“Oh, I just notice lots of things,” the sheriff said. “It’s a habit a man gets when he’s been fooling around with crime as long as I have. You see, George, I never had a chance to study up on all this fingerprint business, and things of that sort, and because I don’t do so good on those things I have to keep up on other stuff. I always felt that you have to know and understand people in order to make a good officer. It’s easier to understand people than it is to understand all this scientific stuff about whorls and loops. Now, Beryl isn’t going to be mixed up in any murder, and you know it.”
“She’s mixed up in one now,” Quinlan said dejectedly.
Bill Eldon shook his head. “I thought that was Roy’s cigarette case,” he said, “so I went to a telephone and in place of telephoning the coroner’s office or the Gazette and locating you myself, I telephoned Beryl and told her about wanting to get hold of you, and about finding this cigarette case down there, and that we wanted you to fingerprint it. So then I went back where I could watch, and waited to see what happened.”
“What was the object in doing that?”
“I wanted to see whether Beryl knew where the cigarette case was. I was very careful to tell her that I found it in the Higbee place and describe it to her, but I didn’t tell her where in the Higbee place I’d found it.”
“And what did she do?”
“Did just what I thought she’d do,” the sheriff said. “Drove down there.”
“And then what did you do?”
“Watched her.”
“You didn’t stop her?”
“No. I saw Beryl drive down, stop her car, open the gate, get in, drive up to the old Higbee place and then she had to do quite a bit of looking around before she found what she wanted.
“Then I watched her drive out and close the gate behind her. I really thought she’d taken the cigarette case with her, but she was too smart for that. She’d just wiped the fingerprints off of it and left it.”
“She had no right to do that,” Quinlan said.
“She didn’t, for a fact,” the sheriff admitted cheerfully, “but I thought it was best to let her play it that way.”
“Why?”
“Because then she’d go to Roy Jasper and get him to tell her just exactly what had happened, and he’d tell her where he wouldn’t tell either you or me. All I had to be certain of was that Beryl hadn’t been in the house when the cigarette case had been dropped. She proved that to me when she had to fumble around looking for it. If she’d gone right to the kitchen where the cigarette case had been left, I’d have had to stop her when she drove out and ask her questions. I’d have hated to do it, too, because Beryl’s such a nice girl.”
Quinlan was having difficulty in adjusting himself to these new developments. “Then you knew before I got there what car it was that had the triangular piece out of the right front tire?”
“Sure.”
“Then why did you have me go through all that business of tearing out a piece of paper and all that?”
“Well, George,” the sheriff said, “I sort of wanted to see what you’d do. That’s why I gave you that triangular piece of paper to keep. I thought perhaps...”
“Don’t think for a minute I wasn’t tempted,” Quinlan interrupted bitterly. “I even went so far as to tear out a substitute piece of paper. But when it came to a showdown I couldn’t use it.”
“I know,” the sheriff said soothingly. “Well, let’s go out to the auto camp and see what’s happening. I’ll call my house first.” Sheriff Eldon called his house. Then, when the answer came, his face winced with displeasure. “Hello, Doris,” he said. “Where’s Merna? Is she there?... I see... Well, take a message for her, will you? Tell her that I want her to start looking through the personal mention in the back issues of the papers beginning about six or seven months ago and see if she can find some mention of an Elvira Dow. I think she...”
The sheriff was interrupted by a burst of high-pitched staccato noises which came rattling over the wire with the insistent stridency of static on a radio.
Slowly the look of annoyance on his face faded to a whimsical smile. “All right, Doris,” he said, “I guess it’s a good thing to have a gossip in the family after all.”
He hung up and grinned at Quinlan. “Looks as though we’re getting somewhere, George. That was the old Human Encyclopedia, my sister-in-law, who sticks that long nose of hers into more different business of more different people than you’d ever suspect. She was visiting here when old Higbee died, and she eagerly devoured all the scandal about his common-law marriage to his housekeeper, and all the stink that was raised. Elvira Dow was the nurse who lived at the house for about ten days after Marvin Higbee had his stroke. She was with him up until the time of his death.”
“Then this girl who was murdered was...”
“Elvira Dow’s daughter. Put that together with the fact that people were zigzagging back and forth around the house looking for something, and we begin to get an answer. We...”
The telephone rang sharply. Eldon answered it, listened to the harsh tones of a rasping voice, and said, “So what?” After an interval he slammed the receiver back into place.
Quinlan looked at him questioningly.
“Rush Medford,” the sheriff said. “He’s down at your place. Your wife told him Beryl got a call a few minutes ago and then jumped in her whoopee and went tearing out.”
Quinlan groaned. “And I suppose he suspects me!”
Eldon grinned. “Come on, son. Kinda looks as though we gotta move fast.”
10
The little group in the cabin at the Stanwood Auto Court talked in low voices.
“All right, Roy,” the sheriff said, “I think it’s your move.”
Roy Jasper shifted his position uneasily. “I didn’t want Beryl to know about this,” he said. “I suppose I was foolish. After all, there was no reason why... Oh well, it would have meant explaining and...”
“Go ahead,” the sheriff said.
“It began last week,” Roy said, “when I was in San Rodolpho on official business. I ate in a cafeteria and... well, the cashier was a good-looking blonde, and I got to passing the time of day with her. I told her I was from Rockville and that I certainly hated to be so close to home without going on up to see my friends, and she laughed and wanted to know whether it was friends, plural, or a friend, singular, and we got to chatting.”
“Then what?”
“Well, then she asked me about whether I knew Marvin Higbee, and I told her he was dead, and she asked a few questions about the place, and I told her something about the lawsuit. Well...” Roy hesitated.
“Go ahead,” the sheriff said.
“Well, I could see this girl kept wanting to talk about Higbee, and finally she told me the story. Her mother nursed Higbee during his last illness, and then in Colorado her mother became critically ill and sent for the daughter. The daughter was there for a couple of days before the mother died, and the mother told her that Higbee had said to her in effect, ‘If anything happens and I shouldn’t pull through, you’ve got to do something for me. He’ll pay you for it and pay you well — make him pay. I told him he’d have to pay,’ but he wouldn’t tell her any more than that, just that she’d be paid well for what she was to do. He’d had a stroke and it had paralyzed one side. Then the day before he died, he had another stroke and knew he wasn’t going to make it. The nurse could see that he wanted to tell her something very badly, but there was always someone else in the room. No one trusted anyone else, people were waiting, watching. The housekeeper kept flitting around, and the doctor was there, in and out, and Carlotta, the man’s favorite sister, was there almost constantly, and business associates kept standing around.