I caught up on sleep for the biggest part of the afternoon. About six o’clock I tapped on the communicating door to Roberta’s room.
“Yes,” she called, “what is it?”
I opened the door a crack. “Getting hungry?”
“Come on in.” She had a sheet pulled up over her. From the clothes on the chair, it looked as though the sheet was about all she had on.
She grinned, said, “This is my negligee. Donald, I’ve simply got to get some clothes. I’ve been using a purse as a suitcase and overnight bag until I feel like something the cat dragged in. The drugstore downstairs managed to give me enough creams, comb, brushes, and toilet articles, but no negligee.”
I said, “I could use some clean clothes, but it’s Sunday and the stores are closed.”
“You live here, don’t you? You must have a room with a lot of things in it.”
“I have.”
“Why don’t you go get them?”
I smiled and shook my head.
“You think-that the police—”
“Yes.”
“Donald, I’m sorry. I’m the one that got you into this mess.”
“No, you didn’t. It isn’t any mess, and I’m not in it. I like the clothes I’ve got on.”
She smiled. “Where would we go?”
“Oh, there are half a dozen places where we could get something to eat and perhaps do a little dancing.”
“Donald, I’d love that.”
“Okay, get your things on.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ve washed out my undies and left them hanging in the bathroom. I think they’re dry.”
“How long?”
“Ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Be seeing you.”
I went back and closed the door, settled down and lit a cigarette. Fifteen minutes later she joined me, and thirty minutes after that we were seated in one of the less exclusive nightclubs with cocktails in front of us, and a special de luxe dinner ordered.
Getting a girl drunk is always a risky business. You don’t know what she’s going to do or what she’s going to say when the cautiousness wears off and she gets right down to the real low-down. What’s more, you never know whether you’re not going to wake up with a terrific headache and find your victim has drunk you under the table.
I suggested a second cocktail. Roberta took it. She turned me down on a third, but admitted that some wine would go nicely with the dinner.
I ordered sparkling Burgundy.
It was a place where people came to dine and talk, laugh, proposition, and be propositioned. Waiters made quite a show of bustling about, but didn’t try to serve the dinners under an hour or an hour and a half.
Our dinner dragged into its second bottle of sparkling Burgundy, and I could see Roberta was getting tight. I was feeling pretty darn good myself.
“You never have told me what your partner said to you.”
“Bertha?”
“Yes.”
“That was because your delicate ears shouldn’t hear such language.”
“You’d be surprised at the things my delicate ears have heard. What’s eating her?”
“Oh, just a general gripe.”
She reached across the table. Her fingers closed around my hand. “You’re protecting me, aren’t you, Donald?”
“Perhaps.”
“I knew you were. Your partner wanted you to find me and turn me in and you wouldn’t do it. You had a fight about it. Isn’t that right?”
“Listening at the door?” I asked.
Her eyes showed indignation. “Certainly not.”
“Just general powers of deduction?”
She nodded slowly, with that serious solemnity which characterizes a woman who is saying to herself, Now I’m pretty tight, hut no one must know it. I’m going to nod my head, and I must be careful to see that it doesn’t nod too far and fall right off in my lap.
I said, “Bertha’s all right now. You can forget about her. She was a little belligerent at first, but that doesn’t mean anything — not with Bertha. She’s like the camel, very even-tempered.”
“Donald, suppose that had been the police. What could we have done?”
“Nothing.”
“Suppose they pick me up. What am I to do?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that. Don’t talk. Don’t make any statements. Don’t give them any information about anything until you’ve seen a lawyer.”
“What lawyer?”
“I’ll get you one.”
“You’re so good to me.”
Her words were getting just a little thick. There was an effort in the concentration of her gaze, as if she wanted to be certain to hold me in one place so that I didn’t drift out of her field of vision right while she was looking at me.
“Know something?” she asked abruptly.
“What?”
“I’m nuts about you.”
“Forget it. You’re cockeyed.”
“I’m tight all right, but I’m still nuts about you. Didn’t you know it back there in the hotel when I kissed you?”
“No, I didn’t think anything about it.”
Her eyes were large. “You should think something about it.”
I leaned across the table, pushed the plates away to make a clear spot on the tablecloth. “Why did you leave Los Angeles?”
“Don’t make me talk about it.”
“I want to know.”
The question seemed to sober her. She looked down at her plate, thought for a moment, said, “I could use a cigarette.”
I gave her one and lit it.
“I’ll tell you, if you make me, Donald, but I don t want to. You could make me do anything.”
“I want to know, Rob.”
“It was years ago, 1937.”
“What happened?”
“I was out with a man in an automobile. We drove around just killing time, and then turned in to one of the parks, and — stopped.”
“Necking?”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
“At that time they were having quite a bit of trouble with a love bandit, a chap who lay in wait in the places where the necking parties went on. I suppose you know the procedure.”
“Holdup?”
“He’d take money from the men, and then — well, then he’d borrow the woman for a while.”
“Go on.”
“We were held up.”
“What happened?”
“This man made a pass at me and my escort wouldn’t stand for it. The bandit shot him — and got away.”
“Were you suspected?”
“Suspected of what?” she asked, her eyes getting wide.
“Of having had anything to do with it.”
“Good heavens, no. Everyone was just as sympathetic and nice to me as they could be. But — well, it clung to me. Of course, the people where I was working knew all about it. They’d keep talking about it. Once when I went out with a fellow one of the girls in the office didn’t like she came to me and told me that a man had given his life in order to protect my honor, that I shouldn’t hold it cheaply.”
“What did you do?”
“I wanted to slap her face. All I could do was to smile and thank her.
“I quit my job, went to work in another place. In about two months they found out all about me. It was the same thing over and over. I suppose I’m just a damn heathen. I didn’t love this man. I liked him. I was going with him off and on, but I was also going with some others. I had no intention of marrying him. If I’d known what he was going to do, I’d have stopped him. I didn’t want him to give his life for me. It was a brave thing to do. It was a wonderful thing to do. It was so — so damned quixotic.”
“I think it was what any man would have done under similar circumstances.”
She smiled. “Statistics prove that you’re wrong.”
I knew she was right, so didn’t say anything more.
“Well,” she went on, “what with having all of my friends whispering around behind my back, and what with the memory of the tragedy gnawing at the back of my consciousness — I decided to travel. I went to New York. After a while I got a job as a model, advertising some lingerie. For a while things were all right, then people recognized my photographs. My friends started whispering again.”
“I’d had a taste of complete freedom. It had lasted for almost a year. I knew what it was like to be just a common, average person, free to live my own life in my own way—”
“So you disappeared again?” I asked.
“Yes. I realized that I’d had the right idea but had made the mistake of getting into a profession where I was photographed. I decided to go to a new place, begin all over again, and smash the first camera that was pointed in my direction.”
“New Orleans?”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
“You know the rest.”
“How did you meet Edna Cutler?”
“I don’t know now just how it was. I think it started in a cafeteria or a restaurant-it may have been the Bourbon House. Come to think of it, I guess it was. That’s something of a Bohemian place, you know. Most of the people who eat there regularly get to know the other people who eat there regularly. Quite a few of the prominent authors, playwrights, and actors eat there when in New Orleans. It’s an unpretentious little place, but it has the atmosphere, the real, authentic, aged-in-the-wood brand.”
“I know.”
“Well, anyway, I got acquainted with her. I found out she was running away from something, too. She hadn’t had as much of a success at it as I’d had, so I offered to take over her identity for a while and let her really disappear.”
I said, “I’m anxious to get that straight, Rob. Did you make the offer to her? ”
She thought for a moment and said, “Well, she paved the way for it. I guess it was her idea.”
“You’re certain?”
“Definitely, yes. Can I have another drink, Donald? You’ve made me get cold sober, talking about this thing. I didn’t want to get sober tonight. I wanted to ring doorbells and have some fun.”
I said, “There’s a little more I want you to tell me first, little details about, for instance, when you first heard about Nostrander’s death.”
She said, “Put yourself in my position. One murder had been committed over me already. I was trying to dodge notoriety. Well, when this thing happened, I–I just acted on instinct. I wanted to run away from it.”
“Not good enough, Rob,” I told her.
“What isn’t good enough?”
“That reason for running.”
“It happens to be the truth.”
I looked her straight in the eyes, said, “You know better, Rob. No one had thought you might have been implicated in the murder of that young man with whom you were riding back in 1937, but two murders in a girl’s life are just too many murders. They’d begin to ask questions about that old murder, and they wouldn’t be the same kind of questions they asked you five years ago.”
“Honest, Donald, I never thought of that. But-well, I guess it’s an angle to take into consideration. It’s something to think of, all right.”
“Let’s go back to that love bandit. Did they ever catch him?”
“Yes.”
“Did he confess?”
“Not to that crime. He always denied having had anything to do with that. He confessed to a couple of others.”
“What did they do with him?”
“Hanged him.”
“Did you ever see him?”
“Yes. They took me down to see if I could identify him.”
“Could you?”
“No.”
“Did you see him alone or in a line-up?”
“They showed him to me in a line-up, in one of those inspection boxes where a person stands on kind of a stage with a lot of lights beating on him and a white screen stretched across the front so he can’t see you, and yet you can see him perfectly.”
“And you couldn’t pick him out of the line-up?”
“No.”
“Then what did they do?”
“Then they put him in a darkened room where there was just a little light, put an overcoat and a hat on him, just the way he’d been dressed at the time of the crime, and asked me if I could identify him.”
“Could you?”
“No.”
“The man who killed your friend wore a mask?”
“Yes.”
“Did you notice anything about him, anything at all?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“He walked with a limp when he came out of the bushes. After the shooting, when he ran away, he didn’t limp.”
“Did you tell the police that?”
“Yes.”
“Did it mean anything to them?”
“I don’t think so. Can’t we quit talking about this and have a drink?”
I called the waiter over. “Same thing?” I asked her.
“I’m tired of wine. Could we have something else?”
“Two Scotch and sodas,” I said. “How’s that, Rob?”
“That’s fine. And then do something for me, will you, Donald?”
“What?”
“Don’t let me drink any more.”
“Why?”
“I want to enjoy the night and not just get dizzy and a little sick and pass out and wake up in the morning with a head.”
The waiter brought the drinks. I drank about half of mine, then excused myself and started in the general direction of the men’s room. I detoured over to the telephone booth, got a couple of bills changed into twenty-five-cent pieces, and called Emory G. Hale at the hotel in New Orleans.
I had to wait less than three minutes while the operator put the call through; then I heard Hale’s booming voice.
Central sweetly told me to start depositing twenty-five-cent pieces, and my quarters played a tune on the gong in the pay box.
It took a second or two for the sound of the gongs to get out of my ear. I heard Hale saying impatiently, “Hello. Hello. Hello. Who is this calling? Hello.”
“Hello, Hale. This is Donald Lam.”
“Lam! Where are you?”
“Los Angeles.”
“Well, why the devil didn’t you report? I’ve been worried sick about you, wondering if you were all right.”
“I’m all right. I’ve been too busy to get near a telephone. I’ve got Roberta Fenn located.”
“You have?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Los Angeles.”
“Bully for you! That’s the way I like to have things done. No excuses. No alibis. Just results. You certainly are entitled—”
“You still have the key to that apartment?” I interrupted.
“Yes, of course.”
I said, “All right. Roberta Fenn lived there. The landlady will identify her photograph. There was a flimflam on a divorce action. She was doubling for Edna Cutler. Edna Cutler lives at Shreveport in an apartment house that’s called River Vista. She staked Roberta to the money to get out of New Orleans.”
“Get in touch with Marco Cutler. You’ll find him in one of the hotels in New Orleans. Tell him that Edna Cutler worked a clever scheme on him by trapping him into serving papers on a woman that wasn’t the defendant. Tell him to come up and look over the apartment. When he does, be sure that he finds the gun and those old newspaper clippings. Then call in the police. Let the California authorities reopen that Craig murder case. As soon as you’ve done that, get on a plane and come to Los Angeles. I’ll have Roberta Fenn all staked out for you.”
Good nature bubbled out of him like coffee in an electric percolator. “Lam, that’s wonderful! Is Roberta Fenn in Los Angeles now?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know where?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“I’m shadowing her.”
“Can you tell me exactly where she is?”
“Right at the present moment, she’s in a nightclub. She’s just getting ready to leave.”
“Anyone with her?” he asked eagerly.
“Not at the moment.”
“And you’re not going to lose her?”
“I’m keeping an eye on her.”
“That’s splendid. Wonderful! Donald, you’re a man in a million! When I said you were an owl, I really—”
Central interrupted to say, “Your three minutes are up.”
“Good-by,” I said, and slammed the receiver back onto its hook.