He came back as I finished my examination.
“Shot,” I told him, “once in the right temple. Before that, I think, there was a fight. There are marks on the arm that was under her body. There’s nothing on her—no jewelry, money—nothing.”
“That goes,” Paget said. “Two women got out of the car back in the clearin’, an’ came here. Could’ve been three women—if the others carried this one. Can’t make out how many went back. One of ’em was larger than this one. There was a scuffle here. Find the gun?”
“No,” I said.
“Neither did I. It went away in the car, then. There’s what’s left of a fire over there.” He ducked his head to the left. “Paper an’ rags burnt. Not enough left to do us any good. I reckon the photo Cereghino found blew away from the fire. Late Friday, I’d put it, or maybe Saturday mornin’. … No nearer than that.”
I took the deputy sheriff’s word for it. He seemed to know his stuff.
“Come here. I’ll show you somethin’,” he said, and led me over to a little black pile of ashes.
He hadn’t anything to show me. He wanted to talk to me away from the Italian’s ears.
“I think the guinea’s all right,” he said, “but I reckon I’d best hold him a while to make sure. This is some way from his place, an’ he stuttered a little bit too much tellin’ me how he happened to be passin’ here. Course, that don’t mean nothin’ much. All these guineas peddle vino, an’ I guess that’s what brought him out this way. I’ll hold him a day or two, anyways.”
“Good,” I agreed. “This is your country, and you know the people. Can you visit around and see what you can pick up? Whether anybody saw anything? Saw a Locomobile cabriolet? Or anything else? You can get more than I could.”
“I’ll do that,” he promised.
“All right. Then I’ll go back to San Francisco now. I suppose you’ll want to camp here with the body?”
“Yeah. You drive the Ford back to Knob Valley, an’ tell Tom what’s what. He’ll come or send out. I’ll keep the guinea here with me.”
Waiting for the next westbound train out of Knob Valley, I got the office on the telephone. The Old Man was out. I told my story to one of the office men and asked him to get the news to the Old Man as soon as he could.
Everybody was in the office when I got back to San Francisco. Alfred Banbrock, his face a pink-grey that was deader than solid grey could have been. His pink and white old lawyer, Pat Reddy, sprawled on his spine with his feet on another chair. The Old Man, with his gentle eyes behind gold spectacles and his mild smile, hiding the fact that fifty years of sleuthing had left him without any feelings at all on any subject. (Whitey Clayton used to say the Old Man could spit icicles in August.)
Nobody said anything when I came in. I said my say as briefly as possible.
“Then the other woman—the woman who killed Ruth was—?”
Banbrock didn’t finish his question. Nobody answered it.
“We don’t know what happened,” I said after a while. “Your daughter and someone we don’t know may have gone there. Your daughter may have been dead before she was taken there. She may have—”
“But Myra!” Banbrock was pulling at his collar with a finger inside. “Where is Myra?”
I couldn’t answer that, nor could any of the others.
“You are going up to Knob Valley now?” I asked him.
“Yes, at once. You will come with me?”
I wasn’t sorry I could not.
“No. There are things to be done here. I’ll give you a note to the marshal. I want you to look carefully at the piece of your daughter’s photograph the Italian found—to see if you remember it.”
Banbrock and the lawyer left.
VI
Reddy lit one of his awful cigars. “We found the car,” the Old Man said.
“Where?”
“In Sacramento. It was left in a garage there either late Friday night or early Saturday. Foley has gone up to investigate it. And Reddy has uncovered a new angle.”
Pat nodded through his smoke.
“A hock-shop dealer came in this morning,” Pat said, “and told us that Myra Banbrock and another girl came to his joint last week and hocked a lot of stuff. They gave him phony names, but he swears one of them was Myra. He recognized her picture as soon as he saw it in the paper. Her companion wasn’t Ruth. It was a little blonde.”
“Mrs. Correll?”
“Uh-huh. The shark can’t swear to that, but I think that’s the answer. Some of the jewelry was Myra’s, some Ruth’s, and some we don’t know. I mean we can’t prove it belonged to Mrs. Correll—though we will.”
“When did all this happen?”
“They soaked the stuff Monday before they went away.”
“Have you seen Correll?”
“Uh-huh,” Pat said. “I did a lot of talking to him, but the answers weren’t worth much. He says he don’t know whether any of her jewelry is gone or not, and doesn’t care. It was hers, he says, and she could do anything she wanted with it. He was kind of disagreeable. I got along a little better with one of the maids. She says some of Mrs. Correll’s pretties disappeared last week. Mrs. Correll said she had lent them to a friend. I’m going to show the stuff the hock-shop has to the maid tomorrow, to see if she can identify it. She didn’t know anything else—except that Mrs. Correll was out of the picture for a while on Friday—the day the Banbrock girls went away.”
“What do you mean, out of the picture?” I asked.
“She went out late in the morning and didn’t show up until somewhere around three the next morning. She and Correll
