Sherry got a lawyer, a slick looking pale man with horn-rim glasses and a thin twitching mouth. His name was Schaeffer. He went around smiling to himself and at us.
When the district attorney had only thumb nails left and was starting to work on them, I borrowed a car from Ringgo and started following the railroad south, trying to learn where Sherry had left the train. We had mugged the pair, of course, so I carried their photographs with me.
I displayed those damned photographs at every railroad stop between Farewell and Los Angeles, at every village within twenty miles of the tracks on either side, and at most of the houses in between. And it got me nothing.
There was no evidence that Sherry and Marcus hadn’t gone through to Los Angeles.
Their train would have put them there at ten-thirty that night. There was no train out of Los Angeles that would have carried them back to Farewell in time to kill Kavalov. There were two possibilities: an airplane could have carried them back in plenty of time; and an automobile might have been able to do it, though that didn’t look reasonable.
I tried the airplane angle first, and couldn’t find a flyer who had had a passenger that night. With the help of the Los Angeles police and some operatives from the Continental’s Los Angeles branch, I had everybody who owned a plane—public or private—interviewed. All the answers were no.
We tried the less promising automobile angle. The larger taxicab and hire-car companies said, “No.” Four privately owned cars had been reported stolen between ten and twelve o’clock that night. Two of them had been found in the city the next morning: they couldn’t have made the trip to Farewell and back. One of the others had been picked up in