'Know him again if you saw him?'
'I reckon I would--if I saw him going past like that.'
Four miles beyond Whidden's we found the Chrysler. It was a foot or two off the road, on the left-hand side, standing on all fours with its radiator jammed into a eucalyptus tree. All its glass was shattered, and the front third of its metal was pretty well crumpled. It was empty. There was no blood in it. The deputy sheriff and I seemed to be the only people in the vicinity.
We ran around in circles, straining our eyes at the ground, and when we got through we knew what we had known at the beginning--the Chrysler had run into a eucalyptus tree. There were tire-marks on the road, and marks that could have been footprints on the ground by the car; but it was possible to find the same sort of marks in a hundred places along that, or any other, road. We got into our borrowed car again and drove on, asking questions wherever we found someone to question; and all the answers were: No, we didn't see her or them.
'What about this fellow Baker?' I asked Rolly as we turned around to go back. 'Debro saw her alone. There was a man with her when she passed Whidden's. The Bakers saw nothing, and it was in their territory that the man must have joined her.'
'Well,' he said, argumentatively; 'it could of happened that way, couldn't it?'
'Yeah, but it might be a good idea to do some more talking to them.'
'If you want to,' he consented without enthusiasm. 'But don't go dragging me into any arguments with them. He's my wife's brother.'
That made a difference. I asked:
'What sort of man is he?'
'Claude's kind of shiftless, all right. Like the old man says, he don't manage to raise nothing much but kids on that farm of his, but I never heard tell that he did anybody any harm.'
'If you say he's all right, that's enough for me,' I lied. 'We won't bother him.'
XV. I've Killed Him
Sheriff Feeney, fat, florid, and with a lot of brown mustache, and district attorney Vernon, sharp-featured, aggressive, and hungry for fame, came over from the county seat. They listened to our stories, looked the ground over, and agreed with Rolly that Gabrielle Collinson had killed her husband. When Marshal Dick Cotton--a pompous, unintelligent man in his forties--returned from San Francisco, he added his vote to the others. The coroner and his jury came to the same opinion, though officially they limited themselves to the usual 'person or persons unknown,' with recommendations involving the girl.
The time of Collinson's death was placed between eight and nine o'clock Friday night. No marks not apparently caused by his fall had been found on him. The pistol found in his room had been identified as his. No fingerprints were on it. I had an idea that some of the county officials half suspected me of having seen to that, though nobody said anything of that sort. Mary Nunez stuck to her story of being kept home by chills. She had a flock of Mexican witnesses to back it up. I couldn't find any to knock holes in it. We found no further trace of the man Whidden had seen. I tried the Bakers again, by myself, with no luck. The marshal's wife, a frail youngish woman with a weak pretty face and nice shy manners, who worked in the telegraph office, said Collinson had sent off his wire to me early Friday morning. He was pale and shaky, she said, with dark-rimmed, bloodshot eyes. She had supposed he was drunk, though she hadn't smelled alcohol on his breath.
Collinson's father and brother came down from San Francisco. Hubert Collinson, the father, was a big calm man who looked capable of taking as many more millions out of Pacific Coast lumber as he wanted. Laurence Collinson was a year or two older than his dead brother, and much like him in appearance. Both Collinsons were careful to say nothing that could be interpreted as suggesting they thought Gabrielle had been responsible for Eric's death, but there was little doubt that they did think so.
Hubert Collinson said quietly to me, 'Go ahead; get to the bottom of it;' and thus became the fourth client for whom the agency had been concerned with Gabrielle's affairs.
Madison Andrews came down from San Francisco. He and I talked in my hotel room. He sat on a chair by the window, cut a cube of tobacco from a yellowish plug, put it in his mouth, and decided that Collinson had committed suicide.
I sat on the side of the bed, set fire to a Fatima, and contradicted him:
'He wouldn't have torn up the bush if he'd gone over willingly.'
'Then it was an accident. That was a dangerous road to be walked in the dark.'
'I've stopped believing in accidents,' I said. 'And he had sent me an SOS. And there was the gun that had been fired in his room.'
He leaned forward in his chair. His eyes were hard and watchful. He was a lawyer cross-examining a witness.
'You think Gabrielle was responsible?'
I wouldn't go that far. I said:
'He was murdered. He was murdered by-- I told you two weeks ago that we weren't through with that damned curse, and that the only way to get through with it was to have the Temple business sifted to the bottom.'
'Yes, I remember,' he said without quite sneering. 'You advanced the theory that there was some connecting link between her parents' deaths and the trouble she had at the Haldorns'; but, as I recall it, you had no idea what the link might be. Don't you think that deficiency has a tendency to make your theory a little--say-- vaporous?'
'Does it? Her father, step-mother, physician, and husband have been killed, one after the other, in less than two months; and her maid jailed for murder. All the people closest to her. Doesn't that look like a program? And'--I grinned at him--'are you sure it's not going further? And if it does, aren't you the next closest person to her?'
'Preposterous!' He was very much annoyed now. 'We know about her parents' deaths, and about Riese's, and that there was no link between them. We know that those responsible for Riese's murder are now either dead
