“Just fine,” she said. “How’s Lucy?”
“She’s always well, thanks. This is Mr. Guild, Mrs. Callaghan.”
Guild bowed, murmuring something polite. The woman ducked her head at him and took a backward step. “If you can’t play cards without rowing I wish you’d stop,” she told her son and husband as she withdrew.
Boyer addressed Guild: “King, the deputy stationed at Wynant’s place, says he hasn’t seen anything of Fremont all day.”
Guild looked at his watch. “He’s had eleven hours to make it in,” he said. He smiled pleasantly. “Or eleven hours’ start if he headed in another direction.”
The undertaker leaned over the table. “You think -?”
“I don’t know,” Guild said. “I don’t know anything. That’s the hell of it. We don’t know anything.”
“There’s nothing to know,” the deputy sheriff said querulously, “except that Wynant was jealous and killed her and ran away and you haven’t been able to find him.”
Guild, staring bleakly at the younger Callaghan, said nothing.
Boyer cleared his throat. “Well, Ray,” he began, “Mr. Guild and I have found quite a bit of confusing evidence in the -“
The elder Callaghan prodded his son with a gnarled forefinger. “Did you tell them about that Smoot boy?”
The deputy sheriff pulled irritably away from his father’s finger. “That don’t amount to nothing,” he said, “and, besides, what chance’ve I got to tell anything with all the talking you’ve been doing?”
“What was it?” Boyer asked eagerly.
“It don’t amount to nothing. Just that this kid – maybe you know him, Pete Smoot’s boy – had a telegram for Wynant and took it up to his house. He got there at five minutes after two. He wrote down the time because nobody answered the door and he had to poke the telegram under the door.”
“This was yesterday afternoon?” Guild asked.
“Yes,” the deputy sheriff said gruffly. “Well, the kid says the blue car, the one she drove out from the city in, was there then, and Wynant’s wasn’t.”
“He knew Wynant’s car?” Guild asked.
Pointedly ignoring Guild, the deputy sheriff said: “He says there wasn’t any other car there, either in the shed or outside. He’d’ve seen it if there was. So he put the telegram under the door, got on his bike, and rode back to the telegraph office. Coming back along the road he says he saw the Hopkinses cutting across the field. They’d been down at Hooper’s buying Hopkins a suit. The kid says they didn’t see him and they were too far from the road for him to holler at them about the telegram.” The deputy sheriff’s face began to redden again. “So if that’s right, and I guess it is, they’d’ve got back to the house, I reckon, around twenty past two – not before that, anyway.” He picked up the cards and began to shuffle them, though he had dealt the last hand. “Yon see, that -well – it don’t mean anything or help us any.”
Guild had finished lighting a cigarette. He asked Callaghan, before Boyer could speak: “What do you figure? She was alone in the house and didn’t answer the kid’s knock because she was hurrying to get her packing done before Wynant came home? Or because she was already dead?”
Boyer began in a tone of complete amazement: “But the Hopkinses said -“
Guild said: “Wait. Let Callaghan answer.”
Callaghan said in a voice hoarse with anger: “Let Callaghan answer if he wants to, but he don’t happen to want to, and what do you think of that?” He glared at Guild. “I got nothing to do with you.” He glared at Boyer. “You got nothing to do with me. I’m a deputy sheriff and Petersen’s my boss. Go to him for anything you want. Understand that?”
Guild’s dark face was impassive. His voice was even. “You’re not the first deputy sheriff that ever tried to make a name for himself by holding back information.” He started to put his cigarette in his mouth, lowered it, and said: “You got the Hopkinses’ call. You were first on the scene, weren’t you? What’d you find there that you’ve kept to yourself?”
Callaghan stood up. Lane and the undertaker rose hastily from their places at the table.
Boyer said: “Now, wait, gentlemen, there’s no use of our quarrelling.”
Guild, smiling, addressed the deputy sheriff blandly: “You’re not in such a pretty spot, Callaghan. You had a yen for the girl. You were likely to be just as jealous as Wynant when you heard she was going off with Fremont. You’ve got a childish sort of hot temper. Where were you around two o’clock yesterday afternoon?”
Callaghan, snarling unintelligible curses, lunged at Guild.
Lane and the undertaker sprang between the two men, struggling with the deputy sheriff. Lane turned his head to give the growling dog in the corner a quieting command. The elder Callaghan did not get up, but leaned over the table whining remonstrances at his son’s back. Mrs. Callaghan came in and began to scold her son.
Boyer said nervously to Guild: “I think we’d better go.”
Guild shrugged. “Whatever you say, though I would like to know where he spent the early part of yesterday afternoon.” He glanced calmly around the room and followed Boyer to the front door.
Outside, the district attorney exclaimed: “Good God! You don’t think Ray killed her!”
“Why not?” Guild snapped the remainder of his cigarette to the middle of the roadbed in a long red arc. “I don’t know. Somebody did and I’ll tell you a secret. I’m damned if I think Wynant did.”
Nine
Hopkins and a tall younger man with a reddish moustache came out of Wynant’s house when Boyer stopped his automobile in front of it.
The district attorney got down on the ground, saying: “Good evening, gentlemen.” Indicating the red- moustached man, he said to Guild: “This is deputy sheriff King, Mr. Guild. Mr. Guild,” he explained, “is working with me.”
The deputy sheriff nodded, looking the dark man up and down. “Yes,” he said, “I been hearing about him. Howdy, Mr. Guild.”
Guild’s nod included Hopkins and King,
“No sign of Fremont yet?” Boyer asked.
“No.”
Guild spoke: “Is Mrs. Hopkins still up?”
“Yes, sir,” her husband said, “she’s doing some sewing.”
The four men went indoors.
Mrs. Hopkins, sitting in a rocking-chair hemming an unbleached linen handkerchief, started to rise, but sank back in her chair with a “How do you do” when Boyer said: “Don’t get up. We’ll find chairs.”
Guild did not sit down. Standing by the door, he lit a cigarette while the others were finding seats. Then he addressed the Hopkinses: “You told us it was around three o’clock yesterday afternoon that Columbia Forrest got back from the city.”
“Oh, no, sir!” The woman dropped her sewing on her knees. “Or at least we never meant to say anything like that. We meant to say it was around three o’clock when we heard them – him – quarrelling. You can ask Mr. Callaghan what time it was when I called him up and -“
“I’m asking you,” Guild said in a pleasant tone. “Was she here when you got back from the village – from buying the suit – at two-twenty?”
The woman peered nervously through her spectacles at him. “Well, yes, sir, she was, if that’s what time it was. I thought it was later, Mr. Gould, but if you say that’s what time it was I guess you know, but she’d only just got home.”
“How do you know that?”
“She said so. She called downstairs to know if it was us coming in and she said she’d just that minute got home.”
“Was there a telegram under the door when you came in?”
The Hopkinses looked at each other in surprise and shook their heads. “No, there was not,” the man said.
“Was he here?”
“Mr. Wynant?”
