunk, though she hadn't smelled alcohol on his breath.
Collinson's father and brother came down from San Francisco. Hubert Collinson, the father, was a big calm man who looked capable of taking as many more millions out of Pacific Coast lumber as he wanted. Laurence Collinson was a year or two older than his dead brother, and much like him in appearance. Both Collinsons were careful to say nothing that could be interpreted as suggesting they thought Gabrielle had been responsible for Eric's death, but there was little doubt that they did think so.
Hubert Collinson said quietly to me, "Go ahead; get to the bottom of it;" and thus became the fourth client for whom the agency had been concerned with Gabrielle's affairs.
Madison Andrews came down from San Francisco. He and I talked in my hotel room. He sat on a chair by the window, cut a cube of tobacco from a yellowish plug, put it in his mouth, and decided that Collinson had committed suicide.
I sat on the side of the bed, set fire to a Fatima, and contradicted him:
"He wouldn't have torn up the bush if he'd gone over willingly."
"Then it was an accident. That was a dangerous road to be walked in the dark."
"I've stopped believing in accidents," I said. "And he had sent me an SOS. And there was the gun that had been fired in his room."
He leaned forward in his chair. His eyes were hard and watchful. He was a lawyer cross-examining a witness.
"You think Gabrielle was responsible?"
I wouldn't go that far. I said:
"He was murdered. He was murdered by— I told you two weeks ago that we weren't through with that damned curse, and that the only way to get through with it was to have the Temple business sifted to the bottom."
"Yes, I remember," he said without quite sneering. "You advanced the theory that there was some connecting link between her parents' deaths and the trouble she had at the Haldorns'; but, as I recall it, you had no idea what the link might be. Don't you think that deficiency has a tendency to make your theory a little-say-vaporous?"
"Does it? Her father, step-mother, physician, and husband have been killed, one after the other, in less than two months; and her maid jailed for murder. All the people closest to her. Doesn't that look like a program? And"-I grinned at him-"are you sure it's not going further? And if it does, aren't you the next closest person to her?"
"Preposterous!" He was very much annoyed now. "We know about her parents' deaths, and about Riese's, and that there was no link between them. We know that those responsible for Riese's murder are now either dead or in prison. There's no getting around that. It's simply preposterous to say there are links between one and another of these crimes when we know there's none."
"We don't know anything of the kind," I insisted. "All we know is that we haven't found the links. Who profits-or could hope to profit-by what has happened?"
"Not a single person so far as I know."
"Suppose she died? Who'd get the estate?"
"I don't know. There are distant relations in England or France, I dare say."
"That doesn't get us very far," I growled. "Anyway, nobody's tried to kill her. It's her friends who get the knock-off."
The lawyer reminded me sourly that we couldn't say that nobody had tried to kill her-or had succeeded-until we found her. I couldn't argue with him about that. Her trail still ended where the eucalyptus tree had stopped the Chrysler.
I gave him a piece of advice before he left:
"Whatever you believe, there's no sense in your taking unnecessary chances: remember that there might be a program, and you might be next on it. It won't hurt to be careful."
He didn't thank me. He suggested, unpleasantly, that doubtless I thought he should hire private detectives to guard him.
Madison Andrews had offered a thousand-dollar reward for information leading to discovery of the girl's whereabouts. Hubert Collinson had offered another thousand, with an additional twenty-five hundred for the arrest and conviction of his son's murderer. Half the population of the county had turned bloodhound. Anywhere you went you found men walking, or even crawling, around, searching fields, paths, hills, and valleys for clues, and in the woods you were likely to find more amateur gumshoes than trees.
Her photographs had been distributed and published widely. The newspapers, from San Diego to Vancouver, gave us a tremendous play, whooping it up in all the colored ink they had. All the San Francisco and Los Angeles Continental operatives who could be pulled off other jobs were checking Quesada's exits, hunting, questioning, finding nothing. Radio broadcasters helped. The police everywhere, all the agency's branches, were stirred up.
And by Monday all this hubbub had brought us exactly nothing.
Monday afternoon I went back to San Francisco and told all my troubles to the Old Man. He listened politely, as if to some moderately interesting story that didn't concern him personally, smiled his meaningless smile, and, instead of any assistance, gave me his pleasantly expressed opinion that I'd eventually succeed in working it all out to a satisfactory conclusion.
Then he told me that Fitzstephan had phoned, trying to get in touch with me. "It may be important. He would have gone down to Quesada to find you if I hadn't told him I expected you."
I called Fitzstephan's number.
"Come up," he said. "I've got something. I don't know whether it's a fresh puzzle, or the key to a puzzle; but it's something."
I rode up Nob Hill on a cable car and was in his apartment within fifteen minutes.
"All right, spring it," I said as we sat down in his paper-, magazine-, and book-littered living room.
"Any trace of Gabrielle yet?" he asked.
"No. But spring the puzzle. Don't be literary with me, building up to climaxes and the like. I'm too crude for that-it'd only give me a bellyache. Just spread it out for me."
"You'll always be what you are," he said, trying to seem disappointed and disgusted, but not succeeding because he was-inwardly-too excited over something. "Somebody-a man-called me up early Saturday morning-half-past one-on the phone. He asked: 'Is this Fitzstephan?' I said: 'Yes;' and then the voice said: 'Well, I've killed him.' He said it just like that. I'm sure of those exact words, though they weren't very clear. There was a lot of noise on the line, and the voice seemed distant.