Collinson’s father and brother came down from San Francisco. Hubert Collinson, the father, was a big calm man who looked capable of taking as many more millions out of Pacific Coast lumber as he wanted. Laurence Collinson was a year or two older than his dead brother, and much like him in appearance. Both Collinsons were careful to say nothing that could be interpreted as suggesting they thought Gabrielle had been responsible for Eric’s death, but there was little doubt that they did think so.
Hubert Collinson said quietly to me, “Go ahead; get to the bottom of it;” and thus became the fourth client for whom the agency had been concerned with Gabrielle’s affairs.
Madison Andrews came down from San Francisco. He and I talked in my hotel room. He sat on a chair by the window, cut a cube of tobacco from a yellowish plug, put it in his mouth, and decided that Collinson had committed suicide.
I sat on the side of the bed, set fire to a Fatima, and contradicted him:
“He wouldn’t have torn up the bush if he’d gone over willingly.”
“Then it was an accident. That was a dangerous road to be walked in the dark.”
“I’ve stopped believing in accidents,” I said. “And he had sent me an SOS. And there was the gun that had been fired in his room.”
He leaned forward in his chair. His eyes were hard and watchful. He was a lawyer cross-examining a witness.
“You think Gabrielle was responsible?”
I wouldn’t go that far. I said:
“He was murdered. He was murdered by– I told you two weeks ago that we weren’t through with that damned curse, and that the only way to get through with it was to have the Temple business sifted to the bottom.”
“Yes, I remember,” he said without quite sneering. “You advanced the theory that there was some connecting link between her parents’ deaths and the trouble she had at the Haldorns’; but, as I recall it, you had no idea what the link might be. Don’t you think that deficiency has a tendency to make your theory a little–say–vaporous?”
“Does it? Her father, step-mother, physician, and husband have been killed, one after the other, in less than two months; and her maid jailed for murder. All the people closest to her. Doesn’t that look like a program? And”–I grinned at him–“are you sure it’s not going further? And if it does, aren’t you the next closest person to her?”
“Preposterous!” He was very much annoyed now. “We know about her parents’ deaths, and about Riese’s, and that there was no link between them. We know that those responsible for Riese’s murder are now either dead or in prison. There’s no getting around that. It’s simply preposterous to say there are links between one and another of these crimes when we know there’s none.”
“We don’t know anything of the kind,” I insisted. “All we know is that we haven’t found the links. Who profits–or could hope to profit–by what has happened?”
“Not a single person so far as I know.”
“Suppose she died? Who’d get the estate?”
“I don’t know. There are distant relations in England or France, I dare say.”
“That doesn’t get us very far,” I growled. “Anyway, nobody’s tried to kill her. It’s her friends who get the knock-off.”
The lawyer reminded me sourly that we couldn’t say that nobody had tried to kill her–or had succeeded–until we found her. I couldn’t argue with him about that. Her trail still ended where the eucalyptus tree had stopped the Chrysler.
I gave him a piece of advice before he left:
“Whatever you believe, there’s no sense in your taking unnecessary chances: remember that there might be a program, and you might be next on it. It won’t hurt to be careful.”
He didn’t thank me. He suggested, unpleasantly, that doubtless I thought he should hire private detectives to guard him.
Madison Andrews had offered a thousand-dollar reward for information leading to discovery of the girl’s whereabouts. Hubert Collinson had offered another thousand, with an additional twenty-five hundred for the arrest and conviction of his son’s murderer. Half the population of the county had turned bloodhound. Anywhere you went you found men walking, or even crawling, around, searching fields, paths, hills, and valleys for clues, and in the woods you were likely to find more amateur gumshoes than trees.