“I notified the El Centro sheriff and described the pieces of glass which were missing from the bent headlight. They seemed to check. So the El Centro men rushed up here bringing the pieces with them. There’s no question about it. The pieces fitted absolutely. Grannis hit that Mexican.
“The El Centro authorities filed a hit-and-run charge against him and took him back with them.”
“Well,” Selby said, “you can see what’s happened now. And here, of course, is something that shouldn’t come as any great surprise.”
“What’s that, Doug?”
“The attorney who is representing Frank Grannis is Mr. Alfonse Baker Carr.”
“Now why the devil didn’t Daphne Arcola tell you that when you talked with her?”
“Hard to tell,” Selby said. “Probably because Carr warned her not to tell me anything. We can begin to fit events into a pattern now. She must have got in touch with Carr very shortly after our talk with Mrs. Carr. That’s why she was out until four o’clock in the morning. Old A. B. C. must have known, shortly after we left his house, that we’d made a mistake in identifying the corpse, but he never said a word about that. He just let us go ahead, let The Clarion publish the report of Daphne Arcola’s death — and I suppose now he’ll have Daphne Arcola file a suit against the newspaper.”
“Damn him,” Brandon said angrily. “He could have saved us a lot of trouble by just picking up the telephone and putting in a call to my office.”
“Well,” Selby said, “when you come right down to it, Rex, why should he try to save us any trouble? Simply by keeping his mouth shut he gave Daphne Arcola a swell chance for a damage suit against The Clarion certainly, and perhaps against us.”
“Well, he’ll have a hell of a time explaining his silence in front of a jury,” Brandon said.
“Oh, no he won’t, Rex. Carr’s too smart to get caught in that trap. If Daphne Arcola starts an action you can bet that Carr won’t be her attorney of record. He’ll have some stooge bring that suit. Carr will be very sympathetic toward us and commiserate with us on our predicament. Don’t worry about old A. B. C. getting caught that easy.”
Brandon said, “Sometimes I feel that it would be worth what it would cost to smash him in the puss. I don’t see how you manage to tolerate him, Doug. The guy seems to amuse you. He makes me see red.”
Selby laughed. “Frankly, Rex, I like the scoundrel. He’s such a suave, ingenious devil, and you have to admit the man has one of the most powerful personalities you’ve ever encountered. He’s a consummate actor, and you never catch him in an actual outright lie. He’s perfectly willing to let us deceive ourselves, but he almost never makes a false statement. It takes an artist to do the things Carr does.”
“Oh, I suppose he’s smart all right,” Brandon said. “Any editorial in there, Doug?”
“Oh, sure,” Selby told him. “It’s smeared all over the editorial page. I guess I told you that Paden gave me a chance to come into camp, and then threatened me with all sorts of trouble in case I didn’t play ball. This case seems to be made to order for him.”
“Paden!” Brandon snorted. “That’s another one of Carr’s importations. Personally, I’d make a bet that Carr put up the money that was used to buy The Blade. Look at what’s happening right under our eyes. When Carr first came to this county he was almost pathetic in his humble desire to become a part of our community and get away from the things which go with a criminal law practice in the big city. He wanted to retire. Then he said his clients wouldn’t let him retire.
“First thing anyone knew, he was doing tricky legal jobs for prominent people here and getting them under obligations to him, until now he’s a regular clearing house of crime.
“Every once in a while you hear of some other prominent citizen who went to him with something that was very hush-hush.
“That’s one thing about old A. B. C. He can keep his mouth shut. And he knows how to get a prominent person out of a scrape so there’s no faintest suggestion of publicity. Every time he gets someone out of trouble, he has another ace in the hole, some other person on whom he can call for help whenever he needs something done locally. I tell you, the man’s dangerous. However, let’s hear what Paden has to say in his editorial. I presume he’s adopted the lofty condescension of a big city intellect dealing with a bunch of rural boobs. Damn those sneering, sarcastic editorials!”
“Why read them, Rex? You know they’ll roast you, so why not just...”
“Nope, I couldn’t do that,” Brandon interrupted, grinning. “Let’s hear what old Paden has to say, Doug.”
Selby folded the paper, said, “All right, Rex, here we go:
Once again we are forced to call to the attention of the taxpayers the utter incompetency of the sheriff and district attorney of this county. Regardless of what some may think, it is not a pleasant duty; but it is for the best interest of the community that we comment on their handling of this last and latest crime.
It so happens that the murder was committed within the city limits, and the city police were on the job at approximately the same time the over-zealous, publicity-hungry county officials started working.
If the county officials had wanted the whole-hearted co-operation of the city police chief, it was theirs for the asking. But the county men, acting with characteristic high-handed disregard for conventional methods of procedure, ignored the city police, even to the extent of failing to communicate important clues.
The manner in which their efforts backfired is attested by the fact that a veteran attorney, who has probably forgotten more law than the district attorney ever knew, and who was getting courtroom experience when the man who now guides the legal destinies of Madison County was in his swaddling clothes, is even now studying the possibilities of litigation.
It is astonishing that Doug Selby, as district attorney, should have put himself in the position he now occupies. Not only did he announce to the press that a certain young woman had been murdered, but he then proceeded to invade the privacy of her bedroom, apparently inviting in a reporter of the servile Clarion to watch him pull a rabbit out of a hat — or, in this case, a clue out of a suitcase.
And just as soon as Sheriff Brandon could break away without letting the chief of police know where he was going, Brandon joined Selby at the hotel. There the two of them set about the systematic search of a room which had been rented by a young woman whose only similarity to the corpse was the fact that they both had been more or less recently in a Montana city.
But the point is that all of this unseemly haste, all of this invasion of privacy, all of this cheapening of the county, merely for the purpose of gaining individual credit, not only accomplished nothing, but did have a tendency to delay the solution of the case. It remained for Chief of Police Otto Larkin, working carefully and methodically, running down clues, putting two and two together, not only to make an arrest of a person who quite evidently is the guilty party, but to uncover evidence which is of the greatest importance, evidence which the county officials would never have seen had Larkin not been on the job.
And, as for a custom which has persisted for years in the office of the sheriff and district attorney, the habit of paying off political debts by catering exclusively to one newspaper and releasing news only through that most favored press organ, this is once when our esteemed contemporary has quite evidently outreached itself, and legal action is in the offing.