That the crime had been deliberate and premeditated was indicated by the fact that once ensconced in four twenty-one, the man had bored a hole in the panel of the door so that he could make certain of the identity of his intended victim before opening the door.
Esther Clarde at the cigar stand had remembered that a very personable young man had followed a mysterious woman into the hotel. She described him as being about twenty-seven years of age, with clean-cut, finely chiseled features, an engaging voice, and lots of personality. He was about five feet six in height, and weighed about a hundred and twenty-five pounds.
The clerk, on the other hand, remembered him as being shifty-eyed and nervous in manner, emaciated, and looking like a dope fiend.
I paid off the taxi in front of Ashbury’s house and went in. Mrs. Ashbury was reclining on a divan in the library. The butler said she wanted to see me.
She looked at me with appealing eyes. “Mr. Lam, please don’t go away. I want you to be here in order to protect Robert.”
“From what?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It seems to me there’s something sinister about this. I think Robert’s in danger. I’m his mother. I have a mother’s intuition. You’re a trained wrestler with muscles of steel. They say that you’ve taken the biggest and best of the Japanese jujitsu wrestlers and tossed them around as though they’d been dolls. Please keep your eye on Robert.”
I said, “You can count on me,” and went off to find Alta. I found her in the solarium. She was seated on the chaise longue. She moved over and made room for me to sit beside her. I said, “All right, tell me.”
She clamped her lips and shook her head.
“What did Ringold have on you?”
“Nothing.”
“I suppose,” I said, “the three ten-thousand-dollar cheques were made for a charitable donation. Perhaps he was a collector for the Community Chest.”
I saw the dismay come into her eyes. “The three cheques?”
I nodded.
“How did you know?”
“I’m a detective. It’s my business to find out.”
“All right,” she said with a flash of temper, “find out why I paid them, then.”
“I will,” I promised, and started to get up.
She caught my sleeve and pulled me back. “Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Leave me.”
“Come down to earth, then.”
She drew up her feet and hugged her knees, her heels resting on the edge of the cushion. “Donald,” she said, “tell me what you’ve been doing, how you found out about — well, you know.”
I shook my head. “You don’t want to know anything about me.”
“Why?”
“It wouldn’t be healthy.”
“Then why do you want to know about me?”
“So that I can help you.”
“You’ve done enough already.”
“I haven’t even started yet.”
“Donald, there’s nothing you can do.”
“What did Ringold have on you?”
“Nothing, I tell you.”
I kept my eyes on her. She fidgeted uneasily. After a while, I said, “Somehow you never impressed me as being the sort who would lie... Somehow I gathered the impression that you hated liars.”
“I do,” she said.
I kept quiet.
“It’s none of your business,” she went on after a while.
I said, “Some day the cops are going to ask me questions. If I know what not to tell them, I won’t give anything away, but if I don’t know what not to tell them, I may say the wrong thing. Then they’ll start in on you.”
She sat silent for several seconds, then she said, “I got in an awful scrape.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It probably isn’t what you think it is.”
“I’m not even thinking.”
She said, “I took a cruise last summer down to the South Seas. There was a man on the boat. I liked him very much, and— Well, you know how it is.”
I said, “Lots of young women have taken cruises to the South Seas, found lots of men whom they liked very much, and still didn’t pay thirty thousand dollars after they got home.”
“This man was married.”
“What did his wife say?”
“I didn’t ever know her. He wrote me. His letters were — they were love letters.”
I said, “I don’t know how much time we have. The more you waste, the less we have left.”
“I wasn’t really in love with him. It was a cruise flirtation. The moonlight got me, I guess.”
“Your first one?”
“Of course not. I’ve taken cruises. That’s why girls sail on cruises. Sometimes you meet a man whom you really love... That is, I suppose you do. Girls have done so. They’ve married and lived happily ever after.”
“But you haven’t?”
“No.”
“But you played around?”
“Well, you try to give yourself a good time. You can tell after the first two or three days if there’s anyone on board for whom you’re apt to care a lot. Usually you find someone who’s attractive enough for a flirtation. But you’re not flirting with him. You’re flirting with romance.”
“This man was married?”
“Yes.”
“And he’s separated from his wife?”
“No. He told me later he was taking a matrimonial vacation while she was taking one of her own.”
“What was hers?”
“I have my doubts about that, too. She was working for a big oil company which had interests in China. She had to go over to wind up the books when they were closing the Shanghai branch.”
“Why the suspicions?”
“The big boss also went over. He was on the same boat. She was sweet on him.”
“Then what?”
She said, “Honestly, Donald, there were some things about him I didn’t like — definitely. And there were other things that appealed to me very much. He enjoyed himself so much. He was — fun.”
“You came back. You still didn’t know he was married.”
“That’s right.”
“He told you he was single?”
“Yes, definitely.”
“Then what?”
“Then he wrote me letters.”
“You answered them?”
“No. I’d found out he was married then.”
“What’s his name?”
“I’m coming to that in a minute.”
“Why not tell me now?”
“No. You’ll have to get the rest of the picture first.”
“Was this man Ringold?”
“Good Lord, no!”
“All right.”
“I wouldn’t answer his letters because I knew he was married, but I liked getting them. They were love letters — I told you that — but they were full of reminiscences about our trip. Some things were so lovely... We sailed into Tahiti late one night... you’d have to see that to realize it... the native dancers waiting around little fires. We could see the red points of light dotting the shore. Then, as the ship came in, we could see the forms of the dancers around the fires. We could hear the drums beating, that peculiar Tap-tap-TAP! Tap-tap-TAP! Tap-tap-TAP! Then they threw more fuel on the fires. Someone turned floodlights down on the quay, and there were these dancers, with nothing on but grass skirts, stamping their bare feet in the rhythm of a dance, then pairing off and facing each other in a sort of hula which became more and more violent. Then, at a signal, they’d all start a running kind of dance around the fires... He reminded me of that... and other things. They were wonderful letters. I saved them and read them over whenever I felt blue. They were so vivid...”