“Know Eric Carter?” I asked.
“The fellow honeymooning down to the Tooker place? I didn’t know his front name was Eric.”
“Eric Carter,” the elder Rolly said; “that’s the way I made out the rent receipt for him.”
“He’s dead,” I told them. “He fell off the cliff road last night or this morning. It could have been an accident.”
The father looked at the son with round tan eyes. The son looked at me with questioning tan eyes and said: “Tch, tch, tch.”
I gave him a card. He read it carefully, turning it over to see that there was nothing on its back, and passed it to his father. “Go down and take a look at him?” I suggested.
“I guess I ought to,” the deputy sheriff agreed, getting up from his chair. He was a larger man than I had supposed—as big as the dead Collinson boy—and, in spite of his slouchiness, he had a nicely muscled body.
I followed him out to a dusty car in front of the office. Rolly senior didn’t go with us.
“Somebody told you about it?” the deputy sheriff asked when we were riding.
“I stumbled on him. Know who the Carters are?”
“Somebody special?”
“You heard about the Riese murder in the San Francisco temple?”
“Uh-huh, I read the papers.”
“Mrs. Carter was the Gabrielle Leggett mixed up in that, and Carter was the Eric Collinson.”
“Tch, tch, tch,” he said.
“And her father and step-mother were killed a couple of weeks before that.”
“Tch, tch, tch,” he said. “What’s the matter with them?”
“A family curse.”
“Sure enough?”
I didn’t know how seriously he meant that question, though he seemed serious enough. I hadn’t got him sized up yet. However, clown or not, he was the deputy sheriff stationed at Quesada, and this was his party. He was entitled to the facts. I gave them to him as we bounced over the lumpy road, gave him all I had, from Paris in 1913 to the cliff road a couple of hours ago.
“When they came back from being married in Reno, Collinson dropped in to see me. They had to stick around for the Haldorn bunch’s trial, and he wanted a quiet place to take the girl: she was still in a daze. You know Owen Fitzstephan?”
“The writer fellow that was down here a while last year? Uh-huh.”
“Well, he suggested this place.”
“I know. The old man mentioned it. But what’d they take them aliases for?”
“To dodge publicity, and, partly, to try to dodge something like this.”
He frowned vaguely and asked:
“You mean they expected something like this?”
“Well, it’s easy to say, ‘I told you so,’ after things happen, but I’ve never thought we had the answer to either of the two mix-ups she’s been in. And not having the answer—how could you tell what to expect? I didn’t think so much of their going off into seclusion like this while whatever was hanging over her—if anything was—was still hanging over her, but Collinson was all for it. I made him promise to wire me if he saw anything funny. Well, he did.”
Rolly nodded three or four times, then asked:
“What makes you think he didn’t fall off the cliff?”
“He sent for me. Something was wrong. Outside of that, too many things have happened around his wife for me to believe in accidents.”
“There’s the curse, though,” he said.
“Yeah,” I agreed, studying his indefinite face, still trying to figure him out. “But the trouble with it is it’s worked out too well, too regularly. It’s the first one I ever ran across that did.”
He frowned over my opinion for a couple of minutes, and then stopped the car. “We’ll have to get out here: the road ain’t so good the rest of the way.” None of it had been. “Still and all, you do hear of them working out. There’s things that happen that makes a fellow think there’s things in the world—in life—that he don’t know much about.” He frowned again as we set off afoot, and found a word he liked. “It’s inscrutable,” he wound up.
I let that go at that.
He went ahead up the cliff path, stopping of his own accord where the bush had been torn up, a detail I hadn’t mentioned. I didn’t say anything while he stared down at Collinson’s body, looked searchingly up and down the face of the cliff, and then went up and down the path, bent far over, his tan eyes intent on the ground.
He wandered around for ten minutes or more, then straightened up and said: “There’s nothing here that I can find. Let’s go down.”
I started back toward the ravine, but he said there was a better way ahead. There was. We went down it to the dead man.
Rolly looked from the corpse to the edge of the path high above us, and complained: “I don’t hardly see how he could have landed just thataway.”
“He didn’t. I pulled him out of the water,” I said, showing the deputy exactly where I had found the body.
“That would be more like it,” he decided.
I sat on a rock and smoked a cigarette while he went around examining, touching, moving rocks, pebbles, and sand. He didn’t seem to have any luck.
14
THE CRUMPLED CHRYSLER
We climbed to the path again and went on to the Collinsons’ house. I showed Roily the stained towels, handkerchief, dress, and slippers; the paper that had held morphine; the gun on Collinson’s floor, the hole in the ceiling, and the empty shells on the floor.
“That shell under the chair is where it was,” I said; “but the other—the one in the corner—was here, close to the gun, when I saw it before.”
“You mean it’s been moved since you were here?”
“Yeah.”
“But what good would that do anybody?” he objected.
“None that I know of, but it’s been moved.”
He had lost interest. He was looking at the ceiling. He said:
“Two shots and one hole. I wonder. Maybe the other went out the window.”
He went back to Gabrielle Collinson’s bedroom and examined the black velvet gown. There were some torn places in it—down near the bottom—but no bullet-holes. He put the dress down and picked up the morphine paper from the dressing-table.
“What do you suppose this is doing here?” he asked.
“She uses it. It’s one of the things her step-mother taught her.”
“Tch, tch, tch. Kind of looks like she might have done it.”
“Yeah?”
“You know it does. She’s a dope fiend, ain’t she? They had had trouble, and he sent for you, and—” He broke off, pursed lips, then asked: “What time do you reckon he was killed?”
“I don’t know. Maybe last night, on his way home from waiting for me.”
“You were in the hotel all night?”
“From eleven-something till five this morning. Of course I could have sneaked out for long enough to pull a murder between those hours.”
“I didn’t mean nothing like that,” he said. “I was just wondering. What kind of looking woman is this Mrs. Collinson-Carter? I never saw her.”
“She’s about twenty; five feet four or five; looks thinner than she really is; light brown hair, short and curly; big eyes that are sometimes brown and sometimes green; white skin; hardly any forehead; small mouth and teeth; pointed chin; no lobes on her ears, and they’re pointed on top; been sick for a couple of months and looks it.”
“Oughtn’t be hard to pick her up,” he said, and began poking into drawers, closets, trunks, and so on. I had poked into them on my first visit, and hadn’t found anything interesting either.
“Don’t look like she did any packing or took much of anything with her,” he decided when he came back to where I was sitting by the dressing-table. He pointed a thick finger at the monogrammed silver toilet-set on the table. “What’s the G.D.L. for?”
“Her name was Gabrielle Something Leggett before she was married.”
“Oh, yes. She
went away in the car, I reckon. Huh?”
“Did they have one down here?” I asked.
“He used to come to town in a Chrysler roadster when he didn’t walk. She could only have took it out by the East road. We’ll go out thataway and see.”
Outside, I waited while he made circles around the house, finding nothing. In front of a shed where a car obviously had been kept he pointed at some tracks, and said, “Drove out this morning.” I took his word for it.
We walked along a dirt road to a gravel one, and along that perhaps a mile to a gray house that stood in a group of red farm buildings. A small-boned, high-shouldered man who limped slightly was oiling a pump behind the house. Rolly called him Debro.
“Sure, Ben,” he replied to Rolly’s question. “She went by here about seven this morning, going like a bat out of hell. There wasn’t anybody else in the car.”
“How was she dressed?” I asked.
“She didn’t have on any hat and a tan coat.”
I asked him what he knew about the Carters: he was their nearest neighbor. He didn’t know anything about them. He had talked to Carter two or three times, and thought him an agreeable enough young fellow. Once he had taken the missus over to call on Mrs. Carter, but Carter told them she was lying down, not feeling well. None of the Debros had ever seen her except at a distance, walking or riding with her husband.
“I don’t guess there’s anybody around here that’s talked to her,” he wound up, “except of course Mary Nunez.”
“Mary working for them?” the deputy asked.
“Yes. What’s the matter, Ben? Something the matter over there?”
“He fell off the cliff last night, and she’s gone away without saying anything to anybody.”
Debro whistled.
Rolly went into the house to use Debro’s phone, reporting to the sheriff. I stayed outside with Debro, trying to get more— if only his opinions—out of him. All I got were expressions of amazement.
“We’ll go over and see Mary,” the deputy said when he came from the phone; and then, when we had left Debro, had crossed the road, and were walking through a field towards a cluster of trees: “Funny she wasn’t there.”
“Who is she?”
“A Mex. Lives down in the hollow with the rest of them. Her man, Pedro Nunez, is doing a life-stretch in Folsom for killing a bootlegger named Dunne in a high-jacking two-three years back.”
“Local killing?”
“Uh-huh. It happened down in the cove in front of the Tooker place.”
We went through the trees and down a slope to where half a dozen shacks—shaped, sized, and red-leaded to resemble boxcars—lined the side of a stream, with vegetable gardens spread out behind them. In front of one of the shacks a shapeless Mexican woman in a pink-checkered dress sat on an empty canned-soup box smoking a corncob pipe and nursing a brown baby. Ragged and dirty children played between the buildings, with ragged and dirty mongrels helping them make noise. In one of the gardens a brown man in overalls that had once been blue was barely moving a hoe.
The children stopped playing to watch Rolly and me cross the stream on conveniently placed stones. The dogs came yapping to meet us, snarling and snapping around us until one of the boys chased them. We stopped in front of the woman with the baby. The deputy grinned down at the baby and said:
“Well, well, ain’t he getting to be a husky son-of-a-gun!”
The woman took the pipe from her mouth long enough to complain stolidly:
“Colic all the time.”
“Tch, tch, tch. Where’s Mary Nunez?”
The pipe-stem pointed at the next shack.
“I thought she was working for them people at the Tooker place,” he said.
“Sometimes,” the woman replied indifferently.
We went to the next shack. An old woman in a gray wrapper had come to the door, watching us while stirring something in a yellow bowl.
“Where’s Mary?” the deputy asked.
She spoke over her shoulder into the shack’s interior, and moved aside to let another woman take her place in the doorway. This other woman was short and solidly built, somewhere in her early thirties, with intelligent dark eyes in a wide, flat face. She held a dark blanket together at her throat. The blanket hung to the floor all around her.
“Howdy, Mary,” Rolly greeted her. “Why ain’t you over to the Carters’?”
“I’m sick, Mr. Rolly.” She spoke without accent. “Chills—so I just stayed home today.”
“Tch, tch, tch. That’s too bad. Have you had the doc?”
She said she hadn’t. Rolly said she ought to. She said she didn’t need him: she had chills often. Rolly said that might be so, but that was all the more reason for having him: it was best to play safe and have things like that looked after. She said yes but doctors took so much money, and it was bad enough being sick without having to pay for it. He said in the long run it was likely to cost folks more not having a doctor than having him. I had begun to think they were going to keep it up all day when Rolly finally brought the talk around to the Carters again, asking the woman about her work there.
She told us she had been hired two weeks ago, when they took the house. She went there each morning at nine—they never got up before ten—cooked their meals, did the housework, and left after washing the dinner dishes in the evening—usually somewhere around seven-thirty. She seemed surprised at the news that Collinson—Carter to her—had been killed and his wife had gone away. She told us that Collinson had gone out by himself, for a walk, he said, right after dinner the previous night. That was at about half-past six, dinner having been, for no special reason, a little early. When she left for home, at a few minutes past seven, Mrs. Carter had been reading a book in the front second-story room.
Mary Nunez couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell us anything on which I could base a reasonable guess at Collinson’s reason for sending for me. She knew, she insisted, nothing about them except that Mrs. Carter didn’t seem happy—wasn’t happy. She—Mary Nunez—had figured it all out to her own satisfaction: Mrs. Carter loved someone else, but her parents had made her marry Carter; and so, of course, Carter had been killed by the other man, with whom Mrs. Carter had now run away. I couldn’t get her to say that she had any grounds for this belief other than her woman’s intuition, so I asked her about the Carters’ visitors.
She said she had never seen any.
Rolly asked her if the Carters ever quarreled. She started to say, “No,” and then, rapidly, said they did, often, and were never on good terms. Mrs. Carter didn’t like to have her husband near her, and several times had told him, in Mary’s hearing, that if he didn’t go away from her and stay away she would kill him. I tried to pin Mary down to details, asking what had led up to these threats, how they had been worded, but she wouldn’t be pinned down. All she remembered positively, she told us, was that Mrs. Carter had threatened to kill Mr. Carter if he didn’t go away from her.
“That pretty well settles that,” Rolly said contentedly when we had crossed the stream again and were climbing the slope toward Debro’s.
“What settles what?”
“That his wife killed him.”
“Think she did?”
“So do you.”
I said: “No.”
Roily stopped walking and looked at me with vague worried eyes.
“Now how can you say that?” he remonstrated. “Ain’t she a dope fiend? And cracked in the bargain, according to your own way of telling it? Didn’t she run away? Wasn’t them things she left behind torn and dirty and bloody? Didn’t she threaten to kill him so much that he got scared and sent for you?”
“Mary didn’t hear threats,” I said. “They were warnings—about the curse. Gabrielle Collinson really believed in it, and thought enough of him to try to save him from it. I’ve been through that before with her. That’s why she wouldn’t have married him if he hadn’t carried her off while she was too rattled to know what she was doing. And she was afr
aid on that account afterwards.”
“But who’s going to believe—?”
“I’m not asking anybody to believe anything,” I growled, walking on again. “I’m telling you what I believe. And while I’m at it I’ll tell you I believe Mary Nunez is lying when she says she didn’t go to the house this morning. Maybe she didn’t have anything to do with Collinson’s death. Maybe she simply went there, found the Collinsons gone, saw the bloody things and the gun—kicking that shell across the floor without knowing it—and then beat it back to her shack, fixing up that chills story to keep herself out of it; having had enough of that sort of trouble when her husband was sent over. Maybe not. Anyway, that would be how nine out of ten women of her sort in her place would have played it; and I want more proof before I believe her chills just happened to hit her this morning.”
“Well,” the deputy sheriff asked; “if she didn’t have nothing to do with it, what difference does all that make anyway?”
The answers I thought up to that were profane and insulting. I kept them to myself.
At Debro’s again, we borrowed a loose-jointed touring car of at least three different makes, and drove down the East road, trying to trace the girl in the Chrysler. Our first stop was at the house of a man named Claude Baker. He was a lanky sallow person with an angular face three or four days behind the razor. His wife was probably younger than he, but looked older—a tired and faded thin woman who might have been pretty at one time. The oldest of their six children was a bowlegged, freckled girl of ten; the youngest was a fat and noisy infant in its first year. Some of the in-betweens were boys and some girls, but they all had colds in their heads. The whole Baker family came out on the porch to receive us. They hadn’t seen her, they said: they were never up as early as seven o’clock. They knew the Carters by sight, but knew nothing about them. They asked more questions than Rolly and I did.
Shortly beyond the Baker house the road changed from gravel to asphalt. What we could see of the Chrysler’s tracks seemed to show that it had been the last car over the road. Two miles from Baker’s we stopped in front of a small bright green house surrounded by rose bushes. Rolly bawled: