Still, he thought he should be gallant. “I must have made a mistake” he said. “But the resemblance is remarkable. Perhaps you have a double, ma’am?”
He thought this was handsome of him and that it gave her a way out.
“A double?” said Julius Maxwell nastily. “Who uses my wife’s name?”
Well, of course, if the man was going to be intelligent about it, that tore it. “Sorry,” said Mitch lightly.
“Sit down and tell me about it,” said Maxwell commandingly.
“Mr.…er…?”
“Brown,” said Mitch shortly. He was of a mind to turn on his heel and go away. But he glanced at Natalie. She had opened her handbag and found her compact. This stuck him as either offensively nonchal-ant or pathetically trusting. Or what? Curiosity rose in Mitch — and he sat down.
“Why, I happened into a bar where a lady had had too much to drink,” he said, as if this were nothing unusual. “I volunteered to put her in a taxi but there was no taxi. I wound up leaving her passed out on my sofa. In the morning she was gone. That’s all there is to the story.”
“This was on Saint Patrick’s Day?” said Maxwell intently.
“In the small hours. In the morning.”
“Then the lady was not my wife. My wife was with me in Santa Barbara at our home that night.”
“With you?” said Mitch carefully, feeling a bit of shock.
“Certainly.” Maxwell’s tone was belligerent.
Mitch was beginning to wonder. The woman had powdered her nose and sat looking as if she couldn’t care less. “Not simply in the same building,” Mitch inquired, “as you may have assumed?”
“Not simply in the same building,” said Julius Maxwell, “and no assumption. She was with me, speaking to me, touching me, if you like.” His black eyes were hostile.
Oh, ho, thought Mitch, then you are a liar, too. Now what is all this? He did not care for this Maxwell at all.
“Perhaps I have mistaken her for another lady,” he said smoothly.
“But isn’t it strange that she is wearing exactly the same clothes now that she was wearing on Saint Patrick’s Day?”
(Try that one on for size, Mitch thought smugly.) Julius said ominously, “Do you know who I am?”
“I have heard your name,” said Mitch.
“You know that I am an influential man?”
“Oh, yes,” said Mitch pleasantly. “In fact, I can smell the money from here.”
“How much do you want to forget that you saw my wife in Los Angeles that night?”
Mitch’s brows went up.
“On Saint Patrick’s Day in the morning,” added Julius sneeringly.
Mitch felt his feathers ruffling, his temper flaring. “Why? What is it worth?” he said.
They locked gazes. It was ridiculous. Mitch felt as if he had strayed into a Class B movie. Then Maxwell rose from the table. “Excuse me.” He lashed Mitch with a sharp look which seemed to be saying,
“Stay,” as if Mitch were a dog. Then he strode off.
Mitch, alone with the blond woman, said to her quickly, “What do you want me to do or say?”
He was looking at her hand, long-fingered, pink-nailed, limp on the table. It did not clench. It did not even move. “I don’t understand,” she said in a mechanical way.
“Okay,” said Mitch disgustedly. “I came here for dinner and I see no profit in this discussion, so please excuse me.”
He got up, crossed over to his own table, and ordered his meal.
Julius Maxwell returned in a few moments and stood looking at Mitch with a triumphant light in his eyes. Mitch waved the wand of reason over the very human activity of his own glands. It was necessary for Mitch’s self-respect that he dine here, as he had planned to do, and that he remain unperturbed by these strange people.
His steak had come when a man walked into the room and up to Maxwell’s table. There was an exchange of words. Julius rose. Both men came over to Mitch.
Julius said, “This is the fellow, Lieutenant.”
Mitch found that the stranger was slipping into the seat beside him and Julius was slipping in beside him on his other hand. He rejected a feeling of being trapped. “What’s all this?” he inquired mildly, patting his lips with his napkin.
“Name’s Prince,” said the stranger. “Los Angeles Police Department. Mr. Maxwell tells me you are saying something about Mrs.
Maxwell’s being here in town on the night of the sixteenth of March and the morning of the seventeenth?”
Mitch sipped from his water glass, watchful and wary.
Julius Maxwell said, “This man was trying to blackmail me with a crazy story.”
“I was what!” Mitch exploded.
The police lieutenant, or whoever he was, had a long lean face, slightly crooked at the bottom, and he had very tired eyelids. He said, “Your story figured to destroy her alibi?”
“Her alibi for what?” Mitch leaned back.
“Oh, come off that, Brown,” said Julius Maxwell, “or whatever your name is. You knew my wife from having seen her picture in the newspaper.”
Mitch’s brain was racing. “I haven’t seen the papers for six weeks,”
he said aggressively.
Julius Maxwell’s black eyes were bright with that triumphant shine. “Now that,” he said flatly, “is impossible.”
“Oh, is it?” said Mitch rather gently. His role of apostle of compassion was fast fading out. Mitch was now a human clashing with another human and he knew he had to look out for himself. He could feel his wings retracting into his spine. “Alibi for what?” he insisted, looking at the policeman intently.
The policeman sighed. “You want it from me? Okay. On the sixteenth of last March, late in the evening,” he droned, “a man named Joseph Carlisle was shot to death in his own front hall.” (Mitch, ears pricked up, remembered the paragraph he had seen just tonight.)
“Lived in a canyon, Hollywood Hills,” the lieutenant continued.
“Winding road, lonely spot. Looked like somebody rang his bell, he answered, they talked in the hall. It was his own gun that he kept in a table there. Whoever shot him closed the front door, which locked it, and threw the gun in the shrubbery. Then beat it. Wasn’t seen — by anybody.”
“And what has this got to do with Mrs. Maxwell?” Mitch asked.
“Mrs. Maxwell used to be married to this Carlisle,” said the policeman. “We had to check her out. She has this alibi.”
“I see,” said Mitch.
“Mrs. Maxwell,” said Julius through his teeth, “was with me in our home in Santa Barbara that evening and all that night.”
Mitch saw. He saw that either Maxwell was trying to save his wife from the embarrassment of suspicion or…that compassion was a fine thing but it can get a well-meaning person into trouble. And a few drinks might hit a murderess very hard and very fast. Mitch knew, that whatever else Maxwell said, he was lying in his teeth about this alibi. Because the woman, still sitting across this restaurant, was the very same woman whom Mitch Brown had taken in, had given a break.
But nobody was giving Mitch Brown any break. And why all this nonsense about blackmail? Mitch, with his wings folded tight away, said to the lieutenant, “Suppose I tell you my story.” And he did so, coldly, briefly.
Afterward, Maxwell laughed. “You believe that? You believe that he would take a drunken woman home with him — and close the door?”
In his breast Mitch Brown felt the smolder of dislike burst into a flame of hatred.