“Did you admit it was your handkerchief?”
“Yes, and I didn’t even hesitate. I think that made a good impression. Thanks to what you’d told me, I knew they were going to pull the handkerchief trick. So, when the district attorney held it out very dramatically and very accusingly, I gave a little squeal and said, ‘Why, that’s my handkerchief,’ and grabbed for it.”
“They ask you where you’d lost it?”
She nodded. “I told them I couldn’t tell. They asked me if I’d left it in Mandra’s apartment, and I told them I might have. Then they wanted to know lots of things and I told them.”
“The truth?” he asked.
“I always tell the truth.” She glanced sidelong at him from beneath lowered lashes, her lips provocatively parted. “Really, Owl, do we have to talk about this?”
“Did you tell them about the portrait?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Tell them where it was?”
“I told them Alma had it. I’d given it to her. I wanted to see what she thought of it, and perhaps have her smooth it up a little.”
Terry picked up the whisky bottles and returned them to the sideboard.
She raised her feet, caught her skirt under the backs of her knees, swung round in the chair and said, “Why, you stingy old walrus!”
“I’m afraid,” he told her, “this is just a recess, Cynthia. How about the attorney?”
She giggled. “He has the longest neck, and the funniest horse face. He reminds me of a string bean on parade. Tell me, Owl, do string beans ever parade?”
“What’s his name?”
“Oh, you know C. Renmore Howland, the criminal attorney, known to his intimates as ‘Renny’. My Heavens, Stubby wouldn’t get anything for me except the best! I’m an intimate, Owl. He told me to call him Renny.”
“How does Stubby figure in this business?”
“He isn’t in it. He’s just standing by me.”
“And what did Howland do?”
“Oooh, he waved his hands and talked about writs of habeas corpus, and stretched his neck in and out of his collar and patted me on the shoulder in a fatherly manner... Honestly, Owl, that man should have been a racehorse. He could have won his races by a neck without ever leaving the starting post.”
“And they turned you loose when he threatened habeas corpus?” he asked.
She nodded and said, “But about that time they found the portrait.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. I suppose Alma gave it to them. That was an awfully nice boy who met me coming down the stairs from Mandra’s place, Owl. His name’s Jack Winton, and he’s a painter. He looked me over and said that he couldn’t tell whether I was the one he’d seen coming down the stairs or not, but that he’d seen a woman who had very attractive ankles carrying a portrait of Mandra. I loved him for that crack about the ankles, Owl. And he gave a perfectly swell description of the portrait: dull background, the face etching high lights, and Mandra’s eyes staring with that cold glint... Ugh, Owl, it just doesn’t seem possible the man’s dead. He had such a way of controlling people and things that somehow you’d expect him to control death itself.”
Terry stared steadily at her. “Cynthia,” he said, “you weren’t the woman Jack Winton met on the stairs. You never did carry that portrait out of Mandra’s studio. But you learned somehow that this man Winton had seen a woman coming down the stairs carrying the portrait. You figured it would be swell if you could manufacture an alibi from that, and you knew that Alma, with her swiftness of execution and deft technique, could make a passable portrait in a few hours. She locked herself in Vera Matthews’s studio, worked all night, and finished a portrait which you could claim was the one on which you had worked.”
Her face lost its animation, became suddenly weary. She raised her chin defiantly and said, “Don’t talk like that, Owl. C. Renmore Howland... damn it, I must remember to call him Renny... would sue you for slander or defamation of character or whatever it is he’d sue you for. He’d have some perfectly splendid word for it.”
Terry Clane crossed to her, slid his arm around her shoulders.
“I’m sorry, Cynthia,” he said, “but you and Alma both overlooked something. The woman who really has this portrait you painted hates you. She’s going to burst your alibi wide open.”
Cynthia grabbed his fingers, pressed them to her cheek. Hot tears dropped on the back of his hand.
“Tell me about it,” he said to her.
She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, laughed half-hysterically and said, “I’m not going to start bawling, Owl, it’s just the let-down.”
“What happened?” he asked.
“Mandra was blackmailing me.”
“Over the hit-and-run business?”
“Yes.”
“Money, marbles, or chalk?” he asked.
“Money, marbles, and chalk,” she replied. “If you’d known Mandra better you wouldn’t have asked.”
“So what happened?”
“Honestly, Owl, I’d never known anyone as completely ruthless as Mandra. He fascinated me. When he wanted something, nothing on God’s green earth could stand in his way. He would use any method and he played a no-limit game.
“He was crazy about the portrait. I saw that that was going to be my strongest hold over him. I decided to call his bluff last night, and told him I was going to take the portrait away with me unless that hit-and-run business was cleaned up.”
“Did you,” Terry asked, “know that he was teamed up with a William Shield to blackmail wealthy car owners?”
“No, Shield is the man I hit. How it could have been just a blackmail scheme, Owl, I don’t know, because X-rays showed a permanent injury to the spine. I really must have...”
“You didn’t hit him at all,” Terry interrupted. “An acrobat hit your car with his fist and then did a tumbling act. Later on they introduced you to Shield. Shield hadn’t even been near your car. It was all a frame-up.”
She stared at him steadily for several seconds and then said slowly:
“Owl, is that absolutely true?”
“Absolutely.”
“That,” she said, “explains it. I told Mandra I was all finished, that I was going to see a lawyer, and that I was taking that portrait home with me. And then, Owl, the man actually had the audacity to drug me. We were drinking tea. God knows what he put in it. I felt things going round and round. I got to my feet, and my knees were weak. I grabbed at the side of the table, and things turned black.”
“Then what?”
“When I woke up,” she said, “it was about three o’clock. I had a terrific headache. I went to the room where I’d left Mandra. He was sitting there at a table, slumped over, with his head on his arms.”
“Did you see a sleeve gun there?”
“No.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Terry said, “this is important, Cynthia. Try and reconstruct the table just as you saw it.”
She closed her eyes and said, “Well, of course, the thing that I keep seeing is Mandra’s arm crooked over the table and his head lying on his arm. It was awful...”
“Was his face down?”
“No, turned slightly to one side, the eyes were open and stary, all glassy and inanimate. Ugh! Owl, you know how dead people are! Don’t make me describe it.”
“Did you scream?”
“I don’t think so.”
“And what else was on the table?”
“Well, let me see. There were some papers.”
“Where were the papers, right in front of Mandra?”
“No, to one side.”
“Do you remember what sort of papers? Were they letters, or what?”