“But when he died, he died pretty sudden-like, and when I started checking up on things I started looking for a bunch of travelers’ checks he carried with him all the time. They’d been cashed. Just a day or two before he died he’d started cashing checks, quite a lot of checks, not too many, but quite a lot.”
“How many?” Selby asked.
“Ten or fifteen thousand dollars, somewhere around in there. I can’t remember the exact amount, thirteen thousand and something, I think it was.”
“All the checks he had with him?”
“No, not all. He carried twenty thousand dollars in checks with him wherever he went. This was his way of being independent. That was his way of showing that he could do whatever he wanted to.
“Land sakes, life isn’t made that way. People can’t do what they want to. People are always doing what they don’t want to do. That’s the way life works, and don’t ask me why. It’s just the fact that you can’t develop none by doing only the things you want to do. You do the things life makes you do, and somehow or other it seems to work out all right. But you take people who are in a position where they can do whatever they want to, and first thing you know they don’t know what they want to do, and then they get sort of goofy. Leastwise, that’s the way it seems to me.”
“So you hired this detective to go and find out what your brother had been doing?”
“Hired this detective to go find out what caused my brother to cash those travelers’ checks, and find out a little more about how he died. Doctors said his heart just gave way. Well, that’s all right. His heart wasn’t as strong when he was sixty as it was when he was twenty, but I just wanted to check up. Just wanted to satisfy myself. Wanted to find out what had happened to him.”
“And did you?”
“Well, I found everything was all right. Leastwise, that’s what that detective wired me.”
Mrs. Nutwell got up from the chair, tapped her way across the room to a writing desk, opened it, and took out a yellow Western Union envelope. She removed the telegram from the envelope and handed it to Selby.
Selby said, “This telegram was sent from Corona at nine-thirty Tuesday night, and reads:
HAVE FINISHED INVESTIGATION IN MONTANA. YOUR BROTHER ALTHOUGH OBVIOUSLY A FINE MAN WAS LEARNING ABOUT LIFE THE HARD WAY. HAVE MADE COMPLETE INVESTIGATION AND EVERYTHING IS ALL RIGHT. NIGHT BEFORE HE DIED DROPPED FIFTEEN THOUSAND GAMBLING. GAME WAS RIGGED. HAD LOST FIVE THOUSAND TO CROOKED CARD SHARK WEEK BEFORE AND A GIRL HAD TAKEN HIM FOR FIFTEEN HUNDRED AS A QUOTE LOAN UNQUOTE. ALL REPORTS INDICATE HE WAS ENJOYING HIMSELF ENORMOUSLY BUT EXCITEMENT AND TENSION POSSIBLY PRECIPITATED HEART ATTACK. WILL REPORT TO YOU IN DETAIL WITHIN NEXT DAY OR TWO. IN THE MEANTIME HAVE TO STOP OFF MADISON CITY ON ANOTHER MATTER WHICH WILL ONLY TAKE ABOUT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS.
Selby said, “May we take this telegram, Mrs. Nutwell?”
She hesitated, then said, “Well, I guess it’s all right. You say she was murdered?”
“That’s right, apparently within two hours after she sent this wire. It seems she returned to Los Angeles, started to type out a report on another case, was interrupted by some client who called for her and insisted she leave immediately for Madison City with him — and she must have sent you this wire on the road to Madison City.”
“And you don’t have any idea who did the killing?”
“No, that’s what we’re trying to find out.”
“She was a mighty competent young woman. She certainly knew her way around. Knew about life and about people. I talked with her. She told me she wouldn’t send me in any report; that she didn’t do business that way; that she took a case and went out and made a job of it. When she was finished she had the story. She told me she wasn’t going to go running up a lot of expenses on me, but that I’d just have to sort of trust her. I felt certain she’d come back with the whole story and tell it to me all at once. She said reports just cramped her style. She said she didn’t want to have to start making guesses before she had all the facts.”
“How long ago did you hire Rose Furman?” Selby asked.
“Must have been three or four weeks.”
“And you gave her money?”
“I gave her four hundred against expenses. I agreed to pay her another four hundred for a complete report, where Carl went the last few days of his life, whom he was with and all that. If you find any notes she made on that, I want ’em.
“And,” Mrs. Nutwell added, with sudden conviction, “you won’t find any. She was too smart to have left as much as the scratch of a pen. You want to bet, young man?”
“No,” Selby said, “I don’t want to bet.”
Sylvia Martin quietly slipped her folded notes back in her purse. She had her story.
15
Driving back to Madison City, Selby studied the mystery of Rose Furman with frowning concentration and Brandon refrained from interrupting the young district attorney’s thoughts.
It was as they were approaching Madison City that Selby said, “Rex, we’re confronted with a peculiar pattern. It isn’t a pattern of coincidence and it isn’t a pattern of accident.”
“What is it, then?”
“Let’s begin with Daphne Arcola,” Selby said. “She came to Madison City. Why?”
“The way it looks now,” Brandon said, “it’s because she knew Frank Grannis had been arrested here and then taken to El Centro.”
Selby said, “The thought keeps recurring to my mind, Rex, that Daphne may have gone to Madison City because of the letter Babe Harlan wrote telling her that she had married A. B. Carr.”
“And she came to visit her friend?”
“Not to visit Mrs. Carr, but to consult A. B. Carr. And that would explain that wire. Don’t forget, Rex, that Mrs. Carr mentioned something in her letter about her marriage and the peculiar circumstances in connection with it; but then went on to state that her husband was a wizard as a criminal attorney and that crooks who were wise would wink at each other and say, ‘It’s as simple as A. B. C.’ ”
Brandon thought that over until they had turned into the main street of Madison City. Then he said simply, “Doug, that’s the right track. Where do we go from there?”
Selby said, “We go to your office, and we call up the sheriff’s office at El Centro. Then we drive down there and start sweating Frank Grannis to see if he doesn’t have some of the answers we want.”
Brandon said, “Sounds reasonable to me.”
They turned off the main street and up the hill toward the Courthouse. Sylvia Martin’s headlights were dancing along right behind them.
“Sylvia’s making good time with that red buzz buggy of hers,” Brandon said.
They parked their car at the Courthouse and waited for Sylvia. The three of them walked up the echoing marble steps to the sheriff’s office.
The night deputy said, “This gentleman has been waiting to see you, Sheriff.”
Brandon turned around as a tall, slim young man with worried eyes came up out of the chair in which he had been sitting and moved toward the sheriff with outstretched hand.
“You may not remember me, Sheriff,” he said. “I knew you several years ago. I’m Horace Lennox. I...”
“Oh, yes,” Brandon said. “You’ve been in Chicago, opened a law office there, I believe.”
“That’s right. I... I have a favor I want to ask you, Sheriff.”
“What?”
“You’re holding Dorothy Clifton, my fiancée, in jail. I’ve flown out here to see her, and... well, I’ve run up against red tape on visiting hours and...”