new may turn up, and you can always drop the case if nothing does. You don’t think they’re innocent, do you?”
He gave me a look that was heavy and sour with pity for my stupidity.
“They’re guilty as hell, but what good’s that to me if I can’t get a conviction? And what’s the good of saying I’ll hold them? Damn it, man, you know as well as I do that all they’ve got to do now is ask for their release and any judge will hand it to them.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’ll bet you the best hat in San Francisco that they don’t ask for it.”
“What do you mean?”
“They want to stand trial,” I said, “or they’d have sprung that alibi before we dug it up. I’ve an idea that they tipped off the Spokane police themselves. And I’ll bet you that hat that you get no habeas corpus motions out of Schaeffer.”
The district attorney peered suspiciously into my eyes.
“Do you know something that you’re holding back?” he demanded.
“No, but you’ll see I’m right.”
I was right. Schaeffer went around smiling to himself and making no attempt to get his clients out of the county prison.
Three days later something new turned up.
A man named Archibald Weeks, who had a small chicken farm some ten miles south of the Kavalov place, came to see the district attorney. Weeks said he had seen Sherry on his—Weeks’s—place early on the morning of the murder.