a silver cigarette case across the table toward me, smiling. “Before I start,” I said, “I want to ask a question. Did Waites have any visitor after he was arrested?”
“Waites?”
“That’s the man you’ve got in jail. Maybe he gave some other name when you booked him, but that’s his right one.”
“Then you found out about him?”
“Quite a bit. And it’s all bad. But first, did anybody go in to see him?”
He nodded. “Yes. Holloway.”
I knew then I’d been right. Holloway was a lawyer, and a good one. He was also a member of Soames’s congregation and active in church work.
“All right, let’s have it,” Buford said quietly.
“Well, hold onto your hat,” I said. “That fifteen-year-old girl Abbie Bell had down there is Waites’s daughter.”
Buford put down the cigar and whistled softly. As rapidly as possible I gave him the whole thing, what I had found out from Bernice, what the letter had said, and what I had been able to figure out from it. He got the whole picture as fast as I gave it to him. There was nothing slow about Buford.
“So now we’ve got Waites in jail, where he’ll be very handy for the grand jury any time they want to listen to him,” he said. “And that Bell woman’s in the hospital, where they can get her story as soon as she’s able to talk.”
“Yes,” I said. “And you can’t do a damned thing about either of them. You can’t move Abbie Bell; and you can’t run Waites out of town because he’s under a serious charge, or will be, and you’d never in God’s world explain it if he turned up missing. It’s just about as near perfect as anything can be.”
Buford picked up his drink and looked at it. “Sweet Jesus,” he said.
“They know they’ve got us,” I went on. “Mrs. Waites probably got in touch with Soames again when her husband took off for here with his hot head and his knife, asking him to try to head the old man off before he got in trouble. It was too late for Soames to do anything about it, but of course he knew who it was as soon as he heard there’d been trouble down at Abbie’s place. So he had Holloway take the case to defend the old man, and in return they asked him to keep his mouth shut for another day or two until they could get their facts ready for the grand jury. I don’t doubt that Holloway even told Waites he’d be in danger of having something happen to him if we found out who he was and what his testimony would do to us.”
Buford got up from the sofa and walked slowly over to the wall where the guns were and stood there for a moment looking at them with his back to us. I sat looking at him, waiting to see what he would have to say, and then the rest of it began to fall into place for me. It was a part of the idea that had never occurred to me until this minute, and as I turned it over in my mind I was conscious of a warm feeling of elation and the knowledge that I had all the loose ends taken care of at last. This last piece fitted into it as perfectly as the final section of a jigsaw puzzle.
I turned back and noticed abruptly that Dinah had been watching my face with that speculative interest I had seen in her eyes before. Now that I thought of it, I remembered that every time I had looked around her eyes had been on me, not with anything flirtatious in them, but only with that intense and fascinated interest, as a child might watch grownups getting ready for a hunting trip.
The gray eyes smiled at me over the top of the highball glass. “You’ve got an idea, haven’t you?”
“I think so,” I said. “I’ll bet it’s a good one.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so.” Buford turned back from the gun collection. He had lifted down one of the shotguns, an English double barrel, and as he turned he brought it up and swung it in an arc, mounting the gun and swinging it through all in one fluid motion the way a good wing shot gets onto a covey of rising birds. Then he took it down, looked at it once, and replaced it on the rack. “I like expensive guns,”