“It’s just possible there’s been a slight error. Is it possible that he may have graduated a year or two either before or after this date?”
But Ronald knew there had been no error, at least as far as he was concerned. Rather, he was testing another little theory of his. When a person tells a lie—if Knight had really gone to considerable trouble to conceal his past—then it was possible that he was telling at least part of the truth. This helps provide an authentic background, little details that can be swiftly filled in when the need arises.
The secretary consulted her files for another minute or two. “I’m sorry, but we’ve never had a student here named Barry Knight,” she said, bursting his little theory beyond repair.
“Thank you,” returned Ronald, a little disappointed, but more than ever convinced he was on the trail of a story bigger than had at first appeared. He held up the graduation program. “Do you mind if I take this with me?”
“Certainly not, by all means.” She looked at him curiously. “So you’re a reporter on the Star. You must find your work just fascinating.”
Ronald was a little puzzled how to answer. To him newspaper work had lost most of its luster. It was a job, not too well paying, irregular hours, and a lot of running around, often with nothing to show for it but rebuffs, frustrations, and the ire of people who felt he was intruding upon them. But there was another side of it, too, though there were times when he was hard put to describe it. Just once in a while there was the satisfaction of a job well done, a story run down that seems to accomplish something useful. Maybe after all it was mostly the thrill of being “in the know,” like the Short Vincent characters he had been hearing so much about.
“It has its moments,” he admitted. “I guess the truth of it is, I’d never be caught doing anything else, if I could help it.”
“Have you ever interviewed any of those big-time gangsters?” she asked breathlessly, as though reluctant to let him go.
“Not since yesterday,” he answered glibly, and it startled him a moment later to reflect that what he had said was exactly the truth.
“I’d sometimes thought I’d like to try newspaper work myself,” she offered, “but I suppose it must be terribly hard.”
“No, not so hard,” Ronald replied, “but it does take a certain type of personality. I don’t know exactly how to describe it, but I guess you have to be the kind of person who believes that today is more important than tomorrow or yesterday. After all, today is all that we ever have.”
She had been raised in a small town, like himself, and he felt a kindred sympathy for her. Besides, she didn’t seem particularly busy, and it was comfortable inside and cold and blustery outside, and he hadn’t quite decided what he wanted to do next. So he talked about newspaper work with her for another ten or fifteen minutes.
“If you’re ever in the city,” he invited, “why not stop in and I’ll show you around the plant. And if nobody ever heard of Ronald Wilford, ask for Hayseed, and they’ll know who you mean.”
He could grin about it now, but in his first few weeks on the job that nickname had been hard to take. Still, if a little thing like that was going to break him down, it was best for the newspaper to know it right from the beginning. He seldom heard the nickname any more.
But after all, he and the secretary both had other work to do, and he finally left. He stood outside for a moment in the cold breeze buttoning up his coat.
Where to now? Mrs. Milton hadn’t known Knight, he had never lived in the village as he had said, hadn’t gone to school there. Yet Dr. Milton had known him well, even though it appeared no one else did. Could it be that that letter from the minister was a forgery? But Mrs. Milton had thought it was authentic, and surely she ought to know better than anyone else.
The village had a small library, and here Ronald was able to get copies of some old directories. No family named Knight had lived in the village or its surrounding territory in recent years. More and more Ronald was coming to the conclusion that Barry Knight was a man who didn’t exist at all, that he had begun to exist only at that moment when he entered the newspaper office and asked for a job. Apparently there was no one, except a minister no longer living, who might have proved that Knight had existed before. So—what do you do when you’re out hunting for a ghost?
When running into a dead end in a small village, Ronald often found it advisable to go to the local newspaper office, if there was one, and leaf through the files for the period he was interested in. It helped to give him the feel of the town, what people were thinking and doing and talking about. And he had no trouble finding out what people in Imperial were talking about at the time Knight was supposed to have graduated from high school. If the local newspaper was any reflection, all people were interested in was a robbery.
This was the robbery of a gasoline station near the edge of town. It was a small robbery by big-time standards, the sum involved being a little less than three hundred dollars. But the thing that made it outstanding was that the money was stolen by a man named Walter Desmond, a respected citizen of the community.
Walter Desmond was a man of middle years, an employee of Don’s Service Station. It wouldn’t be quite accurate to describe him as a ne’er-do-well, although it is true he never had much money. This came about partly through some personal misfortunes, and partly because he put so much time and effort into an invention he was working on, an invention he expected would make him rich and famous. Opinion was about equally divided in the village as to whether he was a genius or a crackpot.
On the night of the robbery, the proprietor had stopped off at the station at about ten o’clock, talked with Desmond briefly, and found everything in good order. Eleven o’clock was the usual closing time, and according to Desmond, he set the burglar alarm, locked up, and went home. Then, at about three o’clock the next morning the sound of shattering glass from a window in the station attracted attention. It was found that the window had been broken by a rock, but the prowler had apparently been scared off.
The proprietor was summoned. He unlocked the door and entered the station, which set off the burglar alarm, and by the time he could get it turned off half the people in the village were awake. With the burglar alarm still in good operating condition, it was quite a shock to him to open the cash register and find that about three hundred dollars was missing.
A little experimentation showed that no one could have entered the station through the broken window, even if there had been time. The hole wasn’t large enough, and anyway the burglar alarm would surely have gone off. The alarm system was of the photoelectric-cell type. Simply breaking the window would probably not have set off the alarm. But any person trying to enter would have broken the invisible beam of light, which would have touched off the alarm. The police were able to show that no one could possibly have entered the building without setting off the alarm, unless he had first cut the wires of the alarm system. Apparently neither thing had happened. Even the proprietor himself could not enter the building, once the alarm was set, until the system automatically shut itself off at seven o’clock in the morning.
The police theory was that Desmond had taken the money from the cash register before closing up, then set the alarm and locked up and gone home. At three o’clock he had returned and broken the window. He intended to pick out the pieces to make a larger hole, then reach in until the alarm system went off, and quickly make his escape. It would then look like an outside robbery. Unfortunately for him, the breaking of the window had attracted attention, and he had been unable to complete his plan.
Although Desmond had not taken the stand in his own defense, the theory his lawyer tried to develop was that he had forgotten to set the alarm when he left. That later, burglars had entered, stolen the money from the register, and set the alarm system as they left. Why the window was broken was not explained, except as possibly the work of a mischievous boy.
The defense theory did not long hold up in court, when Don explained t
hat setting the burglary system was no simple matter. Because the station was a little bit isolated, and there had been past robberies, Don had gone to the trouble of installing an expensive system. There were three boxes that had to be set each in proper turn, and this was done by the turning of a key. Only Don, and his employee, Desmond, had keys. The defense suggested the possibility that a duplicate key might have worked, but Don explained that even then the key had to be used correctly. Turning it the wrong way, or too far, would touch off the alarm. And the alarm box by the door had to be set last with the door open, for it was the closing of the door itself that threw it into operation. It seemed extremely unlikely that anyone could have set the system into operation unless he was familiar with it and had a proper key.
It was easy to see why the jury chose to believe the police theory rather than the defense’s, and Walter Desmond was sentenced to a term of one to ten years in the state penitentiary.
It was an interesting case, Ronald thought, except that it didn’t seem to have anything to do with finding Barry Knight.
“Well, what should I do, follow it up, or go home?” Ronald thought. He took a coin from his pocket. “Heads I go home, tails I stay.” He flipped the coin, and it came down heads.
It was an inexcusable superstition for a newspaperman, except that he seldom did what the coin ordered. He turned the car about and headed toward the gasoline station.
CHAPTER 5
A Barrel of Walnut Shells
The sign over the gas station door still read “Don’s Service Station.” Probably the same proprietor, Ronald thought, for small enterprises tended to change names when they changed owners. The man who came out to render service had an air of proprietorship about him.
“You’re Don?” Ronald questioned.
“That’s right. How much will she hold?”
“Oh, I think five gallons will be enough.”
Don busied himself at the tank for a couple of minutes, and by the time he was done, Ronald was out of the car and had come around to watch him.
“Say, that’s a pretty low license number you got,” Don remarked. “You somebody important?”
“No, I’m a newspaper reporter. The paper got the license for me.”
As a matter of policy, Ronald never refused to give his name or state his profession to anyone who asked him. Partly it was because he felt he wasn’t very successful in carrying out a bluff. At first he had thought that this inability to pretend to be something he wasn’t might prove a handicap in the newspaper business, but as it turned out the results were just the opposite. People came to respect him for his sincerity, and tried to help him when they felt they could.
Don narrowed his eyes. “You down here on business?”
“Oh, there was a little something I’ve been checking into.” Ronald nodded toward the station. “Is this where the robbery took place—that one six years ago?”
“Yep, this is the place. You dragging all that up again?”
“No, not exactly. I just stumbled across it while I was checking into something else.”
“Well, if you want to write it all up again, I don’t care. There were plenty of stories about it at the time, but I guess it’s all old stuff by now. I can’t show you how my alarm system works, because I had to change it around after I got all that publicity, but it’s still on the same principle. I installed it myself, kind of a hobby with me. Photoelectric eyes, three of them, set with a special key that you have to use in just the right way. And you have to set the eyes in the right order, too, because they’re cross-beamed. If you set number two first, for example, you’d break the beam when you tried to set number one, and the alarm would go off. Another little gimmick, these eyes have batteries in them that are automatically switched on if the outside current is cut off. I got a different system for my pumps. I won’t tell you what it is, but if anybody tried to steal some gas some night he’d be due for a big surprise. That’s the idea of all these different kinds of systems—try to stay one jump ahead of the burglars.”
“With these beams that you’ve got set inside, isn’t it possible that if a person knew exactly how they were set, he might be able to jump over them or crawl under them?”
“Not at the angles I’ve got ’em set, not in my small station. A burglar’d have to be the world’s champion jumper, or the world’s champion creeper to get past ’em. No, the police looked it over, and they agreed it was burglarproof, unless the burglar somehow broke down the alarm system first. That didn’t happen at the time of the robbery. Say, just what angle are you following up on this robbery, anyway?”
“I didn’t exactly have an angle,” said Ronald slowly. “I suppose the thing I wanted to know was whether there was any way that Walter Desmond might be innocent.”
“Sure, there is,” said Don promptly.
“There is?” Ronald exclaimed.
“Sure, I might have stolen the money myself.”
“You?”
“That’s right. Suppose Wally forgot to lock up the station that night. I come back and find it open. I go in and steal the money, and set the alarm on my way out. Later this kid breaks the window, which attracts attention, and the police come. I got a perfect case. Only thing you got left to explain is how come Wally forgot to lock up, and why would I want to rob my own cash register, and then send the money back to myself a couple of weeks later?”
“You got your money back?” asked Ronald in surprise.
“Yep, came mailed to me in a plain envelope. That was Wally’s doing, of course.”
“Wasn’t he in jail by that time?”
“Oh, sure, but he must have had some friend on the outside who’d take care of it for him. Who else would send me three hundred dollars except Wally? A real screwball.”
As Ronald turned this new fact over in his mind, Don studied him for a few moments, then laughed. “You don’t really think I’d rob my own station, do you?”
“You weren’t insured against robbery?”
“Nope. These burglar alarms are all the insurance I need.” He nodded proudly toward the station house.
“Then it doesn’t sound very likely, unless you had some grudge against Desmond.”
“Him? You’re barking up the wrong tree there, mister. That’s not my way of doing business. If I had it in for somebody, I might give him a poke in the jaw, but I wouldn’t send him to jail. I like to handle those things for myself. Anyway there couldn’t be anything like that with Wally. He was as harmless as they come—or anyway, that’s what I thought up until the robbery. Big, open face, older man needing a job—I didn’t even bother checking his references when he came. Ordinarily a fellow like me has two or three kids hanging around. They work cheap, but it’s not all profit. When you can get a responsible older man at a reasonable wage, you’re so much ahead. That’s the way it looked to me. And then at the trial it all came out that he had a criminal record before. I never would have thought it. It just goes to show that you can’t trust anybody—but anybody.”
“Was Desmond earning good wages here?”
“Good enough. He put in long hours, picked up quite a bit of overtime. He could have got by easy, except that he was putting so much money into his invention. Always puttering around with it as soon as he had a spare minute. I never had any reason to complain, though.”
“What kind of invention was it,” Ronald questioned, “or did he keep that part of it a secret?”
“Oh, I don’t think it was much of a secret. It was a new kind of storage battery that was supposed to last for the life of your car. I don’t think he ever got it operating very well. He talked it over with me a little, but I didn’t understand very much about it.”
He shrugged. “Maybe he really had something, I don’t know. I suppose they laughed at Thomas Edison, too. A screwball, but what’s the difference? I’m a screwball, you’re a screwball. Know what I got home in my attic? A barrel full of walnut shells. Not good for one blamed thing in all creation as far as I know,
but I got ’em. Collected ’em when I was a boy, I don’t know why, but every time I start to throw them out I remember how much work I went to collecting ’em.”
“Do you happen to know whether Desmond is still in prison?”
“Nope, haven’t seen him since the trial. What did he get, one to ten years, wasn’t it? Chances are he’s been out for years. They wouldn’t hang on to a guy like that any longer than they had to. Never came back around here, though. Sort of wish he would, ‘specially if he needs a job.”
“You’d hire him again?” asked Ronald incredulously.
“Sure, why not? I don’t care, as long as I got my money back.”
“If you’ve got so much confidence in him, why do you suppose he robbed you in the first place? Was he badly in need of money?”
“No, I don’t think so.” Don leaned forward confidentially. Ronald was used to this attitude by now. People whispered things in a reporter’s ear, then expected to see it next day on the front page. “I think he wanted to go to jail. Look how he stole the money so that everybody’d know he did it, and how he hardly put up any defense, and how he returned the money afterward. He must have wanted to go to jail, so he could work on his invention in peace and security.”
Ronald’s hand went into his pocket. He took out a dime and handed it to Don. “Thanks, Don, I appreciate your help. That’s not a tip. Try it out for luck. I’ve just resigned from the screwballs.”
He drove off, as Don stared first at the coin in his hand, and then at the fast-receding car.
Ronald’s next objective was already clear in his mind. It seemed to be an open-and-shut case against Walter Desmond, and there was no reason for him to follow it up further, except that he was becoming more than ever convinced that Barry Knight had been interested in the case.
Imperial was not far from the state capital, and Ronald decided he might just as well drive on and see what he could find out about Desmond at the prison. He entered the bleak walls in the middle of the afternoon and had no trouble securing an interview with the assistant warden, just inside the first of the three locked gates.
The Star Reporter Mystery Page 4
