The D.A. Breaks an Egg

4

Doug Selby was wakened by the sound of gentle but persistent knuckles on the door of his apartment.

“Doug, oh Doug!”

Selby sat up in bed, switched on the light. “Just a moment,” he called.

Selby threw a robe around himself, kicked his feet into slippers, went to the door, then paused cautiously. “Who is it?”

“Rex Brandon, Doug,” the sheriff said.

Selby unlocked the door and pulled it open, grinning as he said, “Guess I’m getting a little suspicious, what with one thing and another.”

“You keep right on being suspicious,” Rex Brandon said. “This county is changing a lot, Doug. Police have found a body down in the park. I left word nothing was to be touched, that they were to rope off a place around the body and block the road in both directions. I thought you’d like to go down.”

Selby nodded, started dressing.

The sheriff settled himself in a chair, pulled a cloth sack of tobacco from his pocket, and started rolling a cigarette. His face, grizzled by years spent in the saddle during the time he had been a cattleman, was crinkled with lines of character which made little calipers at the corners of his mouth, crow’s-feet out from his eyes, giving him an expression of whimsical good nature.

“What is this body?” Selby asked, getting into his clothes. “Is this a murder?”

“Looks like it,” Brandon said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have got you up.”

“Where’s Otto Larkin, the chief of police?”

“I don’t know, probably on the job. He’s going to be tickled to death that this case is within the city limits, so he can strut around and be important. However, I left word that nothing was to be touched and I think that the officer was properly impressed by what I said.”

“Larkin will probably wait for us,” Selby said, lacing his shoes. “He’s been co-operating with us — lately.”

He finished with his shoes, picked up his hat and a flashlight, said, “Let’s go.”

They walked down to the big county car. Brandon said apologetically, “I should have taken a look first, Doug, before I got you out of bed. It may not be anything at all, but from the way it was described to me, I thought it was a case we were going to have to work on, and...”

“Now don’t start explaining or apologizing,” Selby said, grinning. “You know darned well, Rex, that when we’re working on a case which may develop into a trial, I want to have a look at the evidence while it’s on the ground.”

“Well, from all I can gather, this is that kind of a case,” Brandon said. “Of course, I got the dope over the telephone. Interesting bit of psychology there, Doug. The man who made the discovery was on the city police force. He telephoned in to headquarters and then he telephoned me.”

“The officer himself?”

“The officer himself,” Brandon said, smiling. “As far as I know, the night deputy on duty up at the Courthouse hasn’t heard a word yet from police headquarters.”

“Who was it who notified us?” Selby asked.

“Frank Bassett. You remember he worked on that case involving the unidentified corpse in the auto court, and he seems to be a good man. He’s more interested in getting cases solved than he is in trying to grab credit, and that means a lot.”

Selby laughed and said, “It certainly does mean a lot. You don’t encounter that attitude very often. I’ll bet Larkin will have fits when we show up, and he hasn’t as yet given orders to have us notified.”

Brandon grinned. “We’ll have to protect Bassett, of course,” and then swung the car around the corner, slowed down and eased into the graveled driveway of the park, where a sign said, “Orange Park — Madison Agricultural Station — Limit Twenty Miles per Hour.”

Headlights reflected from the white-graveled driveway, giving a brilliant illumination. Then the car came to a barrier in the middle of the driveway, indicating that the road was closed to all traffic.

A big, rawboned man in police uniform, moving with the easy grace of an athlete, stepped out of the shadows, recognized the county car, said, “Hello, Sheriff. How are you, Mr. Selby?”

Selby got out and Bassett, moving close to Brandon, said in a low voice, “I haven’t told the Chief...”

“It’s okay, Frank,” Brandon said. “We’ll protect you.”

“The Chief’s over there with the body,” Bassett said.

They started walking across the grass, then paused as a flashlight blazed into their faces for a moment, then was extinguished. A voice said, “Well, well, Sheriff Brandon and Doug Selby!”

There was surprise in the voice.

Brandon said, in his slow, cowboy drawl, “Hello, Larkin. What’s the trouble?”

“How did you get here?” Larkin demanded, and then added as an afterthought, “so soon.”

“Heard the road was blocked, and that you had something down here,” Brandon said. “What seems to be the trouble, Larkin?”

Larkin hesitated a moment, as though he would have liked to ask further questions, but could hardly see his way clear to doing so. “Body of a young woman over here,” he said. “Evidently a stabbing job. I haven’t touched the body. I’m waiting for the coroner, but I’ve been looking around a bit.”

“Okay, let’s take a look,” Brandon said cheerfully.

“You must have known it was important in order to get Selby up,” Larkin said, curiosity in his voice.

“Why, sure,” Brandon said. “You weren’t trying to keep it a secret, were you, Otto?”

“No, no. I just wondered — how you... how you got here so quick.”

“Oh, we’re fast workers,” Brandon said. “Where is she?”

“Over here.”

They followed the path of Otto Larkin’s flashlight along the grass, moistened slightly by evening dew, to the place where suddenly, out of the darkness, a huddled shape absorbed the circle of light.

“I’m waiting for Harry Perkins, the coroner,” Larkin explained. “But you can see the stab wound in the back there, right between the shoulder blades. It isn’t a messy job, but it must have been right clean to the heart, because apparently she died instantly.”

Larkin waited for a question, and when there was none, added with considerable self-importance, “Now, the reason I know she died instantly is because of the bloodstain on the back of her jacket. You can see that it’s just about evenly distributed around the wound. Now, if she’d been standing up for any length of time after she was stabbed, I figure the blood would have dropped down and there would have been stains on the back of her skirt. There aren’t any. The stains are all around the blouse and the jacket, and that’s all.

“She must have been conscious when she fell, because she flung out her hands in front of her. That’s why the left arm is doubled under and her face is lying on the left arm.”

“Any tracks?” Brandon asked.

“Well, now,” Larkin said, “when you come right down to it you can’t find a track. She’s out here on the grass where you can’t expect to find any tracks. Of course, the gravel driveway won’t help any, but there’s a strip of dirt between the driveway and the lawn and I’ve looked along there pretty carefully. You can’t see a thing.”

“What do you suppose she was doing off this far from the driveway?” Brandon asked. “She must be sixty feet from the driveway.”

“Well, the way I reconstruct what happened,” Larkin said, self-importantly, “is that she was out here on some sort of a necking party, sitting out here with her boy friend, and something happened and he just stabbed her. He was sitting over on the left-hand side, and he reached his right hand around back of her, as though he were just going to put his arm around her, and then suddenly stabbed. That would make the wound come slanting toward the left.”

“And then,” Brandon said, “she’d have pitched forward on her face. That right?”

“That’s right.”

“And what about her legs?”

“Well, they would have sort of straightened out.”

“In that event,” Brandon said, “the skirts would have remained in position as the legs stretched out, and that would give the effect of having the skirts up. This girl is lying with her skirts neatly smoothed out, just as though she’d been walking and had suddenly pitched forward on her face.”

“Or,” Larkin said, reluctant to give up his theory, “the man could have sort of straightened her out.”

“He could have,” Brandon said dryly.

The sheriff moved his flashlight around in probing scrutiny. His eyes, accustomed to reading trail on the range, took in every minute detail that was left, even to the grass which had been tramped down by Otto Larkin, and was now slowly straightening.

“Someone knelt by the body right there,” Brandon said.

“I did that,” Larkin admitted. “I just raised the jacket in order to see about the bloodstains. I could do it without disturbing anything.”

Brandon nodded. The beam of his flashlight quested out in widening circles. He walked over to inspect the strip of dirt bicycle path which bordered the graveled driveway, then said, “Look here. You can see where an automobile came up off the graveled roadway and cut across this dirt.”

“I know,” Larkin said hastily. “I noticed that, but it doesn’t mean a thing. It’s where some car was crowded a little bit on the turn.”

“It could be something else,” Brandon said.

“Well, anyhow,” Larkin pointed out, “it won’t help matters, because you can’t see the tire tread pattern.”

“What makes you think you can’t?”

“Well, look,” Larkin said, pointing his flashlight straight down on the tracks.

Brandon said, “Let’s try another approach, Larkin. Suppose you put out your flashlight and we’ll use just one flashlight.”

The sheriff knelt on the grass and pointed his flashlight along the ground so that the lighting came almost directly from one side. He slowly raised the flashlight for a couple of feet, then lowered it again, until he found the point where he obtained maximum efficiency.

“Now,” he said, “you can see tire treads on all four wheels. That automobile must have made a pretty sharp turn.”

“Well,” Larkin admitted dubiously, “it does show a little something, but not enough to make any identification of tires.”

“We’ll send our technician down here to make casts of those tracks,” Brandon said.

“You won’t get a thing,” Larkin warned. “Those distinctive marks aren’t deep enough.”

“Well, we can try anyway,” Brandon said.

They slowly walked back to the body, searching for prints in the grass, finding nothing.

Standing once more above the body, looking down at the features that were visible, Brandon said, “She was a mighty good-looking young girl, Doug.”

Selby nodded.

The face was that of a young woman, not over twenty-three or twenty-four. She was copper-haired, light-complexioned, trim-figured.

Selby said, “One peculiar thing, Rex.”

“What’s that?” the sheriff asked.

“We don’t see any sign of a purse,” Selby pointed out. “Of course she may be lying on it. We can’t tell for certain until we move the body, but it doesn’t look as though there’s any purse here.”

“Say, by George, that’s right,” Otto Larkin said. “Say, by George, that is right. It was a purse snatcher who did this!”

They were silent for a few seconds.

“Say,” Otto Larkin announced suddenly, “we’ve got the whole thing now. This girl was walking along here in the park. This bunch of hoodlums came along in the car... No, now wait a minute, it probably was a one-man job. He pulled the car in alongside of her, and tried to get her to go for a ride. She wouldn’t do it, but all the time this fellow was sizing her up, and he finally decided he’d snatch the purse. He jumped out and she started to run. She ran across the lawn, and he chased after her, and ordered her to stop. She probably screamed and he stabbed her through the back. Then he grabbed her purse, ran back to the car, and beat it.”

“Of course,” Brandon pointed out, “a good blow on the back of the head would have accomplished his purpose, and then he wouldn’t have faced the gas chamber in case he was arrested.”

“Some of these fellows nowadays,” Otto Larkin announced, “just don’t give a hoot. They’re crazy, absolutely nuts. Things didn’t use to be that way.”

“I know,” the sheriff admitted. “Now that we have these new highways, what with all the overcrowding in the city, we’re picking up a percentage of the city population.”

Larkin said, “If you ask me, he... a couple of cars coming.”

They walked over as Bassett stopped the cars at the barrier. One contained Harry Perkins, the coroner, the other Sylvia Martin, the trim, energetic reporter for The Clarion.

Sylvia gave the officials a friendly smile, then followed the coroner over to the body.

Perkins, a long, lanky individual, eyed the body. “Darned if it ain’t a shame. A good-looking girl like that. Anybody have any idea who she was?”

Larkin said, very importantly, “We didn’t want to move her to see if there was a purse underneath the body, but that’s going to be the significant thing. If the purse is there, we’ll probably find out who she is, and if it isn’t there, the mere fact that it ain’t is a significant clue, a mighty significant clue.”

The coroner bent by the body, felt for a pulse, said, “She’s dead, all right.” He gently inserted his hand under the body, said, “There’s no purse here, gentlemen.”

Brandon said, “I want her left here long enough for us to get some photographs and then I want to get a cast of some tire marks over here. I’m going to call my office and get my technician down here.”

Selby gently turned back the coat worn by the dead girl. “Here’s a label,” he said. “The Style Shop — Windrift, Montana.”

“Nothing to indicate who she is, no initials,” Larkin said, his voice showing disappointment. “I was hoping... I mean I wondered if she wasn’t some local girl... good family and all that. She’s wearing nice clothes.”

Sylvia Martin slipped her gloved hand in under Selby’s arm, drew him gently off to one side.

“What are they waiting for?”

“A photographer from the sheriff’s office.”

Sylvia said, “Gosh, Doug, I’ve got a deadline to meet in just about half an hour.”

Selby said, “There’s a chance — perhaps one out of fifty that she’s a transient who is registered at the hotel and...”

“Oh Doug! Couldn’t we...?”

“It’s just a chance, Sylvia, a long shot.”

“Well, why not, Doug? If she’s a transient, she’s a well-dressed transient who’d be traveling first class, and the Madison Hotel is the place she’d probably be staying.

“Oh, Doug, let’s.”

Selby thought for a moment, then sauntered over to Brandon. “I suppose you want to stay here until your photographer arrives, Rex.”

“I think I’d better, Doug.”

Selby lowered his voice so that there would be no chance of Larkin overhearing him. “Sylvia and I are going to drive up to the hotel and see if a woman of this description from Windrift, Montana, is registered there.”

“Good idea,” Brandon said. “They’ve sent Bassett out to pick up Bob Terry. As soon as he gets here he can take charge. You and Sylvia go on up and I’ll join you at the hotel as soon as I can get away from here.”

Selby moved back to Sylvia. “Okay, Sylvia, let’s try a short cut to find out who she is. We may be lucky.”

Sylvia Martin’s eager fingers dug into his arms. “Come on, Doug. You can ride with me. Of course well be lucky.”

He patted her shoulder. “I may need a little luck. Paden, the new owner of The Blade, called on me and told me the next murder case here would wind me up.”

She stopped abruptly. “Oh, Doug, I’m afraid of him. He’s... he’s utterly ruthless.”

Selby laughed. “Come on, Sylvia. We’ll start off by letting The Clarion steal a march on him, identify the murdered girl, notify the home town papers, and get a paragraph or two off to the wire services.”