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:
“Harve! Hey, Harve!”
A big-boned man of thirty-five or so came to the door, said, “Hullo, Ben,” and walked between the rose bushes to our car. His features, like his voice, were heavy, and he moved and spoke deliberately. His last name was Whidden. Rolly asked him if he had seen the Chrysler.
“Yes, Ben, I saw them,” he said. “They went past around a quarter after seven this morning, hitting it up.”
“They?” I asked, while Rolly asked: “Them?”
“There was a man and a woman–or a girl–in it. I didn’t get a good look at them–just saw them whizz past. She was driving, a kind of small woman she looked like from here, with brown hair.”
“What did the man look like?”
“Oh, he was maybe forty, and didn’t look like he was very big either. A pinkish face, he had, and gray coat and hat.”
“Ever see Mrs. Carter?” I asked.
“The bride living down the cove? No. I seen him, but not her. Was that her?”
I said we thought it was.
“The man wasn’t him,” he said. “He was somebody I never seen before.”
“Know him again if you saw him?”
“I reckon I would–if I saw him going past like that.”
Four miles beyond Whidden’s we found the Chrysler. It was a foot or two off the road, on the left-hand side, standing on all fours with its radiator jammed into a eucalyptus tree. All its glass was shattered, and the front third of its metal was pretty well crumpled. It was empty. There was no blood in it. The deputy sheriff and I seemed to be the only people in the vicinity.
We ran around in circles, straining our eyes at the ground, and when we got through we knew what we had known at the beginning–the Chrysler had run into a eucalyptus tree. There were tire-marks on the road, and marks that could have been footprints on the ground by the car; but it was possible to find the same sort of marks in a hundred places along that, or any other, road. We got into our borrowed car again and drove on, asking questions wherever we found someone to question; and all the answers were: No, we didn’t see her or them.
“What about this fellow Baker?” I asked Rolly as we turned around to go back. “Debro saw her alone. There was a man with her when she passed Whidden’s. The Bakers saw nothing, and it was in their territory that the man must have joined her.”
“Well,” he said, argumentatively; “it could of happened that way, couldn’t it?”
“Yeah, but it might be a good idea to do some more talking to them.”
“If you want to,” he consented without enthusiasm. “But don’t go dragging me into any arguments with them. He’s my wife’s brother.”
That made a difference. I asked:
“What sort of man is he?”
“Claude’s kind of shiftless, all right. Like the old man says, he don’t manage to raise nothing much but kids on that farm of his, but I never heard tell that he did anybody any harm.”
“If you say he’s all right, that’s enough for me,” I lied. “We won’t bother him.”
XV. I’ve Killed Him
Sheriff Feeney, fat, florid, and with a lot of brown mustache, and district attorney Vernon, sharp-featured, aggressive, and hungry for fame, came over from the county seat. They listened to our stories, looked the ground over, and agreed with Rolly that Gabrielle Collinson had killed her husband. When Marshal Dick Cotton–a pompous, unintelligent man in his forties–returned from San Francisco, he added his vote to the others. The coroner and his jury came to the same opinion, though officially they limited themselves to the usual “person or persons unknown,” with recommendations involving the girl.
The time of Collinson’s death was placed between eight and nine o’clock Friday night. No marks not apparently caused by his fall had been found on him. The pistol found in his room had been identified as his. No fingerprints were on it. I had an idea that some of the county officials half suspected me of having seen to that, though nobody said anything of that sort. Mary Nunez stuck to her story of being kept home by chills. She had a flock of Mexican witnesses to back it up. I couldn’t find any to knock holes in it. We found no further trace of the man Whidden had seen. I tried the Bakers again, by myself, with no luck. The marshal’s wife, a frail youngish woman with a weak pretty face and nice shy manners, who worked in the telegraph office, said Collinson had sent off his wire to me early Friday morning. He was pale and shaky, she said, with dark-rimmed, bloodshot eyes. She had supposed he was drunk, though she hadn’t smelled alcohol on his breath.