The D.A. Breaks an Egg

17

It was shortly before noon when knuckles tapped on the door of the sheriff’s private office.

“May I come in?” Sylvia Martin called.

“Come on in,” Brandon invited. “Doug is the only one in here.”

When she had opened the door, Selby said, “That was some story, Sylvia — the one about the meeting between Horace Lennox and Dorothy Clifton. Congratulations.”

She said, “Thanks, Doug. Only I can’t take any credit. The story wrote itself. I just sat back and fed paper into the typewriter. Oh, Doug, you should have seen it! I never saw anything so romantic in my life.”

“I gathered as much from reading your account in The Clarion this morning.”

“The way he took her in his arms! It makes you realize the solemnity of what it means when they say ‘forsaking all others.’ Doug, he’s splendid! He’s marvelous. He — oh, you can’t begin to describe it. You could see that she had been having a question gnawing at the back of her consciousness. She knew how much he cared for his family, and how clannish they were, and how much they made a fetish of respectability and all that stuff, and here she was all mixed up in a murder case, and... well, you know, you could see that while she’d been in jail she hadn’t been sleeping — just staring into the dark and wondering whether he’d stick with his family and be a little standoffish. You could see all of that question in her eyes.”

“And then?” Brandon asked.

“You should have seen the way he answered that question!”

“What did he say?”

“Not what he said. It was what he did, and the way he did it. The question was never put into words and neither was the answer.

“All he said was ‘Darling’ in a voice that was all choked up, and his arms went around her in the most tenderly reassuring way. It made me just stand there and cry. I kept saying to myself, ‘Sylvia, you big goose. You’re a newspaper woman’ — but all the time I was writing up that story against a deadline I felt the tears pushing their way to the surface.”

“It was a great story,” Brandon said. “Made you feel all warm inside. A darned good antidote for the stuff that The Blade has been doing and the machinations of old A. B. Carr.”

“What has Carr been doing?” she asked, instantly alert.

Selby said, “At a late hour last night, Frank Grannis was released on bail. It was a surety bond, purchased for him by an ‘Old Friend,’ whom I’ll gamble he’d never seen before in all his life.”

Sylvia said, “I can tell you something else. The Blade is organizing a citizens’ committee. Of course, you can’t pin it right on The Blade, but it’s being done by people who are controlled by The Blade. They’re calling what they refer to as a ‘mass meeting’ at the City Hall at two o’clock this afternoon, demanding that the attorney general appoint a special prosecutor to prosecute Dorothy Clifton. Of course, people who have any sense will ignore the whole thing. But the crackpots and The Blade henchmen will be there. They’ll pass resolutions with a barb in them, indicating that you are completely hypnotized, under the domination and seductive influence of this murderess, and... oh, you know, it will make a great headline in The Blade tonight. I can just see it, MASS MEETING OF CITIZENS DEMANDS INCOMPETENT OR UNWILLING DISTRICT ATTORNEY WITHDRAW FROM CASE.”

Selby said, “Why let them pull a stunt like that, Rex? Why shouldn’t I go down?”

Brandon shook his head. “They won’t be open-minded, Doug. They’ll be soreheads whipped into line by The Blade. The thing will be stacked against you.”

The telephone rang. Brandon picked it up, said, “Hello, yes?... What’s that?... What’s that?”

He said, “Hold the phone a minute... Wait a minute, just tell me that all over again... And you say he won’t talk?... Okay. Hold the phone a minute.”

Brandon placed his hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone and turned to Doug Selby. “Now, here’s something. Grannis is back in jail at El Centro.”

“What happened?”

“No one knows. The surety company that issued the bond produced him and said it desired to be relieved of liability.”

Selby said, “Come on, Rex, we’re driving to El Centro. Want to go, Sylvia?”

Sylvia shook her head. “I’m going to stay here, Doug. I’m going to take on the job of seeing that some of your friends are at that mass meeting, and then I’m going to see that one other person goes.”

“Who?” Selby asked.

“Horace Lennox,” she said, smiling. “The Blade saw to it that this meeting was held at such a time that they could come out with headlines telling about the action taken by the irate citizens, but by the time we get done with that meeting they may not want to publish what happened.”