It was around eight o’clock in the evening when I rang the buzzer on the apartment at the address given me in Edna Cutler’s letter.
A feminine voice came drifting down through the little telephone set. “Who is it, please?”
I placed the transmitter to my lips. “A representative of the Silkwear Importation Company.”
“I thought you were in New Orleans.”
“We have branches all over the country — special field representatives.”
“Couldn’t you come tomorrow?”
“No. I’m making a swing through this section of the state.”
“Well, I can’t see you tonight.”
“Sorry,” I said in a tone of finality.
“Wait a minute. When can I see you?”
“When I make my next trip through here.”
“When will that be?”
“Three or four months.”
There was an exclamation of dismay. “Oh, hang it — I’m dressing. Wait a minute. I’ll throw something on and open the door. Come on up.”
The buzzer sounded, and I climbed a flight of stairs and walked down a long corridor, looking at door numbers.
Edna Cutler, attired in a blue dressing-gown, stood in the doorway waiting for me. She said, “I thought you shipped by mail.”
“We do.”
“Well, come on in. Let’s get it over with. Why did you come personally?”
I said, “We have to conform with the regulations of the F.I.C.”
“What’s the F.I.C.?”
“Federal Importing Commission.”
“Oh. I don’t see why.”
I smiled and said, “My dear young woman, we’d be subject to a fine of ten thousand dollars and imprisonment for twelve months if we sold to other than private individuals. We aren’t allowed to sell to any dealers, or to any person who intends to resell our merchandise.”
“I see,” she said, somewhat mollified.
She was dark, although not so dark as Roberta Fenn. She was expensive. Her hair, her eyebrows, the curl of her long lashes, the enamel on her nails showed the sort of care which costs both time and money. Women lavish that type of care on themselves only when they are property which is well worth the investment. I looked her over carefully.
“Well?” she asked, smiling tolerantly as she noticed the excursions made by my eyes.
I said, “You still haven’t convinced me.”
“ I haven’t convinced you?”
She looked like a young woman who knew her way around. Sitting there in her apartment wearing a negligee, which showed enough bare leg to demonstrate clearly that she was entitled to an AAA1 priority on stockings, she was neither forward nor in the slightest degree embarrassed. So far as she was concerned, I wasn’t a human being. I was simply six pair of stockings at a bargain price.
“I’ll want to see samples,” she observed abruptly.
“The guarantee protects you.”
“How do I know it does?”
“Because you don’t pay anything until you’ve not only received the stockings, but have worn them for a full thirty days.”
She said, “I shouldn’t think you could afford to do that.”
“The only way we can is by having a very select mailing list. However, we want to get down to business. I have half a dozen other calls to make. Your name’s Edna Cutler. You want these stockings exclusively for your own use?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Now, I understand that you aren’t in business. I’m taking your assurance that none of these stockings will be offered for sale again?”
“Why, certainly. I want them for myself.”
“And perhaps some friends?”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“We’d have to have the names of the friends. That’s the only way we can keep our import permit from the Federal government.”
She studied me curiously. “That sounds just a little fishy to me.”
I laughed and said, “You should try doing business now — even an ordinary business is bad enough. But try doing something where you have to import merchandise from a foreign country and see what happens.”
“How did you get hold of these stockings down in Mexico?”
I laughed. “That’s a secret.”
“I think I’d like to find out more about it just the same.”
I said, “A Japanese ship was carrying a load of hosiery. The Japs raided Pearl Harbor. The ship, like nearly all Japanese ships, was intended for commerce in time of peace, but in time of war it had a certain military mission to perform. The captain put ashore in Mexico on the coast of Lower California, picked a sandy place, dug a long trench, and buried the bulk of the silk goods from his hold. My partner happened to own the tract of land where the stuff was buried. He also happened to have some pull in Mexico City. As a result — well, you can gather—”
She said, “You mean this stuff is highjacked?”
“The Supreme Court of Mexico has given us title to it. We can get you a copy of the decision if you want.”
“But if you have any quantity of silk goods that you received under circumstances such as that, why don’t you bring them up, take them across the border, then sell them to some of the big department stores and—”
I explained patiently, “We can’t do that. Under our license with the government, we have to sell the stockings to individual customers.”
“Your letter didn’t say so.”
“No. It’s a ruling of the F.I.C. We couldn’t bring them into the country otherwise.”
I took a pencil and notebook from my pocket. “Now if you’ll kindly give me the names of any intimate friends to whom you’ll deliver any of these—”
“I want those stockings for my own use. However, I might refer you to a friend who’d take some.”
“That would be fine. Now did you—”
The door from the bedroom opened, and Roberta Fenn came breezing into the room. She’d evidently just finished dressing.
“Hello,” she said. “Are you the stocking man? I was just telling my friend that—”
She stood perfectly still. Her eyes widened, her mouth fell slightly open.
Edna Cutler whirled around quickly, caught the expression on her face, jumped to her feet with alarm, and cried, “Why, Rob, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” Roberta Fenn said after taking a deep breath. “He’s a detective, Edna, that’s all.”
Edna Cutler whirled back to me with indignation and perhaps a trace of fear in her manner. It was the instinctive fight which a frightened animal puts up when it’s driven into a corner.
“How dare you come in here in this way? I could have you arrested.”
“And I could have you arrested for sheltering a person who’s accused of murder.”
The two women exchanged glances. Roberta said, “I think he’s really clever, Edna. I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere with that approach.”
She sat down.
Edna Cutler hesitated for a long moment; then she, too, sat down.
Roberta said, “It was a clever trick all right. Edna and I wondered how anyone had got that address; then we decided that the post office probably took addresses from letters and sold mailing lists.”
I said, “No need to talk about that. That’s water over the dam.”
“It was a clever trick,” Roberta repeated, glancing significantly at Edna Cutler.
I said, “Any one of half a dozen tricks would have accomplished the same purpose. If I found you, the police can find you. The wonder of it is they haven’t found you sooner.”
Roberta said, “I don’t think the police will find me. I think you underestimate your own abilities.”
I said, “We won’t argue about it. We have other things to discuss. Who was Paul Nostrander?”
They exchanged glances.
I looked at my wrist watch. “We haven’t much time to waste.”
Edna Cutler said, “I don’t know.”
I looked at Roberta, and her eyes avoided mine.
I turned back to Edna Cutler. “Suppose I refresh your recollection a bit. You were married to Marco Cutler. He wanted to file suit for divorce. You didn’t want to let him go without more alimony than he was willing to pay. Unfortunately, however, you’d been indiscreet.”
“That’s a lie.”
I said, “Well, let’s put it this way. He had witnesses who would swear that you had been indiscreet.”
“And they were lying!”
I said, “Forget it. I don’t care about the merits or demerits of that divorce action. I don’t care if Marco Cutler had perjured witnesses, or whether circumstantial evidence looked black against you, or whether he could have named seventy-five corespondents and still missed a couple of dozen. What I’m getting at, and want to establish definitely, is that he wanted to get a divorce, that you didn’t want him to get a divorce, and that you didn’t have any defense.”
She said, “Put it that way then, and go on from there, I’m not admitting anything. I’m not denying anything. I’m listening.”
I said, “The stunt you pulled was a masterpiece.”
“If you’re so smart, tell me the rest of it.”
I said, “You went to New Orleans. You let your husband know you were in New Orleans. You let him believe that you had run out of California because you didn’t want the notoriety of having the things you had done dragged into the limelight. Marco Cutler thought it was all cut and dried. You’d played right into his hands. He’d been very smart. You’d been very dumb. He wasn’t going to pay you a cent of alimony.”
“There’s where you pulled your fast one. You let him know that you were taking an apartment. You gave him the address. Then you looked around for someone who had a superficial resemblance to you; height, size, age, and in a general way, complexion. Anyone seeing you and Roberta Fenn together wouldn’t think there was much similarity, but a written description of one of you could well be taken as a description of the other.”
Edna Cutler said, “If you’re getting ready to say something, go ahead and say it.”
“I’m simply laying the foundation.”
“Well, go ahead with the superstructure. We haven’t all night. You yourself said you were in a hurry.”
I said, “I believe my words were that there wasn’t any time to waste. If you think I’m wasting it, you’re crazy.”
Roberta Fenn smiled.
“Go ahead,” Edna Cutler challenged.
“You found Roberta Fenn. She was very much on the loose. You had a little money. You wanted to give her your apartment rent free. Perhaps you offered to pay her something in addition. The only condition you made was that she was to keep your name, receive your mail, forward it on to you, and tell anyone who asked that she was Edna Cutler. You may have told her you expected papers to be served on you in a divorce suit. Perhaps you didn’t.”
“In any event, your husband walked into the trap. He went to his lawyers. He told them all about the cause of action he had, and the lawyers suggested that they file a complaint which just stated facts sufficient to constitute a cause of action. Then if you started fighting, they’d amend the complaint and drag in all the dirt. They asked your husband where you were, and he gave them the address in New Orleans. The lawyers, steeped in the legal lore of the profession, concentrated all their attention on working the old trick of filing a relatively innocuous complaint, but letting you know that if you tried to protect yourself, they’d come down on you with an avalanche of mud.”
The mere mention of it made Edna’s eyes glitter. “And you think that was fair?”
“No. It’s a lousy trick. It’s one that lawyers work all the time.”
“The effect of it was to deprive me of any opportunity to fight for my rights.”
“You should have gone ahead and fought, anyway — if you had anything to fight for.”
“I was framed.”
“I know,” I said, “but we’re not trying the divorce case on the merits. I’m just sketching a picture of what happened. The lawyers sent the papers to a New Orleans process sender. The process server came lumbering up the steps, pounded on the door, looked Roberta over, said, ‘You’re Edna Cutler,’ and handed her papers. He made a return of service that he’d duly and regularly served Edna Cutler on a certain day and date in New Orleans. You, of course, were far, far away.”
Edna said, “You’re making it sound like a conspiracy. As a matter of fact, I didn’t know anything whatever about the divorce until very recently.”
I turned my eyes to Roberta. “That was because you didn’t know where to notify her?”
She nodded.
“It was very, very clever,” I said. “It’s a very neat way of turning defeat into triumph. Marco Cutler thought he had a good divorce. He went to Mexico before he had a final decree, and remarried. You waited long enough so it would look as though you were acting in good faith. Then you wrote Roberta Fenn a letter, asking her to be nice to some man who was a friend of yours. That was the first time Roberta had had your address. She answered that letter by writing to tell you that after you had left, papers had been served on her, that because she had promised you that no matter what happened, she’d swear she was Edna Cutler, she had told the man who served the papers that that was her name. You immediately wrote back and asked Roberta to send the papers on to you. She sent them on, and that gave you all you needed to swear that that was the first time you had any knowledge you had been divorced. Prior to that time you thought you were still the wife of Marco Cutler, separated, of course, but still his wife.”
“So you wrote to your husband and asked him how he got that way, pointing out to him that his divorce wasn’t any good because the papers hadn’t been served OR you. In other words, you now had him hooked, and you were going to make him pay through the nose. He didn’t dare let his present wife get the least inkling of the true facts of the case. In short, you’ve got him where you want him.”
I quit talking and looked at her, waiting for her to say something.
At length, she said, “ You make it sound as though I had worked it out as a clever idea. As a matter of fact, I had absolutely no thought of anything except to get away from it all. My husband had framed me. He had subjected me to all sorts of humiliations. I don’t know whether it was because he had determined to smear me so badly I couldn’t hold my head up among my friends, or whether he himself had been victimized. He’d hired private detectives and had paid them a fancy sum. Those detectives had to produce evidence to get money, so they kept sending in all sorts of lies to Marco, and Marco gleefully thought he was getting something on me. He paid them fabulous sums.”
She stopped for a moment and bit her lip, apparently fighting for self-control.
“And then?” I asked.
“Then,” she said, “when he told me what he had, when he showed me the reports of the detective agency, when he let me read that pack of lies, I almost went crazy.”
“You didn’t admit them, did you?”
“Admit them! I told him they were the most awful lies I had ever read anywhere. I had a complete nervous breakdown. I was under the care of a physician for two weeks, and it was my doctor who told me to travel and get away from, everything, to go some place where there would be nothing to remind me of what had happened, simply to clear out.”
“A sympathetic doctor?” I asked, smiling.
“He was very understanding.”
“Gave you his advice in writing?” I asked.
“How did you know?”
“I was just wondering.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, he did. I went to San Francisco. While I was there, I wrote him a letter. I told him I didn’t feel like coming back and asked him what he thought I should do, and he wrote me this letter telling me he thought it was an excellent idea for me to get a complete change.”
“And, of course, you just happen to have saved that letter. Go ahead.”
“I went to New Orleans. Everything was fine for about three weeks. I stayed in a hotel, while I was looking around to find an apartment. Then something happened.”
“What was it?”
“I met someone on the street.”
“Someone who knew you?”
“Yes.”
“From Los Angeles?”
“Yes. So I decided to disappear.”
I said, “That doesn’t work. If you met someone on the street in New Orleans who knew you in Los Angeles, you’d also meet someone on the street in Little Rock, Arkansas, Shreveport, or Timbuctoo.”
“No. You don’t get it. The friend wanted to know where I was living. I had to tell her. I knew that she’d tell her friends, and the first thing I knew, everybody would know that I was in New Orleans, and be looking me up. I didn’t want to see people who knew anything at all about my old life, but I did want to have a place in New Orleans that I could come back to. Then I met Rob. She was having troubles of her own. She wanted to escape from her identity. I asked her how she’d like to trade identities. She said she’d like it swell. I told her to find a suitable apartment that would be something I could live in later on when I got ready to come back to New Orleans, and about what I was willing to pay for it.”
“What name did you take?” I asked.
“Rob’s.”
“For how long?”
“For not more than two or three days.”
“Then what?”
She said, “I suddenly realized what damning evidence I was manufacturing. If my husband’s lawyers found out about it, they would show that I had gone away and started living under an assumed name. That would have been a confession of guilt, so I took my own name back. That simply meant there were two Edna Cutlers. One of them was Rob who was living in New Orleans, and the other was the real Edna Cutler.”
I said “Very, very interesting. It would make even the most hard-boiled judge cry into his law books.”
“I’m not asking for sympathy. I’m only asking for justice.”
I said, “All right, now let’s cut out the comedy. You didn’t think this up.”
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t think up all that scheme for letting your husband hit the jackpot, and then find out the machine was empty.”
“I don’t get you.”
I said, “I’ve known lots of lawyers. There have perhaps been four or five who could have thought up a trick like that, but the point is it took a lawyer to do it and it took a darned ingenious lawyer to do it.”
“But I tell you it wasn’t any scheme. I didn’t think it up.”
I said, “That brings us back to our friend, Paul G. Nostrander.”
“What about him?”
“You knew him?”
She hesitated for several seconds over that question. I grinned while she was groping for an answer, then went on to say, “You never expected that question would be put to you in just that way, did you, Edna? You hadn’t thought up your answer on that.”
She said defiantly, “No. I didn’t know him.”
I saw Roberta Fenn’s face show surprise.
I said, “That’s where you’re making your fatal mistake.”
“What do you mean?”
I said, “Nostrander’s secretary will probably remember that you were in the office. His books will show that, at least at the start, he received a fee from you. The people at Jack O’Leary’s Bar will remember that you were in there together. They’ll trap you in perjury. Your husband would spend a fortune on private detectives tracking all that stuff down. They’d bring that out in court, and a judge would realize you’d simply—”
She interrupted me to say, “All right, I knew him.”
“How well?”
“I–I’d consulted him.”
“And what did he tell you?”
“Told me that the only thing for me to do was to quit worrying, and,” she went on triumphantly, as she realized the strength of this new defense, “he told me not to do anything at all until papers were served on me, that as soon as papers were served on me to let him know.”
I said, “That’s a swell line. Nostrander’s dead. He can’t contradict you on that, you know.”
She contented herself with glaring at me, but made no other denial.
I turned to Roberta. “You knew him?”
“Yes.”
“How did you meet him?”
Edna said quickly, “He is trying to get you to say that I introduced you to him. You met him in a bar, didn’t you, Rob?”
Roberta didn’t say anything.
I grinned. “That’s another weak point in your story, Edna. I think you’ve already told Roberta too much.”
“I haven’t told her anything.”
I said to Roberta, “Skip that. You don’t have to lie, and if you’re afraid of offending Edna, you can simply keep quiet and let it go at that. Now, why did you avoid Nostrander?”
“What do you mean?”
I said, “You stayed on in the apartment. You hung around the French Quarter for almost a year. You ate at the Bourbon House. You were seen quite frequently in Jack O’Leary’s Bar. According to Edna’s own story, you were supposed to get an apartment and stay there until she came back to live in New Orleans. Then almost overnight, you moved out of the Quarter. You started living uptown. You studied stenography. You never went back to any of your old haunts. You carefully avoided meeting Nostrander. It wasn’t until Edna gave Archibald Smith a letter to you that you went back to your old haunts in the French Quarter. You thought you were safe by that time. You weren’t. Someone told Nostrander you’d been seen there. Nostrander started doing a little detective work. I don’t know just how he went about it, but he may have done the same thing I did. In any event, he found you. He’d been looking for you for two years.”
“Now why did you suddenly leave the French Quarter?”
Edna said, “You don’t have to answer that question, Rob.”
“You don’t either one of you have to answer anything,” I said, “not now. But when the police ask those questions, you’re going to have to answer them.”
“Why will the police ask them?” Edna asked.
“Don’t you see?”
“No.”
“Where were you about half-past two on Thursday morning?” I asked.
“To whom are you talking?” Edna demanded. “You’re looking at me. You mean Roberta, don’t you?”
“No. I mean you.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
I said, “The police haven’t put all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together yet, but when they do, this is the way the picture will look. You had a slick scheme to rob your husband of his triumph. Nostrander was mixed up in that scheme. So was Roberta Fenn. Roberta didn’t know the details. Nostrander did. He’s the one who thought the whole thing up.”
“It was a swell scheme. It worked like a charm. Your husband should have been thrown into such a panic that he’d start paying through the nose. But your husband happens to be made of a little sterner stuff. He came on to New Orleans to investigate. He got in touch with the process server who served the papers. He’ll probably get in touch with private detectives, if he hasn’t a staff of them in New Orleans already. He’d have found out about Nostrander. Nostrander would have been the key witness. If Nostrander was put on the carpet, on a charge of conspiracy, he might talk. If he talked, you’d lose a lot of money. If he didn’t talk, you stood to make a big shakedown. There was one way of insuring Nostrander’s silence. That was with a thirty-eight caliber bullet right in the middle of the heart. Better women than you have succumbed to less urgent temptations.”
She said, “You’re crazy.”
I said, “That’s the way the police are going to reason.”
She glanced almost helplessly at Roberta Fenn.
“Now then,” I said, “suppose you tell me just how you became acquainted with Archibald C. Smith, and why you happened to give him a letter to Roberta.”
There seemed to be genuine surprise on her face. “Smith! Good heavens, what’s that old fossil got to do with it?”
“That’s what I want to know.”
“Now I know you’re crazy. He hasn’t anything to do with it.”
“Well, how did you happen to meet him? What’s—”
The doorbell rang sharply.
“See who it is,” I said to Edna.
She went to the telephone, pressed the button, said, “Who is it?”
Looking at her face, I knew from the expression of sheer terror what the answer was.
“Have you got any things here?” I asked Roberta. “A bag, clothes, anything?”
She shook her head. “I left the apartment without anything. I telegraphed Edna collect and she wired me money to come here. I haven’t had a chance to buy anything. I—”
“Grab everything you’ve got,” I said, “everything that would indicate you’d been here. Let’s get going.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
I said to Edna, “Press the buzzer that opens the downstairs door. Take all these extra cigarette butts from the ash tray, and throw them out of the window. Be putting on that housecoat when they come to the door.”
I saw Edna’s hand groping for the button which controlled the buzzer.
“Who is it?” Roberta asked.
Edna turned to her. Her quivering lips couldn’t answer.
“The police, of course,” I said, grabbed Roberta’s wrist, and rushed her to the door.