“Tch, tch, tch, as Mr. Rolly says.” He shook his grinning face at me. “I ought to tell her what happened to that poor girl up in Poisonville that got so she thought she could trust you.”
“Bring any news down from the village with you?” I asked.
“Andrews has turned up. He was at the Jeffries’ place in San Mateo, where Aaronia Haldorn’s staying. She’s still there. Andrews was there from Tuesday afternoon till last night. Al was watching the place and saw him go in, but didn’t peg him till he came out. The Jeffries are away– San Diego. Dick’s tailing Andrews now. Al says the Haldorn broad hasn’t been off the place. Rolly tells me Fink’s awake, but don’t know anything about the bomb. Fitzstephan’s still hanging on to life.”
“I think I’ll run over and talk to Fink this afternoon,” I said. “Stick around here. And–oh, yeah–you’ll have to act respectful to me when Mrs. Collinson’s around. It’s important that she keep on thinking I’m hot stuff.”
“Bring back some booze,” Mickey said. “I can’t do it sober.”
Fink was propped up in bed when I got to him, looking out under bandages. He insisted that he knew nothing about the bomb, that all he had come down for was to tell me that Harvey Whidden was his step-son, the missing village-blacksmith’s son by a former marriage.
“Well, what of it?” I asked.
“I don’t know what of it, except that he was, and I thought you’d want to know about it.”
“Why should I?”
“The papers said you said there was some kind of connection between what happened here and what happened up there, and that heavy-set detective said you said I knew more about it than I let on. And I don’t want any more trouble, so I thought I’d just come down and tell you, so you couldn’t say I hadn’t told all I knew.”
“Yeah? Then tell me what you know about Madison Andrews.”
“I don’t know anything about him. I don’t know him. He’s her guardian or something, ain’t he? I read that in the newspapers. But I don’t know him.”
“Aaronia Haldorn does.”
“Maybe she does, mister, but I don’t. I just worked for the Haldorns. It wasn’t anything to me but a job.”
“What was it to your wife?”
“The same thing, a job.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why’d she run away from the Temple?”
“I told you before, I don’t know. Didn’t want to get in trouble, I– Who wouldn’t of run away if they got a chance?”
The nurse who had been fluttering around became a nuisance by this time, so I left the hospital for the district attorney’s office in the court house. Vernon pushed aside a stack of papers with a the-world-can-wait gesture, and said, “Glad to see you; sit down,” nodding vigorously, showing me all his teeth.
I sat down and said:
“Been talking to Fink. I couldn’t get anything out of him, but he’s our meat. The bomb couldn’t have got in there except by him.”
Vernon frowned for a moment, then shook his chin at me, and snapped:
“What was his motive? And you were there. You say you were looking at him all the time he was in the room. You say you saw nothing.”
“What of that?” I asked. “He could outsmart me there. He was a magician’s mechanic. He’d know how to make a bomb, and how to put it down without my seeing it. That’s his game. We don’t know what Fitzstephan saw. They tell me he’ll pull through. Let’s hang on to Fink till he does.”
Vernon clicked his teeth together and said: “Very well, we’ll hold him.”
I went down the corridor to the sheriff’s office. Feeney wasn’t in, but his chief deputy–a lanky, pockmarked man named Sweet–said he knew from the way Feeney had spoken of me that he–Feeney–would want me to be given all the help I asked for.
“That’s fine,” I said. “What I’m interested in now is picking up a couple of bottles of–well, gin, Scotch–whatever happens to be best in this part of the country.”
Sweet scratched his Adam’s apple and said: