ANY BODY THAT WANTS MRS. CARTER
CAN HAVE SAME BY PAYING $10000—
There was no date, no salutation, no signature.
“She was seen driving away alone as late as seven Saturday morning,” I said. “This was mailed here, eighty miles away, in time to be postmarked at nine–taken from the box in the first morning collection, say. That’s one to get wrinkles over. But even that’s not as funny as its coming to you instead of to Andrews, who’s in charge of her affairs, or her father-in-law, who’s got the most money.”
“It is funny and it isn’t,” Fitzstephan replied. His lean face was eager. “There may be a point of light there. You know I recommended Quesada to Collinson, having spent a couple of months there last spring finishing _The Wall of Ashdod_, and gave him a card to a real estate dealer named Rolly–the deputy sheriff’s father–there, introducing him as Eric Carter. A native of Quesada might not know she was Gabrielle Collinson, née Leggett. In that case he wouldn’t know how to reach her people except through me, who had sent her and her husband there. So the letter is sent to me, but starts off _Anybody that_, to be passed on to the interested persons.”
“A native might have done that,” I said slowly; “or a kidnapper who wanted us to think he was a native, didn’t want us to think he knew the Collinsons.”
“Exactly. And as far as I know none of the natives knew my address here.”
“How about Rolly?”
“Not unless Collinson gave it to him. I simply scribbled the introduction on the back of a card.”
“Said anything to anybody else about the phone call and this letter?” I asked.
“I mentioned the call to the people who were here Friday night– when I thought it was a joke or a mistake. I haven’t shown this to anybody else. In fact,” he said, “I was a little doubtful about showing it at all– and still am. Is it going to make trouble for me?”
“Yeah, it will. But you oughtn’t mind that. I thought you liked first-hand views of trouble. Better give me the names and addresses of your guests. If they and Coleman account for your whereabouts Friday night and over the week-end, nothing serious will happen to you; though you’ll have to go down to Quesada and let the county officials third-degree you.”
“Shall we go now?”
“I’m going back tonight. Meet me at the Sunset Hotel there in the morning. That’ll give me time to work on the officials–so they won’t throw you in the dungeon on sight.”
I went back to the agency and put in a Quesada call. I couldn’t get hold of Vernon or the sheriff, but Cotton was reachable. I gave him the information I had got from Fitzstephan, promising to produce the novelist for questioning the next morning.
The marshal said the search for the girl was still going on without results. Reports had come in that she had been seen–practically simultaneously–in Los Angeles, Eureka, Carson City, Denver, Portland, Tijuana, Ogden, San Jose, Vancouver, Porterville, and Hawaii. All except the most ridiculous reports were being run out.
The telephone company could tell me that Owen Fitzstephan’s Saturday morning phone-call had not been a long distance call, and that nobody in Quesada had called a San Francisco number either Friday night or Saturday morning.
Before I left the agency I visited the Old Man again, asking him if he would try to persuade the district attorney to turn Aaronia Haldorn and Tom Fink loose on bail.
“They’re not doing us any good in jail,” I explained, “and, loose, they might lead us somewhere if we shadowed them. He oughtn’t to mind: he knows he hasn’t a chance in the world of hanging murder-raps on them as things now stack up.”
The Old Man promised to do his best, and to put an operative behind each of our suspects if they were sprung.
I went over to Madison Andrews’ office. When I had told him about Fitzstephan’s messages, and had given him our explanation of them, the lawyer nodded his bony white-thatched head and said:
“And whether that’s the true explanation or not, the county authorities will now have to give up their absurd theory that Gabrielle killed her husband.”