“A sympathetic doctor?” I asked, smiling.
“He was very understanding.”
“Gave you his advice in writing?” I asked.
“How did you know?”
“I was just wondering.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, he did. I went to San Francisco. While I was there, I wrote him a letter. I told him I didn’t feel like coming back and asked him what he thought I should do, and he wrote me this letter telling me he thought it was an excellent idea for me to get a complete change.”
“And, of course, you just happen to have saved that letter. Go ahead.”
“I went to New Orleans. Everything was fine for about three weeks. I stayed in a hotel, while I was looking around to find an apartment. Then something happened.”
“What was it?”
“I met someone on the street.”
“Someone who knew you?”
“Yes.”
“From Los Angeles?”
“Yes. So I decided to disappear.”
I said, “That doesn’t work. If you met someone on the street in New Orleans who knew you in Los Angeles, you’d also meet someone on the street in Little Rock, Arkansas, Shreveport, or Timbuctoo.”
“No. You don’t get it. The friend wanted to know where I was living. I had to tell her. I knew that she’d tell her friends, and the first thing I knew, everybody would know that I was in New Orleans, and be looking me up. I didn’t want to see people who knew anything at all about my old life, but I did want to have a place in New Orleans that I could come back to. Then I met Rob. She was having troubles of her own. She wanted to escape from her identity. I asked her how she’d like to trade identities. She said she’d like it swell. I told her to find a suitable apartment that would be something I could live in later on when I got ready to come back to New Orleans, and about what I was willing to pay for it.”
“What name did you take?” I asked.
“Rob’s.”
“For how long?”
“For not more than two or three days.”
“Then what?”
She said, “I suddenly realized what damning evidence I was manufacturing. If my husband’s lawyers found out about it, they would show that I had gone away and started living under an assumed name. That would have been a confession of guilt, so I took my own name back. That simply meant there were two Edna Cutlers. One of them was Rob who was living in New Orleans, and the other was the real Edna Cutler.”
I said “Very, very interesting. It would make even the most hard-boiled judge cry into his law books.”
“I’m not asking for sympathy. I’m only asking for justice.”
I said, “All right, now let’s cut out the comedy. You didn’t think this up.”
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t think up all that scheme for letting your husband hit the jackpot, and then find out the machine was empty.”
“I don’t get you.”
I said, “I’ve known lots of lawyers. There have perhaps been four or five who could have thought up a trick like that, but the point is it took a lawyer to do it and it took a darned ingenious lawyer to do it.”
“But I tell you it wasn’t any scheme. I didn’t think it up.”
I said, “That brings us back to our friend, Paul G. Nostrander.”
“What about him?”
“You knew him?”
She hesitated for several seconds over that question. I grinned while she was groping for an answer, then went on to say, “You never expected that question would be put to you in just that way, did you, Edna? You hadn’t thought up your answer on that.”
She said defiantly, “No. I didn’t know him.”
I saw Roberta Fenn’s face show surprise.
I said, “That’s where you’re making your fatal mistake.”
“What do you mean?”
I said, “Nostrander’s secretary will probably remember that you were in the office. His books will show that, at least at the start, he received a fee from you. The people at Jack O’Leary’s Bar will remember that you were in there together. They’ll trap you in perjury. Your husband would spend a fortune on private detectives tracking all that stuff down. They’d bring that out in court, and a judge would realize you’d simply—”
She interrupted me to say, “All right, I knew him.”
“How well?”
“I–I’d consulted him.”
“And what did he tell you?”
“Told me that the only thing for me to do was to quit worrying, and,” she went on triumphantly, as she realized the strength of this new defense, “he told me not to do anything at all until papers were served on me, that as soon as papers were served on me to let him know.”
I said, “That’s a swell line. Nostrander’s dead. He can’t contradict you on that, you know.”
She contented herself with glaring at me, but made no other denial.
I turned to Roberta. “You knew him?”
“Yes.”
“How did you meet him?”
Edna said quickly, “He is trying to get you to say that I introduced you to him. You met him in a bar, didn’t you, Rob?”
Roberta didn’t say anything.
I grinned. “That’s another weak point in your story, Edna. I think you’ve already told Roberta too much.”
“I haven’t told her anything.”
I said to Roberta, “Skip that. You don’t have to lie, and if you’re afraid of offending Edna, you can simply keep quiet and let it go at that. Now, why did you avoid Nostrander?”
“What do you mean?”
I said, “You stayed on in the apartment. You hung around the French Quarter for almost a year. You ate at the Bourbon House. You were seen quite frequently in Jack O’Leary’s Bar. According to Edna’s own story, you were supposed to get an apartment and stay there until she came back to live in New Orleans. Then almost overnight, you moved out of the Quarter. You started living uptown. You studied stenography. You never went back to any of your old haunts. You carefully avoided meeting Nostrander. It wasn’t until Edna gave Archibald Smith a letter to you that you went back to your old haunts in the French Quarter. You thought you were safe by that time. You weren’t. Someone told Nostrander you’d been seen there. Nostrander started doing a little detective work. I don’t know just how he went about it, but he may have done the same thing I did. In any event, he found you. He’d been looking for you for two years.”
“Now why did you suddenly leave the French Quarter?”
Edna said, “You don’t have to answer that question, Rob.”
“You don’t either one of you have to answer anything,” I said, “not now. But when the police ask those questions, you’re going to have to answer them.”
“Why will the police ask them?” Edna asked.
“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.”