Erie Stanley Gardner
Two Clues
Part One
The Clue of the Runaway Blonde
1
Cold afternoon sunlight made a carpet of long shadows back of the eucalyptus trees along the road as Sam Beckett opened the gate of the old Higbee place and drove his tractor into the eighty-acre field.
Things had been moving swiftly. Only the night before, the Higbee heirs had finally quit squabbling long enough to agree on a selling price. John Farnham, the realtor, had made a hurried trip to see Beckett the next morning. Within a few hours, Beckett had gone over the property again, and the heirs had signed on the dotted line, the money went into title escrow, and Sam turned his horses into the Higbee place to pasture. Now he was starting plowing. He’d work until midnight, or longer, if he didn’t get too sleepy.
Out in the center of the field the old homestead was hemmed in by big shade trees. The dirt road ran to it in a diagonal fine from the gate. But Beckett had no use for the big rambling house. It would cost more to fix it up than it was worth.
He lowered the plow and started up the tractor. As he plowed up roads and green-sod with utter impartiality, the rich black soil rolled out in smooth billowing streams. The welcome smell of moist, fertile earth filled his nostrils.
Low, sullen clouds drifted by overhead and to the east. Only in the west, where a wind from the ocean was temporarily pushing back the heavy clouds, was there a strip of blue sky. And the setting sun, glinting through under the clouds, turned the lower dragging wisps of moisture to a reddish purple which held a trace of orange, a color peculiar to wintry sunsets in Southern California.
The monotony of the tractor’s motor, the steady strain of watching the furrow, lulled Sam Beckett into a state of half-hypnotism where minutes marched by unnoticed.
The long shadows dissolved in dusk. Sam Beckett switched on the headlights and kept going. His eyes were fixed on the strip between grass and plowed earth, keeping it lined up just to the left of the right front wheel.
The chill night air flowed past his legs and stung his cheeks. His hands grasped the wheel until the knuckles felt numb, but his eyes remained automatically fixed on that slowly moving strip of ground, green on one side, black on the other.
The horses he had let out to pasture seemed unusually restless, because of the new environment, the green grass and the springy soil, perhaps. They galloped and snorted, chasing each other around the field. At times they plunged over into the heavy going of the plowed land.
Over at Beckett’s place a cow was pleading for the return of her calf, an intermittent, mournful bellowing repeated at regular intervals.
Sam Beckett paid no attention to these things. He kept himself absorbed with his plowing, grinding steadily around the field, turning neat, straight furrows.
Somewhere back of the clouds was a moon, a day or so past the full. After it came up, enough light filtered through the cloud-bank to disclose the weird outlines of objects in a colorless, ghostly world.
Something over there on the right looked like a sack of potatoes.
Sam Beckett jerked his head, rubbed his eyes, looked again. Then he pushed out the clutch and reduced the motor to idling speed. He climbed stiffly down from the seat and stumbled over the furrows toward the object, expecting it to disappear at any moment, an optical illusion of the night and the fatigue of too much work. But the object didn’t disappear. As Beckett approached, it seemed darker and more solid. Beckett saw a pair of high-heeled shoes, legs, a skirt, somewhat disarranged — and then he was kneeling by the side of the limp body of a young woman lying face down in the freshly plowed earth.
“Hey!” Beckett shouted, his ears dulled by the after-noise of the tractor engine. “What’s the matter?”
He touched her. She was warm to his touch, but there was a peculiar, inanimate lack of response, and Beckett suddenly withdrew his hand.
The hand felt sticky and seemed dark in the weak moonlight filtering through the cloud-bank.
Abruptly, Sam Beckett found himself running back toward the tractor. He climbed to the seat, raised the plow, and turned the tractor around. Opening the throttle, he started jolting and lurching over the freshly plowed furrows toward the gate, his mind trying to shake off the weariness of his physical fatigue, trying to adjust itself to this startling development.
Even then, it didn’t occur to him to notice the exact time.
Sheriff Bill Eldon finished the office work on his desk, rolled a cigarette, and settled back in the creaky swivel chair to glance through the paper before going home. Occasionally he worked nights at his office in the courthouse, and he always remained late if his wife’s sister, Doris, was a visitor at the house. Doris was there tonight.
The sheriff could get along all right with Doris because he made it a rule to get along all right with everyone. But he was careful to take her in small doses. Doris felt that her brother-in-law was far too “easygoing,” and she lost no chance to air her convictions. She had a suspicious nature, a hard, driving personality. Her shrewd, glittering little eyes were as impudently appraising as those of a blue-jay, and her tongue was constantly in motion.
The passing years had turned the sheriff’s hair white. They had accented his slow drawl and his whimsical sense of humor. These things were a constant source of irritation to his energetic sister-in-law, who thought a man should have some “git-up-an’-git” to him. Of late, she had been referring to him as “the old man” whenever she had occasion to mention him. This was on an average of a dozen times an hour.
The sheriff skimmed through the headlines of the Gazette. The Higbee heirs had worked out a partial compromise, he noticed, by which title could be conveyed to the old homestead. It was reported that a sale was in process of negotiation.
Bill Eldon knew that the purchaser must be Sam Beckett, who owned the eighty acres directly across from the Higbee place.
The sheriff browsed through the front page, turned to the inside page and read the “Personal Mention Column” with that detailed knowledge of the community which enabled him to get a great deal more news out of the column than was actually printed. He noticed that Elsie Farnham had gone to the city for a visit, and the sheriff’s brow puckered. That meant she and John had split up. Elsie’s visit would be duly announced as a separation after a few weeks. Ever since she...
The telephone rang.
Mechanically, Eldon reached for it, picked it up and said, “Hello,” before it dawned on him that in all probability this was his sister-in-law calling to tell him that it was high time for him to come home; that if the County expected him to work overtime, the County should pay him for it; that he was too easygoing anyway and people were always taking advantage of him; that...
“Hello! Sheriff!” The man’s voice was excited. “This is Sam Beckett. There’s a dead woman down at my place!”
“Who is she?”
“Don’t know.”
“How long she been dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“How did she die?”
“I think somebody stuck a knife into her. I just found her.”
The sheriff said, “Don’t touch anything. I’m coming right out.”
He left the office on the run, climbed in the County car and drove rapidly down Chestnut Street, which paralleled Main Street. He didn’t use the siren. To cronies, he sometimes explained that using sirens in a small city was mostly “showing off.” He said that you could make just as good time by taking the side streets and driving steadily and carefully as you could by hitting the main street and scaring everyone to death.