The D.A. Breaks a Seal

12

Over a dinner of ground round steak, which was all that the bill-of-fare offered in the way of meat, oven-browned potatoes, salad and two cooked vegetables, Selby studied Sylvia Martin.

“Why the appraisal, Doug?”

Selby said somewhat wistfully, “I don’t like being out of harness, Sylvia. Here you are like a hound on a leash with a hot trail in front of you, and I’m... well, I’m just on the sidelines. I’d like to be in there with you. Makes me realize how much water has run under the bridge.”

“You’ll be back, Doug.”

“Probably not as district attorney,” Selby said.

“No, I suppose not,” she conceded. “You have got away from the district attorneyship. You’ll come back decorated with medals and with a broader background and you’ll be in demand as a trial lawyer to handle big litigation. You’ll get more and more important, put on weight and dignity, become a big corporation lawyer and smile tolerantly at me when I come in to try and get a story on the new hydroelectric plant merger.”

Selby said, “You’d get the story, Sylvia.”

“Yes, I suppose I would. You’d let me in past your secretary’s secretary, past your secretary, into the inner sanctum. You’d be fat and smug and prosperous and you’d tell me that the new deal that had just been made was the most important thing that had happened in the community in years, bringing cheap electric power to the entire district, assuring the community that big factories would take advantage of the new and improved facilities... Doug, does life have to be like that?”

“Like what, Sylvia?”

“Does success have to make for prosperity, and for fat and smugness?”

“I don’t know. Hadn’t thought about it that way.”

“Think of it now, Doug. You’re going to come back here a hero. You’ll succeed in whatever you start out to do. Isn’t there something better than merging hydroelectric plants and being a big corporation lawyer? Can’t you somehow do things that will make for a better world to live in, a world where people will be freer and happier?”

“But the new hydroelectric plant merger will do all that. There’ll be lots of jobs...”

“Jobs!” she interrupted. “Perhaps that’s the trouble. Because of what we went through in the thirties we think too much about jobs and not enough about opportunities.”

Selby said, “Well, I’m not going to quit my office as a prosperous corporation lawyer and fire my secretary and my secretary’s secretary and let that hydroelectric merger go by the board without at least a struggle.”

She smiled at him. “I guess you’d never quit anything without a struggle. Let’s go back to murders and let the hydroelectric merger wait for its proper time in the unfolding history of Madison City and of corporation law.”

They both laughed.

Selby said, “I wish we could get a fine on those two people who got off on the train — I just can’t get that little old woman out of my thoughts.”

“The one with the white gardenia?”

“Yes. She was such a spry, self-contained little thing. She knew just exactly what she was doing and had her own way of doing it. She’d figured her expenses down to the last penny. She probably gave the Pullman car porter a fifteen-cent tip which she had been clutching in her hand for fifteen minutes before he came around to brush her off. And whether she would have added that extra nickel to the dime probably called for quite a bit of careful deliberation.”

“I know the type,” Sylvia said.

“And yet,” Selby went on, “she isn’t just a type. She’s an individual character. She’s something all her own — something that’s as distinctive and American as a country newspaper, but — well, you just can’t imagine her being mixed up in a murder case.”

“You can’t for a fact.”

“And she probably isn’t,” Selby went on. “But she certainly must have some incidental connection with it. I’d give a good deal to know just what’s back of those white gardenias and Carr’s trip to the depot.”

“Well,” she said, “you’ll never find out from A.B.C.”

Selby said musingly, “Let’s suppose that Roff was intending to meet these two people who were coming on the train. Let’s suppose that Roff ordered the white gardenias so that when the train came in he could be on hand to meet the witnesses.”

“Witnesses, Doug?”

“They must have been witnesses,” Selby said. “I can’t place them in any other capacity.”

“Witnesses to what, Doug?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Well, suppose they were witnesses, then what happened?”

“Then A. B. Carr quietly stepped into the picture and went down and scooped them up into his net.”

Sylvia Martin laid her knife and fork carefully down on her plate. “Doug, do you realize what you’re saying?”

“What?”

“That means that Carr must have known Roff was dead and couldn’t come down to meet the train. He must have known that he was perfectly safe in wearing the white gardenia and appearing as the one to whom the witnesses were supposed to report.”

“Conceding they are witnesses,” Selby said.

“But, Doug, that means that Carr is mixed up in that murder, right up to his eyebrows.”

Selby said cautiously, “I’m just talking about Roff at the present time, and his reason for ordering the gardenia.”

“Keep talking, Doug.”

“When you put two and two together,” Selby went on, “Carr’s story about what happened to those two passengers from the train is rather elastic so far as the time element is concerned.”

“Trust old A.B.C. for that,” Sylvia said. “If he gives you an explanation, he’ll make it sound logical while he’s talking to you, but after you get away from him, you’ll find he’s left himself a hundred loopholes to crawl through.”

“Let’s suppose that he picked the two people up at the train; that he drove directly to the bus depot; that he was there for perhaps five or ten minutes; that he came out and started looking through the restaurants trying to find Anita Eldon. There’s still quite a bit of time that isn’t accounted for. And I don’t think Carr could have learned at the bus depot that the party he wanted had gone to some restaurant unless she’d left some message for him. No one there would have known...”

“What are you getting at, Doug?”

“I’m wondering,” Selby said, “if perhaps Carr’s search for his client didn’t include a visit to the hotel.”

“Well, suppose it had?”

Selby said, “It’s quite possible that while he was there he might have seen Henry Farley.”

“Then you think Farley really did the poisoning?”

“I don’t know,” Selby said thoughtfully. “I’m just trying to reconstruct Carr’s moves. I...”

They heard hard steps marching down the corridor between booths. Selby raised himself so he could see over the partition and said, “It’s Rex. He looks mad all over.”

Brandon caught Selby’s signal, came over to join them.

“Well?” Sylvia Martin asked.

“No comment,” Brandon said.

Her face flushed. “You mean that you aren’t going to tell me...”

“No,” Brandon said. “I’m quoting her exact words. ‘No comment.’ ”

“She wouldn’t tell you about the phone call!” Selby exclaimed incredulously.

“That’s right.”

“Not a thing about it?”

“Just ‘No comment.’ That was all she had to say.”

Selby’s face showed the extent of his shocked surprise. “I simply can’t believe it, Rex.”

“Did you tell her about what we’d discovered?” Sylvia asked.

“I told her that I wanted to know about a conversation she had over the telephone with Fred Albion Roff last night. She pretended she didn’t know what I was talking about, so then I flashed the record on her, and told her that he’d talked with her office for twenty minutes; that he’d checked out of his hotel and taken an early bus to Madison City, gone to the hotel, registered, and been murdered; that I was investigating the murder and I wanted to know everything I could about a possible motive.”

“And then what?”

“She listened until I’d finished talking, started to say something, then caught herself, thought for a minute, and looked me square in the eyes and said, ‘No comment.’ ”

“What did you do?” Selby asked. “Come on in and sit down, Rex, and have something to eat.”

“No thanks. I’m going home. Dinner’s waiting for me there.”

“Well, sit in and have a cup of coffee...”

“No thanks. You’ve got things to talk about, and my missus is waiting for me. Just thought I’d tell you.”

“I can’t believe it,” Selby said.

“I guess I got mad,” the sheriff admitted. “I told her a thing or two. At first I really couldn’t believe my ears, but she got mad and I got mad.”

“Was anyone with her?” Selby asked.

“A woman — nice-looking woman somewhere around sixty-odd. She didn’t introduce me.”

“Motherly type with white hair?” Selby asked.

“Yes. Why?”

“Do you suppose the presence of this woman had anything to do with her refusal to give you any information?”

“I don’t see how it could have,” the sheriff said, “and even if it had, it didn’t need to cramp her style that bad. She could have told the woman to go out to the other office and wait a minute, or else she could have taken me out there. Before I started talking, I gave her every opportunity to get rid of the client, told her I had something I wanted to ask her about, and that I didn’t want to interrupt anything she was doing, but I was in a hurry. But she said to go right ahead, just tell her what it was, so I told her.”

Sylvia said, “Well, she couldn’t have done any worse than that with me. I’m going to interview her myself on behalf of the paper.”

“The way I see it,” Brandon said, “is that she’s either covering up something for somebody, in which event she’s going to get in bad all around, or she learned something from that telephone conversation she’s afraid to have become public.”

“That must be it,” Selby said. “Poor Inez, I guess she’s in something of a pickle.”

“Poor Inez, nothing!” Sylvia stormed. “She knows Rex Brandon well enough so if it had been anything as confidential as that she could have taken him off to one side and told him what it was all about, and told him she didn’t want it to get out, and...”

Selby shook his head. “I’m not so sure. She might have done it if only her interests had been involved, but she’s a lawyer and representing clients.”

“Well,” Brandon said, “I’m going home. She’s made her bed and she can lie in it, as far as I’m concerned. If I find out what that conversation was about I’ll spread it all over...”

“The front pages of the Clarion,” Sylvia finished with a smile, as Brandon hesitated.

Brandon included them both in a lopsided grin. “I’m on my way.”

“Tell your wife I’m going to be up to see her,” Selby said.

“I will. She’ll be looking for you. Bring Sylvia along.”

Sylvia laughed. “I’m a working woman, but if I can make it, I will.”

Brandon’s stiff-backed walk as he left the restaurant showed that he was still angry.

“Let’s get back to those two witnesses,” Selby said. “What has been done to locate them, Sylvia?”

“We’ve covered bus depots and the train, the rooming houses and the hotels, all with no luck.”

“You had a pretty good description?”

“Gosh yes, I could almost draw a picture of them. I certainly looked them over because I wanted to pick up a human interest story if I could.”

Selby said, “Let’s do a little detective work, Sylvia.”

Her eyes twinkled. “I was hoping you’d get around to that.”

Selby grinned. “Let’s start out with a tentative assumption. Let’s assume that Carr’s meeting of those people at the train was not accidental. Let’s assume that Roff had originally intended to meet them. Now, let’s suppose that Roff’s presence here had something to do with that will-contest case.”

“You keep coming back to that case, Doug.”

“That conversation with Inez Stapleton would seem to clinch it, to my mind,” Selby said.

“I suppose so. Of course she could be representing a client with an interest in something else — perhaps that alimony settlement.”

“All I’m getting so far is a working hypothesis,” Selby said. “It may be wrong. It may turn out to be right, but let’s first get certain assumptions that seem to be logical and then state them in an orderly sequence.”

“All right. You’ve made an assumption. It sounds logical. So what comes next?”

“It seems to me that it’s fair to assume that these two people who got off the train and were met by Carr were witnesses to something. In that case, they’re either witnesses favorable to Carr, or witnesses that are unfavorable.” Sylvia nodded.

“The most logical explanation is that they are unfavorable. If they were favorable, Carr wouldn’t have seen they were spirited out of the country. But so far we can’t afford to reach any definite decision on that. We have to consider both possibilities.

“Now, let’s first assume that they were unfavorable witnesses. Then Carr would want to get them out of the country where they couldn’t be reached until after the will-contest case had been decided.

“On the other hand, let’s suppose they were favorable. Then Carr’s logical move would have been to sew up their testimony in the form of an affidavit, and then only take reasonable precautions to see they weren’t tampered with until he was ready to put them on the stand.”

Selby waited for Sylvia’s comment.

“But if they were unfavorable witnesses, Doug, would they have let Carr rush them out of the country?”

“That depends upon whether they appreciated the significance of their testimony.”

“But do you think that Carr could have taken advantage of a murder...”

“Don’t get me wrong on that, Sylvia. All that I am considering is the possibility that Fred Albion Roff was working with old A. B. Carr, that he was to have met a certain train; that perhaps Carr didn’t entirely trust Roff and was keeping an eye on him. Now let’s suppose that Roff was murdered by some person or persons whose identity is unknown. Let’s suppose, just for the sake of the argument, that this waiter, Henry Farley, went back to get the tray of breakfast things and found Roff lying dead on the floor. For obvious reasons, and in view of the man’s record, he didn’t want to be the one to discover the body. And that’s supposing that he had nothing to do with the murder. Now, under those circumstances, what would he have done?”

“You mean he hurriedly left the room, rushed to a telephone, got hold of Carr and told him that he simply had to see him?”

“Something like that. He may or may not have known that Carr and Roff had any connection.”

Sylvia Martin was nodding thoughtful acquiescence.

“So Farley told Carr that Roff was dead. Carr told Farley to keep quiet; that if he were picked up by the police, he was to say nothing, but telephone for Carr; that Carr would then appear, go through the motions of rebuking the man for not having told his story to the police, and make profuse apologies.”

“What would be the idea of all that, Doug?”

“The idea would be that Farley never would have told his story. The police would never have had any statement from him. Carr would go to Brandon, be very apologetic, tell Brandon what Farley’s story would have been if Farley had talked, and then immediately ask for a writ of habeas corpus, and tell Farley that there was no need for him to do any more talking because Carr had already talked for him.”

Sylvia nodded her head. “You’ve convinced me, Doug. What do we do next?”

“In one case,” Selby said, “the witnesses are being held in some outlying hotel. In the other case, they’ve probably been driven to some nearby city and put on a bus for some remote destination. How much gasoline have you got, Sylvia?”

“Enough,” she said, pushing back her plate. “When do we start?”

“Now.”