Brandon interrupted angrily, “It’s the way they say those things that makes you so damn mad. You’d think we were standing at the Pearly Gates and Saint Peter was looking at us over the top of his glasses and telling us what we’d done wrong. What’s all this new evidence Larkin got?”
Selby said, “Dorothy Clifton, after leaving the Lennox home, apparently by request, went to the Madison Hotel. She put through a phone call or two, then went out. Larkin searched the room. He found blood spots on a blouse in her suitcase. He took the blouse, rushed it to a laboratory. Tests showed the spots were human blood. Larkin made the arrest then. Dorothy Clifton says the blouse was one she wore crossing the divide where she had a nosebleed. She insists all the blood spots were from that nosebleed.”
“And that’s Larkin’s whole case?” Brandon demanded. “Just the tracks of her car and spots of blood on a blouse?”
“No,” Selby said thoughtfully. “He found the murder weapon, Rex.”
“That’s what he claims,” Brandon said. “I’d bet money he hasn’t. Where did he find it, Doug?”
“The newspaper says it is honor bound not to divulge that in print, but that once he was certain of his quarry, Larkin showed the tireless determination of a bloodhound in...”
“Skip all that, Doug. It makes me sick. For heaven’s sake, Doug, are people that dumb?”
Selby smiled. “It depends on how a thing is presented to them, Rex. Of course, the mysterious recovery of this murder weapon makes the whole story ring true... if it is the murder weapon and Larkin has recovered it.”
“If it’s the murder weapon and Otto Larkin recovered it, I’ll eat it,” Brandon declared. “And now we have this Arcola woman getting mixed up with old A. B. C. in that El Centro hit-and-run case... Well, we’ll keep on ridin’ and spurring, Doug, and see where we come out... Won’t Larkin have to turn that murder weapon over to us?”
“Oh sure,” Selby said. “Now that he’s had all the newspaper credit, he’ll turn the whole thing over to us — dump it right in our laps, in fact.”
Selby abruptly folded The Blade and tossed it over in the back of the car. “Let’s go ahead and call the shots as we see them and just forget all about the opposition.”
He pushed his hands down deep in his trousers pockets, and remained silent until Brandon swung the car off a main boulevard and said, “This is where we’re to meet the sheriff’s man.”
A sheriff’s car was waiting at the corner. Two men were in it. A deputy sheriff spotted Brandon’s car, came forward, shook hands and was introduced to Doug Selby as Halbert Hardwick, a deputy who had worked with Brandon on other cases.
“We’ve been getting a line on this babe,” he said, “and we’ve uncovered some funny stuff.”
“What is it, Bert?”
“She was a dick.”
“For the city?”
“No, a private dick. Ran a little agency of her own. One of the men in the department of records thought he remembered the name, so we looked her up. Sure enough, it was the one. She has a license and everything.”
“What sort of work?”
“For the most part she specializes on cases involving playboys. She’s rather a hot number when she decks herself out, and they say she twists them all around her finger and wrings them inside out.”
“Well, she isn’t going to do any more twisting,” Brandon said. “She’s dead. That is, if this is the one. If she was a private detective, we should be able to make an identification.”
“Sure we can make an identification. We have everything, even her fingerprints. I brought the records along.”
“Good work,” Selby said. “We have prints of her fingers and a photograph.”
Brandon opened his wallet, unfolded a set of fingerprints, and took out a photograph.
“Darned if it doesn’t look like the same one,” Hardwick said. “Let’s take a look at those prints. I’ll take the ring finger. You take the right forefinger, Sheriff.”
“Sure looks the same,” the sheriff announced, at length. “Of course, it isn’t like making an absolute comparison, but...”
“It’s the same, all right,” Hardwick said. “Well, that makes it a cinch, Sheriff. I guess we have the identity all cleaned up right now. What’s more we’ve got the man for whom she was working at the time she was bumped off.”
“How did you do all that in such a short space of time?”
“Leg work and luck. This chap kept trying to contact her all last night. He had his car parked in front of the building all the first part of the evening, and then he showed up again before daylight this morning. The manager of the apartment house saw it was an out-of-state car and took his license number, just in case. So, when we got your phone call, we started checking up and when we came to the conclusion this girl was the one you were interested in, we started talking with the landlady. She told us about this car. She’d made a note of the license number. While we were talking, he drove up. Naturally, we started asking him questions. He’s trying to play cagey. We haven’t wanted to go really to work on him until you got here.”
“What’s his story generally?”
“You’d better get it firsthand,” Hardwick said. “So far he hasn’t given us much except that this Furman dame was doing something for him, and he’s trying to contact her to find out what she’s learned. We’ve got the guy parked over here in my car.
“His name is Barton Mosher. He lives up in Windrift, Montana. Come on over and get his story.”
“Does he know anything about what we’re investigating?” Selby asked.
The deputy flashed him a quizzical look, said, “We’re not that dumb, Mr. Selby. That guy just knows we’re looking for Rose Furman, and that’s all. Come on over and meet him.”
They walked over to the deputy’s car.
Hardwick said to the man who was seated in the automobile, “These are a couple of friends of mine, Mr. Selby and Mr. Brandon. And this is Barton Mosher.”
The men shook hands.
“Will someone kindly tell me what this is all about?” Mosher demanded.
“That’s what you’re going to tell us,” Hardwick said. “Now, you’ve been hanging around Rose Furman’s apartment, and...”
“I tell you it was simply a matter of business. I told you what it was.”
“All right, tell us again. My friends might be interested.”
“I asked Rose Furman to do something for me. I don’t know as I should be telling all this,” Mosher said.
“Suit yourself,” Hardwick told him. “We can take you up to headquarters and let you think it over just as well as not. If you have anything to conceal, you’d be foolish to incriminate yourself.”
“What do you mean, incriminate myself?”
Hardwick explained patiently, “I’ll give it to you all over again. Concentrate on it, now. Rose Furman isn’t home. She hasn’t been around her apartment for a while. You’ve been hanging around there. You’re acting mighty suspicious. The people in the neighborhood begin to wonder what it’s all about. One of them telephones in. So we come out and ask you, and you start playing button, button, who’s got the button with us.”
“Say, what are you talking about? You fellows can’t do this. I could go phone my lawyer.”
“Come on, let’s go down to headquarters and you can phone your lawyer from there.”
“I don’t want that. There are newspapermen hanging around police headquarters.”
“Sure. You afraid of them?”
“Yes. That is... well, I can’t stand... I don’t want publicity.”
“Maybe you’d like to talk here, then.”
“My lawyer...”
“Keep on being cagey with us and you’ll need a lawyer.” Hardwick yawned. “One of you guys got cigarettes? Guess we’d better go on down to the sheriff’s office.”