Daisy stared at him incredulously.“Lambert?For murdering Otis Carmody?”
“Let me see if I can make this out. Her telegraphese is so brilliantly ingenious, it takes some working out. She learnt some of this information from your young friend Kevin. Lambert apparently returned to New York andsneaked into the Chelsea to pick up his stuff. Whitaker had asked the management to notify him when any of the three of us returned, which they duly did. Lambert going out met Whitaker coming in and took to his heels—Miss Genevieve witnessed that bit. But I didn’t think Lambert knew Whitaker.”
“He may not have known him, but he saw him when Whitaker came to see me at the hotel. We took him for a villain, remember, and they hid me, he and Mr. Thorwald and Pascoli, with Kevin’s help, of course, after Balfour warned us. Maybe Lambert got muddled and thought he really was a villain. It would be like him.”
“Very,” Alec agreed wholeheartedly. “Hmm, what does Miss Genevieve mean by ‘Washington’?”
“The Washington connection,” said Daisy. “I bet she thinks Whitaker thinks Lambert was sent by someone in Washington whom Carmody upset, to assassinate him. What utter bosh! No one in his right mind would send Lambert to accomplishanything!”
“No one who knew him, certainly.”
“And as for Barton Bender, his arrest doesn’t necessarily mean there’s any real evidence against him. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern just want a scapegoat until after the election.”
Mr. Fisher had listened avidly to every word in silent fascination, but this was too much for him. “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?” he asked.
Daisy looked at Alec, suddenly aware that they had been spouting all sorts of things which he might not want the newspaperman to hear.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Mr. Fisher has promised not to publish the story until Chief Judkins gives him the word.”
So Daisy explained how Hamlet’s courtiers had worked their way into the adventure in spite of her efforts to keep them out. “I was constantly afraid I’d use those names to their faces,” she confessed. “They already considered me an unreliable witness. They would not have been amused.”
Mr. Fisher laughed heartily, but he went on to ask, “And who exactly are the other people you mentioned?”
“Not now, Chuck,” Mrs. Fisher chided. “Let them eat their waffles while they’re hot.”
Chief Judkins arrived while they were still eating. Daisy was embarrassed to be caught in a dressing gown, but he was either too polite to appear to notice or too preoccupied to notice. He was persuaded to sit down to a waffle and a cup of coffee. Then he and Alec put their heads together, and Daisy went to change into the dress Mrs. Fisher had made her. It was a rather ghastly mustard yellow wool, clashing horribly with her blue costume jacket, but it fitted reasonably well and she was far too grateful to quibble. Anything rather than Jake’s trousers.
Judkins drove her and Alec out to the airfield in a Model T with police insignia. (Mr. Fisher swore he would join them there after calling at his office.)
On the way, Alec told Daisy the Chief had made some telephone calls and discovered that news of the pirating of the post office plane had been circulated to Investigation Bureau field offices all over the country. “But no one seems to have made the association of the pirate with Eugene,” he said. “They had a report from a farmer somewhere in Illinois of it landing to refuel at an emergency airfield.”
“That’s all? Isn’t Illinois somewhere in the middle of the country?” Daisy asked.
“Midwest,” Judkins confirmed over his shoulder.
“But it must have come down more than once, mustn’t it, darling?”
“Yes, if he’s coming all the way to Oregon. But remember how few people we saw. Pitt would force the pilot to stick to emergency fields well away from towns.”
“I suppose all he had to do was threaten to shoot him if he landed at a proper aerodrome. Unless he decided to stop somewhere else and come home by train. Or just stay somewhere else.”
“I sure hope not,” said Judkins. “I got a federal agent coming down from Salem just to pinch this guy.”
“If Pitt had hopped off somewhereen route, the pilot would have reported by now,” Alec argued.
“Not if Pitt made him fly to Mexico,” Judkins pointed out. “Or shot him.”
Daisy shivered. It would be bad enough if Pitt just didn’t turn up, after all the fuss. But what if Rosenblatt and Gilligan were right that Bender was Carmody’s murderer, and her pursuit of Pitt had caused the death of the pilot?
Alec put his arm around her shoulders. “There’s plenty of time yet for him to arrive,” he said comfortingly. “The pilot had no one to relieve him, so they would have had to stop for him to rest.”
They drove up to the airfield building and stopped beside a large and gleaming Packard. Two police officers came over to salute Judkins. As Alec and Daisy got out of the Ford, Dipper, Bessie, the reporter Ernest Haycox, and another man—Earl Simmons, Daisy guessed—emerged from the hangar.
Those who had not met were introduced. Simmons wanted to tell Daisy about his wife, who often flew with him. “I dropped Mrs. Simmons off by plane Saturday inSalem to visit with relatives,” he said. “She’ll be real sorry to have missed you. She’d have been mighty pleased to meet the real English aristocracy seeing she married a fake Earl! And you a flyer, too.”
“Not really,” said Daisy, smiling at Haycox, who hovered at her side, notebook in hand, anxious to interview her. “I’m not a pilot.”
“No more is Mrs. Simmons. But Miss Coleman’s been telling me how you helped her navigate through the mountains. Now I gotta admit, I never flew across the Rockies. Miss Coleman’s gonna take me up for some stunts while she’s here. Before Mrs. Simmons comes home,” he added with a wink.
