The D.A. Breaks an Egg

13

Selby read The Blade aloud to Rex Brandon while the sheriff piloted the big county car over the Los Angeles highway.

“Well,” he said, “we have to read The Blade to find out what Daphne Arcola was doing here. Listen to the statement she made to Harry Elrod. This is in quotes, Rex, as her story:

Brandon said, “Why, I’m the one who arrested that Frank Grannis, Doug. The highway police found this dead Mexican outside of Holtville. He’d evidently been riding a bicycle and a car had hit him, knocked him over into the ditch, and the driver had kept right on going. A piece of the headlight lens was found just to the side of the highway at the scene of the accident, and another piece a little farther over toward the ditch. The police telephoned all along the highway asking us to search transient garages and auto courts for a car with a broken headlight lens.

“I remember one of the deputies located this Grannis car. The headlight on the right-hand side was broken, there was a big dent in the fender on the right side and the man who owned the car admitted he had driven up from Tucson the day before, driving until late at night.

“I notified the El Centro sheriff and described the pieces of glass which were missing from the bent headlight. They seemed to check. So the El Centro men rushed up here bringing the pieces with them. There’s no question about it. The pieces fitted absolutely. Grannis hit that Mexican.

“The El Centro authorities filed a hit-and-run charge against him and took him back with them.”

“Well,” Selby said, “you can see what’s happened now. And here, of course, is something that shouldn’t come as any great surprise.”

“What’s that, Doug?”

“The attorney who is representing Frank Grannis is Mr. Alfonse Baker Carr.”

“Now why the devil didn’t Daphne Arcola tell you that when you talked with her?”

“Hard to tell,” Selby said. “Probably because Carr warned her not to tell me anything. We can begin to fit events into a pattern now. She must have got in touch with Carr very shortly after our talk with Mrs. Carr. That’s why she was out until four o’clock in the morning. Old A. B. C. must have known, shortly after we left his house, that we’d made a mistake in identifying the corpse, but he never said a word about that. He just let us go ahead, let The Clarion publish the report of Daphne Arcola’s death — and I suppose now he’ll have Daphne Arcola file a suit against the newspaper.”

“Damn him,” Brandon said angrily. “He could have saved us a lot of trouble by just picking up the telephone and putting in a call to my office.”

“Well,” Selby said, “when you come right down to it, Rex, why should he try to save us any trouble? Simply by keeping his mouth shut he gave Daphne Arcola a swell chance for a damage suit against The Clarion certainly, and perhaps against us.”

“Well, he’ll have a hell of a time explaining his silence in front of a jury,” Brandon said.

“Oh, no he won’t, Rex. Carr’s too smart to get caught in that trap. If Daphne Arcola starts an action you can bet that Carr won’t be her attorney of record. He’ll have some stooge bring that suit. Carr will be very sympathetic toward us and commiserate with us on our predicament. Don’t worry about old A. B. C. getting caught that easy.”

Brandon said, “Sometimes I feel that it would be worth what it would cost to smash him in the puss. I don’t see how you manage to tolerate him, Doug. The guy seems to amuse you. He makes me see red.”

Selby laughed. “Frankly, Rex, I like the scoundrel. He’s such a suave, ingenious devil, and you have to admit the man has one of the most powerful personalities you’ve ever encountered. He’s a consummate actor, and you never catch him in an actual outright lie. He’s perfectly willing to let us deceive ourselves, but he almost never makes a false statement. It takes an artist to do the things Carr does.”

“Oh, I suppose he’s smart all right,” Brandon said. “Any editorial in there, Doug?”

“Oh, sure,” Selby told him. “It’s smeared all over the editorial page. I guess I told you that Paden gave me a chance to come into camp, and then threatened me with all sorts of trouble in case I didn’t play ball. This case seems to be made to order for him.”

“Paden!” Brandon snorted. “That’s another one of Carr’s importations. Personally, I’d make a bet that Carr put up the money that was used to buy The Blade. Look at what’s happening right under our eyes. When Carr first came to this county he was almost pathetic in his humble desire to become a part of our community and get away from the things which go with a criminal law practice in the big city. He wanted to retire. Then he said his clients wouldn’t let him retire.

“First thing anyone knew, he was doing tricky legal jobs for prominent people here and getting them under obligations to him, until now he’s a regular clearing house of crime.

“Every once in a while you hear of some other prominent citizen who went to him with something that was very hush-hush.

“That’s one thing about old A. B. C. He can keep his mouth shut. And he knows how to get a prominent person out of a scrape so there’s no faintest suggestion of publicity. Every time he gets someone out of trouble, he has another ace in the hole, some other person on whom he can call for help whenever he needs something done locally. I tell you, the man’s dangerous. However, let’s hear what Paden has to say in his editorial. I presume he’s adopted the lofty condescension of a big city intellect dealing with a bunch of rural boobs. Damn those sneering, sarcastic editorials!”

“Why read them, Rex? You know they’ll roast you, so why not just...”

“Nope, I couldn’t do that,” Brandon interrupted, grinning. “Let’s hear what old Paden has to say, Doug.”

Selby folded the paper, said, “All right, Rex, here we go:

Brandon interrupted angrily, “It’s the way they say those things that makes you so damn mad. You’d think we were standing at the Pearly Gates and Saint Peter was looking at us over the top of his glasses and telling us what we’d done wrong. What’s all this new evidence Larkin got?”

Selby said, “Dorothy Clifton, after leaving the Lennox home, apparently by request, went to the Madison Hotel. She put through a phone call or two, then went out. Larkin searched the room. He found blood spots on a blouse in her suitcase. He took the blouse, rushed it to a laboratory. Tests showed the spots were human blood. Larkin made the arrest then. Dorothy Clifton says the blouse was one she wore crossing the divide where she had a nosebleed. She insists all the blood spots were from that nosebleed.”

“And that’s Larkin’s whole case?” Brandon demanded. “Just the tracks of her car and spots of blood on a blouse?”

“No,” Selby said thoughtfully. “He found the murder weapon, Rex.”

“That’s what he claims,” Brandon said. “I’d bet money he hasn’t. Where did he find it, Doug?”

“The newspaper says it is honor bound not to divulge that in print, but that once he was certain of his quarry, Larkin showed the tireless determination of a bloodhound in...”

“Skip all that, Doug. It makes me sick. For heaven’s sake, Doug, are people that dumb?”

Selby smiled. “It depends on how a thing is presented to them, Rex. Of course, the mysterious recovery of this murder weapon makes the whole story ring true... if it is the murder weapon and Larkin has recovered it.”

“If it’s the murder weapon and Otto Larkin recovered it, I’ll eat it,” Brandon declared. “And now we have this Arcola woman getting mixed up with old A. B. C. in that El Centro hit-and-run case... Well, we’ll keep on ridin’ and spurring, Doug, and see where we come out... Won’t Larkin have to turn that murder weapon over to us?”

“Oh sure,” Selby said. “Now that he’s had all the newspaper credit, he’ll turn the whole thing over to us — dump it right in our laps, in fact.”

Selby abruptly folded The Blade and tossed it over in the back of the car. “Let’s go ahead and call the shots as we see them and just forget all about the opposition.”

He pushed his hands down deep in his trousers pockets, and remained silent until Brandon swung the car off a main boulevard and said, “This is where we’re to meet the sheriff’s man.”

A sheriff’s car was waiting at the corner. Two men were in it. A deputy sheriff spotted Brandon’s car, came forward, shook hands and was introduced to Doug Selby as Halbert Hardwick, a deputy who had worked with Brandon on other cases.

“We’ve been getting a line on this babe,” he said, “and we’ve uncovered some funny stuff.”

“What is it, Bert?”

“She was a dick.”

“For the city?”

“No, a private dick. Ran a little agency of her own. One of the men in the department of records thought he remembered the name, so we looked her up. Sure enough, it was the one. She has a license and everything.”

“What sort of work?”

“For the most part she specializes on cases involving playboys. She’s rather a hot number when she decks herself out, and they say she twists them all around her finger and wrings them inside out.”

“Well, she isn’t going to do any more twisting,” Brandon said. “She’s dead. That is, if this is the one. If she was a private detective, we should be able to make an identification.”

“Sure we can make an identification. We have everything, even her fingerprints. I brought the records along.”

“Good work,” Selby said. “We have prints of her fingers and a photograph.”

Brandon opened his wallet, unfolded a set of fingerprints, and took out a photograph.

“Darned if it doesn’t look like the same one,” Hardwick said. “Let’s take a look at those prints. I’ll take the ring finger. You take the right forefinger, Sheriff.”

“Sure looks the same,” the sheriff announced, at length. “Of course, it isn’t like making an absolute comparison, but...”

“It’s the same, all right,” Hardwick said. “Well, that makes it a cinch, Sheriff. I guess we have the identity all cleaned up right now. What’s more we’ve got the man for whom she was working at the time she was bumped off.”

“How did you do all that in such a short space of time?”

“Leg work and luck. This chap kept trying to contact her all last night. He had his car parked in front of the building all the first part of the evening, and then he showed up again before daylight this morning. The manager of the apartment house saw it was an out-of-state car and took his license number, just in case. So, when we got your phone call, we started checking up and when we came to the conclusion this girl was the one you were interested in, we started talking with the landlady. She told us about this car. She’d made a note of the license number. While we were talking, he drove up. Naturally, we started asking him questions. He’s trying to play cagey. We haven’t wanted to go really to work on him until you got here.”

“What’s his story generally?”

“You’d better get it firsthand,” Hardwick said. “So far he hasn’t given us much except that this Furman dame was doing something for him, and he’s trying to contact her to find out what she’s learned. We’ve got the guy parked over here in my car.

“His name is Barton Mosher. He lives up in Windrift, Montana. Come on over and get his story.”

“Does he know anything about what we’re investigating?” Selby asked.

The deputy flashed him a quizzical look, said, “We’re not that dumb, Mr. Selby. That guy just knows we’re looking for Rose Furman, and that’s all. Come on over and meet him.”

They walked over to the deputy’s car.

Hardwick said to the man who was seated in the automobile, “These are a couple of friends of mine, Mr. Selby and Mr. Brandon. And this is Barton Mosher.”

The men shook hands.

“Will someone kindly tell me what this is all about?” Mosher demanded.

“That’s what you’re going to tell us,” Hardwick said. “Now, you’ve been hanging around Rose Furman’s apartment, and...”

“I tell you it was simply a matter of business. I told you what it was.”

“All right, tell us again. My friends might be interested.”

“I asked Rose Furman to do something for me. I don’t know as I should be telling all this,” Mosher said.

“Suit yourself,” Hardwick told him. “We can take you up to headquarters and let you think it over just as well as not. If you have anything to conceal, you’d be foolish to incriminate yourself.”

“What do you mean, incriminate myself?”

Hardwick explained patiently, “I’ll give it to you all over again. Concentrate on it, now. Rose Furman isn’t home. She hasn’t been around her apartment for a while. You’ve been hanging around there. You’re acting mighty suspicious. The people in the neighborhood begin to wonder what it’s all about. One of them telephones in. So we come out and ask you, and you start playing button, button, who’s got the button with us.”

“Say, what are you talking about? You fellows can’t do this. I could go phone my lawyer.”

“Come on, let’s go down to headquarters and you can phone your lawyer from there.”

“I don’t want that. There are newspapermen hanging around police headquarters.”

“Sure. You afraid of them?”

“Yes. That is... well, I can’t stand... I don’t want publicity.”

“Maybe you’d like to talk here, then.”

“My lawyer...”

“Keep on being cagey with us and you’ll need a lawyer.” Hardwick yawned. “One of you guys got cigarettes? Guess we’d better go on down to the sheriff’s office.”

“Rose Furman is a detective,” Mosher blurted, “and a good one. She’s done work for me in the past, and has always done a very fine job.”

“Go on, buddy. Keep talking.”

“I live in Montana and, I’ll be frank about it, I run a place there where I try to give the boys a little action, nothing too much out of the way, but a little blackjack, roulette, poker, and a few games of chance.” Mosher hesitated.

“Go on,” Hardwick prompted. “You’re started now.”

“A couple of months ago, on the twenty-sixth of July, to be exact, a girl who hangs around and plays the dude ranches, came in and had a winning streak. It was a winning streak that looked mighty suspicious to me. She cleaned up about six thousand dollars. Now I could afford to lose that if everything was on the up-and-up, but a little birdie whispered in my ear that the deal might have been fixed up with one of my men. Of course, those boys are professionals, and it would be pretty hard to fix them. You couldn’t do it with money, but this girl is quite a dish, and... well, I started wondering, that’s all. Finally I decided I’d send a few hundred dollars along with the six thousand just to find out. So I got Rose Furman to try and locate this girl, and...”

“She’d left town?” Brandon interrupted.

“That’s right. She dusted out the day after she made the winning. She was gone for perhaps two weeks or so, then she came back for a little while, and then she left again. The way she acted and everything, I was plenty suspicious.”

“All right, what’s the rest of it?”

“Well, Rose phoned me that she had a definite answer; that if I’d be here to meet her at her apartment she’d give me complete proof of what I wanted.”

“And then she didn’t show up?”

“She didn’t show up. Now I happen to know she’s working on another job which took her to Windrift, Montana. In fact, that’s the reason I happened to think of her. She came walking in three or four weeks ago and said hello and told me she was working on a job; that it didn’t concern me at all, but that she wanted to get some information from me about some of the other places and how they were being run. So I asked her if she could take on a job for me on the side, and she said she didn’t see any reason why not. So I told her about this girl and about being nicked for the six grand. Now then, gentlemen, there’s my story. I’m clean as a hound’s tooth. I’ll show you my driver’s license, show you pictures of my place, and if I absolutely have to, I can give you references of people here in town who know me, people who have been staying out at one of the dude ranches around Windrift, and have had occasion to stop in at my place and naturally they’ve remembered me. I try to treat them right.”

“Okay,” Hardwick said, “let’s take a look at what you’ve got, buddy. Turn your pockets out. Got any letters from this Rose Furman?”

“Certainly not. She didn’t send me letters, and I didn’t want any. When she had anything important she’d let me know on the phone. When I hire a detective there’s only one thing important that I want and that’s the final answer.”

“Where’re you staying in town?”

“At the Critchwood.”

Hardwick glanced at Brandon and Selby, turned back to Mosher. “All right, buddy, you left out one of the answers.”

“What’s that?”

“The name of the lucky girl.”

“I left that out on purpose.”

“I’m asking her name on purpose.”

“I don’t see that it needs to enter into it.”

“Why are you protecting her?”

“I’m not protecting her. I’m protecting me. We don’t gossip about such things in my profession.”

“You’re not gossiping. You’re answering questions. You’re among friends — if you act friendly. Now then, what’s her name?”

“She’s a girl who plays the dude ranches.”

“You told me that before. Now I want her name.”

“Daphne Arcola.”

Hardwick turned to the visiting officials. “That name mean anything to you boys?”

Brandon’s nod was all but imperceptible.

“And Rose Furman told you she had the definite answer on this babe.”

“That’s right.”

“Did she say whether it was good or bad?”

“No, just that she’d be ready to tell me the answer.”

“Where’d she phone from?”

“Some place in the citrus belt. Madison City, I think it was.”

“You fellows want this man any more now?” Hardwick asked. “We can let him go to his hotel and then check up on him by telephone. What’s the name of the sheriff in your county at home, buddy?”

Mosher grinned and said, “I’ll even go you one better than that. I’ll give you one of his election cards when he was running last fall. I wish you’d ring him up and ask him about me.”

“Okay, we will.”

“You don’t know where Daphne Arcola is now?” Selby asked.

“No, I don’t, but I’m satisfied that Rose Furman does. If we can get hold of her she’ll tell us the whole thing.”

“You think Daphne Arcola put over a crooked play to win the six thousand?”

“I don’t know. I was willing to spend a little money to find out, that’s all.”

Brandon said, “If your place was on the square, one of your men couldn’t very well stand in on the deal so that he could make a pay-off.”

Mosher looked at him, thought a moment, then said dryly, “I hadn’t thought of that, gentlemen.”

Hardwick chuckled. “All right, go to your hotel and stay there, now. Don’t do any running around. We may want to talk with you. If we do, we want to be able to put our finger on you. That car’s registered in your name?”

“That’s right, that’s my car.”

“You drove it out here?”

“Yes, and it didn’t take me very long. I came tearing right along. I’m nervous, and when I’m going any place I want to be the one who pushes the throttle.”

“Then you feel Daphne Arcola is around here somewhere?”

“I think so. Rose Furman telephoned me to come to her apartment here. She said she was going to be in a position to give me an answer.”

“What’s the name of this man you think was standing in with her?”

“I’d rather not say. I have some good men there and if I make a bad guess it’s going to...”

“Which one do you think?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I was getting Rose Furman to find out. I can stand a six-thousand-dollar loss — once. I’d hate to have to stand it twice.”

“Okay,” Hardwick said, “there’s your car. Get in and drive it to your hotel.”

Mosher smiled affably. “Well, gentlemen, I’m glad to see you, and if you’re ever around Windrift, Montana, drop in at the Crystal Ball.”

“You run wide open up there?” Sheriff Brandon asked.

Mosher grinned. “Not wide open, Sheriff, just open.”