“Maybe he was more interested in framing Harve than anything else.”
Feeney was against that. He wanted to grab the marshal pronto; but Vernon reluctantly backed me up. We dropped Rolly at his house and returned to the hotel.
In my room, I put in a phone-call for the agency in San Francisco. While I was waiting for the connection knuckles tapped my door. I opened it and let in Jack Santos, pajamaed, bathrobed, and slippered.
“Have a nice ride?” he asked, yawning.
“Swell.”
“Anything break?”
“Not for publication, but—under the hat—the new angle is that our marshal is trying to hang the job on his wife’s boy friend—with homemade evidence. The other big officials think Cotton turned the trick himself.”
“That ought to get them all on the front page.” Santos sat on the foot of my bed and lit a cigarette. “Ever happen to hear that Feeney was Cotton’s rival for the telegraphing hand of the present Mrs. Cotton, until she picked the marshal—the triumph of dimples over mustachios?”
“No,” I admitted. “What of it?”
“How do I know? I just happened to pick it up. A fellow in the garage told me.”
“How long ago?”
“That they were rival suitors? Less than a couple of years.”
I got my San Francisco call, and told Field—the agency night-man—to have somebody check up the marshal’s Noe Street visit. Santos yawned and went out while I was talking. I went to bed when I had finished.
17
BELOW DULL POINT
The telephone bell brought me out of sleep a little before ten the following morning. Mickey Linehan, talking from San Francisco, told me Cotton had arrived at his mother’s house at between seven and seven-thirty Saturday morning. The marshal had slept for five or six hours—telling his mother he had been up all night laying for a burglar—and had left for home at six that evening.
Cotton was coming in from the street when I reached the lobby. He was red-eyed and weary, but still determined.
“Catch Whidden?” I asked.
“No, durn him, but I will. Say, I’m glad you jiggled my arm, even if it did let him get away. I—well, sometimes a fellow’s enthusiasm gets the best of his judgment.”
“Yeah. We stopped at your house on our way back, to see how you’d made out.”
“I ain’t been home yet,” he said. “I put in the whole durned night hunting for that fellow. Where’s Vern and Feeney?”
“Pounding their ears. Better get some sleep yourself,” I suggested. “I’ll ring you up if anything happens.”
He set off for home. I went into the café for breakfast. I was half through when Vernon joined me there. He had telegrams from the San Francisco police department and the Marin County sheriff’s office, confirming Fitzstephan’s alibis.
“I got my report on Cotton,” I said. “He reached his mothers at seven or a little after Saturday morning, and left at six that evening.”
“Seven or a little after?” Vernon didn’t like that. If the marshal had been in San Francisco at that time he could hardly have been abducting the girl. “Are you sure?”
“No, but that’s the best we’ve been able to do so far. There’s Fitzstephan now.” Looking through the café door, I had seen the novelist’s lanky back at the hotel desk. “Excuse me a moment.”
I went over and got Fitzstephan, bringing him back to the table with me, and introducing him to Vernon. The district attorney stood up to shake hands with him, but was too busy with thoughts of Cotton to bother now with anything else. Fitzstephan said he had had breakfast before leaving the city, and ordered a cup of coffee. Just then I was called to the phone.
Cotton’s voice, but excited almost beyond recognition:
“For God’s sake get Vernon and Feeney and come up here.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Hurry! Something awful’s happened. Hurry!” he cried and hung up.
I went back to the table and told Vernon about it. He jumped up, upsetting Fitzstephan’s coffee. Fitzstephan got up too, but hesitated, looking at me.
“Come on,” I invited him. “Maybe this’ll be one of the things you like.”
Fitzstephan’s car was in front of the hotel. The marshal’s house was only seven blocks away. Its front door was open. Vernon knocked on the frame as we went in, but we didn’t wait for an answer.
Cotton met us in the hall. His eyes were round and bloodshot in a face as hard-white as marble. He tried to say something, but couldn’t get the words past his tight-set teeth. He gestured towards the door behind him with a fist that was clenched on a piece of brown paper.
Through the doorway we saw Mrs. Cotton. She was lying on the blue-carpeted floor. She had on a pale blue dress. Her throat was covered with dark bruises. Her lips and tongue—the tongue, swollen, hung out—were darker than the bruises. Her eyes were wide open, bulging, upturned, and dead. Her hand, when I touched it, was still warm.
Cotton, following us into the room, held out the brown paper in his hand. It was an irregularly torn piece of wrapping paper, covered on both sides with writing—nervously, unevenly, hastily scribbled in pencil. A softer pencil had been used than on Fitzstephan’s message, and the paper was a darker brown.
I was closest to Cotton. I took the paper, and read it aloud hurriedly, skipping unnecessary words:
“Whidden came last night … said husband after him … frame him for Collinson trouble … I hid him in garret … he said only way to save him was to say he was here Friday night … said if I didn’t they’d hang him … when Mr. Vernon came Harve said he’d kill me if I didn’t … so I said it … but he wasn’t here that night … I didn’t know he was guilty then … told me afterwards … tried to kidnap her Thursday night … husband nearly caught him … came in office after Collinson sent telegram and saw it … followed him and killed him … went to San Francisco, drinking whiskey … decided to go through with kidnapping anyway … phoned man who knew her to try to learn who he could get money from … too drunk to talk good … wrote letter and came back … met her on road … took her to old bootleggers’ hiding place somewhere below Dull Point … goes in boat … afraid he’ll kill me … locked in garret … writing while he’s down getting food … murderer … I won’t help him … Daisy Cotton.”
The sheriff and Rolly had arrived while I was reading it. Feeney’s face was as white and set as Cotton’s.
Vernon bared his teeth at the marshal, snarling:
“You wrote that.”
Feeney grabbed it from my hands, looked at it, shook his head, and said hoarsely:
“No, that’s her writing, all right.”
Cotton was babbling:
“No, before God, I didn’t. I planted that stuff on him, I’ll admit that, but that was all. I come home and find her like this. I swear to God!”
“Where were you Friday night?” Vernon asked.
“Here, watching the house. I thought—I thought he might—But he wasn’t here that night. I watched till daybreak and then went to the city. I didn’t—”
The sheriff’s bellow drowned the rest of Cotton’s words. The sheriff was waving the dead woman’s letter. He bellowed:
“Below Dull Point! What are we waiting for?”
He plunged out of the house, the rest of us following. Cotton and Rolly rode to the waterfront in the deputy’s car. Vernon, the sheriff, and I rode with Fitzstephan. The sheriff cried throughout the short trip, tears splashing on the automatic pistol he held in his lap.
At the waterfront we changed from the cars to a green and white motor boat run by a pink-cheeked, tow-headed youngster called Tim. Tim said he didn’t know anything about any bootleggers’ hiding places below Dull Point, but if there was one there he could find it. In his hands the boat produced a lot of speed, but not enough for Feeney and Cotton. They stood together in the bow, guns in their fists, dividing their time between straining forward and yelling back for more speed.
&nbs
p; Half an hour from the dock, we rounded a blunt promontory that the others called Dull Point, and Tim cut down our speed, putting the boat in closer to the rocks that jumped up high and sharp at the water’s edge. We were now all eyes—eyes that soon ached from staring under the noon sun but kept on staring. Twice we saw clefts in the rock-walled shore, pushed hopefully in to them, saw that they were blind, leading nowhere, opening into no hiding-places.
The third cleft was even more hopeless-looking at first sight, but, now that Dull Point was some distance behind us, we couldn’t pass up anything. We slid in to the cleft, got close enough to decide that it was another blind one, gave it up, and told Tim to go on. We were washed another couple of feet nearer before the tow-headed boy could bring the boat around.
Cotton, in the bow, bent forward from the waist and yelled:
“Here it is.”
He pointed his gun at one side of the cleft. Tim let the boat drift in another foot or so. Craning our necks, we could see that what we had taken for the shore-line on that side was actually a high, thin, saw-toothed ledge of rock, separated from the cliff at this end by twenty feet of water.
“Put her in,” Feeney ordered.
Tim frowned at the water, hesitated, said: “She can’t make it.”
The boat backed him up by shuddering suddenly under our feet, with an unpleasant rasping noise.
“That be damned!” the sheriff bawled. “Put her in.”
Tim took a look at the sheriff’s wild face, and put her in.
The boat shuddered under our feet again, more violently, and now there was a tearing sound in with the rasping, but we went through the opening and turned down behind the saw-tooth ledge.
We were in a v-shaped pocket, twenty feet wide where we had come in, say eighty feet long, high-walled, inaccessible by land, accessible by sea only as we had come. The water that floated us—and was coming in rapidly to sink us—ran a third of the way down the pocket. White sand paved the other two thirds. A small boat was resting its nose on the edge of the sand. It was empty. Nobody was in sight. There didn’t seem to be anywhere for anybody to hide. There were footprints, large and small, in the sand, empty tin cans, and the remains of a fire.
“Harve’s,” Rolly said, nodding at the boat.
Our boat grounded beside it. We jumped, splashed, ashore—Cotton ahead, the others spread out behind him.
As suddenly as if he had sprung out of the air, Harvey Whidden appeared in the far end of the v, standing in the sand, a rifle in his hands. Anger and utter astonishment were mixed in his heavy face, and in his voice when he yelled:
“You God-damned double-crossing—” The noise his rifle made blotted out the rest of his words.
Cotton had thrown himself down sideways. The rifle bullet missed him by inches, sang between Fitzstephan and me, nicking his hat-brim, and splattered on the rocks behind. Four of our guns went off together, some more than once.
Whidden went over backwards, his feet flying in the air. He was dead when we got to him—three bullets in his chest, one in his head.
We found Gabrielle Collinson cowering back in the corner of a narrow-mouthed hole in the rock wall—a long triangular cave whose mouth had been hidden from our view by the slant at which it was set. There were blankets in there, spread over a pile of dried seaweed, some canned goods, a lantern, and another rifle.
The girl’s small face was flushed and feverish, and her voice was hoarse: she had a cold in her chest. She was too frightened at first to tell us anything coherent, and apparently recognized neither Fitzstephan nor me.
The boat we had come in was out of commission. Whidden’s boat couldn’t be trusted to carry more than three with safety through the surf. Tim and Rolly set off for Quesada in it, to get us a larger vessel. It was an hour-and-a-half’s round trip. While they were gone we worked on the girl, soothing her, assuring her that she was among friends, that there was nothing to be afraid of now. Her eyes gradually became less scary, her breathing easier, and her nails less tightly pressed into her palms. At the end of an hour she was answering our questions.
She said she knew nothing of Whidden’s attempt to kidnap her Thursday night, nothing of the telegram Eric had sent me. She sat up all Friday night waiting for him to return from his walk, and at daylight, frantic at his failure to return, had gone to look for him. She found him—as I had. Then she went back to the house and tried to commit suicide—to put an end to the curse by shooting herself.
“I tried twice,” she whispered; “but I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I was too much of a coward. I couldn’t keep the pistol pointing at myself while I did it. I tried the first time to shoot myself in the temple, and then in the breast; but I hadn’t the courage. Each time I jerked it away just before I fired. And after the second time I couldn’t even get courage to try again.”
She changed her clothes then—evening clothes, now muddy and torn from her search—and drove away from the house. She didn’t say where she had intended going. She didn’t seem to know. Probably she hadn’t had any destination—was simply going away from the place where the curse had settled on her husband.
She hadn’t driven far when she had seen a machine coming towards her, driven by the man who had brought her here. He had turned his car across the road in front of her, blocking the road. Trying to avoid hitting his car, she had run into a tree—and hadn’t known anything else until she had awakened in the cave. She had been here since then. The man had left her here alone most of the time. She had neither strength nor courage to escape by swimming, and there was no other way out.
The man had told her nothing, had asked her nothing, had addressed no words to her except to say, “Here’s some food,” or, “Till I bring you some water, you’ll have to get along on canned tomatoes when you’re thirsty,” or other things of that sort. She never remembered having seen him before. She didn’t know his name. He was the only man she had seen since her husband’s death.
“What did he call you?” I asked. “Mrs. Carter? Or Mrs. Collinson?”
She frowned thoughtfully, then shook her head, saying:
“I don’t think he ever called me by name. He never spoke unless he had to, and he wasn’t here very much. I was usually alone.”
“How long had he been here this time?”
“Since before daylight. The noise of his boat woke me up”
“Sure? This is important. Are you sure he’s been here since daylight?”
“Yes.”
I was sitting on my heels in front of her. Cotton was standing on my left, beside the sheriff. I looked up at the marshal and said:
“That puts it up to you, Cotton. Your wife was still warm when we saw her—after eleven.”
He goggled at me, stammering: “Wh-what’s that you say?”
On the other side of me I heard Vernon’s teeth click together sharply.
I said:
“Your wife was afraid Whidden would kill her, and wrote that statement. But he didn’t kill her. He’s been here since daylight. You found the statement, learned from it that they had been too friendly. Well, what did you do then?”
“That’s a lie,” he cried. “There ain’t a word of truth in it. She was dead there when I found her. I never—”
“You killed her,” Vernon barked at him over my head. “You choked her, counting on that statement to throw suspicion on Whidden.”
“That’s a lie,” the marshal cried again, and made the mistake of trying to get his gun out.
Feeney slugged him, dropping him, and had handcuffs on his wrists before he could get up again.
18
THE PINEAPPLE
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “It’s dizzy. When we grab our man—or woman—we’re going to find it’s a goof, and Napa will get it instead of the gallows.”
“That,” Owen Fitzstephan said, “is characteristic of you. You’re stumped, bewildered, flabbergasted. Do you admit you’ve met your master, have run into a criminal too wily for you? Not you.
He’s outwitted you: therefore he’s an idiot or a lunatic. Now really. Of course there’s a certain unexpected modesty to that attitude.”
“But he’s got to be goofy,” I insisted. “Look: Mayenne marries—”
“Are you,” he asked disgustedly, “going to recite that catalogue again?”
“You’ve got a flighty mind. That’s no good in this business. You don’t catch murderers by amusing yourself with interesting thoughts. You’ve got to sit down to all the facts you can get and turn them over and over till they click.”
“If that’s your technic, you’ll have to put up with it,” he said: “but I’m damned if I see why I should suffer. You recited the Mayenne-Leggett-Collinson history step by step last night at least half a dozen times. You’ve done nothing else since breakfast this morning. I’m getting enough of it. Nobody’s mysteries ought to be as tiresome as you’re making this one.”
“Hell,” I said; “I sat up half the night after you went to bed and recited it to myself. You got to turn them over and over, my boy, till they click.”
“I like the Nick Carter school better. Aren’t you even threatened with any of the conclusions that this turning-them-over-and-over is supposed to lead to?”
“Yeah, I’ve got one. It’s that Vernon and Feeney are wrong in thinking that Cotton was working with Whidden on the kidnapping, and double-crossed him. According to them, Cotton thought up the plan and persuaded Whidden to do the rough stuff while the marshal used his official position to cover him up. Collinson stumbled on the plan and was killed. Then Cotton made his wife write that statement—it’s phony, right enough, was dictated to her—killed her, and led us to Whidden. Cotton was the first man ashore when we got to the hiding place—to make sure Whidden was killed resisting arrest before he could talk.”
Fitzstephan ran long fingers through his sorrel hair and asked:
“Don’t you think jealousy would have given Cotton motive enough?”
“Yeah. But where’s Whidden’s motive for putting himself in Cotton’s hands? Besides, where does that layout fit in with the Temple racket?”