“How do you know that?”
“Because I checked up at the airport. The man who traveled to New York and back using the name of Emory G. Hale weighed a hundred and forty-six pounds.”
“Perhaps the weight was wrong.”
I smiled at her.
“Oh, don’t be so damned superior! Go ahead, if you feel that way about it. Tell me the rest of it.”
I said, “You put in a call for Hale at New York. You couldn’t get him, but Hale called you and said he was calling from New York, or some intermediate point where the plane was grounded. You don’t know whether he was or not. No one knows. He could have been within a block of the hotel. All he needed was some girl to say into the telephone, ‘New York is calling Mrs. Bertha Cool. Is this she? Hold the line, please.’ ”
Bertha’s eyes were ominous. “Go ahead. Get it all out of your system.”
“When he showed up in New Orleans the next morning and I told him I’d found Roberta Fenn and we started down to her apartment, he knew she wasn’t there.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he went along with me.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Don’t you understand? She knew him as Archibald C. Smith. The minute she saw him, she would have said, ‘Why, how do you do, Mr. Smith? What brings you here?’ Then the cat would have been out of the bag. He knew that. Therefore, if he had thought she was there, he’d have sent me down alone to call on her.”
Bertha was interested now. “Anything else?”
“Lots of it.”
“What?”
“The only real witness to that exact time of the shooting is a girl by the name of Marilyn Winton. She’s a nightclub hostess. She was just entering the apartment house when she heard the sound of the shot. She looked at her wrist watch a few minutes later. She places the shot as being at exactly two-thirty-two.”
“What about her?”
I said, “Emory Hale was seen entering that apartment house at about twenty minutes past two.”
“You mean that’s where he was when he was supposed to have been in New York?”
“Yes.”
“Who saw him?”
“I can’t tell you.”
Her face darkened. “What the hell do you mean you can’t tell me?”
“Exactly that. It’s confidential as yet.”
She glared at me as though she wanted to bite my head off. “Some girl,” she said. “Some little trollop who’s trying to take you for a ride tells you that she saw Hale entering the apartment house, and you mustn’t say anything, just keep it confidential. So you turn your own partner down because some little petticoat with a sweet smile looks languishingly up into your eyes, and gives you the works. Bosh!”
I said, “One other person told me that was true.”
“Who?”
“Hale.”
“Donald — do you mean to say that you talked with him about it? Why, the one thing that he impressed upon us was that, under no circumstances, were we to start speculating about him. He wanted—”
“Take it easy,” I interrupted. “He didn’t tell me about it in words. He told me about it by his actions.”
“What do you mean?”
I said, “He became anxious to meet this Marilyn Winton. I arranged to take him to the nightclub. We poured four or five drinks down each other. He was trying to find out how much I knew. I was trying to find out what he wanted.”
“Did you make him pay for the drinks?”
“Certainly. I may be dumb on financial matters, but I’m not that dumb.”
“What did you find out?”
“He got to talking with Marilyn Winton about the time she’d heard the shot, whether she was absolutely certain it was two-thirty-two and not three o’clock.”
“Well?”
“She told him that it was two-thirty-two by her wrist watch. So Hale admired the watch and asked her to let him look at it.”
“Well, what’s with that?”
“At the time,” I said, “he was drinking Coca-Cola and gin.”
“And what does that have to do with what we’re talking about?” she demanded impatiently.
I said, “He put the drink down below the table, holding it in between his knees while he turned the wrist watch around, looking at.it. A floor show was on, and the lights were dim. His right hand, holding the wrist watch, dropped below the table for a few seconds. After that he blew his nose a couple of times and whipped his handkerchief around rather promiscuously. Then he put the glass back on the table, and while he was doing that, put the wrist watch in the handkerchief. Then he handed the wrist watch back. Marilyn held a napkin to it. Then she moistened the napkin in a glass of water and moved it along her wrist just underneath the wrist watch.”
“Don’t bother me with all that stuff,” Bertha said. “What’s all that got to do with it? What do I care how many times he blew his nose? Just so he pays the money, he can blow his damn head off, for all I care. He—”
“You don’t get it,” I said. “The thing the girl did-putting water on her napkin and rubbing it along her wrist — that’s the significant thing.”
“Why?”
I said, “The wrist watch was sticky.”
“I don’t get you.”
I said, “You dip a wrist watch in a glass of gin and Coca-Cola, leave it in there for a minute or so, and then bring it out, wipe it off hastily with a handkerchief, and the watch is apt to be sticky — enough sugar in the Coca-Cola, you know.”
“And why the devil should anyone dip a wrist watch in a drink of gin and Coca-Cola?” Bertha asked.
“So that when the person who was wearing it was cross-examined about the exact time she heard the shot, she’d have to confess that a few days afterward she noticed her wrist watch was out of order, and she had to take it to a jeweler.”
Bertha sat blinking at me as though I’d flashed a very bright light full in her eyes.
“I’ll be damned!”
I didn’t say anything, but just sat there, letting her think it over.
After a while she said, “Are you sure about the watch, Donald, that he dunked it in the drink?”
“No. I’m simply giving you the evidence. It’s circumstantial.”
“Why on earth would he have gone up to Roberta Fenn’s apartment?”
“Two reasons.”
“Roberta Fenn is one?”
“Yes. And the other’s the dead lawyer, Nostrander.”
“Why would Nostrander figure in it?”
I said, “Roberta Fenn was feeling pretty low. She went to New Orleans. Edna Cutler was in New Orleans. She’s the wife of Marco Cutler. Marco was about to give her a terrific smear in a divorce action. Edna couldn’t face the music. She went to New Orleans, got Roberta to pose as her double. When the papers arrived to be served on Edna, the process server served them on Roberta.
“Marco Cutler got his divorce. He didn’t wait for the final decree. He married a wealthy woman who has ideas about such things. She may be going to have a baby. Edna Cutler chose that time to appear on the scene and calmly observe that she’d never heard of any divorce. It was a slick stunt. She’s got him over a barrel unless he can prove fraud or collusion.”
“Can he do that?”
“He might be trying.”
“How?”
“By hiring detectives.”
“What detectives?”
“Us.”
Bertha’s eyes kept blinking rapidly. “Fry me for an oyster,” she said at length, almost under her breath.
“Get it?” I asked.
“Of course I get it. Marco Cutler is in the millionaire class. If he’d hired us and told us what he wanted us to find out, we’d have soaked him good and proper. Moreover, we’d have been able to blackmail him. He got this New York lawyer to come out here, and because the man was from New York, we kept thinking it was a New York client that was involved in the case.”