The D.A. Breaks an Egg

“We shut off the engine and waited for a minute or two, and then Daphne said she thought she saw someone over in the shadow of some shrubbery. She said she’d go over and take a look. I told her that it was foolish, because if Mr. Carr were there he’d come over to meet us, that he wouldn’t expect us to get out and go over into the shadows. But she thought perhaps something had gone wrong and that he was afraid to come out to the automobile, but wanted one of us to come over there.

“She jumped out of the car and ran over into the shadows and I lost her for... oh, I don’t know, two or three minutes. I was beginning to get frightened when she suddenly came running back to the car, and said to me, ‘Moana, go home just as fast as you can. Don’t ever admit to anyone that you’ve met me, or that you know me, or that you’ve been out of the house this evening. I’ll get in touch with you later on and explain.’ And with that she slammed the car door and ran across the grass. Naturally, I was terribly disturbed. I ran over the dirt path in making a hurried turn.

“I wasn’t as much frightened as I was angry and upset. I wanted to get the thing over, and I... well, all that mystery, all that intrigue. I seemed to be getting mixed into things deeper and deeper. If it hadn’t been for the fact that Mr. Carr always seemed so fatherly, and so dignified, and such a bulwark of strength, and so completely assured of what he was doing... well, I knew all that stuff was wrong and that I was getting into a mess, but... well, Mr. Carr influenced me, that’s all.”

“Then Daphne Arcola had left her purse in your car, or rather, in Dorothy Clifton’s car, and you didn’t know it was there?” Selby asked.

She nodded. “I took the machine back and left it in the driveway. I thought I’d worked it so no one would know anything about what had happened. I went into my room, cut a hole in the screen, unhooked the screen, undressed in the dark, got into bed, and then started screaming.”

“And that’s all you know?” Selby asked.

“That,” she said, “is the entire story.”

“Did Daphne Arcola get in touch with you later?”

She hesitated a moment, then said, “Yes.”

“When?”

“Yesterday. She told me to sit tight, that she and Mr. Carr had everything under control.”

“Last night,” Selby said, “we had every reason to believe that Carr got Frank Grannis out of jail by temporarily putting up a surety bond. He got him to a place where he could meet Daphne Arcola and there they fixed up a story. Do you know anything about that?”

The hard green eyes regarded Selby with cold appraisal. “Isn’t that enough — what I’ve already told you?”

“I want it all,” Selby said. “You’ve held out too much too long. You should have told us all this sooner.”

She said, “You detest me, don’t you? And yet I got into all this trouble simply because I tried to be a good sport and help a man out of a predicament. After all, it was nothing in my young life. I could have sat tight and said nothing. Then I wouldn’t have lost my jewelry and wouldn’t have been in all this mess. I wish now I’d really been selfish.”

“Did you,” Selby asked, “see Frank Grannis last night?”

“Yes,” she flared defiantly.

“Where?”

“At a motel.”

“Who was there?”

“Daphne, A. B. Carr, and some stooge of Carr’s. I believe he’s a real estate man from Fallhaven.”

“And what was the purpose of that conference?”

“To fix it up so Daphne Arcola could tell a convincing story. I told her absolutely everything that had happened, and Frank Grannis told her everything that had happened as he remembered it, and... well, Daphne and Frank sort of got their stories ironed out.”

“And Carr was there?” Selby said, unable to keep the triumph from his voice. “He helped in getting this story straightened out, helped in planning this perjury?”

“No,” she said. “Carr was at the motel, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with the conference. He got us all together and said, ‘You folks probably want to visit for a while. When you’re finished I’ll talk about the case and find out what it’s all about so I can prepare my defense’ and then he went out.”

Brandon glanced questioningly at Selby.

Selby said, “I believe we can get him for subornation of perjury and criminal conspiracy. But we’ll probably need to prove an overt act. We’ll have to get Grannis to testify for us. We should be able to do that all right, because now we’re in a position to deduce what must have happened, and how that hit-and-run charge was framed on Grannis in the first place. However,” Selby went on, “we’d better let that wait until we’ve made certain Miss Lennox has given us all the facts as she is familiar with them.”

Selby turned to Moana. “Do you think there’s any possibility that Daphne Arcola killed Rose Furman when she got out of the car?” he asked.

The green eyes met his for a moment, then wavered, then returned to meet his defiantly. “I don’t know. I have no idea what happened.”

“She was gone long enough to have committed the murder?”