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.”