Duryea started to say something, then with cold dignity opened his safe, took out a newspaper, opened it, and spread the cut places over the message.
For a moment there was a puzzled scowl on his face as he kept moving the newspaper around, trying to adjust its position; then the scowl gave way to an expression of incredulous surprise.
Gramp Wiggins, observing this expression, fished his pipe from his pocket. “There you are, son. Both of ’em are spurious — and, under those circumstances, it might not be such a good idea to stick your neck out by givin’ this here Mrs. Pressman a third degree tomorrow. It just goes to show you can’t trust evidence that turns up after a crime has been committed.”
Duryea glanced up at the sheriff, said wearily: “All right, Gramps. We won’t need you any more.”
“Then I ain’t under arrest?” Gramps asked with some surprise.
“You are not under arrest,” Duryea told him, “—not as yet. And the sheriff and I have some things to discuss in private... And it might be a good thing for you to keep this entire affair in strict confidence... And if I ever find out who is planting evidence in this case,” Duryea said with sudden savage anger in his voice, “I’ll put him in jail and keep him there.”
“Attaboy!” Gramps said. “Now you’re whizzin’! When you get him, give him the works... Now then, son, would you like to have my theory about that?”
“I would not,” Duryea said coldly.
Gramps looked as though he had been struck in the face. “You mean after I went to all the trouble of findin’ this an’—”
“Exactly,” Duryea said. “This isn’t a game. It isn’t a puzzle contest. It’s a murder case. Someone has been fabricating evidence in that murder case. Frankly, I’m just a little afraid that someone is you.”
Gramps registered an expression of wounded dignity.
“I don’t think you’re deliberately trying to shield a murderer,” Duryea said, “but I do think you’re trying to protect someone, probably a woman, who has enlisted your sympathies. Under the circumstances, the less you say the better. I’m going to handle this case my own way. You can’t give me any help, and I don’t want any hindrance.”
Gramps grinned. “I guess that means you’re wishin’ me good night.”
“That’s right.”
Gramps fumbled with his hat for a moment, walked to the door, paused with his hand on the knob as though about to say something, then grinned, said, “Goodnight,” and ducked out into the corridor.
When he had gone, Duryea looked up at the sheriff, reached wearily for the telephone. “Well,” he said, “I may as well call Mrs. Pressman and tell her she needn’t come up tomorrow.”
“You think he planted that newspaper?” Sheriff Lassen asked after Duryea had completed the call.
The district attorney nodded. “Probably both of them.”
“Somehow, he doesn’t seem to me like a man who’d do that.”
“You don’t know him,” Duryea said. “He wouldn’t do it to protect a murderer. He wouldn’t do it to hamper our investigations. He’d do it to aid them. But his idea of aid would be to have us concentrate on some particular person that he thought was guilty.”
“Yes,” Lassen admitted. “I guess there’s something in that.”
“Tell you what, Pete. Have you got someone you can trust, some deputy on duty that’s immediately available?”
The sheriff nodded.
Duryea walked over to the courthouse window, looked down at the parking space, said: “He’s left his car and trailer out at my place. Get your deputy to rush out there and shadow him. If he’s planting evidence, he’ll go out to that shack before midnight. If he goes out there, I want to know about it. We’ll catch him red-handed, and then I’ll teach him a real lesson.”
“We’d better handle this kinda quietly,” the sheriff said. “You can’t throw your own relative in jail.”
“The hell I can’t,” Duryea said with emphasis.
Pete Lassen gently shook his head.
“Why not?”
“Not with the fight against the courthouse ring that’s going on in this county. You put one of your relatives in jail for tampering with evidence, and by the time the voters got done with us, we’d both be laughed out of office.”
Duryea’s face held an expression of angry futility. “Okay,” he said. “Get your deputy on the job. At least, I can scare him to death.”
Chapter 25
Harry Borden, the deputy assigned by Sheriff Lassen to “keep an eye” on Gramp Wiggins, telephoned in his first report about forty minutes after Gramps had left the district attorney’s office.
“This party I’m shadowing,” he reported to the sheriff, “has a jane in the car with him. She was parked in his trailer, keepin’ under cover.”
“Describe her,” Lassen asked.
“You don’t need a description,” Borden said. “She’s the one who was up here answering questions the other night, that snappy-looking number from Los Angeles. I’ve been trying to think of her name.”
“You don’t mean Pressman’s secretary?” Lassen asked.
“No. Wait a minute... I’ve got it now. Eva Raymond.”
“What’s the old man doing?” Lassen asked.
“Right at present,” Borden reported, “Richard Milton, the opposition candidate for district attorney, is making a speech, and the old man has found a parking place for his car and trailer, and is sitting there, taking it all in.”
“Don’t lose sight of him,” Lassen instructed, “and keep an eye open for any violation of the letter of the law. We can’t pinch him, but we’ll throw the book at him on everything from violation of the Mann Act to tampering with witnesses.”
Lassen hung up and reported to the district attorney.
Duryea pushed his hands down deep in his trouser pockets, and then suddenly, as the humour of the situation struck him, he began to chuckle. “Cherchez la femme,” he said, “and at his age!”
“It isn’t funny,” Lassen reproached. “It’s serious, damn serious.”
“I know it is,” Duryea said. “That’s what makes it so damned funny.”
Chapter 26
Richard Milton was going strong. A fiery glib-tongued courtroom orator of the dramatic school, he rose to heights of forensic eloquence under the hypnotic effect of his own voice. Now, with an interested crowd gathered around the bandstand in Santa Delbarra’s municipal park, Milton raised his voice and inquired: “What sort of district attorney does this county have? What does he do for his county in return for his salary?
“Let’s answer that question, by looking for a minute at some of the things he does not do.
“Let’s look at Petrie, for instance.”
Milton made dramatic pauses to let his statements soak in. When he saw that the audience was properly receptive, he went on. “He has not protected the property interests of this county. He has not protected the citizens of the Petrie district. Frank Duryea is a lawyer. He’s supposed to know the law. He should have known that this cloud on the title of all that fine citrus property out east of Petrie was a dangerous menace to the welfare of this county. He was in a position to have done something about it.
“Now that oil-drilling has been started, and the citizens of this county are being subjected to legalized blackmail, it’s too late. But for years those oil rights slumbered along quietly. Now I’ll tell you what I’d have done if I’d been district attorney of this county.”