I stared at him and kept thinking of Jerry’s “Not a word to any one” and the message Klangenberg brought me from “Kidnapped” and “Westward Ho” which begged me “to stick.” Yet I had to say something here or I might as well, since my actions already had spoken for me.
“Yes, Fred; I smashed into her to stop her from meeting your father.”
“I was sure of it. You had reason to think, yesterday, that something was going to happen to him?”
There was nothing for it but another nod at this.
“Where did you get your reason?”
I might as well have told him; he told me that he knew I got it from Jerry. He held the police theory with this variation; I had been having some sort of communication with Jerry through which I had stumbled upon the idea that something was going to happen to Winton Scofield. I had got the notion that it was going to happen through his wife, and so, in my stupid way, I’d driven up to the house deliberately to smash into her car and scare her out of whatever plan she had in her mind.
Fred was emotionally worked up, of course, he believed that I meant well by what I tried to do; he didn’t doubt I meant well now. He didn’t blame me for having supposed when I found something was planned against his father that Shirley was in it.
“That’s what I thought,” he told me, “when Rowan ’phoned me this morning and got me out of bed to tell me, ‘Mr. Fred, your father’s shot.’
“The family—Kenyon and I—always figured, naturally, that money was what Shirley was after. That’s why we fixed his affairs so she could never get much, even if father had wanted to give it to her. He didn’t have it to give; we had him on an allowance. The only big sum she could get in a lump was his life insurance, which he made over to her. He carried it from the old days, nearly half a million.”
Here was some of the stuff I’d come for. All morning my mind had been reaching for a motive, you see,—why old Win Scofield had found a place on Keeban’s board and why his number had come to the top just now. Fred talked on and made it perfectly plain to me.