“Gramps?” her husband asked, smiling.
“Yes. Whenever I don’t know what he’s doing, I become uneasy. When I find out what he’s done, my worst suspicions are invariably confirmed. What do you suppose he’s doing?”
Duryea said: “I was rather short with him last night when he faked a toothache to come busting into the office and try and get in on the examination of those witnesses. I think probably I hurt his feelings. Haven’t seen him since.”
“You may have hurt his feelings,” she admitted, “but you probably didn’t cramp his style any.”
“Well, after all,” Duryea said, “we can’t worry about him. I like him, but—”
“You don’t get me,” Milred interrupted. “As long as this murder case is unsolved, Gramps is out doing something. Heavens knows what it is.”
Duryea seemed strangely good-natured about it all. “Oh, well, if he gets pleasure out of it, let him go. As a matter of fact, any citizen can read about a crime that’s been committed and go out and start trying to solve it. Only, thank heavens, they don’t.”
“Gramps,” Milred announced, “never does the expected.”
“He’s probably headed back toward Mexico with his feelings hurt.” the district attorney said. “He’ll think it over for a while, let the hurt wear off, and some morning we’ll hear the old rattletrap wheezing and banging into the driveway.”
Milred slowly, deliberately wiped the flour off her hands, walked over to Frank Duryea’s chair, placed firmly determined fingers under his chin, elevated his head, and said: “Open your eyes — wide.”
“Why, what’s wrong with my eyes?”
“You,” she announced, “are deceiving me.”
“That’s a blanket accusation! You’ll have to be more specific before I dare commit myself. I might ’fess up to something that you didn’t know about. Give me a bill of particulars.”
She said: “You’re solving that Pressman murder case. That’s why you don’t care what Gramps is doing.”
“Well,” he admitted, “we’re making headway.”
“And holding out on me.”
“Well, not exactly.”
Milred sat down on the arm of the chair. “The biscuits,” she said, “are practically ready to go in the oven. Standing isn’t going to do them any good. Then I did intend to take some of that biscuit dough, add a little more shortening and sugar to it and when we’re about halfway through dinner, slip it in a nice hot oven to cook up for strawberry shortcake. The strawberries are all crushed and sugared in the icebox. There’s a big bowl of cream all whipped and sugared... And I thought I’d take those slabs of hot shortcake right out of the oven, spread on a generous amount of butter, put on a layer of crushed, sweetened fruit, let the ice-cold strawberry juices mingle with the melted butter and run down the outside of the shortcake. Then I’d put on another slab of hot shortcake, put more berries on that, put on great gobs of whipped cream, and bring it in for dessert. But... if you continue to hold out on me, I won’t have time.”
The district attorney ostentatiously wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Woman,” he said, “you’re making my mouth water so I’m about to drown. Go get that strawberry shortcake ready, and quit pulling a Gramp Wiggins on me.”
She said: “I sit right here until you give me the low-down on that Pressman case. Don’t think that any husband of mine is going to hold out on a murder case and get away with it.”
“It isn’t ready to close yet. We still have some work to do on it.”
“Tell me what you know, and quit stalling.”
“You didn’t used to be like this.” Duryea laughed.
“I know. It’s the Wiggins in me. Gramps hangs around here and brings out all the worst that’s in me. I was almost becoming a Duryea, and now that horrible Wiggins streak has come to the surface. But, that’s just the way it is. No information, no shortcake.”
“All right.” Duryea surrendered. “I’ll tell you.”
“And tell me all of it. Don’t hold out anything.”
Duryea said: “We’ll start with the gun. There’s a methodical, regular way of tracing guns, although it would never do to tell one of the gifted amateurs like your grandfather a thing like that.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, he doesn’t go in for the painstaking routine steps which point toward success. He wants some subtle clue to follow or something like that.”
“I get you. The way the gun’s clasped in the dead man’s hand, for instance.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, what about the gun?”
“The gun,” Duryea said, “is an old one. It was manufactured twenty-seven years ago. It was sold to a dealer in Butte, Montana. The dealer sold it to a cattleman who is now dead. We located this man’s widow. She remembered that he had such a gun of which he was very proud, and that he had sold it to some dude from California. She couldn’t remember the dude’s name.
“We then started a methodical investigation to find if any of the men who might possibly be connected with the case had ever had any contact with this cattleman.”
“Well,” Milred asked, her eyes sparkling with excitement, “did you have any luck?”
Duryea cocked his eyebrow at her quizzically. “You,” he announced, “are getting worse than Gramps.”
“But it’s so darned interesting, Frank. It’s a chase.”
“It’s a darn chore,” he said. “Just a lot of things you have to run down in a regular, methodical manner.”
“All right, have it your own way, but tell me the answer. What did you find out?”
“We found,” he said, “that a Pellman Baxter of Los Angeles had been on a neighbouring dude ranch, and we found that a ‘Pelly’ Baxter was a close friend of Pressman. Naturally, we started investigating Baxter.”
“When was it he was up at the dude ranch?”
“About five years ago.”
“And this cattleman has been dead how long?”
“Three years... Well, that’s all there was to it. The cattleman’s widow remembered the name of Baxter when we called it to her attention, remembered all about Pelly Baxter, and remembered he’d bought the gun.”
“Then what?”
“Then we moved in on Baxter. He remembered the gun distinctly, and said he’d bought it for a friend.”
“And the friend?” she asked.
“Pressman.”
“He’d given it to Pressman?”
“Yes. He said he knew Pressman was very much interested in a gun of that particular type, and he’d given it to him as soon as he got back from Montana, and had forgotten all about it, completely dismissed it from his mind until we called it to his attention... It seems Baxter is quite a collector of firearms; has revolvers, rifles, shotguns of ancient and modern vintage hung up on the walls of his den, in his library — in fact, all over his place.”
“Married?” Milred asked.
Duryea laughed. “What’s that got to do with it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I was just wondering. You mentioned his house.”
“No,” Duryea said. “He isn’t married. He’s a bachelor, quite a sportsman, keeps a house so he has room for his various possessions, says he can’t stand to be cramped, and doesn’t like apartments.”
“Then you think it was really suicide?”
“What makes you ask that?”
“It being Pressman’s gun.”
Duryea smiled. “We discounted the suicide theory almost at the start.”
“Well, if he was killed with his own gun—”
“That,” Duryea said, “opens an interesting possibility. We made a quiet investigation of Mrs. Pressman. She’s in the thirties. He was in the fifties. They’d been married five years. He devoted virtually all his attention to his business. You can appreciate how a younger wife would feel about that.”