“Did the sister leave any address?” Simon asked.
“Yes. I’ve got a note of it somewhere.” The editor rummaged through the papers in a tray. “Here it is. 4818 Alamanda Street. I think that’s out towards the hospital.”
“I’d like to talk to her. I won’t pretend that you sent me or even let her know where I got the address. On the other hand, if I don’t think you can do any good by printing anything she tells me, I won’t pass it on to you. Fair enough?”
The gentlemen of the press exchanged glances.
“Well,” said the editor philosophically, “since he seems to have got the address anyhow, we could call that an extravagantly generous offer.”
Alamanda Street proved to be a channel of grimy and uninspired façades that ran for only two blocks — the impressive numbering of the houses was simply scaled to match the corresponding numbers on the boulevard which it paralleled. The buildings were old without having acquired any antique elegance and somewhat oversized without stateliness. Several of them had signs offering rooms or apartments for rent, as the owners tried to eke out some revenue from their outmoded dimensions. Number 4818 was one of these, and the Saint found Miss Ashville’s name on a card over one of the mailboxes in the hall with a penciled note in the corner, 2nd floor back.
She came to the door as soon as he knocked, and he accepted that as a good omen, having been prepared to wait all day if she had been out.
“Good morning,” he said. “Could I talk to you about the call you made to the paper, about your brother?”
“You’ve been long enough getting here,” she said. “Come in.”
The room to which she admitted him was large but airless, shabbily furnished but meticulously tidy. One couch had an unmistakable air of being convertible into a bed, and he suspected that the barest essentials of a kitchenette were crowded behind an anachronistic concertina door in one corner. The contrast with the penthouse which he had left less than twelve hours ago could hardly have been starker.
“A reporter went to see Mr Ashville at once, but he said he didn’t want anything printed.”
“I know. And he may never forgive me for making that call.”
She had waved Simon to a chair, but she remained standing, her hands folded together at her waist. She had black hair with gray strands in it that she must have washed and set herself, very accurately and unbecomingly, and she was probably not more than a year or two past forty, but she had the kind of untended face that any casual observer would say belonged to a nice homely middle-aged woman — without even a thought of the heartbreaks and frustrations that might be buried behind that callous classification.
“Before you called the paper,” he said, “did you try to see Mrs Ashville?”
“I did. More than once. But at the office she was always in a meeting. I went to her apartment, and I know she was in, because the maid took my name, but she came back and said Mrs Ashville was not at home. Just like that. Then I wrote her a letter.”
“A rude one?”
“No, a very nice one. I said that I wondered if she was avoiding me because she was afraid I was going to be a nuisance, either by blaming her for the divorce or trying to patch things up. I told her I could understand that, but I wasn’t the meddling kind, and I didn’t want anything from her, either. Not for myself. But I thought she ought to know about Richard. And I told her just how it was with him.”
“How bad is it?”
“The doctors don’t give him more than a year. Of course, with new drugs being tried all the time, you never give up hope... But even if he hasn’t got long, it might be a little longer, and it’d certainly be a lot less horrible, if he could be taken to Arizona or Colorado or one of those places.”
“Didn’t she answer that?”
“Yes,” said Miss Ashville grimly. “She answered. That’s what I want to show you.”
She went to a drawer in the battered but carefully polished bureau and brought back a letter. It was on the very heaviest pearl-gray stationery, with a very large engraved monogram in gold in one corner surrounded by a corona of twinkling effects which at the first glance would have been taken for stars but on closer scrutiny proved to be tiny coronets. It must have betrayed a powerful fixation, he thought.
The aggressive but agreeable perfume that still clung to the paper and the impetuous self-indulgent sprawl of writing both connected with still very lively memories, but the tone was altogether different.
Dear Miss Ashville,
I’m sorry to hear of Richard’s bad luck — which I think and hope you may be exaggerating slightly — but I must say I’m surprised he should take this sneaky way of getting his sister to write begging letters for him.
After all, getting divorced is for better or for worse like getting married. He made a settlement which satisfied him at the time, and he can’t keep trying to go back on it whenever things aren’t going well for him, or when would it ever stop?
If either of you thinks you have any legal claim on me, please talk to my lawyers who will know how to deal with it.
“Brrr,” said the Saint.
“You see?” said the homely sister. “Of course I’m prejudiced, but she just can’t be a nice person.”
“Did you ever talk to the lawyers?”
“I did not. You know very well I’d have been wasting my time. That’s what people like her have lawyers for. Besides, Richard hasn’t any legal claim. I know it, and she knew it when she said that.”
Simon glanced at the letter again.
“Had you quarreled before? ‘Dear Miss Ashville... Yours truly’ — as if you’d never even met.”
“We haven’t. Not to this day. I was abroad when they got married. I went to work for the Berlitz school in Brussels not long after the war, teaching American English — did you know that they teach both kinds? I only gave it up and came back when I realized that Richard might need someone to take care of him. I’m glad I did, but I wish I’d saved up more money. What I had put away didn’t go very far.”
“Have you talked to a lawyer of your own? I should think any sharp operator could cook up a case that’d at least be good enough to get into court and that wouldn’t be good publicity. Her lawyers might easily advise her to fork out something just to avoid that.”
She shook her head definitely.
“That couldn’t be done without Richard signing complaints and summonses and knowing all about it, and he’d never do that. He’s that kind of fool, but I love him for it.”
“Then what did you think the paper could do?”
“There’s a kind of pride that wouldn’t ask for charity, like Richard’s,” she said, “and another kind that can’t bear to think of a wicked woman getting away with what she’s done, without letting everyone know the rottenness of her. That’s my kind. I’ve read about her in the gossip columns since I’ve been back, going to the parties and the fancy restaurants, and always with some prince or baron or something, and it makes me boil over inside. If you print those stories, I think you ought to print the other things that are just as true. Perhaps it won’t do Richard any good, I’ve got to resign myself to that anyhow, but it’d be an eye opener to some of her fine friends.”
“I’m afraid,” said the Saint cynically, “that nothing would shock most of them, except if she ran out of money.”
“Do you think I’m just being vindictive?”
He considered her levelly.
“Yes. And I thoroughly approve. I often think the world could use a lot more vindictiveness — only I’d rather call it righteous indignation. I had to see you to make up my mind, but you’ve convinced me — you and this letter — that something has to be done.”