Aside from that the trip was a waste of time. Neither could suggest any reason whatever anyone would want to kill Lancaster. And to make the afternoon a complete fiasco, I had to let the last person in the world to whom I cared to be indebted save me from being run over.
The Lancaster Home was right on Carson City’s main street, which is also part of a through highway. I had parked across the road, and I started back across to my car just as a couple of kids in a convertible roared through town at what must have been ninety miles an hour.
I always look before crossing streets, just as I was taught in kindergarten, checking first to the left and then to the right. The highway was clear when I glanced left, but in the half-second it took me to glance right and take one step into the road, the convertible lifted out of a dip a hundred yards away and bore down at me with its horn screaming.
My reactions are fast, but a false leg is unpredictable. My nerves activated the proper muscles in plenty of time to get me out of the way, but the leg picked that moment to buckle. Slipping to the knee of my good leg, I tried to scramble to the curb on all fours, realized I wasn’t going to make it, then suddenly was jerked clear by a pair of hands which gripped both biceps and nearly tore my arms loose from my shoulders.
Since I couldn’t stand until my leg was refastened, I didn’t bother to look up at my rescuer until I had rolled up my trouser leg, readjusted the straps above and below my knee, rolled down the trouser leg again and dusted myself off. Then I climbed to my feet and looked into the buck-toothed face of Farmer Cole.
“Where’d you come from?” I asked sourly, then added reluctantly, “Thanks.”
“I live in this town,” he said. “You’re welcome.”
“Oh. Well, thanks again.” I tried to make this one more enthusiastic, but it still came out sour. Even after the guy had saved my life, I couldn’t shake the feeling of tense watchfulness his nearness induced in me.
Subduing an odd reluctance to put my back to the man, I turned to try the crossing again.
“Want me to help you across?” the Farmer asked.
Slowly I turned to look at him. “That crack makes us even, Farmer. You saved my life; now I’m saving yours by ignoring the crack.”
He grinned at me, a grin as sardonic as Bugs Bunny’s. With dignity I crossed to my car.
Since the only lead I had picked up in Carson City was the widow’s vague idea that Lancaster had been worried over his impending conference with the Jones and Knight Investment Company, I decided to take a chance on finding someone still at the company office, even though it was just five o’clock when I drove off the bridge on my own side of the river. Stopping at the first tavern I saw for a glance in the phone book, I discovered the office was only a few blocks up Broadway, just south of the Federal Reserve Building. I made it by ten after five and found a parking place right in front of the entrance.
According to the building directory, Jones and Knight Investment Company was on the fourth floor. A colored girl took me up in an elevator, informing me as I got off that the elevators stopped running at six.
Though the office building in which it was housed was old and beginning to look run down in a genteel sort of way, the office of Jones and Knight had an air of prosperity about it. Thick carpeting covered the floor of the reception room, the furniture was solidly expensive and Venetian blinds hung at the windows.
A middle-aged woman wearing horn rimmed glasses sat at a desk in the reception room. Apparently I would have missed her had I been five minutes later, for she was just powdering her nose in preparation to go home.
“Mr. Jones or Mr. Knight in?” I asked.
“No, sir,” she said politely. “We close at five. Did you have an appointment?”
I shook my head. “I’m a private investigator inquiring into the Lancaster killing.” I let her look at my license and took a soft leather chair while she was examining it.
She looked it over so long a time I got the impression she was using it as an excuse to gather herself together after the shock of my announcement. And since my announcement had not seemed particularly shocking to me, her reaction intrigued me.
“My name is Matilda Graves, Mr. Moon,” she said finally. “I’m secretary and bookkeeper of the firm. You know, of course, the police have already been here.”
“Yes, but something new has come up since their visit. Are you the only employee aside from the partners, Miss Graves?”
She nodded, not quite seeming to trust her voice.
“Are you sufficiently in Jones’s and Knight’s confidence to know what Mr. Lancaster’s meeting with them was about yesterday?”
Quickly she shook her head. “Mr. Lancaster wasn’t an account of ours, Mr. Moon. This was a personal business matter between Mr. Lancaster and Mr. Knight.”
“How do you know it was a personal business matter if you don’t know what it was? Couldn’t it have been a personal social matter?”
I asked the question in an easy tone, with no intention of upsetting her, but she surprised me by turning dead white.
“The police never questioned me at all,” she said in a faint voice. “I’ve been driving myself crazy trying to decide whether or not I ought to contact them. But if I caused Mr. Knight trouble and there was nothing to it, I might lose my job. Anyway...”
“What about Mr. Knight?” I prompted.
“I thought about talking it over with Mr. Jones and asking his advice, but he doesn’t know anything about it, and that would put him in the same position I am. Making trouble for Mr. Knight, I mean. And after all, they’re partners, so you see it would be uncomfortable for him. He’s such a nice man. Mr. Jones, I mean, not Mr. Knight.” She added hurriedly, “Not that Mr. Knight isn’t nice too, but I mean...”
I said, “Just a minute, Miss Graves. Take a deep breath and start at the beginning.”
She took me literally. She took a deep breath and started at the beginning. It took her a long time and I had to interrupt with questions about every third sentence, but I finally pieced together what was bothering her.
She said Walter Lancaster had met with Knight in Knight’s office at about three P.M., and the two had argued for two hours. Jones had been using a dictaphone in his own office, which was right next to Knight’s, and had not been present at the conference.
I stopped her long enough to ask if she had gotten the impression Jones was deliberately excluded from the conference, or simply had not bothered to attend.
“Why neither, I think,” she said. “Since it wasn’t a company matter, but a personal thing between Mr. Lancaster and Mr. Knight, I suppose Mr. Jones had no reason to sit in. He did go in for a minute once, when Mr. Knight started shouting. I guess to calm Mr. Knight down. But he came right out again and went back to his own office. Mr. Knight didn’t shout any more, but he had left the key open on his call box, and I heard everything he and Mr. Lancaster said.”
It developed there had been quite an argument. Miss Graves was not exactly sure what it was about, but she gathered Walter Lancaster had unearthed some kind of irregularity in a corporation in which he was a major stockholder, and intended to make it public. She did not catch the name of the corporation, but apparently Knight personally owned stock in the same company and was trying to get Lancaster to hold off his announcement at least twenty-four hours so that both of them could unload. Lancaster insisted he would not allow the public to be cheated any more than it already had been. He argued that since he and Knight were two of the principal stockholders and had induced others to invest, it was up to them to bear the loss honestly. He himself, the lieutenant governor said, had no intention of unloading his own stock, even though it meant immediate loss of three-fourths of his fortune.