A moment later she opened the front door. Her blue eyes were dark and excited. She had on a rose bathrobe.
"You needn't have bothered," the district attorney said. "There was nothing special. We got separated from him a little while ago, and just wanted to know if he'd got back yet. He's all right."
"Was-?" Her hands worked folds of her bathrobe over her thin breasts, "Was he after-after Harvey-Harvey Whidden?"
Vernon didn't look at her when he said, "Yes;" and he said it without showing his teeth. Feeney and Rolly looked as uncomfortable as Vernon.
Mrs. Cotton's face turned pink. Her lower lip trembled, blurring her words.
"Don't believe him, Mr. Vernon. Don't believe a word he tells you. Harve didn't have anything to do with those Collinsons, with neither one of them. Don't let Dick tell you he did. He didn't."
Vernon looked at his feet and didn't say anything. Rolly and Feeney were looking intently out through the open door-we were standing just inside it-at the rain. Nobody seemed to have any intention of speaking.
I asked, "No?" putting more doubt in my voice than I actually felt.
"No, he didn't," she cried, turning her face to me. "He couldn't. He couldn't have had anything to do with it." The pink went out of her face, leaving it white and desperate. "He-he was here that night-all night-from before seven until daylight."
"Where was your husband?"
"Up in the city, at his mother's."
"What's her address?"
She gave it to me, a Noe Street number.
"Did anybody-?"
"Aw, come on," the sheriff protested, still staring at the rain. "Ain't that enough?"
Mrs. Cotton turned from me to the district attorney again, taking hold of one of his arms.
"Don't tell it on me, please, Mr. Vernon," she begged. "I don't know what I'd do if it came out. But I had to tell you. I couldn't let him put it on Harve. Please, you won't tell anybody else?"
The district attorney swore that under no circumstances would he, or any of us, repeat what she had told us to anybody; and the sheriff and his deputy agreed with vigorous red-faced nods.
But when we were in the Ford again, away from her, they forgot their embarrassment and became manhunters again. Within ten minutes they had decided that Cotton, instead of going to San Francisco to his mother's Friday night, had remained in Quesada, had killed Collinson, had gone to the city to phone Fitzstephan and mail the letter, and then had returned to Quesada in time to kidnap Mrs. Collinson; planning from the first to plant the evidence against Whidden, with whom he had long been on bad terms, having always suspected what everybody else knew-that Whidden was Mrs. Cotton's lover.
The sheriff-he whose chivalry had kept me from more thoroughly questioning the woman a few minutes ago-now laughed his belly up and down.
"That's rich," he gurgled. "Him out framing Harve, and Harve getting himself a alibi in _his_ bed. Dick's face ought to be a picture for Puck when we spring that on him. Let's find him tonight."
"Better wait," I advised. "It won't hurt to check up his San Francisco trip before we put it to him. All we've got on him so far is that he tried to frame Whidden. If he's the murderer and kidnapper he seems to have gone to a lot of unnecessary foolishness."
Feeney scowled at me and defended their theory:
"Maybe he was more interested in framing Harve than anything else."
"Maybe," I said; "but it won't hurt to give him a little more rope and see what he does with it."
Feeney was against that. He wanted to grab the marshal pronto; but Vernon reluctantly backed me up. We dropped Rolly at his house and returned to the hotel.
In my room, I put in a phone-call for the agency in San Francisco. While I was waiting for the connection knuckles tapped my door. I opened it and let in Jack Santos, pajamaed, bathrobed, and slippered.
"Have a nice ride?" he asked, yawning.
"Swell."
"Anything break?"
"Not for publication, but-under the hat-the new angle is that our marshal is trying to hang the job on his wife's boy friend-with homemade evidence. The other big officials think Cotton turned the trick himself."
"That ought to get them all on the front page." Santos sat on the foot of my bed and lit a cigarette. "Ever happen to hear that Feeney was Cotton's rival for the telegraphing hand of the present Mrs. Cotton, until she picked the marshal-the triumph of dimples over mustachios?"
"No," I admitted. "What of it?"
"How do I know? I just happened to pick it up. A fellow in the garage told me."
"How long ago?"
"That they were rival suitors? Less than a couple of years."
I got my San Francisco call, and told Field-the agency night-man-to have somebody check up the marshal's Noe Street visit. Santos yawned and went out while I was talking. I went to bed when I had finished.
XVII.Below Dull Point
The telephone bell brought me out of sleep a little before ten the following morning. Mickey Linehan, talking from San Francisco, told me Cotton had arrived at his mother's house at between seven and seven-thirty Saturday morning. The marshal had slept for five or six hours-telling his mother he had been up all night laying for a burglar-and had left for home at six that evening.
Cotton was coming in from the street when I reached the lobby. He was red-eyed and weary, but still determined.
"Catch Whidden?" I asked.
"No, durn him, but I will. Say, I'm glad you jiggled my arm, even if it did let him get away. I-well, sometimes a fellow's enthusiasm gets the best of his judgment."
"Yeah. We stopped at your house on our way back, to see how you'd made out."
"I ain't been home yet," he said. "I put in the whole durned night hunting for that fellow. Where's Vern and Feeney?"
"Pounding their ears. Better get some sleep yourself," I suggested. "I'll ring you up if anything happens."
He set off for home. I went into the cafй for breakfast. I was half through when Vernon joined me there. He had telegrams from the San Francisco police department and the Marin County sheriff's office, confirming Fitzstephan's alibis.
"I got my report on Cotton," I said. "He reached his mother's at seven or a little after Saturday morning, and left at six that evening."
"Seven or a little after?" Vernon didn't like that. If the marshal had been in San Francisco at that time he could hardly have been abducting the girl. "Are you sure?"
"No, but that's the best we've been able to do so far. There's Fitzstephan now." Looking through the cafй door, I had seen the novelist's lanky back at the hotel desk. "Excuse me a moment."
I went over and got Fitzstephan, bringing him back to the table with me, and introducing him to Vernon. The district attorney stood up to shake hands with him, but was too busy with thoughts of Cotton to bother now with anything else. Fitzstephan said he had had breakfast before leaving the city, and ordered a cup of coffee. Just then I was called to the phone.
Cotton's voice, but excited almost beyond recognition:
"For God's sake get Vernon and Feeney and come up here."
"What's the matter?" I asked.
"Hurry! Something awful's happened. Hurry!" he cried, and hung up.
I went back to the table and told Vernon about it. He jumped up, upsetting Fitzstephan's coffee. Fitzstephan got up too, but hesitated, looking at me.
"Come on," I invited him. "Maybe this'll be one of the things you like."
Fitzstephan's car was in front of the hotel. The marshal's house was only seven blocks away. Its front door was open. Vernon knocked on the frame as we went in, but we didn't wait for an answer.
Cotton met us in the hall. His eyes were round and bloodshot in a face as hard-white as marble. He tried to say something, but couldn't get the words past his tight-set teeth. He gestured towards the door behind him with a fist that was clenched on a piece of brown paper.
Through the doorway we saw Mrs. Cotton. She was lying on the blue-carpeted floor. She had on a pale blue dress. Her throat was covered with dark bruises. Her lips and tongue-the tongue, swollen, hung out-were darker than the bruises. Her eyes were wide open, bulging, upturned, and dead. Her hand, when I touched it, was still warm.
Cotton, following us into the room, held out the brown paper in his hand. It was an irregularly torn piece of wrapping paper, covered on both sides with writing-nervously, unevenly, hastily scribbled in pencil. A softer pencil had been used than on Fitzstephan's message, and the paper was a darker brown.
I was closest to Cotton. I took the paper, and read it aloud hurriedly, skipping unnecessary words:
"Whidden came last night . . . said husband after him . . . frame him for Collinson trouble . . . I hid him in garret . . . he said only way to save him was to say he was here Friday night . . . said if I didn't they'd hang him . . . when Mr. Vernon came Harve said he'd kill me if I didn't . . . so I said it . . . but he wasn't here that night . . . I didn't know he was guilty then . . . told me afterwards . . . tried to kidnap her Thursday night . . . husband nearly caught him . . . came in office after Collinson sent telegram and saw it . . . followed him and killed him . . . went to San Francisco, drinking whiskey . . . decided to go through with kidnapping anyway . . . phoned man who knew her to try to learn who he could get money from . . . too drunk to talk good . . . wrote letter and came back . . . met her on road . . . took her to old bootleggers' hiding place somewhere below Dull Point . . . goes in boat . . . afraid he'll kill me . . . locked in garret . . . writing while he's down getting food . . . murderer . . . I won't help him . . . Daisy Cotton."
The sheriff and Rolly had arrived while I was reading it. Feeney's face was as white and set as Cotton's.
Vernon bared his teeth at the marshal, snarling:
"You wrote that."
Feeney grabbed it from my hands, looked at it, shook his head, and said hoarsely.
"No, that's her writing, all right."
Cotton was babbling:
"No, before God, I didn't. I planted that stuff on him, I'll admit that, but that was all. I come home and find her like this. I swear to God!"
"Where were you Friday night?" Vernon asked.
"Here, watching the house. I thought-I thought he might— But he wasn't here that night. I watched till daybreak and then went to the city. I didn't-"
The sheriff's bellow drowned the rest of Cotton's words. The sheriff was waving the dead woman's letter. He bellowed:
"Below Dull Point! What are we waiting for?"
He plunged out of the house, the rest of us following. Cotton and Rolly rode to the waterfront in the deputy's car. Vernon, the sheriff, and I rode with Fitzstephan. The sheriff cried throughout the short trip, tears splashing on the automatic pistol he held in his lap.