“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 wifed 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.

  Chapter Sixteen

  THERE WAS a bend in the corridor about twenty feet from Edna’s door. I kept my hand on Roberta’s wrist, guiding her down the corridor and around this bend.

  “But what—” she said. “Why—”

  “Hush,” I whispered. “Wait.”

  There were steps on the stairs.

  “If it’s one man,” I whispered, “we wait here. If it’s two men, we beat it.”

  There were two men. They came walking down the corridor, the heavy tread of beefy men. We could hear knuckles on Edna’s door.

  I peeked around the corner and saw two broad backs. I had s glimpse of Edna’s white face; then the two men pushed their way into the room. I waited until the door closed, turned to Roberta, and beckoned.

  She followed me down the hall.

  At the head of the stairs she asked, “Why would we have waited if there had only been one?”

  “They hunt in couples. If one had gone up, it would have meant the other was sitting in the car, waiting. With both of them in Edna’s room, it should mean the coast is clear. At any rate, let’s hope.”

  We went down the stairs. I pushed open the door and held it for Roberta. A police car was parked in front of the apartment. No one was in it.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  We walked down the street.

  “Not too fast.”

  “I feel as though something were chasing me. I want to run.”

  “Don’t do it. Look up at me and laugh. Slow down. Here, let’s stop and look in this window.”

  We paused, looked casually in a store window, then started walking again. Slowly I guided her around the corner.

  “Know anyone else here?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I said, “Okay, we go into a restaurant and eat. Had dinner?”

  “No. We were just going out for dinner when you rang the bell. Edna was just out of the tub.”

  We strolled along the street. Once or twice she tried to ask me questions. I told her to wait. We found a good-looking restaurant with booths, went in, and selected a quiet booth off in the comer away from the door. The waiter brought a menu, and I ordered two daiquiri cocktails.

  The waiter withdrew.

  I said, “Keep your voice down low. Tell me How much you know about Edna’s little scheme.”

  “Nothing,” she said. “It happened just the way you doped it out, only I didn’t know she was expecting any papers to be served on her.”

  “Why was Nostrander so anxious to see you.—

  She said, “He fell for me. It was very annoying as tar as I was concerned.”

  I said, “You don’t mean that you moved out of the apartment, changed your whole style simply because some man whom you didn’t like was making passes at you.”

  “Well-well, not exactly.”

  “Why, then?”

  “I’d rather let it go just the way it is.

  I shook my head. “You can’t.”

  She said, “Well, to tell you the truth, in part I got tired of the life I was living. I wasn’t working. I was getting all of my expenses paid simply to stay there and take the name of Edna Cutler. I wasn’t getting up until along about eleven or twelve o’clock in the morning. I’d go to breakfast, take a little walk, pick up some magazines, come back, read and doze during the afternoon, go out about seven o’clock for a bite to eat, come back, take a bath, put on my glad rags, take a lot of care with my make-up, and groom myself up to the minute. Then I’d either have a date, or else I’d drift across to one of the bars, and—well, you know how it is in New Orleans. It isn’t like any other city on earth. A girl sits in the bar, and men pick her up. They don’t think anything of it, and neither does the girl. In any other city, you’d wonder what sort she was, but—well. New Orleans is New Orleans.”

  The waiter brought our daiquiris. We touched glasses, took the first sip.

  The waiter stood by the table, exerting a silent pressure for our orders.

  “Could you bring some oysters on the half shell with a lot of cocktail sauce, some horseradish and lemon?” I asked. “Then bring us some of those cold, peppered shrimp, some onion soup, a steak about three inches thick, done medium rare, some French-fried onions, shoestring potatoes, cut some French bread, put on lots of butter, sprinkle on just a trace of garlic, put it in the oven, let it get good and hot so the butter melts all through the bread, put some sparkling Burgundy on the ice, and after that bring us a dish of ice cream, a huge pot of coffee, and the check.”

  The waiter never batted an eyelash. “I could do that very nicely, sir.”

  “How about you?” I asked Roberta.

  “I could go for that in a big way.”

  I nodded to the waiter, waited until the green curtains had dropped back into place, and said suddenly to Roberta, “Where were you at two-thirty a.m. Thursday?”

  She said, “If I told you what happened that night, you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Bad as that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me then.”

  She said, “I’d kept away from Nostrander. He didn’t know I was in New Orleans; then he found me. You were there when he found me. You heard what he said. It was the first time I’d seen him for two years. I didn’t want to have a scene in front of you. The last time I had seen him, he had been absolutely crazy about me. In fact, he had a jealousy complex. That was one of the things which made him so distasteful to me. Whenever I’d try to go out with anyone else, he’d go absolutely crazy-I mean that literally. He was a very brilliant man, but completely unstable. Heaven help the woman whoever married him! He wouldn’t have let even the milkman come to the house.”

  “Is that why you took him out in the corridor the night I was at your apartment?”

  “Yes I knew he had a gun, and I was afraid he was going to do something desperate. When he saw you there he almost pulled his gun. I took him out in the corridor. He was insanely jealous of you. I told him I’d never seen you before, that you were a business visitor. He wouldn’t believe me. He thought, finding you in my apartment, that you were the privileged boy friend. He pulled his gun, said he’d shoot me and kill himself if I didn’t go out with him, and went through all dramatics. So I told him that the reason I hadn’t seen him, and the reason I hadn’t gone out with him was because of that very trait in his character, that if he’d put that gun back in his pocket and quit all that crazy jealousy, I’d go out to dinner with him, and we d have a few drinks.”

  “He wanted to know all about me?” I asked.

  “Oh, of course.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him the truth. I told him you were a detective who was trying to find out something about a man by the name of Smith in order to close up an estate.”

  “Did he ask you who Smith was?”

  “Oh, certainly. You mention any man’s name, and he’d pounce on it like a hawk swooping on a baby chick. He’d want to know all about him, who he was, where he came from, how long you’d known him, and all that. I told him Smith was a friend of Edna’s.”

  “And he did all that out in the corridor?”

  “No, not out in the corridor. I told him that I didn’t have time to stand there and argue with him. I was going to have to get rid of you if I was going to dinner with him. So he agreed to wait.”

  “That’s the point I’m interested in,” I said. “Where did he wait?”

  “He said he’d wait outside somewhere, and come back after you’d gone.”

  “Did he?”

  “What?”

  “Come back after I’d left?”

  “Yes. Within less than a minute.”

  She saw the expression on my face. “What’s the matter? What are you scowling about?”

  “I was trying to think back,” I said. “As I remember it, there’s only one string of apartments in that building. It’s over a storeroom, and the corridor runs the length of the building, with apartments on both sides, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “There are no bends or crooks in the corridor where a man might hide?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t see him there when I went out.”

  “He might have gone over to the far end and flattened himself in the shadows where he could watch you, without your knowing he was there. That’s the way he would do things. He was secretive and liked to spy on people. Good heavens, when I was living there in the Quarter, you’d have thought I was an enemy alien, and he was the whole F.B.I. He snooped around, watched my apartment window with binoculars. When I’d go out with anyone, he’d be hanging around somewhere to find out what time I got in. I didn’t even dare to take a boy friend upstairs to have a drink—”

  The waiter appeared with a tray, put dishes on the table. We started eating.

  “Want to hear the rest of it?” she asked, after a few moments.

  “After dinner,” I said. “Let’s concentrate on eating now. I’m hungry.”

  We ate our way through dinner. I could see that her nerves were relaxing. The wine and the food generated a mood of expansive friendship.

  “Know something, Donald?”

  “What?”

  “I feel that I can trust you. I’m going to tell you the whole truth.”

  “Why not?”

  She pushed away her plate, accepted one of my cigarettes, and leaned forward for a light. She reached up with her hands and held my hand and the match m both of hers. Her hands were soft and warm, the skin smooth. “Paul and I went out to dinner. He was going to kill you,” she said.

  “He Rot drunk and crazy jealous again. He began asking me a lot of questions about you. He wouldn’t believe you were a detective. Finally I got sore, and told him that he hadn’t changed a bit in the last two years, that I’d tried to let him down easy once by simply moving out, but this time I was giving it to him the hard way; that I didn’t want to see him again ever and I didn’t want to have anything to do with him; that it he ever tried to force himself on me, I’d call the officers.”

  “What did he do then?”

  “He did something that frightened me, and at the same time it made me laugh.”

  “What?”

  “He grabbed my purse.”

  “Why? So you wouldn’t have any money?”

  “That’s what I thought at the time, but I realized later what it was.”

  “You mean he wanted your key?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where were you when he took your purse?”

  “In Jack O’Leary’s Bar down in the Quarter. That was always his regular hangout.”

  “And just what did he do?”

  She said, “I was telling him that I was tired of the way he did things, that I couldn’t stand that insane jealousy, and that I wasn’t ever going to see him again.

  “The bar was crowded. I didn’t know what he’d do, but I did feel that if he tried to pull a gun or make any . threats, there were enough people around to grab him before he could do anything. Even if there weren’t, I was just tired of living in perpetual terror of that man. Until he fell in love with me, he was simply wonderful.”

  “You met him through Edna?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did he feel toward Edna?”

  “I think he was—well, perhaps, playing around. I think he picked her up there in Jack O’Leary’s Bar, and they were going together for a while; then Edna told him her troubles, and he worked out this scheme by which she could fleece her husband. That must have been it. I can look back now and put two and two together.”

  “But Edna never told you that?”

  “No. She never confided in me the real reason she wanted me to take the apartment in her name. Just gave me some excuses as she did you when you first asked her.

  She didn’t let me know where she was. Paul Nostrander was the only one who knew that, but he claimed he didn’t. Every month Paul would give me enough money to cover all my living expenses, the apartment, clothes, meals, beauty treatments, and all the rest.”

  “Did you give him the papers when you were served?”

  “No. I tried to, but he wouldn’t take them. He said he had no authority. He told me Edna had simply arranged with him to give me money from a fund she’d left with him. He claimed he didn’t actually know where she was, and had no means of reaching her. He said she’d given him fifteen hundred dollars to apply on my expenses, that the money had nearly all been spent.”

  “All right, you told Nostrander where to get off, and he took your purse. Then what?”

  “Without a word, he walked out.”

  “Pay the check?”

  “They don’t have any checks there at Jack O’Leary’s. You pay for the drinks as you get them.”

  “So he walked out and left you sitting there?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I sat around there for a while, and a couple of soldiers who were on the loose started making eyes at me, and I thought, after all, why not? The boys were going to be shipped somewhere pretty soon. They were entitled to as much of a good time as I could show them, so I smiled back at them. They came over, and we had quite an evening. They were awfully nice boys, but they knew nothing whatever about New Orleans. It was their first night in town. They came from Milwaukee. I took them around and showed them some of the sights, told them stories about the Quarter, drank with them until they were just about able to navigate, and left them.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I walked home, ever)’ single, blessed step of the way.

  “You didn’t take a cab?”

  “No. I didn’t have my purse; I didn’t have a cent.”

  “And how did you intend to get in if you didn’t have a key?”

  “I had a key.”

  “I thought you said he took your key.”

  “Took one of them, but there’s another key in the bottom of my mailbox. I always leave it there, just in case of an emergency. You see, there’s a spring lock on the door, and sometimes when I run down to the corner to get things from the grocery store, I’ll forget to take my key along, so I always leave an extra one there in the mailbox.”

  “What time did you leave the soldiers?”

  “Oh, about two o’clock, I guess. Somewhere around there.”

  “And you walked home?”

  “Yes.”

  “What time did you get there?”

  “At exactly twenty minutes past two.”

  I said, “Why are you so positive in your time? Did you hear a shot?”

  “No.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “I didn’t hear. I saw.”

  “What?”

  “My friend, Archibald C. Smith.”

  I did a little thinking over that one, and said, “Wait a minute. You couldn’t have seen him. He was in New York that night.”

  She smiled. “I saw him plainly.”