The D.A. Breaks an Egg

“Doc Carson thinks it is. He performed the post-mortem, you know, and he said the dagger just about fits the wound in the body. Now, the way I figure it, we can start work down in Tijuana and find out where these stilettos are sold and get a description of people who have bought them and probably get a photograph of this Dorothy Clifton and find somebody that will identify it. That way we can bring the murder weapon home to her, and then the case is an absolute cinch. There isn’t any lawyer on earth that could upset it.”

“And suppose we can’t find someone who will remember having sold the weapon to Dorothy Clifton?” Selby asked.

“Well,” Larkin said, “of course I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not the one who would be trying the case, but it looks to me like you’ve got a perfect case there, absolutely dead open-and-shut.”

Selby said, “You’d better make a sketch of the exact position of that stiletto just as you found it. Make it while the facts are fresh in your mind.”

He handed Larkin a piece of paper and a pencil.

Larkin made a crude diagram.

“Now, take it from the other side,” Selby said. “Show the angle at which it was in the ground, looking at it parallel with the driveway.”

Larkin said, “I think it was slanting toward the house all right. Just like it would have been if someone had popped it out of a car window.”

“You didn’t remember that a moment ago when we asked you,” Brandon said.

“Well, I’m remembering it now,” Larkin told him. “It was slanted just like it had been popped out of the right-hand window of an automobile.”

“All right,” Selby said wearily. “Just sign your name on the sketches, and write the date and time on them.”

Larkin scrawled his signature and the date, pushed back his chair with evident eagerness, and said, “Well, I guess that’s all the damage I can do here.”

“Seems to be your usual quota,” Brandon said dryly.

17

It was shortly before noon when knuckles tapped on the door of the sheriff’s private office.

“May I come in?” Sylvia Martin called.

“Come on in,” Brandon invited. “Doug is the only one in here.”

When she had opened the door, Selby said, “That was some story, Sylvia — the one about the meeting between Horace Lennox and Dorothy Clifton. Congratulations.”

She said, “Thanks, Doug. Only I can’t take any credit. The story wrote itself. I just sat back and fed paper into the typewriter. Oh, Doug, you should have seen it! I never saw anything so romantic in my life.”

“I gathered as much from reading your account in The Clarion this morning.”

“The way he took her in his arms! It makes you realize the solemnity of what it means when they say ‘forsaking all others.’ Doug, he’s splendid! He’s marvelous. He — oh, you can’t begin to describe it. You could see that she had been having a question gnawing at the back of her consciousness. She knew how much he cared for his family, and how clannish they were, and how much they made a fetish of respectability and all that stuff, and here she was all mixed up in a murder case, and... well, you know, you could see that while she’d been in jail she hadn’t been sleeping — just staring into the dark and wondering whether he’d stick with his family and be a little standoffish. You could see all of that question in her eyes.”

“And then?” Brandon asked.

“You should have seen the way he answered that question!”

“What did he say?”

“Not what he said. It was what he did, and the way he did it. The question was never put into words and neither was the answer.

“All he said was ‘Darling’ in a voice that was all choked up, and his arms went around her in the most tenderly reassuring way. It made me just stand there and cry. I kept saying to myself, ‘Sylvia, you big goose. You’re a newspaper woman’ — but all the time I was writing up that story against a deadline I felt the tears pushing their way to the surface.”

“It was a great story,” Brandon said. “Made you feel all warm inside. A darned good antidote for the stuff that The Blade has been doing and the machinations of old A. B. Carr.”

“What has Carr been doing?” she asked, instantly alert.

Selby said, “At a late hour last night, Frank Grannis was released on bail. It was a surety bond, purchased for him by an ‘Old Friend,’ whom I’ll gamble he’d never seen before in all his life.”