“I’m glad you’re back. Come in. Sit down. Are there any new developments?”
“Cotton pass you the dope I gave him?”
“Yes.” Vernon posed in front of me, hands in pockets, feet far apart. “What importance do you attach to it?”
“I advised Andrews to get the money ready. He won’t. The Collinsons will.”
“They will,” he said, as if confirming a guess I had made. “And?” He held his lips back so that his teeth remained exposed.
“Here’s the letter.” I gave it to him. “Fitzstephan will be down in the morning.”
He nodded emphatically, carried the letter closer to the light, and examined it and its envelope minutely. When he had finished he tossed it contemptuously to the table.
“Obviously a fraud,” he said. “Now what, exactly, is this Fitzstephan’s–is that the name?–story?”
I told him, word for word. When that was done, he clicked his teeth together, turned to the telephone, and told someone to tell Feeney that he–Mr. Vernon, district attorney–wished to see him immediately. Ten minutes later the sheriff came in wiping rain off his big brown mustache.
Vernon jerked a thumb at me and ordered: “Tell him.”
I repeated what Fitzstephan had told me. The sheriff listened with an attentiveness that turned his florid face purple and had him panting. As the last word left my mouth, the district attorney snapped his fingers and said:
“Very well. He claims there were people in his apartment when the phone call came. Make a note of their names. He claims to have been in Ross over the week-end, with the–who were they? Ralph Coleman? Very well. Sheriff, see that those things are checked up. We’ll learn how much truth there is to it.”
I gave the sheriff the names and addresses Fitzstephan had given me. Feeney wrote them on the back of a laundry list and puffed out to get the county’s crime-detecting machinery going on them.
Vernon hadn’t anything to tell me. I left him to his newspapers and went downstairs. The effeminate night clerk beckoned me over to the desk and said:
“Mr. Santos asked me to tell you that services are being held in his room tonight.”
I thanked the clerk and went up to Santos’ room. He, three other newshounds, and a photographer were there. The game was stud. I was sixteen dollars ahead at twelve-thirty, when I was called to the phone to listen to the district attorney’s aggressive voice:
“Will you come to my room immediately?”
“Yeah.” I gathered up my hat and coat, telling Santos: “Cash me in. Important call. I always have one when I get a little ahead of the game.”
“Vernon?” he asked as he counted my chips.
“Yeah.”
“It can’t be much,” he sneered, “or he’d ‘ve sent for Red too,” nodding at the photographer, “so tomorrow’s readers could see him holding it in his hand.”
Cotton, Feeney, and Rolly were with the district attorney. Cotton–a medium-sized man with a round dull face dimpled in the chin–was dressed in black rubber boots, slicker, and hat that were wet and muddy. He stood in the middle of the room, his round eyes looking quite proud of their owner. Feeney, straddling a chair, was playing with his mustache; and his florid face was sulky. Rolly, standing beside him, rolling a cigarette, looked vaguely amiable as usual.
Vernon closed the door behind me and said irritably:
“Cotton thinks he’s discovered something. He thinks–”
Cotton came forward, chest first, interrupting:
“I don’t think nothing. I know durned well–”
Vernon snapped his fingers between the marshal and me, saying, just as snappishly:
“Never mind that. We’ll go out there and see.”
I stopped at my room for raincoat, gun, and flashlight. We went downstairs and climbed into a muddy car. Cotton drove. Vernon sat beside him. The rest of us sat in back. Rain beat on top and curtains, trickling in through cracks.
“A hell of a night to be chasing pipe dreams,” the sheriff grumbled, trying to dodge a leak.
“Dick’d do a sight better minding his own business,” Rolly agreed. “What’s he got to do with what don’t happen in Quesada?”
“If he’d take more care of what does happen there, he wouldn’t have to worry about what’s down the shore,” Feeney said, and he and his deputy sniggered together.